Aarushi Kalra

new yorkers cant not vote for the guy explaining rank choice voting in hindi/urdu 😪

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The Means of Prediction An eye-opening examination of how power—not technology—will define life with AI. AI is inescapable, from its mundane uses online to its increasingly consequential decision-making in courtrooms,…

In case somebody missed this yesterday, while watching a political car-crash unfold:

"The Means of Prediction - How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits)"
is now in the UChicago Press catalog, and available for pre-order online!

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Prize Winners

The WS on 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
- jointly held w/ UCLouvain, LCII,Telecom Paris, TSE, Uni Warsaw - just wrapped up.

Congratulations to @chidiya.bsky.social & @juliusgoedde.bsky.social - both won the Best Paper(s) Award 👏

🙏 to the local organizers @tse-fr.eu
ℹ️ www.digital-economics.org

I had an interesting experience yesterday, where my public-facing and scholarly worlds intersected, really collided. There were some fireworks.

Now I'm stuck in an airport on a layover, so I'm going to write about that experience. It happened at this talk at CSU Bakersfield #highered #academiclife

US military plane carrying deported Indians lands in Punjab President Donald Trump has made the mass deportation of undocumented foreign nationals a key policy.

And so it begins 😞...

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Is the pattern in TikTok blackouts... Ugh... Random?

Second: Meta seriously weakened its hate speech standards in a way that makes all protected groups generally, and immigrants, women, and LGBTQ+ people specifically, much more vulnerable to abuse on the site. 🧵 5/11

This article should be required reading for anyone commenting on the political effects of social media.

The Consumer Welfare Effects of Online Ads: Evidence from a 9-Year Experiment Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

Here's a our new paper "The Consumer Welfare Effects of Online Ads: Evidence from a 9-Year Experiment"

We analyze a long-running field experiment of online advertising.

We find no significant differences in valuations between users who see ads vs. those who don't.

www.nber.org/papers/w32846

"you'll be visited by three spirits"

The three spirits

Here's a great starter pack of economists working on AI.

Who else should be on this list?

bsky.app/starter-pack...

Would appreciate being added aarushirita.github.io/papers/

Thanks for this: would love to be added aarushirita.github.io/papers/

throwing random content at users helps algorithms learn user preferences while retaining users.

In related work, I try to think of other viewpoint-blind policy measures to "nudge" the supply of hate to reduce exposure: inserting apolitical local news about devo issues aarushirita.github.io/papers/

could not have written this post better myself: really appreciate it, @rajivsethi.bsky.social! As correctly pointed out, the hard question is whether diversification provides a way to moderate without censoring: the model-based counterfactuals show that partial diversification could be the answer.

Can Social Media Algorithms be Regulated to Prevent Online Radicalization in Developing Countries? We are excited to launch our Job Market Paper Series blog for 2024-2025, beginning with our very first blog post by Aarushi Kalra.  Aarushi Kalra is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Brown Universi…

Interesting experimental paper on online hate by @chidiya.bsky.social treatment group gets randomized feed instead of algo-curated, exposure to toxic content (TC) drops, engagement drops, search for TC rises, sharing of TC rises relative to exposure:

www.econthatmatters.com/2024/11/can-...

#eeac Day 12: @chidiya.bsky.social JMP "Hate in the Time of Algorithms: Evidence from a Large Scale Experiment on Online Behavior” switches from algorithmic feed to random content on Indian TikTok-like platform. Great summary of findings here www.econthatmatters.com/2024/11/can-... #econsky #econjmp

Thank you so much!

Thank you! Would love to be added.

The ACLU gets *zero* funding from the government.

A bit disconcerting that the fellow tasked with reducing government funding doesn't know that.

Thank you so much!

Would love to be added: thank you!

Can Social Media Algorithms be Regulated to Prevent Online Radicalization in Developing Countries? We are excited to launch our Job Market Paper Series blog for 2024-2025, beginning with our very first blog post by Aarushi Kalra.  Aarushi Kalra is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Brown Universi…

Thrilled to share that my work on feed-ranking algorithms, based on a large-scale experiment I conducted with 5 million people in India, was recently featured on the Economics that really matters blog!

So excited for feedback from folks in this lovely space 🦚 www.econthatmatters.com/2024/11/can-...

At least one item on his wishlist has been granted: Bluesky has decided to quadruple the size of its contract workforce of content moderators from 25 to 100, the company told Platformer. The move comes in response to Bluesky’s rapid growth since this month’s US presidential election, which triggered a fresh exodus of users away from Elon Musk’s X and over the weekend took the platform past 22 million total users.

Some news: amid rapid growth and some over-enforcement of its community guidelines, Bluesky trust and safety chief @aaron.bsky.team tells me the company will quadruple the size of its content moderation team www.platformer.news/bluesky-grow...

The composition of a lot of the economics starter packs alone on here was revelatory on the nature of 'homophily in citation patterns and racial clusters in networks'...We can definitely do better as a field #Econsky

"By allowing people to mute content in fine-tuned and personalized ways, it reduces the incentive to mute people."

A very important insight! Would depend on whether the "Discover" algorithm is content based, in which case we still end up in very segregated echo-chambers.

<shameless plug for JMP>

Next up: Aarushi Kalra (aarushirita.github.io), experimenter extraordinaire!

Aarushi works on development, political economy, and the digital platforms/AI. Her JMP studies a massive RCT run on one of India's largest social media platforms, which shut down the content personalization algorithm(!)

Massive experiment on India’s TikTok-like platform: Replacing personalized algorithms with randomized content reduced hate speech by 27%—but led to a 35% drop in platform usage. Toxic users adapted by sharing hate at higher rates. #econsky

Aarushi Kalra on Digital Polarization and Toxicity, Understanding User Behavior, Social Media Algorithms, and Platform Incentives SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Welcome to Ideas of India, a podcast

Great interview on Ideas for India Aarushi Kalra about her fascinating JMP. www.mercatus.org/ideasofindia...