In the last month ICE has bought warehouses in: - Hagerstown, MD: $102 million - Surprise, AZ: $70 million - Hamburg, PA: $87 million - Tremont, PA: $120 million - San Antonio, TX: $82 million - El Paso, TX: $123 million - Social Circle, GA: price unknown This is unprecedented.

The demise of the CIA World Factbook is “part of a broad war on information being waged by the Trump administration,” @dgraham.bsky.social argues in The Atlantic Daily.

Even when there’s no accountability, the record matters. Credit to the Wikipedia editors maintaining this page.

during the first Trump administration, esp right after Jan. 6, non-partisan DC think tanks and policy orgs were clamoring to cover the impacts of U.S. right-wing extremism. This time, there's no such coverage, with many of those orgs having determined domestic extremism is not in their "remit."

Federal law enforcement agents shot and killed a man in Minneapolis on Jan. 24 according to local police officials. DHS told Fox News that the man was “armed with a gun”. A video of the shooting appears to show that a gun was taken from the man before the first shot was fired. x.com/BillMelugin_...

Love this short opinion piece on “mechanical bypass” in analogy to “spiritual bypass”.

A college student complaining about a grade on a paper is not national news. Not even close. The details have minimal import outside the class itself. Well-funded political activists targeting profs and TAs—in this case because they're trans—with the help of elected state officials? National issue.

The Eric Schickler essay in Larry Bartel's symposium on "What Trump Has Taught Us About Political Science" is one of the most insightful pieces I've read in 2025. US institutions turned out to be weak, and we have to rethink conventional wisdom. open access: academic.oup.com/psq/advance-...

i've always been fascinated by cultural property theft/antiquities trafficking (NOT partaking in it 🙃) dream job in another life, tbh

Friend and colleague Ryan McGrady has an excellent piece in Tech Policy Press on Grokipedia. Rather than excoriating the new project for Elon worship (true, but hardly interesting), he looks into how Grokipedia redefines sources for encyclopedic knowledge: www.techpolicy.press/with-grokipe...

Late to this, but if you aren't willing to stand up for trans people that puts you on the side of the villains. There is no excuse and no "strategy" that justifies it. Either stand with people under attack from the state or get out of the way so someone with a working moral compass can step up.

Slate: Scholars, including @cip.uw.edu graduate research assistant and @hcde.uw.edu PhD candidate @zarine.net, say "recent attacks on Wikipedia differ from earlier critiques" of the website, which had focused on Wikipedia's content. Read more: slate.com/technology/2...

Interested in doing a Ph.D studying online communities, governance, digital open infrastructure, etc.? Several faculty at @communitydata.science are recruiting students for next year! Join our Prospective Student Q&A on September 26: blog.communitydata.science/prospective-...

Nudging very much appeals to people who want a politics without politics.

moonflower... santana cover 🌸

Drawing on some of my work from the past year at the Center for an Informed Public, I published a piece in Lawfare with my colleague Stephen Prochaska.

a new short research brief with @mako.cc and @aaronshaw.bsky.social synthesizes some of the work I presented at @communitydata.science Science of Community Dialogues back in April! zenodo.org/records/1560...

For the June issue of @thenation.com, I wrote about the Harper’s letter 5 years later, and how under a quarter of its signatories have spoken out about Mahmoud Khalil and other campus activists imprisoned for speech.

7/ And the study has harmed CMV, an important public sphere for people to engage in debate, learn new things, have their assumptions challenged, and maybe even their minds changed. Are people going to trust that they aren’t engaging with bots? And if they don’t, can the community serve its mission?

Ed Martin's latest target: Wikipedia. The interim U.S. attorney and pro-Trump bulldog has sent a letter seeming to threaten the Wikimedia Foundation's tax-exempt status over allegations that it is "spreading propaganda." Our story: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Seattle! Playing the NEW Hidden Hall in Fremont this Sunday with my funk/r&b/latin group, Soleado 😌💃

🚨 My first solo-authored piece is out in Electoral Studies! 👽 I examine when and how conspiracy theories become participatory, increasing political mobilization. Using the United States and Turkey as cases of a most-different-systems design, I explore how conspiracy theories drive political action.

So weird to see colleges promoting their USNWR grad school rankings today like grad students aren’t being disappeared by their government.

This is tomorrow! Register online here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Are you an organizer of an online group/community thinking through governance strategies for resisting online information manipulation? Join @communitydata.science for our next Community Dialogue!

DHS just detained a Columbia student who helped lead campus protests—a direct attack on campus activism. This timeline shows why authoritarians fear student protests: they're often the first and most effective catalysts for pro-democracy movements.

New paper in International Peacekeeping with Naomi Miyashita, Laura De Backer, and @katestarbird.bsky.social: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The New Yorker says Wikipedia is a beacon of hope, with quotes from me and @mako.cc www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

The lawsuit brought by Rumble and Trump Media against Brazilian Supreme Court Justice de Moraes is *fascinating* in ways that will need a long thread to unpack. 1/ storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

each one of those university programs that push kids to "be entrepreneurial" and "solve community problems with innovation" is a public policy failure and an abdication of the role of the university in the public sphere. stop putting me on committees if you dont want me to say this to deans.

join us in seattle this september! we're especially interested in thinking about "social model collapse," aka how the introduction of novel technologies like AI tools disrupt core social and technical processes that sustain communities

obsessed w/ this thread combining my two of my top interests... e-ink tablets and propaganda www.reddit.com/r/ereader/s/...

Relying on peer production approaches to do fact-checking/content moderation (e.g., Community Notes) requires actually fostering a community that cares about maintaining a public good, and defending it against appropriation or ideological capture. Something neither X nor Facebook have done.

As I wrote last week: "As other information sources fall, Wikipedia’s stubborn independence becomes more vital than ever. The attacks from [the right] aren't just about an online encyclopedia — they're part of a broader assault on any information source that refuses to be controlled."

Data requests fulfilled by Telegram have skyrocketed since Pavel Durov's arrest: www.404media.co/telegram-han...

The world's richest man has joined a growing chorus of right-wing voices attacking Wikipedia as part of an intensifying campaign against free and open access information. Why do they hate it so much?

every time one of these articles gets published I just think that this is just a rehashed critique of the hypodermic needle model of media effects, but with no acknowledgment that no one who actually understands what's going on in this field is arguing this model is correct. it's a total straw man

Twenty years ago today, a massive earthquake struck the coast of Indonesia and sent a tsunami hurtling across the Indian Ocean. What followed was one of the most extraordinary online organizing campaigns I'd ever seen.

how is composable moderation supposed to work without buy-in from the users that are supposed to sustain it? it still seems like the vast majority of users want platforms over protocols

Social media content moderation isn’t a matter of just crowd-sourcing slapping some labels on offending content—it’s literally a microcosm of the horrible and messy project of the building and governance of civilization, and all the problems that come with that

We have 2 fascinating stories today, both first person accounts, by Aleppine Christians talking about Aleppo's rebel takeover and how the community is responding to it.

Was cool to speak with @justinhendrix.bsky.social at @techpolicypress.bsky.social about getting thrown out of the Project Liberty Summit for speaking out against Nancy Mace's bigotry, and what kind of conversations I hope it sparks withing the tech policy space www.techpolicy.press/evan-greer-a...

I got the chance to read some great books and articles during my general exams. They prompted me to think about some of the promise and challenges of integrating distributed and participatory governance structures into online platforms and communities: blog.communitydata.science/on-the-chall...

Starter pack with current and former CDSC members. We'll update it if and when more folks join Bluesky. go.bsky.app/Jeez5Hk

Tech Policy Press fellow Dean Jackson grapples with the apparent failure of an eight-year cycle of effort on tech and media accountability and what it means for pro-democracy reformers. www.techpolicy.press/an-eight-yea...

Friendly neighborhood political scientist here to remind you that everything is political, including and sometimes especially science. In fact, claiming your vocation is apolitical is itself a political claim with a political goal.

i guess "governance capture" may be kind of relevant these days... i'll be at CSCW this week presenting our paper with @mako.cc and @katestarbird.bsky.social exploring why some self-governing online communities are more vulnerable to capture than others: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

People might not be ready to ready stuff like this yet, but I shared some thoughts about what Trump's victory means for those who try to fight against misinfo, hate, and extremism, and what I think should happen next postthroughit.substack.com/p/thoughts-a...

Solidarity to my friends & colleagues in Georgia, Eto Buziashvili & Sopo Gelava, whose homes were raided this week by the Georgian govt for simply doing their jobs. Read their latest research on Georgian Dream's online influence efforts ahead of the upcoming elections: dfrlab.org/2024/10/25/g...