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Simon Munzert

@simonsaysnothin.bsky.social

390 followers 420 following 22 posts

Professor of Data Science and Public Policy | Hertie School Data Science Lab | Elections, Public Opinion, Data

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Political science 35%

Communication & Media Studies 16%

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Reposted by Joanna Bryson

Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · 11d

... in which I accidentally imitate Otto Wels, while saying things far less momentous than he did back then.

Johannes B. Gruber @jbgruber.bsky.social · 11d

@simonsaysnothin.bsky.social at #MEDem Conf: we need to integrate our efforts instead of researchers all building their own datasets and infrastructure. Couldn't agree more!

Integrate

○ Researchers get lost in building fragmented data
infrastructures (case in point: me).
○ specialized collection is fine, but fragmented
dissemination hinders use.
○ Lack of integration blocks comparative research.

Whot I'd like MEDem to build towards

○ Incentivization of shared infrastructures
○ Toolkits to standardize data collection (measurement and interoperability)

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Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · 11d

Day 1 at #MEDem Conference @gesis.org in Cologne, where I had the chance to share a personal perspective on data infrastructure projects for democracy research. Slides here: simonmunzert.com/medem25/

MEDem @medem.bsky.social · 11d

🚀 Kicking off day 1 of the 3rd #MEDemConference at @gesis.org! From @sldelange.bsky.social discussing radical-right normalization 🗳️ to calls to consolidate democracy data by @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social 📊 — keynotes spotlight why #MEDem matters for democracy.

Sarah de Lange presents at the 3rd MEDem Conference 2025. Behind her, a slide shows the book “The Normalization of the Radical Right” and a quote on how radical-right behavior grows when previously hidden views become socially acceptable.

Simon Munzert speaks at the 3rd MEDem Conference 2025 on the past, present, and future of democracy research.

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Reposted by Robert Huber, Simon Munzert

MEDem @medem.bsky.social · 11d

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Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Simon Munzert

Johannes B. Gruber @jbgruber.bsky.social · 11d

@simonsaysnothin.bsky.social at #MEDem Conf: we need to integrate our efforts instead of researchers all building their own datasets and infrastructure. Couldn't agree more!

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Reposted by Robert Huber, Simon Munzert

Alexia Katsanidou @alexiakatsanidou.bsky.social · 17d

Coming up on Monday the @medem.bsky.social conference at @gesis.org in Cologne. Stay tuned for the future of democracy research infrastructures www.medem.eu/coming-up-th... Keynotes from @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social and @sldelange.bsky.social

Coming Up: The 2025 MEDem Conference & Workshop! - Monitoring Electoral Democracy

Coming Up: the 2025 medem Conference! We are thrilled for the upcoming 3rd MEDem Conference, scheduled to take place from September 29-30 at GESIS in Cologne!The 3rd MEDem conference will bring togeth...

www.medem.eu

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Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · 24d

Congrats Andreu, this is so cool!! 🎉

Reposted by David M. Farrell, Simon Munzert, Christian Rauh

Bernd Schlipphak @bschlipphak.bsky.social · Sep 10

Deadline for the position as Full Professor at our dept is coming closer: Great position, great colleagues & very positive working atmosphere. Please contact @danbischof.bsky.social if you have any questions.

And thanks for asking - yes, the pic shows today's view from the position's office.

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Reposted by Cas Mudde, Axel Bruns, Carl Henrik Knutsen , and 7 more Cas Mudde, Axel Bruns, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Juan Cole, W. Andy Knight, Simon Munzert, Arlene Stein, Hisham Zerriffi, Tarik Abou‐Chadi, David Spurrett

Anita Gohdes @argohdes.bsky.social · Aug 11

I have studied the targeting of journalists for many years, but the scale and public display of these killings is truly shocking: “Israel admits deliberate attack on the journalist, known for frontline coverage, in a strike on a tent outside al-Shifa hospital“

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

Anas al-Sharif, prominent Al Jazeera correspondent, among five journalists killed in Israeli airstrike on Gaza

Israel admits deliberate attack on the journalist, known for frontline coverage, in a strike on a tent outside al-Shifa hospital

www.theguardian.com

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Reposted by Lukas F. Stoetzer, Simon Munzert

Christian Stecker @pluggedchris.bsky.social · Feb 20

Die AfD ist hat viele Wähler, aber noch mehr Gegner. Weil sich diese Gegner aber über viele Parteien verteilen, kann die AfD Direktmandate erringen. Würde das Wahlsystem berücksichtigen, dass viele Wähler jede Partei gegenüber der AfD bevorzugen, wäre auch im Osten die Wahlkarte weniger blau.

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Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · Jul 10

Or, if you're looking for a prominent example, check out the original from Baldassarri/Gelman sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/resea...

Partisans without Constraint: Political Polarization and Trends in American Public Opinion

Public opinion polarization is here conceived as a process of alignment along multiple lines of potential disagreement and measured as growing constraint in individuals’ preferences. Using NES data fr...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Reposted by Roman Senninger

Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · Jun 5

If you're a researcher (or, less likely, a policymaker) reading this, you'll definitely want to read on. Featuring a dataset that may include you - and findings that make a solid case for hanging out in this space and sharing your work.

Sebastian Ramirez-Ruiz @seramirezruiz.bsky.social · Jun 5

🤔 How much do politicians engage with academic researchers online?

In my latest paper, I find that politicians from 12 countries rarely engage with researchers on social media, but this can change when expertise gains salience

Preprint: osf.io/preprints/osf/wqbe4_v1

🧵👇

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Reposted by Simon Munzert, Christian Rauh, Roman Senninger

Sebastian Ramirez-Ruiz @seramirezruiz.bsky.social · Jun 5

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Reposted by Amy Bruckman, Mor Naaman, Patricia Aufderheide , and 9 more Amy Bruckman, Mor Naaman, Patricia Aufderheide, Scott A. Hale, Fabio Giglietto, Christian Baden, Giulia Sandri, Jessica Vitak, Aleksandra Kuczerawy, Simon Munzert, Kevin Coe, Heidi Tworek

Rebekah Tromble @rebekahtromble.bsky.social · May 13

The worst happened. We were DOGE’d. Our NSF funding is gone.

So now there’s nothing stopping me from sharing Expert Voices Together, a crisis response system for US-based researchers and journalists facing harassment.

It's a true passion project. 🧵 1/

expertvoicestogether.org

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Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · May 12

A shout-out to the people who did all the hard work for this study - in particular @dawiet.bsky.social and Amin Oueslati, who paved the way in his master's thesis he wrote @hertieschool.bsky.social - super proud of him!

Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · May 12

Finally, black-box audits are not ideal. Researchers need better access to the models behind those services. More implications, and more findings, in the paper!

Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · May 12

Multiply that by the number of calls made to those APIs every day, and the decisions they inform. (We don't know that number, but it's probably no less than ~500k calls over the minute you've engaged with this thread.)

Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · May 12

And what is more, those decisions probably affect those most who are not perpetrators but members of attacked groups.

Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · May 12

But our results indicate that if your moderation pipeline largely builds on automated decisions informed by those services, you're going to produce A LOT of questionable decisions.

Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · May 12

Hate speech moderation is hard, and we wouldn't expect any model to do a perfect job. Also, it's not straightforward to agree on what constitutes hate speech in the first place, which is why our benchmark datasets are not beyond any doubt.

Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · May 12

Main finding #2: Group markers drive over-moderation. Words like "muslim", "gay", or "jews" make mis-classifying non-hate speech as hate speech more likely.

Table providing results from a SHAP Values analysis, showing which speech tokens contribute to misclassification decisions.

Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · May 12

Some APIs seem overly sensitive (in particular Google's NL API) while others tend to under-moderate (Perspective and Microsoft).

Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · May 12

Main finding #1: Performance varies wildly across moderation services, datasets, and metrics, but some of the failure rates are astonishing (FPR & FNR > 75% on balanced samples for some implicit and explicit speech!).

Table reporting some key findings from the paper - hate speech classification performance statistics across moderation services and datasets.

Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · May 12

Our paper investigates how commercial content moderation APIs handle group-targeted hate speech. This is a black-box audit (we have no idea how the models look exactly) of 5 major APIs with five million queries based on four datasets.

Info chart describing the design of the study. Figure title: Our black-box audit framework to evaluate commercial content moderation APIs.

Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · May 12

Have you ever used a content moderation API, such as Perspective API or OpenAI's Moderation API, for your research or to inform moderation decisions? Well, they might not have given you what you think they would.

Bill Murray sitting on a bed, somehow lost. Scene from movie Lost in Translation. Title says "Lost in Moderation"

Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · May 12

Just published at CHI ’25: How Commercial Content Moderation APIs over- and under-moderate hate speech dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... w/ @dawiet.bsky.social ky.social, Amin Oueslati @hheuer.bsky.social cial @dimitristaufer.bsky.social al Lena Pohlmann. 🧵

Lost in Moderation: How Commercial Content Moderation APIs Over- and Under-Moderate Group-Targeted Hate Speech and Linguistic Variations | Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Co...

dl.acm.org

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Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · May 12

Congrats, Lukas! Very nice paper and visuals!

Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · Apr 9

Just checking in on how the young fellas are doing and... great, apparently! Congrats Elias and Andreas on this wonderful publication! And very timely as we enter a new session of the Bundestag that promises lots of contentious debating.

Elias Koch @eliaskoch.bsky.social · Apr 8

Really glad to see this published! It was a true pleasure to collaborate with the wonderful @ankuepfer.bsky.social throughout every stage of this project 🙏 🎉

Andreas Küpfer @ankuepfer.bsky.social · Apr 8

🚀 Our paper (with @eliaskoch.bsky.social) on ‘The Politics of Seeking and Avoiding Discourse in Parliament’ is finally out as EarlyView at the EJPR!

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Reposted by Simon Munzert

Elias Koch @eliaskoch.bsky.social · Apr 8

Really glad to see this published! It was a true pleasure to collaborate with the wonderful @ankuepfer.bsky.social throughout every stage of this project 🙏 🎉

Andreas Küpfer @ankuepfer.bsky.social · Apr 8

🚀 Our paper (with @eliaskoch.bsky.social) on ‘The Politics of Seeking and Avoiding Discourse in Parliament’ is finally out as EarlyView at the EJPR!

The politics of seeking and avoiding discourse in parliament / When do politicians debate each other in parliament, and when do they prefer to avoid discourse? While existing research has shown MPs to unilaterally leverage the dialogical nature of legislative debates to their advantage, the circumstances facilitating actual discursive interaction have so far received less attention. We introduce a new framework to study the emergence of discourse in political debates. Applying this framework, we expect ideological differences and government–opposition dynamics to shape politicians' choices about seeking or avoiding discourse. To test these hypotheses, we draw on an original dataset of all 14,595 attempted and successful interventions (Zwischenfragen) – extraordinary, voluntary discursive exchanges between speakers and MPs in the audience – in the German Bundestag (1990–2020), extracted using an annotation pipeline developed specifically for this study. We find that MPs separated by diverging preferences seek discourse with one another more often than their ideologically aligned counterparts. At the same time, these exact attempts do less frequently result in discursive interactions. When considering government–opposition dynamics in this process, we observe very similar patterns: Attempts to initiate discourse are particularly common among opposition MPs facing government speakers, and we find tentative evidence suggesting that government actors are most likely to avoid these invitations to discursive interaction. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of elite behaviour in public environments.

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Simon Munzert @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social · Feb 21

Was der Kollege sagt - plus schöne Evidenz, warum Wahlkreisverwaisung verkraftbar ist. Schon mal bookmarken für die zu erwartende Debatte nächste Woche… www.zeit.de/politik/deut... (Freebie-Link)

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Reposted by Simon Munzert

Thorsten Faas @wahlforschung.thorstenfaas.de · Feb 21

Schon 4000 Leute - vielen Dank. Aber wir nehmen gerne noch mehr! www.wahlumfrage2025.de

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