This is another summery with explanations of an arXiv paper.

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Everybody is Subject to Propaganda

Propaganda is biased or misleading information used to achieve a political goal. It is often used in nationalist or military pursuit. Everybody is subject to propaganda on a daily basis.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is “The tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.”. I’m sure you all have had an experience with this, especially here. I’ve already met flat earthers, climate change deniers, and one guy who said lizard-men control the world.

Here is one example of confirmation bias:
I once asked a kid at my school why he didn’t believe in climate change. He said the scientists were still debating it, so I asked him to find one organization that denied it. He sent me a link to the American Association of Petroleum Geologists the next day. I don’t believe that makes a difference because they are petroleum geologists, while he thinks they do because they are “scientists”. In the end one smaller organization doesn’t change the overall consensus on climate change, but it can reinforce your opinion taken alone. My opinion everybody tied to the petroleum industry is corrupt and his opinion scientists are still debating climate change.

The consensus is at about 97% so I was right anyway. source

Confirmation bias is important indicator for how well propaganda is doing. The more often people see something, the more likely they are to believe it. Once a group of people show a confirmation bias they will likely spread the propaganda themselves, increasing its range and influence dramatically.

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Simulating the Spread of Propaganda Through Society

The simulation involves a random interaction of people. Each person shares their opinion to another and any opinion highly dissimilar is rejected. How dissimilar an opinion must be to be rejected is a function of how certain the person is of the opinion, if you are more certain of your opinion you are more likely to keep it and vise versa. (Level of confirmation bias.)

In the simulation each person is given a random opinion ranging from 0 to 1 and an uncertainty from 0 (they will never change their opinion) to 5 (they will accept any opinion). When the difference between the opinions is greater than the uncertainty the opinion is rejected. People with an uncertainty of 0 act as propaganda machines, they will never change their opinion but they can change others opinions.

The simulation was run with a population of 25,000. The first run they tested with no propaganda to serve as a control. Any uncertainty being more than 0.26 led to a homogeneous population. Anything below split the population into different groups. Most were in the middle while about 10% on each side were on the extreme.

Next simulations were ran with extremist propaganda. Two extremist propaganda sources existed that increased the opinion number of any individual above 0.9 and one that raised any opinion number above 0.95. The uncertainty had a major impact on what happened. At about 0.25 uncertainty either 0% or about 50% of the people formed an extremest opinion. Greater uncertainties will bring the entire population to a centrist (0.5) opinion. An uncertainty rating of 0.1 fragmented the population.

Next they found that increasing the point at which the propaganda would affect an individual had a linear correlation with the amount of extremists. Propaganda at 0.8 eliminated extremism altogether and the general opinion became moderate. While propaganda at 0.5 increased extremism. (This is most likely because the centrists formed a uniform opinion early. This caused the extremists to have less centrist influence.

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How To Counter Extremist Propaganda

Countering extremist propaganda is an ongoing effort. In these simulations it shows that it is not propaganda of the complete opposite opinion and not centrist propaganda. The solution is propaganda that is in between the centrist opinion and the extremist one. It can act as a path to go from extremism to centrism. Many places have no path. The common mindset “you are either with us, or against us” is part of that problem.

A path to accept a more centrist mindset is the best way to deal with threats like isis, climate change deniers, and flat Earthers.

here is the research paper.

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