Whitewashing surveillance isn't new or surprising. Set against the backdrop of what these tools are enabling however, it's morally repugnant:

Amid anti-immigrant sentiment and political tensions, Chinese-origin tech workers are abandoning the American dream and returning home, where state-led incentives and ambition are plentiful, reports Selina Cheng for @restofworld.org restofworld.org/2025/chinese...

Guests @zevesanderson.com, CDT Research Fellow @mluria.bsky.social, and guest host @aliyabhatia.bsky.social unpack what users really think about age checks, how they shape online behavior, and what’s at stake for balancing child safety with digital rights.

“The Parliament of Nepal right now is Discord,” www.thenation.com/article/worl...

My latest for @techpolicypress.bsky.social The internet is under a quiet coup. Surveillance tech once for dictators is now global, sold to governments. Democracies are complicit, civil society is shrinking. Will we defend an open internet—or let it vanish? www.techpolicy.press/the-internet...

A double feature: - Chotiner's latest with Sunstein on "liberalism" and how we regularly look away from words. www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a... - And then TNC on what you lose if you look away from Kirk and others' words www.vanityfair.com/news/story/c...

Recent headlines about Jimmy Kimmel Live! being pulled after FCC pressure show why we should talk about gov’t influence over speech. Join #FOSO2025 (Oct 28–29) as experts unpack “jawboning” & new legal protections for free expression. cdt.org/event/the-fu...#FOSO2025

Who is writing a long form piece about how/whether astrologers in India are using AI

Friday night immigration news drops are a different kind of evil

Predictable and known: Age verification technology doesn't work equally across users. Think of age verification online as resting on two assumptions: one, carding will keep all people safe, and two, automated technologies work equally well across all users. www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

When ProPublica was reporting on baked in algorithmic bias a decade ago, this is what it was warning us about. But it was too abstract. Or we didn’t wanna fix it. Probably both! Probably both…

Tamil speakers face a double bind online: too much moderation of their speech & too little protection from harassment. In @thehindu.com, CDT’s @aliyabhatia.bsky.social + @thakurdhanaraj.bsky.social explore why moderation in Tamil is broken — & what platforms can do to fix it. www.thehindu.com/opi...

First piece in @thehindu.com! @thakurdhanaraj.bsky.social and I write about the double standard Tamil speaking users face on social media, at once facing over-moderation of their speech and also under-moderation particularly of gender and caste-based attacks. Read: www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-e...

Good to see that our op-ed in the @thehindu.com was published today. It was written by @aliyabhatia.bsky.social and myself and based on research we did at the @cdt.org on social media moderation of user generated content in Tamil. www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-e...

"Confusion, Anger, Relief: Korean Engineer Tells of Week in U.S. ICE Detention" www.wsj.com/world/asia/c...

After a sweeping social media ban, Nepal saw its bloodiest unrest in decades. What has happened in Nepal is a warning to other democracies to tread carefully with efforts to contain online expression, writes Samik Kharel.

Community is the only way.

"Nepal's crackdown on social media companies, which led to protests and police killing at least 19 people, marks the latest episode of a years-long decline of internet freedoms around the world as even democracies seek to curtail online speech." www.euronews.com/next/2025/09...

3/ If true, this profoundly undermines research integrity. Excluding findings, deleting data that sheds light on people’s safety, misrepresenting findings — these would all directly violate the most fundamental research ethics code.

It’s not every day that UX researcher whistleblowers testify before the Senate. Yesterday, two former Meta researchers, Jason Sattizahn and Cayce Savage, shared their concerns with safety research for Meta VR products, and more broadly within Meta. So how does UX research move on from here? 🧵

Justice Sotomayor, not mincing words, also says that today's decision will lead to the "creation of [] a second-class citizenship status" for Latinos, who now will have the burden to "carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely."

@cdt.org's @aliyabhatia.bsky.social and Dhanaraj Thakur present on interrogating and improving content moderation for indigenous and low-resource languages in the Global South. #OTIat15

SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in a college applicant's file is blatantly unconstitutional ALSO SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in targeting whom to detain and deport is cool cool cool

At least 19 people have been reported killed as police fired at protesters, mostly Nepal’s tech-savvy Generation Z, who took over the streets of Kathmandu and other major cities to protest against corruption and the government’s recent ban on social media platforms. www.thehindu.com/news/interna...

"Rightwing populists all over Europe want to destroy the ability of the UK and the EU to regulate large tech platforms — a move that might threaten their disinformation campaigns with genuine political debate." - @ranaforoohar.bsky.social

The wait time for a visa appointment in Colombia, Guatemala, Bangladesh, Nigeria are over 1 year. Among other things, this means people getting notices that they have been accepted to conferences hosted within the same year in the U.S. will not be able to come if they don't have a visa already

Kurdish Wikimedian Mohammed Sardar shares why he creates digital content to preserve his native language.

Looking forward to presenting our research on social media content moderation for low-resource and indigenous languages with @aliyabhatia.bsky.social at @opentechinstitute.bsky.social 15th anniversary. www.newamerica.org/conference/o...

This long read in The Verge does a remarkable job of describing how Wikipedia's editing community works, the project's strengths and weaknesses, and the threats it faces. www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

CDT’s @aliyabhatia.bsky.social: Online age verification is “a lot more complex than showing your ID before you enter a pub.” www.washingtonpost.c...

Watching this House Judiciary hearing is very Spiderman meme, US and EU actors pointing fingers to each other about who is censoring their people more, while the autocrats around the world are laughing themselves as they dole out FIRs with glee

Asking Nigel Farage "whatever happened to the great countries in the west" in the House Judiciary hearing is just such a dogwhistle I'd be outraged if it wasn't entirely predictable

As lawmakers consider bills like KOSA & the Kids Off Social Media Act, it’s critical to hear directly from those most affected. Our new brief from @mluria.bsky.social + @aliyabhatia.bsky.social centers teen & parent voices on age verification approaches ⬇️ cdt.org/insights/tee...

“Law enforcement and the (AI) companies helping them do this are very interested in collecting all the information they possibly can collect on somebody,” EFF’s Beryl Lipton told @TheMarshallProject.org - but how is that data stored, retained, and shared? www.themarshallproject.org/2025/08/30/...

CDT’s @aliyabhatia.bsky.social in the @wsj.com: “If companies are going to be required to do age verification, they must do so in a rights-respecting way.” www.wsj.com/tech/per...

New: I looked at 90 porn sites to test the new age-verification law rewriting the web. The ones following the rules, and scanning visitors' faces, are crumbling, while the lawbreakers are doubling or tripling their traffic. One of many unintended consequences for an experimental tech wapo.st/47QuttW

"These decisions, taken in close collaboration with the Trump administration, have made it impossible for me to teach modern Middle East history, the field of my scholarship and teaching for more than 50 years, 23 of them at Columbia."

🧵 In the wake of numerous reports of interactions with AI chatbots that resulted in deadly consequences, the Center for Democracy & Technology's Dr. Michal Luria says AI firms should stop designing products that pretend to be human.

Happy to see @bsky.app call for contributions to improve their moderation. One idea: recognize the way caste shows up in violative speech. @equalitylabs.bsky.social has shown how systemic caste-based harassment is routinely under moderated and silences users: www.equalitylabs.org/research/pub...

We used a Design Research approach (#speeddating) to test scenarios currently being proposed and debated in policy circles with teens and parents. Here is what we found on age verification approaches 👉 Full report on all topics, including screen-time features and algorithm controls coming soon.

It's undeniable the extent to which attacks on speech are attacks on Pro-Palestinian viewpoints. Latest in the case: a letter scrutinizing Wikipedia for platforming "anti-Israel" positions. PlatGov folks are missing the forest for the trees without this lens: oversight.house.gov/wp-content/u...

SALC's director, Anneke Meerkotter, questioned how any third country can justify the acceptance of foreign nationals who were illegally deported from the US. @thecontinent.org #NoToUSdeportationPlanesToSADC open.substack.com/pub/continen...

When civil society is pushed offline, what’s lost isn’t just voices, but history, memory, resistance, and possibility

yeah... i mean, it's right there in the name, "estimation." that only sounds slightly better than "not-really-sure-about-this technology"

Our own study of multilingual AI finds that these systems are trained on mostly English-lang data, machine translated speech, or data scraped from the web which doesn't represent how people speak. Translation is an art form. AI is creating six-fingered mimicry of language: cdt.org/insights/los...

Moderators said these tools don't work: “We can’t rely on AI’s suggestions,” said Kadenova, 36, who works for a content moderation firm in Kazakhstan that contracts with a big tech company. “It doesn’t match most of the time — like 80%. We don’t even look at them.” www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

CDT more fully explained its concerns about the use of social media in the immigration context in May 2025 comments it submitted to USCIS objecting to the proposed collection of social media handles from applicants for political asylum and other immigration benefits. cdt.org/insights/cdt...

CDT's ‪@kateruane.bsky.social‬: “The State Department’s announcement should send a chill down the spine of every American. No one should feel the government breathing down their neck when they post about politics or social issues online." apnews.com/article/trum...

Proving yet again that you can't make a good joke in front of just anyone