📄 New paper: people choose AI models partly on political grounds This is joint work with @pettertornberg.com @chrisbail.bsky.social @michelleschimmel.bsky.social and led by @michaelheseltine.bsky.social

New in Nature: LLMs give "the party line" in the languages of authoritarian regimes. This works when they control the media, which feeds pretraining data. We show more state control over the media means less critical LLMs. 6 studies spanning 38 languages & 13 models. Details ↓

New in Nature: LLMs give "the party line" in the languages of authoritarian regimes. This works when they control the media, which feeds pretraining data. We show more state control over the media means less critical LLMs. 6 studies spanning 38 languages & 13 models. Details ↓

You can just research things. New from @jatucker.bsky.social & me at @brookings: Coding agents like Claude Code and Codex will likely accelerate research AND undermine institutional structures we built to support it.

You can just research things. New from @jatucker.bsky.social & me at @brookings: Coding agents like Claude Code and Codex will likely accelerate research AND undermine institutional structures we built to support it.

AI personas do not 'contain multitudes,' unlike actual human survey respondents who contradict themselves across a wide array of issues. Cool work from my colleague @cbarrie.bsky.social, excited to see this out in the world!

CORRECTION, Claude Code launched in February 2025, suggesting a roughly 13% increase above expectations.

[ #GenAI-post warning] Almost every researcher I know is using Claude Code, and talking about the huge productivity gains. Are we actually producing more scientific papers yet? Since its release in May 2025, arXiv submissions are indeed *12%* above what we'd expect. Details in thread:

🌐 📲 With international collaborators, the Observatory’s director @andreucasas.bsky.social revisited recent “TikTok censorship” claims after the TikTok USDS takeover ➡️ Detailed information about the analysis available: goodauthority.org/news/was-the... 🧵[1/5]

Last week the story was that TikTok censored anti-Trump/ICE/Pretti videos after the U.S. ownership change. We investigated with a large set of US TikTok data and found some interesting results, short thread...

🚨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...

Is Joe Rogan really just a voice of the right? Our new @csmapnyu.org piece for @goodauth.bsky.social shows he’s just as much a space for the left and the center, too. A look inside today’s surprisingly complicated podcast information ecosystem. 🎙️ goodauthority.org/news/podcast...

Next up on my reading list. …I am already regretting this choice.

How common are “survey professionals” - people who take dozens of online surveys for pay - across online panels, and do they harm data quality? Our paper, FirstView at @politicalanalysis.bsky.social, tackles this question using browsing data from three U.S. samples (Facebook, YouGov, and Lucid):

TODAY Aug 28 - "Politics in 60 Seconds: Short-Form Video, TikTok, and Political Communication" at #APSA2025 - 2 PM, VCC West Ballroom B Chair: @eunjikim.bsky.social. Discussant: @mollyeroberts.bsky.social

Spoiler alert: the answer is “no”

Maybe let’s not dismantle the tenure system while admin and athletic budgets balloon

New from me about Grok's very bad week, with insight from @solmg.bsky.social. www.engadget.com/ai/how-exact...

🧵 NEW PAPER - "Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages" is live at SMR. We combine NLP w pairwise LLM evals to track ideas across media ecosystems and languages. We also figured out a way to eval unsupervised probs on widely understood supervised performance metrics.

I am thrilled to share a new article in Sociological Methods & Research, “Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages”. My co-first author Sol Messing and our collaborators developed a new approach to measuring “narrative similarity” between texts: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Important corrective paper and solid work from @cbarrie.bsky.social: don't mistake game simulations as evidence of intelligence if the game is in the training data.

1/ I am excited to share my new article with Adam Goldstein in the American Journal of Sociology. We harmonized a set of historical public opinion data from 1966-2013 to investigate the shifting bases of inequality perceptions in the United States. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Join us as a research engineer @ CSMAP. 1. Collaborate on deploying and fine-tuning LLMs/LMs - build your AI chops 2. Big compute resources and data infra already in place 3. Access to largest social data collections on earth 4. Smart & teched up co-workers who know their isht

💡 Ever wondered how social media and digital technology shapes our democracy? Join our team @CSMaP_NYU as a Research Engingeer and help us build the tools that power cutting-edge research on the digital public sphere. 🚀 Apply now! apply.interfolio.com/165833

🚨 NEW job posting for research engineer/TL @ CSMAP. 1. Collaborate on deploying and fine-tuning LLMs/LMs - build your AI chops 2. Big compute resources and data infra already in place 3. Access to largest social data collections on earth 4. Smart & teched up co-workers who know their isht

🚨 Fantastic data + methods work in PNAS on “scripted propaganda,” government-authored phrases/talking points that appear in commercial newspapers. They show it’s been on the rise in recent decades & particularly during COVID — huge congrats on this incredibly heavy lift

Dodge-targeted agencies are the ones that create knowledge, suggesting this is about more than just political retribution

Regardless of whether TikTok will be sold to a non-Chinese owner, @zevesanderson.com, @solmg.bsky.social, and Scott Babwah Brennen argue that researchers need access to independent data to understand the platform’s democratic effects in the U.S. and abroad.

In the absence of federal regulation, states continue to lead the development of technology policy in the US, passing 238 bills in 46 states in 2024, a 163 percent increase from last year. New report published today by us & NYU's Center on Tech Policy. 🧵 1/

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Political scientist: The cup is in a 2-party equilibrium. No major 3rd party will emerge due to its first-past-the-post voting system.

📢 New CSMaP & @ucsandiego.bsky.social paper published in PNAS Nexus! Main finding: Latinos who rely on Spanish-language social media for news were significantly more likely to believe false political narratives than those who consume English-language content 🧵 1/ academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

It's not fair u come armed with stupendous math coupled with actual experience as former Twitter employee. It's said much of Musk's followers are bots. But millions of his real followers will still do the job of multiplying effect.

🧵The study everyone here is talking about does NOT provide evidence that Twitter/X pushed a pro-Republican home timeline ranking change in July 2023. The cascading, multiplicative effects of ranking changes likely explain the effect--details below

🧵Do not accept the narrative that Trump won b/c racism & sexism: 1. Doesn’t line up with the evidence 2. Assumes the worst about Trump voters & will further alienate them 3. Plays into "the left is too woke" meme 4. May embolden white supremacy

Excited to share a pre-print about web scraping for research! We're happy to receive feedback on how we frame this issue and try to build some paths forward for researchers. w/ @orangechair.org, Gabe Maldoff, @solmg.bsky.social, Zeve Sanderson, & @michaelzimmer.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2410.23432

How might AI, TikTok, and the liar's dividend affect the 2024 elections? Zeve Sanderson, @solmg.bsky.social, and @jatucker.bsky.social explain in this new piece for Brookings. 🧵 1/ www.brookings.edu/articles/mis...

CSMaP is thrilled to welcome our new Tech Policy Fellow, Lama Mohammed! In this role, Lama will work to insert rigorous research into the policy conversation around social media, technology, and democracy. Please join us in welcoming Lama! csmapnyu.org/people/lama-...

THREAD: Early projections for 2024 based on previous Presidential and House returns do not look good for Biden—Republicans have a slight edge. NOTE: These are completely unrelated to Biden’s recent polling numbers.  www.270towin.com/maps/OWYvL

The online environment is rapidly transforming, as generative AI intersects with a fragmenting social media ecosystem. In the past year, CSMaP published several major studies analyzing the platforms, and built a foundation to study the shifting landscape moving forward.

🚨Job alert 🚨 CSMaP is hiring 3 postdoctoral fellows to work on research examining the intersection of social/digital media & politics! 1) Focuses generally on social media/politics 2) Focuses on comparative politics 3) Focuses on political behavior Info & application links 👇

As the big migration is happening, I highly recommend reading @solmg.bsky.social 's blog post. Everything is beautiful around here, but it's still too early to tell whether it will stay that way (in terms of moderation, centralization, and platform revenue) csmapnyu.org/news-views/n...

1/ Many said Science went overboard on its cover for those Meta studies. Science published my take yesterday. It shows Meta’s algorithms actually tended NOT to increase ideological segregation in general, at least in 2020

How should we measure "filter bubbles"? Some comments building on a letter to Science by @solmg.bsky.social statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/10/13/p...

1/ Many said Science went overboard on its cover for those Meta studies. Science published my take yesterday. It shows Meta’s algorithms actually tended NOT to increase ideological segregation in general, at least in 2020

Excellent post from Tom Cunningham on the what we know about the possible effects of social media on affective polarization tecunningham.github.io/posts…

People are flocking to BlueSky. But will it keep its luster as it scales up? @solmg.bsky.social explores what could happen with this new platform. Read his full post and thread 👇 https://csmapnyu.org/news-views/news/on-bluesky