Related papers: Quantifying Filter Bubbles: Analyzing Surprise in …
We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…
The present level of proliferation of fake, biased, and propagandistic content online has made it impossible to fact-check every single suspicious claim or article, either manually or automatically. Thus, many researchers are shifting their…
Opinion diffusion is a crucial phenomenon in social networks, often underlying the way in which a collective of agents develops a consensus on relevant decisions. The voter model is a well-known theoretical model to study opinion spreading…
Nowadays users get informed and shape their opinion through social media. However, the disintermediated access to contents does not guarantee quality of information. Selective exposure and confirmation bias, indeed, have been shown to play…
We study the ability of a social media platform with a political agenda to influence voting outcomes. Our benchmark is Condorcet's jury theorem, which states that the likelihood of a correct decision under majority voting increases with the…
Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…
Automatic unreliable news detection is a research problem with great potential impact. Recently, several papers have shown promising results on large-scale news datasets with models that only use the article itself without resorting to any…
An increasing number of politicians are relying on cheaper, easier to access technologies such as online social media platforms to communicate with their constituency. These platforms present a cheap and low-barrier channel of communication…
How popular a topic or an opinion appears to be in a network can be very different from its actual popularity. For example, in an online network of a social media platform, the number of people who mention a topic in their posts---i.e., its…
The drastic effect of local alliances in three-party competition is investigated in democratic hierarchical bottom-up voting. The results are obtained analytically using a model which extends a sociophysics frame introduced in 1986…
The hypothesis of selective exposure assumes that people seek out information that supports their views and eschew information that conflicts with their beliefs, and that has negative consequences on our society. Few researchers have…
We study an outcome of a vote in a population of voters exposed to an externally applied bias in favour of one of two potential candidates. The population consists of ordinary individuals, that are in majority and tend to align their…
Filter bubbles have been studied extensively within the context of online content platforms due to their potential to cause undesirable outcomes such as user dissatisfaction or polarization. With the rise of short-video platforms, the…
Participatory budgeting, as a paradigm for democratic innovations, engages citizens in the distribution of a public budget to projects, which they propose and vote for implementation. So far, voting algorithms have been proposed and studied…
How does targeted advertising influence electoral outcomes? This paper presents a one-dimensional spatial model of voting in which a privately informed challenger persuades voters to support him over the status quo. I show that targeted…
This study uses the semantic brand score, a novel measure of brand importance in big textual data, to forecast elections based on online news. About 35,000 online news articles were transformed into networks of co-occurring words and…
In an election in which each voter ranks all of the candidates, we consider the head-to-head results between each pair of candidates and form a labeled directed graph, called the margin graph, which contains the margin of victory of each…
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter permit experiments to be performed at minimal cost on populations of a size that scientists might previously have dreamt about. For instance, one experiment on Facebook involved over 60…
Bribery in election (or computational social choice in general) is an important problem that has received a considerable amount of attention. In the classic bribery problem, the briber (or attacker) bribes some voters in attempting to make…
Recent work in news recommendation has demonstrated that recommenders can over-expose users to articles that support their pre-existing opinions. However, most existing work focuses on a static setting or over a short-time window, leaving…