This is appalling. There has to be a way to hold massive companies accountable for *knowingly* facilitating & profiting from criminal behavior. And yes, I understand the value of Section 230, but here we have a trillion $ company that profits by letting its users get scammed. Has to be a better way.

[New Paper Alert] Online toxic speech as positioning acts: Hate as discursive mechanisms for othering and belonging socialmedialab.ca/2025/11/03/n...

Excited to share that together with @malojan.bsky.social we’ve published a research note in #partypolitics introducing PartySOME, a comprehensive dataset on political parties’ social media activity. A thread 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

lol

"Trump has ramped up his use of artificial intelligence-generated content on his Truth Social channel since starting his second White House term, making his administration the first to deploy hyper-realistic fake visuals as a core communications strategy."

Recommender algorithms controlled by unfriendly foreign powers threaten democracy and security. They artificially boost authoritarians and break society apart. They silence the rest of us.

Big story from Sky news. It is a mistake to think the DSA alone is going to fix this. This requires more, including and most particularly enforcement of GDPR Art 9 news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

"...libraries historically tend to grow in societies that prioritize education & decline in societies where power is being concentrated, & he’s worried where the US is headed. That makes it hard to predict if IA—or any library project—will be supported long term." arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

A new paper analyzes the “production-consumption gap” on social media, where a small subset of users produce most of the content, and considers its implications for the study of phenomena such as political polarization, and for the design of policy interventions. Prithvi Iyer considers the results:

It's new article day! So excited that this piece with @luccousineau.bsky.social and @iamryanhopkins.bsky.social is out in the world. In it we work through our experiences studying the far-right & propose some ways universities can better support students. journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/SS...

We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.

It's always nice when a physical book copy hits your hands, especially when your work is alongside so many great scholars' contributions. www.routledge.com/Contemporary... (Given the date, I was tempted to wear my vampire teeth, but that, uh, seemed like a mixed message)

This is such a great plain-English history by @taylorlorenz.bsky.social - do go watch! youtu.be/8VL16A7OWiw?...

Was on @rachelgilmore.bsky.social's podcast, along with @acmack.bsky.social, talking all things extremism. Listen here: www.youtube.com/live/p-vRVaU...

Threats to electoral integrity during the campaign was largest of three categories (93 of 172 instances), followed by candidate targeting (62), & threats to polling day electoral integrity (19). Content published on X accounted for 85 instances, followed by Facebook (37), TikTok (36) & YouTube (14).

"...this isn’t a crisis just for academics. When independent researchers can’t investigate, society can’t understand, governments can’t regulate, communities can’t prepare and parents can’t decide. The funding collapse is not just inconvenient, it’s dangerous." techbullion.com/independent-...

Also: Even in the context of 9/11 and with the imprimatur of the 2001 AUMF, lethal strikes were authorized only for “senior operational members” of al Qaeda and associated forces

A Wales-based Catholic priest (57), who went by "skinheadlad1488" online--where he described himself as 16-year-old skinhead loner--& admitted discussing bombing mosques & shooting black people in the head in neo-Nazi chatrooms, sentenced to 12-month community order. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Is social media dying? How much has Twitter changed as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has transformed. Here are the key take-aways 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

I would much prefer that Ireland invests seriously in *its own* and EU security and defence but here Dr Eoin Drea suggests an Anglo-Irish defence union as the solution to Irish, EU and British concerns about the western exposure of Europe to attack. www.politico.eu/article/angl...

EVERYTHING about "AI" depends on validation by a knowledgeable human observer. How can you be impressed that it "makes sense" if you don't know whether it makes sense? How can you know if it's just making shit up if you don't know what "making sense" looks like?

"...about 120 data centers are clustered around Dublin and dot the countryside beyond. A third of the country’s electricity is expected to go to data centers in the next few years, up from 5 percent in 2015" and 20% today. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/t...

Today is the day 🎁 The #dsa regime for researchers to get access to platform data to study societal impact and risks starts TODAY. This has been a loooooong time coming. And the proof of the pudding will be in the eating … #dataaccess #commsky digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/new-...

Funders must recognise that great discoveries often come from studies that seeks to advance knowledge for its own sake go.nature.com/47zrzYZ

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has crossed 120 million EU users for its search feature and may fall under the Digital Services Act. Ramsha Jahangir breaks down what this could mean for regulation of AI chatbots in Europe.

Equally true of Ireland.

German neo-Nazi rappers push hate speech, disinfo on TikTok nordot.app/135616776540...

Excuse me? So the company the President currently owns is teaming up with a cryptocurrency company to create a prediction market, which will take bets... on things the President himself has quite a lot of control over? Gosh, I'm sure nothing bad will happen. www.ft.com/content/4855...

From teenage honor student to dining at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump: the story of Nick Fuentes shows how today’s digital ecosystem can turn fringe figures into influential extremists. 🔗 tinyurl.com/2vcd8s5u #radicalright #polsky #politicalextremism #politicaldiscourse #digitaldiscourse

"During their trial it emerged the men, [open underline] who are not believed to have met in the real world before appearing in court [close underline], were preparing to use more than 200 weapons they had amassed, including machetes, swords, crossbows..." www.bbc.com/news/article...

I cannot tell you how many tech journalists at prominent media organizations do not understand this

My piece for RUSI on Ireland‘s defence dilemma

New paper: LLMs are increasingly used to label data in political science. But how reliable are these annotations, and what are the consequences for scientific findings? What are best practices? Some new findings from a large empirical evaluation. Paper: eddieyang.net/research/llm_annotation.pdf

by OpenAI’s own estimates, hundreds of thousands of ChatGPT users are showing signs of manic or psychotic crisis every week

He’s designing the ballroom with AI isn’t he www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I 100% endorse this message. The spoiled votes are a 3rd or 4th order story in this election and disproportionate attention and airtime is a measure of the level of editorial discomfort with talking about Connolly’s success and FF/FG failure.

Free guided tours of the new Changing Ireland galleries at the National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks Explore Irish history from 1900–2020 through powerful stories & exhibits. 📅 Sat 25 & Sun 26 Oct 🕑 14:00 & 15:30 📍 National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks www.museum.ie/en-IE/Museum...

The AI industry wants us to believe AI superintelligence is the real threat from generative AI. But that narrative was crafted to distract from the many ways genAI is being used to tear our societies apart, as we saw this week when a deepfake video rocked the Irish election. It must be reined in.

Mali JNIM is now operating with increasing confidence & visibility […] well-armed combatants driving around a Malian town bordering Burkina Faso in the middle of a civilian population that does not flee is significant www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/1...

An expert, thorough takedown of that shoddy and grossly misleading CSIS report from a few weeks back. www.justsecurity.org/122278/corre...

"A New Jersey teenage girl whose real photo was allegedly transformed by a classmate into at least one fake-nude image is suing the developer of the “clothes removal” software that was used."

You’ll notice that new developments in generative AI are always accompanied by new ways of depicting women without their consent—undermining their autonomy and harassing them—almost like it’s a pillar of the technology and its evolution

Next week, Oct 22 at 5:30 pm EDT, join Vital Voices and co-host Sine Institute of Policy & Politics in welcoming @milleridriss.bsky.social for a discussion of her book, Man Up, and how an explosion of misogyny is driving a surge of mass and far-right violence. Get your free ticket: buff.ly/gCDFe9N

Some followers may wish to join tomorrow's @crexuio.bsky.social webinar on the challenges of using an empathetic methodology to interview right-wing extremists, which will feature @vox-pol.bsky.social's @lizzypearson.bsky.social. More info. at: www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/englis...

One of the best ways to keep up-to-date with our publications, events, etc. is via our monthly newsletter. Sign-up on our website voxpol.eu. #PleaseRS

A lot of the J6 groups came down, btw, based on FB's own calls, because of calls for violence within those groups. That got reframed as "anti-conservative censorship". What apparently happened here is that Laura Loomer got upset about some groups she thought needed to come down & DOJ made requests.

I'm sorry, is the Trump Administration talking to a tech platform? Is it...requesting content moderation?

Lmao WaPo has fewer than 100K circulation now. It turns out “alienate your liberal subscriber base” is not a good strategy when the Republicans also hate you. www.forbes.com/sites/andyme...

To anyone who studies the new right, this is absolutely no surprise. A movement forged in the edgelord chambers of online cruelty and malice. What happens when 4chan becomes the soul of a party.

If anyone needs me I will be in the museum, lying down next to the bog bodies.