Dear all / Bonjour à tous,

We are happy to invite you to Andjela Mladenovic' Predoc III defense onWednesday, December 20th, at 10am.

Vous êtes cordialement invité.e.s à la présentation du sujet de recherche d'Andjela Mladenovic, le mercredi 20 décembre à 10h00.

Jury

Abstract

Misinformation and polarization in the modern age are considered foundational threats to democracy and consequently constitute major problems in contemporary society. Addressing these pressing issues, in this work, we seek to answer the following question: "is it possible to combat misinformation on social media without *censorship*?” To answer this question, we borrow tools from economic theory which enables us to construct a solution, designed to be moderate in nature, that persuades users on social media platforms not to share misinformation. Specifically, we apply Bayesian persuasion in a setting where social media platforms have—with some degree of accuracy— knowledge of the popularity and veracity of *to-be-shared posts* which can be used to craft signals that are strategically revealed to users who are motivated to share popular posts. Additionally,  using a performative prediction framework, we analyze the effectiveness of our proposed solution when the distribution of misinformation is dynamic and undergoes changes due to the mitigation process. Finally, we propose a natural extension of our current work that takes into account the underlying graph structure of social media.

Keywords: Misinformation, Polarization, Cognitive Biases, Social Media, Bayesian Persuasion, Performative Prediction