Systems and Communications Commons^™

Characterizing Controversiality Of Topics Utilizing Eccentricity Of Opinions, Sriniwas Pandey, Hiroki Sayama

Northeast Journal of Complex Systems (NEJCS)

Access to abundant biased information in echo chambers and social bubbles often intensifies opinions to the extremes. The extremization of opinions results in several topics becoming controversial. However, it is very difficult to measure the degree of controversiality of a topic objectively since the controversiality of any topic is subjective and perceived differently from different communities. The absence of an objective measure of controversiality has been a major hindrance in understanding the causes and effects of it. In this work we propose a method to quantify controversiality of a topic by utilizing eccentricity of opinions on that topic. The eccentricity …