Experimental participants to us

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...

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?

Happy to share our new preprint “Content-based detection of misinformation expands its scope across politicians and platforms.” We analyzed misinformation at the text level in posts by German politicians on Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok. osf.io/preprints/so... 🧵1/8

See also Peterson and Iyengar onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... - "our findings support the motivated reasoning interpretation of misinformation; partisans seek out information with congenial slant and sincerely adopt inaccurate beliefs that cast their party in a favorable light."

What if people appreciate having an abundance of content and communication, more than they feel overloaded by it? @annisch.bsky.social et al decided to have a look. Their results? "We found that appreciation for abundance was about twice as common as overload". Paper: journalqd.org/article/view...

NEW: In a recent Oxford-led study by @mmosleh.bsky.social, researchers analysed millions of social media posts containing links to news stories, across seven different social platforms. Read the full research paper here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

"only about 5% of the variance in personality can be predicted from digital footprints, and personality‐tailored messages show negligible effects on behavior... When design and evaluation flaws are controlled, the combined end‐to‐end effectiveness of psychological targeting approaches zero."

🤖 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓 𝐃𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐄𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐀𝐈𝐠𝐧 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫 🇳🇱 Less than one week before the Dutch elections, @meinungsfuehrer.bsky.social & I looked at over 20k posts to reveal patterns in the usage of AI-generated visuals across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. #tk2025 🧵Thread

New hobby: Remaking article abstracts as movie trailers to expose hype and fearmongering.

We continue with our seminar series next Wednesday with Dr Sacha Altay @sachaltay.bsky.social from University of Zürich, talking about the problem of misinformation. Full details on our website (surl.li/mqtofs). See you there!

Super cool data on what people saw on their phone during the 2024 US elections: "On an average day, the median individual saw the terms ‘Donald Trump’, ‘Joe Biden’, and ‘Kamala Harris’ on their phone for only 3 seconds." www.guyaridor.net/files/digita...

Climate skeptics actively engage in information avoidance. We need to bring them to the facts and let the facts do their work: ❝Using generative AI to increase sceptics’ engagement with climate science❞ (thread) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🗞️ 🤖 Weekend reading anyone? For the launch of @transformernews.ai as a standalone publication, they invited me to contribute a piece on what persuasive AI might mean for democracy and elections. Here’s the result… buff.ly/OJsNmpK

WhatsApp deactivation experimental results in Brazil, India, and South Africa mirror those from prior social media studies: big changes in content exposure -> minimal changes in attitudes, decreases in political knowledge, increases in subjective wellbeing www.venturatiago.com/talk/vmtn_wh...

NEW PAPER!! We study how the "AI slop" era could actually boost demand for credible news. In an experiment with thousands of Süddeutsche Zeitung readers, we found that AI misinformation made people *trust news less*, but *read it more*. 🧵

new working paper: osf.io/7v4zj tl;dr: taking the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor seriously requires taking the nuances of actually-existing markets seriously, which means thinking about tradeoffs between transaction costs and conformity costs. applied to misinfo and ideological belief systems.

From ancient Greece to the Arabic golden age, scholars have been driven by their curiosity to investigate astronomy, history, philosophy, and sundry other disciplines. Is there a structure to that curiosity? Are astronomers as likely to also be historians or to also be philosophers?

New paper with @kirstenaeddy.bsky.social in Journalism on whether people across 45 countries think news coverage of people their age, their gender, and with their political views is fair or unfair. We outline some interesting demographic differences (more details in 🧵)... doi.org/10.1177/1464...

This is good news for debriefings in misinformation research: Debriefings that include fact-checks of the false claims used in the experiment reduce false beliefs, improve attitudes towards the study, and show no signs of negative effects. 👉 osf.io/preprints/ps... Feedback much welcomed :)

What about debriefings in Misinformation Research? ✅ Only specific debriefings reduce belief in false info ⚠️ Both slightly reduce belief in true info 🧠 Only specific boosts perceived learning 🟢 Only general reduces manipulation & frustration 🔍 Both increase transparency osf.io/preprints/ps...

More constructive approaches to online political debate generate more constructive replies but no greater change in attitudes www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

How effective are user corrections on social media, and does adding a link to a fact check improve effectiveness? In piece led by @sachaltay.bsky.social we find corrections have small effects, adding a fact-check unlikely to make them more effective misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/the-... 1/6

New blog! ‘Consequences of a skewed discourse around generative AI and elections’. Read why @felixsimon.bsky.social, @oii.ox.ac.uk and @sachaltay.bsky.social, University of Zurich, believe claims about the impact of generative AI on elections have been overblown: bit.ly/46YTZg7 1/2

In addition to the original UK results, we have now ***replicated*** this (TWICE) in the US. The main findings hold strong: information diets are a lot more diverse in attention than in engagement. New version here: osf.io/preprints/os...

Today (w/ @ox.ac.uk @stanford @MIT @LSE) we’re sharing the results of the largest AI persuasion experiments to date: 76k participants, 19  LLMs, 707 political issues. We examine “levers” of AI persuasion: model scale, post-training, prompting, personalization, & more!  🧵:

Have now read this paper in detail. It’s a tour de force. If you’re interested in the potential impact of AI on election outcomes you should put it by your bedside. Key takeaway: let’s remain alive to, but healthily skeptical of, the possibility of large impacts: knightcolumbia.org/content/dont...

NEW on our website @felixsimon.bsky.social and @sachaltay.bsky.social on why should be worry more about humans than AI systems when it comes to elections in the age of generative AI Click to read reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/generat...

Excellent, comprehensive paper (and thread) on the lack of impact of generative AI on elections so far. There was so much hype around it in 2023-24, mostly fuelled by AI people with no understanding of elections, politics, the information environment or how persuasion works (or mostly doesn't).

Did AI so far upend elections and destroy democracy? Not quite! Balanced assessment by @felixsimon.bsky.social and @sachaltay.bsky.social And important plea to move discussion to a less dramatic level and link AI discussions to democracy challenge discussions. knightcolumbia.org/content/dont...

How harmful is GenAI around elections? Will it trigger a misinformation apocalypse and upend elections? I am happy to finally be able to share @sachaltay.bsky.social & my answers to these and other questions on which we have been working for a year and which is now out via @knightcolumbia.org

New essay by @sachaltay.bsky.social & @felixsimon.bsky.social in @knightcolumbia.org's AI & Democratic Freedoms series, on how we should think about (and do research on) generative AI's impact on elections. Short 🧵 on this important piece: knightcolumbia.org/content/dont...

🚨 Now out in Nature Human Behaviour 🚨 We show that following the news on WhatsApp or Instagram (N = 3,395 🇫🇷🇩🇪) increases current affairs knowledge, participants’ ability to discern true from false news stories, awareness of true news stories, as well as trust in the news. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Our Digital News Report 2025 is out! 📊48 markets 🌏Almost 100K respondents 📰Key headline: Audiences lean into video news and influencers, raising misinformation concerns and new dilemmas for publishers 📱Explore now buff.ly/xLP67Tg 🧵Findings in thread #DNR25

In 2010, Mark Zuckberberg became Time's "Person of The Year". The article is surreal reading today. Here are just two quotes: "As for money, his indifference to it is almost pathological" "Facebook wants to...tame the howling mob...The Internet, and the whole world, will feel more like a family"

A conference on Misinformation and Disinformation on 19–20 May at CEU! We’ll be joined by excellent speakers: @sachaltay.bsky.social Quassim Cassam, Justin McBrayer, Anne Meylan, Jessica Pepp, Verena Wagner, @danwphilosophy.bsky.social and @kraymondh.bsky.social More details here: buff.ly/0CB8IdH

🎙️We’re thrilled to introduce our #ZPLS Keynote Speaker: @sachaltay.bsky.social! Join us as he presents “Rethinking the Problem of Misinformation” — a fresh perspective at the intersection of Psychology and Law, on May 22nd‼️registration: celleuven.wixsite.com/home/zpls/z-...

New Paper! I'm truly excited to share @natematias.bsky.social and my new Policy Forum in Science published yesterday. We evaluate science's ability to address technological harms, and offer recommendations for what could be done to improve on the status quo: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🚨New AI-dialogue WP on vax hesitancy🚨 A conversation with our LLM was >2x more effective than standard CDC messaging for increasing hesitant parents' intent to vax kids against HPV Many diff reasons for hesitancy = need for tailored responses PDF: osf.io/preprints/ps... Bot: healthinfobot.com/hpv

Pop-AI doomerism offers a superficial alarmism www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/what-if-th...

New blog post! In which I explain the issue with mediation analysis and sketch out one way to deal with the underlying causal inference problem -- in just a bit over 1,000 words! If you have never found the time to read up on this, now is your chance. www.the100.ci/2025/03/20/r...

Great keynote talk by @janpfa.bsky.social & @sachaltay.bsky.social at the inauguration of the 3rd edition of the #InfoxsurSeine2025 seminar. infoxsurseine.org/2025/ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨NEW ARTICLE 🚨 with Adam Peresman, @honoratam.bsky.social & @thoruplars.bsky.social We show that those often seen as most critical of research - populists! - have relatively *high* trust in scientists across 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 🇨🇿 🇩🇰 & are willing to follow their advice: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... 🧵(1/4)

In April I will be in New York to present our paper with @felixsimon.bsky.social entitled "Don’t Panic (Yet): Assessing the Evidence and Discourse Around (Generative) AI and Elections"

I'm hiring! I'm looking for 1️⃣ pre-doc and 2️⃣ post-docs. If you're fascinated by media effects, quantitative methods, and open science, please consider applying 🙂 International applications welcome! Application Pre-doc: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie... Application Post-doc: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie...

In this SRMA, @janpfa.bsky.social and @sachaltay.bsky.social find that people rate true news as more accurate than false news and are better at rating false news as false than at rating true news as true. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This paper was a lot of work and hides many cool findings, notably in Supplement. In this thread I present a few findings that you may have missed 👇

"participants were able to discern true from false news and erred on the side of skepticism rather than credulity. [...] to improve discernment, there is more room to increase the acceptance of true news than to reduce the acceptance of fact-checked false news."

NEW on our site Our data shows that people are turning away from the news, with interest in news falling and news avoidance rising. A new piece by our researcher Craig T. Robertson explains why this is happening and what publishers can do about it reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/people-...

Out in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social Can people tell true from false news? Yes! Our meta-analysis shows that people rate true news as more accurate than false news (d = 1.12) and were better at spotting false news than at recognizing true news (d = 0.32). www.nature.com/articles/s41...