Opinion dynamics with bilateral propaganda and unilateral information blockade

Abstract

In the struggle for discourse power, different communities propagate different political values to their people, and some communities additionally adopt Internet censorship to block values that differ from their own. In blockaded communities, some people manage to bypass the blockade. Some of these people are no longer influenced by the propaganda of their communities and become independent, while others remain affected by it and are unswerving. On this basis, we propose an opinion dynamics model of two opposite groups with bilateral propaganda and a unilateral information blockade, and divide the population into four categories: the independent bypassing agents, the unswerving bypassing agents, the remaining agents in the blockaded group, and the agents in the blockade-free group. In the model, the opinion evolution follows the Deffuant–Weisbuch expression. The bilateral propaganda works in opinion evolution, while the unilateral information blockade works in networks of agents. We discuss the model in regard to two scenarios. First, we assume that the agents are well-mixed, deduce the Hegselmann–Krause expression of the model in the mean field, and obtain a theoretical solution. The results show that there are optimum levels of the intensity of bilateral propaganda and of the proportion of bypassing agents that enable the blockaded group to best control the discourse power, and the blockaded group is doomed to be unable to compete for the discourse power through institutional reform. Secondly, we assume that the agents follow scale-free networks which better model the Internet, and we acquire results by Monte Carlo simulations. The results show that there are optimum points of the intensity of bilateral propaganda and of the proportion of bypassing agents for the blockaded group or the blockade-free group to best control the discourse power in different situations. Moreover, the more independent agents there are, the closer the discourse power inclines towards the blockade-free group.