Alberto Acerbi

I link della settimana (#131) (i) I social media hanno democratizzato l’opinione pubblica, mentre l’IA potrebbe avere un effetto opposto e potrebbe non essere un male.

I link della settimana (#131)
open.substack.com/pub/albertoa...

We surely agree we use other strategies/mechanisms too :)

Social information use in the wild! Humans are basically using local enhancement.

I wonder whether AI usage will exacerbate academic divisions, at least in social sciences - users vs non-users, which are already quite clearly overlapping with the divisions already there.

"Removing political advertisements from the Facebook and Instagram feeds of randomly selected participants before the 2020 US election did not have a detectable effect on political knowledge, polarization, turnout or political participation."

Indeed! (More) rapid change should be the baseline assumption for me, and I would need convincing evidences to suggest it is not the case...

I am not very convinced by the idea of "cultural stagnation". Even without entering in cultural niches, mainstream observations seem to vary. E.g., the great majority of most-listened songs on Spotify is post 2010.

(Note these are cumulative streamings, which advantage older songs)

Evidence Hub on Social Media Ban for Kids Tracking global legislation, evidence, and expert analysis on social media age restrictions. A Lisbon Council initiative.

Looks like an interesting initiative
socialmediaban.lisboncouncil.net

Unfortunately not, sorry!

Looking forward to Jamie Tehrani's guest lecture in my cultural analytics course, open to everybody. If you are in Trento and want to know more about cultural evolution, that is a great opportunity! eventi.unitn.it/en/origins-s...

I link della settimana (#130) (i) L’intelligenza artificiale generativa ha fatto anche la sua apparizione a Sanremo 2026. Détournement post-situazionista contro il tecnoliberalismo capitalista? Più probabilmente, l’Italia si asses...

I link della settimana (#130)
open.substack.com/pub/albertoa...

Even granting, as I do here, that social media use has genuine negative effects, it does not follow that a ban alone would produce net benefits.

For higher-SES teenagers, social media might be replaced by alternative activities — reading, hobbies, sports. For lower-SES teenagers, the replacement might be other online activities, possibly worse ones.

Even those convinced that social media has negative effects on teenagers generally agree that these effects are mediated by socioeconomic status (SES): lower SES → more usage → more negative outcomes, or some variation of this. So what would a ban actually change?

"the effect of population size depends on attention filtering [...] CCE was enhanced in larger populations when participants could use an external record to support learning and innovation."
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Your “possible answer” seems plausible to me. (Also it is an answer for many other things…)

Why so much spend? They do have some effects, e.g. brand awareness. If you like hiking, and if you want to buy hiking shoes, than a hiking shoes ad can be useful (among other things). Another interesting critical read on online ads: www.abebooks.it/978037453865...

Not Born Yesterday Why people are not as gullible as we think

Naturally I speak for myself, but effectiveness of ads is not obvious, you can check chapter 9 here: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign? We investigated the effects of Facebook’s and Instagram’s feed algorithms during the 2020 US election. We assigned a sample of consenting users to reverse-chronologically-ordered feeds instead of the ...

I know this study has been criticised for Meta involvement, but seems also reasonable to me, and pointing (cautiously) in the other direction www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Also not sure I would say "NO effect", that would be implausible :) But I'd stay on: probably small effects; overemphasised in discussions; less important than other systemic socio-cultural-economic factors.

not agreeing would just leave (as people did left X...).
More generally I would say a single study (in either direction) can not provide a firm conclusion, but we should put many of them together and see what is the general tendency

I think it is a nice study! Not sure it changes too much my opinion though...The study seems fair, but (i) the effects are quite small, (ii) it is unclear how they would translate in real-world setting, (iii) participants in the "For you" condition have to stay there (in real life individuals -->

I link della settimana (#129) (i) Dal Washington Post, un altro articolo sensato che esprime dubbi sui divieti dei social media per i minori di 16 anni.

I link della settimana (#129)
open.substack.com/pub/albertoa...

Qualitative researchers can choose to not engage with AI, but it'd be a shame.
nber.org/papers/w34834

PhD student grant (3 years) on the evolution of written communication My team recruits a PhD student to work under the supervision of Olivier Morin on the evolution of written communication, within a project jointly led by Olivier Morin, Hugo Mercier, and Marc Allassonn...

CALL: a PhD grant (3 years) to do a PhD with me at @cognitionens.bsky.social on the evolution of graphic codes. euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/410213

The left is missing out on AI As a movement, it has largely refused to engage seriously with AI, ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right

Ironically, most comments here are supporting the claim of the article...
www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-i...

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...

UCL students win £21mn over Covid disruption in watershed UK settlement Move involving 6,500 claimants is set to put pressure on other universities to compensate graduates

Madness, produced by the madness of making students customers. www.ft.com/content/a0cf...

My kind of papers.
"Can LLMs Cook Jamaican Couscous? A Study of Cultural Novelty in Recipe Generation"
arxiv.org/pdf/2602.10964

Wikipedia has different versions for every language, and the same topics don't always use the same pictures. Here you can search for topics and see the pictures in the different versions.
walzr.com/in-every-lan...