Tag Archives: papers

Probing political bias on Twitter with drifter bots

September 24, 2021Fil, NaN, Newsbias, echo-chamber, information networks, misinformation, papers, politics, social bots, social media, social networks, Twitterfil

Our latest paper “Neutral bots probe political bias on social media” by Wen Chen, Diogo Pacheco, Kai-Cheng Yang & Fil Menczer just came out in Nature Communications. We find strong evidence of political bias on Twitter, but not as many think: (1) it is conservative rather than liberal bias, and (2) it results from user interactions (and abuse) rather than platform algorithms. We tracked neutral “drifter” bots to probe political biases. In the figure, we see the drifters in yellow and a sample of their friends and followers colored according to political alignment. Large nodes are accounts sharing a lot of low-credibility links.

Continue reading →

ICWSM Test of Time Award

June 11, 2021Fil, NaN, Newsaward, ICWSM, papers, social media, social networks, Twitterfil

Our 2011 paper Political Polarization on Twitter was recognized at the 2021 AAAI International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) with the Test of Time Award. First author Mike Conover, who was then a PhD student and is now Director of Machine Learning Engineering at Workday, accepted the award at a ceremony at the end of the ICWSM conference. Other authors are Jacob Ratkiewicz (now a Tech Lead at Google), Bruno Gonçalves (now VP at JPMorgan Chase), Matt Francisco (now Lecturer at IU Luddy School), Alessandro Flammini (Professor of Informatics at IU Luddy), and Filippo Menczer (Distinguished Professor and Director of the Observatory on Social Media at IU).

Continue reading →

Hoaxy: A Platform for Tracking Online Misinformation

December 21, 2016Fil, NaN, Newsinformation networks, large-scale infrastructures, misinformation, papers, social media, Truthyfil

diffusion networks of hoaxes in Twitter — Misinformation (yellow/brown) spreads within the healthy (blue) Twittersphere network. Left: chemtrails conspiracies mix with conversations about the sky. Right: antivax campaigns penetrate discussions about the flu.

UPDATE (21 Dec 2016): we just launched Hoaxy, our open platform to visualize the online spread of claims and fact checking.

Continue reading Hoaxy: A Platform for Tracking Online Misinformation →

Awards at CCS 2015

October 5, 2015Fil, NaN, Newsaward, bots, CASCI, dynamical systems, dynamics, media, misinformation, modularity, NaN, papers, poster, socialfil

The CNetS poster “The Rise of Social Bots in Online Social Networks” by Emilio Ferrara, Onur Varol, Prashant Shiralkar, Clayton Davis, Filippo Menczer, and Alessandro Flammini won a Best Poster Award at CCS 2015. The poster was presented by Clayton Davis. The results will also appear in the paper “The Rise of Social Bots” to be published in Comm. ACM (in press, preprint).

The paper “Modularity and the Spread of Perturbations in Complex Dynamical Systems” by Artemy Kolchinsky, Alexander J. Gates and Luis M. Rocha, and the poster “Information Theoretic Structures of the French Revolution” by Alexander Barron, Simon DeDeo and Rebecca Spang won additional awards.

Finally, our former postdoctoral scientist Bruno Gonçalves (now tenured faculty member at Aix-Marseille Université) received a Junior Scientist Award from the Complex Systems Society for his contributions to the study of human social behavior from large-scale online attention and behavioral data. This is the second Junior Scientist Award for CNetS (the first was won by Filippo Radicchi).

Congratulations to the CNetS team!

CNetS research at CCS’15

June 16, 2015Fil, NaN, NewsCASCI, computational social science, control, dynamical systems, information theory, modularity, NaN, papers, polarization, social media, talksferrarae

Big success for CNetS researchers at the Conference on Complex Systems (CCS’15)! Here are the accepted talks from our center:

Computational fact checking from knowledge networks by Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Prashant Shiralkar, Johan Bollen, Luis M Rocha, Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini
Control of complex networks requires structure and dynamics by Alexander Gates and Luis M. Rocha
Darwin’s Semantic Voyage by Jaimie Murdock, Simon DeDeo, and Colin Allen
Defining and Identifying Sleeping Beauties in Science by Qing Ke, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Radicchi and Alessandro Flammini
Detecting conflict in social unrest using Instagram^* by Rion Brattig Correia, Kwan Nok Chan and Luis M. Rocha
Detecting Campaigns in Social Media by Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini
Discourse Polarization in the US Congress by Rion Brattig Correia, Kwan Nok Chan and Luis M. Rocha
Eigenmood Twitter Analysis: measuring collective mood variation by Ian B. Wood, Joana Gonçalves-Sá, Johan Bollen and Luis M. Rocha
Evolution of Online User Behavior During a Social Upheaval by Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Christine Ogan, Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini
How human perception of the urban environment influences the abandonment process by Stefani Crabstree, Simon DeDeo
Information theoretic structures of the French Revolution by Alexander Barron, Simon DeDeo, and Rebecca Spang
Measuring Emotional Contagion in Online Social Networks by Zeyao Yang, Emilio Ferrara
Modularity and the Spread of Perturbations in Complex Dynamical Systems^* by Artemy Kolchinsky, Alexander J. Gates and Luis M. Rocha
On Predictability of Rare Events Leveraging Social Media by Lei Le, Emilio Ferrara and Alessandro Flammini
Optimal network modularity for information diffusion by Azadeh Nematzadeh, Emilio Ferrara, Alessandro Flammini and Yong-Yeol Ahn
Redundancy and control in complex networks by Luis M. Rocha
The Rise of Social Bots in Online Social Networks by Emilio Ferrara, Onur Varol, Prashant Shiralkar, Clayton Davis, Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini

Simon DeDeo will also deliver one of the plenary talks. ^*Denotes papers “starred”, or designated as especially worthwhile by the CCS15 program committee.

In addition, CNetS researchers presented several papers at the recent NetSci, ICCSS, CAP 2015, CSCW, YTH Live, WWW, and ICCS conferences. Congratulations!

Paper on Web traffic modeling presented at WAW 2010

December 16, 2010NaNagent-based modeling, papers, talks, traffic, web, webgraphfil

Dr. Mark Meiss

On December 16, Mark Meiss presented our paper “Modeling Traffic on the Web Graph” (with Bruno, José, Sandro, and Fil) at the 7th Workshop on Algorithms and Models for the Web Graph (WAW 2010), at Stanford. In this paper we introduce an agent-based model that explains many statistical features of aggregate and individual Web traffic data through realistic elements such as bookmarks, tabbed browsing, and topical interests.

Summer 2010 conferences

August 22, 2010Fil, NaNpapers, talksfil

NaN folks were busy during the summer. First, we descended to Riva del Garda for Sunbelt XXX, the social networks conference. Rossano presented a poster on social link prediction from shared metadata (with Alain, Ciro, Ben, Fil); Fil presented a paper on Scholarometer (with Diep); and Sandro presented a paper on Wikipedia traffic modeling (with Jacob and Fil). Then Lilian went to Wshington, DC where she presented a poster on social games with a purpose at HCOMP2010. Finally, Jacob presented two papers on traffic in social media (with Sandro, Fil, Santo, and Alex) at the SocialCom2010 International Symposium on Social Intelligence and Networking (SIN-10) in Minneapolis. Congratulations to everyone for the great work!

Article in Nature on the plenitude of scientific performance metrics features the research of Bollen and Vespignani

June 21, 2010Newsbibliometrics, papers

The relatively new field of bibliometrics has experienced an explosion of research as scientists become more interested in developing metrics that can accurately measure scientists’ performance. The common but naive practice of tallying the number of journal citations accumulated by researchers has serious limitations insofar as many salient factors like the weight of a citation as a function of a journal or database’s popularity, how well an article integrates with contemporaneous research, and individual productivity are not taken into account.

The article discusses Bollen’s concern that the scramble to uncover new metrics and combinations of them has obscured an equal need to define the concepts under measurement more rigidly. It also addresses an approach taken by Vespignani and colleagues to apply the concept of weighted citations to develop a network of over 400,000 papers published over 100 years in order to demonstrate the variable influence scientists have over the scientific community. Read more…