Directed propaganda in the majority-rule model

Abstract

Advertisement and propaganda have changed continuously in the past decades, mainly due to the people’s interactions at online platforms and social networks, and operate nowadays reaching a highly specific online audience instead targeting the masses. The impacts of this new media effect, oriented directly for a specific audience, are investigated on this study, in which we focus on the opinion evolution of agents in the majority-rule model, considering the presence of directed propaganda. We introduce p as the probability of a “positive” external propaganda and q as the probability to the agents follow the external propaganda. Our results show that the usual majority-rule model stationary state is reached, with a full consensus, only for two cases, namely when the external propaganda is absent or when the media favors only one of the two opinions. However, even for a small influence of external propaganda, the final state is reached with a majority opinion dominating the population. For the case in which the propaganda influence is strong enough among the agents, we show that the consensus cannot be reached at all, and we observe the polarization of opinions. In addition, we show through analytical and numerical results that the system undergoes an order–disorder phase transition that occurs at [Formula: see text] for the case [Formula: see text].