Still time to apply: New Generation Thinkers 2026 AHRC is partnering with BBC Radio 4 to offer five early-career researchers the opportunity to work with programme makers, appear on air, and gain first-hand experience of how ideas make it to broadcast. Apply by 28 Jan 2026

Strong recommendation for an anti-brainrot January! The series already features two of my personal heroes - Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz & Simone Weil 💛

There's just over a month until our Digital Good Research Fund closes. We're looking for individuals (or small teams) to produce blueprints around what a good digital society looks like. Each one will focus on an aspect of social life or societal institution. digitalgood.net/call-for-app...

Happy Wreath of Khan season to all who celebrate

Holy mixed signals, Batman… 😵‍💫

Check out our newest piece on @goodauth.bsky.social! Especially if you are someone who thinks the left needs a "Joe Rogan of the left". Exciting analysis from our new podcast dataset👇. Huge kudos to project leads @melinamuch.bsky.social & Kylan Rutherford!

Tracks with my MSc dissertation on Rogan back in 2022 - the “far right” characterisation never made much sense to me & obscures a lot of what is actually interesting about the popularity of the show

Enjoyed this by @nickfthilton.bsky.social on what counts as a podcast. I wonder if we need a word like carcinisation, the tendency for organisms to become crabs, to reflect the many evolutionary paths to podcasts. Podcarcinisation doesn't make etymological sense but has a nice ring to it

Time to share some news I've been sitting on: starting in January, I will lead a @dfg.de Emmy Noether Group at @weizenbauminstitut.bsky.social! We will investigate how local public spheres are constituted under conditions of digitalization & globalization. www.weizenbaum-institut.de/en/research/...

I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

Fabulous online seminar organized by @algosoc.org Algorithmic Effects on #Elections: Using Social Media Data Donations to Study Elections 🗓️ Fri 12 Dec, 14:00–15:30 CET @ernesto-deleon.com @favstats.eu @antmandan.bsky.social @simonchauchard.bsky.social Registration ⬇️ algosoc.org/events/algos...

📣 Online platforms shape what we know, how we connect, and who gets heard, yet researcher access to public platform data is shrinking, while platforms monetize this data. Our new report "Better Access" offers a framework for accessing this critical data: kgi.georgetown.edu/research-and...

This has been carried out by amazing Nicolò Pagan, with Chris Bail, Chris Barrie, and Anikó Hannák. Paper (preprint): arxiv.org/abs/2511.04195 Happy to share prompts, configs, and analysis scripts.

LLMs are now widely used in social science as stand-ins for humans—assuming they can produce realistic, human-like text But... can they? We don’t actually know. In our new study, we develop a Computational Turing Test. And our findings are striking: LLMs may be far less human-like than we think.🧵

Excited to share that together with @malojan.bsky.social we’ve published a research note in #partypolitics introducing PartySOME, a comprehensive dataset on political parties’ social media activity. A thread 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Hits the nail on the head - “digital politics is driven not just by information, but by personality and performance”

We are pleased that @sophiaaknight.bsky.social has joined the network as a Visiting Researcher, bringing her expertise in digital technologies and the ways they support and shape civic and democratic participation.

Podcasts are now illegal in China

Calling ALL health data folk: Re UK Health Data Research Service. The UK gov & Wellcome have pledged up to £600 million to create a HDRS. Myself & an ace team have been tasked by Wellcome to assess the existing health data ecosystem & identify what is needed to support the HDRS 👇. Get in touch

GreenEarth is creating open source AI-driven recommender infrastructure for BlueSky. Type a prompt, see your feed change. We are here for the users, the builders, the dreamers. Join us. greenearthsocial.substack.com/p/introducin...

🟡 New blog post: What does meaningful civic participation look like in a world shaped by third-party platforms? ⬇️

If any US tech journalists want to chat with @workersobservatory.org let us know. Could be funding here: omidyar.com/where-we-foc...

Work!! 🚨 We are looking for a #postdoc in our AI, media and Democracy Lab @aimediademlab.bsky.social Dynamic position, great team, nice colleagues 💥 Profile: communication/ poli sci/ computational social sci 🗓️ DL November 1 Spread the word 📣 werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

📚 The Responsible Innovation Centre for Public Media Future's six-part scoping report series is out now! 📚 We've drawn on insights of over 100 experts to set out some of the biggest challenges & opportunities for public media in digital technology and innovation, including...

📣 New Publication - 𝐍𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐞 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐁𝐂 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐈 𝐝𝐢𝐝: Conducted 22 expert interviews & a workshop in London to explore the principles-to-practices gap of responsible AI at the BBC. 🧵 with some findings 👇

The British Podcast Awards featured a strange “glitch” that everyone found amusing; but has interesting implications. Most of the winners were upstairs in the cheap balcony seats, meaning there was a few minutes’ delay on almost EVERY award as the winners went down the back stairs to the stage. >>

"While we heard throughout the research that people value the role of local news, the word 'journalism' can evoke partisanship or elitism for some audiences, while 'media' sounds like entertainment to many people." www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/dont...

Wrote something for @powertochange.org.uk about the fact that government policy must include a new category - digital social policy - to address the social impacts of technologies. Tech policy has to be more than cutting-edge innovation and growth www.powertochange.org.uk/evidence-and...

We have heard about how the welfare system treats those that depend on it, including poor communication, limited transparency, delays, and long waiting times. But a welfare system is possible 🗣️ Read the latest blog from @j-hancock.bsky.social: demos.co.uk/blogs/puttin...

📢 New Journal Article: AI & Deliberation 📢 What impact does #AI have on democratic deliberation? Together with @adrauc.bsky.social, I explore this question in a new article in Government Information Quarterly. Findings in the thread 🧵👇 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... (1/7)

“AI sovereignty, as it currently plays out outside of the U.S.-China vacuum, is not a banner‐waving claim to territorial control; rather, it manifests itself as the quiet right to decide what counts as knowledge & how that knowledge shows up in the world.” — @digitaldang.bsky.social #ai #aistacks

Delighted that @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social has identified the same problem. Digital ID compounds smartphone dystopia www.thetimes.com/article/bcc1...

I’ve worked on and off on digital identity for a decade. I have plenty of thoughts about the UK govt proposal. Right now though, based on my work with 14-24 year olds I’m curious how a compulsory DIGITAL ID will help with extricating young people from mobile devices? 🤷🏻‍♀️ www.gov.uk/government/n...

I'd like to see UK data centre plan developed with net zero goals, community health and opportunity, and local renewal in mind. What is the upside of living and working near to a data centre? And if there isn't one, govt needs to *create* one.

📣 NEW: How can we validate claims about AI? Many AI companies often base their testing on specific tasks but overstate their overall capabilities. Our latest policy brief presents a three-step validation framework for separating legitimate from unsupported claims. hai.stanford.edu/policy/valid...

This free digi inclusion booklet will be distributed in libraries and community venues in Liverpool 😍 It covers a wide range of topics including how to apply for jobs, manage money, avoid scams, and spot misinformation 👉 api.liverpoolcityregion-ca.gov.uk/wp-content/u... #localgov @dxw.com

“Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” Wayne Gretzky 🏒 (also New_ Public) We’re looking for a short-term Research Fellow to help us identify emerging trends and explore how the growth of AI is impacting digital public spaces.

🏘️ "We're losing our neighborhoods" w/ @caseyrandazzo.bsky.social et al. 8 months post-Hurricane Ida: Online groups (organizing/informal) & town halls (formal/structured) discussed similar topics. Crisis effects extend far beyond emergency response. #CrisisInformatics; arxiv.org/abs/2503.07892

RESEARCH: Participating in local conversations can strengthen your connection to your community, online & off. A study found active, long-term participants in their local subreddit were more likely to be civically involved & report a higher sense of belonging. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Excellent, vital work! 👏

The internet is not a monolith. But what I have felt the entire week (and what I felt last week writing about the MN shooter's viral video) is that so many people are dedicated to having the highest stakes conversations and fights about crucially important things in the worst possible venues.

Small correction - correct handle for LGA is @local.gov.uk 😅

We’ve just launched a paper I wrote as a freelancer for the Independent Commision on Neighbourhoods! Thank you all of the brilliant interviewees, including @helenmilner.bsky.social @goodthingsfdn.bsky.social, @learnforlife.bsky.social, @localgovernment.bsky.social & more ⭐️

Every Star Trek episode that was derided as "unrealistic", where Kirk argues a computer into destroying itself, is vindicated.

At long last, I can post my team's summer project: applied modules to teach how ML/AI tools are changing social science and humanities research: ubcecon.github.io/praxis-ubc/ Highlights: LegalBERT to analyze anti/pro-immigrant sentiment in 19th c. BC law: ubcecon.github.io/praxis-ubc/d... 🧵1

Good to feel seen

“The last decade has made clear that we aren’t going to fact-check or inoculate our way toward a healthier civic culture.” — @zevesanderson.com & Scott Babwah Brennen #misinformation #disinformation #democracy

What a paragraph

"In short, every trend of what is happening with online ads is the opposite of what it would in a world in which ever-better data is improving their targeting and relevance year-on-year. Companies can’t target ads, no-one can track who’s being shown what, and the public hates what we see."

📣Job alert! We're hiring a Policy Researcher. Join us to work on projects looking at how AI governance, including regulations, assurance and standards, helps ensure that AI works for people and society. Closing: 9:30am BST, Monday 15 September. www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/job/policy-r...