Sander van der Linden

What are the alternatives to #socialmedia bans for children? 📱

Yesterday, @houseofcommons.parliament.uk rejected a ban for under-16s. Many countries are considering bans or other ways to protect children online.

@profsanderlinden.bsky.social argues there are more nuanced solutions 👇

How the 'red v blue school wars' exposed the social media gap between children and parents Parents were frightened by social posts that seemed to encourage violence at schools. But it was more complicated than it looked

Some comments in BBC today on how The Red vs Blue School Wars on social media is an interesting example of how social media algorithms exploit Us vs Them psychology to gain traction and incite violence www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The reason why he’s speaking is because Utah introduced groundbreaking legislation to hold social media companies accountable.

Folks the conference can’t just be an echo chamber we need to hear from people on the other side who have an interest in countering disinformation on social media. Change isn’t going to enact itself we need people from within driving that change. if they have ideas, we should hear them out.

We are pleased to announce that Utah Governor Spencer J. Cox will participate in a virtual keynote discussion at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit on how social media is weakening trust and undermining our ability to solve problems together in the public square.

governor.utah.gov

Anthropic boss rejects Pentagon demand to drop AI safeguards Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth previously threatened to remove the firm from the department's supply chain.

Anthropic CEO rejects Pentagon demands to drop AI safeguards.

“We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk” www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

100%

And we need regulation to enforce safety-by-design feeds for kids for sure I think! We need strong enforcement of appropriate regulation but I'm just not sure if bans are the answer - there's very little evidence of their efficacy and they take away all autonomy maybe better used a temp lever.

Social media bans for teens lack evidence Nature Health - Online harms are an urgent societal challenge, but governments should prepare teenagers to responsibly use digital technology.

Yes here ungated rdcu.be/e5Eft

Yes indeed both the research we have says they don’t have the desired effect but also we don’t have very much high quality research on it. I’d love to see more large scale population trials in schools.

Interesting points!

Exactly

(3) We can't hide from technology, but instead of restricting kids' autonomy, we need to make the companies pay by forcing safe feeds and building digital resilience.

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...

AI is turning research into a scientific monoculture - Communications Psychology The rush to study generative AI is producing a feedback loop of topical and methodological convergence, flattening scientific imagination and crowding out the pluralism needed to keep research adaptiv...

This paper argues that the rush to study gen AI has led researchers to focus on the same topics and rely on the same methods. As a result, creativity is limited and the diversity of ideas needed to keep research flexible, strong, and innovative is being pushed aside.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

We have a new paper out on how the AI boom is creating a scientific monoculture! Everything AI.

"The task for social science is to ensure that, in navigating this moment, we do not become artificial ourselves."

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

Led by the brilliant @cecilietraberg.bsky.social

New article in Nature describes a field experiment on X which shows that assigning users to an algorithmic feed pushes conservative content and demotes mainstream news.

Sounds obvious but important in light of prior claims algorithms don't cause attitudinal changes.

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

Thanks so much for the careful translation and referencing!

Very cool to receive the Japanese edition of the Psychology of Misinformation!

People form beliefs not only as individual agents, but as members of social groups.

Children (4-6 years old) who belonged to a group were more convinced by evidence that supported their ingroup’s belief (and were less convinced by evidence that opposed their ingroup): www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Important message today from Hillary Clinton at the World Forum on Democracy.

“The autocrats attack academia and media because they are potential sources of truth and fact”.

The Matrix of Coordinated Influence. Traditional frameworks for analyzing online influence focus on the distinction between human and automated actors (Identity Axis) or between spontaneous and coordinated behavior (Articulation Axis). Bot Nets (top-left) rely on synthetic identities and automated scripts. Troll Farms (bottom-left) use human operators to manage fake personas. Grassroots Action (bottom-right) involves verified citizens sharing self-authored views. Cyborg Propaganda (top-right) represents a new paradigm: verified human users disseminating centrally generated, algorithmically generated narratives, effectively ‘hybridizing’ the authenticity of the grassroots with the scale of the botnet.

The distinction between grassroots activism and automated influence is collapsing.

We typically worry about "bot farms" or "troll factories." But a distinct, more complex threat is emerging. We call it "Cyborg Propaganda."

LLMs need immunization to protect against misinformation!

New out in The Lancet Digital Health with the brill @yarakyrychenko.bsky.social where we argue that AI systems should be inoculated against misinformation!

We offer three broad ways to inoculate LLMs

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Inoculating against anti-vax messaging through empathy Vaccine hesitancy can be overcome through personalised, empathetic conversational approaches.,,,European Commission

Nice writeup of our now-finished JITSUVAX project: cordis.europa.eu/art... The main output of the project is the empathetic refutational interview...
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He struck me as an extreme sceptic and cynic so that description doesn’t really resonate with me but I didn’t know him very well so I guess he could be but his mind didn’t really strike me as the gullible kind.

But Epstein’s conviction was already long public by then. The counter-intelligence required here would have been a simple google search…

Yes I mean for one of the world’s foremost intellectuals to claim “I didn’t do my research” is a hard pill to swallow. All so disappointing.

Official Statement From Valeria Chomsky Regarding Jeffrey Epstein As many are aware, my husband, Noam Chomsky, now 97, is confronting significant  health challenges after suffering a devastating stroke in June 2023.

Noam Chomsky’s wife responds to the Epstein friendship. I’m a little disappointed the basic answer is just “we didn’t do our research”. znetwork.org/znetarticle/...

There have been increasingly shrill accusations against the EU over its digital legislation, based on accusations of "censorship" by defenders of "free speech" -- including, so it appears, the right to peddle an AI app that seemingly produces child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
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It's disturbing to see many of the the major figures in moral cognition all over the Epstein files

He was friendly with a huge number of the leading figures in the field, including giving millions to their labs, long after he pled guilty to sexually abusing young girls
www.justice.gov/epstein