I’m an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where I co-direct the Social Media Analysis and Support for Humanity (SMASH) group. My research is on AI & Social Media: how to detect fake / AI-generated media at scale, how LLMs claim epistemic authority and handle disagreements with users, and how multi-agent AI systems can automate scientific work and education. I am broadly interested in Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science.
I teach Computational Social Science and Text Technologies in Data Science, supervise a lab of seven, and explain AI to a general audience on my Turkish YouTube channel.
Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Indiana University at Bloomington’s Observatory on Social Media (OSOME). I received my Ph.D. from EPFL in 2022, and my B.S. from Bilkent University in 2017, with a major in Computer Science and a minor in Philosophy. I also spent a semester at the National University of Singapore.
Recent News
- Program Co-Chair, International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2027
- Awarded Generative AI Lab Seed Funding for Can LLMs Give Relationship Advice?, with Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya — building the first large-scale, theory-grounded dataset of online relationship narratives and AI-generated advice, and benchmarking how well LLMs understand complex relational problems
- Book chapter published: An Optimistic Outlook on Teaching, Learning and Assessment for Coding With the Emergence of Generative AI
- Understanding Society with Big Data: Computational Social Science nominated for a University of Edinburgh Teaching Award
Teaching
- Understanding Society with Big Data: Computational Social Science 2026– — Open Course Materials
- Text Technologies in Data Science 2024–
- Evidence, Argument and Persuasion in a Digital Age 2025–2026
- Introduction to Object Oriented Programming 2025
- Distributed Information Systems, EPFL, 2018–2021
- Applied Data Analysis, EPFL, 2018
- Introduction à la Programmation, EPFL, 2019
Team
- Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya (Postdoc)
- Riyadh Alnasser (PhDc)
- Onat Özdemir (PhDc)
- Sholpan Bolatzhanova (PhDc)
- Dhyey Mehta (Undergrad)
- Serdar Kara (Undergrad)
- Alp Eren Köken (Undergrad)
Publications
-
Online Safety Regulation Increases Privacy Risk: Evidence from the UK Online Safety Act
Dhyey Mehta, Eldar Jalilzade, Maksim Kalameyets, Rebecca Owens, Marc Juarez, Stergios Aidinlis, Lei Shi, Tuğrulcan Elmas Preprint
PDF -
How AI Models Manage Epistemic Authority: A Taxonomy and Comparative Analysis of Responses to User Disagreement
Riyadh Alnasser, Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya, Sumin Zhao, Tuğrulcan Elmas Preprint -
TRACE-Inset: Unified Whole-Image and Partial-Match Image Retrieval with Vision-Language Embeddings
Onat Özdemir, Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya, Tuğrulcan Elmas Preprint -
An Optimistic Outlook on Teaching, Learning and Assessment for Coding With the Emergence of Generative AI
Steven Watterson, Laila Dabab Nahas, Tuğrulcan Elmas, Hebatallah Shoukry, Ozan Evkaya
In Teaching Programming Across Disciplines. Book Chapter
Chapter -
ChatGPT vs Teachers vs Students: Large-Scale Analysis of Generative AI Discourse in Education Communities on Reddit
Pelin Yüce, Xiangruo Dai, Rebecca Owens, Tuğrulcan Elmas
21st International Conference On Web And Social Media ICWSM 2027. Full Paper
PDF - Evaluating Image Forgery Detection and Propaganda in Manipulated Images of the Russian Trolls Campaign
Basem Mohammed, Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya, Tuğrulcan Elmas
IEEE Internet Computing 2026. Journal Paper
PDF Generative AI tools have increased the scale and accessibility of deceptive image creation, but the robustness of existing forgery detection methods under emerging editing tools and real-world social media conditions remains uncertain. This study evaluates state-of-the-art image forgery detectors on recent benchmarks and applies the strongest model to a historical influence-campaign case study: Russian troll activity during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We find that TruFor is the most consistent detector across legacy and recent datasets, but that its performance degrades on edits produced by advanced tools such as Nano Banana. We then deploy a multimodal pipeline combining forgery localization, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), face recognition, and visual-language-model-based annotation to characterize manipulated images in the campaign. Our analysis suggests that Russian troll accounts relied primarily on low-effort meme-style edits and ridicule-oriented reputation attacks, disproportionately targeting prominent U.S. political figures including Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.TL;DR: TruFor is the most consistent image-forgery detector but degrades on edits from tools like Nano Banana — applied to Russian troll images from 2016, it shows low-effort meme edits mainly targeted Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama
-
Humans Cannot Detect AI-Generated Media But Communities May — For Now: Collaborative AI Detection in r/RealOrAI on Reddit
Tuğrulcan Elmas Preprint
PDF -
Israel-Hamas War on X: A Case Study of Coordinated Campaigns and Information Integrity
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Filipi Nascimento Silva, Manita Pote, Priyanka Dey, Keng-Chi Chang, Jinyi Ye, Luca Luceri, Cody Buntain, Emilio Ferrara, Alessandro Flammini, Fil Menczer Preprint
PDF -
Gendered Communication Patterns of Political Elites on Truth Social
Tom Bidewell, Artemis Deligianni, Tuğrulcan Elmas, Clare Llewellyn, Bjorn Ross
18th ACM Web Science Conference WebSci 2026. Full Paper
PDF -
Grievance Politics vs. Policy Debates: A Cross-Platform Analysis of Conservative Discourse on Truth Social and Reddit
Yining Wang, Alhasan Abdellatif, Artemis Deligianni, Hannah Hok, Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya, Tuğrulcan Elmas
20th International Conference On Web And Social Media ICWSM 2026. Full Paper
PDF -
State & Geopolitical Censorship on Twitter (X): Detection & Impact Analysis of Withheld Content
Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya, Tuğrulcan Elmas
The Conference on Information and Knowledge Management CIKM 2025. Short Paper
PDF -
Density-aware Walks for Coordinated Campaign Detection
Atul Anand Gopalakrishnan, Jakir Hossain, Tuğrulcan Elmas, Ahmet Erdem Sariyuce
European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases ECML PKDD 2025. Full Paper
PDF -
Cross-Partisan Interactions on Social Media
Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya, Vahid Ghafouri, Jose Such, Guillermo Suarez Tangil, Tuğrulcan Elmas
19th International Conference On Web And Social Media ICWSM 2025. Full Paper
PDF -
Large Engagement Networks for Classifying Coordinated Campaigns and Organic Twitter Trends
Atul Anand Gopalakrishnan, Jakir Hossain, Tuğrulcan Elmas, Ahmet Erdem Sariyuce
19th International Conference On Web And Social Media ICWSM 2025. Full Paper
PDF -
Coordinated Reply Attacks in Influence Operations: Characterization and Detection
Manita Pote, Tuğrulcan Elmas, Alessandro Flammini, Fil Menczer
19th International Conference On Web And Social Media ICWSM 2025. Full Paper
PDF -
Toxic Synergy Between Hate Speech and Fake News Exposure
Munjung Kim, Tuğrulcan Elmas, Filippo Menczer
International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats CySoc 2024 (colocated with ICWSM 2024). Workshop Paper
PDF -
#TeamFollowBack - Detection and Analysis of Follow Back Accounts
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Mathis Randl, Youssef Attia
18th International Conference On Web And Social Media ICWSM 2024. Full Paper
PDF -
Shorts vs. Regular Videos on YouTube: A Comparative Analysis of User Engagement and Content Creation Trends
Caroline Violot, Tuğrulcan Elmas, Igor Bilogrevic, Mathias Humbert
16th ACM Web Science Conference WebSci 2024. Full Paper
PDF -
Measuring and Detecting Virality on Social Media: The Case of Twitter’s Viral Tweets Topic
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Selim Stephane, Célia Houssiaux
ACM Web Conference 2023 WebConf 2023. Workshop Paper
PDF Data -
Analyzing Activity and Suspension Patterns of Twitter Bots Attacking Turkish Twitter Trends by a Longitudinal Dataset
Tuğrulcan Elmas
International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats CySoc 2023 (colocated with WebConf 2023). Workshop Paper
PDF Data -
The Impact of Data Persistence Bias on Social Media Studies
Tuğrulcan Elmas
15th ACM Web Science Conference WebSci 2023. Full Paper
PDF Data - The Role of Compromised Accounts in Social Media Manipulation
Tuğrulcan Elmas Ph.D. Thesis
PDF In recent years there has been a marked increase in disinformation, including as part of a strategy of so-called hybrid warfare. Adversaries not only directly spread misleading content but manipulate social media by employing sophisticated techniques that exploit platform vulnerabilities and avoid detection. It is getting increasingly important to analyze social media manipulation to better understand, detect, and defend public dialogue against it. In this thesis, the author contributes to the research on social media manipulation by describing and analyzing how adversaries employ compromised social media accounts. The thesis provides a background of social media by describing the mechanisms and the influence of the platforms to better understand why adversaries target them, gives a detailed overview of social media manipulation and techniques to detect and counter it, and discusses three main contributions: 1) an extensive analysis of an attack on social media algorithms using compromised accounts, 2) a study of the implications of compromised bots for bot research through the characterization of retweet bots, and 3) a detection method to find compromised accounts that are later repurposed.TL;DR: Adversaries hijack compromised social media accounts to attack trending algorithms, pose as retweet bots, and get repurposed after periods of dormancy — this thesis details detection methods for each tactic
-
Misleading Repurposing on Twitter
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Rebekah Overdorf, Karl Aberer
17th International Conference On Web And Social Media ICWSM 2023. Full Paper
PDF -
Characterizing Retweet Bots: The Case of Black Market Accounts
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Rebekah Overdorf, Karl Aberer
16th International Conference On Web And Social Media ICWSM 2022. Full Paper
PDF Data -
Ephemeral Astroturfing Attacks: The Case of Fake Twitter Trends
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Rebekah Overdorf, Ahmed Furkan Özkalay, Karl Aberer
2021 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Euro S&P 2021. Full Paper
PDF Code
Featured in The Next Web, ACM Technews, Le Temps, Mashable ME, Atlantic, Anadolu Agency, Milliyet, Hacker News, Ekşi Sözlük, Countless Others -
WayPop Machine: A Wayback Machine to Investigate Popularity and Root Out Trolls
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Thomas Romain Ibanez, Alexandre Hutter, Rebekah Overdorf, Karl Aberer
International Symposium on Foundations of Open Source Intelligence and Security Informatics FOSINT-SI 2022 (colocated with ASONAM 2022). Workshop Paper -
A Dataset of State-Censored Tweets
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Rebekah Overdorf, Karl Aberer
15th International Conference On Web And Social Media ICWSM 2021. Dataset Paper
PDF Data -
Tactical Reframing of Disinformation Campaigns Against the Istanbul Convention
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Rebekah Overdorf, Karl Aberer
Data for the Welbeing of Most Vulnerable colocated with ICWSM 2021. Workshop Paper
PDF -
Can Celebrities Burst Your Bubble
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Kristina Hardi, Rebekah Overdorf, Karl Aberer
Innovative Ideas in Data Science (colocated with WebConf 2020).
MISINFO (colocated with WebConf 2021). Workshop Paper
PDF - Opinion Mining from YouTube Captions Using ChatGPT: A Case Study of Street Interviews Polling the 2023 Turkish Elections
İlker Gül, Tuğrulcan Elmas Preprint
PDF
Talks
- Invited Teaching Seminar at John Hopkins SAIS Conflicts and Cultures in Contemporary Turkey course by Lisel Hintz
- Panelist, “Unmasking the Digital Deception: Defending Against DeepFakes and Disinformation Attacks” — Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD) 2025, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
- Panelist, AIM Lab Roundtable Discussion
- Invited speaker, Bilkent AI Tech Talks — Artificial Intelligence and Social Media, Bilkent University
- Speaker & Panelist at Scotsman Data Conference 2024, Edinburgh, UK
- Speaker & Panelist at Middle East Conference 2024, Doha, Qatar
Services
- Advise BBC fact-checkers on verifying suspected AI-generated images and video
- Program Co-Chair: International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2027
- Generative AI Lab Fellow, University of Edinburgh
- Organiser: SICSS Edinburgh 2025
- Committee Member, University of Edinburgh: Ethics Committee, Teaching Committee, Board of Studies
- PC Member: WebSci, ICWSM, CySoc
- Conference Reviewer: Euro S&P 2021, EDBT 2021, ICDE 2020, IEEE CIC 2019, CIKM 2019, WISE 2018, IEEE Big Data 2018
- Journal Reviewer: Turkish Journal Of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, Online Social Networks and Media, EPJ Data Science, PeerJ, OSNEM
Media
- Interviewed by Ali Tarakçı
- Interviewed by Cüneyt Özdemir
- Guest at Dijital Hayat / TRT Radyo
- Interviews while being the president of Turquia1912
- Prompted the Short Film This AI Makes You Think 2X Faster
- Directed the Short Film Lemongrass
- Turkish Youtube Channel Dr. Tuğrulcan Elmas
Misc
- Deanonimized author of the popular Turkish blog azimliyazar.blogspot.com (4+ million views)
- President of Switzerland Turkish Student Association (2019-2021)
- Bilkent University Ultimate Frisbee Team (2015-2017) - Fencing Team (2017) - Orienteering Team (2015)