My research focuses on digital politics, platform governance, misinformation, polarization, and computational social science methods.
The publication record includes more than 70 papers/publications and over 4,000 citations (Google Scholar).
This paper argues that social media intensify polarization less through persuasion and more through partisan sorting and identity reinforcement.
Its impact is a clearer causal account of polarization dynamics that is now central in debates on platform design and democratic risk.
2) When do parties lie? Misinformation and radical-right populism across 26 countries (The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2025)
A large cross-national analysis linking party families to misinformation behavior.
Its impact is comparative evidence showing systematic differences across political actors, widely discussed in public debate and international media coverage.
3) Echo chambers and viral misinformation: Modeling fake news as complex contagion (PLoS ONE, 2018)
An early computational model showing how misinformation can spread rapidly through clustered online networks.
Its impact is methodological and conceptual: it helped frame misinformation as a networked contagion process rather than only an individual-level belief problem.
4) Inside a White Power echo chamber (New Media & Society, 2022)
A close analysis of fringe online ecosystems and their role in radicalization.
Its impact is to connect platform architecture, emotional dynamics, and extremist mobilization in one empirical framework.
5) White supremacists anonymous (Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2025)
Examines how digital communication infrastructures emotionally energize far-right movements.
Its impact is a stronger account of how emotional amplification works in radical-right networked spaces.
6) Large language models outperform expert coders and supervised classifiers at annotating political social media messages (Social Science Computer Review, 2024)
Tests LLM-based annotation against human experts and traditional classifiers.
Its impact is practical: it provides a benchmark and workflow shift for computational social science methods.
7) Validation is the Central Challenge for Generative Social Simulation (Artificial Intelligence Review, 2025)
A critical review of LLM-driven agent-based simulation.
Its impact is to set a rigorous validation agenda for generative simulation research before policy deployment.
8) Artificial intelligence and the state: Seeing like an artificial neural network (Big Data & Society, 2025)
Develops a theory of how AI infrastructures mediate state vision and governance.
Its impact is to bridge social theory and AI governance in a way useful for both social scientists and policy researchers.
9) How platforms govern: Social regulation in digital capitalism (Big Data & Society, 2023)
Develops a social-theoretical framework for platform governance beyond simple market or infrastructure metaphors.
Its impact is to clarify how digital platforms regulate behavior at scale.
10) Tweeting ourselves to death: The cultural logic of digital capitalism (Media, Culture & Society, 2022)
Analyzes social media dynamics as part of broader political-economic transformations in digital capitalism.
Its impact is to connect platform behavior and polarization dynamics to deeper structural and cultural conditions.
Papers
Below is a broader list of journal articles, preprints, and conference papers.
How digital media drive affective polarization through partisan sorting
Petter
Törnberg
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Impact: central reference in current debates on platform-driven polarization and democratic resilience.
, 2022
