Related papers: Is the Commercial Mass Media Necessary, or Even De…
The concept of truth, as a public good is the production of a collective understanding, which emerges from a complex network of social interactions. The recent impact of social networks on shaping the perception of truth in political arena…
We study the ability of a social media platform with a political agenda to influence voting outcomes. Our benchmark is Condorcet's jury theorem, which states that the likelihood of a correct decision under majority voting increases with the…
Communication of scientific knowledge beyond the walls of science is key to science's societal impact. Media channels play sizable roles in disseminating new scientific ideas about human health, economic welfare, and government policy as…
Mainstream media, through their decisions on what to cover and how to frame the stories they cover, can mislead readers without using outright falsehoods. Therefore, it is crucial to have tools that expose these editorial choices underlying…
Participatory citizen platforms are innovative solutions to digitally better engage citizens in policy-making and deliberative democracy in general. Although these platforms have been used also in an engineering context, thus far, there is…
Online platforms have completely transformed American social life. They have democratized publication, overthrown old gatekeepers, and given ordinary Americans a fresh voice in politics. But the system is beginning to falter. Control over…
The suggestions generated by most existing recommender systems are known to suffer from a lack of diversity, and other issues like popularity bias. As a result, they have been observed to promote well-known "blockbuster" items, and to…
The paper develops a stochastic model of drift in human beliefs that shows that today's sheer volume of accessible information, combined with consumers' confirmation bias and natural preference to more outlying content, necessarily lead to…
In the current digital age of the Internet, with ever-growing networks and data-driven business models, digital platforms and especially marketplaces are becoming increasingly important. These platforms focus primarily on digital businesses…
We study the link between political influence and industrial concentration. We present a joint model of political influence and market competition: an oligopoly lobbies the government over regulation, and competes in the product market…
Disinformation research has proliferated in reaction to widespread false, problematic beliefs purported to explain major social phenomena. Yet while the effects of disinformation are well-known, there is less consensus about its causes; the…
Providing opinions through labeling of images, tweets, etc. have drawn immense interest in crowdsourcing markets. This invokes a major challenge of aggregating multiple opinions received from different crowd workers for deriving the final…
The hegemony of control over our search platforms by a few large corporations raises justifiable concerns, particularly in light of emerging geopolitical tensions and growing instances of ideological imposition by authoritarian actors to…
Many networks do not live in isolation but are strongly interacting, with profound consequences on their dynamics. Here, we consider the case of two interacting social networks and, in the context of a simple model, we address the case of…
In an online survey in December 2020, 385 journalists in Germany were surveyed about platforms in journalism and about their frequency of use and willingness to adopt emerging technologies. Journalists have a commitment to publish on a…
A prediction market is a useful means of aggregating information about a future event. To function, the market needs a trusted entity who will verify the true outcome in the end. Motivated by the recent introduction of decentralized…
Social networking and micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, play an important role in sharing digital information. Despite the popularity and usefulness of social media, they are regularly abused by corrupt users. One of these nefarious…
Browsing privacy solutions face an uphill battle to deployment. Many operate counter to the economic objectives of popular online services (e.g., by completely blocking ads) and do not provide enough incentive for users who may be subject…
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so (Galileo Galilei). According to the above sentence we do not ask why we need to measure democracy but if it is possible to measure something which is not unequivocally defined.…
Liquid democracy is a hybrid direct-representative decision making process that provides each voter with the option of either voting directly or to delegate their vote to another voter, i.e., to a representative of their choice. One of the…