Related papers: Controlling Elections through Social Influence
In 1992, Bartholdi, Tovey, and Trick opened the study of control attacks on elections---attempts to improve the election outcome by such actions as adding/deleting candidates or voters. That work has led to many results on how algorithms…
Social media, once hailed as a vehicle for democratization and the promotion of positive social change across the globe, are under attack for becoming a tool of political manipulation and spread of disinformation. A case in point is the…
A central theme in computational social choice is to study the extent to which voting systems computationally resist manipulative attacks seeking to influence the outcome of elections, such as manipulation (i.e., strategic voting), control,…
Recently, online social networks have become major battlegrounds for political campaigns, viral marketing, and the dissemination of news. As a consequence, ''bad actors'' are increasingly exploiting these platforms, becoming a key challenge…
We study the behavior of Range Voting and Normalized Range Voting with respect to electoral control. Electoral control encompasses attempts from an election chair to alter the structure of an election in order to change the outcome. We show…
Networked multi-agent dynamical systems have been used to model how individual opinions evolve over time due to the opinions of other agents in the network. Particularly, such a model has been used to study how a planning agent can be used…
Mass Media outlets have occupied the central role of the political scenario, and are persuasive in the process of opinion formation of the citizens. In particular, the study of the relationship between Mass Media and behaviour of citizens…
In this work we are interested in the modelling and control of opinion dynamics spreading on a time evolving network with scale-free asymptotic degree distribution. The mathematical model is formulated as a coupling of an opinion alignment…
We study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…
We study the election control problem with multi-votes, where each voter can present a single vote according different views (or layers, we use "layer" to represent "view"). For example, according to the attributes of candidates, such as:…
We propose a computational framework for modeling opinion dynamics in electoral competitions that combines two realistic features: voter memory and exogenous shocks. The population is represented by a fully-connected network of agents, each…
Social media, seen by some as the modern public square, is vulnerable to manipulation. By controlling inauthentic accounts impersonating humans, malicious actors can amplify disinformation within target communities. The consequences of such…
Voting is a simple mechanism to aggregate the preferences of agents. Many voting rules have been shown to be NP-hard to manipulate. However, a number of recent theoretical results suggest that this complexity may only be in the worst-case…
A voting center is in charge of collecting and aggregating voter preferences. In an iterative process, the center sends comparison queries to voters, requesting them to submit their preference between two items. Voters might discuss the…
Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress towards computational fake news detection. To mitigate its negative impact, we argue that it is critical to understand what user attributes potentially cause users to share fake news. The key…
Both Schulze and ranked pairs are voting rules that satisfy many natural, desirable axioms. Many standard types of electoral control (with a chair seeking to change the outcome of an election by interfering with the election structure) have…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…
Today, our more-than-ever digital lives leave significant footprints in cyberspace. Large scale collections of these socially generated footprints, often known as big data, could help us to re-investigate different aspects of our social…
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…
"Control" studies attempts to set the outcome of elections through the addition, deletion, or partition of voters or candidates. The set of benchmark control types was largely set in the seminal 1992 paper by Bartholdi, Tovey, and Trick…