Opinion Formation under Antagonistic Influences

We study the opinion dynamics in a generalized voter model in which voters are additionally influenced by two antagonistic news sources, whose effect is to promote political polarization. We show that, as the influence of the news sources is increased, the mean time to reach consensus is anomalously long, the time to reach a politically polarized state is quite short, and the steady-state opinion distribution exhibits a transition from a near consensus state to a politically polarized state.

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