SMASH
Social Media Analysis and Support for Humanity
SMASH is a research group at the University of Edinburgh that studies how information, influence and harm spread across social media and large language models. We build and evaluate NLP and machine-learning methods, from detecting misinformation and coordinated influence operations to benchmarking bias and calibration in LLMs.
What We Work On
- Detecting misinformation, propaganda & hate speech with NLP
- Tracking coordinated influence operations & bot networks
- Censorship, content moderation & algorithmic repression
- Digital religion and religious misinformation in the Middle East
- Political polarisation and discourse on social media
- Arabic and multilingual NLP for dialects & low-resource languages
- Bias, calibration & persuasion in large language models
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Our People
Selected Publications
"God says we are right!": The Interplay between Religion and Propaganda on Arabic Social Media
Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · 2026
State & Geopolitical Censorship on Twitter (X): Detection & Impact Analysis of Withheld Content
Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'25) · 2025
Our Collaborators & Funders
