There’s been a lot of buzz around the Borjas/Breznau (2026) paper (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and potential ideological bias in research. We took a closer look at the data. Could there be a "bias in bias research"? Here is what we found: www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10...

The German state of Bavaria is trying to ban AI bans in academia. Can't make this shit up

In new joint work with @sebastianjblock.bsky.social, Sandra Jaworeck, Manuel Holz, and Philipp Spielbauer, we examine textual complexity in sociology using a corpus of more than 1,700 full-text articles from major German sociology journals. osf.io/preprints/so...

In new joint work with @sebastianjblock.bsky.social, Sandra Jaworeck, Manuel Holz, and Philipp Spielbauer, we examine textual complexity in sociology using a corpus of more than 1,700 full-text articles from major German sociology journals. osf.io/preprints/so...

Code reviewed by WIRED uncovered an unreleased face-recognition system embedded in Meta’s smart glasses platform. Internally called “NameTag,” it’s designed to identify people via biometric data stored on users’ phones.

📢 Open positions! I’m recruiting 2 postdocs + 3 PhD positions at C³S, @goetheuni.bsky.social in #ClimateJustice, environmental inequality, #Demography & #ComputationalSocialScience 🌍📊💻 3–4 years + strong support for training🎒 Deadline: 23 June 2026 More: www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794987/Zen...

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.

📢 Job: Research Associate (75%, E13) Join my team at @goetheuni.bsky.social! Looking for a researcher in sociology/network analysis for an @erc.europa.eu project on the interplay of children's & parents' networks. Until end of 2028. Info & apply: 🔗 www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794784/FB0...

Early in my PhD, a colleague finishing his (highly rated) dissertation told me he was stuck on the introduction. After years of hard work, he could no longer find an argument for why any of it actually mattered. This stuck with me ever since. A🧵 about this paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Do researchers share their code upon request? Does running their orginal code on the original data produce the original results? We provide evidence in a new Royal Society Open Science publication. Studying more than 1,000 articles which use data from the European Social Survey, we find that... 🧵

This is the clearest and most accessible introduction to DML I've ever read: arxiv.org/abs/2504.08324 Congrats to the authors @aahrens.bsky.social, @markeschaffer.bsky.social, et al on this amazing paper and great accompanying R package! I'm now DML-pilled.

Very happy to share that I am going to be the new Director of the Democracy unit at the @wzb.bsky.social Berlin Social Science Center. I am excited to form a new research unit on democratic politics and to engage with people in Berlin and elsewhere to make liberal democracy more resilient.

Jetzt an der LMU: Master Computational Social Science (M.Sc.) Bewerbungen für die 2. Kohorte sind offen. Der interdisziplinäre Studiengang verbindet Kommunikationswissenschaft, Soziologie und Politikwissenschaft mit daten- und computergestützten Methoden. Info-Sprechstunde: 27. April.

Concentrated academic recruiting. 10% of political science departments produce 60% of all polsci professors in Germany. FU Berlin produced most professors, followed by Mannheim, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Heidelberg. In psychology,...

We opened a new PhD position in our department focusing on CSS research on and with AI agents. Please share the job ad and contact us if you have questions: gesis.jobs.personio.de/job/2594220?...

*job* work with my great colleagues at @gesis.org CSS group led by @clauwa.bsky.social and @sebstier.bsky.social

Puebla et al. (2024). Ten simple rules for recognizing data and software contributions in hiring, promotion, and tenure. PLOS Computational Biology, 20(8), e1012296. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes! "Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

If you haven't done yet, please try Claude Coworker just to get an idea about its capabilities. It took 2 minutes for it to read our paper, provide perfectly running R-code to justify a case selection across 14 countries using Vdem. Produced a 10 pager underlining our case selection.

🚨Job alert 🚨 I have an opening for a postdoc in my team at @ipz.bsky.social in the area of digital democracy starting Sep 1, 2026. If you are working on the impact of the digital transformation on politics, please apply by 🗓️ Mar 1, 2026. 📤 Please share widely! www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...

Big news: I started a new position as Professor for Computational Social Science (W1 tenure track) at the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main! www.c3s-frankfurt.de/who-we-are#m...

Super excited to see that somebody finally wrote about this 🥳 If you do research about research, you really need causal thinking (just like when you do research about anything else really).

We are opening an investigation into Grok because we believe that X may have breached the DSA. We have seen antisemitic content, non-consensual deepfakes of women, and child sexual abuse material. In Europe, no company will make money by violating our fundamental rights. link.europa.eu/Fh8h84

Ooooh {stringr} now includes a function for my favorite naming convention, snake_case. ☺️

Cool PhD Position in an amazing project 🚀

Just out in Nature Communications: "Examining public support for Ukraine’s defense against autocratic aggression". With F. Haggerty and P. Thurner, we show that Western citizens back Ukraine’s fight, but moral and strategic concerns, as well as internal divisions, impose restraints. rdcu.be/eYKAr

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)? Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

COME WORK WITH US ON DIGITAL SOCIETY & DEMOCRACY IN 🇩🇰! Full Professorship. Fantastic conditions. Highly dynamic team environment. Great colleagues. FUN! Happy to answer questions and make introductions to the rest of the team...

A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the release of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” and the advent of the late-2000s electro-pop era, which both appeared around the same year, 2008.

Most LLM evals use API calls or offline inference, testing models in a memory-less silo. Our new Patterns paper shows this misses how LLMs actually behave in real user interfaces, where personalization and interaction history shape responses: arxiv.org/abs/2509.19364

New paper out in @science.org! We unveil the online manipulation market with the Cambridge Online Trust & Safety Index (COTSI). We show in real time the cost of purchasing fake accounts across every social platform around the world - so they can be held accountable www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

It's out!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Big thank you to my coauthors @small-schulz.bsky.social and @lorenzspreen.bsky.social, and to all participants who discussed 20 political issues over 4 weeks in 6 subreddit, 3 experimental conditions and let us observe.

🚀 We’re hiring a Postdoc! Our group is looking for a Postdoc to join the team working on computational comm research. If you’re excited about automated content analysis, large text & social-media data, open science, this might be for you. 💡 Sounds like you or someone you know? Please share/boost!

An der Uni Leipzig werden nach meinen Infos in 2026 keine (!) Mittelbau-Stellen verlängert oder neu besetzt. Das hängt natürlich auch an der Landesregierung. Im letzten Newsletter für Mitarbeitende bekam ich eine Einladung zur Diskussion über Perspektiven für Early Career Researchers ...

We're looking for a colleague (postdoc) 📢 @politikuhh.bsky.social 3+3 years Doing your own research while teaching 2.5 courses per semester Research agenda with links to our team (democracy, digital politics, political competition/behaviour) DL 🗓️ 05/01 stellen.uni-hamburg.de/jobposting/6...

In light of record submission rates and a large volume of AI-generated slop, SocArXiv recently implemented a policy requiring ORCIDs linked in the OSF profile of submitting authors, and narrowing our focus to social science subjects. Today we are taking two more steps: /1

Wrote up a little intervention post/explanation for my class about why using LLMs for trying to learn programming (as first time learners!) is bad and detrimental datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-11...

we're done

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

PPS more updates! We now have a figure with an overview of the workflow, plus some other nifty additions. osf.io/preprints/ps...

We're excited to announce that the website and registration for IC2S2 2026 (July 28-31) will launch in early December! The Vermont Complex Systems Institute @vcsi.bsky.social at the University of Vermont will be hosting IC2S2 in 2026: youtube.com/watch?v=p412S4GnPkc&feature=youtu.be

Billions of regressions ≠ robustness. My new PNAS Letter shows how unjustified models can drown out justified ones — and why thoughtful model selection matters👇 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

LAST CALL! #Sociology Professorships in Copenhagen, Denmark! We're hiring 2+ open-rank profs (Asst/Assoc/Full). Any area. Deadline: this Saturday, Nov 15! Join a leading European sociology department. Please repost! jobportal.ku.dk/videnskabeli...

Letzte Woche haben wir 5 Jahre #95vsWissZeitVG gefeiert. Viel hat sich seit 2020 & besonders seit #IchBinHanna geändert, nur ein paar spezielle Quatsch-Argumente für Befristung kommen immer wieder. Damit wir sie nicht ständig von vorn widerlegen müssen, hab ich das heute in #ArbeitInDerWiss gemacht!

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?

🚨We’re hiring! The Max Weber Institute in beautiful Heidelberg seeks a W3 Professor of Sociology (focus: sociological theory) who connects well with the department’s focus on comparative sociology adb.zuv.uni-heidelberg.de/info/INFO_FD... Happy to answer any questions! #Sociology #socsky

5 Jahre #95vsWissZeitVG! 🎉 Für @drkeichhorn.bsky.social, @kubon.bsky.social & mich 1 Anlass, Euch DANKE zu sagen, liebe Community: für Ausdauer, Engagement & Solidarität! Nur: Wie? Noch 1 gemeinsamer Text? Nein! Dem Anlass angemessen gibt‘s was ganz Neues: 1 gemeinsames Lied für Euch! #IchBinHanna 🎶

It is happening 👇

Any experiences with data donation of #Spotify listening history? I requested to download my full listening history and it said that it would take 30 days to produce the download. 2 hours later I received the link to the zip file with full JSON records. Any other experiences with this?