Social media sites can bring people together or push them further apart. A modeling study shows how small changes in posting or recommendation rules can flip a system from consensus to polarization. In PNAS Nexus: https://ow.ly/hLrY50Y3KPk

We link virality and polarization. An ABM calibrated on Brexit and Vaccine debates shows the same parameters that generate cascades also generate polarized opinions. Thanks to @ymoreno.bsky.social and @kleber-ao.com academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Para quienes habláis español: si queréis saber más sobre la polarización y la difusión de información en redes sociales, aquí tenéis una nota de prensa sobre nuestro estudio reciente. www.unizar.es/actualidad/v... @ymoreno.bsky.social and @kleber-ao.com www.unizar.es/actualidad/v...

Come and do a PhD at Exeter with me and Chico Camargo (Computer Science) on human-genAI coevolution "Leveraging Natural Language Processing for Data-Driven Agent-Based Modelling of Online Cultural Dynamics" www.exeter.ac.uk/v8media/recr... More details here: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...

One week left to apply to the UVA Biology PhD program! If you or someone you know are interested in contagion from a complex systems perspective, please reach out! I'm looking for a grad student! bio.as.virginia.edu/how-apply-gr...

I think the shortest version of why LLMs are an anti education technology is that education is fundamentally about making shared context to understand ourselves, each other, and the world And by design LLMs destroy shared context

"Access to data by researchers is a crucial element of ensuring transparency and democratic accountability,” @lewan.bsky.social says. “The public is entitled to know what platforms and their algorithms are doing to the information landscape.” I wrote for @science.org about Meta, TikTok and the DSA 🧪

arXiv alert! 📄🚨 A review paper about the physics of news, rumors, and opinions arxiv.org/abs/2510.15053 w @manlius.bsky.social @sarawalk.bsky.social Guido Cadarelli et al.

📣 NEW -- In The Economist, discussing the privacy perils of AI agents and what AI companies and operating systems need to do--NOW--to protect Signal and much else! www.economist.com/by-invitatio...

Uncritical adoption of AI “undermines our basic pedagogical values and principles of scientific integrity. It prevents us from maintaining our standards of independence & transparency. And most concerning, AI use … hinder[s] learning and deskill critical thought.” openletter.earth/open-letter-...

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

With everything else going on, I'm not sure people realize that Trump's latest tariff on Brazil took things to a new (lower) level paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumps-dic...

the Brazilian replies to this post will take you on a fucking journey

If you're looking for a quite handy multitype branching process framework for modeling diffusion in networks with communities check this work by @davidjpos.bsky.social and friends. @netsciconf.bsky.social #netsci2025

Fully-funded PhD positions to work with a fantastic team (and me 🫠) in a beautiful campus. Please share it with people who may be interested! Deadline on the 10th of July.

We often suppose that things like intelligence and opinions not only exist, but can be measured in a “correct” way. So our goal is to reduce the error as much as possible to get closer and closer to such “correct” measurement. [1/7]

Glad to share that next month I am joining @mikeq.bsky.social's group on a full-time research position in my alma mater. I've been studying social systems for some time, but never from the theoretical foundations of how people act towards each other (which are from social psychology).

Good piece in Science by @kakape.bsky.social on the massive censorship of scientific work by the U.S. government - all in the name of free speech, presumably: www.science.org/content/arti...

Now out: "Rumor propagation on hypergraphs" (arxiv.org/abs/2504.19305). We propose a higher-order rumour model incorporating a group-based annihilation mechanism. We run computational experiments to characterise the model's dynamics in synthetic and real systems... 1/5

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

Are you interested in inequalities, mobility and cities? Come to work with us as a postdoc at @ceu-dnds.bsky.social in Vienna in the Computational Human Dynamics Lab of @martonkarsai.bsky.social. Check the post here: careers.ceu.edu/job/Vienna-P... @ic2s2.bsky.social @netscisociety.bsky.social

If you study networks, or have been stuck listening to people who study networks for long enough (sorry to my loved ones), you may have heard that open triads – V shapes – in social networks tend to turn into closed triangles. But why does this happen? In part, because people repost each other.

We've a new software paper out, check it below:

🚨 New paper 🚨 Can big data solve all our measurement problems? Measuring constructs like opinions, happiness, etc. is problematic as it depends on various choices, including the choice of variables and model. [1/4] pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/sr...

Now out our new preprint “Higher-order dissimilarity measures for hypergraph comparison”! www.arxiv.org/abs/2503.16959 With Cosimo Agostinelli and @alainbarrat.bsky.social We extend to hypergraphs similarity measures defined previously only on pairwise networks. 🧵⬇️ 1/5

Open postdoc position at @ceu-dnds.bsky.social in Vienna in the Computational Human Dynamics Lab of @martonkarsai.bsky.social on inequalities in 15-minutes cities in collaboration with www.dut-coline.org. Check it out: careers.ceu.edu/job/Vienna-P... @ic2s2.bsky.social @netscisociety.bsky.social

I wanted to highlight key findings from our study and the replication, and how they extend to 2024. Now it provides a systematic review of more than 600 scientific studies on the relationship between digitalization and democracy. So what does science have to say? We actually know quite a bit: 1/5

The publisher may have failed to bottle up their intrusive thoughts

If we allow technofeudal lords to dictate the rules, corporate interests will override national sovereignty and political accountability, and ultimately democracy, writes David Nemer. Brazil is a case study.

"Brazil has demonstrated how democracies that value themselves defend themselves," Quico Toro writes. "America could have done the same."

Worst. Episode. EVER.

Whenever I hear or read "far right", I think it's such a heartwarming/welcoming way to call it. Like it's another possible "point of view" in a debate instead of a group actively trying to shut down the whole conversation. How about "extreme right" or "radical right"?

Happy to see our perspective article "Topology shapes dynamics on higher-order networks" is finally published in Nature Physics! rdcu.be/eauyN

Pretty darn rigorous study of "inattention contagion" showing that students are influenced by nearby peers who display inattentive behavior, affecting their self-perceptions of attentiveness, their note-taking quantity, & their quiz performance. https://buff.ly/4hwvnhb

I’m looking for a new PhD student with a curious and interdisciplinary mindset to work on integrating multimodal data to better understand trajectories of mental and brain health disorders! Deadline of applications: Feb 16! Please spread the word. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DLO680/f...

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Applied https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/applied "You are all impure now!"

Thinking of colleagues in Argentina. Sad to read this. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I would have to spend a lot more time with the methods of this paper to know what to make of it, but the conclusion they draw is amusing. Giving people awards for peer reviewing lots of papers leads them to review fewer papers. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Problem with referring to AI errors as "hallucinations" is that it makes them seem like something abnormal when in fact it's the exact same process it uses to produce every response

Researchers are willing to trade their results for journal prestige: results from a discrete choice experiment metaror.org/kotahi/artic...

Delighted to see our work (which I co-authored with @hfarruda.bsky.social and @ymoreno.bsky.social) getting additional media coverage, this time right ahead of Irish elections. www.breakingnews.ie/general-elec...

New paper out in @ScienceMagazine! In 8 studies (multiple platforms, methods, time periods) we find: misinformation evokes more outrage than trustworthy news, when it does it's shared more + ppl are less likely to read before sharing. w/ @killianmcl1 @Klonick @mollycrockett 🧵👇

When I asked Bluesky users why they left X, many said they didn’t want their posts training AI. But with Bluesky’s open API, anyone can scrape posts for that purpose. A HuggingFace employee just shared a dataset of 1M posts. The reality: if you post online, assume it’ll be used to train AI.

“The report about the alleged plot to help the right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro cling to power paints a chilling portrait of how close one of the world’s largest democracies came to being plunged back into authoritarian rule.”

We are hiring! If you are a #Psychology #Sociology #Neuro student, BSc or MSc level, and care about the role of human biases in the spread of #disinformation please consider applying (Lisbon based) If you are not but happen to know who is, do share euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/287003 @spac.bsky.social

When I was 5, I loved science, which I took to be planets and magnets and chemicals and shit. Soon I realized science was a collective human activity, and these were just the objects of its attention. Anyway, whenever I read an OpEd on how science isn't political, I think "Are you 5 years old?"

🚨Funded PhD position at UCL Computer Science! 🌍💻 Learn how to use and develop LLMs, RL, Networks, and Agent-Based Models to forecast the impact of #AI in society and pathways towards a #net-zero economy. 👉 www.findaphd.com/phds/project... #MachineLearning #ComplexSystems #GreenTransition #PhD

My twitter account has been closed and locked since November 2022, but I had left the posts up until now. I just deleted the entire thing in 15 minutes, thanks to a great script from Luca Hammer: github.com/lucahammer/t... Thanks to @amyhoy.bsky.social and @thomasfuchs.at for steering me there.