Related papers: Troll Farms
We study continuous-time persuasion where a sender controls both how informative a signal is over time and when to stop providing information to a receiver. Given an exogenous signal process, the sender can both garble the evolving signal…
Viral campaigns on the Internet may follow variety of models, depending on the content, incentives, personal attitudes of sender and recipient to the content and other factors. Due to the fact that the knowledge of the campaign specifics is…
Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate content that is as persuasive as human-written text and appear capable of selectively producing deceptive outputs. These capabilities raise concerns about potential misuse and unintended…
We study the opinion dynamics in a generalized voter model in which voters are additionally influenced by two antagonistic news sources, whose effect is to promote political polarization. We show that, as the influence of the news sources…
We consider two-alternative elections where voters' preferences depend on a state variable that is not directly observable. Each voter receives a private signal that is correlated to the state variable. Voters may be "contingent" with…
Communication is essential for coordination among humans and animals. Therefore, with the introduction of intelligent agents into the world, agent-to-agent and agent-to-human communication becomes necessary. In this paper, we first study…
Until recently, social media was seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication platform has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…
A recent article in $\textit{Science}$ by Guess et al. estimated the effect of Facebook's news feed algorithm on exposure to misinformation and political information among Facebook users. However, its reporting and conclusions did not…
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…
Much of the theoretical work on strategic voting makes strong assumptions about what voters know about the voting situation. A strategizing voter is typically assumed to know how other voters will vote and to know the rules of the voting…
Misinformation has become a growing issue on online social platforms (OSPs), especially during elections or pandemics. To combat this, OSPs have implemented various policies, such as tagging, to notify users about potentially misleading…
When considering a specific event, news that accurately reflects the ground truth is deemed as real information, while news that deviates from the ground truth is classified as false information. False information often spreads fast due to…
Nowadays, artificial intelligence algorithms are used for targeted and personalized content distribution in the large scale as part of the intense competition for attention in the digital media environment. Unfortunately, targeted…
We study an information design problem with two informed senders and a receiver in which, in contrast to traditional Bayesian persuasion settings, senders do not have commitment power. In our setting, a trusted mediator/platform gathers…
Political moderation, a key attractor in democratic systems, proves highly fragile under realistic information conditions. We develop a stochastic model of opinion dynamics to analyze how noise and differential susceptibility reshape the…
Recent political campaigns have demonstrated how technologies are used to boost election outcomes by microtargeting voters. We propose and analyze a framework which analyzes how political activists use technologies to target voters. Voters…
We consider the problem of distributed Kalman filtering for sensor networks in the case there are constraints in data transmission and there is model uncertainty. More precisely, we propose two distributed filtering strategies with…
A growing number of empirical studies suggest that negative advertising is effective in campaigning, while the mechanisms are rarely mentioned. With the scandal of Cambridge Analytica and Russian intervention behind the Brexit and the 2016…
Decision makers who receive many signals are subject to imperfect recall. This is especially important when learning from feeds that aggregate messages from many senders on social media platforms. In this paper, we study a stylized model of…
Misleading newsletters can shape individuals' perceptions, and pose a threat to societies; as we witnessed by lowering the severity of follow-up stay-at-home orders and burdening a significant challenge to the fight against COVID-19. In…