In a blatant 1st Amendment violation, students in the Texas Tech University system are completely banned from researching or writing anything related to sexual orientation or gender identity as part of their thesis.

🚨NEW ESSAY ALERT🚨Broken Connections: Fieldnotes from the Old Internet. The most personal thing I've written in years. I trace my history with internet communities & online relationships & how much of that is now gone. And a lot about LiveJournal. Open Access! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

It's hard to articulate the level of anger & rage I have about watching this happen. I first saw weev doxx people I love *TWENTY* years ago. I spoke to founders of multiple social networks about the risk of these people over 15 years ago. I wrote about it all a dozen+ years ago. They let it happen.

For the first time, Pew Research Center went deeper into comparing teens’ experiences on three widely used platforms: TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. And while similarities exist, how and why teens use these sites differ in many ways. Dive in ⬇️

Yo @lieselsharabi.bsky.social, that's a nice research idea on social media's influence on wedding planning ideals, comparisons and stress

Really interesting--p. 7 stood out to me. "Across all three platforms, most teen users say it neither hurts nor helps their mental health...We asked parents how social media overall impacts their teen: About a quarter say they hurt their teen’s mental health, compared with 8% who say they help."

DATE CHANGE! Join us on April 29 at 12pm ET for another session of our Advocacy in Action series with Power Leveling. Join this month's community conversation where we will be talking about the cost of caring and how to be sustainable. Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/getwigi

@mattsharpe.bsky.social and I want to test a cool idea and we are looking for datasets including: (a) Depression, (b) Objectively logged social media time, and (c) Subjectively estimated social media time. We've found some from @cjsewall9.bsky.social & @dougaparry.bsky.social but want more!

It's almost like "illegal immigration" wasn't the problem at all...He's trying to turn back the demographic changes made possible by the Immigration Act of 1965 which over time resulted in more *legal* immigrants from non-European countries.

PDF-Direct Firefox extension ('Bypass "fancy online reader" and just get the darn pdf') updated: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo... & now supports ACM ACS Cambridge University Press Elsevier IEEE JSTOR Nature OUP PLOS PNAS Royal Society Publishing Sage Science Springer Nature Taylor & Francis Wiley

A really interesting methodological approach separates within- from between-person effects and challenges the broad belief that social media use promotes political expression, and suggests instead that people already predisposed to political expression tend to use social media for politics. #CommSky

Survey Participants Needed! Fanfiction Writers, Fanfiction Readers, Fans, Fandom enthusiasts ucf.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... (@fanstudies.bsky.social @scmsfaas.bsky.social can i get a boost for this student's research solicitation?)

Updating my website (jessmorrissette.net) with recent publications and syllabi for some of my favorite courses. - Media, Culture, and Politics - Politics of the Undead - War and Popular Culture - Politics and Video Games I'm teaching that last one again this Fall. 👾

We support Brittney 100%, and we always, always will. We’re so fucking proud of you. We know how painful the past year has been. Hopefully, this brings closure and healing.

📄DDC PUBLICATION UPDATE 📄 What's the role of social media in spreading hate against sexual & gender minorities? Anne Clausen, @lenafrescamente.bsky.social, & Peter Mayer provide the current state of the art, now published in Information Communication & Society! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Picard management tip: Have an opinion on one side of an issue. Stay out of the neutral zone.

fuck yeah

A sort of social signaling or virtue signaling, from a certain point of view.

Believing in something that can hurt you (eg denying covid) is a useful feature of a belief: This costly belief signals a social identity to others, and also signals that one values this identity so much they are willing to take risks to obtain social benefits www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The book, The No Asshole Rule, has supporting evidence en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_...

One of the most powerful lessons I’ve ever learned in social change is to clean your house first. If Democrats want to create the necessary momentum to hold the men in the Epstein files accountable, then they have to lead by example with Swalwell.

As part of my efforts to combat the COVID Amnesia Project, let's accurately remember what 3 influential laptop class doctors from Stanford said 6 years ago as COVID overflowed hospitals and morgues. They won't remind you. I will. My latest.

It’s particularly stunning when someone replies to you that they don’t believe x y and z women who have come forward about sexual violence and then you click their account and their bio says “women’s rights”

At a certain point of wealth, what is being pursued seems not to be wealth, but the ability to make other people suffer. What's being pursued is immunity from human decency; the ability and even the right to be depraved with impunity. They get off on the suffering. www.the-reframe.com/where-it-ends/

🛑 Chatbots are not fit for giving voting advice 🗳️ Latest study from @liberties.eu on the Hungarian election shows lack of transparency and reliability in the advice. Our research shows that 10-15% by now use chatbots for advice, for young voters up to one quarter. www.liberties.eu/en/stories/h...

Europe should regulate Big Tech instead of banning kids from social media, Estonia says

When people use AI for writing assistance, it can shift their political attitudes by autocompleting sentences in biased ways. Yet people are often unaware of the AI bias & it's influence This is not merely about the facts presented, but how autocomplete worlds www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I'm already seeing these chatbots deployed with ZERO critical framing or guardrails among tweens/middle school students (ie, not even teens yet). This is SO dangerous.

Lonely young people are likely better off texting a random stranger than talking to a chatbot, according to a new study. www.404media.co/chatgpt-lone...

The ERROR project recruits independent experts to recheck social sciences papers’ data, statistics, methodology, code; now the project plans to publish the reviews in a new peer-reviewed journal. science.org/content/arti... @dalmeet.bsky.social @science.org #reproducibility

New preprint out today (osf.io/preprints/ps...). We tested whether AI agents are actually infiltrating online surveys. Spoiler alert: they aren't Thread 🧵 [1/9]

Nice review of key evidence (and what's missing) related to teen social media bans from @orbenamy.bsky.social and the digital mental health group in Cambridge. If you're looking for a trustworthy report, this is a great high-level starting point! www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/d0b4c5...

One last thing before I log off. I took a digital bystander intervention class today from Right To Be, and they shared this INCREDIBLY valuable resource by @penamerica.bsky.social for anyone who may have to deal with The Internet being The Internet.

This is why I go so hard about studying entertainment as politically relevant media. Viewers may be learning about these issues for the first time, or connecting to what they’ve already experienced. And how they make sense of entertainment as politically relevant will affect what happens next.

I do not believe there is any published media psych/comm sci research on cringe in social media Is there something of this sort? @ascor.bsky.social @jessgallmyrick.bsky.social

Burn everything down.

New article! Why do some societies resist democratic backsliding while others remain indifferent or actively support it? Neil Lavie-Driver and @profsanderlinden.bsky.social extend the social identity model of collective action to explore the role of collective memory. advances.in/psychology/1...

Looking forward to #CHI2026 coming up soon in Barcelona! Extremely proud of my PhD advisees Denny Starks and Senami Kojah whose first-authored papers were accepted 🤩 Here are our group's four papers this year:

"Les femmes sont encore largement minoritaires dans le monde du jeu vidéo mais les formations tentent de lutter contre ce déséquilibre et contre un certain sexisme ambiant." Avec @womeningames.bsky.social 🙏

Teaching kids social-emotional skills is working! “Studies suggest youths are more empathetic and less narcissistic than in the past, as well as more open-minded and inclusive. Drug use is down, youth violence has dropped and teen pregnancies have declined.”

🧵 New report just dropped 🚨 "Fractured Reality: How Democracy Can Win the Global Struggle Over the Information Space" — from the EU Joint Research Centre, led by Mario Scharfbillig and I. A landmark read for anyone working on disinformation, platforms & democracy. 👇 1/10

My colleague, from my program.

I was invited to give a campus-wide keynote at a flagship university for Sexual Assault Awareness Month. I was offered a speaker’s fee of $150 and parking validation. These schools really let us know their values based on where they spend their money.

I'd really like to see leadership calling for impeachment and removal, regardless of whether they have the votes to get it done. Same way we called for marriage equality before we had the votes. A leader's job is to lead. If a genocidal threat isn't impeachable, then nothing is.

If scientists continue to sit on the sidelines, afraid of being tainted by politics or harming public trust, we won’t have many scientists left for the public to mistrust.

I’ve been warned that by engaging in politics, I might undermine myself as a scientist. Or worse, reduce the trust that people have in me or scientists as a whole. This latter point is the thesis of a recent article by Byron Hyde: link.springer.com/article/10.1... I disagree for multiple reasons.

If you liked this week's disinfo as narrative paper, you might like this earlier paper about the moral panic about Drag Queen Story Hour and how anti-trans narratives recreate older anti-queer narratives, which, we argue, is why they are so successful. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... [Paywalled]

A paper I think about a lot these days. "People high in the motivation to express prejudice are relatively likely to resist pressure to support programs promoting intergroup contact and vote for political candidates who support oppressive policies." pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

New report drawing from our interview and survey research about social media and YouTube use with @glunardi.bsky.social eprints.qut.edu.au/264446/1/Aus...