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📣 Official job description: my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

my.corehr.com

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Funding is available for attending national and international conferences, as well as specialised training in areas, methods, or approaches of interest.

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The postdocs will join a lively research group. We hold weekly meetings featuring internal or external talks, host regular workshops with top researchers in the field, and engage with a variety of relevant stakeholders at the intersection of technology, media, AI, and politics in the UK and abroad.

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Please indicate in your cover letter whether you would like to be considered for the Political Communication or the Computational Social Science position, or both.

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(Postdoc #2) Computational Social Science: strong computational expertise in working with large amounts of social media and digital trace data. This person will have experience fine-tuning and implementing large open-weight multimodal models, remote computing, and high-performance clusters.

(Postdoc #1) Political Communication: someone with strong knowledge of polcomm literature, and strong expertise in survey design, experiments, and causal inference more generally. Ideally, this person will also have experience collecting and/or working with digital trace data linked to survey data.

🔬 These researchers will be involved in, and lead, a variety of studies examining the determinants and effects of the curation and moderation of political speech across social media platforms, and developing new computational methods to study of large amounts of multimodal social media data.

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GESIS Training @gesistraining.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

🚨 I'm recruiting 2 postdoctoral researchers for the @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social, to be based at the University of Oxford (@ox.ac.uk). These are both full-time positions for 2 years. Deadline for applications: June 23. Expected start date: September 2026. 🔁 Please share and help me spread the word! 🚀

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Reposted by Andreu Casas

Do you want to use computer vision for analyzing image and video data? Join @andreucasas.bsky.social in his #GESISfallseminar course to gain theoretical & methodological expertise and benefit from hands-on tutorials & consulting sessions. Register Now ➡️ t1p.de/ComputerVision #Python @gesis.org

GESIS Fall Seminar in Computational Social Science
Computer Vision for Image and Video Data Analysis with
Python 14 – 18 September 2026 | Online
Andreu Casas (Royal Holloway University of London)

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Reposted by Andreu Casas

Christopher Barrie @cbarrie.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...

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Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

This is very timely! We looked into the posting/moderation anomalies last week in the US. Special kudos to @benguinaudeau.bsky.social @solmg.bsky.social and @kengchichang.bsky.social. An outage rather than targeted censorship is what makes the most sense in this case, we’ll stay vigilant.

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Reposted by Andreu Casas

Ben O'Loughlin @benoloughlin.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Great time at the @psampg.bsky.social annual conference in Bournemouth. #AI #theory #discourse and #moderation discussed by our team me, Marco Guglielmo and @andreucasas.bsky.social. Thanks Dan Jackson and all the organisers.

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Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

🚨 One more week to apply to the PhD position at the London Social Media Observatory. If you are interested in empirical, quantitative, and/or computational approaches to studying social media and politics, apply! 😊

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Reposted by Andreu Casas

Oxford Social Media Observatory @oxsocmedobs.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

🎉 We're really excited to be collaborating with our excellent partners on this, as part of WP3 of the What-If Horizon project, hosted at the Observatory. 🎯 Understanding what interventions affect citizen misinformation effects is crucial to build evidence based policy in the area! More insights 🔜

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Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

The candidate will also have the opportunity to work in other international projects, with societal partners and policymakers, network with top scholars in the field, and the opportunity to teach in our department from the second year onwards.

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Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

The candidate will join a very exciting work environment, work side by side with me and the team in our central London location, and have access to funding for conferences, training, and data collection, on top of the stipend. Help me spread the word!

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Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

🚨Hiring a fully funded (3.5 years) PhD for the @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social to research social media and politics. Candidates should have quantitative/computational skills and/or be interested in content curation/moderation. UK home candidates only unfortunately. www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/hquftp...

royalholloway.ac.uk

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Reposted by Andreu Casas

Claes de Vreese @claesdevreese.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

All EU countries appear to be gone in the Google political ad library By @lizcarolan.com

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I hope I’m wrong and the UK government is still committed to transparency, academic access to tech/platform data, and independent/external scrutiny of the impact of these products on society. Time will tell I suppose. Meanwhile, we’ll keep advocating for what we think is right.

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This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

The Memorandum of Understanding from the UK government about the deal I fear confirms some of these suspicions, with language such as “advancing pro-innovation AI policy frameworks and efforts to support U.S. and UK-led AI technology adoption” (full memo here: lnkd.in/dw3NYvGz).

lnkd.in

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The US-UK tech deal last week left me worried. There was already a feeling the UK government was abandoning the idea of regulating tech companies/platforms, to facilitate trade deals with the US, incl legislation for better academic data access, and external scrutiny of tech products and platforms.

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We went to Berlin this week to learn more from our peers about ways to leverage DSA to access platfrom data and conduct relevant research, and to keep building a coalition to advocate for this topic in the EU, the UK, and everywhere.

Very happy to have people from our @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social attend the DSA40 Data Access Days organized by @dsa40collaboratory.bsky.social. With threats to our online and political safety in the rise, access to platform data for independent and academic researchers is more important than ever.

What a pity that my usual partner in crime on this one couldn’t make it this time around 🥺 @feloe.bsky.social we really missed you!

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And as usual, the highlight of the week was to learn about the participants’ projects and to discuss with them how to take them to the next level. Here a few pictures from our traditional final session “Slides with Slices” 🍕 where participants presented the projects they worked on during the week.

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Thanks @gesistraining.bsky.social for having me again. @marlenemauk.bsky.social @verenakunz.bsky.social and the team always make me feel at home in Mannheim for one week a year. Is Mannheim growing on me? 🤔

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Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

🥰I had so much fun again teaching computer vision and other computational methods to these bright social scientists this week. (Un)supervised classification, image encoding, content similarity, object detection, face detection/analysis, muldimodal modeling, video data, etc., you name it!

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To junior scholars, the Observatory is the perfect home for computational social scientists to grow and shine! I’ll be soon recruiting a data engineer, PhD, and 2 postdocs, for our new offices in Bedford Square. To academics/orgs working in this area, we are eager to collaborate, please reach out!

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Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

Additionally, the Observatory will engage with key stakeholders in this area (@ofcom.bsky.social, @electoralcommission.org.uk, platforms, and others) to promote evidence-based policymaking in this area. Stay tuned for a first public event that we are putting together for the first week of December.

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

🚨Very honored to receive the Future Leaders Fellowship from @ukri.org I’ll use this 2.3 million £ investment to create the London Social Media Observatory, for cutting-edge research on social media and politics, and novel computational tools for social science research. www.ukri.org/news/ukri-an...

ukri.org

UKRI announces winners of £120 million Future Leaders Fellowships

Research into the causes of lung cancer and Alzheimer’s disease are among 77 projects to be funded by UKRI’s Future Leaders Fellowships.

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Reposted by Andreu Casas

GESIS Training @gesistraining.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

📣 Last Call! We still have spots left for our #GESISfallseminar course on Computer Vision for Image and Video Data Analysis with @andreucasas.bsky.social. Join us before it’s too late!⏳ ➡️ t1p.de/ImageVideoAn...

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Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

You'll be able to master all of these and more, with a combination of lectures, hands on sessions where code is provided, and with one-on-one consulting sessions. Students will also work on a project throughout the week. Bring your own data and project, and use that week to take it to the next level

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Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

I will cover a wide range of relevant topics: video/image processing, supervised classification, unsupervised classification, facial analysis, multimodal modeling, Large Visual Language Models, cloud computing, etc.

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Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

Do you want to use large amounts of visual data (or text + visuals) in your research but don't know how? Join my "Computer Vision for Image and Video Analysis" course at GESIS this September (15-19th) to learn about machine learning for automatic visual analysis: training.gesis.org?site=pDetail...

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This is all work in progress ( /!\ ), so all feedback welcome. Come and share your thoughts!

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Friday (11:20-13:00: 1A.12) Large Visual Language Models for Supervised Multimodal Classification in Political Science Research. We compare 2 VLMs to 6 other supervised classifiers (incl. LLMs: Llama2&3), across 2 datasets and 10 tasks. VLMs outperform all models across all tasks, w. some caveats.

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Thursday (13:10-14:50: 1A.13): Moderation of Political Content on YouTube during the 2024 US Election. I tracked 20k channels and 6mil videos. Conservatives suspended more often, but also post most of hateful/misinfo. No difference in visibility, w. higher engagement for conservatives.

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Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

On my way to Madrid-EPSA! Please join in if you want to hear about (political biases? in) content moderation on YouTube during the 2024 US Election, and/or about using open-source Large Visual Language Models (VLMs) for supervised multimodal classification in political science research.

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Interestingly, we do not see Presidents to have much of an influence (neither Biden nor Trump). See above a great summary from the CSMaP comms team. Many years in the making. Thank you so much to the great co-authors, specially Oscar Stuhler (@oms279.bsky.social), my partner-in-crime on this one!

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Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

🚨New Publication @thejop.bsky.social We study who sets the issue agenda of state policymakers in the US. We find a mixed picture: they respond to shifts in attention by members of Congress, but also to the constituents in their states, particularly their own party supporters.

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We discuss the problems that emerge for research, and put forward solutions. Beyond academia, the findings emphasize that AI models trained on human data can replicate cultural, ideological, gender, etc. biases; and call for closer attention and more diversity in AI development.

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We show systematic differences between annotators of different gender and ideology. These emerge even for fairly objective tasks (e.g. is a protest shown in the image?), may not be detected by inter-rater reliability statistics (e.g. Cohen Kappa), and can bias downstream analyses

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Researchers often turn to human annotators (e.g. research assistants, crowdworkers) to identify theoretical quantities of interest (e.g. hate speech) in their data (e.g. social media posts), to then conduct analyses (e.g. do hateful social media posts receive more engagement?).

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