LIRa session (online-only): Mina Young Pedersen

Recent literature has shown a growing interest for research in the interplay between logic and social network theory. One particularly prominent approach is to think of social relationships in terms of relations on a Kripke frame and use tools from various modal logics to reason about agents’ knowledge, characteristics and access to information.

This talk will be about two such logics in context of the social phenomena polarization and echo chambers. The first is a recent basic modal logic developed to analyze balance theory. We examine different extensions to its language to define previously undefinable frame properties and introduce distance measures to evaluate how far a network is from polarization. Then a novel two-sorted hybrid logic of strong and weak ties will be presented. We see that a known claim from social network analysis is a validity and relate it to echo chamber formation. We will also talk about threshold models, an epistemic modality and dynamic operators in this logical framework.