Related papers: Explaining the Relationship between Internet and D…

Political polarization plays a pivotal and potentially harmful role in a democracy. However, existing studies are often limited to a single country and one form of polarization, hindering a comprehensive understanding of the phenomena. Here…

This PhD thesis investigates the societal impact of machine learning (ML). ML increasingly informs consequential decisions and recommendations, significantly affecting many aspects of our lives. As these data-driven systems are often…

Political polarization in online social platforms is a rapidly growing phenomenon worldwide. Despite their relevance to modern-day politics, the structure and dynamics of polarized states in digital spaces are still poorly understood. We…

The impact of predictive algorithms on people's lives and livelihoods has been noted in medicine, criminal justice, finance, hiring and admissions. Most of these algorithms are developed using data and human capital from highly developed…

There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…

Socio-diversity, the variety of human opinions, ideas, behaviors and styles, has profound implications for social systems. While it fuels innovation, productivity, and collective intelligence, it can also complicate communication and erode…

In this paper, the influence of the social media on the opinion formation process is modeled during an election campaign. In the proposed model, peer- to-peer interactions and targeted online propaganda messages are assumed to be the…

Undoubtedly, the Internet has become one of the most important conduits to information for the general public. Nonetheless, Internet access can be and has been limited systematically or blocked completely during political events in numerous…

Theoretical work on sequential choice and large-scale experiments in online ranking and voting systems has demonstrated that social influence can have a drastic impact on social and technological systems. Yet, the effect of social influence…

Political beliefs vary significantly across different countries, reflecting distinct historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. These ideologies, ranging from liberal democracies to rigid autocracies, influence human societies, as…

Political advertising on social media has fundamentally reshaped democratic deliberation, playing a central role in electoral campaigns and propaganda. However, its systemic impact remains largely theoretical or unexplored, raising critical…

Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…

Digital networks have profoundly transformed the ways in which individuals interact, exchange information, and establish connections, leading to the emergence of phenomena such as virality, misinformation cascades, and online polarization.…

This paper presents a machine learning approach to classify countries as peaceful or non-peaceful using linguistic patterns extracted from global media articles. We employ vector embeddings and cosine similarity to develop a supervised…

Internet censorship impacts large segments of the Internet, but so far, prior work has focused almost exclusively on performing measurements using IPv4. As the Internet grows, and more users connect, IPv6 is increasingly supported and…

This paper considers online reputation and polling systems where individuals make recommendations based on their private observations and recommendations of friends. Such interaction of individuals and their social influence is modelled as…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as gateways to information, yet their content moderation practices remain underexplored. This work investigates the extent to which LLMs refuse to answer or omit information when…

Social learning is defined as the ability of a population to aggregate information, a process which must crucially depend on the mechanisms of social interaction. Consumers choosing which product to buy, or voters deciding which option to…

Many machine learning approaches are characterized by information constraints on how they interact with the training data. These include memory and sequential access constraints (e.g. fast first-order methods to solve stochastic…

The strength of democracy lies in the free and equal exchange of diverse viewpoints. Living up to this ideal at scale faces inherent tensions: broad participation, meaningful deliberation, and political equality often trade off with one…