About

Cody Buntain is an Assistant Professor at the College of Information. His research focus and key contributions are not detailed in the provided page text. He is associated with AIM (Algorithms, Information, and Management) and is involved in activities such as course development, research, and training to enhance career readiness. He is also engaged in collaborative efforts with AIM and is part of the AIM Fellows and Research Seed Award Program. Further information about his specific research interests or background is not included in the provided content.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Machine Learning
• World Wide Web
• Social Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• History
• Engineering
• Media studies
• Business
• Advertising
• Data science
• Law

Selected publications

• Understanding the Gap Between Stated and Revealed Preferences in News Curation: A Study of Young Adult Social Media Users

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-04-13

  preprintOpen access

  Social media feed algorithms infer user preferences from their past behaviors. Yet what drives engagement often diverges from what users value. We examine this gap between stated preferences (what users say they prefer) and revealed preferences (what their behavior suggests they prefer) among young adults, a group deeply embedded in algorithmically mediated environments. Using a mixed-methods approach combining surveys and interviews with feed curation activities, we investigate: what gaps exist between stated and revealed preferences; how users make sense of these gaps; what values users believe should guide algorithmic curation; and how systems might reflect those values. Participants often found themselves engaging with low-quality content they did not endorse, despite wanting high-quality information. When asked to curate an ideal social media news feed for a hypothetical persona, participants created feeds they considered more satisfying and higher in quality by prioritizing values such as accuracy and diversity. In doing so, they navigated trade-offs between different values, factoring in social relationships and context surrounding the persona. These findings suggest that feed curation is a socially situated process of judging what should be visible and appropriate in shared information spaces. Based on these insights, we offer design directions for bridging the gap between stated and revealed preferences.

  PublisherDOI

• Understanding the Gap Between Stated and Revealed Preferences in News Curation: A Study of Young Adult Social Media Users

  ArXiv.org · 2026-04-13

  articleOpen access

  Social media feed algorithms infer user preferences from their past behaviors. Yet what drives engagement often diverges from what users value. We examine this gap between stated preferences (what users say they prefer) and revealed preferences (what their behavior suggests they prefer) among young adults, a group deeply embedded in algorithmically mediated environments. Using a mixed-methods approach combining surveys and interviews with feed curation activities, we investigate: what gaps exist between stated and revealed preferences; how users make sense of these gaps; what values users believe should guide algorithmic curation; and how systems might reflect those values. Participants often found themselves engaging with low-quality content they did not endorse, despite wanting high-quality information. When asked to curate an ideal social media news feed for a hypothetical persona, participants created feeds they considered more satisfying and higher in quality by prioritizing values such as accuracy and diversity. In doing so, they navigated trade-offs between different values, factoring in social relationships and context surrounding the persona. These findings suggest that feed curation is a socially situated process of judging what should be visible and appropriate in shared information spaces. Based on these insights, we offer design directions for bridging the gap between stated and revealed preferences.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Israel-Hamas War on X: A Case Study of Coordinated Campaigns and Information Integrity

  ArXiv.org · 2026-04-12

  articleOpen access

  Coordinated campaigns on social media play a critical role in shaping crisis information environments, particularly during the onset of conflicts when uncertainty is high and verified information is scarce. We study the interplay between coordinated campaigns and information integrity through a case study of the 2023 Israel-Hamas War on Twitter (X). We analyze 4.5~million tweets and employ established coordination detection methods to identify 11 coordinated groups involving 541 accounts. We characterize these groups through a multimodal analysis that includes topics, account amplification, toxicity, emotional tone, visual themes, and misleading claims. Our analysis reveal that coordinated campaigns rely predominantly on low-complexity tactics, such as retweet amplification and copy-paste diffusion, and promote distinct narratives consistent with a fragmented manipulation landscape, without centralized control. Widely amplified misleading claims concentrate within just three of the identified coordinated groups; the remaining groups primarily engage in advocacy, religious solidarity, or humanitarian mobilization. Claim-level integrity, toxicity, and emotional signals are mutually uncorrelated: no single behavioral signal is a reliable proxy for the others. Targeting the most prolific spreaders of misleading content for moderation would be effective in reducing such content. However, targeting prolific amplifiers in general would not achieve the same mitigation effect. These findings suggest that evaluating coordination structures jointly with their specific content footprints is needed to effectively prioritize moderation interventions.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Israel-Hamas War on X: A Case Study of Coordinated Campaigns and Information Integrity

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-04-12

  preprintOpen access

  Coordinated campaigns on social media play a critical role in shaping crisis information environments, particularly during the onset of conflicts when uncertainty is high and verified information is scarce. We study the interplay between coordinated campaigns and information integrity through a case study of the 2023 Israel-Hamas War on Twitter (X). We analyze 4.5~million tweets and employ established coordination detection methods to identify 11 coordinated groups involving 541 accounts. We characterize these groups through a multimodal analysis that includes topics, account amplification, toxicity, emotional tone, visual themes, and misleading claims. Our analysis reveal that coordinated campaigns rely predominantly on low-complexity tactics, such as retweet amplification and copy-paste diffusion, and promote distinct narratives consistent with a fragmented manipulation landscape, without centralized control. Widely amplified misleading claims concentrate within just three of the identified coordinated groups; the remaining groups primarily engage in advocacy, religious solidarity, or humanitarian mobilization. Claim-level integrity, toxicity, and emotional signals are mutually uncorrelated: no single behavioral signal is a reliable proxy for the others. Targeting the most prolific spreaders of misleading content for moderation would be effective in reducing such content. However, targeting prolific amplifiers in general would not achieve the same mitigation effect. These findings suggest that evaluating coordination structures jointly with their specific content footprints is needed to effectively prioritize moderation interventions.

  PublisherDOI

• Supply and Demand on Alt-Tech Social Media: A Case Study of BitChute

  Computational Communication Research · 2025-04-08 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  As media platforms continue to develop content moderation policies, alternative platforms have emerged as safe havens for deplatformed content. As these alternatives to major media platforms grow, the importance of understanding their role in the media ecosystem grows too. In this paper, we perform a longitudinal study of the content dynamics of one such alternative media platform, BitChute. BitChute is an alternative video-hosting site similar to YouTube. We first theorize what technological affordances may drive the supply and demand of content on BitChute. We then test those theories through an analysis of 6,363,596 videos from 82,162 channels, which were viewed 2,868,117,905 times, over 54 months. We find that BitChute’s minimal content moderation drives much of the content supply and demand. Videos which were more offensive, certain, and covered commonly deplatformed topics were most popular. In particular, we find that BitChute fills a demand gap created by moderation policies on major media platforms around COVID-19 and - to a lesser extent - elections fraud. The most popular videos on the platform were re-uploaded videos that were banned by YouTube and Facebook. As a whole, our results suggest that BitChute’s current role is less as a town square and more as a backup for deplatformed video content.

  PublisherDOI

• Post-January 6 deplatforming shows long-term effects on ideological polarization among Twitter users

  PNAS Nexus · 2025-10-22 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This study examines audience response to Twitter's "Great Deplatforming" following the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Using a survey of Twitter users from the 2020 US election, we test whether Twitter's deplatforming coincides with significant changes in respondents' behavior, operationalized using individuals' posting frequency and ideological lean-measured daily via a news-sharing metric we validate. To control for exogenous changes in the information environment, we pair Twitter respondents with Reddit accounts that exhibit similar pre-event behavior. Results indicate a shift in Twitter's ideological landscape: Respondents become more extreme, and polarization between liberals and conservatives intensifies as ideologically extreme users move further from the center. As the Great Deplatforming recedes, our Twitter users trend toward the center, suggesting that, while the platform experiences an immediate shock, it ultimately undergoes a long-term moderating effect. Importantly, these effects do not appear on Reddit, which instead exhibits an immediate reduction in ideological extremity following January 6th and sees no changes in longer-term trends. We also do not find evidence of a uniform flight from Twitter; only conservative-leaning respondents are significantly less likely to remain active. While results show ideologically extreme Twitter accounts experience some suppressive effect in activity, these effects seem specific to the most extreme actors, as decreasing trends among middle-of-the-road actors are present in both Twitter and Reddit. Taken together, while Twitter did experience a significant increase in the level of polarization and ideological extremity, the long-term trend appears to be one of moderation, an effect absent from Reddit.

  PublisherDOI

• Engage and Mobilize! Understanding Evolving Patterns of Social Media Usage in Emergency Management

  ArXiv.org · 2025-01-26

  preprintOpen access

  The work of Emergency Management (EM) agencies requires timely collection of relevant data to inform decision-making for operations and public communication before, during, and after a disaster. However, the limited human resources available to deploy for field data collection is a persistent problem for EM agencies. Thus, many of these agencies have started leveraging social media as a supplemental data source and a new venue to engage with the public. While prior research has analyzed the potential benefits and attitudes of practitioners and the public when leveraging social media during disasters, a gap exists in the critical analysis of the actual practices and uses of social media among EM agencies, across both geographical regions and phases of the EM lifecycle - typically mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. In this paper, we conduct a mixed-method analysis to update and fill this gap on how EM practitioners in the U.S. and Europe use social media, building on a survey study of about 150 professionals and a follow-up interview study with 11 participants. The results indicate that using social media is no longer a non-traditional practice in operational and informational processes for the decision-making of EM agencies working at both the local level (e.g., county or town) and non-local level (e.g., state/province, federal/national) for emergency management. Especially, the practitioners affiliated with agencies working at the local level have a very high perceived value of social media for situational awareness (e.g., analyzing disaster extent and impact) and public communication (e.g., disseminating timely information and correcting errors in crisis coverage). We conclude with the policy, technological, and socio-technical needs to design future social media analytics systems to support the work of EM agencies in such communication including the applications of AI.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Emotional Appeals in the 2020 #SaveTheChildren Campaign: A Multi-Platform Study of Online Engagement in QAnon Messaging

  2025-05-20 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This study examines how emotional appeals in content related to the #SaveTheChildren campaigns are associated with user engagement across Parler, Gab, Twitter, and Facebook.As emotional appeals are key dimensions in QAnon messaging and #SaveTheChildren in particular, we analyze #SaveTheChildren-related content posted to Parler, Gab, Twitter, and Facebook.Matching content from Parler to posts on other platforms, we first conducted exploratory analyses to understand the emotional landscape and engagement patterns across these platforms.We then tested the consistency in relationships between emotional cues and the engagement these matched #SaveTheChildren posts received across the four platforms.This study found distinct platform-specific patterns: surprise drove engagement on Twitter and Parler, joy was positively associated with engagement only on Facebook, disgust was a mobilizing emotion on Gab, and fear did not mobilize engagement on fringe platforms.Our findings show that the role of emotions in political processes is highly context-dependent, varying significantly across different social media ecosystems, emphasizing the need for cross-platform studies in future research on digital political engagement.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Call to Arms: Automated Methods for Identifying Weapons in Social Media Analysis of Conflict Zones

  2025-05-19

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>Engage</i> and <i>Mobilize!</i> Understanding Evolving Patterns of Social Media Usage in Emergency Management

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025-05-02 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  The work of Emergency Management (EM) agencies requires timely collection of relevant data to inform decision-making for operations and public communication before, during, and after a disaster. However, the limited human resources available to deploy for field data collection is a persistent problem for EM agencies. Thus, over the last decade, many of these agencies have started leveraging social media as a supplemental data source and a new venue to engage with the public. Such uses present both opportunities and challenges. While prior research has analyzed the potential benefits and attitudes of practitioners and the public when leveraging social media during disasters, a gap exists in the critical analysis of the actual practices and uses of social media among EM agencies, across both geographical regions and phases of the EM lifecycle - typically mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. In this paper, we conduct a mixed-method analysis to update and fill this gap on how EM practitioners in the U.S. and Europe use social media, building on a survey study of about 150 professionals and a follow-up interview study with 11 participants. The results indicate that using social media is no longer a non-traditional practice in operational and informational processes for the decision-making of EM agencies working at both the local level (e.g., county or town) and non-local level (e.g., state/province, federal/national) for emergency management. Especially, the practitioners affiliated with agencies working at the local level have a very high perceived value of social media for situational awareness (e.g., analyzing disaster extent and impact) and public communication (e.g., disseminating timely information and correcting errors in crisis coverage). Further, practitioners now engage with the public during the preparedness phase to mobilize them during the response phase. We present a model to understand the current practices of communication between agencies and the public, as well as among practitioners while leveraging social media. We also discuss novel challenges, including public fragmentation caused by the increasing use of multiple social media platforms, information integrity, and social listening expectations. We conclude with the policy, technological, and socio-technical needs to design future social media analytics systems to support the work of EM agencies in such communication.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jennifer Golbeck

  University of Maryland, College Park

  18 shared

• Milo Z. Trujillo

  12 shared

• Maurício Gruppi

  10 shared

• Benjamin D. Horne

  9 shared

• Richard McCreadie

  University of Glasgow

  8 shared

• Joshua A. Tucker

  New York University

  7 shared

• Matthew Louis Mauriello

  University of Delaware

  6 shared

• Brooke E. Auxier

  5 shared

Education

• PhD, Computer Science

  University of Maryland, College Park

  2016