I like this summary of how CS became heavily empirical, especially the bit about the introduction of human concerns leading to beliefs that the only way to understand is empirical (this was the bane of my existence for a couple years, actually 🙂)

In a new blog post, I argue that CS is already an empirical discipline, even though we often act as if it is not (mostly to our students). doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-empiri...

The Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow to work with an interdisciplinary team (me, @bstewart.bsky.social, and @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social). Link: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app... Please apply by THIS SUNDAY, Dec. 14!

The Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow to work with Andy Guess (Politics/SPIA), Brandon Stewart (Sociology), and me (CS). puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app... Please apply before Sunday, the 13th of December!

🚨 New in Nature+Science!🚨 AI chatbots can shift voter attitudes on candidates & policies, often by 10+pp 🔹Exps in US Canada Poland & UK 🔹More “facts”→more persuasion (not psych tricks) 🔹Increasing persuasiveness reduces "fact" accuracy 🔹Right-leaning bots=more inaccurate

help spread the word about this campaign - or, if you're able, consider supporting yourself! Bonfire is building a modular toolkit for organizing, mutual aid, open science, and collective decision-making on the open social web. communities choose what gets built: www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/...

Whoa, excellent study just dropped in Science! "Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Led by @tiziano.bsky.social and @msaveski.bsky.social

Come work with Homa!! She’s amazing!!

Trying an experiment in good old-fashioned blogging about papers: dallascard.github.io/granular-mat...

TikTok and the likes transformed how we spend time on our phones. But do they increase mobile use, or just reshuffle what we already do? We find that adopting TikTok increases total mobile usage and shortens breaks from the phone. Preprint: osf.io/preprints/so...

⚖️ Measuring Scalar Constructs in Social Science with LLMs with rising (and established) stars in Computational Social Science @haukelicht.bsky.social @rupak-s.bsky.social @patrickwu.bsky.social @pranavgoel.bsky.social @elliottash.bsky.social @alexanderhoyle.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2509.03116

🚨 I'm recruiting PhD students in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University for Fall 2026. If you're interested in AI, HCI, and designing better online platforms and experiences, apply to work with me! More info: piccardi.me

Have been waiting for this paper to come out ever since Hongyao told me about it -- more academics should be taking advantage of such open data to answer important questions

wild :o

There’s plenty of evidence for political bias in LLMs, but very few evals reflect realistic LLM use cases — which is where bias actually matters. IssueBench, our attempt to fix this, is accepted at TACL, and I will be at #EMNLP2025 next week to talk about it! New results 🧵

The debate over “LLMs as annotators” feels familiar: excitement, backlash, and anxiety about bad science. My take in a new blogpost is that LLMs don’t break measurement; they expose how fragile it already was. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/labeling-d...

Graze is doing great work in supporting the entire ATProto Ecosystem, and their latest newsletter is a great illustration. Also featuring an interview with @sjgreenwood.bsky.social about Paper Skygest (bsky.app/profile/pape...)

Join us as postdoc at the Inequality Discourse Observatory at the University of Konstanz: stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/7... We will do epic research between Linguistics and Computational Social Science at the Cluster of Politics of Inequality. Feel free to DM if you have any questions.

Computer Science is no longer just about building systems or proving theorems--it's about observation and experiments. In my latest blog post, I argue it’s time we had our own "Econometrics," a discipline devoted to empirical rigor. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-missin...

🌱✨ Life update: I just started my PhD at Princeton University! I will be supervised by @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social and affiliated with Princeton CITP. It's only been a month, but the energy feels amazing —very grateful for such a welcoming community. Excited for what’s ahead! 🚀

Social media feeds today are optimized for engagement, often leading to misalignment between users' intentions and technology use. In a new paper, we introduce Bonsai, a tool to create feeds based on stated preferences, rather than predicted engagement. arxiv.org/abs/2509.10776

I'm thinking a lot about the debate around whether LMs can "understand." Enter a new thought experiment I call "the lean Chinese room." IMO, it shows how the pressure of compression and speed blurs the line between symbol-shuffling and understanding. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-lean-c...

Whether or not AIs “truly” understand is less important than how they reshape jobs, politics, and culture. My new post: why the “Human of the Gaps” fallacy distracts us from governing real-world AI impacts. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/the-retrea...

Creators pour years into building a following, but in a growing underground market, you can simply buy accounts and inherit their audience. In our new pre-print, we find this practice of repurposing accounts to be prevalent and consequential on YouTube! arxiv.org/abs/2507.16045

🚨 Study alert! We've developed a prototype that enables you to create personalized social media feeds using natural language rules and import them into Bluesky. Join our study to try out the tool, give us your feedback, and earn a $50 gift card! Sign up: forms.gle/MkSGKzxDfBEc... Please share :)

In a new blogpost, I argue GenAI as is won't "eat social media," because of: - authenticity - user preferences - platforms being able to handle content at scale doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/publish/post...

In a new blog post, I... - show that AI-generated videos are quite expensive to create - argue that even if they weren't, we still would not drown in it. doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/ai-generat...

A good chunk of the AI-generated content we see right now is paid for by VC money. E.g., Leonardo.ai, a popular image/video creator, offers Veo3 **cheaper than Google**! It is like early-day Uber.

I’m stoked to have received two honorable mention awards at @icwsm.bsky.social ! With work led by Peppe, thorsten and Maciej! Sad I couldn’t attend this year but looking very much forward to catching up with this community next year!!!

Excellent talk by Hayoung in the Political Information and Opinion Dynamics panel at #ICWSM

This @icwsm.bsky.social paper fine-tunes Temporal Adapters for Llama3 8B on timelines from a panel of British Twitter users, finding that the fine-tuned LLMs retrieve collective emotions! Cool extension of simulation work to the longitudinal scenario: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC... cc @dgarcia.eu

In a new (very short) post, I wonder about whether the inability to forget harms large reasoning models doomscrollingbabel.manoel.xyz/p/chatgpt-th...

Laypeople often learn about science from expert explanations & those explanations often contain JARGON. Does jargon make explanations better or worse? In a paper out today in Nature Human Behaviour, @cruzf.bsky.social and I find that jargon can support illusions of understanding...

This paper characterizes (self-described) TikTok addiction with surveys and (n=107) data donations. One interesting finding is that watching positive videos predicts addiction, even controlling for session number and session time. ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC... cc: @ingmarweber.de

This @chi.acm.org paper compares 1-hour, 1-day, and 3-day suspensions with two massive experiments on Roblox (N=700k+). TL;DR Longer suspensions work better. I hope this gets the recognition it deserves. We need more 'basic' studies on content moderation. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

This @chi.acm.org paper surveys 319 knowledge workers. The authors find that GenAI reduces cog load for some tasks (info search) but creates new tasks (verification). This made me wonder to what extent automating search will create "rich-get-richer" effects. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Before that, I'll spend 2025-2026 as a postdoc at Princeton's CITP @princetoncitp.bsky.social. I'm excited to conduct research about informedness and mental health on social media with @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social and @andyguess.com.

It's finally public! 🎉 Excited to announce I'll be joining UIUC's iSchool as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2026. My lab will focus on AI information ecosystems, computational social science, and social computing. I will start recruiting PhD students this cycle, so please reach out if interested.

This @chi.acm.org paper finds that AI assistance homogenized writing in a controlled experiment with American and Indian participants (n=118). With a classifier, it was harder to predict writer origin without AI (84% vs 91%). dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1... @informor.bsky.social @imadityav.bsky.social

Thrilled to share that I’ve successfully defended my PhD dissertation and I will be joining MIT as an Assistant Professor starting Fall 2026, with a shared appointment between Sloan and EECS! I will be recruiting 1-2 PhD students this upcoming cycle. Consider applying to MIT EECS!

This @chi.acm.org paper finds non-intentional social media usage / algorithmically recommended content particularly regrettable. The paper's methodology is very neat: the authors triangulate surveys with screenshot analysis (with VLMs). dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... cc: @alexishiniker.bsky.social

I'm excited to announce that I’ll be joining the Computer Science department at Johns Hopkins as an Assistant Professor this Fall! I’ll be working on large language models, computational social science, and AI & society—and will be recruiting PhD students. Apply to work with me!

Receiving positive feedback on Reddit leads to slightly more frequent & much higher-quality contributions (for some days). Sustained positive feedback can complement content moderation. (Cool to see obs studies at @chi.acm.org!) dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.... @kous2v.bsky.social @ceshwar.bsky.social

Stay hungry, stay foolish

This paper increased my hype over Visual Language Models for CSS. Masood et al. mixed a user study, VLMs, and data donation to create a descriptive analysis of TikTok's algorithm. arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20030

This is a poor argument against LLM simulations. It suggests that LLM-based behavioral models should capture nuances that no model ever has (do agent-based models go to the toilet?). Ofc, ABM is meant to be interpretable, but social science also needs predictive power (where LLM simulations excel)

Throwback to the LIS Symposium at @rutgerscomminfo.bsky.social. Key takeaway from our panel: Researchers must get “scrappy & scrape-y” as platforms increasingly restrict data access @informor.bsky.social @haimson.bsky.social @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social & Shagun Jhaver

Shower thought: As developers rely more on AI to code, we might see fewer new languages/frameworks. AI excels with what already exists... Innovation outside its training data is harder, which could subtly discourage reinventing (slightly better) wheels.

Cannoli: The coolest dog in New Jersey! (And yeah, a typo in Italian)

📣 Calling all #CHI2025 attendees who work with human participants: Join our panel discussion on #LLM, #simulation, #syntheticdata, and the future of human subjects research on Apr 30 (Wed), 2:10 - 3:40 PM (JP Time) Post your questions for panelists here: forms.gle/m2mXY3xFafAX...