Our new paper, "Information Pathways in Online Science Communication: The Role of Platform
Actors and News Media" (w/ Giuseppe Russo & @luceriluc.bsky.social) has just been accepted at ICWSM 2026!
Preprint: arxiv.org/pdf/2603.17249
Here are the main takeaways 🧵
X's new location labels unmask users. Insiders say the idea was rejected for years. www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-mu...
Interested in detecting influence operations on TikTok? Check this out👇 just accepted at ICWSM 2026 @icwsm.bsky.social 🚀🚀🚀
Great collab w/ Gian Marco Orlando, @jinyiye.bsky.social, Valerio La Gatta, Mahdi Saeedi, Vincenzo Moscato, and
@emilioferrara.bsky.social
📄 Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2510.25003
📊 Interactive Dashboard: llmxio-dashboard.vercel.app
⚠️ Significant implications for AI safety, platform governance, and digital influence ecosystems.
🧭 Curious how this plays out? An interactive dashboard lets you inspect agent behaviors, network evolution, and coordination dynamics directly.
As coordination emerges:
- Malign agents' networks become denser & more clustered;
- Interactions grow more reciprocal & increasingly positive;
- Narratives converge toward greater semantic homogeneity;
- Amplification becomes synchronized.
✨ TL;DR:
Give AI agents just a bit of awareness of their “teammates,” and they begin to self-organize. No scripts. No central command. Just networked AI learning how to act together.
🚨 New preprint 🚨
Can AI agents coordinate influence campaigns without human guidance? And how does coordination arise among AI agents? In our latest research, we simulate LLM-powered AI agents acting like users on an online platform, some benign, some running an influence operation
Comparison diagram showing traditional vs discourse network user representations. Left: isolated platform-specific clusters with no cross-platform connections. Right: unified network where users are connected across platforms through shared narrative engagement, revealing previously invisible cross-platform communities.
New paper + interactive dashboard on the 2024 election information ecosystem.
Building on discourse networks work with @hanshanley.bsky.social @luceriluc.bsky.social @emilioferrara.bsky.social—this lets us visualize the online landscape as a unified system, rather than isolating each platform.
🎖️Best student paper honorable mention for our @zhiyi-chen.bsky.social & @jinyiye.bsky.social 🎖️
Synthetic Politics: Prevalence, Spreaders, and Emotional Reception of AI-Generated Political Images on X | Proceedings of the 36th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Big news from #ICWSM2025!
"The Susceptibility Paradox in Online Social Influence” by @luceriluc.bsky.social, @jinyiye.bsky.social, Julie Jiang & @emilioferrara.bsky.social was named a Top 5 Paper & won Best Paper Honorable Mention!
👏 Congrats to all!
It was a pleasure to present our research at @icwsm.bsky.social in Copenhagen with many friends and colleagues!
Don't miss our work with @frapierri.bsky.social, Stefano Cresci, @luceriluc.bsky.social, @pettertornberg.com and @silviagiordano.bsky.social here: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC...
Box and whisker plot showing the top 20 recommended accounts across "neutral" sock puppet accounts. Elon Musk is most recommended.
Box and whisker plot showing the top 20 recommended accounts across "left-leaning" sock puppet accounts. Elon Musk is most recommended.
Box and whisker plot showing the top 20 recommended accounts across "right-leaning" sock puppet accounts. Elon Musk is most recommended by far.
So satisfying to have some evidence that Elon Musk is wildly promoting himself on X.
Researchers made 120 sock puppet accounts to see whose content is getting pushed on users. #FAccT2025
@jinyiye.bsky.social @luceriluc.bsky.social @emilioferrara.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1145/3715...
w/ @emilioferrara.bsky.social @isi.edu
What does coordinated inauthentic behavior look like on TikTok?
We introduce a new framework for detecting coordination in video-first platforms, uncovering influence campaigns using synthetic voices, split-screen tactics, and cross-account duplication.
📄https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10867
Chatted with @laist.com LAist’s AirTalk about our ongoing work on AI-generated content, how it spreads on social media, and how people respond to it (arxiv.org/pdf/2502.11248)
Give it a listen here: laist.com/shows/airtal...
@isi.edu squad at The Web Conference 2025
@federicocinus.bsky.social presenting our paper on the detection of coordinated inauthentic behavior across platforms at The Web Conference
Visit our poster today at 2:45pm:
Exposing Cross-Platform Coordinated Inauthentic Activity in the Run-Up to the 2024 U.S. Election
arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22716
"Limited effectiveness of LLM-based data augmentation for COVID-19 misinformation stance detection" by @euncheolchoi.bsky.social @emilioferrara.bsky.social et al, presented by the awesome Chur at The Web Conference 2025
arxiv.org/abs/2503.02328
"Limited effectiveness of LLM-based data augmentation for COVID-19 misinformation stance detection" by @euncheolchoi.bsky.social @emilioferrara.bsky.social et al, presented by the awesome Chur at The Web Conference 2025
arxiv.org/abs/2503.02328
Rachel Kim and @ashtonanderson.bsky.social showing that issues are more polarized in the consumption of social media content than in its production, and with greater intensity compared to traditional media @The Web Conference 2025
dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
Rachel Kim and @ashtonanderson.bsky.social showing that issues are more polarized in the consumption of social media content than in its production, and with greater intensity compared to traditional media @The Web Conference 2025
dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
@jlenti.bsky.social presenting his causal model on climate activism on Reddit at The Web Conference
Brilliant work in collaboration with @c0rrad0.bsky.social @lajello.bsky.social @gdfm.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2410.10562
Fascinating work by Marian-Andrei Rizoiu’s group on modeling behavioral homophily through inverse reinforcement learning at The Web Conference
arxiv.org/abs/2502.02943
Amazing talk on affective polarization by our own (incredibly elegant) @ashwinrao.bsky.social at The Web Conference 2025
ISI’s Luca Luceri partnered with Financial Times to uncover a coordinated online campaign influencing Canadian voters.
Read about it here: bit.ly/3Sb598U
@luceriluc.bsky.social @usc.edu @viterbischool.usc.edu
In collaboration with the Financial Times, our recent analysis uncovers a network of coordinated inauthentic actors engaged in amplifying misleading news content that promotes Poilievre while attacking Carney
Can we effectively detect covert Information Operations (IOs) that attempt to manipulate socio-political debates on social media?
This is the focus of our work, "IOHunter: Graph Foundation Model to Uncover Online Information Operations", just presented at the #AAAI #AAAI2025
This work would not have been possible without the other amazing coauthors @luceriluc.bsky.social @frafabbri.bsky.social @emilioferrara.bsky.social
Bonus Pic: myself beyond excited to stand next to my poster!
Brava Zhiyi!
📄 Read our pre-print: arxiv.org/abs/2502.11248
🫶🏻We made our resources available to the research community, including 2M+ labeled images - visit: github.com/angelayejiny...
