64 citations · 104 across the 21 of their papers we have counts for
26 papers
When Does the Public Become Suspicious of Bots? Demand-Side Evidence from Botometer Query Logs
Tuğrulcan Elmas
We study private bot-checking behavior from the demand side: when people suspect an account is automated, whom they suspect, and what follows. Using Botometer's server-side query l…
How AI Models Manage Epistemic Authority: A Taxonomy and Comparative Analysis of Responses to User Disagreement
Riyadh Alnasser, Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya, Sumin Zhao +1
Large language models are increasingly used as sources of advice and information, including in high-stakes settings, yet little is known about how they respond to user disagreement…
Credible, Not Always Correct: How Reddit Users Verify AI-Generated Legal Advice
Rebecca Owens, Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya, Stergios Aidinlis +2
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used by laypeople to resolve real legal problems, against a backdrop of persistent access-to-justice deficits. This article presents e…
Online Safety Regulation Increases Attention to VPNs: Privacy Implications of the UK Online Safety Act
Dhyey Mehta, Eldar Jalilzade, Maksim Kalameyets +5
Governments worldwide are increasingly regulating digital platforms to reduce online harms, but access restrictions can alter user behaviour and create new privacy risks. The UK On…
Humans Cannot Detect AI-Generated Media But Communities May -- For Now: Collaborative AI Detection in r/RealOrAI on Reddit
Tuğrulcan Elmas
We study human AI-detection behaviour at scale using a year of activity from r/RealOrAI, a Reddit community where users collaboratively assess whether visual media is real or AI-ge…
Israel-Hamas War on X: A Case Study of Coordinated Campaigns and Information Integrity
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Filipi Nascimento Silva, Manita Pote +8
Coordinated campaigns on social media play a critical role in shaping crisis information environments, particularly during the onset of conflicts when uncertainty is high and verif…
Gendered Communication Patterns of Political Elites on Truth Social
Tom Bidewell, Artemis Deligianni, Tuğrulcan Elmas +2
The influence of gender on online political communication remains contested, with existing scholarship providing mixed evidence as to whether gender shapes political messaging in d…
Grievance Politics vs. Policy Debates: A Cross-Platform Analysis of Conservative Discourse on Truth Social and Reddit
Yining Wang, Alhasan Abdellatif, Artemis Deligianni +3
We present the first large-scale comparative analysis of Truth Social and the most popular conservative Reddit communities, r/Conservative, r/conservatives, and r/Republican. Using…
State & Geopolitical Censorship on Twitter (X): Detection & Impact Analysis of Withheld Content
Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya, Tuğrulcan Elmas
State and geopolitical censorship on Twitter, now X, has been turning into a routine, raising concerns about the boundaries between criminal content and freedom of speech. One such…
Density-aware Walks for Coordinated Campaign Detection
Atul Anand Gopalakrishnan, Jakir Hossain, Tuğrulcan Elmas +1
Coordinated campaigns frequently exploit social media platforms by artificially amplifying topics, making inauthentic trends appear organic, and misleading users into engagement. D…
Cross-Partisan Interactions on Twitter
Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya, Vahid Ghafouri, Guillermo Suarez-Tangil +2
Many social media studies argue that social media creates echo chambers where some users only interact with peers of the same political orientation. However, recent studies suggest…
Large Engagement Networks for Classifying Coordinated Campaigns and Organic Twitter Trends
Atul Anand Gopalakrishnan, Jakir Hossain, Tugrulcan Elmas +1
Social media users and inauthentic accounts, such as bots, may coordinate in promoting their topics. Such topics may give the impression that they are organically popular among the…
Coordinated Reply Attacks in Influence Operations: Characterization and Detection
Manita Pote, Tuğrulcan Elmas, Alessandro Flammini +1
Coordinated reply attacks are a tactic observed in online influence operations and other coordinated campaigns to support or harass targeted individuals, or influence them or their…
Toxic Synergy Between Hate Speech and Fake News Exposure
Munjung Kim, Tuğrulcan Elmas, Filippo Menczer
Hate speech on social media is a pressing concern. Understanding the factors associated with hate speech may help mitigate it. Here we explore the association between hate speech a…
#TeamFollowBack: Detection & Analysis of Follow Back Accounts on Social Media
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Mathis Randl, Youssef Attia
Follow back accounts inflate their follower counts by engaging in reciprocal followings. Such accounts manipulate the public and the algorithms by appearing more popular than they…
Shorts vs. Regular Videos on YouTube: A Comparative Analysis of User Engagement and Content Creation Trends
Caroline Violot, Tuğrulcan Elmas, Igor Bilogrevic +1
YouTube introduced the Shorts video format in 2021, allowing users to upload short videos that are prominently displayed on its website and app. Despite having such a large visual…
Analyzing Activity and Suspension Patterns of Twitter Bots Attacking Turkish Twitter Trends by a Longitudinal Dataset
Tuğrulcan Elmas
Twitter bots amplify target content in a coordinated manner to make them appear popular, which is an astroturfing attack. Such attacks promote certain keywords to push them to Twit…
Opinion Mining from YouTube Captions Using ChatGPT: A Case Study of Street Interviews Polling the 2023 Turkish Elections
Tuğrulcan Elmas, İlker Gül
Opinion mining plays a critical role in understanding public sentiment and preferences, particularly in the context of political elections. Traditional polling methods, while usefu…
Measuring and Detecting Virality on Social Media: The Case of Twitter's Viral Tweets Topic
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Stephane Selim, Célia Houssiaux
Social media posts may go viral and reach large numbers of people within a short period of time. Such posts may threaten the public dialogue if they contain misleading content, mak…
The Impact of Data Persistence Bias on Social Media Studies
Tuğrulcan Elmas
Social media studies often collect data retrospectively to analyze public opinion. Social media data may decay over time and such decay may prevent the collection of the complete d…
Characterizing Retweet Bots: The Case of Black Market Accounts
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Rebekah Overdorf, Karl Aberer
Malicious Twitter bots are detrimental to public discourse on social media. Past studies have looked at spammers, fake followers, and astroturfing bots, but retweet bots, which art…
Tactical Reframing of Online Disinformation Campaigns Against The Istanbul Convention
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Rebekah Overdorf, Karl Aberer
In March 2021, Turkey withdrew from The Istanbul Convention, a human-rights treaty that addresses violence against women, citing issues with the convention's implicit recognition o…
A Dataset of State-Censored Tweets
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Rebekah Overdorf, Karl Aberer
Many governments impose traditional censorship methods on social media platforms. Instead of removing it completely, many social media companies, including Twitter, only withhold t…
Misleading Repurposing on Twitter
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Rebekah Overdorf, Karl Aberer
We present the first in-depth and large-scale study of misleading repurposing, in which a malicious user changes the identity of their social media account via, among other things,…