New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

Half of online time goes to two activities: social media (25%) and email (25%). LLM tools (ChatGPT, Gemini) now account for 2.9% of all online time. News sites get 2.5%. AI is already a bigger share of attention than news. For adults 18-29 the gap widens: LLMs 5.1%, news 1.1%.

Our new report is out: How Americans Spend Their Time Online. www.nuinfoinstitute.org/publications... Five companies (Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon) capture more than half of all online time. Alphabet alone takes 35%.

🚨 Excited to share our new paper to appear in the Findings of ACL 2026! "JudgeMeNot" asks: Can LLMs learn the specific reasoning signature of an individual judge? We tackle this in the low-resource setting of Hebrew case law. 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2604.18041 🧵👇

“It’s a massive data pipeline: phone metadata, location pings, SIM card swaps, app usage, social media behavior, sometimes even banking or facial recognition inputs. A lot is ‘scraped’ from commercial platforms, mobile networks, partner intelligence agencies, or spies on the ground..."

The we're-paying-too-much-attention-to-Twitter-and-not-enough-to-YouTube problem, quantified New pre-print from @dfreelon.bsky.social @davidlazer.bsky.social @pranavgoel.bsky.social @meredithpruden.bsky.social et al osf.io/preprints/so...

Here’s a presentation for students on data brokers & digital surveillance, with a lot of links that might be of interest. (Got a little enthusiastic about animations!) docs.google.com/presentation...

But science is a social practice, one that depends on cooperation and trust. I've studied cooperation and trust for 25 years, often with computational models, including AI. The longer I've done this work, the more I've seen the limitations of these tools. >>

Last weekend I received the Troland Research Award from the @nationalacademies.org. I’m so grateful to the communities who made this work possible. It's strange to receive this award at a time when much of the work being recognized is not eligible for federal funding. My remarks 👇 and a 🧵>>

Making the lunacy clear: The 14th Amendment gives Congress the explicit power to legislate to enforce the Amendment. Congress passed the 1965 Civil Rights Act to explicitly enforce the 14th Amendment. The court guts the legislation as a violation of 14th Amendment. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/02/o...

LLMs have been widely reported as left-wing biased. The finding has shaped policy and debate — with Trump banning "Woke AI". Our new paper challenges this story. It's not that the models are biased. It's that they think the auditor is. 🧵 w/ michelleschimmel.bsky.social‬arxiv.org/pdf/2604.27633

Science shapes our lives — but how often do we talk about how it connects to society? We spoke with 2024 SciComm Excellence award winner C. Brandon Ogbunu on why creativity and communication are essential to science itself. Read: https://ow.ly/X51R50YQLhy

lol [ It wasn’t like Twitter was best characterized by well-informed, carefully reasoned democratic discourse that constituted a Habermasian ideal speech situation. ] David Nickerson via Edsall

Michael A. Santoro highlights the denominator problem: counting harms without measuring the opportunities for harm, and attempting to draw conclusions from data that cannot support them. He argues that this measurement gap is undermining AI governance across numerous domains.

Political campaigns have no idea what's about to hit them www.nytimes.com/2026/04/28/o...

Journal of Online Trust and Safety published its Spring 2026 Issue and here is the list of authors and editors for the issue. Read the issue at tsjournal.org/index.php/jo... and follow the authors here!

More details on the firing of the National Science Board. The NSF now has no director, deputy director, or board. They have issued almost no new awards in 2026. The plan appears to be to completely destroyed the agency. The details are horrifying and have Russ Vought written all over them.

Political violence is never justified & we must always condemn it, including last night’s attack. But saying the President is “terrible for this country” — which he is — is not the cause of that violence & it’s bizarre CNN would suggest it is.

"The State Department is excluding tech researchers from the United States because of their constitutionally protected work, and this newly disclosed memo only underscores the unbounded scope and unconstitutionality of the policy" -- @carriedecell.bsky.social knightcolumbia.org/content/knig...

This wild document is the basis for the State Department's decision to cancel the visas and green cards of tech researchers who study the social media platforms and of tech regulators who enforce privacy and transparency laws. Disclosed to us last night in @thecoalition.bsky.social v. Rubio.

🚨 New preprint alert: we analyzed how social scientists use social media data for empirical research, drawing data from 59 journals, 5 social science disciplines + interdisciplinary, 2010–2024. Link: doi.org/10.31235/osf... Details in 🧵 1/8

This is a FRAUDULENT paper, AI-generated. My name was used as an author and I had nothing to do with it, never saw it until today e-pubmed.co.uk/journals/dig... The "Editors" Angelo Rossi Mori, David Mensah, and Zarnie Khadjesari and this "Journal" should be reported.

Americans are more polarized in their trust in scientists than in virtually any other societal institution. Jamie Druckman shared insights on the state of America's distrust in science at the @umisrcps.bsky.social Miller-Converse Lecture: cps.isr.umich.edu/news-events/...

An absolutely incredible breakthrough!

PaCSS (Politics and Computational Social Science) is back! APSA preconference at BU joint with Political Communication, deadline for submission is May 8. Should be great! cssi.umass.edu/pacss2026

We’re officially two months out from the publication of my book, A Second Sight: How Black Mediamakers Push America Toward Freedom (June 16, 2026), and I’m feeling incredibly grateful for the early reception its already getting. You can pre-order (on discount) and support local bookstores here:

"Defunct startups are being liquidated for their Slack archives, Jira tickets, and email threads—operational exhaust that AI labs now treat as premium training data."

I'm speaking at ML-NYC on Monday, April 20 4pm at Flatiron Institute. "Life Trajectories and Life Chances: New Approaches from Population Registries and AI". Registration is free and reception afterwards: www.eventbrite.com/e/ml-nyc-spe...

Say Trump is somewhat or very religious Republicans 50% White evangelicals 49% Catholics 29% Black Protestants 13% Atheists 12% Democrats 10% https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/16/americans-have-become-more-likely-to-say-trump-is-not-too-or-not-at-all-religious/

+1. FWIW, here is a report we recently did on public opinion regarding higher ed: edbarometer.org (Which is in the bibliography, which is pretty extensive! Almost as long at the report. But the cited literature is... quite scarce.)

Really excellent logical discussion about the practical problem with 'viewpoint diversity' as a governing logic for universities-- if truth is the goal of scientific research. www.aaup.org/academe/issu...

Extension of Polnet deadline to April 22!

The greatest threat from AI is not that it will displace human work but that it will displace human thought. My latest. www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/a...

Where are all the Computing Science undergraduates going? Adjacent fields such as data science, robotics, cybersecurity, etc www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Lessons that all Americans should contemplate about the road ahead for Hungary and for us

Survey by an AI company, no useful information on the sample, no wording for most of the questions. That's right, we've got more advertising pretending to be surveys.

While we're celebrating space things, let me direct you to one of my favorite Golden Goose Awards. One of the reasons we have supercomputers now (that run the internet we enjoy) is because scientists needed more powerful computers to study black holes. 1/3 www.goldengooseaward.org/01awardees/b...

Second Term Worse than the First. Consumer sentiment is far worse in 2nd term than in 1st. Economic sentiment was a tremendous advantage in the first Trump term and is a tremendous burden in the second. 1/n

This is quite extraordinary- scientists set a kind of trap for AI chat bots by inventing a fake disease. AI told people it was real and… the deliberately bogus preprints started being cited in peer reviewed literature 🫣 🧪 #MedSky www.nature.com/articles/d41...

🚨 NSF is already quietly eliminating the SBE Directorate, despite Congress’ mandate that NSF support the behavioral & social sciences. Steps to counter this are in motion. If you - have an SBE proposal under review - serve on an SBE grant panel You can help! Fill out this form: shorturl.at/xuKw2

register for our CSDP Conference on Identity and Inequality, April 17-18 url:https://spia.princeton.edu/events/csdp-conference-identity-and-inequality

This is a fun read. I posted in the company Slack and the first response was appropriately yeah, 'scientists.' www.sciencealert.com/scientists-d...

"To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago." If you think it is necessary to be on Twitter to communicate your fact-based worldview, the reality is that worldview is being smothered.

New on NPR’s Marketplace Tech 🎧: CDT’s Elizabeth Laird breaks down why trust in US government data practices is slipping and what it means for everyday people.

In "Partisan Hostility and American Democracy," Jamie Druckman and coauthors explore the recent consequences of polarization. Druckman presents the Miller-Converse Lecture today at @umisrcps.bsky.social. More on this work: cpsblog.isr.umich.edu?p=3354

TODAY: Jamie Druckman gives the Miller-Converse lecture at the @umisr.bsky.social, the university's preeminent lecture on American electoral politics. A foremost expert on polarization, Druckman will speak on American distrust in science. @electionstudies.bsky.social events.umich.edu/event/139760

CHIP50 will be doing a (roughly) synchronous, nonprob, replication of parts of the GSS. If: (1) you have a module in the GSS and would potentially like a nonprob sample (no cost), or

We opened a new PhD position in our department focusing on CSS research on and with AI agents. Please share the job ad and contact us if you have questions: gesis.jobs.personio.de/job/2594220?...

Looks super interesting! I see from this talk www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSgR... that @davidlazer.bsky.social gave that they have app-level data and biweekly mental health data too. cross-device data (well browser/phone) is also nice for studying behaviour

👇 Cool opportunity for mobile data from @jsradford.bsky.social and Northeastern's National Internet Observatory nationalinternetobservatory.org/researchers.... Of interest to @icamobile.bsky.social 📱 Thanks to @qinli0.bsky.social for sharing! ❤️