Wai Yen Tang Ph.D.

The science influencers going viral on TikTok to fight misinformation Scientists and medical experts are countering climate denialism, vaccine scepticism and wellness pseudoscience on social media.

It's nice to see more academic journals cover the importance of scientists meeting people where they are (social media) in order to share evidence-based information.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

📣 New preprint!

We brought together experts from academia, major video game studios, NGOs, funding bodies, and civil society groups to ask: what should be prioritised when it comes to the future of video games? 🧵

Just 85 experts 😓, it should've been double that number

One of my current projects is a book that will likely interest of perhaps four or five people (give or take) is a monograph on the history of research on the weapons effect. I start out with a discussion of the conditions (social & research) in the mid-1960s that led to Berkowitz & Lepage (1967). /1

Motivated causal judgments and responsibility for civilian casualties in military conflicts Causal judgments are ubiquitous in politics and crucial for assigning responsibility and blame. Cognitive science has demonstrated that people are more likely to pick factors as “causal” when they ma...

Loyalty to favoured groups trumps the effects of causal structure in making causal judgments on issues of politics.
When identities are not provided, causal structure matters; when they are known, they are almost all that matters.
Here is the link to our study onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The Matrix of Coordinated Influence. Traditional frameworks for analyzing online influence focus on the distinction between human and automated actors (Identity Axis) or between spontaneous and coordinated behavior (Articulation Axis). Bot Nets (top-left) rely on synthetic identities and automated scripts. Troll Farms (bottom-left) use human operators to manage fake personas. Grassroots Action (bottom-right) involves verified citizens sharing self-authored views. Cyborg Propaganda (top-right) represents a new paradigm: verified human users disseminating centrally generated, algorithmically generated narratives, effectively ‘hybridizing’ the authenticity of the grassroots with the scale of the botnet.

The distinction between grassroots activism and automated influence is collapsing.

We typically worry about "bot farms" or "troll factories." But a distinct, more complex threat is emerging. We call it "Cyborg Propaganda."

Sharing this one last time before the survey closes at the end of February. If you had an NSFW game posted to Steam or itch.io in July, consider participating in our survey.

Babbage, 1830, discussing the problem that scientists selectively report findings that they want to be true.

Confirmation bias is a strong human tendency. This is why we need to design science in a way that prevents conformation bias from leading us away from the truth.

I ran into the same problem described in @malte.the100.ci et al's paper of meta-science authors hiding which papers they've studied.

This anonymization practice is antithetical to scientific norms and the entire purpose of meta-science.

Old blog post about it:

and loot boxes are 'surprise mechanics' via @jamiemadigan.bsky.social
www.forbes.com/sites/jamiem...

Also lots of assumptions about this "no social media" world. For one, it's not going to be in a WEIRD country.

Perhaps we can take gander in history in regards to the introduction of the television

Not an expert on social media & youth studies, but here's a question for those who are: all the evidence that shows detrimental effects of not using it, come from a context where everybody is using it and just a few are not. How much can that be extrapolated to a world where nobody is? #CommSky

Depressed? Anxious? Lonely?

What if mental health doesn’t just result from media use, but shapes how we choose media?

In a new preprint, Valerie Klein, @gongxuanjun.bsky.social @aeden.bsky.social and I and I test this using a computational decision-making model: doi.org/10.21203/rs....

🧵Thread

It must be very hard to publish null results Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

Exclusive | OpenAI Executive Who Opposed ‘Adult Mode’ Fired for Sexual Discrimination Ryan Beiermeister, who served as the vice president leading OpenAI’s product policy team, had raised concerns about the upcoming launch of erotic content.

OpenAI fired a VP who opposed their erotica rollout (and had started a company-wide peer mentorship program for women), allegedly telling her it was because she discriminated against a man 🤔 www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

Graphic titled Safer Internet Day. A dark blue background with the date February 10th 2026. Graphic features some text that says: The internet is not just a technological space — it is a psychological one too. Creating a safer internet goes beyond cybersecurity measures alone. It requires an understanding of human behaviour, social interaction, identity, power, and vulnerability in digital contexts.

Today is Safer Internet Day 🌐

The internet is not just a technological space - it is a psychological one. The BPS Cyberpsychology Committee is committed to advancing research, practice, and policy that promote safer, more inclusive, and psychologically healthy online spaces.

#SaferInternetDay

(Un)Silencing Academia in Times of Epistemic Conflicts | Navigating On This volume tackles the pressing issue of online violence against academics, considering the diverse forms that cyberbullying and harassment can take, as well

(Un)Silencing Academia in Times of Epistemic Conflicts:
Navigating Online Violence by
@albertagiorgi.bsky.social & @haeszi.bsky.social

doi.org/10.4324/9781...

cc @veletsianos.bsky.social

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.

Hundreds of kids are still detained.

We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

SCIENCE IS UNDER CENSORSHIP. “WOMEN” “VACCINE” “EQUITY” “ADDICTION” FROM PEN AMERICA’S LIST OF WORDS BANNED FROM FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WORK.

Science cannot thrive when censorship shuts down research. Shutting down research doesn't make people healthy. Help us impeach & #RemoveRFKJr by visiting standupforscience.net/impeach-rfkjr .
(1/5🧵)

YouTube video by 404 Media The Screen Time Panic Sets Parents Up to Fail

The screen time panic sets parents up to fail by @404media.co @patrickklepek.bsky.social
youtu.be/p2DEjvIvfs0?...

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

Very much of Cory Doctorow's reverse centaur www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

Sounds very much of Cory Doctorow's reverse centaur www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

My colleague Krist Vaessen wrote a new book: “Neomania: How our obsession with innovation is failing science, and how to restore trust”. It's a great analysis how the drive for novelty hinders reliable scientific progress. Open Access, so read it here: books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp...

Defining prosociality: systematic review on prosocial, altruistic, helping and proactive behaviors incorporating artificial intelligence Despite extensive research, clear conceptual distinctions between prosociality, altruism and helping remain lacking. This systematic review analyzes 1075 empirical studies to examine definitional o...

Defining prosociality: systematic review on prosocial, altruistic, helping and proactive behaviors incorporating artificial intelligence by Benjamin Binder, Michael Eid & Timo Lorenz
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Bluesky Map Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

I have yet to see any evidence that there is a market for AI-generated books outside of people being tricked into thinking they are not AI-generated books. AKA, it is a project of scamming and deceiving people, and really should be treated as fraud

YouTube video by MPR News Sociologist Nicole Bedera explains how observing ICE is a 'de-escalation' tactic

Sociologist @nbedera.bsky.social
explains how observing ICE is a 'de-escalation' tactic