Reducing Opinion Echo-Chambers by Intelligent Placement of Moderate-Minded Agents

In the era of social media, people frequently share their own opinions online on various issues and also in the way, get exposed to others' opinions. Be it for selective exposure of news feed recommendation algorithms or our own inclination to listen to opinions that support ours, the result is that we get more and more exposed to opinions closer to ours. Further, any population is inherently heterogeneous i.e. people will hold a varied range of opinions regarding a topic and showcase a varied range of openness to get influenced by others. In this paper, we demonstrate the different behavior put forward by open- and close-minded agents towards an issue, when allowed to freely intermix and communicate. We have shown that the intermixing among people leads to formation of opinion echo chambers i.e. a small closed network of people who hold similar opinions and are not affected by opinions of people outside the network. Echo chambers are evidently harmful for a society because it inhibits free healthy communication among all and thus, prevents exchange of opinions, spreads misinformation and increases extremist beliefs. This calls for reduction in echo chambers, because a total consensus of opinion is neither possible nor is welcome. We show that the number of echo chambers depends on the number of close-minded agents and cannot be lessened by increasing the number of open-minded agents. We identify certain 'moderate'-minded agents, who possess the capability of manipulating and reducing the number of echo chambers. The paper proposes an algorithm for intelligent placement of moderate-minded agents in the opinion-time spectrum by which the opinion echo chambers can be maximally reduced. With various experimental setups, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm fares well when compared to placement of other agents (open- or close-minded) and random placement of 'moderate'-minded agents.