The focus of this research project is understanding how information propagates through complex socio-technical information networks. Leveraging large-scale behavioral trace data from online social networking platforms we are able to analyze and model the spread of information, from political discourse to market trends, in unprecedented detail.

Our work to date includes a number of core research themes. Truthy is a web-based system to analyze and visualize the diffusion of information on Twitter. The Truthy system evaluates thousands of tweets an hour to identify new and emerging bursts of activity around memes of various flavors. Building on this foundation we have undertaken several analyses of political communication on Twitter, addressing political polarization and cross-ideological communication, the automated prediction of political affiliation from network and text data, and partisan asymmetries in online political engagement. Members of the Truthy team have successfully applied a custom psycholinguistic sentiment analysis framework to the problem of forecasting key market indicators, technology which now underpins the trading decisions of a $40 million investment fund.

The current focus of the project is on three directions:

1. Expanding the platform to make the data more easily accessible and thus more useful to social scientists, reporters, and the general public.
2. Modeling efforts to better understand how information spreads, why some memes go viral, the role of sentiment on the diffusion process, the mutual interaction between traffic on the network and the emergent structure of the network.
3. Combining sophisticated network analysis with content and time series mining in a machine learning framework to automatically detect deceptive, coordinated attempts to spread misinformation, such as astroturf in political campaigns.

In the Press

Principle Investigators

Fil Menczer

Sandro Flammini

Alex Vespignani

Johan Bollen

Research Team

Emilio Ferrara

Ruby Wang

Michael Conover

Alex Rudnick

Huina Mao

Lilian Weng

Karissa McKelvey

Qian Zhang

Dae Wook Kim

Clayton Davis

Mohsen Jafari-Asbagh

Alumni

Jiayi Zhu

Jacob Ratkiewicz

Bruno Gonçalves

Mark Meiss

Przemyslaw Grabowicz

Snehal Patil

Luca Aiello

Publications

L. Weng, A. Flammini, A. Vespignani, and F. Menczer.
Competition among memes in a world with limited attention. Sci. Rep., (2)335, 2012.
URL

A. Vespignani.
Modeling Dynamical Processes in Complex Socio-technical Systems. Nature Physics, 8, 32-39, 2012.
URL

Karissa McKelvey, Alex Rudnick, Michael Conover, and Filippo Menczer.
Visualizing Communication on Social Media: Making Big Data Accessible. Proc. CSCW Workshop on Collective Intelligence as Community Discourse and Action, 2012.
URL

Jacob Ratkiewicz, Michael Conover, Mark Meiss, Bruno Goncalves, Alessandro Flammini, and Filippo Menczer.
Detecting and Tracking Political Abuse in Social Media. Proc. 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media ICWSM, 2011.
URL

Michael Conover, Jacob Ratkiewicz, Matthew Francisco, Bruno Goncalves, Alessandro Flammini, and Filippo Menczer.
Political Polarization on Twitter. Proc. 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media ICWSM, 2011.
URL

Conover, B Goncalves, J Ratkiewicz, A Flammini, and F Menczer.
Predicting the Political Alignment of Twitter Users. Proceedings of 3rd IEEE Conference on Social Computing SocialCom, 2011.
URL

M. Conover, J. Ratkiewicz, B. Goncalves, M. Francisco, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer.
Networks of Political Communication I: Multi-Mode Interactions in an Online Social Network. International School and Conference on Network Science NetSci, 2011.

Jacob Ratkiewicz, Michael Conover, Mark Meiss, Bruno Gonçalves, Snehal Patil, Alessandro Flammini, and Filippo Menczer.
Truthy: Mapping the Spread of Astroturf in Microblog Streams. Proc. 20th Intl. World Wide Web Conf. Companion WWW, 2011.
URL

B. Goncalves, M. Conover, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer.
Networks of Political Communication II: Partisan Engagement and Social Media. International School and Conference on Network Science NetSci, 2011.

B. Goncalves, M. Conover, and F. Menczer.
Abuse of social media and political manipulation. In
Markus Jakobsson (Eds.),
The Death of The Internet, Wiley, 2012.

L. Weng, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer.
An Information Propagation Model Based on User Interests. In
H. Sayama, A. Minai, D. Braha, and Y. Bar-Yam (Eds.),
Unifying Themes in Complex Systems Volume VIII: Proc. 8th International Conference on Complex Systems ICCS, 2011.

Datasets

• ICWSM 2011 Dataset: Truthy/Legitimate Classification
• ICWSM 2011 Dataset: Political Polarization on Twitter

Videos

• The Truthy Project Ferrets Out Online Deception - by WSJ
• Political Polarization on Twitter – presentation at ICWSM 2011
• Political Communication on Twitter: Misinformation, Polarization and Partisan Engagement - D2I seminar

Support

We gratefully acknowledge support from the Lilly Foundation (Data to Insight Center Research Grant), the National Science Foundation (ICES award CCF-1101743 on Meme Diffusion Through Mass Social Media), the James S. McDonnell Foundation (complex systems grant on contagion of ideas in online social networks), and DARPA (SMISC project DESPIC: Detecting Early Signatures of Persuasion in Information Cascades). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies.

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