Sometimes when people ask me why I’m wearing a mask I say I’m traveling or have some important thing soon and can’t afford to get sick and miss it and that’s pretty much always true but I think it would be nice if it were more normalized to just say “I don’t want to get sick” and leave it at that

I’ve come to believe that we need to gather considerable forces and a campaign to demand the removal of face masks by ICE, Border Patrol, FBI and police. It is a practice in conflict with the principles of transparency & accountability that are central to the concept of democracy.

you put self-driving cars on the road and you kill a person, you should be scared. if you put a chatbot into kids' hands and tell them to use it and they use it and then they kill themselves, you should be really fucking scared. the idea that the wagons should circle *around you* is unbelievable.

🚨Special Issue Alert: Platforms, Publics, and Anti-Publics (1/9) Introduction from our guest editors Zoetanya Sujon, Harry Dyer and Felipe Bonow Soares. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #academicsky #socialmediasky

🚨 New paper drop! How does a social movement once started out powerful somehow turn into a partisan battle? In our new publication in @icsjournal.bsky.social, we answer this question by analyzing 83 million #MeToo tweets from 2017–2020. 1/

On Tuesday night, you may have noticed something a little different on Bluesky. Here's a peek behind the scenes of how the election feed came together. Endlessly grateful for this collaboration with @wnyc.org/@gothamist.com & @bsky.app!

we should stop pretending people in academia are aligned with our projected political imaginations of higher ed. many CS/AI "luminaries" are obviously engaged in political projects to unravel labor power, belittle human intelligence & creativity, and enhance capacities for state & corporate violence

Meta earns $3.5 billion every six months from showing Faceboon and Instagram users 15 billion “higher legal risk” scam ad impressions a day, internal documents state. That haul vastly exceeds how much the company expects regulators To fine it for running scam ads. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

The secret life of an LM is defined by its internal data types. Inner layers transport abstractions that are more robust than words, like concepts, functions, or pointers. In new work yesterday, @arnabsensharma.bsky.social et al identify a data type for *predicates*. bsky.app/profile/arn...

Should local officials in a democracy be allowed to sign NDAs?

Null models for comparing information decomposition across complex systems journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Digital humanities researchers often care about fine-grained similarity based on narrative elements like plot or tone, which don’t necessarily correlate with surface-level textual features. Can embedding models capture this? We study this in the context of fanfiction!

It’s almost like if people tell you that to win you have to turn your back on poor people, or Muslims, or trans people, or immigrants, you can just say, “no, that’s immoral, we’re not doing that,” and keep doing good old fashioned organizing and campaigning and things will be ok

Not sure about everyone else, but I’m encouraged today (elated?) that we learned last night that we can beat candidates/parties of bullshit, AI slop, corruption, and authoritarianism without emulating them and without tacking towards a false center between us and them.

Zohran Mamdani says on NY1 he didn't get a congratulatory call from either Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams last night. He says he got a congratulatory call from Curtis Sliwa, though.

Another day, hundreds more ads for #AI nudify apps across #Meta platforms... Meta loves to talk about "new technology to detect ads for nudify apps" and "strict rules against non-consensual intimate imagery." Funny though, because we at @americansunlight.org sure do find these ads often...

Good things are possible and we don’t have to settle.

😎😎😎😎 GOOD THINGS CAN STILL HAPPEN 😎😎😎😎

Watching Mamdani's victory speech, I'm struck by his—and his campaign's—unabashed vision of the US as an immigrant society, a culture built from the ground up from diversity. It is a complete rejection and reversal of the search for a white-washed homogeneity that the political right projects.

As many have pointed out, Mamdani didn't stand apart from our trans brothers and sisters. He didn't play the "Gee, gosh, it sure is complicated," milquetoast moderate card. And he crushed. The way forward is together, not over the bodies of our own.

Today in class we read two papers on data and ethics: "Data Is the New What? Popular Metaphors & Professional Ethics in Emerging Data Culture" culturalanalytics.org/article/1105... "Ethical and Privacy Considerations for Research Using Online Fandom Data" par.nsf.gov/servlets/pur...

BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York City mayoral race, NBC News projects. nbcnews.to/4nIzNUC

hot off the (virtual) press in @transstudies.bsky.social: a collaboration with @pranavgoel.bsky.social, @crazybrokeasian.bsky.social, and @diesagar.bsky.social on information flows in US local & national news about transgender people (spoiler alert: it’s complicated) doi.org/10.57814/557...

hi researcher friends! if you conduct & record interviews with people and are concerned about the privacy risks of using online transcription services, i have good news, now with a minimal, kinda bad UI! github.com/asmithh/tran...

hey i heard bluesky is improving reply quality by banning u

I think the dislike button is a good idea as long as I also receive a monthly email with the name and address of everyone who disliked one of my posts

People three hops away in your social network are people you don't know - Your friends' friends' parents - Your partner's parents' friends - Your boss's kid's teachers - Your friend's doctor's parents - Your ex's partner's colleague List goes on and on for why this is terrible criteria

This. 100x over "Rather than trying to reinvent trust & safety from scratch, you need to be learning from what already exists out there, what has worked and what has failed and where there's room for improvement."

We have a new preprint: osf.io/preprints/so... What have we learned about social media - the constantly moving target of empirical research - over the past decade?

Today marks 30 days of the government shutdown and federal workers -- 750,000 were furloughed -- are barely making ends meet. @telliotter.bsky.social + @makenakelly.bsky.social spoke to federal workers struggling to pay bills, working side gigs, and relying on free food programs to get by:

i'm also rly proud of writing up the User Guide for this T&S reasoning model: cookbook.openai.com/articles/gpt... It includes how this could work with @roost.tools first public tool, Osprey! cookbook.openai.com/articles/gpt...

Excited to announce here at the @parispeaceforum.bsky.social that, after months of joint technical work together, OpenAI will open source through ROOST one of its main internal models that handles detection and moderation. This will allow anyone or any company to use, test, and study the model.

We live in a country where the media is focused more on who a Democratic mayoral candidate defines as his ‘aunt’ than on the DHS Twitter account putting out white nationalist propaganda and replying to Nazis online.

that certainly is one way to start an encylopedia entry for george floyd

We're surveying researchers about name changes in academic publishing. If you've changed your name and dealt with updating publications, we want to hear your experience. Any reason counts: transition, marriage, cultural reasons, etc. forms.cloud.microsoft/e/E0XXBmZdEP

Also new in v1.109: custom feed operators now receive more interaction events. If you run a custom feed, now you'll know when people like, quote, repost, reply, and see posts in your feed. All valuable signals that can help you drive higher-quality recommendations in your feeds.

We've just published the most comprehensive study of news creators to date covering 24 countries. Authored by Nic Newman @amyrossarguedas.bsky.social @mitalilive.bsky.social @richardfletcher.bsky.social, it identifies the most mentioned in each country 📱Report buff.ly/bL6y8Hj 🧵6 findings in thread

This is a sad but correct decision. Thank you, @python.org, for committing to your values when it matters. I would love a list of organization that have made this kind of value-driven decision to donate to.

LLMs are often used for text annotation, especially in social science. In some cases, this involves placing text items on a scale: eg, 1 for liberal and 9 for conservative There are a few ways to accomplish this task. Which work best? Our new EMNLP paper has some answers🧵 arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00828

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

The fact that the Hatch Act has just disappeared is not the worst violation of this government but it's a good microcosm of the problem with everything right now, e.g. laws are not self-enforcing

Very good overview of the current state of Platform data access under the DSA by @daphnek.bsky.social verfassungsblog.de/dsa-platform...

Welcome to Decoherence Media, an independent nonprofit founded by @jennefer.bsky.social and @tristanl.ee that investigates authoritarian and anti-democratic movements using open-source and data-driven methods.

📣THREAD: It’s surprising to me that so many people were surprised to learn that Signal runs partly on AWS (something we can do because we use encryption to make sure no one but you–not AWS, not Signal, not anyone–can access your comms). It’s also concerning. 1/

Trump’s victims are now washing up in Trinidad: “The U.S. campaign targeting what it says is drug trafficking from Venezuela has exposed Trinidad to the fallout: unidentified bodies with burn marks and missing limbs showing up in its territory.“

When Jacobin and the Pod Save bros are aligned on defending nazi tattoos, we’ve got a problem and it’s not going to be solved by you coming into my mentions and telling me I’m not seeing what I’m definitely seeing— which is white people left, right, and center coming together to defend Nazi tattoos

An AP analysis finds drops in the number of Black freshmen at many elite colleges in the two years since the Supreme Court’s decision ending affirmative action. apnews.com/article/affi...

On X, an AI Community Note contributor (🙃) inaccurately claimed that No Kings footage from Boston was from a previous march. Despite failing to reach consensus (to the system's credit), the screenshotted note was used to accuse MSNBC of lying. Senator Cruz also posted - then deleted - this claim.