This is terrifying. "[AI agents] can... infer a researcher's latent hypotheses and produce data that artificially confirms them." ... "We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people" [email protected]

Scientists and scholars in AI and its social impacts call on von der Leyen to retract #AIHype statement. @olivia.science @abeba.bsky.social @irisvanrooij.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social @rocher.lc @danmcquillan.bsky.social @robin.berjon.com & many others have signed www.iccl.ie/press-releas...

🇺🇸 Este fin de semana abrimos la portada de CTXT con este texto de Fernando Prats sobre ese proyecto distópico del capitalismo extremo en EEUU llamado Trumpismo. ¡Lean! "Lo importante es descifrar el significado profundo del proyecto global de la ultraderecha estadounidense." ctxt.es/es/20251101/...

Today I’m very happy to watch @davidbazan.bsky.social brilliantly defend his thesis ”Algorithmic Interaction Ritual Chains on TikTok: Scrolling through Feedback Loops”

👉Es profundamente patológico que una persona sienta un deseo persistente de eludir una tarea agotadora que no le interesa lo más mínimo y que se ve forzada a realizar durante cuatro o más décadas de su vida para poder comer🍽️ Genial aquí, Adri T.✍️ ¿Síndrome postvacacional?⁉️ ctxt.es/es/20250901/...

For all the talks about concerns over disinformation, the mainstream media have been a key agent in the mainstreaming of far right politics by: - covering them disproportionately - hyping moral panics - platforming their bad faith actors as legitimate bylinetimes.com/2025/06/09/b...

​​“There is no ‘one weird trick’ that removes experts and creates miracle machines that can do everything that humans can do, but better,” Asmelash Teka Hadgu and @timnitgebru.bsky.social write. www.scientificamerican.com/article/repl...

THREAD: Under a new law, thousands of prisoners in Louisiana have been cut off from ever getting a chance at parole. Why? Because an algorithm said so. 1/

🦄 Conference Call : (DON'T) BELIEVE THE HYPE  Submit an abstract to the newly founded Hype Studies Group! We're organising the first edition of a Hype Studies Conference in Barcelona, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, the 10th-12th of September 2025. More info: hypestudies.org/conference

I very much appreciate @dkreiss.bsky.social & @shannimcg.bsky.social on this point. “Polarization can only be seen as a central threat to democracy if inequality is ignored.” journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

A WIRED investigation reveals that billion-dollar scam compounds in Myanmar—where tens of thousands are enslaved—are using Starlink, the satellite internet service from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to stay online and keep their operations running.

New article! It was a treat to be invited to contribute to and working with the editors and co-contributors in this special issue on economic ventures seeking or claiming to do good. valuationstudies.liu.se/article/view... Also, check out the full issue here: valuationstudies.liu.se/issue/view/496

"TikTok displayed the greatest right-wing skew, per its findings — showing right-leaning content 74% of the time." techcrunch.com/2025/02/19/s...

🔍 How can creative coding techniques like soundscaping and video recomposition help us unpack political issues + influencer practices on TikTok? 🎵📹 📖 Insights from explorations w/ @publicdatalab.bsky.social around the 2024 Romanian elections at @digitalmethods.net winter school:

"Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship."

Curiosamente, un joven que no se deja manipular por nadie defiende las mismas ideas que los tres hombres más ricos del mundo.

Tiktok boosted Republican messages 11.8% more than Democrat messages during the 2024 U.S. Presidential Race according to this new study that employed bots to view ~394,000 videos.

The salary of a 1st and 2nd year Phd student in Spain is now only about 100€ higher that than the minimum wage

“DeepSeek’s results demonstrate that the US Big Tech narrative that the expansion of energy production is what’s required for them to lead in a global ‘AI race’ is utter hogwash,” said @mmitchell.bsky.social. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Searching #liberal or #democrat on Instagram now returns "We've hidden these results", #Republican has no such problem. Seems bad.

Now that I've slept on it, let's discuss the TikTok ban. The message popping up on everyone's app is propaganda, plain and simple. And having propaganda involved in something as precarious at the creator economy is very, very dangerous.

Many of the parents blaming social media for their teens’ mental health struggles are just deflecting blame from their own violence and abuse. And that’s what the report finds. Adults’ violence is one of the major reasons teens struggle.

🌟 Fully funded PhD in European Studies! 🌟 Join us at Lund University to explore digital politics, digital diplomacy, digital disinformation & more. ✅ Master’s in humanities/social sciences required ⏳ Deadline: Jan 20th 📚 Apply: lu.varbi.com/what:job/job... #PhD #AcademicTwitter #digitaldiplomacy

This is information fragmentation. Extremely-online niches (and their norms!) are also not the be-all end-all — there’s an availability & prevalence issue. When Trump started ranting about “eating the pets” during the debate, people went to google to try to figure out wtf he was talking about.

It’s like no one saw this coming www.theguardian.com/society/2024...

Thrilled to announce the @datasociety.bsky.social Generative AI & Labor Primer by Aiha Nguyen & Alexandra Mateescu. It covers how GenAI impacts many forms of work, the human labor behind GenAI & AI's impact on worker control & surveillance. A labor/tech must-read! datasociety.net/library/gene...

A growing problem --- fake papers polluting systematic reviews. And interesting point that the gold-standard protocols that Cochrane is developing to weed out untrustworthy studies, are too much of an effort for systematic-review authors looking at 100s of papers. www.science.org/content/arti...

PhD-course on Multiple Correspondence Analysis, in Oslo January 13-16 2025! Come learn the technique from renowned expert Johs. Hjellbrekke, shooting star @marentoft.bsky.social, and yours truly. www.uio.no/studier/emne...

The far right has accrued so much financial & political power, particularly through the tech industry, that it should not surprise us that the liberal elite in politics, the media and academia are so scared to upset them Democracy and equality have always ever been secondary

Police are on track to kill more people this year than any other year on record in the US. mappingpoliceviolence.us

🔝🎯 Please SPREAD the voice &/or apply! 2 excellent PhD opportunities on Quantitative Sociology & Inequalities Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin At excellent & vibrant department, school, institute & university! Deadline: April 5th, 2024 call: www.tcd.ie/sociology/va...

The effect of social media on adolescents' #mentalhealth currently calls Western politicians on the scene. 😊☹️ Why they risk to fall for the trap of tech determinism & what to do about it 👉 Check out the commentary @paschneiders.bsky.social & I published in IPR policyreview.info/articles/new...

A judge has ordered that Starbucks rehire a Colorado Starbucks worker who was illegally fired for organizing a union and issue back pay and write an apology letter

Fascinating new experiment suggests "autonomous safety systems in cars can degrade the ordinary norms of reciprocity between people." www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

When we warn the real threat of AI is how it’s used against people in the present, not the fantasies that some day computers might think for themselves, this is exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about: health insurers using AI to deny care. arstechnica.com/health/2023/...