There's a colorable argument that a substantial part of the effectiveness of most of the major innovations in campaign communication in the last 15 years have been as a result of novel strategies to gain attention, including but not limited to social pressure GOTV mail, relational organizing, etc

🇺🇸 #July4 project 🇺🇸 How does ChatGPT map the Declaration’s 27 #grievances to 2025 executive actions? Scale 0-1 minor · 2 noticeable · 3 substantial · 4 ≈ average 1776 abuse · 5 worse. AI coded (o3). Thread follows ⤵︎ [1/66]

Academia in 2025: For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI. A quick search confirmed the company recently launched new AI software, which now means..

Just published: our new paper in Scientific Reports 📄 “Coordinated Link Sharing on Facebook” doi.org/10.1038/s415... We introduce a statistically grounded, human-interpretable method to detect coordination on social media.

ATTENTION: NSF GRANT RECIPIENTS We received a heads up from a trusted source that you should proactively download/print/screen shot any documentation on research.gov pertaining to your NSF awards, both those that are current and any that have closed in the last 5-6 years. 1/n

Thrilled to have this published. Everything you've wanted to know about political Youtube -- from Kevin Munger, Jim Bisbee (@jamesbisbee.bsky.social), Omer Yalcin (@ofyalcin.bsky.social), Joe Phillips (@polpsychjoe.bsky.social), and myself. Out now in the Journal of Quantitative Description.

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

New and important: we built a federal expenditure tracker. All expenditure line items that are available on the Daily Treasury Statement. USAID was zeroed out on 1/28 and has been at zero ever since. www.hamiltonproject.org/data/trackin... #EconSky

Arguably the biggest national security breach in U.S. history. Private employees downloading personnel data on every federal employee and tax and social security data on every American onto private unsecured servers. Needless to say, completely illegal and subject to major prison sentences.

These are true “holy shit” results — a huge step change in AI capabilities on the very hardest current benchmarks. For competitive coding, this is like Deep Blue beating Kasparov. We all need to update our priors on how much knowledge work AI will displace — and how quickly.

Where does extreme right-wing rhetoric come from? In a new article in Communication Research, Yuan Hsiao and I analyze 19K videos & 661M comments on conservative YouTube channels to trace how extreme rhetoric forms. BLUF: it comes mostly from users themselves. doi.org/10.1177/0093...

Awesome job alert: Analyst Institute is hiring a research manager. Great job for Social Science PhD who wants to change the world for the better through experiments. analystinstitute.pinpointhq.com/en/postings/...

This is a really great piece, as Ganz's work always is. I think the inconvenient thing is the civic associationism of American history was heavily driven by local religious congregations, supplemented in the 20th century by veterans groups like the VFW. It was these groups that included "normies."

Yes—but the most important shift needed here is simpler. We need less bullshit about “listening,” and more of the hard work of audience building.

A good time to (re)read @newsprof1.bsky.social @melbunce.bsky.social @martinscott2010.bsky.social on government capture of public media and its relationship to democratic backsliding global.oup.com/academic/pro...

The AI military-industrial complex is forming quickly—legacy contractors, big tech firms, and generative AI startups. I wrote about what the military and the AI industry want for @gzeromedia.bsky.social:

This looks to be the story Penny's team referenced. It's an AI-written article by "The Pinnacle Gazette," a site run by a popular Turkish science company. The jury is anonymous, but "Martin Beck" is not one of their names, according to Penny's lawyers. AI in journalism, folks.

The convergence of Trump and Musk’s political power with ownership of social media platforms raises urgent questions about democratic accountability and unprecedented authority over communication platforms, writes Philip M. Napoli. www.techpolicy.press/platforms-an...

🚨 NEW PAPER: When low-income Americans get $1,000/month for 3 years, what happens to their political views & behavior? The OpenResearch Unconditional income Study reveals surprising findings about the effects of income on politics... 🧵

We asked journalists around the world who have endured attacks on press freedom what advice they would give their American colleagues. We have collected their wise and remarkable responses in a special issue of @niemanreports.org. “Dear America,” they wrote.

Meet OLMo 2, the best fully open language model to date, including a family of 7B and 13B models trained up to 5T tokens. OLMo 2 outperforms other fully open models and competes with open-weight models like Llama 3.1 8B — As always, we released our data, code, recipes and more 🎁

Pollsters weighted more in 2024 – and it helped. Adjustments for education and past vote made national and state polls more accurate. Read the story: goodauthority.org/news/pollste...

A new report on how Chinese pro-PRC disinformation continues to spread on supposedly independent news websites around the globe, from Google's Threat Analysis Group. cloud.google.com/blog/topics/...

New article in Journal of Communication looking at changes to trust in news across 46 countries in the last 10 years. Trust in news declined in just over half of countries. It decreased more in countries where TV news use has declined, and/or where social media news use has grown. A thread:

In the New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI, NYT lawyers spent 150 hours combing through OAI's training data. OpenAI engineers *erased it* and admitted to erasing it. Had to be pretty incriminating. The NYT is now unable to get that data back. This should be a serious scandal.

With Fox News hosts nominated for the cabinet, I wanted to share takeaways from two recently-accepted papers w @jkalla.bsky.social on partisan TV. There's been much skepticism that partisan TV actually affects public opinion. Our findings rebut that skepticism: partisan media matters! 🧵

Please repost this new Pew Research Center internship opportunity for winter 2025. We're looking for interns who (will) reside in DC/MD/VA or PA & do (in-person/remote) coding work for a project on religious restrictions around the world. $17.50/hr. pewtrusts.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Center...

Biggest regret is not listening to Kevin Munger more kmunger.github.io/pdfs/the-you...

My hunch is that 2024 will be the year when the AI industry is visited by the Ghost of Napster. AI evangelists keep insisting that old copyright law is going to have to bend to accommodate new technology. They have that backward. (My latest, at Foreign Policy): foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/31/a...

They’re just gonna Gamergate anybody they don’t like the look of. That’s what’s gonna happen for the next year. They’ll say you’re doing a communism or a DEI and come up with a reason the news likes later. It’ll happen to a lot of people. You’re just gonna have to hope regular people get sick of it.

🚨New paper🚨 out in the International Journal of Press/Politics w/ Assaf Shamir and @jenny-oser.bsky.social 🎉 Here's what we learned from studying the composition of political content available to 600k+ registered U.S. voters on Twitter during the 2020 election. doi.org/10.1177/1940... 🧵👇

"Let them fight!" The latest @davekarpf.bsky.social missive on the OpenAI fiasco is, as usual, essential reading: davekarpf.substack.com/p/on-openai-...

In case literally anyone in the tech industry has any wildly radioactive bad news they're trying to bury, now would be the ideal moment, just saying.

More like Sam Deleteman send tweet

This is a bad decision & ridiculous justification: “Executives at Meta made the decision based on free-speech considerations after weighing past U.S. elections in which the results might have been contested by a portion of the electorate.” www.wsj.com/tech/meta-al...

@mattgraham.bsky.social and Omer Yair show that expressive responding inflates partisan gaps on the ability to discern facts and opinions correctly. 1/3 m-graham.com/papers/Graha...

I have a theory of that fwiw programmablemutter.substack.com/p/shitpostin...

"We're all going to die here." My friend, Haaretz journalist Amir Tibon, spent a harrowing 10 hours barricaded in his home's safe room with his wife and daughters, as men with guns hunted them, before an extraordinary rescue. He told me his story. Please read it. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Great (and important!) new piece on what we miss on when we just collect social media data based just on keywords.

Accepted last week at #APSR "Turnout Turnaround: Ethnic Minority Victories Mobilize White Voters" (with Stephanie Zonszein). Ungated draft can be found at osf.io/w2dg8/.

"We estimate that harmful content on Facebook lowered US vaccination intentions by 2.3 percentage points per Facebook user... this effect was driven predominantly by vaccine-skeptical content from mainstream sites, rather than outright misinformation published by fringe outlets" psyarxiv.com/nwsqa

My latest, at Substack: “does anyone think Twitter gets *better* from here? (I’m done.)” open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...

Direct from Mosseri: they DON’T want to encourage politics and hard news posting on Threads, and the “scrutiny, negativity…or integrity risks that come along with them.”

1. https://tinyurl.com/yc68rbxa So Cosma Shalizi and I have a piece in the Economist on shoggoths. The Large Language Models driving ChatGPT and Bing are indeed Lovecraftian monsters. But so too are markets, bureaucracies, and even democracy, if squinted at askance.