Per one large server I'm in, there's a new Discord scam to watch out for. Stay alert, and beware of suspicious links

Great analysis about all the panic-mongering in sillicon valley around AI @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social points to a COVID phantom pain of the elites "The only thing Big Tech is selling us is their own unprocessed trauma back to us" www.garbageday.email/p/a-comfort-...

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

The other goal of going to museums is to build a collection of eyeballs

Ring is a wildly dangerous company. Always has been. But it has sort of flown under the radar the last couple years as it tried to soften its image. Make no mistake that this is an extremely dangerous surveillance dragnet: www.404media.co/with-ring-am...

Pensar alternativas al prohibicionismo en internet implica desplazar el foco: de la censura y la vigilancia hacia otras medidas como la educación digital, las redes públicas y el control democrático de las plataformas.
 @christocasas.bsky.social zonaestrategia.net/es-que-nadie...

Governing TikTok - A US Power Play 🎭 Check out our new analysis published in Tech Policy Press wrapping up the last year of US tech policy shenanigans leading up to the #TikTokdeal that closed last week. Shout out to @alexturvy.bsky.social for leading this endeavor!

They built this reddit-like platform "Moltbook" where thousands of AI agents cosplay as sentient robots, pushing more people into AI psychosis, meanwhile our world crumbles over scarce resources 🫠 TO WHAT PROBLEM IS THIS A SOLUTION??? arstechnica.com/information-...

I haven't read the leaked 183-page Commission Decision against X, but I am reading the House Judiciary Committee's X posts about it and the worst stuff they could find is... preposterously weak. judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-su... x.com/JudiciaryGOP...

A reminder that one of the new owners of TikTok is Larry Ellison who also now owns CBS News…

3am, best time to change my bio here from "PhD student" to "freshly minted PhD" since that still hadn't properly sunk in... I may be slightly burnt-out from having worked on projects all the way through and after my defense to financially survive 🥹 but a few days in the mountains definitely helped!

To that end, I've teamed up with my friend @j12t.org, who runs @fediforum.org to put together an online "un-workshop" to explore different ways of growing the open social web! fediforum.org/2026-03-grow...

BREAKING: Now that TikTok is under US-based ownership, the social media app potentially collects more detailed information about its users, including precise location data. My latest for @wired.com: www.wired.com/story/tiktok...

Good read. A submission to the European Commission's call for evidence on Towards European Open Digital Ecosystems (importance of OSS for EU tech sovereignty, security and competitiveness). It ends with: > If you work in OSS, consider adding your voice. The feedback period ends February 3, 2026.

It's also *deliberately* disingenuous because we did explain AT and Eurosky at great length to their primary funder. If I were launching a social media about truth and verification I'd, like, try not to lie but that's just me. Anyway, some of us have work to do.

Why do tech billionaires want server farms in orbit? So that they don't have to deal with communities trying to defend their energy grids, water supplies and well being: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/techno...

📃🚌 We have just published version 2.0 of our report on the #DigitalOmnibus, now including recommendations for EU legislators on each of the most important articles, including whether the proposed changes should be rejected or retained. Read more here 👉 noyb.eu/en/digital-o...

This whole Greenland situation is truly insane, but I made a bet with a friend almost exactly one year ago that Trump would really try to take Greenland, and the prospect of my friend having to make a speech in a full beerhall that he was ignorant about Trump's insanity somehow helps me cope?

Can't hit the repost button often enough on that one. Great takedown of his _Anxious Generation_ airport book in none other than <checks notes> Nature, BTW: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

German bundestag all getting verified today

Belgium will participate in Eurovision. So disappointing. @rtbf.be fails to see that its platform is being weaponized by the state of Israel to maintain the impression that the country holds a large support for its genocide and occupation by the European population. www.rtbf.be/article/euro...

This explains something that has always mystified me about drivers who rail against bike lanes and transit. Why WOULDN'T you want people to have options not to drive? It would make your own driving better! But they don't just want good traffic, they want to reinforce the NORM of driving

HELP WANTED: We need a remote / hybrid experience lead for #ATmosphereConf Leave a comment in the forum and/or DM me discourse.atprotocol.community/t/atmosphere... FAQ entry discourse.atprotocol.community/t/atmosphere...

And now AI slop is taking a serious bite out of SocArXiv. Thread:

Citarella noted that he’s been warning, for more than half a decade, that too many people remain under the mistaken impression that “what happens on the internet isn’t real.” www.newyorker.com/culture/podc...

tl;dr: Bluesky began with genuine promise: a new social media platform where users could feel safer, but inconsistent moderation quickly eroded trust. When systemically marginalized users pushed back, Bluesky’s leadership minimized concerns and began to target them for bans.

These companies truly belong in hell.... internal documents showed META calculated that regulatory fines would be smaller than revenue from scam ads, so they just... keep running them at a higher price. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

This is one of the worst, most horrifying exposures we have ever seen. It is hard to overstate how bad the things that people are using tools like for are, and it's insane to pretend like these tools are anything other than nonconsensual porn machines www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

When you recreate Twitter, you shouldn't be surprised that you've recreated Twitter. Boggles my mind that Bluesky's leadership seems to have done very little forward thinking about these issues.

I became a Doctor yesterday 🥳 presented my thesis "What Others afford: sociotechnical shaping of normative processes on social media platforms". In it I describe how the way we all shape each other's behavior on social media is shaped by the architectures of the digital environments we inhabit.

A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?

"Conversations about “internet sovereignty” should not mistakenly assume that the exercise of sovereign state power over corporations will necessarily translate into greater agency for its people", @prateekwaghre.com writes www.techpolicy.press/indias-searc...

Flipped this on earlier and holy god do some of you post a lot bsky.app/profile/stec...

How can we know if a law or policy has chilled people’s free expression? Can we use science to find out? Excited to join @penney.bsky.social, author of a new book on Chilling Effects, & @katygb.bsky.social on Dec 10th to discuss the science of civil liberties knightcolumbia.org/events/the-s...

"if you CAN tinker, it's empowering, if you MUST tinker, it's discouraging" @robin.berjon.com at #decidimfest on the difficulties of decentralized social media systems

Great panel on digital sovereignty at #decidimfest with @francescabria.bsky.social : "we cannot build apps empowering popular sovereignty on top of critical infrastructure that is weaponized against democracy"

Ugh. The right wing bullshit machine is pumping out and amplifying fake videos (Sora, AI) of Black people talking about SNAP benefits, videos oozing with racist stereotypes, to justify / distract from the real human suffering that the SNAP suspension is going to cause. www.tiktok.com/t/ZTMqbgpgj/

This interesting pre-print misses sth about the Twitter-like platform they've set up. Twitter affords a lot of abilities for users to make the content of others visible which isn't the case for all platforms, I wrote how this significantly shapes group dynamics journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Very much enjoyed this presentation on the role of social norms & demarcation in platform regulation by @nathalievanraemdonck.com - long story short “democracy is hard” @ckatzenbach.bsky.social #ZeMKI20

I wrote about the Reiser brothers and their hilarious, disgusting Listers documentary for Slate: slate.com/culture/2025...

Successfully defended my thesis to the jury this week 🥳 Public defense on 13/11! grateful to @snurb.info @tomdeleyn.bsky.social @pieterballon.bsky.social and Ksenia Ermoshina for their insightful feedback and @ikepicone.bsky.social @imuses.bsky.social and Trisha Meyer for their amazing supervision!

Andreessen Horowitz, which will be one of three firms to lead the acquisition of TikTok, is headed by Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley tech titan who considered himself to be "an unpaid intern" of Elon Musk's DOGE. But he's not the only major Trump ally involved with this deal

Too bad the GOP effectively criminalized studying how information moves online and news orgs laid off and demonized all the reporters who covered the burgeoning online accelerationist performative death cults. All of that work was somehow "censorship" that needed to be stopped. Now we're here.

did a little media criticism www.theverge.com/politics/777...

MAGA and libs are tumbling over themselves to pinhole the Charlie Kirk shooter as left or right but @garbageday.email piece is probably the most accurate take. Shooting a big name for internet clout and accelerationism, with no clear political motive other than being an agent of chaos.

IF this is true-- and it's a big if, remember who is running the FBI right now-- please be aware that back when I was monitoring 8chan and later Terrorgram, this is EXACTLY what Nazis urged their followers to do. They encouraged each other to do mass murder and then frame the left for it.

Conversations around decentralisation and the open social web have gotten fairly unproductive, resulting in a letter calling for mutual respect Im signing it, and with that, I have thoughts regarding discourse, decentralisation and why this space matters. connectedplaces.online/on-discourse...

science is constructed through social processes, which does not mean it is arbitrary but it means it is dynamic. great piece (and thread) by @carlbergstrom.com

8. This has been a short and honestly rather peevish thread, so if you want read more that has been written in a more equanimous tone, here's a short piece that I coauthored a few years ago, precisely about how we deal with this kind of duplicity.