What are the social dynamics behind the resilience of today’s elected authoritarian regimes? In order to answer this question, I develop the concept “democratic autocracy.” This regime type is a populist update to fascism under neoliberal conditions. 1/6 brill.com/view/journals/…

🚨 SICSS-Edinburgh is back! 🚨 We’re excited to announce that applications for SICSS-Edinburgh 2025 are now open. 📅 Dates: May 26 - June 6 Apply now 👉 sicss.io/2025/edinburgh/ #SICSS2025 #SICSSEdinburgh

We are back😎 Application deadline is March 21st. Don’t miss out this great opportunity to connect peers and learn more about computational social science!

Ekopolitik Akademi devam ediyor! Doç. Dr. Uğur Özdemir [Uğur Özdemir] ile "Siyasi ideolojiler, Kimlikler ve Aidiyet Psikolojisi" dersinde buluşuyoruz.

We are running a summer school in Computational Social Science at Edinburg this year - 3 days left to apply!

We are organising the SICSS summer school on computational social science in Edinburgh this summer! We offer a two-week intensive course to learn and practice how to use data science for understanding/analysing social phenomena. Apply soon #ICWSM #CSCW

Turkish politics have an endless creativity. It seemed far fetched but now it's real. Istanbul University has revoked the diploma of Ekrem İmamoğlu that it conceded 35 years ago in what can only be seen as a politically driven manoeuvre to impede his presidential candidacy. Sad.

After forcing Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu out of politics, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is getting closer to establishing an autocratic system with no real opposition—and with no electoral surprises, writes Gönül Tol. foreignaffairs.com/turkey/turkey-…

📄NEW PAPER📄 Ever wondered content people actually pay *attention* to online? Our new research reveals that you likely pay attention to far more varied political content than your likes and shares suggest

❗️❗️ Deadline extended to 31st of March ❗️❗️

Even Pikachu was not spared from police violence in Turkey this week.

Check out our new preprint👇🏼 We measure attention to political content online using a clone social media environment. osf.io/preprints/osf/…

Volkan Konak’ın bugün sahnede hayatını kaybetmeden önceki son sözleri: “Volkan abi sivri konuşma içeri atarlar seni diyorlar. Ya bırak. Sen bilmez misin devrimciler korkmaz?”

The X account of Istanbul’s twice-elected mayor and opposition presidential candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu has been blocked in Turkey. After failing to silence him through imprisonment, Erdoğan’s government now resorts to digital censorship. A striking example of how Turkey’s

🤖💡 Are LLMs really developing social behaviors—or just reproducing familiar patterns from training? In our new paper, Petter Törnberg and I take a closer look at recent claims of emergent conventions in AI and offer a different perspective... 🧵

Is social media still a political echo chamber? In our new ICWSM25 paper "Cross-Partisan Interactions on Twitter" we analyzed 3M replies from 2020 and find that 34% were directed to users from opposite political alignment. However these interactions are more likely to be toxic🧵

Excited to share our new paper in Political Analysis co-authored with Neil Ketchley, Alexandra Siegel, and Mossaab Bagdouri! 📢 We introduce an open-source, computationally light method for measuring media criticism—a key marker of media freedom and democratization.

Our new paper with Christopher Barrie & Alia ElKattan is out in Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media! We present a multimodal dataset capturing how candidates campaigned on X during the 2024 UK General Election. Check it out👇👇 🔗 journalqd.org/article/view/9…

Pleased to see this new dataset article out in JQD. We introduce a dataset of social media posts by *all* candidates in the last UK GE.

📢 ICYMI! 📢 SKAPE Seminar: Topic modelling UK science advisory committees during Covid-19 23 Oct, 1-2pm VLR, Chrystal Macmillan Building / Online via Zoom More info and registration: edin.ac/46uJMGn