Join us in Konstanz! For anyone interested, feel free to DM if you have questions.

@uni-graz.at featured our brand-new article on collective moderation of online spaces published in @pnasnexus.org 🥳 Wanna read what citizen-based strategies can be a remedy against online hate? Click here: ow.ly/csZK50XGteK @janalasser.bsky.social @aroyehuns.bsky.social @dgarcia.eu

LLMs excel at mimicking individual text, but what about collective conversations? 🤔 In our recent paper 📄, we conducted a Turing Test to see if GPT4 and Llama 3-generated social media conversations can fool humans into believing they're authentic! arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08592

Misinformation research has a causality problem: lab experiments are limited; observational studies confounded. We used causal inference on 9.9M tweets, quantifying effects in the wild while blocking backdoor paths. Does misinfo get higher engagement? Are following discussions more emotional? 🧵

I'm hiring! Post-doctoral researcher-KOMEX director Wanted: talent in social science research methodology/ methods-versed inequality researcher, interest in global knowledge production! @excinequality.bsky.social @komex.bsky.social @methodsnet.bsky.social stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/2...

Join us as postdoc at the Inequality Discourse Observatory at the University of Konstanz: stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/7... We will do epic research between Linguistics and Computational Social Science at the Cluster of Politics of Inequality. Feel free to DM if you have any questions.

🚨Call for papers for the 2026 Inequality conference in Konstanz. I'm co-organizing it and we welcome submissions from Computational Social Science. The deadline is approaching quickly! inequality-conference.de

📣 Call for Papers is open! In_equality Conference 2026 | 15–17 April | Konstanz We invite papers on the political causes & consequences of #inequality Submit Aug 8–Oct 5 ➡️ inequality-conference.de @uni-konstanz.de

#OpenAccess from @pspolisci.bsky.social - Large Language Models Are Democracy Coders with Attitudes - cup.org/3H8EebY - @nilsweidmann.bsky.social, Mats Faulborn & @dgarcia.eu #FirstView #LLM

Do LLMs represent the people they're supposed simulate or provide personalized assistance to? We review the current literature in our #ACL2025 Findings paper and investigating what researchers conclude about the demographic representativeness of LLMs: osf.io/preprints/so... 1/

Excited to present our paper with @maxpe.bsky.social, @dgarcia.eu, and @mstrohm.bsky.social next week at #ICWSM! ✨ We extend social simulation with LLMs to a longitudinal setting by fine-tuning Temporal Adapters—here's how: 🧵

New preprint with @jbakcoleman.bsky.social @lewan.bsky.social @randomwalker.bsky.social @orbenamy.bsky.social @lfoswaldo.bsky.social where we argue for a complex-system perspective to understand the causal effects of social media on society and for a triangulation of methods arxiv.org/abs/2505.09254

A few months ago I was like "why is there so much gay porn in my anti-AI app" and now there is none of it in my discover feed. It's just a matter of time for the algorithm to sort it out.

Are you interested in inequalities, mobility and cities? Come to work with us as a postdoc at @ceu-dnds.bsky.social in Vienna in the Computational Human Dynamics Lab of @martonkarsai.bsky.social. Check the post here: careers.ceu.edu/job/Vienna-P... @ic2s2.bsky.social @netscisociety.bsky.social

Honest people don’t lie. Or do they? Liars aren’t honest. Or are they? One puzzling conundrum in contemporary politics is that politicians who seem to be estranged from facts and evidence are nonetheless considered honest by their followers. 1/n

Now available on arxiv: "Large Language Models Are Democracy Coders with Attitudes" (with Mats Faulborn and @dgarcia.eu) arxiv.org/abs/2503.22315

"I can do things with LLMs" seems to be the next "I can get Twitter data" in Computational Social Science. Not that I think it's bad, it's just funny to see how things change.

We are looking for a German-speaking lab manager for the Social Data Science lab in Konstanz. More info here: stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/4...

I'm really happy to welcome David Garcia @dgarcia.eu at the DM3L for a talk on "Polarization and consensus: between online discussions and generative agents" Join us if you are in Zurich next Thursday! dm3l.uzh.ch/news?nId=69

Our open review portal is down, but our team is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. In light of this, the submission deadline has been extended to Feb 26, 23:59 AoE. We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience caused.

EPJ Data Science Highlight - Mapping the cross-generational impact of musical sampling www.epj.org/113-epj-ds/2...

How politicians communicate shapes online discourse in ways we might overlook. Our new paper shows that their choice between a fact-based (evidence-driven) and a belief-based (sincerity-driven) honesty creates a "contagion" effect, influencing how users engage and respond. ⬇️(1/8)

Hello world! Meet our consortium—15 organizations, 10 countries—joining forces to rethink the digital political information space. 🚀 Last week, we kicked off our project WHAT-IF, setting the stage to build a digital twin that will help us test the impact of policy interventions. More in the 🧵!

It's supercool that Deepseek v3 is open, but it's pretty censored at least through the Android app. It refused to answer about Tiananmen and when asked about the capital of Taiwan, it deleted the output mid-generation.

If you are interested in studying good old human activity on pre-Musk Twitter, we are now sharing the complete 375M dataset of our 24h Twitter data collection with researchers. Get in touch! ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC... Please forward to interested scholars.

😡Emotions ≠ 🤓Reasoning?! Nope! 😎 @apeksha.bsky.social's & @julaluehring.bsky.social's first PhD paper on recognizing COVID-19 misinformation & links with emotions got accepted! If you haven't already seen the preprint, have a look at the paper or this 🧵! doi.org/10.1186/s412...

I'm glad to announce that I just started as co-Editor-in-chief of EPJ Data Science with @yelenamejova.bsky.social Looking forward to building the community around one of my favorite journals! www.epj.org/113-epj-ds/2...

I have an open 3-year PostDoc position in my research group, centered on the extraction and analysis of relations of societal actors (e.g. politicians, CEOs, ...) from unstructured text data. Feel free to reach out if you want to know more! Deadline is Jan 1st. jobs.uni-graz.at/en/jobs/a122...

Happy new year!

Which celebrities are the most popular and unpopular on social media? We are working on a new Holiday Paper Series article on that! We are changing to a Summer schedule for the HPS. On the meantime, here is a teaser for Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Britney Spears: dgarcia.eu/CSS_Holiday_...

Very interesting paper that is making rounds on Bluesky but please notice this issue is for *proprietary* LLMs like the OpenAI ones. Running Llama locally was remarkably stable. In general, using any kind of proprietary software, especially through an API, is bad for reproducibility.

Join us tomorrow (Friday, December 13th) for the fourth talk in the I2SC Lecture Series by @dgarcia.eu from 12:00-13:00 in building E 1.7, Room 3.23.

Job announcement: Junior Professorship in Computational Social Science at the University of Konstanz. Join us at the Center for Data and Methods! Feel free to reach out if you have questions. stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/2...

It's nice to see an old paper of mine being covered by a YouTube short! www.youtube.com/shorts/SLlWA...

Looking forward to giving a talk about gender inequality in digital traces and AI today at 15:30 at ETH Zurich: www.swish.ethz.ch/events/ Slides are available here: dgarcia.eu/eth-gender-2...

Curating and sharing high-quality datasets is the foundation of good empirical science. @icwsm.bsky.social promotes dataset creation through a dedicated conference track published in the conference's regular proceedings. Submit your dataset paper by Jan 15th! www.icwsm.org/2025/submit/...

Hi, so I've spent the past almost-decade studying research uses of public social media data, like e.g. ML researchers using content from Twitter, Reddit, and Mastodon. Anyway, buckle up this is about to be a VERY long thread with lots of thoughts and links to papers. 🧵

I'm so glad to see the one-day-in-twitter dataset being used for projects like this one! I miss our old spreadsheets full of API keys...

You can measure the political beliefs of economists from their language and use that to measure their priors in statistics. I saw Suresh Naidu presenting this at a UCLA IPAM workshop back in 2016. It's exciting to see it out but concerning to see it took so long. academic.oup.com/ej/article/1...

I am reposting this for all the many newly arrived. Let’s get connected🌻 #CSS @ic2s2.bsky.social @iasliu.bsky.social @sonia-yeh.bsky.social @pholme.bsky.social @dgarcia.bsky.social @giuliandr.bsky.social @ajungherr.bsky.social

Repost if you’ve participated in a Summer Institute in Computational Social Science. Let’s get #SICSS Bluesky going!

I created this starter pack of researchers based in Europe who study misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. I suspect this list will grow -- get in touch with suggestions go.bsky.app/36RdG8Z

New millennial bucket list item: Run around Helsinki with a suitcase under my arm as if someone was chasing me

Idea for Bluesky: Send a notification when you are added to a starter pack so you understand when you suddenly get a lot of followers.