Related papers: Media Slant is Contagious
How could LLMs influence our democracy? We investigate LLMs' political leanings and the potential influence of LLMs on voters by conducting multiple experiments in a U.S. presidential election context. Through a voting simulation, we first…
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…
We study the diffusion of influence in random multiplex networks where links can be of $r$ different types, and for a given content (e.g., rumor, product, political view), each link type is associated with a content dependent parameter…
Elected officials have privileged roles in public communication. In contrast to national politicians, whose posting content is more likely to be closely scrutinized by a robust ecosystem of nationally focused media outlets, sub-national…
Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress towards computational fake news detection. To mitigate its negative impact, we argue that it is critical to understand what user attributes potentially cause users to share fake news. The key…
We present an analysis of the dynamics of discussions in Twitter (before it became X) among supporters of various candidates in the 2022 French presidential election, and followers of different types of media. Our study demonstrates that we…
Independent fact-checking organizations have emerged as the crusaders to debunk fake news. However, they may not always remain neutral, as they can be selective in the false news they choose to expose and in how they present the…
Health misinformation is believed to have contributed to vaccine hesitancy during the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting concerns about the role of social media in polarization and social stability. While previous research has identified a…
Large Language Model (LLM) based summarization and text generation are increasingly used for producing and rewriting text, raising concerns about political framing in journalism where subtle wording choices can shape interpretation. Across…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, conflicting opinions on physical distancing swept across social media, affecting both human behavior and the spread of COVID-19. Inspired by such phenomena, we construct a two-layer multiplex network for the…
Public opinion is shaped by the information news media provide, and that information in turn may be shaped by the ideological preferences of media outlets. But while much attention has been devoted to media bias via overt ideological…
Research on growing American political polarization and antipathy primarily studies public institutions and political processes, ignoring private effects including strained family ties. Using anonymized smartphone-location data and…
Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of…
In an election, we are given a set of voters, each having a preference list over a set of candidates, that are distributed on a social network. We consider a scenario where voters may change their preference lists as a consequence of the…
Prime-time cable news programs are a highly influential part of the American media landscape, with top-rated opinion shows attracting millions of politically attentive viewers each night. In an era of intense political polarization, a…
The contagion threshold for diffusion of innovations is defined and calculated in finite graphs (two-dimensional regular lattices, regular random networks (RRNs), and two kinds of scale-free networks (SFNs)) with and without the bilingual…
As people rely on social media as their primary sources of news, the spread of misinformation has become a significant concern. In this large-scale study of news in social media we analyze eleven million posts and investigate propagation…
Political bias in media plays a critical role in shaping public opinion, voter behaviour, and broader democratic discourse. Subjective opinions and political bias can be found in media sources, such as newspapers, depending on their funding…
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…
This study examines whether German X users would see politically balanced news feeds if they followed comparable leading politicians from each federal parliamentary party of Germany. We address this question using an algorithmic audit tool…