Modeling the Adoption of Political Opinions in Networks Using Social Sensing

 

ANMOL MADAN

MIT MEDIA LAB

 

The exposure to new information and opinions, and their diffusion within social networks are important questions in education, business, and government. However, to date there has been no method to automatically capture fine-grained social interactions between people and then use the data to better understand the diffusion process. In this talk, we describe the use of co-location and communication sensors in ‘socially aware’ mobile phones to measure and model the face-to-face interactions and opinion changes of residents of an undergraduate dormitory during the last three months of the US presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain. We find that political discussants have characteristic interaction patterns. We also show that the different types of measured interactions can be used to recover the self-reported ‘political discussant’ ties within the network. Automatically measured mobile phone features allow us to estimate exposure to different types of opinions within this community. Based on exposure, we propose a measure of ‘dynamic homophily’ which reveals surprising short-term population-wide behavior changes around external political events, such as election debates and Election Day. To our knowledge, this is the first time such dynamic-homophily has been measured. We show that it is possible to use exposure to other nodes in the network to predict future opinions for individuals (r square=0.8, p < 0.0001). We find that using mobile phone based features on dynamic exposure increases the explained variance by up to 30%.