Related papers: Troll Farms
Misinformation has disruptive effects on our lives. Many researchers have looked into means to identify and combat misinformation in text or data visualization. However, there is still a lack of understanding of how misinformation can be…
The current public sense of anxiety in dealing with disinformation as manifested by so-called fake news is acutely displayed by the reaction to recent events prompted by a belief in conspiracies among certain groups. A model to deal with…
Over the past couple of years, anecdotal evidence has emerged linking coordinated campaigns by state-sponsored actors with efforts to manipulate public opinion on the Web, often around major political events, through dedicated accounts, or…
I study a model of costly Bayesian persuasion by a privately and partially informed sender who conducts a public experiment. The cost of running an experiment is the expected reduction of a weighted log-likelihood ratio function of the…
This study investigates the generation of synthetic disinformation by OpenAI's Large Language Models (LLMs) through prompt engineering and explores their responsiveness to emotional prompting. Leveraging various LLM iterations using…
With fact-checking by professionals being difficult to scale on social media, algorithmic techniques have been considered. However, it is uncertain how the public may react to labels by automated fact-checkers. In this study, we investigate…
We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…
Political messages increasingly bundle economic policy arguments with moral social policy stances. Using survey experiments with roughly 6,500 U.S. adults, I show that such bundling sharply weakens economic persuasion among respondents who…
Information transmitted across modern communication platforms is degraded not only by intentional manipulation (disinformation) but also by intrinsic cognitive decay and topology-dependent social averaging (misinformation). We develop a…
What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…
Although misinformation tends to spread online, it can have serious real-world consequences. In order to develop automated tools to detect and mitigate the impact of misinformation, researchers must leverage algorithms that can adapt to the…
Since the information available is fundamental for our perceptions and opinions, we are interested in understanding the conditions allowing for a good information to be disseminated. This paper explores opinion dynamics by means of…
We examine how misinformation spreads in social networks composed of individuals with long-term offline relationships. Especially, we focus on why misinformation persists and diffuses despite being recognized by most as false. In our…
We characterize epistemic consequences of truthful communication among rational agents in a game-theoretic setting. To this end we introduce normal-form games equipped with an interaction structure, which specifies which groups of players…
We introduce a novel non-cooperative game to analyse opinion formation and resistance, incorporating principles from social psychology such as confirmation bias, resource constraints, and influence penalties. Our simulation features Large…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
How can a system designer exploit system-level knowledge to derive incentives to optimally influence social behavior? The literature on network routing contains many results studying the application of monetary tolls to influence behavior…
Online political microtargeting involves monitoring people's online behaviour, and using the collected data, sometimes enriched with other data, to show people-targeted political advertisements. Online political microtargeting is widely…
A voting center is in charge of collecting and aggregating voter preferences. In an iterative process, the center sends comparison queries to voters, requesting them to submit their preference between two items. Voters might discuss the…
Language models (LMs) are pretrained on diverse data sources, including news, discussion forums, books, and online encyclopedias. A significant portion of this data includes opinions and perspectives which, on one hand, celebrate democracy…