Max Falkenberg

Is the world getting more polarized? The polarization of the U.S. is worrying. But is polarization similarly bad elsewhere? What drives polarization globally, what role does social media play, and will AI make things worse? New review in @nature.com communications: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A median of 55% think social media has had a positive impact on democracy, across 37 nations surveyed. But in many countries, the share of people who believe social media is bad for democracy has increased significantly in recent years. #SocialMedia #GlobalSurvey

Excited and grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the British Election Study for the next five years! At King's we will be leading on building the study's AI infrastructure and integrating novel data collection methods. Will be hiring two postdocs soon, so drop me a line if interested 🌞

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...

How should we deter student from cheating?? Well, if history is any guide...

Nearly half of all polarization research focuses on the US, yet many American findings are global outliers. A Review in Nature Communications argues that a globally equitable understanding requires bridging traditional social science with new approaches leveraging social media and AI. 🧪

"What has fundamentally changed is the emergence of the information age (the internet, social media, AI) and its integration into, and domination over, our contemporary political discourse." Needed: a globally equitable understanding of political polarization www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We need to understand political polarization through a global lens: Evidence from 53 countries suggests that high levels of affective polarization are correlated with democratic backsliding, but high levels of ideological polarization are not. www.nature.com/articles/s41...,

🚨 Come join @ceu-dnds.bsky.social as an 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗿! 🚨 We are looking for a young and coming researcher in 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 and 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲. If that sounds like you (or someone you know), check out the call & apply (or share the link): careers.ceu.edu/job/Vienna-A...

I am very happy to share that as of June 2026, I will be joining the Informatics department @ KCL as an AI+ Senior Research Fellow (Senior Lecturer / Associate Professor). I am very grateful to everyone who has supported me on the way and excited to be continuing my research at King's 🎉

Another Cloudflare outage. On Friday at business time for the UK and many other parts of the world. This was a scheduled thing that seems to have failed. There is something deliberate in the timings of these 'maintenance gone wrong events'. The rest of the world suffers whilst the US sleeps.

🔈 *Call for Participation* 🔈 Italian Conference on Computational Social Science – CS2Italy May 19-21, 2026 in Torino, Italy Premier venue for Computational Social Science in Italy: #sociology #polisci #economics #netsci #complexsystems ++ Submit your abstract by Jan 15: cs2italy.org plz reshare

Just occurred that the BBC is the most literal example of Conquest's third law in that it is actually run by a cabal of its enemies.

Firing a BBC director for *leftist* bias is like punishing a pig for taking a bath.

Spoke to the BBC about how Grok is facilitating the abuse of politicians on X. Abusive messaging on X is not new (we studied it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41... ), but the enhanced visibility of Grok posts will increase engagement with this content. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It is hard to overstate the number of academic hours which are wasted on fruitless funding applications 👇

If you're in need of positive and rather wholesome news, there's a high school teacher named Bryan who took a ton of freely licensed celebrity headshots at the New York Film Festival last month for Wikipedia, and I truly can't believe how drastic the upgrade is for some articles (thread)

The EBU just published a new report on how well consumer AI chatbots function as gateways to news by public service media – an interesting piece, but with some big problems in my view that make me question its usefulness. buff.ly/X9ident

Competition for ERC Starting Grants up 38% in two years. No increase in the number of grants awarded and no increase in grant value. Result: more academic hours wasted on fruitless, bureaucratic grant applications instead of research erc.europa.eu/news-events/...

Last week we had our second “Inverse Complexity Lab Retreat” at wonderful Traunkirchen! skewed.de/lab/group.ht... Nothing like eldritch C++ incantations by the sunny lakeside! 🏖️

General reminder: Good internet regulation is not easy if you're a small island with little real influence.

New preprint: “Multiscale patterns of migration flows in Austria: regionalization, administrative barriers, and urban-rural divides”, with @thomrobiglio.bsky.social, Martina Contisciani, @martonkarsai.bsky.social, arxiv.org/abs/2507.11503

🧵 New preprint! Do online mental health communities form patterns of association that mirror diagnostic systems or challenge them? “Network Analysis of Reddit Mental Health Communities: Mapping the Interconnectedness of Psychopathology” 👉 osf.io/7dfcw_v1 @ceu-dnds.bsky.social Short thread: 1/N

Are you from the US and would like to work as a postdoc in Austria, maybe in our lab? 25 new fellowships will be available in July from the @oeaw.bsky.social: www.oeaw.ac.at/en/news/25-n... If you are interested; get in touch!

Testing LLMs in the Prisoner’s Dilemma to reveal their moral biases. LLMs can defect often but become more forgiving and less retaliatory than humans when opponents are mostly cooperative. Nicolò Fontana at #ICWSM. w @frapierri.bsky.social Paper: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC...

Kicking off #ICWSM with the DETOX workshop and @maxfalken.bsky.social’s keynote on why the Web is not a set of siloed platforms and why we should not study it as such. Shows why deplatforming doesn’t work exactly as we expect and why large online platforms are plagued by affective polarization

Here's another paper by Shalizi showing how inferring *latent* homophily allows for disentangling from contagion. Bizarre how this gets overlooked, since it's obvious that homophily leaves huge traces in the network structure, while contagion changes nothing. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The systemic impact of deplatforming on social media, featuring @maxfalken.bsky.social. From the Cambridge Disinformation Summit youtu.be/k5IA96g0U5s

No surprise that bank lending to the fossil fuel sector keeps rising 👇 Nadia Ameli and I recently wrote about why current banking regulations are insufficient and ineffective at limiting continued funding to the FF sector - call ordinated action is needed: www.thebanker.com/content/e812...

Extremely fun little secret recording in @desmog.com by @geoffdembicki.bsky.social here - Lomborg just openly saying to the Fraser Institute that CCS wont' work but that it can be used to soak up subsidies www.desmog.com/2025/06/05/c...

@maxfalken.bsky.social on the importance of nuence when studying polarization at the social network session at #netsci2025

Celebrating my first post on Bluesky with a picture of @abovet.bsky.social giving his invited talk at UNCSS today. The Satellite in running now at NetSci 2025. Feel free to join even for the last round of talks. Together with: @maxfalken.bsky.social & Alessandro Galeazzi

Looking forward to hosting this tomorrow! Lots of great talks! 👇

I can officially confirm my presence to the satellite! If I made it, you cannot miss.

🎉 Very happy to announce Maxime Lucas @maximelca.bsky.social as our next panelist! Maxime is an FNRS Postdoc at the Namur Institute for Complex Systems & UCLouvain in Belgium. He is interested in dynamical systems, complex systems, networks, and their applications to life sciences.

Dr @maxfalken.bsky.social on the impact of social media deplatforming. From the Cambridge Disinformation Summit meetings. m.youtube.com/watch?v=k5IA...

The rise (and fall?) of misinformation research.

🎙️Meet the chair of Data Stories: @maxfalken.bsky.social We're excited to welcome Max Falkenberg as chair of this year's Data Stories! 📅 Join Max and our speakers *TOMORROW*, Tuesday, May 20 1/n

For weeks I have been telling reporters that #Trump could have the power to switch off our tech in #Europe. It felt a bit alarmist until I just read the #Microsoft, on the behest of the #US gov has suspended the email account of Karim Khan, #ICC chief prosecutor. One of the most important […]

New Marie Curie initiative with €1.25bn of funding marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/news/marie-s... Scheme aims to address the "precarity of research careers"... Which is ironic, because the same programme required me to move country for a two year contract (albeit a very nice one)

Yeah. As a lapsed manufacturing engineer with some other surprisingly relevant hobbies, I always get a chuckle seeing the argument that a superintelligent brain in a vat could easily wipe out humanity. Possible, perhaps. Trivial? Nah. Smarts only gets you so far. An excellent illustration below.

Data Stories is next week! Join us to hear the invited talks and visit the poster exhibition 🎨 RSVP below 👇

New study by Elisa Omodei @elisaomodei.bsky.social & @isifoundation.bsky.social co-authors finds that only 4–6.5% of links in Reddit climate discussions cite scientific sources, raising questions about the role of science in online climate discourse. 🔎 Read more: journals.plos.org/climate/arti...

New paper alert. "More is different" & the LLMs. LLMs are usually studied in isolation. But what happens when they start interacting? We explored this by looking at their collective behaviour. Work with @ariel-flint.bsky.social and @lajello.bsky.social 1/