Congratulations to my PhD student Isuru Ariyarathne for his #WebSci26 paper. Thank you @osome.iu.edu @fil.bsky.social & Sandro Flammini for their valuable contributions.
Behavior change can be used for identifying social media manipulation
arxiv.org/abs/2603.03128
github.com/wm-newslab/b...
Join us Wednesday at 12pm ET for our final OSoMe Awesome Speaker talk!
🎙️ Alissa Cooper (Knight-Georgetown Institute)
📌 Better Feeds: Algorithms That Put People First
🗓 March 4 | 12pm ET
🔗 Register: iu.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
Tapping into his favorite "rigged election" frame, yesterday Trump repeated allegations of Iranian intereference in U.S. elections to justify US/Israeli strikes on Iran. The hypocrisy of those allegations is telling — and hints towards his own interference plans. I wrote this thread into a blog:
Rewriting other people's original reporting and clickbait-wrapping the "new" story is not new. But a scumbag operation called "The Daily News Today" is doing it at AI-juiced scale.
Alexios Mantzarlis, one of journalism's expert observers of this stuff, explains here:
The AI videos supercharging Russia's online disinformation campaigns
www.bbc.com/news/article...
Epstein who?
OFFS. When Iran tried to interefere in 2020, researchers caught them and called them out. Then the Benz-Weiss-Taibbi-Musk-Jordan-Trump axis labeled those researchers "censors" ... and set about defunding them and dismantling their organizations.
Important experiment showing that social media algorithms do have political effects.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
This story via @theconversation.com weaves together research done with @yang3kc.bsky.social @baottruong.bsky.social and several others: 🧪 Swarms of AI bots can sway people's beliefs – threatening democracy
theconversation.com/swarms-of-ai...
Is it acceptable to use AI to impersonate a candidate during an election and make it appear as though they did or said something they did not, without disclosing that the video is AI-generated or satire?
news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/h...
An important argument: Internet platforms must be held accountable for their actions, and US attacks against EU transparency and accountability regulations, equating them to "censorship", are ironic given the Trump administration’s own vast record of censorship.
"Professors Are Being Watched: ‘We’ve Never Seen This Much Surveillance’"
"Scrutiny of university classrooms is being formalized, with new laws requiring professors to post syllabuses and tip lines for students to complain."
Gift link 🎁
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/u...
The link seems to be working now, alternatively you can try link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Fig 1 showing temporal and geographic patterns of antivax tweets from https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00606-1
Fig 2 showing model and results plots from https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00606-1
Does health misinformation kill? Yes.
Our latest paper w/@jmbollenbacher.bsky.social is finally out with evidence of a causal link between exposure to antivax content on Xitter and deaths.
🧪 Effects of antivaccine tweets on COVID-19 vaccinations, cases, and deaths.
doi.org/10.1140/epjd...
🚨Job alert 🚨
I have an opening for a postdoc in my team at @ipz.bsky.social in the area of digital democracy starting Sep 1, 2026.
If you are working on the impact of the digital transformation on politics, please apply by 🗓️ Mar 1, 2026.
📤 Please share widely!
www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...
Research showed that political disinformation on social media had negligible effects, but I always wondered if such tiny effects, when targeting battleground states, could influence close elections. A new paper analyzing voter-suppression ads shows this was the case in 2016:
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Congrats to @matthewdeverna.com and @shalmoli-ghosh.bsky.social for coverage of their important research on deepfakes of real women:
www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/30/1...
Yet more coverage on our @science.org paper on AI swarms:
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Latest working paper 🧪 w/ @shalmoli-ghosh.bsky.social and @matthewdeverna.com shows that AI porn and NSFW deepfakes targeting women are being commoditized
A Marketplace for AI-Generated Adult Content and Deepfakes
Preprint: doi.org/10.48550/arX...
More coverage of our recent @science.org paper warning about AI swarms:
www.inc.com/chloe-aiello...
Don't forget Mirta's awesome talk tomorrow!!
Coverage of our recent paper in Science
www.wired.com/story/ai-pow...
If you don't have access, here is a preprint: doi.org/10.31219/osf...
Our latest paper in @science.org warns about malicious AI swarms, agents capable of adaptive influence campaigns at scale. We already observed some in the wild (picture). AI is a real threat to democracy.
#SciencePolicyForum #ScienceResearch 🧪
Paper: doi.org/10.1126/scie...
We’re excited to welcome Mirta Galesic as our next OSoMe Awesome Speaker!
🗓 Wednesday, Jan 28, 2026
⏰ 12:00–1:00 PM ET
🎙 Dynamics of belief networks
Register: iu.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
Check your sources, we have been saying...
cyberscoop.com/the-quiet-wa...
Just had a meeting with @fil.bsky.social and the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University (@osome.iu.edu) to discuss the potential for using @furryli.st and the AT Protocol at large to study how to design healthier social media at scale. Really excited to see what comes of it!
What are the dynamic effects of fact-checking on the behavior of those who circulate misinformation and on the spread of false news? In this paper, we provide causal evidence on these questions, building on a unique partnership with the Agence France Presse (AFP), the world's largest fact-checking organization and a partner of Facebook's Third-Party Fact-Checking Program. Over an 18-month period (December 2021-June 2023), we collected information on the stories proposed by fact-checkers during the daily editorial meetings, some of which were ultimately fact-checked while others, despite being ex ante "similar", were left aside. Using two complementary Difference-inDifferences approaches, one at the story level and the other at the post level (within fact-checked stories), we show that fact-checking reduces the circulation of misinformation on Facebook by approximately 8%, an effect driven entirely by stories rated as "False." Furthermore, we provide evidence of behavioral responses: the publication of a fact-check more than doubles the deletion of posts in the fact-checked stories, and users whose posts appear in fact-checked stories become less likely to share misinformation in the future. While our results clearly confirm the effectiveness of fact-checking, we provide policy recommendations to further strengthen its impact.
When FB introduced its fact-checking program, it claimed (w/out evidence, despite our asking) that it reduced exposure to debunked content by 80%. When Meta killed fact-checking in the US, Zuck claimed (without evidence) that it didn't work. Both lies. The truth? ~8%:
dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...
Handbook of Computational Social Science cover and authors
ICYMI -- Delighted that the Handbook of Computational Social Science is finally out. Amazing cast of coauthors, with special thanks to @tahayasseri.bsky.social for leading the effort. Happy Holidays!
www.elgaronline.com/edcollbook/b...
