Fil Menczer

@fil.bsky.social

7269 Followers 541 Following

Researcher on social media misinformation and manipulation, director of the Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe.iu.edu, pronounced “awesome”) at Indiana University

An agent email
Lost ducks in Chiavari streets
Fig 1 showing temporal and geographic patterns of antivax tweets from https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00606-1
civitai screenshot
Network showing an AI swarm -- bots controlled through ChatGPT, in yellow -- and people who followed them on Xitter.
What are the dynamic effects of fact-checking on the behavior of those who circulate misinformation and on the spread of false news? In this paper, we provide causal evidence on these questions, building on a unique partnership with the Agence France Presse (AFP), the world's largest fact-checking organization and a partner of Facebook's Third-Party Fact-Checking Program. Over an 18-month period (December 2021-June 2023), we collected information on the stories proposed by fact-checkers during the daily editorial meetings, some of which were ultimately fact-checked while others, despite being ex ante "similar", were left aside. Using two complementary Difference-inDifferences approaches, one at the story level and the other at the post level (within fact-checked stories), we show that fact-checking reduces the circulation of misinformation on Facebook by approximately 8%, an effect driven entirely by stories rated as "False." Furthermore, we provide evidence of behavioral responses: the publication of a fact-check more than doubles the deletion of posts in the fact-checked stories, and users whose posts appear in fact-checked stories become less likely to share misinformation in the future. While our results clearly confirm the effectiveness of fact-checking, we provide policy recommendations to further strengthen its impact.
Handbook of Computational Social Science cover and authors
OsoMe Awesome Speaker Michelle Amazeen
Screenshot of Grammarly wrongly correcting my email grammar
flyer for panel in above message
Patrick Warren OSoMe Awsome Speaker
Bao Tran passes PhD defense
Please oppose the nomination of Robert Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Our research has shown that the nominee is a top spreader of vaccine disinformation (http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302201), and further that exposure to such disinformation even on just one social media platform, Twitter, has caused at least 29,000 additional COVID cases and 430 additional deaths between February and August 2021 in the US (http://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2406.09142). These past actions conflict with the goals of public health agencies like the NIH, CDC, and FDA that he would lead as HSS Secretary. Thank you.
Northern lights on New Year’s Eve
Nan folks around foosball table
Onur and Fil in Istanbul, blue mosque in background
PNAS article title
Jeremy Blackburn OSoMe Speaker
Screenshot of email bribery attempt, offering $1500 to accept paper
Kristina Lerman's OSoMe talk info
AI-generated image of a 6-fingered girl in a native American costume holding an "i voted" sign.
Article about paywalls behind paywall
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Jay Graber speaking at Knight Informed conference
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OSoMe Awesome Speaker Renee DiResta
#LuddyStepUp socks
OSoMe Awesome Speaker Ceren Budak
OSoMe awesome speaker