Petter Törnberg
@pettertornberg.com
Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at University of Amsterdam Studying the intersection of AI, social media, and politics. Polarization, misinformation, radicalization, digital platforms, social complexity.
‘Polarization’ has become the master concept for diagnosing our current democratic crisis. But this is not polarization. It is the radicalization of the political right. By misdiagnosing it, we risk becoming complicit in the crisis. 🧵 Just out in Perspectives on Politics doi.org/10.1017/S153...
How do people choose what LLMs they will use? Accuracy, it turns out, is less important than you might think. Our results suggest that the choice of LLM might itself become a new line of polarization.
Christopher Barrie@cbarrie.bsky.social · 2mo ago📄 New paper: people choose AI models partly on political grounds This is joint work with @pettertornberg.com @chrisbail.bsky.social @michelleschimmel.bsky.social and led by @michaelheseltine.bsky.social
Another great piece from Jennifer Oullette at Ars Technica!
Jennifer Ouellette@jenlucpiquant.bsky.social · 3mo agoRIP social media. What comes next is messy. As social media splinters, how can we keep the new online spaces from devolving into toxic pits of despair? @pettertornberg.com of the University of Amsterdam has some ideas. arstechnica.com/science/2026...
LLMs have been widely reported as left-wing biased. The finding has shaped policy and debate — with Trump banning "Woke AI". Our new paper challenges this story. It's not that the models are biased. It's that they think the auditor is. 🧵 w/ michelleschimmel.bsky.socialarxiv.org/pdf/2604.27633
Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/so... preprint w/ Richard Rogers
Is social media dying? How much did Twitter change as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has changed Here are the key take-aways 🧵 Full paper out now in in JQD:DM!
Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization | Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media
journalqd.org
The housing crisis isn't a policy failure. It's the system working exactly as intended. 📝 New paper out in Antipode
The City as an Anti‐Growth Machine
Logan and Molotch's “urban growth machine” remains foundational in urban theory, describing how coalitions of landowners, developers, and politicians promote urban growth to raise land values. This p...
doi.org
Like Grok and Attie, more and more social media platforms now integrate AI directly in online conversations. But how do these AI bots actually impact political discourse? We ran a series of experiments to find out. (Spoiler: the news are not altogether great.) osf.io/preprints/so...
OSF
osf.io
US social media is getting smaller, angrier, and more Republican. @pettertornberg.com analyses American National Election Studies between 2020 - 2024 and shows the evolution of a smaller, more polarised and less diverse public sphere @lseimpactblog.bsky.social
US social media is getting smaller, angrier, and more Republican - LSE Impact
Petter Törnberg shows how social media use in the USA has changed in the period 2020 – 2024 creating a smaller more polarised and less diverse public sphere.
blogs.lse.ac.uk
💥New | US social media is getting smaller, angrier, and more Republican ✍️ @pettertornberg.com #SocialMedia #AcademicSky #Polarization
US social media is getting smaller, angrier, and more Republican - LSE Impact
Petter Törnberg shows how social media use in the USA has changed in the period 2020 – 2024 creating a smaller more polarised and less diverse public sphere.
blogs.lse.ac.uk
AI systems are now making decisions about you — who gets hired, whose content gets removed, whose voice gets heard. My new paper finds something concerning: LLMs infer your ethnic identity from subtle textual cues… … and use it to discriminate against you. 🧵 1/
Large Language Models Reproduce Racial Stereotypes When Used for Text Annotation
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated text annotation in tasks ranging from academic research to content moderation and hiring. Across 19 LLMs and two experiments totaling m...
arxiv.org
Come be my colleague! Postdoc position at the University of Amsterdam: Open-source AI for Social Sciences & Humanities. Work on open LLM infrastructure, reproducible research tools, and ethical AI for SSH. 🗓 Tight deadline: Apply by April 3 werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...
Vacancy — Postdoctoral Researcher in Open AI research for social sciences and humanities
<p>The Humane AI research priority area of the University of Amsterdam is looking for a new PostDoc to amend our existing team (<a href="https://humane-ai.nl/">https://humane-ai.nl/</a>). AI is everywhere. Chatbots, translation tools, shopping assistants, hyper-personalised services - as Large Language Models become widely accessible, they're reshaping how we live, work, play and connect. This rapid shift sparks big questions: Whose norms and values shape this AI-driven society—and who gets left behind? What are the rules that govern the development and deployment of Generative AI different sectors of society, and towards what kind of society will they steer us? Is the risked-based approach to AI. </p>
werkenbij.uva.nl
A recent debate on the left pits “abundance” vs “anti-monopoly” Is the problem that we've made it too hard to build? Or that extractive corporations dominate the economy? My new paper argues: both reflect a deeper shift. We've entered an economy oriented toward scarcity—the Anti-Growth Machine.
The City as an Anti‐Growth Machine
Logan and Molotch's “urban growth machine” remains foundational in urban theory, describing how coalitions of landowners, developers, and politicians promote urban growth to raise land values. This p...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The bots populating Moltbook apparently all come to sound like a familiar kind of internet denizen with delusions of philosophical grandeur. Manifestos and declarations all over the place.
Eugene Lim@tukohbin.bsky.social · 6mo agoSomebody created an Reddit clone exclusively populated by personal digital agents and let them interact with each other. It’s bonkers, fascinating and terrifying in equal measure. www.forbes.com/sites/amirhu...
📢 We’re hiring @vuamsterdam.bsky.social PhD position in my ERC project: Welfare State Transformation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Interested in how AI is reshaping labor markets, social protection, and the politics of redistribution? Apply here: lnkd.in/eCcAXsaS Please share widely!
The impact of AI is not just a matter of what AI can do. It is shaped by the economy in which AI is forged. Today, AI is emerging inside technofeudalism — built on lock-in, dependency, and rent extortion. Our new preprint explores what this means for the coming AI society. osf.io/preprints/so...
🚨 We are entering the AI society. After two decades of platforms reshaping markets, communication, and governance, a new shift is underway: AI is transforming society. What should we expect from the 'AI society'? 🧵 📄 Our new paper faces this question: osf.io/preprints/so...
📕 Review of “Seeing like a Platform” “What makes this book essential reading is its recognition that digital technology’s democratic potential and authoritarian dangers are not separate phenomena but two faces of the same coin.” albertoblumenscheincruz.substack.com/p/review-see...
Review: “Seeing Like a Platform”
Digital Modernity’s New Forms of Power -- By Petter Törnberg and Justus Uitermark -- Routledge, 2025
albertoblumenscheincruz.substack.com
I’m about a quarter of the way through this open access* book and it’s SO GOOD, so far at least lol, I really want to talk about it with someone * www.taylorfrancis.com/reader/downl...
e-Reader | Taylor & Francis Group eBooks, Reference Works and Collections
taylorfrancis.com
Petter Törnberg@pettertornberg.com · 8mo ago📘 Book launch: Seeing Like a Platform (with Justus Uitermark) 🗓 10 Dec | Amsterdam A conversation on platforms, politics, power, and digital modernity - followed by drinks. Hope to see you there! 👉 Details & RSVP: globaldigitalcultures.uva.nl/content/even...
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
📘 Book launch: Seeing Like a Platform (with Justus Uitermark) 🗓 10 Dec | Amsterdam A conversation on platforms, politics, power, and digital modernity - followed by drinks. Hope to see you there! 👉 Details & RSVP: globaldigitalcultures.uva.nl/content/even...
Book Launch | Seeing Like a Platform (Justus Uitermark & Petter Törnberg) - Global Digital Cultures
On Wednesday 10 december (18:00-19:30), Petter Törnberg (Assistant Professor, Institute for Language, Logic and Computation, UvA) and Justus Uitermark (Professor of Urban Geography, Faculty of Social ...
globaldigitalcultures.uva.nl
Featured article by Anton Törnberg and @pettertornberg.com: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
The aesthetics of climate misinformation: computational multimodal framing analysis with BERTopic and CLIP
Climate misinformation today is increasingly conveyed through multimodal content, where images and text interact to shape meaning, emotional resonance, and enhance credibility. Yet, research on cli...
tandfonline.com
Pretty wild: I just learned that, in terms of Altmetric, this paper became the most impactful Political Science article of the past five years, and the 4th most impactful EVER. 😳 Altmetric is... well, Altmetric. But still, kind of surreal.
Petter Törnberg@pettertornberg.com · 2y agoMisinformation isn't random - it's strategic. 🧵 In the first cross-national comparative study, we examine 32M tweets from politicians. We find that misinformation is not a general condition: it is driven by populist radical right parties. with @julianachueri.bsky.social doi.org/10.1177/1940...
.@pettertornberg.com's keynote in Oxford was fantastic. What comes after the traditional model of social media ends? 1) Algorithmic broadcasting platforms (everything turning into TikTok and Instagram reels) 2) Private and semi-private spheres (like group chats) 3) Chatbots and LLMs as new media
LLMs are now widely used in social science as stand-ins for humans—assuming they can produce realistic, human-like text But... can they? We don’t actually know. In our new study, we develop a Computational Turing Test. And our findings are striking: LLMs may be far less human-like than we think.🧵
Computational Turing Test Reveals Systematic Differences Between Human and AI Language
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in the social sciences to simulate human behavior, based on the assumption that they can generate realistic, human-like text. Yet this assumption rem...
arxiv.org
Most people study what misinformation says. We decided to study how it looks. Using novel multi-modal AI methods, we study 17,848 posts by top climate denial accounts - and uncovered a new front in the misinformation war. Here's what it means 🧵 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Is social media dying? How much has Twitter changed as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has transformed. Here are the key take-aways 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417
@jerusalem.bsky.social Will The Argument bring back 'Good on Paper' in some form? Please do, its loss has left a huge hole in my podcast app! And there are a lot of persuasive papers out there!
🚨 New #SingularityFM 🎙 What do Facebook, Google & TikTok really see when they look at us — and what do they miss? My latest interview with @pettertornberg.com explores algorithmic tyranny, digital modernity & the future of power. 👉 snglrty.co/4mDn1Gb
Petter Törnberg: Algorithmic Tyranny & Digital Modernity
See this interview to discover Petter Törnberg’s insights on algorithmic tyranny, digital modernity, and how platforms reshape power.
snglrty.co
Not just one but two podcasts featuring @pettertornberg.com who wrote some of the most interesting papers in recent years. 1: @seanmcarroll.bsky.social, below 2: Singularity Weblog: Algorithmic Tyranny, the Rise of Digital Modernity and Seeing Like a Platform www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJrV...
Petter Törnberg on Algorithmic Tyranny, the Rise of Digital Modernity and Seeing Like a Platform
YouTube video by Singularity Weblog
youtube.com
Sean Carroll@seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 10mo agoMindscape 330 | Petter Törnberg @pettertornberg.com on the Dynamics of (Mis)Information. #MindscapePodcast www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025...
