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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…

This study considers a simple variation of the voter model with two competing parties. In particular, we represent the case of political elections, where people can choose to support one of the two candidates or to remain neutral. People…

How can society understand and hold accountable complex human and algorithmic decision-making systems whose systematic errors are opaque to the public? These systems routinely make decisions on individual rights and well-being, and on…

We focus on the potential fragility of democratic elections given modern information-communication technologies (ICT) in the Web 2.0 era. Our work provides an explanation for the cascading attrition of public officials recently in the…

Money is central in US politics, and most campaign contributions stem from a tiny, wealthy elite. Like other political acts, campaign donations are known to be socially contagious. We study how campaign donations diffuse through a network…

Nowadays, social media represent persuasive tools that have been progressively weaponized to affect people's beliefs, spread manipulative narratives, and sow conflicts along divergent factions. Software-controlled accounts (i.e., bots) are…

Viral campaigns on the Internet may follow variety of models, depending on the content, incentives, personal attitudes of sender and recipient to the content and other factors. Due to the fact that the knowledge of the campaign specifics is…

If popular online platforms systematically expose their users to partisan and unreliable news, they could potentially contribute to societal issues like rising political polarization. This concern is central to the echo chamber and filter…

Twitter is increasingly used for political, advertising and marketing campaigns, where the main aim is to influence users to support specific causes, individuals or groups. We propose a novel methodology for mining and analyzing Twitter…

Conversational AI systems are increasingly being used in place of traditional search engines to help users complete information-seeking tasks. This has raised concerns in the political domain, where biased or hallucinated outputs could…

The coronavirus pandemic is impacting our lives at unprecedented speed and scale - including how we eat and work, what we worry about, how much we move, and our ability to earn. Google Trends can be used as a proxy for what people are…

Propaganda campaigns aim at influencing people's mindset with the purpose of advancing a specific agenda. They exploit the anonymity of the Internet, the micro-profiling ability of social networks, and the ease of automatically creating and…

This paper presents a few observations about pro-Kremlin propaganda between 2015 and early 2021 with a dataset from the East Stratcom Task Force (ESTF), which is affiliated with the European Union (EU) but working independently from it.…

The 2020 US Elections have been, more than ever before, characterized by social media campaigns and mutual accusations. We investigate in this paper if this manifests also in online communication of the supporters of the candidates Biden…

Social media, once hailed as a vehicle for democratization and the promotion of positive social change across the globe, are under attack for becoming a tool of political manipulation and spread of disinformation. A case in point is the…

We report the first direct comparisons of multiple alternative social media algorithms on multiple platforms on outcomes of societal interest. We used a browser extension to modify which posts were shown to desktop social media users,…

Acts of political violence in the continental United States have increased dramatically in the last decade. For this rise in political violence, we are interested in where and when such incidents occur: how are the locations and times of…

COVID-19 related policies were extensively politicized during the 2020 election year of the United States, resulting in polarizing viewpoints. Twitter users were particularly engaged during the 2020 election year. Here we investigated…

Affective polarization and increasing social divisions affect social mixing and the spread of information across online and physical spaces, reinforcing social and electoral cleavages and influencing political outcomes. Here, using…

Recent events, such as the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, Brexit and the COVID-19 "infodemic", have brought into the spotlight the dangers of online disinformation. There has been a lot of research focusing on fact-checking and…