Excited to share that our paper on Density-Guided Response Optimization has been accepted to ACM FAccT! We show that local density in embedding space encoded recoverable community preference signal, and this can be used for alignment without explicit preference annotations.

New post (thanks to @annieknk.bsky.social for her edits+feedback) looking at the structural forces that make misinformation and disinformation so hard to combat, why current responses like fact-checking keep falling short, and what that means for American democracy. open.substack.com/pub/american...

This week, Temporary Protected Status for 350K Haitians in the U.S. was set to expire, with no White House plan to renew it. Many warned this would lead to mass roundups of people unable to safely return to Haiti. Today, Judge Reyes blocked it from happening. Her ruling was scathing. 👇

A federal judge stayed Noem’s decision to end Haiti’s temporary protected status, thank goodness. But it's still vital to understand how "they're eating the pets" participatory propaganda was used to motivate and justify that policy change. This article gives a detailed breakdown of that effort.

Heads up everyone - There is likely to be a large ICE operation tomorrow in Springfield OH. Check out this brilliant piece by my former USC student who explores how this anti-immigrant campaign was engineered using ancient tropes like blood libel.

Highly recommend this article showing how the "They're Eating the Pets" refrain emerged from the right's participatory propaganda machine. Extremely relevant, as many Haitian immigrants (the targets of that false rumor/campaign) lose their status Feb 3. americanunreality.substack.com/p/american-u...

ICE is reportedly preparing operations in Springfield and TPS expires tomorrow. We're likely about to see a surge of rhetoric justifying the raids. I wanted to get the full timeline documented -- to show how unfounded it all is: open.substack.com/pub/american...

On the "boots on the ground" question and Trump saying that it will mainly be about protecting oil operations. Given this framing, we should expect a massive payday for politically connected mercenary companies, who will use this to expand their private armies.

📣📣 New paper with #JoergFriedrichs, @florianschaffner.bsky.social, @niklasstoehr.bsky.social , “Populism and governmentalism as thin-centered ideologies: Emotions and frames on social media” is out at @ejprjournal.bsky.social Read more: doi.org/10.1017/S147...

Had a great time last week at the Oxford Internet Institute’s (@oii.ox.ac.uk) Future of Social Media Research workshop! I presented my work on cross-platform discourse networks — moving past platform silos to a unified view of the online information ecosystem. Presentation: tinyurl.com/gerard-oii

Happy to say this was accepted at ICWSM 2026!

Social media users adopt the toxic behaviors of ingroup members An analysis of 7 million tweets from over 700,000 accounts finds that exposures to toxic behavior by ingroup members is the primary driver of contagious toxicity online academic.oup.com/jcmc/article...

(Second Conspiracy Pattern) Similar trajectory with COVID lab-leak/Fauci narratives—claims about NIH gain-of-function research and intentional virus creation. Telegram ⚪ + Truth Social 🟣 dominate early and throughout Later gains ground on Twitter 🔵 and TikTok 🔴 Very similar pattern :0

New paper + interactive dashboard on the 2024 election information ecosystem. Building on discourse networks work with @hanshanley.bsky.social @luceriluc.bsky.social @emilioferrara.bsky.social—this lets us visualize the online landscape as a unified system, rather than isolating each platform.

🧵 FINALLY, excited to have been invited to present a pitch talk at the #DETOX workshop at @icwsm.bsky.social 2025, organized by @alessianetwork.bsky.social , @lajello.bsky.social l, Alessandro Galeazzi, & Eugenia Polizzi. Link to the workshop is here! detox-workshop.github.io/website.gith...

While I'm here, I might as well post about my newest work with @luceriluc.bsky.social and @emilioferrara.bsky.social in which we built a platform-agnostic framework that models and connects users as distributions over latent narratives rather than interactions.

🧵 ALSO Excited to present our work on "othering" at @icwsm.bsky.social 2025! In this paper with @kristinalerman.bsky.social, we go beyond traditional (hate|fear) speech to identify and study the mechanisms of "othering" language: the subtle process of depicting outgroups as fundamentally different.

🧵 Excited to present at @icwsm.bsky.social 2025! In this paper with @kristinalerman.bsky.social, we introduce a novel framework for modeling narrative evolution in streaming text data. Link here: arxiv.org/abs/2409.07684

Across 26 countries and using a database of 32M tweets, radical-right populist elites are the most likely to spread misinformation, finds @pettertornberg.bsky.social & @julianachueri.bsky.social doi.org/10.1177/1940...

This multi-year, multi-country analysis shows that right-wing populist politicians spread more online misinfo than their mainstream counterparts and explains how “the rise of political misinformation is associated to the recent wave of radical-right populism.” journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....