Fake it til you make it. Journalist, Comm PhD at @stanford. Formerly @stanfordhai @latimes @PKU1898 @AmherstCollege
Joined July 2010
- Tweets 3,438
- Following 572
- Followers 890
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307 Photos and videos
Matt DeButts retweeted
May 19
Absolutely not surprising but a limited leak of a Chinese local surveillance platform drawing off an apparently large national one has a special drop down for tracking for tracking foreign journalists in China… including me. @NetAskari found the data open.substack.com/pub/netask…
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Matt DeButts retweeted
Apr 22
If you are interested in academic research on this very subject, check out @ucdpolitics PhD candidate @LinetteMLim
here:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/ful…
and here:
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…
Apr 20
You may not like to hear this, but there is a correlation between improving views of China globally and Beijing’s expulsion and harassment of foreign journalists. The Chinese Communist Party has successfully shaped the portrayal of China globally, by severely restricting journalists ability to analyze and report on the country.
The result? Higher favoribility ratings of Xi Jinping and China than Trump and the United States, and growing favoribility rates of China in the United States.
This is not to downplay the clear, Trumpian reasons the U.S. has lost global luster — rather, it’s to express consternation and concern of entities around the world for believing China to be a responsible global actor.
fccchina.org/2026/04/20/fccc…
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Matt DeButts retweeted
Apr 20
Striking statement from China’s foreign press club, explicitly making clear its critique of China revoking visas, China detaining journos over coverage, not associated w/any media outlet. Media orgs - powerful ones - are not speaking up, and they should. fccchina.org/2026/04/20/fccc…
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Matt DeButts retweeted
Mar 30
Excited to share that the Mandarin-language version of my book is being published April 1 in Taiwan !
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I’m hiring a predoc starting this summer. The focus is building AI workflows to improve research efficiency.
More importantly, I value independent thinking and ambition. You do not need to fit into a narrow topic.
If you’re interested in applied statistics, causal inference, or Chinese politics, broadly defined, plz apply. You can propose your own project --- I will support it.
iriss.stanford.edu/predoc/20…
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The quirky Ma Qianzu explains why the Chinese internet is so frustrating to read: there’s little actual analysis, only a straightjacketed state media and a proliferation of dramatic narratives
And a metaphor from a great interview by @afrazhaowang
afraw.substack.com/p/first-d…
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Matt DeButts retweeted
Mar 11
New paper with @xuxupolitics in @PNASNexus: China origin LLMs refuse political questions at dramatically higher rates than US models — BaiChuan refused 60% of prompts, DeepSeek 36%. This holds in Chinese and English, ow.ly/vmfp50Yl8KC
Feb 24
Chinese chatbots are likely censored by the Chinese government, and will often refuse to answer or provide inaccurate answers to politically charged questions, regardless of whether they are posed in English or Chinese. In PNAS Nexus: ow.ly/vmfp50Yl8KC
ALT Refusal to respond with mean and 95% confidence intervals.
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Matt DeButts retweeted
Feb 28
Thanks to UW IT for inviting me to present my Polymarket data collection pipeline at Google Cloud Platform Research Day. Pipeline enabled by cloud computing: $40B in volume, 500M trades, and 1.25M comments with continuous collection. Preprints and public datasets coming soon!
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Matt DeButts retweeted
Join us on February 13 (Friday) at 1pm EST for a presentation on “Media Patronage: How Authoritarian Regimes Exploit Media Competition to Shape Global Information“ by @debutts and @jenjpan. Discussants: @MariaRepnikova and @dstreisman. Zoom link: chinesepoliticsresearchinpro…
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Matt DeButts retweeted
Jan 22
for the latest @WIRED issue, I wrote about China’s Industrial Party movement and its signature intellectual product, Morning Star of Lingao, a sprawling, effectively never-ending sci-fi project created collaboratively on the Chinese internet. The premise is wild: 500 people time-travel back to the Ming dynasty to industrialize China.
in the piece, I mentioned that there was no English translation to be found. Well, it turns out that wasn’t entirely true.
someone took it on as a passion project, translated the canonical chapters (with Gemini 2.5 Pro), built a GitHub repo covering all 2,876 chapters, and even created a dedicated website for the translated version.
links in reply.
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Matt DeButts retweeted
1 Dec 2025
Postdoc Opportunity at @NorthwesternU @NU_SoC @BuffettInst! Our Global LLM Values Benchmarking Working Group is seeking a postdoc starting Summer 2026. If you are working on LLMs and computational social science, this may be for you. Apply by Jan 16, 2026👉comap@northwestern.edu
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11 Nov 2025
UM is lucky to have him!!!
11 Nov 2025
✨ Very overdue update:
I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in CS at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Fall 2026. I will be recruiting PhD students!!
Please help me spread the word! [Thread] 1/n
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Matt DeButts retweeted
8 Oct 2025
Big thanks to @perryworldhouse and @ForeignAffairs for this honor! I'm excited to share my research on how China is (and isn't!) using aid for influence in international organizations with a broader audience.
8 Oct 2025
Congratulations to @AliciaRrChen for being named the winner of the 2025 PWH-@ForeignAffairs Emerging Scholars Policy Prize! Chen's article "How China Uses Aid to Shape the Global Order" will be published in Foreign Affairs in the coming months. Read more: perryworldhouse.upenn.edu/ne…
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It’s been a while since I last reported in Chinese! And if you haven’t heard: foreign labor in the U.S. now comes with a $100,000 price tag. Here’s the story behind it: theinitium.com/article/20251…
#h1b
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17 Sep 2025
So excited to be joining @StanfordData! My ~data science~ journey continues (but still a journalist at heart! "别忘初心" as they say) datascience.stanford.edu/new…
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Matt DeButts retweeted
2 Jul 2025
my novel is out today. here I am, holding the last draft and the first draft, 10 years apart. thank you, thank you all for reading 🏡🩷
1 Jul 2025
Happy Pub Day! 🏊♀️💜
Wanting by @clairejiacriesis out today!
Oprah Daily Most Anticipated Book of 2025!
“Dives deep into the layers of envy, regret & longing that pierce through even the strongest friendships.”
—⭐Harper’s Bazaar, A Best Book of Summer
tinhouse.com/book/wanting
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Matt DeButts retweeted
27 May 2025
Excited to share our new @AJPS_Editor paper! We analyze 5M Douyin videos from 18K regime-affiliated accounts and show how propaganda is now produced and spread through a decentralized model on social media. Four years of work with an incredible team: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…
27 May 2025
How has digital media transformed authoritarian propaganda? In our new @AJPS_Editor paper with @YingdanL_kk, @jenjpan & @xuyiqing, we proposed a *decentralized propaganda* model and empirically demonstrate its existence on Douyin: doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12990 🧵
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