Sol Messing
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Blog

Projects and notes on data visualization, elections, social media, AI, and statistics.

Interactive Web Replication & Update of State Media Influence on LLMs

Increasing research accessibility/reach with udpated models and analyses, text interactives and new analyses.

May 24, 2026

An Early Election 2024 Forecast

Estimating State-Level Swing with Shrinkage Beat the Polls in 2020. Here’s the Forecast for Election 2024.

Jan 11, 2024

Disaggregating ‘Ideological Segregation’

Domain-level analysis in a new Science paper greatly overstates the influence of algorithmic feed ranking on segregation, aka the ‘Filter Bubble’

Aug 2, 2023

On BlueSky

BlueSky is a half-decentralized social network designed to replace Twitter. Will it keep its luster as it scales up?

Apr 3, 2023

What can we learn from ‘The Algorithm,’ Twitter’s partial open-sourcing of it’s feed-ranking recommendation system?

Last Friday (2023-03-31) Twitter released what it calls “the algorithm,” which appears to be a highly redacted, incomplete part of code that governs the “for you” home…
Apr 3, 2023

Past vote data outperformed the polls. How did it go so wrong?

It’s too early to say for sure, here are the questions to ask

Nov 8, 2020

Trump’s chances are better than they look

Don’t get too comfortable

Jun 20, 2020

Facebook Condor URLs Data Release

Largest ever social science data set, released under differential privacy

May 18, 2020

Projecting Confidence

How the Probabilistic Horse Race Demobilizes the Public

May 18, 2020

Impression of Influence

A book on how Members of Congress use Credit Claiming

May 17, 2020

Why Election Forecasting Matters

A Response to FiveThirtyEight

Apr 26, 2020

Know your data - Pricing diamonds using scatterplots and predictive models

Second post in my data visualization series on scatterplots and regression analysis

Feb 2, 2020

How to break regression

Regression models are a cornerstone of modern social science. They’re at the heart of efforts to estimate causal relationships between variables in a multivariate…
Jun 13, 2018

Replication of ‘Bias in the Flesh’

Replication of Study 2 in “Bias in the Flesh: Skin Complexion and Stereotype Consistency in Political Campaigns”

Oct 16, 2017

Ideologically diverse news, an agenda for future research

Earlier this month, we published an early access version of our paper in ScienceExpress (Bakshy et al. 2015), “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on…
Apr 24, 2015

When to Use Stacked Barcharts?

Yesterday a few of us on Facebook’s Data Science Team released a blogpost showing how candidates are campaigning on Facebook in the 2014 U.S. midterm elections. It was picked…
Oct 11, 2014

Insight From Cleveland And Tufte On Plotting Numeric Data By Groups

After my post on making dotplots with concise code using plyr and ggplot, I got an email from my dad who practices immigration law and runs a website with a variety of…
Mar 4, 2012

Working with Bipartite/Affiliation Network Data in R

Data can often be usefully conceptualized in terms affiliations between people (or other key data entities). It might be useful analyze common group membership, common…
Mar 4, 2012
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