For this episode (30 min. long), we talk with Fil Menczer, whose work is awesome. No, seriously — he’s the director of OSoMe, which is pronounced “awesome” and stands for the Observatory on Social Media. Fil’s research spans web science, computational social science, network science, and data science.

In this conversation, Fil gives insight into how information can spread on social media and be manipulated. He talks what astroturfing looks like and how bots can work. And he tells us the tools that the Observatory on Social Media has developed to combat some of these issues, including “Botslayer.” Despite the name of that tool, he also discusses why not all bots are “bad,” and what differentiates a good or neutral one from one that’s harmful. Listen to learn about this and more!

Click here for this episode’s transcript, and click here for this episode’s show notes.