Tweet by first author: https://twitter.com/florianederer/status/1658478757601222659
Thread on the #EJMR forum:
https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/florian-ederer-claims-he-could-geolocate-the-majority-of-ejmr-posters
Collection of comments (looks like a rather right-wingy blog):
https://www.karlstack.com/p/yale-university-vows-to-geolocate-aa2
Article in Times Higher Education:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/toxic-anonymous-online-posts-linked-university-ip-addresses
“🚨NEW PAPER🚨 "Anonymity and Identity Online" We geolocate the majority of EJMR posters and show that posting on EJMR is wide-spread at US universities and also frequent in other organizations employing economists. Presentation at NBER SI (7/20/2023): https://t.co/TYjV26la9Y”
Interesting paper on de-anonymization of users on an economics forum (#EJMR). The forum used four hex digits of the hashed IP address as pseudonym - which allowed the authors to guess locations and institutions of users.
Really nice combination of cryptanalysis, NLP, statistics. Of course also with major implications regarding privacy, ethics, responsible disclosure.
(The authors initially intended to share code + dataset but refrained from it shortly afterwards).
https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/files/2023-07/ejmr_paper_nber(1).pdf
By @joshgans
"#EJMR is funded by advertising. Some of these are #Google ads but there is one permanent ad placed by econ-jobs.com. That ad highlights featured jobs. So you can see here that effectively ANU and the UK Treasury Dept are advertising on EJMR."
https://twitter.com/joshgans/status/1685258344804552704?t=s9DkwRvPbtuzxdJN1_RB8A&s=09
https://www.youtube.com/live/JwmZuxN0LDI
Offensive posts (hate speech?) on #EJMR comes from a high share of all posters (not just a few) and, based on IP, from all types of organisations including high ranking universities. A sobering study by Florian Ederer, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, amd Kyle Jensen.
But how representative are those posting on #EJMR for the profession as a whole? How strong is the selection bias and why does this platform attract these people?
I can't stress enough how unethical this #ejmr research paper appears to have been.
When you do this kind of work against a service, you follow a principle called responsible disclosure. That means you give notice to the victim what you found, and you give them a chance to fix it.
The researchers here do not seem to have provided any notice. The authors should not be in academia, #yale should be ashamed, and #nber should retract this.
Álvaro La Parra-Pérez
Raphael Wimmer
Gwenaël Piaser
Sven Fischer
ChrisAdamsEcon 
Klaus Pforr
Rick Carback
Sebastian Karcher