cs.SIJun 2, 2026

What Makes Majority Illusion Easy to Detect?

Authors: Šimon Schierreich, Ildikó Schlotter

Organizations: Czech Technical University in Prague · ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies · Budapest University of Technology and Economics

Abstract

Majority illusion is an undesirable phenomenon in social networks in which agents incorrectly perceive a minority opinion as dominant. This can severely distort collective behavior and decision-making. We study the fundamental question of detecting whether a social network allows for a majority illusion. Formally, in the qq-Majority Illusion problem, we ask whether there exists a binary labeling of agents in which at least a qq-fraction of agents have the majority of neighbors with the minority label. We investigate how various structural properties of the underlying social network influence the tractability of this question, and provide a detailed map of its computational complexity.

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