Related papers: Explaining the Relationship between Internet and D…

Social media broadly refers to digital platforms and applications that simulate social interactions online. This study investigates the impact of social media platforms and their algorithms on political interest among users. As social media…

Globally, people widely regard technology as a solution to global social problems. In a democratic society, its citizens view technology as a way to ensure commitment and sustaining the nation's democracy by allowing them to participate…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly mediate global information access for millions of users worldwide, their alignment and biases have the potential to shape public understanding and trust in fundamental democratic institutions,…

This position paper argues that effectively "democratizing AI" requires democratic governance and alignment of AI, and that this is particularly valuable for decisions with systemic societal impacts. Initial steps -- such as Meta's…

The Internet provides students with a unique opportunity to connect and maintain social ties with peers from other schools, irrespective of how far they are from each other. However, little is known about the real structure of such online…

Closeness is a global measure of centrality in networks, and a proxy for how influential actors are in social networks. In most network models, and many empirical networks, closeness is strongly correlated with degree. However, in social…

The digital spread of misinformation is one of the leading threats to democracy, public health, and the global economy. Popular strategies for mitigating misinformation include crowdsourcing, machine learning, and media literacy programs…

Interpersonal influence estimation from empirical data is a central challenge in the study of social structures and dynamics. Opinion dynamics theory is a young interdisciplinary science that studies opinion formation in social networks and…

Influential beliefs are crucial for our understanding of how people reason about political issues and make political decisions. This research proposes a new method for measuring the influence of political beliefs within larger context of…

Nowadays, in societies threatened by atomization, selfishness, short-term thinking, and alienation from political life, there is a renewed debate about classical questions concerning the quality of democratic decision-making. In this work a…

The information age is also an era of escalating social problems. The digital transformation of society and the economy is already underway in all countries, although the progress in this transformation can vary widely. There are more…

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…

The problem of learning in the absence of external intelligence is discussed in the context of a simple model. The model consists of a set of randomly connected, or layered integrate-and fire neurons. Inputs to and outputs from the…

People often stick to their existing beliefs, ignoring contradicting evidence or only interacting with those who reinforce their views. Social media platforms often facilitate such tendencies of homophily and echo-chambers as they promote…

Democratic governments comprise a subset of a population whose goal is to produce coherent decisions, solving societal challenges while respecting the will of the people. New governance frameworks represent this as a social network rather…

We present a novel approach to the measurement of American state legislature polarization with an experimental comparison of three different machine learning algorithms. Our approach strictly relies on public data sources and open source…

Over the years, the Internet has democratized the flow of information. Unfortunately, in parallel, authoritarian regimes and other entities (such as ISPs) for their vested interests have curtailed this flow by partially or fully censoring…

Political online participation in the form of discussing political issues and exchanging opinions among citizens is gaining importance with more and more formats being held digitally. To come to a decision, a thorough discussion and…

This work is aimed at studying realistic social control strategies for social networks based on the introduction of random information into the state of selected driver agents. Deliberately exposing selected agents to random information is…

Many recent political events, like the 2016 US Presidential elections or the 2018 Brazilian elections have raised the attention of institutions and of the general public on the role of Internet and social media in influencing the outcome of…