In the era of social media, people frequently share their own opinions online
on various issues and also in the way, get exposed to others' opinions. Be it
for selective exposure of news feed recommendation algorithms or our own
inclination to listen to opinions that support ours, the result is that we get
more and more exposed to opinions closer to ours. Further, any population is
inherently heterogeneous i.e. people will hold a varied range of opinions
regarding a topic and showcase a varied range of openness to get influenced by
others. In this paper, we demonstrate the different behavior put forward by
open- and close-minded agents towards an issue, when allowed to freely intermix
and communicate.
We have shown that the intermixing among people leads to formation of opinion
echo chambers i.e. a small closed network of people who hold similar opinions
and are not affected by opinions of people outside the network. Echo chambers
are evidently harmful for a society because it inhibits free healthy
communication among all and thus, prevents exchange of opinions, spreads
misinformation and increases extremist beliefs. This calls for reduction in
echo chambers, because a total consensus of opinion is neither possible nor is
welcome. We show that the number of echo chambers depends on the number of
close-minded agents and cannot be lessened by increasing the number of
open-minded agents. We identify certain 'moderate'-minded agents, who possess
the capability of manipulating and reducing the number of echo chambers. The
paper proposes an algorithm for intelligent placement of moderate-minded agents
in the opinion-time spectrum by which the opinion echo chambers can be
maximally reduced. With various experimental setups, we demonstrate that the
proposed algorithm fares well when compared to placement of other agents (open-
or close-minded) and random placement of 'moderate'-minded agents