Blog

Our fourth OSoMe annual report highlights the many activities of the Observatory during the academic year 2023-2024, roughly, as well as updates on the growing OSoMe team.

The Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe) at Indiana University - Bloomington invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow (one year term with expected renewals for up to 3 years). The Postdoctoral Fellow will work closely with Yong-Yeol “YY” Ahn and other researchers at the Observatory on modeli...

Filippo Menczer co-authored an eLetter, questioning a study that suggests Facebook's algorithm is not contributing to political polarization on the platform. The study, “How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?” was published in Science in Jul...

The Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe, pronounced “awesome”) is excited to introduce five new tools that will enhance the public’s ability to analyze and attend to the complexities of online information ecosystems: Coordiscope, Botometer X, Hoaxy2, OSoMe Mastodon Search, and Facebook News Bridge....

Indiana University researchers will lead a multi-institutional team of experts in areas such as informatics, psychology, communications and folklore to assess the role that artificial intelligence may play in strengthening the influence of online communications — including misinformation and radical...

Kai-Cheng Yang finished second in the mathematics, physical sciences, and engineering category for the 2024 Indiana University Distinguished Ph.D Dissertation Award. Yang’s dissertation focused on better understanding the behaviors of malicious bots and address their negative social media impact b...

Congratulations to OSoMe Ph.D. students, Bao Tran Truong and Ozgur Can Seckin, for being named finalists in the Prosocial Ranking Challenge, hosted by the Center for Human Compatible Artificial Intelligence! This competition aimed to develop new social media ranking algorithms that can mitigate...

We are thrilled to announce a significant achievement within our research team at OSoMe: the promotion of Dr. Filipi N. Silva from Assistant Research Scientist to Associate Research Scientist! Prior to joining OSoMe, Dr. Silva served as an Assistant Research Scientist for four years at the IU Net...

We’re excited to announce that researchers at the Observatory on Social Media will present 20 papers at various conferences over the summer. Annual Conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Papers Jason Peifer, Junghyun Moon, Taeyoung Lee,...

Our latest paper "Identifying and characterizing superspreaders of low-credibility content on Twitter" by DeVerna, Aiyappa, Pacheco, Bryden, and Menczer was published in PLOS ONE. The world’s digital information ecosystem continues to struggle with the spread of misinformation. Prior work has su...

The original Botometer website was disabled after Twitter (now X) suspended free access to their data for researchers. However, there is still a need for bot detection. So we decided to revive the tool even if it only has minimal functionality compared with the original Botometer. To differentiate t...

Our third OSoMe annual report highlights the many activities of the Observatory during the academic year 2022-2023, roughly, as well as updates on the growing OSoMe team.

A preprint of the paper titled “Anatomy of an AI-powered malicious social botnet” by Yang and Menczer was posted on arXiv. Concerns have been raised that large language models (LLMs) could be utilized to produce fake content with a deceptive intention, although evidence thus far remains anecdotal....

AI lowers the cost of generating false but credible content at scale, defeating the already weak moderation defenses of social media platforms. How much of this junk is out there already? Read some research ideas in "Addressing the harms of AI-generated inauthentic content" at doi:10.1038/s42256...

Social media superspreaders have the ability to rapidly disseminate information, regardless of its veracity. This means they can influence consequential conversations — for better or worse — related to elections, public health and social issues. With the goal of tracking superspreaders that are di...

We are thrilled to share the news that our paper "Online Misinformation is Linked to Early COVID-19 Vaccination Hesitancy and Refusal" has been included in the 2023 Economic Report of the U.S. President. Adding to its accolades, this paper has also been recognized by Scientific Reports as one of...

We’re excited to announce that researchers at the Observatory on Social Media, the IU Network Science Institute, and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research will present 51 papers at various conferences over the summer. Network Science Conference (NetSci) Oral presentations...

In October 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter, declaring that "the bird is freed" and that freedom of expression would be a priority on his platform. Although little is known about Musk's understanding of free speech, many feared that his policies would lead to a neglect in the moderation of harmful...

Misleading claims about elections create serious challenges for election officials, social media companies, journalists, and voters. The Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe) at Indiana University has launched a new dashboard focused on the 2022 US midterm elections. The US Midterm Elections 2022...

The Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, Bloomington invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow position. The anticipated start date is January 1, 2023. The position is initially for 12 months and can be renewed for up to 24 additional months, depending on performance and funds a...

Today we launched three new or revamped research tools to give journalists, other researchers and the public a broad view of what's happening on social media. The tools help overcome some of the biggest challenges of interpreting information flow online, which is often difficult to understand beca...

The Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, Bloomington invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow position. The anticipated start date is August 1, 2022. The position is initially for 12 months and can be renewed for up to 24 additional months, depending on performance and funds av...

Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, funded in part with a $3 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, has named two new Knight Fellows for 2022. Bao Tran Truong and Jimmy Ochieng will help advance the Observatory’s mission to understand the role of media and t...

The Indiana University Network Science Institute (IUNI) is building a new tech team! We are hiring three positions: a database manager, a web developer (full stack), and a systems engineer. This team will be based at the Indiana University Network Science Institute (IUNI), and will work on...

We have two big announcements! First, OSoMe (along with IUNI and CNetS) is moving to the new Luddy Center for Artificial Intelligence. Second, we have a new tenure-track assistant professor position in Artificial Intelligence and Network Science. We welcome any candidates who study AI, complex...

2023 UPDATE: This project has been completed and archived. This is a new project which aims to foster a social-contagion intervention that puts the power of choice on voluntary African American participants to share reliable information about COVID-19 vaccines. Our focus on this demographic group...

Our latest paper "Neutral bots probe political bias on social media" by Wen Chen, Diogo Pacheco, Kai-Cheng Yang & Fil Menczer just came out in Nature Communications. We find strong evidence of political bias on Twitter, but not as many think: (1) it is conservative rather than liberal bi...

The Indiana University Network Science Institute is seeking a backend software/systems engineer. If you join our IT team, you will be working on several projects related to misinformation and big data, in collaboration with our partners at the Observatory on Social Media. We are a small team so...

By David Axelrod (first published on Misinfocon.com) The last year has been distinguished by two global challenges: the COVID-19 pandemic has killed millions of people and millions more have been exposed to misinformation and disinformation campaigns around a variety of topics of global impo...

Our 2011 paper Political Polarization on Twitter was recognized at the 2021 AAAI International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) with the Test of Time Award. First author Mike Conover, who was then a PhD student and is now Director of Machine Learning Engineering at Workday, accept...

A new project from Indiana University's Observatory on Social Media, or OSoMe, points to misinformation as a factor affecting COVID-19 vaccine adoption. Working with colleagues from the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy, the OSoMe team has created a publicly available dashboard called CoVax...

CNetS alumnus Mihai Avram is the recipient of the 2020 Indiana University Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award for his work on Hoaxy and Fakey: Tools to Analyze and Mitigate the Spread of Misinformation in Social Media. This award recognizes a “truly outstanding” Master’s thesis based on criteria...

On 15 September 2020, The Washington Post published an article by Isaac Stanley-Becker titled “Pro-Trump youth group enlists teens in secretive campaign likened to a ‘troll farm,’ prompting rebuke by Facebook and Twitter.” The article reported on a network of accounts run by teenagers in Phoenix,...

We are excited to announce the new v.1.3 of BotSlayer, our OSoMe cloud tool that lets journalists, researchers, citizens, & civil society organizations track narratives and detect potentially coordinated inauthentic information networks on Twitter in real-time. Improvements and new features includ...

Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, funded in part last year with a $3 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, has named two new Knight Fellows. Matthew DeVerna and Harry Yaojun Yan will help advance the center’s ongoing investigations into how information...

In the groundbreaking new PBS series “NetWorld,” Niall Ferguson visits network theorists, social scientists and data analysts (including at OSoMe) to explore the intersection of social media, technology and the spread of cultural movements. Reviewing classic experiments and cutting-edge research,...

Work by the Observatory on Social Media is having real-world impact. For example, our tools have been used to uncover the roots of political misinformation in investigative pieces on the White Helmets and the pizzagate conspiracy. Hoaxy and Botometer have been leveraged in studies of m...

Indiana University will establish a $6 million research center to study the role of media and technology in society. With leadership by CNetS faculty, the Observatory on Social Media will investigate how information and misinformation spread online. It will also provide students, journalists and c...

Our analysis of information shared on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election has found that social bots played a disproportionate role in spreading misinformation online. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, analyzed 14 million messages and 400,000 articles sha...

Filippo Menczer appeared on a panel of experts to discuss the emergence and dissemination of misinformation, and how it threatens society at the annual meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., Feb. 15. Menczer was a part of a three-person panel and pre...

Onur Varol, a postdoctoral research associate at Northeastern University who earned his Ph.D. in Informatics from IU and was a member of OSoMe, has been honored with the University Distinguished Ph.D. Dissertation Award for 2018, which is the highest honor for research Indiana University bestows on...

The spread of fake news is no game, but to recent OSoMe graduate Mihai Avram, a game just might be the solution. As a graduate student in CNetS, Avram developed a mobile app called Fakey to help combat the spread of fake news on social media. It is available to download for both Android and i...

Researchers at CNetS, IUNI, and the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media have launched upgrades to two tools playing a major role in countering the spread of misinformation online: Hoaxy and Botometer. A third tool Fakey — an educational game designed to make people smarter news c...

The indictment of 13 Russians in the operation of a "troll farm" that spread false information related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election has renewed the spotlight on the power of "fake news" to influence public opinion. Filippo Menczer joined prominent legal scholars, social scientists and res...

While social media have brought about a more egalitarian model of information access, the lack of oversight from expert journalists makes the users of these platforms vulnerable to the intentional or unintentional spread of misinformation. We observe hoaxes, rumors, fake reports, and conspiracy th...

After the 2016 US elections, the topic of fake news and their spread on social media has become a hotly debated issue. As our group has been studying this phenomenon since 2010, our work has been covered and quoted in the media, analyzing the influence of social bots, the appearance of fake new...

Research on detection of social bots by OSoMe faculty members Alessandro Flammini and Filippo Menczer, former IUNI research scientist Emilio Ferrara, and graduate students Clayton A Davis, Onur Varol, and Prashant Shiralkar was featured on the covers of the two top computing venues:...

The power to explore online social media movements — from the pop cultural to the political — with the same algorithmic sophistication as top experts in the field is now available to journalists, researchers and members of the public from a free, user-friendly online software suite released today....

Congratulations to Clayton A Davis, who won the best presenter prize at the 25th International World Wide Web Conference's Developers Day Workshop! Clayton presented BotOrNot: A system to evaluate social bots, a paper coauthored with Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Alessandro Flammini, and...

Social bots have been circulating on social media platforms for a few years, and if you frequent online social media, you've probably come across them whether you know it or not! To learn more about social bots, we built BotOrNot, a tool to analyze a Twitter user's behavior and compare it to the b...

Predicting popularity and success in cultural markets is hard due to strong inequalities and inherent unpredictability. A good example comes from the world of fashion, where industry professionals face every season the difficult challenge of guessing who will be the next seasons’ top models. A rece...

Traditional fact checking by expert journalists cannot keep up with the enormous volume of information that is now generated online. Computational fact checking may significantly enhance our ability to evaluate the veracity of dubious information. In our paper, Computational Fact Checking from Know...

Work by Olaf Sporns, YY Ahn, Alessandro Flammini, and colleagues was featured on the cover of Neuron. In the paper Cooperative and Competitive Spreading Dynamics on the Human Connectome, the authors present a simulation model of spreading dynamics, previously applied in studies of social ne...

Congratulations to Przemyslaw Grabowicz, Luca Aiello, and Fil Menczer for winning the WICI Data Challenge. A prize of $10,000 CAD accompanies this award from the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation at the University of Waterloo. The Challenge called for tools and methods th...

Congratulations to Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Chris Ogan, Fil Menczer, and Sandro Flammini for winning the ACM Web Science 2014 Best Paper Award with their paper Evolution of online user behavior during a social upheaval (preprint). In the paper, the authors study the pivotal role p...

In our paper on Competition among memes in a world with limited attention in Nature Scientific Reports, Lilian Weng and coauthors Sandro Flammini, Alex Vespignani, and Fil Menczer report that we can explain the massive heterogeneity in the popularity and persistence of memes as deriv...

Truthy team members Karissa McKelvey and Johan Bollen collaborated with IU Department of Sociology members Joseph DiGrazia and Fabio Rojas on the paper More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior published in PLoS ONE. The paper aimed to see if t...

A social bot is a computer algorithm that automatically produces content and interacts with humans on social media, trying to emulate and possibly alter their behavior. On August 11, 2013, the New York Times published an article by Ian Urbina with the headline: I Flirt and Tweet. Follow Me at #So...

One might think that online social media, operating on a global scale via the Internet, wouldn't be affected much by geography. In fact, authors Emilio Ferrara, Onur Varol, Fil Menczer, and Sandro Flammini, show in their paper Traveling trends: social butterflies or frequent fliers? that o...