Blog

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...