Alexandre Bovet

Day 2 Keynotes kicked off with Laura Nelson's inspiring presentation, “Why Qualitative Research Needs Computational Social Science”. What is the state of this maturing field called qualitative computational methods? What are the ongoing debates and futures? #ic2s2

Will anyone review this paper? Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review Scholarly publishing relies on peer review to identify the best science. Yet finding willing and qualified reviewers to evaluate manuscripts has become an increasingly challenging task, possibly even ...

1. Kevin Gross and I just posted a new science-of-science preprint.

This one explores the looming peer review crisis. As many of you know, it's becoming significantly more difficult for journal editors to find scholars willing to serve as peer reviewers for submitted manuscripts.

Excited to share this new paper in JPhys Complexity from @abovet.bsky.social @lambiotte.bsky.social @nicopedre.bsky.social 'Community detection on directed networks with missing edges'
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Mapping the interaction between science and misinformation in COVID-19 tweets. Publication from @luzuzek.bsky.social, Juan Pablo Bascur, @annabertani.bsky.social, @ricgallotti.bsky.social. This project is supported by European Media and Information Fund. Abstract: During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific understanding related to the topic evolved rapidly. Along with scientific information being discussed widely, a large circulation of false information, labelled an infodemic by the WHO, emerged. Here, we study the interaction between misinformation and science on Twitter (now X) during the COVID-19 pandemic. We built a comprehensive database of 407M COVID-19 related tweets and classified the reliability of URLs in the tweets based on Media Bias/Fact Check. In addition, we use Altmetric data to see whether a tweet refers to a scientific publication. We find that many users find that many users share both scientific and unreliable content; out of the 1.2M users who share science, also share unreliable content. Publications that are more frequently shared by users who also share unreliable content are more likely to be preprints, slightly more often retracted, have fewer citations, and are published in lower-impact journals on average. Our findings suggest that misinformation is not related to a ``deficit'' of science. In addition, our findings raise some critical questions about certain open science practices and their potential for misuse. Given the fundamental opposition between science and misinformation, our findings highlight the necessity for proactive scientific engagement on social media platforms to counter false narratives during global crises.

New preprint! 🚨

We study the interaction between misinformation and science on Twitter during COVID-19 based on ~407M tweets. Both science and misinformation featured prominently during the pandemic, but the interaction between the two has not been studied on this scale before.

🧵 (1/10)

Charting multidimensional ideological polarization across demographic groups in the USA - Nature Human Behaviour Ojer et al. use data from the American National Election Studies to map US voters in a two-dimensional ideological space. Democrats and Republicans have grown more polarized over the past 30 years, wh...

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

The perceived immorality of too much wealth in 20 nations. Scores are standardized, and whiskers represent the 95% confidence interval.

Most people don’t find excessive wealth immoral when considered separately from economic inequality; however, people in countries with high GDP and high levels of inequality find being too rich more morally wrong than being of average wealth. In PNAS Nexus: academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Adamic-Glance Awardee Keynote: @gvrkiran.bsky.social on misinformation on whatsapp through the lens of a large data donation program #icwsm

Our work on Bluesky: doi.org/10.1609/icws...

Joint work with
@bibo7086.bsky.social
@harnen.bsky.social
@garethtyson.bsky.social
@asonur.bsky.social
@ignactro.bsky.social
@baronca.bsky.social

The Detox Workshop at @icwsm.bsky.social has wrapped up. Thanks to our keynote @maxfalken.bsky.social , all our speakers, my co-organisers, and everyone who joined the event! 🫖
We don’t have all the solutions yet, but it’s clear that tackling platform harms requires new methods and data sources!

Excited for my first #ICWSM!

I'll be showing our work on the Twitter to Bluesky academic migration this afternoon at the nextgensocial-workshop.github.io (paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.24801)

@yuan1227.bsky.social will show our paper on incivility on Thursday: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC...

I'll be at #ICWSM 2025 next week to present our paper about Bluesky Starter Packs.

For the occasion, I've created a Starter Pack with all the organizers, speakers, and authors of this year I could find on Bluesky!
Link: go.bsky.app/GDkQ3y7

Let me know if I missed anyone!

Promotional graphic for NetSciX 2026 in Auckland, New Zealand. The image features a cityscape of Auckland with the Sky Tower prominently visible against a clear blue sky and harbor. On the right side, bold text reads "CALL FOR ABSTRACTS" with a note encouraging submissions on diversity in network science. The deadline is listed as "Friday, 5 September 2025 at 23:59 AoE." The website for more information is netscix2026.github.io.

📢 The NetSci-X 2026 Call for Abstracts is now open!
Submit your work and join us in #Auckland to explore diversity in network science.

📅 Deadline: 5 September 2025, 23:59 AoE
🌐 More info: netscix2026.github.io

@mluczak.bsky.social‬ Michael Small @droneale.bsky.social‬ Daniela Paolotti

@yasasgari.bsky.social @dorianquelle.bsky.social @yuan1227.bsky.social @SamuelKoovely

10 years ago, I went to my first #NetSci. I had just finished my PhD, had nothing to present, knew nobody, but I knew I was finally where I wanted to be. Fascinating science and people. I feel very lucky to have helped organize @netsciconf.bsky.social this year and to have brought my great students!

It has been a pleasure hosting the #NetSci2025 conference in Maastricht! Our thanks to all participants for their energy, ideas, talks, posters, discussions, and laughter!

Omid V. Ebrahimi, Riet van Bork, Anne Roefs at the Netsci focus session on network psychometrics

This turned out great, thanks to three amazing speakers and an engaged audience. Great job everyone!
Let's maybe turn this into a regular NetSci satellite?
@netsciconf.bsky.social

And the sustainability award for cycling to Maastricht from Venice!

🥰

Now that #NetSci25 is over and the adrenaline has settled, all I can say is: thank you! It's always a blast - and winning an unexpected prize makes it even more special.

I hope e-values found a place in (some of) your hearts. Stay tuned, the paper is coming soon!

Thanks to everyone who helped us put this whole event together. Thanks to everyone who joined us this week. Seeing so many happy network scientists was truly wonderful!

@netsciconf.bsky.social

#netsci2025 awards! Congrats to all winners!

UZH: Postdoctoral Researcher in Machine Learning/NLP for Media Monitoring The Quantitative Network Science group at the Department of Mathematical Modeling and Machine Learning (DM3L) of the University of Zurich (UZH) invites applications for a Postdoctoral Researcher posit...

Interested in building new digital tools to understand how the media frames different topics? ➡️ Open postdoc position in my group at the University of Zurich on Machine Learning/NLP for Media Monitoring and Discourse Analysis: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie...

Always happy to chat!
I believe my excellent collaborators @skojaku.bsky.social, @hirokisayama.bsky.social, and Renaud are all happy to discuss more!!

What if edge weights are MATRICES? 🤯 We showed matrix-weights are a natural represention of multidimensional interactions (eg your climate views influencing my economic beliefs), generalizing the notion of communities & structural balance. Find us to discuss more.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ #NetSci2025

Last day of #NetSci2025
Keynote speaker Michael Macy discusses how network mechanisms can cause "shallow deep division" in society

Our last #NetSci2025 keynote speaker is Michael Macy, who discussed polarization not from the opinion perspective but from the people point of view. His work was very insightful when showing the importance of 'early movers' when generating polarization cascades. @netsciconf.bsky.social

Time-respecting path problem: getting by train to Düsseldorf. Your first train is cancelled. Should you wait for a direct connection (to be cancelled with probability p) or pick a route with many hops (p again per hop, but increasing number of alternatives). There must be a DAG for this #NetSci2025

Kicking off the machine learning session, @moritzlaber.bsky.social studies how incorporating prior knowledge about network dynamical systems into neural ODEs influences sample efficiency, as well as the correlation between network structure and performance.

#NetSci2025