Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Depolarising Social Networks: Optimisation of Exposure to Adverse
  Opinions in the Presence of a Backfire Effect   As social networks are ubiquitous in everyday life, problems such as
misinformation, bots and polarisation of opinion gain more and more importance.
This paper focuses on the last one as we propose novel methods to reduce the
amount of polarisation in a social group. We leverage the voter model in which
users hold binary opinions and repeatedly update their beliefs based on others
they connect with. Stubborn agents who never change their minds ("zealots") are
also disseminated through the network. We are interested in two equilibrium
metrics, the diversity of opinions $\sigma$ and the density of active links
$\rho$. The latter is a measure of the exposure to adverse opinions. We derive
formulas to compute them that are valid in any directed, weighted network. Then
we study the problem of finding optimal numbers of zealots in order to maximise
these quantities. We account for the presence of a backfire effect, which may
lead the group to react negatively and reinforce its level of polarisation in
response. We provide exact solutions in the specific context of a complete
unweighted graph, and propose a method for $\sigma$ in the general case.
Finally we apply these problems to the network of the US House of
Representatives. The network exhibits high levels of opinion diversity but
lower levels of active links density. We find optimal numbers of zealots that
maximise these quantities and show that both can be efficiently increased in
some cases.

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The categories of this paper are: hep-ph
4
The categories of this paper are: cond-mat
19
The categories of this paper are: eess
31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
8
The categories of this paper are: hep-ex
21
The categories of this paper are: adap-org
36
The categories of this paper are: cmp-lg
27
The categories of this paper are: comp-gas
35
The categories of this paper are: mtrl-th
11
The categories of this paper are: hep-lat
25
The categories of this paper are: patt-sol
26
The categories of this paper are: bayes-an
33
The categories of this paper are: plasm-ph
7
The categories of this paper are: hep-th
14
The categories of this paper are: math-ph
24
The categories of this paper are: dg-ga