What if you find out your own brother is a thief? We asked how people respond when a close other commits a moral transgression. -> It gets people to feel both as the victim + as the perpetrator & changes what punishment they seek. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #socialpsyc #PsychSciSky

New blog post introducing Causion - a web app for causal inference teaching and learning: pedermisager.org/blog/causion....

We just published the methodology behind CoPE, our 9B parameter model that matches GPT-4o at content classification at 1% the size! The model is already open source, but now we're sharing our training technique. blog.zentropi.ai/how-we-built... 🧵 1/6

Our Department at Aalborg University is hiring an Associate Professor in Sociology with a focus on quantitative methods: www.stillinger.aau.dk/videnskabeli...

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data. If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition. eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

Social media was supposed to expand political participation. But often, women politicians face hate, threats, and abuse just for showing up. After analysing 110,000+ Facebook & YouTube comments during elections in #SriLanka, we found disproportionate amounts of hate towards women.👇

Wow, Stackoverflow is cooked.

Absolutely love this paper! Genius design and super insightful! Must read for anyone interested in the study of online political discussions.

Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

We've published an Open Letter urging EU policymakers to reject the Digital Omnibus' proposed Amendment to Article 12(5) GDPR, which would undermine citizens' data access rights & the researchers who depend on them for #DataDonation research. Read & sign: shorturl.at/e1mr4 - your signature matters.

Despite new EU transparency laws, researchers are still blocked from vital social media data, while corporations buy the same information freely, argues Brandon Silverman. The result: a two-tier system that shields platforms from scrutiny and weakens democratic oversight.

Happy to share our new preprint “Content-based detection of misinformation expands its scope across politicians and platforms.” We analyzed misinformation at the text level in posts by German politicians on Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok. osf.io/preprints/so... 🧵1/8

You can now search our database of 1.7 million Community Notes on X. The database contains every Community Note that has ever been produced, even those that are not yet publicly available. notetracker.socialmediadata.org

New hobby: Remaking article abstracts as movie trailers to expose hype and fearmongering.

#DataMethods #OpenScience #GESISMethodsHub: An open portal for computational social science research—find tools, tutorials, and code, directly usable in your browser. Methods Hub makes it easy to learn, apply, and reproduce computational methods in the Social Sciences. methodshub.gesis.org/#DataMethods#OpenScience#GESISMethodsHub:

🚨✨ Publication alert: How do people in 6 countries (🇬🇧 🇺🇸 🇫🇷 🇦🇷 🇩🇰 🇯🇵 ) use AI 🤖 and think about it in the context of information, news, and institutions? Our new @reutersinstitute.bsky.social survey research (n ≈ 12,000) with @richardfletcher.bsky.social & @rasmuskleis.bsky.social explores this.

Very excited to announce the next term of the TADA speaker series! This term revolves around the validity of LLM generated data in the Social Sciences. We have a set of four great speakers to enlighten us on different aspects of this issue. If you'd like to join, sign up here: TADA.cool

Great to see this out! With @bsky.charispapaevangelou.eu we analyse the DSA “Statement of Reasons” database, the EU-mandated archive of moderation decisions by online platforms. We examine what kind of platform observability the database affords & find large regional and cross-platform differences.

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

Looking for help from #psychology and #survey folks who study #politics and use Prolific to collect data What is the maximum for # of GOP participants one can plausibly get? According to the prescreen there's 10-12k GOP/leaners, but of course what's realistic for uptake is much lower. Thank you!

Excited to share my newest quarto revealjs plugin: imagemover Easily reposition and resize images directly in your quarto revealjs slides for a much smoother slidecrafting experience github.com/EmilHvitfeld... #quarto

We built the simplest possible social media platform. No algorithms. No ads. Just LLM agents posting and following. It still became a polarization machine. Then we tried six interventions to fix social media. The results were… not what we expected. arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385

📢 In a new online field experiment, we find that #counterspeech with perspective-based messages can reduce online hate speech, and its 🌟amplification🌟 with a large research team across #ETHZurich @ipz.bsky.social @uclspp.bsky.social and beyond www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 Big News for European Political Science 🚨 We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the European Political Science Society (EPSS): a new, member-led, not-for-profit association built to support our scholarly community. 🔗 epssnet.org Here’s a thread with everything you need to know. 🧵

I took a closer look at the program #EPSA2024 and found some interesting trends – there seem to be more US based scholars than last year 🇺🇸 @epsanet.bsky.social‬ A thread on this year's authors and affiliations 🧵

Interested in how people talk to each other online? Care about causal inference and/or NLP? Want to design and implement field experiments? Come do a PhD with Dominik Hangartner, me, and a bunch of awesome people at IPL in Zurich: jobs.ethz.ch/job/view/JOP...

🧠 New Preprint | The concept of reflection in the work of John Dewey So excited to share my latest preprint (osf.io/preprints/ps...) which revisits John Dewey’s foundational work on reflection through the lens of his broader philosophy of cultural naturalism. In this article, I introduce...

VEO 3 Prompt: Generate a TV news anchor with a British accent, the anchor says "in shocking news, Jake Kaye Rowe ling's yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of turkey" include the announcement in the dialogue. This took one prompt and 2 minutes to generate.

EuroSpeech: Massive Multilingual Parliamentary Speech Corpus - 78,100+ hours across 22 European languages - 50,500+ hours of quality-filtered data (CER < 20%) - Robust alignment algorithm for non-verbatim texts - Dramatically expands resources for 19+ languages huggingface.co/datasets/dis...

The worst happened. We were DOGE’d. Our NSF funding is gone. So now there’s nothing stopping me from sharing Expert Voices Together, a crisis response system for US-based researchers and journalists facing harassment. It's a true passion project. 🧵 1/ expertvoicestogether.org

Version 1.5 of the #r-text package is now available from #CRAN. This version improves the application of pre-trained language assessments from the #LBAM-library (r-text.org/articles/LBA...). #mlsky #PsychSciSky #Statistics #PsychSciSky #StatsSky #NLP

💥Postdoc call 💥 Join my @erc.europa.eu project #YOPOW at Aarhus University 🎇 3-y position (possibility of 1-y extension) ❓How societal norms give rise to biased beliefs about political power in youth 🤖 Computational social science (large-scale text & image data) Deadline May 15: bit.ly/4hIpSeD

The mods of r/ChangeMyView shared the sub was the subject of a study to test the persuasiveness of LLMs & that they didn't consent. There’s a lot that went wrong, so here’s a 🧵 unpacking it, along with some ideas for how to do research with online communities ethically. tinyurl.com/59tpt988

Draft “A Practical Guide to Estimating Conditional Marginal Effects: Modern Approaches” is on arXiv: arxiv.org/pdf/2504.01355 w/ two amazing grad students, Jiehan_Liu & Ziyi Liu 🧵

🔥second-to-last panel at #COMPTEXT2025 on Hate, Counterspeech & Algorithmic Influence! @simonkarg.bsky.social on tracking hate/counterspeech Thomas Kirchmair on cross-platform variations of hate Chico Camargo on (in)effective user agency Chaired/discussed by Travis Coan & @jadevrielink.bsky.social 👏

🎉 Effects of climate protests by scientists paper published! Our findings suggest that scientists can engage in public protest without compromising their credibility, but that such actions alone may have less impact than one would like to believe: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Okay, I'm not done yet but I have been instructed to head to the #EuroCIM2025 student mixer and I guess you get the idea. I've been struggling to explain this in talks just working with the equations; I think the figures should make it a lot easier to follow along.

SCOOP: YouTube removes 'gender identity' from hate speech policy. "YouTube quietly removing ‘gender identity and expression’ from its list of protected groups is a major radical shift away from best practices in the field of trust and safety."

Super cool work shining light on some yet underexplored but super important factors driving who speaks and who remains silent on in online conversations!

COMPTEXT 2025 – The Countdown is On! 🥳 ✅ The preliminary program is now available! Check out the amazing sessions, workshops, and speakers lined up for this year's event. Don't miss out – register today and secure your spot! 👉 Register here comptextconference.org/7th-annual-c... 👈

I asked DeepSeek to develop a scale to measure addiction to addiction scale development and of course it delivered.

Pleased to share the latest version of my paper with Arthur Spirling and @lexipalmer.bsky.social on replication using LMs We show: 1. current applications of LMs in political science research *don't* meet basic standards of reproducibility...

Closeread Prize winners are here! 🏆 Want to create engaging, scroll-based stories with your data? See stunning scrollytelling examples made with Quarto: posit.co/blog/closere... Learn more about Closeread and its power to create dynamic narratives. Congrats winners! #Quarto #RStats #Python

Want to learn about computational social science *for free* and launch interdisciplinary research projects? We are so excited to announce there will be *26* Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science this year! Apply to one of them here: sicss.io/locations

Print this out and put it on your pinboard! Most compact and at the same time clear and intuitive figure on possible associations between predictors and outcome (or variables). (source: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/..., by @dingdingpeng.the100.ci and @achatton.bsky.social)

The relationship between social media and democracy is complex but important and there is a lot of debate. For coordination, I wanted to gauge the community with a discussion thread about what, in my view, we do know and the ones we do not know (yet), please add your thoughts and/or disagree: 1/n

As Germany gears up for its parliamentary elections on February 23, I’ve analyzed digital ad spending trends from 2021 to 2025. TL;DR: ad spending increased but that is mainly due to a shift to Google. Click through the thread below or check out my blog post ⬇️ www.favstats.eu/post/btws/

A while coming, but happy to say that `parttree` is finally on CRAN. #rstats #dataviz Visualize simple decision tree partitions on the scale of the data. Useful for getting an intuitive sense of how your model has carved up the feature space. Works for both classification & regression tasks. 1/2

NEW: I've obtained internal Meta docs revealing an array of sample posts that are now allowed under new hate speech rules. Examples include calling children "trannies," “Jews are flat out greedier than Christians," and “immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit” theintercept.com/2025/01/09/f...