Related papers: Influence Operations in Social Networks

Organizations have long used deception as a means to exert influence in pursuit of their agendas. In particular, information operations such as propaganda distribution, support of antigovernment protest, and revelation of politically and…

In order to combat the creation and spread of harmful content online, this paper defines and contextualizes the concept of inauthentic, societal-scale manipulation by malicious actors. We review the literature on societally harmful content…

This paper presents four examples of different ways that coordinated influence operations exert pressure on the prominence of ideas on social networks. We argue that these examples illustrate the four archetypical paths to influence:…

Coordinated campaigns are used to influence and manipulate social media platforms and their users, a critical challenge to the free exchange of information online. Here we introduce a general, unsupervised network-based methodology to…

Social networks have become an increasingly common abstraction to capture the interactions of individual users in a number of everyday activities and applications. As a result, the analysis of such networks has attracted lots of attention…

This work is aimed at studying realistic social control strategies for social networks based on the introduction of random information into the state of selected driver agents. Deliberately exposing selected agents to random information is…

The battlefield of information warfare has moved to online social networks, where influence campaigns operate at unprecedented speed and scale. As with any strategic domain, success requires understanding the terrain, modeling adversaries,…

Social media, seen by some as the modern public square, is vulnerable to manipulation. By controlling inauthentic accounts impersonating humans, malicious actors can amplify disinformation within target communities. The consequences of such…

Estimating influence on social media networks is an important practical and theoretical problem, especially because this new medium is widely exploited as a platform for disinformation and propaganda. This paper introduces a novel approach…

Online social networks have become an important platform for people to communicate, share knowledge and disseminate information. Given the widespread usage of social media, individuals' ideas, preferences and behavior are often influenced…

Social media has enabled users and organizations to obtain information about technology usage like software usage and even security feature usage. However, on the dark side it has also allowed an adversary to potentially exploit the users…

The ever-increasing amount of information flowing through Social Media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message. A large study of information propagation…

Social influence drives both offline and online human behaviour. It pervades cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior empirical work on…

Influence operations are large-scale efforts to manipulate public opinion. The rapid detection and disruption of these operations is critical for healthy public discourse. Emergent AI technologies may enable novel operations which evade…

Many online social networks thrive on automatic sharing of friends' activities to a user through activity feeds, which may influence the user's next actions. However, identifying such social influence is tricky because these activities are…

The focus of this work is on designing influencing strategies to shape the collective opinion of a network of individuals. We consider a variant of the voter model where opinions evolve in one of two ways. In the absence of external…

Interpersonal influence estimation from empirical data is a central challenge in the study of social structures and dynamics. Opinion dynamics theory is a young interdisciplinary science that studies opinion formation in social networks and…

This article evaluates AI-enabled influence operations in synthetic social networks through controlled simulations of narrative release, amplification, and counter-messaging. We measure exposure and belief change in agentic audiences,…

Social media platforms have transformed the dynamics of collective opinion formation, enabling rapid, large-scale interactions while simultaneously exposing online discourse to polarization and manipulation. Traditional models of opinion…

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are a cutting edge topic. Almost everybody --users, marketers, brands, companies, and researchers-- is approaching OSNs to better understand them and take advantage of their benefits. Maybe one of the key…