IDeaS in the News
2025
Knight Fellow Samantha Phillips co-authored a new publication entitled, "Limited effectiveness of psychological inoculation against misinformation in a social media feed," Read the full paper here.
June 9, 2025
Knight Associate Lynnette Ng has a new publication entitled, "A global comparison of social media bot and human characteristics," that came out in the March 31st publication of Scientific Reports. Read the full paper here.
March 31, 2025
Researchers from the IDeaS Center and CMU facilitated a training event the last two weeks in March in Orlando Florida with participants from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United Kingdom and the United States. The event know as TOTO trains participants in evaluating social media data to identify disinformation and information maneuvers using our BEND framework. For the first time, this event used 100% synthetic data created by CMU and utilized live posts and real-time data analysis during the training.
March 28, 2025
Center Director Kathleen M. Carley is interviewed by Sophie Perryer for the Logically Facts article entitled, "The 'pink slime' sites sharing sanctioned Russian content with readers in Europe". Read the full article here.
March 26, 2025
The winners and finalists from this year's Hacking4Humanity hackathon were invited to a follow up competition at the Pennsylvania Governor's residence on March 21st. Judges included the First Lady Lori Shapiro and members of her staff. This is the second year that finalists have been invited to present in Harrisburg. Find out who won and watch the competition here.
March 21, 2025
Knight Fellow Catherine King has a new publication entitled, "A path forward on online misinformation mitigation based on current user behavior," that came out in the March 19th publication of Scientific Reports. Read the full paper here.
March 19, 2025
Center affiliates Lynnette Ng, Dawn Robertson and Director Kathleen M. Carley's paper, Stabilizing a supervised bot detection algorithm: How much data is needed for consistent predictions?, has been selected as 2024 Online Social Networks and Media Best Paper!
January 13, 2025
2024
Center Director Kathleen M. Carley is interviewed and IDeaS Center research is referenced in the article by Kanishka Singh and Sheila Dang in Reuters entitled, "Musk and X are epicenter of US election misinformation, experts say". Read the full article here.
November 4, 2024
Center Director Kathleen M. Carley is interviewed and IDeaS Center research is referenced in the article by Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic entitled, "Nobody Look at Mark Zuckerberg". Read the full article here.
November 4, 2024
Knight Affiliate Lynnette Ng won the best graduate student poster for her poster "Online Community: Are you chatting with bots?" at the fifth annual 2024 Tech Ethics Symposium at Duquesne University. Her poster discussed how bots generate more than half of the internet traffic, and actively disseminate propaganda, amplify disinformation, manipulate opinions; and play key roles in political and crisis events on social media and online.
October 18, 2024
Center Director Kathleen M. Carley is interviewed and IDeaS Center research is referenced in the article by Melissa Goldin in AP entitled, "Overseas voters are the latest target in Trump’s false narrative on election fraud". Read the full article here.
September 25, 2024
Knight Fellows Samantha Phillips and Lynnette Ng won the SBP-BRiMS 2024 Best Paper Award Runner Up Award for the paper, "Moral and emotional influences on attitude stability towards COVID-19 vaccines on social media" with co-authors Wenqui Zhou and Kathleen M. Carley.
September 20, 2024
IDeaS Fellows and graduate students Daniele Bellutta, Catherine King, Samantha Phillips, Evan Williams, and Christine Lepird presented papers at the 2024 IDeaS and SBP-BRiMS conferences held at CMU September 18-20, 2024.
September 18, 2024
Center Director Kathleen M. Carley is interviewed and IDeaS Center research is referenced in the article by Hannah Murphy in Financial Times entitled, "US local news swamped by ‘pink slime’ as political influence ramps up". Read the full article here.
April 3, 2024
Center Director Kathleen M. Carley is interviewed and IDeaS Center research is referenced in the article by Charlotte Hu in Scientific American entitled, "How AI Bots Could Sabotage 2024 Elections around the World". Read the full article here.
February 13, 2024
IDeaS Center research is highlighted in the article by Chris Stokel-Walker in New Scientist entitled, "Armies of bots battled on Twitter over Chinese spy balloon incident". Read the full article here.
(This research and article were also published at Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/
February 2, 2024
Carnegie Mellon University faculty and researchers, including our director, Kathleen M. Carley,provided expertise on a wide variety of topics for a series of videos entitled "CMU Experts". Watch her video and others here.
January 11, 2024
2023
Knight Fellow Christine Lepird won the best graduate student poster for her poster "Agenda-Driven Partisan Algorithms Are Creating "Local" News: Is Your Community Being Targeted?" at the 2023 Tech Ethics Symposium at Duquesne University. Her poster showed how 'pink slime' sites spend their ad money in each state in a way that was related to the margin of the vote spread in the 2020 presidential election; how the ad spend resulted in authentic spread to neighborhood Facebook groups; and how the sites were shared by social media users on political lines rather than geographic ones.
November 10, 2023
Knight Fellow Isabel Murdock presented “An Agent-Based Model of Reddit Interactions and Moderation,” at IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2023) where she received the Best Paper Award.
November 9, 2023
IDeaS Director Kathleen M. Carley is interviewed for the Financial Times article, "Israel conflict lets loose a deluge of falsehoods on social media" regarding disinformation surrouding the conflict.
October 16, 2023
IDeaS Fellows graduate students Daniele Bellutta, Catherine King, Samantha Phillips, Wenjia Hu, and Yurun Tian presented papers at the 2023 IDeaS and SBP-BRiMS conferences held at CMU September 20-22, 2023.
September 20, 2023
IDeaS Graduate Janice Blane and current graduate student Lynnette Ng along with director Kathleen M. Carley have a chapter published in the publication, Vaccine Communication Online. Full citation and link to the book is below.
Blane, J.T., Ng, L.H.X., Carley, K.M. (2023). Analyzing Social-Cyber Maneuvers for Spreading COVID-19 Pro- and Anti- Vaccine Information. In: Ginossar, T., Shah, S.F.A., Weiss, D. (eds) Vaccine Communication Online. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/
August 8, 2023
IDeaS graduate student Joshua Uyheng and research associate Dawn Robertson along with director Kathleen M. Carley have a research article published in the BMC Digital Health. Link to the article below:
Uyheng, Joshua, Robertson, Dawn C. and Carley, Kathleen M. (2023). Bridging online and offline dynamics of the face mask infodemic. https://doi.org/10.1186/
July 27, 2023
IDeaS Director Kathleen M. Carley gives keynote at the 2023 NetSci Conference in Vienna July 13th. The conference held by the Network Science Society, aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners working in the emerging area of network science.
July 13, 2023
IDeaS graduate student Iuliia Alieva and research associate Dawn Robertson along with director Kathleen M. Carley have a research article published in the Journal of Health Communication. Link to the article below:
Alieva, Iuliia , Robertson, Dawn & Carley, Kathleen M (2023) Localizing COVID-19 Misinformation: A Case Study of Tracking Twitter Pandemic Narratives in Pennsylvania Using Computational Network Science, Journal of Health Communication, 28:sup1, 76-85, DOI: 10.1080/10810730.2023.2217102. https://www.tandfonline.com/
June 30, 2023
IDeaS Co-Director Kathleen M. Carley is interviewed for the Quanta Magazine article, "Chatbots Don't Know What Stuff Isn't". Read the full article here.
May 12, 2023
IDeaS Fellow Catherine King published a new paper entitled, "Gender dynamics on Twitter during the 2020 U.S. Democratic presidential primary". Check out the paper in Social Network Analysis and Mining here.
March 15, 2023
IDeaS Co-Director Kathleen M. Carley is interviewed by Rolling Stone in the article, "Twitter Bots Are Promising Cheap Guns to Anyone Using the N-Word". Read the article here.
March 6, 2023
IDeaS Fellow Daniele Bellutta published a new paper entitled, "Investigating coordinated account creation
using burst detection and network analysis." Check out the paper in the Journal of Big Data here.
February 10, 2023
IDeaS Co-Director Kathleen M. Carley is interviewed by The Grid about how Twitter API access charges could kill Twitter as we know it. See article here.
February 2, 2023
IDeaS co-director Kathleen M. Carley is interviewed and quoted in the french publication Science & Medicine in the January 2023 issue in the article entitled, "Les Nouvelles Règles de Twitter Inquiètent la Recherche" ("New Twitter Rules Worry Researchers"). Access the acticle here.
January 11, 2023
IDeaS Fellow Lynnette Ng published a new paper entitled, "A combined synchronization index for evaluating collective action social media." Check out the paper in Applied Network Science here.
January 3, 2023
2022
IDeaS Fellow Lynnette Ng published a new paper entitled, "Coordinating Narratives Framework for cross-platform analysis in the 2021 US Capitol riots." Check out the paper in Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory here.
November 21, 2022
IDeaS Fellow Evan Williams paper entitled, "TSPA: Efficient Target-Stance Detection on Twitter" was accepted to be presented at the 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) in Istanbul, Turkey. Check out the paper here.
November 6, 2022
IDeaS Fellow Lynnette Ng published a new paper entitled, "Is my stance the same as your stance? A cross validation study of stance detection datasets." Check out the paper in Information Processing & Management here.
November 2, 2022
IDeaS Fellow Lynnette Ng published a new paper entitled, "Cross-platform information spread during the January 6th capitol riots." Check out the paper in Social Network Analysis and Mining here.
September 9, 2022
IDeaS Co-Director Kathleen M. Carley is interviewed by CNN's Anchors on Early Start regarding the number of bots on Twitter and the methods in detecting them. See the full interview here.
June 7, 2022
IDeaS Co-Director Kathleen M. Carley is interviewed by Technology Reporter Benjamin Powers from Grid regarding bots and Twitter. Read the full article here.
May 31, 2022
IDeaS Co-Director Kathleen M. Carley is interviewed by the Washington Post for the Article "Musk's question about bots is nothing new for Twitter". Read about her comments and some of our research regarding bots on Twitter by reading the full article here.
May 13, 2022
Robert Thibadeau's proposal on /SI/ Distributing Cryptocurrency and NFT across Self-Protecting Storage was accepted the the 2022 Flash Memory Summit to be held in Santa Clara this August.
May 2, 2022
Graduate student Luke Osterritter joined the National Cryptologic Foundation to discuss dismantling disinformation. Watch the video here.
April 26, 2022
IDeaS faculty Conrad Tucker appointed to serve on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's new Commission on Artificial Intelligence Competition, Inclusion, and Innovation. See the full announcement.
March 7, 2022
IDeaS PA Vaccine Hesitancy Project is referenced in this WTAE Action News 4 piece on disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
February 10, 2022
Baruch Fischhoff has been named a 2021 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
January 26, 2022
2021
IDeaS associate Andrew Moore was presented with the keys to the city by Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto.
November 5, 2021
Andy Norman talks about his new book, Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think, on several recents podcasts and interviews.
October 2021
Dr. Kathleen Carley talks about social-cybersecurity and the BEND framework on The Cognitive Crucible, a podcast from the Information Professionals Association. Hear the full episode here.
August 17, 2021
Aman Tyagi and Kathleen M. Carley looked at the polarization of climate change beliefs on social media and offered targeted approaches toward reshaping beliefs in their recent paper, "Climate Change Conspiracy Theories on Social Media."
See full article from CS News here
August 11, 2021
IDeaS student Judeth Oden Choi is announced as a graduate student affiliate at The Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, CITAP.
August 2021
Knight Fellow Mansi Sood and Dr. Osman Yağan are working to improve distributed systems. “In many distributed systems, connectivity is a fundamental driver of system performance,” Sood says. But, establishing the links between nodes can be costly, and as you set up more, you approach a trade-off between connectivity and cost. Read the article here.
July 19, 2021
Ashique KhudaBukhsh of Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute led a team of researchers who used machine learning to identify supportive tweets from Pakistan during India’s COVID crisis. In the throes of a public health crisis, words of hope can be welcome medicine.
June 28, 2021
Columbia University 's Pandemic Research for Preparedness & Resilience (PREPARE)'s workshop: SBEG: Social, Behavioral, Economic and Governance Issues during a Pandemic featured Dr. Kathleen M. Carley speaking about COVID disinformation campaigns. See the video here.
June 25, 2021
"Convenience nearly always comes at a cost, and there is a danger that this creates opportunities for greater levels of surveillance." IDeaS faculty Jason Hong talks to Lifewire about storing your ID on your phone. Read the article.
June 16, 2021
"Jodi Forlizzi will lean on her background as a designer to address what she calls "a truly wicked problem" in her role as the inaugural associate dean of diversity, equity and inclusion in the School of Computer Science."
June 7, 2021
Dr. Kathleen M. Carley discusses Deepfakes, Disinformation, and Democracy at the D3 Conference, hosted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), in collaboration with the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) U.S. Technology Policy Committee (USTPC) and the Online News Association (ONA).
June 2, 2021
"Public health messengers should start with a discussion of risks and benefits for kids and teens, said Baruch Fischhoff. Having that discussion sooner rather than later helps get in front of misinformation and makes public health messengers’ jobs easier..." Article in Bloomberg Law
May 5, 2021
Baruch Fischhoff explains how to communicate risk in medical messaging, including the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, in Scientific American
April 30, 2021
Dr. David Danks wins a 2020 Amazon Research Award for his project "An integrated framework for understanding human-AI hybrid decision-making"
April 27, 2021
IDeaS faculty member Mark Kamlet discusses "Cable News and Misinformation" as part of Deitrich Deep Dives, a series of engaging and in-depth presentations about critical political and societal issues through the lens of the humanities, social sciences and related fields. Hosted by Kathy Newman, associate professor, Dietrich College
April 20, 2021
Dr. Kathleen Carley speaks on an expert panel organized by Spotlight PA, Fighting Misinformation. 
April 20, 2021
Dietrich Deep Dives, a series of engaging and in-depth presentations about critical political and societal issues through the lens of the humanities, social sciences and related fields, invited Dr. Kathleen Carley to speak about Social Media and Misinformation, hosted by IDeaS Professor Danny Oppenheimer.
April 1, 2021
Kathleen M. Carley speaks about developing understandings and technologies to manage the safety of online discourse in this Cybercrimeology podcast interview with Michael Joyce.
March 31, 2021
IDeaS faculty member, Michael Shamos, talks about electronic voting machine security for Dietrich Deep Dives, a series of engaging and in-depth presentations about critical political and societal issues through the lens of the humanities, social sciences and related fields. Hosted by Aaditya Ramdas, assistant professor, Dietrich College and School of Computer Science.
March 30, 2021
IDeaS faculty member Conrad Tucker has a new article in the journal Nature.
Read feature summary by Daniel Tkacik: Inferring What We Share by How We Share
Read the article: Classification of unlabeled online media
March 25, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world. CMU asked experts, including Dr. Kathleen Carley, to reflect on the past year and what the changes mean for our future.
March 11, 2021
IDeaS Co-director Dr. David Danks shared thoughts on the Future of Information. The panel discussion moderated by Rebecca MacKinnon is part of the Futures Forum series from Linda Hall Library.
Panelists Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Asta Zelenkauskaite, David Danks
March 4, 2021
Dis/misinformation created false narratives that feuled violence at the Capitol riot on January 6. TribLive talked to experts, including Dr. Kathleen M. Carley, about how these narratives develop.
February 7, 2021
PublicSource asked about the warning signs of radicalization and who is most susceptible. Kathleen M. Carley provided some answers.
January 26, 2021
IDeaS Center Director Kathleen M. Carley talks about disinformation and how media outlets can combat it in an article from Yahoo! Finance.
January 22, 2021
2020
Director Kathleen M. Carley joined a panel and gave a talk "Social Influence and Disinformation in Cyberspace" at The 3rd Carnegie Mellon University Open Science Symposium Tuesday, October 20, 2020. Find more info here.
The IDeaS Center collaborated with Duquesne University for the Inaugural Grefenstette Symposium: Disinformation, Misinformation and Technology: New Ethical Challenges and Solutions on October 7th. Learn more about the symposium here.
The IDeaS Center and the Block Center for Technology and Society will co-presented Combatting Disinformation One Month Before the Election: What State and Local Policy Makers Can Do with panelists Kathleen Carley and Yonatan Bisk on Tuesday, October 6th.
Kathleen M. Carley sits down to talk to Dr. Nick van Terheyden on "The Incrementalist" to discuss social media and misinformation online. Follow this link for the full podcast.
Through guided research opportunities, students are exploring issues related to COVID-19 and other topics at CMU this summer. Prof. Kathleen M. Carley will lead a project course. Find more information here.
Wisconsin Public Radio conversation Kathleen M. Carley about how bots pushed to reopen the economy, wpr.org
Kathleen M. Carley sits down with Julie Rose of "Top of Mind" on BYU Radio June 10th to discuss how Twitter bots are responsible for most tweets about COVID-19.
Center research is discussed in the article by Maya Shwayder in Digital Trends, "Researchers: Bots are spreading conspiracy theories about #blacklivesmatter". Read the full article here.
Director Kathleen M. Carley from Carnegie Mellon University speaks with ABC7's Kristen Sze about its use and power. Read the article here.
NPR interviews Kathleen M. Carley for their article, "Researchers: Nearly Half Of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Likely Bots". Read article here.
MIT Technology Review Article, "Nearly half of Twitter accounts pushing to reopen America may be bots" discusses the research of Kathleen M. Carley and the IDeaS Center. Read full article here
Kathleen M. Carley and M. Anthony Mills (R Street Institute) pen the article in The Fulcrum, "Our duty as citizens includes combatting pandemic's digital disinformation", read article here.
VICE News interviews director Kathleen M. Carley about bots and misinformation surrounding COVID-19. Read the article here.
AP News features CASOS Center Research directed by Kathleen M. Carley in the article "Virus misinformation flourishes in online protest groups" about the spread of misinformation on Facebook with protest groups.
Director Kathleen M. Carley contributes to PBS News Hour's Courtney Vinopal article about misinformation and the pandemic, "Why uncertainty about coronavirus breeds opportunity for misinformation"
"There Is 'Way, Way More' Disinformation Related To Coronavirus Compared To Other Events" by Wesa.fm's Liz Reid highlights findings by Director Kathleen M. Carley and CASOS Center on misinformation about COVID-19.
Director Kathleen M. Carley joins CASOS graduate student Geoff Dobson on the podcast The COVID-19 Experience. Listen to this and other episodes here.
Director Kathleen M. Carley is a panelist for the R Street Institute Panel Combatting Digital Disinformation During a Global Pandemic streamed live on March 19, 2020.
Article "Investing in Social Cybersecurity" by CASOS graduate student David Beskow and Director Kathleen M. Carley is featured in the new volume of Naval Science and Technology Future Force pages 16-19.
Article "BEND: A Framework for Social Cybersecurity" by Director Kathleen M. Carley is featured in the new volume of Naval Science and Technology Future Force pages 20-25.
Article "Identifying Misinformation Campaigns" by CASOS graduate student Iain Cruikshank and Director Kathleen M. Carley is featured in the new volume of Naval Science and Technology Future Force pages 36-37.
Popular Science article "Yes, the new coronavirus is mutating—but that’s not a bad thing SARS-CoV-2 is changing at the rate scientists would expect for a coronavirus" Kathleen M. Carley discusses CASOS Center research on Disinformation about Coronavirus Mutations.
Director Kathleen M. Carley discusses disinformation and COVID-19 in the USA Today Article by Jessica Guynn.
CASOS researchers study disinformation and the COVID-19 pandemic, find out more here.
Researchers at Princeton and Carnegie Mellon develop a new model to track epidemics. Article by John Sullivan.
Director Kathleen M. Carley presents CASOS research at the NAS Surprise Resulting from Convergence Workshop in Washington, DC February 6th and 7th.
Director Kathleen M. Carley briefs the hill on CASOS research February 27th in Washington, DC.
Director Kathleen M. Carley participates in panel in Oslo Norway Hacking Democracy: Influence Operations in the Digital Age hosted by Norwegian Defence Research Establishment on February 13th.
2019
Fake news? CMU’s Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity forms to counter spread of online disinformation - Next Pittsburgh
August 5, 2019
Researching Democracy in the Digital Age -Inside Higher Ed
July 24, 2019
CMU creates center to fight disinformation online - Pittsburgh Business Times
July 23, 2019