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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing
@solmg.bsky.social
1.6K followers 550 following 200 posts
Social Scientist/Research Prof at NYU CSMaP, formerly Twitter. http://solomonmg.github.io
solomonmg.github.io
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · 27d
7/ Kernel Approximation Ideal Point Poisson Factorization - scalable Bayesian ideological estimation from billions of observations, applied to 134 million TikTok comments to map ideology on the platform. @matiaspiqueras.bsky.social
Matías Piqueras (@matiaspiqueras.bsky.social)
PhD student in Computer Science at Uppsala University working on developing computer vision models and methods relevant to the study of politics and society.
matiaspiqueras.bsky.social
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · 27d
6/ Propaganda or Parity? testing whether TikTok amplifies pro-China content, using LLM classifiers and longitudinal engagement/moderation data. @kengchichang.bsky.social, @mollyeroberts.bsky.social, H Barnehl
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · 27d
5/ To Be or Not to Be on TikTok: a rare activation experiment, recruiting users to start TikTok and measuring causal effects on attitudes, knowledge and well-being.
K Rutherford, @tiagoventura.bsky.social
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · 27d
4/ Scrolling Through Hate: mapping hate speech on TikTok across time, place, topic, plus experiments testing moderation responsiveness.
responsiveness.
@karstendonnay.bsky.social, @fabriziogilardi.bsky.social , @gloriagennaro.bsky.social, @dhangartner.bsky.social
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · 27d
3/ First: The Political Supply of TikTok: political content spreads faster than entertainment, and a small set of creators dominates reach. @benguinaudeau.bsky.social, K Rutherford, @jatucker.bsky.social
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · 27d
2/ Short-form video platforms (TikTok, Reels, Shorts) are reshaping political comms: vertical video, personalized feeds, huge reach. But opaque data access makes them hard to study.
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · 27d
TODAY Aug 28 - "Politics in 60 Seconds: Short-Form Video, TikTok, and Political Communication" at #APSA2025 -

2 PM, VCC West Ballroom B

Chair: @eunjikim.bsky.social. Discussant: @mollyeroberts.bsky.social
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Sep 5
Spoiler alert: the answer is “no”
kwcollins.bsky.social
Kevin Collins @kwcollins.bsky.social · Sep 5
More elected officials need to read this paper: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Aug 28
Maybe let’s not dismantle the tenure system while admin and athletic budgets balloon
aaup.org
AAUP @aaup.org · Aug 26
AAUP President Todd Wolfson denounces planned academic cuts at the University of Oregon, laying out several concerns.

@uauoregon.bsky.social

🧵
AAUP President Denounces Planned Cuts at the University of Oregon
The AAUP stands with the United Academics of the University of Oregon in protesting the administration's plan to slash multiple departments and programs and fire faculty.
www.aaup.org
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Reposted by Sol Messing
igorbonifacic.bsky.social
Igor @igorbonifacic.bsky.social · Jul 10
New from me about Grok's very bad week, with insight from @solmg.bsky.social. www.engadget.com/ai/how-exact...
How exactly did Grok go full 'MechaHitler?'
After Grok took a hard turn toward antisemitic earlier this week, many are probably left wondering how something like that could even happen.
www.engadget.com
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Jun 21
Reposting @hwaight.bsky.social ‘s thread on this bsky.app/profile/hwai...
hwaight.bsky.social
Hannah Waight @hwaight.bsky.social · Jun 18
I am thrilled to share a new article in Sociological Methods & Research, “Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages”. My co-first author Sol Messing and our collaborators developed a new approach to measuring “narrative similarity” between texts: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages - Hannah Waight, Solomon Messing, Anton Shirikov, Margaret E. Roberts, Jonathan Nagler, Jason Greenfield, Megan A. Brown, Kevin Aslett, Joshua A. Tuck...
How can one understand the spread of ideas across text data? This is a key measurement problem in sociological inquiry, from the study of how interest groups sh...
journals.sagepub.com
solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Jun 20
Here's a link to the paper! solomonmg.github.io/pdf/Quantify...
solomonmg.github.io
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Jun 20
Limitations exist—measuring narrative similarity doesn't alone prove "diffusion." Contextual and temporal analyses remain essential for robust conclusions about propaganda or any information dynamics.
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Jun 20
Authorship Analysis:
Current methods often employ BERT for authorship attribution. However, larger, modern LLMs (like GPT-4o) remain under-explored for this task. There's untapped potential here waiting to be studied.
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Jun 20
Science of Science:
Tracking idea origins in scientific literature traditionally uses topic models or exact text reuse, often missing important conceptual linkages. Our method could clarify how ideas propagate through academic communities.
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Jun 20
Information Reuse:
The study of content recycling ("memetracking") relies heavily on exact text matches. Using our approach could identify deeper connections—tracing the subtle evolution and spread of ideas.
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Jun 20
Our method has potential beyond narrative similarity. Here are some potential applications:

Plagiarism Detection:
Exact-text matching often misses subtle, paraphrased copying. Our approach could vastly improve recall, catching nuanced cases traditional methods miss.
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Jun 20
And here's the same story appearing shortly after and appearing in Infowars
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Jun 20
What does this look like in practice? Here's an article in Sputnik alleging a false-flag operation by the US:
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Jun 20
Now it's important to note that often matching narratives represent humdrum coverage of the same real-world developments:
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Jun 20
And here's what we actually found: low quality news outlets with lower journalistic standards are more likely to print narratives appearing in Russian state media outlets
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Jun 20
We use purposive sampling at various decision boundaries to oversample positive cases to generate labeled training and validation data sets. This allows us to estimate recall and thus F1!
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Jun 20
The challenge is estimating recall, and hence F1.
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solmg.bsky.social
Sol Messing @solmg.bsky.social · Jun 20
But wait how did we get supervised metrics for an unsupervised problem? We build on Grimmer
& @garyking90.bsky.social
(2011) & Mozer et al (2020) generating within & between-cluster measures of validity, but we estimate [out-of-sample] precision, recall, & F1.
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