Great snappy documentary (12 minutes) about misinformation by the Expedition team www.joinexpeditions.... 1/2 1/2

This is absolutely the best thing I’ve ever read about elite news-media bothsiderism, as well the relationship between knowledge-production and journalism. It’s also filled w gossip and so human! 10/10 lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

Laurence Fox is never again going to be able to threaten to sue anybody for calling him, an increasingly overt racist, racist

The man who has caused this will now be a trillionaire. 600.000 deaths, two thirds of them children.

Hundreds of thousands of people, dead because of a decision made by the world's richest man

Vital piece of investigative reporting from Sky. They've uncovered the X algorithm which feeds users extremist right wing material from the moment they join the site. It is a far-right radicalisation engine, by design. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

1. This is a thread on freedom, and how easy it is to lose. Over the past 2,000 years in Europe, there have been few periods and places of freedom. For much of the time we lived under highly oppressive tyrannies of various kinds, whether small or grand, local or imperial, secular or religious.🧵

A magnificent piece of work. Comprehesive, revelatory & shocking. Journalism this good is always rare & precious but never moreso than at times like this. Latter day Lord Haw Haws being plumped, preened & delivered to your doorstep in plain sight by a Nazi-saluting goon news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

Great thread. Don’t wake the dead

For each additional moral–emotional word in a social media post, the number of shares increases 13% Our new meta-analysis finds robust evidence of moral contagion (N=4,821,006) The moral contagion effect is even stronger in larger, pre-registered studies (17%). academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Trump Dreams of Bringing Orwellian Nightmare to Life: Similar vanity projects sprouted up in Nazi Germany, in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in Orban’s Hungary, and in many other countries that have fallen into the clutches of totalitarian leaders. sfreporter.com/columns/lett...

We live in an era of democratic backsliding and autocratization. Scholars and researchers are among those in the firing line. How should they respond? We will provide hints & guidance in a webinar on 13 November for the European Geophysical Union: You can register here:

It’s clear to anyone paying attention that Farage gets an easy ride from the media. They give him as much airtime as he wants but never hold him to account for the damage he’s done. So much of what’s broken in Britain is thanks to Nigel Farage.

“There are some people who hate London, and hate New York,” Mayor Sadiq Khan told me, on Bloomberg TV. “There's a reason why they demonize London, and now, indeed, New York. Why? Because we are progressive cities. We are liberal cities. We are multicultural cities. And we are incredibly successful.”

As pressures on democracy and our infosphere continue to grow, the role of scientists is increasingly politicised and at risk. @egu.eu's webinar on 13 November, featuring @lewan.bsky.social, offers an overview of how scientists can respond and safeguard their work. www.egu.eu/webinars/646...

We live in an era of democratic backsliding and autocratization. Scholars and researchers are among those in the firing line. How should they respond? We will provide some hints and guidance int his webinar on 13 November for the European Geophysical Union:

Let me excerpt the concluding paragraph:

"When authoritarian leaders destroy the symbols of democracy, they are preparing to destroy its substance. Their goal is to raise doubts about who this country belongs to, and make us believe that it doesn’t belong to us."

We have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so... What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?

Happy to share a new paper (accepted at J Environ Psych), led by the amazing @emilyspearing.bsky.social Black Summer Arson: Examining the Impact of Climate Misinformation and Corrections on Reasoning osf.io/preprints/ps... @johnfocook.bsky.social @lewan.bsky.social @profsanderlinden.bsky.social

It's not confused and it's not hapless. They got what they wanted and got the center-right to establish it as the new common m normal. Then, consistent with the behaviour of all right wing racists for the last century, they refused to take yes for an answer and upped their demands.

"Access to data by researchers is a crucial element of ensuring transparency and democratic accountability,” @lewan.bsky.social says. “The public is entitled to know what platforms and their algorithms are doing to the information landscape.” I wrote for @science.org about Meta, TikTok and the DSA 🧪

Really excited to share this new paper on "Data Visualizations as Propaganda", co-led by PhD students Priya Dhawka and Nina Lutz, which just won a Best Paper award at the CSCW conference: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... [Short thread]

This project wouldn’t have come together without the amazing team -- Tomer Zipori and @louisteitelbaum.bsky.social for the heavy lifting and computational analysis, @lewan.bsky.social for his insight, and @profsanderlinden.bsky.social whose vision made this possible. Truly grateful for this!

New Bayesian *Meta-Analysis* of Psychological Inoculation Against Misinformation! Open-access 👇Thread! Buckle up www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... ✅We find that prebunking interventions improve people's ability to discern between reliable & unreliable news without causing undue skepticism!

“Science is never settled” sounds reasonable—but it’s often a rhetorical trick to undermine consensus on issues like vaccines or climate change. Science evolves, but some things are overwhelmingly supported by evidence. My latest for Live Science www.livescience.com/... 1/10

America’s Democracy Meets A Wrecking Ball open.substack.com/pub/meidasto...

A particularly insidious form of attacks on science by the Trump administration: @lewan.bsky.social describes "another of at least 318 actions against science that the second Trump administration has taken since the president took office in January 2025." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The Washington Post thinks the White House Ballroom is a splendid idea and anyone who thinks otherwise is a NIMBY. In other news Post owner Jeff Bezos is helping to pay for the Ballroom

Plutocrats, petrostates, polluters & propagandists who profit from the status quo don't care if you fall victim to denial, deflection, division, or despair. Same result: disengagement. Read #ScienceUnderSiege by @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social & yours truly: www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/micha...

Sunday Reading: A Constant Torrent of Authoritarian Arrogance, Corruption, and Complicity American politics is an exasperating, frenzied, and acutely dangerous mess. Let’s sort through the events of the past week to separate what matters from what does not.   Some thoughts from my new piece:

Are the right ok? This is next level of "journalistic* " slop. Join.greenparty.org.uk

The Trump Action Tracker has an update! Main change is to break down the five authoritarian domains into ten - this allows for easier understanding of why actions have been logged and more tools for searching / filtering the now 1621 actions. www.trumpactiontracker.info? 1/2

“Authoritarians always target art first. They do so, because art and history are enemies of the myths a regime needs to survive." From my new TIME piece on Donald Trump’s campaign to defund the arts and rewrite our history. The stakes could not be higher.

let's hope so.

My latest column in Science appeared a few days ago, entitled Trojan gold: New US “standard” is another veiled attack on science. doi.org/10.1126/scie... The main points are as follows: 1/n 1/9

Oops. www.treason.io/p/news-white...

Public health is under attack by a deluge of misinformation. We offer a consensus report from the American Psychological Association summarizing what we know & what interventions are effective in countering it. We provide 8 concrete recommendations. Open-access - awspntest.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Not sure the dude who's choosing pictures to go with headlines had a good day at the Financial Times: www.ft.com/content/0...

We warned against "political hijacking" of #openscience back in 2021 (academic.oup.com/joc/article/...). As @lewan.bsky.social's diagnosis in @science.org shows, ignoring the scholarship in this space for almost five years creates serious vulnerabilities for science and the societies it serves.

Just 2 hours to go to the Skeptics in the Theatre gig tonight in Bristol: thewardrobetheatre.c...

Ah! Good morning, reality. And welcome. We’ve been expecting you…

Very good 😂. This describes a lot of what is going on accurately. Credit: @integralanswers.bsky.social

This morning my ChatGPT quota was inexplicably exhausted. It took a while but I pieced it together. Voice mode somehow got activated when I went to bed. The bot then engaged in a 10 hour conversation with my snoring dog, answering questions the pup wasn’t asking and praising him for his insight.

Yep. New US “standard” is another veiled attack on science science.org/doi/10.1126/... @lewan.bsky.social Gold standard "is thus best understood as yet another of at least 318 actions against science that the second Trump administration has taken since the president took office in January 2025."

Calmly explain your points to them and they become incensed 👏

I'm sorry, is the Trump Administration talking to a tech platform? Is it...requesting content moderation?

Knock me down with a feather. What a surprise.

Oh gosh... it's a grift. Who woulda known. The people crying "censorship" (better known as fascists in everyday language) are profiting from their lies, as revealed by @ninajankowicz.com

To be effective, protest must be noisy, obstructive, annoying. No longer is this allowed. Now the last attribute of effective dissent – persistence – is also to be banned. But the moment protest ceases to be effective is the moment democracy dies. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...