Christopher Barrie

Assistant Professor of Sociology, New York University

Core Faculty, Center for Social Media, AI, and Politics

About

I am a computational sociologist at New York University. My substantive work is on protest, conflict, communication, and political attitudes.

Methodologically, I work on natural language processing, large language models, and repurposing digital trace data for social science research.

Portrait of Christopher Barrie

Published in American Journal of Sociology · PNAS · Nature Human Behaviour · Political Analysis · British Journal of Political Science · Perspectives on Politics · Sociological Science

Publications

2026

A reporting checklist for large language models in behavioural science

Stefan Feuerriegel, Christopher Barrie, M. J. Crockett, and 55 others

Nature Human Behaviour

PDF
2026

AI-generated language remains systematically distinguishable from human communication

Nicolò Pagan, Petter Törnberg, Christopher A. Bail, and Christopher Barrie

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

PDF Replication
2026

Beyond “Emergencies?” Reporting on Humanitarian Issues Around the World

Kate Wright, Dani Madrid-Morales, and Christopher Barrie

Digital Journalism

PDF Replication
2026

Improving computational reproducibility in the social sciences

Michael V. Reiss, Susanne J. Adler, Christopher Barrie, and 28 others

Nature Human Behaviour

PDF
2026

Information diets are more diverse in attention than in engagement

Christopher Barrie, Aybüke Atalay, and Alia ElKattan

Sociological Science

PDF Replication
2026

LLMs as Content Curators: A Large-Scale Audit of Recommendation Bias Across Providers and Platforms

Nicolò Pagan, Christopher Barrie, Christopher A. Bail, and Petter Törnberg

Third Conference on Language Modeling (COLM)

Replication
2025

An enriched, multimodal social media dataset of a UK General Election campaign

Christopher Barrie, Aybüke Atalay, and Alia ElKattan

Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media

PDF Replication
2025

Emergent LLM behaviors are observationally equivalent to data leakage

Christopher Barrie and Petter Törnberg

arXiv, Comment

PDF Replication
2025

Measuring Media Criticism with ALC Word Embeddings

Christopher Barrie, Neil Ketchley, Alexandra Siegel, and Mossaab Bagdouri

Political Analysis

PDF Replication
2024

Burnings, Beatings, and Bombings: Disaggregating Anti-Christian Violence in Egypt, 2013–2018

Christopher Barrie, Killian Clarke, and Neil Ketchley

Perspectives on Politics

PDF Replication
2024

Does Protest Influence Political Speech? Evidence from UK Climate Protest, 2017–2019

Christopher Barrie, Thomas G. Fleming, and Sam S. Rowan

British Journal of Political Science

PDF Replication
2024

Explaining Recruitment to Extremism: A Bayesian Hierarchical Case–Control Approach

Roberto Cerina, Christopher Barrie, Neil Ketchley, and Aaron Y. Zelin

Political Analysis

PDF Replication
2024

Online calls for protest and offline mobilization in autocracies: evidence from the 2017 Dey Protests in Iran

Mohammad Ali Kadivar, Neil Ketchley, Abolfazl Sotoudeh-Sherbaf, and Christopher Barrie

European Sociological Review

PDF
2023

Did the Musk takeover boost contentious actors on Twitter?

Christopher Barrie

Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review

PDF Replication Preprint
2023

The Process of Revolutionary Protest: Development and Democracy in the Tunisian Revolution

Christopher Barrie

Perspectives on Politics

PDF Replication Preprint
2022

Using the Twitter Academic API With R for Social Science Research

Christopher Barrie and Justin Chun-ting Ho

SAGE Research Methods: Doing Research Online

PDF
2021

Faces in the crowd: Twitter as alternative to protest surveys

Christopher Barrie and Arun Frey

PLOS ONE

PDF Replication
2021

Kingdom of Trolls? Influence Operations in the Saudi Twittersphere

Christopher Barrie and Alexandra Siegel

Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media

PDF Replication
2021

Political sociology in a time of protest

Christopher Barrie

Current Sociology

PDF Replication
2021

Sect, Nation, and Identity after the Fall of Mosul: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Christopher Barrie

American Journal of Sociology

PDF Replication
2021

academictwitteR: an R package to access the Twitter Academic Research Product Track v2 API endpoint

Christopher Barrie and Justin Chun-ting Ho

Journal of Open Source Software

PDF Code
2020

Did Local Civil Rights Protest Liberalize Whites’ Racial Attitudes?

Michael Biggs, Christopher Barrie, and Kenneth T. Andrews

Research and Politics

PDF Replication
2020

Searching Racism after George Floyd

Christopher Barrie

Socius

PDF Replication
2019

Fridays of revolution: focal days and mass protest in Egypt and Tunisia

Christopher Barrie and Neil Ketchley

Political Research Quarterly

PDF Replication
2018

Opportunity Without Organization: Labor Mobilization in Egypt After the 25th January Revolution

Christopher Barrie and Neil Ketchley

Mobilization

PDF Preprint
2017

The contentious politics of nationalism and the anti-naturalization campaign in Tunisia, 1932–1933

Christopher Barrie

Nations and Nationalism

PDF

Working papers

2026

AI and Research Methods

Christopher Barrie, Lisa Argyle, James Bisbee, and 6 others

APSA Preprints, Book chapter

PDF
2026

AI summaries in social media improve dialogue but reduce engagement

Michael Heseltine, Christopher A. Bail, Petter Törnberg, Michelle Schimmel, and Christopher Barrie

SocArXiv

PDF
2026

Polarization by Default: Auditing Recommendation Bias in LLM-Based Content Curation

Nicolò Pagan, Christopher Barrie, Christopher A. Bail, and Petter Törnberg

arXiv

PDF
2026

Political Sorting Can Drive AI Models Apart Through User Feedback

Petter Törnberg, Michael Heseltine, Nicolò Pagan, Christopher A. Bail, Michelle Schimmel, and Christopher Barrie

arXiv

PDF Replication
2026

Political identity drives choice of large language models—even when accuracy is incentivized

Michael Heseltine, Christopher A. Bail, Petter Törnberg, Michelle Schimmel, and Christopher Barrie

SocArXiv

PDF
2026

Request routing services undermine the reproducibility of open weight LLMs

Joe Higton, Joshua Tucker, and Christopher Barrie

SocArXiv

PDF
2026

Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems

Christopher Barrie and Roberto Cerina

SocArXiv

PDF
2026

The Partisan Effects of Social Media Bans

Tiago Ventura, Christopher Barrie, Margaret E. Roberts, Christopher Schwarz, and Joshua A. Tucker

SocArXiv

PDF
2025

Stage 1 Registered Report: Testing the Causal Impact of Social Media Reduction Around the Globe

Steve Rathje, Nejla Asimovic, Tiago Ventura, and 6 others, including Christopher Barrie

PsyArXiv, Stage 1 registered report

PDF
2024

Prompt stability scoring for text annotation with large language models

Christopher Barrie, Elli Palaiologou, and Petter Törnberg

arXiv

PDF Code
2024

Replication for Language Models: Problems, Principles, and Best Practice for Political Science

Christopher Barrie, Alexis Palmer, and Arthur Spirling

Working paper

PDF

Software

academictwitteRR

Collect tweets and user data from the Twitter Academic Research API v2, built for social science research.

GitHub · CRAN · Paper
promptstabilityPython

Score how stable large language model text annotations are across prompt variations.

GitHub · PyPI · Paper
extremeRR

Fit the Bayesian hierarchical case-control model for studying recruitment to extremism and other rare behaviours.

GitHub · Paper