Felix Jan Nitsch

I am almost thirty, and my physical property amounts to about 3-4 suitcases. #academialife

YouTube prepares crackdown on 'mass-produced' and 'repetitive' videos, as concern over AI slop grows | TechCrunch YouTube's creator liaison said the change is a "minor" update to YouTube's longstanding policies.

This seems like a positive development and distinctly different from how Meta and TikTok have handled AI slop proliferation. It’s attempting to differentiate between spam content and AI generated creative content.

techcrunch.com/2025/07/09/y...

Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us? Why does the online world seem so toxic compared with normal life? Our research shows that a small number of divisive accounts could be responsible – and offers a way out

Only a small % of people engage in toxic activity online, but they’re responsible for a disproportionate share of hostile or misleading content on nearly every platform

Because super-users are so active, they dominate our collective impression of the internet www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...

The Machine Stops The neurologist Oliver Sacks on steam engines, smartphones, and fearing the future.

AFAIK there is no scientific evidence that supports a "neurological catastrophe of gigantic scale" related to social media. Giving platform to what seems entirely personal writing by a neurologist here is misleading. Can we tone down the rhetoric please?

www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

Last week I had the pleasure to present my research at the Marketing Department of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa on invitation of my friend and colleague Andrea Bazzani. Also really cool to see the Neuromarketing Lab that they are building there!!

Bluesky is most definitely alive and kicking CEO Jay Graber says the days of winner-take-all social networking are over. Thank heavens she’s right.

"Bluesky is most definitely alive and kicking. CEO Jay Graber says the days of winner-take-all social networking are over." www.fastcompany.com/91342316/blu...

Has the reign of social media ended? NEWS ANALYSIS. After 20 years of domination by the major social media platforms, the way we use the internet has changed. People now seek refuge in private bubbles, relegating the large platforms to s...

Mosseri (Instagram): "But you don't share personal moments in feed today the way you did five or 10 years ago. You share them in stories or in messages more so." - Seems about right. People now are more strategic and self-presentational about their timeline posts.

www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/ar...

Good suggestions Raf... I also contemplated a physical stop watch to keep track of time (didn't really like using my phone for this)

Communalytic Introduces Civility Analyzer Module - Social Media Lab A New Research Module for Identifying Both Toxic and Prosocial Interactions in Online Discourse Toronto, Ontario – [06/17/2025] – We are pleased to announce the launch of the new Civility Analyzer mod...

We are pleased to announce the launch of the new Civility Analyzer module in @Communalytic.org. The module offers researchers an accessible, data-driven approach to studying both prosocial and harmful behaviours across various social media platforms. socialmedialab.ca/2025/06/17/c...

A recent Reuters survey finds that more people in the US get their news from social media than from any other source. I think that's mostly incidental exposure: You can hardly not read news on social media, whereas it’s an active choice to read the news in the newspaper.

Conference The 2024 NeuroPsychoEconomics Conference will take place at Politecnico di Milano, Italy on June 6th and 7th 2024

In Dublin at @ucddublin.bsky.social for the 2025 #neuropsychoeconomics conference. Let me know if you are around and want to chat about #socialmedia x #decisionscience x #mentalwellbeing!

www.neuropsychoeconomics.org/conference/

Political advertising on Facebook and Instagram before the 2020 US election had no effect.
www.nber.org/papers/w33818

This summer, I will start as an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the #UniversityOfSouthCarolina Darla Moore School of Business. This is an incredible step forward for me, and it also marks the accomplishment of one of my life goals which was to become a professor b4 turning 30. Took a village :)

Is there starter kit / list for researchers in the #socialmedia space already? Would be nice to connect with people across #econ, #psych, #mkt and more...

Is there starter kit / list for researchers in the #socialmedia space already? Would be nice to connect with people across #econ, #psych, #mkt and more...

How Germany’s AfD Harnessed Social Media The far-right group has learned to communicate in a country where traditional media no longer shape public opinion.

"How Germany’s AfD Harnessed Social Media. The far-right group has learned to communicate in a country where traditional media no longer shape public opinion." www.wsj.com/world/europe...

New paper on how a massive bot campaign is currently in action in Twitter/X to undermine the current german election...

Spoiler :
They better than the russian bots, and they're not afraid to spam 1000 tweets by day with IA help.

PDF in english here (Canva link) :
www.canva.com/design/DAGer...

We took X to court. And we won! ⚖️

The courts ruled that X must urgently grant us access to their publicly available data via their API. This access is critical for our analysis of online public discourse ahead of the upcoming German elections.

Read: bit.ly/4gBWGp4

Here's what's happened 1/3 👇

🚨New WP🚨
Remember Musk+Zuck+Trump+Jordan etc crying fact-checker bias b/c Reps were flagged more than Dems? We analyzed Community Notes on Musk's X and guess what: posts flagged as "misleading" are 67% more likely to be written by Reps! The issue is Reps, not fact-checkers...
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Here's a peek at what our @gruzd.ca & @philipmai.com have been working on this weekend: cn.deepfakestracker.org

It's a new dashboard for tracking media on X that have been labelled as "misleading or manipulated" by Community Notes members. More info later this week.

PSA: Bluesky is a public social network, like a blog. Posts are visible to anyone online. Built on the AT Protocol, it supports PUBLIC, portable conversations by storing data in accessible repositories.

Quite the indictment of AI products: they are more appealing to people who don't understand how they work and see them as magical

The paper concludes: "businesses may benefit from targeting those with lower AI literacy" and "maintaining an aura of magic around AI" ✨

tinyurl.com/ynefd8zk

This is probably not the best source for this, but:

- Consider what you know about your sample
- Consider what you know about the data-generating process
- Consider what is your "loss-function" when trying to summarise the data

coursekata.org/preview/book...

[Breaking] Two Republican supporters of the TikTok ban in the Senate, Senator Cotton and Senator Ricketts, cast doubt on the notion that Trump will swiftly reinstate the app.

My first reaction to the #tiktokban.

That's super interesting, thanks for sharing!

Just a reminder for Germans abroad that you need to re-register to vote in the Federal Election, even if you didn't move houses since 2021 (yes, I'm a political scientist and had to google this). Here are the docs you need: www.bundeswahlleiterin.de/bundestagswa.... (1)

To be clear, I don't think it's sci reformers pushing this tendency. Rather, it's something that happens as more people pick up on a criticism of a practice and then throw the baby out with the bathwater...

A sad tendency of many sci reform efforts is that instead of promoting transparency, certain research practices are just devalued entirely. Examples:

1. Exploratory research. Should be labelled as such but still valuable.

2. Correlative evidence. Does not establish causality but still valuable.