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There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
An ability to infer the political leaning of social media users can help in gathering opinion polls thereby leading to a better understanding of public opinion. While there has been a body of research attempting to infer the political…
Election polls play a critical role in political discussions by probing public opinion and enabling political parties to assess their performance before elections. However, traditional polling methods sometimes fail to predict election…
Recent studies suggest that social media usage -- while linked to an increased diversity of information and perspectives for users -- has exacerbated user polarization on many issues. A popular theory for this phenomenon centers on the…
News recommenders help users to find relevant online content and have the potential to fulfill a crucial role in a democratic society, directing the scarce attention of citizens towards the information that is most important to them.…
We study a model of user decision-making in the context of recommender systems via numerical simulation. Our model provides an explanation for the findings of Nguyen, et. al (2014), where, in environments where recommender systems are…
It is part of our daily social-media experience that seemingly ordinary items (videos, news, publications, etc.) unexpectedly gain an enormous amount of attention. Here we investigate how unexpected these events are. We propose a method…
In an election, we are given a set of voters, each having a preference list over a set of candidates, that are distributed on a social network. We consider a scenario where voters may change their preference lists as a consequence of the…
It has been suggested that online search and retrieval contributes to the intellectual isolation of users within their preexisting ideologies, where people's prior views are strengthened and alternative viewpoints are infrequently…
We investigate a variation of the classical voter model in which the set of influencing agents depends on an individual's current opinion. The initial population consists of a random sample of equally sized sub-populations for each state,…
The dynamics of opinion formation in a society is a complex phenomenon where many variables play an important role. Recently, the influence of algorithms to filter which content is fed to social networks users has come under scrutiny.…
While the polls have been the most trusted source for election predictions for decades, in the recent presidential election they were called inaccurate and biased. How inaccurate were the polls in this election and can social media beat the…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
In this paper we study the impact of news media and public surveys on the electoral campaigns for political competitions. We present an agent-based model that addresses the effective influence of surveys in orienting the opinions of voters…
Social networks are increasingly being used to conduct polls. We introduce a simple model of such social polling. We suppose agents vote sequentially, but the order in which agents choose to vote is not necessarily fixed. We also suppose…
Several elections run in the last years have been characterized by attempts to manipulate the result of the election through the diffusion of fake or malicious news over social networks. This problem has been recognized as a critical issue…
An individual's opinion concerning political bias in the media is shaped by exogenous factors (independent analysis of media outputs) and endogenous factors (social activity, e.g. peer pressure by political allies and opponents in a…
Elections, the cornerstone of democratic societies, are usually regarded as unpredictable due to the complex interactions that shape them at different levels. In this work, we show that voter turnouts contain crucial information that can be…
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…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…