Maximizing Diversity of Opinion in Social Networks
This work addresses the problem of designing social networks to promote diverse opinions, but it is incremental as it extends existing opinion dynamics models with diversity measures and provides analytical solutions for specific network topologies.
The authors study how to place a single opinion leader in a social network to maximize opinion diversity, using the French-DeGroot model and two ecological diversity indices. They provide analytical solutions for paths, cycles, and trees, and illustrate with a numerical example.
We study the problem of maximizing opinion diversity in a social network that includes opinion leaders with binary opposing opinions. The members of the network who are not leaders form their opinions using the French-DeGroot model of opinion dynamics. To quantify the diversity of such a system, we adapt two diversity measures from ecology to our setting, the Simpson Diversity Index and the Shannon Index. Using these two measures, we formalize the problem of how to place a single leader with opinion 1, given a network with a leader with opinion 0, so as to maximize the opinion diversity. We give analytical solutions to these problems for paths, cycles, and trees, and we highlight our results through a numerical example.