Gianluca Stringhini

Boston University

Improving the Moderation of False Information and Influence Campaigns on Social Media

Wednesday, November 5th 2025, 2pm in room -102, building 50.34

False information thrives on social media, due to the lack of mitigation efforts and recommendation algorithms promoting or demoting content based on opaque criteria. In this talk, I will present my group's efforts in developing automated tools to identify false content and inauthentic accounts. These tools allow us to recommend social media posts that should receive additional information (i.e., soft moderation), to identify false and misleading images posted online, and to detect inauthentic social network accounts that are likely involved in state-sponsored influence campaigns. I will then present our recent work to identify shadowbanning practices by platforms, where certain content is suppressed or promoted without public disclosure.

CV: Gianluca Stringhini is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Boston University, holding affiliate appointments in the Computer Science Department and in the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences. In his research Gianluca applies a data-driven approach to better understand malicious activity on the Internet. Through the collection and analysis of large-scale datasets, he develops novel and robust mitigation techniques to make the Internet a safer place. Over the years, Gianluca has worked on understanding and mitigating malicious activities like malware, online fraud, influence operations, and coordinated online harassment. He received multiple prizes including an NSF CAREER Award in 2020, and his research won multiple Best Paper Awards. Gianluca has published over 160 peer reviewed papers including several in top computer security conferences like IEEE Security and Privacy, CCS, NDSS, and USENIX Security, as well as top measurement, HCI, and Web conferences such as IMC, ICWSM, CHI, CSCW, and WWW.