Thomas Davidson

New paper in Nature Human Behaviour. I use a conjoint experiment to test multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for context-sensitive content moderation and compare with human subjects. Methodologically, this demonstrates how social science techniques can enhance AI auditing. 💻🤖💬

Over the past couple of weeks Claude found bugs that affected core functionality in two different R packages just through routine use for research and teaching. The first PR was just merged. Less satisfying than discovering these issues myself, but what amazing time for software development!

New preprint! A review article on Generative AI and Society, with the fantastic @thomasdavidson.bsky.social & Danny Karell (smartly not online!) osf.io/preprints/so... The lit on genAI is sprawling and mostly not in sociology. Our goal is to synthesize core themes relevant to sociologists. +

I just landed in Burlington for @ic2s2.bsky.social. Looking forward to seeing everyone at the conference. I'm giving a talk about large reasoning models tomorrow and Duhui Lee is presenting some of our new work on conspiracy theories and visual media on Thursday #IC2S2

We have re-opened our search for a 3-year AI-research postdoc at NYU's Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics!! The position starts this **September 1st** (or as soon as possible thereafter) and is in person at NYU. If necessary, we will also consider a 1/1/27 start. 1/3

Ranjit Lall, @thomasdavidson.bsky.social & Felix Hagemeister confirm the boosting influence of public health shocks on right-wing populism using data from France, Great Britain and the Netherlands: doi.org/10.1177/0010...

📢 Call for Reviewers: WOAH @ #EMNLP2026 WOAH is looking for reviewers to help evaluate submissions for our 10th edition at EMNLP 2026. Interested in serving as a reviewer? 🔗 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... Thank you for helping us make #WOAH2026 a success! #NLP #AI #OnlineSafety

Our paper on the pandemic and populism is online in Comparative Political Studies. We find that local COVID-19 transmission increased support for right-wing populists in Europe, and triangulate our findings across data from social media, elections, and surveys.

This is a fairly large (EUR 29M) initiative at Universität des Saarlandes around using data and computational methods to understand and support societal tranformations. As part of this initiative, *five* professorships will be created. Talk to me about details.

✨New paper out @nature.com ✨ For 8 weeks around the 2024 US election, we randomly assigned 2,000 people to use social media algos we built ourselves. Do engagement-based algorithms amplify intergroup, moral & emotional (IME) content—and does that distort how we see political norms? 🧵🔗 👇

A new paper in Nature finds that engagement-based algorithms on social media amplifies intergroup, moralized and emotional (IME) information + toxic content relative to reverse-chronological feeds, with the largest increases in moral outrage and political content. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Another angle I have been thinking about is what this means for computational sociology (and CSS more broadly) as a field. Is all social science becoming CSS? Do all social scientists now need to understand word embeddings, etc? When is AI a computational method, and when is it something else?

📣 SKAT virtual event tomorrow! Are you a sociologist interested in careers in the tech industry? Come join our panel of experts who can chat about hiring and the industry writ large.

Is social media dying? How much did Twitter change as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has changed Here are the key take-aways 🧵 Full paper out now in in JQD:DM!

I’m #hiring a PhD Student in Computational Social Science / Agentic Large Language Models. Know anyone who might be interested? www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/44...

🚨 Update: WOAH Mentorship @ #EMNLP2026 🚨 Deadline extended to April 17! 📅 Still time to apply as mentor or mentee and develop your WOAH submission with expert guidance 💡 📝 Mentor: forms.gle/XaK8KBFomaWZ... 📝 Mentee: forms.gle/AC5akVcdzsCv... Join us! 🌍 #NLP #WOAH

This blog by @maartengr.bsky.social has some awesome visualizations showing the architecture and components of multimodal models. This will be a great pedagogical resource, up there with Christopher Olah's blogs and 3Brown1Blue's videos.

📄Published Today in Nature: 500 researchers reproduced 100 studies across the social & behavioral sciences to assess their analytical robustness (led by @balazsaczel.bsky.social & @szaszibarnabas.bsky.social). Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Preprint: osf.io/preprints/me... TLDR: 1/11

3-year contract for a Phd position in Sociology on the discourse of/about AI, at l'Institut polytechnique de Paris.

It appears this was due to badly configured repetition_penalty parameter in transformers. Essentially, if you penalize repetition then the model optimizes by regurgitating random tokens. The responses are now coherent after removing this - but painfully slow.

Excited to be in Toronto to share my latest research in the UTM sociology speaker series and conduct a graduate student masterclass this afternoon! www.sociology.utoronto.ca/events/utm-s...

WOAH is coming back for its 10th edition at EMNLP 2026 in Budapest! 🎊 For this important anniversary, we invite authors to critically reflect on our achievements as a community and adjust the aim going forward. Stay tuned, more updates coming soon! #EMNLP2026 #WOAH2026 #NLProc

AI-generated summaries of history led to more liberal opinions compared to Wikipedia, while summaries by chatbots prompted to use a conservative framing produced more conservative opinions—but primarily among conservative readers. In PNAS Nexus: https://ow.ly/1moU50YpOHN

Call for Submissions: AI for Social Science Methodology (Yale) • Keynote: @nachristakis.bsky.social • Panel with editors of leading journals on publishing AI research • Mentoring roundtables for early-career scholars • Generous travel support Discussion-driven, high-quality research.

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

Great write-up on our recent studies: “Back in the day, if you wanted to know what the Seattle General Strike was, you’d grab an encyclopedia or ... check Wikipedia,” Karell said. “Now, you just ask ChatGPT... Increasingly, the information we rely on is being packaged by tools built by companies.”

Our new paper is out today in @pnasnexus.org with colleagues at Yale (@matthewshu.com, Danny Karell, @keitarookura.bsky.social) We wanted to understand how using AI-generated summaries to learn about history influenced attitudes compared to existing resources like Wikipedia. 1/4

Want to learn about computational social science *for free* and identify new research partners across academic fields? Apply to one of the 2026 Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (described in yellow in the attached map) here: sicss.io/locations

a gpt in a sublime 200 lines of pure Python — it is all there. Incredible for teaching students (and yourself) karpathy.github.io/2026/02/12/m...

Come work w CSMaP! We're hiring two postdocs.: one with a focus on AI; other is general focus. Let me know if you have questions about the roles. And please share widely. apply.interfolio.com/181817 apply.interfolio.com/181820

Benchmarks of LLM common sense overwhelmingly rely on correct labels to report an accuracy score. But what if your "ground truth" genuinely differs from mine? In a new @pnasnexus.org paper, @duncanjwatts.bsky.social, @whiting.me and I explore the implications of this intriguing question. 🧵⤵️

📢WORK! At the Sociology department of @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social we are hiring a postdoc who will work on applications of AI in sociological research. Join our vibrant-yet-cohesive research community doing cutting-edge research. Please share or apply! www.uu.nl/en/organisat...

AI does not engage in motivated reasoning While individuals processing information may be motivated to reach a certain conclusion, LLMs have no such motivation and operate on purely cognitive input. As such, they do not mimic humans in motivated reasoning tasks. arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16130

LLMs are very good at extracting information from academic articles. They are much better than even highly trained humans (our grad RAs had hundreds of hours of practice). And of course they're ~1000x cheaper and faster

Really interesting new paper from some of my former @gesis.org colleagues in @bigdatasoc.bsky.social: "From (almost) open to heavily restricted data access – The development of the Twitter/X developer policies" doi.org/10.1177/2053... #commsky #computationalsocialscience