“None of these laws actually crack down on Big Tech. Instead, age verification schemes consolidate power among the largest and most powerful tech conglomerates and allow the companies to harvest and profit from even more highly sensitive data from users.“

Was really exciting for me to sit down with @taylorlorenz.bsky.social and discuss my research on her Podcast, Power User! I’ve followed her social media coverage for a long time. Highly recommend watching the full YouTube version below (has visuals from the relevant paper): youtu.be/K-0z0j0QvPI?...

Thanks to the editors @pnas.org for their support! New piece from me, @georgiaturner.bsky.social and @fassiluisa.bsky.social…

Fantastic and blistering comment about the need for transparency in industry-academic collaborations. From @georgiaturner.bsky.social, Ian Anderson, and Luisa Fassi www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

In the 2020 Election Project, Meta collaborated w/ academics to study how FB impacts elections. ⬇️ @aanixel.bsky.social, @fassiluisa.bsky.social & I argue that such research collaborations, w/ clear conflicts of interest, should be regulated. Would love to hear thoughts!💬 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Very happy to see this paper published!! Big thanks to all the mentors, peers, reviewers, and editors who gave us great feedback throughout the writing process...readers: please don't hesitate to reach out to us about how we could work together to improve transparency in social media research 😎

"The watchlist is not a little sunglasses icon. It is a scope with someone’s sight that you would think of on a gun for precision. That to me is terrifying. It is threatening. You don’t have to be very far between the lines, between figuring out what a watchlist might mean."

When this "AI" bubble pops, the men pretending they weren't pushing the hype, like "critics" whose position is "AGI is real but LLMs aren't the way," who were in eugenicist and "AI existential risk"🙄 circles, will get specials discussing what they saw coming, when its the women who told you so.

This article explains why the right's "censorship industrial complex" myth has been so successful: "The government wasn’t defending her, she was banned from defending herself, and even potential allies were staying quiet, having sensed which way the wind was blowing."

Requiring foreign visitors to hand over 5 years of social media isn’t “security,” it’s unchecked government control. All-seeing surveillance systems don’t make us safer. They are in direct opposition to our civil liberties. www.nbcnews.com/politics/tru...

On the internet, age verification doesn't know you're a dog.

Thanks for sharing our research!!

Cool to see our newest work on social media covered by @the-independent.com! www.independent.co.uk/news/health/...

A novel new study finds you can reduce polarization on X simply with a simple change to the algorithm. I spoke with the researchers: www.platformer.news/stanford-pol...

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Most basic neuroscience research in the U.S. is funded by the federal government, but there is an entire funding landscape that lies beyond those federal agencies. To bring those sources together, @thetransmitter.bsky.social presents a funding source directory: bit.ly/4pBBF2B #StateOfNeuroscience

STOKED that our paper on smartphone and spatial habits is out in Scientific Reports! 🎉 Using mobility 🏃 and app 📱 data (27,446,977 logs; 7,226 trip questionnaires) we found that smartphone habits are stronger in habitually traveled and visited spaces 🏡 Personal thread below! rdcu.be/eQ7q0

I’m glad to see on platform ranking algorithm work done without platform scientists in the mix. I think it’s quite telling that, by the only means we have to verify Metas election collaborations results… we can’t confirm their claims of little to no effect.

Excited to see these studies (finally) published in Scientific Reports! 🚨 S1: More social media users perceived themselves as addicted than met clinical addiction criteria. S2: Increasing perceived addiction hurt perceived control over use and increased self-blame for overuse. Thread below... 🧵

The brilliant @alice-gregory.bsky.social asks what smart phone bans mean for kids like hers who needs their phone to stay alive

Today’s “teenage mental health crisis” and social media panic are founded in nostalgic myths. Our best long-term surveys and statistics show Boomer and Xer teens were no happier or more “together” than teens are today

“And while the U.S. Supreme Court okayed such age verification when it came to children accessing obscene material online, @kateruane.bsky.social with CDT said the high court appeared more skeptical on blanket social media bans like what VanValkenburg wants.”

Meta has exhibited a clear pattern of behavior in which it undermines and/or buries most negative research; it's tough to believe they'd put honest effort into any research that risks reputational damage...though that pattern itself should be more damaging than any one finding...

It would, of course, be great if the underlying results were made public but it looks like meta in 2019 ran withdrawal experiments to examine polarization and well being ahead of forging collaborations with academics. Seems like more than enough to design bias the collaborations towards nulls 🧵

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

I wonder if this will make people actually slow their roll in terms of taking information from people they do not know as sacrosanct. Probably not. The amount of lying and deception online is overwhelming.

X rolled out a new feature overnight showing where accounts are based. This network of “Trump-supporting independent women” that claimed to be “real Americans” are based in Thailand. The photos were stolen from European models & posts pushed pro-Trump lines while targeting Islam and LGBTQ people.

“Are we the baddies?”

“Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.”

genuinely says so much about what twitter has become that the biggest rightwing grift accounts pushing US fascist narratives aren’t real people and not even close to the united states

❤️❤️❤️

Meta halted internal research that purportedly showed (young) people who stopped using Facebook became less depressed and anxious, according to an unredacted legal filing released on Friday. www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/m...

Thanks to everyone who came out to the early session this morning!!! Had a great time presenting and answering your questions 🥳 #NCA2025

Its near "super intelligence" "replacing professionals" in the PR rounds, then once everyone is convinced and uses them for legal and medical advice, following the deceptive marketing, they slip it in the terms of service that you shouldn't do that. buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

Excited to present some new research I’ve been working on at #NCA2025 tomorrow! We are in the early Comm and Social Cognition session starting at 8:15AM!

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

We're so back [to the undergrad participant pools?] -- though looks like this might have been from a press release about a paper that's not out yet, no one can find the link (not in the piece), so please share below if you have seen it...

Worth mentioning that by our own tests we know these videos were made with OpenAI’s Sora, highlighting how tools released by some of the richest companies in the world are being combined to generate and monetize videos that take advantage of human suffering

We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people.”

Catching up on AI pieces from the past couple of weeks. Recommendations: 1. End Stage Enshittification awardsforgoodboys.substack.com/p/end-stage-... 2. AI Psychosis investigation from A More Perfect Union www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkGk... 3. Open AI compute costs www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

New from me: “working the refs” has come for Wikipedia. The same type of attacks alleging anti-conservative bias that right wing politicians have make about social media are coming for the encyclopedia — because of its critical role in shaping AI answer engines. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

An account is spamming horrific, dehumanizing videos of immigration enforcement because the Facebook algorithm is rewarding them for it.

The person behind this account does not seem to actually have any sort of vested interest in the US or in immigration. But they are nonetheless spamming horrific videos because the Facebook algorithm is rewarding them for that type of content, and because Facebook directly makes payments for it.

High end wealth inequality allows for shit like this

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.