Talk at Leopoldina Symposium on Digitization and its Effects on Man and Society
(Die Digitalisierung und ihre Auswirkungen auf Mensch und Gesellschaft)
leopoldina.org/de/veranstaltungen/veranstaltung/event/2464/
TEST BANK For Radiologic Science for Technologists, 12th Edition by Stewart C...
Opinion Formation and Spreading
1. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 1Institute for Web Science and Technologies · University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
Web and Internet Science Group · ECS · University of Southampton, UK &
Opinion Formation and Spreading
Schafft Digitalisierung eine eigene Dynamik in der
Meinungsbildung?
Steffen Staab
@ststaab
http://west.uni-koblenz.de
http://wais.soton.ac.uk
2. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 2
Individual Opinion Formation vs Opinion Spreading
(Staab, 2013)
3. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 4
Individual online behavior and personality
(Buckels et al., Trolls just want to have fun, Personality and Individual Differences 2014)
4. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 5
Herbert Simon: Satisficing = satisfying + sufficient
• Classification of information to be satisficing,
not to achieve optimal information organization
Individual Satisficing Information Processing
5. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 6
• Experiment A: Classify web pages by bookmarks
– Recommender A1: suggest classification by others
– Recommender A2: suggest earlier classification by yourself
• Experiment B:
Construct optimal information structure
• Result:
– A2 hides majority opinion
A2 yields results closer to optimal information structure
(Dellschaft & Staab, 2008, 2012)
Individual Satisficing Information Processing
7. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 9
What makes something famous?
• Gangnam style?
• Mona Lisa?
• Trump tweets?
• Double rainbow?
Communication Internal Events vs.
Communication External Events
8. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 10
Network structure – who follows whom?
From (Weng et al, Scientific Reports 2012)
9. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 11
Majority Illusion
(Lerman et al., 2015)
10. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 12
(Salganik, Dodds, Watts, Science 2006)
• Experiment
– 48 unknown songs
– Nine “worlds“ with
different users
– Songs start being liked
differently in each world
– A song that starts being
liked is liked even more
– Virtuous reinforcement
Unpredictability
Market share fluctuates heavily between
different worlds
12. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 14
Recipes for Spreading Misinformation
Quoting (Metaxas et al, WebSci 2010)
Comparison by (Metaxas et al, WebSci 2017)
Recipes handle unpredictability
13. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 15
Herding Behaviour - Dislikes
1-2 €
per
1000
views
(CPM)
plus
extras
14. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 16
Clickbait Economics
(Silverman & Alexander, Buzzfeed, November 2016)
15. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 17
Media Economics
• Offline media publishes daily or twice daily
• Online media must publish every hour
– The message becomes the news
• Trump generates news by producing messages
Social Media
• (some) individuals become publishers
– Different participant types tend to have different personality profiles
Temporality
Faster republishing cycles beget
increasing dynamics beget
increasing competition for attention beget
increasing unpredictability
16. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 18
Good or bad? (my subjective judgement)
Good
• Self-empowerment
– Political movements,
e.g. Campact
– Decentralized culture
Bad
• Group manipulation
– By economic players
(clickbait)
– By political players
(Breitbart)
– By consultancies
(Cambridge analytica)
17. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 19
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst
das Rettende auch. Hölderlin
Where is danger, grows
salvation, too.
18. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 20
• Confirmation bias
– Very hard to turn one‘s opinion
– Easier:
• Enforce belief
• Spread doubt
– Online viral marketing often does not work
• Everything is different the second time
– Election campaigns don‘t repeat themselves
– Facebook now is different than 5 years ago
– New online media on the rise
Individual Resilience
(Watts: Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer)
19. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 21
>100 Fact checking networks: IFCN
• Fact checking website: snopes.com
• Deleting shared content based on comments
https://fullfact.org/blog/2017/jun/general-election-2017-factchecked/
Societal Resilience: Fact Checking
(Friggeri et al,
ICWSM-2014)
21. Steffen Staab Opinion Formation and Spreading 23
• Who defines what resilience is beneficial?
• How to further resilience?
• Need for joint research of
– Social sciences, humanities, computer science, etc.
Conclusion: Individual, Network & Resilience