Lisa Oswald

I am extremely thankful to so many people along the way, just to name a few: @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social @lorenzspreen.bsky.social @arc-mpib.bsky.social @hertieschool.bsky.social @anaskozyreva.bsky.social @sebstier.bsky.social @seramirezruiz.bsky.social @andyguess.com @small-schulz.bsky.social

Admin note: if you'd like to reach out - please use my new email address as my MPIB account is no longer in use!! I will also soon advertise a position but feel free to reach out proactively.

It's hard to put into words how excited I am about this step and I am very much looking forward to working with the students of Goethe university and especially to getting to know many new colleagues at C3S, the political science department and collaborators across the university and region.

Big news: I started a new position as Professor for Computational Social Science (W1 tenure track) at the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main!

www.c3s-frankfurt.de/who-we-are#m...

And... we're off

Join us next Spring at the University of Potsdam for the third Applied Causal Graphs workshop: applied-causal-graphs.de

Now that the date and place are set and two of the keynote speakers are fixed, all we need is an abstract from you.

Disentangling participation in online political discussions with a collective field experiment A field experiment examines patterns of online political discussion participation and the challenges of addressing inequality.

A new field experiment conducted on Reddit explains why some people lurk quietly and why others become extremely active in online political discussions.

Learn more in #ScienceAdvances: https://scim.ag/4oOdywQ

Full Professorship (W3) in Machine Learning Deadline: January 31, 2026

We @uni-konstanz.de are hiring a full professor in machine learning for our MSc program in Social and Economic Data Science: stellen.uni-konstanz.de/jobposting/6...

Join us in Konstanz! For anyone interested, feel free to DM if you have questions.

Für eine deutsche Zusammenfassung, hier ein kurzes Interview beim DLF www.deutschlandfunk.de/online-disku...

Online political discussions are characterized by a minority of users dominate the discussion, while most remain silent.

Those who perceived a discussion as toxic/polarized tend to remain silent: But toxicity engages power users (namely men interested in politics) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

It's out!!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Big thank you to my coauthors @small-schulz.bsky.social and @lorenzspreen.bsky.social, and to all participants who discussed 20 political issues over 4 weeks in 6 subreddit, 3 experimental conditions and let us observe.

Inequalities in online discourse

Whose voices are heard in online discussions? Most people stay silent... and the drama may drive power users to post even more. A Reddit field experiment by
@lfoswaldo.bsky.social @small-schulz.bsky.social
& @lorenzspreen.bsky.social reveals why and explores ways to change it. tinyurl.com/3pwksmpu

2️⃣4️⃣🎁🎄 Doing something new for Advent this year: one great data journalism piece per day until Dec 24. I’m teaching a data journalism course @hertieschool.bsky.social next semester, so this is partly selfish homework. But maybe interesting for others too.

Our survey on research practices in Computational Communication Science is still open for participation!
#CommSky

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.

Christmas markets in Cologne in 2025

Each Christmas tree 🎄 shows the location of one of the 9 Christmas markets. I created a Christmas tree flat icon as an SVG and imported it into mapbox.com Studio. Finally, I discovered the particle-based snow setting. ❄

#30DayMapChallenge Day 21: Icons

Demokratie: Wenn die Rechte mitregiert, wird sie nicht geschwächt – im Gegenteil Eine Untersuchung von 57 Ländern zeigt: Wenn die Rechte in Verantwortung kommt, gewinnt sie dazu. Daraus lässt sich für Deutschland lernen.

📣 New op-ed in Süddeutsche Zeitung: What the data say about the “Brandmauer”

I summarize key findings from a study with @anninahermes.bsky.social across 57 democracies

➡️ Far-right parties don’t get weaker in government, they get stronger (~6 points by the next election)

tinyurl.com/4j6jaud2

wow, thanks a lot for covering this - let me just emphasize that I'd regard this preprint as a conceptual perspective / review article that aims to act as a synthesis if existing evidence (the analysis of the GLES data serves mostly as another empirical illustration)

One postdoctoral Research Position Deadline: November 15th, 2025

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.

Absolutely, I think this paper connects really well to, for example, your work with Claire Robertson

Another casualty of the LLM revolution.

In "arXiv’s CS category, review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review."

Thanks! That's great to hear - and makes me curious to hear more about your project.

Big thanks to my fantastic coauthors: Will Schulz @small-schulz.bsky.social, Ralph Hertwig @arc-mpib.bsky.social , David Lazer @davidlazer.bsky.social and Sebastian Stier @sebstier.bsky.social !

Feedback very welcome! Now read, share, cite 😊

Finally, we move beyond social media research and discuss potential consequences of the production-consumption gap, which results in a remarkable visibility gap, for public opinion more broadly.

We then discuss methodological challenges this production-consumption gap poses for us, social media researchers, and derive implications for sampling, study design and inference.

Focusing on political content on social media, we discuss existing evidence on predictors and consequences of this production-consumption gap.

One phenomenon that is remarkably consistent across platforms, time and contexts: most people lurk, read along, and never really post while a small minority is very active, and very visible — a.k.a. the production-consumption gap.

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?

How common are “survey professionals” - people who take dozens of online surveys for pay - across online panels, and do they harm data quality?

Our paper, FirstView at @politicalanalysis.bsky.social, tackles this question using browsing data from three U.S. samples (Facebook, YouGov, and Lucid):

Unfortunately not but (almost) all references are in English