The biggest news coming out of YouTube lately looks to have been a quiet change to its search engine: instead of "sorting" you now "prioritize" (popularity, not view count). i.e. removing one of the last remaining ways to search based on concrete metrics. You also can't search the past hour anymore.

Pair of articles on slop developments on YouTube. Report from Kapwing about the most popular slop channels by country, and a finding of 33% of a new account's feed being brainrot (though it doesn't look like they replicated it). Bonus @eryk.bsky.social quote. www.kapwing.com/blog/ai-slop...

You know what I've grown fond of, in a world of horribly outrageous news? Things that I can feel a cute little tiny outrage over. Calling the tuna melt "the ultimate NYC sandwich" is a deranged thing to do. <small>outrage!!</small> gothamist.com/food/in-prai...

I'm working on a single graphic that illustrates how participatory propaganda becomes policy in the second Trump administration, particularly around the case of "They're Eating the Pets". Still hoping we'll get to take that last label away before those ?s resolve.

Common use of the word “censorship”conflates three distinct things: (a) factual claims ab suppressing speech; (b) legal claims ab U.S. law; (c) a normative claims ab free speech values. Elon slides between them interchangeably; the word becomes an escape hatch from accountability & chills others.

There is a fashionable "heterodox" self-branding trend that could really use more satire/derision. I am an edgy dissident intellectual who doesn't fit into your boxes! I have the courage to argue for my only *sometimes* reactionary/regressive beliefs! My honesty upsets you (but I require coddling).

This is worth reading for anyone interested in student use of LLMs for classwork. Wiki Education supports students as they edit @wikipedia.org, and they published some valuable findings here. Some is unsurprising, but as an evaluation of a largescale support/intervention system it looks quite useful

Read this 3800-word article by @hillaryclinton.bsky.social, published today in @theatlantic.com, on MAGA's war on empathy and the politically ascendant "don't-love-thy-neighbor" strain of Christianity on the front line. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Media Cloud is now a Digital Public Good! www.digitalpublicgoods.net/r/media-cloud @mediacloud.bsky.social

. @puddingviz.bsky.social made a funny "how bad is your streaming music" thing a few years ago. Spotify has now copied it in a Roast Me list, and it's *terrible*. Try the original pudding.cool/2021/10/judg...

@ehanford.bsky.social only part-way through your wonderful podcast and, being a dutiful wikipedian, I looked at some of the articles on subjects you deal with. I have thoughts, but I'm curious if you've evaluated wikipedia's coverage and what your thoughts are

CEO of Runaway goes full AI villain, creating a plugin specifically to thwart @wikipedia.org human editors' efforts to control LLM-generated content. I know the tell-tale differences are temporary, but why accelerate the pollution of the commons in particular? arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/n...

The podcasts that have most powerfully affected or informed me, in a thread. This is a very 8-years-ago thing to do, but I'm listening to the fantastic Sold a Story podcast, and feeling some affection for the format that's been dunked on a lot lately: 1/?

Podcasts have been shit on a lot lately, thanks to the dominance of the Rogansphere, but I'm listening to Sold a Story right now, which just feels like such an important and fascinating piece of journalism (about reading instruction), and it reminds me how incredible the format can be.

LLM disclosures are, in part, trigger warnings. Trigger warnings go at the top.

youtu.be/9hpHj5wNYDw?... 😚👌

Former NYC Mayor Eric Adams accused of rug pull as NYC Token crashes January 12, 2026 https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=nyc-token-crash

The desire to stand on a beach in bitter winter wind to stare at distant birds is hard to explain. Thanks to @rosemarymosco.com, people closest to me understand "oh, I get it, it's weird duck time." We don't talk about the masochism of scanning flocks of gulls, tho. rosemarymosco.com/comics/bird-...

Do you also love science museums? I continue my past studies in pedagogy by teaching a class on designing interactive educational exhibits. Students built a pop-up at Boston Cyberarts called "The Feeling is Mutual". See more about the exhibit at dataculture.northeastern.edu/teaching/the...

Call for Papers! We are seeking short papers that center questions and stakes of time in AI models. How do machines encode time & how do they structure our experience of time? For example, work examining the compression of labor & capitalism within AI’s infrastructures and model vectors. Details:

Join me Wednesday for a panel on “Wikipedia at 25: Authority, Legitimacy, and the Future of Knowledge” with Phoebe Ayers, Ryan McGrady, Steven Mintz. http://woborders.blog/2026/01/12/wikipedia-25-panel/

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has generated a flood of sexualized images of women and minors posted to the social media platform X. Regulators around the world are responding by opening inquiries, demanding takedowns, and threatening legal action. Tech Policy Press is tracking such responses.

Fentanyl deaths plummeted in 2023-2024 alongside an overall supply shortage, likely due to a Biden administration deal with China to restrict the sale of precursor chemicals. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

“WAGMI” — we're all gonna make it — was crypto's 2021 rallying cry. But those with wealth and power knew it was a lie, and that “all” just meant them. My latest traces the last five years from hype to technoligarchy — and why they're not all gonna make it either.

"The Block Log: 20 Years of Content Moderation on Wikipedia" rhododendrites.com/pdfs/The%20B...

NYT has an article about the companies that found MechaHitler, Great Replacement, White Genocide, non-consensual intimate images, and CSAM, and saw opportunity. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/t...

Preprint version now up. rhododendrites.com/main.html

Excited to join the panel for Wiki Education's Wikipedia at 25 event next week! We can celebrate the surprising resilience of this extraordinary project, as well as the discounted car rental rates it now qualifies for!

I have a short essay in Communications of the ACM about the new scraping wars between AI companies and websites, and how the fault lines are less clear than they were last time around. cacm.acm.org/opinion/ai-s... 1/3

When the clock strikes midnight on January 1, creative works from 1930 & sound recordings from 1925 will enter the public domain in the US, like: 💄 Dizzy Dishes, first Betty Boop cartoon 🕵️♀️ First 4 Nancy Drew novels 🚂 The Little Engine That Could 🎩 Morocco 🍑 Georgia on My Mind and many more! 🧵👇

These ads made me think again about Steve Mann, who was pitching head-mounted displays and augmented reality to block ads (among other things) like 25 years ago. Seems like potential killer app, but wearables are made by attention, not hardware companies these days. www.curbed.com/article/tech...

New paper out today: The Blocklog: 20 Years of Content Moderation on Wikipedia. In New Media & Society. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Albums + 90s is dirty, dirty millennialbait, but here I am. Post a perfect album from the 1990s that isn't [an obvious one].

iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent. Archivists have uploaded the 60 Minutes episode Bari Weiss spiked.

Spotify was archived by Anna's Archive 2 days ago. When the company starts filing lawsuits, remember this bit from the book "Spotify Teardown": Spotify *exists* because of bittorrent, and because it began ... *with an archive of pirated music*.

Let me tell you a story. Perhaps you can guess where this is going... though it does have a bit of a twist. I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let's dig into the findings. 🧵

Well now that's interesting. Anna's Archive scraped nearly all of Spotify, making it available through bit torrent, starting with the metadata. Some quantitative description in the post. annas-archive.org/blog/backing...

If only anyone said at the time that a law giving the executive branch power to ban an entire speech platform (or, of course, extract value under threat of ban) was a giant bipartisan congressional self-own.

Gift link to an Interview with the Vanity Fair photographer who took photos of Trump’s staff. I’m struck by his response to the response: “If presenting what I saw, unfiltered, is an attack, then what would you call it had I chosen to edit it and hide things about it?” wapo.st/49ixYtq

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

My friend Isaac Brickman of @officehourspodcast.bsky.social and I have a new article out on middleware in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: journals.sagepub.com/eprint/JMYZ3...

"If the court had carefully scrutinized the government’s national security arguments, it would have seen [...] a familiar example of the government exploiting national security fears to intimidate courts into giving it power that the constitution puts off limits." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

🎉 Celebrate Wikipedia Day NYC 2026 with us as we honor 25 years of the world's largest online encyclopedia! Enjoy keynote speeches, panel talks, edit-a-thons, family fun activities, swag, and more! 🎂 Register by Jan 20 wikipediadaynyc2026.eventbrite.com #Wikipedia25 #WikipediaDay #WikimediaNYC

MRC/Daily Wire's inane "expose" on Wiki Education is useful in that it's the most transparent expression of "yes, the war on Wikipedia is a direct extension of the war on education." Look, an org that supports any class supports classes we don't like!

Since Elon Musk joined the Trump Administration in January 2025, Starlink has entered 26 new countries, sometimes in places where they had struggled for regulatory approval for years until they were suddenly greenlit https://restofworld.org/2025/musk-starlink-trump-doge

It’s that time of year: what was the piece of writing about AI that stuck with you the most this year, pop press or academic? A few of mine in the thread. ⬇️

Recently attended the @oii.ox.ac.uk workshop on the Future of Social Media Research. Just went ahead and jotted down a few notes in a recap post here: rhododendrites.com/posts/OII-Wo... Thanks again to @manueltonneau.bsky.social and other organizers for two days of impressive sessions!

Most interesting talk at this [early] morning's PlatGovNet conference was Sohini Banerjee's work on the caste/gender/labor exploitation of maid-on-demand app gig workers in India. Service upgrades like "do you want to add a background check - 3 in 10 maids are criminals!" marketing.

Perfect ending to this @theguardian.com article about the tech industry's own coddling media bubble. “If you were a cupcake, what cupcake would be?” “I don’t want to be a cupcake because I don’t want to be eaten,” Karp said. “I’m resisting becoming a cupcake.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...