Don't forget our next OSoMe Awesome Speaker this Wednesday! 📅 November 12 @ 12 PM ET Petter Törnberg, University of Amsterdam Register at osome.iu.edu/events/speak...

Is social media to blame for teens’ mental health decline? Intuition says yes—but RCTs find only small short-term effects when users quit. This new preprint argues these studies don’t prove social media isn’t to blame. Here’s why: 3 reasons.

🚨 New paper! 🔍 “Question the Questions: Auditing Representation in Online Deliberative Processes” In deliberative polls, participants propose questions for experts but only a few make it to the panel. How representative are those chosen questions of everyone’s interests? 🧵👇

For years, I’ve been obsessed with a number. What’s the #? It’s the amount Meta earns per year from scam ads. Thanks to @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social, we know it: $16 billion. Our free @indicator.media Briefing looks at what needs to happen now that we know the number: indicator.media/p/briefing-m...

📣 Online platforms shape what we know, how we connect, and who gets heard, yet researcher access to public platform data is shrinking, while platforms monetize this data. Our new report "Better Access" offers a framework for accessing this critical data: kgi.georgetown.edu/research-and...

arxiv.org/abs/2511.02615 from @baottruong.bsky.social et al ...

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Interested in how LLM tools are being creatively used for good? Check out this map of LLM Tools for Public Discourse, Pluralism & Social Cohesion. Bonus: link to a public dataset of 70+ tools is included in the first page of the report.

We have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so... What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?

Unprecedented corruption. Everyone gets a taste.

Are Large Language Models Sensitive to the Motives Behind Communication? (Basically yes, although reasoning models underperform, and all of them struggle with online ads in a naturalistic setting.) arxiv.org/abs/2510.19687

One week left! Submit your abstract for the #JOTS special issue on Digital Intersectionality and Marginalization in the #MajorityWorld. 🗓️ Deadline: October 31, 2025 🔗 Learn more: bit.ly/4mZDjtb #TrustAndSafety

Our team presented five papers at the CSCW (computer supported cooperative work and social computing) conference this week in Bergen, Norway. (CSCW is an ACM conference and a “home conference” for my team.) I’m going to share a few highlights in a thread here.

Three new NERDS publications: Polarization, image-to-text-mapping, and candidate recommendation nerds.itu.dk/2025/09/30/t...

“Wait, what is this exactly?” 🤔 New in @hbr.org, Director Jeff Hancock, PhD candidate Angela Lee, and co-authors from BetterUp Labs discuss the surge in AI-generated "workslop" and its implications for today's workers and business leaders. #workslop #AI

One week to the Trust and Safety Research Conference! Stoked to see you there and for the amazing program! @stanfordcyber.bsky.social

📣 Yale workshop, Oct 16-17! 📣 How could/should content ranking work? What's new in content moderation? How can platforms promote civility? Hosted by Yale's Institute for Foundations of Data Science (FDS). Great speakers! Submit posters by 9/22! Spread the word! yalefds.swoogo.com/socialalgori...

The agenda for the Trust and Safety Research Conference is out now. Two days of lightning talks, presentations, networking and more, with @dwillner.bsky.social‬ as keynote. Join us! For the full line-up and times, plus link to register, visit: cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/content/trus...

Looking forward to moderating the 💥 AI and Algorithm Auditing 💥 session in just a few weeks at the Trust and Safety Research Conference at Stanford!! 🎟️ Last chance to register! sto.stanfordtickets.org/the-2025-tru... #TSRConf @stanfordcyber.bsky.social

Today, we’re proud to share the Coalition’s new report: The State of Independent Technology Research: Power in Numbers It's an offering to our community and all researchers doing public interest work–a reflection of collective strength, solidarity and persistence in the face of adversity. (1/2)

We're the University of Washington Information School, aka UW iSchool, based in beautiful Seattle. We offer five degree programs, and our graduates use their expertise for the advancement of science, business, education, and culture. Check out our website to learn more: ischool.uw.edu

In addition to the original UK results, we have now ***replicated*** this (TWICE) in the US. The main findings hold strong: information diets are a lot more diverse in attention than in engagement. New version here: osf.io/preprints/os...

"persuasive power ... is likely to stem more from post-training and prompting methods—which boosted persuasiveness by as much as 51% and 27% respectively—than from personalization or increasing model scale"

I’ve got serious FOMO for @ic2s2.bsky.social … keynotes and program look awesome!! 🤩🤩 Have fun everyone!

See here the paper: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... And poster below. We will have several more NERDS at #IC2S2 - see you soon in Norrköping!

Our preprint “How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy” is now online. We show how coordinated multi-agent LLM swarms can infiltrate communities, craft synthetic grassroots “consensus,” and erode institutional trust—and what we can do now to stop it. osf.io/preprints/os...

move slow and fix things

Cool "micro-sabbatical" opportunity for tenured or tenure-track faculty at GW’s Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics (IDDP).

New preprint: How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy 🧪 osf.io/preprints/os...

I am privileged to announce the publication of the Anti-Autocracy Handbook: sks.to/autocracy 1/12

I am thrilled to share a new article in Sociological Methods & Research, “Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages”. My co-first author Sol Messing and our collaborators developed a new approach to measuring “narrative similarity” between texts: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🚨 Call for Abstracts! I'm excited to announce the 2nd workshop on Directions of Polarization, Social Norms, and Trust in Societies @ MIT on Dec 5-6 Keynotes from @bgoldberg.bsky.social & @adamberinsky.bsky.social 🗓️ Deadline to submit: July 14, 2025 🔗 sites.google.com/view/polariz...

When the government cancels your research grant, here’s what you can do www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Psychological inoculation is a very popular intervention against online misinfo, but it hasn't been tested using real-world outcomes in realistic scenarios. In a new paper just published in PNAS Nexus, this is what we did: academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar... Short version: It didn't really work.

With nearly all of Harvard Chan School’s direct federal grants terminated, we are relying on philanthropy to power our research and support our educational programs. Every gift, regardless of size, advances our vision of health, dignity, and justice for every human. Support our work: hsph.me/whygive

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Interesting thread about researcher access to DSA data.

Congrats to @baottruong.bsky.social and @matthewdeverna.com !!!

And congrats also to Dr. @matthewdeverna.com !! 👏🎉🎓

After 3 years in the making, our Registered Report is out in @nathumbehav.nature.com! We analyse nationally representative UK data from 3,340 adolescents (aged 11–19) to examine how social media use differs between those with and without mental health conditions. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cool work from @dashunwang.bsky.social and team...