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’m also interested in understanding and describing humans’ interactions with each other on social media platforms and with the platforms themselves. I use a combination of security, data science and computational social science methods to conduct my research.
Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Indiana University at Bloomington working with Prof. Dr. Filippo Menczer and Prof. Dr. Alessandro Flammini at Observatory on Social Media (OSOME). I received my Ph.D. from EPFL, under supervision of Prof. Dr. Karl Aberer in 2022, and my B.S. from Bilkent University in 2017, with a major in Computer Science and a minor in Philosophy.
If you would like to pursue a PhD with me, feel free to get in touch.
#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 is coming soon] 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
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