The 2025 Headline of the Year Nominees 🧵

Worth bringing back this briefer on how encryption protects and promotes human rights www.ohchr.org/en/documents...

Creating apps like Signal or WhatsApp could be 'hostile activity,' claims UK watchdog - www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-priv... #ukgov is out of its tiny mind #encryption

All you need: your computer or smartphone, some free tools, and your child’s internet- or Bluetooth-connected toy

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Beautiful and so important indeed!

This is incredibly important. If you read one thing this week: marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-...

VPNs starting to enter the regulatory frame: now in Denmark www.theregister.com/2025/12/15/d...

2025 was the year AI hit hard in education after a long lead in If anyone's left with a job in the social sciences and humanities to keep studying it critically in the future, here's a reading list I've been compilung all year to get you going

👀👀 DiffProtect “rewrites a person’s face in a photograph using the same generative technology behind modern image creation tools. The resulting photo still looks like the person to any human viewer, but to state-of-the-art facial recognition systems, the image becomes something else entirely.”

Really worth reading and reflecting on! Gosh, I wish I could join those classes!

This description/reflection from @mattdinan.bsky.social on how he essentially delegitimized using LLMs as a way to outsource student thinking/writing is a model on how to work through your values and build a course around them. mattdinan.substack.com/p/the-ai-ske...

Today, DWI publishes a powerful essay by @mgasia.bsky.social, who works impersonating an AI sex companion: data-workers.org/michael/ This piece offers a rare glimpse into the psychological and economic realities behind one of the fastest-growing sectors: AI-assisted intimacy.

Holy CRAP. Retired engineer takes random pics of *kids*, without consent or attribution, bins them into “autistic” or “not autistic”, and uploads that “data” for free on Kaggle. Well over a HUNDRED papers are published, 38 in Springer Nature, 25 in IEEE, using it. And no reviewers objected? WTF.🧪

why? it will ruin what made Wallace & Gromit so fantastic in the first place

Don't let anyone — not even the US Secretary of State — tell you that the European Commission's €120 million enforcement against Elon Musk’s X under the Digital Service Act is about censorship, writes Daphne Keller. It’s just the EU enforcing some normal, boring requirements of its law, she says.

OHCHR welcomes Seoul Statement of ISO, IEC and ITU that highlights the importance of integrating human rights into tech standard development. www.linkedin.com/posts/home-i...

Excited to see these studies (finally) published in Scientific Reports! 🚨 S1: More social media users perceived themselves as addicted than met clinical addiction criteria. S2: Increasing perceived addiction hurt perceived control over use and increased self-blame for overuse. Thread below... 🧵

From our summer intern at the Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers: "S-risk is the risk that AGI doesn’t kill us all, but instead enslaves and tortures us for eternity (the ‘S’ stands for suffering). It was awesome to learn about it." directing.attention.to/p/ill-never-...

ARTICLE 19 is proud to have engaged with and contributed to the OHCHR’s recent research. Ensuring technical standards development is linked to and rooted in human rights will empower us all to exercise our rights to communicate and to access information freely. www.ohchr.org/en/documents...

24. November 1936 #VictorKlemperer #Tagebücher #NS #Nationalsozialismus #Faschismus #Antisemitismus #Propaganda #LTI (See alt-text for English)

This is a big deal bc insurance is one of the strongest levers for changing policy and behavior (the other being taxes). AI companies may have so much money they can self insure. But their enterprise customers don’t and this will cause them think twice about how they adopt and deploy AI.

What was ChatGPT? Now nearly three years old, we can look at OpenAI's LLM as a product of its time, optimized ever since to its earliest uses. While this period of deep disorientation and social isolation has been obscured from public memory, it remains embedded within the interface.

Couldn’t be more timely!

A man in Australia is challenging a state's ban on Vegemite in prisons, claiming that denying him the polarizing spread violates his human rights.

📅Nov 19 @ 9AM | Digital identity systems are transforming governance across Africa while raising big questions about privacy, inclusion & power. Join DFRLab's Democracy+Tech Initiative as we explore how digital identity is reshaping governance, elections & rights across the continent bit.ly/3K4IPxk

Ireland winning goal and end of match with Irish commentary

Cinema paradiso

Pope Leo absolutely cooking

Precht insinuiert hier das Bild einer "ursprünglich proletarischen Linken" mit einem "derben und martialischen Jargon" als Gegenstück zur heutigen "akademischen" Linken. Polarisierung, Vereinfachung, historisch kontrafaktisch. Schauen wir in die Arbeiter*innengeschichte. Los geht's 1/

If you think you can do better at content moderation, check out the two content moderation games listed on the Digital Literacy page of our Deepfakes Tracker research portal: 1) Moderator Mayhem and 2) Trust and Safety Tycoon. deepfakestracker.org/digital-lite...

This!!! 👇👇👇

On Lawfare Daily, @klonick.bsky.social and @alanrozenshtein.com spoke to @superwuster.bsky.social about about his new book, “The Age of Extraction," how platforms have evolved, and what he sees as the future solution set for the problems that have developed in the digital era. youtu.be/SBTOdJpaZNY

I distribute my newsletter on Substack and Patreon. Only on Patreon, I am hit with these “community guidelines” warnings. Note: the platform didn’t take action, but it’s concerning that topics that tech journalists write about like porn, violence, politics, etc are deemed unsafe.

« Chat Control » : le projet européen de surveillance des messageries largement abandonné

"We find that all six developers appear to employ their users' chat data to train and improve their models by default, and that some retain this data indefinitely" oh well arxiv.org/abs/2509.05382

📢 After almost a decade of activism and community efforts, Victoria has passed Australia's first ever treaty legislation establishing a permanent Indigenous representative body in the state parliament. The landmark agreement between the Victorian Government and the Firs... 👉 More news/weather bots

Please take some time and read this briefer on the serious human rights impacts of last month’s telecommunications shutdowns in Afghanistan, from hindering access to healthcare to disrupting humanitarian operations and exposing women to even harsher restrictions: www.ohchr.org/en/press-bri...

Please take some time and read this briefer on the serious human rights impacts of last month’s telecommunications shutdowns in Afghanistan, from hindering access to healthcare to disrupting humanitarian operations and exposing women to even harsher restrictions: www.ohchr.org/en/press-bri...

Fascinated by #eastgermany #ddr #gdr ? go.bsky.app/drcrDK

UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) comment on the signing ceremony of the UN #Cybercrime Convention: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

NEW: an a16z-backed startup called Doublespeed promises clients can “orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts through both bulk content creation and deployment.” Essentially an AI-powered bot service in violation of all major social media platforms www.404media.co/a16z-backed-...

UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) comment on the signing ceremony of the UN #Cybercrime Convention: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

A thread worth reading. Nuanced assessment of a headline grabbing report.

⚠️ The European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee @libe.europarl.europa.eu will hold a debate on 🇪🇺EU funding for #spyware, following our @ftm.eu investigation.

This report on platform transparency under the DSA in the Global South is excellent – both as a nuanced explanation of the DSA and for the significant, detailed considerations it adds from other regions. drive.google.com/file/d/1fpKY...

Remember this one? www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiUV...

In-the-wild testing of police facial recognition systems has failed to generate clear evidence of the technology’s benefits, or to assess the full range of socio-technical impacts www.computerweekly.com/news/3666322...

I'll just print up this list and distribute it to all the colleges and universities nearby

Read this thread, please!