Related papers: Social Media and Democracy

Successful attempts to predict judges' votes shed light into how legal decisions are made and, ultimately, into the behavior and evolution of the judiciary. Here, we investigate to what extent it is possible to make predictions of a…

The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…

This study investigates how the majority group influences individual judgment formation and expression in anonymous, spontaneous online conversations. Drawing on theories of social conformity and anti-conformity, we analyze everyday…

We focus on the election manipulation problem through social influence, where a manipulator exploits a social network to make her most preferred candidate win an election. Influence is due to information in favor of and/or against one or…

Online comment sections, such as those on news sites or social media, have the potential to foster informal public deliberation, However, this potential is often undermined by the frequency of toxic or low-quality exchanges that occur in…

We analyse strategic, complete information, sequential voting with ordinal preferences over the alternatives. We consider several voting mechanisms: plurality voting and approval voting with deterministic or uniform tie-breaking rules. We…

We investigate the collective accuracy of heterogeneous agents who learn to estimate their own reliability over time and selectively abstain from voting. While classical epistemic voting results, such as the \textit{Condorcet Jury Theorem}…

Social networks are increasingly being used to conduct polls. We introduce a simple model of such social polling. We suppose agents vote sequentially, but the order in which agents choose to vote is not necessarily fixed. We also suppose…

A group of privately informed agents chooses between two alternatives. How should the decision rule be designed if agents are known to be biased in favor of one of the options? We address this question by considering the Condorcet Jury…

Corrections given by ordinary social media users, also referred to as Social Correction have emerged as a viable intervention against misinformation as per the recent literature. However, little is known about how often users give disputing…

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter permit experiments to be performed at minimal cost on populations of a size that scientists might previously have dreamt about. For instance, one experiment on Facebook involved over 60…

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…

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…

While research continues to investigate and improve the accuracy, fairness, and normative appropriateness of content moderation processes on large social media platforms, even the best process cannot be effective if users reject its…

Online discussion threads are important means for individual decision-making and for aggregating collective judgments, e.g. the `wisdom of crowds'. Empirical investigations of the wisdom of crowds are currently ambivalent about the role…

Many networks do not live in isolation but are strongly interacting, with profound consequences on their dynamics. Here, we consider the case of two interacting social networks and, in the context of a simple model, we address the case of…

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…

Election polls play a critical role in political discussions by probing public opinion and enabling political parties to assess their performance before elections. However, traditional polling methods sometimes fail to predict election…

In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…

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…