Yesterday's news about OpenAI, and not only literally — tech companies have been openly working on US and other defense contracts for years now, protests lead to people fired rather than projects abandoned. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

It was only a matter of time before these two would see eye to eye on something other than competitive kid-making

My friend @aivengo96.bsky.social attended "The Forum of Yulia Navalnaya" and, in a shocking twist, saw a glimpse of the future for the Russian opposition instead of the never-ending squabble we are all used to.

My piece on Kaskad, an obscure Russian army unit that offers officials, pro-Kremlin youth activists and various regime "Mitläufer"s a chance to get the badge of war veteran and come back home safe and sound after a short deployment in Ukraine: www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/w...

NKVD shot Yezhov

Only by p.50 I figured the book “The End. Germany in 1945-1955”, was not in fact the “Wolf Time - Germans 1945-1955”, the book that I actually wanted to read. Now adding not one, but two of these to the book about 1945 German suicide epidemic would be concerning, so I am considering -a library-.

Great article by @alexfiniarel.bsky.social about how migrants and refugees are not really coming to your country to commit crimes and steal your jobs. Written by an immigrant who hasn't stolen anyone's job yet, too, so take note!

Our exhibition in Berlin is giving out tiny statuettes of Alexey Navalny as part of the art installation by Spanish artist Fernando Sanchez Castillo. It's a part of a larger project that depicts famous protesters from across the world.

The decision to delete Instagram from my phone and just use the desktop version is undoubtedly the best thing I did for the quality of my mornings, evenings and commute. The reels were just too addictive, and I still get plenty from my friends to feel in the loop.

Dear Friend, I am Hon. Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of Defense. I urgently seek your trust to assist in transferring $6,000,000 USD extracted from the European Union as a payment for a highly classified US military operation against Houthi forces in Yemen.

Wow. Russian disinformation network "Pravda" succeeded in polluting outputs of 10 leading AI tools, including models by Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Over 3,6 million articles released by this network in 2024 are now contaminating their datasets. meduza.io/en/feature/2...

Entertaining thoughts of an SPD-Linke-Green coalition this election day

NEW on our site Our data shows that people are turning away from the news, with interest in news falling and news avoidance rising. A new piece by our researcher Craig T. Robertson explains why this is happening and what publishers can do about it reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/people-...

Russia pulled this stunt in 2016 www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/artic...

Ok folks, deep breaths. There is very real reason to worry about the dynamic emerging between Washington and Moscow when it comes to Ukraine. But there is also very real reason to believe that Ukraine and Europe can create a better outcome. (A rather long 🧵, obviously) /1

Ugh my feed is full of Superbowl

I mostly regret the years I spent watching Russian state TV for work, but 10 years ago today I had it on in the background when Putin landed in Egypt for this rendition of the Russian national anthem Still one of the single funniest minutes of video on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=IifS...

This is interesting! Did not know that the 1914 Germany-Russia border was in the same spot as the current Poland-Lithuania-Russia (Kaliningrad) border, but the side that was then Germany is now Russia and the side that was Russia is Lithuania

Craving pryaniks all of a sudden

Thinking about watching Twin Peaks for the first time in my life

if you ever meet someone who watches every minute of Yury Dud interviews, you need to run for your life because you’ve come face-to-face with a psychotic maniac

Интересная статься про то, как сирийские журналисты из пропагандистских медиа переобуваются в воздухе, чтобы сохранить работу www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

We are not ready for the future political implications of that second paragraph.

🎉 It is our birthday! On this day in 2001, Wikipedia was launched. Over two decades later, it has become one of the largest and most trusted sources of knowledge on the internet, with 63+ million articles in 300+ languages. Read all about the history of Wikipedia ➡️ w.wiki/KYn

This is something from Matryoshka (Kremlin's disinfo network) that can become truly dangerous if used at scale amid the 𝕏 / Twitter>BlueSky exodus: They cloned a pre-existing legitimate account (bio, avatar, banner--but not name) from 𝕏 / Twitter↙️ to BlueSky↘️...

Jokes on you I've never made this mistake

‼️ Afgantsy Redux: How Russian military intelligence used the Taliban to bleed U.S. forces at the end of America’s longest war The GRU funded Afghan attacks on U.S. troops via a gemstone trading company. The Insider was able to ID the network's key players.

Lots to unpack here. I feel like some things are good — focused moderation, good riddance to fact-checkers, bringing back civic content. The political pandering to Republicans is too palpable tho — it's a troubling embracement of far-right frameworks by the largest social media

Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield explain that the Internet functions as a "justification machine" — providing ample "evidence" for people to use (with the help of political pundits and online influencers) to create and maintain their preferred realities: www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

The response of Liv, now retired Meta AI profile, is probably a hallucination. I do not see an LLM storing and retrieving data about racial characteristics of team members who worked on it as part of the dataset it was trained on.

Crime to eat it, crime to not eat it…

Sykes and Georges-Picot when it became clear Turkey is losing WW1

The internet has made it so that you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand. For some, it looks like updating your LinkedIn connections; for others, it's asking customers to give you five stars on Google Reviews; for still more, it's crafting an engaging-but-authentic persona on Instagram.

Assad and his family have arrived in Moscow and received Russian asylum, the Kremlin just told the state media. tass.ru/mezhdunarodn...

time to update this fairly simple diagram

For a human rights perspective on the Biden admin’s decision to send antipersonnel landmines to Ukraine, I spoke to @marywareham.bsky.social of @hrw.org. “Once you pull at the fine fabric of international humanitarian law, the whole thing could unravel,” she warned. meduza.io/en/feature/2...

I am at the point in my bluesky feed when I unfollow irrelevant people more often than I like the relevant ones. Starter packs worked great to kickstart Bluesky but now it seems a bit overwhelming.

Brain rot is officially Oxford dictionary’s word of the year. Read about how the term emerged and gave birth to an entirely new online lexicon in my latest for @passionfruit4us.bsky.social passionfru.it/brain-rot-cr...

Kurt Volker was Donald Trump’s special representative for Ukraine negotiations from 2017 to 2019. Here’s he how thinks the U.S. president-elect could seek to end Russia’s war. https://buff.ly/418aKCQ

Okay this is cool tool that can help you (as a journalist or activist) find a right path to a resolve a whatever digital or platform security issue that you are having, step-by-step. digitalfirstaid.org

🧵 Common misconceptions that I'm hearing lately from 𝕏 users migrated to 🦋BlueSky: 🫢 "Engagement levels are insane here, we all were throttled on the other site" 🫢 "It took me N years to build up my audience on 𝕏. It took M days to regain K% of it on Bluesky": Hate to disappoint, but:

hard to exaggerate how nuts the engagement is on Bluesky compared to 𝕏. a vastly smaller user base (at least officially), but just look at these stats for one of the biggest newspapers on Earth. Musk has absolutely trashed the platform. folks, you are not locked in on 𝕏. not even a little.

I wonder if the niche media (I guess the first to thrive from migrating to Bluesky as they do not need "general public") have already found the way to measure the impact compared to Twitter. Bluesky does not seem to have any analytics yet, and likes/reposts are trivial ways to measure engagement)

I can barely gorge out two posts per day, how is he able to run three companies and influence politics with a schedule like that

One of RU's leading opposition groups, Navalny's FBK, started a campaign to pressure Apple into non-compliance with Russian censorship ... through Norway's sovereign wealth fund, Apple's shareholder, who has a policy against investing in companies with bad human rights record t.me/teamnavalny/...

RI's Journalism Today newsletter is hands down the most useful thing I’ve ever gotten from LinkedIn, they nailed both the format and the content.

Half a year after the killing, there are no solid leads, or at least none that have been made public. ... That has reinforced the perception, fed by a series of incidents, that the Kremlin can reach into Europe and target its enemies with impunity.

To my new followers: you will just follow anyone these days, huh?

Ukraine’s battle against Russia in maps and charts: latest updates. www.ft.com/content/4351... via @financialtimes.com