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!
New post: Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? (No. No it can't. Come on, now.)
davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...
🧵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...
New Video Analysis Reveals Flawed and Fatal Decisions in Pretti Shooting www.nytimes.com/video/us/100...
Everybody should watch this and see this woman, who has a baby in her arms and is thrust into basically a standoff, develop courage in real time.
Using facts to provide clarity. This is what good journalism is all about. “Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis www.nytimes.com/video/us/100...
Remember when “authentic” was the word of the year in 2023? That was also the first full year generative AI became a household term, and the last year authenticity still meant “human,” not “well-prompted.”
#PostAuthentic #DigitalShift
After 3 years and 5,322 emails (and counting) our Encyclopedia of Political Communication is finally out at @elgarpublishing.bsky.social
📚 Three volumes
⭐ 431 entries
🎓 581 wonderful authors from across the world
A very short 🧵
IC2S2 2026 registration is open!
Explore the 2026 conference here ➡️ ic2s2-2026.org
✔️ Submissions open December 15th
✔️ Keynotes will be announced between now and February
✔️ Full program of selected talks and tutorials will be available in late April
Abstract: Recent political communication scholarship finds that groups and identities play a central role in the crises faced by political and media systems globally, particularly in democracies. Yet an individualist orientation in the literature has resulted in key theoretical and conceptual limitations, preventing a broader group-centric theoretical framework from emerging. We synthesize disparate bodies of theory on groups, politics, and communication to offer three basic propositions underlying a group theory of political communication. First, it is the group—not the individual—that is the fundamental organizing unit of social and political life. Second, groups are constituted through communication, which is central to how they define their politics. Third, groups and politics are reciprocally influencing forces through political communication, oriented around power. We offer a framework for studying the role of groups in political communication at the micro, meso, and macro levels, providing a concrete agenda for the study of groups in political communication.
🚨New pub alert!🚨 Now available open-access in @journal-of-comm.bsky.social, we (w/ @dkreiss.bsky.social, @danlane.bsky.social, & @shannimcg.bsky.social) critique political communication's "Identity Turn" and offer instead a foundation for studying #polcomm from a *group* perspective. 🧵
🔍 Insightful piece debunking some of the "mythology” behind Big Data:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
#commsky #polsky #bigdata
Our latest paper on how #metoo got entangled in partisan discourse, explained in a two-minute AI generated video!
Timely research on news creators and their influence across the globe!
Open Research (OpenAI-linked research outfit) just put out a new report on using LLMs for public opinion polling that suggests they may improve response rates substantially: www.openresearchlab.org/findings/ai-...
”It’s a lot easier to blame food dyes, vaccines, or lack of exercise for every health issue your family faces… It makes you think if you eliminate or do that one thing, or take a supplement instead, it will all be fine. It gives you control — a false sense of control.”
🚨New publication in Social Media + Society🚨
Candidates Be Posting: Multi-Platform Strategies and Partisan Preferences in the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections
And it's open access!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
🚨New Pub🚨 Media-bashing became an identity. When Trump attacked the news media on social media, how did political influencers on the left and right amplify his rhetoric? Check out our new article (w/ @yinizhang.bsky.social): www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Z8NQW...
📣Call for Papers:
CCR Special Issue on Computational Approaches to Researching Short Videos
co-edited by Jing Zeng, @lrossi.bsky.social, and @rupertkiddle.com
Abstract deadline: 25-Jul-2025
See announcement for more information -
journal.computationalcommunication.org/announcement...
💡 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
Reading Careless People makes me appreciative of @bsky.app and the AT Protocol.
The open social web feels like this bright light in a sea of mercurial CEOs.
Seeing teams like @graze.social and @stream.place build on it, solidifies this belief for me.
Grateful to be here 💕
Couldn’t agree more! @shannimcg.bsky.social's amazing talk at UB last Friday and this clip really helped clarify the current presidential-press relationship for me.
This paper is in collaboration with @jiyoun-suk.bsky.social, @dongdongyang, @zhiyingyue, @wangrui.bsky.social, @xinxiadong, @zijianan,
@kennyjoseph.bsky.social. Check out the full paper here: journalqd.org/article/view.... We’d love to hear your feedback!
Thus, if we want to tackle today’s information challenges, we must study how news media and social media together drive information flows across the broader social media system.
While most cross-platform research focuses on differences between platforms, we highlight something critical: news media serves as the connective tissue across social media platforms.
Our key takeaway: users’ linking practices shape how information flows across platforms; news outlets and social media sites act as key information pathways in the system.
After news sites, social media platforms were the next most linked. YouTube stood out across different types of platforms, followed by Twitter, which was especially prominent on forums.
So, what did we find? News media sites dominated the link-sharing landscape (68.5% of all links for immigration and 48.4% for sexual violence), especially center-left (e.g., nytimes.com, cnn.com) and right-wing (e.g., breitbart.com, foxnews.com) outlets.
Using two massive datasets on #MeToo and immigration, we analyzed linking patterns in 60+ million posts across 186 social network sites and forums.
Specifically, we focus on hyperlinks—traces of cross-platform and cross-media sharing that not only enable information diffusion but also reveal key connectors across the social media system.
🚨 New paper out in @journalqd.bsky.social! 🚨
How do different social media platforms connect to each other? In our latest study, we propose that social media can be understood as a system made up of differentiated yet interconnected platforms, shaped by how users share information. #socialmedia🧵
