David Garcia

David Garcia

@dgarcia.eu

Professor for Social and Behavioral Data Science at the University of Konstanz. Also at CSH Vienna, ETH Zurich and TU Graz.

2.4K followers325 following40 posts

David Garcia reposted

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the #UniKonstanz examines how AI agents reach a consensus. The results show that artificial intelligence operates similar to people in relationship to each other – but at a significantly larger scale. Details: t1p.de/7obk7 Giordano De Marzo @dgarcia.eu ​

David Garcia reposted

🔥 Happening now: The 2nd General Assembly Meeting of the WHAT-IF project is currently taking place in 📍 Bucharest, Romania. Over the coming days, partners from across the consortium will come together to share progress, discuss preliminary findings and explore new research ideas. Stay tuned!

David Garcia reposted

Looking back on #InequalityConference2026: inspiring keynotes, the In_equality Research Award, engaging talks, fresh insights from the satellite program, and a vibrant social program in Konstanz. Thanks to everyone who joined us-we’re already looking forward to the next conference! @uni-konstanz.de

David Garcia reposted

David Garcia reposted

@uni-graz.at featured our brand-new article on collective moderation of online spaces published in @pnasnexus.org 🥳 Wanna read what citizen-based strategies can be a remedy against online hate? Click here: ow.ly/csZK50XGteK @janalasser.bsky.social @aroyehuns.bsky.social @dgarcia.eu

University of Graz@uni-graz.at

🤬 „Merkel zeigt, Frauen gehören nicht in die Politik!“, Aussagen wie diese gehören zu den über eine Million Tweets aus den Jahren 2015-2018, die ein Forschungsteam der #unigraz rund um @hailina.bsky.social und @janalasser.bsky.social analysiert hat. Was gegen Online-Hass hilft, liest du hier 👇

David Garcia reposted

Misinformation research has a causality problem: lab experiments are limited; observational studies confounded. We used causal inference on 9.9M tweets, quantifying effects in the wild while blocking backdoor paths. Does misinfo get higher engagement? Are following discussions more emotional? 🧵

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David Garcia reposted

Do LLMs represent the people they're supposed simulate or provide personalized assistance to? We review the current literature in our #ACL2025 Findings paper and investigating what researchers conclude about the demographic representativeness of LLMs: osf.io/preprints/so... 1/

David Garcia reposted

A few months ago I was like "why is there so much gay porn in my anti-AI app" and now there is none of it in my discover feed. It's just a matter of time for the algorithm to sort it out.

David Garcia reposted

Honest people don’t lie. Or do they? Liars aren’t honest. Or are they? One puzzling conundrum in contemporary politics is that politicians who seem to be estranged from facts and evidence are nonetheless considered honest by their followers. 1/n

"I can do things with LLMs" seems to be the next "I can get Twitter data" in Computational Social Science. Not that I think it's bad, it's just funny to see how things change.

David Garcia reposted

How politicians communicate shapes online discourse in ways we might overlook. Our new paper shows that their choice between a fact-based (evidence-driven) and a belief-based (sincerity-driven) honesty creates a "contagion" effect, influencing how users engage and respond. ⬇️(1/8)

David Garcia reposted

Hello world! Meet our consortium—15 organizations, 10 countries—joining forces to rethink the digital political information space. 🚀 Last week, we kicked off our project WHAT-IF, setting the stage to build a digital twin that will help us test the impact of policy interventions. More in the 🧵!

It's supercool that Deepseek v3 is open, but it's pretty censored at least through the Android app. It refused to answer about Tiananmen and when asked about the capital of Taiwan, it deleted the output mid-generation.

Which celebrities are the most popular and unpopular on social media? We are working on a new Holiday Paper Series article on that! We are changing to a Summer schedule for the HPS. On the meantime, here is a teaser for Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Britney Spears: dgarcia.eu/CSS_Holiday_...

Very interesting paper that is making rounds on Bluesky but please notice this issue is for *proprietary* LLMs like the OpenAI ones. Running Llama locally was remarkably stable. In general, using any kind of proprietary software, especially through an API, is bad for reproducibility.

Christopher Barrie@cbarrie.bsky.social

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...

David Garcia reposted

Hi, so I've spent the past almost-decade studying research uses of public social media data, like e.g. ML researchers using content from Twitter, Reddit, and Mastodon. Anyway, buckle up this is about to be a VERY long thread with lots of thoughts and links to papers. 🧵

Daniel van Strien@danielvanstrien.bsky.social

First dataset for the new @huggingface.bsky.social @bsky.app community organisation: one-million-bluesky-posts 🦋 📊 1M public posts from Bluesky's firehose API 🔍 Includes text, metadata, and language predictions 🔬 Perfect to experiment with using ML for Bluesky 🤗 huggingface.co/datasets/blu...