Academic Publications

Hierarchical Level-Wise News Article Clustering via Multilingual Matryoshka Embeddings
Hans W. A. Hanley and Zakir Durumeric
In The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025). In this work, we utilize Matryoshka-based learning techniques to build hierarchical embeddings that can differentiate news articles at different levels of granularity.
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Bridging the Narrative Divide: Cross-Platform Discourse Networks in Fragmented Ecosystems
Patrick Gerard, Hans W. A. Hanley, Luca Luceri, Emilio Ferrara
In this work, we propose a new platform-agnostic framework that enables accurate reconstruction of cross-platform social graphs by uncovering latent narratives, revealing that a small group of bridge users drives most narrative migration between platforms like Truth Social and X, with broad implications for content moderation and policy.
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Tracking the Takes and Trajectories of English-Language News Narratives across Trustworthy and Worrisome Websites
Hans W. A. Hanley, Emily Ito Okabe, and Zakir Durumeric
In 34th USENIX Security Symposium. In this work, we perform narrative analysis on 29.0M different articles from 2022 and 2023 across 4,076 different low, mixed, and highly reliable websites.
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Across the Firewall: Foreign Media’s Role in Shaping Chinese Social Media Narratives on the Russo-Ukrainian War
Hans W. A. Hanley, Yingdan Lu, and Jennifer Pan
In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We track the origin and spread of narratives from foreign news websites onto the Chinese social media platform Weibo.
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M-STANCE: Soft Contrastive Learning and Synthetic Translations for Multilingual Stance Detection
Hans W. A. Hanley, Emily Ito Okabe, and Zakir Durumeric
In this work, we release a novel 54-language multilingual stance detection dataset and utilize synthetic translation and soft contrastive learning to perform multilingual stance detection.

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.
Paper Code Recording

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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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.
Paper Code Recording

Sub-Standards and Mal-Practices: Misinformation’s Role in Insular, Polarized, and Toxic Interactions on Reddit
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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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.
Paper Recording

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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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

“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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