It takes a village to produce research with impact. This is the idea that motivated us to write this paper, published today.  Kudos to the team: @lluisdanus.bsky.social @william-dinneen.bsky.social @carotorreblanca.bsky.social @guygrossman.bsky.social @asc.upenn.edu www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

"For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging." Today I am resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council. I wrote about my decision in TIME. time.com/7285045/resi...

Looking forward to this, next week! 'The Impact of AI on (Mis)Information' asc.upenn.edu/cind2025, w/ @ndiakopoulos.bsky.social @hwaight.bsky.social @jolukito.bsky.social @lexipalmer.bsky.social Kaicheng Yang @ekvraga.bsky.social Kiran Garimella & Jennifer Allen + @ylelkes.bsky.social @asc.upenn.edu

Great opportunity in beautiful Zurich 👇

Nice article by Kevin Munger (based on @sgonzalezbailon.bsky.social et al.'s paper on FB polarization and @jongreen.bsky.social et al.'s paper). Part of the argument is that one reason we don't find filter bubbles is that we've been looking in 2D open.substack.com/pub/kevinmun...

Spare a thought for your green-card holding and naturalized colleagues, many of whom are now doing risk-benefit calculations before speaking on anything that could be considered remotely political

Penn State faculty position in computational social science/AI: psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic...

WHERE WILL YOU BE TOMORROW?

Cfp: come join us at the 2025 Political Networks and Computational Social Science conference! sites.google.com/view/confpol...

WHERE WILL YOU BE ON MARCH 7TH!? Head to www.standupforscience2025.org/local-event-information/ or the link in our bio to find your closest event—or add one if you're hosting one! #standupforscience2025

My new piece in @theguardian.com Techno-optimism is human pessimism. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Save the date! PolNet & PaCSS 2025 are joining forces at Harvard and Northeastern on August 11–14, 2025—workshops on Aug 11–12, conference on Aug 13–14. Stay tuned for details on CFP, registration, and more. See you at #PolNetPaCSS2025!

New Bright Line Watch report brightlinewatch.org/accelerated-... -Expert ratings of US democracy at post-2016 low -55% of Trump-aligned Rs approve of "strong leader who does not have to bother w/Congress" -Jan 6 pardons, exec branch firings, Musk influence rated as grave threats 🧵 of results below

📣 Our first speaker announcement for the Philly @standupforscience.bsky.social rally on March 7th, 11a at City Hall. 📣 We will hear from Congressmembers Jamie Gauthier and Nina Ahmad and squid biologist @sarahmackattack.bsky.social (Skype A Scientist). RSVP: www.eventbrite.com/e/stand-up-f...

📢 Scholarship opportunities for our prestigious two-year interdisciplinary Master's program in Social Sciences! 💡 Available scholarships: ✅ 4 full scholarships 🗓 Deadline: March 31, 2025. ✅ 3 tuition waiver scholarships 🗓 Deadline: May 31, 2025. 🎓 Apply now! 🔗 www.uc3m.es/master/socia...

📢 Postdoctoral position opportunity! We're seeking a full-time postdoc for 22 months to dive into societal cohesion research using network science/network statistics. At the COALESCE Lab in sunny Barcelona, Spain: euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/319601. Apply before March 7th! #sociology #NetSci

Want to learn about computational social science *for free* and launch interdisciplinary research projects? We are so excited to announce there will be *26* Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science this year! Apply to one of them here: sicss.io/locations

Our new piece in Nature Machine Intelligence: LLMs are replacing human participants, but can they simulate diverse respondents? Surveys use representative sampling for a reason, and our work shows how LLM training prevents accurate simulation of different human identities.

Welcome to the Bluesky account for Stand Up for Science 2025! Keep an eye on this space for updates, event information, and ways to get involved. We can't wait to see everyone #standupforscience2025 on March 7th, both in DC and locations nationwide! #scienceforall #sciencenotsilence

Encyclopædia Britannica will continue to use ‘Gulf of Mexico’ for a few reasons: -We serve an international audience, a majority of which is outside the U.S. -The Gulf of Mexico is an international body of water, and the U.S.’s authority to rename it is ambiguous. 🧵⬇️

Happy to report that APA wrote this letter, gathered a coalition across science, and will now pay for ads for it to be disseminated in Science and Chronicle of Higher Ed to spread the word!! unitedsciencealliance.org

💥 Mark Zuckerberg’s Immoderate Proposal 💥 (via @sgonzalezbailon.bsky.social and @davidlazer.bsky.social) Researchers are "skeptical" the new system will slow the spread of misinformation and "anticipate [Meta's policy changes] will cause a flood from some Pages."

📢 Our new paper in Political Analysis explains how to use LLMs like GPT-4o, Llama or Mistral to estimate the ideological and policy position of political texts. Our approach is fast, reliable, cost-effective and reproducible and works with texts written in different languages 1/7 cup.org/4axBEXo

UCD’s School of Sociology is hiring an Assistant Professor (permanent) in Computational Social Science. – Salary Scale: €62,855–€99,533 – Application deadline: 10 Feb – Details: www.timeshighereducation.com/unijobs/list... @ucdsociology.bsky.social @ucddublin.bsky.social

We wrote another piece about why Zuckerberg's decision to end fact-checking is so disingenuous -- check it out @techpolicypress.bsky.social: www.techpolicy.press/mark-zuckerb...

Based on their research, David Lazer and Sandra González-Bailón anticipate that Meta's elimination of penalties for sharing misinformation will cause a flood from some Pages– which are still the most effective means to spread content on Facebook.

‼️ Hiring‼️ One postdoctoral position in my ERC Consolidator in Madrid. Application deadline: end of February. Job ad & details: tinyurl.com/3dwm96kb Come and join me and my team in sunny Madrid for 5 years of intensive research and lots of publications, traveling, and fun! Please share widely.

In the wake of Meta's announcement to scrap fact-checking, a recent study of Facebook during the 2020 US election is instructive: Content moderation works, but peer-to-peer distribution still allows fake news to spread. [autotranslated:] tinyurl.com/2ahy88at [original German:] tinyurl.com/326kskp2

We are excited to launch a CFP for a special issue of Digital Journalism on Platform Governance and Fact Checking. Abstract deadline: June 2; Editors: Oscar Westlund @anjabechmann.bsky.social @sgonzalezbailon.bsky.social @gravesmatter.bsky.social @mediarepublik.bsky.social Steen Steensen & myself

If you are outside Spain and would like to come to Barcelona for a postdoc, the Beatriu de Pinós call is out. Check the conditions and contact us if you want to come to the UAB! agaur.gencat.cat/ca/beques-i-...

If you feel that BlueSky is “different“ from X, the data supports you :) Using a network of 15M users (56% of the platform) we find that the probability that the log-normal law is wrong wrt to the power-law is just ~7% Why that matters? Pop 🧵 follows! 1/ #scaling #NetSky #ComplexSystems 🧪

Reflecting on the remarkable announcement from Meta today regarding content moderation. @sgonzalezbailon.bsky.social & I & team had a recent paper looking at the diffusion of (mis)information on Facebook during the 2020 election. A few reflections... sociologicalscience.com/articles-v11...

In a recent paper, Prof. @sgonzalezbailon.bsky.social and David Lazer found that content moderation interventions by Facebook led to a reduction in the diffusion of content fact-checked as false. They wrote about their findings in Tech Policy Press: www.techpolicy.press/the-need-to-...

⚠️Job⚠️ Deadline to apply to our postdoc at the Polarization Research Lab is Jan. 15! We study democratic attitudes and behaviors. Postdocs have the opportunity to lead and propose projects and get a lot of writing experience. Join our group! polarizationresearchlab.org/hiring/

There will still be concerning opacity about how Meta applies its content moderation policies to control information flows, as we wrote in www.techpolicy.press/the-need-to-...

I have an open 3-year PostDoc position in my research group, centered on the extraction and analysis of relations of societal actors (e.g. politicians, CEOs, ...) from unstructured text data. Feel free to reach out if you want to know more! Deadline is Jan 1st. jobs.uni-graz.at/en/jobs/a122...

My new blog on substack. Avoiding the causality trap. substack.com/home/post/p-...

A new study by Professor Sandra González-Bailón and colleagues analyzed the spread of over one billion Facebook posts to reveal how information flowed on the social network during the U.S. 2020 presidential election. Learn more: www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/... @sgonzalezbailon.bsky.social

Content moderation is a power platforms exercise with consequence at moments of collective vulnerability, such as during elections. Assuming that platforms act for the betterment of all is, at this point, one assumption too many, write Sandra González-Bailón and David Lazer.

Related to this, @davidlazer.bsky.social and I also wrote an opinion piece www.techpolicy.press/the-need-to-... @annenbergpenn.bsky.social

New publication (4+ years in the making): “The Diffusion and Reach of (Mis)Information on Facebook”. shorturl.at/VE2fU We analyze the propagation of 1B+ posts across content moderation regimes, with @davidlazer.bsky.social @jatucker.bsky.social @taliastroud.bsky.social @annenbergpenn.bsky.social

🚨 Job Alert! 🚨 @knightgtown.bsky.social and Georgetown’s CCT Program are looking for a Postdoctoral Research Fellow! This is an exciting opportunity to lead research to understand how evidence and research is being used in social media and platform litigation. Apply here: bit.ly/4fWh8kY

Job announcement: Junior Professorship in Computational Social Science at the University of Konstanz. Join us at the Center for Data and Methods! Feel free to reach out if you have questions. stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/2...

@sgonzalezbailon.bsky.social lanza preguntas interesantes sobre la difusión de discursos de odio en redes sociales: "¿se pueden diseñar algoritmos que construyan puentes en lugar de algoritmos que separen cada vez más?" www.pagina12.com.ar/788858-el-pa...

New paper in PNAS 🧪 Fact-checking information from large language models can decrease headline discernment What are the unintended consequences of AI fact-checking? Even LLMs that accurately identify false headlines can actually cause harm. Read all about our experiment: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Entrevista sobre la investigación sobre las fakes news y la democracia de EEUU @sgonzalezbailon.bsky.social youtu.be/6konbCIm794?...

We are hosting the 11th International Conference on Computational Social Science in Sweden 🚀The IC2S2'25 website is LIVE, and submissions are OPEN! 📍Norrköping | July 21-24, 2025 Call for Abstracts (until Feb 24) Call for Tutorials (until Jan 17) 🔗Explore details & submit: ic2s2-2025.org

Now out in @science.org: misinformation exploits outrage to spread online. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Doing this work was way harder than it had to be, thanks to Big Tech. I want to highlight our lead analyst @killianmcloughlin.bsky.social for his heroic perseverance to bring you this paper 🧵