With the availability of internet, social media, etc., the interconnectedness of people within most societies has increased tremendously over the past decades. Across the same timespan, an increasing level of fragmentation of society into small isolated groups has been observed. With a simple model of a society, in which the dynamics of individual opinion formation is integrated with social balance, we show that these two phenomena might be tightly related. We identify a critical level of interconnectedness, above which society fragments into sub-communities that are internally cohesive and hostile towards other groups. This critical communication density necessarily exists in the presence of social balance, and arises from the underlying mathematical structure of a phase transition known from the theory of disordered magnets called spin glasses. We discuss the consequences of this phase transition for social fragmentation in society.

中文翻译：

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社会平衡对社会分裂的影响

随着互联网、社交媒体等的普及，大多数社会中人们的相互联系在过去几十年里大大增加。在同一时间跨度内，观察到越来越多的社会分裂成孤立的小群体。通过一个简单的社会模型，其中个人意见形成的动态与社会平衡相结合，我们表明这两种现象可能密切相关。我们确定了一个关键的相互联系水平，高于这个水平，社会分裂成内部凝聚力和敌对其他群体的子社区。这种关键的交流密度必然存在于社会平衡的存在下，并且源于从称为自旋玻璃的无序磁铁理论中已知的相变的潜在数学结构。