Interesting #ICA26 session on AI and politics (both AI in politics, and AI as an object of politics). Liveblog is up:

ICA 2026 | Snurblog — Axel Bruns

International Communication Association conference, Cape Town, 4-8 June 2026

snurb.info

south africa withdraws own government AI policy over hallucinated citations www.reuters.com/world/africa...

PDF-Direct Firefox extension ('Bypass "fancy online reader" and just get the darn pdf') updated: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo... & now supports ACM ACS Cambridge University Press Elsevier IEEE JSTOR Nature OUP PLOS PNAS Royal Society Publishing Sage Science Springer Nature Taylor & Francis Wiley

Very pleasantly surprised to see my recent preprint being discussed in this NYT article on silicon sampling and its implications for opinion polling. More forthcoming work on this coming soon! (H/T @rohanalexander.bsky.social) www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/o...

Opinion | It’s Called Silicon Sampling, and It’s Going to Ruin Public Opinion Polling

nytimes.com

The Trump administration is seeking to cut more than half of the science foundation budget. A NSF budget proposal “would dissolve the agency’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate” www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration

Budget proposal would also curb federal payments for scientific publishing.

nature.com

Two weeks left to apply 👇

Lisa Oswald@lfoswaldo.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I'm hiring a postdoc! @goetheuni.bsky.social Focus: CSS, political behavior, political communication & transforming information environments. 📍 Frankfurt | ⏳ 3 years | 📅 Deadline: 14 April 2026 Full job ad here: www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794987/Zen... (search for “political behavior” to find it)

Interesting new bot-detection strategy in online samples: academic.oup.com/jcr/advance-...

The @bredowinstitut.bsky.social, Media Research Methods Lab is hiring! Two PhD positions with TV-L EG13, 100%. Apply if you fancy digital methods, multimodal content analysis and working with @azadekakavand.bsky.social, @grenwi.bsky.social and @thejanrau.bsky.social.

Is there a place for (professional) news on TikTok? Based on 99 interviews w/ young people, I.Costera Meijer, @kenzalamot.bsky.social & I find that adapting to the platform risks diluting journalism’s distinctive value and blurring it with less reliable content ⬇️ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The User Experience of TikTok and Its Compatibility with News

While TikTok is rapidly growing as a source of news for young people, they appear to have limited interest in news from traditional sources on the platform. Exploring whether there is a place for p...

tandfonline.com

🚨 (SELF)NOMINATIONS OPEN @apsa.bsky.social Walter Lippmann Award for Best Published Article in the field of political communication in ‘25 Low threshold, email to me by 1 March with link to article The same article cannot be nominated in successive years Self-nominate, really! Plz RT Info 👇

Section23 - American Political Science Association (APSA)

Political Communication (Section 23) The purpose of this section is to foster the study of political communications within the discipline of political

apsanet.org

Stubb in Munich: “5 countries are in top ten, whether it's justice, whether it's least corrupt, whether it's open, whether it's welfare,… environment, whether it's open media, gender equality—they are the Nordics. So I don't buy the argument that we're doing bad. I'm actually bloody happy” 🇫🇮 🇳🇴 🇸🇪 🇩🇰 🇮🇸

Trump job approval rating by news platform 🟢 Twitter/X: +9 🔴 Facebook: -7 🔴 Cable TV: -10 🔴 Podcasts/YouTube: -14 🔴 Local TV: -17 🔴 Instagram: -21 🔴 Broadcast TV: -28 🔴 TikTok: -28 🔴 Newspapers/news sites: -33 🔴 Reddit: -40 www.theargumentmag.com/p/twitter-is...

“These findings provide clear evidence that data collected on MTurk simply cannot be trusted.”

🚀 We’re hiring a Postdoc! Our group is looking for a Postdoc to join the team working on computational comm research. If you’re excited about automated content analysis, large text & social-media data, open science, this might be for you. 💡 Sounds like you or someone you know? Please share/boost!

This paper is now out in Artificial Intelligence Review Bottom line: using LLMs to "simulate humans" sits in a no-man’s-land between theory and empirics—too opaque to function as a model, too ungrounded to count as evidence. Validation remains the core challenge. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Petter Törnberg@pettertornberg.com · last yr.

Large Language Model-based social simulation has emerged as an exciting new research method. But do LLMs actually resolve the problems that have historically limited use of Agent-Based Models? What do they bring? We review the literature to find out! with Maik Laaroij arxiv.org/abs/2504.03274

🚨 New in Nature+Science!🚨 AI chatbots can shift voter attitudes on candidates & policies, often by 10+pp 🔹Exps in US Canada Poland & UK 🔹More “facts”→more persuasion (not psych tricks) 🔹Increasing persuasiveness reduces "fact" accuracy 🔹Right-leaning bots=more inaccurate

My Nieman Lab prediction for 2026: The AI bubble may pop but people’s use of AI for information won’t and it's better if we start taking this seriously.

Unser Highlight am Ende unseres Jubiläumsjahrs zum 75. Geburtstag des Instituts: 💐𝗪𝗶𝗿 𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝘂𝗺𝗴𝗲𝘇𝗼𝗴𝗲𝗻 𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗲𝗶𝘁 𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗿 𝗪𝗼𝗰𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗪𝗮𝗿𝗯𝘂𝗿𝗴𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮ß𝗲 𝟯𝟬𝗯 𝘇𝘂 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗻! 🏠🗝️ #HBI75 Wir freuen uns auf alles, was wir hier bewegen können! 🚀 leibniz-hbi.de/hbi-news/akt...

After a long time in development, {traktok} #rstats is now finally on CRAN! Whether you have access to the Research API or just want to scrape some pages, traktok has you covered jbgruber.github.io/traktok/

Collecting TikTok Data

Getting TikTok data (<https://www.tiktok.com/>) through the official and unofficial APIs—in other words, you can track TikTok.

jbgruber.github.io

CRAN Package Updates Bot@cranberriesfeed.bsky.social · 8mo ago

New CRAN package traktok with initial version 0.1.0 #rstats https://cran.r-project.org/package=traktok

📢 CCR needs a new Editor in Chief! 📢 @vanatteveldt.com is rotating out so we are inviting (self)nominations to lead our journal through its next phase. Deadline 15 January, see link for details: journal.computationalcommunication.org/announcement...

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

Super important and dear to my heart! Also a good opportunity to remind people of the super helpful systematic list of open science/access media and communication research journals by Moritz Büchi and @tobiasdienlin.com here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Open Media and Communication Research

docs.google.com

Stefanie Haustein@stefhaustein.scholcommlab.ca · 9mo ago

Over the past months (and at least 11 versions!), I was lucky to work with 11 amazing colleagues on a call to action to reform academic publishing. Not another declaration, but an appeal to our powerful friends, research funders & institutions, to Stop the Drain of Scientific Publishing. 1/n

🚨 Job Alert! Postdoc in POLITICAL TEXT ANALYSIS in the MULTIREP project You do quant text analysis? You are interested in political representation? Enjoy working in teams? Would like to live in a great city? Consider joining us in Vienna! ⏱️ Apply by 15/12/2025 wratil.eu/files/MULTIR... 1/4 🧵

Interesting and important, thanks for doing this!

Karin Boczek@kbczk.bsky.social · 9mo ago

🚨New Publication Alert 🚨"Gender diversity in the field of communication in Germany, Austria, Switzerland". 3 Studies in 1 Paper! We analyzed the scientific job market, publications, citations, and grants! Available open access: doi.org/10.1007/s116... [English]. German summary in 🧵 #commSky

Interesting insights that align well with what we found for Germany with 63% having used GenAI in May 2025, up from 44% in 2024.

IKMZ Media Change and Innovation Division@ikmzmediachange.bsky.social · 9mo ago

🧑‍💻 The share of the Swiss online population that has used generative AI has risen sharply – from 37% in 2023 to 54% in 2024 and 73% in 2025. 📈 Explore all our World Internet Project – Switzerland 2025 reports: mediachange.ch/research/wip-ch-2025 #WIP2025 #Switzerland #Schweiz #AI #internet

Join us as postdoc at the Inequality Discourse Observatory at the University of Konstanz: stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/7... We will do epic research between Linguistics and Computational Social Science at the Cluster of Politics of Inequality. Feel free to DM if you have any questions.

One postdoctoral Research Position

Deadline: November 15th, 2025

stellen.uni-konstanz.de

This week, we have @lorenzspreen.bsky.social visiting our lab. He presented his work on disinformation classification and toxicity in group discussions on Reddit. He also has a new CSS group, check it out: css-synosys.github.io

Elmo just started #Grokipedia. I took a quick look at the "racism" entry since I was wondering if it might be slightly(!!) biased. I asked #Grok, who would be a fairer judge, to compare the entry with #Wikipedia. The results speak for themselves...

My lab is looking for a Senior Scientist (= PostDoc with option of permanency)! We are looking for someone interested in doing cutting-edge computational social science + helping us with data & software engineering 🤓. See job ad for details jobs.uni-graz.at/en/jobs/7d14...

The Yearbook Quality of the Media 2025 is here! 📊 Focus topic: News deprivation and its consequences for democracy. 👉 Learn more and find additional analyses, including on the sources used by AI chatbots: www.news.uzh.ch/en/articles/... 1/3

News Deprivation on the Rise – with Consequences for Democracy

news.uzh.ch