COSMOS Research Center is proud to celebrate a Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Integration of Digital and AI-related Technologies (IntAI 2026), held June 7–11, 2026, in Porto, Portugal.

The award-winning study, “Narrative Contagion Under Competing Information Environment: An Epidemiological Modeling Analysis of Tariff Discourse on X and Weibo,” authored by Prof. Nitin Agarwal, examines how competing narratives surrounding the 2025 tariff discourse spread across two very different digital environments.

Using more than 107,000 posts from X and Weibo, COSMOS applies epidemiological modeling to treat narratives much like contagion, measuring how effectively ideas are transmitted, reinforced, challenged, or suppressed through online engagement. 

The findings reveal a striking contrast. On X, both agreeing and disagreeing narratives remained below the threshold for self-sustaining spread. On Weibo, agreeing narratives reached a reproduction number of 1.8, while disagreeing narratives fell to 0.2, highlighting how platform architecture and governance can strongly influence the spread of competing viewpoints. 

This work advances COSMOS’s broader research on narrative dynamics, online influence, and cognitive security by showing that the spread of information depends not only on the message itself, but also on the digital environment through which it travels. The Best Paper recognition further reflects Prof. Agarwal and COSMOS’s continued leadership in developing AI-based computational approaches for understanding complex social information ecosystems.