Related papers: Weakly Supervised Learning for Analyzing Political…
In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others. However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with those who…
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…
Political advertising on social media has fundamentally reshaped democratic deliberation, playing a central role in electoral campaigns and propaganda. However, its systemic impact remains largely theoretical or unexplored, raising critical…
Social media influence campaigns pose significant challenges to public discourse and democracy. Traditional detection methods fall short due to the complexity and dynamic nature of social media. Addressing this, we propose a novel detection…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
This article discusses a problem that has received scant attention in literature: microtargeted propaganda by foreign actors. Microtargeting involves collecting information about people, and using that information to show them targeted…
Mass Media outlets have occupied the central role of the political scenario, and are persuasive in the process of opinion formation of the citizens. In particular, the study of the relationship between Mass Media and behaviour of citizens…
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…
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…
Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies, especially in the western world, where platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in…
As social media has permeated large parts of the population it simultaneously has become a way to reach many people e.g. with political messages. One way to efficiently reach those people is the application of automated computer programs…
Discovering the stances of media outlets and influential people on current, debatable topics is important for social statisticians and policy makers. Many supervised solutions exist for determining viewpoints, but manually annotating…
Election prediction has long been an evergreen in political science literature. Traditionally, such efforts included polling aggregates, economic indicators, partisan affiliation, and campaign effects to predict aggregate voting outcomes.…
Obtaining demographics information from video is valuable for a range of real-world applications. While approaches that leverage facial features for gender inference are very successful in restrained environments, they do not work in most…
Modeling information cascades in a social network through the lenses of the ideological leaning of its users can help understanding phenomena such as misinformation propagation and confirmation bias, and devising techniques for mitigating…
Social media platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for connectivity and exchange of ideas; however, they also serve as fertile grounds for the dissemination of disinformation. Over the years, there has been a rise in state-sponsored…
Political polarization in online social platforms is a rapidly growing phenomenon worldwide. Despite their relevance to modern-day politics, the structure and dynamics of polarized states in digital spaces are still poorly understood. We…
Following recent policy changes by X (Twitter) and other social media platforms, user interaction data has become increasingly difficult to access. These restrictions are impeding robust research pertaining to social and political phenomena…
Social media platforms provide convenient means for users to participate in multiple online activities on various contents and create fast widespread interactions. However, this rapidly growing access has also increased the diverse…
Negative campaigning is a central feature of political competition, yet empirical research has been limited by the high cost and limited scalability of existing classification methods. This study makes two key contributions. First, it…