phd student @usc/@usc_isi | misinformation, networks, nlp, (hate|fear) speech

Joined August 2023
Replying to @patrickgerard_
This is a new way of thinking about user networks: birds of the same feather don't simply tweet together; they *think* together. Connecting users via latent narratives lets us model with less data and break from arbitrary platform boundaries. Paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2505.21729
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Excited to share that our paper on Density-Guided Response Optimization has been accepted to ACM FAccT! We show that local density in embedding space encoded recoverable community preference signal, and this can be used for alignment without explicit preference annotations
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you are the coolest person
Neurips 2025 was such a blast! We snuck a grand piano into the CreativeAI Track to demo Aria, our pretrained chat-style music model:
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Had a great time last week at the Oxford Internet Institute’s (@oiioxford) Future of Social Media Research workshop! I presented my work on cross-platform discourse networks — moving past platform silos to a unified view of the online information ecosystem.
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Patrick Gerard retweeted
Grateful for the opportunity to speak yesterday at the Oxford Internet Institute during the Future of Social Media Research workshop! I presented Narrative Networks, my system for using transformer models, multilingual embeddings, and network analysis to track ipropaganda!
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✨ Very overdue update: I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in CS at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Fall 2026. I will be recruiting PhD students!! Please help me spread the word! [Thread] 1/n
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Similar trajectory with COVID lab-leak/Fauci narratives—claims about NIH gain-of-function research and intentional virus creation. Telegram ⚪ + Truth Social 🟣 dominate early and throughout Later gains ground on Twitter 🔵 and TikTok 🔴 Very similar pattern :0
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New paper + interactive dashboard on the 2024 US election information ecosystem. Building on the original discourse networks work with @Hans_Hanley, @LucaLuceri, @emilio__ferrara, we can understand+visualize the online landscape as a unified system across platforms.
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When emergence occurs, users tend to have +290% more active cross-platform neighbors discussing the narrative than when it doesn't. This proximity signal makes cross-platform prediction tractable—no diffusion modeling required.
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Take a look for yourself! 🎛️ Dashboard: patrikgerard.github.io/cross… 📄 New Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.09464 🌐My Website here: patrickgerard.co Really curious what patterns you find when exploring the data
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