Abstract
Social media environments often foster the formation of communities promoted by users’ tendencies toward homophily. These tendencies of connecting with similar users are solidified by the social media companies’ algorithmic and business practices, leading to polarized networks, where communities of different interests rarely interact. This paper investigates via simulations the adoption of a new convention promoted by a persistent minority in a network polarized into two communities. We perform experiments on two real-world networks and various synthetic networks with controlled properties. We discover that the position of the persistent minority has a greater impact on spreading new conventions than its relative size. We also show that although diffusion becomes harder as network polarization increases, a persistent minority can increase its effectiveness in promoting new conventions by targeting low-influence users from the opposite community.
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Acknowledgements
Supported by the Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-18-1-2128, the US National Science Foundation Grant IIS 1546453 and the DARPA SocialSim Program and the Air Force Research Laboratory under contract FA8650-18-C-7825.
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Nair, S., Ng, K.W., Iamnitchi, A. et al. Diffusion of social conventions across polarized communities: an empirical study. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 11, 17 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-021-00726-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-021-00726-2