🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

This is very timely! We looked into the posting/moderation anomalies last week in the US. Special kudos to @benguinaudeau.bsky.social @solmg.bsky.social and @kengchichang.bsky.social. An outage rather than targeted censorship is what makes the most sense in this case, we’ll stay vigilant.

Great time at the @psampg.bsky.social annual conference in Bournemouth. #AI #theory #discourse and #moderation discussed by our team me, Marco Guglielmo and @andreucasas.bsky.social. Thanks Dan Jackson and all the organisers.

🚨 One more week to apply to the PhD position at the London Social Media Observatory. If you are interested in empirical, quantitative, and/or computational approaches to studying social media and politics, apply! 😊

🎉 We're really excited to be collaborating with our excellent partners on this, as part of WP3 of the What-If Horizon project, hosted at the Observatory. 🎯 Understanding what interventions affect citizen misinformation effects is crucial to build evidence based policy in the area! More insights 🔜

🚨Hiring a fully funded (3.5 years) PhD for the @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social to research social media and politics. Candidates should have quantitative/computational skills and/or be interested in content curation/moderation. UK home candidates only unfortunately. www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/hquftp...

All EU countries appear to be gone in the Google political ad library By @lizcarolan.com

Very happy to have people from our @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social attend the DSA40 Data Access Days organized by @dsa40collaboratory.bsky.social. With threats to our online and political safety in the rise, access to platform data for independent and academic researchers is more important than ever.

🥰I had so much fun again teaching computer vision and other computational methods to these bright social scientists this week. (Un)supervised classification, image encoding, content similarity, object detection, face detection/analysis, muldimodal modeling, video data, etc., you name it!

🚨Very honored to receive the Future Leaders Fellowship from @ukri.org I’ll use this 2.3 million £ investment to create the London Social Media Observatory, for cutting-edge research on social media and politics, and novel computational tools for social science research. www.ukri.org/news/ukri-an...

📣 Last Call! We still have spots left for our #GESISfallseminar course on Computer Vision for Image and Video Data Analysis with @andreucasas.bsky.social. Join us before it’s too late!⏳ ➡️ t1p.de/ImageVideoAn...

Do you want to use large amounts of visual data (or text + visuals) in your research but don't know how? Join my "Computer Vision for Image and Video Analysis" course at GESIS this September (15-19th) to learn about machine learning for automatic visual analysis: training.gesis.org?site=pDetail...

On my way to Madrid-EPSA! Please join in if you want to hear about (political biases? in) content moderation on YouTube during the 2024 US Election, and/or about using open-source Large Visual Language Models (VLMs) for supervised multimodal classification in political science research.

🚨New Publication @thejop.bsky.social We study who sets the issue agenda of state policymakers in the US. We find a mixed picture: they respond to shifts in attention by members of Congress, but also to the constituents in their states, particularly their own party supporters.

🚨New publication @The_JOP on human biases in data annotation (w. Nora Webb Williams, @kevinaslett.bsky.social, John Wilkerson). Extremely important given the increasing societal reliance on AI tools often trained on human coders www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Featured in the latest issue! ⚖️ "On Measurement Validity and Language Models: Increasing Validity and Decreasing Bias with Instructions" by Laurer et al. (@moritzlaurer.bsky.social @vanatteveldt.com @andreucasas.bsky.social @kasperwelbers.bsky.social). Read: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

1/ Excited to share our new paper, “Can foreign aid reduce the desire to emigrate? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial,” w/ Cassilde Schwartz (@rhulpirp) & @profdavidhudson (@iddbirmingham) — published in @AJPSeditor! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/CFSFRF...

Apply to our MSc program "Media, Power, and Public Affairs", at @rhulpir.bsky.social: strategic pol comm, media and intl affairs, elections, campaigns, public opinion, amazing quant and qual methods training etc! W. great faculty @benoloughlin.bsky.social @joostvanspanje.bsky.social @caprosser.com

We took X to court. And we won! ⚖️ The courts ruled that X must urgently grant us access to their publicly available data via their API. This access is critical for our analysis of online public discourse ahead of the upcoming German elections. Read: bit.ly/4gBWGp4 Here's what's happened 1/3 👇

We had an amazing time in the kick-off meeting. Brilliant and diverse people working on novel approaches to addressing important and timely challenges. Follow the project account and stay tuned!

Lots of voices are concerned about Elon Musk’s attempts to meddle in German and UK politics. The question is: what do people actually make of this? YouGov Germany has some recent data: In both, the public are assessing Musk’s interference negatively. https://buff.ly/4gkPqxI

Are the platforms ready for the German elections? 🇩🇪🗳️ The @ec.europa.eu have requested platforms like X, Meta, TikTok, Google, and Microsoft to a meeting this week. The EC wants to stress test the companies on election interference, AI and disinformation campaigns. techcrunch.com/2025/01/24/t...

It's Sunday! What a perfect day to support this #ResearchInfrastructure initiative! If you like to work with political data & agree that mapping concepts, indicators, and linking 🔗 diverse datasets can advance #DemocracyResearch 🗳️ for everyone, add your name to show your support. Sign up here ✍️🤝

Also for the international crowd: #Instagram censors “Democrat” as a search term, while allowing “Republican” and seems to prioritize anti-leftwing content in search queries for alternative search terms. #DSA

EU is asking X for internal documents about its algorithms. "The company has been accused of manipulating the platform’s systems to give far-right posts and politicians greater visibility over other political groups." www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

New report "Academic Access to Social Media Data for the Study of Political Online Safety" w. @georgidag.bsky.social @benoloughlin.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/so... As new threats reach the social media environment, platforms continue to obstruct independent research. It’s time to act!

Apply for a PhD position in our Politics department at @rhulpirp.bsky.social! Happy to supervise thesis in social media and politics, legislative politics, and/or computational methods. Hit me up if you're interested! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DKW353/p...

Has someone been granted access to the Meta Content Library/API? I'm trying to collect feedback on pros and cons for a report, and would love to have a chat with people who have used it.