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SUMMARY:Tracking the Takes and Trajectories of News Narratives from Trustw
 orthy and Worrisome Websites - Hans Hanley\, Stanford University
DTSTART:20241108T140000Z
DTEND:20241108T150000Z
UID:TALK221590@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Tina Marjanov
DESCRIPTION:Uncovering and understanding how influence networks push propa
 ganda and disinformation within the wider news ecosystem remains a difficu
 lt challenge that requires tracking and characterizing how narratives spre
 ad across thousands of fringe and mainstream news websites. Using 18 month
 s of daily news article scrapes from 1\,003 unreliable news (e.g. twisted.
 news)\, 1\,012 mixed-reliability websites (e.g.\, theepochtimes.com)\, and
  2\,061 reliable news websites (e.g.\, washingtonpost.com)\, the finetuned
  Matryoshka embedding\, hierarchical Reciprocal Nearest Neighboring cluste
 ring\, and zero-shot stance detection\, we isolate and quantify the relati
 onships between unreliable\, mixed-reliability\, and reliable news outlets
 . We show that by utilizing the stances of website articles toward particu
 lar entities and network inference-based tools\, we can track slanted prop
 aganda networks and identify the most influential websites in spreading pa
 rticular attitudes\, not only on fringe websites but within the broader me
 dia ecosystem\, helping the reporting and fact-checking of propaganda and 
 disinformation. \n\nBio: Hans is a rising 5th year Ph.D. student at Stanfo
 rd University supervised by Professor Zakir Durumeric and researching in t
 he Empirical Security Research Group. His research focuses on natural lang
 uage processing\, computer security\, and the spread of misinformation onl
 ine. His research is supported by the Meta/Facebook Ph.D. Research Fellows
 hip and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Hans
  completed two Masters’ degrees in Computer Science and in Statistics wi
 th the Daniel M. Sachs Scholarship at the University of Oxford. Hans compl
 eted his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at Princeton Unive
 rsity.\n\nZoom link:\nhttps://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83115049986?pwd=6W5bzFb4
 9HcCbWqz6HR3tRhpVxubTb.1\n
LOCATION:Webinar & FW26\, Computer Laboratory\, William Gates Building.
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