📄 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

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 ↓

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 ↓

You can just research things. New from @jatucker.bsky.social & me at @brookings: Coding agents like Claude Code and Codex will likely accelerate research AND undermine institutional structures we built to support it.

You can just research things. New from @jatucker.bsky.social & me at @brookings: Coding agents like Claude Code and Codex will likely accelerate research AND undermine institutional structures we built to support it.

AI personas do not 'contain multitudes,' unlike actual human survey respondents who contradict themselves across a wide array of issues. Cool work from my colleague @cbarrie.bsky.social, excited to see this out in the world!

Christopher Barrie@cbarrie.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🧵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...

CORRECTION, Claude Code launched in February 2025, suggesting a roughly 13% increase above expectations.

Sol Messing@solmg.bsky.social · 5mo ago

[ #GenAI-post warning] Almost every researcher I know is using Claude Code, and talking about the huge productivity gains. Are we actually producing more scientific papers yet? Since its release in May 2025, arXiv submissions are indeed *12%* above what we'd expect. Details in thread:

[ #GenAI-post warning] Almost every researcher I know is using Claude Code, and talking about the huge productivity gains. Are we actually producing more scientific papers yet? Since its release in May 2025, arXiv submissions are indeed *12%* above what we'd expect. Details in thread:

🌐 📲 With international collaborators, the Observatory’s director @andreucasas.bsky.social revisited recent “TikTok censorship” claims after the TikTok USDS takeover ➡️ Detailed information about the analysis available: goodauthority.org/news/was-the... 🧵[1/5]

Was there censorship on TikTok after the U.S. takeover?

A TikTok outage more likely explains recent anomalies – there’s no evidence of larger platform changes so far.

goodauthority.org

Last week the story was that TikTok censored anti-Trump/ICE/Pretti videos after the U.S. ownership change. We investigated with a large set of US TikTok data and found some interesting results, short thread...

🚨Job alert 🚨 I have an opening for a postdoc in my team at @ipz.bsky.social in the area of digital democracy starting Sep 1, 2026. If you are working on the impact of the digital transformation on politics, please apply by 🗓️ Mar 1, 2026. 📤 Please share widely! www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...

Offene Stellen / Open Positions

ipz.uzh.ch

Is Joe Rogan really just a voice of the right? Our new @csmapnyu.org piece for @goodauth.bsky.social shows he’s just as much a space for the left and the center, too. A look inside today’s surprisingly complicated podcast information ecosystem. 🎙️ goodauthority.org/news/podcast...

Next up on my reading list. …I am already regretting this choice.

How common are “survey professionals” - people who take dozens of online surveys for pay - across online panels, and do they harm data quality? Our paper, FirstView at @politicalanalysis.bsky.social, tackles this question using browsing data from three U.S. samples (Facebook, YouGov, and Lucid):

TODAY Aug 28 - "Politics in 60 Seconds: Short-Form Video, TikTok, and Political Communication" at #APSA2025 - 2 PM, VCC West Ballroom B Chair: @eunjikim.bsky.social. Discussant: @mollyeroberts.bsky.social

Spoiler alert: the answer is “no”

Kevin Collins@kwcollins.bsky.social · 11mo ago

More elected officials need to read this paper: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Maybe let’s not dismantle the tenure system while admin and athletic budgets balloon

AAUP@aaup.org · 11mo ago

AAUP President Todd Wolfson denounces planned academic cuts at the University of Oregon, laying out several concerns. @uauoregon.bsky.social 🧵

New from me about Grok's very bad week, with insight from @solmg.bsky.social. www.engadget.com/ai/how-exact...

How exactly did Grok go full 'MechaHitler?'

After Grok took a hard turn toward antisemitic earlier this week, many are probably left wondering how something like that could even happen.

engadget.com

🧵 NEW PAPER - "Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages" is live at SMR. We combine NLP w pairwise LLM evals to track ideas across media ecosystems and languages. We also figured out a way to eval unsupervised probs on widely understood supervised performance metrics.

I am thrilled to share a new article in Sociological Methods & Research, “Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages”. My co-first author Sol Messing and our collaborators developed a new approach to measuring “narrative similarity” between texts: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages - Hannah Waight, Solomon Messing, Anton Shirikov, Margaret E. Roberts, Jonathan Nagler, Jason Greenfield, Megan A. Brown, Kevin Aslett, Joshua A. Tuck...

How can one understand the spread of ideas across text data? This is a key measurement problem in sociological inquiry, from the study of how interest groups sh...

journals.sagepub.com

Important corrective paper and solid work from @cbarrie.bsky.social: don't mistake game simulations as evidence of intelligence if the game is in the training data.

Christopher Barrie@cbarrie.bsky.social · last yr.

🤖💡 Are LLMs really developing social behaviors—or just reproducing familiar patterns from training? In our new paper, @pettertornberg.com and I take a closer look at recent claims of emergent conventions in AI and offer a different perspective... 🧵

1/ I am excited to share my new article with Adam Goldstein in the American Journal of Sociology. We harmonized a set of historical public opinion data from 1966-2013 to investigate the shifting bases of inequality perceptions in the United States. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Join us as a research engineer @ CSMAP. 1. Collaborate on deploying and fine-tuning LLMs/LMs - build your AI chops 2. Big compute resources and data infra already in place 3. Access to largest social data collections on earth 4. Smart & teched up co-workers who know their isht

Joshua Tucker@jatucker.bsky.social · last yr.

💡 Ever wondered how social media and digital technology shapes our democracy? Join our team @CSMaP_NYU as a Research Engingeer and help us build the tools that power cutting-edge research on the digital public sphere. 🚀 Apply now! apply.interfolio.com/165833

💡 Ever wondered how social media and digital technology shapes our democracy? Join our team @CSMaP_NYU as a Research Engingeer and help us build the tools that power cutting-edge research on the digital public sphere. 🚀 Apply now! apply.interfolio.com/165833

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics@csmapnyu.org · last yr.

🚨 Job Alert! 🚨 Come join our team studying the impact of digital media on democracy! We're hiring a Technical Lead - Research Engineering to help us build and maintain the robust data infrastructure and custom tools that power our research. More info + apply: apply.interfolio.com/165833

🚨 NEW job posting for research engineer/TL @ CSMAP. 1. Collaborate on deploying and fine-tuning LLMs/LMs - build your AI chops 2. Big compute resources and data infra already in place 3. Access to largest social data collections on earth 4. Smart & teched up co-workers who know their isht

NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics@csmapnyu.org · last yr.

🚨 Job Alert! 🚨 Come join our team studying the impact of digital media on democracy! We're hiring a Technical Lead - Research Engineering to help us build and maintain the robust data infrastructure and custom tools that power our research. More info + apply: apply.interfolio.com/165833

🚨 Fantastic data + methods work in PNAS on “scripted propaganda,” government-authored phrases/talking points that appear in commercial newspapers. They show it’s been on the rise in recent decades & particularly during COVID — huge congrats on this incredibly heavy lift

Hannah Waight@hwaight.bsky.social · last yr.

How can researchers identify covert state propaganda campaigns in China? My co-authors Yin Yuan, Molly Roberts, Brandon Stewart @bstewart.bsky.social and myself are excited to share our new article in PNAS (@PNAS): doi.org/10.1073/pnas... Thread below.

Dodge-targeted agencies are the ones that create knowledge, suggesting this is about more than just political retribution

Patrick Wu@patrickwu.bsky.social · last yr.

@adambonica.bsky.social showed ideology predicts which agencies experience DOGE layoffs. But what other factors could be driving this? Using a generative LLM-derived measure, I find agencies perceived as knowledge institutions are more likely to experience layoffs, even controlling for ideology. 🧵

Regardless of whether TikTok will be sold to a non-Chinese owner, @zevesanderson.com, @solmg.bsky.social, and Scott Babwah Brennen argue that researchers need access to independent data to understand the platform’s democratic effects in the U.S. and abroad.