We are super happy to announce that the project on Political Expression of Academics on Social Media has been accepted for publication at Nature Human Behavior — you can read a bit about the project on academicexpression.online. As part of this publication process we were asked to write a bit about the background of this paper. So here it goes an extended verison.
I learned to code as a young kid when the internet was still a creative playground and genuinely novel. This was well before it calcified into the walled gardens of limited interoperability that aim to separate the user from the data we now inhabit. What was once an open, experimental space for knowledge creation has transformed into a marketplace weaponized for attention and division.
Because of this early experience, I noticed the growing proliferation of social media and equally recognized the impact that the internet had on traditional media, with news outlets increasingly leaning toward opinion pieces rather than genuine content production. Social media, in particular—the technology that promised global connection and decentralization —has instead become an arena of performative content production, where advertising metrics and engagement algorithms reward outrage over attempts to foster understanding. Many of the same marketing tools are now also being employed by academics, which may erode the quality of the scientific process.
To me, this challenges the fundamental notion of what we as academics do and may fundamentally skew the incentives in perverse ways. Surely, it should not be about “selling” research, but good research will find its audience—not the other way around.
Crucially, I also noticed that some challenges arise because a whole generation did not get a form of digital literacy training, leaving people vulnerable to manipulation and less able to critically navigate these information ecosystems. Academics, who should be role models of critical thinking, may not be immune to the same platforms and algorithms. Social media may offer instantaneous rewards—engagement, likes, or clicks—whereas traditional research processes are incredibly slow. This can encourage academics to shift their attention from knowledge production toward producing content that “works,” aimed at a broader audience that is difficult to reach via the painfully slow traditional channels.
But with all this critique, it is also important to acknowledge that, when used responsibly, social media can be incredibly useful. In fact, I got to know Prashant through social media. Having been a bit of an odd one in the economics profession due to my academic socialisation across computer science, maths and economics, it was so refreshing to finally be able to connect with early stage academics that share the passion and where this passion is substantiated with similar technical skills and journey. This has led to an incredibly rewarding journey of fruitful academic collaboration with LLMs now enabling a lot of research that previously was difficult to do, essentially working ourselves down a long list of research ideas that have been left out due to lack of computational and other resources.
Now, there is also a further motivation for me to weigh in on the paper. Part of studying academics on social media is also motivated by my own personal experience. I had the (ill) fortune of having produced a fair bit of research that received considerable attention, though I’d like to think that the social influence of my work was mainly carried through the arts and the wider traditional media engagement it attracted, rather than through social media itself. But it may have served as a catalyst. So in some ways, my work “benefited” from the social media sphere. This experience provided me with a unique perspective on the challenge of transmitting knowledge from research into wider society, the responsibility that arises from this and gave me some perspective of some of the fundamental challenges with how academics engage with the public through that medium.
Fundamentally, I feel that this shift has significant implications for the scientific process, skewing effort away from what is invisible (such as anonymous refereeing) toward what is visible and immediately rewarding. Further, this selective representation creates profound epistemological challenges. When academics engage on platforms designed to maximize emotional reactivity, they risk generating biased perceptions of reality. The selection mechanisms now resemble political landscapes—benefiting those with narcissistic traits who excel at personal branding over substantive contribution.
By documenting systematic variations in how academics communicate on politically salient topics, we can illuminate how digital architectures fundamentally reshape knowledge transmission. The goal is to understand how our most sophisticated knowledge producers are being subtly reconfigured by platforms that prioritize spectacle over substance.
Ultimately, it matters how academics engage with social media because this technological shift distorts knowledge production and perception. Even though social media can serve as a powerful tool for collaboration and outreach, it can also undermine the traditional rigor of academic research by rewarding immediacy over reflection. By highlighting these tensions and studying them systematically, we can begin to address the fundamental challenges in how academics transmit knowledge to wider society—ensuring that substance, rather than spectacle, remains our guiding principle.
We have globally some of the most exciting work that is ongoing in this sphere presently in the pipeline.