Tuğrulcan Elmas

I’m an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. I am a co-director of the Social Media Analysis and Support for Humanity (SMASH) group. My research focuses on computational approaches to understand and counter social media manipulation. I use a combination of security, data science and natural language processing methods in my research.

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.

Team

• Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya (Postdoc)
• 3 PhDcs to join in September 2025

Publications

• 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

• 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.
  [PDF] Full Paper

• 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.
  [PDF] Full Paper

• 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.
  [PDF] Full Paper

• 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).
  [PDF] Workshop Paper

• #TeamFollowBack - Detection and Analysis of Follow Back Accounts
  Tuğrulcan Elmas, Mathis Randl, Youssef Attia
  18th International Conference On Web And Social Media ICWSM 2024.
  [PDF] Full Paper

• 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.
  [PDF] Full Paper

• 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.
  [PDF] [Data] Workshop Paper

• 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).
  [PDF] [Data] Workshop Paper

• The Impact of Data Persistence Bias on Social Media Studies
  Tuğrulcan Elmas
  15th ACM Web Science Conference WebSci 2023.
  [PDF] [Data] Full Paper

• The Role of Compromised Accounts in Social Media Manipulation
  Tuğrulcan Elmas
  [PDF] Ph.D. Thesis

• Misleading Repurposing on Twitter
  Tuğrulcan Elmas, Rebekah Overdorf, Karl Aberer
  17th International Conference On Web And Social Media ICWSM 2023.
  [PDF] Full Paper

• 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.
  [PDF] [Data] Full Paper

• 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.
  [PDF] [Code] Full Paper
  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.
  [PDF] [Data] Dataset Paper

• 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.
  [PDF] Workshop Paper

• 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).
  [PDF] Workshop Paper

Talks

• Invited Teaching Seminar at John Hopkins SAIS Conflicts and Cultures in Contemporary Turkey course by Lisel Hintz
• Panelist at AMLD 2025, Lausanne, Switzerland
• Speaker & Panelist at Scotsman Data Conference 2024, Edinburgh, UK
• Speaker & Panelist at Middle East Conference 2024, Doha, Qatar

Preprints

• State & Geopolitical Censorship on Twitter (X): Detection & Impact Analysis of Withheld Content
• Opinion Mining from YouTube Captions Using ChatGPT: A Case Study of Street Interviews Polling the 2023 Turkish Elections

Teaching

• Computational Social Science 2026-
• Evidence, Argument and Persuasion in Digital Age 2025-
• Text Technologies in Data Science 2024-
• Introduction to Object Oriented Programming 2025-
• Distributed Information Systems 2018-2021
• Applied Data Science 2018
• Introduction à la Programmation 2019

Services

• 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
• 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)
• Developer of @DisinfoNews - A Twitter Bot to share disinformation related tweets (https://twitter.com/DisinfoNews)

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