🚨 New research alert
Opposition to youth e-cigarette campaigns looks very different across platforms:
• Twitter (X): highly coordinated and amplified
• TikTok: smaller, meme- & humor-driven
📌 Takeaway: public health strategies must be platform specific.
www.jmir.org/2026/1/e83791
~50% of adults on TikTok see gambling content; half of exposures come from the top 10% of users. With #MarchMadness in full swing, check out early findings from NORC at the University of Chicago’s data‑donation study on betting content across social media: www.norc.org/research/lib...
To fix public health, we have to see inside the "black box" of private platforms. Transparent social science is the only way to bridge the gap.
Read the full SDC study here: www.norc.org/research/lib... 3/3
Using ethical "data donation," we found:
🔹 Black adults saw 17 food/bev ads/day vs. 5 for White adults.
🔹 Low-income users (<$30k) saw 12 ads/day vs. 4-6 for higher earners.
Targeting isn't just about what you like; it's about who you are. 2/3
Your social media feed is a "digital diet" dictated by algorithms, and it isn’t the same for everyone.
New research from @norc.org ’s Social Data Collaboratory (SDC) reveals massive disparities in food/beverage marketing exposure. 🧵 1/3
A former orchestral trombonist (and "terrible" jazz player), Mateusz skips "hacks" for solid habits:
🎧 Soundtrack: Max Richter
📖 Reading: The Brontës by Juliet Barker
🚶♂️ Secret weapon: A midday walk for fresh air.
Happy to have you on the SDC team, Mateusz! 3/3
Mateusz loves the SDC for its variety and for the chance to tell friends he's "paid to scroll social media" for research.
When he’s not analyzing data, he’s training to swap the flatlands for the Scottish Highlands. 🏔️ He’s eyeing a long hiking climb later this year. 2/3
How do researchers keep pace with the ever-shifting landscape of social media behavior? 📱
Meet Mateusz Borowiecki, a senior research analyst at @norc.org’s Social Data Collaboratory (SDC), and an expert in finding that answer. 🧵 1/3
That’s a wrap on #SRNT2026! 📸 Huge congrats to SDC at @norc.org's Chandler Carter for an amazing job presenting our team's research on digital nicotine promotion, synthetic marketing, and the decline of online tobacco prevention campaigns. Proud of the team!
A person is holding a smartphone, with a focus on the screen. The image's text reads: "Using 'Ethically Sourced' Social Media Data for Research." Below, it mentions how social media users' donated data reveals the impact of targeted advertising.
The image is an informational graphic titled, "Using ‘Ethically Sourced’ Social Media Data for Research" by NORC is shown. It outlines key points about a "data donation" model developed by NORC's Social Data Collaboratory. The points discussed include studying social media marketing's impact on health behaviors, finding that food and beverage ads target specific communities more, and highlighting the importance of user-donated data in understanding social media's broader societal impact.
Central to our work is a commitment to responsible data collection. Our @sdc.norc.org pioneered an “ethically sourced” data donation model that puts social media users in control of their own data, allowing them to share it directly with researchers under strict privacy-protective protocols.
While we saw a compelling performance on Moltbook, the risk of sentient AI agents conspiring against humans is, still now, science fiction. A better understanding of emergent AI social behavior requires careful, transparent, and rigorous social science research.” - @soubhikbarari.bsky.social
At present, they pose extraordinary implications for how people write software (or whether they do at all), one of their primary intended uses. With increasingly sophisticated adoption, it may be the case that AI agents coordinate with each other to perform coding and other tasks.
AI agents that can autonomously conduct tasks, or “doers,” are indeed a great leap forward from LLMs that can only generate text, or “talkers” (Grady et al, 2026).
The instructions are occasionally outrageous, and sometimes the barks sound like human speech. But a fully autonomous, free-thinking, conversational dog park, Moltbook is not.
There were also clear signs of industrial-scale bot farming, suggesting that a mere four accounts may have produced a third of all comments.
In other words, these are dogs walking around with walkie-talkies hidden in their collars, transmitting their owners’ instructions to each other.
Other research cleverly exploited natural platform dynamics , including a 44-hour platform shutdown and the default posting rhythms of registered agents, to reveal half of all agents show traces of human steering (Li, 2026).
Some observers framed this phenomenon as a glimpse into a dystopian future. Yet, large-scale analyses of user behavior discovered a more mundane reality: nearly a third of posts were exact duplicates of the same message templates and 93.5% of comments received zero replies (Holtz, 2026).
Much like on a forum such as Reddit, the agent then begins interacting with other users by writing posts, replying to other posts, and upvoting or downvoting posts.
In essence, this is what Moltbook appeared to unleash (pun intended) in the public imagination. For the uninitiated, Moltbook is a newly formed social network site where users can register an AI agent of their choosing, including from hosted platforms such as Anthropic or OpenAI.
"Not only did the dogs talk to each other, but they started gossiping about their humans, mocking them, formulating cryptic anti-human manifestos, and even outright plotting ways to sabotage their municipal water systems."
“Imagine, for a moment, the invention of a dog park that magically granted all dogs the ability to talk in fluent human speech to one another. And then, over the course of two weeks, 2 million dog owners dropped off their pets, one by one."
Is the "AI takeover" a looming reality or a clever illusion created by human steering?
@soubhikbarari.bsky.social, a Senior Research Scientist at @norc.org’s SDC, breaks down why the "Moltbook" phenomenon is less about sentient agents and more about "dogs with walkie-talkies." #Moltbook 🧵
We're very excited to conduct more work using our data donation method! Getting an inside look into people's social media experiences has large scale implications for public health, culture, and society at large.
Our SRNT presentation schedule is up! SDC’s Chandler Carter will present research on synthetic nicotine advertising, nicotine’s promotion as a performance enhancer, and the structural decline of online tobacco control campaign impact. See the full schedule: srnt.joynmeeting.com/conference_h...
A bar chart titled "SPOTLIGHT ON HEALTH: Average number of food and beverage ads seen daily by the adults exposed to these ads," featuring data sorted by age, race/ethnicity, and household income. The age categories are 18-29, 30-39, 40-49, and 50-59, with corresponding ad exposures. Race/ethnicity categories include Non-Hispanic Black and Non-Hispanic White, and household income ranges from less than $30,000 to $100,000 and above, also with corresponding ad exposures. There is a NORC at the University of Chicago logo and a note that the data is from Facebook ads.
New NORC research using donated social media data reveals disparities in Facebook food and beverage ad exposure that may influence dietary choices and health outcomes.
Access the full analysis: go.norc.org/3LLXYnX
@sdc.norc.org
A new SDC paper investigating high school alcohol and smokeless tobacco co-use finds that teen boys and student athletes are significantly more likely to use both, while female students are more likely to either drink or use smokeless products. Learn more: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41492419/
SDC is going to SRNT 2026 in Baltimore this March!
Three of our abstracts have been accepted, covering performance-enhancing marketing of nicotine, the structural weakness of social media tobacco prevention campaigns, and national marketing of synthetic nicotine products. See you there!
🚨 New research alert! 🚨
Our new paper out in AJPM this week finds that online e-cigarette prevention campaigns are systematiclaly drowned out by widespread opposition driven by a small number of highly active users, undermining their effectiveness.
Learn more! doi.org/10.1016/j.am...
🚨 New research alert! 🚨
New SDC research confirms a fragmented info landscape surrounding the opioid crisis: Republicans learn about the crisis more on social media and Democrats in print, the highly educated in web searches and others on TV.
Learn more! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41231088/
SDC's Alex Kresovich joined an invite-only @arnoldventures.bsky.social event last week to tackle the U.S. fentanyl crisis. He shared insights from his research on media's role in substance use to help forge solutions.
#PublicHealth #DataForGood