Max Grömping

Who shares which sources on social media, and why does this matter politically? Our open-access @polcommjournal.bsky.social article shows how far-right French Twitter/X users strategically post and cite sources to achieve their goals. doi.org/10.1080/1058... #polisky #commsky #migcitsky A 🧵:

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Grade 1 Company Description: Every institution values excellence. What matters most is why. Griffith was created to be a different type of university. You’ll find we’re about leading research, academic excel...

Please share widely! Great #PostDoc opportunity at one of Australia's top #PoliticalScience departments, on a #FutureFellowship on electoral resilience. 3yrs, great pay, and a workplace practically next to the Great Barrier Reef!
Closing date is 1 Oct 2025
jobs.smartrecruiters.com/GriffithUniv...

Great work on democratic resilience by my @larslott.bsky.social & Aurel Croissant

Wow, Princeton UP got bamboozled into this like a travel vlogger.

The Misleading Panic over Misinformation People can’t agree on how to define misinformation and its related terms, making regulation nearly impossible. Instead, free expression serves as a better tool for discovering truth.

🧵 THREAD: Why the Cato Institute’s new paper on “misinformation panic” is dangerously wrong, and why it completely misunderstands the real crisis we face.
www.cato.org/policy-analy...

Are tailored ads in political campaigns as persuasive as conventional wisdom holds? 📢

In joint work w/ @heikekluever.bsky.social we present evidence from a field experiment with the German Greens ahead of the 2024 European Elections calling this into question 🤔
#epsa2025

⏰: Friday, 16:50
📍: 0A.10

🚨In PNAS🚨
The right often accuses fact-checkers of political bias
But we analyzed Community Notes on Musk's X and found posts flagged as "misleading" are 2.3x more likely to be written by Reps than Dems!
The issue is Reps sharing misinformation, not fact-checker bias...
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Huge! Massive congratulations Sofia.

Check out this great work by @griffith.edu.au colleague @ammassarisofia.bsky.social on women's party engagement on the radical right.

Friends in Germany interested in #deliberative #democracy, this is THE event for you. "Can citizen councils strengthen representative democracy?".
I wish I could make it to Berlin for this one.

Re-upping this as I continue to find it helpful for normalizing rejection: I need to remember it’s the modal outcome! Plus didn’t @mirya.bsky.social have a thing about rewarding X number of rejections, as a way of marking how much you’re putting your work out there?

Comment Elon Musk utilise son réseau X pour faire monter l'extrême droite en Europe - RTBF Actus Voici un extrait du compte X (anciennement Twitter) de Dries Van Langenhove, ex-député Vlaams Belang condamné en 2024 à...

Here's me saying it like it is regarding Elon Musk and X as a propaganda tool that is increasingly biased towards the far right.

The article is in French - in this thread are some auto-translated excerpts from my comments. Shout out to @markandrejevic.bsky.social

www.rtbf.be/article/comm...

Fake news and the election campaign - how worried should voters be? New research reveals a growing number of Australians are encountering political misinformation and disinformation in the election campaign and are worried about it.

Two in three Australians say they have encountered misinformation in the lead up to the election. How concerned should we be? Read about the results of our recent survey w @acarson.bsky.social theconversation.com/fake-news-an...

Congrats, Roman!

🚨 New book alert!

Policy Preparation Inside the European Commission is out with OUP @oxfordacademic.bsky.social

It’s about the behind-the-scenes stage of EU policymaking that shapes everything—yet rarely gets the spotlight: how the Commission prepares its proposals.

Link: doi.org/10.1093/9780...

What a well-argued thread about the benefits of semi parliamentarism.

It's exactly like the real time diaries of people witnessing the Nazi takeover in '33... as he says in the first post.
Trying make sense of the madness as ot unfolds.

I highly recommend following @adamprz.bsky.social's substack.

My department at Southampton is offering a 2 day summer school June 23-24 on “Declining democratic health: Methods for diagnosis, treatment and recovery.” Not only is this free to attend, but travel support may be available. Spots are limited.

www.southampton.ac.uk/politics/new...

Congrats, @breznaunate.bsky.social @emrinke.bsky.social @kunkakom.bsky.social and team. Taking part in this project was not only eye-opening in terms of #metascience but also great fun. Even with shared data and code, reproducibility is not a given. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

What a fantastic opportunity to talk with Alex Fischer and Selen Ercan about the role of research for democratic practice. I learned about communicating democracy research for better impact + suggested we listen to scholars of #authoritarianism to address the current moment @deldemucan.bsky.social

Exhibit #1099: The most dangerous disinformation isn’t spread by anonymous accounts on the internet—it’s the disinformation crafted & amplified by elites through legacy media. When those in power distort facts, they shape public perception & influence policy on a scale no anonymous troll ever could.

Real chilling effects A extraordinary pattern of government censorship and threats to speech

New, from me: you were told that the threats to free speech came from wokeness. Some compared it to Maoist China.

Now we are witnessing government power being used to silence dissent and censor ideas. Now we know what real society-wide chilling effects look like. 🧵
open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...

!!
"you can’t fact check your way to a win in this kind of frame game. You have create alternative frames, support people in telling stories that resonate with those frames, and make sure those stories are heard"

I want to paint a picture of what scholarship is like when autocracy has taken hold, based on experiences from the 20th century. Specifically, I want to map the spectrum of choices—ethical, professional, and intellectual—available to scholars under autocracy. First, a disclaimer: I am not a historian, not even a historian of science. I am a cognitive psychologist. But I was born in the Soviet Union, grew up in East Germany, studied Psychology at Moscow State University and then did my PhD and worked at Humboldt University in East Berlin. That makes me one of a vanishing breed of those who remember what academia was like under the 20th-century autocracies behind the Iron Curtain.

When the autocratic past becomes frighteningly relevant: Vera Kempe, one our panelists at today's workshop on Science under Autocracy www.scibeh.org/events/works... has recorded her experiences in USSR and East Germany here: substack.com/home/post/p-.... She offers some recommendations, too.

IN NEW ISSUE: What explains interest group prominence in parliamentary speech? D Halpin, @timothyjgraham.bsky.social, @bertfraussen.bsky.social, @maxgroemping.bsky.social & Z Zhou argue it's more aligned with policy agendas than partisanship or ideology: https://buff.ly/3EL7Kmz (OPEN ACCESS)

Everyday Authoritarianism is Maddening and Stupid Eight years ago, I wrote a post on this blog entitled “Everyday Authoritarianism is Boring and Tolerable.” A slightly edited version did some numbers when it appeared at Vox as “L…

Everyday authoritarianism is mostly boring and tolerable, but it is always maddening and stupid

The Path to American Authoritarianism What comes after democratic breakdown.

"U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration"

Levitsky & Way analyse the capture of the US state in comparative perspective. By far the best read on what's going on.

www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

As Vance 'lectures' Europe on free speech, it is good to be reminded that the United States ranks 55 (!) on the World Press Freedom Index.

The top 10 countries are ALL in Europe.

#journalism #democracy #freepress

rsf.org/en/index