The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

Based a lot on @duncanjwatts.bsky.social, @msalganik.bsky.social, and collaborators' research

For my social networks course Claude Code and I vibecoded this app to teach about the unpredictability of virality in online social networks. can-s26.jeremydfoote.com/activities/v... It shows 4 Bluesky posts and has you predict which one was most popular. Give it a try!

OK, so let's talk about one of the most noxious labor practices in academia: the attention arbitrage strategy for getting eyeballs on and dollars into your Substack/newsletter/etc. the core mechanic is exploiting asymmetries between the reputation economies in academia and conservative social media.

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Just read this great piece - paulgp.com/2026/03/16/r... by @paulgp.com and it got me thinking. It feels like there is a lot of moral(?) ambiguity and ambivalence around the use of LLMs for academics. So far, I've avoided having LLMs do basically any of my research writing ...

New paper! Conversations with AI chatbots have been shown to be persuasive across a bunch of contexts. However, most of these studies are short-term and track only changes in attitudes or beliefs. ...

Yes absolutely. And in particular, we desperately need social scientists in the middle of testing and publishing on these methodological questions, for all the reasons Phil and Jeff outline. This is too consequential to leave to CS.

Last year, The Atlantic gave me $10,000 to gamble with. What started as a journalistic gimmick turned into something more... unnerving. My cover story on the online betting boom that's warping sports, culture, politics, and the psyches of millions of young men: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Submit your work on causality and networks today!

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

Super excited to see my first R package `imaginarycss' in CRAN (cran.r-project.org/web/packages...) #R #Network #SNA

It’s actually FEWER Misérables

I'm begging my fellow politicians, Illinoisans, and Americans to realize that right now, we aren't fighting over policy or political party. We're fighting over whether we're going to be a country rooted in empathy and kindness — or one rooted in cruelty and rage.

Stop sharing the “our AI agent made up data” reddit story. It is as fake as the AI you think you are critiquing & the people sharing it have done zero due dilligence 🙄🙄🙄🙄

Cool/important job alert: Principal Research Scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation's Research team for the area of knowledge integrity Job posting: job-boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jo...

Do ordinary Republicans and Democrats really avoid each other in everyday life? In a new working paper with Delia Baldassarri, we present descriptive and experimental evidence to challenge the view that partisanship drives the formation of social relationships. osf.io/preprints/so... 1/15

Bots help keep Wikipedia running. They fix broken links, revert vandalism, and tag pages so volunteers can focus on writing. Each bot is reviewed by the community and must be harmless and accountable.  Meet the bots ➡️ w.wiki/WPH

A few weeks back I gave a talk at Stanford about some of our work on generative AI in the online social world. The video is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH-h... Preprints of the work are at: arxiv.org/abs/2601.10754 arxiv.org/abs/2601.20100

Have any academic researchers been able to get access to Reddit data through their new "Responisble Builder Policy" and approval process? www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/...

I gave a talk at Princeton about LLMs in the online social world - the video is now up at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITjI... Slides are at jeremydfoote.com/presentation...

CPSC Warns Consumers to Immediately Stop Using Batteries for E-Bikes from Rad Power Bikes Due to Fire Hazard; Risk of Serious Injury or Death www.cpsc.gov/Warnings/202...

What's the most clichéd academic paper title template? It has to be "Mind the .* Gap", right?

Another quick thought about LLMs: In the real world, we should always assume that "exponential" growth curves are actually logistic curves. That is, anything that connects to the real world will eventually be resource constrained in some way, and growth will slow...

A hopeful thought about LLMs: Because they involve sharing information between people, they will always require moderation, servers, etc. These needs lead to some level of centralization (and in practice, corporate ownership). LLMs are different—very capable models can already be run on a laptop..

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

BBC really burying the lede there

Join the CDSC on Nov. 7th for our next Community Dialogue! Northwestern Student Matt Gaughan and Dr. Igor Steinmacher will discuss how FLOSS projects adapt their work processes to recruit new contributors and build the project communities that they want. Learn more and register:

There once was a man named Oz'mandias, Who had thought that he was the grandiest. "Look on me and despair" But now nobody cares And nothing remains but the sandy dust.

This morning, I’m at the CSCW conference in a session on “Activism in a Time if Data.” Most of the papers seem to assume activism for “good,” ending with design recs for supporting activism. As far as I can tell, none of the papers center right wing activism. Seems like we have a massive blind spot.

so sick of the explore-exploit dilemma, how about something new?

If you've ever wanted to learn how to make beautiful websites with #QuartoPub and #rstats , check out this workshop I'm giving in a couple weeks! It'll be a blast (and we're covering Quarto's brand new _brand dot yaml system!)

I'm teaching a proseminar this semester for new PhD students. We're reading @jessicacalarco.com's great book, "A Field Guide to Grad School" & we're talking about academic jargon tomorrow. What's some academic jargon you took a long time to understand? Any weird jargon I should share with students?

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

Thinking about applying to grad school? Wonder what it’s like to pursue a PhD or MS? Interested in the intersect of technology and society? CDSC is hosting a Q&A session for prospective students on Sept. 26th at 12pm CT. Learn more and register here: blog.communitydata.science/prospective-...

I am recruiting PhD students this year! Our research group is holding an info session in a few weeks - details are at blog.communitydata.science/prospective-... , including a sign-up link.

🧵 Colleagues, I have a methods question and could do with some help: 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘰 𝘐 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘢𝘯 𝘙𝘋𝘋 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 '𝘥𝘰𝘴𝘢𝘨𝘦𝘴' I'll give a general overview of the project and design below, so please do follow along and chime in with any advice!

Tenure Track Assistant Professor in Technology, Society, and Power at UMSI. Apps due Nov 1. www.si.umich.edu/people/facul...

Illustrating the first point: the talk is by Korean man who works at a British university, he's presenting ideas based on previous work by American thinkers, speaking at a Dutch university, to an audience from around the world. The casual cosmopolitanism of academia is striking to me in these times.

I'm thinking a lot about the debate around whether LMs can "understand." Enter a new thought experiment I call "the lean Chinese room." IMO, it shows how the pressure of compression and speed blurs the line between symbol-shuffling and understanding. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-lean-c...

I'm co-organizing #CSCW NE, an in-person regional gathering for people in Northeast America, alongside some folks from Stevens, Rutgers, and Princeton. If you want to come hang out (especially if you can't make it out to the full conference in Bergen this year), RSVP at cscw-ne.hci.social!

Perfect weather for freshman move in day 😐

Just read this incredible paper by @s0hw.bsky.social & @jeremydfoote.com: Why Do People Participate in Small Online Communities? The authors question the assumption that growth is always good, and instead show many benefits of small online communities. Highly recommended! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Last day of summer for the kids. Quick trip to Indiana Dunes.

ICYMI #commsky #science

I am fascinated with how people come to such different beliefs about the world. In our new paper, led by Tiwalade Adekunle, we used @lauraknelson.bsky.social's computational grounded theory to compare how a pro-masking subreddit and an anti-masking subreddit talked about risks during COVID. 1/

We just posted an interactive on changes in approval for Trump from right before he was inaugurated to the present. We have very large samples (30k), and the interactive allows you to look at changes within very small slices of the public. www.chip50.org/blog/whose-a...

IMO, one of the most important ideas from social networks is that our social world is not an agreed upon fact but is perceived differently by different people and those perceptions matter. I loved working on this project led by @kyosuketanaka.bsky.social , who is an expert in network perceptions.

Attn #ICA25 tragically I lost an earring in the Hyatt Regency. It is a very cool earring. No reward except good karma but do let me know if you find it. :)