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90
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Introduction
Studies at the intersection of AI, platforms, and politics.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
January 2021 - present
April 2019 - January 2021
April 2017 - April 2019
Publications
Publications (90)
The emergence of the modern state was closely intertwined with the advent of statistics and demographic data. Today, we are witnessing the ascent of artificial intelligence as a new technology of governance. This article seeks to lay the groundwork for a research agenda at the intersection of the state and artificial intelligence, unpacking the not...
Recent advancements in AI have reinvigorated Agent-Based Models (ABMs), as the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to the emergence of ``generative ABMs'' as a novel approach to simulating social systems. While ABMs offer means to bridge micro-level interactions with macro-level patterns, they have long faced criticisms from social...
Toxic and uncivil politics is widely seen as a growing threat to democratic values and governance, yet our understanding of the drivers and evolution of political incivility remains limited. Leveraging a novel dataset of nearly 18 million Twitter messages from parliamentarians in 17 countries over five years, this paper systematically investigates...
Social media are becoming a growing presence in our cities, filtering our experience of urban place and enabling locations to “go viral.” This article examines the downstream consequences of this new reality, examining how the urban actors who shape the city consider social media in their work. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with e...
The spread of misinformation has emerged as a global concern. Academic attention has recently shifted to emphasize the role of political elites as drivers of misinformation. Yet, little is known of the relationship between party politics and the spread of misinformation—in part due to a dearth of cross-national empirical data needed for comparative...
Large Language Models (LLMs) have ushered in a new era of text annotation, as their ease-of-use, high accuracy, and relatively low costs have meant that their use has exploded in recent months. However, the rapid growth of the field has meant that LLM-based annotation has become something of an academic Wild West: the lack of established practices...
Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful new tool for text analysis. As these models are capable of zero-shot annotation based on instructions written in natural language, they obviate the need of large sets of training data—and thus bring potential paradigm-shifting implications for using text as data. Whi...
Recent decades have seen a blurring of the line between extremist movements and mainstream politics, driven by rising sectarian polarization. This development has been linked to digital media, with suggestions that so-called echo chambers may drive political radicalization. To understand the social processes taking place inside such digital spaces,...
Researchers are increasingly using language models (LMs) for text annotation. These approaches rely only on a prompt telling the model to return a given output according to a set of instructions. The reproducibility of LM outputs may nonetheless be vulnerable to small changes in the prompt design. This calls into question the replicability of class...
The rise of social media has corresponded with an increase in the prevalence and severity of online toxicity. While much work has gone into understanding its nature, we still lack knowledge of its emergent structural dynamics. This work presents a novel method—network toxicity analysis—for the inductive analysis of the dynamics of discursive toxici...
Social media is often criticized for amplifying toxic discourse and discouraging constructive conversations. But designing social media platforms to promote better conversations is inherently challenging. This paper asks whether simulating social media through a combination of Large Language Models (LLM) and Agent-Based Modeling can help researcher...
This guide introduces Large Language Models (LLM) as a highly versatile text analysis method within the social sciences. As LLMs are easy-to-use, cheap, fast, and applicable on a broad range of text analysis tasks, ranging from text annotation and classification to sentiment analysis and critical discourse analysis, many scholars believe that LLMs...
The question of the democratic character of the European Union (EU) has been a center-point of decades of political research. An important critique suggests that the development of the European political arena is still incomplete, with European parliamentarians primarily orienting themselves to national issues and politicians, implying a problemati...
This paper assesses the accuracy, reliability and bias of the Large Language Model (LLM) ChatGPT-4 on the text analysis task of classifying the political affiliation of a Twitter poster based on the content of a tweet. The LLM is compared to manual annotation by both expert classifiers and crowd workers, generally considered the gold standard for s...
Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture
https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2023/03/urban-attention-economy/
The influential “echo chamber” hypothesis suggests that social media drive polarization through a mutual reinforcement between isolation and radicalization. The existence of such echo chambers has been a central focus of academic debate, with competing studies finding ostensibly contradictory empirical evidence. This paper identifies a fundamental...
The rise of digital platforms has in recent years redefined contemporary capitalism-provoking discussions on whether platformization should be understood as bringing an altogether new form of capitalism, or as merely a continuation and intensification of existing neoliberal trends. This paper draws on regulation theory to examine social regulation...
Politics has in recent decades entered an era of intense polarization. Explanations have implicated digital media, with the so-called echo chamber remaining a dominant causal hypothesis despite growing challenge by empirical evidence. This paper suggests that this mounting evidence provides not only reason to reject the echo chamber hypothesis but...
Digital platforms such as Airbnb have become a major economic and political force in recent years, presenting themselves as a “sharing economy”–a new, more just way of organizing social and economic activity–while functioning as owners and managers of proprietary markets. These platforms have in recent years been subject to variegated but growing r...
This paper develops the notion of “platform placemaking”, describing how platforms mobilize user data to remake urban spatial imaginaries in their interests. Using Airbnb as a case, the paper studies the digital urban culture of “Airbnbification” – examining how Airbnb’s reviews and descriptions become part of reshaping urban place, while contribut...
We are today increasingly experiencing the city through interfaces of platforms like Google Maps, Instagram, TripAdvisor, Airbnb, and Yelp. As our very sense of the city is shaped by these technological interfaces, the media are acquiring a constitutive role in reshaping contemporary urbanity. To conceptualize how media represent urban change, this...
As our social life is mediated by digital interfaces such as Twitter, TikTok, and Google Maps, these services are at the same time producing large quantities of social data that are transforming the social sciences. Such “Big Data” are giving researchers access to new ways of studying society, bringing the emergence of a rapidly growing discipline:...
Media scholarship has long argued that public discourse is a function of the architecture of the media by which it is carried. Media architecture is, as political economists have argued, in turn shaped by the capitalist regime of accumulation within which the media operate. This paper draws together these two strands of literature to ask: as the ac...
Rising political polarization in recent decades has hampered and gridlocked policymaking, as well as weakened trust in democratic institutions. These developments have been linked to the idea that new media technology fosters extreme views and political conflict by facilitating self-segregation into “echo chambers” where opinions are isolated and r...
The proliferation of digital data has been the impetus for the emergence of a new discipline for the study of social life: 'computational social science'. Much research in this field is founded on the premise that society is a complex system with emergent structures that can be modeled or reconstructed through digital data. This paper suggests that...
We investigate how users on a prominent forum for white supremacists interpreted and framed two seminal events for the far-right in the U.S., the elections of Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016. These cases precipitated dramatic shifts in the far-right alliance and conflict structure. We combine computational methods and qualitative analysis on a corp...
Despite the prevalence of disagreement between users on social media platforms, studies of online debates typically only look at positive online interactions, represented as networks with positive ties. In this paper, we hypothesize that the systematic neglect of conflict that these network analyses induce leads to misleading results on polarized d...
How do new scientific ideas diffuse? Computational studies reveal how network structures facilitate or obstruct diffusion; qualitative studies demonstrate that diffusion entails the continuous translation and transformation of ideas. This article bridges these computational and qualitative approaches to study diffusion as a complex process of conti...
Despite the prevalence of disagreement between users on social media platforms, studies of online debates typically only look at positive online interactions, represented as networks with positive ties. In this paper, we hypothesize that the systematic neglect of conflict that these network analyses induce leads to misleading results on polarized d...
Social scientists have long studied international differences in political culture and communication. An influential strand of theory within political science argues that different types of political systems generate different parliamentary cultures: Systems with proportional representation generate cross-party cohesion, whereas majoritarian system...
This article introduces the Twitter Parliamentarian Database (TPD), a multi-source and manually validated database of parliamentarians on Twitter. The TPD includes parliamentarians from all European Free Trade Association countries where over 45% of parliamentarians are on Twitter as well as a selection of English-speaking countries. The database i...
Digital platforms are reshaping cities in the twenty-first century, providing not only new ways of seeing and navigating the world, but also new ways of organizing the economy, our cities and social lives. They bring great promises, claiming to facilitate a new "sharing" economy, outside of the exploitation of the market and the inefficiencies of t...
Airbnb has recently become a growing topic of both concern and interest for urban researchers, policymakers, and activists. Previous research has emphasized Airbnb’s economic impact and its role as a driver of residential gentrification, but Airbnb also fosters place entrepreneurs, geared to extract value from a global symbolic economy by marketing...
Despite remarkable empirical and methodological advances, our theoretical understanding of the evolutionary processes that made us human remains fragmented and contentious. Here, we make the radical proposition that the cultural communi- ties within which Homo emerged may be understood as a novel exotic form of organism. The argument begins from a...
Artificial societies used to guide and evaluate policies should be built by following "best practices". However, this goal may be challenged by the complexity of artificial societies and the interdependence of their sub-systems (e.g., built environment, social norms). We created a list of seven practices based on simulation methods, specific aspect...
Contemporary economic theory has entered into an era of unprecedented pluralism. Convincing arguments have been presented for the integration of this pluralism, the possibilities for which however rest on questions of ontology. This paper looks at two hubs of pluralist research, complexity economics and heterodox economics, to evaluate the possibil...
This essay places contemporary platform capitalism in a larger historical trajectory, emphasizing the transformations of control and power with the progression of modernity. It argues that liquidity of modernity means that control becomes increasingly organized in lower ontological stratas: rather than top-down command-and-control, control paradoxi...
The viral spread of digital misinformation has become so severe that the World Economic Forum considers it among the main threats to human society. This spread have been suggested to be related to the similarly problematized phenomenon of “echo chambers”, but the causal nature of this relationship has proven difficult to disentangle due to the conn...
This paper reviews the contemporary discussion on the epistemological and ontological effects of Big Data within social science, observing an increased focus on relationality and complexity, and a tendency to naturalize social phenomena. The epistemic limits of this emerging computational paradigm are outlined through a comparison with the discussi...
Working towards a topology for politician retweet networks in 23 different countries using network measures.
This is a study on the diffusion of novel scientific ideas. We examine how scholarly communities mediate diffusion in the academic landscape. As a case study, we analyze the diffusion of a specific scientific idea, namely the ’Strength of Weak Ties’ hypothesis, introduced by Granovetter in his 1973 paper. Using Web of Science data, we construct a n...
Traditional scientific policy approaches and tools are increasingly seen as inadequate, or even counter-productive, for many purposes. In response to these shortcomings, a new wave of approaches has emerged based on the idea that societal systems are irreducibly complex. The new categories that are thereby introduced - like "complex" or "wicked" -...
This thesis engages with questions on the boundary between what has traditionally been understood as social and natural. The introductory essay contextualizes the specific contributions of the included papers, by noting and exploring a reinvigoration of "naturalism" (the notion of a continuity between the human realm and the rest of natural phenome...
Free social spaces have long been emphasized in the social movement literature. Under names such as safe spaces, social havens, and counterpublics, they have been characterized as protective shelters against prevailing hegemonic ideologies and as hubs for the diffusion of ideas and ideologies. However, the vast literature on these spaces has predom...
Human culture signifies the emergence of an entirely new domain of existence: an event in natural history that is paralleled only by the Cambrian Explosion in terms of creativity and scope. The question of how human culture-as opposed to its animal counterparts-came to become open-endedly creative and cumulative is therefore one of wide and general...
Human culture signifies the emergence of an entirely new domain of existence: an event in natural history that is paralleled only by the Cambrian Explosion in terms of creativity and scope. The question of how human culture—as opposed to its animal counterparts—came to become open-endedly creative and cumulative is therefore one of wide and general...
This article combines topic modeling and critical discourse analysis to examine patterns of representation around the words Muslim and Islam in a 105 million word corpus of a large Swedish Internet forum from 2000 through to 2013. Despite the increased importance of social media in the (re)production of discursive power in society, this is the firs...
In this article we present an analysis of the discursive connections between Islamophobia and anti-feminism on a large Internet forum. We argue that the incipient shift from traditional media toward user-driven social media brings with it new media dynamics, relocating the (re)production of societal discourses and power structures and thus bringing...
Our society is increasingly beset by a range of interrelated crises -- with the financial crisis, the energy crisis, and the global warming crisis as leading examples -- forming a "meta-crisis" with its roots in processes deeply entrenched in society (Lane et al., 2011), and emanating from large-scale complex adaptive systems so strongly interlinke...
We sympathize with the project of a synthetic approach for devising a "theory of intentional change" and agree that Darwinism should be central in such a theory. But Darwinism is not the only process of evolution that needs to be included. Evolutionary biology itself has taken such a turn recently, with the emergence of developmental evolutionary a...
Evolutionary developmental theories in biology see the processes and organization of organisms as crucial for understanding the dynamic behavior of organic evolution. Darwinian forces are seen as necessary but not sufficient for explaining observed evolutionary patterns. We here propose that the same arguments apply with even greater force to cultu...
