A breaking update from @timheidecker.bsky.social.

This week, I wrote an article for The Conversation explaining the rapid rise of prediction markets and some of the questions this raises. Consider it a sneak preview of my dissertation-in-progress. 😉

When prediction markets aren't the subject of news articles (for their surging popularity and concerns about insider trading), they are often providing forecasts about the likely odds of elections, Supreme Court decisions, military action, and more.

How polling failures, gambling legalization and political gridlock paved the way for the explosive rise of prediction markets While media outlets are signing deals with Polymarket and Kalshi for their insights into the wisdom of crowds, gamblers are pouncing on opportunities to wager on geopolitics and celebrity weddings.

🚨 Public scholarship alert! 🚨

Have you seen prediction markets in the news? In the 18 months since prediction markets on elections were legalized in the U.S., it seems like Polymarket and Kalshi can't stop making news and making money.

I wrote my dissertation on all the ways in which news media used social media to represent public opinion in elections -- and all the democratic problems with it. But prediction markets are a whole 'nother level of wildness. The good news? @parkerbach.bsky.social & I are already planning our study.

Reminder: All it would take to end the murder of American citizens by an untrained government goon squad is 16 Republicans in Congress voting with Dems to defund ICE (or 23 to impeach and remove Trump — 3 in House & 20 in Senate). That’s it. 23 Americans can vote for the public and end all of this.

Every day @theonion.com gets closer to discovering STS

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. 🧵

GitHub - dfreelon/pyktok: A simple module to collect video, text, and metadata from Tiktok. A simple module to collect video, text, and metadata from Tiktok. - dfreelon/pyktok

You should try Pyktok! TikTok has changed its structure a few times, so it’s hard to scrape consistently, but hopefully this will help github.com/dfreelon/pyk...

Pete Hegseth on FOX NEWS with headline chyron that reads: Tracking Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.

Secretary of Defense Hegseth says he doesn’t know if Russia invaded Ukraine.

This you?

Seeking a Sociotechnical Systems Research Assistant (aka “Pre-Doc”) Apply here: (NOTE: Application Portal opens February 3, 2025) Deadline: March 3, 2025. (Late or incomplete applications will not be considered.)  NOTE: Unfortunately, applicants must be eligib…

Do you know an MA student or undergrad with a bright future working at the intersections of technology, society, and communication? Encourage them to apply to Predoc position with Microsoft Research's Social Media Collective!

I can't recommend enough!

socialmediacollective.org/2025/01/22/s...

I do love this comment as an endorsement of this piece as foundational literature!

But the real answer is that this is a concept explication. Which means taking a bunch of parallel uses of a concept or an idea and providing them some shared grounding.

I'm so proud of this piece and thrilled for it to be out in the world.

HUGE kudos to @carolynschmitt.bsky.social and @shannimcg.bsky.social for being wonderful coauthors and to @citap.bsky.social for helping us make this piece OPEN ACCESS! Here's the link, one last time: bit.ly/StratAm

Today's empowered far right uses less ambiguity. But when they do, the best thing to do is not to let them get away with it.

What are they saying? To whom? How are they trying to hide it? And what do they stand to gain? We can fight ambiguity, and we do it with clear-eyed analysis. End/🧵

Ambiguity is an apt tool for populists. Who are "the people"? Who are "the elites" or "the enemy"? We want "change," but what kind?

Strategic ambiguity allows communicators to let audiences hear the meaning they want to hear. 4/🧵

Irony fits hand-in-hand with strategic ambiguity. Audiences know ironic messages do not mean what they appear to mean at first glance, but this provides an opportunity for the communicator to encode multiple "true" meanings for different crowds, or default to "It's just a joke!" 3/🧵

Strategic ambiguity, in our view, is defined by:

1) Polysemy
2) Intended audiences from varying interpretive communities
3) A benefit to be gained from addressing these multiple communities at once

It thus encompasses dog whistles, doublespeak, coded language, and more.

2/🧵

🗣️New Communication Theory article! With @carolynschmitt.bsky.social and @shannimcg.bsky.social

Communication can benefit from clarity, but what about a tactical lack of clarity? Here, we explicate "strategic ambiguity" and argue for its importance in political communication. 1/🧵

bit.ly/StratAm

If SNL doesn’t bring in Tim Robinson to play NYC mayoral candidate Brad Lander I will riot

Help my friend and cohort-mate do important dissertation research!

Did we need experts to “question” this for us??? Why can’t we just say it???

Shout out to all my fellow “experts” being asked to confirm that bad things are indeed bad to preserve a misguided sense of journalistic neutrality in outlets that the Right doesn’t read.

It’s not just sports. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket are now operating legally in the US and were able to ride the wave of sports gambling app popularity and the US presidential election to some pretty major numbers.

I just hate how dumb the fascist shift in the US has been.

There was no Machiavellian plot. No critically overlooked flaw in the system. They just said they were gonna do dumb, evil things. And we didn’t stop them. So they did.

I would love for someone to ask Zuck/Meta what “once again prioritizing speech” means in this context. I mean, minoritized subjects understand that he’s removing the flimsy guardrails meant to protect us, but I’m curious what they THINK they are communicating here.

well that turned out to be a bit of an understatement

NEW PUB with Lee McGuigan! 🎉

We the Consumers: The Conservative “Parallel Economy” as Reactionary Commodity Activism ijoc.org/index.php/ij...