Sacha Altay
🔎 Misinformation, social media & the news 🗞️
🇨🇭 Postdoc at the University of Zurich, previously Reuters Institute & ENS 🇫🇷
- Reposted by Sacha Altay🚨Job alert 🚨 I have an opening for a postdoc in my team at @ipz.bsky.social in the area of digital democracy starting Sep 1, 2026. If you are working on the impact of the digital transformation on politics, please apply by 🗓️ Mar 1, 2026. 📤 Please share widely! www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...
- Reposted by Sacha AltayA vast array of data suggests that school, not social media, is the biggest modern threat to the mental health of children. If you were recently a child, that won’t be a surprise. If not: enjoy the post :) open.substack.com/pub/unpublis...
- Reposted by Sacha AltayYesterday, I awoke to news of another ICE killing in MN. On Bluesky, the conversation was deeply critical of ICE. But I wanted to see how things were going on X. Surprisingly, the attempts there to blame the victim weren't getting as much traction as I suspected. So I wrote a thing.
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- Reposted by Sacha AltayHenry Shevlin and I discuss "misinformation", propaganda, mass gullibility, advertising, social media, and deepfakes with the great Sacha Altay (@sachaltay.bsky.social). www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l5T...
- Reposted by Sacha AltayIf you tell an AI to convince someone of a true vs. false claim, does truth win? In our *new* working paper, we find... ‘LLMs can effectively convince people to believe conspiracies’ But telling the AI not to lie might help. Details in thread
- I spend more and more time on Substack. I find it surprisingly good and stimulating. You can find me here: substack.com/@sachaaltay
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- Reposted by Sacha Altay“Our findings tell us that young people’s choices around social media and gaming may be shaped by how they’re feeling but not necessarily the other way around,” said Prof Neil Humphrey, a co-author [of a Manchester University study that followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years].
- Reposted by Sacha AltayNEW article by me! We can now visualize pathogens down to atoms; design vaccines in weeks; manufacture them in microbial factories; engineer them more precise than ever before. We're living through a golden age of vaccine development, but only if we continue to invest in them.
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- Reposted by Sacha Altay📣📣📣 GREAT, time-sensitive opportunity for senior/mid-career scholars to join us in Madrid at UC3M´s social sciences department (UC3M-ATRAE Program 2026) on an attractive pay+research funds package 📣📣📣 This does NOT happen everyday. THREAD below if this is of interest 1/n
- Reposted by Sacha AltayThe Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow to work with an interdisciplinary team (me, @bstewart.bsky.social, and @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social). Link: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app... Please apply by THIS SUNDAY, Dec. 14!
- Reposted by Sacha AltayAny headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no” (Betteridge's law). Should we worry about gen AI persuasion shaping elections? I think “no” holds here. See knightcolumbia.org/content/dont... for a good summary of why we shouldn’t be too concerned
- Reposted by Sacha Altay🚨 New in Nature+Science!🚨 AI chatbots can shift voter attitudes on candidates & policies, often by 10+pp 🔹Exps in US Canada Poland & UK 🔹More “facts”→more persuasion (not psych tricks) 🔹Increasing persuasiveness reduces "fact" accuracy 🔹Right-leaning bots=more inaccurate
- Reposted by Sacha AltayPreparing this talk gave me an opportunity to reflect on what lessons I've learned from psychology's replication crisis and credibility revolution, and what advice I would have for other fields. We've come a long way! Video: youtu.be/_vb1CNwC3CM?... Slides : osf.io/cuj62/files/...
- In case you have missed Simine Vazire's excellent webinar yesterday, here is the link to watch it online: youtu.be/_vb1CNwC3CM Thanks again @simine.com for staying up so late and thanks to the audience for the great questions!
- Reposted by Sacha AltayThe man who inspired Australia's teen social media ban literally did this:
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- Three preregistered experiments with prolific participants (N = 2,254) found no evidence for experimenter demand effects osf.io/preprints/ps...
- Reposted by Sacha AltayOk, just wow. If the content of this article is right, this is depressing. We're slowly reaching the point where ~100% of what I was taught in Social Psych was either innocently wrong or plainly frauded onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
- Reposted by Sacha AltayWe have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so... What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?
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- Reposted by Sacha Altay🤖 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓 𝐃𝐮𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐄𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐀𝐈𝐠𝐧 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫 🇳🇱 Less than one week before the Dutch elections, @meinungsfuehrer.bsky.social & I looked at over 20k posts to reveal patterns in the usage of AI-generated visuals across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. #tk2025 🧵Thread
- Reposted by Sacha AltayNew hobby: Remaking article abstracts as movie trailers to expose hype and fearmongering.
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- Super cool data on what people saw on their phone during the 2024 US elections: "On an average day, the median individual saw the terms ‘Donald Trump’, ‘Joe Biden’, and ‘Kamala Harris’ on their phone for only 3 seconds." www.guyaridor.net/files/digita...
- Reposted by Sacha AltayClimate skeptics actively engage in information avoidance. We need to bring them to the facts and let the facts do their work: ❝Using generative AI to increase sceptics’ engagement with climate science❞ (thread) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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- Reposted by Sacha Altaynew working paper: osf.io/7v4zj tl;dr: taking the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor seriously requires taking the nuances of actually-existing markets seriously, which means thinking about tradeoffs between transaction costs and conformity costs. applied to misinfo and ideological belief systems.
- Reposted by Sacha AltayFrom ancient Greece to the Arabic golden age, scholars have been driven by their curiosity to investigate astronomy, history, philosophy, and sundry other disciplines. Is there a structure to that curiosity? Are astronomers as likely to also be historians or to also be philosophers?
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- This is good news for debriefings in misinformation research: Debriefings that include fact-checks of the false claims used in the experiment reduce false beliefs, improve attitudes towards the study, and show no signs of negative effects. 👉 osf.io/preprints/ps... Feedback much welcomed :)
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- Reposted by Sacha AltayHow effective are user corrections on social media, and does adding a link to a fact check improve effectiveness? In piece led by @sachaltay.bsky.social we find corrections have small effects, adding a fact-check unlikely to make them more effective misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/the-... 1/6
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- Reposted by Sacha AltayToday (w/ @ox.ac.uk @stanford @MIT @LSE) we’re sharing the results of the largest AI persuasion experiments to date: 76k participants, 19 LLMs, 707 political issues. We examine “levers” of AI persuasion: model scale, post-training, prompting, personalization, & more! 🧵:
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- Reposted by Sacha AltayDid AI so far upend elections and destroy democracy? Not quite! Balanced assessment by @felixsimon.bsky.social and @sachaltay.bsky.social And important plea to move discussion to a less dramatic level and link AI discussions to democracy challenge discussions. knightcolumbia.org/content/dont...
- Reposted by Sacha AltayHow harmful is GenAI around elections? Will it trigger a misinformation apocalypse and upend elections? I am happy to finally be able to share @sachaltay.bsky.social & my answers to these and other questions on which we have been working for a year and which is now out via @knightcolumbia.org
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- 🚨 Now out in Nature Human Behaviour 🚨 We show that following the news on WhatsApp or Instagram (N = 3,395 🇫🇷🇩🇪) increases current affairs knowledge, participants’ ability to discern true from false news stories, awareness of true news stories, as well as trust in the news. doi.org/10.1038/s415...
- Participants were asked to follow two accounts for two weeks and activate the notifications. In the treatment condition the accounts were news-related whereas in the control they were not. We measured compliance with screenshots uploaded by participants and self-reported measures.
- Reposted by Sacha AltayOur Digital News Report 2025 is out! 📊48 markets 🌏Almost 100K respondents 📰Key headline: Audiences lean into video news and influencers, raising misinformation concerns and new dilemmas for publishers 📱Explore now buff.ly/xLP67Tg 🧵Findings in thread #DNR25
- Reposted by Sacha AltayIn 2010, Mark Zuckberberg became Time's "Person of The Year". The article is surreal reading today. Here are just two quotes: "As for money, his indifference to it is almost pathological" "Facebook wants to...tame the howling mob...The Internet, and the whole world, will feel more like a family"
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