Cody Buntain

Tuğrulcan Elmas, Filipi Nascimento Silva, Manita Pote et al.

Coordinated campaigns on social media play a critical role in shaping crisis information environments, particularly during the onset of conflicts when uncertainty is high and verified information is scarce. We study the interplay between coordinated campaigns and information integrity through a case study of the 2023 Israel-Hamas War on Twitter (X). We analyze 4.5~million tweets and employ established coordination detection methods to identify 11 coordinated groups involving 541 accounts. We characterize these groups through a multimodal analysis that includes topics, account amplification, toxicity, emotional tone, visual themes, and misleading claims. Our analysis reveal that coordinated campaigns rely predominantly on low-complexity tactics, such as retweet amplification and copy-paste diffusion, and promote distinct narratives consistent with a fragmented manipulation landscape, without centralized control. Widely amplified misleading claims concentrate within just three of the identified coordinated groups; the remaining groups primarily engage in advocacy, religious solidarity, or humanitarian mobilization. Claim-level integrity, toxicity, and emotional signals are mutually uncorrelated: no single behavioral signal is a reliable proxy for the others. Targeting the most prolific spreaders of misleading content for moderation would be effective in reducing such content. However, targeting prolific amplifiers in general would not achieve the same mitigation effect. These findings suggest that evaluating coordination structures jointly with their specific content footprints is needed to effectively prioritize moderation interventions.

Afia Abedin, Abdul Bais, Cody Buntain et al.

The massive proliferation of social media data represents a transformative opportunity for conflict studies and for tracking the proliferation and use of weaponry, as conflicts are increasingly documented in these online spaces. At the same time, the scale and types of data available are problematic for traditional open-source intelligence. This paper focuses on identifying specific weapon systems and the insignias of the armed groups using them as documented in the Ukraine war, as these tasks are critical to operational intelligence and tracking weapon proliferation, especially given the scale of international military aid given to Ukraine. The large scale of social media makes manual assessment difficult, however, so this paper presents early work that uses computer vision models to support this task. We demonstrate that these models can both identify weapons embedded in images shared in social media and how the resulting collection of military-relevant images and their post times interact with the offline, real-world conflict. Not only can we then track changes in the prevalence of images of tanks, land mines, military trucks, etc., we find correlations among time series data associated with these images and the daily fatalities in this conflict. This work shows substantial opportunity for examining similar online documentation of conflict contexts, and we also point to future avenues where computer vision can be further improved for these open-source intelligence tasks.

Do Won Kim, Cody Buntain, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia

Social media feed algorithms infer user preferences from their past behaviors. Yet what drives engagement often diverges from what users value. We examine this gap between stated preferences (what users say they prefer) and revealed preferences (what their behavior suggests they prefer) among young adults, a group deeply embedded in algorithmically mediated environments. Using a mixed-methods approach combining surveys and interviews with feed curation activities, we investigate: what gaps exist between stated and revealed preferences; how users make sense of these gaps; what values users believe should guide algorithmic curation; and how systems might reflect those values. Participants often found themselves engaging with low-quality content they did not endorse, despite wanting high-quality information. When asked to curate an ideal social media news feed for a hypothetical persona, participants created feeds they considered more satisfying and higher in quality by prioritizing values such as accuracy and diversity. In doing so, they navigated trade-offs between different values, factoring in social relationships and context surrounding the persona. These findings suggest that feed curation is a socially situated process of judging what should be visible and appropriate in shared information spaces. Based on these insights, we offer design directions for bridging the gap between stated and revealed preferences.

Maneet Mehta, Cody Buntain

This paper examines potential biases and inconsistencies in emotional evocation of images produced by generative artificial intelligence (AI) models and their potential bias toward negative emotions. In particular, we assess this bias by comparing the emotions evoked by an AI-produced image to the emotions evoked by prompts used to create those images. As a first step, the study evaluates three approaches for identifying emotions in images -- traditional supervised learning, zero-shot learning with vision-language models, and cross-modal auto-captioning -- using EmoSet, a large dataset of image-emotion annotations that categorizes images across eight emotional types. Results show fine-tuned models, particularly Google's Vision Transformer (ViT), significantly outperform zero-shot and caption-based methods in recognizing emotions in images. For a cross-modality comparison, we then analyze the differences between emotions in text prompts -- via existing text-based emotion-recognition models -- and the emotions evoked in the resulting images. Findings indicate that AI-generated images frequently lean toward negative emotional content, regardless of the original prompt. This emotional skew in generative models could amplify negative affective content in digital spaces, perpetuating its prevalence and impact. The study advocates for a multidisciplinary approach to better align AI emotion recognition with psychological insights and address potential biases in generative AI outputs across digital media.

Milo Trujillo, Maurício Gruppi, Cody Buntain et al.

In this paper we present a near-complete dataset of over 3M videos from 61K channels over 2.5 years (June 2019 to December 2021) from the social video hosting platform BitChute, a commonly used alternative to YouTube. Additionally, we include a variety of video-level metadata, including comments, channel descriptions, and views for each video. The MeLa-BitChute dataset can be found at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/KRD1VS.

Cody Buntain, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler et al.

In January 2019, YouTube announced it would exclude potentially harmful content from video recommendations but allow such videos to remain on the platform. While this step intends to reduce YouTube's role in propagating such content, continued availability of these videos in other online spaces makes it unclear whether this compromise actually reduces their spread. To assess this impact, we apply interrupted time series models to measure whether different types of YouTube sharing in Twitter and Reddit changed significantly in the eight months around YouTube's announcement. We evaluate video sharing across three curated sets of potentially harmful, anti-social content: a set of conspiracy videos that have been shown to experience reduced recommendations in YouTube, a larger set of videos posted by conspiracy-oriented channels, and a set of videos posted by alternative influence network (AIN) channels. As a control, we also evaluate effects on video sharing in a dataset of videos from mainstream news channels. Results show conspiracy-labeled and AIN videos that have evidence of YouTube's de-recommendation experience a significant decreasing trend in sharing on both Twitter and Reddit. For videos from conspiracy-oriented channels, however, we see no significant effect in Twitter but find a significant increase in the level of conspiracy-channel sharing in Reddit. For mainstream news sharing, we actually see an increase in trend on both platforms, suggesting YouTube's suppressing particular content types has a targeted effect. This work finds evidence that reducing exposure to anti-social videos within YouTube, without deletion, has potential pro-social, cross-platform effects. At the same time, increases in the level of conspiracy-channel sharing raise concerns about content producers' responses to these changes, and platform transparency is needed to evaluate these effects further.