Started reading "Prophecy" by @carissaveliz.bsky.social with one of my new research assistants (the second one doesn't seem to be as much into reading so far). In all seriousness, the first pages already sound very promising and I like the style!

NEW: Meta paid hundreds of contractors to pretend they were kids—and then prompt rival chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT to talk about subjects like suicide, sex, eating disorders, and self-harm. From @dmehro.bsky.social and @joelkhalili.bsky.social

Spotify competitor Tidal built a reputation by collaborating with musicians and focusing on audio quality. How will it handle the era of AI-generated slop?

❤️🧡💛💚💙🩷💜

“If Doctorow’s idea of platform “enshittification” is fundamentally about ruining the experience of end users for the sake of the shareholders, Wikipedia is attempting something like the opposite. The end-user experience is being preserved, and the people behind the scenes are bearing the cost.”

"an audit by Lighthouse Reports of public data on the government’s chosen AI provider shows that its tech misclassified more than a third of 16-year-olds as adults and, in some tests, was shown to give the wrong assessment in 70 per cent of cases" www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

🧵Technosolutionism turns moral panic into moral failure. It is the case - and it's been for a very long time - for the UK Home Office, now about to roll out AI age checks for migrant children, despite knowing they are flawed and they will damage the most vulnerable. www.wired.com/story/facial...

The Big Tech company META has an ad running on the swiss newspaper "le temps" since several days...promoting centralised age verification. they push for age verification through google and apple on the app store level. they outsource and sell it as privacy-preserving solution... no joke.

🚨 Our Digital News Report 2026 is out! Authored by Jim Egan, Craig T. Robertson, Amy Ross Arguedas, Nic Newman, Rasmus Nielsen, Mitali Mukherjee and Richard Fletcher, it is based on 100K interviews in 48 markets Full report reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news... 7 findings in thread

This morning scrolling Bluesky, there is nothing at all in my feed about Putin’s barbaric attack on the Ukraine’s holiest site, the UNESCO protected Lavra so I’m posting this here.

𝐃𝐢𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐝ä𝐫𝐞 𝐀𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐬𝐧𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐥 @leewas.bsky.social 𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐭 – 𝐦𝐢𝐭 𝐋𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐧𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐄𝐜𝐡𝐭𝐳𝐞𝐢𝐭! Jetzt den Abstimmungssonntag verfolgen: www.tagesanzeiger.ch @lucasleemann.bsky.social @mariostauble.bsky.social @rfrbrghs.bsky.social #10MillionenSchweiz #Zivildienstgesetz #abst26

Und weil Palantir jetzt nicht zufrieden ist, dass ihre ellenlange Gegendarstellung nirgendwo abgedruckt wird, publizieren sie sie einfach selber😄 palantir.medium.com/response-to-...

Happy to share that the Social Computing Group received the Best Poster Award at the inaugural UZH.ai Interdisciplinary Lab Exchange & Poster Session 🚀 We presented our research on AI from three angles: user, system, and interaction. Many thanks to @uzhai.bsky.social for organizing the event.

A big shout-out to Michael Correll (is he on Bluesky...?) for this blog post which is ::chef's kiss:: as a bridge to HCI from my work on ethics education in the context of "hey maybe let's re-think what it means to be good at computer science." mcorrell.medium.com/the-othering...

The *most debated* ballot since @foeg.bsky.social data begins: no prop has generated as many articles as the upcoming vote to cap the population. The media tone is very critical. Yet still the radical right SVP as the only major actor in favor gets the most attention www.foeg.uzh.ch/de/research/...

✨New paper out @nature.com ✨ For 8 weeks around the 2024 US election, we randomly assigned 2,000 people to use social media algos we built ourselves. Do engagement-based algorithms amplify intergroup, moral & emotional (IME) content—and does that distort how we see political norms? 🧵🔗 👇

Can LLMs Emulate Human Belief Dynamics? 🧪 The answer is a clear no. [The findings] raise a sharp warning against deploying LLMs as human proxies in social simulations. arxiv.org/pdf/2605.18781 #SyntheticData #EsWirdImmerAbsurder

I somehow vividly remember this exact issue at IC2S2 in Copenhagen a couple of years ago. Computational social science is skewed this way as well.

People often pitch AI as unprecedented. But what if we already have the organizational tools to evaluate & negotiate its use? Our new book Auditing AI opens in the 1980s with the story of the US Network for Organ Sharing how how they test & decide on their algorithms direct.mit.edu/books/book/6...

Google AI search is going to be great!

The impact of AI is already producing a massive flood of content in so many creative industries--I don't know how we are going review or evaluate all this stuff. The peer review system was already at a breaking point. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Lmao

I’m hiring 2 doctoral researchers in Politics of Climate Change at Heidelberg University 🌍 📊 Survey Research & Political Participation 🗣️ Qualitative Research & Group Formation Part of “The New Climate Divide” Deadline: 21 June 2026 Calls: www.ipw.uni-heidelberg.de/en/about-us/... Please share!

The chatbot of the police in the Netherlands reacts to a report of incitement of violence against Palestinians as a case of antisemitism. Likely because the word Palestinian was mentioned. Thinking of the scholars who claimed recently AI can help democracies & governance. LOLwelp #ResistAI #Racism

A Democratic candidate is using AI to write personalised letters to "tens of thousands", based on voter file data and scraped info. Reading the piece, this is a pitch to become a vendor to other campaigns, rather than a viable candidacy... www.govtech.com/artificial-i...

“by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated.” This has always been the case and this shouldn’t even need to be stated. Yet here we are.

The team behind #Subnautica was well on track to receiving a $250 million bonus for the hit game’s highly anticipated sequel. That was until the Krafton CEO asked ChatGPT for help to avoid paying it out fortune.com/2026/03/17/k...

“if children are involved, even 2-3 victims can draw more attention.” :( www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

Nicht nur die Hochschule St. Gallen, auch der «Schweizer Monat», mediales Scharnier zwischen Bürgerlich-Liberalen, Rechtslibertären und reaktionären Kulturkämpfern, gibt Curtis Yarvin, dem «einflussreichsten und umstrittensten Denker der Neuen Rechten», ein Forum schweizermonat.ch/nobody-watch...

(2/4) Gegen den belarusischen Autor Sasha Filipenko laufen mehrere Strafverfahren, etwa weil er aus seinem eigenen Buch zitiert hat. In seinem angesichts des Themas schon fast unverschämt unterhaltsamem Gastbeitrag schildert er die bizarre Praxis der Literaturzensur.

🇭🇺🎧 Hungary’s new PM Péter Magyar DJ’d at his own inauguration party in front of Parliament. The Orbán era and its political culture (smear campaigns, fearmongering, hatemongering etc) is gone for good. The latest poll puts Magyar’s Tisza party at 70%. 🎥 @telexhu.bsky.social

As more countries add age restrictions to apps and websites, the EU has flagged that VPNs provide a loophole for people to get around these restrictions. There are proposals to require age verification to use a VPN to close this loophole. Papers please, internet version.

🔎🇷🇺 Inside Russia's elite Bauman University, a secret department trains the GRU's next-gen hackers, saboteurs, and spies. Now, 2,000+ leaked documents expose how its graduates feed the units behind Russia's cyberattacks, election interference, and NATO sabotage.

What if we teach basic computational literacy in schools before we teach AI literacy?

We now have an AI wellbeing index! "Some models are happier than others. Larger models are also consistently less happy than their smaller counterparts." www.ai-wellbeing.org #AIWelfareIsBS

What the hell www.newyorker.com/culture/prog...

the biggest tech companies in the world are endorsing a new bill that would shove AI onto kids in school www.404media.co/literacy-in-...

Can you boost your AI review scores by asking an LLM to rewrite your paper? Yes! We call it paper laundering Our @icmlconf.bsky.social spotlight paper argues current AI reviewers aren't ready to automate peer review, and outlines what a science of peer review automation should look like 🧵👇 #ICML2026

Ohne Worte. Curtis Yarvin wird wieder eine Bühne geboten, diesmal beim St. Galler Symposium. (h/t @josserme.bsky.social)

Russian police arrested at least 16 men on extremism charges for belonging to a queer VK dating group, human rights activists report. The legal basis: a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that declared a fictitious "International LGBT Movement" to be an extremist group. meduza.io/en/news/2026...

IT CAN’T CONFESS! IT ISN’T SENTIENT! FFS, people.

Thanks for the shout-out @jlgleason.bsky.social Web search has changed a lot since early 2000s. Yet, papers still rely on Broder's taxonomy of search intent from that time. It's time to change that! In this paper led by Elsa Lichtenegger we present a new taxonomy, accounting for AI search as well!

"Mr. Brin, 52, long showed little interest in politics... But now, like so many other leaders in the traditionally liberal bastion of Silicon Valley, Mr. Brin has shifted to the right."

Unfortunately, the Labour government does not only empower authoritarian and populist narratives in the area of immigration. With a new system to guarantee "free speech" at universities, they legitimize a favorite talking point and gateway drug of the far right. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Uh oh.

Amazing that Apple's approach to anything even approaching consenting porn is "not on your life, you filthy pervert" and its approach to nonconsensual porn is, basically, "well, what can ya do"

NEW: We documented almost 100 cases of deepfake sexual abuse happening in schools around the world—with more than 600 children being victimized by their peers. Mostly boys in 25+ countries created explicit imagery of girls they often know from school over the last couple of years

“Everybody’s using AI for everything nowadays, and if you don’t, you’re a misfit outsider who should be stoned to death in the town square, and then resurrected virtually from your data so you can be stoned to death in the virtual town square, for infinity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/o...

Ein neuer David gegen Goliath-Kampf: Staatsanwaltschaften aus der Romandie verpflichten Telcos einzelne Websites zu sperren. Obwohl es dafür keine gesetzliche Grundlage gibt. Fast alle (Salt & Co ) setzen brav um. Nur Init 7 will diesen Präzedenzfall verhindern. www.republik.ch/2026/04/14/n...