Academic Publications

Specious Sites: Tracking the Spread and Sway of Spurious News Stories at Scale

In this work, we perform narrative analysis on 3M different articles across 1,633 different unreliable news website, tracking the spread of 56,112 different stories throughout 2022.

Recommended citation: Hans WA Hanley, Deepak Kumar, and Zakir Durumeric. "Specious Sites: Tracking the Spread and Sway of Spurious News Stories at Scale." (2023).

A Golden Age: Conspiracy Theories’ Relationship with Misinformation Outlets, News Media, and the Wider Internet

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.

Recommended citation: Hanley, Hans WA, Deepak Kumar, and Zakir Durumeric. "A Golden Age: Conspiracy Theories’ Relationship with Misinformation Outlets, News Media, and the Wider Internet." (2023). https://www.hanshanley.com/files/A_Golden_Age.pdf

Sub-Standards and Mal-Practices: Misinformation’s Role in Insular, Polarized, and Toxic Interactions

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.

Recommended citation: Hans W. A. Hanley and Zakir Durumeric. "Sub-Standards and Mal-Practices: Misinformations Role in Insular, Polarized, and Toxic Interactions." (2023). https://www.hanshanley.com/files/Sub_Standards_and_Mal_Practices.pdf

“A Special Operation”: A Quantitative Approach to Dissecting and Comparing Different Media Ecoystems’ Coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian War

17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 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).

Recommended citation: Hanley, Hans WA, Deepak Kumar, and Zakir Durumeric. ""A Special Operation": A Quantitative Approach to Dissecting and Comparing Different Media Ecoystems’ Coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian War." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Vol. 17. 2023. https://www.hanshanley.com/files/ICWSM_Eluosi.pdf

Happenstance: Utilizing Semantic Search to Track Russian State Media Narrative about the Russo-Ukrainian War on Reddit

17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 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.

Recommended citation: Hanley, Hans WA, Deepak Kumar, and Zakir Durumeric. "Happenstance: Utilizing Semantic Search to Track Russian State Media Narrative about the Russo-Ukrainian War on Reddit." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Vol. 17. 2023. https://www.hanshanley.com/files/happenstance.pdf

No Calm in the Storm: Investigating QAnon Website Relationships

16th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 2022

This paper concerns QAnon’s role on the Internet and its connection to mainstream and alternative news sources.

Recommended citation: Hanley, Hans WA, Deepak Kumar, and Zakir Durumeric. "No Calm in The Storm: Investigating QAnon Website Relationships." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Vol. 16. 2022. https://www.hanshanley.com/files/No_Calm_In_the_Storm.pdf