“On what basis does a federal minister presume the authority to decide which elements of Palestinian history should be presented and which should not? Is Minister Miller known for his scholarship on Palestine and its people?”

Age-verification laws claim to protect kids from porn, but in the UK, they’ve blocked minors from r/gaytransguys, r/transDIY, and menstruation forums. Canada’s Bill S-209 could do the same. When “obscenity” swallows queer identity, who’s protected? https://thewalrus.ca/internet-queer-censorship/

This sentence captures my entire scholarly field.

Not sure what this says about me, but the more I explore the capacities of generative AI the less it interests me. I'm not denying its potential power, just that how it does what it does is not nearly as interesting as the thoughts and expressions of some other, any other, human being.

The thing about Trump is he tells us what he wants & what he intends to do. He wants to end democracy. Freeze MAGA in power forever. Have zero accountability. Just seize power & keep it. We are so close to true authoritarianism. We must use every ounce of power & leverage we have to stop them.

“Windfall” makes it sounds like Il Duce won a lottery & is as astonished as anyone at his blessings and good fortune. The @nytimes.com continues to pearl-clutchingly struggle with language. “Despotic corruption”, “monetized presidency”, and “plundering strongman” are all waiting in the wings.

“Almost anything they do…they have inside information,” [Trump] said. “I tell my kids to stay away from as much as you can stay away from but they also have a life.” He’s a crook (& misogynist, racist, felon, etc) — tho in the US many admire that set as “strength.” 🎁: www.wsj.com/finance/stoc...

Two years ago, my colleagues and I were sued by Stephen Miller's America First Legal. The Hines v Stamos case — built atop a number of false allegations — was a central element of the "censorship industrial complex" myth. Today, that case was dismissed (by a Trump judge in LA). We won.

+1 At this point, the only way to amend the US constitution is to pack the Supreme Court. Yes, yes, that would be blatantly politicizing the court but the ship has sailed…

I’m shocked.

There’s a journalism ethics textbook from about 10-12 years ago that had a case that looked at DC-journo buzz around “hot young bloggers” Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, etc. and asked students to really think about who gets elevated into the best careers and who don’t. I think about that case a lot.

Slaughter is an earthquake: SCOTUS has overturned a 90-year-old precedent that facilitated much of modern governance by granting many agencies meaningful independence from the president. Now SCOTUS crushes that independence ... for seemingly every agency except the Federal Reserve.

If you’re not using your personal celebrity or status or wealth to fight MAGA right now, what are you even doing? www.nytimes.com/2026/06/28/o... My @knightcolumbia.org piece argues similar: knightcolumbia.org/blog/is-indi...

This is the best writing I’ve read in years. Its clarity, force, urgency, self-awareness, and zero-fucks-given honesty is jaw-droppingly impressive. lareviewofbooks.org/article/dang...

I'm just a small-town political scientist, frightened & confused by the ongoing casual media normalization of the lawless authoritarianism, but it seems that the wild illegality & unconstitutionality of this should be mentioned somewhere in the hed, dek, lede, or main text of this very long article.

This is the best writing I’ve read in years. Its clarity, force, urgency, self-awareness, and zero-fucks-given honesty is jaw-droppingly impressive. lareviewofbooks.org/article/dang...

The DOGE rats are still in the regime, still criming. Did you know passports.gov is now run by the White House, not the State Department, running illegal tracking technology? #doge

Today is a good day to remember that authoritarianism is not inevitable, overthrowing fascists is possible, and good things can still happen. www.pbs.org/newshour/wor...

The second Central New Yorker visited by federal agents in the past week; the first was a poll worker who was confronted *during* NY primary voting.

Fantastic @cbcradiocanada.bsky.social interview by Piya Chattopadhyay with Simon Pare-Poupart (Montreal garbage collector & sociologist) discussing his sharp & witty memoir “Trash! A Garbageman's Story”. bookshop.org/p/books/tras... www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday...

Usually these political corruption maps have complicated plumbing. You know it’s bad when it’s just a closed loop that looks like an inbred family tree.

If you’re not using your personal celebrity or status or wealth to fight MAGA right now, what are you even doing? www.nytimes.com/2026/06/28/o... My @knightcolumbia.org piece argues similar: knightcolumbia.org/blog/is-indi...

If the mechanism for issuing exemptions doesn’t exist then it’s a ban. “Officials estimated it could take up to 18 months after the bill becomes law for the regulator to be stood up.” Calling it a pause or temp moratorium just gives comms cover to government ambiguity. www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

I keep seeing interviews w/ experts in social & child psychology (obvi good voices to hear) *but* I’m not seeing interviews w/ experts in childhood culture or youth media. Analysis & polling on the ban are seen in narrowly *psychological safety* terms w/ scant focus on youth culture & development.

"The United States is in a faster deterioration process than any democracy in recent times, setting aside old-fashioned military coups. What’s going on?” https://dissentmagazine.org/article/declaration-250-anniversary-democracy-backsliding/

Silly example but matters for news -- media partnerships can impose error-prone AI. "'Meta auto-enrolled us in an AI personalization tool that produced an inaccurate & inappropriate...image.' The REI spokesperson said the company unenrolled from the Meta tool." www.seattletimes.com/business/the...

Smart 🧵by @fieldsmeyer.com. A key skill is linking the authoritarian moves that have happened so quickly, have become normalized or forgotten at a dizzying pace, live in many places, & feel inevitable & irreversible. We urgently need dissident, persuasive, coherent stories that mobilize broadly.

Resurfacing online to mention: my book on the history of Speech Rec, NLP, and data-driven AI is coming out in a couple of weeks! Just got my author's copy from @uchicagopress.bsky.social and it finally feels real! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

I keep seeing interviews w/ experts in social & child psychology (obvi good voices to hear) *but* I’m not seeing interviews w/ experts in childhood culture or youth media. Analysis & polling on the ban are seen in narrowly *psychological safety* terms w/ scant focus on youth culture & development.

Compare Alito's description of Trump's racist statements (on the left) to Justice Kagan's anthology of Trump's racist statements (on the right). These are passages from this morning's opinions in Mullin v. Doe.

The @prisonjournalism.bsky.social continues to be simply stellar & urgently needed, especially today. Send some money their way if you can.

As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, incarcerated Americans were asked: What does America's big birthday mean to them?

Foundations of Digital Sovereignty - Chapter 8 "Building Sovereign Canadian Compute" If we want to embed Canadian governance and support Canadian growth, we need to build publicly-anchored digital infrastructure. Here's how we do that: canadianshieldinstitute.ca/updates/buil...

With big thanks to @annaschjoett.bsky.social for invitation & co-panelists @tainab.bsky.social, @mrsbunz.bsky.social, Tobias Blanke for smart conversation, it was a treat to join this "Public Problematisations of AI" panel: www.spui25.nl/programma/pu... My remarks: drive.google.com/file/d/1U0dB...

Sigh, they're actually doing a social media ban for <16 years. Yes, platforms with "adequate safeguards" will be exempt but such safeguards "will be based on criteria to be determined later," by a nonexistent commission. It's not a pause or temporary moratorium; it's a ban with everyone monitored.

Canadian digital policymakers have intro’d a dizzying array of incentives, bans, exemptions, undefined rules, privacy contradictions, commission mandates, fragmented timelines, models of childhood, etc. It seems designed to overwhelm & thwart measured consultation—and collapse under its own weight?

All reports in this thread are from the collections of Northwestern University's Transportation Library. Materials we've digitized can generally be found in HathiTrust. Learn more and search our catalog here: www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-co...

The bill is a Jenga tower of dependencies… “The exemption was the government’s answer to critics of the ban with assurances that the restriction would be temporary, conditional, & designed to reward platforms that make their products genuinely safer for kids. But it turns out that is illusory.”

I just heard @cbcnews.ca ask people if they support stopping young people from accessing harmful social media. *Of course* ppl said “yes!” but instead ask “do you support national age verification program for all Canadians that uses private AI & online surveillance to restrict social media access?”

My post on how the government framed online safety as urgent, yet Bill C-34 defers 50 key decisions. That includes which social media services are covered and what counts as age verification. All overseen by a Digital Safety Commission that does not exist.

"It is an everything-all-at-once approach in which nearly every key component...is left to regulations that do not yet exist." "a social media ban for those <16 is bad policy that will take considerable time to implement & raises serious privacy concerns that will affect tens of millions of Cdns"

. @mikeananny.bsky.social is take on Canada's < 16 social media ban is spot on, especially his last points about compliance, tougher & better options for platform regulation, weak evidence, and lack of consideration of children's rights and how they use the internet, devices & social media.

Sigh, they're actually doing a social media ban for <16 years. Yes, platforms with "adequate safeguards" will be exempt but such safeguards "will be based on criteria to be determined later," by a nonexistent commission. It's not a pause or temporary moratorium; it's a ban with everyone monitored.

Good overview for anyone following expected proposed ban on social media for Canadians under 16. “Rejecting a ban does not mean rejecting regulation. Rather, it places the emphasis on the need to regulate the platforms, not the user.” The ban frames the wrong problem, creating a harmful solution.

"CrankGPT is a fully offline and off-the-grid AI box (...) You can feel that load curve through the crank: when LLM inference and speech synthesis run together, the crank gets a lot harder to turn." squeezlabs.github.io/handcrank/

A thoughtful thread on why social media bans are bad for kids and wrong headed generally.

The Canadian government is poised to double-down on a very narrow & harmful image of childhood, with massive repercussions for the country’s democracy and privacy. They either haven’t received strong expert guidance or have ignored it.

Canada is reportedly considering a social-media ban for kids under 16. It's a bad idea for multiple reasons, as this very good post explains.