Alberto Acerbi

@albertoacerbi.bsky.social

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I am an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento (Italy): cognitive anthropology / cultural evolution / digital media / cultural analytics
Website: https://acerbialberto.com

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The present study investigates the evolution of a more abstract dimension of popular music, specifically melody, using a new dataset of popular melodies spanning from 1950 to 2023 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on U.S. charts from 1950 to 2023 - Scientific Reportswww.nature.com Scientific Reports - Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on U.S. charts from 1950 to 2023

Do you remember the story of Orson Wells radio airing of War of the Worlds and the panic it spawned? Well, apparently it is a myth, generated by another, more real, panic, the one about the power of the radio, the then new mass media. us.macmillan.com/books/978080...

Broadcast Hysteriaus.macmillan.com On the evening of October 30, 1938, radio listeners across the United States heard a startling report of a meteor strike in the New Jersey countryside. With ...

An image that summarise the message from various recent researches. TV consumption is declining, while online news consumption has not significantly increased to fill the gap (note: the y-axes have different scales). newsconsumption.seas.upenn.edu/overall-news...

What is the current status of claims about predicting personality traits from social media activity e.g. Facebook "likes" as in this (more than 10 years old!) paper? Any recent take/review? Thank you! www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior | PNASwww.pnas.org We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly s...

We rightly complained about Trump casting doubt about the electoral results, but scares about deepfakes, Cambridge analytica, Russian bots interferences, etc do exactly the same. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Deepfakes are here and can be dangerous, but ignore the alarmists – they won’t harm our elections | Ciaran Martinwww.theguardian.com Although we can’t be complacent about digital interference in our democracy, this new wave of hysteria is not the answer, says Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of the National Cyber Security ...

"because most people are much more likely to encounter reliable news than misinformation, any increase in general scepticism may have a much stronger negative effect than the positive effect of reducing misperception" rdcu.be/dKmXg

Prominent misinformation interventions reduce misperceptions but increase scepticismrdcu.be Nature Human Behaviour - This study reveals that current interventions against misinformation erode belief in accurate information. The authors argue that future strategies should shift their focus...

"Comparing the same movie across different markets, we establish that films that resonate more with local folklore systematically accrue higher revenue and are more likely to be screened" www.nber.org/papers/w32220

Movieswww.nber.org Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

5-veloci-5 link a settimana albertoacerbi.substack.com/p/i-link-del...

I link della settimana (#58)albertoacerbi.substack.com (i) E se avere accesso a internet facesse bene? Pensate che idea strana. (ii) I critici degli studi sulla disinformazione online (come il sottoscritto) sono accusati di fare “affermazioni ridicole”. N...

"Combating contamination and contagion: Embodied and environmental metaphors of misinformation" journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Tim Lewens "Cultural selection" - free to downloads for two weeks. www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Cultural Selectionwww.cambridge.org Cambridge Core - Philosophy: General Interest - Cultural Selection

"We find that a ten percent increase in the proportion of county residents with access to broadband internet leads to a 1.01 percent reduction in the number of suicides in a county, as well as improvements in self-reported mental and physical health." www.nber.org/papers/w32517

Broadband Internet Access, Economic Growth, and Wellbeingwww.nber.org Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

So the Guardian now says that "Cambridge Analytica-style microtargeted political adverts [...] is now considered by many to be an ineffective “red herring”" www.theguardian.com/politics/art...

‘Show this to everyone’: UK political ads move away from microtargetingwww.theguardian.com Old approach of seeking ultra-niche audiences has fallen out of favour as main parties spend tens of millions online

albertoacerbi.substack.com/p/i-link-del...

I link della settimana (#57)albertoacerbi.substack.com (i) Due nuovi paper usciti su Science, il primo mostra ancora una volta che è una minuscola minoranza di utenti che condivide la stragrande maggioranza della disinformazione e che, anche prima delle e...

New confirmation that few users are responsible for most of misinfo (defined at domain-level) sharing. Also usual proportion of misinfo within all political news sharing (~5/10 %). www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Supersharers of fake news on Twitterwww.science.org Governments may have the capacity to flood social media with fake news, but little is known about the use of flooding by ordinary voters. In this work, we identify 2107 registered US voters who accoun...

Excellent point. Vaccine-related flagged misinformation was 0.3% on Facebook (usual) BUT non-flagged vaccine-skeptical content was much more diffused and had a 46X estimated effect. Study news not fake news! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebookwww.science.org Low uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine in the US has been widely attributed to social media misinformation. To evaluate this claim, we introduce a framework combining lab experiments (total N = 18,725), c...

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Alberto Acerbi

In a detailed review and reflection, Simon Reader and I discuss and explore the definitions, approaches, controversies, and key questions in human and nonhuman innovation, under the lens of cultural evolution: academic.oup.com/edited-volum...

academic.oup.com

What are the best meta analysis of longitudinal studies in social media and mental health?

Thanks to @orbenamy.bsky.social and @shuhbillskee.bsky.social I can have this subsection title in the book I am drafting :) Ps: I am writing a pop(-ish) book in Italian on digital techno-panics, hopefully more in the next months!

Ci riproviamo visto che è finito il semestre... albertoacerbi.substack.com/p/i-link-del...

I link della settimana (#56)albertoacerbi.substack.com Continua il mio struggle con “Cinque link a settimana”. Ci provo per l’ultima (?) volta, con due decisioni: (i) post con uscite regolari il sabato mattina e (ii) testo più scarno - insomma io procuro ...

""stakeholders should focus their interventions on cultivating more accurate and optimistic perceptions about news and news production to re-establish trust in the news media, rather than constantly warning audiences of the potential for deception." misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/misi...

Misinformation perceived as a bigger informational threat than negativity: A cross-country survey on challenges of the news environment | HKS Misinformation Reviewmisinforeview.hks.harvard.edu This study integrates research on negativity bias and misinformation, as a comparison of how systematic (negativity) and incidental (misinformation) challenges to the news are perceived differently by...

Just out! Join us for The first Italian Conference on Computational Social Science the 15-18 January 2025 in Trento, including the establishment of the Italian Society of Computational Social Sciences. Submission is open until September 15. cs2italy.org

So it is not only neuroscience papers... 🤔

I find it interesting that we are worried at the same time that there is too much information online and that some of it disappears. Cultural selection acting?

New report from Pew finds 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later. This research underscores how critical web archiving efforts are. www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...

When Online Content Disappearswww.pewresearch.org A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible.

Starting today the last week of my cultural analytics course. Shout-out to the guests @fpianz.bsky.social @sobchuk.bsky.social @edgardubourg.bsky.social and @chiarabonacchi.bsky.social - surely students have had food for thought!

"An interesting aspect of the Billboard Hot 100 historical data is the absence of accelerated public attention [...] hits dominating the chart for much longer periods than used to be the case" arxiv.org/abs/2405.075...

Is it getting harder to make a hit? Evidence from 65 years of US...arxiv.org Since the creation of the Billboard Hot 100 music chart in 1958, the chart has been a window into the music consumption of Americans. Which songs succeed on the chart is decided by consumption...

"In the context of COVID-19, prestige was not a determining factor in the amount of information remembered by people" - preregistered study journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

How does prestige bias affect information recall during a pandemic?journals.plos.org The prestige theory of evolution states that our memory has an intrinsic bias to memorize information from someone of prestige. However, the evidence for information recall is mainly focused on conten...

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Alberto Acerbi

"If we’re going to make the online world safe for young people, we can’t just go in guns blazing with strong beliefs and a one size fits all solution - we really need to make sure that we’re sensitive to having our minds changed by data" #digitalwellbeing www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Internet use linked to higher wellbeing, global study suggestswww.bbc.co.uk The Oxford study comes as concern about the impact of internet use prompts laws in many countries.

Treating cultural analytics students with a guest lecture from @sobchuk.bsky.social

"a long-term literacy course increased students’ ability to accurately assess the reliability of mainstream, but not untrustworthy news. Since the prevalence of the latter is much lower than that of the former, I argue this to be a welcome finding" www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...

www.google.com

Vaccination hesitancy shapes increased conspiracy beliefs more than viceversa journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Do Conspiracy Theories Shape or Rationalize Vaccination Hesitancy Over Time? - Jan-Willem van Prooijen, Nienke Böhm, 2024journals.sagepub.com Conspiracy beliefs are associated with vaccination hesitancy, which is commonly interpreted as evidence that conspiracy theories contribute to a worldview that ...