New Signal backup phishing attacks just dropped, targeting civil society: techcrunch.com/2026/05/28/h...

Until @elplatt.com wrote the opening post in this series, I had no idea that biostatisticians have used the analogy of perpetual motion to think about what AI can/cannot do. As an empiricist, I'm so used to "try & find out" that I forget you can ask in advance what's mathematically possible.

One glimmer of hope in the Ebola response: Within hours of the outbreak in DRC being declared, researchers convened to prepare drug trials. A lot has changed on that front since the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a decade ago. But huge challenges remain 🧪 My story in @science.org (🧵 to come)

In the @inquirer.com, @geurkink.bsky.social clearly lays out the unambiguous reality that the Trump administration is engaging in a censorship campaign against researchers of technology companies and the information ecosystem. www.inquirer.com/opinion/comm...

STAT is seeking an ambitious and intellectually curious reporter to cover one of the defining issues in medicine, science, and public health today: declining trust in science. www.statnews.com/careers/stat...

What does it mean to serve one's country? On Memorial Day, I rode to the Elmira National Cemetery and out to several memorial day parades along the Southern Tier. On the ride, I listened to two stories about how complicated it can be to serve one's people at a time of violence & risk (1/3)

This month, @globalvoices.org is putting a spotlight on how people and communities in the Global Majority are taking significant action to protect and improve their environment - stories that don't get enough coverage in the US-focused, rich-people-centered media. Like this story:

This is the year that fact-checkers get hired in greater numbers and paid more, right? ... right?

People often pitch AI as unprecedented. But what if we already have the organizational tools to evaluate & negotiate its use? Our new book Auditing AI opens in the 1980s with the story of the US Network for Organ Sharing how how they test & decide on their algorithms direct.mit.edu/books/book/6...

NEW: They Got the Best NIH Scores of Their Careers. A Year Later, They Still Don’t Have Funding. As the NIH bankrolls new research at a significantly slower-than-usual pace, I talked to scientists left in the lurch about the toll on their research and careers: www.chronicle.com/article/they...

"The Trump administration has been going after researchers who study and try to counter hate speech, harassment, propaganda, and disinformation online... Now, some of those researchers are fighting back." @eileenguo.bsky.social in the MIT Tech Review www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/21/1...

Three things said about AI and social science: it's a topic to study, a thing to critique, a tool to use. My new Daedalus essay argues these aren't three conversations; they're one. A 🧵 on "Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object, and Tool." www.amacad.org/publication/...

fwiw, my friend is looking for a program manager: opensciencehardware.org/2026/05/oshf...

Anti-DEI laws are quietly narrowing what counts as knowledge and whose experiences are recognized as valid. The true ripple effect behind anti-DEI laws isn’t discussed enough. Read this article to learn more: www.usnews.com/opinion/arti...

"ChatGPT, the most heavily used AI service, gave wrong information in 46% of its answers, including making up an expenses scandal, giving inaccurate replies on voter eligibility rules and getting the date of the election wrong by two months." www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Welcome and ICYMI go.bsky.app/7VsB1Yu

1.) The University of Nottingham has divested from big deal packages with five major publishers https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-universities-2026-5-university-of-nottingham-drops-five-publishing-deals/ 2.) The University of Nottingham also has an insitutional rights […]

As agentic AI rapidly transforms internet infrastructure, how do we ensure disabled people's needs are not displaced? In a new article by me and @frank.computer, we argue that accessibility must not be treated as an incidental benefit of rapid AI expansion. Read below:

Lucky to participate in a wonderful workshop from local artist Laidy Saenz on making Incan-inspired Quipu to tell our own histories of migration. The activity led to sharing of some amazing stories of the journeys of my immigrant neighbors. A lovely invitation to make and share 👏🏽

Years ago, Christian Sandvig predicted that companies would convert email it into yet another feed they could control, datamine, and advertise on as it became the last place that people and publishers could use to guarantee interpersonal information delivery. www.theverge.com/tech/932973/...

We developed a queueing model to support performance evaluation and improvement snap-call-center-access.org Current staffing guidance is overly optimistic because when callers can't get through to complete an interview in 30 days, they'll call back - this *endogenous congestion* worsens backlogs

I *just so happened* to be on a call with my counterparts across the nation from the other states councils of churches. Not trying to set off alarm, but we are all seeing an increase in activity

"The UK public view science positively & want scientists and government to engage with them. However, opportunities for them to engage are under threat. [researchers] express a strong desire to engage... but are not given the stability, time, skills, confidence, protections, or money to do it well."

Professor Schiebinger has published four books with SUP — Ignorance Unmasked: Essays in the New Science of Agnotology (co-edited with Robert N. Proctor) 2/6

This paper has now been accepted at Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science!

"The core question at stake is... whether the government can use immigration enforcement as a tool to shape what research gets done." Courtney Radsch on @thecoalition.bsky.social's day in court this Wednesday www.techpolicy.press/dispatch-fro...

Good news; I've been selected for a fellowship at the @rad-institute.bsky.social, where I'm working on Academic Freedom & Connecting Across Difference. This work isn't done alone, so there will be ways for freedom-lovers everywhere to get involved (🧵/n) citizensandtech.org/2026/05/fire...

Good news; I've been selected for a fellowship at the @rad-institute.bsky.social, where I'm working on Academic Freedom & Connecting Across Difference. This work isn't done alone, so there will be ways for freedom-lovers everywhere to get involved (🧵/n) citizensandtech.org/2026/05/fire...

A lawyer for academics, journalists and researchers made a case in federal court against a Trump administration policy they say would chill free speech and adversely affect fact-checking.

“We want to get AI to the point where it’s useful and reliable enough that you don’t have to think about it.” Grateful to the @cornelluniversity.bsky.social Chronicle for a great interview about our new book, Auditing AI, out with @mitpress.bsky.social news.cornell.edu/stories/2026...

#MozFest 2026 Call for Proposals is now open until May 24th. We're rethinking what the internet can look like and if you have ideas and projects, now is the time to pitch them: appv2.sessionboard.com/submit/mozfe...

and GUESS WHAT? Our Pride Month Spotlight in June is going to be 🏳️‍🌈GENDER DIVERSITY🏳️‍🌈 bringing you the joy, struggle, and resistance of diverse gender expression around the world!

"Opt-in polls have been shown to generate erroneous data for young adults and estimates of relatively rare behaviors."

"These are researchers, students, and nonprofit workers analyzing how information spreads online. They do not wield the power to censor the speech of Americans. Instead, what they share is work that helps the public understand and scrutinize these systems." www.inquirer.com/opinion/comm...

1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses.

In a new op-ed for @inquirer.com, @thecoalition.bsky.social's @geurkink.bsky.social writes about how a U.S. immigration policy is targeting those who help the public understand social media. A federal court in D.C. will hear arguments this morning on CITR’s PI motion seeking to block the policy.

Thanks to MIT CS3 for this Q&A about our recent paper on hourly air pollution forecast evaluation! (We find existing forecasts aren't that great, but there's a lot of room for improvement.)

"This sort of everyday corruption keeps spreading until everything collapses. Systems like this break down, and then have to be rebuilt through tremendous collective effort."

More of the authoritarian playbook attacking media freedom and threatening journalistic independence. This is something I outline in our report CHOKEHOLD (below). www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/u...

I grieve that we rehearse again the rituals of confusion, horror, and anger following a shooting. This time on Memorial Drive in Cambridge. And we don’t have to live like this. Why did anyone have access to a machine gun? #BanAssaultWeapons www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/11/m...

This is a really great, research-based summary of the attention span “shrinking” effect related to technology and discusses how and why this effect often gets overstated, plus some reasons for optimism about reversing its undesirable impacts www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This essay is extraordinary. By a 93-year-old who remembers what life was like before modern vaccines.

as per melissa's thread, it is really important to understand that a major goal of this administration is the resegregation of key institutions of american society

6. Finally, something to think about: If we hadn't used replicability estimates to draw attention to a heterogeneous collection of issues, we'd never have a "replication" crisis. Since we show that replicability as a measure is not capable of telling a crisis apart from order, how do we proceed?

This is a big decision! Mass termination of National Endowment for the Humanities grants (remember DOGE doing this?) "unlawful, unconstitutional... and without legal effect." Terminations violate 1st Amendment & equal protection component of 5th Amendment, "and without statutory authority."

One year later - my reflections on what's happened to US science since the National Science Foundation grant terminations last year. The problem of misinformation isn't going away, but our ability to study and understand it is under attack. 1/ 🧪 www.tennessean.com/story/opinio...

Safety testing is expensive, and in a country that's de-funding science, I can see why orgs ask industry to pay. But if Common Sense is going to call itself "independent" *and* take money from OpenAI, it's worth asking how much that will actually be true. www.cnn.com/2026/05/05/t...

@ethanz.bsky.social interviewed me on the social media lawsuits. My answer: “lawsuits can make products safer... [but] I worry that that we will jump out of Big Tech’s frying pan into the fire of untested, so-called safety products that enrich the same VCs" www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/techno...

I learned so much in this talk - about what users value in their subreddits, the spectrum of rules mods use and, most fascinatingly, what rules are connected to healthier communities. If you missed, this is a great write-up, but @galenweld.bsky.social is so fun to listen to it's worth the watch.

"We move beyond a homogenous racial sample to examine how different racial groups engage sociopolitical cues when classifying other"