Social bots and mass media manipulated public opinion through dual opinion climate

Abstract

Opinion dynamics models based on the multi-agent method commonly assume that interactions between individuals in a social network result in changes in their opinions. However, formation of public opinion in a social network is a macroscopic statistical result of opinions of all expressive individuals (corresponding to silent individuals). Therefore, public opinion can be manipulated not only by changing individuals’ opinions, but also by changing their states of expression (or silence) which can be interpreted as the phenomenon “spiral of silence” in social psychology. Based on this theory, we establish a “dual opinion climate” model, involving social bots and mass media through a multi-agent method, to describe mechanism for manipulation of public opinion in social networks. We find that both social bots (as local variables) and mass media (as a global variable) can interfere with the formation of public opinion, cause a significant superposition effect when they act in the same direction, and inhibit each other when they act in opposite directions.