Related papers: Troll Farms
Complex dynamical systems driven by the unravelling of information can be modelled effectively by treating the underlying flow of information as the model input. Complicated dynamical behaviour of the system is then derived as an output.…
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…
An uninformed sender publicly commits to an informative experiment about an uncertain state, privately observes its outcome, and sends a cheap-talk message to a receiver. We provide an algorithm valid for arbitrary state-dependent…
How does targeted advertising influence electoral outcomes? This paper presents a one-dimensional spatial model of voting in which a privately informed challenger persuades voters to support him over the status quo. I show that targeted…
It is believed that interventions that change the media's costs of misreporting can increase the information provided by media outlets. This paper analyzes the validity of this claim and the welfare implications of those types of…
This study investigates adversarial attacks conducted to distort voter model dynamics in complex networks. Specifically, a simple adversarial attack method is proposed to hold the state of opinions of an individual closer to the target…
This paper studies a communication game between an uninformed decision maker and two perfectly informed senders with conflicting interests. Senders can misreport information at a cost that increases with the size of the misrepresentation.…
We study the effects of campaigning, where the society is partitioned into voter clusters and a diffusion process propagates opinions in a network connecting the clusters. Our model is very powerful and can incorporate many campaigning…
We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an…
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…
I study how strategic communication among voters shapes both political outcomes and parties' advertising strategies in a model of informative campaign advertising. Two main results are derived. First, echo chambers arise endogenously.…
Disinformation campaigns can distort public perception and destabilize institutions. Understanding how different populations respond to information is crucial for designing effective interventions, yet real-world experimentation is…
Advances in large language models have raised concerns about their potential use in generating compelling election disinformation at scale. This study presents a two-part investigation into the capabilities of LLMs to automate stages of an…
Informal sensemaking surrounding U.S. election processes has been fraught in recent years, due to the inherent uncertainty of elections, the complexity of election processes in the U.S., and to disinformation. Based on insights from…
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 paper presents the research of the influence of cognitive, behavioral, representational factors on the susceptibility of the participants in social networks to misinformation, as well as on the activity of the nodes in this regard. The…
When people choose what messages to send to others, they often consider how others will interpret the messages. A sender may expect a receiver to engage in motivated reasoning, leading the receiver to trust good news more than bad news,…
Over the past couple of years, the topic of "fake news" and its influence over people's opinions has become a growing cause for concern. Although the spread of disinformation on the Internet is not a new phenomenon, the widespread use of…
We study the impact of disinformation on a model of resource allocation with independent selfish agents: clients send requests to one of two servers, depending on which one is perceived as offering shorter waiting times. Delays in the…
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…