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Jenny Allen

@jennyallen.bsky.social
607 followers 235 following 10 posts

Assistant Professor of Technology, Operations, and Statistics @ NYU Stern Interested in Computational Social Science, Digital Persuasion, and Wisdom of Crowds

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Reposted by Jenny Allen
Joshua Tucker @jatucker.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
1/ Excited to report we have a new paper out @nature.com today! The bottom line: training data for LLMs does not just fall from the sky - it is created in the context of existing social political institutions - and that has consequences for LLM output. nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
State media control influences large language models - Nature
Government-controlled media influences the output of large language models via their training data, and models queried in the languages of countries with lower media freedom show a stronger ...
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Reposted by Jenny Allen
Hannah Waight @hwaight.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
I’m excited to share a new paper in Nature that shows how large language models launder the strategic rhetoric of authoritarian states. Paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... A thread.
nature.com
State media control influences large language models - Nature
Government-controlled media influences the output of large language models via their training data, and models queried in the languages of countries with lower media freedom show a stronger ...
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Reposted by Jenny Allen
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
New in Nature: LLMs give "the party line" in the languages of authoritarian regimes. This works when they control the media, which feeds pretraining data. We show more state control over the media means less critical LLMs. 6 studies spanning 38 languages & 13 models. Details ↓
Scatter plot of 38 countries plus China showing the proportion of LLM responses favorable to the regime in the local language vs. World Press Freedom Index score. Lower press freedom predicts more regime-favorable responses; all production models pooled.
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Dan Goldstein @dggoldst.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
Attention NYC undergrads: Applications are open for our 13th annual Data Science Summer school at Microsoft Research NYC! Apply here by April 14th: bit.ly/3pCQENh
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Mor Naaman @informor.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
🥁🥁🥁 Newly out from us today in Science Advances: “Biased AI Writing Assistants Shift Users’ Attitudes on Societal Issues”. Large Language Models are providing users with autocomplete writing suggestions on many platforms. Could these suggestions shift users’ own attitudes? (spoiler: YES) (1/7)
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
NYU is hiring two postdocs at the Center for Social Media, AI & Politics: csmapnyu.org/jobs And a grant manager in Sociology with the Social Science Research Hub: uscareers-nyu.icims.com/jobs/15327/g... I'm part of both groups--please share with anyone who is interested!
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Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
Last week the story was that TikTok censored anti-Trump/ICE/Pretti videos after the U.S. ownership change. We investigated with a large set of US TikTok data and found some interesting results, short thread...
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Hanna Wallach @hannawallach.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
Microsoft Research NYC is hiring a researcher in the space of AI and society!
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Dan Williams @danwphilosophy.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
A very interesting data-rich analysis of persuasion on digital media by @benmtappin.bsky.social. Recommend! open.substack.com/pub/benmtapp...
open.substack.com
For Digital Mass Persuasion, Exposure Matters More Than Persuasiveness
If you are interested in understanding the mass persuasive impact of digital media content you should generally pay more attention to content exposure than to its persuasiveness.
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Reposted by Jenny Allen
Melina Much @melinamuch.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
Is Joe Rogan really just a voice of the right? Our new @csmapnyu.org piece for @goodauth.bsky.social shows he’s just as much a space for the left and the center, too. A look inside today’s surprisingly complicated podcast information ecosystem. 🎙️ goodauthority.org/news/podcast...
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jake hofman @jakehofman.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
We're hiring interns in the Computational Social Science group at Microsoft Research NYC! If you're interested in designing AI‑based systems and understanding their impact at both individual and societal scales, apply here by Jan 9, 2026: apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...
apply.careers.microsoft.com
Research Intern - Computational Social Science | Microsoft Careers
Research Interns put inquiry and theory into practice. Alongside fellow doctoral candidates and some of the world's best researchers, Research Interns learn, collaborate, and network for life. Researc...
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andyguess @andyguess.com · 09/12/2025
The Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow to work with an interdisciplinary team (me, @bstewart.bsky.social, and @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social). Link: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app... Please apply by THIS SUNDAY, Dec. 14!
We are seeking a Fellow to lead cutting-edge research on short-form video content and its societal implications.

Bridging the gap between computer vision, causal inference, and computational social science, the Fellow will focus on the large-scale analysis of TikTok data (using an existing, massive dataset).

The position involves developing novel multimodal methods to understand how short-form algorithmic content shapes public opinion, political polarization, and online culture.

This is a unique opportunity to work at the forefront of the field, combining rigorous social science research designs with state-of-the-art computational techniques.
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Dan Goldstein @dggoldst.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
Want to be an intern at Microsoft Research in the Computational Social Science group in NYC (Jake Hofman, David Rothschild, Dan Goldstein) Follow this link and do your thing! Deadline approaching soonish! apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...
apply.careers.microsoft.com
Research Intern - Computational Social Science | Microsoft Careers
Research Interns put inquiry and theory into practice. Alongside fellow doctoral candidates and some of the world's best researchers, Research Interns learn, collaborate, and network for life. Researc...
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Reposted by Jenny Allen
Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
New in Science: Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Key from @jennyallen.bsky.social @jatucker.bsky.social: (1) important new paradigm (2) but not clear why results differ www.science.org/doi/full/10....
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Martin Saveski @msaveski.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
New paper in Science: In a platform-independent field experiment, we show that reranking content expressing antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity in social media feeds alters affective polarization. 🧵
Today, social media platforms hold the sole power to study the effects of feed-ranking algorithms. We developed a platform-independent method that reranks participants’ feeds in real time and used this method to conduct a preregistered 10-day field experiment with 1256 participants on X during the 2024 US presidential campaign. Our experiment used a large language model to rerank posts that expressed antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity (AAPA). Decreasing or increasing AAPA exposure shifted out-party partisan animosity by more than 2 points on a 100-point feeling thermometer, with no detectable differences across party lines, providing causal evidence that exposure to AAPA content alters affective polarization. This work establishes a method to study feed algorithms without requiring platform cooperation, enabling independent evaluation of ranking interventions in naturalistic settings.
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David Rand @dgrand.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
🚨Out in PNAS🚨 Examining news on 7 platforms: 1)Right-leaning platforms=lower quality news 2)Echo-platforms: Right-leaning news gets more engagement on right-leaning platforms, vice-versa for left-leaning 3)Low-quality news gets more engagement EVERYWHERE - even BlueSky! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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Jenny Allen @jennyallen.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
Now in PNAS! With @mmosleh.bsky.social and @dgrand.bsky.social Examining news engagement across 7 platforms, we find: - differences WRT political lean ("echo platforms") - similarities WRT news quality (posting low qual news => more engagement) Read paper and thread for more!
pnas.org
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
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Reposted by Jenny Allen
Oxford Internet Institute @oii.ox.ac.uk · 03/11/2025
New! Great piece by Tech and Science Post highlighting new research study examining partisan news sharing on social media platforms, lead author Dr @mmosleh.bsky.social, @oii.ox.ac.uk, co-authors Jennifer Allen and @dgrand.bsky.social. 1/2 techandsciencepost.com/news/other-s...
techandsciencepost.com
Low-quality news links draw higher engagement, no matter the political slant online - Tech and Science Post
The spread of dubious headlines on social media isn’t just a right-wing thing—it’s a social media thing, according to new research from Cornell. After studying millions of social media posts containin...
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Reposted by Jenny Allen
Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
"While high-quality content is posted more and receives more total engagement across platforms...a given author attracts higher levels of engagement when they post lower-quality content" "pattern we find seems to be driven more by an underperformance of particularly popular high-quality outlets"
pnas.org
Divergent patterns of engagement with partisan and low-quality news across seven social media platforms | PNAS
In recent years, social media has become increasingly fragmented, as platforms evolve and new alternatives emerge. Yet most research studies a sing...
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Johan Ugander @jugander.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
📣 Yale workshop, Oct 16-17! 📣 How could/should content ranking work? What's new in content moderation? How can platforms promote civility? Hosted by Yale's Institute for Foundations of Data Science (FDS). Great speakers! Submit posters by 9/22! Spread the word! yalefds.swoogo.com/socialalgori...
yalefds.swoogo.com
New Directions in Social Algorithms Research on October 16-17, 2025 at Yale University
As social media algorithms increasingly mediate social experiences, there has been a rapid increase in research on the effects of how these algorithms are configured, alternatives to engagement-centri...
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Jenny Allen @jennyallen.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
New in TiCS w @dgrand.bsky.social @gordpennycook.bsky.social It’s been ~10yrs since misinfo research exploded but our paradigms are stuck in the post-2016 “fake news” model Time for new approaches: o True/False → Content that misleads o Belief → Behavior o Eval interventions in ambiguous settings
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Dan Goldstein @dggoldst.bsky.social · 16/04/2025
🚨 Predoc at Microsoft Research 🚨 Do you have strong front-end programming and statistics skills but need research experience before heading off to graduate school for a computational social science PhD? Apply now for this summer! www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...
microsoft.com
Predoctoral Research Assistant (Contract) – Computational Social Science - Microsoft Research
Are you a recent college graduate wishing to gain research experience prior to pursuing a Ph.D. in fields related to computational social science (CSS)? Do you have a deep love of “playing with data”—...
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Eunji Kim @eunjikim.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
Thrilled to be hosting the 3rd MEEW (Media Effects Empirical Workshop) at Columbia again. Hope to see some of you there! RSVP link is available at: sites.google.com/view/columbi...
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Reed Orchinik @rorchinik.bsky.social · 01/02/2025
New WP! The illusory truth effect (repetition -> belief) is core to psych of beliefs, & thought to be a deep bias impacting misinfo, persuasion & advertising Why would cognition include such a flaw? We argue it is a rational adaptation to high-quality info environments 🧵1/
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David Rand @dgrand.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
🚨New WP🚨 We examine news sharing on 7 platforms: 1)Right-leaning platforms=lower quality news 2)Echo-platforms: Right-leaning news gets more engagement on right-leaning platforms, vice-versa for left-leaning 3)But low-quality news gets more engagement EVERYWHERE, even BlueSky! osf.io/preprints/ps...
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