Sol Messing

bsky.app/profile/solm...

Remember media events are a burst of attention while the other keywords are evergreen w consistent volume/interest. The trajectory for ICE etc is definitely lower than what it would have been if the site didn’t go down. But that’s still consistent w a site outage

Yes we only capture if it eventually went up on the site, we cannot see what happens on individuals devices

bsky.app/profile/ldns...

Was there censorship on TikTok after the U.S. takeover? A TikTok outage more likely explains recent anomalies – there’s no evidence of larger platform changes so far.

🌐 📲 With international collaborators, the Observatory’s director @andreucasas.bsky.social revisited recent “TikTok censorship” claims after the TikTok USDS takeover

➡️ Detailed information about the analysis available: goodauthority.org/news/was-the...

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This is posting behavior tho

Was there censorship on TikTok after the U.S. takeover? A TikTok outage more likely explains recent anomalies – there’s no evidence of larger platform changes so far.

Here's the post on Good Authority! Thanks @goodauth.bsky.social @johnsides.bsky.social & Vanessa Lide! goodauthority.org/news/was-the...

Bottom line: We found no systematic evidence of political censorship on TikTok 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.

Comments on Ofcom’s Call for Evidence on Researcher Access - NYU’s Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics

Still, our position is that TikTok and other platforms should provide a way for third-party researchers to study their recommender systems and look for evidence of undue political influence. csmapnyu.org/impact/polic...

False accusations of censorship can create a "Suspect's Dividend" - if a company gets blamed regardless, the cost of actually doing the unethical thing goes down.

We can't rule out individual posts being shadowbanned, specific types of content quietly suppressed, or changes in private messaging. And our keyword-based approach can’t catch everything.

We also looked at total views. Same story: viewership plummeted after the outage, then rebounded for political and non-political content alike.

TikTok outage live updates — 'major infrastructure issue' revealed, and what's going on with TikTok's Terms of Service? It's not been a smooth transition...

The timing lines up with a reported TikTok outage on Jan. 25. Other tech companies also experienced server issues around the same time, and a major winter storm knocked out power across the mid-Atlantic, where three Oracle data centers are reportedly located. www.tomsguide.com/computing/li...

We tracked public TikToks containing keywords like "ICE," "Alex Pretti," "Renee Good," "Trump," and "Epstein" over time. There was a big drop - but it hit everything, political and non-political alike. "Recipe" and "Oscar" posts fell off too.

BTW, "we" here is an awesome group: @benguinaudeau.bsky.social, Kylan Rutherford, Molly Roberts, @andreucasas.bsky.social, @kengchichang.bsky.social, Hennes Barnehl, & @jatucker.bsky.social.

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...

Offene Stellen / Open Positions

🚨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...

Is Joe Rogan really just a voice of the right? Our new @csmapnyu.org piece for @goodauth.bsky.social shows he’s just as much a space for the left and the center, too. A look inside today’s surprisingly complicated podcast information ecosystem. 🎙️

goodauthority.org/news/podcast...

IF ANYONE BUILDSIT, EVERYONE DIES WHY SUPERHUMAN AI WOULD KILLUS ALL ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY & NATE SOARES

Next up on my reading list.

…I am already regretting this choice.

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):

7/ Kernel Approximation Ideal Point Poisson Factorization - scalable Bayesian ideological estimation from billions of observations, applied to 134 million TikTok comments to map ideology on the platform. @matiaspiqueras.bsky.social

6/ Propaganda or Parity? testing whether TikTok amplifies pro-China content, using LLM classifiers and longitudinal engagement/moderation data. @kengchichang.bsky.social, @mollyeroberts.bsky.social, H Barnehl

5/ To Be or Not to Be on TikTok: a rare activation experiment, recruiting users to start TikTok and measuring causal effects on attitudes, knowledge and well-being.
K Rutherford, @tiagoventura.bsky.social

4/ Scrolling Through Hate: mapping hate speech on TikTok across time, place, topic, plus experiments testing moderation responsiveness.
responsiveness.
@karstendonnay.bsky.social, @fabriziogilardi.bsky.social , @gloriagennaro.bsky.social, @dhangartner.bsky.social

3/ First: The Political Supply of TikTok: political content spreads faster than entertainment, and a small set of creators dominates reach. @benguinaudeau.bsky.social, K Rutherford, @jatucker.bsky.social

2/ Short-form video platforms (TikTok, Reels, Shorts) are reshaping political comms: vertical video, personalized feeds, huge reach. But opaque data access makes them hard to study.

TODAY Aug 28 - "Politics in 60 Seconds: Short-Form Video, TikTok, and Political Communication" at #APSA2025 -

2 PM, VCC West Ballroom B

Chair: @eunjikim.bsky.social. Discussant: @mollyeroberts.bsky.social

Spoiler alert: the answer is “no”

Maybe let’s not dismantle the tenure system while admin and athletic budgets balloon