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...

The title of this article is "How Russia Invaded Wikipedia." but the article itself is actually about how Russia *failed* to significantly influence the Russian-language of Wikipedia, such that it had to create an entirely different platform in Ruwiki! foreignpolicy.com/2024/10/04/r...

In a new rapid research post, we cover rumoring across many communities and platforms - from Q-Anon aligned influencers on Telegram to left-wing accounts on TikTok - that speculates about a recently reissued DoD directive and its implications for the 2024 election. uwcip.substack.com/p/rumors-rap...

Early last week, Donald Trump made a Truth Social post falsely claiming that Democrats were using UOCAVA (overseas voting) to cheat in the 2024. Our team unpacked where those rumors come from — and how they mislead — in a "rapid" research post: uwcip.substack.com/p/examining-...

Understanding the drivers of platform regulation requires looking at its key actors, their interests, and the institutional channels through which they can pursue them, writes Robert Gorwa, considering the case study of Telegram: www.techpolicy.press/durovs-arres...

Our team just published a "rapid" analysis of some of the rumors we've been tracking since the assassination attempt on Saturday, drawing on these foundational understandings of "collective sensemaking" during crises: www.cip.uw.edu/2024/07/15/t...

Jack is still clueless about stuff we learned in the early 2000s within about two days after starting a bulletin board. No moderation = chaos, and no ability to communicate effectively. Plus the safety issues... I mean, this is dead simple stuff, and it blows right past him.

In recent years the profile and credibility of open source research has grown. It seems everybody’s doing it – but not necessarily well. Learning to recognise these common mistakes will allow you to judge the quality of open source research: www.bellingcat.com/resources/20...

In the wake of this Lorenz/LoTT fracas I'm seeing a lot of people talk about Milo Yiannopoulos downfall and using it as ammunition for both sides of the argument. So it's worth getting the history right on this.

Really proud of our UW CIP community, led by PhD student Zarine Kharazian, and this response to a recent article which claimed there could be no science of misinformation. Not surprisingly, the article mischaracterized our research field across a number of dimensions. www.cip.uw.edu/2024/01/24/m...

new essay: Dan Williams argues that "misinformation studies" amounts to a "moral panic" and it's neither feasible nor desirable to advance the systematic study of "misleading content." we disagree: www.cip.uw.edu/2024/01/24/m...

new paper with @mako.cc and @katestarbird.bsky.social (forthcoming in CSCW) looks at how similar language editions on wikipedia deal with the threat of "governance capture" – the takeover of a project's mechanisms of governance by a small group of users. blog.communitydata.science/governance-c...