Blog
OSoMe researcher provides expertise on misinformation battle at AAAS conference
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...
OSoMe grad honored with 2018 University Distinguished Ph.D. Dissertation Award
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...
OSoMe grad combats the spread of fake news with new mobile app
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...
Three new tools to study and counter online disinformation
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 science of fake news
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...
Hoaxy: A Platform for Tracking Online Misinformation
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...
Why study fake news and digital misinformation
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...
Social bot research featured on CACM, IEEE Computer covers
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:...
Observatory on Social Media launched
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....
Best poster and best presenter prizes
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...