On Thursday at 8:30: I'll be presenting joint work with @dasalgon.bsky.social on how parties react to political violence and contribute to political polarisation. @kanol.bsky.social , Gary LaFree and I organised a panel with excellent cotributions by @britdavidson.bsky.social and Leoni Heyn

We are looking for a research assistant to help us develop tools to make dashboards easier for social scientists to create 🤩 If you are really into R and passionate about data and science communication, please apply!

Value alignment (supposedly aligning LLMs w/ human values) has become powerful not only in AI safety research but also informing regulation. yet, most of it is neither about humans nor human values & every paper=“here’s an algorithm for aligning to human preferences" & a bunch of math & benchmarks

🔗I’m thrilled to share my latest article for @uk.theconversation.com! In it, I explore how memes have become powerful vehicles for spreading dangerous ideas—including conspiracy theories—and what we should all consider before sharing one.

A new study from @emilygodwin.bsky.social and @britdavidson.bsky.social shows the sinister side to memes, revealing their role in strengthening online communities of conspiracy theorists and helping to spread harmful beliefs www.bath.ac.uk/announcement...

I am excited to share my latest research paper published in Social Media + Society, titled 'Internet Memes as Stabilizers of Conspiracy Culture: A Cognitive Anthropological Analysis' and co-authored with @britdavidson.bsky.social, Tim Hill, and Adam Joinson. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

So excited to see my first first-author paper out in print! Rage against the machine: exploring violence and emotion in conspiracy narratives on Parler journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... special thank you to my supervisors @britdavidson.bsky.social, Lukasz Piwek and Jonathan Roscoe

Proud supervisor moment 👏 my fab PhD student Johnny has finished his first paper, looking at smart tech, privacy, and security. Specifically looking at smart doorbells in neighbourhoods and how individual choices impact those around us. 🔐 📖📚Have a read, link to the preprint is here: osf.io/g9dpt

we badly need healthy public awareness around AI (it’s harms, failures, downstream impacts… not the current hype AI companies push through and the media parrots with 0 critical scrutiny) as much as we need better, enforceable regulation

one of the world leading research institutes that prides itself in responsible & public benefiting AI: we want you to write a blog post me: sure, I can write about my expertise; holding those that are developing/deploying harmful AI accountable them: let's not be overly critical of powerful actors

New in NHB: We systematically replicated 26 of 41 PNAS social science studies that used MTurk. The approach provides a proof-of-concept for using decision markets to select findings to replicate. Replication effect sizes were 45% of original effect sizes. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hearing from former colleagues about this and it seems an utter management fiasco as ever at Edinburgh. School Heads weren't warned the redundancy email was going out. At the all-staff meeting the next day Senior Management then refused to provide any specifics... www.bbc.com/news/article...

A rent paper has been portrayed in the news as proof that Twitter/X new #recsys favors republicans. In our latest work, collecting millions of datapoints via 120 sock puppets, we should the reality is much more complex: you would be surprised by our findings: arxiv.org/abs/2411.01852 thread 1/n

Now is the time to archive the gov data and webpages that you depend on for your research. They may not be there in the future. #AcademicSky

If you’re interested/worried about the effects of screens, phones and social media, my book, Unlocked, is still just 99p on Kindle at the moment: www.amazon.co.uk/Unlocked-Sci...

Horrifying statistics obtained by UCU show 61% of undergraduate tutorials at Oxford colleges done by junior academics on fixed-term contracts or in hourly-paid roles. Colleges pay many below minimum wage in the UK, after accounting for preparation and marking. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Getting the US numbers to “say” what an autocrat wants them to say is a lot harder than creating the impression that the numbers are unreliable, civil servants are untrustworthy/stupid, and methods are corrupt. Numbers don’t speak for themselves. They have interpreters, for better and for worse.

🚨New preprint 🚨 **A computational model of reward learning and habits on social media** 🧵 We develop a computational reward learning model of real-world social media data, which infers the separate goal-directed and habitual cognitive processes driving posting...

“When kids hear 'you’re addicted, you're addicted, you're addicted,' they don’t necessarily feel cared for - they feel criticised. They feel as if they’re being punished, and the devices are taken away” www.wbur.org/radioboston/...

Network Science Institute starter pack in BlueSky! A list of members and alumni (to be updated) go.bsky.app/N3PQTdw

Judgment and Decision Making JDM by @dggoldst.bsky.social

Diversity Scientists in Social Psychology by @joelleforestier.bsky.social

List of psychology-related starter packs! #Psychology #AcademicSky 🧪 🧵 Cross-Cultural Psychology and Quant Anthropology by @drboothroyd.bsky.social

I made a starter pack for computational sociologists. Please DM if you think you should be added (or taken off!) go.bsky.app/U1Wia61

"Software that doesn't run is kind of pointless" New Registered Report, led by David Ellis, considers whether psych research artefacts (software, data, databases, etc) are plug&play or more like plug&weep, and how they fare (and FAIR) over time. (1) doi.org/10.3758/s134...

Fascinating look into the alt-tech platform Parler from @darja.bsky.social, Piwek, Roscoe, & @britdavidson.bsky.social doi.org/10.31234/osf...

My fab PhD student @darja.bsky.social’s first paper! Give it a read, it’s all about #conspiracytheories, their narratives, and violent outcomes. Fascinating and critically important work to lay groundwork to find early stage interventions!

New preprint! How often do editors/reviewers actually compare preregistrations to the reporting in the article? Almost never. This figure sums up all of the results. Not good.

Come join me at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law! There’s currently a call out for research assistants with the ambition to pursue a doctorate recruitingapp-5535.de.umantis.com/Vacancies/43...

Today's my birthday! 🥳 Here are my birthday wishes in light of my Twitter feed. - Ceasefire - Safe AI - Data consent in AI - Fettuccine Alfredo for dinner Followed by: - World peace - Long term beneficial assistive and augmentative AI that neither harms nor exploits people 🙏

Our Department is advertising a new Tenure Track Assistant Professorship on Media Literacy! Click here to apply: academicjobs.univie.ac.at/datenabfrage...

1/ NEW PREPRINT: Delve into the UK's conspiracy movement with our latest dataset paper on 'The Light’, where we lay the groundwork to dissect this self-prescribed 'truthpaper's' influence on anti-mainstream discourse. Read it here: tinyurl.com/3wv6ez5w

New preprint with the most fabulous team @emilyjanegodwin.bsky.social @britdavidson.bsky.social @dessibocheva.bsky.social Alberto Arletti and Liv Brown who aren't on Bluesky yet If you are interested in conspiracy narratives this dataset is for you!

Hot Off the press!

It was such an honour and a fantastic time to work with these great folks for my first PhD publication!

I am SO excited by this publication. Our lead author @britdavidson.bsky.social does an excellent job of describing it in the thread below. A massive well done to the whole team, and a big thank you to #NatureHumanBehaviour!

New commentary out in Nature Human Behavior in which we join the chorus arguing for better access to platform data. Here we highlight the ways in which platform control over APIs through their restrictive usage terms undermines open science.

Read --> 🧊 free online: rdcu.be/dp7RT 📕 pre/post print: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🌴 journal: doi.org/10.1038/s415... Thanks to @britdavidson.bsky.social for co-ordinating this one!

Thrilled our article: Platform-controlled social media APIs threaten open science -- rdcu.be/dp7RT is hot off the press at #NatureHumanBehaviour!

Read this. There is a lot of fear of too much criticism in psychology, talk of protecting ECRs from this threat, etc. What about protecting ECRs from the damage of being silenced or worse when they raise legitimate criticism of famous people’s work? https://www.theorgplumber.com/posts/statement/

This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/

New paper with @ianhussey.bsky.social @taymalsalti.bsky.social @rubenarslan.bsky.social. Most measures are only used once or twice, w/o agreement on gold standards - a serious barrier to cumulative science. that leads to lots of papers without meaningful progress. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

🧪 Scientist? 🟦 New to BlueSky? 👀 Wanna find posts by other people in your area and use the right hashtags in your own posts? 📃 Here’s a list of around 160 science-related feeds and their hashtags. #AcademicSky #PhDSky

All right. Finally jumped onto #procreate and this is my third drawing in it. Still have no idea how any of it works, but it’s a start :) also fits todays #inktober prompt of drip

🚨Vacancy for Assistant Professor: AI and Philosophy of Mind and Language Come work with us at Radboud University! www.ru.nl/en/working-a... (please RT for wider reach)

Okay, I’ll try and hold myself accountable for doing #inktober where we get daily prompts for a drawing. Yesterdays (ahem my bad for being late), was dream

In the spirit of trying to make sure my job doesn’t consume my entire life, I’ve started a “recipe” blog of lots of things I enjoy cooking for people. So far it’s mostly types of curd (lemon, blackberry): easy and wholesome www.brittanydavidson.co.uk/blog I’ll be adding more autumnal recipes soon