Emilio Ferrara
Prof of Computer Science at USC
AI, social media, society, networks, data, and
HUMANS LABS http://www.emilio.ferrara.name
- 🤯 We have officially entered the era of Synthetic Reality. 🤖 My latest paper, "The Generative AI Paradox," reveals how GenAI is no longer just making "fake content"—it’s manufacturing entire contexts of belief. Read the full paper on arXiv: lnkd.in/gu9XftrG
- From perfectly forged passports to Biden shaking hands with the Supreme Leader of Iran, the cost of deception has collapsed to zero. The paradox? As synthetic media becomes ubiquitous, we may soon stop believing anything digital. When truth becomes too expensive to verify, democracy hurts 😱
- How does an isolated "fake" turn into a systemic failure? It happens in layers. 📑 In our paper, we formalize the Synthetic Reality Stack. We are moving from a media problem to an institutional resilience problem. We can't just "spot the fake" anymore; we have to redesign how trust itself works.
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View full threadPillars: 1. Measurement: Quantifying "verification load" and "correction latency." 2. Interaction: Benchmarking how AI agents steer human beliefs. 3. Robustness: Building end-to-end provenance that actually sticks. 4. Institutions: Shifting from "artifact-based trust" to "process-based trust."
- Reposted by Emilio FerraraAt OASIS Lab, #UCLA, we are accepting applications for a PhD student who is passionate about using computational modeling, big data, and HCI to advance digital safety, responsible AI, and the study of online information ecosystems. tinyurl.com/phdopenningu... #PhD #AIforGood #OnlineSafety
- Reposted by Emilio Ferrara🚨 New preprint 🚨 Can AI agents coordinate influence campaigns without human guidance? And how does coordination arise among AI agents? In our latest research, we simulate LLM-powered AI agents acting like users on an online platform, some benign, some running an influence operation
- Reposted by Emilio FerraraNew paper + interactive dashboard on the 2024 election information ecosystem. Building on discourse networks work with @hanshanley.bsky.social @luceriluc.bsky.social @emilioferrara.bsky.social—this lets us visualize the online landscape as a unified system, rather than isolating each platform.
- Thrilled to share our latest paper "Information Suppression in Large Language Models" is now published on Information Sciences! To read more, see: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... great work w/ @siyizhou.bsky.social
- We created a framework for auditing and characterizing the undesireable effects of alignment safeguards in LLMs, that can result in censorship or information suppression. And we tested DeepSeek against potentially sensitive topics!
- Reposted by Emilio FerraraPeiran Qiu, Siyi Zhou, Emilio Ferrara: Information Suppression in Large Language Models: Auditing, Quantifying, and Characterizing Censorship in DeepSeek arxiv.org/abs/2506.12349 arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12349 arxiv.org/html/2506.12349
- Reposted by Emilio FerraraAmin Banayeeanzade, Ala N. Tak, Fatemeh Bahrani, Anahita Bolourani, Leonardo Blas, Emilio Ferrara, Jonathan Gratch, Sai Praneeth Karimireddy Psychological Steering in LLMs: An Evaluation of Effectiveness and Trustworthiness arxiv.org/abs/2510.04484
- Reposted by Emilio FerraraBig 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!
- Reposted by Emilio Ferrara
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... - Reposted by Emilio FerraraA 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
- 🤖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
- 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
- Reposted by Emilio FerraraI'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!at://did:plc:nggqjgdkqhytcag6x7fhiyuv/app.bsky.graph.starterpack/3ls4fy33kpd2r
- Reposted by Emilio FerraraPaper here: arxiv.org/abs/2505.21729
- Reposted by Emilio Ferrara🚨 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
- One of my favorite recent projects! Link to the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.10867
- Reposted by Emilio FerraraWhat 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
- Reposted by Emilio Ferrara"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
- Reposted by Emilio Ferrara🚀 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🤖📢
- Reposted by Emilio Ferrara🤩Cool collaboration w/ @jinyiye.bsky.social @emilioferrara.bsky.social @luceriluc.bsky.social 🔍Read more: arxiv.org/abs/2502.11248 📊Resources available: github.com/angelayejiny...
- 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.
- 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.
- Reposted by Emilio FerraraGood 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...
- Reposted by Emilio Ferrarai 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...
- 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!
- Reposted by Emilio Ferrara"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.
- Reposted by Emilio FerraraFascinating new look at source selection in news from Spangher, @emilioferrara.bsky.social et al. doi.org/10.48550/arX...
- An incredibly important work by Jinyi, Luca and Julie! #icwsm2025 Thread below:
- Are your friends more susceptible to influence than you? Our new work in #ICWSM2025 uncovers The Susceptibility Paradox in online social influence. w/ @luceriluc.bsky.social , Julie Jiang, @emilioferrara.bsky.social Explore our findings: arxiv.org/abs/2406.11553
- Reposted by Emilio FerraraNew evidence of cross-platform foreign interference on social media during the 2024 U.S. Election that drove the spread of highly-partisan, low-credibility, and conspiratorial content, from Cinus, Minici, @luceriluc.bsky.social @emilioferrara.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22716
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- Since I can’t edit, I’m tagging both Luca Luceri @luceriluc.bsky.social and Keith Burghardt @keithburghardt.bsky.social here in case folks want to reach out directly to them!
- That's an amazing recognition, proud of Luca!
