The real issue isn’t immigration, it’s the feedback loop: platforms amplify anxiety → voters feel it → politicians chase it → hollow policy follows. Until we break that cycle, we won’t get functional decisions or functional democracy.

Governments and voters are both reacting to algorithm-shaped “public opinion,” not grounded priorities. Immigration feels urgent because platforms amplify fear, pulling parties into hollow performances of toughness. The far right reads that drift as confirmation it’s winning.

Weird is beautiful

I've had the immense pleasure of meeting and working with some of the folks at the Gazzetta journalism lab and they recently published this based on some of their efforts: www.gazzetta.xyz/ai-worker-ri... I strongly encourage you to read this.

Just to pre-empt the pundits, I absolutely believe you could run a Mamdani in middle America and win

🎉🎉🎉

The WSJ journalists build a house of deep reporting and accountability. Then the op-ed page editors spend all day burning it down with toxic, fact-free arson.

Das ist richtig, aber Konsolidierung ist fällig. Und dann eine Förderung so gestaltet, dass Medien nicht am Interesse der Kunden (der berühmte „Markt“ - das sind wir alle) vorbei produzieren. Viele Medien, die wenig konsumiert werden, ist gesellschaftlich auch kein Mehrwert. 1/2

Really pretty weird that this is the central topic of the NYC mayoral debate.

Portland, I love you! 💙❤️💙 This gives me great hope, and a good chuckle. #StopTheMadness #StopTrump #Resist 👊🏼

"even if it's AI, it's at least true" hard to overstate the damage this stuff is doing to people's brains. we're gonna be cleaning the slop out of archives for decades

I kind of can’t believe this Bari Weiss quote is even real, and yet www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/b...

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU. Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

I was curious if The Post's shift to accommodating the right was yielding any distinct benefit to the paper. To this point, it hasn't — and it's hard to see why it would. More data (including on CBS) here: www.pbump.net/o/you-cant-g...

It’s hard to find much evidence of a true youth movement rallying behind Kirk beside the conservatives who were already fans. Instead, we see a top-down effort from powerful people to use a controversial man’s death to create a cult of personality where one didn't exist. trib.al/pAP5Egz

I have criticisms of ICEBlock, but this is authoritarian bullshit, and the fact that nearly all smartphone use one of two app stores controlled by US corporations does not bode well for the future

And yes, while Mastodon isn’t my thing and I prefer AT Proto to Activity as federated social media infrastructure, I am VERY glad it exists and is being built out, too. The future absolutely requires online communication hubs that can’t be bought by dead-eyed Nazis.

You absolutely should not dismiss the AT Protocol technology that runs this place as boring nerd stuff, because that is the exact technology we are going to need to ensure that usable social media that isn’t controlled by Nazis continues to exist.

No one knows Silicon Valley better than @stevenlevy.bsky.social. And no one is more clear-eyed about how far removed it has become from its supposed ideals.

One problem I think is Ezra is a policy guy who basically thinks arguing for liberalism is like an extension of arguing for policy, instead of an argument for a form of life/association

Service-oriented journalism can help provide deeper impact data and ensure your reporting is relevant. But how can we adopt this approach when so many systems in our industry are resistant to change? Madison Karas & @pboehler.net explored this idea through workshops and one-on-one sessions 👇

Shot, chaser Young men more likely to vote Green than Reform. Young men second most progressive group of any demographic. Combined right-wing vote barely bigger than Green vote alone for young men

I wrote in support of @thisismissem.social's letter saying that ATProto and ActivityPub ecosystems ought to engage kindly and constructively with each other. And I have explained my thinking more here: github.com/swicg/genera...

Newspapers disappear. Communities’ stories shouldn’t. Community Webs librarians are archiving grassroots news to preserve the web we built. Learn more ⤵️ blog.archive.org/2025/08/27/p... 🧵

Social media's rage-bait engagement-based business model has been horrific for societies globally, but what if AI chatbots suck-up-bait is even worse? It's less trackable, has a huge impact on how we see ourselves and the world, and on our ability to challenge our thinking.

If Bourdieu were alive today, he’d probably be here (or his publisher) and write something like this: „The populist performance masks how economic capital appropriates anti-elite rhetoric to secure its own reproduction.“

professional activists and institutional intellectuals be like:

Thanks to @pboehler.net for the shoutout to #ProtocolsForPublishers in his newsletter talking about service journalism. See him at #HOPE16 and at PfP next month as we all continue to gather technologists and journalists to forge a better tomorrow www.pboehler.net/19-work-in-p...

Someone on here compared AI produced material as "digital asbestos " which in a few decades' time we will have to work out how to eradicate from the fabric of research.

Want to go deeper? Join the Lenfest Communities of Practice on Thursday, Aug. 21 at 2 p.m. EDT for a workshop with Madison and Patrick. We’ll discuss how to implement service methods in your newsroom and provide audiences with valuable information that helps them navigate their lives 👇

This gathering on protocols for publishers (ATProto, MCP, …) in August might be of interest of New York-based media thinkers: pfp.unternet.co h/t @chadkoh.com

Journalism struggles to articulate its value — but a service framework can help publishers measure and communicate their impact. Building on a session from the Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit, Madison Karas & @pboehler.net shared resources for rethinking your impact tracking strategy:

why are people still on twitter

Between social media, public-private chat spaces (think ClubHouse, Twitter Spaces), and now LLMs; the billionaires and many other people have nearly perfected the sociotechnology for cooking one’s own brain in a groupthink counter-knowledge stew—which increasingly seems not accidental??

"Free Press" means becoming part of a company that paid off an administration attempting to stifle the free press www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/b...

If you want to get involved in fighting these here, check out @fightforthefuture.org's "Bad Internet Bills" campaign as a starting point. www.badinternetbills.com

This was so disappointing. It revealed a narrow-minded pettiness that underlies editorial judgment, an unkind and unthoughtful institutional understanding of the world & your role in it. The self-righteous response shows you aren’t even trying to understand the limits your privileged horizons.

Incredible that Very Serious People are decrying proposals that Zohran Mamdani didn’t run on. His rent freeze pledge is only for NYC’s rent stabilized apartments—a tiny fraction of housing inventory. He never proposed rent control.

Lesenswertes Interview mit Medienforscher @luis-paulitsch.bsky.social über die Strategien rechtsextremer Propaganda-Plattformen, die sich „alternative Medien“ nennne:

nyt op-ed: we cannot normalize the left’s brazen attempt to win voters by talking to them

Original post: bsky.app/profile/did:...

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? You absolutely can lie via data & math & everything about how you present data is an argument for how to interpret/understand it Everything we know is founded on best guesses & analogies All technoscience is enmeshed with human values

Backup data for the China Labour Bulletin（中国劳工通讯）. Go to “Files” and you will find downloadable datasets and the data description. osf.io/ajw37/?view_... China Labour Bulletin just dissolved on 12th June 2025. It’s an NGO based in Hong Kong. #CLB #中国劳工通讯

If we’re going to talk about media ecosystems, I do think there’s something to learn from accounts like this. They aren’t reacting to change, they’re building a specific reality and insisting on that reality regardless of what the actual facts are, and people’s worldview changes around that.

This looks like an 80s comedy where John Belushi & some stoners steal a tank for shits & giggles

"The survey, conducted by Public Policy Polling for Democrat Justin Brannan’s city comptroller campaign, found Mamdani beating Cuomo 35 percent to 31 percent — a difference that is narrowly within the 4.1 percent margin of error." good things are still possible www.politico.com/news/2025/06...