The internet is revolutionary to free speech because it empowers individuals and citizens to route around censorship in all its forms—even a captured “free” press. This is why private platform governance; law on internet access or online content, and anonymity online will always matter.

Excited to see this out! congrats to @tahayasseri.bsky.social & all contributors!

Perhaps others have seen it already, but I found this pre-print (first posted in September) deeply troubling, raising concerns about how LLMs used for classification tasks in research open new researcher-degrees-of-freedom, which they call "LLM-hacking" (akin to p-hacking) arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

This is a must-read visionary (and pragmatic) piece from @alondra.bsky.social on how to promote ethical AI development and use by building on, learning from, and improving the ELSI genetics model, which I missed when it came out back in September: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

So what's the alternative to grantwashing you ask? We offer several ideas, including one by Alondra Nelson that borrows from the structure of the Human Genome project to dedicate 3-5% of R&D funding from emerging technologies to safety and ethics research. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Should scientists apply to OpenAI's fund for research on AI & mental health? Should policymakers consider it a credible safety effort? Avriel Epps & I see it as "grantwashing," and it's an insult to anyone whose loved one's death involved chatbots. We explain: www.techpolicy.press/beware-of-op...

PNAS: Perception of own centrality in social networks https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2420334122?af=R

Submit your #APSA2026 proposals for the 122nd APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition, September 3–6, exploring the theme, “Democracy Under Threat: How to Understand, Protect, and Rebuild” by January 14, 2026. View submission details: buff.ly/sV7bLoi Submit your proposals: buff.ly/LY7hVmd

Surely the people who file hundreds of demands that libraries they've never been to remove books that they've never read — surely those people wouldn't abuse an open syllabus law to harass professors teaching topics they don't like the sound of. Important reporting from @stephaniemlee.bsky.social

What this will mean, in practice, that if you are deemed an enemy of the administration, they will pore through your citizenship application paperwork looking for some reason to retroactively disqualify you. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/u...

Just a shocking missed opportunity that this paper (a) develops a Bayesian approach to network community detection, tested on (b) Sampson’s Monastery Data—which is about conflict amongst a group of monks—but (c) is somehow *not* titled “Updating Your Prior”. www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~teh/researc...

Thinking of this photo of Carl & Rob Reiner at dinner that went viral a few years ago. May their memory be a blessing. ❤️❤️❤️

Excellent job opportunity: Full professorship in Digital Society and Democracy @ddc-sdu.bsky.social and @d-ias.bsky.social. Top conditions, environment & colleagues. Candidates welcome across places and disciplines. 🗓️ DL: March 15, 2026 fa-eosd-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

FULL PROFESSOR OF DIGITAL SOCIETY AND DEMOCRACY ...at the DDC and DIAS, here at the University of Southern Denmark 🇩🇰 ...open to various disciplines, including law, economics, political science, communication, journalism, or AI. More info: fa-eosd-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

For the second year in a row, the wealth gains for the 100 richest Americans exceeded what ALL American households spent on groceries combined. ~$995B for billionaires vs ~$775B in total grocery spending. We have an oligarchy and inequality problem masquerading as an affordability crisis.

So much gerrymandering! We know gerrymandering is bad for democratic representation, but new research suggests candidates campaigning in non-competitive districts campaign differently; using more moral & emotional language in tweets during primaries than those in more competitive districts 🧵

"With only 18% coming from megadonors, Dems have a fundraising advantage among grassroots supporters that enabled them to outraise Republicans in 2024. Yet the party courts billionaires while campaigning against oligarchy," writes @adambonica.bsky.social. data4democracy.substack.com/p/money-does...

The decline of democracy in the US means you can’t visit the US if you commented on the decline of democracy in the US

I don’t write the headlines but I do like this one (post-Slaughter argument roundtable for @nytimes.com with @stevevladeck.bsky.social & @williambaude.bsky.social) www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/o...

David Lazer on the gaps in Americans’ trust in science—and how to address them—in this Northeastern Global News piece, based on a new Nature Human Behaviour paper (tinyurl.com/4tm8769p). @davidlazer.bsky.social news.northeastern.edu/2025/12/09/s...

Keynote Announcement! We're thrilled to have Kate Starbird from the University of Washington's Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering speak at IC2S2 2026. Registration is open with submissions opening on 12/15: ic2s2-2026.org

Our new study provides rare causal evidence about NYC’s speed camera program. We find large reductions in collisions (30%) and injuries (16%) near intersections with cameras. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... @astagoff.bsky.social ky.social @brendenbeck.bsky.social nbeck.bsky.social 🧪

Paper out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com: 1) those groups (women, African Americans, lower SES, rural) that are underrepresented in science have been less trusting of science. 2) If you improve representation in science, you improve trust among those groups. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The book is real! To celebrate, I will give out five copies to interested early career folks. DM if you’d like one.

New research from the #NetSI team + colleagues shows: groups with historically lower trust—women, Black people, rural and lower-income residents—trust scientists more when they share their identity. Greater representation across communities can boost trust in science. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New strategies to catch LLM powered bots in panel surveys www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Summer 2026 MSR-NYC-CSS internship opportunity for current PhD candidates! Purely academic position with possible projects around agentic markets, mapping public opinion, market for news, etc. Apply by January 9 for full consideration: apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...

The NYT, like the BBC, is a repeat offender on this front. They are two of the institutions in the world that can most afford to be generous with credit, and instead they are miserly.

My @techpolicypress.bsky.social piece about X’s DSA fine, and how it is NOT about censorship, is up. It expands on points I made in a thread here, and adds context. Thanks to @justinhendrix.bsky.social for helping me pull it together!

If you read one piece on Trump’s pernicious new National Security Strategy, read this by @himself.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/programm...

Want to be an intern at Microsoft Research in the Computational Social Science group in NYC (Jake Hofman, David Rothschild, Dan Goldstein) Follow this link and do your thing! Deadline approaching soonish! apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...

🚨JOB POSTING: The Institute seeks an accomplished nonprofit leader, strategist, and manager who is passionate about organizational excellence and the Institute’s mission to serve as its Chief of Staff. Details to apply here: knightcolumbia.org/page/chief-o...

Do it. Do it. Do it. "April 23 (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is expected on Tuesday to approve a rule that would ban agreements commonly signed by workers not to join their employers' competitors, which it says limit worker mobility and suppress their pay."

@jennyallen.bsky.social and @jatucker.bsky.social add a fantastic Perspective piece on the importance of platform-independent experiments on social media's impact on us: science.org/doi/10.1126/... Strongly agree!

Our new article in @science.org enables social media reranking outside of platforms' walled gardens. We add an LLM-powered reranking of highly polarizing political content into N=1256 participants' feeds. Downranking cools tensions with the opposite party—but upranking inflames them.

Happy to share our most recent paper, led by @allisonwan.bsky.social, auditing what domains Google shows when you search for a Member of Congress. journalqd.org/article/view... @journalqd.bsky.social

I hope people take two minutes to listen to this shocking display of bigotry. It brings clarity to what we are fighting against. We should all be sick to hear such un-American drivel from the President of the United States.

Americans aren’t following the news as closely as they were a decade ago. And that’s true for older and younger Americans and Republicans and Democrats alike. New today from Pew: www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

It might be that autonomous cars will be a public health boon. But, we can't say that based on someone downloading Waymo data, spending "weeks" (!) looking at the data, & exclaiming that as fact in a @nytimes.com opinion piece. (Who needs @jama.com, I guess?) www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

Pure, unmitigated hate.

The White House debuted its national AI platform for scientific discovery with a 100% stock footage promo. But the real risks aren't clichés: 1️⃣ Centralizing research with no democratic oversight 2️⃣ Building a corporate, closed environment 3️⃣ Ignoring research for communities Read more: bit.ly/4iyoGwp

After becoming a congressional leader, a politician’s stock portfolio beats out those of peers by 47 (!!!) percentage points a year through trades timed around bills and firms that later get government contracts www.nber.org/papers/w34524 via @florianederer.bsky.social

If you have enjoyed the blog and are interested in subscribing, I will matching the annual value of all new paid subscriptions in December with a donation to Give Directly. Stay informed and do something good!

GREAT blog about scientific publishing including this provocative figure: danielroelfs.com/posts/the-mo...

On this Giving Tuesday, I'm proud to support @opensecrets.org, an outstanding non-profit working to increase accountability in government by providing transparency in money in politics. Join me in supporting them! www.opensecrets.org?_gl=1*1wx5cy...

Join us for two exciting talks happening today — one at our London Hub and one at our Boston Hub! 🌍✨ Stay up to date on all upcoming events by visiting our Events page: 🔗 www.networkscienceinstitute.org/events

New paper in Science: In a platform-independent field experiment, we show that reranking content expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity in social media feeds alters affective polarization. 🧵

I would add that there is _a lot_ of heterogeneity in which women are less likely to use Twitter. Thus, for example, we see a 75% decline among 50+ year old Democratic women; & no decline among 50+ Republican women... www.chip50.org/social-media...

Needed - larger samples, more realism about (the lack of) heterogeneous treatment effects: -"less than a third of proposed hypotheses were supported... the largest predictor of positive exp. results was sample size" -"moderation hypotheses were rarely significant" academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...

When a news outlet puts a reckless, undocumented claim by the Trump regime in the main headline and puts medical experts’ pushback in the smaller type, it’s making a choice. And not a good one.