Matt Hindman
@matthindman.bsky.social
1K followers 730 following 21 posts
Professor at SMPA GWU Author of *The Internet Trap* and *The Myth of Digital Democracy* political communication | digital platforms | politics of AI Washington, DC
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matthindman.bsky.social
Where does extreme right-wing rhetoric come from?

In a new article in Communication Research, Yuan Hsiao and I analyze 19K videos & 661M comments on conservative YouTube channels to trace how extreme rhetoric forms.
BLUF: it comes mostly from users themselves.
doi.org/10.1177/0093...
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
doi.org
Reposted by Matt Hindman
kwcollins.bsky.social
There's a colorable argument that a substantial part of the effectiveness of most of the major innovations in campaign communication in the last 15 years have been as a result of novel strategies to gain attention, including but not limited to social pressure GOTV mail, relational organizing, etc
dannagal.bsky.social
Attention needs to be the DV in these models. NOT attitude change. Attention.
kwcollins.bsky.social
I agree with Brendans point, which is why I'm increasingly concerned that the dominant paradigm for message testing -- forced view survey-based ad testing -- is one that treats attention as a constant by design rather than one that treats it as a variable or, better yet, an outcome
Reposted by Matt Hindman
joshpasek.com
🇺🇸 #July4 project 🇺🇸
How does ChatGPT map the Declaration’s 27 #grievances to 2025 executive actions?
Scale 0-1 minor · 2 noticeable · 3 substantial · 4 ≈ average 1776 abuse · 5 worse.
AI coded (o3). Thread follows ⤵︎
[1/66]
Reposted by Matt Hindman
apuddleofmuddle.bsky.social
Academia in 2025: For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI. A quick search confirmed the company recently launched new AI software, which now means..
Reposted by Matt Hindman
Just published: our new paper in Scientific Reports
📄 “Coordinated Link Sharing on Facebook”
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

We introduce a statistically grounded, human-interpretable method to detect coordination on social media.
Coordinated link sharing on Facebook - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Coordinated link sharing on Facebook
doi.org
Reposted by Matt Hindman
jeremymberg.bsky.social
ATTENTION: NSF GRANT RECIPIENTS

We received a heads up from a trusted source that you should proactively download/print/screen shot any documentation on research.gov pertaining to your NSF awards, both those that are current and any that have closed in the last 5-6 years.

1/n
a cartoon of a man holding a frying pan and a spoon with red alert written above him
ALT: a cartoon of a man holding a frying pan and a spoon with red alert written above him
media.tenor.com
matthindman.bsky.social
Thrilled to have this published.

Everything you've wanted to know about political Youtube -- from Kevin Munger, Jim Bisbee (@jamesbisbee.bsky.social), Omer Yalcin (@ofyalcin.bsky.social), Joe Phillips (@polpsychjoe.bsky.social), and myself.

Out now in the Journal of Quantitative Description.
Reposted by Matt Hindman
darbysaxbe.bsky.social
🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.
list of banned keywords
Reposted by Matt Hindman
laurenhlb.bsky.social
New and important: we built a federal expenditure tracker. All expenditure line items that are available on the Daily Treasury Statement.

USAID was zeroed out on 1/28 and has been at zero ever since.

www.hamiltonproject.org/data/trackin...

#EconSky
Reposted by Matt Hindman
jonmladd.bsky.social
Arguably the biggest national security breach in U.S. history. Private employees downloading personnel data on every federal employee and tax and social security data on every American onto private unsecured servers. Needless to say, completely illegal and subject to major prison sentences.
joshtpm.bsky.social
3/ different pieces fit together. There also seems to be a significant amount of downloading government data onto private servers, etc, totally outside any cybersecurity regime. Additionally it’s unclear to the people inside whether the people doing these things actually work for the US govt…
matthindman.bsky.social
To say François Chollet has been a skeptic of current LLM capabilities is an understatement.

So this post from him is all the more remarkable.

arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-...
OpenAI o3 Breakthrough High Score on ARC-AGI-Pub
OpenAI o3 scores 75.7% on ARC-AGI public leaderboard.
arcprize.org
matthindman.bsky.social
These are true “holy shit” results — a huge step change in AI capabilities on the very hardest current benchmarks.

For competitive coding, this is like Deep Blue beating Kasparov.

We all need to update our priors on how much knowledge work AI will displace — and how quickly.
emollick.bsky.social
Independent evaluations of OpenAI’s o3 suggest that it passed math & reasoning benchmarks that were previously considered far out of reach for AI including achieving a score on ARC-AGI that was associated with actually achieving AGI (though the creators of the benchmark don’t think it o3 is AGI)
matthindman.bsky.social
The key finding, though, is that right-wing rhetoric on YouTube isn't simply echoing media messages - it's being actively transformed through user interactions.

Understanding online extremism requires studying the role of users themselves in that transformation process.
matthindman.bsky.social
So where ARE users learning these extreme associations, if not from the original videos?

Our methods emphasize the most-engaged content. Commenters may be selectively remixing content from other platforms or less-seen, more-extreme channels like OANN. But this is an important ? for future work.
matthindman.bsky.social
For example, videos on BLM protests focused on news events. But commenters added entirely new associations-- "antifa," "marxist," etc.--the videos never mentioned.

There is also a big Trump effect: he becomes the central node in comment networks despite a modest presence in the original coverage.
matthindman.bsky.social
Our results look much more like the networked framing story.

While media outlets set the broad agenda (COVID, BLM, election), commenters consistently introduce conspiracy theories and emotional rhetoric absent from the original videos.
matthindman.bsky.social
Networked framing research (e.g. Meraz & @zizip.bsky.social) has argued that user discussion on social media actively transforms frames in news coverage. By contrast, network agenda setting argues that the media transfers bundles of associations more-or-less unchanged.

Which do we find?
matthindman.bsky.social
Our data includes every video, w/ comments, from the Fox News, OANN, Daily Wire, and Breitbart YouTube channels from 2019-2021.

We use semantic network analysis to track how language changes between the 19,112 video transcripts and the 661,958,464 comments.
matthindman.bsky.social
Where does extreme right-wing rhetoric come from?

In a new article in Communication Research, Yuan Hsiao and I analyze 19K videos & 661M comments on conservative YouTube channels to trace how extreme rhetoric forms.
BLUF: it comes mostly from users themselves.
doi.org/10.1177/0093...
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
doi.org
matthindman.bsky.social
For example, videos on BLM protests focused on news events. But commenters added entirely new associations--"antifa," "marxist," etc.--the videos never mentioned.

There is an enormous Trump effect: Trump becomes the central node in comment networks despite little presence in the original coverage.
Scatterplot of term centrality score for the transcripts network (i.e. the original video) and the comments network. Green terms indicate terms with a higher centrality score in the transcripts network. Red terms indicate terms with a higher centrality score in the comments network.
matthindman.bsky.social
Our results look much more like the networked framing story.

While media outlets set the broad agenda (COVID, BLM, election), commenters consistently introduce conspiracy theories and emotional rhetoric absent from the original videos.
matthindman.bsky.social
Networked framing research (e.g. Meraz & @zizip.bsky.social) has argued that user discussion on social media actively transforms frames in news coverage. By contrast, network agenda setting argues that the media transfers bundles of associations more-or-less unchanged.

Which do we find?
matthindman.bsky.social
Our data includes every video, w/ comments, from the Fox News, OANN, Daily Wire, and Breitbart YouTube channels from 2019-2021.

We use semantic network analysis to track how language changes between the 19,112 video transcripts and the 661,958,464 comments.
Reposted by Matt Hindman
drkath.bsky.social
Awesome job alert: Analyst Institute is hiring a research manager. Great job for Social Science PhD who wants to change the world for the better through experiments.
analystinstitute.pinpointhq.com/en/postings/...
Research Manager
Job Opening: Research Manager at Analyst Institute in Remote.
analystinstitute.pinpointhq.com
matthindman.bsky.social
Or to put it another way:

bsky.app/profile/jake...
jakemgrumbach.bsky.social
For messaging to work, you need a media apparatus to convey the message to swing voters.
For messaging to work, you need a media apparatus
Reposted by Matt Hindman
jonmladd.bsky.social
This is a really great piece, as Ganz's work always is. I think the inconvenient thing is the civic associationism of American history was heavily driven by local religious congregations, supplemented in the 20th century by veterans groups like the VFW. It was these groups that included "normies."
lioneltrolling.bsky.social
There's been a lot of talk about reinvigorating a thick civic life in the wake of the election. Back in 2017, I had the same idea and I found that while associationism might be what our democracy is missing, it was not for me.
www.unpopularfront.news/p/civic-life...
Civic Life Kinda Sucks
A Memoir of Trying to Get Involved
www.unpopularfront.news