@smidgeproject.bsky.social has been looking at extremism in middle age these past three years, but is lots of more work to be done in this field.

Who thought monetising social media was a good idea?

Yes and can confirm

For all those who still think susceptibility to radicalisation is caused by economic disadvantage, I hope they're getting it. The susceptible wealthy used to go off the rails in ways appropriate to their own environments, but digital ecologies are a great equaliser. Just not quite how we'd hoped.

I’m sorry, but it is disgraceful to be an academic who uses this technology to conduct research. It should be prohibited in all of our scholarly institutions, including universities and journals.

I have written a very mediocre analysis of a tv show with Monty Python that’s been cited ten times. Eight of those are by papers in data science…. about the programming language Python. Some of those articles were “written” by big name scientists with thousand of citations.

This was the year that AI-generated images and videos became, sometimes, indistinguishable from real ones. But as @chaykak.bsky.social writes, “if 2025 marked the mainstreaming of slop, it also ushered in an accompanying slop backlash.” www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

Listen to our latest podcast episode about the development of our counternarratives in @smidgeproject.bsky.social (and make sure to follow Smidge here on Bsky)

The “Online Death Threat industry” is a very apt description of the problem with online conspiracy theory communities. We have an article out early next year on the violence of networked conspiracy theories in New Media & Society based on a Danish QAnon case

“Regulators also said X also put up "unnecessary barriers" for researchers trying to access public data, which stymied research into systemic risks that European users faced.” Yes yes yes yes yes yes 💯 www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12...

one thing that receives almost no attention is that the only reason he ran for president again is because he had to to avoid prosecution for a litany of crimes, the whole plan was: 1). Take shelter in SCOTUS-granted immunity. 2). Loot.

Load-bearing Huge Wak˜ ∏◊ı˜ Closet

People who are continuously impressed with “how good AI is getting” are you okay?

this is correct. colleges and universities need this too.

People do not use information to determine their social identities; they use their social identities to determine what counts as information. The climate fight is, and has always been, an identity fight. Gonna talk with @samuel-bagg.bsky.social about this soon.

Introduce yourself with five animals you’ve seen in the wild: Orcas Humpback whales Penguins Moose Polar fox Muskox (Australia, Norway, Sweden and Greenland)

Ny forskning i Science visar hur kommersiella sociala medier väljer att tjäna pengar på bekostnad av våra demokratiska samtal. Men det går att ändra, om vi som samhälle vill, och politiken slutar dansa efter plattformarnas pipa. fof.se/artikel/andr...

New academic drinking game: Reading each other's publications and guessing which sections were added to appease reviewers.

"Imagine you stole all of the intellectual property in the world. And you're using it to help people write middling emails and make revenge porn about women, and also children. And you're powering this plagiarism and non-consensual porn machine by eating up what's left of humanity's carbon budget."

You can get 25% of my book on Mediatized Fan Play this week. From Taylor Shift to Sherlock and QAnon, I argue that s main mode of online participation is play and social media is our playground www.routledge.com/Mediatized-F...

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

They line up perfectly.

Looking forward to reading the work by @christinawurst.bsky.social on ideology in (anti)fandom

Well, it's a little clearer now why billionaires are so invested in technology that produces better written emails.

#tbt sorry we missed this, @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social

The most spectacular costume of 2025? That honor belongs to…

‘Every adventure begins with a cup of coffee’: Black rifle coffee company, reactionary fandom, and the tactical body Anthony Dannar Convergence 30 (1), 375-394, 2024 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

I don't think we understand just how bad the decline of the Internet is to knowledge. 3 years ago, I could perform a very basic search in any engine and get an absurd number of relevant links, research articles, etc. Today, I can perform the same search and find absolutely nothing.

Exposure to “memeified” content, coupled with real or perceived social isolation, can gradually normalise extremist rhetoric and symbols. While most individuals remain online-only, a small minority may escalate to real-world violence. www.isdglobal.org/isd-in-the-n...

The key terms here are: 1) burdensome procedures 2)burdensome tools While the findings themselves are not public, let's take a closer look 🧵👇

The @ec.europa.eu preliminarily finds TikTok and Meta in breach of transparency obligations under the Digital Services Act. The EC also finds that Meta and TikTok have put in place "burdensome procedures and tools for researchers to request access to public data." ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

This person is one hundred percent correct and it’s scary af. We will never “media literacy” our way out of this as a society. We are about to reap the whirlwind when it comes to misinformation, disinformation, and informational warfare.

This photo accompanying a news story about the heist at the Louvre is perfection.

Josh @bradleywhitford.bsky.social playing CJ’s husband in The Diplomat is perhaps the single most soothing thing I’ve seen since January

The prompt "never invent data" is meaningless to a machine. Might as well say "Don't be a sneaky little monkey."

Seeing people nonchalantly post stuff like makes me feel like I'm going crazy honestly.

Saw this great tactic to get the word out there by beating social media’s own algorithms….

Pritzker: "He wants to militarize major cities because he wants us to get used to the idea of troops on the streets. I believe he's gonna post people outside of polling places and if he needs to in order to control those elections, he'll assume control of the ballot boxes & count the votes himself"

"If we Europeans do not wake up and say, ‘We want to take back control of our democracies,’ I can tell you this: within 10 years [...] we will be a continent, like many others, of conspiracy theorists, extremists, noise and fury." defenddemocracy.eu/macron-democ...

you’re never more than 10 feet away from someone texting “lol” with a completely expressionless face

Let's be clear: no one should be taking medical advice from the man who told Americans to inject bleach. To moms worried about the Tylenol they took while pregnant: you deserve better than being RFK Jr's scapegoat. And to the autism community: you are loved exactly as you are.

There's a wrong way and a right way to report this

Hang on?? I was assured this was a both sides problem??

Worth reading: "Esotericism, the New Right, and Academic Scholarship" by Julius Strube 👉 brill.com/view/journal... in Aries Special Issue: Far-Right Politics and the Study of Esotericism (2025) 👉 brill.com/view/journal...

“Modern political journalism must identify memetic warfare tactics early and disrupt coordinated manipulation before mass adoption.”

lol

Cynthia @milleridriss.bsky.social observes there was bipartisan condemnation of Charlie Kirk's murder from political leaders. "But on social media, we also had a lot of celebration from the left and we had calls for civil war from the right... Those are really dangerous trends." bit.ly/46IYpHo

I've written this post, and then I've deleted it. As a public scholar, I walk the line of commentary and inviting trouble. I don't believe I've done it, but in these times, I don't know. This is my diagnostic of internet culture, algorithms, & violence. bythewaysocial.substack.com/p/btw-social...