Polarization in social media

Congli Zhang, Xiaolei Wang, Yong Min, Shanqing Yu, Ye Wu, Qi Xuan and Chenbo Fu

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2025, vol. 665, issue C

Abstract: The development of social media has changed the way in which information is consumed by the public. However, it also promotes polarization, especially among the more controversial topics. Furthermore, recommendation systems commonly used in social media have been shown to emerge an echo chamber effect, amplifying user groups’ polarization. Most of current studies focus on analyzing the generation of polarization phenomena on social media but rarely investigate how to quantify polarization. In this study, we construct user opinion networks and utilize random walk to quantify the polarization of related topics. The experiments on three real datasets, i.e., Bilibili, YouTube and Reddit, demonstrate that there is polarization in Bilibili and YouTube, especially in Bilibili. Our work complements quantitative measurements of polarization in social media platforms.

Keywords: Polarization quantization; Echo chamber; Social networks; Networks analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437125001396
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:665:y:2025:i:c:s0378437125001396

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2025.130487

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().