Modeling and Measuring the Spread of Disinformation

The online information ecosystem is complex, with multiple online services influencing each other and various actors operating in a coordinated fashion to make content go viral. In this project we focus on better understanding how disinformation spreads, developing techniques that allow us to measure the provenance of online information (e.g., news articles or memes).

Papers

Lambretta: Learning to Rank for Twitter Soft Moderation

Pujan Paudel, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Savvas Zannettou, Gianluca Stringhini.
Oakland, 2023.

TrollMagnifier: Detecting State Sponsored Troll Accounts on Reddit

Mohammad Hammas Saeed, Shiza Ali, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Savvas Zannettou, Gianluca Stringhini.
Oakland, 2022.

Characterizing the Use of Images in State-sponsored Information Warfare Operations by Russian Tolls on Twitter

Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfield, Barry Bradlyn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Gianluca Stringhini, Jeremy Blackburn.
WEBSCI, 2019.

Who Let the Trolls Out? Towards Understanding State-sponsored Trolls

Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfield, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, Jeremy Blackburn.
WEBSCI, 2019.

On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities

Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfield, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, Guillermo Suarez-Tangil.
IMC, 2018.

The Web Centipede: Understanding How Web Communities Influence Each Other Through the Lens of Mainstream and Alternative News Sources

Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfield, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Nicolas Kourtellis, Ilias Leontiadis, Michael Sirivianos, Gianuca Stringhini, and Jeremy Blackburn.
IMC, 2017.