If you are interested in studying the efficacy of soft interventions such as footnote labels & blurred filter on other topics such as climate change or health misinfo, our free ModSimulator (moderation simulator) research tool is available for free on GitHub: socialmedialab.ca/2023/04/25/i...

Soft moderation (e.g., fact-checking labels) significantly reduced the frequency of interactions w/false claims. Control group averaged 0.9 interactions, about 1.5 more than either intervention group (0.62 for the footnote warning label, 0.60 for the blur filter). socialmedialab.ca/2024/09/11/n...

I appreciate the work of these authors to show that this problem not only is still here but has grown: www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne... But it is also quite frustrating 🧵>>

wise and incredibly funny

NEW PUB: Twitch’s Digital News Standard: Breaking Journalistic Boundaries in Platform Streaming Environments in Digital Journalism www.tandfonline.com/eprint/62NS2...

X and TikTok accounts are dedicated to posting AI-generated videos of women being strangled.

"After the federal mass-deportation initiative dubbed “Operation Midway Blitz” hit the shelter, a meeting was held the next day. Black residents affirmed they stood with Latino residents and the raid impacted everyone. Afterward folks were less divided by race..." hammerandhope.org/article/trum...

This program has spread nationwide, with many institutions, including my own, following this model. It’s been spectacular for my department and for my college.

Had fun presenting on my forthcoming work about social media habits and addiction at the USC Neely Center and Addiction Sciences Institute the other week...A recording is now available on YouTube! Link below goes to my intro and ~15min talk; Q&A is at the end! youtu.be/QT6G0PpvQhg?...

🚨 New preprint 🚨 Can AI agents coordinate influence campaigns without human guidance? And how does coordination arise among AI agents? In our latest research, we simulate LLM-powered AI agents acting like users on an online platform, some benign, some running an influence operation

"Haidt, who boosted his career blaming social media for every problem from mental health to school failure, drugs, shootings, suicide, and destroying childhood, completely ignores parental abuses, addictions, mental health, and crime issues."

#AcademicSky #PrejudiceResearch It's good, for other people, for you not to be a bigot. New longitudinal paper shows: Being racist makes you more mentally distressed over time. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Bluesky is now testing dislikes. If you see a post you dislike you're in the beta techcrunch.com/2025/10/31/b...

Thanks to Caltech Magazine for the #SoCaltech feature, which touches on my forthcoming research on social media habits and addiction as well as my past in social media marketing 🥳

Federal conspiracy charges because an ICE goon had to drive a little slower. What an absolute joke.

NEW: "The company’s estimates therefore suggest that every seven days, around 560,000 people may be exchanging messages with ChatGPT that indicate they are experiencing mania or psychosis." @lmatsakis.bsky.social reports: www.wired.com/story/chatgp...

“Apple, Google, and Meta were under no obligation to remove these apps,” says @alexabdo.bsky.social. “If they did it because the DOJ threatened them, even implicitly, that’s a First Amendment violation. The government shouldn’t be able to behave like a mob boss in going after protected speech.”

This new reporting from @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social is jaw-dropping and I think warrants a response from @cos.io given their ongoing collaboration with Meta. Jeff writes about how Meta identified content-specific harms as a key problem for teens on Instagram. 🧵 www.reuters.com/business/ins...

If you make "controversial statements" outside of classroom, that the President of the university dislikes, you can be summarily fired even if you are tenured.

A majority of queer youth say they’ve turned to online spaces for support and community. But what if that goes away? Two new studies show that losing access to online safe spaces — whether because of age verification laws or restrictions on LGBTQ expression — could be devastating.

One of the papers I've been most excited about since starting the lab! We adopt a network neuroscience approach to understand how arousal reconfigures large-scale functional network organization to support memory of complex narratives!

How over- and underrepresented are different causes of death in the media? Another way to visualize this data is to measure how over- or underrepresented each cause is. To do this, we calculate the ratio between a cause’s share of deaths and its share of news articles.

A thorough look at how TikTok builds scrolling habits from @washingtonpost.com, with a really nice dataset (~800 user data donations). My (still unpublished, lol) dissertation did something similar with Twitter--do I email the authors about using their data for a second study? 🙃

Anyone who thinks this massive surveillance regime will be limited to immigration enforcement (and it’s bad enough that they’re using it for immigration enforcement) should try reading a little history sometime. www.wired.com/story/ice-so...

Very excited to share that my first paper, with Peter Mende-Siedlecki and @leorhackel.bsky.social, is out now in @commspsychol.nature.com! ☺️ Can getting more rewards make you feel more skilled, even if your performance doesn't change? www.nature.com/articles/s44...

The Trump administration’s attempt to deport students for their political views is an assault on the Constitution and a betrayal of American values. @knightcolumbia.org, @ruaaup-aft.bsky.social Harvard & NYU AAUP, MESA & @aaup.org. All praise to @veenadubal.bsky.social

its hard to imagine a more embarrassing unforced error for the Dems than the "ban TikTok" fiasco. Not only did they alienate youth voters, openly waffle on the First Amendment and let Trump claim to be the defender of "free speech," now they've literally handed the platform to Trump to control

🧵 Thread with my favourite quotes from: 📝 Guest, O., Suarez, M., Müller, B., et al. (2025). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 1/🧵

Think TikTok or Instagram Reels, but every single video you come across is essentially just AI slop.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, regulation is the antichrist.

Searching Charlie Kirk's name or terms like "Charlie Kirk shooting" on Instagram now yields a mix of debate clips and graphic videos of him being shot, a shift from earlier moderation practices. theintercept.com/2025/09/24/c...

Probably the most disgusting piece of anti-science garbage in service of whitewashing Bhattacharya and legitimizing attacks on NIH to date in the NYT op-ed section. And there have been many. Since the NYT keeps doing this drivel, I will say a few things about the NYT's modus operandi... 1/

Will continue to recommend not bending the knee to right-wing criticism—it won’t be enough anyway.

You know things are rough when the AAUP's advice on how to use social media is just "set all your accounts to private."

Excellent reading of the week: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia "We expound on why universities must take their role seriously to counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm" zenodo.org/records/1706...

TLDR: Peter Thiel weaponizes Nazi philosophy and biblical scripture to reframe democratic opposition as cosmic evil—while building the surveillance state he claims to fear.

Thousands of X users have posted about Ali Nasrati, a 30 yr old IT tech for Walmart, claiming he made insensitive comments abt Charlie Kirk. But Nasrati has never posted about Kirk. Now, he's been suspended from work and forced into hiding. I wrote about people being falsely targeted by the right

Attended Queersurf camp (🥰) in San Diego last month, and had the opportunity to learn from the writer (@bokchoy-baobei.bsky.social) of this article about the pollution in the Tijuana River -- sharing here to spread the word about this still-ongoing crisis in SoCal! www.latimes.com/environment/...

The professor has been fired and senior administrators removed from their post. No mention of this in the New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic or other outlets who drove the campus speech moral panic.

In this new Commentary in @natclimate.nature.com, I reflect on the recent focus on truth discernment in #misinfo research and argue that this outcome alone may not be beneficial to society if interventions do not improve behaviour and other outcomes because... 1/ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"If your tactics disrupt the order of things under capitalism, you may well be accused of violence, because 'violence' is an elastic term often deployed to vilify people who threaten the status quo. Conditions that the state characterizes as 'peaceful' are, in reality, quite violent."

A German teen told Meta's child safety researchers his under-10 little brother had been sexually propositioned multiple times on its VR platform. Meta deleted the evidence. New internal whistleblower docs indicate that was part of a broader cover-up: www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

if i had a background in psychoanalysis i would be tempted to go back to stanford CS to see why some of those professors (who patently understand how all this shit works) are willing to submit AI-generated documents to courts as part of an expert testimony. as it stands now, it's beyond my capacity.

This is a great interview. LA Taco really has been doing great stuff, well before the ICE raids. One of the best Los Angeles-based outlets. I remember a very good piece profiling the one voting center inside Skid Row, in an election where homelessness was the top issue.

LA Taco is such a great example of fearless local journalism

That’s my friend 🗣️🗣️ yes @ayyuhhh.bsky.social !!!

Age verification laws exploit the moral panic over social media to repackage old censorship tactics under the guise of protecting children. Like book bans, tech ban proponents have performed a lot of concern for children and parents’ ability to control what information they have access to.

The age verification push is the latest pathway to internet censorship of important news, activism, content related to queer folks, and more…great breakdown of the issues here!

This is a very important report from @thecoalition.bsky.social on the challenges of technology research: "Across countries, support for public-interest research on technology is rapidly eroding, just as society’s need for it grows more urgent" independenttechresearch.org/citr-report-...