Hans Hanley

Hans Hanley

Computer Science Ph.D. Stanford University Disinformation, Networks, NLP

Talks

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

September 01, 2023

Talk, Mechanisms of Domination?: State Sponsored Information and Media Ecosystems at 119th American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, CA

In this work, we study the most prominent disinformation narratives being touted by the Russian government to English-speaking audiences. To do this we perform topic analysis using the large-language model MPNet on articles published by nine different Russian disinformation websites and the new Russian “fact-checking” website waronfakes.com. We then map Reddit comments to the topics being promoted by these disinformation websites.

Online Information Flows and Ecosystems: Understanding the Role of Misinformation and AI-Generated Media

June 13, 2023

Talk, University of Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford, UK

In this work, firstly utilizing daily scrapes of 3,074 news websites (both mainstream and misinformation), the large-language model MPNet, and DP-Means clustering, we build a system to automatically isolate and analyze the narratives being spread within online ecosystems. Secondly, to understand the impact of AI-Written content, we present one of the first large-scale studies of the prevalence of AI-written articles within online news media.

Online Information Flows and Ecosystems: Understanding the Role of Misinformation and AI-Generated Media

June 12, 2023

Talk, University College London Information Security Seminar, London, UK

In this work, firstly utilizing daily scrapes of 3,074 news websites (both mainstream and misinformation), the large-language model MPNet, and DP-Means clustering, we build a system to automatically isolate and analyze the narratives being spread within online ecosystems. Secondly, to understand the impact of AI-Written content, we present one of the first large-scale studies of the prevalence of AI-written articles within online news media.

Tracking the Influence of Russian State Media Narratives about the Russo-Ukrainian War

September 06, 2022

Talk, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL

How have Russian information campaigns influenced and affected public perceptions of the Russo-Ukrainian War? In this talk, we study the coordinated information campaign to understand the most prominent disinformation narratives touted by the Russian government to English-speaking audiences.

Tracking the Influence of Russian State Media Narratives about the Russo-Ukrainian War

August 16, 2022

Talk, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL

How have Russian information campaigns influenced and affected public perceptions of the Russo-Ukrainian War? In this talk, we study the coordinated information campaign to understand the most prominent disinformation narratives touted by the Russian government to English-speaking audiences.

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

May 11, 2022

Talk, Stanford Security Lunch, Stanford, CA

In this work, we study the most prominent disinformation narratives being touted by the Russian government to English-speaking audiences. To do this we perform topic analysis using the large-language model MPNet on articles published by nine different Russian disinformation websites and the new Russian “fact-checking” website waronfakes.com. We then map Reddit comments to the topics being promoted by these disinformation websites.

No Calm in the Storm

September 08, 2021

Talk, Stanford Security Lunch, Stanford, CA

In this talk, we explore using web crawls seeded from two of the largest QAnon hotbeds on the Internet, Voat and 8kun, to build a hyperlink graph in order to study the QAnon conspiracy theory.