A little bit late, but this paper has now been published in ACL. Note: more recent (unpublished) analyses suggest agents are getting better at searching the web—which I've been mentioning in my conference presentations this summer.

Large Language Models Require Curated Context for Reliable Political Fact-Checking—Even with Reasoning and Web Search

Matthew R. DeVerna, Kai-Cheng Yang, Harry Yaojun Yan, Filippo Menczer. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026. 2026.

aclanthology.org

Matt DeVerna@matthewdeverna.com · 8mo ago

🚨 New working paper 🚨 Can LLMs with reasoning + web search reliably fact-check political claims? We evaluated 15 models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and DeepSeek on 6,000+ PolitiFact claims (2007–2024). Short answer: Not reliably—unless you give them curated evidence. arxiv.org/abs/2511.18749

The Higgs mechanism was proposed in 1964 by three independent teams. But here is the puzzle🤔: the "disruption index" says Higgs's paper is among the least disruptive ever. So what is going on? In our new paper, just out in #ScienceAdvances, we take up this puzzle: doi.org/10.1126/scia... 👇 1/7

Uncovering simultaneous breakthroughs with a robust measure of disruptiveness

An embedding-based disruption measure not only robustly captures disruptive works but also reveals simultaneous discoveries.

doi.org

🚨 New working paper 🚨 Can LLMs with reasoning + web search reliably fact-check political claims? We evaluated 15 models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and DeepSeek on 6,000+ PolitiFact claims (2007–2024). Short answer: Not reliably—unless you give them curated evidence. arxiv.org/abs/2511.18749

We’re recruiting PhD students at @uvadatascience.bsky.social, and I’m looking for students to join our group (Y Lab) next year! My group works at the intersection of network science, machine learning, and interpretable AI. yyahn.com/ylab/ Apply here! datascience.virginia.edu/degrees/phd

Please repost to get the word out! @nkgarg.bsky.social and I are excited to present a personalized feed for academics! It shows posts about papers from accounts you’re following bsky.app/profile/pape...

Ready for #ICWSM2026 in LA next May? 🌴 📅 Deadlines: • Jan 15, 2026 – Full papers, posters, demos, datasets, tutorials (note: posters/demos/datasets submitted in Sep 2025 are reviewed only after this deadline) • Jan 30, 2026 – Workshop proposals 🔗 Details: www.icwsm.org/2026/submit....

Find out how we spot constructive conflicts and uncover their language patterns, along with other key insights here 👇

Ozgur Can Seckin@ozgurcanseckin.bsky.social · 10mo ago

In our research, we argue that the key lies in identifying constructive conflict — controversial posts that are toxicity resilient. We define a "toxicity resilient" post as one that is less likely to attract toxic responses from other users. See our #ICWSM2026 paper here arxiv.org/abs/2509.18303 📖

We find that a post doesn't need to be toxic to attract toxic comments ☢️ Our Reddit data shows that 47% of non-toxic submissions still attract at least one toxic reply, while only 6% of toxic submissions do. The initial post's content, therefore, is a poor predictor of a comment section's health.

A simple solution, prioritizing only “the feel-good" content, is flawed, as it avoids important societal topics that are inherently negative and can devolve into toxic debates. After all, how often does thinking about wars, viruses, or economic policy put a smile on your face?

Modern social media is divisive, partly due to recommender algorithms that promote emotionally charged, negative content at the expense of thoughtful discourse. Researchers are exploring prosocial recommenders that foster positive outcomes, aiming for users to feel connected rather than angry 💡

📣 Yale workshop, Oct 16-17! 📣 How could/should content ranking work? What's new in content moderation? How can platforms promote civility? Hosted by Yale's Institute for Foundations of Data Science (FDS). Great speakers! Submit posters by 9/22! Spread the word! yalefds.swoogo.com/socialalgori...

New Directions in Social Algorithms Research on October 16-17, 2025 at Yale University

As social media algorithms increasingly mediate social experiences, there has been a rapid increase in research on the effects of how these algorithms are configured, alternatives to engagement-centri...

yalefds.swoogo.com

Today (w/ @ox.ac.uk @stanford @MIT @LSE) we’re sharing the results of the largest AI persuasion experiments to date: 76k participants, 19  LLMs, 707 political issues. We examine “levers” of AI persuasion: model scale, post-training, prompting, personalization, & more!  🧵:

If you're @ic2s2.bsky.social #IC2S2 and are looking for a faculty position, get in touch. @uni-saarland.de is hiring. Right now, there's an open call in Computer Science @saarland-informatics-campus.de: www.uni-saarland.de/fileadmin/up... Soon, there'll be open calls in the Social Sciences.

Our team "Computational Social Science" at SynoSys is growing! Welcome @baottruong.bsky.social and Ezequiel Lopez-Lopez! At the moment, they are all @ic2s2.bsky.social, say hi get to know their research. And check out our website: css-synosys.github.io

In Norrköping for #IC2S2! Excited to share three work with my amazing collaborators @dowonkim.bsky.social , @ozgurcanseckin.bsky.social, and @rasikamurali.bsky.social — come say hi! 🧵 Where to find us: Predicting Constructive Conflict in Online Discussions 📍 Poster | Jul 23, 1:30 PM | Atrium

New preprint! 🚀 We looked into the rise of Bluesky and found that this platform is definitely sticking around 🚀 Huge kudos to my amazing co-authors for digging through nearly two years of all Bluesky data!

Ozgur Can Seckin@ozgurcanseckin.bsky.social · last yr.

Paper alert! 🚨 We investigate Bluesky’s journey from an invitation only platform with a few thousands of users to reaching 30 million users in terms of user activity and network growth. 📄 Full paper: arxiv.org/abs/2504.12902 💻 Codes: github.com/osome-iu/ris... 💾 Dataset: zenodo.org/records/1506...