Related papers: Competition, Politics, & Social Media
Online news has made dissemination of information a faster and more efficient process. Additionally, the shift from a print medium to an online interface has enabled user interactions, creating a space to mutually understand the reader…
Online platforms have transformed the way in which individuals access and interact with news, with a high degree of trust particularly placed in search engine results. We use web tracked behavioral data across a 2-month period and analyze…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
The spread of online misinformation on social media is increasingly perceived as a problem for societal cohesion and democracy. The role of political leaders in this process has attracted less research attention, even though politicians who…
Using the minority game as a model for competition dynamics, we investigate the effects of inter-agent communications on the global evolution of the dynamics of a society characterized by competition for limited resources. The agents…
Our infrastructure systems enable our well-being by allowing us to move, store, and transform materials and information given considerable social and environmental variation. Critically, this ability is shaped by the degree to which society…
As machine learning (ML) is deployed by many competing service providers, the underlying ML predictors also compete against each other, and it is increasingly important to understand the impacts and biases from such competition. In this…
Misinformation poses a growing global threat to institutional trust, democratic stability, and public decision-making. While prior research has often portrayed social media as a channel for spreading falsehoods, less is known about the…
Although misinformation tends to spread online, it can have serious real-world consequences. In order to develop automated tools to detect and mitigate the impact of misinformation, researchers must leverage algorithms that can adapt to the…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
The rise of social networks as the primary means of communication in almost every country in the world has simultaneously triggered an increase in the amount of fake news circulating online. This fact became particularly evident during the…
We compare two scenarios in a model where politicians offer local public goods to heterogeneous voters: one where politicians have access to data on voters and thus can target specific ones, and another where politicians only decide on the…
Social media influencers account for a growing share of marketing worldwide. We demonstrate the existence of a novel form of market failure in this advertising market: influencer cartels, where groups of influencers collude to increase…
Newsfeed algorithms frequently amplify misinformation and other low-quality content. How can social media platforms more effectively promote reliable information? Existing approaches are difficult to scale and vulnerable to manipulation. In…
Fact-checking has been promoted as a key method for combating political misinformation. Comparing the spread of election-related misinformation narratives along with their relevant political fact-checks, this study provides the most…
News feeds in virtually all social media platforms include engagement metrics, such as the number of times each post is liked and shared. We find that exposure to these social engagement signals increases the vulnerability of users to…
The ever-increasing amount of information flowing through Social Media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message. A large study of information propagation…
We model competition on a credence goods market governed by an imperfect label, signaling high quality, as a rank-order tournament between firms. In this market interaction, asymmetric firms jointly and competitively control the aggregate…
Political expression through social media has already taken root as a form of political participation. Meanwhile, democracy seems to be facing an epidemic of incivility on social media platforms. With this background, online political…
In recent years online social networks have become increasingly prominent in political campaigns and, concurrently, several countries have experienced shock election outcomes. This paper proposes a model that links these two phenomena. In…