Modeling Position Selection by Individuals during Informational Warfare with a Two-Component Agenda

The article develops and analyzes the model of position selection by individuals in conditions of informational confrontation on two issues. We consider a society, in which two parties holding opposing positions on these issues are competing. The confrontation is manifested as follows: messages regarding these issues are distributed by each of the parties as information flows through affiliated media. Individuals absorb these flows, become supporters of one or party or the other on each of the issues, and relay them further to other individuals in accordance with their political preferences. The relative importance of the issues is determined based on the agenda-setting theory. This implies that the relative importance of the promoted issue is determined by the broadcasting intensity of both parties. Two variants of the mathematical model are constructed. One of them assumes interpersonal communications uniformly distributed throughout society and involves the consideration of system parameters affecting the stability of decisions. The second version suggests the presence of two groups (ethnic communities, social classes, etc.) in society, the members of which tend to communicate more with each other than with the representatives of the other group. For this variant, a simple Blotto game is considered: each party distributes its media broadcasting resource between two issues in order to maximize the number of supporters at the end of the propaganda battle.