Giving what we can has implemented a fun game where you spin a globe to see how your starting point in life would compare if you were reborn today, randomly somewhere on earth. www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery

EU says it strongly condemns U.S. visa ban on European individuals reut.rs/3YNpK6o

Full solidarity with @hateaid.org ! Standing up for our rights online is the way to go, and these accusations couldn't be more Orwellian... all the more reason to keep going this way and push for the DSA and transparency from online platforms!

Krass: Die US-Regierung hat Sanktionen gegen Anna-Lena von Hodenberg und Josephine Ballon von @hateaid.org erlassen, dazu trifft es auch den früheren EU-Kommissar Thierry Breton, weil "These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states". Einreiseverbot

Thrilled to announce the Handbook of Computational Social Science is officially out! 956 pages, 118 authors, and truly global, interdisciplinary perspectives. Deep thanks to the contributors and anonymous reviewers who shaped this over 4 years. Buy your copy now! @elgarpublishing.bsky.social

Happy to announce that our Opinion article about the hotly debated EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) has been accepted for publication in Communications of the ACM! Preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2512.14223

Save the Date: In January Julian Jaursch from the German Digital Service Coordinator Bundesnetzagentur will talk about "Applications via the EU's DSA Data Access Portal: An Introduction". Please join this talk on Friday, January 16, 2026, at 14:00 CET/UTC+1.

Das ZIH der #TUDresden plant Ende 2026 die Installation eines neuen Hochleistungsrechners. 💻 Der Supercomputer soll die wachsenden Anforderungen der Forschung an maschinelles Lernen adressieren & neben einer hohen Leistung auch auf Energieeffizienz setzen. ℹ️ tu-dresden.de/tu-dresden/n...

„Soziale Medien zündeln an Gesellschaften, um Geld zu verdienen“: Dr. Philipp @lorenzspreen.bsky.social spricht neben anderen Experten in der @wirtschaftswoche.bsky.social darüber, ob und inwieweit soziale Medien für Kinder geeignet sind. 📲 ℹ️ www.wiwo.de/technologie/...

A new field experiment conducted on Reddit explains why some people lurk quietly and why others become extremely active in online political discussions. Learn more in #ScienceAdvances: https://scim.ag/4oOdywQ

A new study of the last 50 years of US pop music shows “a significant increase in stress-related language, alongside declines in positive sentiment and lyrical complexity.”

Here's a peek at our new Social Media Research Toolkit, a curated collection of more than 50 social media research tools. This toolkit is unique in that it only features tried and tested tools that have been used in peer-reviewed academic studies. (ETA Jan 5, 2026) #academicsky #comsky

Für eine deutsche Zusammenfassung, hier ein kurzes Interview beim DLF www.deutschlandfunk.de/online-disku...

New paper out in @science.org! We unveil the online manipulation market with the Cambridge Online Trust & Safety Index (COTSI). We show in real time the cost of purchasing fake accounts across every social platform around the world - so they can be held accountable www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Online political discussions are characterized by a minority of users dominate the discussion, while most remain silent. Those who perceived a discussion as toxic/polarized tend to remain silent: But toxicity engages power users (namely men interested in politics) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#GESISblog #blog #dataquality #Qualitätskriterien #DigitaleVerhaltensdaten #dbd Ein neuer Blog-Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit Qualitätskriterien für Digitale Verhaltensdaten Soziale Medien, Online-Plattformen und Smartphones sind Teil unseres Alltags und erzeugen viele digitale Verhaltensdaten. 1/2

It's out!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Big thank you to my coauthors @small-schulz.bsky.social and @lorenzspreen.bsky.social, and to all participants who discussed 20 political issues over 4 weeks in 6 subreddit, 3 experimental conditions and let us observe.

Christmas came early this year! Very happy to see our paper out in Science Advances. Led by @lfoswaldo.bsky.social, we ran a unique collective field-experiment on Reddit, to better understand who is participating in online debates and why. Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... And more below 👇

A Reddit field experiment finds that toxic or polarized discussions discourage most users from commenting, while motivating active users; nonmonetary rewards and clear rules may help balance participation. doi.org/hbd8wc

Christmas came early this year! Very happy to see our paper out in Science Advances. Led by @lfoswaldo.bsky.social, we ran a unique collective field-experiment on Reddit, to better understand who is participating in online debates and why. Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... And more below 👇

"The data element will require ESTA applicants to provide their social media from the last 5 years." ...what?

Ultimately, the struggle over disinformation is a struggle over power, legitimacy, and narrative control. It goes far beyond fact-checking or content moderation.

By (trying to) shift the debate to the content level and constructing alleged censorship vs. freedom of expression scenarios, they try to distract from what it is really about: power and control over the structural levers of modern information systems e.g. algorithms, design or visibility control.

Just to be clear: It's not about controlling the content itself, but about the systemic rules that platforms apply, which we need to rethink and align with democratic principles. 1/3

By (trying to) shift the debate to the content level and constructing alleged censorship vs. freedom of expression scenarios, they try to distract from what it is really about: power and control over the structural levers of modern information systems e.g. algorithms, design or visibility control.

Doesn’t get more Orwellian than calling a completely closed off system for information control run by an individual ”free speech.”

Providing access to already public data for public interest research on systemic risks under DSA 40/12 is the bare minimum and has nothing to do with censorship. The fact that X tries to prevent even that lower bound of transparency, gives me the impression that we are on the right track.

Don't let anyone tell you that the Commission's DSA enforcement against X is about speech or censorship. That would, indeed, be interesting. But this is just the EU enforcing some normal, boring laws that would get bipartisan support in the U.S. (I bet similar bills *have* had that support.) 1/

Heads up for colleagues from abroad planning travel to the us. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

“Censorship” is a thought-terminating cliché. These people want you to believe that: - labeling is censorship - fact-checking is censorship - transparency is censorship - research is censorship What they’re doing is redefining anything that might inconvenience a hard-right populist as censorship.

Improving Social Media is the much harder task than just banning it for some.

Im Panel "Gesellschaftliche Kipppunkte" haben @lorenzspreen.bsky.social, @matthiasfejes.bsky.social und @michaelwingens.bsky.social diskutiert, welchen Einfluss Aufmerksamkeitsökonomie und Plattformmacht auf Politik und Meinungsbildung haben. 👉 wissenschaft-im-dialog.de/blog/plattfo... #fwk25 #KI

New paper in Science: In a platform-independent field experiment, we show that reranking content expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity in social media feeds alters affective polarization. 🧵

How it started / How it’s going

🚨 New working paper 🚨 Can LLMs with reasoning + web search reliably fact-check political claims? We evaluated 15 models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and DeepSeek on 6,000+ PolitiFact claims (2007–2024). Short answer: Not reliably—unless you give them curated evidence. arxiv.org/abs/2511.18749

ロドプシングアニル酸シクラーゼと改変型 cGMP作動性 K⁺ チャネルを用いた神経抑制型オプトジェネティクス🌟 Optogenetic silencing using rhodopsin-GC and engineered cGMP-gated K+ channels🌟 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @johvierock.bsky.social #OpenAccess

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.

A tiny minority of highly active users produce the majority of online political content, while most users consume content passively and remain largely silent. Toxic comments are more likely to be expressed, even though most people disagree with them, creating false norms. osf.io/preprints/so...

We haven’t really tried alternative Social Media. Just little bits of transparency about from where and how information is reaching us, is used by people immediately. If chosen well, such cues could empower users and reward quality. Some suggestions from some time ago: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Social media could work differently. We teach digital literacy, but ppl often can’t apply those lessons w/in systems that obscure where info comes from & how it gets to them. What might social media look like if users had better signals of information provenance? www.rawstory.com/maga-foreign...

Interesting preprint from @lorenzspreen.bsky.social's team using LLMs to classify misleading social media posts of German politicians by platform and party belonging. Link here: osf.io/preprints/so...

The official CDC website on autism and vaccines is now a screed of cherry-picked data and conspiratorial thinking claiming that actually vaccines *might* cause autism. This is where we’re at folks…

🔥 NEW PUBLICATION: What is the state of generative AI and disinformation? Aqsa Farooq and I edited an #openaccess, special issue section of the International Journal of Communication, including a scene-setting Introduction article ⬇️ 🧵[1/3] ijoc.org/index.php/ij...

Heute läuft der deutsch-französische #EUSummit25. In der aktuellen geopolitischen Lage braucht es klare Akzente, doch digitale #Souveränität ist weit mehr als Cloud & KI. Im @grimmeinstitut.bsky.social Interview erkläre ich, warum wir digitale #Souveränität und Demokratie zusammendenken müssen:

Great perspective from #CDSM2025: causal inference is 'what-if' analysis. You don’t have to get everything perfect—or how dare you use the c-word. What matters is laying out your assumptions transparently and showing us what happens when they're violated.

Unser #DatensatzdesMonats: Einblicke in die Querdenken-Szene 2021: Einstellungen, Motive und politische Orientierung von Marvin Stein (Socium Universität Bremen). #Facts: standardisierte, quantitative Online-Befragung auf Telegram im August 2021 mit 5.543 Interviews: doi.org/10.4232/1.14540#DatensatzdesMonats:

New paper! We propose a framework to empirically study animal social relationships by modelling social network (SN) data as time-series—that is, without the need to aggregate them over time. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Behavioral data can be very detailed but are usually aggregated and normalized in ways that smother the dynamics. Ben wrote a continuous-time Markov model to improve on this, and also wrote simulations for exploring and validating pipelines. All the code is here: github.com/BenKawam/ASN...

Debate or talking past each other? In a new preprint, we quantify the arguments that German politicians put forward for and against wealth taxation. Led by @saminenno.bsky.social, with more information in his thread below 👇