Blog

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.