ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Link recommendation algorithms and dynamics of polarization in online social networks.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 188 citations in OpenAlex.
- Toward an integrated and globally equitable understanding of political polarization.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Free information disrupts even Bayesian crowds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Control over Recommendation Algorithms in Heterogeneous Modular Systems with Dynamic Opinions.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Network analysis of psychological capital: mapping interconnected dynamics in teacher wellbeing and professional commitment.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Why more social interactions lead to more polarization in societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Multifaceted polarization and information reliability in climate change discussions on social media platforms.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Charting multidimensional ideological polarization across demographic groups in the USA.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Leveraging Promotional Strategies to Enhance Hospital Influence on Social Media: Cross-Sectional Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- How media competition fuels the spread of misinformation.Science advances · 2025Article
- Mitigating opinion polarization in social networks using adversarial attacks.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Short-term exposure to filter-bubble recommendation systems has limited polarization effects: Naturalistic experiments on YouTube.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Ruminant livestock and climate change: critical discourse moments in mainstream and farming sector news media.Agriculture and human values · 2025Article
- Social polarization promoted by sparse higher-order interactions.Communications physics · 2025Article
- A multilevel network approach to revealing patterns of online political selective exposure.PloS one · 2025Article
- Inconsistency among evaluation metrics in link prediction.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- The maximum capability of a topological feature in link prediction.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- The ethical significance of user-control in AI-driven speech-BCIs: a narrative review.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Review
- The Potential Influence of AI on Population Mental Health.JMIR mental health · 2023Article
- Modelling opinion dynamics under the impact of influencer and media strategies.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Machine culture.Nature human behaviour · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The level of antagonism between political groups has risen in the past years. Supporters of a given party increasingly dislike members of the opposing group and avoid intergroup interactions, leading to homophilic social networks. While new connections offline are driven largely by human decisions, new connections on online social platforms are intermediated by link recommendation algorithms, e.g., "People you may know" or "Whom to follow" suggestions. The long-term impacts of link recommendation in polarization are unclear, particularly as exposure to opposing viewpoints has a dual effect: Connections with out-group members can lead to opinion convergence and prevent group polarization or further separate opinions. Here, we provide a complex adaptive-systems perspective on the effects of link recommendation algorithms. While several models justify polarization through rewiring based on opinion similarity, here we explain it through rewiring grounded in structural similarity-defined as similarity based on network properties. We observe that preferentially establishing links with structurally similar nodes (i.e., sharing many neighbors) results in network topologies that are amenable to opinion polarization. Hence, polarization occurs not because of a desire to shield oneself from disagreeable attitudes but, instead, due to the creation of inadvertent echo chambers. When networks are composed of nodes that react differently to out-group contacts, either converging or polarizing, we find that connecting structurally dissimilar nodes moderates opinions. Overall, our study sheds light on the impacts of social-network algorithms and unveils avenues to steer dynamics of radicalization and polarization in online social networks.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.