Palestine’s most popular leader, Marwan Barghouti, was beaten unconscious and has his ribs broken by Israeli prison guards and his family fears for his life, his son has said, citing evidence given by former Palestinian detainees released this week as part of the ceasefire deal.

Meta ends (at least for now) political ads in the EU today. Per their ad library data, they've run nearly 11,000,000 different political, social and issue ads in the EU since 2018 and made around €800m from them.

This is an EU proposed policy with the benign-sounding name "Child Sexual Abuse Regulation" which proposes to screen private online communications using sketchy image-scanning algorithms. It is technically unworkable, and would be a privacy catastrophe, especially for those in authoritarian states

Part of your information landscape is very likely fake and designed to influence you. Read @marcowenjones.bsky.social 's investigations to begin grasping the extent. marcowenjones.substack.com/p/nobody-tal...

Fascinating insights on Israel’s influence operations in the US, costing millions. Particularly striking is how the contracts openly talk about the usage of bots to “flood the zone”

Following the recent violence #Libya lays in a dangerous place for a nation to be in A ruling elite, acting like everything is normal And a public desperate to live a normal, dignified, honest life and wondering why they must accept this as normal.

Labour’s immigration “strategy” is bad on three levels: 1. It’s unlikely to work politically. Pandering to the far right on immigration rarely ends well, even if you deliver. 2. Tied to that - don’t raise the salience of issues you’re weak on! 3. What should be the most important: it’s bad policy.

Earlier this month, Bluesky restricted access to 72 accounts in Turkey at the request of Turkish governmental authorities techcrunch.com/2025/04/23/g...

I don't think it's possible to be truly happy unless you believe your existence is positive sum and brings good to others.

As Trump settles into the White House for the second time, is right-wing populism destined to keep growing? @iyadelbaghdadi.bsky.social and @gatnash.com explore the structural reasons for its continued rise: kawaakibi.org/seven-forces...

FELLOWSHIPS for Scholars at Risk Applications until 20.01.2025 at 23:59 (CET). #SAFE offers 60 fully-funded fellowships (up to 24 months) for doctoral & postdoctoral researchers of non-EU nationality. Read the call carefully, contact potential supervisor in your academic field. saferesearchers.eu

Really struggling to find good quality Arabic books for my toddler. Her bookshelf is clearly two-standard: the English ones are well-illustrated, engaging and fun, the Arabic ones have 80s standard amateur illustration and transparently-moralistic stories.

About 3-4 years ago, I predicted that authoritarian governments would start using deepfakes to discredit and attack activists. I have no idea why this hasn't transpired yet, but I'm very grateful it hasn't.

People who care about decentralisation should have a bias towards using services from a company which isn't the single globally dominant provider of that service.

Told my two-year-old that I love her hair. She looked at me for a second, processing, and replied "I love your ears!"

Kawaakibi congratulates the Syrian people on their historic liberation from the Assad regime! We stand ready to support the rebuilding process of Syria with the Syrian people and remain steadfast partners in this endeavour every step of the way. kawaakibi.org/kawaakibi-fo...

I wrote something about my experience attending #Devcon and Funding the Commons last week. gatnash.com/posts/reflec...

Public mass protest is a tactic. Like all tactics, it can be effective when part of a wider strategy, and you understand why you're doing it and what the objective is. It's not effective when the tactic *becomes* the strategy, with no wider theory of how this creates change.

Once we've all recovered enough to be able to think straight again, there will be a reckoning for the Western donors who decided that mid-genocide was the time to cut off funding to human rights groups. aje.io/haqhqv

The genocide in Gaza has made so many take their masks off and out themselves. So many who previously disguised themselves as pro -human rights. One of many things that will never be the same again. lettertohrf.com

Antisemites, islamophobes, tankies, and general grifters are spreading their bs like wildfire right now.

Worried about what our world looks like after there is no longer even a pretence of or aspiration to moral universalism, and the idea of intentional law looks like nothing but a discredited colonial charade.

Shorter Duss: if you declare anti-civilian atrocities acceptable if your ally does them, or in the name of anti-imperialism, you're supporting a world where might makes right. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

This was a really outstanding listen. Beyond Twitter, plenty to learn from it about the way all our online public spaces are set up for failure.

Social media companies have figured out that regulators won’t MAKE them moderate disinformation (or anything else!), and that they won’t be meaningfully punished for failing to do so. This won’t change until we start punishing big tech. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Showing the small one nice things.

The world's largest reservoir of crushed dreams and rage.

A pretty beautiful review of Ernst Jünger's On the Marble Cliffs - on how noticing and enjoying beauty is a way to cope with dark times and remain functional during disaster. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-on-the-marble-cliffs

@kawaakibi.org is on bluesky

Just received a reply to an email I sent in January 2013. Absolute legend.

Threads is ideal if what you want from social media is being blasted by generic content from celebrities, but if you're looking for community, it's not viable. I've spent 48h just twiddling my thumbs waiting to be able to find posts from people I care about, meanwhile most have already left. 3/3

Tried Threads for 48 hours and my verdict is, it's definitely what it was intended to be: text posts for Instagram. It’s probably good if you’re used to the IG algorithm, but for people from Twitter/Mastodon/BlueSky looking for the classic social media feel, it’s basically unusable. 1/3

Remember Facebook's good old days, when it felt like a place rather than an advertising chamber, and you saw stuff that you cared about? Then they nuked that for the business model: extorting publishers to pay for their audience to see stuff. Why would I trust them again?

lol nah, i’m good

Elon Musk doing his absolute best to destroy the myth of meritocracy - lots of these billionaires won a lottery and have considered themselves geniuses ever since (or think their expertise in a single field generalizes to universal intellectual superiority).

Given how sensitive military authoritarians are to minute insults, and how prone the regimes they build are to total collapse at the first sign of threat, perhaps we should drop the obvious misnomer of "strongman" and call them weakmen.

the “block right wing losers on sight” approach on this app is the only one that works btw, the idiots on twitter who would qrt them for easy dunks actually helped show the algorithm that type of content is viral and gave it a bigger platform

I’d not be surprised if this tech shakeup is less a quick recession and more a fundamental economic shift. Even since dot com so much of the industry has been powered by ad revenue and unlimited VC cash. Neither were ever going to be sustainable.

Something I wish I knew before my book came out. It would have saved much frustration.

Turkish election reminded me of some of the worst of Twitter. Wishful thinking, bias and denial dressed up as coverage and expert commentary. At least it didn't take too long for egg on faces.

My brother just got around ChatGPT's restriction on providing instructions for modifying a vehicle by informing it that the modification is not in violation of regulations where he lives (on Mars).

A pretty fascinating narrative of part of the history of computer viruses, the Bulgarian virus-coding scene, and the virus writer known as "Dark Avenger" https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/may/09/on-the-trail-of-the-dark-avenger-the-most-dangerous-virus-writer-in-the-world

I'm basically waiting for my network to show up here so I can jump ship from Twitter for good.

Currently watching a European country make the same mistake they've made to disastrous effect in Libya no less than 4 times in the last decade. And that's just in Libya. You really start to wonder what the point is after a while.

This shows the brilliance of leveraging the existing domain name and WebPKI system for social media handles

This makes so much sense

Hello world. We're trying a third would-be Twitter replacement in 6 months. Will it stick?