Our new article in @science.org enables social media reranking outside of platforms' walled gardens. We add an LLM-powered reranking of highly polarizing political content into N=1256 participants' feeds. Downranking cools tensions with the opposite party—but upranking inflames them.

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...

We're doing a follow-up (in-person) workshop @ CSCW! Positech 2: Design for Hope will explore how design methodologies can help us envision and achieve positive social futures AND how these processes cultivate hope in the face of otherwise overwhelming challenges. More: positech-cscw-2025.github.io

Following up on last year’s Positech workshop, thrilled to announce our workshop @acm-cscw.bsky.social 2025 on how design might help us cultivate deliberate hope in the face of complex societal challenges, whether in our everyday or broader aspirations 🌱 cfp 👉 positech-cscw-2025.github.io

a couple of hours before my keynote, I went through an intense negotiation with the organisers (for over a hour) where we went through my slides and had to remove anything that mentions 'Palestine' 'Israel' and replace 'genocide' with 'war crimes' 1/

i think it is a sign of low character to post something controversial knowing it will get angry comments and then insult the people who responded to your ragebait

AI companions aren’t science fiction anymore 🤖💬❤️ Thousands are turning to AI chatbots for emotional connection – finding comfort, sharing secrets, and even falling in love. But as AI companionship grows, the line between real and artificial relationships blurs.

As infuriating as the conservative SCOTUS is, never forget that America’s genocide against its trans population is the child of “moderate” liberal outlets like the Atlantic and the New York Times, and especially Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, who made healthy careers out of polishing bigotry.

what is stanford hci going to do without our funniest member next year?

I'm so excited to join the CS department at Johns Hopkins University (@jhu.edu) as an Assistant Professor! I'm looking for students interested in social computing, HCI, and AI—especially around designing better online systems in the age of LLMs. Come work with me! piccardi.me

I'm excited to announce that I’ll be joining the Computer Science department at Johns Hopkins as an Assistant Professor this Fall! I’ll be working on large language models, computational social science, and AI & society—and will be recruiting PhD students. Apply to work with me!

@kjfeng.me and @rockpang.bsky.social are kicking off the panel on sociotechnical AI governance! #CHI2025

As Mariam Kaba said, "hope is a discipline." As Václav Havel said (well before he helped liberate his country from totalitarianism), “Hope is … is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth doing, regardless of how it turns out.”

BREAKING: We're sending an open letter to universities across the country, offering support and urging them to reject pressure to punish international students and faculty for exercising their First Amendment rights. Schools must hold firm against the Trump administration's censorship attempts.

I just sent our university president and provost an urgent request to defend First Amendment freedoms at Stanford, given this administration’s willingness to punish those who disagree with it. I urge you to do the same with your university leaders.

Hard to overstate just how much of the tech industry’s horrifically dystopian present grew right out of its transparently misogynistic past

Zuck positioned these changes as a return to history practice but, for these policy changes, that is untrue. The specific examples I called out above have been prohibited on the site since I wrote the first set of hate speech standards in 2009. 🧵 8/11

Dismantling the fact-checking infrastructure is going to be super handy when things start going wrong in the new administration and they want to redirect blame onto the left.

My advisor warned me that academics trend towards bitterness. He encouraged me to intentionally resist this, remember where I came from, and never forget the privilege of getting to spend a life working with knowledge and ideas. He too said that bitterness and resentment is easy.

How do people *really* read Wikipedia? 📖 👀 We explored how readers navigate, fall into rabbit holes, and engage with information in a chapter for the ‘Handbook of Computational Social Science,’ edited by @tahayasseri.bsky.social. Stay tuned for the full book! 📚 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2501.00939

The future (imo) will be filled with a constant ache and continual search for — with increasingly diminished capacity for discovery / identification of — authenticity.

hey coca cola is officially on the BDS list now so no more buying Topo Chico or starlight coke or whatever else they make

New paper: Do social media algorithms shape affective polarization? We ran a field experiment on X/Twitter (N=1,256) using LLMs to rerank content in real-time, adjusting exposure to polarizing posts. Result: Algorithmic ranking impacts feelings toward the political outgroup! 🧵⬇️

Academic job market post! 👀 I’m a CS Postdoc at Stanford in the Stanford HCI group. I develop ways to improve the online information ecosystem by designing better social media feeds & improving Wikipedia. I work on AI, Social Computing, and HCI. piccardi.me 🧵

This paper argues that online spaces become ghost towns because it's too easy to lurk without contributing, and that asking people to regularly re-commit—or the incoming messages start getting muted—reverses the trend. arxiv.org/abs/2410.23267 It works! #cscw2024 paper by @popowski.bsky.social .