Professor in the John E. Walker Department of Economics at Clemson University. Disinfo, Pol. Econ. Active in @rotary and @LWV. --Personal Account

Clemson, SC
Joined February 2009
We contributed to the NYT story on Haley Stevens and an India-based content farm: nytimes.com/2026/10/19/busin… | archive.ph/qRpHE As it started gaining traction yesterday, here is some backstory.
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Hundreds of fake accounts. Nearly 40,000 messages. A new BFMI and @ClemsonHub investigation exposes a coordinated network amplifying Aleksandar Vučić and targeting independent media ahead of Serbia’s election. Read our new report, “Double Attack”: bit.ly/double-attack #MediaFreedom #Serbia #ElectionIntegrity
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Excited to announce our second joint report with @BalkanFreeMedia. Here, revealing and analyzing a coordinated inauthentic network supporting the nationalist @sns_srbija in the upcoming election.
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This looks like a recurrence of a network that was shut down by Twitter/Meta a couple years ago, back in a new form. The network amplifies official pro-SNS messaging, attacks opponents, and pushes pro-SNS narratives in the comments of media outlets.
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Patrick Warren retweeted
HAPPENING NOW in downtown Chicago, outside the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the historic center of onion futures trading
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Patrick Warren retweeted
University of Chicago Students to Protest at Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Demand End to Federal Ban on Onion Futures Student-led group For Our Futures will rally Monday morning to call for repeal of the 1958 Onion Futures Act On Monday, October 19, at 8:30 a.m., members of For Our Futures, a student-led organization from @UChicago, will gather outside the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (@CMEGroup) headquarters to demand the repeal of the Onion Futures Act of 1958, a nearly 70-year-old federal law prohibiting futures trading in onions. The Onion Futures Act, enacted following allegations of market manipulation in the 1950s, singled out onions for a prohibition on futures contracts that remains in effect today. For Our Futures is calling on Congress to repeal the ban and restore the ability of onion growers, buyers, and traders to participate in a regulated futures market. Onions remain the only commodity banned from futures trading in the United States. The protest will feature a giant inflatable onion costume, protest signs, and dozens of students, and will take place outside the headquarters of CME Group, one of the world's largest derivatives marketplaces and the historic center of American onion futures trading. DM for details cc: @pointsnfigures1 @CharlesFLehman @matt_levine @nbcchicago @ABC7Chicago @cbsnewschicago @WGNNews @fox32news @WBEZ @Suntimes @BlockClubCHI @chalkbeatCHI @SeanCasten @mansourtarek_
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I'm glad there's not video of my first day in the classroom.
😬 Katie Zacharia's first press briefing was brutally bad 😬 Trump managed to find a press secretary who can barely read, but she does have the number one qualification -- looking like Ivanka Here's a supercut from Zacharia's first briefing, which made Karoline Leavitt seem like Ronald Reagan
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By popular demand: A follow-up thread on Russian bots, Yandex, Cloudflare, MAGA, AfD and "breathing easier" on social media. 1️⃣ We see no "dramatic drop" in traffic of Kremlin-aligned human trolls-for-hire targeting Russian domestic users (which we have been tracking for years).
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Patrick Warren retweeted
No, a Yandex cloud malfunction did not take down disinformation/troll bots. It's a dangerous misconception. This is not how it works, not even technically. After Ukrainian drones hit Yandex data centers, a viral chart showed Russian "bot traffic" collapsing. But those bots are mostly Yandex's own search crawlers, not the info-ops social media accounts. Troll farms hide behind proxies, hijacked devices and Western clouds. They're still operating. Hired influencers are also still around. The "bots went silent" story is misinformation. Believing it is plainly dangerous. It tells people the threat is gone while influence operations keep going. Ahead of elections that complacency is what they may count on.
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Excited to work on this report with @BalkanFreeMedia. BOLO for future collaborations on upcoming electionin the region.
New BFMI and Clemson University Media Forensics Hub research reveals how coordinated inauthentic behaviour shaped the online debate around Bosnia and Herzegovina’s 2026 general election. False Chorus identifies a coordinated network supporting the SNSD across X and Facebook, using linked personas, small “pods” of accounts, and coordinated commenting to amplify narratives, attack opponents, and create the appearance of wider grassroots support. The report also shows how these accounts interacted with major media and political pages, pointing to a broader hybrid threat where online manipulation, captured or aligned media, and regulatory gaps reinforce one another. Read the full report: bit.ly/3VsG9yZ #MediaFreedom #Disinformation #BosniaAndHerzegovina #WesternBalkans #FalseChorus
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Political Science job candidates with an interest in online inauthenticity? Come to Clemson and collaborate with the Hub! apply.interfolio.com/194509
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Patrick Warren retweeted
As far as I can tell, Beamer/SC has blown more 16+ point leads since the beginning of last season than the rest of the SEC combined. And they’ve done it every time they’ve gotten such a lead.
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Patrick Warren retweeted
1.5 years later, ODNI, one of the FOIAble agencies in the chat, finally responded by releasing unredacted images of the chat to me. DOD responded last week (end of FY, so agencies try to make FOIA stats look better) that it had "no dox." Still wating for State CIA and Treasury
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Patrick Warren retweeted
I think we know now who concocted the Single Hawk Theory
My girlfriend when we’re having dinner with her parents and I have three cocktails and start talking in a gay accent:
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Patrick Warren retweeted
I recently asked ChatGPT to improve the efficiency of some simulations from a few years ago. To my amazement, its code ran in a few seconds instead of 3 hours. It turns out it went into the GitHub repository, downloaded my final results, and used it as a starting guess in the optimization. I then tried running it on a new set of parameters. It’s been 15 hours.
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Benny Johnson was paid by the Russians in the last election. Who's paying him this time?
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