Who produces hate speech? And how does that matter for content moderation?
We show that across different countries and platforms, a relatively small share of users are responsible for a very large share of hate - overall, 5% write 83-100% of hateful content.
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
besides some very recent work (eg Josh & Sol's linked Brookings piece) the debate over LLMs in political science has been bereft of recent history. we're working in the aftermath of a 30-yr war over methods that nearly crashed the discipline, after all :thread:
EPSS Travel Grants for 2026 Belfast conference:
PhD students & junior scholars @ institutions in European countries that are often underrepresented, can apply for full fee waiver & £500 stipend
Apply: lnkd.in/ehXjhCgf
Deadline: March 8, 11:59pm GMT.
More details: lnkd.in/eZTP5sWR
🚨 Very insightful thread on a fundamental issue/misunderstanding when we are engaging with LLMs!
Quick PSA for all mid-career academics and above: people may be citing articles with your name on them that don't exist.
Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes."
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Gelbe Kachel mit DIZH-Logo. Titel: «Kulturvermittlung: Antike erleben». Projekt Vox Lapidum: Die lateinische Epigraphik-Datenbank EDCS wird um automatische Annotationen, Bilder, 3D-Scans und Metadaten erweitert. Ein dialogisches Interface macht die Geschichte von über 500'000 Inschriften zugänglich – für Forschung, Bildung und Öffentlichkeit.
Gelbe Kachel mit DIZH-Logo. Titel: «Gesundheit und medizinische Diagnostik». Drei Projekte: ADAPT zur kinderfreundlichen ADHS-Diagnostik mittels Hirnsignalen und Bewegungsdaten; DiSpLA, erste App zur automatischen Sprachanalyse auf Schweizerdeutsch für die Früherkennung von Demenz und Sprachstörungen; Digitalisierung handschriftlicher Kinderimpfausweise mittels KI-Pipeline.
Gelbe Kachel mit DIZH-Logo. Titel: «Intensivmedizin». Drei Projekte: eFICUS zur psychoedukativen Unterstützung von Familien schwerkranker Personen auf der Intensivstation; MERLIN, Multi-Agenten-System für medizinische Echtzeit-Entscheidungen; Delirium DynamiX zur Früherkennung von Delirium mittels lokaler Sprachmodelle und Bayes'scher Netzwerke.
Gelbe Kachel mit DIZH-Logo. Titel: «Bildung: Lernende gezielt fördern». Zwei Projekte: LitAI kombiniert Eye-Tracking und KI für adaptive Leseförderung; Chat4All ist ein digitaler Lernassistent zur Förderung von Bildungsgerechtigkeit.
12 neue Projekte werden im 5. Projekt-Call gefördert: von der Intensivstation über das Klassenzimmer bis ins Forensische Institut, von antiken Inschriften bis zu Deepfake-Stimmen. Der 6. Projekt-Call entfällt, die Mittel wurden vorgezogen.
Mehr Informationen: www.dizh.uzh.ch/2026/02/18/f...
🚨🚨🚨The Berlin Court of Appeal ruled today that @democracyreporting.bsky.social (DRI) is entitled to publicly available data from X to conduct research on election interference and disinformation on X in connection with the elections in Hungary 🗳️ 🇭🇺
democracy-reporting.org/en/office/EU...
A lot of smart people have been in denial about AI for understandable reasons:
– the people pitching it can be distasteful
– there’s been a ton of snake-oil hype
– it’s easier not to reckon with a major disruption
It must be very hard to publish null results Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.
I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.
🚀 dashboardr is out!
An #rstats package for building interactive dashboards with tidyverse-style syntax.
Launched with a fun hackathon at @ascor.bsky.social (🍕 included).
📦: favstats.github.io/dashboardr/
Big thanks to the dashboardr team, Digicomlab, and @vivifabrien.bsky.social for the logo 🎨
Early-career researchers: we offer a Peace Research Fellowship at @ipz.bsky.social University of Zurich - fully funded, 2-week research visit with the Decades of Peace team.
Deadline: March 20
Application details: www.decadesofpeace.com/fellowship
August in Zurich may include a swim in the river.
New CIS Position Openings including a Senior Research Coordinator, Postdoc Position with Karsten Donnay in Digital Democracy, and a Postdoc Position in the Political Economy of Low-Carbon Technologies: cis.ethz.ch/news-and-eve...
🚨 Join us for the next edition Summer School for Women* in Political Methodology in Mannheim 🚨
7 days of hands-on advanced methods + networking for PhDs, postdocs & early-career researchers.
Free of charge (limited travel support).
Deadline 1 March 2026: summerschoolwpm.org
#methodsky #polisky
Last week the story was that TikTok censored anti-Trump/ICE/Pretti videos after the U.S. ownership change. We investigated with a large set of US TikTok data and found some interesting results, short thread...
Was TikTok blocking certain political posts last week?
We investigated & found no systematic evidence of political censorship on TT post-restructuring at this point. A server outage better explains the data. But the story isn't over, and platforms need to provide the public more transparency.
@florianfoos.bsky.social @argohdes.bsky.social @ryanjgallag.com @iguinaudeau.bsky.social @jamoeberl.bsky.social @benguinaudeau.bsky.social @zeitzoff.bsky.social @ipz.bsky.social @antvalentim.bsky.social @valentimvicente.bsky.social
⬇️ Please repost in your networks, thank you!
@csmapnyu.org @jatucker.bsky.social @solmg.bsky.social @henryhenryhenry.com @benansell.bsky.social @nachristakis.bsky.social @dingdingpeng.the100.ci @claesdevreese.bsky.social @dgrand.bsky.social @ecpr.bsky.social @fil.bsky.social
I am really angry about all of the scientists who cozied up to Epstein even after it was known who he was.
I am nearly as angry at how many people are justifying this as "they had to, it's how academia works"
NO IT FUCKING WELL ISN'T
Job ad for the postdoc position in digital democracy specifying the responsibilities, profile, conditions etc. of the position. The job ad can be downloaded as PDF file here: https://www.ipz.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:e07fd17d-3fa0-4ccd-97d4-f0bf993e8c84/01_Postdoc-Donnay.pdf
💻 Please submit your application through our institutional job portal:
www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...
📄 The full job ad is available at:
www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...
🚨Job alert 🚨
I have an opening for a postdoc in my team at @ipz.bsky.social in the area of digital democracy starting Sep 1, 2026.
If you are working on the impact of the digital transformation on politics, please apply by 🗓️ Mar 1, 2026.
📤 Please share widely!
www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...
Red and yellow image with the text "Political Analysis" in white and "#OpenAccess" in red.
#OpenAccess from @polanalysis.bsky.social -
Potential and Pitfalls of Audio as Data for Political Research: Alignment, Features, and Classification Models - https://cup.org/4t9JG1r
- @r-mestre.bsky.social & Matt Ryan
#FirstView
A presenter talking in front a presentation.
A group photo of the professors from UZH's IPZ and ETH's CIS.
A photo of the audience filling up the room.
At his year's annual CIS Colloquium, researchers from @ipz.bsky.social and @ciseth.bsky.social presented their latest work, showcasing the vital role of political science in developing multidisciplinary responses to today's complex global challenges.
Promotional banner for the European Journal of Political Research, available on Cambridge Core, featuring the Cambridge University Press logo.
#OpenAccess from @ejprjournal.bsky.social -
Improving hate speech detection with large language models - cup.org/3YYVnKy
- @nataliaumansky.bsky.social, @maelkubli.bsky.social, Kotarcic, Bronner, Kurer, Grech, Hangartner, Gilardi & @karstendonnay.bsky.social
#FirstView #LLM
Fascinating that NZ's FM publicly lectures RBNZ Governor about respecting statutory independence whilst simultaneously demonstrating precisely why central bankers worldwide felt compelled to defend institutional independence from political interference! The irony has clearly stayed in its own lane.
Logo of Political Science Research and Methods featuring the initials "PSRM" in a stylized grey font on a black background.
#OpenAccess from @psrm.bsky.social -
Media effects revisited: corporate scandals, partisan narratives, and attitudes toward cryptocurrency regulation - https://cup.org/4jn9aUE
- Pepper D. Culpepper, Taeku Lee & Ryan Shandler
#FirstView
✖️Who produces most online hate speech and how effective is counterspeech?
➡️ @gloriagennaro.bsky.social et al. find that hate speech is concentrated among a few users and that counterspeech on X mostly fails to curb prolific offenders www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView
Logo of Political Science Research and Methods featuring the initials "PSRM" in a stylized white font on a black background.
#OpenAccess from @psrm.bsky.social -
The distribution of hate speech and its implications for content moderation - https://cup.org/4sgFqNl
- Gennaro, Bronner, Derksen, @maelkubli.bsky.social, Kotarcic, Kurer, Grech, @karstendonnay.bsky.social, @fgilardi.bsky.social & Hangartner
#FirstView
But the experience with Perspectives was great and I am very happy it has now appeared as a much stronger paper. Happy reading and looking forward to engaging with you about our work!
