We're hiring at School of Social Sciences at Univ of Mannheim Full Professorship (W-3) in Social Data Science and Social Science Methodology Apply by Oct 22 2026 www.sowi.uni-mannheim.de/en/about/job... @methodsnet.bsky.social

Job Vacancies

sowi.uni-mannheim.de

📽️What do MPs communicate beyond their words? Our DFG project (w/ @chrisguarnold.bsky.social + @pluggedchris.bsky.social) studies not just what MPs say, but how and why they say it: voice, gestures, eye contact. We draw on 30,000+ hours of video from the German Bundestag and all 16 state parliaments.

I've been messing around with the new @mysky.social feed since it was announced, and it seems pretty good. Out of the box it feels comparable to the For You feed (the current best of breed), except MySky is highly user-configurable, including a neat debug view to see why you are seeing certain posts

Renee DiResta@noupside.bsky.social · 6d ago

New work featured in New Public!: There is no neutral feed algorithm. Each one makes source, ranking, & content diversity choices. @jonathanstray.com & I started MySky so you can see - and change! - these settings. Check it out here on Bluesky, in "Feeds" # newpublic.substack.com/p/meet-the-a...

I've joined the editorial board of a Disinformation: An Interdisciplinary Journal (journals.sagepub.com/home/DIN ) . I'm in very good company and I'm sure this will evolve into an interesting venue for a lot of relevant research!

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

Such a cool paper! 👇

Dominik Deffner@dominikdeffner.bsky.social · 6d ago

Now published in @natcomms.nature.com! Using a 3D immersive-reality group experiment, we show how people integrate dynamically changing personal and social cues in realistic environments, resulting in either collective intelligence or maladaptive behavior! Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are hiring at LMU Munich: two PhD positions and one postdoc on democracy, political psychology and computational social science. Start: January 2027 or as soon as possible. We review applications on a rolling basis until October 20. Details below. Reposts very welcome! 1/7

New work featured in New Public!: There is no neutral feed algorithm. Each one makes source, ranking, & content diversity choices. @jonathanstray.com & I started MySky so you can see - and change! - these settings. Check it out here on Bluesky, in "Feeds" # newpublic.substack.com/p/meet-the-a...

🎛️📲 Meet the algorithm you can actually control and understand

Jonathan Stray and Renée DiResta introduce MySky, a feed that shows its work

newpublic.substack.com

Is human culture purely a product of bottom-up "social tinkering?" Or is it designed? In our commentary on Chater and Christiansen, @lorenzspreen.eurosky.social,
Ralph Hertwig, and I argue that we should pay more attention to the designed environments in which cultural evolution occurs.

Social tinkering in designed environments | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

Social tinkering in designed environments - Volume 49

cambridge.org

Social media algorithms don't allow us to understand or control what we see online and why... until now! Top scholars @jonathanstray.com and @noupside.bsky.social are sharing @mysky.social, a tool that allows users to adjust their feed’s priorities and explains why certain posts appear over others.

🎛️📲 Meet the algorithm you can actually control and understand

Jonathan Stray and Renée DiResta introduce MySky, a feed that shows its work

newpublic.substack.com

oh this is a cool feed:

MySky Feed@mysky.social · last mo.

Click SETTINGS to personalize your MySky feed. A feed you control, designed for constructive conversation.

Try out this feed! It’s the result of a massive amount of research on how to build beneficial recommendations. It’s the first real workable implementation of a choose your algorithm system and it will be good for you and the broader ecosystem. Courtesy of the great @jonathanstray.com

MySky Feed@mysky.social · last mo.

Click SETTINGS to personalize your MySky feed. A feed you control, designed for constructive conversation.

Also looking forward to the opening keynote by Philipp @lorenzspreen.eurosky.social on digital media, the public sphere, and democracy. Philipp kicks off #GeNeMe2026 before our panel (🙂just realized when looking up the full agenda). See you Thursday!

Communities in New Media [GeNeMe]

GeNeMe 2026 will take place from September 16 to 18, 2026 at the TUD Dresden University of Technology and will deal with online communities from the perspective of several disciplines.

geneme.de

Torsten Goerke (verified 🤜 🤛) 🎛️🎹🔊🎚️🎧📟🔌🐸@tgoerke.bsky.social · 2w ago

Excited for a panel I helped organize at #GeNeMe2026 @tudresden.bsky.social „Handlungsfähigkeit (Agency) in KI-vermittelten Lernumgebungen zurückgewinnen" — reclaiming agency in AI-mediated learning. Fishbowl format, four angles: UX, agency-enabling design, education, Folk Tech. 🧵

It was exactly ten years ago today, on my 33rd birthday, that I posted this comic online.

As with other technologies, AI is developed by people and can therefore be regulated and shaped by us; it is neither a force of nature nor extraterrestrial life nor magic.

Bluesky gives users the power to choose their algorithms, but how does this actually work in practice? In our new preprint, we explore the ecosystem of Bluesky custom feeds and the feed creators behind them! 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2609.12958

Middleware for Feed Recommendation in Practice: How Feed Creators Build, Maintain, and Sustain Custom Feeds on Bluesky

Scholars have long proposed third-party middleware as an alternative to centralized algorithmic feeds: feeds built and distributed by independent feed creators. This vision saw no large-scale instanti...

arxiv.org

Approximating the Lorenz attractor with a chaotic leaky water wheel. The orange dot is the centre of mass of the water. It traces (a projection of) the familiar attractor as the wheel spins seemingly randomly left and right.

📢 We’re hiring a Postdoc in Computational Communication Science at the University of Vienna! 🔎 Text/image analysis, platform data & political communication 📍 Vienna ⏳ 6 years, full-time ⏰ Apply by 3 Oct jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Universi... Find out more about our team here: compcommlab.univie.ac.at

Have seen this Nature piece about the effects of X's algorithm mentioned again and it bears repeating; exposure to a right wing algorithm makes you - measurably and predictably - more right wing, even after you stop using it. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm - Nature

Among users initially on a chronological feed, 7 weeks of exposure to X’s algorithmic feed in 2023 shifted political attitudes and account-following behaviour in a more conservative direction compared...

nature.com

Alles, was in Sachsen-Anhalt passiert ist, war zu erwarten. Und alles hat Gründe. Die Frage ist: Reagieren die, die die Macht und Verantwortung haben, endlich? Und reagieren sie richtig? Hier meine Gedanken zur organisierten Ambitionslosigkeit der Macht. georgdiez.substack.com/p/frontier-p...

Frontier Politics

Technologie und die organisierte Ambitionslosigkeit der Macht

georgdiez.substack.com

Excited and looking forward to the panel discussion with @kaisassenberg.bsky.social @evalottabrakemeier.bsky.social @rimamrahal.bsky.social @lewan.uk & G.-J. Hogrefe on populist politics as a threat to academic freedom at #DGPs2026 📆Wednesday, 9 September, 🕧1:45PM, 📍 Room Plenary 1 #psychscisky

Horrible election results today. Again, we need to urgently understand how to repair things. I know there are many factors, but at least one is a fragmented, commercialised information system that favors populism and propaganda. No force of nature, but exploitative technology that can be changed.

Big news! 🎉 𝚖𝚊𝚛𝚐𝚒𝚗𝚊𝚕𝚎𝚏𝚏𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚜 1.0.0 for #Rstats is out. It’s a big number and it feels like a big step. I wrote a blog on the challenges of interpreting statistical models, SPEED, cool new features, the future, and a 5 year package development and writing odyssey. arelbundock.com/posts/margin...

A murmuration of starlings above Sardinia, Italy. One of my favorite natural phenomena.

It is with great honor and joy that today I start my new position as Professor of Computational Social Science at @tudresden.bsky.social With a fantastic team and so many collaborators (past and present), I feel very privileged to continue researching and teaching about digitalization and society!

Our opinion article about "Research Opportunities and Challenges of the EU’s Digital Services Act" is out in CACM! cacm.acm.org/opinion/rese...

Feeling very honored and grateful today. Some of the journalists whose work I admire most have received this prize in the past and at a time when journalism is under threat in so many ways it’s just really heartening to be recognized by people who care deeply about journalism.

CASW@sciencewriting.bsky.social · 4w ago

Congratulations to @kakape.bsky.social for winning the 2026 Victor Cohn Prize! Judges called his reporting on infectious diseases and misinformation bold, urgent and groundbreaking. And big thanks to Michelson Philanthropies for underwriting the award. casw.org/news/kai-kup...

This is significant indeed, with potentially huge implications for research and data access to study those systems:

European Commission@ec.europa.eu · 4w ago

We have designated ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine and Reddit and Roblox as Very Large Online Platforms under the Digital Services Act. They now have four months to comply with additional DSA obligations. #DSA

I am once again begging everyone who supervises student theses to stop making students conduct mediation analyses because “a regression isn’t complicated enough for a thesis” 😭

Job opening with my colleagues at GESIS Knowledge Technologies for the Social Science Department: gesis.jobs.personio.de/job/2765070?... #ResearchData #FAIR #FAIRdata #researchinfrastructure

Forschungsdatenmanager*in (Postdoc) für die Erstellung von Harvestingnetzwerken (KTS-84) | Jobs at GESIS – Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften

GESIS is one of the world's leading social science infrastructure facilities, supporting researchers at all levels of their research projects with expertise and infrastructure services. We help ensure...

gesis.jobs.personio.de