David Lazer
@davidlazer.bsky.social
đ€ 6587
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computational social scientist
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David Lazer
Meredith Conroy
4 days ago
Some of us former 538 folks are reviving a project we started in 2018 tracking key endorsements in congressional primaries. Just finished checking all
@emilyslist.bsky.social
endorsees through 6/23 primaries: they're winning 81% of their races. In past primaries their win rate was 81-85%.
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Jake Grumbach
13 days ago
My new theory paper (early draft) A new reason why concentrated wealth destroys democracy: common ownership A standalone media owner maximizes profit. A common owner like Musk (who owns X + SpaceX) will run the media firm at a loss to increase the $ of his total portfolio
tinyurl.com/mcekr7cd
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alice e marwick
9 days ago
I am hiring a qualitative postdoc to start this fall for the
@datasociety.bsky.social
project AI-Enabled Scams as a Systemic Security Challenge. Fully remote but must be US-based. Interested in youth, scams, hustle/financial/consumer culture? More here:
job-boards.greenhouse.io/datasocietyr...
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Post-Doctoral Fellow, AI-Enabled Scams as a Systemic Security Challenge
Remote
https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/datasocietyresearchinstitute/jobs/8598064002
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Last chance to register for polnet!
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9 days ago
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Brian J. Enquist
11 days ago
âThe entire National Science Foundation budget is less than what we spent in the first week of the war with Iran. The National Institutes of Health,⊠accounts for a fraction of 1 percent of all federal spendingâ
www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/o...
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Opinion | The Science That Turned Lizard Venom Into GLP-1s Is Under Attack
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/opinion/glp1-research-science-funding.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
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Erika Franklin Fowler
12 days ago
Midterms are always referendums on incumbents, but the presidentâs party typically puts distance between themselves and the incumbent. That pattern has never held for Trump and in fact seems to be even more pronounced this cycle. This and more in our latest report âŹïžâŹïž
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APSA
14 days ago
Join us for a virtual workshop discussing AI tools that political scientists are using and the challenges and considerations of incorporating AI in your research, presented by the APSA Status Committee on Graduate Students in the Profession. Using AI Tools in Graduate School đ Friday, June 28,âŠ
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Using AI Tools in Graduate School: Virtual Workshop: APSA Status Committee on Graduate Students in the Profession | Friday, June 26, 2026
"Using AI Tools in Graduate School" Friday, June 26, 2026 12:00 PM (ET) / 9:00 AM (PT) | Run Time 75 minutes Register Here Artificial intelligenceâs rapid adoption and growing technological power affect nearly all aspects of the political science graduate student research process. Join the APSA Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession for a timely and thoughtful discussion on its impact on political science research, the tools that political scientists are using, the challenges and considerations of incorporating AI in your research, and more.Â
https://politicalsciencenow.com/using-ai-tools-in-graduate-school-virtual-workshop-apsa-status-committee-on-graduate-students-in-the-profession-friday-june-28-2026/
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David Lazer
Pranav Goel
15 days ago
Happening in less than a week! June 22, 9 AM in Daytona Beach! View details and sign up now:
forms.gle/rA1XxibZ2ydX...
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David Lazer
ProPublica
19 days ago
No one owns ProPublica. As a nonprofit newsroom, our journalism is free from corporate interests, free from political pressure and free to read. Join us. Become a member by midnight:
https://propub.li/49vQRJ9
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Evelyn Douek
23 days ago
Excited that the final version of my article "TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon" has been published. It argues that the case is a shameful example of the all-too-common tradition betraying 1A principles in the name of national security
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
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Tiktok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon | The Supreme Court Review: Vol 2025, No null
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/740549
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David Lazer
Dhruv Mehrotra
23 days ago
NEW: Days after WIRED revealed that Meta had embedded an unreleased facial-recognition system in software distributed to more than 50 million users, the company appears to have removed it.
www.wired.com/story/meta-r...
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Meta Deletes Face-Recognition System From Its Smart Glasses App After WIRED Report
The code WIRED identified is gone from the latest version of Meta AI, the companion app for the companyâs smart glasses. Meta wonât say why or whether itâs coming back.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-removes-face-recognition-code-meta-ai-app-smart-glasses/
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If you will be at Sunbelt, please come check out our workshop on the National Internet Observatory, a large, NSF-funded infrastructure, for studying people's experiences online.
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26 days ago
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Daniel Aldrich
28 days ago
Too often we emphasize the role of the individual (prepping, insurance, etc.) or the state (warning systems, seawalls etc). But we overlook the critical nature of
#socialcapital
- the ties that bind us - to help us survive and thrive during shocks
www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4oY...
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Studying recoveries after disasters showed a clear protective factor | Daniel Aldrich | TEDxBoston
YouTube video by TEDx Talks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4oY0suwvRQ
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David Lazer
Carl T. Bergstrom
28 days ago
1. How common is LLM use in scientific publishing, and how does it vary across field, publisher, journal prestige, author demographics etc.?
@kylesiler.bsky.social
has new paper in PNAS that addresses this question on a massive scale: 7.3 million papers from Elsevier, PLOS, MDPI, and Frontiers.
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The diffusion of large language models in published academic articles | PNAS
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing academic research, raising questions of who is adopting these tools and under what conditions. Th...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2605754123
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Di Jiang
28 days ago
Check out this Associate or Senior Editor opportunity
@science.org
recruiting.ultipro.com/AME1123ASEM/...
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https://recruiting.ultipro.com/AME1123ASEM/JobBoard/07f12c2c-f20e-42f2-b442-dbab6fe420be/OpportunityDetail?opportunityId=1540e811-ed04-427c-843e-1da001b7a8b5
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David Lazer
Petter Törnberg
2 months ago
Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era â and research needs to catch up.
osf.io/preprints/so...
preprint w/ Richard Rogers
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David Lazer
Kate Starbird
about 1 month ago
danah boyd recently argued that social media (as we knew it) is mostly dead; what we have now is parasocial media:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
I agree. Networked social media is disappearing, replaced by a new logic/structure of content creator, creator-centered community, & algorithm.
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Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media - danah boyd, 2026
When practitioners used the term âsocial mediaâ to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051261437487
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David Lazer
Very pleased to announce Who Follows Whom, a bargain, free to download for the next 2 weeks, looking at patterns of following on Twitter.
www.cambridge.org/core/element...
The dominant driver of patterns of online attention, with no spatial constraints on who you can connect to, is...
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Who Follows Whom?
Cambridge Core - Politics: General Interest - Who Follows Whom?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/who-follows-whom/C40139F0F3B85BB2924E738AB43D5CC6
about 1 month ago
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David Lazer
Carl T. Bergstrom
about 1 month ago
Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.
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Very pleased to announce Who Follows Whom, a bargain, free to download for the next 2 weeks, looking at patterns of following on Twitter.
www.cambridge.org/core/element...
The dominant driver of patterns of online attention, with no spatial constraints on who you can connect to, is...
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Who Follows Whom?
Cambridge Core - Politics: General Interest - Who Follows Whom?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/who-follows-whom/C40139F0F3B85BB2924E738AB43D5CC6
about 1 month ago
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David Lazer
Eric Topol
about 1 year ago
He's right. "Nothing short of devastating" By
@holdenthorp.bsky.social
@science.org
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
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Alondra Nelson
about 1 year ago
âScientific knowledge is, fortunately, a public good, and as such, its benefits transcend international boundaries. But relinquishing its prominence in creating the future is nothing short of devastating for the United States.â
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Don Moynihan
about 1 month ago
New, from me: The self-proclaimed "Most Transparent Administration in History" wants to compel all federal employees to sign Non Disclosure Agreements. The purpose is to vastly expand the culture of secrecy in government, undermining accountability. đ§”
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/trump-want...
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Trump wants all federal employees to sign NDAs
A breathtaking expansion of the culture of governmental secrecy
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/trump-wants-all-federal-employees
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William J. Brady
about 1 month ago
âšNew paper out
@nature.com
âš For 8 weeks around the 2024 US election, we randomly assigned 2,000 people to use social media algos we built ourselves. Do engagement-based algorithms amplify intergroup, moral & emotional (IME) contentâand does that distort how we see political norms? đ§”đ đ
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Kai Kupferschmidt
about 1 month ago
One glimmer of hope in the Ebola response: Within hours of the outbreak in DRC being declared, researchers convened to prepare drug trials. A lot has changed on that front since the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a decade ago. But huge challenges remain đ§Ș My story in
@science.org
(đ§” to come)
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Can fast, nimble clinical trials deliver a drug to halt the new Ebola outbreak?
Past outbreaks spawned clever strategies for testing antivirals and antibodies, but researchers will still face major challenges on the ground
https://www.science.org/content/article/can-fast-nimble-clinical-trials-deliver-drug-halt-new-ebola-outbreak
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Alondra Nelson
about 1 month ago
Three things said about AI and social science: it's a topic to study, a thing to critique, a tool to use. My new Daedalus essay argues these aren't three conversations; they're one. A đ§” on "Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object, and Tool."
www.amacad.org/publication/...
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Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object & Tool
Uses of advanced artificial intelligence are changing how societies organize labor, govern, produce knowledge, and make meaning. In light of these developments, this essay argues that AI models, tools...
https://www.amacad.org/publication/daedalus/field-theory-ai-social-science-question-object-tool
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Alondra Nelson
about 1 month ago
What made David and Gerald's work so powerful and so threatening to the powerful is that they didn't just write rigorous history. They also leveraged it. Their research supported litigation across the US holding firms accountable in the courts and building archives for others to use for the same.
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David Lazer
Institute for Information, the Internet and Democracy
about 1 month ago
Congratulations to the IIID team who produced this latest research on how Americans spend their time online. Read it here:
www.nuinfoinstitute.org/publications...
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD
about 2 months ago
As a scholar, it's often impossible to control how your research is used in the real world. My favorite example of this is Edward Luttway's handbook on Coup D'Etat. His book was intended as a detached academic political science book, but was framed an an accessible "how to" manual.
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD
about 2 months ago
Many academics think we are doing virtuous work by addressing critical issues. But this example reveals that we cannot control how others will use our research--for good or evil. This is why I try to make a point of communicating my research in ways that can help them put it to good use.
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David Lazer
Internet Archive
about 2 months ago
Web history disappears when it canât be preserved. Today, many publishers are blocking the Wayback Machine from archiving parts of the public web, putting decades of digital history at risk. Tell publishers: donât block the
#WaybackMachine
. Sign the petition âĄïž
www.savethearchive.com/newsleaders/
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Tell New York Times, The Atlantic, and USA Today to keep the crucial work of journalists in the Wayback Machine!
The news isnât getting preserved in the Wayback Machine anymore because major media outlets are blocking it.
https://www.savethearchive.com/newsleaders/
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anil oza
about 2 months ago
wow â the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations đ€
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Tech Policy Press
about 2 months ago
State media is a component of LLM training data. A new Nature study says this material is laundered into what presents as objective chatbot text. LLMs also give more pro-regime answers when prompted in the official language of low-press-freedom countries than in English.
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Language Models Trained on State Media Sources Launder Propaganda
Tech Policy Press is a nonprofit media and community venture intended to provoke new ideas, debate and discussion at the intersection of technology and democracy. We publish opinion and analysis.
https://buff.ly/oaSsVbS
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David Lazer
Eddie Yang
about 2 months ago
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.
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David Lazer
about 2 months ago
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%.
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David Lazer
about 2 months ago
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%.
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Nir Grinberg
about 2 months ago
đš 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. đ
arxiv.org/abs/2604.18041
đ§”đ
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Justin Hendrix
about 2 months ago
âItâs 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 âscrapedâ from commercial platforms, mobile networks, partner intelligence agencies, or spies on the ground..."
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Inside Israelâs AI targeting system: How cellphone data becomes a death sentence | The Jerusalem Post
Ahmad Turmus got in his car, started it up, and drove off. Less than 30 seconds later came the shriek of the two missiles that lanced through his car.
https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-895697
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David Lazer
Alex Engler
about 2 months ago
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...
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Miriam Posner
2 months ago
Hereâs 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...
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Copy of DH150 S26 W05B Data Brokers
Data brokers
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1uiq7a2GEyG9-H5FDbmkHCAwaIbLlR4GI1lkWa0phwfw/edit?usp=drivesdk
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M.J. Crockett
2 months ago
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. >>
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M.J. Crockett
2 months ago
Last weekend I received the Troland Research Award from the
@nationalacademies.org
. Iâm 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 đ and a đ§”>>
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NAS 163rd Annual Meeting - Awards Ceremony
YouTube video by National Academy of Sciences
https://www.youtube.com/live/7sg0J6yPsdo?t=3355s
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Petter Törnberg
2 months ago
LLMs have been widely reported as left-wing biased. The finding has shaped policy and debate â 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. đ§” w/
michelleschimmel.bsky.socialâŹ
arxiv.org/pdf/2604.276
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The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine
2 months ago
Science shapes our lives â 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
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David Lazer
2 months ago
lol [ It wasnât like Twitter was best characterized by well-informed, carefully reasoned democratic discourse that constituted a Habermasian ideal speech situation. ] David Nickerson via Edsall
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Tech Policy Press
2 months ago
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.
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The Denominator Problem in AI Governance
Michael A. Santoro argues that counting AI harms without measuring opportunities for harm makes the data uninterpretableâand undermines effective AI governance.
https://buff.ly/xAc6nf9
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Political campaigns have no idea what's about to hit them
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/28/o...
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Opinion | Political Campaigns Have No Idea Whatâs About to Hit Them
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/28/opinion/political-campaigns-artificial-intelligence.html
2 months ago
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David Lazer
Stanford Tech Impact and Policy Center
2 months ago
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!
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