Another great piece from Jennifer Oullette at Ars Technica!

LLMs have been widely reported as left-wing biased. The finding has shaped policy and debate — with Trump banning "Woke AI". Our new paper challenges this story. It's not that the models are biased. It's that they think the auditor is. 🧵 w/ michelleschimmel.bsky.social‬arxiv.org/pdf/2604.27633

Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/so... preprint w/ Richard Rogers

Is social media dying? How much did Twitter change as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has changed Here are the key take-aways 🧵 Full paper out now in in JQD:DM!

The housing crisis isn't a policy failure. It's the system working exactly as intended. 📝 New paper out in Antipode

Like Grok and Attie, more and more social media platforms now integrate AI directly in online conversations. But how do these AI bots actually impact political discourse? We ran a series of experiments to find out. (Spoiler: the news are not altogether great.) osf.io/preprints/so...

US social media is getting smaller, angrier, and more Republican. @pettertornberg.com analyses American National Election Studies between 2020 - 2024 and shows the evolution of a smaller, more polarised and less diverse public sphere @lseimpactblog.bsky.social

💥New | US social media is getting smaller, angrier, and more Republican ✍️ @pettertornberg.com #SocialMedia #AcademicSky #Polarization

AI systems are now making decisions about you — who gets hired, whose content gets removed, whose voice gets heard. My new paper finds something concerning: LLMs infer your ethnic identity from subtle textual cues… … and use it to discriminate against you. 🧵 1/

Come be my colleague! Postdoc position at the University of Amsterdam: Open-source AI for Social Sciences & Humanities. Work on open LLM infrastructure, reproducible research tools, and ethical AI for SSH. 🗓 Tight deadline: Apply by April 3 werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

A recent debate on the left pits “abundance” vs “anti-monopoly” Is the problem that we've made it too hard to build? Or that extractive corporations dominate the economy? My new paper argues: both reflect a deeper shift. We've entered an economy oriented toward scarcity—the Anti-Growth Machine.

The bots populating Moltbook apparently all come to sound like a familiar kind of internet denizen with delusions of philosophical grandeur. Manifestos and declarations all over the place.

📢 We’re hiring @vuamsterdam.bsky.social PhD position in my ERC project: Welfare State Transformation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Interested in how AI is reshaping labor markets, social protection, and the politics of redistribution? Apply here: lnkd.in/eCcAXsaS Please share widely!

The impact of AI is not just a matter of what AI can do. It is shaped by the economy in which AI is forged. Today, AI is emerging inside technofeudalism — built on lock-in, dependency, and rent extortion. Our new preprint explores what this means for the coming AI society. osf.io/preprints/so...

🚨 We are entering the AI society. After two decades of platforms reshaping markets, communication, and governance, a new shift is underway: AI is transforming society. What should we expect from the 'AI society'? 🧵 📄 Our new paper faces this question: osf.io/preprints/so...

📕 Review of “Seeing like a Platform” “What makes this book essential reading is its recognition that digital technology’s democratic potential and authoritarian dangers are not separate phenomena but two faces of the same coin.” albertoblumenscheincruz.substack.com/p/review-see...

I’m about a quarter of the way through this open access* book and it’s SO GOOD, so far at least lol, I really want to talk about it with someone * www.taylorfrancis.com/reader/downl...

This paper is now out in Artificial Intelligence Review Bottom line: using LLMs to "simulate humans" sits in a no-man’s-land between theory and empirics—too opaque to function as a model, too ungrounded to count as evidence. Validation remains the core challenge. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

📘 Book launch: Seeing Like a Platform (with Justus Uitermark) 🗓 10 Dec | Amsterdam A conversation on platforms, politics, power, and digital modernity - followed by drinks. Hope to see you there! 👉 Details & RSVP: globaldigitalcultures.uva.nl/content/even...

Featured article by Anton Törnberg and @pettertornberg.com: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Pretty wild: I just learned that, in terms of Altmetric, this paper became the most impactful Political Science article of the past five years, and the 4th most impactful EVER. 😳 Altmetric is... well, Altmetric. But still, kind of surreal.

[email protected]'s keynote in Oxford was fantastic. What comes after the traditional model of social media ends? 1) Algorithmic broadcasting platforms (everything turning into TikTok and Instagram reels) 2) Private and semi-private spheres (like group chats) 3) Chatbots and LLMs as new media

LLMs are now widely used in social science as stand-ins for humans—assuming they can produce realistic, human-like text But... can they? We don’t actually know. In our new study, we develop a Computational Turing Test. And our findings are striking: LLMs may be far less human-like than we think.🧵

Most people study what misinformation says. We decided to study how it looks. Using novel multi-modal AI methods, we study 17,848 posts by top climate denial accounts - and uncovered a new front in the misinformation war. Here's what it means 🧵 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Is social media dying? How much has Twitter changed as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has transformed. Here are the key take-aways 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

@jerusalem.bsky.social Will The Argument bring back 'Good on Paper' in some form? Please do, its loss has left a huge hole in my podcast app! And there are a lot of persuasive papers out there!

🚨 New #SingularityFM 🎙 What do Facebook, Google & TikTok really see when they look at us — and what do they miss? My latest interview with @pettertornberg.com explores algorithmic tyranny, digital modernity & the future of power. 👉 snglrty.co/4mDn1Gb

Not just one but two podcasts featuring @pettertornberg.com who wrote some of the most interesting papers in recent years. 1: @seanmcarroll.bsky.social, below 2: Singularity Weblog: Algorithmic Tyranny, the Rise of Digital Modernity and Seeing Like a Platform www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJrV...

Such a crazy and amazing experience to be on a podcast of which I'm a huge fan!

www.flamman.se/valfardsstat... It was great to talk to @flamman.se about the link between weak welfare state protection and the expansion of online platform work in Europe. @pettertornberg.com

And I now received an automatic request to review a revised version. This is depressing. Academia is becoming AI slop.

New article! The aesthetics of climate misinformation: computational multimodal framing analysis with BERTopic and CLIP by Anton Törnberg & Petter Törnberg / @pettertornberg.com doi.org/10.1080/0964...

The one-plot summary of what Elon Musk did to Twitter.

How much did Elon's takeover reshape Twitter/X? How did the partisan tilt of social media use change from 2020 to 2024? The ANES 2024 data is out — and this thread answers all your burning questions! 🔥

I was interviewed on New Books Network Podcast with Nicholas McCay on Justus and my book "Seeing Like a Platform" (available open access!) newbooksnetwork.com/seeing-like-...

I was interviewed on Justin Hendrix's TechPolicy podcast about 'Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity', that sets out to address the “entanglement of epistemology, technology, and politics in digital modernity." www.techpolicy.press/seeing-like-...

Algorithms are not necessary for the creation of echo chambers. All that is required is people muting or leaving when they have a bad interaction. Then an echo chamber arises with minimal preferences. From @pettertornberg.com #psych arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10466

Destabilisieren #Musk & Co. durch die Algorithmen sozialer Netzwerke die liberale Demokratie? So einfach ist die Sache nicht, zeigen @maiklarooij.nl und @pettertornberg.com von der Universität Amsterdam. Spannend, wie sich Sozialforschung durch #KI weiterentwickelt. www.faz.net/aktuell/feui...

🥳🥳🥳 Huge achievement and an amazing project on AI & the politics of welfare! Follow her work if you're interested in how we can manage the mess that's coming!

I flagged to the editor that the paper I reviewed looked AI-generated. Immediately received a generic AI-generated email from the editor. The AI future is here!

The "digital" never exists in isolation. The platform society is always part and parcel of deeper transformations in capitalism.

Gig labor is often understood as the expression of digital disruption. But our new study suggests a deeper story: 👉 The rise of platform labor is inseparable from the retreat of the welfare state. 🧵 w/ @pettertornberg.com journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

🚨 PhD Position at the University of Amsterdam 🚨 Join my team as a computer scientist / computational social scientist working on LLMs, social media, and politics. We offer freedom, impact, and an inspiring environment at one of Europe's leading universities. 🔗 werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...

Don’t blame the algorithm: Polarization may be inherent in social media | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti... @pettertornberg.com

Somehow, Marx is suddenly popular with tech bros talking about AI. I just wished they would actually read him. Because Marx did have a lot to say about automation -- and it's eerily relevant to today’s debates. 🧵

In the literature, there are two competing explanations for "echo chambers": 1️⃣ Algorithms curate what we see (“filter bubbles”) 2️⃣ People choose like-minded peers (“selective exposure”) Our new study suggests something surprising: both explanations might be wrong. 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2508.10466

I'm really stoked about this paper! Builds on amazing MSc thesis work by @maiklarooij.nl‬

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

1/ 🧵 What if your exhaustion isn’t personal, but political? What if the endless noise, rage, and chaos every time you open your phone isn’t accidental, but the product of a system designed to destabilize democratic focus? #Voices4Victory #DemVoice1 #USDemocracy #ProudBlue

💥New paper💥 1)LLMs achieve superb accuracy detecting negative campaigning ACROSS languages and countries - enabling a new paradigm of comparative political research 2)We use this to carry out the largest cross-country study to date: 18M tweets from MPs across 19 countries arxiv.org/abs/2507.17636