Had a breast exam today. After being contorted & smushed into a glass shield, then gracelessly crushed w/ a vice, the tech asked if I was okay. I said my neck was stiff. She replied, “And you’re only 50. I put 80-year olds in this thing.” My one thought: No way this device was designed by women.

I scribbled down all my shutdown-related intrusive thoughts and put them in a blog post. open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer. He is a computer safety researcher. And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine. In under 1600 words. aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

I’m speechless over this one: www.fpol.no/the-informat...

WATCH: Counsel @haydenjohnson.bsky.social breaks down the key aspects of our victory against the Trump admin’s violent and unconstitutional actions in the Chicago area. Threaded ⬇️ If you're in the area & have witnessed misconduct by ICE & other federal agents, report them at tinyurl.com/chicagoTRO

“Early calls” are a common focus of rumors about election integrity. They contribute to uncertainty and can feed conspiracy theories about politically motivated “calls” (from one side) and changed votes (from the other).

Hi Bluesky 👋 Small life update: I’m at the centre of a multimillion dollar lawsuit in Alberta launched by a failed candidate for Jason Kenney’s UCP It may be the longest and most expensive media trial in Canadian history I’m ready to go public about it and I want to share more details with you 🧵

Collaborative news curation as a service, demonstrating the value of social media based on protocols, not platforms and a “playbook for killing information voids.”

This is appalling. There has to be a way to hold massive companies accountable for *knowingly* facilitating & profiting from criminal behavior. And yes, I understand the value of Section 230, but here we have a trillion $ company that profits by letting its users get scammed. Has to be a better way.

Scams undermine democracies and free enterprise by eroding general mutual trust. Meta’s business model incentivizes people to financially exploit each other.

Sky News does a great job here of showing that right wing voices get outsized amplification on X. The why of it is complicated (we have upcoming work on this). But the fact if it is undeniable. The platform is also full of clickbaity bullshit. Not unrelated.

#Seattle peeps! Does the #HousingCrisis and growing #Homelessness concern you? Come to the FREE Seattle premiere of a new documentary on consequences of eviction for kids and families. * Friday, Nov. 7, 7 p.m. * Kakao - 415 Westlake Ave N Registration required www.eventbrite.com/e/evicting-t...

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.

Last week, my Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction class covered an older paper about “social translucence” where they explain how the design of online systems shapes the norms & behaviors w/in those systems. But the framework they create can be applied more broadly, eg to our political moment.

Mamdani: "We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves. After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him."

Was over at <loved ones> house on Sunday. I explained that a few friends are dealing with cancer diagnoses. They said it must be the vaccines. And then they explained how they were investing in rare earth minerals and other sure bets now that Trump is back and they can understand the stock market.

Perhaps relevant today, a framework for understanding how many election rumors mislead.

Election rumors tend to organize around a finite number of “tropes” that anchor on different parts of the election process. Ballot design is one of the common starting points, especially for rumors questioning election integrity.

"Science is being destroyed across many agencies" say federal researchers. For my latest @nature.com piece, I spoke to 19 different scientists across EPA, NOAA, NIH, NASA, and USGS to document how science is being dismantled across US federal agencies.

if you want to know what happened to Teen Vogue yesterday, my work wife @allegrak.bsky.social — who ran our politics section for 6 years until this past June — said it all in this. can't even pull out a favorite part til I sign my separation letter lol, just read the whole thing.

We saw this same issue — voting day bomb threats — in 2024. Motive could be strategic voter suppression, but in 2024 it was likely foreign interference designed to cause mayhem and further erode trust in US election. These tactics can also provide pretext for contesting elections later.

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia is one of many experiments designed to replace human-generated writing with LLMs. But Ryan McGrady argues that its defining feature is its use of technological power to re-exert top-down authority over information and knowledge. buff.ly/odvgs4q

Interesting review documenting the rise in scholarship on visual misinformation, how it is more persuasive than text misinformation, and how #GenAI is both increasing visual misinformation content and being used to combat it. (!) #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky doi.org/10.1080/1520...

I am looking for a post-doc working on behavioral/environmental/urban/energy economics to join my group at the University of Copenhagen. Position is 2 years (possibly 3), good salary, free health insurance, one of the most livable cities in the world. Apply here: jobportal.ku.dk/videnskabeli...

Heather Gerken, Ford Foundation’s New Leader, Vows to Protect Elections and the Rule of Law www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/u...

This is tragic. Lex and team were doing such great work, one of the few bastions of hard-hitting political journalism within mainstream media in recent years.

“People are getting more and more obsessed with [devices] and losing track of listening to their bodies.”

Venture capitalists Andreessen and Horowitz invest in startup that sells thousands of AI bot influencers to manipulate social media as a service, clearly violating major platform policies www.404media.co/a16z-backed-...

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/

Authoritarian regimes are notorious for making people think what they perceive to be reality is not actually real. Sometimes this is called creating "unreality" sometimes "gas-lighting." It doesn't matter which label is used, the goal is the same: make people doubt what they see with their own eyes.

The Washington Post with a story about how remaking an institution to appeal to the pro-Trump right doesn't help the bottom line.

"The interviews come from several years of conversations with Youtube employees focused on policy and health, and in trust and safety roles; they appear to undercut years of GOP accusations of the Biden administration censoring social media platforms during the pandemic."

Summer legal internships at @knightcolumbia.org. Send us the best people! knightcolumbia.org/page/summer-...

"Many of the deals OpenAI has struck — with chipmakers, cloud computing companies and others — are strangely circular. OpenAI receives billions from tech companies before sending those billions back to the same companies to pay for computing power and other services." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Report from ISD describing how Ireland is experiencing online rumors, misinformation, and targeted disinformation undermining the legitimacy of elections, including via content generated by AI.

New report out from us & the Hope and Courage Collective today, looking at online threats to electoral integrity in the recent Irish presidential election. In the report: 🔵 Online narratives targeting the legitimacy of election 🔵 The targeting of candidates 🔵 The use of genAI Read more below ⬇️

Is social media dying? How much has Twitter changed as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has transformed. Here are the key take-aways 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

This one lands… www.tiktok.com/t/ZTM4CUeSu/

I keep seeing people say, oh, trans people must take a hit for the greater good and, first of all, no, you don't get to discard someone else's rights and second, we know from past experience that marginalized communities like theirs are merely the first to be targeted. They'll come for you next.

Got a new story about a little-known HHS agency with a massive job: the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR). ASPR gave us Operation Warp Speed. Now it's being run by a conspiracy theorist who calls those vaccines “genocide.” www.msnbc.com/msnbc/meet-a...

I use Claude (an AI) to scan my posts for spelling and grammar errors. On the most recent post (about the East Wing, link below), I got a really amazing addendum. www.pbump.net/o/yes-most-a...

Dave Karpf takes apart analyses/arguments claiming the solution to the Democrats’ woes is more centrist messaging.

The @thebulwark.com's ever-talented Art Director @avecruth.bsky.social has some thoughts on the Department of Labor's Heroic Realism propaganda. Read today's Morning Shots — "What We Choose to Nazi" www.thebulwark.com/p/what-we-ch...

🧵There's a pernicious myth that Republicans have more money than Democrats. In fact, Democrats have raised more—including so-called "dark money." Republicans have less money but understand politics better. This is why they win. My upcoming e-book "What Republicans Know" discusses…

Another step in the de-professionalization and politicization of DOD. "The head of an office that helps organize technical research and disburse billions of dollars for the Navy is being replaced by a 33-year-old former DOGEr with no apparent naval experience." www.thebulwark.com/p/scoop-trum...

We use the term “influencer” to capture how accounts with large audiences play an outsized role in shaping online discourse. But influence works both ways, and the audience’s (and other influencers’) power in shaping the views of elites (including electeds) is probably the most meaningful dynamic.

I would read the hell out of a deeply reported piece on how the media/political elite addiction to Twitter is shaping their views, which in turn shape the views of millions of people. It's a total reality-warper.

DHS says our new piece is "dishonest, slanted, and fundamentally inaccurate" but won't say why. Here's the story where we show with evidence that DHS spliced together clips spanning years and multiple locations to create its own reality. Gift link wapo.st/4nuDGwf

Ruby on driftwood in the early afternoon sun.

The rapid decimation of traditional media is both travesty & opportunity for the left. Opportunity in that the left had become over-reliant on these outlets & now has to reckon w/ the need for infrastructure to tell their stories & to contest the right’s reconfiguration of reality, politics, values.