Superb piece on why “AI” is bad user design from @sifu.tweety.fish - and why AI proponents and skeptics so frequently seem to be talking completely past each other. buttondown.com/apperceptive...

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Interested in platform governance, a defining issue of our time? Dec 1-2, PlatGovNet is hosting its 2025 online conference. 60+ presentations, conversations with civil society, Reddit, Bluesky. It is free to attend. Program platgov.net/assets/site/... Registration ucph-ku.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

I wrote an updated guide on which AIs to use right now, & some tips on how to use them (and how to avoid falling into some common traps) A lot has changed since I last wrote a guide like this in the spring, and AI has gotten much more useful as a result. open.substack.com/pub/oneusefu...

A median of 72% of adults across 25 nations say the spread of false information online is a major threat to their country. Concern about this issue is widespread in both high- and middle-income countries, and it has remained relatively stable over time.

🌐 Want to understand how countries are prioritizing key issues ahead of WSIS+20? GNI and @gpdigital.bsky.social have published a new summary infographic offering a quick visual guide to where countries stand on key WSIS+20 issues. globalnetworkinitiative.org/gni-and-gpd-...

These 2 stellar pieces from @techpolicypress.bsky.social are essential for educators thinking through the profoundly new internet our students are experiencing. techpolicy.press/how-ai-drive...

July roundup on tech policy litigation from Tech Justice Law Project’s Melodi Dinçer! This month covers key legal discussions in generative AI and “digital replicas,” section 230 protections, privacy law enforcement, demise of FTC’s click to cancel, and a resolution in Cambridge Analytica.

🚨 New publication! 🚨 Do people really trust the government? It depends on how you ask. Happy to share that our paper on why Question Form Matters with KatharinaPfaff (@stawi-univie.bsky.social‬) is now out in @jssam.bsky.social 📊🇦🇹 🔗 academic.oup.com/jssam/advanc...

New special issue, "Comparative Approaches to Studying Privacy," edited by #CPRN is now published in Social Media + Society! journals.sagepub.com/topic/collec... w/ @lutzid.bsky.social, Lemi Baruh, Kelly Quinn, @masurphil.bsky.social, Carsten Wilhelm (comparativeprivacy.org)

Judgitbu the abstract, this seems like an interesting read..

On politics and policy preferences of tech workers: In a preprint of a study lead by Gilad Be'ery and co-authored with @raanan-sk.bsky.social we show that, despite some similarities, techies do not have a universal policy agenda; developers are particularly distinct. osf.io/preprints/os...

The immense political influence possessed by the tech elite perfectly demonstrates how free and fair elections may coexist with and even foster a political system that privileges the policy preferences of a select few, writes Surya Gowda.

Grok’s “sudden ideological reorientation” underscores that the “anodyne political character” of other chatbots is also a construction, @jwherrman.bsky.social writes. It's a reminder that all chatbots are the product of "people deciding what they should and shouldn’t say.” nymag.com/intelligence...

If the power grid around St. Petersburg and Moscow went down for a while, we imagine many "Western" social media accounts would suddenly go quiet, too.

Our free Computational Social Science (CSS) Summer School is open to graduate students, researchers, journalists, and analysts interested in CSS, textual, and network analysis of social media data — no prior experience is needed! socialmedialab.ca/2025/06/28/2...

Working on platform governance? Join for PlatGovNet 2025 Free online conference Dec 1-2 Extended abstracts (800-1000 words) due Sep 2 Amazing community, opportunity to share work, get feedback, meet others working in this area. Glad to be part of organizing it Details: platgov.net/conferences/...

🎉 Excited to share the APSA Technology & Politics Section Award winners! 🏆 📚 Best Book The Illiberal Public Sphere: Media in Polarized Societies by @sabinamihelj.bsky.social & @vstetka.bsky.social. You can access it, it is in open access! link.springer.com/book/10.1007... 🧵

This is no longer a contest over AI models alone, but over standards, adoption, and the architecture of global digital ecosystems. buff.ly/WrOKnN9

Trump fires Copyright Office director after report raises questions about AI training

#ICA25 ICA CAT panel: Building Bridges in Privacy Research: Comparative Perspectives and Collaborative Insights - 14-Jun-25, 10:30 AM in Mineral G (Regency 3).

Canadians are split on GenAI’s net societal impact (39% positive, 34% negative, 27% neutral), but unite around key concerns—security and privacy (72%), reliability of information (68%), job displacement (68%), and effects on higher education (68%). socialmedialab.ca/2025/04/08/n...

I am really pleased to see our meta-analysis of media literacy interventions (160 studies!) has been published in HCR. Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of nuance. One piece of good news is that the interventions work longitudinally. Free download here: academic.oup.com/hcr/advance-...

Already fed up with AI in Google search? "Forget AI. Google just created a version of its search engine free of all the extra junk it has added over the past decade-plus." tedium.co/2024/05/17/g...

🚨 More than 1,400 people have signed up to watch our free conference on AI and the future of news Our day-long event features presentations and panel discussions with experts from @ox.ac.uk and journalists from around the world Sign up now

Webinar - State Privacy Legislation 2.0: New Directions and Legislative Challenges (Tues, Mar 18, 12 PM ET) – Daniel Solove chats with Monique Priestley (VT Legislature). Register free: teachprivacy.com/webinar-stat...

I'm hiring! I'm looking for 1️⃣ pre-doc and 2️⃣ post-docs. If you're fascinated by media effects, quantitative methods, and open science, please consider applying 🙂 International applications welcome! Application Pre-doc: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie... Application Post-doc: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie...

"... innovation (...) doesn’t actually happen in a vacuum. The reason Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley wasn’t because a bunch of genius inventors happened to like California weather. It was because of a complex web of institutions that made innovation possible: ..." 1/2

Ever wondered whether all those health-related apps are any good? Spoiler: not so much. We just showed it in: "An App a Day will (Probably Not) Keep the Doctor Away: An Evidence Audit of Health and Medical Apps Available on the Apple App Store" link.springer.com/ar... OA: papers.ssrn.com/sol3...

The #ica25 program is online now: Check it out and build your own schedule for Denver! #academicsky #comsky #Denver #researchmatters #conferencing @icahdq.bsky.social ica2025.abstractcentral.com/s1agxt/com.s...

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... ever tried to fix the whole Internet? We look at efforts by a small group of network engineers to get a standard set in the late 90s (BCP38) - but never fully applied - adopted around the world, with surprising success. Result is a big change to global DDoS.

Looks promising...

Check out another installment of the Global Digital Policy Roundup for January 2025 from the experts at Digital Policy Alert. Tommaso Giardini and Maria Buza highlight tech policy developments in four key areas: content moderation, artificial intelligence, competition, and data governance.

Excited to see this resource: Today we released our archive of data.gov on Source Cooperative. The 16TB collection includes over 311,000 #datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025, a complete archive of federal public datasets linked by data.gov. See lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2025/02... #publichealth

Extremely excited and proud to see this published! Really looking forward to see how others will engage with the Comparative Privacy Research Framework we are proposing. #privacy #commsky

Our global study on the state of trust in scientists is now out in Nature Human Behaviour! 🥳 With a team of 241 researchers, we surveyed 71,922 people in 68 countries, providing the largest dataset on trust in scientists post-pandemic 👇🧵https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02090-5

We are hosting the 2025 @aoir.bsky.social Flashpoint Symposium in Bremen! 🎯 CfP "From Platform Governance to Generative AI: Concepts, Methods, and Data for Studying Tech Governance" 📆 3-4 June 2025, Bremen, DE 🗒️ Deadline for Abstracts: 15 February 2025 platform-governance.org/aoir-flashpo...

PhD students whose work connects with Communication and Technology and/or Mobile Communication theories, methods, and topics are encouraged to apply to the Doctoral Consortium, an #ICA25 pre-conference to be held on Thurs Jun 12.

Still very much thinking in hashtags (like me) and looking for #ica25? I created a feed for you to follow! #commsky bsky.app/profile/did:...

If you are interested in digital #privacy and resignation, this collection will be a treasure trove. Thank you @noradraper.bsky.social, @cphoffmann.bsky.social, @lutzid.bsky.social, @giuliaranzini.bsky.social and Joe Turow for masterfully steering this venture! Proud to be part of it.

📣 Together with @aoir.bsky.social, we are pleased to announce the next #AoIRFlashpointSymposium, entitled "From Platform Governance to Generative AI", which will be hosted by the PGMT Lab in Bremen, on 3 and 4 June 2025. Submissions are now open: platform-governance.org/aoir-flashpo...

The Joint Expeditionary Force has launched Operation Nordic Warden, a UK-led reaction system designed to monitor threats to undersea infrastructure and track Russia’s shadow fleet. ukdefencejournal.org.uk/britain-laun...

Real-time bidding, which powers nearly every ad you see online, might be the most privacy-invasive surveillance system that you’ve never heard of. Learn how it works and how to protect yourself.

Do you have students interested in #netGov? The NextGen@ICANN application round for ICANN83 has been extended through 24 Jan 2025. It's an opportunity to get funding to attend the ICANN meeting in Prague in June. Details: www.icann.org/public-respo... To apply: webportalapp.com/sp/login_sam...

🎉 Happy New Year! Start 2025 strong—submit your work to #COMPTEXT2025, international conference on quantitative and computational analysis of text, image, and video as data 🚀 We can’t wait to welcome you to Vienna! ⏳Submission deadline: January 15 More here: shorturl.at/AmocX #css #commsky #polisky

#parker #sun

Tetsuwan Scientific is making robotic AI scientists that can run experiments on their own

Calling all would-be post docs! This opportunity to study #AI, corporate power and policymaking looks absolutely fascinating @mic-center.bsky.social www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/...