Related papers: Social Media and Democracy
Social media users may perceive moderation decisions by the platform differently, which can lead to frustration and dropout. This study investigates users' perceived justice and fairness of online moderation decisions when they are exposed…
The popularity of an opinion in one's direct circles is not necessarily a good indicator of its popularity in one's entire community. Network structures make local information about global properties of the group potentially inaccurate, and…
Proponents of participatory democracy praise Liquid Democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters delegate their votes freely. When better informed voters are present, delegation can increase the probability of a correct…
Social media has shaken the foundations of our society, unlikely as it may seem. Many of the popular tools used to moderate harmful digital content, however, have received widespread criticism from both the academic community and the public…
Information cocoons are frequently cited in the literature on whether and how social media might lead to ideological segregation and political polarization. From the behavioural and communication perspectives, this paper first examines why…
A key promise of democratic voting is that, by accounting for all constituents' preferences, it produces decisions that benefit the constituency overall. It is alarming, then, that all deterministic voting rules have unbounded distortion:…
Many recent political events, like the 2016 US Presidential elections or the 2018 Brazilian elections have raised the attention of institutions and of the general public on the role of Internet and social media in influencing the outcome of…
Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, raising concerns about its societal impacts -- from mental health and polarization to violence and democratic disruption. Yet research on its causal effects is still inconclusive: Various…
Integrity of elections is vital to democratic systems, but it is frequently threatened by malicious actors. The study of algorithmic complexity of the problem of manipulating election outcomes by changing its structural features is known as…
I develop a rather simple agent-based model to capture a co-evolution of opinion formation, political decision making and economic outcomes. I use this model to study how societies form opinions if their members have opposing interests.…
Search systems in online social media sites are frequently used to find information about ongoing events and people. For topics with multiple competing perspectives, such as political events or political candidates, bias in the top ranked…
We study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…
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…
While the polls have been the most trusted source for election predictions for decades, in the recent presidential election they were called inaccurate and biased. How inaccurate were the polls in this election and can social media beat the…
Committee-selection problems arise in many contexts and applications, and there has been increasing interest within the social choice research community on identifying which properties are satisfied by different multi-winner voting rules.…
Social networks offer a ready channel for fake and misleading news to spread and exert influence. This paper examines the performance of different reputation algorithms when applied to a large and statistically significant portion of the…
The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…
Every day, we judge the probability of propositions. When we communicate graded confidence (e.g. "I am 90% sure"), we enable others to gauge how much weight to attach to our judgment. Ideally, people should share their judgments to reach…
In social choice theory with ordinal preferences, a voting method satisfies the axiom of positive involvement if adding to a preference profile a voter who ranks an alternative uniquely first cannot cause that alternative to go from winning…
We introduce a new opinion dynamics model where a group of agents holds two kinds of opinions: inherent and declared. Each agent's inherent opinion is fixed and unobservable by the other agents. At each time step, agents broadcast their…