Ronald E. Robertson
LightNews LightNews
rer.bsky.social
Ronald E. Robertson
@rer.bsky.social
340 followers 270 following 6 posts
Research Scientist @ Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Studying online information seeking, influence, and ways to more accurately model how people interact with online systems.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
aurman21.bsky.social
Google AI overviews now reach over 2B users worldwide. But how reliable are they on high stakes topics - for instance, pregnancy and baby care?

We have a new paper - led by Desheng Hu, now accepted at @icwsm.bsky.social - exploring that and finding many issues

Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2511.12920
🧵👇
Auditing Google's AI Overviews and Featured Snippets: A Case Study on Baby Care and Pregnancy
Google Search increasingly surfaces AI-generated content through features like AI Overviews (AIO) and Featured Snippets (FS), which users frequently rely on despite having no control over their presen...
arxiv.org
November 19, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
brendannyhan.bsky.social
The underlying study: "Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning" academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

"participants reported developing shallower knowledge from LLM summaries even when the results were augmented by...web links" vs. search
November 21, 2025 at 1:31 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
to keep functioning, a society must discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

bsky.app/profile/anna...
annabower.bsky.social Anna Bower @annabower.bsky.social · 8d
This is nuts.

Yesterday in the Comey hearing, prosecutors *repeatedly* confirmed that the full grand jury never saw or voted on the two-count indictment.

Now they’re claiming the grand jury *did* vote on it.
The government respectfully submits this supplemental filing to correct the record regarding statements during the hearing held on November 19, 2025, before U.S. District Court Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff, suggesting an issue with the grand jury voting process on the indictment returned in Case No. 1:25-CR-272-MSN. The official transcript of the September 25, 2025, proceedings before Magistrate Judge Vaala conclusively refutes that claim and establishes that the grand jury voted on - and true-billed - the two-count indictment. I. The Court and the Foreperson Confirmed the Vote on the Two-Count Indictment The transcript contains the following direct exchange between the Court and the grand jury foreperson: THE COURT: Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. 10 So you voted on the one that has the two counts? 11 THE FOREPERSON: Yes. See Transcript, Dkt No, 10, attached as Exhibit "A" at 4. This sworn testimony alone establishes that the grand jury voted on the two-count
November 20, 2025 at 10:40 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
daphnek.bsky.social
Google has moved from moral cowardice (removing ICE tracking apps) to direct complicity in the violent, unconstitutional abuse of vulnerable people.

As a civil liberties lawyer who worked at Google for ten years, this one hits me in the gut.
Google Has Chosen a Side in Trump's Mass Deportation Effort
Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, while simultaneously removing apps that report the location of ICE officials because Google sees ICE as a vulnerable gr...
www.404media.co
November 14, 2025 at 3:28 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
tiziano.bsky.social
🚨 I'm recruiting PhD students in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University for Fall 2026. If you're interested in AI, HCI, and designing better online platforms and experiences, apply to work with me!
More info: piccardi.me
November 13, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
mantzarlis.com
NEW on @indicator.media: A first *full-scale* comparison of Grokipedia v Wikipedia.

Last week the awesome @harold.bsky.social rocked up to my desk bearing gifts.

Hal had collected almost all 900K Grokipedia entries and compared them to their Wikipedia equivalents for text and citation similarity.
Grokipedia cites a Nazi forum and fringe conspiracy websites
A site-wide comparison with Wikipedia sheds light on what Elon Musk is trying to do
indicator.media
November 13, 2025 at 1:12 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
noupside.bsky.social
New from me: “working the refs” has come for Wikipedia. The same type of attacks alleging anti-conservative bias that right wing politicians have make about social media are coming for the encyclopedia — because of its critical role in shaping AI answer engines.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...
The Right-Wing Attack on Wikipedia
The free internet encyclopedia is widely used to train AI. That’s why conservatives are trying to dethrone it.
www.theatlantic.com
November 12, 2025 at 9:41 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
brendannyhan.bsky.social
A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?
hansonmark.bsky.social Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · 18d
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 12, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
nicholasgrossman.bsky.social
Cornell agreed to pay $30m, hand over admissions data with demographic breakdowns, produce annual "campus climate" surveys to check on antisemitism and changes "since October of 2023," and—here's the dumbest part they agreed to—that the govt can open new investigations whenever it wants.

Appeasers.
November 7, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
karlbode.com
10% of Meta's 2024 ad revenue came from outright frauds and scams; the platform shows consumers 15 billion ads for fraud and scams every single day. This doesn't even include agitprop and AI slop.

the existential collapse of this monumental pile of shit company simply can't come quickly enough
Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show
Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, and it internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day, company documents show.
www.reuters.com
November 6, 2025 at 2:04 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
gligoric.bsky.social
I'm recruiting multiple PhD students for Fall 2026 in Computer Science at @hopkinsengineer.bsky.social 🍂

Apply to work on AI for social sciences/human behavior, social NLP, and LLMs for real-world applied domains you're passionate about!

Learn more at kristinagligoric.com & help spread the word!
November 5, 2025 at 2:56 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
lorenzspreen.bsky.social
How prevalent is misinformation really? Many detection methods rely on URL/Source-level, but they miss a big part of posts that don't include links.

In a new preprint from the group, led by @saminenno.bsky.social, we analyze 10x more posts from German politicians on four platforms.

thread below👇
November 3, 2025 at 5:06 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
carnage4life.bsky.social
arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.

This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month.

Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.
Attention Authors: Updated Practice for Review Articles and Position Papers in arXiv CS Category – arXiv blog
blog.arxiv.org
November 1, 2025 at 5:28 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
brendannyhan.bsky.social
Nothing to worry about, totally normal
yasharali.bsky.social Yashar Ali 🐘 @yasharali.bsky.social · 28d
“100% ANTI TRUMP, WHICH IS PROBABLY ILLEGAL.”
Donald J. Trump & + @realDonaldTrump Seth Meyers of NBC may be the least talented person to "perform" live in the history of television. In fact, he may be the WORST to perform, live or otherwise. I watched his show the other night for the first time in years. In it he talked endlessly about electric catapults on aircraft carriers which I complain about as not being as good as much less expensive steam catapults. On and on he went, a truly deranged lunatic. Why does NBC waste its time and money on a guy like this??? - NO TALENT, NO RATINGS, 100% ANTI TRUMP, WHICH IS PROBABLY ILLEGAL!!!
November 2, 2025 at 2:43 AM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
richardfletcher.bsky.social
A thread on how people's use of generative AI has changed in the last year - based on survey data from 6 countries (🇬🇧🇺🇸🇫🇷🇩🇰🇯🇵🇦🇷 ).

First, gen AI use has grown rapidly.

Most people have tried out gen AI at least once (61%), and 34% now use it on a weekly basis - roughly doubling from 18% a year ago.
October 8, 2025 at 7:23 AM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
nicolefoy.bsky.social
Hi, I'm the ProPublica reporter who's been tracking an unusual stat: U.S. citizens grabbed by immigration agents.

I did it because the government isn’t.

This is what I found.
White words on a black background read: 50+ Immigration agents have the authority to detain whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino. ~130 Agents also can arrest citizens who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused of assaulting or impeding officers. ~20 Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer.
October 18, 2025 at 2:11 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
carlquintanilla.bsky.social
POLITICO: “.. They referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies .. and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

@politico.com
www.politico.com/news/2025/10...
October 14, 2025 at 5:25 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
noupside.bsky.social
I'm sorry, is the Trump Administration talking to a tech platform?

Is it...requesting content moderation?
Today following outreach from @thejusticedept, Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to dox and target @ICEgov agents in Chicago. The wave of violence against ICE has been driven by online apps and social media campaigns designed to put ICE officers at risk just for doing their jobs. The Department of Justice will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement.
October 14, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
hakeemjefferson.bsky.social
Agree 100% @stanfordaaup.bsky.social!

“When it inevitably comes time for Stanford to choose, we must remember that we owe our loyalty not to any executive branch official but to our own foundational principles. We must be ready, when it’s our turn, to walk away.”

stanforddaily.com/2025/10/12/f...
From the Community | We must refuse the 'Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education'
Associate professor Greg Martin writes on behalf of the Stanford's AAUP chapter to condemn the White House's compact on higher education.
stanforddaily.com
October 13, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
joachimbaumann.bsky.social
🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**.

Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825
We present our new preprint titled "Large Language Model Hacking: Quantifying the Hidden Risks of Using LLMs for Text Annotation". We quantify LLM hacking risk through systematic replication of 37 diverse computational social science annotation tasks. For these tasks, we use a combined set of 2,361 realistic hypotheses that researchers might test using these annotations. Then, we collect 13 million LLM annotations across plausible LLM configurations. These annotations feed into 1.4 million regressions testing the hypotheses. For a hypothesis with no true effect (ground truth $p > 0.05$), different LLM configurations yield conflicting conclusions. Checkmarks indicate correct statistical conclusions matching ground truth; crosses indicate LLM hacking -- incorrect conclusions due to annotation errors. Across all experiments, LLM hacking occurs in 31-50\% of cases even with highly capable models. Since minor configuration changes can flip scientific conclusions, from correct to incorrect, LLM hacking can be exploited to present anything as statistically significant.
September 12, 2025 at 10:33 AM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
brendannyhan.bsky.social
New job ad: Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College apply.interfolio.com/172357

Please share with your networks. I am the search chair and happy to answer questions!
August 21, 2025 at 6:50 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
techimpactpolicy.bsky.social
The agenda for the Trust and Safety Research Conference is out now. Two days of lightning talks, presentations, networking and more, with @dwillner.bsky.social‬ as keynote. Join us!

For the full line-up and times, plus link to register, visit:

cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/content/trus...
August 20, 2025 at 6:46 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
kwcollins.bsky.social
If you work in message testing or persuasive communication, this may be the most importantly paper you will read this month, perhaps all year. From @carnes.bsky.social and Henderson in @bjpols.bsky.social

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
August 15, 2025 at 12:26 PM
Reposted by Ronald E. Robertson
gordpennycook.bsky.social
Interested in doing a postdoc with me & @dgrand.bsky.social? Consider applying to Cornell's Klarman Fellowship: as.cornell.edu/research/kla...

It involves a competitive internal application process, but it's 3 years of funding @$80k/year

Please email me/Dave if you're interested! Oct 15th deadline
Klarman Fellowships
The Klarman Fellowships in the College of Arts & Sciences provide postdoctoral opportunities to early-career scholars of outstanding talent, initiative and promise. Among the most selective of its kin...
as.cornell.edu
August 15, 2025 at 1:11 PM