Related papers: A data-driven model for Mass Media influence in el…
In this paper we propose and investigate a multi-dimensional opinion dynamics model where people are characterised by both opinions and importance weights across these opinions. Opinion changes occur through binary interactions, with a…
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…
News articles of varying degrees of truthfulness and political alignment, and their influences on the political opinions of the media consumers are modeled as a Bayesian network incorporating a mixture of ideas from dual-reasoning models of…
Political advertising plays a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and influencing electoral outcomes, often through subtle persuasive techniques embedded in broader propaganda strategies. Detecting these persuasive elements is crucial…
Information is crucial to the function of a democratic society where well-informed citizens can make rational political decisions. While in the past political entities were primarily utilizing newspaper and later television to inform the…
In the past, the Voter Model has been explicitly used to model the impact of propaganda on a dynamic, interconnected population, and certain factors have been identified that influence the behavior of voters when under outside influence.…
User response to contributed content in online social media depends on many factors. These include how the site lays out new content, how frequently the user visits the site, how many friends the user follows, how active these friends are,…
After the recent COVID-19 outbreaks, it became increasingly evident that individuals' thoughts and beliefs can have a strong impact on disease transmission. It becomes therefore important to understand how information and opinions on…
Processes of mass communications in complicated social or sociobiological systems such as marketing, economics, politics, animal populations, etc. as a subject for the special scientific discipline - "mediaphysics" - are considered in its…
The heterogeneity of the influence processes is an important feature of social systems: how we perceive social influence and how we influence other individuals is heavily influenced by our opinion and non-opinion attributes. The latter…
Biased news reporting poses a significant threat to informed decision-making and the functioning of democracies. This study introduces a novel methodology for scalable, minimally biased analysis of media bias in political news. The proposed…
Mainstream media, through their decisions on what to cover and how to frame the stories they cover, can mislead readers without using outright falsehoods. Therefore, it is crucial to have tools that expose these editorial choices underlying…
Population behaviours, such as voting and vaccination, depend on social networks. Social networks can differ depending on behaviour type and are typically hidden. However, we do often have large-scale behavioural data, albeit only snapshots…
We present numerical simulations of a model of social influence, where the opinion of each agent is represented by a binary vector. Agents adjust their opinions as a result of random encounters, whenever the difference between opinions is…
Social media influence campaigns pose significant challenges to public discourse and democracy. Traditional detection methods fall short due to the complexity and dynamic nature of social media. Addressing this, we propose a novel detection…
Collective decision-making is a process by which a group of individuals determines a shared outcome that shapes societal dynamics; from innovation diffusion to organizational choices. A common approach to model these processes is using…
Forecasting elections -- a challenging, high-stakes problem -- is the subject of much uncertainty, subjectivity, and media scrutiny. To shed light on this process, we develop a method for forecasting elections from the perspective of…
Election control considers the problem of an adversary who attempts to tamper with a voting process, in order to either ensure that their favored candidate wins (constructive control) or another candidate loses (destructive control). As…
The United States have some of the highest rates of gun violence among developed countries. Yet, there is a disagreement about the extent to which firearms should be regulated. In this study, we employ social media signals to examine the…
Most of the conventional models for opinion dynamics mainly account for a fully local influence, where myopic agents decide their actions after they interact with other agents that are adjacent to them. For example, in the case of social…