Recent advances in opinion propagation dynamics: A 2020 Survey

Opinion dynamics have attracted the interest of researchers from different fields. Local interactions among individuals create interesting dynamics for the system as a whole. Such dynamics are important from a variety of perspectives. Group decision making, successful marketing, and constructing networks (in which consensus can be reached or prevented) are a few examples of existing or potential applications. The invention of the Internet has made the opinion fusion faster, unilateral, and on a whole different scale. Spread of fake news, propaganda, and election interferences have made it clear there is an essential need to know more about these dynamics. The emergence of new ideas in the field has accelerated over the last few years. In the first quarter of 2020, at least 50 research papers have emerged, either peer-reviewed and published or on pre-print outlets such as arXiv. In this paper, we summarize these ground-breaking ideas and their fascinating extensions and introduce newly surfaced concepts.