Regulierung sollte genau dort ansetzen: bei Designentscheidungen und Geschäftsmodellen – nicht beim Zugang.
Hier traut man sich nicht ran oder macht sich selbst kleiner als man ist. Statt Big Tech sollen nun junge Menschen reguliert werden. Fatal!
5/5
Dear hackers, meet Marvin!! 🐧 Marvin is a South African Penguin who loves eating squid and developing R packages for his friends. Marvin's also here to remind you to register for some #hackica26 fun 🔽
a hex sticker showing the autrian parliament with palace athene
Happy to release the initial version of ParlAT, an #rstats package wrapping the API of the Austrian Parliament @parlament.gv.at . If you are a researcher, student, journalist, simply someone interested in the AT Parliament, ParlAT hopefully comes as a helpful tool. werkstattcodes.github.io/ParlAT/
🎺 On May 21/22 @lespin.bsky.social , @doriantsolak.bsky.social, and I host “Democracy at Risk? Societal Challenges, Data, and Research Infrastructures in the Age of CSS” in Vienna
Keynotes: @lauraknelson.bsky.social and @lorenzspreen.bsky.social
computational-social-science.org/workshops/20...
Good news! 🎉
The registration issue has been resolved — everything should now work smoothly.
🔗 Direct link: www.icahdq.org/event/Hackat...
🗓 Registration is open until April 5, 2026
Looking forward to seeing you at the ICA Hackathon 2026 @SU School for Data Science and Computational Thinking! 🚀💡
🚀 dashboardr is out!
An #rstats package for building interactive dashboards with tidyverse-style syntax.
Launched with a fun hackathon at @ascor.bsky.social (🍕 included).
📦: favstats.github.io/dashboardr/
Big thanks to the dashboardr team, Digicomlab, and @vivifabrien.bsky.social for the logo 🎨
🚨 Join us for the next edition Summer School for Women* in Political Methodology in Mannheim 🚨
7 days of hands-on advanced methods + networking for PhDs, postdocs & early-career researchers.
Free of charge (limited travel support).
Deadline 1 March 2026: summerschoolwpm.org
#methodsky #polisky
🚀 Save the Date!
If you're considering joining us, now is a great time to block the dates and start planning your #trip.
We can’t wait to see you at the SU School for Data Science and Computational Thinking in Stellenbosch on 3rd and 4th June 2026 for this year's #Hackathon! 🌍✨
Yohooo another comm scientist joining us at the hub :)) congrats and welcome!🎉
Krass: Die US-Regierung hat Sanktionen gegen Anna-Lena von Hodenberg und Josephine Ballon von @hateaid.org erlassen, dazu trifft es auch den früheren EU-Kommissar Thierry Breton, weil "These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states". Einreiseverbot
Group picture of researchers at the WHAT-IF workshop in Vienna: Rupert Kiddle, David Garcia, Giordano de Marzo, Nikolaus Pöchhacker, Aytalina Kulichkina, Annie Waldherr, Taehee Kim, Jula Lühring, Max van Drunen, Wouter van Atteveldt, Sophie Reisinger, Max Pellert, Daisuke Nakamura, Constantine Boussalis
(How) can AI help build better online spaces? ✨
Last week, 16 researchers from 8 institutions gathered in Vienna to explore exactly that question. Between the Christmas markets, the WHAT-IF team discussed how LLMs can power agent-based simulations to tackle online hostility and harmful content 👇
Our survey on research practices in Computational Communication Science is still open for participation!
#CommSky
After a long time in development, {traktok} #rstats is now finally on CRAN!
Whether you have access to the Research API or just want to scrape some pages, traktok has you covered
jbgruber.github.io/traktok/
We’ve seen research showing LLM chatbots can reduce belief in conspiracy theories in experimental settings: scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=e...
But in the wild, it seems that these tools likely contribute to strengthening belief in conspiracy theories for many.
Herzlichen Glückwunsch, Andrea!🎉
Thanks for this point! I think you're referring to how extreme the misinfo is, right? We didn't account for that in the statistical analysis, but we did include less (typically yellow press) & more extreme types (outright hyperpartisan sources) in the data collection, so they should be represented
Thanks, this is an important point that we also raised in another study (see doi.org/10.1186/s412...)!
Unfortunately, we couldn't measure it so easily in this study, and also weren't interested theoretically, since both scenarios would count as an angry reaction
✨New preprint led by Jula Lühring!
We found that news from untrustworthy sources elicit different forms of social media engagement than trustworthy news.
Check out Jula‘s thread for more:
Thanks to all my co-authors @dgarcia.eu @anniewald.bsky.social @janalasser.bsky.social @apeksha.bsky.social @hannahmetzler.bsky.social
Link to pre-print: doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Please let me know any thoughts and feedback on this!
We contribute to misinfo research by
✅ using a comprehensive source-based approach (capturing the full spectrum, not just clear-cut fake news)
✅ applying a matching method to social media data... aka we measure misinfo effects on populations that are hard to reach otherwise!
So misinformation seems to leave distinct fingerprints on engagement and emotions, potentially creating a self-reinforcing cycle where angry users seek it out and amplify it through retweeting, which creates more self-selection through exposure (ie the motivated minority?)
Higher anger is partially driven by self-selection. Users who engage with untrustworthy content show higher baseline anger.
Within the same user, disgust and fear increase with untrustworthy content, but anger doesn't change significantly.
2) Using ML to detect 7 distinct emotions in 11M replies, we found discussions following untrustworthy news show 9% more anger, 22% more disgust, and 12% less joy.
😡 Not all negative emotions matter equally: anger, disgust, and fear are key.
But...
Key findings:
1) Despite being only 6% of shared news, untrustworthy sources get 39% more retweets and 12% more quote tweets, but 14% fewer likes and 19% fewer replies.
🤔 Untrustworthy news content, often containing misinfo, spreads differently than trustworthy news!
Misinformation research has a causality problem: lab experiments are limited; observational studies confounded.
We used causal inference on 9.9M tweets, quantifying effects in the wild while blocking backdoor paths.
Does misinfo get higher engagement? Are following discussions more emotional? 🧵
So excited for another round of the ICA hackathon!! I highly recommend it for early career scholars going to ICA. It's a great way to meet new conference buddies before the main conference and learn more about computational methods 👩💻
Group photo: The CCL team standing together outdoors with the mountains around Dienten an Hochkönig in Salzburg in the background, smiling at the camera.
Ski lift: A line of orange ski lift chairs stretching up a green slope surrounded by dense forest to get up the mountain.
Hiking trail: The CCL team hiking down a narrow trail across a sunlit mountain slope with autumn-colored vegetation.
Mountain view: A wide view of mountain peaks and ridges around Dienten am Hochkönig in Salzburg, with low-hanging clouds drifting between the valleys under a blue sky.
Every strong team needs time to pause, reset, and grow together. #TeamRetreat #DientenAmHochkönig
Yaay congrats Jo, that's so exciting!! Hopefully see you soon over here then, come visit us in Vienna :)
Screenshot reading: Waves of Attention to Racial Injustice on Social Media: Extrajudicial Police Killings in the United States as Focusing Events Authors: Annie Waldherr, Nicola Righetti, Ryan J. Gallager, Kira Klinger, Daniela Stoltenberg, Sagar Kumar, Dominic Ridley, and Brooke Foucault Welles Abstract: The deaths of Black victims of police brutality, such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and Philando Castile, have become focusing events and symbols for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, catalyzing wide-spread public attention to racial injustice. While prior studies on hashtag activism predominantly focus on single and widely known cases, less is understood about why some incidents draw massive public attention while others do not. Addressing this gap, our study investigates the factors influencing the likelihood and size of public attention on Twitter (now X) following extrajudicial police killings. We analyzed 1.5 million tweets in response to 795 police killings between January 1, 2015, and December 8, 2016, in the United States. By examining cases on all scales, from unnoticed to prominent, we provide large-scale empirical evidence on disparities in public attention to police killings and their victims. Results indicate two distinct processes in the emergence of focusing events: While victims’ attributes such as race, age, and gender increased likelihood of receiving any attention (thresholding), variables of context and social construction were related to overall wave size (focusing).
Second, with a large team of authors, led by @anniewald.bsky.social, we study which (personal, temporal, spatial, affordance-based) properties of incidences of extrajudicial police killings facilitate public attention on social media.
So the UN Global Risks Report is out...
& it lists Mis- and Disinformation as the biggest risk we face.
unglobalriskreport.org
Listen... I'm a mis- and Disinformation kinda guy, meaning I worry about this professionally.
But there is no way this issue should be all the way up there!
Plus...
