Matthew R. DeVerna

About Matt

Matt is an Informatics PhD candidate at Indiana University studying complex networks and systems. Currently, he works in Dr. Filippo Menczer's research group, Networks and agents Networks, and with the Observatory on Social Media. He is broadly interested in computational social science with a focus on social media dynamics, the spread of information online, and curbing the spread of misinformation.

Research

† equal contribution

Peer-reviewed publications

  1. Rachith Aiyappa, Matthew R. DeVerna, Manita Pote, Bao Tran Truong, Wanying Zhao, David Axelrod, Aria Pessianzadeh, Zoher Kachwala, Munjung Kim, Ozgur Can Seckin, Minsuk Kim, Sunny Gandhi, Amrutha Manikonda, Francesco Pierri, Filippo Menczer, Kai-Cheng Yang

    Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 2023.

  2. Francesco Pierri, Matthew R. DeVerna, Kai-Cheng Yang, David Axelrod, John Bryden, and Filippo Menczer

    Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2023.

  3. Matthew R. DeVerna, Andy Guess, Adam Berinsky, Joshua Tucker, and John Jost

    Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 2022.

  4. Francesco Pierri, Brea L. Perry, Matthew R. DeVerna, Kai-Cheng Yang, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer, and John Bryden

    Scientific Reports. 2022.
    Listed in Scientific Reports Top 100 most downloaded articles of 2022
    Cited in the 2023 Economic Report of the President

  5. Matthew R. DeVerna, Francesco Pierri, Bao Tran Truong, John Bollenbacher, David Axelrod, Niklas Loynes, Christopher Torres-Lugo, Kai-Cheng Yang, Filippo Menczer, and John Bryden

    Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 2021.

Circulated working papers

  • Matthew R. DeVerna, Rachith Aiyappa, Diogo Pacheco, John Bryden, and Filippo Menczer


Ongoing projects

  • ChatGPT fact-checking as a misinformation intervention
  • Reconstructing social media cascades to identify misinformation amplifiers

News

Tool Created an interactive dashboard called Top FIBers that tracks and reports on the top superspreaders of low-credibility information on Twitter and Facebook each month

General During the spring semester I had the pleasure of mentoring Ashley Zeigler as part of Indiana University's Undergraduate Research Opportunities in Computing (UROC) program.

General I will be serving as a guest editor for EPJ Data Science's special issue Computational Approaches for Cyber Social Threats. 💥 Make sure to submit your manuscript! 💥

Talk My work reconstructing social media cascades to identify misinformation amplifiers was accepted for a poster at the International Conference on Computational Social Science!

Talk My work reconstructing social media cascades to identify misinformation amplifiers was accepted for a talk at NetSci!

Award I was recognized with the Informatics Luddy Graduate Service Award ($500)

General Spoke on Indiana Newsdesk about our paper One Year of COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation on Twitter

General Online misinformation is linked to early COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy and refusal was cited in the 2023 Economic Report of the President

General Online misinformation is linked to early COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy and refusal was listed in Scientific Reports Top 100 most downloaded articles of 2022

Publication One year of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on Twitter published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research

General Our application to host the fourth annual Cyber Social Threats workshop at The Web Conference (2023) was accepted!

General Accepted into the Twitter Developer Student Ambassador Program!

Award Very honored to have been awarded the Best Student Extended Abstract award at MISDOOM 2022! 🎉

Talk I spoke about our work at the Truth and Trust Online conference (TTO) today! Check out some pictures the conference shared on Twitter about my talk here.

Talk I spoke about our work at the Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM) today!

General Spoke as a panelist at NYU about the PhD application process for currently applying MA students

Publication Rumors in Retweet: Ideological Asymmetry in the Failure to Correct Misinformation was published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Preprint Identification and characterization of misinformation superspreaders on social media

Preprint One year of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on Twitter

General Had a wonderful conversation on the Misinformation in Science and Society (MISS) YouTube Channel

General Co-organized the third annual Cyber Social Threats workshop at ICWSM

Award Information Disorder Prize Competition (Aspen Tech Policy Hub): Semi-finalist ($5,000)

Talk Invited as a speaker for the Hacking Online Virality event at the University of Minnesota's Learning Informatics Lab

Publication Online misinformation is linked to early COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy and refusal was published in Scientific Reports

Tool Created a Python package called py_misinfo_exposure to calculate a Twitter user's misinformation-exposure score (based on Mosleh and Rand, 2021)

Talk Invited to give a demonstration of osometweet on Twitter's official Twitch channel (Jupyter notebook; this notebook may be outdated if the package is updated).

Tool Released the first version of osometweet — a Python package designed for academics to access Twitter's V2 API

Talk Invited as a speaker for the Knight Research Network Tool Demonstration Day (CoVaxxy)

Talk Invited by the ACHA CoVAC Initiative to speak at the Managing COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation on Campus webinar

Talk Accepted by the Networks Conference to give a presentation about identifying superspreaders of misinformation on Twitter

Talk Invited to give a demonstration of CoVaxxy at ICWSM

Publication CoVaxxy: A Collection of English Language Twitter Posts about COVID-19 Vaccines was published in the ICWSM proceedings

Tool Released CoVaxxy — a web-based data visualization dashboard for visualizing the relationship between (mis)information and vaccine adoption in the United States

Talk Gave a presentation about my research for the Computer and Information Ethics course at Indiana University

General Joined the IU Graduate Professional Student Government as a representative for the Informatics program (PhD)

General Awarded a Knight Research Fellowship

General Began working with the Observatory on Social Media and Dr. Filippo Menczer's research group, Networks and Agents Networks

General Accepted by Indiana University's Informatics PhD program (Complex Networks and Systems track)! 🕺🏻

General Graduated from NYU with General Psychology MA

Award Masters Research Award, New York University ($500)

Tools

Top FIBers image
Top FIBers

The Top FIBers dashboard tracks and reports on the top superspreaders of low-credibility information on Twitter and Facebook each month.

Visit
Midterm 22 image
US Midterm Elections 2022

Multi-platform analysis of information about US 2022 midterm elections.

Visit
Covaxxy map image
CoVaxxy

Visualizing the relationship between COVID-19 vaccine adoption and online (mis)information.

Visit

Contact me

I would love to hear from anyone who is interested in:

  • talking about my research
  • collaborating on a project
  • speaking to me about really anything at all 😎
I will be most accessible via email — mdeverna[at]iu[.]edu — but you can also feel free to message me on Twitter.