TY - JOUR
AU - Franceschi, Jonathan
AU - Bresadola, Marco
AU - Pareschi, Lorenzo
AU - Bellodi, Elena
AU - Gavanelli, Marco
PY - 2023
DA - October
TI - Modeling opinion polarization on social media: Application to Covid-19 vaccination hesitancy in Italy
JO - PLoS ONE
VL - 18
IS - 10
DO - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291993
AB - The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic reminded us how vaccination can be a divisive topic on which the public conversation is permeated by misleading claims, and thoughts tend to polarize, especially on online social networks. In this work, motivated by recent natural language processing techniques to systematically extract and quantify opinions from text messages, we present a differential framework for bivariate opinion formation dynamics that is coupled with a compartmental model for fake news dissemination. Thanks to a mean-field analysis we demonstrate that the resulting Fokker-Planck system permits to reproduce bimodal distributions of opinions as observed in polarization dynamics. The model is then applied to sentiment analysis data from social media platforms in Italy, in order to analyze the evolution of opinions about Covid-19 vaccination. We show through numerical simulations that the model is capable to describe correctly the formation of the bimodal opinion structure observed in the vaccine-hesitant dataset, which is witness of the known polarization effects that happen within closed online communities.
PB - Public Library of Science
UR - https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/publications/48e00d7f-bc1e-4f04-8ac4-51263fb064b3
KW - Coronavirus (COVID-19)
KW - Digital health and technology
ER