Voter Participation Control in Online Polls

News outlets, surveyors, and other organizations often conduct polls on social networks to gain insights into public opinion. Such a poll is typically started by someone on a social network who sends it to her friends. If a person participates in the poll, the poll information gets published on her wall, which in turn enables her friends to participate, and the process continues. Eventually, a subset of the population participates in the poll, and the pollster learns the outcome of that poll. We initiate the study of a new but natural type of election control in such online elections. We study how difficult/easy it is to sway the outcome of such polls in one's favor/against (aka constructive vs destructive) by any malicious influencer who nudges/bribes people for seemingly harmless actions like non-participation. These questions are important from the standpoint of studying the power of resistance of online voting against malicious behavior.