Blog

When thousands of fake accounts controlled by an unknown actor flood social media with some story, and platform algorithms amplify these messages, real people may be fooled into believing that they are seeing the opinions of fellow citizens. In contrast, the posts shared by real people are buried....

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals, named Filippo Menczer to its 2024 fellows’ class, a lifetime honor within the scientific community. Menczer is among 471 scientists,...

In Memoriam: Moe, Beloved Compute Cluster It is with a mix of sadness and gratitude that we announce the decommissioning of Moe, our steadfast compute cluster, which served the research community faithfully for over a decade (doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.87). Born from cutting-edge technology of its tim...

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...