publications

2025

1. Social Dynamics and Mobilization Potential of Online Election Narratives

   Kristen Engel, Tanushree Mitra, and Emma S. Spiro

   Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Jun 2025
2. Privacy versus Transparency: Navigating Public Records Requests and Adversarial Dynamics in a Distributed Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration

   Rachel Moran, Sukrit Venkatagiri, Emma S. Spiro, and Kate Starbird

   Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., May 2025

   Abs

   Public records laws are standard for state and federal governments across the U.S. Such laws rest on the core notion that transparency, enacted through access to governmental documentation, will ensure accountability and minimize governmental corruption. However, these laws can also be exploited to harass or burden government employees, including researchers at public universities. CSCW researchers have both an acute vulnerability to these requests, e.g., due to increasing politicization of topics core to our research agenda, and a unique opportunity to study challenges around public records requests as they intersect with the design and use of collaboration technologies. In this paper, we explore how a large number of public records requests (PRRs) affected the collaborative work of a large, multi-site academic research project. We find that — though participants believed PRRs were a valuable tool for government transparency — they added a complicated new dimension to distributed "work" which blends personal and professional dimensions. We explain how researchers interpreted these requests and adapted their communication techniques in response. We discuss how current technologies for communication and collaboration are unprepared to ensure personal privacy and security within adversarial research environments — and collaborative work environments more broadly. Finally, we highlight the misalignment between long-standing transparency laws and the current design of collaboration technologies and provide recommendations for updating these laws.

3. ElectionRumors2022: A Dataset of Election Rumors on Twitter During the 2022 U.S. Midterms

   Joseph Schafer, Kayla Duskin, Stephen Prochaska, Morgan Wack, Anna Beers, Lia Bozarth, Taylor Agajanian, Michael Caulfield, Emma Spiro, and Kate Starbird

   Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, May 2025
4. Podcasts in the periphery: Tracing guest trajectories in political podcasts

   Sydney A. DeMets, and Emma S. Spiro

   Social Networks, May 2025

   Abs

   Social networks structure the flow of political information that is critical for civic participation and individual decision making, simultaneously opening and constraining the diffusion of ideas and information. Understanding the current information landscape is pressing given the current salience of false and misleading information. Given the growing prominence of podcasts within the information ecosystem, and the high levels of trust that podcasters enjoy from listeners, it is critical to better understand the role this medium plays in political communication. In this paper, we construct a bipartite network of podcasts and their invited guests. We then generate a network of paths that guests take as they move from one podcast to the next using entailment analysis, and evaluate if guests are typically invited to speak on less prominent shows first, before moving on to more prominent shows. This dynamic has several parallels to Centola’s power of the periphery hypothesis, complimented by the idea that guests may visit progressively more prominent podcasts as they themselves become more visible. We also find that shows aiming to feature a politically diverse set of guests on their own shows play an outsize role in brokering the movement of guests between liberal and conservative shows, although this cross-boundary brokerage has equivocal outcomes.

5. The persuasive potential of AI-paraphrased information at scale

   Saloni Dash, Yiwei Xu, Madeline Jalbert, and Emma S Spiro

   PNAS Nexus, Jul 2025

   Abs

   In this article, we study how AI-paraphrased messages have the potential to amplify the persuasive impact and scale of information campaigns. Building from social and cognitive theories on repetition and information processing, we model how CopyPasta—a common repetition tactic leveraged by information campaigns—can be enhanced using large language models. We first extract CopyPasta from two prominent disinformation campaigns in the United States and use ChatGPT to paraphrase the original message to generate AIPasta. We then validate that AIPasta is lexically diverse in comparison to CopyPasta while retaining the semantics of the original message using natural language processing metrics. In a preregistered experiment comparing the persuasive potential of CopyPasta and AIPasta (N = 1,200), we find that AIPasta (but not CopyPasta) is effective at increasing perceptions of consensus in the broad false narrative of the campaign while maintaining similar levels of sharing intent with respect to Control (CopyPasta reduces such intent). Additionally, AIPasta (vs. Control) increases belief in the exact false claim of the campaign, depending on political orientation. However, across most outcomes, we find little evidence of significant persuasive differences between AIPasta and CopyPasta. Nonetheless, current state-of-the-art AI-text detectors fail to detect AIPasta, opening the door for these operations to scale successfully. As AI-enabled information operations become more prominent, we anticipate a shift from traditional CopyPasta to AIPasta, which presents significant challenges for detection and mitigation.

2024

1. Echo Chambers in the Age of Algorithms: An Audit of Twitter’s Friend Recommender System

   Kayla Duskin, Joseph S Schafer, Jevin D West, and Emma S Spiro

   In Proceedings of the 16th ACM Web Science Conference, Jul 2024

   PDF
2. Beyond Initial Removal: Lasting Impacts of Discriminatory Content Moderation to Marginalized Creators on Instagram

   Yim Register, Izzi Grasso, Lauren N Weingarten, Lilith Fury, Constanza Eliana Chinea, Tuck J Malloy, and Emma S Spiro

   Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Jul 2024
3. ElectionRumors2022: A dataset of election rumors on Twitter during the 2022 US midterms

   Joseph S Schafer, Kayla Duskin, Stephen Prochaska, Morgan Wack, Anna Beers, Lia Bozarth, Taylor Agajanian, Mike Caulfield, Emma S Spiro, and Kate Starbird

   Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, Jul 2024
4. Rumors Have Rules

   Emma S Spiro, and Kate Starbird

   Republished in American Scientist, Jul 2024

2023

1. Legislating Uncertainty: Election Policies and the Amplification of Misinformation

   Morgan Wack, Joseph S Schafer, Ian Kennedy, Anna Beers, Emma S Spiro, and Kate Starbird

   Policy Studies Journal, Jul 2023
2. Rumors Have Rules: Decades-old research about how and why people share rumors is even more relevant in a world with social media.

   Emma S Spiro, and Kate Starbird

   Issues in Science & Technology, Jul 2023
3. Spotlight Tweets: A Lens for Exploring Attention Dynamics within Online Sensemaking During Crisis Events

   Kaitlyn Zhou, Tom Wilson, Kate Starbird, and Emma S Spiro

   ACM Transactions on Social Computing, Jul 2023
4. Followback clusters, satellite audiences, and bridge nodes: coengagement networks for the 2020 US election

   Andrew Beers, Joseph S Schafer, Ian Kennedy, Morgan Wack, Emma S Spiro, and Kate Starbird

   In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Jul 2023
5. Attached to “The algorithm”: Making sense of algorithmic precarity on instagram

   Yim Register, Lucy Qin, Amanda Baughan, and Emma S Spiro

   In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Jul 2023
6. Selective and deceptive citation in the construction of dueling consensuses

   Anna Beers, Sarah Nguyễn, Kate Starbird, Jevin D West, and Emma S Spiro

   Science Advances, Jul 2023

2022

1. Developing Self-Advocacy Skills through Machine Learning Education: The Case of Ad Recommendation on Facebook

   Yim Register, and Emma S Spiro

   In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Jul 2022
2. Repeat spreaders and election delegitimization: a comprehensive dataset of misinformation tweets from the 2020 US election

   Ian Kennedy, Morgan Wack, Andrew Beers, Joseph S Schafer, Isabella Garcia-Camargo, Emma S Spiro, and Kate Starbird

   Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, Jul 2022
3. Temporal trends in health worker social media communication during the COVID-19 pandemic

   Julian D Ford, Davide Marengo, Miranda Olff, Cherie Armour, Jon D Elhai, Zack Almquist, and Emma S Spiro

   Research in Nursing & Health, Jul 2022
4. Community-based strategies for combating misinformation: Learning from a popular culture fandom

   Jin Ha Lee, Nicole Santero, Arpita Bhattacharya, Emma May, and Emma S Spiro

   Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, Jul 2022

2021

1. Nobody puts redditor in a binary: Digital demography, collective identities, and gender in a subreddit network

   Leo G Stewart, and Emma S Spiro

   Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Jul 2021
2. Rejecting Science With Science: Boundary-Work In Anti-Mask Twitter Reply Threads During COVID-19

   Andrew Beers, Sarah Nguyễn, Emma S Spiro, and Kate Starbird

   AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, Jul 2021
3. How do you solve a problem like misinformation?

   Ryan Calo, Chris Coward, Emma S Spiro, Kate Starbird, and Jevin D West

   Science Advances, Jul 2021

2020

1. Misinformation, Crisis, and Public Health—Reviewing the Literature

   Kate Starbird, Emma S. Spiro, and Kolina Koltai

   Jul 2020

2019

1. "Friending" in Online Fitness Communities: Exploring Activity-Based Online Network Structure

   Li Zeng, Zack Almquist, and Emma S Spiro

   In Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Jul 2019
2. Keeping rumors in proportion: managing uncertainty in rumor systems

   Peter M Krafft, and Emma S Spiro

   In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Jul 2019
3. Detecting journalism in the age of social media: three experiments in classifying journalists on twitter

   Li Zeng, Dharma Dailey, Owla Mohamed, Kate Starbird, and Emma S Spiro

   In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Jul 2019
4. Unbiased sampling of users from (online) activity data

   Zack W Almquist, Sakshi Arya, Li Zeng, and Emma S Spiro

   Field Methods, Jul 2019

2018

1. Stay connected and keep motivated: Modeling activity level of exercise in an online fitness community

   Li Zeng, Zack W Almquist, and Emma S Spiro

   In Social Computing and Social Media. Technologies and Analytics: 10th International Conference, SCSM 2018, Held as Part of HCI International 2018, Las Vegas, NV, USA, July 15-20, 2018, Proceedings, Part II 10, Jul 2018
2. # drunktwitter: Examining the relations between alcohol-related Twitter content and alcohol willingness and use among underage young adults

   Dana M Litt, Melissa A Lewis, Emma S Spiro, Lovenoor Aulck, Katja A Waldron, Maya K Head-Corliss, and Alex Swanson

   Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Jul 2018
3. Promises and pitfalls of using digital traces for demographic research

   Nina Cesare, Hedwig Lee, Tyler McCormick, Emma S Spiro, and Emilio Zagheni

   Demography, Jul 2018
4. Engage early, correct more: How journalists participate in false rumors online during crisis events

   Kate Starbird, Dharma Dailey, Owla Mohamed, Gina Lee, and Emma S Spiro

   In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Jul 2018

2017

1. Centralized, parallel, and distributed information processing during collective sensemaking

   Peter Krafft, Kaitlyn Zhou, Isabelle Edwards, Kate Starbird, and Emma S Spiro

   In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Jul 2017
2. Alternative narratives of crisis events: Communities and social botnets engaged on social media

   A Conrad Nied, Leo Stewart, Emma S Spiro, and Kate Starbird

   In Companion of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CWSW), Jul 2017
3. Non-lexical features encode political affiliation on twitter

   Rachael Tatman, Leo Stewart, Amandalynne Paullada, and Emma S Spiro

   In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP and Computational Social Science, Jul 2017
4. Let’s Workout! Exploring Social Exercise in an Online Fitness Community

   Li Zeng, Zack W Almquist, and Emma S Spiro

   iConference 2017 Proceedings Vol. 2, Jul 2017
5. Language Limitations in Rumor Research? Comparing French and English Tweets Sent During the 2015 Paris Attacks.

   Tom Wilson, Stephanie A Stanek, Emma S Spiro, and Kate Starbird

   In Annual Global Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), Jul 2017
6. Shifting attention: Modeling follower relationship dynamics among us emergency management-related organizations during a colorado wildfire

   Zack W Almquist, Emma S Spiro, and Carter T Butts

   In Social network analysis of disaster response, recovery, and adaptation, Jul 2017
7. Drawing the lines of contention: Networked frame contests within# BlackLivesMatter discourse

   Leo Graiden Stewart, Ahmer Arif, A Conrad Nied, Emma S Spiro, and Kate Starbird

   PACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Jul 2017
8. Using Twitter for demographic and social science research: tools for data collection and processing

   Tyler H McCormick, Hedwig Lee, Nina Cesare, Ali Shojaie, and Emma S Spiro

   Sociological Methods & Research, Jul 2017

2016

1. Rumors at the Speed of Light? Modeling the Rate of Rumor Transmission during Crisis

   Li Zeng, Kate Starbird, and Emma S Spiro

   In In Proceedings of the 49th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS), Jul 2016
2. How Information Snowballs

   Ahmer Arif, Kelley Shanahan, Fang-Ju Chou, Yoanna Dosouto, Kate Starbird, and Emma S Spiro

   In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, Jul 2016
3. Keeping Up with the Tweet-dashians: The Impact of ‘Official’Accounts on Online Rumoring

   Cynthia Andrews, Elodie Fichet, Yuwei Ding, Emma S Spiro, and Kate Starbird

   In In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), Jul 2016
4. Shifting stakes: Understanding the dynamic roles of individuals and organizations in social media protests

   Emma S Spiro, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández

   PloS ONE, Jul 2016
5. Research opportunities at the intersection of social media and survey data

   Emma S Spiro

   Current Opinion in Psychology, Jul 2016
6. The persistence of division: Geography, institutions, and online friendship ties

   Emma S Spiro, Zack W Almquist, and Carter T Butts

   Socius, Jul 2016
7. Could this be true? I think so! Expressed uncertainty in online rumoring

   Kate Starbird, Emma Spiro, Isabelle Edwards, Kaitlyn Zhou, Jim Maddock, and Sindhuja Narasimhan

   In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Jul 2016
8. # unconfirmed: Classifying rumor stance in crisis-related social media messages

   Li Zeng, Kate Starbird, and Emma S Spiro

   In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Jul 2016
9. Networks of gratitude: Structures of thanks and user expectations in workplace appreciation systems

   Emma S Spiro, J Nathan Matias, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández

   In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Jul 2016
10. Spatio-temporal filtering techniques for the detection of disaster-related communication

    Sean M Fitzhugh, C Ben Gibson, Emma S Spiro, and Carter T Butts

    Social Science Research, Jul 2016
11. Thumbs up for privacy?: Differences in online self-disclosure behavior across national cultures

    Philip J Reed, Emma S Spiro, and Carter T Butts

    Social Science Research, Jul 2016
12. Crisis in a Foreign Language: Emergency Services and Limited English Populations.

    Amirah M Majid, and Emma S Spiro

    In Annual Global Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), Jul 2016

2015

1. A cross-hazard analysis of terse message retransmission on Twitter

   Jeannette Sutton, C Ben Gibson, Nolan Edward Phillips, Emma S Spiro, Cedar League, Britta Johnson, Sean M Fitzhugh, and Carter T Butts

   Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jul 2015
2. Using Facebook data to examine culture and self-disclosure behaviors

   Philip J Reed, Emma S Spiro, and Carter T Butts

   iConference 2015 Proceedings, Jul 2015
3. Expressed Uncertainty and Denials as Signals of Online Rumoring

   Kate Starbird, Emma S Spiro, Ahmer Arif, Fang-Ju Chou, and Sindhuja Narasimham

   In Collective Intelligence Conference., Jul 2015

2014

1. Warning tweets: Serial transmission of messages during the warning phase of a disaster event

   Jeannette Sutton, Emma S Spiro, Britta Johnson, Sean Fitzhugh, Ben Gibson, and Carter T Butts

   Information, Communication & Society, Jul 2014

   Bib PDF

   @article{sutton2014warning,
     title = {Warning tweets: Serial transmission of messages during the warning phase of a disaster event},
     author = {Sutton, Jeannette and Spiro, Emma S and Johnson, Britta and Fitzhugh, Sean and Gibson, Ben and Butts, Carter T},
     journal = {Information, Communication \& Society},
     volume = {17},
     number = {6},
     pages = {765--787},
     year = {2014},
     publisher = {Routledge},
     url = {https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118X.2013.862561},
   }

2. Online message amplification in the boston bombing response

   Jeannette N Sutton, Emma S Spiro, Sean Fitzhugh, Britta Johnson, Ben Gibson, and Carter T Butts

   In Proceedings of the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference (ISCRAM), Jul 2014
3. Is anyone out there? Unpacking Q&A hashtags on Twitter

   Jeffrey M Rzeszotarski, Emma S Spiro, Jorge Nathan Matias, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, and Meredith Ringel Morris

   In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Jul 2014
4. Terse message amplification in the Boston bombing response.

   Jeannette N Sutton, Emma S Spiro, Sean M Fitzhugh, Britta Johnson, C Ben Gibson, and Carter T Butts

   In Annual Global Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), Jul 2014
5. Online Information Behaviors During Disaster Events: Roles, Routines, and Reactions

   Harrison T Reeder, Tyler H McCormick, and Emma S Spiro

   Jul 2014

2013

1. Tweeting the spill: Online informal communications, social networks, and conversational microstructures during the Deepwater Horizon oilspill

   Jeannette Sutton, Emma Spiro, Carter Butts, Sean Fitzhugh, Britta Johnson, and Matt Greczek

   International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (IJISCRAM), Jul 2013
2. Extended structures of mediation: Re-examining brokerage in dynamic networks

   Emma S Spiro, Ryan M Acton, and Carter T Butts

   Social Networks, Jul 2013

2012

1. Rumoring during extreme events: A case study of Deepwater Horizon 2010

   Emma S Spiro, Sean Fitzhugh, Jeannette Sutton, Nicole Pierski, Matt Greczek, and Carter T Butts

   In Proceedings of the 4th Annual ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci12), Jul 2012
2. Connected Communications: Network Structures of Official Communications in a Technological Disaster

   Jeannette N Sutton, Emma S Spiro, Britta Johnson, Sean M Fitzhugh, Mathew Greczek, and Carter T Butts

   In In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM). Vancouver, Canada., Jul 2012
3. Waiting for a Retweet: Modeling Waiting Times in Information Propagation

   Emma S Spiro, CA Irvine, Christopher L DuBois, and Carter T Butts

   In 2012 NIPS Workshop of Social Networks and Social Media, Jul 2012

2009

1. The h-index of a graph and its application to dynamic subgraph statistics

   David Eppstein, and Emma S Spiro

   In Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures, Jul 2009