Carsten Schwemmer
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cschwem2er.bsky.social
Carsten Schwemmer
@cschwem2er.bsky.social
1.4K followers 390 following 30 posts
Professor of Computational Social Science, University of Munich | Text & Images | Data Scraping | Data Visualization

https://www.carstenschwemmer.com/
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Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
danbischof.bsky.social
If you haven't done yet, please try Claude Coworker just to get an idea about its capabilities.

It took 2 minutes for it to read our paper, provide perfectly running R-code to justify a case selection across 14 countries using Vdem. Produced a 10 pager underlining our case selection.
February 2, 2026 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
karstendonnay.bsky.social
🚨Job alert 🚨

I have an opening for a postdoc in my team at @ipz.bsky.social in the area of digital democracy starting Sep 1, 2026.

If you are working on the impact of the digital transformation on politics, please apply by 🗓️ Mar 1, 2026.

📤 Please share widely!

www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...
Offene Stellen / Open Positions
www.ipz.uzh.ch
January 31, 2026 at 9:26 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
lfoswaldo.bsky.social
Big news: I started a new position as Professor for Computational Social Science (W1 tenure track) at the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main!

www.c3s-frankfurt.de/who-we-are#m...
Who we are - Center for critical computational studies
www.c3s-frankfurt.de
February 2, 2026 at 3:35 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Super excited to see that somebody finally wrote about this 🥳

If you do research about research, you really need causal thinking (just like when you do research about anything else really).
vtraag.bsky.social Vincent Traag @vtraag.bsky.social · 15d
📣 Our introduction to structural causal models in science studies is now published:
doi.org/10.1162/QSS....

@tklebel.bsky.social and I tried to make our introduction as accessible as possible. We illustrate the theory by three case studies based on a simulated model of Open Science. 🧵(1/6)
January 27, 2026 at 11:08 AM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
ec.europa.eu
We are opening an investigation into Grok because we believe that X may have breached the DSA.

We have seen antisemitic content, non-consensual deepfakes of women, and child sexual abuse material.

In Europe, no company will make money by violating our fundamental rights.

link.europa.eu/Fh8h84
January 26, 2026 at 1:24 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
cghlewis.bsky.social
Ooooh {stringr} now includes a function for my favorite naming convention, snake_case. ☺️
posit.co Posit @posit.co · 21d
ICYMI: stringr 1.6.0 🧵

This update brings performance gains and new fns for string manipulation in #RStats.

Highlights include: Faster replacements with `str_replace_all()`, 🐫 new case tools to camel, snake, and kebab, case-sensitive str_like(), & more.

Read more: tidyverse.org/blog/2025/11...
The stringr hex, a violin with text that says stringr, and Posit logo
January 20, 2026 at 4:14 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
philippmendoza.com
Cool PhD Position in an amazing project 🚀
kunkakom.bsky.social Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · Jan 6
🧵 PhD position (75%) in Political Behavior / Political Communication / CSS
📍 LMU Munich | ⏳ 3 years | 🗓 start March–May 2026

We’re hiring for DemocraGPT, a @bidt.bsky.social-funded project developing an AI-based training for difficult conversations in times of growing polarization
January 14, 2026 at 10:26 AM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
lukrudolph.bsky.social
Just out in Nature Communications: "Examining public support for Ukraine’s defense against autocratic aggression". With F. Haggerty and P. Thurner, we show that Western citizens back Ukraine’s fight, but moral and strategic concerns, as well as internal divisions, impose restraints. rdcu.be/eYKAr
Client Challenge
doi.org
January 13, 2026 at 1:28 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
sabrinanorwood.bsky.social
Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)?

Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"
Text reads: About synthetic panels Recruiting the right participants for a study can be difficult. You may not get the exact demographics you need, and the shorter the deadline, the less sure you can be that everyone will answer on time. One possible solution can be to use synthetic panels. Synthetic panels are powered by a first party proprietary AI model developed here at Qualtrics. Our synthetic panel is trained on thousands of responses from a variety of demographic backgrounds in order to more accurately predict how certain populations would respond to a survey. Our synthetic panel is based on the United States General Population, and is only available in English. This panel comes with ready-made quotas and target breakouts in order to represent your chosen population and make it easy to launch your survey right away. Text reads: Question-writing best practices To get the most reliable and actionable results from synthetic audiences, consider these question-writing best practices: Ask forward-looking and attitudinal questions. Synthetic panels perform best with perceptions, preferences, and intent-based questions. For example, “How likely are you to try…?” Synthetic panels are less applicable for studies on past behaviors, detailed recall, brand recall, or awareness questions. For example, “When did you last visit…?” Text reads: Discussion The current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of the TPB when applied to health behaviours which addressed the limitations of previous reviews by including only prospective tests of behaviour, applying RE meta-analytic procedures, correcting correlations for sampling and measurement error, and hierarchically analysing the effect of behaviour type and sample and methodological moderators. Some 237 tests were identified which examined relations amongst model components. Overall the analysis indicated that the TPB could explain 19.3% of the variance in behaviour and 44.3% of the variance in intention across studies. This level of prediction of behaviour is slightly lower than that of previous meta-analytic reviews which have found between 27% (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Hagger et al., 2002) and 36% (Trafimow et al., 2002) of the variance in behaviour to be explained by intention and PBC.
December 16, 2025 at 5:38 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
rmcelreath.bsky.social
I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students.

I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...
course schedule as a table. Available at the link in the post.
December 9, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
curdknupfer.bsky.social
COME WORK WITH US ON DIGITAL SOCIETY & DEMOCRACY IN 🇩🇰!

Full Professorship. Fantastic conditions. Highly dynamic team environment. Great colleagues. FUN!

Happy to answer questions and make introductions to the rest of the team...
claesdevreese.bsky.social Claes de Vreese @claesdevreese.bsky.social · Dec 15
Excellent job opportunity: Full professorship in Digital Society and Democracy @ddc-sdu.bsky.social and @d-ias.bsky.social.

Top conditions, environment & colleagues.

Candidates welcome across places and disciplines.

🗓️ DL: March 15, 2026

fa-eosd-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...
DIAS Professorship in Digital Society and Democracy
Application deadline: March 15, 2026, 11.59 PM/23.59 CET/CEST.
fa-eosd-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com
December 15, 2025 at 12:18 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
ianhussey.mmmdata.io
A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the release of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” and the advent of the late-2000s electro-pop era, which both appeared around the same year, 2008.
jayvanbavel.bsky.social Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · Dec 14
A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the invention of smartphones and the advent of social media, which both appeared around the same year, 2008.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
December 15, 2025 at 8:21 AM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
angelinawang.bsky.social
Most LLM evals use API calls or offline inference, testing models in a memory-less silo. Our new Patterns paper shows this misses how LLMs actually behave in real user interfaces, where personalization and interaction history shape responses: arxiv.org/abs/2509.19364
December 12, 2025 at 8:42 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
profsanderlinden.bsky.social
New paper out in @science.org! We unveil the online manipulation market with the Cambridge Online Trust & Safety Index (COTSI). We show in real time the cost of purchasing fake accounts across every social platform around the world - so they can be held accountable

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Mapping the online manipulation economy
A market perspective on digital manipulation may help improve online trust and safety
www.science.org
December 11, 2025 at 7:05 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
lfoswaldo.bsky.social
It's out!!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Big thank you to my coauthors @small-schulz.bsky.social and @lorenzspreen.bsky.social, and to all participants who discussed 20 political issues over 4 weeks in 6 subreddit, 3 experimental conditions and let us observe.
December 11, 2025 at 10:34 AM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
css-lmu.bsky.social
🚀 We’re hiring a Postdoc!

Our group is looking for a Postdoc to join the team working on computational comm research. If you’re excited about automated content analysis, large text & social-media data, open science, this might be for you.

💡 Sounds like you or someone you know? Please share/boost!
December 12, 2025 at 6:45 AM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
fuhsejan.bsky.social
An der Uni Leipzig werden nach meinen Infos in 2026 keine (!) Mittelbau-Stellen verlängert oder neu besetzt.
Das hängt natürlich auch an der Landesregierung.
Im letzten Newsletter für Mitarbeitende bekam ich eine Einladung zur Diskussion über Perspektiven für Early Career Researchers ...
Einladung zur Fishbowl-Diskussion mit dem Rektorat über die neue Forschungsakademie und "Perspektiven für Early Career Researchers an der Universität Leipzig"
November 27, 2025 at 10:04 AM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
gessler.bsky.social
We're looking for a colleague (postdoc) 📢 @politikuhh.bsky.social
3+3 years
Doing your own research while teaching 2.5 courses per semester
Research agenda with links to our team (democracy, digital politics, political competition/behaviour)
DL 🗓️ 05/01
stellen.uni-hamburg.de/jobposting/6...
Research Associate (Postdoc) Political Science § 28 Subsection 2 HmbHG
stellen.uni-hamburg.de
December 1, 2025 at 8:56 AM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
socarxiv.bsky.social
In light of record submission rates and a large volume of AI-generated slop, SocArXiv recently implemented a policy requiring ORCIDs linked in the OSF profile of submitting authors, and narrowing our focus to social science subjects. Today we are taking two more steps:
/1
November 27, 2025 at 2:54 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
andrew.heiss.phd
Wrote up a little intervention post/explanation for my class about why using LLMs for trying to learn programming (as first time learners!) is bad and detrimental datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-11...
In the first week of class, I had you read an article about how ChatGPT is philosophical “bullshit”, as well as this other post about AI and LLMs in this class. I’ve seen a surprising increase in the amount of ChatGPT-based weekly check-ins and graph interpretations in the exercises. (In the past, I’ve even had students tell me they PDFs of the slides into ChatGPT to generate interesting and confusing things.) Don’t do this! LLMs cannot find three things that you personally found interesting from the readings. LLMs are not you. It’s a huge waste of time for all of us to for me to spend time evaluating and grading output from ChatGPT. I want to read what you think and do, not what a computer invents. NoteMy personal stance on AI and LLMs Many of you have asked about how I think about and use LLMs in my own work (and in the class materials). Please check this short little page where I explain what I do with text, images, code, research, and learning. In short, I do not use LLMs to create any of the materials for this class, and I do not use them to grade or evaluate any of your work. I’ve even had several students submit completely made up stuff for mini projects and final projects. In your final project, your job is to take a dataset, make three different plots with it, and combine the plots into one graphic that tells some sort of story. I’ve (really truly) received projects like this: (a ChatGPT-generated plot of completely made up data from gapminder) At a very quick glance, that looks like a plausible image. But holy crap it falls apart fast, both comically and tragically. Comically because, like, look at the y-axis in the scatterplot; or the x-axis ticks in the population grown chart that are sometimes spaced every 20 years, sometimes every 10 years, and has 1980 there twice; or the weird blobs in the map. Tragically—and most importantly—literally nothing in this image is real and none of the annotations make sense and none of the colors make sense and everything here is completely meaningless and devoid of any information. It’s pure philosophical bullshit—an image “produced without concern for its truth.” That’s what I mean when I say that it’s a forgetful and unreliable resource. Lots of that code is helpful as an illustration of what’s going on. Lots of the explanation is good and fine. But it subtly changed its mind halfway through and didn’t realize it (because it can’t realize it! it’s just a chain of statistically likely text!) Hopefully you can see where this is dangerous for learning. It can often “teach” you wrong, and you can only recognize that if you know stuff already. It’s extra dangerous if you then take that example output, paste it into your exercise, and submit it. I’m not even concerned about the plagiarism aspect of that—code is code and there are only a few ways to write {dplyr} code that will do this, and it’s easy to adapt from real human-based examples online, so I’m less worried about stealing other people’s work here. I’m concerned that it’s not real data. It made up values of 1, 2, 3, and 4 for some countries to illustrate grouping and summarizing. That’s good and normal. None of that is real. Don’t treat it as real.
November 2, 2025 at 10:17 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
vincentab.bsky.social
we're done
November 18, 2025 at 7:46 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
joshmccrain.bsky.social
new paper by Sean Westwood:

With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research
November 18, 2025 at 7:16 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
PPS more updates! We now have a figure with an overview of the workflow, plus some other nifty additions.

osf.io/preprints/ps...
November 13, 2025 at 5:37 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
ic2s2.bsky.social
We're excited to announce that the website and registration for IC2S2 2026 (July 28-31) will launch in early December! The Vermont Complex Systems Institute @vcsi.bsky.social at the University of Vermont will be hosting IC2S2 in 2026: youtube.com/watch?v=p412S4GnPkc&feature=youtu.be
IC2S2 2026 | Burlington, Vermont
YouTube video by UVM Office of Research
youtube.com
November 13, 2025 at 3:36 PM
Reposted by Carsten Schwemmer
kauspurg.bsky.social
Billions of regressions ≠ robustness.

My new PNAS Letter shows how unjustified models can drown out justified ones — and why thoughtful model selection matters👇
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
November 11, 2025 at 4:56 PM