Election Manipulation on Social Networks: Seeding, Edge Removal, Edge Addition

We focus on the election manipulation problem through social influence, where a manipulator exploits a social network to make her most preferred candidate win an election. Influence is due to information in favor of and/or against one or multiple candidates, sent  by seeds and spreading through the network according to the independent cascade model.  We provide a comprehensive theoretical study of the election control problem, investigating  two forms of manipulations: seeding to buy influencers given a social network and removing  or adding edges in the social network given the set of the seeds and the information sent.  In particular, we study a wide range of cases distinguishing in the number of candidates or  the kind of information spread over the network.