🔥 Happening now: The 2nd General Assembly Meeting of the WHAT-IF project is currently taking place in 📍 Bucharest, Romania. Over the coming days, partners from across the consortium will come together to share progress, discuss preliminary findings and explore new research ideas. Stay tuned!

🗓️ This week, we will be presenting several papers with our collaborators at the #EPSSBelfast conference. 💬 Come along to see the presentations and discuss, we’re eager to hear people’s feedback! ⬇️ Here's what's coming up! 🧵[1/7]

🚨 I'm recruiting 2 postdoctoral researchers for the @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social, to be based at the University of Oxford (@ox.ac.uk). These are both full-time positions for 2 years. Deadline for applications: June 23. Expected start date: September 2026. 🔁 Please share and help me spread the word! 🚀

Do you want to use computer vision for analyzing image and video data? Join @andreucasas.bsky.social in his #GESISfallseminar course to gain theoretical & methodological expertise and benefit from hands-on tutorials & consulting sessions. Register Now ➡️ t1p.de/ComputerVision #Python @gesis.org

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

This is very timely! We looked into the posting/moderation anomalies last week in the US. Special kudos to @benguinaudeau.bsky.social @solmg.bsky.social and @kengchichang.bsky.social. An outage rather than targeted censorship is what makes the most sense in this case, we’ll stay vigilant.

London Social Media Observatory@ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🌐 📲 With international collaborators, the Observatory’s director @andreucasas.bsky.social revisited recent “TikTok censorship” claims after the TikTok USDS takeover ➡️ Detailed information about the analysis available: goodauthority.org/news/was-the... 🧵[1/5]

Great time at the @psampg.bsky.social annual conference in Bournemouth. #AI #theory #discourse and #moderation discussed by our team me, Marco Guglielmo and @andreucasas.bsky.social. Thanks Dan Jackson and all the organisers.

🚨 One more week to apply to the PhD position at the London Social Media Observatory. If you are interested in empirical, quantitative, and/or computational approaches to studying social media and politics, apply! 😊

London Social Media Observatory@ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social · 10mo ago

🔭🚨 One more week to apply to the fully funded (3.5 years) PhD position at the Observatory! 💻 Deadline: 2nd November ℹ️ For more information, see the link below! ➡️ www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/hquftp...

🎉 We're really excited to be collaborating with our excellent partners on this, as part of WP3 of the What-If Horizon project, hosted at the Observatory. 🎯 Understanding what interventions affect citizen misinformation effects is crucial to build evidence based policy in the area! More insights 🔜

WHAT-IF@what-if-horizon.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Learn more about this partnership here: what-if-horizon.eu/2025/09/30/s...

🚨Hiring a fully funded (3.5 years) PhD for the @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social to research social media and politics. Candidates should have quantitative/computational skills and/or be interested in content curation/moderation. UK home candidates only unfortunately. www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/hquftp...

All EU countries appear to be gone in the Google political ad library By @lizcarolan.com

Claes de Vreese@claesdevreese.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Ad history gone? 🤯 Disturbing report: Google appears to have deleted its political ad archive for the EU; so the last 7 years of ads, of political spending, of messaging, of targeting - on YouTube, on Search - for countless elections across 27 countries - gone www.thebriefing.ie/google-just-...

Very happy to have people from our @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social attend the DSA40 Data Access Days organized by @dsa40collaboratory.bsky.social. With threats to our online and political safety in the rise, access to platform data for independent and academic researchers is more important than ever.

London Social Media Observatory@ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social · 10mo ago

🇩🇪 Hello from Berlin! 📍This week, LSMO is at the #DSA40 Workshop, thanks @dsa40collaboratory.bsky.social for the invitation! 🤝 We’re here to connect with other academics to learn more about how to access platform data for research via DSA & to advocate for better data access more generally 🧵[1/3]

🥰I had so much fun again teaching computer vision and other computational methods to these bright social scientists this week. (Un)supervised classification, image encoding, content similarity, object detection, face detection/analysis, muldimodal modeling, video data, etc., you name it!

🚨Very honored to receive the Future Leaders Fellowship from @ukri.org I’ll use this 2.3 million £ investment to create the London Social Media Observatory, for cutting-edge research on social media and politics, and novel computational tools for social science research. www.ukri.org/news/ukri-an...

UKRI announces winners of £120 million Future Leaders Fellowships

Research into the causes of lung cancer and Alzheimer’s disease are among 77 projects to be funded by UKRI’s Future Leaders Fellowships.

ukri.org

London Social Media Observatory@ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social · 11mo ago

📣 We’re launching the London Social Media Observatory! 🎉 ➡️ We are a new multidisciplinary research centre, directed by @andreucasas.bsky.social & funded by the @ukri.org Future Leaders Fellowship 🧵 [1/4]

📣 Last Call! We still have spots left for our #GESISfallseminar course on Computer Vision for Image and Video Data Analysis with @andreucasas.bsky.social. Join us before it’s too late!⏳ ➡️ t1p.de/ImageVideoAn...

GESIS Training@gesistraining.bsky.social · last yr.

Do you want to use computer vision for analyzing image and video data? Join @andreucasas.bsky.social in his #GESISfallseminar course to gain theoretical & methodological expertise and benefit from hands-on tutorials & consulting sessions. More info & registration at t1p.de/ImageVideoAn...

Do you want to use large amounts of visual data (or text + visuals) in your research but don't know how? Join my "Computer Vision for Image and Video Analysis" course at GESIS this September (15-19th) to learn about machine learning for automatic visual analysis: training.gesis.org?site=pDetail...

On my way to Madrid-EPSA! Please join in if you want to hear about (political biases? in) content moderation on YouTube during the 2024 US Election, and/or about using open-source Large Visual Language Models (VLMs) for supervised multimodal classification in political science research.

🚨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.

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics@csmapnyu.org · last yr.

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/...

🚨New publication @The_JOP on human biases in data annotation (w. Nora Webb Williams, @kevinaslett.bsky.social, John Wilkerson). Extremely important given the increasing societal reliance on AI tools often trained on human coders www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Featured in the latest issue! ⚖️ "On Measurement Validity and Language Models: Increasing Validity and Decreasing Bias with Instructions" by Laurer et al. (@moritzlaurer.bsky.social @vanatteveldt.com @andreucasas.bsky.social @kasperwelbers.bsky.social). Read: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

1/ Excited to share our new paper, “Can foreign aid reduce the desire to emigrate? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial,” w/ Cassilde Schwartz (@rhulpirp) & @profdavidhudson (@iddbirmingham) — published in @AJPSeditor! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/CFSFRF...

Apply to our MSc program "Media, Power, and Public Affairs", at @rhulpir.bsky.social: strategic pol comm, media and intl affairs, elections, campaigns, public opinion, amazing quant and qual methods training etc! W. great faculty @benoloughlin.bsky.social @joostvanspanje.bsky.social @caprosser.com

We took X to court. And we won! ⚖️ The courts ruled that X must urgently grant us access to their publicly available data via their API. This access is critical for our analysis of online public discourse ahead of the upcoming German elections. Read: bit.ly/4gBWGp4 Here's what's happened 1/3 👇

We had an amazing time in the kick-off meeting. Brilliant and diverse people working on novel approaches to addressing important and timely challenges. Follow the project account and stay tuned!

WHAT-IF@what-if-horizon.bsky.social · 2y ago

Our project #WHAT-IF is live! 🚀 Disinformation and hate speech threaten democratic discourse. WHAT-IF is building a digital twin of the political information landscape to test interventions and foster healthier democracies. Stay tuned for updates and check our brand-new website: what-if-horizon.eu

Lots of voices are concerned about Elon Musk’s attempts to meddle in German and UK politics. The question is: what do people actually make of this? YouGov Germany has some recent data: In both, the public are assessing Musk’s interference negatively. https://buff.ly/4gkPqxI

Are the platforms ready for the German elections? 🇩🇪🗳️ The @ec.europa.eu have requested platforms like X, Meta, TikTok, Google, and Microsoft to a meeting this week. The EC wants to stress test the companies on election interference, AI and disinformation campaigns. techcrunch.com/2025/01/24/t...

The EU wants to talk to US tech companies ahead of Germany's upcoming election | TechCrunch

The EU plans on holding a "stress test" for these tech companies to see if they are compliant with the EU Digital Services Act.

techcrunch.com

It's Sunday! What a perfect day to support this #ResearchInfrastructure initiative! If you like to work with political data & agree that mapping concepts, indicators, and linking 🔗 diverse datasets can advance #DemocracyResearch 🗳️ for everyone, add your name to show your support. Sign up here ✍️🤝

MEDem - Personal Expression of Endorsement

To whom it may concern, The social sciences and humanities play an indispensable role in understanding the functioning of democracies and comprehending the intricate dynamics between citizens, elites,...

forms.gle

MEDem@medem.bsky.social · 2y ago

🌍📊 #MEDem will facilitate comparative #DemocracyResearch by harmonizing data on countries, institutions, parties, politicians, media, and voters – making it easier to link #DemocracyData across actors, space, and time 🔗. Discover more at medem.eu and join the #MEDemCommunity! 🚀

Also for the international crowd: #Instagram censors “Democrat” as a search term, while allowing “Republican” and seems to prioritize anti-leftwing content in search queries for alternative search terms. #DSA

EU is asking X for internal documents about its algorithms. "The company has been accused of manipulating the platform’s systems to give far-right posts and politicians greater visibility over other political groups." www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

EU asks X for internal documents about algorithms as it steps up investigation

Musk’s company has been accused of manipulating systems to give far-right posts and politicians greater visibility

theguardian.com

New report "Academic Access to Social Media Data for the Study of Political Online Safety" w. @georgidag.bsky.social @benoloughlin.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/so... As new threats reach the social media environment, platforms continue to obstruct independent research. It’s time to act!