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....