Linda Yaccarino replies to a Zohran Mamdani tweet to say that taxing rich people's penthouses is "actually one of the scariest things I have ever seen"

Zohran Mamdani said he's going to start taxing rich people who buy luxury housing in NYC but don't actually live in there, and the former CEO of Twitter/X called it "actually one of the scariest things I have ever seen."

🚀Introducing 𝐆𝐔𝐈𝐃𝐄-𝐋𝐋𝐌: A reporting checklist for using LLMs in behavioral & social science

✅GUIDE-LLM is a reporting checklist designed by 80+ experts to improve transparency, reproducibility & ethical accountability of LLM-based research

📄 llm-checklist.com

We've extended the #CySoc2026 deadline to March 25 to give authors a few additional days to prepare their submissions! Please consider submitting your work and sharing this information!

More information: cy-soc.github.io/2026/
Submission portal: easychair.org/conferences?...

📣 Manuscript out! 📣

Do you struggle in navigating the maze of ABM methods? 🧭

This works unifies the literature on ABM calibration/estimation within a single comprehensive taxonomy:
🎲 sampling-based methods
🤖 meta-models
📖 open-box methods

with @gdfm.bsky.social 💡

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Are LLMs Smarter Than Chimpanzees? An Evaluation on Perspective Taking and Knowledge State Estimation Cognitive anthropology suggests that the distinction of human intelligence lies in the ability to infer other individuals' knowledge states and understand their intentions. In comparison, our closest ...

New work by my former PhD student, Boyang Li

His team produced 500 stories of less than 100 words. LLMs were basically chance-level at answering binary questions about the stories

arxiv.org/abs/2601.12410

📣 CS2Italy 2026 the Italian Conference on Computational Social Science
⏰ Today is the last day to submit your abstract

📍 Turin, May 19–21

We welcome abstract submissions in:
#ComputerScience #NetSci #ComplexSystems #Sociology #Economics #Politics #CognitiveScience #Psychology

👉 cs2italy.org

Submit your abstracts to CS2Italy by 👉 Jan 15 👈
Italian Conference on Computational Social Science
to join us in Turin on May 19-21

We welcome abstract submissions on #computerscience #netsci #complexsystems #sociology #economics #politics #cognitivesci #psychology and more

For more: cs2italy.org

Today, social media platforms hold the sole power to study the effects of feed-ranking algorithms. We developed a platform-independent method that reranks participants’ feeds in real time and used this method to conduct a preregistered 10-day field experiment with 1256 participants on X during the 2024 US presidential campaign. Our experiment used a large language model to rerank posts that expressed antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity (AAPA). Decreasing or increasing AAPA exposure shifted out-party partisan animosity by more than 2 points on a 100-point feeling thermometer, with no detectable differences across party lines, providing causal evidence that exposure to AAPA content alters affective polarization. This work establishes a method to study feed algorithms without requiring platform cooperation, enabling independent evaluation of ranking interventions in naturalistic settings.

New paper in Science:

In a platform-independent field experiment, we show that reranking content expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity in social media feeds alters affective polarization.

🧵

🔈 *Call for Participation* 🔈

Italian Conference on Computational Social Science – CS2Italy
May 19-21, 2026 in Torino, Italy

Premier venue for Computational Social Science in Italy: #sociology #polisci #economics #netsci #complexsystems ++

Submit your abstract by Jan 15: cs2italy.org

plz reshare

🏆 We have won a Methods Recognition award at #CSCW2025 for our paper about Narratives of War in the Ukrainian memetic warfare!

Link to the paper: arxiv.org/abs/2309.08363

With @yelenamejova.bsky.social , Arthur Capozzi, @gdfm.bsky.social and myself.

Huge thanks to @acm-cscw.bsky.social !

Comparing Data Assimilation and Likelihood-Based Inference on Latent State Estimation in Agent-Based Models In this paper, we present the first systematic comparison of Data Assimilation (DA) and Likelihood-Based Inference (LBI) in the context of Agent-Based Models (ABMs). These models generate observable t...

While limited to one ABM, this work fills a critical gap in the ABM calibration literature, providing the first structured comparison of DA and LBI for latent state inference.

Kudos to Marco, Corrado, and Gianmarco for such a wonderful collaboration!

Hope you enjoy it
👉 arxiv.org/abs/2509.17625

🚨 Fresh from ArXiv:
“Comparing Data Assimilation and Likelihood-Based Inference on Latent State Estimation in Agent-Based Models”
with @marcopangallo.bsky.social, @c0rrad0.bsky.social, & @gdfm.bsky.social
👉 arxiv.org/abs/2509.17625

Mango Mussolini is the new expression that I didn’t know I needed until now!

Almost back from #ic2s2 (thanks Lufthansa). The most positively-surprising impression from the conference, almost a decade after the first edition, is how much the discipline has coalesced. In 2016, it was easy to distinguish a paper authored by computer scientists vs sociologists. Not so easy now!

Agreed. And to do so we need to stop using tools that were developed to measure human concepts.

🚨 Study alert!

We've developed a prototype that enables you to create personalized social media feeds using natural language rules and import them into Bluesky.

Join our study to try out the tool, give us your feedback, and earn a $50 gift card!

Sign up: forms.gle/MkSGKzxDfBEc...

Please share :)

FOMO for #ic2s2 is hitting hard---especially for Francesco, who is bravely pretending he’s totally fine without me.

Go check out our poster on early linguistic fingerprints of conspiracy theorists on Reddit (w. @gdfm.bsky.social )!

Full paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2506.05086

@c0rrad0.bsky.social presenting our work on the Russia-Ukraine war on social media #ic2s2

If you're @ic2s2.bsky.social #IC2S2 and are looking for a faculty position, get in touch. @uni-saarland.de is hiring.
Right now, there's an open call in Computer Science @saarland-informatics-campus.de: www.uni-saarland.de/fileadmin/up...
Soon, there'll be open calls in the Social Sciences.

Causality center stage at #ic2s2 with opening keynote by @eckles.bsky.social

Moral judgments in online discourse are not biased by gender Scientific Reports - Moral judgments in online discourse are not biased by gender

🚨Are moral judgements biased by the gender of the subject?
We find *no* direct effect when looking at Reddit!

Our causal study design is based on carefully matching similar situations that people with different genders experience (and share).

Study led by @loreb92.bsky.social

rdcu.be/eumlQ

Hugging my poster at @icwsm.bsky.social! 🥰

Back in Copenhagen to present "Variational Inference of Parameters in Opinion Dynamics Models"!
Great time here, meeting all my @nerdsitu.bsky.social friends and creating new connections in the community!

ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC...

Our paper "Conspiracy theories and where to find them on TikTok" has been accepted at the Main conference of @aclmeeting.bsky.social 2025!

Great work led by @fracorso.bsky.social supervised by @gdfm.bsky.social and yours truly.

For more details check the preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2407.12545

Great experience in Sydney at #WWW2025!

Today I presented the paper "Causal modeling of climate activism on Reddit", the work done during my visiting period in Copenhagen with the amazing team @c0rrad0.bsky.social, @lajello.bsky.social, @gdfm.bsky.social!

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

📢 Deadline Extended! 🚨
6th Workshop on Data for the Wellbeing of the Most Vulnerable at #ICWSM2025!

🗓️ New Deadline: April 7th, 2025
Submit your abstract or paper
🔗 tinyurl.com/DWMV25

#DataForSocialGood

@yelenamejova.bsky.social @danielapaolotti.bsky.social @isi.it @icwsm.bsky.social

One day remaining to submit to our #ICWSM Workshop on #Data for the Wellbeing of the Most #Vulnerable -- submit your short and long papers by March 31!

sites.google.com/view/datafor...

Ph.D. and postdoc positions in Data Science for epidemic preparedness at the NERDS research group The NERDS (NEtwoRks, Data, and Society) team at the IT University of Copenhagen welcomes applications from aspiring PhD students and postdocs in the areas of Da

I am hiring PhD students and Postdocs to join me in beautiful Copenhagen. Together, we will develop data science methods to improve epidemic preparedness.

Copenhagen is amazing, salary is good, we have plenty of funding, and a great community.

Read more..: candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

📢📢📢"The Relativity of Causal Knowledge"

THANK YOU to @clabat9.bsky.social for working side by side with me on this exciting project and making this article possible. Big thanks also to @hansmriess.bsky.social and Fabio Massimo Zennaro for their valuable feedback on an earlier version of the paper.

See you in the amazing Copenhagen! 🍻🇩🇰

Extended abstract of "Variational Inference on Parameters of Opinion Dynamics Models" accepted at @icwsm.bsky.social !

Big thanks to @gdfm.bsky.social and Fabrizio Silvestri!

Check the arXiv
arxiv.org/pdf/2403.05358

(TL;DR: Model + Data = ❤️)

📢 Meet the keynote speakers of the upcoming #ICWSM Workshop on #Data for the Wellbeing of the Most #Vulnerable

👉 Paddy Brock at World Bank & UNHCR Joint Data Center
👉 @robysinatra.bsky.social at University of Copenhagen

Join us! Submission deadline: March 31 sites.google.com/view/datafor...