Related papers: Influential News and Policy-making
Opinion dynamics has recently been modeled from a game-theoretic perspective, where opinion updates are captured by individuals' cost functions representing their motivations. Conventional formulations aggregate multiple motivations into a…
Combating fake news and misinformation propagation is a challenging task in the post-truth era. News feed and search algorithms could potentially lead to unintentional large-scale propagation of false and fabricated information with users…
Social media has been a paramount arena for election campaigns for political actors. While many studies have been paying attention to the political campaigns related to partisanship, politicians also can conduct different campaigns…
News media is expected to uphold unbiased reporting. Yet they may still affect public opinion by selectively including or omitting events that support or contradict their ideological positions. Prior work in NLP has only studied media bias…
The integrity of democratic elections depends on voters' access to accurate information. However, modern media environments, which are dominated by social media, provide malicious actors with unprecedented ability to manipulate elections…
This study quantifies influence between media outlets by applying a novel methodology that uses causal effect estimation on networks and transformer language models. We demonstrate the obscured influence of state-controlled outlets over…
Framing used by news media, especially in times of conflict, can have substantial impact on readers' opinion, potentially aggravating the conflict itself. Current studies on the topic of conflict framing have limited insights due to their…
Misinformation proliferation on social media platforms is a pervasive threat to the integrity of online public discourse. Genuine users, susceptible to others' influence, often unknowingly engage with, endorse, and re-share questionable…
We study the notion of informedness in a client-consultant setting. Using a software simulator, we examine the extent to which it pays off for consultants to provide their clients with advice that is well-informed, or with advice that is…
The election control problem through social influence asks to find a set of nodes in a social network of voters to be the starters of a political campaign aiming at supporting a given target candidate. Voters reached by the campaign change…
The growing prevalence of fruitless disagreement threatens social cohesion and constructive public discourse. While polarised discussions often reflect distrust in the news, the link between disagreement and misinformation remains unclear.…
Strategic communication often relies on anchors observed by the sender but not by the receiver. An analyst may report against a proprietary valuation model, an auditor against an internal score, a manager against an accounting estimate, or…
This paper examines how LLMs handle false presuppositions and whether certain linguistic factors influence their responses to falsely presupposed content. Presuppositions subtly introduce information as given, making them highly effective…
Media bias and its extreme form, fake news, can decisively affect public opinion. Especially when reporting on policy issues, slanted news coverage may strongly influence societal decisions, e.g., in democratic elections. Our paper makes…
We present the results of a study designed to measure the impact of interruptive advertising on consumers willingness to pay for products bearing the advertiser's brand. Subjects participating in a controlled experiment were exposed to ads…
News entities must select and filter the coverage they broadcast through their respective channels since the set of world events is too large to be treated exhaustively. The subjective nature of this filtering induces biases due to, among…
We study the diffusion of a true and a false message (misinformation) when agents are biased and able to verify messages. As a recipient of a false message who verifies it becomes informed of the truth, a higher prevalence of misinformation…
We analyze and quantify, in a financial market with parameter uncertainty and for a Constant Relative Risk Aversion investor, the utility effects of two different boundedly rational (i.e., sub-optimal) investment strategies (namely, myopic…
A recent article in $\textit{Science}$ by Guess et al. estimated the effect of Facebook's news feed algorithm on exposure to misinformation and political information among Facebook users. However, its reporting and conclusions did not…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…