NEW: On Memorial Day, Pope Leo XIV releases his first AI encyclical with an Anthropic co-founder. Trump blacklisted Anthropic over Pentagon access. It will lift up the primacy of the human person over technology in moral confrontation with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman’s Silicon Valley.

Interesting tensions come up in this piece about the relationship between content creators and campaigns, campaign finances, authenticity, and audience-creator trust. Questions of who pays (or should appear to pay) political content creators and how.

Increasingly it seems like "teach AI literacy" means "encourage kids to adopt certain big tech products." These things should not be synonymous. Tech literacy is good, what this bill is calling literacy is bad!

🚨NEW DISINFO PAPER🚨 TLDR; disinformation circulates as narratives, not false facts. This paper took five years (!!!) and a rotating cast of collaborators and GRAs. Our case studies include the pee tape, and we have an entire appendix justifying that. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Social movement scholar here to comment on No King again. a 🧵: These protests are important b/c: 1.) as sustained image events, protests offer evidence of continued disapproval of the direction the country is going and disavowal of the country's leadership.

You know, honestly whatever at this point. Might as well.

German press on the death of Jürgen Habermas.

In honor of Habermas, a meme I made

Breaking: The Trump administration will receive a $10 billion fee for brokering the deal that kept TikTok alive in the U.S. on.wsj.com/3NdA4mh

Through Palantir software demos, public documentation, and Pentagon records, @carolinehaskins.bsky.social explains exactly how the US military uses Claude:

“The indispensability of a liberal education is the freedom from being tied to the zeitgeist of one’s age or situation to love what is true, good, and beautiful, and to be initiated into the world while cultivating a love for it.” www.liberalcurrents.com/upholding-li...

NEW: Guards have taken away crayons, colored pencils & paper during recent room searches at Dilley, according to detainees and others. After one inspection, the children just “cried and cried and cried,” a mother said. The facility denies the claims. By @mckenziefunk.com @micarosenberg.bsky.social

when people talk about AI used in moderation of social media posts, you must remember there is always the human-in-the-loop, often a woman, often in the Global South, always dehumanised and forgotten 1/n www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

UW-Madison Bad Bunny connection, On Wisconsin!

NEW: Records reviewed by WIRED show DHS’s facial recognition app (Mobile Fortify) isn’t designed to actually "verify" identity—despite DHS claims and its agents relying on its matches to support probable cause in the field.

The EU Commission has preliminarily found TikTok in breach of the Digital Services Act over its addictive design — infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications & hyper-personalized recommendations. ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

Here is a neat scroll that gives you a look into both Lawson's legacy and some history of console gaming: artsandculture.google.com/story/jerry-...

I just

The LYS is a generative place

Glad to see Aphex getting his due, though the term "nostalgiacore" is a no thanks from me

A few days ago we lost an important hidden figure in the history of 20th century Cold War technology—Gladys West’s work and insights were essential in the creation of GPS: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

As I discuss at much more length here, extremism is an exercise in the social construction of reality. Actions targeting out-groups are intended to strengthen the validity of an in-group's narrative about what is real and which values matter. www.jmberger.com/extremism/th...

🧵

This is morally wrong and everyone can see that it is wrong.

Beautiful words about Centralia and the ambivalence of the coal region. As teens we would walk down graffiti highway, look for puffs of steam, and wish there was still more to see.

Hey #teamrhetoric: I'm part of a team submitting a proposal to RSQ for a special issue on conspiracy theories. If you're doing work on conspiracy rhetoric outside of the US or using a feminist/queer/trans or BIPOC lens, I want to know about it! Please reach out or share with a friend!

💥 Sovereignty as a service. New article in Media, Culture & Society on how big tech companies are co-opting and redefining digital sovereignty. Co-authored by me and Alexandre Costa Barbosa journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Like early QAnon posts, which were often framed as questions and short, decontextualized words and phrases, the recent Epstein emails invite readers to participate in crafting a range of their own meanings.

Essential perspective

Wow (if so)! This has become a kind of received wisdom in humanities fields as well. Looking forward to reading

There is a difference, by definition, between mainstream and extremist messaging, but in many ways the boundaries are blurring in digital spaces. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Deeply sad for those who now face this, and disgusted that the ones with the least pay the price every time www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

I think, in our hearts, we all knew this was where things were heading: www.theregister.com/2025/10/24/m...

Yes to this. Public speaking is an important democratic skill!

"The protocol taught us that technology can be based on human values like ethics and morality. It showed that voluntary compliance works when all parties benefit." On robots.txt. www.heise.de/en/backgroun...

Wow what a blast from the past. This was my favorite movie for years as a kid

There's still time to submit to the Conspiratorial Economies NCA preconference! We would love to hear about your communication and conspiracy theory research and works-in-progress. You can submit either a 250 word abstract or a 2-3 sentence flash talk proposal (that's not a lot, you can do it!)

I’m frustrated for many reasons at surface-skimming media history takes on AI like “people opposed the printing press too!” If media history is going to help us navigate the present, we have to reckon with something people often omit from those comparisons—the intersection of power & new media (1/4)

We are delighted to share the publication of Risky Research: An AoIR Guide to Researcher Protection and Safety, the culmination of over two years of collaborative effort by the AoIR Risky Research Working Group. aoir.org/riskyresearc...

Yep! Looks like it is indeed nothing more than a rumor and likely to be untrue (planning to delete my prior comment shortly to avoid contributing to the confusion)

Proud night to be a Badger, On Wisconsin!

Today is the last day to submit your paper to ECS for NCA 2025 Denver!

Working on comm and economics? Digital or creator economy? Neoliberalism? Circulation or ecologies? Rhetoric, cultural studies, political economy, or org comm? Consider submitting to the Economics, Communication, and Society division for NCA 2025 in Denver! More info and link below:

Working on comm and economics? Digital or creator economy? Neoliberalism? Circulation or ecologies? Rhetoric, cultural studies, political economy, or org comm? Consider submitting to the Economics, Communication, and Society division for NCA 2025 in Denver! More info and link below:

Hi, we are an alternative to Amazon-owned Audible 👋🏻 With us, you select the independent bookshop you want to support (we have 3,000+ partners across the globe), and we share profits from your purchase with them. We're also employee-owned and a registered Social Purpose Corporation.

Don't buy shit, write your book

Wife and I just did our daily 5calls through 5calls.org. Not the only thing one can do, but it’s absolutely worth making your reps feel the collective rage. Signed, someone whose social anxiety goes through the roof on the phone. Just black out and read the script :)

🧶💾 Punch cards aren’t just relics of computing—they’re still powering knitting machines today! Discover how hobbyists & archivists are preserving this blend of tech + textile. ⁠ 🔗 https://blog.archive.org/2025/02/12/vanishing-culture-punch-card-knitting/ ⁠ 🕳️ #VanishingCulture⁠