Matt DeVerna

A little bit late, but this paper has now been published in ACL. Note: more recent (unpublished) analyses suggest agents are getting better at searching the web—which I've been mentioning in my conference presentations this summer.

I missed this reporting from @noupside.bsky.social and @rer.bsky.social back in August, but add Grokipedia to the list of projects Musk hyped then discarded once he discovered it was hard www.lawfaremedia.org/article/grok...

When a chatbot uses anthropomorphic companion language like "I'm worried about you" or "You are great, dear", people actually see it as less likable, humanlike, and trustworthy, according to our new simulation study @GoogleResearch with people from the US, UK, India, and Nigeria.

In August, we hosted 23 scholars at the second annual Summer Institute in #ComputationalSocialScience at Stanford. Explore our 2026 #SICSS-Stanford recap for takeaways from @rer.bsky.social and @matthewdeverna.com, and stay tuned for details about next year’s institute! 🔗 stanford.io/4zMQzs9

Our Fall Seminar Series continues on Tuesday, October 20 with a talk by @matthewdeverna.com, TIP Center postdoctoral scholar. Matt will present two projects on #AI and political #factchecking, as well as ongoing work examining how six AI systems respond to general health questions.

People increasingly turn to #AI systems to make sense of the news and to answer questions about their #health. What happens when the answers we get about #politics and our own health come from AI?

Happy that @nathumbehav.nature.com put out the research briefing describing our paper -- this is a one-pager open-access summary: rdcu.be/1X2W1SuAH25a

New @nature.com Health perspective 🧪 The invisible risks of AI-generated health information rdcu.be/VuS2jwQt6B3a We argue that these risks are serious, yet hidden from the institutions responsible for protecting public health w/ @matthewdeverna.com @yang3kc.bsky.social @harryyan.bsky.social

Check out our full lineup of OSoMe Awesome Speakers for this semester and register at osome.iu.edu/events/speak...

Check out our Nature Health perspective 👇

Join us on Tuesday, October 13 as our #FallSeminarSeries kicks off with a talk by Anthony Chen, postdoctoral scholar at the Tech Impact and Policy Center! 🔗 stanford.io/3VWPcIB

Check out our new paper! arxiv.org/abs/2603.21404

I'm recruiting 1-2 PhD students to join our lab in Fall 2027, through either Computer Science or Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder! Looking for people with interests in NLP plus [healthcare | literary studies | narratives | social media | etc.]. Join us! 🏔️☀️

OpenAI Says It Will Not Release Newest A.I. Model Over Safety Concerns www.nytimes.com/2026/09/28/t...

Excited to share a working preprint on GenAI platforms and publishers! We study the causal effects of AI Overviews and AI Mode on users’ behavior, perceptions, & traffic to web publishers. Co-led w/ @jlgleason.bsky.social , & Yakov Bart, Christo Wilson, and Danaé Metaxa. arxiv.org/abs/2608.18352 1/

Interested in doing a postdoc with me & @dgrand.bsky.social? Consider applying to Cornell's Klarman Fellowship: as.cornell.edu/research/kla... It involves a competitive internal application process, but it's 3 years of funding @$80k/year Please email me/Dave if you're interested! Oct 15th deadline

NYU is hiring in American Politics! Deadline October 6. See more details here: apply.interfolio.com/193724 @rozenas.bsky.social @cdsamii.bsky.social @sanfordgordon.bsky.social @bryantjmoy.bsky.social @awilke.bsky.social @stasavage.bsky.social @jatucker.bsky.social @peterrosendorff.bsky.social

Can someone explain why some journals ask authors to submit their manuscripts with figures at the end? This is not how the work is published and it makes reviewing a nightmare. On page 6, the authors are walking me through a figure that is included (at the request of the editor) on page 45... 🤦‍♂️

www.cnbc.com/2026/09/18/g...

📝 New Report! #AICompanions are rapidly emerging as a new form of interaction with #AI systems that users increasingly engage with not only as tools, but also as sources of emotional support, companionship, mentorship, role-play, and intimacy. 🔗 stanford.io/4dJrvJI

We're hiring! GW’s Political Science Department is seeking a junior tenure-track professor in Comparative Politics. The search is open to any substantive or regional focus and all methodological approaches. Review of applications begins October 16. www.gwu.jobs/postings/128...

Registration for #TSRConf closes in less than one week! If you’ve been thinking about joining us, this is your last chance to be part of this year’s conference. Sign up by Sunday, September 20! ⤵️ 🎟️ stanford.io/3SgrmWl

I am hiring a qualitative postdoc to start this fall for the @datasociety.bsky.social project AI-Enabled Scams as a Systemic Security Challenge. Fully remote but must be US-based. Interested in youth, scams, hustle/financial/consumer culture? More here: job-boards.greenhouse.io/datasocietyr...

Applications are open for SFI's 2027 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. SFI is looking for recent Ph.D. graduates with strong quantitative and computational skills who want to pursue independent, transdisciplinary research. Deadline: September 30, 2026 Apply: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

The 2027 Tech Policy Press Fellowship application is live! We’re seeking journalists, policy professionals, and researchers to pursue independent reporting and analysis on issues at the intersection of technology and democracy.

Friends, countrymen, lend me your shares! We are hiring a *𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐃𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫* to lead a *𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐦* as we build Penn MEDIATED into the first† public-facing data science institute for the information ecosystem (think the Urban Institute or CSET, but for media and information technology).

📢 We’re hiring a Postdoc in Computational Communication Science at the University of Vienna! 🔎 Text/image analysis, platform data & political communication 📍 Vienna ⏳ 6 years, full-time ⏰ Apply by 3 Oct jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Universi... Find out more about our team here: compcommlab.univie.ac.at

I'm excited to share this article about a project I've been working on with fantastic collaborators. Check out the dashboard for yourself here: llmelectionobservatory.org www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/b...

New on @indicator.media: Community Notes on Instagram covered just 3% of false posts debunked by the US bureau of AFP Fact Check. This analysis comes one day after Meta announced it would expand the program to 16 new countries.

Get to know Assistant Professor @tiziano.bsky.social in our New Faculty Q&A:

The Journal of Online Trust and Safety is thrilled to release its new special issue: Digital Intersectionality and Marginalization in the Majority World. 🌏 🔗 tsjournal.org/index.php/jo... #JOTS #TrustAndSafety #MajorityWorld #GlobalSouth

Dancing very very VERY close to saying “OpenAI stole our almost-complete proof of Navier-Stokes from internal access to our ChatGPT sessions because they were desperate to scoop Anthropic” which is absolutely 100% a believable thing OpenAI would do right now cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/st...

1/ Co-directing the first @casbsstanford.bsky.social Summer Institute on AI Methods for Social Scientists (AIMS) with Lara Tiedens was one of the highlights of my sabbatical at CASBS. A month later, here are five key takeaways. 🧵

Trust and safety gig at the bottom

What happens when agentic systems no longer show their work? In a post for @lawfaremedia.org, @rer.bsky.social and @noupside.bsky.social shared takeaways from their analysis of the edit logs of Grokipedia, offering insights into the governing practices of an AI-generated reference system. ⤵️

New preprint: Community Notes are good at correcting posts. But do they change the people behind them? We tracked 19,854 corrected accounts on X — 11.9M posts, 4 weeks before/after each correction. The answer: it depends who you are. @oii.ox.ac.uk 📎 arxiv.org/abs/2608.27526

We’re hiring! Poli Sci & IR department at IE University in Madrid is hiring three tenure-track Assistant Professors, starting 1st of September 2027, in: Comparative Politics: lnkd.in/ePDfwjJB International Relations: lnkd.in/eDu5vGTf Political Economy: lnkd.in/eciDukTA 1/3

PhD candidates/new grads: Postdoc opportunity with me focused on political economy and tech. See details here: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/32502

We are hiring an assistant professor in American Politics this Fall, at the intersection of law and political economy. Review will begin after September 21st. academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/32519

Submissions for CODE@MIT are open until Sept 13th. As @dholtz.bsky.social noted www.linkedin.com/feed/update/... we're particularly interested in these topics this year:

www.nytimes.com/2026/08/27/t...

What does #AI look like in the future of online trust and safety? This year, #TSRConf will feature multiple sessions exploring AI and its growing role in #TrustAndSafety, including the new risks these systems create and how they can be evaluated, governed, and used to make digital spaces safer.

23% drop in student visas to US in 2025 57% drop from India alone catastrophic for research and learning, here and abroad www.insidehighered.com/news/global/...

📢 JOB ANNOUNCEMENT 📢 Our department is hiring an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Political Science. We seek a scholar in AP, CP, PE, or IR who applies frontier methods of statistics and data science to substantive questions in their area of expertise. apply.interfolio.com/189477