Network Manipulation

In this episode we talk with Manita Pote, a PhD student at Indiana University Bloomington, specializing in online trust and safety, with a focus on detecting coordinated manipulation campaigns on social media.

Key insights include how coordinated reply attacks target influential figures like journalists and politicians, how machine learning models can detect these inauthentic campaigns using structural and behavioral features, and how deletion patterns reveal efforts to evade moderation or manipulate engagement metrics.

**Follow our guest**

[X/Twitter](https://x.com/manitapote)<br /> [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ukS-vPcAAAAJ&hl=en)

**Papers in focus**<br /> [Coordinated Reply Attacks in Influence Operations: Characterization and Detection ,2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19272)<br /> [Manipulating Twitter through Deletions,2022](https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19355)

Guest

Manita Pote: Hi, I’m Manita Pote. I am a PhD student in Informatics, Complex Networks and System at Indiana University, Bloomington supervised by Prof. Fil Menczer, Prof. Alessandro Flammini and Prof. Zoran Tiganj. My research interests lie in social media data mining, computational social science, network science to understand abusive user behavior for platform integrity and in developing machine learning/deep learning tools to curb those behaviors. I primarily focus on the detection of inauthentic coordination, identifying coordinated efforts and strategies used in influence operations campaigns on social networks.