Related papers: Democratic Resilience and Sociotechnical Shocks

Our infrastructure systems enable our well-being by allowing us to move, store, and transform materials and information given considerable social and environmental variation. Critically, this ability is shaped by the degree to which society…

There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…

People who are involved with political campaigns face increased digital security threats from well-funded, sophisticated attackers, especially nation-states. Improving political campaign security is a vital part of protecting democracy. To…

Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…

Cybersecurity in politics has emerged as a critical and intricate realm intersecting technology, governance, and international relations. In this interconnected digital context, political entities confront unparalleled challenges in…

Heterogeneity in individual characteristics and behaviour is a fundamental property of complex dynamical systems. While previous studies on evolutionary dynamics of strategies evolution in various systems have predominantly focused on the…

Traditional social organizations such as those for the management of healthcare and civil defence are the result of designs and realizations that matched well with an operational context considerably different from the one we are…

In the 21st Century information environment, adversarial actors use disinformation to manipulate public opinion. The distribution of false, misleading, or inaccurate information with the intent to deceive is an existential threat to the…

Short-term survival and an exuberant plunge into building our future are generating a new kind of unintended consequence -- hidden fragility. This is a direct effect of the sophistication and structural complexity of the socio-technical…

The prevalence of misinformation on online social media has tangible empirical connections to increasing political polarization and partisan antipathy in the United States. Ranking algorithms for social recommendation often encode broad…

The 2016 US election was a watershed event where an electoral intervention by an adversarial state made extensive use of networks of software robots and data driven communications which transformed the interference into a goal driven…

Technological systems increasingly mediate human information exchange, spanning interactions among humans as well as between humans and artificial agents. The unprecedented scale and reliance on information disseminated through these…

Digital networks have profoundly transformed the ways in which individuals interact, exchange information, and establish connections, leading to the emergence of phenomena such as virality, misinformation cascades, and online polarization.…

The advent of the digital era provided a fertile ground for the development of virtual societies, complex systems influencing real-world dynamics. Understanding online human behavior and its relevance beyond the digital boundaries is still…

We propose a computational framework for modeling opinion dynamics in electoral competitions that combines two realistic features: voter memory and exogenous shocks. The population is represented by a fully-connected network of agents, each…

Trust is often conveyed through delegation, or through recommendation. This makes the trust authorities, who process and publish trust recommendations, into an attractive target for attacks and spoofing. In some recent empiric studies, this…

Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…

Socio-technical systems, where technological and human elements interact in a goal-oriented manner, provide important functional support to our societies. Here we draw attention to the underappreciated concept of timeliness -- i.e., system…

The integrity of democratic elections depends on voters' access to accurate information. However, modern media environments, which are dominated by social media, provide malicious actors with unprecedented ability to manipulate elections…

Natural and artificial collectives exhibit heterogeneities across different dimensions, contributing to the complexity of their behavior. We investigate the effect of two such heterogeneities on collective opinion dynamics: heterogeneity of…