Aleksandra Puchalska: On how social structure shapes the spread of disinformation in political election

Speaker: Aleksandra Puchalska (IMFM)

Abstract: In this talk, I propose a replicator–mutator system, originally introduced in [1], and explore its application to the modelling of political elections. As the novelty to the classical approach in this framework, the lack of rationality in political preferences is incorporated through the graph Laplacian, which determines the probability of a change in voting strategy. I will present preliminary results on the relation between the long-term behaviour of the solutions and the structural properties of the corresponding social network. Furthermore, I will address the question on further connections between the spectrum of the graph Laplacian and the dynamics of the replicator–mutator system. Finally, I will show numerical simulations based on the Polish presidential election in 2025.

[1] R. Olfati-Saber, Evolutionary Dynamics of Behaviour in Social Networks, Proceedings of the 46th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, New Orleans, LA, USA, 2007.