My Friday afternoon...

My dataset covering #Querdenken has been awarded dataset of the month @gesis.org – which kind of feels like a bucket list moment I didn‘t even know was on the map 😇

Misinformation research has a causality problem: lab experiments are limited; observational studies confounded. We used causal inference on 9.9M tweets, quantifying effects in the wild while blocking backdoor paths. Does misinfo get higher engagement? Are following discussions more emotional? 🧵

Very happy to update the {traktok} #rstats readme. After 1.5 years, you can finally search TikTok again without access to the Research API. It's slow and a bit clunky, but it works! Thanks, @michaelgoodier.bsky.social for the crucial hint!

🚨🎉New Publication Friday 🎉🚨 Campaigning in the Age of Platforms: A Longitudinal Analysis of German Parties & Politicians w/ @ulrikeklinger.bsky.social & @andersoloflarsson.bsky.social Out now in Political Communication. #polisky #commsky doi.org/10.1080/1058...

"dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap" hadley.github.io/genzplyr/

Here is the first piece in a series of short articles I'm doing about the DSA and researcher access to publicly available information. It focuses on categories of researchers under the DSA, and what data they are each authorized to use. 1/ verfassungsblog.de/dsa-platform...

The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) sets important rules for research using publicly available platform data. But who benefits from its protections? DAPHNE KELLER argues that while the DSA is an important opportunity, key questions remain unresolved: verfassungsblog.de/dsa-platform...

Cool paper by @eddieyang.bsky.social, confirming our LLM hacking findings (arxiv.org/abs/2509.08825): ✓ LLMs are brittle data annotators ✓ Downstream conclusions flip frequently: LLM hacking risk is real! ✓ Bias correction methods can help but have trade-offs ✓ Use human expert whenever possible

One good thing about developing software is that you can keep your own needs in mind. Like when you can never remember your username and use it as the example value 😅 #rstats

Academic life hack: check which papers AI hallucinated most often and write them 🚀🚀🚀

Social-Media-Daten zwischen Forschung und Infrastrukturen - nachhaltige Archivierung, Erschließung und Bereitstellung: An der @dnb-aktuelles.bsky.social finden vom 17.-19.03.2026 die Social Media Access Days statt. Wir freuen uns über Einreichungen bis zum 31.10.2025. www.dnb.de/DE/Professio...

#AmCAT is proudly developed by the @societal-analytics.nl You can learn more about it in the: * Book: amcat.nl/book/ * Blog post: societal-analytics.nl/blogs/202501...

@sebstier.bsky.social at #MEDem Conf: computational research of democracy stands in the shoulders of the few enthusiasts who create datasets, software and infrastructure for it. How can we move forward? Short answer: more collaboration & sharing!

@simonsaysnothin.bsky.social at #MEDem Conf: we need to integrate our efforts instead of researchers all building their own datasets and infrastructure. Couldn't agree more!

The "validate, validate, validate" (GRIMMER, 2014) principle of Text Analysis/NLP never gets old.

Bluesky is not just a clone of the old Twitter. It's meant to look and feel like it to popularise a version of social media with a fundamental difference to the big platforms: its infrastructure is open. Nice write up of that background: overreacted.io/open-social/

Wanna know more about #data #access and the Digital Services Act? Here’s our latest policy paper about how it works👇 www.weizenbaum-library.de/items/86842c... #commsky #polisky #dsa @weizenbauminstitut.bsky.social

❗️Our next workshop will be on October 2nd, 6 pm CEST, on Effective and Useful Feature engineering by @emilhvitfeldt.bsky.social Register or sponsor a student by donating to support Ukraine! Details: bit.ly/3wBeY4S Please share! #AcademicSky #EconSky #RStats

Coming up on Monday the @medem.bsky.social conference at @gesis.org in Cologne. Stay tuned for the future of democracy research infrastructures www.medem.eu/coming-up-th... Keynotes from @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social and @sldelange.bsky.social

"acknowledging LLM contributions is key to maintaining transparency and ethical standards in academic publishing" Why though? Acknowledging the use of LLMs only dilutes responsibility. Authors are responsible for everything in an article. And if it's fake/plagiarised, authors are responsible.

Just wanted to share this Google Scholar trick: I often have the problem that I want to find papers using certain computational methods, but specifically in my own field (for lit reviews). You can do that by limiting the search to certain sources. My (imperfect) collection in the alt text.

The new ggplot2 4.0.0 now supports absolute plot dimensions 🤩 #rstats #dataviz #phd

Find us Sep 22.-26. at the #DGS2025 Conference, Campus Duisburg. At the @gesis.org stand we present DP-R|EX – the Data Portal for Right-Wing & Extremism Data. Let’s talk about sharing data for reuse, data management & hate speech! 👉info: datenportal-rechtsextremismus.de #ResearchData #ExtremismData

Which Canadian MPs are on Bluesky and what do they post? My new paper w/ @rohanalexander.bsky.social in @cjps-rcsp.bsky.social unpacks these questions, finding MPs use it like Twitter to discuss policy, the Ottawa bubble & constituency Read more: doi.org/10.1017/S000... #polsky #commsky #cdnpoli

If you feel uneasy using LLMs for data annotation, you are right (if not, you should). It offers new chances for research that is difficult with traditional #NLP/#textasdata methods, but the risk of false conclusions is high! Experiment + *evidence-based* mitigation strategies in this preprint 👇

Are you a CSS researcher using LLMs for text annotation tasks? Do you integrate the results into downstream statistical analyses? Turns out, even with SOTA models you have a 31-50% chance of coming to wrong conclusions this way! Learn more about this and mitigation strategies in our new preprint 👇

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

Turned this into a blog post, adding a dash of Alinsky as well, just to get the ideas out of my head and down on paper. (Some people smoke as a stress-reliever. I quote Schattschneider and Alinsky.) open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...

The University of Cologne plans drastic cuts to its Political Science department, potentially abolishing the MSc in Political Science and eliminating the professorships in IR and Comparative Politics. This would severely weaken the social sciences at @unicologne.bsky.social. Petition (de/en) ⤵️

Such a fun course to teach! Just a very brief overview of: - obtaining (scraping) data - network analysis - computational text analysis - how to use LLMs for social science

🎙️ New @ccspod.bsky.social episode! I unpack how computational methods transform the study of opinionated communication + share insights from my work on studying climate change campaigns on social media with @cidape.bsky.social Listen here 👉 aboutccs.net/opinion/

This is becoming so normalized, I did not even wake up the second time there was an air alert. 100s of drones, missiles, with loud explosions & house shaking, reading about the destruction & deaths in the morning - several times a week #UkrainianView

An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/29/...

If you want to test the 120B models of gpt-oss, you can do so using the Ollama Turbo (a API version of Ollama hosted by the creators) from #rstats 📦 {rollama} (it worked with my account even though I didn't give them my credit card info) jbgruber.github.io/rollama/arti...

If you are not personally interested in attending, you can also sponsor participation of a student! Details: bit.ly/3wBeY4S Please share! #AcademicSky #EconSky #RStats

*Panic debugging*

Random reminder that the #rstats 📦 {rio} exists and can import and export basically every file format with rio::import()/rio::export()

GPT-5 The marketing: "It's like having a team of PhDs in your pocket!" Also the marketing: This y-axis🤷‍♂️❓ #DataViz #ChatGPT

What do people in 🇨🇭🇩🇪🇯🇵🇺🇸 think about GenAI for news-related purposes? We find the adoption of GenAI for news and trust in the journalistic deployment of GenAI are relatively low, and so is knowledge regarding GenAI. Read more in this new paper led by Eliza Mitova! journalqd.org/article/view...

#Telegram research is about to be changed: Telegram introduced a global keyword search. (Not yet implemented in telethon)

Not sure if this is useful for anyone else here, but you can run #Stata through Steam/Proton on Linux.

First time I'm pulling a model from 'Open'AI to my computer to run locally. I know it's just a publicity stunt to undermine Anthropic's release of the new Claude yesterday. But curious nonetheless!

I love this #rstats package!! Go test it out!

The next version of the #rstats 📦 {atrrr} will likely contain a function to stream from the Bluesky Firehose! Looking for people to test and comment now: github.com/JBGruber/atr...

New job ad @gesis.org: 👉 Research on Platform Data and #CSS 👉 Coordinate access to online platform data (#DSA) 👉 100% TV-L 14, 4 years with possible tenure ❗good German language abilities No Deadline, apply soon 👇!

I talked to some people recently who said they got bored or overwhelmed by Bluesky after a while. Turns out they didn't know about alternative feeds yet and we're scrolling the chronological one. If you like that, great, but here are some alternative feeds I like.

Pretty wild that depending on how you search the #tiktok research API, you get wildly different results

Then, once you scrape that news, make it available to others for "non-consumptive research" - osf.io/gz3xf_v1 @jbgruber.bsky.social @vanatteveldt.com #ica25