Related papers: The Politics of Personalized News Aggregation

We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…

The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…

Political polarization appears to be on the rise, as measured by voting behavior, general affect towards opposing partisans and their parties, and contents posted and consumed online. Research over the years has focused on the role of the…

The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…

Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…

We develop an equilibrium theory of attention and politics. In a spatial model of electoral competition where candidates have varying policy preferences, we examine what kinds of political behaviors capture voters' limited attention and how…

Unlike traditional media, online news platforms allow users to consume content that suits their tastes and to facilitate interactions with other people. However, as more personalized consumption of information and interaction with…

Content that drives engagement need not be the same content that drives willingness to pay. We study how polarizing content affects engagement (time on site) and commitment (subscriptions and retention) on a major news platform. We measure…

Slanted news coverage strongly affects public opinion. This is especially true for coverage on politics and related issues, where studies have shown that bias in the news may influence elections and other collective decisions. Due to its…

We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…

Political polarization in the US is on the rise. This polarization negatively affects the public sphere by contributing to the creation of ideological echo chambers. In this paper, we focus on addressing one of the factors that contributes…

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…

We study the opinion dynamics in a generalized voter model in which voters are additionally influenced by two antagonistic news sources, whose effect is to promote political polarization. We show that, as the influence of the news sources…

Despite extensive research, the mechanisms through which online platforms shape extremism and polarization remain poorly understood. We identify and test a mechanism, grounded in empirical evidence, that explains how ranking algorithms can…

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…

We investigate how information-spreading mechanisms affect opinion dynamics and vice-versa via an agent-based simulation on adaptive social networks. First, we characterize the impact of reposting on user behavior with limited memory, a…

While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating cognitive tasks (e.g., learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values. For…

We present a systematic study of Plurality elections with strategic voters who, in addition to having preferences over election winners, have secondary preferences, which govern their behavior when their vote cannot affect the election…

In online platforms, recommender systems are responsible for directing users to relevant contents. In order to enhance the users' engagement, recommender systems adapt their output to the reactions of the users, who are in turn affected by…

In the age of information abundance, attention is a coveted resource. Social media platforms vigorously compete for users' engagement, influencing the evolution of their opinions on a variety of topics. With recommendation algorithms often…