Last week the story was that TikTok censored anti-Trump/ICE/Pretti videos after the U.S. ownership change. We investigated with a large set of US TikTok data and found some interesting results, short thread...

CSMaP is now the Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics (CSMAP). Our research has expanded beyond social media to include digital media more broadly—especially generative AI and large language models and their role in politics and public life. Learn more at csmapnyu.org

Is Joe Rogan really just a voice of the right? Our new @csmapnyu.org piece for @goodauth.bsky.social shows he’s just as much a space for the left and the center, too. A look inside today’s surprisingly complicated podcast information ecosystem. 🎙️ goodauthority.org/news/podcast...

As generative AI becomes more accessible, synthetic political images are reshaping how people see and interpret events. One question remains: Do AI labels help the public navigate this environment? Our new preprint, It Works When It Works, tests exactly that. 🔗 osf.io/preprints/so...

When we think about false news stories, we usually focus on what is being said. But what if the language of a story shapes whether people believe it? Our new paper in the Journal of Experimental Political Science explores this question in Ukraine. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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.🧵

The paper is co-authored with Bernhard Von Clemm, @ericka.bric.digital @jonathannagler.bsky.social @magdalenawojciesza.bsky.social This is also one of the projects I started at @csmapnyu.org ---- thanks to the entire lab involved! The paper can be found here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

How common are “survey professionals” - people who take dozens of online surveys for pay - across online panels, and do they harm data quality? Our paper, FirstView at @politicalanalysis.bsky.social, tackles this question using browsing data from three U.S. samples (Facebook, YouGov, and Lucid):

Fascinating work from @jatucker.bsky.social and @csmapnyu.org looking at the effect of labeling images as AI on people’s beliefs about the provenance + veracity of that image. They also explore the implications of AI images not being labeled after seeing labeled images #PaCSS2025 #polnet2025

Exciting methodological development from Ben Guinadeau and @csmapnyu.org using poisson factorization to do ideal point estimation of TikTok posts #pacss2025 #polnet2025

Very interesting work from @hwaight.bsky.social and @csmapnyu.org examining narrative similarity between news stories from global media sources. Methodological challenging because stories may communicate the same ideas/claims without using the same ngrams #pacss2025 #polnet2025

My awesome co-author with our poster about the GenZ gender gap and podcast consumption at PolNet/PACSS! If you didn’t see us here catch us at APSA at the PolCom preconference and Saturday first thing in the morning 💃🏻 @csmapnyu.org

🚨 Paper now as "just accepted" at @The_JOP. We ran the first WhatsApp deactivation experiment focused on multimedia content ahead of the 2022 election in Brazil. We find a reduction in users' recall of false rumors -- and, to a smaller degree, of true news. Null effects on attitudes. Full thread ⬇️

In addition to the original UK results, we have now ***replicated*** this (TWICE) in the US. The main findings hold strong: information diets are a lot more diverse in attention than in engagement. New version here: osf.io/preprints/os...

In the Global South, WhatsApp is more popular than X or Facebook. New in @The_JOP, we ran a WhatsApp deactivation experiment during Brazil’s 2022 election to explore how the app facilitates the spread of misinformation and affects voters’ attitudes. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

I am thrilled to share a new article in Sociological Methods & Research, “Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages”. My co-first author Sol Messing and our collaborators developed a new approach to measuring “narrative similarity” between texts: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🚨New Publication @thejop.bsky.social We study who sets the issue agenda of state policymakers in the US. We find a mixed picture: they respond to shifts in attention by members of Congress, but also to the constituents in their states, particularly their own party supporters.

If your NSF grant has been terminated, please, please report it here: airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni... Collecting this information is supremely helpful to organize and facilitate a response.

🚨 NEW: Crowdsourced database of #NSF grant terminations. 🚨 We've been able to collect info on >110 cancelled grants that were cancelled on Friday. Thanks to all the researchers who reported over the holiday weekend. 🧪 airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni...

New paper out in @thejop.bsky.social with my colleagues at @csmapnyu.org . Substantive findings are summarized in the thread below. Of interest to a broader sociological audience: we show how to measure discursive influence between different groups.

Amid growing DC gridlock, state legislatures play a vital role in shaping policy. But how do state lawmakers decide which issues deserve their attention? Our new @thejop.bsky.social paper is the first large-scale multi-state analysis exploring this question www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Here's a copy of an NSF grant termination notice that went out today. "NSF is issuing this termination to protect the interests of the government pursuant...on the basis that they no longer effectuate the program goals or agency priorities." Not subject to appeal. #HigherEd #AcademicSky

Friday Night Massacre of accurate information. A devastating day for the USA as tens of millions of dollars of grants seeking to combat the spread of false information were terminated. We have a federal govenrment that does not consider the verifiable truth a priority. www.nsf.gov/updates-on-p...

Do age verification laws change online behavior? @zevesanderson.com joined @jerusalem.bsky.social to talk about the importance of research for measuring policy impacts for The Atlantic's Good on Paper podcast. www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/arc...

Experts are far more bullish about the potential of AI than the American public is. 56% expect a positive impact (vs. 17% of the public). 76% expect it to benefit them personally (vs. 24% of the public). Also much more positive on specific AI applications: www.pewresearch.org/internet/202...

🚨 Job Alert! 🚨 Come join our team studying the impact of digital media on democracy! We're hiring a Technical Lead - Research Engineering to help us build and maintain the robust data infrastructure and custom tools that power our research. More info + apply: apply.interfolio.com/165833

ELB Podcast 6:7: Combatting False Election Information: Lessons from 2024 and a Look to the Future (Marwick, Starbird, Tucker) electionlawblog.org?p=149336

Users always respond to the incentives of a given social media platform. On X, the new incentive if you want to go viral is to just say something Elon Musk will like, @zevesanderson.com tells @politifact.bsky.social.

📄NEW PAPER📄 Ever wondered content people actually pay *attention* to online? Our new research reveals that you likely pay attention to far more varied political content than your likes and shares suggest

So excited to finally see this out! It was the first paper I started during my postdoc at @csmapnyu.org

It's well known that politicians take more extreme positions during primaries. In @electoralstudies.bsky.social, we find this shift is much more likely when incumbents in safe seats face a well-funded primary challenger. 🧵👇 authors.elsevier.com/a/1kn5KxRaZn...

Amazingly exciting work from our former @csmapnyu.org post-doc -- now Asst Professor at the University of Oregon -- @hwaight.bsky.social, as well as our colleagues Yin Yuan, Molly Roberts & @bstewart.bsky.social. A must read if you are interested in identifying Chinese state propaganda 👇

MAGA forces are once again attacking researchers studying online misinformation and social media manipulation. In this article for Just Security, I write about what's going on at Indiana University, University of North Carolina, and other schools: www.justsecurity.org/109030/acade...

How can researchers identify covert state propaganda campaigns in China? My co-authors Yin Yuan, Molly Roberts, Brandon Stewart @bstewart.bsky.social and myself are excited to share our new article in PNAS (@PNAS): doi.org/10.1073/pnas... Thread below.

Do age-verification laws for online adult content work? Based on Google search data, not really. New WP from me and & co-authors up now on OSF: osf.io/z83ev

How a PhD student’s lab size affects their chance of future academic success - perhaps not very surprising but still fascinating 🧪 #AcademicSky Original work www.nature.com/articles/s41... @naturehumbehav.bsky.social @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

New: We interviewed the White House digital team for a deep dive into how their unapologetic rapid-response social media and influencer operation is working to shape public opinion and dominate the press: "All offense, all the time" wapo.st/41pvswh

We're deeply concerned about the growing number of attacks on academic researchers studying the online landscape. This is a tremendous overview of how this research works and why it matters. We will continue to stand behind our peers and colleagues who come under attack.

Does generative AI present an unprecedented threat to democracy, as many worried ahead of 2024? Or did it have little impact, as others now claim? The truth is we don't have enough data to draw concrete conclusions. Our latest at @brookings.edu:

🚨 NEW REPORT – Better Feeds: Algorithms That Put People First 🚨 As policymakers around the globe grapple with addressing concerns about algorithms, KGI’s new report offers guidance on improving the design of algorithmic systems that shape billions of users’ digital lives. bit.ly/3QzxVzq

The future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences

Will spinning off Reels into a standalone app help Meta take on TikTok? While many have complained it's not as good as TikTok, creating a separate app reflects a broader effort to prioritize Reels and invest more in its recommendation system, @solmg.bsky.social tells @cnet.com.

New from me: Meta decided to stop working with U.S. fact-checkers at the same time as it’s revamping a program to pay bonuses to creators with high engagement numbers, potentially pouring accelerant on the kind of false posts the company once policed: www.propublica.org/article/face...

As Trump dismantles the agencies that monitor foreign influence operations, the national security concerns around TikTok remain. But how could we even know if TikTok's algorithm has been influenced, either by China or another adversarial actor? Our latest in @lawfare.bsky.social 🧵👇

“Over the past decade, U.S. institutions worked to form a comprehensive shield against foreign interference in American politics. Over the past few weeks, the second Trump administration has turned itself to the task of undoing this project.” New from me&Quinta www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-...

How can we simultaneously (1) fear foreign manipulation of public discourse enough to BAN TIKTOK, and also (2) completely dismantle the parts of the government that protect us from that manipulation??

As journalists increase their use of AI, how will that impact trust in news? This study finds labeling news with AI-written content decreased trust among readers, and the effect was most pronounced among those with higher pre-existing trust in news. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Deeply thoughtful article about our YouTube research by BBC's Thomas Germain: www.bbc.com/future/artic... (I get too much credit in this article - the statistical and programming brilliance of Kevin Zheng made the work possible and Ryan McGrady captained the hard work of hand-coding.)

"Even as the technical and policy dimensions of content moderation shift, it is important to ground the debate and for all participants in it to have enough technical fluency to engage in meaningful discussions." - Dia Kayyali