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How social networks can be used to bias votes

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02616-2

This article introduces the concept of gerrymandering not in a physical way but in social networks. In the voting circumstances mentioned in the article, there is a large majority of voters who tend to be indecisive. When bots are placed on one side, however, they can have a huge impact on swaying the indecisive voters.

The article references a study published in Nature by a team of researchers, led by mathematical biologist Alexander Stewart. The study looked into the use of game theory where they put out a game where players are on one of two teams. Their payoffs were points, where if their team won the most number of votes then they get the most amount of points. However, they also receive some points for losing and none for having a draw. This creates an unwillingness to have deadlocks. Players were shown polling data to see what people were most likely to vote so they made their best choices based on those polls. 

The payoffs were established as the following: 2 for winning, 0 for deadlock, and 0.5 for losing. For each team, their best outcome is if they won. If they see another team is winning based on polls, then their best option is to vote for the other team due to the 0.5 payoff being higher than 0.

Matrix Yellow Party
Purple Party Win Lose
Win (0,0) Tie (2, 0.5)
Lose (0.5, 2) (0,0) Tie

Study source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1507-6

The bots’ role in the study was to be part of the yellow party but be placed amongst the undecided voters in the purple party. The results showed that they heavily turned the favor towards the yellow party. In this digital age, the networks developed through social media have been huge and many people are now connected online. It is much easier to place these bots and affect these networks. As almost everyone is connected in one or another, this could be a large problem in the future as it becomes easier to manipulate voting.

 

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