1.6k citations · 5.7k across the 32 of their papers we have counts for
26 papers · 1 filter
Who Belongs Together? Topical and Social Structure in Bluesky Starter Packs
Sima Adleyba, Onur Varol
Bluesky starter packs are human curated collections of accounts and feeds aimed at helping users discover new communities, especially during onboarding. Prior research has examined…
Social Media Data Toolkit: Standardization and Anonymization of Social Network Datasets
Ali Najafi, Letizia Iannucci, Mikko Kivelä +1
The rapid diversification of social media platforms and the increasing restrictions on official APIs have significantly complicated cross-platform analysis. Researchers are often f…
Towards global equity in political polarization research
Max Falkenberg, Matteo Cinelli, Alessandro Galeazzi +18
With a folk understanding that political polarization refers to socio-political divisions within a society, many have proclaimed that we are more divided than ever. In this account…
Politics and Propaganda on Social Media: How Twitter and Meta Moderate State-Linked Information Operations
Nihat Mugurtay, Umut Duygu, Onur Varol
Why do Social Media Corporations (SMCs) engage in state-linked information operations? Social media can significantly influence the global political landscape, allowing governments…
Social Bots: Detection and Challenges
Kai-Cheng Yang, Onur Varol, Alexander C. Nwala +4
While social media are a key source of data for computational social science, their ease of manipulation by malicious actors threatens the integrity of online information exchanges…
Unsupervised detection of coordinated fake-follower campaigns on social media
Yasser Zouzou, Onur Varol
Automated social media accounts, known as bots, are increasingly recognized as key tools for manipulative online activities. These activities can stem from coordination among sever…
Just Another Day on Twitter: A Complete 24 Hours of Twitter Data
Juergen Pfeffer, Daniel Matter, Kokil Jaidka +13
At the end of October 2022, Elon Musk concluded his acquisition of Twitter. In the weeks and months before that, several questions were publicly discussed that were not only of int…
#Secim2023: First Public Dataset for Studying Turkish General Election
Ali Najafi, Nihat Mugurtay, Ege Demirci +3
In the context of Turkey's upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections ("seçim" in Turkish), social media is playing an important role in shaping public debate. The increasin…
Should we agree to disagree about Twitter's bot problem?
Onur Varol
Bots, simply defined as accounts controlled by automation, can be used as a weapon for online manipulation and pose a threat to the health of platforms. Researchers have studied on…
Information Access Equality on Network Generative Models
Xindi Wang, Onur Varol, Tina Eliassi-Rad
It is well known that networks generated by common mechanisms such as preferential attachment and homophily can disadvantage the minority group by limiting their ability to establi…
Misinformation, Believability, and Vaccine Acceptance Over 40 Countries: Takeaways From the Initial Phase of The COVID-19 Infodemic
Karandeep Singh, Gabriel Lima, Meeyoung Cha +4
The COVID-19 pandemic has been damaging to the lives of people all around the world. Accompanied by the pandemic is an infodemic, an abundant and uncontrolled spreading of potentia…
Detection of Novel Social Bots by Ensembles of Specialized Classifiers
Mohsen Sayyadiharikandeh, Onur Varol, Kai-Cheng Yang +2
Malicious actors create inauthentic social media accounts controlled in part by algorithms, known as social bots, to disseminate misinformation and agitate online discussion. While…
Deception Strategies and Threats for Online Discussions
Onur Varol, Ismail Uluturk
Communication plays a major role in social systems. Effective communications, which requires transmission of the messages between individuals without disruptions or noise, can be a…
Does putting your emotions into words make you feel better? Measuring the minute-scale dynamics of emotions from online data
Rui Fan, Ali Varamesh, Onur Varol +4
Studies of affect labeling, i.e. putting your feelings into words, indicate that it can attenuate positive and negative emotions. Here we track the evolution of individual emotions…
The spread of low-credibility content by social bots
Chengcheng Shao, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Onur Varol +3
The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cogniti…
Online Human-Bot Interactions: Detection, Estimation, and Characterization
Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Clayton A. Davis +2
Increasing evidence suggests that a growing amount of social media content is generated by autonomous entities known as social bots. In this work we present a framework to detect s…
Early Detection of Promoted Campaigns on Social Media
Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Menczer +1
Social media expose millions of users every day to information campaigns --- some emerging organically from grassroots activity, others sustained by advertising or other coordinate…
Predicting online extremism, content adopters, and interaction reciprocity
Emilio Ferrara, Wen-Qiang Wang, Onur Varol +2
We present a machine learning framework that leverages a mixture of metadata, network, and temporal features to detect extremist users, and predict content adopters and interaction…
BotOrNot: A System to Evaluate Social Bots
Clayton A. Davis, Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara +2
While most online social media accounts are controlled by humans, these platforms also host automated agents called social bots or sybil accounts. Recent literature reported on cas…
The DARPA Twitter Bot Challenge
V. S. Subrahmanian, Amos Azaria, Skylar Durst +18
A number of organizations ranging from terrorist groups such as ISIS to politicians and nation states reportedly conduct explicit campaigns to influence opinion on social media, po…
Clustering memes in social media streams
Mohsen JafariAsbagh, Emilio Ferrara, Onur Varol +2
The problem of clustering content in social media has pervasive applications, including the identification of discussion topics, event detection, and content recommendation. Here w…
The Rise of Social Bots
Emilio Ferrara, Onur Varol, Clayton Davis +2
The Turing test aimed to recognize the behavior of a human from that of a computer algorithm. Such challenge is more relevant than ever in today's social media context, where limit…
Evolution of Online User Behavior During a Social Upheaval
Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Christine L. Ogan +2
Social media represent powerful tools of mass communication and information diffusion. They played a pivotal role during recent social uprisings and political mobilizations across…
Connecting Dream Networks Across Cultures
Onur Varol, Filippo Menczer
Many species dream, yet there remain many open research questions in the study of dreams. The symbolism of dreams and their interpretation is present in cultures throughout history…