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? 🧵

Das crazy. -> Das's' crazy.

Job Alert! We are hiring two post-docs (full time, 4+ years) in our project SCEPTIC - Social, Computational and Ethical Premises of Trust and Informational Cohesion with @annanosthoff.bsky.social @guzoch.bsky.social and Prof. Andreas Peters (uol.de/informatik/s...)

📢 New Journal Article: AI & Deliberation 📢 What impact does #AI have on democratic deliberation? Together with @adrauc.bsky.social, I explore this question in a new article in Government Information Quarterly. Findings in the thread 🧵👇 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... (1/7)

Happy 3²/4²/5² day! (for the US only—it's the less cool 20(5²)-3²-4² in ISO-8601)

If you are interested in doing a PhD on Agent-based models of Protests consider this call: 2 Doctoral Scholarships (48 months) ‘Contentious Politics in the Digital Age’ (CoPoDi), funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Visit: www.bigsss-bremen.de/academic-pro...

To cite this meme: Photoshop et al. (2025)

My fourth day at #CCS2025 starts in the physics of self-organization satellite, where @cgershen.bsky.social discussed a balance-based narrative to explain complex systems science to the general public. He gave us a historical overview on the topic and then a formalization of his ideas.

realistic Star Trek

My daughter knew I would enjoy the evolutionary dynamics (an evolutionary stable state / Nash equilibrium) described in this 3 minute video from KQED’s excellent Deep Look team: These Lizards Have Been Playing Rock-Paper-Scissors for 15 Million Years #evolution #nature

PsyArXiv is seeking new moderators to help combat an increase in AI submissions! If you've ever posted a preprint to PsyArXiv, please consider joining. Minimum commitment 1h/month, there's a training session this Monday @ 1pm ET. More info here: forms.gle/9LB1rEtxHAeZ... #PsychSciSky

By far the best alternative I have come across is Matilda: matilda.science?l=en

We built the simplest possible social media platform. No algorithms. No ads. Just LLM agents posting and following. It still became a polarization machine. Then we tried six interventions to fix social media. The results were… not what we expected. arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385

Interesting paper that can extend to digital technologies generally and concludes: “Understanding the consequences of actual AI for actual democracy, and figuring out how to steer toward the better rather than the worse outcomes, will require new kinds of cooperation than the ones we have today.”

Super important blog post on large scale scientific fraud through „scientific publishing“ by paying for it in „paper mills“.

only a maniac would use a 2-sided test here

Men dominate hollywood scripts. pudding.cool/2017/03/film...

I think they’re here to stay, but it’s worth remembering (and this will become increasingly apparent in the years to come) that, despite some clear benefits, LLMs/large AI models are a net negative for society and it’s not even close.

Seltener Fund eines Fun-Content in der deutschen Wikipedia: Das Beispiel zum ökonomischen Grenznutzen ist wirklich besser zu verstehen, wenn man vorher dem Link zum Bratwurst-Artikel und das Bild konsultiert! de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenznu...

My lab has a name and a website now 🥳 Please welcome the "Psychology of Social Complexity" lab: www.socolab.co.uk

I've been working on a new tool, Refine, to make scholars more productive. If you're interested in being among the very first to try the beta, please read on. Refine leverages the best current AI models to draw your attention to potential errors and clarity issues in research paper drafts. 1/

Review "Opinion dynamics: Statistical physics and beyond" arxiv.org/abs/2507.11521 Lab experiments, data, models, analytical/computational tools. 93 pages, >1k references. With Fabian Baumann, David Garcia, Gerardo Iñiguez, Márton Karsai, Jan Lorenz, Katarzyna Sznajd-Weron. Led by Michele Starnini

The representative electoral statistics show how often each demographic group voted for different parties in the German federal election. This year, I’ve prepared the data as radar charts. What do you think: does this type of chart work well for this kind of data? www.spiegel.de/politik/deut...

Haben nicht alle noch nach einem Namen für schwarz-rot gesucht? Wie wäre es mit "Drecksarbeit"-Koalition?

This was the jumpstart event for a major focus of my research going forward, together with many excellent collaborators (those in attendance and many others). I’m so grateful for the opportunity to put this together, and i hope for more events to come. #culturalevolution

10 years work has led to this: Social identity networks: People holding attitudes are a collective social identity information system & bipartite networks are a useful way to represent them. European Review of Social Psychology. @polpsyispp.bsky.social doi.org/10.1080/1046...

Regarding Italian referendums, do I get it right: There is a participation quorum of 50%, but only 30% went (so FAIL). Of those, 85% were in favor of the labor law thing; thus, if an additional 20% of voters had voted NO, it would have been a WIN with 51% YES 49% NO? www.euronews.com/my-europe/20...

We're offering two funded PhD studentships in the ERC-Funded ID-Compression project at the University of Limerick, Ireland -- please pass on to any kind, curious & talented candidates who might be interested. Thank you! @csi-research.bsky.social www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/svvz1...

Ich mag keine (semi-)präsidentiellen Systeme. Sie ver-/behindern den Kompromiss als die eigentlich demokratische Form des Entscheidens.

Slides for SemGenAge Workshop: docs.google.com/presentation...

How AI will surpass human intelligence... 😂😅

New preprint on the global state of political polarization research 🎉 osf.io/preprints/os... We discuss the many different ways polarization can be conceptualised, how it manifests very differently across countries and domains, and the problems with the dominance of US focused research.

📢 CALL FOR PAPERS: DEMOCRATIC DECISION-MAKING IN TIMES OF AI ℹ️ Info on themes and how to submit: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... 📅 Deadline: 3 October 2025

@lagedernation.org Apr 11, bitte einmal vorrechnen warum, wie behauptet, die SPD zuviel Minister hat und eigentlich 5 haben müsste. (Ich zähle Kanzler als 2 Minister) Ich komme auf SPD passt prozentual, übervorteilt wie immer CSU zu Lasten CDU

Excited to announce my recently published article with Christoffer Florczak on LLMs' multiclass classification capabilities. rdcu.be/d9oIw

Kurze Frage: Mütterrente war doch schon mindestens 3mal als quasi immer das Resultat von Union-SPD Koalitionsverhandlung. Die kann doch nicht immer wieder neu eingeführt werden, gehts um Erhöhung oder um was? Und warum wird das nicht sinnvoller benannt?

Beim Wahlrecht gibts also wieder eine #Wahlrechtskommission, die nach dem Perpetuum Mobile suchen soll. Mehrheitswahl, Einerwahlkreise und 2 Stimmen nach bisherigem Muster scheinen als selbstverständlich unterstellt zu sein.

CfP for the 6th Pluralumn* Workshop at Uni Hamburg and Flensburg - looking forward to your submissions! @zoessuhh.bsky.social

5️⃣days left to apply! 👇We are very much looking forward to receiving your applications!

This is a good and useful essay about AI and society. Recommended, as is the thread below.

Very happy supervisor with the publication of Pietro Nickl's article on global trends in online headlines: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

my favorite film genres: 5. cop with a conscience 4. an assassin has an existential crisis 3. a team of thieves pull off the heist of the century 2. a middle-aged bureaucrat is embroiled in a political conspiracy 1. Economists rediscovered a new topic that sociologists have studied for decades.

I am #hiring! If you are interested in AI and data science this #PhD position may be of interest to you! This is a fully funded position at @ucdcs.bsky.social, €22,000 tax free per annum. Research area: AI for mining, understanding and augmenting public opinion and public discourse. Link below! 🧵1/2

A week ago or so I stumbled across this piece by @edzitron.com. He raises some compelling points and is asking the right question - where's the money? - but ultimately I think he is wrong. The money is there. And it's in the data centers. Let me explain. 1/10 www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-m...

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.” Absurd we still need to go through this 🧪👩‍🔬

When LLMs also read all the papers we have solved science and can do other things! Seriously: More sifting work in even better-formulated bullshit. Furthermore, reading is a part of doing science I dislike most often. So, it will become worse :-(

Nothing to see here, just Nature advocating LLM peer review. “Feed your dictated notes into an offline large language model (LLM) to clarify and organize your feedback. A simple prompt such as “Write a critical reviewer letter based on the following notes. Maintain a professional tone throughout”