Could social media make us less polarized instead of more? We tested 5 algorithms on 3 platforms with 10,000 people for 6 months during the 2024 election, and found that the answer is yes. 🧵

Pleased to share our new paper forthcoming in @icwsm.bsky.social! We introduce a novel framework to measure value expressions in social media posts at scale, leveraging personalization to handle the inherent subjectivity of human values. arxiv.org/abs/2511.08453

Excited to join a panel discussion on our recent work about social media and polarization!

Excited to share our new paper in ACM Transactions on Social Computing! link.growkudos.com/1eqlle3swsg

Read the article by @tiziano.bsky.social:

Is the only way we can create algorithms that people understand to make them trivially simple? We argue, no. People can predict the behavior of algorithms that are arbitrarily complex, if and only if they are available, compact and aligned. arxiv.org/abs/2601.18966

Deadline soon!

📢 Undergrads! Can’t make tomorrow’s CS faculty research panel? Join us for our 2nd panel on Thurs, 1/15 to learn about research opps & connect w/ faculty like @ananya-a-joshi.bsky.social, @tiziano.bsky.social, @erye.bsky.social, & more out of the classroom. Learn more: www.cs.jhu.edu/event/comput...

📣 Postdoc opportunity at Johns Hopkins The DSAI Institute at Johns Hopkins is hiring postdocs through its fellowship program (2+ years). If you're interested in human-AI interaction, social computing, and the design of online platforms, I'd love to work with you. 🗓 Deadline: January 23, 2026

CSCW folks, I wanted to highlight how excited and proud I am to see work from our community (dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/..., CSCW '24 best paper winner led by @jiachenyan.bsky.social and @mlam.bsky.social) grow and expand ambition into this Science paper. CSCW has a ton to offer the world.

Our new article in @science.org enables social media reranking outside of platforms' walled gardens. We add an LLM-powered reranking of highly polarizing political content into N=1256 participants' feeds. Downranking cools tensions with the opposite party—but upranking inflames them.

New paper in Science: In a platform-independent field experiment, we show that reranking content expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity in social media feeds alters affective polarization. 🧵

🚨 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

🎓 Alumni Spotlight #7: Tiziano Piccardi @tiziano.bsky.social 💻 Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins (@jhu.edu), exploring HCI, AI & Social Computing. PhD in Computer Science at EPFL (Data Science Lab, Robert West). Former Postdoc at Stanford and co-founder of Widerun, a VR + fitness startup.

The Department of Computer Science is pleased to welcome nine new tenure-track faculty to its ranks this academic year! Featuring @anandbhattad.bsky.social, @uthsav.bsky.social, @gligoric.bsky.social, @murat-kocaoglu.bsky.social, @tiziano.bsky.social, and more:

10 new CS professors! 🥳 @anandbhattad.bsky.social @uthsav.bsky.social @gligoric.bsky.social @murat-kocaoglu.bsky.social @tiziano.bsky.social

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

5 fully funded visiting researcher positions in Oxford and Stanford! ‼️

The EPFL NLP lab is looking to hire a postdoctoral researcher on the topic of designing, training, and evaluating multilingual LLMs: docs.google.com/document/d/1... Come join our dynamic group in beautiful Lausanne!

Last day of #ACL2025NLP but there's still lots to do: attend the #WikiNLP workshop, where we explore how NLP and wikipedia can help each other! We have amazing keynotes, discussions with Wikipedia editors, a panel + posters! Details: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/NLP_for... Join us in room 2.31!

Excited to co-organize the Bridging Human and LLM Annotations for Social Science tutorial at #ic2s2 tomorrow! Join us at 1:30pm CEST to learn how to combine Qualtrics+Prolific, MTurk, & LLMs for automated annotation and valid estimates. Code&materials: github.com/kristinaglig...

#ICWSM @icwsm.bsky.social would be nothing without its community. Here are some of the heroes who work hard to guarantee that authors receive useful reviews: @aldayelabeer.bsky.social @chibold.bsky.social @lespin.bsky.social @elaragon.bsky.social @shrutiphadke.bsky.social @tiziano.bsky.social

Looking forward to giving a tutorial on Social Media Feed Ranking Algorithms with @tiziano.bsky.social at @icwsm.bsky.social today! Come join us at AAU, Room 2.1.083.

I'm so excited to join the CS department at Johns Hopkins University (@jhu.edu) as an Assistant Professor! I'm looking for students interested in social computing, HCI, and AI—especially around designing better online systems in the age of LLMs. Come work with me! piccardi.me

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!

100 Years of Engineering @ Stanford!

Deadline today! 🚨 Join us at the 2nd WikiNLP Workshop on NLP for Wikipedia, co-located with #ACL2025 in Vienna. We welcome both in-person and virtual attendees! 🗓️ Submission deadline: April 30 🔗 Details: w.wiki/CumQ

New funding opportunity for Wikimedia-related research! Grants up to $150K available. Apply by April 16th: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:...

2⃣ seminars coming up on Thursday with @tiziano.bsky.social and @uthsav.bsky.social! Check them out at bit.ly/3Fv5n7C and bit.ly/3FssGPr

Book announcement: with Melissa Valentine, we are publishing "Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work." It's a leadership book synthesizing a decade of Stanford research on how computing, online platforms, and AI reshape teamwork. Coming October from @mitpress.bsky.social!

Thanks to @tilmanbayer.bsky.social for covering our work on Wikipedia readership in the latest Wikimedia Research newsletter! ➡️ arxiv.org/abs/2501.00939

🤖🍲 What can LLMs do for sustainable food? 🤖🍲 We collaborated with domain experts (food scientists and chefs) to define a typology of food design and prediction tasks. LLMs can assist in food and menu development, saving food scientists' time and reducing emissions! URL: bit.ly/3ERJbUV

The call for papers for the second edition of the #WikiNLP workshop at @aclmeeting.bsky.social is out! We welcome contributions on #NLProc + Wikimedia, especially on datasets, and ideas to advance its mission. More details: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/NLP_for...

📢 Call for #ICWSM2025 workshop proposals! icwsm.org/2025/submit/... All Web + social media topics are welcome! Especially emerging approaches and task areas, bridging gaps between the social sciences and computing, and elucidating results of exploratory research. Due Fri Jan 24th AoE!

How do people *really* read Wikipedia? 📖 👀 We explored how readers navigate, fall into rabbit holes, and engage with information in a chapter for the ‘Handbook of Computational Social Science,’ edited by @tahayasseri.bsky.social. Stay tuned for the full book! 📚 Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2501.00939

Thrilled to share that the Handbook of Computational Social Science manuscript was finally submitted to the publisher in full! Huge thanks to all the authors and reviewers who made this possible. Check out the Table of Contents!

Weekend exercise: testing the Bluesky firehose. Who doesn't need a real-time dashboard to track EVERY emoji in messages? 😭, 😂, 🤣, ❤️ are topping the leaderboard! feeds.feedwizard.org (counters just started)

New @acm-cscw.bsky.social paper, new content moderation paradigm. Post Guidance lets moderators prevent rule-breaking by triggering interventions as users write posts! We implemented PG on Reddit and tested it in a massive field experiment (n=97k). It became a feature! arxiv.org/abs/2411.16814

New paper: Do social media algorithms shape affective polarization? We ran a field experiment on X/Twitter (N=1,256) using LLMs to rerank content in real-time, adjusting exposure to polarizing posts. Result: Algorithmic ranking impacts feelings toward the political outgroup! 🧵⬇️

I made a starter pack with as many of the Twitter folk I follow that I could find: go.bsky.app/9u9wdBc

Here are a few interesting starter packs with users to follow 🦋 AI: go.bsky.app/SipA7it RL: go.bsky.app/3WPHcHg NLP: go.bsky.app/SngwGeS NetSci: go.bsky.app/KMfiTU2 CSS: go.bsky.app/CYmRvcK PIT: go.bsky.app/He8HTaC You can find/create any starter pack you want! blueskydirectory.com/starter-pack...

I am recruiting 1-2 PhD students for Fall 2025 at Princeton to work on Comp Social Science/Societal Impact of GenAI/GenAI for SocSci I wrote a bit on research flavor & interests here: manoelhortaribeiro.github.io/advising Deadline: December 15th www.cs.princeton.edu/grad#prospec... Please boost!

Here is a @github.com repo where I will share tutorial notebooks on how to retrieve and analyze data from @bsky.app @atproto.com Feedback, suggestions, and contributions are welcome! github.com/brianckeegan...

Academic job market post! 👀 I’m a CS Postdoc at Stanford in the Stanford HCI group. I develop ways to improve the online information ecosystem by designing better social media feeds & improving Wikipedia. I work on AI, Social Computing, and HCI. piccardi.me 🧵

Now up on HDSR: "The Art of Randomness: Sampling and Chance in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction", a collaboration with @ziv-e.bsky.social where we examine the stochastic nature of AI tools by connecting to the history of chance aesthetics. hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/x5yq8vmk...

Hey Bluesky - I write my latest NYT opinion piece about Bluesky’s custom feeds and how it would be great if all social media had them. (Gift link)