Melina Much
@melinamuch.bsky.social
Postdoctoral Fellow @csmapnyu.org. Identities, political behavior, social media 👩🏻💻 melinamuch.com
🚨Read the latest publication from @caltechlcssp.bsky.social Co-Director, @rmichaelalvarez.bsky.social, Mitchell Linegar, Betsy Sinclair, and @profsanderlinden.bsky.social in the latest issue of @royalsociety.org Open Science! 🟨 Paper: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...
🔊New blog from @caltechlcssp.bsky.social's Postdoc Scholar @rcenteno.bsky.social, @caltech.edu: 🟠The Racial Gap in Voter Confidence: How Trust in Ballot Counting Varies Across Racial and Ethnic Groups🟠 lcssp.caltech.edu/more/lcssp-b... See details on project with @rmichaelalvarez.bsky.social:
Raquel Centeno@rcenteno.bsky.social · 4w ago🚨 new research alert! 🚨 Check out the latest @caltechlcssp.bsky.social blog summarizing my new project with @rmichaelalvarez.bsky.social 👇 We use the 2024 CMPS to provide newly precise estimates of voter confidence across racial & ethnic groups, demonstrating a racial gap in voter confidence 🗳️
Favorite figure from our recent CCR paper on #MeToo, essentially demonstrating the probability of a given tweet related to MeToo being about testimnials of sexual violence (CR), about political action (activated), or being reactionary to the movement. The counter movement by the end is...large. 👀
New paper out in Computational Communication Research We analyze 8.4 million English-language #MeToo tweets from 2017–2019 to study how consciousness-raising cultivates activated senses of identity online. www.aup-online.com/content/jour...
Activating Identity and Political Action in the #MeToo Era | Amsterdam University Press Journals Online
Abstract Twitter (now X) represented an invaluable space for sparking and mobilizing political movements. An example of this is the #MeToo movement beginning in 2017, which was one of the largest soci...
aup-online.com
New in Nature: LLMs give "the party line" in the languages of authoritarian regimes. This works when they control the media, which feeds pretraining data. We show more state control over the media means less critical LLMs. 6 studies spanning 38 languages & 13 models. Details ↓
I was interviewed for some statements about narrative/discourse co-optation by the right, linked below. If you’re interested in this stuff, I’ll be presenting on how this happens on social media at APSA 👩🏻💻
HuffPost@huffpost.com · 3mo agoThe conservative podcast host says the phrase marks the most intolerant people in America.
ICYMI my solo article on MENA identity. When MENA Americans aren’t given a “MENA” option on forms, they answer identity-related questions on politics more strongly (eg higher end of the scale) than if“MENA” had been added. Having the group label or not changes the average response!
American Political Science Review@apsrjournal.bsky.social · 5mo agoFrom our FirstView article: What Happens When You Can’t Check the Box? Categorization Threat and Public Opinion among Middle Eastern and North African Americans by @asdurso.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1017/S000...
"the decline in [academic freedom in] the United States has been more rapid and pronounced, particularly in the last year. It has deteriorated by 50% from 2015 to 2025 and is now evaluated as moderate autonomy by country experts" academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...
great stuff by @davekarpf.bsky.social "Journal articles aren’t social science. They’re just a unit of measurement. They’re how we keep score. Producing journal articles isn’t what we are actually meant to be doing — we’re supposed to be learning meaningful things about people, power, and society."
Are you a social scientist who has been hearing about Claude Code but hasn't checked it out yet? Or are you a social scientist who has been playing with Claude Code and has been wondering what it means for the future of social science research? www.brookings.edu/articles/the... 1/
The train has left the station: Agentic AI and the future of social science research | Brookings
A new era of agentic AI agents has begun. What does it mean for social scientists? Solomon Messing and Joshua Tucker discuss.
brookings.edu
🧵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...
Joe Rogan helped Trump with one thing he always wants more of: male voters. @melinamuch.bsky.social expands in our latest episode ➡️ linktr.ee/americanfriction #JoeRogan #Trump #TrumpElection #USpolitics #AmericanFriction
Should Harris have gone on Rogan? Check out my response here on American Friction. Thanks for having me @jacobjarvis.bsky.social @chrisjonesprod.bsky.social open.spotify.com/episode/16Uy...
Joe Rogan and the podcast bros – Why are they so confused?
Spotify video
open.spotify.com
American Friction@americanfric.bsky.social · 6mo ago🚨NEW EPISODE🚨 The world of Joe Rogan and his fellow bro podcasters is a weird place to enter. @melinamuch.bsky.social joins @jacobjarvis.bsky.social and @chrisjonesprod.bsky.social to talk through their weird and confusing political views ➡️ linktr.ee/bunker_pod
Why is it so hard to keep track of Joe Rogan's politics? @melinamuch.bsky.social explains how he bounces around and then social media clips confuse things more ➡️ linktr.ee/americanfriction
Steve Levitsky, the co-author of How Democracies Die, on the dangerous place we have reached as Trump escalates: “Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists,” he said. “And in Hungary if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people."
I wrote a piece for @slate.com on Gen Z, sexism, and why the “most progressive generation ever” narrative misses something important. Short version: Gen Z is uniquely progressive on race. On gender, not so much. slate.com/news-and-pol...
Gen Z Is More Progressive Than Millennials, Except in One Crucial Way
The most open-minded generation ever? It’s complicated.
slate.com
DOGE was A LOT less likely to cancel contracts from companies that donated money to Republicans than companies that donated to Democrats.
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...
#OpenAccess from @politicsgenderj.bsky.social - Women or Fetuses First? An Experimental Study of the Effectiveness of the Pro-Life Movement’s Use of the “Pro-Woman” Frame - https://cup.org/48qJXVm - @profamandaroberti.bsky.social, Kyle J. Morgan & @katiekrumbholz.bsky.social #FirstView
#OpenAccess from @polanalysis.bsky.social - Survey Professionalism: New Evidence from Web Browsing Data - https://cup.org/3KWgqtg - Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg, @tiagoventura.bsky.social, Jonathan Nagler, @ericka.bric.digital & Magdalena Wojcieszak #FirstView
We fed an LLM 30,000 podcast episodes to see where politics sneaks in to influence young folks… @csmapnyu.org Come hang at our #APSA2025 panel Podcasts and Partisanship in American Politics Sat, Sept 13, 8:00–9:30am PDT (11:00–12:30pm EDT)
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
In the words of Nelson Mandela: it always seems impossible until it’s done. My friends, it is done. And you are the ones who did it. I am honored to be your Democratic nominee for the Mayor of New York City.
We have gone from the margin of error to the margin of effort. On the day before the election, we stand on the verge of toppling a political dynasty and winning a city we can afford. But we can only do it with you. zohranfornyc.com/gotv
Since its founding, the US has engaged in nearly 500 foreign military conflicts and operations. Congress has formally declared war in only five of these. All wars are crimes. Only a handful have been Constitutional.
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/...
Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages - Hannah Waight, Solomon Messing, Anton Shirikov, Margaret E. Roberts, Jonathan Nagler, Jason Greenfield, Megan A. Brown, Kevin Aslett, Joshua A. Tuck...
How can one understand the spread of ideas across text data? This is a key measurement problem in sociological inquiry, from the study of how interest groups sh...
journals.sagepub.com
