Related papers: Controlling Elections through Social Influence

Most of the computational study of election problems has assumed that each voter's preferences are, or should be extended to, a total order. However in practice voters may have preferences with ties. We study the complexity of manipulative…

Understanding how individuals change their opinions is essential to mitigate the harmful effect of fake news and stop opinion polarization. Building upon an extremely flexible opinion dynamics model that can capture the key microscopic…

Coordinated campaigns are used to influence and manipulate social media platforms and their users, a critical challenge to the free exchange of information online. Here we introduce a general, unsupervised network-based methodology to…

Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…

We consider a distributed voting problem with a set of agents that are partitioned into disjoint groups and a set of obnoxious alternatives. Agents and alternatives are represented by points in a metric space. The goal is to compute the…

Polls posted on social media have emerged in recent years as an important tool for estimating public opinion, e.g., to gauge public support for business decisions and political candidates in national elections. Here, we examine nearly two…

We consider the problem of influence maximization in fixed networks for contagion models in an adversarial setting. The goal is to select an optimal set of nodes to seed the influence process, such that the number of influenced nodes at the…

In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…

In order to combat the creation and spread of harmful content online, this paper defines and contextualizes the concept of inauthentic, societal-scale manipulation by malicious actors. We review the literature on societally harmful content…

Bots, software-controlled accounts that operate on social media, have been used to manipulate and deceive. We studied the characteristics and activity of bots around major political events, including elections in various countries. In this…

In this paper, we study stochastic coupon probing problem in social networks. Assume there is a social network and a set of coupons. We can offer coupons to some users adaptively and those users who accept the offer will act as seeds and…

The well-known influence maximization problem aims at maximizing the influence of one information cascade in a social network by selecting appropriate seed users prior to the diffusion process. In its adaptive version, additional seed users…

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…

The diffusion of opinions in Social Networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key…

It is important to understand how the outcome of an election can be modified by an agent with control over the structure of the election. Electoral control has been studied for many election systems, but for all studied systems the winner…

Modern threats have emerged from the prevalence of social networks. Hostile actors, such as extremist groups or foreign governments, utilize these networks to run propaganda campaigns with different aims. For extremists, these campaigns are…

By the Gibbard--Satterthwaite theorem, every reasonable voting rule for three or more alternatives is susceptible to manipulation: there exist elections where one or more voters can change the election outcome in their favour by…

Propaganda campaigns aim at influencing people's mindset with the purpose of advancing a specific agenda. They exploit the anonymity of the Internet, the micro-profiling ability of social networks, and the ease of automatically creating and…

Adversarial Internet robots (botnets) represent a growing threat to the safe use and stability of the Internet. Botnets can play a role in launching adversary reconnaissance (scanning and phishing), influence operations (upvoting), and…

In parliamentary elections, parties compete for a limited, typically fixed number of seats. Most parliaments are assembled using apportionment methods that distribute the seats based on the parties' vote counts. Common apportionment methods…