Breaking: CBC/ Radio-Canada investigation identifies Dutch YouTube creators behind Alberta separatist videos getting millions of views. 🧵 #AlbertaSeparatism

Proud to have worked on this!:)

yeah, i follow canadian news

Welcome to my pond:) (sound on!) - made in Nannou, with evolutionary particle life + graph rewriting automata driving spatial audio

initial version of growing mesh cellular automata (based on @nervousjesse.bsky.social's differential growth system but with a cellular automata defining growth regions rather than heat equation style diffusion)

TikTok is uniquely blocking research access in Canada for no apparent reason. We're in the dark when it comes to online harms. open.substack.com/pub/bensteel...

couldn't help but scrape some moltbook data and make a datamap, I like that Qwen vibe-matches topic names to the writing style as it did for my Douyin datamap. made with toponymy and datamapplot. link to datamap and scraper below

Just uploaded the metadata of 1.1m Douyin posts here, if anyone wants to use it!: huggingface.co/datasets/ben...

Mapping the winds of online attitude change

Very happy to announce that our paper 'Just Another Hour on TikTok: ID sampling to obtain a complete slice of TikTok' was just published in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media! Check it out here: journalqd.org/article/view...

I've been developing an open-source library for stance detection: github.com/bendavidstee... My hope is to make stance detection much easier to apply, opening it up for more social scientists to use. If you're interested in attitudes and text data, take a look!

Our work was featured in The Economist! www.economist.com/graphic-deta...

Deutschlandfunk radio covering our work TikTok (in German): www.deutschlandfunk.de/social-media...

Ever wanted to pan through the latent🌌 space of TikTok videos? Made using the amazing toponymy and datamapplot from @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social and data from mine and @jurgenpfeffer.bsky.social 's first complete TikTok slice. link below

Instantiations of extended particle life, exploring using CLIP

Cyclical lenia

Choropleth of the amount of AI generated content different countries produce on TikTok

Upswing in content tagged as AI related to the canadian election as it draws closer

Have you ever asked yourself about the overall extent of TikTok? Here some numbers from "Just Another Hour on TikTok" - Great compliment to @bendavidsteel.bsky.social for this data collection effort! w/ @miriamschirmer.bsky.social & Derek Ruths arxiv.org/abs/2504.13279