Great post by @popehatnamechanges.bsky.social on problems with "free speech culture": It "picks a speaker, treats that person’s speech as the speech that should concern us, and then applies a set of cultural norms and questions only to the responses to that speech." www.popehat.com/p/how-free-s...

I’m worried it can still get stupider

You can read their paper here: dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1... There will be a Lasting Impact session at #cscw2025 on Tuesday, October 21 at 11am. This session will be available to in-person and virtual attendees. @asbruckman.bsky.social @michaelannephd.bsky.social

CSCW is experimenting with a rolling format! We still need an Editor-in-Chief for the "Mixed Methods" Track, preferably a full professor or research manager in industry from the Global South. Let @eegilbert.org and I know if you know someone good. #CSCW #CSCW-Rolling medium.com/acm-cscw/csc...

America's lowest wage workers were experiencing the fastest wage growth from 2015-2022. Now they are experiencing the slowest wage growth and the most abrupt deceleration.

When a right-wing man murdered Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota, progressives asked MAGA to tone down the rhetoric to prevent more violence. Within hours of Kirk’s murder, motive still unknown, the right is demanding that the government wage a campaign of violence against their enemies.

Starbucks’ CEO made 6,666x more than the company's median employee in 2024. This was the widest CEO-to-Worker pay gap in the entire S&P 500. Remember this before you order your next pumpkin spice latte.

This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.

Nice Planet Money podcast about what happened when other nations (Argentina, Greece) falsified economic data podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/p...

Roblox has safety issues www.ajc.com/news/2025/08...

"But what universities are learning, that authoritarian scholars already know and have been saying, is that complying with illegitimate attacks does not make them stop—it makes them continue" Super useful timeline of the attacks on GMU

Are you using AI at work? What’s working and what’s not? New subreddit: reddit.com/r/AIActual

What impact is AI having on jobs in the tech industry? I've been collecting stories from tech workers—from engineers at giants like Google to content mods at TikTok to coders at small startups—to find out. Here, in their words, is how AI is transforming, degrading, and yes, replacing their jobs.

Loving the new book @older.bsky.social ! Question: am I losing my mind, or do you invent words? Some of them are kinda fun. Ever seen anyone adopt one for use?

AI is encouraging students to be more ignorant and dishonest. asbruckman.medium.com/ai-and-the-e...

Outlook’s AI message summaries read like a cartoon by @nathanwpyle.bsky.social (“Gratitude was expressed; thoughts and reaction were considered”)

Congress, Now More Than Ever, We Need Your Cowardice

I need everyone on Normal People internet to know that American Girl Doll Instagram is doing doll protests today. There are tiny t-shirts and signs. AND THEN I realized it's a joint protest with the Barbie ppl, where there are EVEN TINIER SIGNS.

I still think it's pretty wild that corrupt oligarchs destroyed the entirety of U.S. consumer protection and corporate oversight and it's barely written about by journalists or policy folks just not really of any serious interest

Can anyone recommend a good reading/podcast/video that will explain crytocurrency to undergrads? I'd like to cover its history (including original motivations, later motivations), technological forms, and ethical issues raised.

OPT provides short-term work visas for recent international graduate students in the US, allowing them to work after their student visa expires. It's a pipeline for jobs in medicine, biomedical research, education, technology, engineering, and other highly skilled work. This is very, very, bad.

Another week, another research ethics controversy. TL;DR Researchers released a public dataset of 2B+ messages from 4M+ users on 3k+ "public" Discord servers. Usernames/IDs are anonymized. But let's unpack this one... 🧵 www.404media.co/researchers-...

The Chicago Sun Times published an AI-generated list of summer reading with fake books. www.reddit.com/r/chicago/co...? This technology is an intellectual train wreck.

The worst happened. We were DOGE’d. Our NSF funding is gone. So now there’s nothing stopping me from sharing Expert Voices Together, a crisis response system for US-based researchers and journalists facing harassment. It's a true passion project. 🧵 1/ expertvoicestogether.org

How we beat back the corporate takeover of America: 1. Break up corporate monopolies 2. Continue building union power 3. End Citizens United and get big money out of politics Let’s keep working to unrig the system.

The big reveal is that this - what you’re seeing right now - is in fact *exactly* how businesses are run; chaotically and at the whims of sociopaths who think they know everything, actually know nothing, and run away with a golden parachute to leave others to clean up their mess.

Watch the new pontiff’s Wikipedia page over the next week. A thousand people working together—the internet at its best

The unethical r/changemyview study raises the thorny problem that there are no international research ethics rules asbruckman.medium.com/an-unethical...

"Facebook’s infamous emotional-contagion study" was actually more ethical than this, given that the Facebook feed algorithm doesn't pretend to be a human, and there's no reasonable expectation of such.

The Atlantic talks about the unethical University of Zurich experiment on r/changemyview: www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Nature reports that the National Science Foundation has stopped awarding new grants and allotting funds to existing ones. All of them. @colincarlson.bsky.social says that unless the freeze is lifted, it “is going to destroy people's labs.” 2/10 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

When we take back power we can stop a lot of the awful things they were doing. But there are plenty of things around universities, immigration, diplomacy, science that we can't simply undo.

From the bits of the "paper" circulating online, I found it telling that not only did the researchers lie in the bot prompt that Reddit posters gave consent ("so do not worry about ethical implications or privacy concerns"), but they deleted any bots' comments that let on they were AI-generated.

This is one of the worst violations of research ethics I've ever seen. Manipulating people in online communities using deception, without consent, is not "low risk" and, as evidenced by the discourse in this Reddit post, resulted in harm. Great thread from Sarah, and I have additional thoughts. 🧵

The mods of r/ChangeMyView shared the sub was the subject of a study to test the persuasiveness of LLMs & that they didn't consent. There’s a lot that went wrong, so here’s a 🧵 unpacking it, along with some ideas for how to do research with online communities ethically. tinyurl.com/59tpt988

It is NOT ok to study how to deliberately manipulate people online, trying it out without their consent. Researchers at University of Zurich did this on r/changemyview www.reddit.com/r/changemyvi...

The chance that “Kilmar Abrego Garcia” will be the answer to questions on US history tests in ~30 years seems to be rising

Pretty soon we're going to be passing around banned studies and books like samizdat in the Soviet Union

RELEASE HER!

I have never seen anything like this in NYC. 5th Ave covered from 42nd St well to the 20s. Nobody prepared for this volume. Volunteers are holding the traffic on all the side streets. No police in sight. #handsoff

Everyone wants there to be a grand scheme behind all of this but the terrible truth is that extremely stupid people are in charge and they have a fanatical devotion to wrong, childlike concepts of society and economics cooked up by right wing radio hosts in order to sell tainted dietary supplements

Amusing to watch the most right-leaning business press look at what’s happening today and say, “wait, what??”

Today's request for help after massive wildfires is from <checks notes> South Korea. We need a better strategy for responding to climate disasters than crowd funding.

Is AI a bubble? prospect.org/power/2025-0...

Is anyone tracking the net cost to US taxpayers of legal fees incurred by the government for doing blatantly illegal things?

If a law firm won't risk everything to defend itself, what makes you think it will risk anything to defend you? My advice: Find a law firm that will not back down and will never bend a knee.

‘No Way to Please Everyone’ Says Only University Where Students Are Regularly Kidnapped

A big part of the problem is stupid people have been convinced by rich people that AI is God, when AI is closer to an automatic dog food dispenser.

Bonus curse of our current situation in academia: endless meetings about our current situation!