Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

WHAT-IF @what-if-horizon.bsky.social · 11d

Learn more about this partnership here: what-if-horizon.eu/2025/09/30/s...

Strategic Partnership to Advance Misinformation Research Through Real-World Collaboration

WHAT-IF colleagues from Work Packages 3 and 5—Andreu Casas (UK) and Sílvia Majó-Vázquez (Spain)—have established a strategic partnership with two leading Spanish organizations at the forefront of c…

what-if-horizon.eu

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 12d

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.

1

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 12d

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!

1

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 12d

🚨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...

www.royalholloway.ac.uk

1 14 4

Claes de Vreese @claesdevreese.bsky.social · 13d

All EU countries appear to be gone in the Google political ad library

By @lizcarolan.com

4 51 72

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 14d

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.

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 14d

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).

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

lnkd.in

1

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 14d

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.

1

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 14d

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.

1 1

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 14d

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.

London Social Media Observatory @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social · 15d

🇩🇪 Hello from Berlin!

📍This week, LSMO is at the #DSA40 Workshop, thanks @dsa40collaboratory.bsky.social for the invitation!

🤝 We’re here to connect with other academics to learn more about how to access platform data for research via DSA & to advocate for better data access more generally

🧵[1/3]

1 1

London Social Media Observatory @ldnsocmedobs.bsky.social · 15d

🇩🇪 Hello from Berlin!

📍This week, LSMO is at the #DSA40 Workshop, thanks @dsa40collaboratory.bsky.social for the invitation!

🤝 We’re here to connect with other academics to learn more about how to access platform data for research via DSA & to advocate for better data access more generally

🧵[1/3]

1 1 5

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 22d

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!

2

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 22d

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.

1

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 22d

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? 🤔

1 2

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 22d

🥰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!

1 3

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 25d

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!

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 25d

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.

1 1

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · 25d

🚨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...

5 2 14

GESIS Training @gesistraining.bsky.social · May 21

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.

More info & registration at
t1p.de/ImageVideoAn...

GESIS Fall Seminar in CSS
Computer Vision for Image and Video Data Analysis
15 to 19 September | Mannheim
Andreu Casas (Royal Holloway University of London)

2

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · Jul 31

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

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · Jul 31

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.

1

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · Jun 25

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

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · Jun 25

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.

1

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · Jun 25

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.

1

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · Jun 25

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.

1 1 2

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · Apr 23

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!

2

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · Apr 23

🚨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.

NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics @csmapnyu.org · Apr 21

Amid growing DC gridlock, state legislatures play a vital role in shaping policy. But how do state lawmakers decide which issues deserve their attention? Our new @thejop.bsky.social paper is the first large-scale multi-state analysis exploring this question

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Title: Bottom Up? Top Down? Determinants ofIssue-Attention in State Politics

Abstract: Who shapes the issue-attention cycle of state legislators? Although state governments make critical policy decisions, data and methodological constraints have limited re-searchers’ ability to study state-level agenda setting. For this paper, we collect more than 122 million Twitter messages sent by state and national actors in 2018 and 2021.We then employ supervised machine learning and time series techniques to study how the issue-attention of state lawmakers evolves vis-`a-vis various local- and national-level actors. Our findings suggest that state legislators operate at the confluence of national and local influences. In line with arguments highlighting the nationalization of state politics, we find that state legislators are consistently responsive to policy debates among members of Congress. However, despite growing nationalization concerns, we also find strong evidence of issue responsiveness by legislators to members of the public in their states and moderate responsiveness to regional media sources.

7 3 8

NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics @csmapnyu.org · Apr 21

Amid growing DC gridlock, state legislatures play a vital role in shaping policy. But how do state lawmakers decide which issues deserve their attention? Our new @thejop.bsky.social paper is the first large-scale multi-state analysis exploring this question

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

2 4 14

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · Mar 28

@thejop.bsky.social

Andreu Casas @andreucasas.bsky.social · Mar 28

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.