Related papers: Troll Farms
The Bayesian persuasion paradigm of strategic communication models interaction between a privately-informed agent, called the sender, and an ignorant but rational agent, called the receiver. The goal is typically to design a (near-)optimal…
This study considers a simple variation of the voter model with two competing parties. In particular, we represent the case of political elections, where people can choose to support one of the two candidates or to remain neutral. People…
Localized communication in swarms has been shown to increase swarm effectiveness in some situations by allowing for additional opportunities for cooperation. However, communication and utilization of potentially outdated information is also…
Information regarding vaccines from sources such as health services, media, and social networks can significantly shape vaccination decisions. In particular, the dissemination of negative information can contribute to vaccine hesitancy,…
How does one test empirically the hypothesis that a decision maker (DM) is being influenced by information via Bayesian persuasion? In this paper, I consider a DM whose state-dependent preferences are known to an analyst, who sees the…
Modern information environments, especially social media, are highly complex systems that exceed individual processing capacities such as humans' limited attention. This environment/cognition mismatch can increase susceptibility to…
We examine receiver-optimal mechanisms for aggregating information divided across many biased senders. Each sender privately observes an unconditionally independent signal about an unknown state, so no sender can verify another's report. A…
Several elections run in the last years have been characterized by attempts to manipulate the result of the election through the diffusion of fake or malicious news over social networks. This problem has been recognized as a critical issue…
The daily exposure of social media users to propaganda and disinformation campaigns has reinvigorated the need to investigate the local and global patterns of diffusion of different (mis)information content on social media. Echo chambers…
US voters shared large volumes of polarizing political news and information in the form of links to content from Russian, WikiLeaks and junk news sources. Was this low quality political information distributed evenly around the country, or…
Existing challenges in misinformation exposure and susceptibility vary across demographic groups, as some populations are more vulnerable to misinformation than others. Large language models (LLMs) introduce new dimensions to these…
An informed planner wishes to spread information among a group of agents in order to induce efficient coordination -- say the adoption of a new technology with positive externalities. The agents are connected via a social network. The…
In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the potential misuse of modern Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating credible-sounding misinformation and its subsequent impact on information-intensive applications, particularly…
This paper studies a game in which an informed sender with state-independent preferences uses verifiable messages to convince a receiver to choose an action from a finite set. We characterize the equilibrium outcomes of the game and compare…
Social media are pervaded by unsubstantiated or untruthful rumors, that contribute to the alarming phenomenon of misinformation. The widespread presence of a heterogeneous mass of information sources may affect the mechanisms behind the…
We study the contrarian voter model for opinion formation in a society under the influence of an external oscillating propaganda and stochastic noise. Each agent of the population can hold one of two possible opinions on a given issue…
Understanding the relationship between network features and misinformation propagation is crucial for mitigating the spread of false information. Here, we investigate how network density and segregation affect the dissemination of…
Mass Media outlets have occupied the central role of the political scenario, and are persuasive in the process of opinion formation of the citizens. In particular, the study of the relationship between Mass Media and behaviour of citizens…
This study uses agent-based modeling to examine the impact of various recommendation algorithms on the propagation of misinformation on online social networks. We simulate a synthetic environment consisting of heterogeneous agents,…
Over the past decade it has become evident that intentional disinformation in the political context -- so-called fake news -- is a danger to democracy. However, until now there has been no clear understanding of how to define fake news,…