When people seek guidance from science, they expect it to work more than once. I have TWO new articles on commercial forces & proprietary models that make science less reliable, with pointers to communities and ideas that might help. This post offers a summary: citizensandtech.org/2026/07/comm...

New Studies: How Commercial Forces Make Science Less Reliable

Computational social science has been distorted by commercial forces, and AI is making it worse.

citizensandtech.org

Unfortunately, I can’t make it to #IC2S22026 / #IC2S2 this year, but I hope everyone attending has a great time! For those of you working with Prolific or similar participant platforms, our working paper may be relevant. Maintaining high data quality in CSS will continue to be a major challenge.

Carsten Schwemmer@cschwem2er.bsky.social · last wk.

1/6 What happens when you tell an AI browser: “Fill out this survey”? It fills out the survey. In our new study, led by @rtopinkova.bsky.social, we tested three consumer-facing agentic browsers without lengthy prompts, custom code, or technical fine-tuning.

1/6 What happens when you tell an AI browser: “Fill out this survey”? It fills out the survey. In our new study, led by @rtopinkova.bsky.social, we tested three consumer-facing agentic browsers without lengthy prompts, custom code, or technical fine-tuning.

1/6 What happens when you tell an AI browser: “Fill out this survey”? It fills out the survey. In our new study, led by @rtopinkova.bsky.social, we tested three consumer-facing agentic browsers without lengthy prompts, custom code, or technical fine-tuning.

There’s been a lot of buzz around the Borjas/Breznau (2026) paper (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and potential ideological bias in research. We took a closer look at the data. Could there be a "bias in bias research"? Here is what we found: www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10...

The German state of Bavaria is trying to ban AI bans in academia. Can't make this shit up

In new joint work with @sebastianjblock.bsky.social, Sandra Jaworeck, Manuel Holz, and Philipp Spielbauer, we examine textual complexity in sociology using a corpus of more than 1,700 full-text articles from major German sociology journals. osf.io/preprints/so...

In new joint work with @sebastianjblock.bsky.social, Sandra Jaworeck, Manuel Holz, and Philipp Spielbauer, we examine textual complexity in sociology using a corpus of more than 1,700 full-text articles from major German sociology journals. osf.io/preprints/so...

Code reviewed by WIRED uncovered an unreleased face-recognition system embedded in Meta’s smart glasses platform. Internally called “NameTag,” it’s designed to identify people via biometric data stored on users’ phones.

Meta Silently Added Face-Recognition Code for Its Smart Glasses to Millions of Phones

Code reviewed by WIRED uncovered an unreleased face-recognition system embedded in Meta’s smart glasses platform. It’s designed to identify people via biometric data stored on users’ phones.

wired.com

📢 Open positions! I’m recruiting 2 postdocs + 3 PhD positions at C³S, @goetheuni.bsky.social in #ClimateJustice, environmental inequality, #Demography & #ComputationalSocialScience 🌍📊💻 3–4 years + strong support for training🎒 Deadline: 23 June 2026 More: www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794987/Zen...

danah boyd recently argued that social media (as we knew it) is mostly dead; what we have now is parasocial media: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... I agree. Networked social media is disappearing, replaced by a new logic/structure of content creator, creator-centered community, & algorithm.

Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media - danah boyd, 2026

When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms...

journals.sagepub.com

📢 Job: Research Associate (75%, E13) Join my team at @goetheuni.bsky.social! Looking for a researcher in sociology/network analysis for an @erc.europa.eu project on the interplay of children's & parents' networks. Until end of 2028. Info & apply: 🔗 www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794784/FB0...

Early in my PhD, a colleague finishing his (highly rated) dissertation told me he was stuck on the introduction. After years of hard work, he could no longer find an argument for why any of it actually mattered. This stuck with me ever since. A🧵 about this paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Do researchers share their code upon request? Does running their orginal code on the original data produce the original results? We provide evidence in a new Royal Society Open Science publication. Studying more than 1,000 articles which use data from the European Social Survey, we find that... 🧵

This is the clearest and most accessible introduction to DML I've ever read: arxiv.org/abs/2504.08324 Congrats to the authors @aahrens.bsky.social, @markeschaffer.bsky.social, et al on this amazing paper and great accompanying R package! I'm now DML-pilled.

An Introduction to Double/Debiased Machine Learning

This paper provides an introduction to Double/Debiased Machine Learning (DML). DML is a general approach to performing inference about a target parameter in the presence of nuisance functions: objects...

arxiv.org

Very happy to share that I am going to be the new Director of the Democracy unit at the @wzb.bsky.social Berlin Social Science Center. I am excited to form a new research unit on democratic politics and to engage with people in Berlin and elsewhere to make liberal democracy more resilient.

Jetzt an der LMU: Master Computational Social Science (M.Sc.) Bewerbungen für die 2. Kohorte sind offen. Der interdisziplinäre Studiengang verbindet Kommunikationswissenschaft, Soziologie und Politikwissenschaft mit daten- und computergestützten Methoden. Info-Sprechstunde: 27. April.

Concentrated academic recruiting. 10% of political science departments produce 60% of all polsci professors in Germany. FU Berlin produced most professors, followed by Mannheim, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Heidelberg. In psychology,...

We opened a new PhD position in our department focusing on CSS research on and with AI agents. Please share the job ad and contact us if you have questions: gesis.jobs.personio.de/job/2594220?...

*job* work with my great colleagues at @gesis.org CSS group led by @clauwa.bsky.social and @sebstier.bsky.social

Claudia Wagner@clauwa.bsky.social · 4mo ago

We opened a new PhD position in our department focusing on CSS research on and with AI agents. Please share the job ad and contact us if you have questions: gesis.jobs.personio.de/job/2594220?...

Puebla et al. (2024). Ten simple rules for recognizing data and software contributions in hiring, promotion, and tenure. PLOS Computational Biology, 20(8), e1012296. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Ten simple rules for recognizing data and software contributions in hiring, promotion, and tenure

doi.org

Aleksandra Lazić, PhD@alelazic.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Another paper I came across this week in PLOS Computational Biology tackling a key #OpenScience issue in a practical way (journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...). Together with PLOS Biology's new code-sharing policy (journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...), it really boosts my view of PLOS.

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes! "Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky

Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

academic.oup.com

If you haven't done yet, please try Claude Coworker just to get an idea about its capabilities. It took 2 minutes for it to read our paper, provide perfectly running R-code to justify a case selection across 14 countries using Vdem. Produced a 10 pager underlining our case selection.

🚨Job alert 🚨 I have an opening for a postdoc in my team at @ipz.bsky.social in the area of digital democracy starting Sep 1, 2026. If you are working on the impact of the digital transformation on politics, please apply by 🗓️ Mar 1, 2026. 📤 Please share widely! www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...

Offene Stellen / Open Positions

ipz.uzh.ch

Big news: I started a new position as Professor for Computational Social Science (W1 tenure track) at the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main! www.c3s-frankfurt.de/who-we-are#m...

Super excited to see that somebody finally wrote about this 🥳 If you do research about research, you really need causal thinking (just like when you do research about anything else really).

Vincent Traag@vtraag.bsky.social · 6mo ago

📣 Our introduction to structural causal models in science studies is now published: doi.org/10.1162/QSS.... @tklebel.bsky.social and I tried to make our introduction as accessible as possible. We illustrate the theory by three case studies based on a simulated model of Open Science. 🧵(1/6)

We are opening an investigation into Grok because we believe that X may have breached the DSA. We have seen antisemitic content, non-consensual deepfakes of women, and child sexual abuse material. In Europe, no company will make money by violating our fundamental rights. link.europa.eu/Fh8h84

Ooooh {stringr} now includes a function for my favorite naming convention, snake_case. ☺️

Posit@posit.co · 7mo ago

ICYMI: stringr 1.6.0 🧵 This update brings performance gains and new fns for string manipulation in #RStats. Highlights include: Faster replacements with `str_replace_all()`, 🐫 new case tools to camel, snake, and kebab, case-sensitive str_like(), & more. Read more: tidyverse.org/blog/2025/11...

Cool PhD Position in an amazing project 🚀

Alexander Wuttke@kunkakom.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🧵 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

Just out in Nature Communications: "Examining public support for Ukraine’s defense against autocratic aggression". With F. Haggerty and P. Thurner, we show that Western citizens back Ukraine’s fight, but moral and strategic concerns, as well as internal divisions, impose restraints. rdcu.be/eYKAr