Election Manipulation in Social Networks with Single-Peaked Agents

TL;DR

This paper investigates election manipulation in social networks with nearly single-peaked voter preferences, showing that while the problem remains computationally hard, simple heuristics can be effective in this setting.

Contribution

It extends the analysis of election manipulation complexity to social network settings with single-peaked preferences, proposing efficient heuristics for such cases.

Findings

Most hardness results still apply in social network manipulation.

Single-peaked preferences enable the design of simple, effective heuristics.

Heuristics perform well despite the underlying computational hardness.

Abstract

Several elections run in the last years have been characterized by attempts to manipulate the result of the election through the diffusion of fake or malicious news over social networks. This problem has been recognized as a critical issue for the robustness of our democracy. Analyzing and understanding how such manipulations may occur is crucial to the design of effective countermeasures to these practices. Many studies have observed that, in general, to design an optimal manipulation is usually a computationally hard task. Nevertheless, literature on bribery in voting and election manipulation has frequently observed that most hardness results melt down when one focuses on the setting of (nearly) single-peaked agents, i.e., when each voter has a preferred candidate (usually, the one closer to her own belief) and preferences of remaining candidates are inversely proportional to the distance between the candidate position and the voter's belief. Unfortunately, no such analysis has been done for election manipulations run in social networks. In this work, we try to close this gap: specifically, we consider a setting for election manipulation that naturally raises (nearly) single-peaked preferences, and we evaluate the complexity of election manipulation problem in this setting: while most of the hardness and approximation results still hold, we will show that single-peaked preferences allow to design simple, efficient and effective heuristics for election manipulation.