Cognitive anthropology / cultural evolution / digital media / cultural analytics. Associate professor sociology @UniTrento - more info in the pinned tweet.
Trento, Italy
Joined October 2012
- Tweets9.3K
- Following1.8K
- Followers5.9K
- Likes9.8K
Pinned Tweet
Website: acerbialberto.com
"Cultural evolution in the digital age" (OUP): bit.ly/2McstmR
"Individual-based models of cultural evolution. A step-by-step guide using R" (Routledge): bit.ly/3MQBjT4
Substack (free - in italiano): bit.ly/3lDERMq
Una relazione positiva (!) tra social media e benessere; L'effetto (minuscolo) di non avere smartphone in classe; Yandex e i bot russi: troppo bello per essere vero; Un data center in miniera, con mele e Trentodoc; Distruggete siti web.
albertoacerbi.substack.com/p…
Interesting paper, claims that reduction of variation in LLMs (aka mode collapse) is mostly due to human biases - annotators preferring familiar answers - and it can be reduced using a specific prompting strategy.
simonucl.notion.site/verbali…
Posts on Ukrainian drones/Russian bots activity:
"it is not true, but it could be true, and if it was, I would be very right."
Very nice the authors of the Science paper on social/individual learning in orangutans took the time to write a detailed response to my short thread!
We actually used the daily number of peering events to assess overall propensities to engage in social learning. We also identified socially intiated learning by analysing how long exploration remains elevated after peering. Here is a detailed response:
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
Intelligenza (artificiale) collettiva; i giovani stanno meglio?; i 20 post più visti su Facebook fanno lo 0,03% delle visualizzazioni; l'IA dimostra teoremi; Netflix semplifica le serie?
albertoacerbi.substack.com/p…
Ignoring AI in research workflow is not an option. This looks like an interesting experiment. journalqd.org/special-workfl…
I asked ChatGPT to plot a comparison...
The 20 most-viewed Facebook posts (in US) represent only the 0.03 % of all content views (in US). I say "only" because usually the popularity of "cultural things" (think books, movies, songs, etc.)....
transparency.meta.com/report…
The 20 most-viewed Facebook posts (in US) represent only the 0.03 % of all content views (in US). I say "only" because usually the popularity of "cultural things" (think books, movies, songs, etc.)....
transparency.meta.com/report…
...follows a power-law, where hits get the big share of the market and everything else crumbles.
Feed algorithms are thought to reinforce this tendency, so that it is commonly thought that "richer get (even more) richer" in social media. But maybe is not the case?
New preprint - "Associations between content and engagement vary across social media communities"
Research on social media often seeks content features linked in general to engagement, e.g. negativity, moralisation, etc. But social media is not an uniform environment.
This may explain some contrasting findings in the literature. Different studies may find different associations. "Universal" effects may be masked by sampling heterogeneous niches.
Preprint here:
osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xw…
Alberto Acerbi retweeted
🔪"Spending time using popular social media platforms is not directly related to Americans’ ability to discriminate between truths and falsehoods, even among those who characterize a platform as their most important source of news."
journals.plos.org/plosone/ar…
ArXiv submissions through time. From blog.arxiv.org/2026/10/01/up…
