Marco Minici
@marcominici.bsky.social
Researcher at ICAR-CNR I develop computational tools to identify threats to online users posed by malicious actors and algorithms that behave unpredictably. Personal Website: https://mminici.github.io
Do you believe that groups of users can coordinate on different social platforms to try to influence other people opinion? Well, in the new episode of targz @marcominici.bsky.social, from ICAR-CNR, describes the technique they used in their research to identify such malevolent groups. Link below! 👇
📢 New paper! We study urban location recommenders and their feedback with human mobility. Simulating this loop reveals a paradox: people explore more individually, yet city visits and encounters concentrate. Cities coevolve with AI, and inequality can grow. 📄 link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Client Challenge
link.springer.com
Our new article in @science.org enables social media reranking outside of platforms' walled gardens. We add an LLM-powered reranking of highly polarizing political content into N=1256 participants' feeds. Downranking cools tensions with the opposite party—but upranking inflames them.
New paper in Science: In a platform-independent field experiment, we show that reranking content expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity in social media feeds alters affective polarization. 🧵
What 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
We constantly ask our apps where to visit, eat or drink. AI tells us, and most of the time, we follow it. The loop continues. But do AIs favor certain places? How would we even know if we don’t own the platforms? We modeled this complex phenomenon, and results are fascinating! Spoiler: rich get…
arxiv.org
IU's Observatory on Social Media defends citizens from online manipulation – the opposite of censorship osome.iu.edu/research/blo...
IU's Observatory on Social Media defends citizens from online manipulation – the opposite of censorship
When thousands of fake accounts controlled by an unknown actor flood social media with some story, and platform algorithms amplify these messages, real...
osome.iu.edu
The three horsemen of social media: brain rot, anxiety and foreign interference voxeurop.eu/en/social-me...
The three horsemen of social media: brain rot, anxiety and foreign interference
With so many media institutions bidding farewell to X, it's a good time to reflect on the relationship status of social media and European society at large.
voxeurop.eu
"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.
New 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
