Sacha Altay
@Sacha_Altay
Postdoc @IPZ_ch🇨🇭| @Cognition_ENS PhD 🇫🇷 | 🔎 Misinformation, misperceptions, social media & (dis)trust 🦹♂️
Reminder to join us on the other place🦋 I use it more often that X nowadays and the signal to noise ratio is amazing compared to here...
Finally got round to reading this paper in detail. It’s a tour de force. If you’re interested in the potential impact of AI on election outcomes you should put it by your bedside. Key takeaway: let’s remain alive to, but healthily skeptical of, the possibility of large impacts.
How harmful is GenAI around elections? Will it trigger a misinformation apocalypse and upend elections? I am happy to finally be able to share @Sacha_Altay’s & my answers to these and other questions on which we have been working for a year and which is out via @knightcolumbia.
How effective are user corrections on social media, and does adding a link to a fact check improve effectiveness? In piece led by @Sacha_Altay , we find corrections have small effects, adding a fact-check is unlikely to make corrections more effective misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/the-sm… 1/6
New blog! ‘Consequences of a skewed discourse around generative AI and elections’. Read why @_FelixSimon_ @oiioxford and @Sacha_Altay @IPZ_ch believe claims about the impact of generative AI on elections have been overblown: bit.ly/46YTZg7 1/2
In addition to the original UK results, we have now 👏replicated👏 this (TWICE) in the US. The main findings hold strong: information diets are a lot more diverse in attention than in engagement.
📄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
“The appeal of the “wrecking ball” narrative lies partly in its promise of a simple fix to complex problems.” Excellent summary, as usual, from @danwilliamsphil asteriskmag.com/issues/11/scap…
Today (w/ @UniofOxford @Stanford @MIT @LSEnews) 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 🧵
🚨Publication alert!! Our WhatsApp multimedia deactivation paper is now "just accepted" at @The_JOP. @CSMaP_NYU has published a full thread summarizing the paper! Check it out below 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽
In the Global South, WhatsApp is more popular than X or Facebook. New in @The_JOP, we ran a WhatsApp deactivation experiment during Brazil’s 2022 election to explore how the app facilitates the spread of misinformation and affects voters’ attitudes. journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…
NEW on our website @_FelixSimon_ and @Sacha_Altay on why should be worry more about humans than AI systems when it comes to elections in the age of generative AI Click to read reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/generativ…
Excellent corrective account by @_FelixSimon_ and @Sacha_Altay to the alarmist narratives on AI's prospective impact on elections propagated by AI-panic merchants.
How harmful is GenAI around elections? Will it trigger a misinformation apocalypse and upend elections? I am happy to finally be able to share @Sacha_Altay’s & my answers to these and other questions on which we have been working for a year and which is out via @knightcolumbia.
And read all the other, super intelligent pieces in the Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms series, including @random_walker & @sayashk's “AI as a normal technology” knightcolumbia.org/research/artif…
How harmful is GenAI around elections? Will it trigger a misinformation apocalypse and upend elections? I am happy to finally be able to share @Sacha_Altay’s & my answers to these and other questions on which we have been working for a year and which is out via @knightcolumbia.
New post in which I reflect on media trends: – Legacy media is in rapid decline – The media environment of 2025 is very different from ten years ago – In some ways, the US media landscape now resembles Brazil more than the UK – X remains highly influential (1/2)
🚨New preprint with @Arkyfish What drives engagement with *reliable* news on social media?
Very happy to share the preprint of the study @acerbialberto and I have been working on, showing that, like fake news, factual news uses negative and divisive (including group-binding, anti-outgroup, and dominance-oriented) content to get attention. doi.org/10.31234/osf.i…
In this article, @Sacha_Altay @EmmaHoes93 and @mwojcieszak show that following the news on social media increases current affairs knowledge, the ability to discern true from false news, and trust in the news. nature.com/articles/s4156…