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 Truth & Trust Online, using computational approaches to understand and counter social media manipulation, deepfakes, online Human-Human & Human-AI interactions and the epistemic authority of LLMs. I am broadly interested in Computational Social Science and Natural Language Processing.
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.
I currently teach Understanding Society with Big Data: Computational Social Science (CSS), Evidence, Argument and Persuasion in a Digital Age, and Text Technologies in Data Science.
Team
- Yusuf Mücahit Çetinkaya (Postdoc)
- Riyadh Alnasser (PhDc)
- Onat Özdemir (PhDc)
- Dhyey Mehta (Undergrad)
Publications
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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#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
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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
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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
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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
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The Impact of Data Persistence Bias on Social Media Studies
Tuğrulcan Elmas
15th ACM Web Science Conference WebSci 2023. Full Paper
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The Role of Compromised Accounts in Social Media Manipulation
Tuğrulcan Elmas Ph.D. Thesis
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Misleading Repurposing on Twitter
Tuğrulcan Elmas, Rebekah Overdorf, Karl Aberer
17th International Conference On Web And Social Media ICWSM 2023. Full Paper
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Opinion Mining from YouTube Captions Using ChatGPT: A Case Study of Street Interviews Polling the 2023 Turkish Elections
İlker Gül, Tuğrulcan Elmas Preprint
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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
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 Analysis 2018
- Introduction à la Programmation 2019
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)