Melina Much

@melinamuch.bsky.social

Postdoctoral Fellow @csmapnyu.org. Identities, political behavior, social media 👩🏻‍💻 melinamuch.com

🔊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 · 3w 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. 👀

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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 ↓

Scatter plot of 38 countries plus China showing the proportion of LLM responses favorable to the regime in the local language vs. World Press Freedom Index score. Lower press freedom predicts more regime-favorable responses; all production models pooled.

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 · 4mo ago

From 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...

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...

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."

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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.