🔥 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!

(How) can AI help build better online spaces? ✨ Last week, 16 researchers from 8 institutions gathered in Vienna to explore exactly that question. Between the Christmas markets, the WHAT-IF team discussed how LLMs can power agent-based simulations to tackle online hostility and harmful content 👇

Antico Caffè Torinese, Trieste 🇮🇹 1st visit. Stunning classical café with a booze & cakes focus. Red River & Erdinger on tap, special cocktails and wall of Amaro. The sort of bar you dream of finding in Italy. 🍸 🍻👍

Our next speaker is @emmafraxanet.bsky.social, who will talk to us about ideological segregation and news quality in social media #CCS2025

Next, we have @maxpe.bsky.social, with a talk on the semantic distance between comments in online newspaper forums #CCS2025

It was a great week at IC2S2 in Norrköping! This community is really something. Today I got to share our findings on tracking engagement with news content on Facebook (check the preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2409.13461 )...and I was lucky enough to do so on the amazing auditorium stage✨️

Excited to present our paper with @maxpe.bsky.social, @dgarcia.eu, and @mstrohm.bsky.social next week at #ICWSM! ✨ We extend social simulation with LLMs to a longitudinal setting by fine-tuning Temporal Adapters—here's how: 🧵

WHAT-IF team members met in Konstanz last week to design the WHAT-IF machine—an agent-based simulation with LLM-driven agents. It models media ecosystems to test 'what if' policy scenarios. Curious how? Read more: what-if-horizon.eu/2025/05/16/o...

Paper is out! Together with Camelia Oprea and Markus Strohmaier, we have explored the potential impact of toxic comments on Wikipedia: academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Toxic comments are associated with reduced activity of volunteer editors on Wikipedia

Abstract. Wikipedia is one of the most successful collaborative projects in history. It is the largest encyclopedia ever created, with millions of users worldwi

academic.oup.com