Opinion polarisation and echo chambers in online social media: structure, dynamics and mitigation strategies

In a more and more connected world, relationships and opinions are shaped and evolve through online interactions. Similar-minded users tend to cluster together and form strongly opinionated online communities, the so-called echo chambers. The ensuing polarisation of opinions fosters the spread of conspiracy theories and hinder fruitful political debate. Research on opinion dynamics is focusing more and more on this problem, with most models considering user-level psychological and social features. Those are however difficult to evaluate in practice and there has been a dearth of empirical evaluation of these theoretical works. In this PhD research project I will present a new mathematical framework for the description of echo chambers and quantification of polarisation from a macroscopic point of view. I will also evaluate my model on real-world data and propose leads for algorithmic methods aimed at mitigating the polarisation of opinions.

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity will train over 55 experts in multi-disciplinary aspects of cybersecurity, from engineering to crime science and public policy.

Short term impacts are associated with the research outputs of the 55+ research projects that will be undertaken as part of the doctoral studies of CDT students. Each project will tackle an important cybersecurity problem, propose and evaluate solutions, interventions and policy options. Students will publish those in international peer-reviewed journals, but also disseminate those through blog posts and material geared towards decision makers and experts in adjacent fields. Through industry placements relating to their projects, all students will have the opportunity to implement and evaluate their ideas within real-world organizations, to achieve short term impact in solving cybersecurity problems.

In the longer term graduates of the CDT will assume leading positions within industry, goverment, law enforcement, the third sector and academia to increase the capacity of the UK in being a leader in cybersecurity. From those leadership positions they will assess options and formulate effective interventions to tackle cybercrime, secure the UK's infrastructure, establish norms of cooperation between industries and government to secure IT systems, and become leading researcher and scholars further increasing the UK's capacity in cybersecurity in the years to come. The last impact is likely to be significant give that currently many higher education training programs do not have capacity to provide cybersecurity training at undergraduate or graduate levels, particularly in non-technical fields.

The full details of our plan to achieve impact can be found in the "Pathways to Impact" document.