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Misinformation -- false or misleading information -- is considered a significant societal concern due to its associated "misinformation effects," such as political polarization, erosion of trust in institutions, problematic behavior, and…
The widespread emergence of opinion polarization is often attributed to the rise of social media and the internet, which can promote selective exposure and the formation of echo chambers. However, experimental evidence shows that exposure…
In recent years online social networks have become increasingly prominent in political campaigns and, concurrently, several countries have experienced shock election outcomes. This paper proposes a model that links these two phenomena. In…
Social media platforms have been exploited to disseminate misinformation in recent years. The widespread online misinformation has been shown to affect users' beliefs and is connected to social impact such as polarization. In this work, we…
When users on social media share content without considering its veracity, they may unwittingly be spreading misinformation. In this work, we investigate the design of lightweight interventions that nudge users to assess the accuracy of…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
Community-based fact-checking is a promising approach to verify social media content and correct misleading posts at scale. Yet, causal evidence regarding its effectiveness in reducing the spread of misinformation on social media is…
Users online tend to join polarized groups of like-minded peers around shared narratives, forming echo chambers. The echo chamber effect and opinion polarization may be driven by several factors including human biases in information…
Corrections given by ordinary social media users, also referred to as Social Correction have emerged as a viable intervention against misinformation as per the recent literature. However, little is known about how often users give disputing…
A great deal of empirical research has examined who falls for misinformation and why. Here, we introduce a formal game-theoretic model of engagement with news stories that captures the strategic interplay between (mis)information consumers…
The rapid growth of social media as a news platform has raised significant concerns about the influence and societal impact of biased and unreliable news on these platforms. While much research has explored user engagement with news on…
Social media users post content on various topics. A defining feature of social media is that other users can provide feedback -- called community feedback -- to their content in the form of comments, replies, and retweets. We hypothesize…
Recently, two influential PNAS papers have shown how our preferences for 'Hello Kitty' and 'Harley Davidson', obtained through Facebook likes, can accurately predict details about our personality, religiosity, political attitude and sexual…
In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others. However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with those who…
More often than not, bad decisions are bad regardless of where and when they are made. Information sharing might thus be utilized to mitigate them. Here we show that sharing the information about strategy choice between players residing on…
The increased popularity and ubiquitous availability of online social networks and globalised Internet access have affected the way in which people share content. The information that users willingly disclose on these platforms can be used…
Social media systems rely on user feedback and rating mechanisms for personalization, ranking, and content filtering. However, when users evaluate content contributed by fellow users (e.g., by liking a post or voting on a comment), these…
News media has been utilized as a political tool to stray from facts, presenting biased claims without evidence. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, politically biased news (PBN) has significantly undermined public trust in vaccines, despite strong…
The many decisions people make about what to pay attention to online shape the spread of information in online social networks. Due to the constraints of available time and cognitive resources, the ease of discovery strongly impacts how…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…