Academic Publications

Tall and True Tales: Thoroughly Tracking the Takes and Trajectories of News Narratives from Trustworthy and Worrisome Websites
Hans W. A. Hanley, Emily Ito Okabe, and Zakir Durumeric
In this work, we perform narrative analysis on 27.4M different articles across 4,077 different authentic and unreliable news websites, tracking the spread of 103,285 different stories throughout 2022 and 2023.

Narratives of Foreign Media Ecosystems in Chinese Social Media Discussions of the Russo-Ukrainian War
Hans W. A. Hanley, Yingdan Lu, and Jennifer Pan
By comparing narratives about the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War circulating on Chinese social media with narratives found in over 24 million articles from 10,000 Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian, and U.S.-based news websites, we find that Russian news websites are the largest originators and influencers of narratives related to the Russo-Ukrainian War found on Weibo, followed closely by Ukrainian news websites and more distantly by Chinese and U.S. news websites.

Specious Sites: Tracking the Spread and Sway of Spurious News Stories at Scale
Hans W. A. Hanley, Deepak Kumar, and Zakir Durumeric
In 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE S&P 2024). In this work, we perform narrative analysis on 1.9M different articles across 1,334 different unreliable news websites, tracking the spread of 52,036 different stories throughout 2022.
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Machine-Made Media: Monitoring the Mobilization of Machine-Generated Articles on Misinformation and Mainstream News Websites
Hans W. A. Hanley and Zakir Durumeric
In 18th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2024). In this work, we study the increase in machine-made/synthetic news articles across 3,074 news websites.
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Partial Mobilization: Tracking Multilingual Information Flows Amongst Russian Media Outlets and Telegram
Hans W. A. Hanley and Zakir Durumeric
In 18th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2024). In this work, we study how 16 Russian media outlets have interacted with and utilized 732 Telegram channels throughout 2022.
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TATA: Stance Detection via Topic-Agnostic and Topic-Aware Embeddings
Hans W. A. Hanley and Zakir Durumeric
In The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2023). In this work, we utilize contrastive learning with a triplet loss and synthetic data to engineer topic-aware and topic-agnostic embedding layers for performing stance detection.
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Twits, Toxic Tweets, and Tribal Tendencies: Trends in Politically Polarized Posts on Twitter
Hans W. A. Hanley and Zakir Durumeric
Within this work, we explore the role that political ideology plays in contributing to toxicity both on an individual user level and a topic level on Twitter.
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A Golden Age: Conspiracy Theories’ Relationship with Misinformation Outlets, News Media, and the Wider Internet
Hans W. A. Hanley, Deepak Kumar, and Zakir Durumeric
In The 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing (CSCW 2023). In this work, we study the relationships between five prominent conspiracy theories (QAnon, COVID, UFO/Aliens, 9/11, and Flat-Earth) and the role that misinformation and political polarization play in spreading these conspiracies.
Paper Code Recording

Sub-Standards and Mal-Practices: Misinformation’s Role in Insular, Polarized, and Toxic Interactions
Hans W. A. Hanley and Zakir Durumeric
In this work, we examine the role of online misinformation in sparking political incivility and toxicity on the social media platform Reddit's online communities or subreddits.
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“A Special Operation”: A Quantitative Approach to Dissecting and Comparing Different Media Ecoystems’ Coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian War
Hans W. A. Hanley, Deepak Kumar, and Zakir Durumeric
In 17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2023). In this work, we present a quantitative analysis of the differences in coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian War amongst three different news ecosystems (Western, Chinese, Russian).
Paper Recording

Happenstance: Utilizing Semantic Search to Track Russian State Media Narrative about the Russo-Ukrainian War on Reddit
Hans W. A. Hanley, Deepak Kumar, and Zakir Durumeric
In 17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2023). In this work, we study the coordinated information campaign to understand the most prominent disinformation narratives touted by the Russian government to English-speaking audiences.
Paper Recording

No Calm in the Storm: Investigating QAnon Website Relationships
Hans W. A. Hanley, Deepak Kumar, and Zakir Durumeric
In 16th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2022). This paper concerns QAnon's role on the Internet and its connection to mainstream and alternative news sources.
Paper Code Recording

DPSelect: A Differential Privacy Based Guard Relay Selection Algorithm for Tor
Hans W. A. Hanley, Yixin Sun, Sameer Wagh, and Prateek Mittal
In 19th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (2) (PoPETs 2019). This paper concerns counteracting information leakage in Tor relay selection algorithms.
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