Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Emilio Ferrara

USC Information Sciences Institute @isi.edu · Jun 26

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!

3 8

Reposted by Emilio Ferrara

Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social · Jun 25

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...

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.

1 6 27

Reposted by Emilio Ferrara

Lisette Espín-Noboa @lespin.bsky.social · Jun 23

A Multimodal TikTok Dataset of #Ecuador's 2024 Political Crisis and Organized Crime Discourse
by Gabriela Pinto, @emilioferrara.bsky.social USC

workshop-proceedings.icwsm.org/abstract.php...

@icwsm.bsky.social #dataforvulnerable25

Proceedings of the ICWSM Workshops

workshop-proceedings.icwsm.org

3 3

Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · Jun 22

We uncovered different overt and covert information suppression dynamics, as well as even more subtle ways DeepSeek answers are internally moderated, selectively presented, and at times even framed with ideological alignment to state sponsored propaganda narratives.

arxiv.org/abs/2506.12349

Information Suppression in Large Language Models: Auditing, Quantifying, and Characterizing Censorship in DeepSeek

This study examines information suppression mechanisms in DeepSeek, an open-source large language model (LLM) developed in China. We propose an auditing framework and use it to analyze the model's res...

arxiv.org

Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · Jun 22

🤖Thrilled to share our latest work☄️

Have you ever wondered what LLMs know but they are not saying?

We built an auditing framework to study information suppression in LLMs, and demonstrated it to quantify and characterize censorship in DeepSeek.

Read more:

arxiv.org/abs/2506.12349

Information Suppression in Large Language Models: Auditing, Quantifying, and Characterizing Censorship in DeepSeek

This study examines information suppression mechanisms in DeepSeek, an open-source large language model (LLM) developed in China. We propose an auditing framework and use it to analyze the model's res...

arxiv.org

1 2 7

Reposted by Emilio Ferrara

Leo Balduf @leobalduf.bsky.social · Jun 21

I'll be at #ICWSM 2025 next week to present our paper about Bluesky Starter Packs.

For the occasion, I've created a Starter Pack with all the organizers, speakers, and authors of this year I could find on Bluesky!
Link: go.bsky.app/GDkQ3y7

Let me know if I missed anyone!

6 13 30

Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · Jun 22

Thx! Very useful!

Reposted by Emilio Ferrara

Patrick Gerard @patrikgerard.bsky.social · Jun 22

Paper here:
arxiv.org/abs/2505.21729

Bridging the Narrative Divide: Cross-Platform Discourse Networks in Fragmented Ecosystems

Political discourse has grown increasingly fragmented across different social platforms, making it challenging to trace how narratives spread and evolve within such a fragmented information ecosystem....

arxiv.org

2 6

Reposted by Emilio Ferrara

Paolo Papotti @papotti.bsky.social · Jun 1

🚨 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐝 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐭-𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫?
new "Community Moderation and the New Epistemology of Fact Checking on Social Media"

with I Augenstein, M Bakker, T. Chakraborty, D. Corney, E
Ferrara, I Gurevych, S Hale, E Hovy, H Ji, I Larraz, F
Menczer, P Nakov, D Sahnan, G Warren, G Zagni

arxiv.org

1 8 16

Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · May 19

One of my favorite recent projects!

Link to the paper:

arxiv.org/abs/2505.10867

8

Reposted by Emilio Ferrara

Luca Luceri @luceriluc.bsky.social · May 19

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

2 8 19

Reposted by Emilio Ferrara

Luca Luceri @luceriluc.bsky.social · May 1

"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

2 6

Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · Apr 8

wait until they hear matplotlib...

1

Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · Apr 8

1 3 12

Reposted by Emilio Ferrara

Zhiyi Chen @zhiyi-chen.bsky.social · Feb 21

🚀 First study on multimodal AI-generated content (AIGC) on social media! TLDR: AI-generated images are 10× more prevalent than AI-generated text! Just 3% of text spreaders and 10% of image spreaders drive 80% of AIGC diffusion, with premium & bot accounts playing a key role🤖📢

1 1 6

Reposted by Emilio Ferrara

Zhiyi Chen @zhiyi-chen.bsky.social · Feb 21

🤩Cool collaboration w/ @jinyiye.bsky.social @emilioferrara.bsky.social @luceriluc.bsky.social
🔍Read more: arxiv.org/abs/2502.11248
📊Resources available: github.com/angelayejiny...

Prevalence, Sharing Patterns, and Spreaders of Multimodal AI-Generated Content on X during the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election

While concerns about the risks of AI-generated content (AIGC) to the integrity of social media discussions have been raised, little is known about its scale and the actors responsible for its dissemin...

arxiv.org

1 3

Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · Jan 31

lol insisting is indeed one possible strategy; the screenshots maybe are not that clear but I asked exactly the same thing four times in a row and once I got a no redacted answer!

3

Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · Jan 30

Once the response composition is completed, however, the entire answer is deleted and replaced by the famous error message “Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”

Up to us, as researchers, to decide what kind of model alignments we find acceptable.

1 5

Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · Jan 30

How does DeepSeek censorship work?

Here is a practical example: I asked it to discuss about my work (having studied censorship online by various countries).

DeepSeek at first starts to compose an accurate answer, even mentioning China’s online censorship efforts.

1 6

Reposted by Emilio Ferrara

Ian Axel Anderson @aanixel.bsky.social · Jan 8

Good day to boost this paper on the contrasting effects of lax content moderation (like on X and what is coming at Meta) and how they drive toxic content; by a team including @luceriluc.bsky.social and @emilioferrara.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2412.157...

Safe Spaces or Toxic Places? Content Moderation and Social Dynamics of Online Eating Disorder Communities

Social media platforms have become critical spaces for discussing mental health concerns, including eating disorders. While these platforms can provide valuable support networks, they may also amplify...

arxiv.org

1 3 5

Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · Jan 5

And by some higher order approximation, these are all economic/$ policy problems :)

1 2

Reposted by Emilio Ferrara

Yoav Goldberg @yoavgo.bsky.social · Jan 5

i was annoyed at having many chrome tabs with PDF papers having uninformative titles, so i created a small chrome extension to fix it.

i'm using it for a while now, works well.

today i put it on github. enjoy.

github.com/yoavg/pdf-ta...

5 22 98

Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · Dec 28

Great list. I have done a few of these things myself:)

2

Emilio Ferrara @emilioferrara.bsky.social · Dec 25

When I was a grad student I looked up to giants of my discipline and never would have thought a day like this would ever come for me, happy to celebrate a personal milestone on this holiday! Academia and research are great. Thanks all!

14

Reposted by Emilio Ferrara

Marco Minici @marcominici.bsky.social · Dec 23

"IOHunter: Graph Foundation Model to Uncover Online Information Operations" goes to AAAI'25!
This is the result of an incredible collaboration with @luceriluc.bsky.social @frafabbri.bsky.social and @emilioferrara.bsky.social

Read the entire thread for a summary and the link to the preprint.

1 1 5