Simon Karg

Can We Fix Social Media? Testing Prosocial Interventions using Generative Social Simulation Social media platforms have been widely linked to societal harms, including rising polarization and the erosion of constructive debate. Can these problems be mitigated through prosocial interventions?...

We built the simplest possible social media platform. No algorithms. No ads. Just LLM agents posting and following.

It still became a polarization machine.

Then we tried six interventions to fix social media.

The results were… not what we expected.

arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385

Very cool! Thanks for the update :) I'll check it out!

Counterspeech encouraging users to adopt the perspective of minority groups reduces hate speech and its amplification on social media - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Counterspeech encouraging users to adopt the perspective of minority groups reduces hate speech and its amplification on social media

📢 In a new online field experiment, we find that #counterspeech with perspective-based messages can reduce online hate speech, and its 🌟amplification🌟

with a large research team across #ETHZurich @ipz.bsky.social @uclspp.bsky.social and beyond

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 Big News for European Political Science 🚨

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the European Political Science Society (EPSS): a new, member-led, not-for-profit association built to support our scholarly community.

🔗 epssnet.org

Here’s a thread with everything you need to know.

🧵

I took a closer look at the program #EPSA2024 and found some interesting trends – there seem to be more US based scholars than last year 🇺🇸

@epsanet.bsky.social‬

A thread on this year's authors and affiliations 🧵

Interested in how people talk to each other online? Care about causal inference and/or NLP? Want to design and implement field experiments?

Come do a PhD with Dominik Hangartner, me, and a bunch of awesome people at IPL in Zurich:
jobs.ethz.ch/job/view/JOP...

🧠 New Preprint | The concept of reflection in the work of John Dewey

So excited to share my latest preprint (osf.io/preprints/ps...) which revisits John Dewey’s foundational work on reflection through the lens of his broader philosophy of cultural naturalism. In this article, I introduce...

VEO 3

Prompt: Generate a TV news anchor with a British accent, the anchor says "in shocking news, Jake Kaye Rowe ling's yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of turkey" include the announcement in the dialogue.

This took one prompt and 2 minutes to generate.

disco-eth/EuroSpeech · Datasets at Hugging Face We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

EuroSpeech: Massive Multilingual Parliamentary Speech Corpus

- 78,100+ hours across 22 European languages
- 50,500+ hours of quality-filtered data (CER < 20%)
- Robust alignment algorithm for non-verbatim texts
- Dramatically expands resources for 19+ languages

huggingface.co/datasets/dis...

The worst happened. We were DOGE’d. Our NSF funding is gone.

So now there’s nothing stopping me from sharing Expert Voices Together, a crisis response system for US-based researchers and journalists facing harassment.

It's a true passion project. 🧵 1/

expertvoicestogether.org

it's of course totally fine if not (I understand you're developing a wider ecosystem of packages for text analysis) – just wanted to let you know about this tradeoff :)

Sorry for hijacking this, but would it be possible to remove the dependency to the topics package (requiring rjava)? I planned to use the text package in a class I'm teaching, but opted not to simply because getting students to install rjava on their devices added another layer of complexity

Version 1.5 of the #r-text package is now available from #CRAN.

This version improves the application of pre-trained language assessments from the #LBAM-library (r-text.org/articles/LBA...).

#mlsky #PsychSciSky #Statistics #PsychSciSky #StatsSky #NLP

💥Postdoc call 💥

Join my @erc.europa.eu project #YOPOW at Aarhus University

🎇 3-y position (possibility of 1-y extension)

❓How societal norms give rise to biased beliefs about political power in youth

🤖 Computational social science (large-scale text & image data)

Deadline May 15: bit.ly/4hIpSeD

From the changemyview community on Reddit Explore this post and more from the changemyview community

The mods of r/ChangeMyView shared the sub was the subject of a study to test the persuasiveness of LLMs & that they didn't consent. There’s a lot that went wrong, so here’s a 🧵 unpacking it, along with some ideas for how to do research with online communities ethically. tinyurl.com/59tpt988

Draft “A Practical Guide to Estimating Conditional Marginal Effects: Modern Approaches” is on arXiv: arxiv.org/pdf/2504.01355

w/ two amazing grad students, Jiehan_Liu & Ziyi Liu 🧵

🔥second-to-last panel at #COMPTEXT2025 on Hate, Counterspeech & Algorithmic Influence!
@simonkarg.bsky.social on tracking hate/counterspeech
Thomas Kirchmair on cross-platform variations of hate
Chico Camargo on (in)effective user agency
Chaired/discussed by Travis Coan & @jadevrielink.bsky.social 👏

Picture of the abstract of our new paper

Picture of our key results (Figure 1)

🎉 Effects of climate protests by scientists paper published!

Our findings suggest that scientists can engage in public protest without compromising their credibility, but that such actions alone may have less impact than one would like to believe: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Okay, I'm not done yet but I have been instructed to head to the #EuroCIM2025 student mixer and I guess you get the idea.

I've been struggling to explain this in talks just working with the equations; I think the figures should make it a lot easier to follow along.

YouTube removes 'gender identity' from hate speech policy TariffTokers, Gen Z’s ‘it couple’, Easter potatoes, anti-MAGA hats, Zuck's D.C. mansion, Amazon's TikTok bid, Silicon Valley's cupid, and the fastest growing political channels on YouTube

SCOOP: YouTube removes 'gender identity' from hate speech policy. "YouTube quietly removing ‘gender identity and expression’ from its list of protected groups is a major radical shift away from best practices in the field of trust and safety."

Super cool work shining light on some yet underexplored but super important factors driving who speaks and who remains silent on in online conversations!

7th Annual Conference 2025 - The COMPTEXT Project 7th ANNUAL COMPTEXT Conference 2025 Please find the information on registration to COMPTEXT 2025 below. The COMPTEXT Association offers travel grants to PhD students, based on a motivation statement, ...

COMPTEXT 2025 – The Countdown is On! 🥳

✅ The preliminary program is now available! Check out the amazing sessions, workshops, and speakers lined up for this year's event.

Don't miss out – register today and secure your spot!

👉 Register here comptextconference.org/7th-annual-c... 👈

I asked DeepSeek to develop a scale to measure addiction to addiction scale development and of course it delivered.

Pleased to share the latest version of my paper with Arthur Spirling and @lexipalmer.bsky.social on replication using LMs

We show:

1. current applications of LMs in political science research *don't* meet basic standards of reproducibility...

Closeread Prize winners are here! 🏆

Want to create engaging, scroll-based stories with your data? See stunning scrollytelling examples made with Quarto: posit.co/blog/closere...

Learn more about Closeread and its power to create dynamic narratives. Congrats winners! #Quarto #RStats #Python

Want to learn about computational social science *for free* and launch interdisciplinary research projects? We are so excited to announce there will be *26* Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science this year! Apply to one of them here: sicss.io/locations

Print this out and put it on your pinboard! Most compact and at the same time clear and intuitive figure on possible associations between predictors and outcome (or variables).
(source: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/..., by @dingdingpeng.the100.ci and @achatton.bsky.social)

The relationship between social media and democracy is complex but important and there is a lot of debate.

For coordination, I wanted to gauge the community with a discussion thread about what, in my view, we do know and the ones we do not know (yet), please add your thoughts and/or disagree: 1/n

As Germany gears up for its parliamentary elections on February 23, I’ve analyzed digital ad spending trends from 2021 to 2025.

TL;DR: ad spending increased but that is mainly due to a shift to Google.

Click through the thread below or check out my blog post ⬇️
www.favstats.eu/post/btws/

A while coming, but happy to say that `parttree` is finally on CRAN. #rstats #dataviz

Visualize simple decision tree partitions on the scale of the data. Useful for getting an intuitive sense of how your model has carved up the feature space. Works for both classification & regression tasks.

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