Just occurred that the BBC is the most literal example of Conquest's third law in that it is actually run by a cabal of its enemies.

Firing a BBC director for *leftist* bias is like punishing a pig for taking a bath.

Spoke to the BBC about how Grok is facilitating the abuse of politicians on X. Abusive messaging on X is not new (we studied it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41... ), but the enhanced visibility of Grok posts will increase engagement with this content. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It is hard to overstate the number of academic hours which are wasted on fruitless funding applications 👇

If you're in need of positive and rather wholesome news, there's a high school teacher named Bryan who took a ton of freely licensed celebrity headshots at the New York Film Festival last month for Wikipedia, and I truly can't believe how drastic the upgrade is for some articles (thread)

The EBU just published a new report on how well consumer AI chatbots function as gateways to news by public service media – an interesting piece, but with some big problems in my view that make me question its usefulness. buff.ly/X9ident

Competition for ERC Starting Grants up 38% in two years. No increase in the number of grants awarded and no increase in grant value. Result: more academic hours wasted on fruitless, bureaucratic grant applications instead of research erc.europa.eu/news-events/...

Last week we had our second “Inverse Complexity Lab Retreat” at wonderful Traunkirchen! skewed.de/lab/group.ht... Nothing like eldritch C++ incantations by the sunny lakeside! 🏖️

General reminder: Good internet regulation is not easy if you're a small island with little real influence.

New preprint: “Multiscale patterns of migration flows in Austria: regionalization, administrative barriers, and urban-rural divides”, with @thomrobiglio.bsky.social, Martina Contisciani, @martonkarsai.bsky.social, arxiv.org/abs/2507.11503

🧵 New preprint! Do online mental health communities form patterns of association that mirror diagnostic systems or challenge them? “Network Analysis of Reddit Mental Health Communities: Mapping the Interconnectedness of Psychopathology” 👉 osf.io/7dfcw_v1 @ceu-dnds.bsky.social Short thread: 1/N

Are you from the US and would like to work as a postdoc in Austria, maybe in our lab? 25 new fellowships will be available in July from the @oeaw.bsky.social: www.oeaw.ac.at/en/news/25-n... If you are interested; get in touch!

Testing LLMs in the Prisoner’s Dilemma to reveal their moral biases. LLMs can defect often but become more forgiving and less retaliatory than humans when opponents are mostly cooperative. Nicolò Fontana at #ICWSM. w @frapierri.bsky.social Paper: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC...

Kicking off #ICWSM with the DETOX workshop and @maxfalken.bsky.social’s keynote on why the Web is not a set of siloed platforms and why we should not study it as such. Shows why deplatforming doesn’t work exactly as we expect and why large online platforms are plagued by affective polarization

Here's another paper by Shalizi showing how inferring *latent* homophily allows for disentangling from contagion. Bizarre how this gets overlooked, since it's obvious that homophily leaves huge traces in the network structure, while contagion changes nothing. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The systemic impact of deplatforming on social media, featuring @maxfalken.bsky.social. From the Cambridge Disinformation Summit youtu.be/k5IA96g0U5s

No surprise that bank lending to the fossil fuel sector keeps rising 👇 Nadia Ameli and I recently wrote about why current banking regulations are insufficient and ineffective at limiting continued funding to the FF sector - call ordinated action is needed: www.thebanker.com/content/e812...

Extremely fun little secret recording in @desmog.com by @geoffdembicki.bsky.social here - Lomborg just openly saying to the Fraser Institute that CCS wont' work but that it can be used to soak up subsidies www.desmog.com/2025/06/05/c...

@maxfalken.bsky.social on the importance of nuence when studying polarization at the social network session at #netsci2025

Celebrating my first post on Bluesky with a picture of @abovet.bsky.social giving his invited talk at UNCSS today. The Satellite in running now at NetSci 2025. Feel free to join even for the last round of talks. Together with: @maxfalken.bsky.social & Alessandro Galeazzi

Looking forward to hosting this tomorrow! Lots of great talks! 👇

I can officially confirm my presence to the satellite! If I made it, you cannot miss.

🎉 Very happy to announce Maxime Lucas @maximelca.bsky.social as our next panelist! Maxime is an FNRS Postdoc at the Namur Institute for Complex Systems & UCLouvain in Belgium. He is interested in dynamical systems, complex systems, networks, and their applications to life sciences.

Looking forward to our satellite on "Understudied Networks in Computational Social Science" next Tuesday (June 3) from 9am at @netsciconf.bsky.social Join us for 10 great talks discussing (Meta)Decidem, Tiktok, Bluesky, Wikidata, Painters, and more! galeale.github.io/UNCSS/?trk=f...

Dr @maxfalken.bsky.social on the impact of social media deplatforming. From the Cambridge Disinformation Summit meetings. m.youtube.com/watch?v=k5IA...

The rise (and fall?) of misinformation research.

🎙️Meet the chair of Data Stories: @maxfalken.bsky.social We're excited to welcome Max Falkenberg as chair of this year's Data Stories! 📅 Join Max and our speakers *TOMORROW*, Tuesday, May 20 1/n

For weeks I have been telling reporters that #trump could have the power to switch off our tech in #europe. It felt a bit alarmist until I just read the #microsoft, on the behest of the #US gov has suspended the email account of Karim Khan, #ICC chief prosecutor. One of the most important […]

New Marie Curie initiative with €1.25bn of funding marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/news/marie-s... Scheme aims to address the "precarity of research careers"... Which is ironic, because the same programme required me to move country for a two year contract (albeit a very nice one)

Yeah. As a lapsed manufacturing engineer with some other surprisingly relevant hobbies, I always get a chuckle seeing the argument that a superintelligent brain in a vat could easily wipe out humanity. Possible, perhaps. Trivial? Nah. Smarts only gets you so far. An excellent illustration below.

Data Stories is next week! Join us to hear the invited talks and visit the poster exhibition 🎨 RSVP below 👇

New study by Elisa Omodei @elisaomodei.bsky.social & @isifoundation.bsky.social co-authors finds that only 4–6.5% of links in Reddit climate discussions cite scientific sources, raising questions about the role of science in online climate discourse. 🔎 Read more: journals.plos.org/climate/arti...

New paper alert. "More is different" & the LLMs. LLMs are usually studied in isolation. But what happens when they start interacting? We explored this by looking at their collective behaviour. Work with @ariel-flint.bsky.social and @lajello.bsky.social 1/

Very happy to be chairing this event next week 🎉 Come join us if you are in Vienna 🙏

This is bleak reading

We are hiring postdocs in Computational Social Science 📍SweCSS, Norrköping, Sweden ⏰Deadline June 3 🔗https://liu.se/en/work-at-liu/vacancies/26854 Please apply // help us spread the word

Meet 𝐓𝐨𝐛𝐢𝐚𝐬 𝐁𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐤, one of the keynote speakers at to present at #DataStoriesCEU! He works at the intersection of 𝗴𝗲𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗿𝘆 and 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, focuses in interactive visualizations and developed a shape-shifting haptic device for VR. 𝐉𝐨𝐢𝐧 𝐮𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐲 𝟐𝟎, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓! 🔗More info: bit.ly/datastories25

In the updated version, we can now estimate for the one day: - a total of 269 million posts produced - 176 years of videos uploaded - ~1/4 of videos gets deleted New version: www.arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13279 PS: Thanks for all your comments and questions. :)

Cannot recommend more highly 👇

YouTube live captionings really taking that whole American pope thing to heart! 🤣 🏈💰🇺🇸🧙‍♂️

Great to have you with us @ariannapera.bsky.social !

*Permanent* position in Applied Mathematics at City. We are - of course - particularly interested in profiles in Computational Social Science, Network Science, Data Science, and related fields. The application deadline is June 1st. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMY889/l...

Opinion from the FT's Editorial Board: 'The US and European countries that tout Israel as an ally that shares their values have issued barely a word of condemnation. They should be ashamed of their silence, and stop enabling Netanyahu to act with impunity.' www.ft.com/content/f5fd...

Lecturer/senior lecture in Networks and Systems at Queen Mary. Note that people with a complex networks background will be considered (many of us in the Networks group do complex networks far more than we do Internet networks): www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMX906/l...

Stop Blaming Social Media for Everything: The Minimal Effects of Facebook in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election www.jonathanmladd.com/uploads/5/3/...

@maxfalken.bsky.social Falkenberg, from Central European University in Vienna presents his paper: The systemic impact of deplatforming on social media 2025 Cambridge Disinformation Summit, 23 April 2025 youtu.be/k5IA96g0U5s

✨ Deadline Extended – Submit by May 7! ✨ We're still accepting poster submissions for Data Stories, CEU's annual celebration of data visualization in research. If you’re crafting a compelling, data-driven story, there’s still time to share your work! 🔗 networkdatascience.ceu.edu/data-stories

The mods of r/ChangeMyView shared the sub was the subject of a study to test the persuasiveness of LLMs & that they didn't consent. There’s a lot that went wrong, so here’s a 🧵 unpacking it, along with some ideas for how to do research with online communities ethically. tinyurl.com/59tpt988

A privilege for me to present this work in Cambridge on the need to view social media as an ecosystem, not disconnected platforms, when thinking about deplatforming. Definitely a memorable place to give a presentation 🙂

A privilege for me to present this work in Cambridge on the need to view social media as an ecosystem, not disconnected platforms, when thinking about deplatforming. Definitely a memorable place to give a presentation 🙂