Evolution of public opinions in closed societies influenced by broadcast media

• Published in: Physica A Vol. 472; pp. 53 - 66
• Main Authors: Fan, Kangqi, Pedrycz, Witold
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 15.04.2017
• Subjects: Broadcast media; Closed societies; Opinion dynamics; Social media; Closed societies; Opinion dynamics; Broadcast media; Social media
• ISSN: 0378-4371; 1873-2119
• DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2017.01.027

Studies on opinion evolution in a closed society can help people design strategies to emancipate from the control of public opinions and prevent the diffusion of extremism. In this work, the social judgment based opinion (SJBO) dynamics model is extended to explore the collective debates in a closed system that consists of a social network and a broadcast network. The broadcast network is a group of channels through which the so-called broadcast media or mainstream media transmit the same opinion to social agents. Numerical experiments show that the broadcast media can assimilate most of the agents when contrarians are absent. Including agents’ diverse attitudes toward the broadcast media, although downsizes the supporters of broadcast media, fails to make contrarians outnumber the supporters. The dominance of broadcast media in a closed system can be overturned by introducing a small number of inflexible contrarians. Influenced by the competition between contrarians and broadcast media, few centrists survive the collective debates. The scale of supporters is maximized when agents neither have their own initial opinions nor have access to the contrarians, whereas the development of contrarians can be boosted when agents start with non-zero opinions and the repulsion to broadcast media is taken into consideration. •The SJBO model is extended to study the opinion evolution in a closed society.•The effect of broadcast coverage on the size of their supporters is insignificant.•Individuals’ interaction promotes the diffusion of opinion from mainstream media.•Diverse attitudes toward mainstream media prevent the opinion uni-polarization•The dominance of mainstream media can be broken by 30% inflexible contrarians.