🧵 PhD position (75%) in Political Behavior / Political Communication / CSS 📍 LMU Munich | ⏳ 3 years | 🗓 start March–May 2026 We’re hiring for DemocraGPT, a @bidt.bsky.social-funded project developing an AI-based training for difficult conversations in times of growing polarization

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Not long ago I discussed with people what our red lines would be before not traveling to the US anymore. We landed on illegal occupation of another country, like Russia is attempting in Ukraine. We're there now.

…Really undermines the sanctity of the FIFA Peace Prize, doesn’t it?

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January 16, 2026: Julian Jaursch from the German Digital Service Coordinator @bnetza.bsky.social will introduce the EU's #DSA Data Access Portal during the series "Show & Tell – Social Media Data in Research Practice". Register here: events.gwdg.de/event/1259/ #digitalservicesact #platformdata

The Call for Papers and Panels for #COMPTEXT2026 in Birmingham (23-25 April) is out; feel free to circulate: shorturl.at/gRg0p! Deadline: January 16!

Ich werde der Deutschen Bahn nie verzeihen, dass sie mich zu einem Menschen gemacht hat, der sich über die Deutsche Bahn beschwert.

Reflections on the day 1 of the age ban: experts sidelined again, nuance ignored, and the debate drowned by low-effort vox pops. Policy built on vibes not evidence gets sold as "protecting kids" with all the spectacle of a state propaganda march, loud, choreographed, & divorced from substance.

For example, in case you wonder whether it is still ok to use self-reports of media exposure, you can now cite me for saying "yes, sure" - doi.org/10.4337/9781... Preprint here: doi.org/10.31219/osf...

Grateful for the opportunity to contribute—by name—to what must be the most massive collaborative encyclopedia project of all time, next to Wikipedia. All credit goes to @annisch.bsky.social who did the heavy lifting for the overview article on Populist Attitudes. osf.io/preprints/so...

Someone shared a dataset via sharepoint with me. It took me a week to find out it needs to be shared with my OneDrive account specifically and that I need to click a sync Button in a browser on a Windows machine with OneDrive installed to get the files. Every other way was broken or disabled. 🙇

I posted it here before, but @favstats.eu and I wrote an entry about LLMs in the encyclopedia below 👇 Final version is out now at www.elgaronline.com/display/book... Or read the preprint: doi.org/10.31219/osf...

After 3 years and 5,322 emails (and counting) our Encyclopedia of Political Communication is finally out at @elgarpublishing.bsky.social 📚 Three volumes ⭐ 431 entries 🎓 581 wonderful authors from across the world A very short 🧵

Tiefgehende Vergleiche wie die Gleichsetzung der EU mit Nazi-Deutschland, der frei erfundene Genozid an weißen Menschen in Südafrika oder „Mechahitler“ – all das haben uns einige seit Monaten als enormen Nachteil auf #Bluesky beschrieben wollen... sie nannten es nur "Diversität der Meinungen".

X is free to appeal this decision in the European courts. A right it has because it *operates in the EU market.* And of course if X doesn’t want to follow the EU’s laws at all, it’s free to withdraw from that market at any time.

#rstats question: my {cookiemonster} package was removed because I missed the email about a failing test. I got it reinstated. But {traktok} was also taken down "as requires archived package 'cookiemonster'". Do I still have to submit an updated version or will it go back online automatically?

After a long time in development, {traktok} #rstats is now finally on CRAN! Whether you have access to the Research API or just want to scrape some pages, traktok has you covered jbgruber.github.io/traktok/

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