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

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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.