Sacha Altay

The sky is not falling; high-quality platforms (Prolific, Verasight, CR Connect) have low rates of apparent bots. osf.io/preprints/ps... But also not zero; vigilance is very much needed!

Despite all the chatter, social media bans for teens lack evidence! New paper out in Nature Health.

(1) Harms from social media are real & serious.

(2) We need regulatory action but bans are not nuanced, do not empower youth, & are not supported by evidence.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Offene Stellen / Open Positions

🚨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...

School is Way Worse For Kids Than Social Media On building a world that doesn’t make children want to die

A vast array of data suggests that school, not social media, is the biggest modern threat to the mental health of children. If you were recently a child, that won’t be a surprise. If not: enjoy the post :)
open.substack.com/pub/unpublis...

Another Killing on ICE The right wing propaganda machine can’t spin the killing of Alex Pretti

Yesterday, I awoke to news of another ICE killing in MN. On Bluesky, the conversation was deeply critical of ICE. But I wanted to see how things were going on X. Surprisingly, the attempts there to blame the victim weren't getting as much traction as I suspected. So I wrote a thing.

Don’t Panic (Yet): Assessing the Evidence and Discourse Around Generative AI and Elections

It seems like a good moment to re-share knightcolumbia.org/content/dont...

AI Sessions #8: Misinformation, Social Media, and Deepfakes (with Sacha Altay) YouTube video by Conspicuous Cognition

Henry Shevlin and I discuss "misinformation", propaganda, mass gullibility, advertising, social media, and deepfakes with the great Sacha Altay (@sachaltay.bsky.social). www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l5T...

If you tell an AI to convince someone of a true vs. false claim, does truth win? In our *new* working paper, we find...

‘LLMs can effectively convince people to believe conspiracies’

But telling the AI not to lie might help.

Details in thread

Sacha Altay | Substack Postdoc working on misinformation, misperceptions, social media & trust.

I spend more and more time on Substack. I find it surprisingly good and stimulating. You can find me here: substack.com/@sachaaltay

Evidence for link between digital technology use and teenage mental health problems is weak, our large study suggests The research found little evidence that time spent on social media or frequent gaming causes mental health problems in early-to-mid adolescence.

"If the evidence is so weak, why is the concern so strong?"

Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression

“Our findings tell us that young people’s choices around social media and gaming may be shaped by how they’re feeling but not necessarily the other way around,” said Prof Neil Humphrey, a co-author [of a Manchester University study that followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years].

The golden age of vaccine development - Works in Progress Magazine The first vaccine was a lucky accident. Now we can design new vaccines in weeks, atom by atom.

NEW article by me!

We can now visualize pathogens down to atoms; design vaccines in weeks; manufacture them in microbial factories; engineer them more precise than ever before.

We're living through a golden age of vaccine development, but only if we continue to invest in them.

Don’t Panic (Yet): Assessing the Evidence and Discourse Around Generative AI and Elections Why claims about the impact of generative AI on elections have been overblown

Instead of Christmas albums, my favourite piece of writing:

“Don’t panic (yet): Assessing the evidence and discourse around generative AI and elections” co-written with @sachaltay.bsky.social on why arguments we see around AI’s impact on elections and democracy are problematic.

buff.ly/Zy7gCnL

📣📣📣 GREAT, time-sensitive opportunity for senior/mid-career scholars to join us in Madrid at UC3M´s social sciences department (UC3M-ATRAE Program 2026) on an attractive pay+research funds package 📣📣📣

This does NOT happen everyday.

THREAD below if this is of interest 1/n

We are seeking a Fellow to lead cutting-edge research on short-form video content and its societal implications. Bridging the gap between computer vision, causal inference, and computational social science, the Fellow will focus on the large-scale analysis of TikTok data (using an existing, massive dataset). The position involves developing novel multimodal methods to understand how short-form algorithmic content shapes public opinion, political polarization, and online culture. This is a unique opportunity to work at the forefront of the field, combining rigorous social science research designs with state-of-the-art computational techniques.

The Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow to work with an interdisciplinary team (me, @bstewart.bsky.social, and @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social).

Link: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

Please apply by THIS SUNDAY, Dec. 14!

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no” (Betteridge's law).

Should we worry about gen AI persuasion shaping elections?

I think “no” holds here.

See knightcolumbia.org/content/dont... for a good summary of why we shouldn’t be too concerned

🚨 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

Preparing this talk gave me an opportunity to reflect on what lessons I've learned from psychology's replication crisis and credibility revolution, and what advice I would have for other fields. We've come a long way!
Video: youtu.be/_vb1CNwC3CM?...
Slides : osf.io/cuj62/files/...

The man who inspired Australia's teen social media ban literally did this:

No control group 👀

Experimental participants to us

Debunking “When Prophecy Fails” In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased....

Ok, just wow. If the content of this article is right, this is depressing. We're slowly reaching the point where ~100% of what I was taught in Social Psych was either innocently wrong or plainly frauded

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

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?

Happy to share our new preprint “Content-based detection of misinformation expands its scope across politicians and platforms.” We analyzed misinformation at the text level in posts by German politicians on Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok.
osf.io/preprints/so... 🧵1/8

See also Peterson and Iyengar onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... - "our findings support the motivated reasoning interpretation of misinformation; partisans seek out information with congenial slant and sincerely adopt inaccurate beliefs that cast their party in a favorable light."

What if people appreciate having an abundance of content and communication, more than they feel overloaded by it?

@annisch.bsky.social et al decided to have a look. Their results? "We found that appreciation for abundance was about twice as common as overload".

Paper: journalqd.org/article/view...

NEW: In a recent Oxford-led study by @mmosleh.bsky.social, researchers analysed millions of social media posts containing links to news stories, across seven different social platforms.

Read the full research paper here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The (In)Effectiveness of Psychological Targeting: A Meta‐Analytic Review The use of psychological targeting—employing machine learning to predict consumer personality from digital footprints and subsequently tailoring persuasive messages—has emerged as a controversial yet...

"only about 5% of the variance in personality can be
predicted from digital footprints, and personality‐tailored messages show negligible effects on behavior... When design and evaluation flaws are controlled, the combined end‐to‐end effectiveness of psychological targeting approaches zero."

🤖 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓 𝐃𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐄𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐀𝐈𝐠𝐧 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫 🇳🇱

Less than one week before the Dutch elections, @meinungsfuehrer.bsky.social & I looked at over 20k posts to reveal patterns in the usage of AI-generated visuals across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. #tk2025

🧵Thread

New hobby:

Remaking article abstracts as movie trailers to expose hype and fearmongering.