Protecting the Future of Democracy
Join us in the fight against online disinformation and manipulation
Key Highlights
Our Mission
Our mission is to protect democratic processes by monitoring and analyzing online media to identify and combat malicious interference.
Through cutting-edge research and advanced technological solutions, we strive to ensure the integrity of elections and public discourse.
Our Current Focus
Monitoring Over a Dozen Platforms: Our observatory keeps a vigilant watch over various social media platforms and fringe communities.
Real-time Analysis: We provide real-time insights and documentation of any detected online interference.
Global Impact: Our past discoveries efforts have influenced policies and legislation both in the US and internationally.
Who We Are
This is an initiative led by the USC HUMANS Lab led by Prof. Emilio Ferrara.
Our labs are housed at the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science and at the USC Information Sciences Institute, a unit of the at USC Viterbi.
We are focused on the intersection of Humans & Machines with Networks & Society. Learn more about our team here.
Featured Research
By Marco Minici, Luca Luceri, Federico Cinus, Emilio Ferrara
[from the abstract]… Information Operations pose a significant threat to the integrity of democratic processes, with the potential to influence election-related online discourse. In anticipation of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we present a study aimed at uncovering the digital traces of coordinated IOs on X (formerly Twitter). Using our machine learning framework for detecting online coordination, we analyze a dataset comprising election-related conversations on X from May 2024. This reveals a network of coordinated inauthentic actors, displaying notable similarities in their link-sharing behaviors
Tracking the 2024 US Presidential Election Chatter on Tiktok: A Public Multimodal Dataset
By Gabriela Pinto, Charles Bickham, Tanishq Salkar, Luca Luceri, Emilio Ferrara
This paper documents our release of a large-scale data collection of TikTok posts related to the upcoming 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. Our current data comprises 1.8 million videos published between November 1, 2023, and May 26, 2024. Its exploratory analysis identifies the most common keywords, hashtags, and bigrams in both Spanish and English posts, focusing on the election and the two main Presidential candidates, President Joe Biden and Donald Trump…The dataset is publicly available at this https URL
By Dr. Emilio Ferrara
GenAI technologies might create personalized synthetic realities, tailored to individual desires
These synthetic realities could lead to everyone perceiving the world through their own unique filters
Such personalized views could be subtly influenced by others, altering perceptions of reality.
By Dr. Emilio Ferrara
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) pose significant risks, particularly in the realm of online election interference.
This paper explores the nefarious applications of GenAI, highlighting their potential to disrupt democratic processes through deepfakes, botnets, targeted misinformation campaigns, and synthetic identities.
By Emily Chen
The repository contains a collection of tweets IDs associated with the 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections through 6 months post-inauguration.
By Emily Chen
[from the abstract]…We decided to publicly release a massive-scale, longitudinal dataset of U.S. politics- and election-related tweets. This multilingual dataset that we have been collecting for over one year encompasses hundreds of millions of tweets and tracks all salient U.S. politics trends, actors, and events between 2019 and 2020…
The 2024 Election Integrity Initiative 