My friend Rivi drew a remarkable graphic narrative for Inside Higher Ed, in which she uses her illustrations to let six Chinese graduate students in the U.S. tell their stories of visa chaos, political fears, and uncertain futures. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

1/ I’m thrilled (and a little proud 🤗) to share my first single-authored publication! It’s now out open access in Information, Communication & Society: 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/1369...

i love ta-nehisi coates so much

Not the point of this piece exactly but a great example of how chatbot validation could increase polarization www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/w...

I was introduced to Borsook's work in grad school and still cite it regularly as it remains relevant!

The story is not what Kimmel said but what others won’t say now for fear of state retribution. Authoritarian countries thrive on self censorship.

I've been saying this for yearsf: LLM-GENERATED SAMPLES ARE JUST FALSIFIED DATA. It's similar to just lying about what people said, or taking your own best guesses. HEY FELLOW SOCIAL SCIENTISTS: STOP TRYING TO FIND WAYS TO AVOID ACTUALLY TALKING TO THE PEOPLE YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE STUDYING

All right, I wrote about it:

hi, cis folks! the WSJ endangered trans lives with false reporting yesterday. it’s still accepted as truth by many, regardless of it being false. the article’s still up with a little note. it needs full retraction. it's not even a phone call—it's email. you can do this. contact info below.🧵⬇️

Wikipedia editors trying to fend off the onslaught of AI crap have crowdsourced some telltale signs of LLM-generated writing; it might be handy for editors and proofreaders generally. Thanks to @ellenrykers.com for pointing me to it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

NEW: Tenure-track position in History at UC Berkeley in the GLOBAL HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY. We are casting a wide net here: *all* periods, places, and fields are under consideration. I'm on the search committee, so do let me know if you have questions.

If you're following this story in the NYT by @kashhill.bsky.social, I recommend @schancellor.bsky.social's post that breaks down why AI is bad at therapy. Pretty much everything she she warns about shows up in this story, which is heartbreaking notatechdemo.substack.com/p/why-ai-can...

What is it going to take to get companies to care about this and do something? It's been a tough day reading this great report by @kashhill.bsky.social on the risks of chatbots. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

The full-day, hybrid workshop is "Matters: Ethical Challenges in Research with Online Communities" led by Matthew Zent plus @schancellor.bsky.social, @cfiesler.bsky.social, @sarahagilbert.bsky.social, @estellesmithphd.bsky.social and more. sites.google.com/umn.edu/cont...

Really good article/explainer from @parkermolloy.com www.readtpa.com/p/the-sydney...

✨ MAKE YOUR RESEARCH FINDINGS ACCESSIBLE ✨ I promise you don't have to make TikToks. Maybe a Bluesky thread or a LinkedIn post? Or my favorite option... blog your papers! cfiesler.medium.com/why-and-how-... Lay audiences unable to access scientific literature want to learn from you. 🥰

My intro to digital history class at GMU this Fall is themed around the Salem Witchcraft Trials. It was ideally not going to be an immersive learning experience

New OA pub day! Given the dwindling of local newspapers, folks are turning to social media. Platforms are discursively constructing local community groups as a new kind of hub. But local volunteer mods are the ones who are charged to realize these visions. journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

It's well known that big tech contracts out its human (and AI) moderation. In this new paper @lucas-wright.bsky.social describes a pivot to moderation infrastructure, giving these companies a lot of power over trust & safety papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Very excited to see this report I contributed to on ethical use of pervasive data for research is out! The report includes actions stakeholders can take to continue progress towards trusted ethics and privacy practices in research. Thanks @annalenhart.bsky.social for your leadership!

Apropos of nothing, your regular reminder that it is not in fact necessary to platform bigots. slate.com/technology/2...

Kudos to @charlottewillner.bsky.social for her opening speech at #trustcon calling out how the US government is making the role of trust & safety more dangerous... And how many people couldn't even come to the event because it's not safe to travel to the US.

I’ll be here today to present our cancelled grant where we were working with volunteer moderators of @AskHistorians and other communities to develop a tool that would help support their work. We mentioned misinformation as a challenge mods grapple with and suspect that’s why it was cancelled.

Are you or were you participating in a medical study that has been affected by federal funding cuts? Our reporters want to hear from you. You can share your experience by: ✉️ Emailing [email protected] ☎️ Calling 301-388-5405 📱 Sending a message on Signal to 917-512-0201

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/

This is literally exhibit A for why queer joy is so profoundly subversive. Anger is important too. But joy -- "smiling and talking and crying and laughing" -- that's what the fascists want to stamp out. That's the real challenge to their reign.

Yes, this is bad for porn. But porn famously has no clear legal definition. As such: This is a direct path to censoring anything the GOP wants to censor and can argue is “adult” - info on birth control, queer identity, anything about trans people or gender diversity or safe sex or HIV or drag or

Yes to all of this! I've been saying for years that content moderation isn't censorship, and casting it as such advances a limited (and harmful) vision of freedom. If we're not free from oppression—the end result of a polluted information ecosystem—then we're not free. Content moderation helps.

My new piece on accelerationism as the core strategy of technofascism. Technoaccelerationism is the rapid progress of technology in order to drive social regression. They see AI as the key to breaking societal commitments to equity and human freedom.

Vaccination schedules on the CDC website have already started changing under RFK Jr. So we published a guide to the evidence-based vaccine recommendations in place *before* all 17 members of the advisory panel were abruptly dismissed by the new admin. www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-... 🧪

Spread the word! 3rd and final New Digital Regulator Workshop (Virtual, July 17th). Let your recent civil servant friends know! iddp.gwu.edu/calling-all-...

fuck these fucking fucks.

Major decision out of the Northern District of California. AI training on copyrighted material is fair use under the copyright act. This will have major implications for the AI industry and artists having their work stolen by AI companies. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

As I've been saying www.readtpa.com/p/the-grok-w...

Summer solstice apnews.com/article/mahm...

No court can erase the history of trans people existing. www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...

I thought the last thing we needed was a Joe Rogan of the left, but I stand corrected. The last thing we need is a QAnon of the left.

The Minnesota shooter apparently used data broker websites to find the home addresses of the people he shot and murdered. Congress has had years to do something about data brokers and they've sided with the tech lobby over and over again. Their inaction is deadly.

If you ran into me, @cfiesler.bsky.social or @vitak.bsky.social at #ICA25 you likely heard about the PERVADE Project and our current work assessing researcher preparedness to address data ethics issues in their work. ICA members can take the survey here: marquette.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

NEW ARTICLE: It's not that LLMs are outright transphobic in their responses - in fact, they try to push against the basic stuff - but there's subtle anti-trans sentiment embedded throughout LLM responses that it's hard to see if you're not trans yourself. We can do better! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

The tech industry needs serious, meaningful regulation about the things it can sell and how it can sell them, and the neoliberal bullshit of “free markets” has allowed this nakedly harmful software to proliferate, taking advantage of the fact that more people than ever feel alone and desperate

Wikipedia wanted to use AI summaries at the top of article pages. Editors said please please don't www.404media.co/wikipedia-pa...

Don’t tell that thing anything that could be used against you

I've been working on something! It's not nearly done yet, but I thought no need to gatekeep the work in progress. This is an AI ethics "syllabus" based on a post-hoc curation of hundreds of short form videos I've made for social media, to make the content more accessible. bit.ly/ai-ethics-sy...

Not true. I see you're a luxury watch dealer. I'm also interested in watches. Let me show you how free and easy migration has allowed you to earn a living. 🧵

While the LA wildfires have disappeared because of the circus in DC, their aftermath is still very real. The emergence of strong social ties in the aftermath of disasters is one of the most robust findings in the social sciences. Among other reasons Trump and Miller picked the wrong city.

must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to have federal funding that was promised to you for important work suddenly and arbitrarily ripped away