Related papers: Noncooperative dynamics in election interference

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…

The fifty-eighth American presidential election in 2016 still arouse fierce controversyat present. A portion of politicians as well as medium and voters believe that theRussian government interfered with the election of 2016 by controlling…

Opinion dynamics models how the publicly expressed opinions of users in a social network coevolve according to their neighbors as well as their own intrinsic opinion. Motivated by the real-world manipulation of social networks during the…

Until recently, social media was seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication platform has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…

Until recently, social media were seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication ecosystem has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…

Adversarial interactions against politicians on social media such as Twitter have significant impact on society. In particular they disrupt substantive political discussions online, and may discourage people from seeking public office. In…

There is evidence that Russia's Internet Research Agency attempted to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election by running fake accounts on Twitter - often referred to as "Russian trolls". In this work, we: 1) develop machine learning models…

In 2016, a network of social media accounts animated by Russian operatives attempted to divert political discourse within the American public around the presidential elections. This was a coordinated effort, part of a Russian-led complex…

Many networks do not live in isolation but are strongly interacting, with profound consequences on their dynamics. Here, we consider the case of two interacting social networks and, in the context of a simple model, we address the case of…

The 2016 US election was a watershed event where an electoral intervention by an adversarial state made extensive use of networks of software robots and data driven communications which transformed the interference into a goal driven…

The detection of state-sponsored trolls operating in influence campaigns on social media is a critical and unsolved challenge for the research community, which has significant implications beyond the online realm. To address this challenge,…

We developed and used a collection of statistical methods (unsupervised machine learning) to extract relevant information from a Twitter supplied data set consisting of alleged Russian trolls who (allegedly) attempted to influence the 2016…

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine emphasises the role social media plays in modern-day warfare, with conflict occurring in both the physical and information environments. There is a large body of work on identifying malicious…

Bots have become increasingly prevalent in the digital sphere and have taken up a proactive role in shaping democratic processes. While previous studies have focused on their influence at the individual level, their potential macro-level…

One of the hallmarks of a free and fair society is the ability to conduct a peaceful and seamless transfer of power from one leader to another. Democratically, this is measured in a citizen population's trust in the electoral system of…

The reports of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections brought into the center of public attention concerns related to the ability of foreign actors to increase social discord and take advantage of personal user data for…

We investigate the political roles of "Internet trolls" in social media. Political trolls, such as the ones linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), have recently gained enormous attention for their ability to sway public…

Since the 2016 US Presidential election, social media abuse has been eliciting massive concern in the academic community and beyond. Preventing and limiting the malicious activity of users, such as trolls and bots, in their manipulation…

This research investigates the impact of dynamic, time-varying interactions on cooperative behaviour in social dilemmas. Traditional research has focused on deterministic rules governing pairwise interactions, yet the impact of interaction…

Probabilistic Graphical Bayesian models of causation have continued to impact on strategic analyses designed to help evaluate the efficacy of different interventions on systems. However, the standard causal algebras upon which these…