And it begs the question as to what the reality of "full autonomy" actually is. On paper, sure, they get to maintain "academic freedom". In practice? Don't ask the wrong questions or support the wrong students and the government won't cut your grants (again). Not really the definition of autonomous.

This was a fantastic article, and fits well to be read in concert with the one in the reply inthesetimes.com/article/the-...

This really hasn’t gotten enough attention this week. @wired.com #ICE www.wired.com/story/fbi-wa...

"Criminals posing as US immigration officers have carried out robberies, kidnappings, and sexual assaults in several states" according to an FBI bulletin. Which, of course, gives ICE cover to commit the same crimes. "It wasn't us, it was different thugs, dressing up as us."

Last week, my Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction class covered an older paper about “social translucence” where they explain how the design of online systems shapes the norms & behaviors w/in those systems. But the framework they create can be applied more broadly, eg to our political moment.

Stick your head in the sand long enough and you may find that when you try to speak only sand comes out.

If you aren't paying attention to what is happening in Illinois/Chicago, you're missing out on Bovino and federal agents using tear gas, pepper balls, and force against the people. Check out our investigation alongside @evidentmedia.org

Happy, honored, humbled by this: www.volvogroup.com/en/news-and-... Thanks 2 all friends, family, colleagues, who have supported me along the way, esp #ErikMConway & @bloomsburybooksus.bsky.social @bloomsburybooksuk.bsky.social @harvard.edu @harvardhistsci.bsky.social @ucsandiego.bsky.social

This article provokes a broader question: as our institutions are systematically dismantled, how can we reimagine and rebuild them in a way that is resilient to this type of manipulation, ensuring they advance the interests of the people they purport to serve?

What could possibly go wrong

I know we a so far beyond this point, but the blatant hypocrisy continues to be one of the most frustrating parts of these narratives. I'm reminded of a quote about hypocrisy being a flex for authoritarians, a way to assert power. Something like that

Bullshit as U.S. government policy. This is the punchline from my Feb 2025 lecture. If you’re interested in understanding more about how we got here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjiG... It ends with a call to action to rage against the bullshit machine.

Shocking

This is certainly not surprising to those of us in the election space. We wrote about hybrid infrastructures supporting undermining elections via "evidence" generation and DDoS style iniatives purging voter rolls as part of our rumoring research last election cycle. www.cip.uw.edu/2024/10/29/e...

Really excited to share this new paper on "Data Visualizations as Propaganda", co-led by PhD students Priya Dhawka and Nina Lutz, which just won a Best Paper award at the CSCW conference: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... [Short thread]

A major front of the current information war: getting your facts, frames, propaganda, disinformation, etc. into the AI systems that create so much of the content we see and are rapidly becoming the de facto “ground truth” of the internet.

"Vanderbilt is failing in its moral responsibility to push back against rising authoritarianism and political coercion." My effort to convince Vanderbilt (and all universities) to take a stand for the rule of law, the Constitution, and our democracy. www.tennessean.com/story/opinio...

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

This is how many conspiracy theories work, by exploiting real anger from legitimate grievances (often downstream from complex, unjust systems) and redirecting it onto scapegoats through simplified “conspiracy” narratives.

Our team presented five papers at the CSCW (computer supported cooperative work and social computing) conference this week in Bergen, Norway. (CSCW is an ACM conference and a “home conference” for my team.) I’m going to share a few highlights in a thread here.

This research used interviews and trace data analysis to understand how TikTok users experienced a sudden burst of attention and whether/how/why they changed their content creation and engagement practices afterwards. UW PhD student @schafer.bsky.social will present the paper at CSCW this afternoon.

We turned our pain into a research paper… documenting how our collaborative research team (which included researchers at a public university) navigated a slew of public records requests (by some of the same folks who have since turned their attention towards attacking academia more broadly).

this rocks. when indiana edu killed the student newspaper, Purdue stepped up, printed the forbidden issue, drove it to Bloomington and stocked the boxes.

Russian asylum-seekers are being deported en masse to their country of origin, where many are imprisoned upon arrival due to their involvement in opposition and anti-war campaigning foreignpolicy.com/2025/10/08/t...

Henry Farrell on the Trump admin’s proposed “compact” for universities, arguing that the rollout signals weakness, and that academics need to band together to reject this authoritarian attack on university independence and academic freedom. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o...

Recently published work from colleagues Morgan Wack (postdoc at University of Zurich) & Joey Schafer (UW PhD candidate) showing how state election policies that delayed vote counting fueled rumoring and conspiracy theorizing around the 2020 election: blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/20...

Based on the experience of countries that have tried this, there’s overwhelming evidence that it is utterly unnecessary.

Dartmouth’s response to the Trump admin’s corrupt contract, short and sweet: “You have often heard me say that higher education is not perfect and that we can do better. At the same time, we will never compromise our academic freedom and our ability to govern ourselves.”

United States immigration authorities are moving to dramatically expand their social media surveillance, with plans to hire nearly 30 contractors to sift through posts, photos, and messages to target people for deportation.

A moment that calls for collective action… to reject this transparent attack on academic freedom.

Trump's FCC yesterday voted to kill a program that provided free Wi-Fi to rural school kids at no cost to taxpayers, falsely claiming the program was "illegal" and was being used to "censor Conservative ideology."

All, lots of shut down news, much of it is grim. But flagging this one - wapo.st/3IRQBdg

Thought provoking piece by my colleague #Charlie Tyson www.chronicle.com/article/can-...

The right wing media machine incentives the constant production of “evidence” to fit their frames. News influencers “work” by selectively amplifying content that aligns w/ their frames/goals. The left seems to be catching on, but they need to do more than just solicit content, they need to reward it

New work about how perceptions of social consensus shape belief. My sense is that the design of social media, w/ signals of engagement on top of massive attention flows, shapes social consensus… a key factor (IMO ) of information disorder.

Deadline for comment on EPA endangerment finding extended to 22 Sept. Please send a comment. Here's a good piece with some ideas, and you don't have to be a scientist to comment. blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechang...

Worth a try, this strategy. Also worth writing through the voices of siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles who didn’t survive childhood due to the same diseases.

I watched the DSA and OSA "Censorship" Hearing in the House Judiciary Committee today so you don't have to. I have some questions. A 🧵 of my internet lawyer, free speech expert, First Amendment scholar ponderings, to no no one in particular: Why are we here? 1/

"...Mr. Musk and his artificial intelligence company, xAI, have tweaked the chatbot to make its answers more conservative on many issues, according to an analysis of thousands of its responses by The New York Times. The shifts appear, in some cases, to reflect Mr. Musk’s political priorities."

This is such a fascinating case study. On a different note, I have been enjoying Wired's reporting as they fill a very needed gap in the current environment.

All of the election fraud lies and conspiracy theories have softened the ground underneath our election process, enabling the Trump regime’s next steps… to use those lies to justify changing the rules of elections to (further) tilt them in their favor.

Less than 30 minutes after the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer resigned following a whistleblower complaint, recipients could no longer access the resignation email. www.wired.com/story/charle...

New study by @brendannyhan.bsky.social, @jasonreifler.bsky.social & colleagues demonstrates that prebunking election fraud rumors — by warning about anticipated false claims & filling conceptual gaps that those claims exploit — helps to reduce belief in falsehoods: www.science.org/content/arti...

Turns out that the humanities and the values of open inquiry upon which democracy is founded are, indeed, symbiotic. We cannot have one without the other. This is apparent on the surface for anyone who knows the history of the founding if the U.S.

He does make this point I think, just in a more roundabout way. Maybe a sign I need to get back to writing instead of doomscrolling...

This is an important point, but stops before the punchline. The pathway of this admin to power has been to "fake it till you make it". Their idea is that by acting, even if it seems absurd or surreal, they begin to manifest the reality they envision simply by acting as though it is already present.

APS Fellow @lewan.bsky.social & colleagues have recently developed the Anti-Autocracy Handbook, which they describe as “a call to action, resilience, and collective defense of democracy, truth, and academic freedom in the face of mounting authoritarianism.”

It genuinely melts my mind how so many allegedly smart people are willing to simply discard the utterly crucial differences between the embodied, organic consciousness of human beings (and bees, and dogs, and fish) and the networked, disembodied simulacra of such that is an LLM.

What happened to "God helps those who help themselves"? That was the most common refrain I heard growing up. They're just manufacturing learned helplessness.

Oreskes and Conway's The Big Myth is required reading for anyone seeking to understand how historical propaganda has created a foundation for current events. I read it alongside Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda" and they pair surprisingly well together.