Max Falkenberg

Assistant Professor (f/m/d) Assistant Professor (f/m/d)

🚨 Come join @ceu-dnds.bsky.social as an 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗿! 🚨

We are looking for a young and coming researcher in 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 and 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲.

If that sounds like you (or someone you know), check out the call & apply (or share the link):

careers.ceu.edu/job/Vienna-A...

Thanks Richard! Yes, would be very nice to catch up 😊

I am very happy to share that as of June 2026, I will be joining the Informatics department @ KCL as an AI+ Senior Research Fellow (Senior Lecturer / Associate Professor).

I am very grateful to everyone who has supported me on the way and excited to be continuing my research at King's 🎉

Another Cloudflare outage. On Friday at business time for the UK and many other parts of the world. This was a scheduled thing that seems to have failed. There is something deliberate in the timings of these 'maintenance gone wrong events'. The rest of the world suffers whilst the US sleeps.

🔈 *Call for Participation* 🔈

Italian Conference on Computational Social Science – CS2Italy
May 19-21, 2026 in Torino, Italy

Premier venue for Computational Social Science in Italy: #sociology #polisci #economics #netsci #complexsystems ++

Submit your abstract by Jan 15: cs2italy.org

plz reshare

Just occurred that the BBC is the most literal example of Conquest's third law in that it is actually run by a cabal of its enemies.

Firing a BBC director for *leftist* bias is like punishing a pig for taking a bath.

MP wants Musk's Grok chatbot shut down over claim he enabled grooming gangs SNP MP Pete Wishart says he is seeking legal advice over the

Spoke to the BBC about how Grok is facilitating the abuse of politicians on X.

Abusive messaging on X is not new (we studied it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41... ), but the enhanced visibility of Grok posts will increase engagement with this content.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I can understand this. The one thing I would say is that I have learnt a lot about my own work in the process of writing grants. Even when they get rejected there are sometimes useful takeaways

It is hard to overstate the number of academic hours which are wasted on fruitless funding applications 👇

If you're in need of positive and rather wholesome news, there's a high school teacher named Bryan who took a ton of freely licensed celebrity headshots at the New York Film Festival last month for Wikipedia, and I truly can't believe how drastic the upgrade is for some articles (thread)

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory New research coordinated by the EBU and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants routinely distort or misrepresent public service journalism.

The EBU just published a new report on how well consumer AI chatbots function as gateways to news by public service media – an interesting piece, but with some big problems in my view that make me question its usefulness.

buff.ly/X9ident

Starting Grants 2026 applications: Facts and figures The ERC Starting Grants 2026 call closed for applications on 14 October 2025. These are the preliminary data on submitted proposals:

Competition for ERC Starting Grants up 38% in two years.

No increase in the number of grants awarded and no increase in grant value.

Result: more academic hours wasted on fruitless, bureaucratic grant applications instead of research

erc.europa.eu/news-events/...

Last week we had our second “Inverse Complexity Lab Retreat” at wonderful Traunkirchen!

skewed.de/lab/group.ht...

Nothing like eldritch C++ incantations by the sunny lakeside! 🏖️

This is of course absolutely true

General reminder:
Good internet regulation is not easy if you're a small island with little real influence.

Multiscale patterns of migration flows in Austria: regionalization, administrative barriers, and urban-rural divides Migration is central in various societal problems related to socioeconomic development. While much of the existing research has focused on international migration, migration patterns within a single c...

New preprint: “Multiscale patterns of migration flows in Austria: regionalization, administrative barriers, and urban-rural divides”, with @thomrobiglio.bsky.social, Martina Contisciani, @martonkarsai.bsky.social, arxiv.org/abs/2507.11503

🧵 New preprint!

Do online mental health communities form patterns of association that mirror diagnostic systems or challenge them?

“Network Analysis of Reddit Mental Health Communities: Mapping the Interconnectedness of Psychopathology”

👉 osf.io/7dfcw_v1

@ceu-dnds.bsky.social

Short thread: 1/N

25 new scholarships for US researchers Fonds Zukunft Österreich (FZÖ) is providing €10 million in funding for an academy program to bring postdocs from the USA to Austria ++ Faßmann: “The right signal in these turbulent times”

Are you from the US and would like to work as a postdoc in Austria, maybe in our lab? 25 new fellowships will be available in July from the @oeaw.bsky.social: www.oeaw.ac.at/en/news/25-n...

If you are interested; get in touch!

Testing LLMs in the Prisoner’s Dilemma to reveal their moral biases. LLMs can defect often but become more forgiving and less retaliatory than humans when opponents are mostly cooperative. Nicolò Fontana at #ICWSM. w @frapierri.bsky.social
Paper: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC...

Looking forward to chatting soon!

The systemic impact of deplatforming on social media YouTube video by Cambridge Disinformation Summit

A similar talk was recorded here:
youtu.be/k5IA96g0U5s?...

Papers:
academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

osf.io/preprints/os...

Kicking off #ICWSM with the DETOX workshop and @maxfalken.bsky.social’s keynote on why the Web is not a set of siloed platforms and why we should not study it as such. Shows why deplatforming doesn’t work exactly as we expect and why large online platforms are plagued by affective polarization

Here's another paper by Shalizi showing how inferring *latent* homophily allows for disentangling from contagion. Bizarre how this gets overlooked, since it's obvious that homophily leaves huge traces in the network structure, while contagion changes nothing.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The systemic impact of deplatforming on social media YouTube video by Cambridge Disinformation Summit

The systemic impact of deplatforming on social media, featuring @maxfalken.bsky.social.

From the Cambridge Disinformation Summit

youtu.be/k5IA96g0U5s

No surprise that bank lending to the fossil fuel sector keeps rising 👇

Nadia Ameli and I recently wrote about why current banking regulations are insufficient and ineffective at limiting continued funding to the FF sector - call ordinated action is needed: www.thebanker.com/content/e812...

Carbon Capture ‘Not Going to Happen,’ Top Fossil Fuel Advocate Predicts In audio obtained by DeSmog, Bjorn Lomborg told a Fraser Institute event in Vancouver that the technology is way too expensive to be viable.

Extremely fun little secret recording in @desmog.com by @geoffdembicki.bsky.social here - Lomborg just openly saying to the Fraser Institute that CCS wont' work but that it can be used to soak up subsidies

www.desmog.com/2025/06/05/c...

@maxfalken.bsky.social on the importance of nuence when studying polarization at the social network session at #netsci2025

Celebrating my first post on Bluesky with a picture of @abovet.bsky.social giving his invited talk at UNCSS today. The Satellite in running now at NetSci 2025. Feel free to join even for the last round of talks.
Together with: @maxfalken.bsky.social & Alessandro Galeazzi

Looking forward to hosting this tomorrow! Lots of great talks!
👇