Related papers: Troll Farms
Disinformation continues to attract attention due to its increasing threat to society. Nevertheless, a disinformation-based attack on critical infrastructure has never been studied to date. Here, we consider traffic networks and focus on…
What are the value and form of optimal persuasion when information can be generated only slowly? We study this question in a dynamic model in which a 'sender' provides public information over time subject to a graduality constraint, and a…
The increasing cost of electoral campaigns raises the need for effective campaign planning and a precise understanding of the return of such investment. Interestingly, despite the strong impact of elections on our daily lives, how this…
We develop a model of content filtering as a game between the filter and the content consumer, where the latter incurs information costs for examining the content. Motivating examples include censoring misinformation, spam/phish filtering,…
Artificial intelligence is changing the way we create and evaluate information, and this is happening during an infodemic, which has been having dramatic effects on global health. In this paper we evaluate whether recruited individuals can…
Competition among news sources may encourage some sources to share fake news and misinformation to influence the public. While sharing misinformation may lead to a short-term gain in audience engagement, it may damage the reputation of…
This work is a technical approach to modeling false information nature, design, belief impact and containment in multi-agent networks. We present a Bayesian mathematical model for source information and viewer's belief, and how the former…
This work advances investigations into the visual media shared by agents in disinformation campaigns by characterizing the images shared by accounts identified by Twitter as being part of such campaigns. Using images shared by US…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a transformational technology, fundamentally changing how people obtain information and interact with the world. As people become increasingly reliant on them for an enormous variety of tasks, a body of…
Large-scale social networks are thought to contribute to polarization by amplifying people's biases. However, the complexity of these technologies makes it difficult to identify the mechanisms responsible and to evaluate mitigation…
The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…
This paper explores the design of a propaganda detection tool using Large Language Models (LLMs). Acknowledging the inherent biases in AI models, especially in political contexts, we investigate how these biases might be leveraged to…
It is quite common that guides are introduced to suppress the information spreading in modern society for different purposes. In this paper, an agent-based model is established to quantitatively analyze the impacts of suppressing guides on…
This paper evaluates the effect of online disinformation upon offline political protests with a time series cross-sectional sample of 125 countries in a period between 2000 and 2019. The results are mixed. Based on Bayesian multi-level…
Online manipulation of information has become more prevalent in recent years as state-sponsored disinformation campaigns seek to influence and polarize political topics through massive coordinated efforts. In the process, these efforts…
Independent voters play an increasingly decisive role in contemporary elections, yet their collective behavior remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how a minority of voters with greater flexibility in their political…
Previous work suggests that people's preference for different kinds of information depends on more than just accuracy. This could happen because the messages contained within different pieces of information may either be well-liked or…
The diffusion of opinions in Social Networks is a relevant process for adopting positions and attracting potential voters in political campaigns. Opinion polarization, bias, targeted diffusion, and the radicalization of postures are key…
The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…
Until recently, social media were seen to promote democratic discourse on social and political issues. However, this powerful communication ecosystem has come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions in an…