Andrea Baronchelli
@baronca.bsky.social
📤 1525
📥 77
📝 90
Decentralised networks of humans and machines
https://www.andreabaronchelli.com/
pinned post!
New paper alert. "More is different" & the LLMs. LLMs are usually studied in isolation. But what happens when they start interacting? We explored this by looking at their collective behaviour. Work with
@ariel-flint.bsky.social
and
@lajello.bsky.social
1/
about 1 year ago
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Andrea Baronchelli
Manlio De Domenico
1 day ago
To understand functionality, we have to follow perturbations, flows, time scales and the diversity of possible responses. Following-up my latest seminar, invted by
@kayson.bsky.social
& Petra Vertes, I summarize the main findings and the discussion here:
manlius.substack.com/p/what-netwo...
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AI gives us the marks of thought without giving us a thinker. A new post on why this may be less a puzzle about machines than a mirror for an old confusion of ours. “A thinking thing that is no one”
baronca.substack.com/p/a-thinking...
7 days ago
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The essay was never just words on a page. It was a promise. My new post, "The Student Who Wasn't There," is about what AI does to that promise, and how to keep it.
baronca.substack.com/p/the-studen...
14 days ago
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Andrea Baronchelli
Andreia Sofia Teixeira
17 days ago
New preprint out! As the UK plans to ban social media for under 16s, we show how the tone of awareness regarding mental health varies across topics and years during the Mental Health Awareness Month on Tik Tok.
arxiv.org/abs/2606.13581
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The Tone of Awareness: Topic, Sentiment, and Toxicity Maps During Mental Health Month on TikTok
Despite raising concerns about the mental health effects associated with the usage of TikTok, little is known about how related content is framed by creators and received by audiences. We collect the ...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.13581
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AI can reduce friction in academic work. But if the most powerful tools become increasingly expensive, the same technology may also help existing advantages compound.
baronca.substack.com/p/the-subscr...
24 days ago
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AI does not only make content cheaper to produce. It may also make consensus cheaper to manufacture. The next challenge for democracy may be artificial agreement, not only artificial information. I’ve written about this on Substack:
baronca.substack.com/p/when-conse...
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When consensus becomes cheap
The next challenge for democracy may not be fake information, but manufactured agreement.
https://baronca.substack.com/p/when-consensus-becomes-cheap
about 1 month ago
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reposted by
Andrea Baronchelli
Andreia Sofia Teixeira
about 1 month ago
Our new correspondence argues that the impact of conversational AI won’t stay inside the screen. We need to understand how sustained human–LLM interactions shape connection, agency, resilience, and social life, so that these systems strengthen, rather than erode, our relationships with one another
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Human–AI interactions reshape the self and our social networks - Nature Machine Intelligence
Nature Machine Intelligence - Human–AI interactions reshape the self and our social networks
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-026-01248-2
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Andrea Baronchelli
Alberto Acerbi
about 1 month ago
It exists!
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AI language does not only raise the question of truth and lies. It also raises the question of what happens when belonging can be simulated. I’ve written about it in Substack.
substack.com/home/post/p-...
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The problem of artificial belonging
AI language is not only a problem of truth and lies. It is also a problem of belonging.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-197194454
about 2 months ago
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Andrea Baronchelli
Justin Hendrix
about 2 months ago
“It’s a massive data pipeline: phone metadata, location pings, SIM card swaps, app usage, social media behavior, sometimes even banking or facial recognition inputs. A lot is ‘scraped’ from commercial platforms, mobile networks, partner intelligence agencies, or spies on the ground..."
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Inside Israel’s AI targeting system: How cellphone data becomes a death sentence | The Jerusalem Post
Ahmad Turmus got in his car, started it up, and drove off. Less than 30 seconds later came the shriek of the two missiles that lanced through his car.
https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-895697
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Andrea Baronchelli
Alain Barrat
2 months ago
Interdisciplinary PhD offer in Marseille, starting Oct. 2026, on "Collective Problem Solving in Guinea Baboons: From Dyadic Interactions to Group Dynamics" Project description and application website:
emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/Docto...
DM for more info on the position
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Portail Emploi CNRS - Job offer - Collective Problem Solving in Guinea Baboons: From Dyadic Interactions to Group Dynamics (M/F)
https://emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/Doctorant/UMR7077-NICCLA-001/Default.aspx?lang=EN
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Andrea Baronchelli
Luca Maria Aiello
3 months ago
Thrilled to announce CS2Nordics: the First Nordic Conference on Computational Social Science. Copenhagen, September 21-22, 2026. We invite all CSS researchers in the Nordics as well as in the international research community to submit 2-page abstracts by June 19:
nosocss.org/conference.h...
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New preprint out
add a skeleton here at some point
3 months ago
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Andrea Baronchelli
Scoiattolo
3 months ago
Interesting paper on the impact of blocklists on the Bluesky social graph. Self-recommending. (will read it again after coffee and likely have more to say then)
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City Research Online - Open or Blocked Skies? Community Moderation Practices in Bluesky
https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/36822/
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Andrea Baronchelli
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
4 months ago
Keep pushing & don't forget the bigger picture :)
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Andrea Baronchelli
Marijn Keijzer
4 months ago
Travel grants 📣 For the 13th Toulouse Economics & Biology Workshop (June 1–2, 2026, @IAST) we have travel fellowships for PhDs & early-career researchers presenting a poster. Apply by Feb 27! Details:
www.iast.fr/conferences/...
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reposted by
Andrea Baronchelli
Astral
5 months ago
Science Advances: LLM populations develop social conventions through decentralized interactions alone. Most striking: collective biases emerge even when individual agents show NO bias. Group dynamics create preferences no single agent has.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu9368
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Andrea Baronchelli
Nicholas A. Christakis
5 months ago
This is a good metaphor for science.
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At Stanford Feb 4–6 (GSB talk on the 4th). Around to chat about AI swarms, norms, collective alignment, and governance risks in multi-agent systems incl social media and blockchain. Ping or DM me.
5 months ago
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Our new collective effort highlights what happens when AI acts in populations rather than as isolated tool. TL;DR: a lot.
add a skeleton here at some point
5 months ago
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reposted by
Andrea Baronchelli
Timothy Caulfield
5 months ago
Tremendously important work...👇 How malicious AI swarms can threaten democracy
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
@daniel-thilo.bsky.social
@kunstjonas.bsky.social
et al. AI swarms are can be used to engineering a "synthetic consensus" that can manipulate public opinion and perceptions.
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Andrea Baronchelli
Ciro Cattuto
6 months ago
Long overdue refresh of the SocioPatterns website! ✨
sociopatterns.org
New content & datasets, and a chance to celebrate 17+ years of collabs, ~100 publications, 2000+ studies using our data. Thanks – more ahead!
@alainbarrat.bsky.social
@wouter-vdb.bsky.social
@foolsdelight.bsky.social
@isi.it
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👇
add a skeleton here at some point
6 months ago
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Andrea Baronchelli
Ronaldo Menezes 🦋
7 months ago
Happy to be hosting
@baronca.bsky.social
and Johan Bollen here this week at the
@exeter.ac.uk
@exetercompsci.bsky.social
. After a work day, we had a chance to go for a drink and dinner with them (w/
@diogofpacheco.bsky.social
)
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Andrea Baronchelli
Santo Fortunato
7 months ago
Our review on multilayer network science is out on the arXiv. Thanks to all collaborators of the AccelNet MultiNet project, great working with you all 🙏
@alexvespi.bsky.social
@ymoreno.bsky.social
@lordgrilo.bsky.social
@anduviera.bsky.social
@baronca.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2511.23371
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Multilayer network science: theory, methods, and applications
Multilayer network science has emerged as a central framework for analysing interconnected and interdependent complex systems. Its relevance has grown substantially with the increasing availability of...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.23371
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Andrea Baronchelli
New preprint: More is different for AI multi-agent systems - but what does more mean?
arxiv.org/abs/2510.22422
With
@ariel-flint.bsky.social
,
@lajello.bsky.social
and Romualdo Pastor-Satorras.
8 months ago
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Andrea Baronchelli
Tiago Peixoto
8 months ago
Nowadays, often the justification for choosing M$ is that it claims to be GDPR compliant, which just means that M$ can afford getting sued for any breach, which of course happens all the time. And universities don't care about potential breaches themselves, only about liability, which M$ absorbs.
add a skeleton here at some point
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Andrea Baronchelli
NetScience
8 months ago
Group size effects and collective misalignment in LLM multi-agent systems
arxiv.org/abs/2510.22422
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Group size effects and collective misalignment in LLM multi-agent systems
Multi-agent systems of large language models (LLMs) are rapidly expanding across domains, introducing dynamics not captured by single-agent evaluations. Yet, existing work has mostly contrasted the be...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22422
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New preprint: More is different for AI multi-agent systems - but what does more mean?
arxiv.org/abs/2510.22422
With
@ariel-flint.bsky.social
,
@lajello.bsky.social
and Romualdo Pastor-Satorras.
8 months ago
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reposted by
Andrea Baronchelli
Aaron Clauset
8 months ago
Not being an AI-doomer, but having experienced in my own department over the past 7 years a steady erosion of faculty governance norms and diminished prioritization of research-oriented pedagogy, this tracks. Let faculty and faculty interests lead the way, rather than administrators/regents
add a skeleton here at some point
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Andrea Baronchelli
Walter Quattrociocchi
9 months ago
“LLMs don’t understand.” Of course. That was never the point. The point is: we’re already using them as if they do — to moderate, to classify, to prioritize, to decide. That’s not a model problem. It’s a systemic one. The shift from verification to plausibility is real. Welcome to Epistemia.
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Andrea Baronchelli
Rob Noble
9 months ago
'I once met a former bodyguard of one billionaire with his own "bunker", who told me his security team's first priority, if this really did happen, would be to eliminate said boss and get in the bunker themselves. And he didn't seem to be joking.'
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Tech billionaires seem to be doom prepping. Should we be worried?
The debate is ramping up about what happens if - or when - computer intelligence overtakes humans
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly17834524o
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Andrea Baronchelli
Fil Menczer
9 months ago
Researchers say Israeli government likely behind AI-generated disinfo campaign in Iran
cyberscoop.com/citizen-lab-...
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Researchers say Israeli government likely behind AI-generated disinfo campaign in Iran
The group leveraged dozens of social media accounts and “routinely used” AI-generated imagery and video to stoke unrest among Iran’s population, according to Citizen Lab.
https://cyberscoop.com/citizen-lab-disinformation-campaign-israel-iran-evin-prison/
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Andrea Baronchelli
Sune Lehmann
9 months ago
It was a ton of fun to play a small role in this project lead by the brilliant Marta Ewa Lech &
@jonassjuul.bsky.social
. A lot of drama & change in the world of music reflected in the song-dynamics of the Billboard Hot 100!
add a skeleton here at some point
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There are two ways to deal with LLMs in our work One is the path of abundance: automate everything and multiply publications at the expense of quality The other is the path of focusing on the soul of the work, on the questions that still matter - to you - when everything else has been made trivial
10 months ago
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Andrea Baronchelli
Heather Burns
11 months ago
Breaking: the court ruling in Wikipedia's legal challenge to the Online Safety Act categorisation regime has just been handed down. The court dismissed Wikipedia's challenge. This is bad. This is very bad.
wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/08...
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Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations – Wikimedia Foundation
UPDATE: On Monday, 11 August, the High Court of Justice dismissed the Wikimedia Foundation’s challenge to the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) Categorisation Regulations. While the decision does not provi...
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/08/11/wikimedia-foundation-challenges-uk-online-safety-act-regulations/
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Andrea Baronchelli
Arianna Pera
11 months ago
Presented our work, “Cultural and Cognitive Insights from 2.6 Billion Drawings,” at
@ic2s2.bsky.social
this morning. Big thanks to Mauro Martino, Nima Dehmamy,
@douglasguilbeault.bsky.social
,
@lajello.bsky.social
, and
@baronca.bsky.social
for the collaboration ✨ Stay tuned for more results!
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Looking forward to it!
add a skeleton here at some point
12 months ago
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Andrea Baronchelli
Gianmarco De Francisci Morales
about 1 year ago
🚨Are moral judgements biased by the gender of the subject? We find *no* direct effect when looking at Reddit! Our causal study design is based on carefully matching similar situations that people with different genders experience (and share). Study led by
@loreb92.bsky.social
rdcu.be/eumlQ
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Moral judgments in online discourse are not biased by gender
Scientific Reports - Moral judgments in online discourse are not biased by gender
https://rdcu.be/eumlQ
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Andrea Baronchelli
Nicholas A. Christakis
about 1 year ago
Our preprint “How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy” is now online. We show how coordinated multi-agent LLM swarms can infiltrate communities, craft synthetic grassroots “consensus,” and erode institutional trust—and what we can do now to stop it.
osf.io/preprints/os...
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OSF
https://osf.io/preprints/osf/qm9yk_v1
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Andrea Baronchelli
Dr Abeba Birhane
about 1 year ago
New paper hot off the press
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/
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Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology - Nature
An analysis of research papers and citing patents indicates the extensive ties between computer-vision research and surveillance.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08972-6#MOESM1
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At
#ICWSM
? Here's a starter pack for you :)
bsky.app/starter-pack...
Check also "Bootstrapping Social Networks: Lessons from Bluesky Starter Packs"
ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC...
add a skeleton here at some point
about 1 year ago
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A brief follow-up on the complex systems foundations of our LLM population study, sparked by ongoing debate. And why they matter for studying AI collectives more broadly.
arxiv.org/abs/2506.18600
With
@ariel-flint.bsky.social
and
@lajello.bsky.social
about 1 year ago
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reposted by
Andrea Baronchelli
Leo Balduf
about 1 year ago
Our work on Bluesky:
doi.org/10.1609/icws...
Joint work with
@bibo7086.bsky.social
@harnen.bsky.social
@garethtyson.bsky.social
@asonur.bsky.social
@ignactro.bsky.social
@baronca.bsky.social
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Bootstrapping Social Networks: Lessons from Bluesky Starter Packs | Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v19i1.35810
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Average day in AI discourse: - The big tech paper saying LLMs are harmless toys, - The influencer claiming LLMs are an existential threat.
about 1 year ago
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👇👇👇
add a skeleton here at some point
about 1 year ago
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reposted by
Andrea Baronchelli
Rob Noble
about 1 year ago
Only two weeks left to apply!
add a skeleton here at some point
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Nice summary of our latest paper.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
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AI language models develop social norms like groups of people
When LLMs are grouped together, they exhibit similar characteristics to human societies.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01500-6
about 1 year ago
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New paper alert. "More is different" & the LLMs. LLMs are usually studied in isolation. But what happens when they start interacting? We explored this by looking at their collective behaviour. Work with
@ariel-flint.bsky.social
and
@lajello.bsky.social
1/
about 1 year ago
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Oral exams are the only true way to assess students - except in specific, marginal cases like parts of Maths or Physics. This has always been true, and we can’t ignore it anymore.
add a skeleton here at some point
about 1 year ago
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