Related papers: Troll Farms
This paper studies the persuasion of a receiver who accesses information only if she exerts costly attention effort. A sender designs an experiment to persuade the receiver to take a specific action. The experiment affects the receiver's…
Advances in AI offer the prospect of manipulating beliefs and behaviors on a population-wide level. Large language models and autonomous agents now let influence campaigns reach unprecedented scale and precision. Generative tools can expand…
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…
Strategic information disclosure, in its simplest form, considers a game between an information provider (sender) who has access to some private information that an information receiver is interested in. While the receiver takes an action…
For more than a decade scholars have been investigating the disinformation flow on social media contextually to societal events, like, e.g., elections. In this paper, we analyze the Twitter traffic related to the US 2020 pre-election debate…
We study how motivated reasoning affects the provision of climate policy in an electoral competition framework. Voters experience anticipatory disutility when future outcomes appear grim and may therefore distort beliefs in response to…
The massive diffusion of social media fosters disintermediation and changes the way users are informed, the way they process reality, and the way they engage in public debate. The cognitive layer of users and the related social dynamics…
Fears about the destabilizing impact of misinformation online have motivated individuals and platforms to respond. Individuals have increasingly challenged others' online claims with fact-checks in pursuit of a healthier information…
Political polarization, fueled by public discourse and echo chambers, threatens the foundation of democratic elections. However, traditional one-dimensional opinion models -- assuming ``support for one party equals opposition to another''…
We present a generalizable AI-assisted framework for rapidly generating effective "prebunking" interventions against misinformation. Like mRNA vaccine platforms, our approach uses a stable template structure that can be quickly adapted to…
Conversational AI has been proposed as a scalable way to correct public misconceptions and spread misinformation. Yet its effectiveness may depend on perceptions of its political neutrality. As LLMs enter partisan conflict, elites…
We propose an information propagation model that captures important temporal aspects that have been well observed in the dynamics of fake news diffusion, in contrast with the diffusion of truth. The model accounts for differential…
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…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
In this work we study how pervasive is the presence of disinformation in the Italian debate around immigration on Twitter and the role of automated accounts in the diffusion of such content. By characterising the Twitter users with an…
Communication plays a major role in social systems. Effective communications, which requires transmission of the messages between individuals without disruptions or noise, can be a powerful tool to deliver intended impact. Language and…
We focus on the following natural question: is it possible to influence the outcome of a voting process through the strategic provision of information to voters who update their beliefs rationally? We investigate whether it is…
Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are…
Disinformation, irrespective of domain or language, aims to deceive or manipulate public opinion, typically through employing advanced persuasion techniques. Qualitative and quantitative research on the weaponisation of persuasion…
We study a repeated information design problem faced by an informed sender who tries to influence the behavior of a self-interested receiver. We consider settings where the receiver faces a sequential decision making (SDM) problem. At each…