"Understanding the strengths and limitations of community-based responses to misinformation" — very nice commentary by @ekvraga.bsky.social in PNAS, covering my recent paper on causal effects of Community Notes w/ @isaacslaughter.bsky.social @axelp.bsky.social @msaveski.bsky.social

A view of Mount Rainier from the University of Washington campus in Seattle with bright blue skies.

Our team at the @cip.uw.edu is currently seeking applications for up to two postdoctoral scholar positions. Applications received prior to January 15, 2026 will be given priority. Learn more about the positions, salary range, qualifications and application process: apply.interfolio.com/177901

Such a great compilation! Thanks for all the inspiration!

All thanks to my amazing collaborators Lodewijk Gelauff, Ashish Goel, Smitha Milli, Ariel Procaccia and Alice Siu!!!

This was some work I did Meta FAIR this summer (more on the way!)

Read more here: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04588 (7/7)

Our auditing tools are integrated into a deliberation platform
used in 50+ countries, allowing moderators to measure and improve representation in real time (thanks, Harshvardhan Agarwal and others!) (6/7)

LLM-generated questions achieve representation levels comparable to—or better than—the theoretically optimal subsets, and consistently outperform human-selected slates (lower value is better) (5/7)

We audit historical deliberations from the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, comparing:
(a) human-moderator selections
(b) theoretically optimal subsets
(c) LLM-generated questions (4/7)

We infer general utilities using LLM text-embeddings, assuming participants derive high utility from questions semantically similar to ones they propose (3/7)

We formalize representation using Justified Representation (JR) from social choice theory and introduce the first efficient algorithms for auditing JR in general utility settings (2/7)

🚨 New paper! 🔍
“Question the Questions: Auditing Representation in Online Deliberative Processes”

In deliberative polls, participants propose questions for experts but only a few make it to the panel. How representative are those chosen questions of everyone’s interests? 🧵👇

Please repost to get the word out! @nkgarg.bsky.social and I are excited to present a personalized feed for academics! It shows posts about papers from accounts you’re following bsky.app/profile/pape...

Great presentation!

Supernotes: Driving Consensus in Crowd-Sourced Fact-Checking | Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2025 You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.

More results and implementation details in our full paper, here: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

If you're in Sydney and attending www2025.thewebconf.org come say hi, I'd love to chat!

I'll also be presenting this as a poster on Day 5, noon in the Parkside Ballroom @ ICC Sydney

Supernotes are also found to be superior on several other parameters, such as source quality, clarity, comprehensiveness, context and (lack of) argumentativeness

Beyond helpfulness, participants also rated the Supernotes more favorably than the best existing notes on quality, clarity, coverage, context, and argumentativeness.

Supernotes are more helpful than the best existing notes

In a human-subjects evaluation, participants rated Supernotes significantly more helpful than the best existing human-written notes on Community Notes.

We propose "Supernotes" to improve existing Community Notes by

(a) summarizing relevant information across multiple human-written notes, and
(b) using LLMs to compose these notes in language that is more broadly appealing and helpful

Supernotes generation pipeline

I'll be in Sydney presenting ✨Supernotes✨ at the ACM WebConf 🚀 (WWW'25). Incase you missed it, here's a very short thread about it: 🧵

Full paper: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

#www2025 #thewebconf2025

Congratulations, Sanjush!

Cherry blossoms and clouds at the UW Quad

Cherry blossoms

A freshly bloomed cherry blossom

UW Campus, today!

#peakbloom #seattle #cherryblossoms

Congratulations!!

🕵🏼‍♀️✅ Fact-checking’s future: can social media handle the truth? Who should decide what’s true online?

This week’s newsletter brings together past, present and future of fact-checking social media:

✔️ Sorting out moderation vs fact-checking
✔️ Where social media fact-checking came from
✔️ What actually works and what else to consider

Super cool & important work from @matthewdeverna.com!

Yes! I've been lurking here for about a year and it finally feels a little like Academic Twitter again!

I've been eagerly waiting for this to come out -- and the results are so worth it! Very cool how impactful a 7-day intervention can be!!

Benefits of an open network

While Bluesky looks like other social apps on the surface, it’s actually quite different. It’s an open network.

I blogged about it here:

90 days ago Bluesky had 6.18M users
30 days ago Bluesky had 10.85M users
Tomorrow Bluesky will have 15M users

This is absolutely wild, thanks for believing in us y'all

UW campus, Drumheller Fountain and Rainier Vista.

[Please reshare]
I’m recruiting PhD students to work with me at UW!

I’m looking for students passionate about developing new *social media algorithms*, both broadly and within the scope of this NSF grant: tinyurl.com/395yfphd

More info: faculty.washington.edu/msaveski/

cc @uwischool.bsky.social

Welcome to Bluesky, everyone! We opened access yesterday, and we just crossed 4M people total on the network. 🎉

• 800k+ new users have signed up
• Averaged 8.5 new accounts/second
• 2M posts were created in the last 24 hours

We're so excited to have you here!

I’m recruiting PhD students to work with me at UW!

I’m looking for students passionate about using computational methods to study how social platforms can be reimagined to enable better conversations, bridge political divides, and reduce the spread of misinfo. 

>>

Hello World!