Explore everything
Filter by research area, year and venue. Every filter is in the address bar, so you can share a view as a link.
Bots & coordinated campaignsPlatforms, policy & society
Disinformation Warfare: Understanding State-Sponsored Trolls on Twitter and Their Influence on the WebLarge-scale empirical study of 2.7K Russian state-sponsored troll accounts and 27K tweets (Jan 2016–Sep 2017) reveals minimal direct Twitter influence but significant content amplification through RT news outlet. Trolls actively target political events, adopt multiple identities, concentrate geographically in USA/Germany/Eastern Europe,…
Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns
On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web CommunitiesLarge-scale empirical study of how image memes originate and propagate across fringe and mainstream Web communities. Analyzes 160M images posted to Twitter, Reddit, /pol/, and Gab (2016–2017) using perceptual hashing, clustering, and custom distance metrics.
Bots & coordinated campaignsSpread & networks
Who Let The Trolls Out? Towards Understanding State-Sponsored TrollsComparative analysis of 934 Russian and 770 Iranian state-sponsored trolls across Twitter and Reddit (10M posts) reveals distinct operational patterns: Russian trolls prioritized URL amplification (retweets, mentions) and pro-Trump messaging; Iranian trolls pursued regional and anti-Trump narratives motivated by real-world events. Both…
Spread & networksDatasets & evaluation
The Web of False Information: Rumors, Fake News, Hoaxes, Clickbait, and Various Other ShenanigansComprehensive typology of the false information ecosystem on the Web, identifying eight types of false information (fabricated stories, propaganda, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, biased news, rumors, clickbait, satire), twelve actor categories (bots, criminal organizations, activists, governments, paid posters, journalists, useful idiots,…
Spread & networksDetection methods
Rumor Detection on Twitter with Tree-structured Recursive Neural NetworksProposes two variants of recursive neural networks (RvNN)—bottom-up and top-down—that operate on propagation tree structures of tweets to detect rumors. Rather than treating tweets sequentially, the model learns representations that respect how tweets actually propagate in response threads.
Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns
Anatomy of an online misinformation networkA network analysis of misinformation and fact-checking spread during the 2016 US Presidential Election reveals stark segregation between the two communities on Twitter. The core of the network is dominated by misinformation spreaders; fact-checking nearly disappears in the densest regions.
Datasets & evaluationSpread & networks
FakeNewsNet: A Data Repository with News Content, Social Context and Spatiotemporal Information for Studying Fake News on Social MediaFakeNewsNet is a multi-dimensional repository for fake news research on social media, integrating news content (linguistic and visual features), social context (user engagement, network structure, response patterns), and spatiotemporal information (location, timestamps). The dataset contains both fake and real news from PolitiFact and…
Spread & networksPlatforms, policy & society
Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarizationThis field experiment tested whether exposure to opposing political views on social media reduces polarization. Twitter users (Republicans and Democrats) were randomly offered money to follow bots retweeting messages from opposing politicians and opinion leaders for one month.
Spread & networksPsychology & interventions
The small, disloyal fake news audience: The role of audience availability in fake news consumptionContrary to claims that fake news has reached a broad audience, this empirical analysis of comScore data shows the fake news audience is small and comprises heavy internet users. Applying the Law of Double Jeopardy from media theory, the authors show that fake news attracts disloyal audiences disproportionately from social platforms.
Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns
Influencers in Polarized Political Networks on TwitterThis paper identifies three types of influencers in polarized political Twitter conversations during Brazil's 2016 Dilma Rousseff impeachment: "opinion leaders" who shape discourse within ideological groups, "informational influencers" (media/institutions) drawn into one camp, and "activists" who amplify like-minded messages. The…
Bots & coordinated campaignsSpread & networks
Bots increase exposure to negative and inflammatory content in online social systemsSocial bots during the 2017 Catalan independence referendum strategically targeted influential humans to amplify negative and inflammatory content. Operating from network peripheries, bots coordinated sentiment-driven amplification that exacerbated polarization, with approximately one in three referendum-related tweets generated by bots.
Spread & networksDetection methods
This Just In: Fake News Packs a Lot in Title, Uses Simpler, Repetitive Content in Text Body, More Similar to Satire than Real NewsFake news differs systematically from real news in stylistic features, especially titles. Contrary to the assumption that fake news mimics real news, it is actually more similar to satire: packed titles with fewer stop words and more proper nouns, combined with shorter, repetitive body text with simpler language.
Detection methodsSpread & networks
"News you don't believe": Audience perspectives on fake newsUsing focus groups and surveys across the US, UK, Spain, and Finland, Nielsen and Graves find that ordinary people see fake news as a spectrum rather than a binary distinction—encompassing poor journalism, political propaganda, misleading advertising, and fabricated content. Audiences experience the "fake news" problem as one of degree,…
Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns
The Truth About False NewsA presentation discussing findings from a large-scale longitudinal study of false and true news spread on Twitter (2006–2017). The research found that false news spreads further, faster, and more broadly than truth by orders of magnitude—not primarily due to bots, but because humans are more susceptible to sharing novel information, and…
Bots & coordinated campaignsSpread & networks
Social Bots and the Spread of Fake NewsA presentation on how social bots amplify misinformation spread on Twitter and other social platforms. The speaker discusses bot detection techniques (network structure, user behavior, temporal patterns), case studies of coordinated bot campaigns (2010–2016 elections, vaccine debates, Brexit), findings showing bots act as "igniters" in…
Spread & networksFact-checking & verification
Leveraging the Crowd to Detect and Reduce the Spread of Fake News and MisinformationOnline social networks use crowd-powered flagging to identify misinformation: when users flag a story, enough flags trigger fact-checking, which disputes false claims. This paper formulates the problem of deciding which stories to fact-check and when, subject to limited fact-checking resources, as a stochastic optimal control problem.
Spread & networksDetection methods
Turing at SemEval-2017 Task 8: Sequential Approach to Rumour Stance Classification with Branch-LSTMThis paper proposes Branch-LSTM, a sequential neural model for rumour stance classification in Twitter conversations. By decomposing conversation threads into linear branches and modeling them with LSTM layers, the approach captures conversational context while assigning stance labels (Support/Deny/Query/Comment) to each tweet.
Detection methodsSpread & networks
Some Like it Hoax: Automated Fake News Detection in Social NetworksHoaxes on Facebook can be detected with 99% accuracy using user interaction patterns (who "liked" posts) rather than content analysis. Two algorithms—logistic regression and harmonic boolean crowdsourcing—achieve high accuracy even with minimal labeled training data, and knowledge transfers across different Facebook communities.
Spread & networksDetection methods
Topological Recurrent Neural Network for Diffusion PredictionWang et al. propose Topo-LSTM, a novel LSTM architecture for modeling dynamic directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to predict which node will be activated next in information cascades. The key insight is that information diffusion on networks should be modeled explicitly as diffusion topologies—graphs showing how information spreads from…
Spread & networksDatasets & evaluation
SemEval-2017 Task 8: RumourEval: Determining rumour veracity and support for rumoursRumourEval is a shared task benchmark for detecting and verifying rumours in social media. It introduces two subtasks: (a) stance classification (SDQC: Support/Deny/Query/Comment) of replies to rumourous claims, and (b) veracity prediction (true/false) of source tweets.
Spread & networksDatasets & evaluation
Quantifying Controversy on Social MediaThis work presents a graph-based pipeline to measure controversy in social media discussions. The authors build conversation graphs from Twitter interactions (retweets, follows, mentions), partition them to identify opposing sides, and apply multiple controversy measures—with a random-walk-based metric (RWC) emerging as the most reliable…
Detection methodsSpread & networks
Detect Rumors in Microblog Posts Using Propagation Structure via Kernel LearningThis paper addresses rumor detection in microblog posts by modeling information diffusion as propagation trees and proposing a kernel-based method (PTK) that captures high-order structural patterns differentiating rumors from non-rumors. The approach extends to context-sensitive variants (cPTK) and achieves superior early detection…
Spread & networksBots & coordinated campaigns
The spread of low-credibility content by social botsEmpirical analysis of 14 million Twitter messages during the 2016 U.S. election finds social bots disproportionately amplify low-credibility content: though bots comprise only 6% of accounts sharing such content, they account for 31% of tweets. Bots employ two strategies—rapid early amplification and targeting of influential users—making…
Detection methodsDatasets & evaluation
Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining PerspectiveThis comprehensive survey reviews fake news detection on social media through a data mining lens. It frames the problem around two key aspects—characterization (understanding the psychological and social foundations of fake news) and detection (building computational methods using news content and social context features).