Filippo Menczer Explained

Filippo Menczer
Birth Date: df=y 16 May 1965
Birth Place:Rome
Field:Cognitive science
Computer science
Physics
Workplaces:Indiana University Bloomington
Alma Mater:Sapienza University of Rome
University of California, San Diego

Filippo Menczer (born 16 May 1965) is an American and Italian academic. He is a University Distinguished Professor and the Luddy Professor of Informatics and Computer Science at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University. Menczer is the Director of the Observatory on Social Media,[1] a research center where data scientists and journalists study the role of media and technology in society and build tools to analyze and counter disinformation and manipulation on social media. Menczer holds courtesy appointments in Cognitive Science and Physics, is a founding member and advisory council member of the IU Network Science Institute,[2] a former director the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research,[3] a senior research fellow of the Kinsey Institute, a fellow of the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication,[4] and a former fellow of the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy. In 2020 he was named a Fellow of the ACM.

Education, career, service

Menczer holds a Laurea in physics from the Sapienza University of Rome and a PhD in computer science and cognitive science from the University of California, San Diego. He used to be an assistant professor of management sciences at the University of Iowa, and a fellow-at-large of the Santa Fe Institute. At Indiana University Bloomington since 2003, he served as division chair in the Luddy School in 2009–2011. Menczer has been the recipient of Fulbright, Rotary Foundation, and NATO fellowships, and a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. He holds editorial positions for the journals Network Science,[5] EPJ Data Science,[6] PeerJ Computer Science,[7] and HKS Misinformation Review.[8] He has served as program or track chair for various conferences including The Web Conference and the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media. He was general chair of the ACM Web Science 2014 Conference[9] and general co-chair of the NetSci 2017 Conference.

Research

Menczer's research focuses on Web science, social networks, social media, social computation, Web mining, data science, distributed and intelligent Web applications, and modeling of complex information networks. He introduced the idea of topical and adaptive Web crawlers, a specialized and intelligent type of Web crawler.[10] [11]

Menczer is also known for his work on social phishing,[12] [13] a type of phishing attacks that leverage friendship information from social networks, yielding over 70% success rate in experiments (with Markus Jakobsson); semantic similarity measures for information and social networks;[14] [15] [16] [17] models of complex information and social networks (with Alessandro Vespignani and others);[18] [19] [20] [21] search engine censorship;[22] [23] and search engine bias.[24] [25]

The group led by Menczer has analyzed and modeled how memes, information, and misinformation spread through social media in domains such as the Occupy movement,[26] [27] the Gezi Park protests,[28] and political elections.[29] Data and tools from Menczer's lab have aided in finding the roots of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory[30] and the disinformation campaign targeting the White Helmets,[31] and in taking down voter-suppression bots on Twitter.[32] Menczer and coauthors have also found a link between online COVID-19 misinformation and vaccination hesitancy.[33]

Analysis by Menczer's team demonstrated the echo-chamber structure of information-diffusion networks on Twitter during the 2010 United States elections.[34] The team found that conservatives almost exclusively retweeted other conservatives while liberals retweeted other liberals. Ten years later, this work received the Test of Time Award at the 15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM).[35] As these patterns of polarization and segregation persist,[36] Menczer's team has developed a model that shows how social influence and unfollowing accelerate the emergence of online echo chambers.[37]

Menczer and colleagues have advanced the understanding of information virality, and in particular the prediction of what memes will go viral based on the structure of early diffusion networks[38] [39] and how competition for finite attention helps explain virality patterns.[40] [41] In a 2018 paper in Nature Human Behaviour, Menczer and coauthors used a model to show that when agents in a social networks share information under conditions of high information load and/or low attention, the correlation between quality and popularity of information in the system decreases.[42] An erroneous analysis in the paper suggested that this effect alone would be sufficient to explain why fake news are as likely to go viral as legitimate news on Facebook. When the authors discovered the error, they retracted the paper.[43]

Following influential publications on the detection of astroturfing[44] [45] [46] [47] [48] and social bots,[49] [50] Menczer and his team have studied the complex interplay between cognitive, social, and algorithmic factors that contribute to the vulnerability of social media platforms and people to manipulation,[51] [52] [53] [54] and focused on developing tools to counter such abuse.[55] [56] Their bot detection tool, Botometer, was used to assess the prevalence of social bots[57] [58] and their sharing activity.[59] Their tool to visualize the spread of low-credibility content, Hoaxy,[60] [61] [62] [63] was used in conjunction with Botometer to reveal the key role played by social bots in spreading low-credibility content during the 2016 United States presidential election.[64] [65] [66] [67] [68] Menczer's team also studied perceptions of partisan political bots, finding that Republican users are more likely to confuse conservative bots with humans, whereas Democratic users are more likely to confuse conservative human users with bots.[69] Using bot probes on Twitter, Menczer and coauthors demonstrated a conservative political bias on the platform.[70]

As social media have increased their countermeasures against malicious automated accounts, Menczer and coauthors have shown that coordinated campaigns by inauthentic accounts continue to threaten information integrity on social media, and developed a framework to detect these coordinated networks.[71] They also demonstrated new forms of social media manipulation by which bad actors can grow influence networks[72] and hide high-volume of content with which they flood the network.[73]

Menczer and colleagues have shown that political audience diversity can be used as an indicator of news source reliability in algorithmic ranking.[74]

Textbook

The textbook A First Course in Network Science by Menczer, Fortunato, and Davis was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.[75] The textbook has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Projects

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe). February 5, 2023.
  2. Web site: IUNI. March 18, 2019.
  3. Web site: Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS). May 8, 2014.
  4. Web site: Center for Computer-Mediated Communication. March 18, 2019.
  5. Web site: Editorial Board. Network Science. March 18, 2019.
  6. Web site: Editorial Board. EPJ Data Science Editorial Board. March 18, 2019.
  7. Web site: PeerJ Academic Editors. PeerJ. March 18, 2019.
  8. Web site: HKS Misinformation Review Editorial Board. February 5, 2023.
  9. Web site: Web Science 2014. May 4, 2014.
  10. Menczer. F.. G. Pant. P. Srinivasan. Topical Web Crawlers: Evaluating Adaptive Algorithms. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology. 2004. 4. 4. 378–419. 10.1145/1031114.1031117. 5931711.
  11. Srinivasan. P.. F. Menczer. G. Pant. A General Evaluation Framework for Topical Crawlers. Information Retrieval. 2005. 8. 3. 417–447. 10.1007/s10791-005-6993-5. 10.1.1.6.1074. 5351345.
  12. Jagatic. Tom. Nathaniel Johnson . Markus Jakobsson . Filippo Menczer . Social Phishing. Communications of the ACM. October 2007. 50. 10. 94–100. 10.1145/1290958.1290968. 15077519. free.
  13. News: LENZ. RYAN. School Conducts Anti-Phishing Research. The Washington Post. July 22, 2007.
  14. Book: Maguitman, Ana. Filippo Menczer. Heather Roinestad . Alessandro Vespignani. Proceedings of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web - WWW '05 . Algorithmic detection of semantic similarity . 2005. 107–116. 10.1145/1060745.1060765. 978-1595930460. 2011198.
  15. Book: Markines, Benjamin. Ciro Cattuto . Filippo Menczer . Dominik Benz . Andreas Hotho. Gerd Stumme. Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web . Evaluating similarity measures for emergent semantics of social tagging . 2009. 641–650. 10.1145/1526709.1526796. 9781605584874. 10.1.1.183.2930. 2708853.
  16. Menczer. F. Lexical and semantic clustering by web links. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 2004. 55. 14. 1261–1269. 10.1002/asi.20081. 10.1.1.72.1136.
  17. Book: Schifanella, Rossano. Alain Barrat. Ciro Cattuto. Benjamin Markines. Filippo Menczer. Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Web search and data mining . Folks in Folksonomies . 2010. 271–280. 10.1145/1718487.1718521. 1003.2281. 9781605588896. 2010arXiv1003.2281S. 10097662.
  18. Fortunato. Santo. Alessandro Flammini. Filippo Menczer . Scale-free network growth by ranking. Physical Review Letters. 2006. 96. 21. 218701. 10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.218701. cond-mat/0602081. 2006PhRvL..96u8701F. 16803279. 11357370.
  19. Ratkiewicz. Jacob. Santo Fortunato. Alessandro Flammini . Filippo Menczer. Alessandro Vespignani. Characterizing and modeling the dynamics of online popularity. Physical Review Letters. 2010. 105. 15. 158701. 10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.158701. 21230945. 2010PhRvL.105o8701R. 1005.2704. 17597814.
  20. Menczer. F. Evolution of document networks. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.. 2004. 101. suppl. 1. 5261–5265. 10.1073/pnas.0307554100. 14747653. 387305. 2004PNAS..101.5261M. free.
  21. Menczer. F. Growing and navigating the small world web by local content. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.. 2002. 99. 22. 14014–14019. 10.1073/pnas.212348399. 12381792. 137828. 2002PNAS...9914014M. free.
  22. News: Researchers: Impact of censorship significant on Google, other search engine results. Network World. March 15, 2006. May 4, 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20140504141128/http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/031506-google-censorship.html. May 4, 2014. dead.
  23. Meiss. Mark. Filippo Menczer. Visual comparison of search results: A censorship case study. First Monday. 2008. 13. 7. 10.5210/fm.v13i7.2019. free.
  24. Fortunato. Santo. Alessandro Flammini . Filippo Menczer. Alessandro Vespignani. Topical interests and the mitigation of search engine bias. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.. 2006. 103. 34. 12684–12689. 10.1073/pnas.0605525103. 16901979. 1568910. cs/0511005. 2006PNAS..10312684F. free.
  25. News: Egalitarian engines. The Economist. November 17, 2005.
  26. Conover. Michael. Clayton Davis. Emilio Ferrara. Karissa McKelvey . Filippo Menczer. Alessandro Flammini. The Geospatial Characteristics of a Social Movement Communication Network. PLOS ONE. 2013. 8. 3. e55957. 10.1371/journal.pone.0055957. 23483885. 3590214. 1306.5473. 2013PLoSO...855957C. free.
  27. Conover. Michael. Emilio Ferrara . Filippo Menczer. Alessandro Flammini. The Digital Evolution of Occupy Wall Street. PLOS ONE. 2013. 8. 5. e64679. 10.1371/journal.pone.0064679. 23734215. 3667169. 1306.5474. 2013PLoSO...864679C. free.
  28. Book: Varol, Onur. Emilio Ferrara. Christine L. Ogan. Filippo Menczer. Alessandro Flammini. Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science . Evolution of online user behavior during a social upheaval . 81–90. 2014. 10.1145/2615569.2615699. 9781450326223. 2014arXiv1406.7197V. 1406.7197. 6986974.
  29. Conover. Michael. Bruno Gonçalves. Alessandro Flammini. Filippo Menczer . Partisan asymmetries in online political activity. EPJ Data Science. 2012. 1. 6. 10.1140/epjds6. 2012arXiv1205.1010C. 1205.1010. 2347930.
  30. Robb . Amanda . Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal . 18 March 2019 . Rolling Stone . November 16, 2017.
  31. News: Solon . Olivia . How Syria's White Helmets became victims of an online propaganda machine . 18 March 2019 . The Guardian . 18 December 2017.
  32. News: Bing . Christopher . Exclusive: Twitter deletes over 10,000 accounts that sought to discourage U.S. voting . 18 March 2019 . Reuters . November 2, 2018.
  33. Pierri . Francesco . Perry . Brea . DeVerna . Matthew . Yang . Kai-Cheng . Flammini . Alessandro . Menczer . Filippo . Bryden . John . Online misinformation is linked to early COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy and refusal . Scientific Reports . 2022 . 12 . 1 . 5966 . 10.1038/s41598-022-10070-w . 35474313 . 9043199 . 2104.10635 . 2022NatSR..12.5966P . 247939732 .
  34. Conover. Michael. Jacob Ratkiewicz. Matthew Francisco. Bruno Gonçalves . Filippo Menczer. Alessandro Flammini. Political Polarization on Twitter. Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. 2011.
  35. Web site: ICWSM-2021 Award Winners. February 5, 2023.
  36. Nikolov. Dimitar. Alessandro Flammini. Filippo Menczer. Right and left, partisanship predicts (asymmetric) vulnerability to misinformation. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. 2021. 1. 7. 10.37016/mr-2020-55. 234356375 . 2010.01462.
  37. Sasahara . Kazutoshi. Wen Chen . Hao Peng . Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia . Alessandro Flammini . Filippo Menczer . Social Influence and Unfollowing Accelerate the Emergence of Echo Chambers . Journal of Computational Social Science . 2021. 4. 381–402 . 10.1007/s42001-020-00084-7. 257090517 . 1905.03919 .
  38. Weng. Lilian . Filippo Menczer . Yong-Yeol Ahn. Virality Prediction and Community Structure in Social Networks. Scientific Reports. 2013. 3. 2522. 10.1038/srep02522. 23982106 . 3755286 . 1306.0158. 2013NatSR...3E2522W.
  39. News: Matson. John. Twitter Trends Help Researchers Forecast Viral Memes. Scientific American. December 17, 2013.
  40. Weng. L. A Flammini. A Vespignani . F Menczer . Competition among memes in a world with limited attention. Scientific Reports. 2012. 2. 335. 10.1038/srep00335. 22461971. 3315179. 2012NatSR...2E.335W.
  41. News: McKenna. Phil. Going viral on Twitter is a random act. New Scientist. April 13, 2012.
  42. Qiu . X. . F. M. Oliveira . D. . Sahami Shirazi . A. . Flammini . A. . Menczer . F. . Limited individual attention and online virality of low-quality information . Nature Human Behaviour . 1 . 7 . 0132 . 10.1038/s41562-017-0132 . 2017 . 2017arXiv170102694Q . 1701.02694 . 23363010 .
  43. Dancyger . Lilly . Researchers Retract Widely Cited Fake-News Study . 18 March 2019 . Rolling Stone . 10 January 2019.
  44. Book: Ratkiewicz, Jacob. Michael Conover. Mark Meiss. Bruno Gonçalves. Snehal Patil. Alessandro Flammini. Filippo Menczer . Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web . Truthy . 2011. 249–252. 10.1145/1963192.1963301. 1011.3768. 9781450306379. 1958549.
  45. Ratkiewicz. Jacob. Michael Conover. Mark Meiss. Bruno Gonçalves . Alessandro Flammini. Filippo Menczer. Detecting and Tracking Political Abuse in Social Media. Proc. Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. 2011.
  46. News: Giles. Jim. Twitter tool roots out disguised mass postings. New Scientist. 27 October 2010.
  47. News: Keller. Jared. When Campaigns Manipulate Social Media. The Atlantic. November 10, 2010.
  48. News: Silverman. Craig. Misinformation Propagation. Columbia Journalism Review. November 4, 2011.
  49. Ferrara . Emilio . Varol . Onur . Davis . Clayton A. . Menczer . Filippo . Flammini . Alessandro . The rise of social bots . Comm. ACM . 2016 . 59 . 7 . 96–104 . 10.1145/2818717 . 1407.5225 . 1914124 .
  50. News: Urbina. Ian. I Flirt and Tweet. Follow Me at #Socialbot.. The New York Times. August 10, 2013.
  51. Lazer . D. . Baum . M. . Benkler . Y. . Berinsky . A. . Greenhill . K. . Menczer . F. . etal . The science of fake news . Science . 2018 . 359 . 6380 . 1094–1096 . 10.1126/science.aao2998 . 2018Sci...359.1094L . 29590025 . 2307.07903 . 4410672 .
  52. News: Menczer . Filippo . Misinformation on social media: Can technology save us? . 18 March 2019 . The Conversation . November 27, 2016.
  53. News: Bergado . Gabe . The Man Who Saw Fake News Coming . 18 March 2019 . Inverse . December 14, 2016.
  54. Mitchell Waldrop . M. . The genuine problem of fake news . PNAS . November 28, 2017 . 10.1073/pnas.1719005114 . 114 . 48 . 12631–12634. 29146827 . 5715799 . 2017PNAS..11412631W . free .
  55. News: Ciampaglia . Giovanni Luca . Menczer . Filippo . Misinformation and biases infect social media, both intentionally and accidentally . 18 March 2019 . The Conversation . June 20, 2018.
  56. News: Zamudio-Suaréz . Fernanda . A Professor Once Targeted by Fake News Now Is Helping to Visualize It . 18 March 2019 . The Chronicle of Higher Education . December 22, 2016.
  57. Varol . Onur . Ferrara . Emilio . Davis . Clayton A. . Menczer . Filippo . Flammini . Alessandro . Online Human-Bot Interactions: Detection, Estimation, and Characterization. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 2017 . 11 . 280–289 . 10.1609/icwsm.v11i1.14871 . 2017arXiv170303107V . 1703.03107 . 15103351 .
  58. News: Chong . Zoey . Up to 48 million Twitter accounts are bots, study says . 18 March 2019 . CNET . March 14, 2017.
  59. Web site: WOJCIK . STEFAN . MESSING . SOLOMON . SMITH . AARON . RAINIE . LEE . HITLIN . PAUL . Bots in the Twittersphere . Pew Research Center . 18 March 2019. 2018-04-09 .
  60. News: Gershgorn . Dave . There's a new tool to visualize how fake news is spread on Twitter . 18 March 2019 . Quartz . December 21, 2016.
  61. News: Kauffman . Gretel . Indiana University tech tool 'Hoaxy' shows how fake news spreads . 18 March 2019 . The Christian Science Monitor . December 22, 2016.
  62. News: Skallerup Bessette . Lee . Hoaxy Visualizes the Spread of Online News . 18 March 2019 . The Chronicle of Higher Education . January 9, 2017.
  63. News: Reaney . Patricia . U.S. university launches tool to show how fake news spreads . 18 March 2019 . Reuters . December 21, 2016.
  64. Shao . C. . Ciampaglia . G. L. . Varol . O. . Yang . K. . Flammini . A. . Menczer . F. . The spread of low-credibility content by social bots . Nature Communications . 2018 . 9 . 1 . 4787 . 10.1038/s41467-018-06930-7 . 30459415 . 6246561 . 2018NatCo...9.4787S . 1707.07592 .
  65. Shao . C. . Hui . P. . Wang . L. . Jiang . X. . Flammini . A. . Menczer . F. . Ciampaglia . G. L. . Anatomy of an online misinformation network . PLOS ONE . 2018 . 13 . 4 . e0196087 . 10.1371/journal.pone.0196087 . 29702657 . 5922526 . 2018PLoSO..1396087S . 1801.06122 . free .
  66. News: Ouellette . Jennifer . Study: It only takes a few seconds for bots to spread misinformation . 18 March 2019 . Ars Technica . 21 November 2018.
  67. News: Boyce . Jasmin . 'Relatively few' Twitter bots were needed to spread misinformation and overwhelm fact checkers, study finds . 18 March 2019 . NBC News . November 21, 2018.
  68. News: de Haldevang . Max . Twitter could have partly blocked Russia's 2016 election attack with CAPTCHAs . 18 March 2019 . Quartz . November 20, 2018.
  69. Yan . Harry . Yang . Kai-Cheng . Menczer . Filippo . Shanahan . James . Asymmetrical Perceptions of Partisan Political Bots . New Media and Society . 2021 . 23 . 10 . 3016–3037 . 10.1177/1461444820942744 . 225633835 .
  70. Chen . Wen . Pacheco . Diogo . Yang . Kai-Cheng . Menczer . Filippo . Neutral Bots Probe Political Bias on Social Media . Nature Communications . 2021 . 12 . 1 . 5580 . 10.1038/s41467-021-25738-6 . 34552073 . 8458339 . 2005.08141 . 2021NatCo..12.5580C .
  71. Uncovering Coordinated Networks on Social Media: Methods and Case Studies . Pacheco . Diogo . Hui . Pik-Mai . Torres-Lugo . Christopher . Truong . Bao Tran . Flammini . Alessandro . Menczer . Filippo . 2021 . AAAI . Proc. International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) . 455–466 . 10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18075 . 2001.05658 .
  72. The Manufacture of Partisan Echo Chambers by Follow Train Abuse on Twitter . Torres-Lugo . Christopher . Yang . Kai-Cheng . Menczer . Filippo . 2022 . AAAI . Proc. International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) . 1017–1028 . 10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19354 . 2010.13691 .
  73. Manipulating Twitter through Deletions . Torres-Lugo . Christopher . Pote . Manita . Nwala . Alexander . Menczer . Filippo . 2022 . AAAI . Proc. International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) . 1029–1039 . 10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19355 . free . 2203.13893 .
  74. Bhadani . Saumya . Yamaya . Shun . Flammini . Alessandro . Menczer . Filippo . Ciampaglia . Giovanni . Nyhan . Brendan . Political audience diversity and news reliability in algorithmic ranking . Nature Human Behaviour . 2022 . 6 . 4 . 495–505 . 10.1038/s41562-021-01276-5 . 35115677 . 220546483 . 2007.08078 .
  75. Book: Menczer . Filippo . Fortunato . Santo . Davis . Clayton . Filippo Menczer . 2020 . A First Course in Network Science . Cambridge University Press . 9781108471138.
  76. Web site: OSoMe: Home. 18 March 2019.
  77. News: Hotz. Robert Lee. Decoding Our Chatter. The Wall Street Journal. October 1, 2011.
  78. Web site: OSoMe Tools . Observatory on Social Media . 18 March 2019.
  79. Davis . Clayton A. . etal . OSoMe: The IUNI Observatory on Social Media . PeerJ Computer Science . 2016 . 2 . e87 . 10.7717/peerj-cs.87 . free . 11858/00-001M-0000-002D-21B1-D . free .
  80. Web site: Botometer. 5 February 2023.
  81. Web site: BotAmp. 5 February 2023.
  82. Web site: Hoaxy . Hoaxy . 5 February 2023.
  83. Web site: Fakey . Fakey . 5 February 2023.
  84. Web site: Scholarometer. 18 March 2019.
  85. News: Kolowich. Steve. Tenure-o-meter. Inside Higher Ed. December 15, 2009.
  86. Kaur. Jasleen. Diep Thi Hoang. Xiaoling Sun. Lino Possamai. Mohsen JafariAsbagh. Snehal Patil. Filippo Menczer. Scholarometer: A Social Framework for Analyzing Impact across Disciplines. PLOS ONE. 2012. 7. 9. e43235. 10.1371/journal.pone.0043235. 22984414. 3440403. 2012PLoSO...743235K. free.
  87. Kaur. Jasleen. Filippo Radicchi . Filippo Menczer. Universality of scholarly impact metrics. Journal of Informetrics. 2013. 7. 4. 924–932. 10.1016/j.joi.2013.09.002. 1305.6339. 2013arXiv1305.6339K. 7415777.
  88. News: Van Noorden. Richard. Who is the best scientist of them all?. Nature. November 6, 2013.
  89. Web site: Kinsey Reporter. 18 March 2019.
  90. News: Kinsey Reporter. May 4, 2014. Scientific American.
  91. News: Healy. Melissa. Want to dish about Valentine's Day sex? There's an app for that. Los Angeles Times. February 14, 2014.

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