If you only read one thing today - a Q&A with Patricia Kingori, a remarkable scholar who uncovered a remarkable story about a huge ‘fake essay industry’. 🧪 #academicSky @nature.com @ox.ac.uk www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Computation+Journalism 2025 is a month away (December 11-12); we're finishing the last details of the symposium: cplusj2025.com Here's the full agenda: cplusj2025.com/agenda/ Join us! You can register here ($150 for professionals, $30 for students): events.miami.edu/event/cplusj...

Should local officials in a democracy be allowed to sign NDAs?

Ok, just wow. If the content of this article is right, this is depressing. We're slowly reaching the point where ~100% of what I was taught in Social Psych was either innocently wrong or plainly frauded onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

NJ's bluest counties saw biggest turnout increases, propelling landslide Three densest counties saw largest jumps from '21: Hudson (Jersey City), Essex (Newark), Union >30% increase in total vote >30-pt Democratic margin High-profile local races helped, e.g., Jersey City mayoral w/ former gov 1/2

A new paper analyzes the “production-consumption gap” on social media, where a small subset of users produce most of the content, and considers its implications for the study of phenomena such as political polarization, and for the design of policy interventions. Prithvi Iyer considers the results:

hot off the (virtual) press in @transstudies.bsky.social: a collaboration with @pranavgoel.bsky.social, @crazybrokeasian.bsky.social, and @diesagar.bsky.social on information flows in US local & national news about transgender people (spoiler alert: it’s complicated) doi.org/10.57814/557...

Finally, we move beyond social media research and discuss potential consequences of the production-consumption gap, which results in a remarkable visibility gap, for public opinion more broadly.

We then discuss methodological challenges this production-consumption gap poses for us, social media researchers, and derive implications for sampling, study design and inference.

One phenomenon that is remarkably consistent across platforms, time and contexts: most people lurk, read along, and never really post while a small minority is very active, and very visible — a.k.a. the production-consumption gap.

Who people spend time with in physical space is more predictive of voting behavior than who they connect with online, according to a study. The study uses real-world colocation data derived from the Facebook app’s location services feature. In PNAS Nexus: https://ow.ly/PBTe50XhFcC

Trump approval at low point with: '24 non-voters (33%) Independents (30%) People of color (26%) Economic outlook remains negative, with few expecting prices to decrease any time soon, and many saying Trump's policies making them worse off More from latest poll: www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-new... 2/2

The effort to end gerrymandering on a state-by-state basis has clearly failed, and it needs to be taken on by some future Congress, preferably by creating multi-member districts with list PR

Did you know that we allow child marriage in the US? We do, in 34 states, and four or five children are being married every day on average. I once met a Floridian married at 11 to her rapist. And California has no minimum age at all for marriage: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/01/o...

Starting in 3 minutes - join us! ucla.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

We have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so... What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?

There's going to be a lot of focus on the topline -- that polling was more accurate than in 2016 and 2020 but still biased towards Dems on average by 2.7 pp -- but I want to highlight some of the other findings I found most interesting

Great talk by John Wihbey @harvard.edu @shorensteinctr.bsky.social on his new book!

Cornell University, Sociology: "Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists" Friday, Oct 31, 01:25 pm, Goldwin Smith Hall With Jamila Michiner (government), David Rand @dgrand.bsky.social (information science & communications), and Dan Hirschman @asociologist.bsky.social (sociology) /2

New at Media Nation: The Washington Post runs three editorials failing to disclose Jeff Bezos' business interests. dankennedy.net/2025/10/29/t...

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has crossed 120 million EU users for its search feature and may fall under the Digital Services Act. Ramsha Jahangir breaks down what this could mean for regulation of AI chatbots in Europe.

New story up on the non-existent banned words from NIH grants (based on my grant title, word cloud analysis) www.statnews.com/2025/10/29/n... 1/3

Exciting position @northeasternu.bsky.social ! Managing Policy Director at the new Institute for Information, & Democracy, please share with interested parties. northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/career...

We will have two CoCo seminars on October 29th and 30th! Dakota Murray (U. Albany) and Anastasia Bizyaeva (Cornell) will come to Binghamton/CoCo :) Note the irregular schedule.

Happy 24th Birthday Wayback Machine! On October 24, 2001, The Internet Archive organization launched a free digital archive of websites for the general public called the Wayback Machine. The oldest pages stored in the archive date back to 1996.

"Elon Musk on Monday launched an early version of Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia written by AI that the billionaire has touted as a less biased alternative to the venerable online resource Wikipedia." Sigh.

After a huge post-election flip in economic perceptions, I thought Democrats and Republicans might be lying to pollsters to send a partisan message — but I was wrong! New in the Journal of Experimental Political Science (open access): doi.org/10.1017/XPS....

This paper is definitely outside my niche expertise, but fascinating and really, really well done. "gridded, orderly neighborhoods reduce the social interactions residents have with neighbors, lower embeddedness in political problem-solving networks, and depress electoral turnout."

> “Universities are not tech companies,” Olivia Guest and Iris van Rooij, two computational cognitive scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands[.] “Our role is to foster critical thinking,” the researchers said, “not to follow industry trends uncritically.”

Watch: archive.org/details/the-...

"Vanderbilt is failing in its moral responsibility to push back against rising authoritarianism and political coercion." My effort to convince Vanderbilt (and all universities) to take a stand for the rule of law, the Constitution, and our democracy. www.tennessean.com/story/opinio...

Cool Boston event alert, this Oct 30!

@democracyreporting.bsky.social is searching for a Data Protection Consultant to conduct consulting for developing a Rresearch Data Protection Framework specifically tailored to the processing of social media data for research purposes democracy-reporting.org/en/office/gl...

🌎📖"Atlas of Macroscopes: Interactive Data Visualizations", co-authored by Katy Börner, Elizabeth Record and Todd Theriault is now out! Congratulations to the authors and editors! ✨ 🛒Check out the book and order it here: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204992... @mitpress.bsky.social @katyborner.bsky.social

We're two weeks out from Virginia's election. Almost no state's electorate has realigned as much as Virginia's over the past decades. When Mark Warner won the 2001 Gov. election, he did so with a coalition that included the Western coal counties and Hampton Roads, but mostly lost NOVA. 1/x

Grad students in political science and other social sciences! Consider applying to the great 2-week summer program in Qualitative and Multi-Method Research at Syracuse. Info is here: www.maxwell.syr.edu/research/cen...

Can partisanship lead survey respondents to knowingly spread misinformation? Schaffner & Luks used controversy over crowd sizes in the 2009 and 2017 presidential inaugurations. Trump supporters gave expressive responses to show their support. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

good news (what's that?) for higher ed... Unless there are some hidden details.

Pleased to share that the Kennedy School has been authorized to conduct a faculty search in American politics This is as an extraordinary opportunity for us - please share widely with your networks and consider applying academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15418

I'm so thrilled and honored to be selected for this award, and really grateful to @scicommexcellence.nationalacademies.org for their support of science communication. www.nationalacademies.org/awards/excel... #scicomm

A pardon "following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company." Unprecedented corruption.

The spiral created by Trump's move in Texas continues

For this week’s podcast, Justin Hendrix spoke to Cybersecurity for Democracy’s Laura Edelson and Arturo Béjar, a whistleblower and safety advocate, about their report, “Teen Accounts, Broken Promises: How Instagram is Failing to Protect Minors.”

Call for new members of the #GESISPanel scientific advisory board! Help us to shape the future of the #GESISPanel by providing crucial input in the areas of #surveymethodology, #dataquality assurance, and strategic development. More info: www.gesis.org/en/ges...#GESISPanel

Advising and Mentoring Political Science PhDs for Careers Beyond the Academy: APSA Careers Diversity Committee Virtual Workshop An APSA Careers Diversity Committee Virtual Workshop Details: Advising and Mentoring Political Science PhDs for Careers Beyond the Academy Tuesday, October 28, 2025 12:00…

New research finds that anti-vaccine networks on Facebook were smaller but more tightly coordinated, spreading emotionally charged misinformation faster, while pro-vaccine networks were larger and more institutional, sharing accurate info but with less engagement. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

As this thread also points out, this is both a bad sign and also acting responsibly in the face of a cratering academic market -- it is unethical IMHO to admit large PhD cohorts when the jobs for them simply no longer exist

What makes the internet so special you ask? It was designed in the 1970s to create a system resilient to single points of.....oh. Jokes aside, I'm grateful that so much infrastructure *did* keep running yesterday. Saying a general thanks to all the engineers whose work made that possible.

This new reporting from @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social is jaw-dropping and I think warrants a response from @cos.io given their ongoing collaboration with Meta. Jeff writes about how Meta identified content-specific harms as a key problem for teens on Instagram. 🧵 www.reuters.com/business/ins...