Ian Axel Anderson
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aanixel.bsky.social
Ian Axel Anderson
@aanixel.bsky.social
530 followers 1.3K following 110 posts
Postdoc @ Caltech
Technology researcher, Surfer, Poet
They/he
Posts Replies Media Videos
aanixel.bsky.social
Cool to see our newest work on social media covered by @the-independent.com! www.independent.co.uk/news/health/...
You may be scrolling through Instagram out of habit and not addiction
Almost half of teenagers in Britain say they feel addicted to social media
www.independent.co.uk
December 3, 2025 at 10:35 PM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
caseynewton.bsky.social
A novel new study finds you can reduce polarization on X simply with a simple change to the algorithm. I spoke with the researchers: www.platformer.news/stanford-pol...
The results: reducing exposure to divisive content improved feelings toward the other party by about 2 points on a 100-point scale. On the other hand, boosting that content cooled feelings by about 2.5 points. The researchers say the shift is equivalent to about three years of rising partisan animosity in America, created (or reversed) in just a week. Remarkably, researchers found this result without adding or removing hyper-partisan material — it simply changed the order in which the posts appear. (For people who saw less polarizing content, for example, it was still in their feeds — just way lower, and thus less likely to be seen.) “I think the general intuition is that there's a little bit of a failure of imagination going on with a lot of the platforms,” Michael S. Bernstein, a researcher at Stanford and co-author of the paper, told me in an interview. “We think they were sort of painted into a box where they felt like they had to optimize for certain engagement criteria, like that's the only thing they could do. It just felt like that didn't necessarily have to be the case anymore."
December 2, 2025 at 12:58 AM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
thetransmitter.bsky.social
Most basic neuroscience research in the U.S. is funded by the federal government, but there is an entire funding landscape that lies beyond those federal agencies. To bring those sources together, @thetransmitter.bsky.social presents a funding source directory: bit.ly/4pBBF2B

#StateOfNeuroscience
Neuroscience funding: A source directory
Our list features expected and lesser-known governmental and nongovernmental sources of funding for basic neuroscience research.
bit.ly
December 1, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
mqrmobile.bsky.social
STOKED that our paper on smartphone and spatial habits is out in Scientific Reports! 🎉

Using mobility 🏃 and app 📱 data (27,446,977 logs; 7,226 trip questionnaires) we found that smartphone habits are stronger in habitually traveled and visited spaces 🏡

Personal thread below!

rdcu.be/eQ7q0
Smartphone habits are stronger in spaces chosen out of habit
Scientific Reports - Smartphone habits are stronger in spaces chosen out of habit
rdcu.be
November 21, 2025 at 4:38 PM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
jbakcoleman.bsky.social
I’m glad to see on platform ranking algorithm work done without platform scientists in the mix.

I think it’s quite telling that, by the only means we have to verify Metas election collaborations results… we can’t confirm their claims of little to no effect.
November 28, 2025 at 10:40 PM
aanixel.bsky.social
Excited to see these studies (finally) published in Scientific Reports! 🚨

S1: More social media users perceived themselves as addicted than met clinical addiction criteria.

S2: Increasing perceived addiction hurt perceived control over use and increased self-blame for overuse.

Thread below... 🧵
This plot shows the number of users in the Study 1 sample that self-described as 'addicted' to Instagram versus those who were 'at risk' of clinical addiction. The ratios for the addiction symptom scale are 9:371 and for the perceived addiction 69: 311, suggesting a much greater proportion of users self-perceive as addicted than are actually addicted to Instagram
November 29, 2025 at 2:33 AM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
candiceodgers.bsky.social
The brilliant @alice-gregory.bsky.social asks what smart phone bans mean for kids like hers who needs their phone to stay alive
November 25, 2025 at 8:42 PM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
taylorlorenz.bsky.social
Today’s “teenage mental health crisis” and social media panic are founded in nostalgic myths. Our best long-term surveys and statistics show Boomer and Xer teens were no happier or more “together” than teens are today
Today’s “teenage mental health crisis” and social media panic are founded in nostalgic myths
Our best long-term surveys and statistics show Boomer and Xer teens were no happier or more “together” than teens are today. Elders: cut out your boasting, and Gen Z: don't believe them!
mikemales.substack.com
November 25, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
cdt.org
“And while the U.S. Supreme Court okayed such age verification when it came to children accessing obscene material online, @kateruane.bsky.social with CDT said the high court appeared more skeptical on blanket social media bans like what VanValkenburg wants.”
Virginia sued over new social media age verification law
Barring judicial intervention, Virginia’s law is set to go into effect January 1st.
www.wvtf.org
November 25, 2025 at 7:13 PM
aanixel.bsky.social
Meta has exhibited a clear pattern of behavior in which it undermines and/or buries most negative research; it's tough to believe they'd put honest effort into any research that risks reputational damage...though that pattern itself should be more damaging than any one finding...
jbakcoleman.bsky.social Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 13d
It would, of course, be great if the underlying results were made public but it looks like meta in 2019 ran withdrawal experiments to examine polarization and well being ahead of forging collaborations with academics. Seems like more than enough to design bias the collaborations towards nulls 🧵
November 25, 2025 at 5:16 PM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
jbakcoleman.bsky.social
It would, of course, be great if the underlying results were made public but it looks like meta in 2019 ran withdrawal experiments to examine polarization and well being ahead of forging collaborations with academics. Seems like more than enough to design bias the collaborations towards nulls 🧵
November 24, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
hbcompass.bsky.social
I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.
November 23, 2025 at 7:13 PM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
prisonculture.bsky.social
I wonder if this will make people actually slow their roll in terms of taking information from people they do not know as sacrosanct. Probably not. The amount of lying and deception online is overwhelming.
bendobrown.bsky.social Benjamin Strick @bendobrown.bsky.social · 14d
X rolled out a new feature overnight showing where accounts are based. This network of “Trump-supporting independent women” that claimed to be “real Americans” are based in Thailand.

The photos were stolen from European models & posts pushed pro-Trump lines while targeting Islam and LGBTQ people.
November 23, 2025 at 2:31 PM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
bendobrown.bsky.social
X rolled out a new feature overnight showing where accounts are based. This network of “Trump-supporting independent women” that claimed to be “real Americans” are based in Thailand.

The photos were stolen from European models & posts pushed pro-Trump lines while targeting Islam and LGBTQ people.
November 23, 2025 at 12:55 PM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
jbakcoleman.bsky.social
“Are we the baddies?”
November 24, 2025 at 3:24 AM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
hypervisible.blacksky.app
“Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.”
Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege - The Economic Times
Meta reportedly halted internal research into the mental health impacts of Facebook and Instagram after finding causal evidence of harm. Internal documents revealed users reported lower depression and...
m.economictimes.com
November 23, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
junlper.beer
genuinely says so much about what twitter has become that the biggest rightwing grift accounts pushing US fascist narratives aren’t real people and not even close to the united states
November 24, 2025 at 7:13 AM
aanixel.bsky.social
❤️❤️❤️
meninblazers.bsky.social Men in Blazers Media Network @meninblazers.bsky.social · 14d
NORTH LONDON BELONGS TO EBERECHI EZE 👑
November 24, 2025 at 8:43 AM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
lorak.bsky.social
Meta halted internal research that purportedly showed (young) people who stopped using Facebook became less depressed and anxious, according to an unredacted legal filing released on Friday. www.cnbc.com/2025/11/23/m...
Meta halted internal research suggesting social media harm, court filing alleges
Meta is alleged to have halted internal research suggesting social media harm, according to court documents.
www.cnbc.com
November 24, 2025 at 12:31 AM
aanixel.bsky.social
Thanks to everyone who came out to the early session this morning!!! Had a great time presenting and answering your questions 🥳 #NCA2025
aanixel.bsky.social Ian Axel Anderson @aanixel.bsky.social · 18d
Excited to present some new research I’ve been working on at #NCA2025 tomorrow! We are in the early Comm and Social Cognition session starting at 8:15AM!
November 20, 2025 at 8:37 PM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
timnitgebru.bsky.social
Its near "super intelligence" "replacing professionals" in the PR rounds, then once everyone is convinced and uses them for legal and medical advice, following the deceptive marketing, they slip it in the terms of service that you shouldn't do that.

buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...
OpenAI Tries to Shift Responsibility to Users
OpenAI is trying to shift the blame for bad legal and medical advice from its chatbot away from the company and onto users. We agree that no chatbot should be used for medical or legal advice.
buttondown.com
November 20, 2025 at 5:30 PM
aanixel.bsky.social
Excited to present some new research I’ve been working on at #NCA2025 tomorrow! We are in the early Comm and Social Cognition session starting at 8:15AM!
November 19, 2025 at 6:56 PM
Reposted by Ian Axel Anderson
joshmccrain.bsky.social
new paper by Sean Westwood:

With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research
November 18, 2025 at 7:16 PM
aanixel.bsky.social
We're so back [to the undergrad participant pools?] -- though looks like this might have been from a press release about a paper that's not out yet, no one can find the link (not in the piece), so please share below if you have seen it...
November 18, 2025 at 6:21 AM