Related papers: Is the Commercial Mass Media Necessary, or Even De…
This article challenges the assumption that journals and peer review are essential for developing,evaluating and disseminating scientific and other academic knowledge. It suggests a more flexible ecosystem, and examines some of the…
Since this century, the speed, availability, and plethora of online informational content have made it increasingly difficult for humans to keep an overview of real-world situations, build a personal opinion, and sometimes even decide on…
In this paper, we present a resource allocation mechanism for the problem of incentivizing filtering among a finite number of strategic social media platforms. We consider the presence of a strategic government and private knowledge of how…
I present evidence that communication between marketplace participants is an important influence on market demand. I find that consumer demand is approximately equally influenced by communication on both formal and informal networks-…
A monopolist faces a partially uninformed population of consumers, interconnected through a directed social network. In the network, the monopolist offers rewards to informed consumers (influencers) conditional on informing uninformed…
Why do Social Media Corporations (SMCs) engage in state-linked information operations? Social media can significantly influence the global political landscape, allowing governments and other political entities to engage in concerted…
We study a Bayesian persuasion setting in which a sender wants to persuade a critical mass of receivers by revealing partial information about the state to them. The homogeneous binary-action receivers are located on a communication…
As we move towards more data intensive, device centric global communication networks, our ability to usefully harvest these large datastores is degrading. The widening asymmetry in the explosive growth of data versus our ability to use it,…
A core tenet underpinning the conception of contemporary information networks, such as social media platforms, is that users should not be constrained in the amount of information they can freely and willingly exchange with one another…
Algorithmic intermediaries govern the digital public sphere through their architectures, amplification algorithms, and moderation practices. In doing so, they shape public communication and distribute attention in ways that were previously…
The amount of information available to the general public is enormous, and it is challenging to extract meaningful and reliable content. The availability of news sources and their trustability are the biggest problems for selecting the…
An increasing number of politicians are relying on cheaper, easier to access technologies such as online social media platforms to communicate with their constituency. These platforms present a cheap and low-barrier channel of communication…
The distinction between genuine grassroots activism and automated influence operations is collapsing. While contemporary policy debates prioritize fully autonomous generative agents and synthetic content, this paper offers a conceptual…
The information system (T.V., newspapers, blogs, social network platforms) and its inner dynamics play a fundamental role on the evolution of collective debates and thus on the public opinion. In this work we address such a process focusing…
The information flow inside a P2P network is highly dependent on the network structure. In order to ease the diffusion of relevant data toward interested peers, many P2P protocols gather similar nodes by putting them in direct contact. With…
Middleware, third-party software intermediaries between users and platforms, has been broached as a means to decentralize the power of social media platforms and enhance user agency. Middleware may enable a more user-centric and democratic…
The old mantra of decentralizing the Internet is coming again with fanfare, this time around the blockchain technology hype. We have already seen a technology supposed to change the nature of the Internet: peer-to-peer. The reality is that…
We present a model of news media that shape consumer beliefs by providing information (signals about an exogenous state) and narratives (models of what determines outcomes). To amplify consumers' engagement, media maximize consumers'…
The reporting and the analysis of current events around the globe has expanded from professional, editor-lead journalism all the way to citizen journalism. Nowadays, politicians and other key players enjoy direct access to their audiences…
"Fake news" is a recent phenomenon, but misinformation and propaganda are not. Our new communication technologies make it easy for us to be exposed to high volumes of true, false, irrelevant, and unprovable information. Future AI is…