Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!
"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."
If you haven't done yet, please try Claude Coworker just to get an idea about its capabilities.
It took 2 minutes for it to read our paper, provide perfectly running R-code to justify a case selection across 14 countries using Vdem. Produced a 10 pager underlining our case selection.
🚨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...
Big news: I started a new position as Professor for Computational Social Science (W1 tenure track) at the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main!
www.c3s-frankfurt.de/who-we-are#m...
Super excited to see that somebody finally wrote about this 🥳
If you do research about research, you really need causal thinking (just like when you do research about anything else really).
We are opening an investigation into Grok because we believe that X may have breached the DSA.
We have seen antisemitic content, non-consensual deepfakes of women, and child sexual abuse material.
In Europe, no company will make money by violating our fundamental rights.
link.europa.eu/Fh8h84
Ooooh {stringr} now includes a function for my favorite naming convention, snake_case. ☺️
Cool PhD Position in an amazing project 🚀
Just out in Nature Communications: "Examining public support for Ukraine’s defense against autocratic aggression". With F. Haggerty and P. Thurner, we show that Western citizens back Ukraine’s fight, but moral and strategic concerns, as well as internal divisions, impose restraints. rdcu.be/eYKAr
Text reads: About synthetic panels Recruiting the right participants for a study can be difficult. You may not get the exact demographics you need, and the shorter the deadline, the less sure you can be that everyone will answer on time. One possible solution can be to use synthetic panels. Synthetic panels are powered by a first party proprietary AI model developed here at Qualtrics. Our synthetic panel is trained on thousands of responses from a variety of demographic backgrounds in order to more accurately predict how certain populations would respond to a survey. Our synthetic panel is based on the United States General Population, and is only available in English. This panel comes with ready-made quotas and target breakouts in order to represent your chosen population and make it easy to launch your survey right away.
Text reads: Question-writing best practices To get the most reliable and actionable results from synthetic audiences, consider these question-writing best practices: Ask forward-looking and attitudinal questions. Synthetic panels perform best with perceptions, preferences, and intent-based questions. For example, “How likely are you to try…?” Synthetic panels are less applicable for studies on past behaviors, detailed recall, brand recall, or awareness questions. For example, “When did you last visit…?”
Text reads: Discussion The current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of the TPB when applied to health behaviours which addressed the limitations of previous reviews by including only prospective tests of behaviour, applying RE meta-analytic procedures, correcting correlations for sampling and measurement error, and hierarchically analysing the effect of behaviour type and sample and methodological moderators. Some 237 tests were identified which examined relations amongst model components. Overall the analysis indicated that the TPB could explain 19.3% of the variance in behaviour and 44.3% of the variance in intention across studies. This level of prediction of behaviour is slightly lower than that of previous meta-analytic reviews which have found between 27% (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Hagger et al., 2002) and 36% (Trafimow et al., 2002) of the variance in behaviour to be explained by intention and PBC.
Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)?
Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"
course schedule as a table. Available at the link in the post.
I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students.
I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...
COME WORK WITH US ON DIGITAL SOCIETY & DEMOCRACY IN 🇩🇰!
Full Professorship. Fantastic conditions. Highly dynamic team environment. Great colleagues. FUN!
Happy to answer questions and make introductions to the rest of the team...
A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the release of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” and the advent of the late-2000s electro-pop era, which both appeared around the same year, 2008.
Most LLM evals use API calls or offline inference, testing models in a memory-less silo. Our new Patterns paper shows this misses how LLMs actually behave in real user interfaces, where personalization and interaction history shape responses: arxiv.org/abs/2509.19364
New paper out in @science.org! We unveil the online manipulation market with the Cambridge Online Trust & Safety Index (COTSI). We show in real time the cost of purchasing fake accounts across every social platform around the world - so they can be held accountable
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
It's out!!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Big thank you to my coauthors @small-schulz.bsky.social and @lorenzspreen.bsky.social, and to all participants who discussed 20 political issues over 4 weeks in 6 subreddit, 3 experimental conditions and let us observe.
🚀 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!
Einladung zur Fishbowl-Diskussion mit dem Rektorat über die neue Forschungsakademie und "Perspektiven für Early Career Researchers an der Universität Leipzig"
An der Uni Leipzig werden nach meinen Infos in 2026 keine (!) Mittelbau-Stellen verlängert oder neu besetzt.
Das hängt natürlich auch an der Landesregierung.
Im letzten Newsletter für Mitarbeitende bekam ich eine Einladung zur Diskussion über Perspektiven für Early Career Researchers ...
We're looking for a colleague (postdoc) 📢 @politikuhh.bsky.social
3+3 years
Doing your own research while teaching 2.5 courses per semester
Research agenda with links to our team (democracy, digital politics, political competition/behaviour)
DL 🗓️ 05/01
stellen.uni-hamburg.de/jobposting/6...
In light of record submission rates and a large volume of AI-generated slop, SocArXiv recently implemented a policy requiring ORCIDs linked in the OSF profile of submitting authors, and narrowing our focus to social science subjects. Today we are taking two more steps:
/1
Wrote up a little intervention post/explanation for my class about why using LLMs for trying to learn programming (as first time learners!) is bad and detrimental datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-11...
we're done
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
PPS more updates! We now have a figure with an overview of the workflow, plus some other nifty additions.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
We're excited to announce that the website and registration for IC2S2 2026 (July 28-31) will launch in early December! The Vermont Complex Systems Institute @vcsi.bsky.social at the University of Vermont will be hosting IC2S2 in 2026: youtube.com/watch?v=p412S4GnPkc&feature=youtu.be
Billions of regressions ≠ robustness.
My new PNAS Letter shows how unjustified models can drown out justified ones — and why thoughtful model selection matters👇
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
LAST CALL! #Sociology Professorships in Copenhagen, Denmark!
We're hiring 2+ open-rank profs (Asst/Assoc/Full). Any area.
Deadline: this Saturday, Nov 15!
Join a leading European sociology department. Please repost!
jobportal.ku.dk/videnskabeli...
Letzte Woche haben wir 5 Jahre #95vsWissZeitVG gefeiert. Viel hat sich seit 2020 & besonders seit #IchBinHanna geändert, nur ein paar spezielle Quatsch-Argumente für Befristung kommen immer wieder. Damit wir sie nicht ständig von vorn widerlegen müssen, hab ich das heute in #ArbeitInDerWiss gemacht!
We have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so...
What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?
🚨We’re hiring! The Max Weber Institute in beautiful Heidelberg seeks a W3 Professor of Sociology (focus: sociological theory) who connects well with the department’s focus on comparative sociology adb.zuv.uni-heidelberg.de/info/INFO_FD... Happy to answer any questions! #Sociology #socsky
