Workshop Proceedings of the 15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Workshop: International Workshop on Social Sensing (SocialSens 2021): Special Edition on Information Operations on Social Media

DOI: 10.36190/2021.32

Published: 2021-06-01
On Polarization Dynamics in the Age of Information Overload
Chao Xu, Jinyang Li, Dachun Sun, Ruijie Wang,Tarek Abdelzaher, Jesse Graham, Boleslaw Szymanski

The paper discusses a recently proposed stochastic model of evolution of human beliefs that demonstrates how today's sheer volume of accessible information (and, thus, information overload), combined with consumers' confirmation bias and asymmetric preference for outlying content, result in increased polarization. It suggests that escaping the polarizing forces in the age of information overload is a particularly challenging problem.