The answer is that students now correctly anticipate that the federal government will punish the entire campus --- cancelling federal grants, opening investigations, and deporting international students --- if even a handful of students dare to speak out on any political issue.

🚨NEW DISINFO PAPER🚨 TLDR; disinformation circulates as narratives, not false facts. This paper took five years (!!!) and a rotating cast of collaborators and GRAs. Our case studies include the pee tape, and we have an entire appendix justifying that. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Thrilled to publish my latest article BAN COOKIE BANNERS: A CASE STUDY IN TECH REGULATION with the Harv. J. of Law & Tech! A cri de cœur to end this worse-than-useless regulatory compliance regime and let something that actually protects users take its place. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... 1/

The real story is that foreign govts try to "interfere" all the time. In 2020 and 2024 we had mechanisms to catch them, call them out, & mitigate damage. Now, those mechanims are gone & the Trump admin would prefer to exploit "foreign interference" to justify a federal take-over of elections.

Last week the story was that TikTok censored anti-Trump/ICE/Pretti videos after the U.S. ownership change. We investigated with a large set of US TikTok data and found some interesting results, short thread...

Essential research, a great place to work, extremely cool colleagues - if I had any relevant technical skills (and did not already work next door) I'd apply.

The Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow to work with an interdisciplinary team (me, @bstewart.bsky.social, and @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social). Link: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app... Please apply by THIS SUNDAY, Dec. 14!

📣 Yale workshop, Oct 16-17! 📣 How could/should content ranking work? What's new in content moderation? How can platforms promote civility? Hosted by Yale's Institute for Foundations of Data Science (FDS). Great speakers! Submit posters by 9/22! Spread the word! yalefds.swoogo.com/socialalgori...

Very cool looking Ass Prof job posting from the great group at Copenhagen Business School www.cbs.dk/cbs/jobs-paa...

FTC and Musk are working to sue Media Matters out of existence. A real canary in the coalmine moment for civil society. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/u...

Deeply reported story by @stephaniemlee.bsky.social, on the impact of grant terminations — even for those who have managed to get their awards reinstated “I do not trust 100 percent,” one researcher said, “that there won’t be another termination.”

Anyway, I know it's not news that Trump is hypocritical, but here's my story reminding people that MAGA world insisted that the Biden admin sending impolite notes to Facebook was the greatest threat to free speech, but are completely silent on Trump calling up Murdoch and demanding he kill a story

Will Meet The Press ask random other white politicians to condemn Trump's antisemitic language this weekend? Or does that only apply to Mamdani?

It’s weird how the white conservative guys at the NYT get to say whatever they want but anyone else has to watch what they say because it’s “too political”

A nice complement to this paper by @aecoppock.bsky.social and @andyguess.com alexandercoppock.com/guess_coppoc..., which found no evidence of backlash from one-sided counter-attitudinal information

Not surprising that an administration that rose to power on the spread of bullshit and propaganda is terminating the funding of researchers studying these phenomena. We are just receiving word about funding cancellations re: existing grants to members of our team and our colleagues.

Out now! "GERDA: The German Election Database." GERDA provides comprehensive municipal, state, and federal election results at the municipality level between 1990 and 2021. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We hang together or we hang separately. Could not be clearer what is happening and how universities must respond.

Every single university president should be asked, in public, why they are not speaking out this way to support all the students currently detained without due process, and all those terrified that they will be next, on every campus in this country. Yes, including Columbia's acting president.

If we were conquered and under hostile occupation, what would the government do differently? Would an occupation government that wanted to crush the United States as a vibrant, prosperous country with influence around the world do anything differently?

Former Columbia president Lee Bollinger, interviewed by the Chronicle earlier this month, said universities should think in centuries and consider what they might look back on in shame; apparently Columbia’s current leadership considered the question and decided they’re content submitting to a king.

Reminder that 'savvy' political fact checkers spent the entire campaign telling voters that Trump was not going to do the things he obviously was going to do.

I'm sure this is the last time they'll ever threaten Columbia's funding. So rest easy. It's not like Donald Trump to keep on threatening the same person or entity over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. I don't think the sets any precedent. 🙄

me for the next 4 years

As Vance 'lectures' Europe on free speech, it is good to be reminded that the United States ranks 55 (!) on the World Press Freedom Index. The top 10 countries are ALL in Europe. #journalism #democracy #freepress rsf.org/en/index

I really wish Americans would stop treating the continued existence of Canada as the sort of thing they can do amusing thought experiments about.

ACTION THIS WEDNESDAY: Researchers from New York universities are holding a rally to protest the funding cuts at Washington Square Park at 4 pm. This will be part of a national day of action, with rallies at HHS in DC and all around the country. RSVP HERE: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

It is vitally important that journalists speak to comparativists who study authoritarian takeovers, like @kimlanelaw.bsky.social, and not just to people whose expertise is in US domestic law and politics.

Excited to share my new #JEPS paper with @xiaoxiaoshen.bsky.social introducing ReChat, a research tool for live-text interaction studies! Makes it easy to embed live chats in surveys, opening new possibilities for research on social interaction. Check it out! 🧵👇 #AcademicSky #PoliSciSky #PoliSky

At long last, my stupidly long post on how Brendan Carr is aiming to be America's top censor. www.techdirt.com/2024/11/27/b...

ICYMI yesterday: Sen. Markey called on Meta to recommit itself to transparency, data sharing, and ongoing research to study its platforms' effects on elections and democracy. www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/do...

FIRE is currently going to bat for Wax because, according to them, there’s no evidence that she ever engaged in actual discriminatory conduct. meanwhile i took one semester of civil procedure with her and remember like 5-6 specific racist incidents directed at students.

We should attack transphobia head-on simply because it is a disgusting ideology, but if that's not enough for you, it's a system of control that stems from a patriarchal assumption about what a woman "should" be whose natural end is rigid gender roles upheld by state violence. Which seems bad!

the attacks on Ella Emhoff (as well as Lin Yu-ting and Imane Khalif) are part of what trans people have correctly warned about for a long time: the rise in transphobia will target cis women too.

A foghorn not a dog whistle. Could not be more explicit.

We're pleased to announce the publication of our first special issue in collaboration with ICWSM! This special issue aims to build bridges between scholarly communities engaging in the study of digital media. See here for more on the 8 fantastic papers in this series: journalqd.org/announcement...

I spent the past week hanging around the student protests in New York City, trying to square the madness on social media with what I was seeing with my own eyes. Here's what I found. www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/o...

📢 CSMaP is hiring a Researcher! The role will focus on two main areas: 1️⃣ Writing compelling grant proposals for research projects 2️⃣ Working as a research data scientist supporting quantitive research projects More info + apply 👇 apply.interfolio.com/140966

Can searching for false news increase belief in misinformation? Yes, by approximately 20 percent, according to our new paper, out today in @natureportfolio.bsky.social. In addition, this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower quality information. 👇🧵1/

ICYMI: Apply to be a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton (due Dec. 1)! Most postdocs are matched to a specific faculty advisor (including, possibly, me). See below for more details. citp.princeton.edu/programs/fel...

I was happy to sign this. Important to set this norm!

Thank you to @dianebolet.bsky.social and @florianfoos.bsky.social for this impt study of platforming right-wing activists -- exposure increases agreement with extreme right views with low, medium, and high baseline authoritarian attitudes. When the interviewer challenges the activist, fx are ~0

a moving dispatch from a young palestinian journalist in gaza www.thenation.com/article/worl...

Important statement from Amaney Jamal and Keren Yarhi-Milo: "Campuses must protect free speech, but equally advocate for mutually respectful dialogue...There is no better place for these discussions than a university campus. But sponsoring this kind of debate takes courage."

This is definitely true; I just turned mine off. CHECK YOURS! Keeping Twitter for work purposes (I teach social media), but every day is a new disaster over there!

A good tool to bridge people you follow on Twitter over to Bluesky but took me a minute to figure out: — install plugin in Chrome — go to *your Twitter profile page* and click on list of people you follow — activate plugin Very short video was helpful: github.com/kawamataryo/...