I'm overjoyed to finally be able to share that I've been awarded tenure here at MSU! I'm thankful that my colleagues have decided to keep me around, grateful to the many of you who have supported me along the way, and looking forward to a long, productive career as a Spartan. On to the next chapter!

Every system that was regulated, either explicitly or implicitly, by the fact that they were effortful for humans (letters of recommendation, government filings, essays, or, as this paper finds, lawsuits) will break under a wave of AI.

Also today at #SANS2026, Ziyu Zhao investigates the “brain rot” hypothesis. When studied rigorously, in large multi-national samples, we find a whole lot of nothing. Conclusion: previously observed alarming results might be driven by sampling bias and/or measurement error (P1-C-20)

Science is good. We should fund it.

1/n New preprint with Ziyu Zhao, @dougaparry.bsky.social, & @jacobtfisher.online Can an AI bot complete a live online reaction-time task & produce data that passes as human? We built an autonomous bot to take the Attention Network Test (ANT) in real time Preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

the Norwegian campaign against enshittification is pretty great tbf vimeo.com/1168468796

The Ensh*ttificator

Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved…

vimeo.com

The last edition of this conference was one of the most intellectually exciting conferences I have ever attended. I'm looking forward to September!

Jacob T. Fisher@jacobtfisher.online · 5mo ago

Hey y'all! Very pleased to announce that we'll be hosting Communication Science Futures again in East Lansing later this year. The conference in 2024 was a blast, and we're looking forward to running it back! Keynote speaker: James Pennebaker Submission deadline: June 5th. → commscifutures.com

Hey y'all! Very pleased to announce that we'll be hosting Communication Science Futures again in East Lansing later this year. The conference in 2024 was a blast, and we're looking forward to running it back! Keynote speaker: James Pennebaker Submission deadline: June 5th. → commscifutures.com

Home | Communication Science Futures

Communication Science Futures is a conference aimed at addressing pressing issues and opportunities in the interdisciplinary, social...

commscifutures.com

🚨 New Preprint Alert 🚨 Communication science has no shortage of data. But what do we do with all of it? Experience sampling, sensors, digital trace, location aware observations are growing in popularity and scale.

On almost everything – fraud, polarisation, radicalisation, misinformation – evidence suggests that over 60s are in much more urgent need of online protection and education than teenagers. But that issue gets zero political attention, and is a total non-starter. Nothing good will come of it.

John Oxley@joxley.jmoxley.co.uk · 6mo ago

This was a minor story on London news this morning - but suspect is a real cautionary (and alarming) tale of an older man getting radicalised online. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

One of my favourite events of the year! Learn about new tools/methods/people and hack on some dataset/tool/project 😍

hackingcommsci@hackingcommsci.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Good news! 🎉 The registration issue has been resolved — everything should now work smoothly. 🔗 Direct link: www.icahdq.org/event/Hackat... 🗓 Registration is open until April 5, 2026 Looking forward to seeing you at the ICA Hackathon 2026 @SU School for Data Science and Computational Thinking! 🚀💡

Depressed? Anxious? Lonely? What if mental health doesn’t just result from media use, but shapes how we choose media? In a new preprint, Valerie Klein, @gongxuanjun.bsky.social @aeden.bsky.social and I and I test this using a computational decision-making model: doi.org/10.21203/rs.... 🧵Thread

We're getting excited... just putting the finishing touches to **PsychoPy Studio** This is a complete rewrite of the PsychoPy Builder/Coder app, now packaged in Electron. Faster load, modernised UI, web-ready, independent of the Python interpreter 🎉 🚀 blog.psychopy.org/general%20bl...

PsychoPy Studio: the app we love, reimagined

It’s now over 20 years since PsychoPy’s humble beginnings as an open-source Python library to help users present high-precision stimuli and collect responses from participants. Since 2009 PsychoPy…

blog.psychopy.org

In the future we're gonna look back at online gambling and prediction markets in the same way we look now at cigarettes on airplanes and lead-based paint www.wsj.com/business/med...

The "smartphones/social media" discourse suffers from some amazing historical amnesia. There was no 2008 financial crisis and no global pandemic starting in 2020, it's all SCREENS SCREENS SCREENS. Major world events? Just the backdrop against which SCREENS happened.

Works the other way around too. “If I was Jonathan Haidt, how would I destroy the next generation?”

Mike Caulfield@mikecaulfield.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Haidt is "stunned" that ChatGPT asked how it would threaten youth reveals that its plan would be what Haidt has argued in his books. The secret plan! There should be some way to rescind the doctorate of any commentator on digital media who interprets ChatGPT output like this. I am not joking.

Very cool study! Happy to see someone is actually studying this. My anecdotal experience aligns as well. Framing overuse/compulsive use of screens as "addiction" robs people of their agency and masks the issues we should actually be talking about (adversarial design tactics, attention economy, etc).

Ian Axel Anderson@aanixel.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Excited to see these studies (finally) published in Scientific Reports! 🚨 S1: More social media users perceived themselves as addicted than met clinical addiction criteria. S2: Increasing perceived addiction hurt perceived control over use and increased self-blame for overuse. Thread below... 🧵

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

I still get chills Meet Mike *30+ years severe depression *first hospitalized @ 13y *20 meds *3 rounds of ECT *2 near-fatal suicide attempts Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE see videos, read paper, follow thread doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🎉 Huge congrats to our team @overbye.bsky.social, Kristy Hamilton and @jacobtfisher.online for receiving a Top Student Paper award in the Communication & Social Cognition Division at #NCA25! 🏆

Wrapping up #ica25 with @rzhprfshr.bsky.social presenting our work with @joebayer.bsky.social reviewing the research under the broad umbrella of “social connection”. And perfect timing because the paper was published TODAY at @natrevpsychol.nature.com 🥳 rdcu.be/erayE

Very happy to see that @overbye.bsky.social’s fantastic work on detecting bias in human-in-the-loop algorithms was awarded a top paper in @icacsab.bsky.social this year. Incredibly interesting, rigorous, and timely research! #ica25

Took some time off to get into the mountains for a little different view on #ica25 this morning! Out of breath but totally worth it!

Can we kick off #icacoffee for #ica25 on here? First on the docket for me is Huckleberry Coffee Roasters. About .5mi from the hotel but definitely worth the walk. maps.app.goo.gl/ncBAAchbFJzi...

From text-as-data to sleep data collection, this year‘s #hackica25 in Boulder, CO, was a blast and we‘re proud to say that we‘ve (again) successfully hacked communication science. Thanks to all participants and see y‘all at #ica25 ✨

We’re thrilled to see MNL represented at @hackingcommsci.bsky.social! Huge thanks to @jacobtfisher.online and @kyliewoodman.bsky.social for organizing another fantastic hackathon and sharing valuable comm sci insights such as using GitHub and running fMRI analyses. #hackica25 #ica25

Kicking off our fourth(!) annual #hackica this year at @colorado.edu. This is always the highlight of ICA. Super excited to get hacking! #hackica25

Leading up to #ICA25 we're sharing info on papers that received Top Paper awards. Today, you can read about "Expectation of Algorithm Bias Increases Caution: Implications for Human-in-the-Loop Decisions" by @overbye.bsky.social Kristy Hamilton & @jacobtfisher.online : commscience.org/ica-top-pape...

ICA Top Paper: Overbye-Thompson, Hamilton, & Fisher

Hannah Overbye-Thompson In our lead up to #ICA25, we are providing information about papers that received Top Paper awards from the Communication Science and Biology (CSaB) Interest Group. Each pap…

commscience.org