Heading to #COMPTEXT2026 this week? Meet the CCL team sharing new work on social identities, political influence, environmental journalism, partisan polarization and more!
Details👇
compcommlab.univie.ac.at/news-detaila...
New study out in Nature Human Behaviour: 37 million US users were exposed to deceptive networks on Facebook & 3 million on Instagram during the 2020 elections—roughly 15% and 2% of active users. 🧵
📢 New publication!
My dissertation paper "Online Protest and Repression in Authoritarian Settings" co-authored with 🌟 @anniewald.bsky.social and Nanda Wijermans 🌟 is now out in @jasssjournal.bsky.social
Read the full #openaccess article: www.jasss.org/29/2/4.html
#ABM #CSS #dreamcollab
💫 Join our POLNET School this September for an enriching learning experience curated by the Standing Group on Political Networks @politicalnets.bsky.social
📆 21–25 Sep📍 @uni-konstanz.de
🎓️ @fernschreiber.bsky.social @cbravuna.bsky.social @anniewald.bsky.social @petrocelik.bsky.social
🚨 Job Alert!
We are looking for a Senior Scientist (40h/week) to develop, establish, and organize the research network “Democracy and Human Rights”.
Start: March 1, 2026
Application deadline: February 2, 2026
Find out more👇
jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Senior-S...
Are you applying computational methods in your research or thinking about starting a lab? Join the first Computational Methods Labs Showcase by the ICA CM Division @icacm.bsky.social 🌟
Online on Feb 16, 2026, 4:00–5:30 pm CET / 10:00–11:30 am EST 📆
Register 👇
forms.office.com/e/zHBkwUWNFw
Join us in Frankfurt or online: "Social Media Access Days" - Social media data between research and infrastructure – sustainable archiving, cataloguing and access. March 17-19. Featuring a keynote by @snurb.info. Full program and registration details at: www.dnb.de/EN/Kulturell...
🎉 Today's the day! Notifications for #ICA26 are now being sent out via email! Please be patient & be sure to check your spam folder too. You can also check your results by logging into the ScholarOne website and clicking the Messages tab. buff.ly/Lm6odET
The Call for Papers and Panels for #COMPTEXT2026 in Birmingham (23-25 April) is out; feel free to circulate: shorturl.at/gRg0p!
Deadline: January 16!
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 👇
Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵
Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...
We need a new iteration of retraction watch for retracting publications that are not publications.
Time to share some news I've been sitting on: starting in January, I will lead a @dfg.de Emmy Noether Group at @weizenbauminstitut.bsky.social! We will investigate how local public spheres are constituted under conditions of digitalization & globalization.
www.weizenbaum-institut.de/en/research/...
🔍 Insightful piece debunking some of the "mythology” behind Big Data:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
#commsky #polsky #bigdata
the background depicts the proposed amendment, the foreground reads "Open Letter: The Amendment to Article 12, paragraph 5 GDPR in the Omnibus Proposal Undermines Evidence-Based Policymaking"
We've published an Open Letter urging EU policymakers to reject the Digital Omnibus' proposed Amendment to Article 12(5) GDPR, which would undermine citizens' data access rights & the researchers who depend on them for #DataDonation research.
Read & sign: shorturl.at/e1mr4 - your signature matters.
Are you applying computational methods in your research or thinking about starting a lab? Join us for the first Computational Methods Labs Showcase by the ICA CM Division @icacm.bsky.social 🌟
Online on Feb 16, 2026, 4:00–5:30 pm CET / 10:00–11:30 am EST 📆
Register 👇
forms.office.com/e/zHBkwUWNFw
Join us for the first Computational Methods Labs Showcase @icacm.bsky.social Registration is free and open to colleagues interested in computational methods! DM me if you have questions 1/2
📣 Das Social Media Observatory am @bredowinstitut.bsky.social und @fgz-risc.bsky.social lädt zum TikTok Starter Workshop ein!
🗓 Wann? 2.12. 13:00 - 3.12. 14:00 Uhr
🌐 Wo? Online (Zoom)
👨💻 mit @boesch.bsky.social, @julianhohner.bsky.social & @lionw.bsky.social
Infos 👉 leibniz-hbi.de/hbi-events/t...
✨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:
📣New study by Linde, Chan & Balluff reviews 38 ML-based content analyses: frequentist stats on full populations, no misclassification adjustment—big-N + auto-coding isn’t automatically better. Worth a rethink. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... #commsky @profdimitrova.bsky.social
sharepic: "Call for papers"
#CfP: Submit your abstract for a special issue on “Celebrating 60 Years of ELIZA? Critical Pasts and Futures of AI”, which seeks interdisciplinary contributions on the cultural, ethical & social legacies of Joseph Weizenbaum’s chatbot.
📅 Submission deadline: 17 Nov 2025
More: buff.ly/A8ejM8C
How fair are the algorithms that decide who gets information online? Our new paper in PNAS Nexus shows that maximization algorithms, the ones used to pick “influencers” in social networks, unintentionally deepen inequality.
🧠 Sekara, Dotu, Cebrian, Moro & García-Herranz
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/pnas...
Danke @brodnig.bsky.social für das aufgreifen! #Vergewaltigungsdrohungen & wüste Beschimpfungen sind keine Seltenheit, so wie mir geht es vielen Frauen. Die Justiz darf uns den Tätern nicht schutzlos ausliefern, sie muss zumindest ernsthaft ermitteln. www.derstandard.at/story/300000...
I'm excited to teach my course on longitudinal data & analysis in the context of #KOMEX2026 again.
For me, the first iteration of this earlier this year was a lot of nerdy 🤓 fun, and the participants agreed - even anonymously in the evals 😜
Let me know if you have any questions!
More info ⬇️
We have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so...
What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?
We're hiring! @univie.ac.at is seeking a TT Assistant Professor in the Psychology of Digitalization. If your work is about automation, AI, or immersive technology (e.g., VR) in the context of work and organizations (broadly defined), we’d love to hear from you. 👇
Join us as postdoc at the Inequality Discourse Observatory at the University of Konstanz: stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/7...
We will do epic research between Linguistics and Computational Social Science at the Cluster of Politics of Inequality. Feel free to DM if you have any questions.
Karolina and Lise-Lore stand side by side outdoors against a stone wall, smiling at the camera. Karolina wears a black top and jeans, with arms crossed, while Lise-Lore wears a bright blue blouse and black trousers. The photo conveys a friendly and professional atmosphere.
Karolina Garančovská presents in a classroom, standing beside a projection slide titled “Crisis all around? Crisisification of the EU Institutional Discourse.” She gestures while speaking, wearing a light grey sweater and black trousers. A chalkboard and classroom lights are visible in the background.
Lise-Lore Steeman stands at the front of a classroom giving a presentation titled “From Bias to Balance: Examining media representations, public attitudes and campaigns in understanding discrimination.” She is smiling, wearing a bright blue blouse, and standing in front of a projected slide and a chalkboard filled with math formulas.
We currently have the pleasure of hosting Karolina Garančovská & @lise-loresteeman.bsky.social for a research stay at the CCL!
Both presented their fascinating ongoing work – from EU crisis communication to media representations & discrimination. 🧩
Thank you for sharing your insights with us! 🤗
Three schematic diagrams. The first illustrates selective publishing of internal resection, the second selective causal focus, and the third selective access and funding for researchers.
1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv.
There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.
Misinformation researchers benefit from real-world insights. Practitioners benefit from scientific evidence on what interventions actually work. Our partnership with the media literacy & fact-checking organizations Learn to Check! and @maldita.es combines both 🤝
🧵 below