These publications explore digital politics, platform governance, misinformation, polarization, urban change, and computational social science methods. Across these themes, I am interested in the relationship between technological systems and collective life: how platforms shape what becomes visible, sayable, and politically possible.
The page offers a selection of books and papers, followed by a broader bibliography. For a more current list of recent work, please see my Google Scholar profile.
Featured Books
Intimate Communities of Hate (Routledge, 2024)
A book-length account of how social media affordances and online group dynamics fuel far-right extremism.
The recent work extends the research program into the dynamics of conflict, the politics of urban scarcity, multimodal misinformation, and the social consequences of generative AI.
Echo chambers are defined by conflict, not isolation (Sociological Science, 2026)
This paper argues that conflict, rather than isolation alone, is central to the formation of online echo chambers. It introduces a signed-network approach that brings negative interactions into the study of polarization.
The aesthetics of climate misinformation (Environmental Politics, 2026)
Argues that financialized urban economies can make restricting development a way to protect asset values, producing an anti-growth machine with consequences for affordability and exclusion.
Political bias audits of LLMs capture sycophancy to the inferred auditor (arXiv, 2026)
Shows how standard political-bias audits can partly measure how language models accommodate the identity and expectations of the person they infer is asking the questions.
Selected Publications: Questions and Contributions
1) How digital media drive affective polarization through partisan sorting (PNAS, 2022)
This paper argues that social media intensify polarization less through persuasion and more through partisan sorting and identity reinforcement.
The paper’s contribution is a clearer account of polarization dynamics, showing how changes in social connection can matter as much as changes in political opinion.
2) When do parties lie? Misinformation and radical-right populism across 26 countries (The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2026)
A large cross-national analysis linking party families to misinformation behavior.
It offers comparative evidence about how different political actors use misinformation, and raises questions about the relationship between political strategy and public trust.
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.
The paper develops a way of understanding misinformation as a networked contagion process, rather than only as 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.
The paper connects 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.
It develops an 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.
The paper offers a practical benchmark for using language models in computational social science, while also making the case for careful validation.
7) Validation is the Central Challenge for Generative Social Simulation (Artificial Intelligence Review, 2025)
A critical review of LLM-driven agent-based simulation.
The review asks what it would take to validate generative social simulations before relying on them in research or policy.
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.
The paper brings social theory into conversation with debates about AI governance and the changing ways states see and act on society.
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.
The paper clarifies how digital platforms regulate behavior at scale, including through ordinary design choices and social expectations.
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.
The paper connects platform behavior and polarization dynamics to deeper structural and cultural conditions.
Papers
Below is a broader list of journal articles, preprints, and conference papers.
Journal Articles
2026
SocSci
Echo chambers are defined by conflict, not isolation
Anna
Keuchenius, Petter
Törnberg, and Justus
Uitermark
Sociological Science. Contribution: a signed-network approach that brings negative interactions into the study of polarization.
, 2026
How digital media drive affective polarization through partisan sorting
Petter
Törnberg
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Contribution: a mechanistic account of how platform-mediated sorting can intensify polarization.
, 2022
Finds that AI-generated summaries can improve the quality of social-media discussion while reducing engagement and shaping how users articulate arguments.
arXiv
Polarization by default: Auditing recommendation bias in LLM-based content curation
Nicolò
Pagan, Christopher
Barrie, Chris Andrew
Bail, and
1 more author
