This is basically Shattered Glass but for academia? All the way down to creating fake company websites...https://www.wsj.com/economy/aidan-toner-rodgers-mit-ai-research-78753243?st=NGTDig&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Just finished Brother's Karamazov for the first time. As Dostoevsky is to Tolstoy, Tolkien is to G.R.R. Martin?

NEW REPORT 💻 @annalenhart.bsky.social and @brandonsilverman.bsky.social interviewed 18 high-profile social media figures about how they view privacy. Many policymakers assume that public data from prominent accounts involve lower expectations of privacy. Is that the case? Read here: bit.ly/4peorZB.

We live in a two-tiered system—where corporations & brands buy access to the data they need and public interest researchers are locked out. One customer representative candidly admitted: "Even when they added more restrictions on Facebook, we found a way to get more data."

Needless to say, strongly agree with @ebakerwhite.bsky.social in this op-ed in the Times this morning! www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/o...

This new report from @brandonsilverman.bsky.social and @naomishiffman.bsky.social is great. It documents numerous concrete cases in which platform transparency (or scraping-based research) has had significant real-world impact. iddp.gwu.edu/sites/g/file...

Anyone know what video was actually played?

Unsubscribe from campaign text messaging is obviously broken. We need a mechanism for more upstream unsubscribes...campaigns should have to tell you *where* they got your number and you should be able to remove yourself from the source list.

The worst happened. We were DOGE’d. Our NSF funding is gone. So now there’s nothing stopping me from sharing Expert Voices Together, a crisis response system for US-based researchers and journalists facing harassment. It's a true passion project. 🧵 1/ expertvoicestogether.org

My useless contribution to the Qatar plane news cycle is that people are severely underestimating the economics of private jet ownership.

This morning, @naomishiffman.bsky.social and I published a report that helps make the case for why online platform transparency is so important by looking at *specific, concrete case studies* where data sharing led to real-world impact. Link to the report and 🧵 with more details below!

Looks like we finally found the censorship industrial complex. I'm sure the Twitter Files conspiracy theorists will be all over it any day now. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Just submitted my first suggestion. Super easy process and such a useful tracker.

Thanks for the bump @mmasnick.bsky.social! And whole thing started with a BlueSky post from @moskov.goodventures.org. Have had a ton of user submissions and just need to go through and approve them all now...

This site gets an A+ in design. It's simple, but effective. It's fast. The background isn't blindingly white. There is still strong contrast between the text and background. It looks good on desktop AND mobile.

Nearly half of people currently detained by ICE/CBP have no criminal charges, yet some are being held in conditions that would be unacceptable in high-security prisons. Admin has eliminated oversight bodies ensured health/safety requirements are met www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

General purpose decision making tree for my 10 year-old:

New from me: an essay on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, and its remarkable 30 year history of witch hunts & blacklists. It chronicles the progression of how industries & academia went from capitulation to defiance,& what we can take from that today www.lawfaremedia.org/article/proc...

Oh. "This is about whether we have functional constitutional government in this country. If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we'd no longer live in a free country.“

I’m profoundly disappointed that the only bias Meta apparently tested for in Llama 4 was *ideological* bias so no one will call them woke. Seems political appeasement is more important at Meta than preventing actual race & gender discrimination in their AI’s decisionmaking.

When someone writes the book on Facebook and their role in news & politics over the decades, the last four words of this announcement should be the title. It perfectly captures the complete total capitulation to their bad faith critics.

So much for the so-called "Censorship Industrial Complex" that fuels so much of the white right's victimhood complex, and led to countless hearings in the GOP-controlled Congress. Data scientists say differently. c/o @techpolicypress.bsky.social www.techpolicy.press/scientists-r...

This is one of the those times when I can so vividly see myself three years in the future, looking backwards and thinking "I have some vague memory of a journalist being added to a highly sensitive group chat but honestly, it just paled in comparison to so much that came after..."

Excellent statement from Nature’s editorial board. The last section on “How to respond” is the most important. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A Mike Pesca line for the ages: “Donald Trump's big speech perfectly showcased a quintessential Trump's quality: imperviousness to fact-checking. The man doesn't just dodge accountability; he breakdances on its grave while firing merch out of a t-shirt cannon.”

What a joke

So disappointed in Martin Gurri's interview with Ezra Klein. Revolt of the Public was one of the best books about the internet that I've read and I've been so curious about why he turned into Trump supporter. Turns out his explanation is just a litany of incoherent, political grievances.

Massive fan of this project and very bull-ish on the huge impact its going to have over the long-run...congrats on the launch to everyone involved! @camillefrancois.bsky.social @elisugarman.bsky.social @dwillner.bsky.social @julietshen.bsky.social and a lot more...

Jim Jordan’s claims about platform content moderation in Europe under the #DSA are fact checked and turn out to be ... false. edmo.eu/publications...

New: A 2nd DOGE staffer has amplified extremists online, including Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate www.reuters.com/world/us/sta...

Any European lawyers out there? How big of a deal is this because it seems like a big deal: democracy-reporting.org/en/office/EU...

They just invented fact checks.

Tomorrow's the RFK Jr hearing. I hope to see the hearing room papered with two sets of poster-sized images: Kennedy's insane-crank Instagram circa early 2020, and pictures of kids with vaccine-preventable diseases. If they're going to confirm him, make it clear to the public what we're getting.

Early on at Facebook, the nascent Content Policy team organically developed a set of aphorisms to guide our work. A set of simple-ish “north stars” to navigate by, keeping us on track while coping with of the ever growing and diversifying torrent of reports. 🧵1/9

The big tell in this interview is that when he gets to the big, shocking moment of what the Biden administration *actually* did that radicalized him so much...his only concrete complaint is about crypto, a produft with no actual PMF and enormous amounts of fraud. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/o...

The more I think about Mark Zuckerberg’s excuses for complying with Biden administration pressure to remove content, the angrier I get. (It was the media’s fault! Or maybe it was the woke Californians way down the reporting chain. Or was it “feminine energy”?) 1/

I really, really don't want to do this, but let's do a bit (just a LITTLE BIT) of fact checking about what Zuck said on the Joe Rogan podcast, because this is something I not only followed closely, but also spent time *talking to the actual people at Meta who dealt with this* which WAS NOT ZUCK.

Old enough to remember when meta would talk about how study after study showed that diverse teams were more effective.

As long as Elon & Trump have a good working relationship, then I think we should assume we're in the "Elon Era" of social media rules...and that every major platform will increasingly adopt X's policies on all contentious issues.

Folks are mostly missing the forest for the trees re: the recent Meta announcement. Specifically, the focus on the move from fact checking to community notes. There two different changes that are a much bigger deal that have received less focus. 🧵 1/11

I know it was almost 4 months ago and that's a long-time but I still remember this zinger: "I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction — and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

It’s not jawboning when he does it

Content moderation on private platforms is imperfect, but the reflexive use of “censorship” in this Zuck statement — a word rendered meaningless by a right-wing propaganda campaign that saw moderating as disadvantaging them — is a purely political statement.

government pressure on social media platforms is good now. keep up!

Looking forward to conservative free speech advocates being very upset by this jawboning.

Genuinely baffled by the unempirical assertion that Community Notes “works.” Does it? How do Meta know? The best available research is pretty mixed on this point. And as they go all-in on an unproven concept, will Meta commit to publicly releasing data so people can actually study this?

I am all for revising content moderation approaches in the face of *evidence* that something is or isn't working. This is all a project of experimentation! It should be subject to revision. But companies should release the data to support their assertions.

📣 #Researchers, please use/share this opportunity: Join our training session with two #LinkedIn representatives who will share the platform's #DataAccess tools to support independent research under the #DSA! 📨 Apply by 9/1/2025 👉 Find out more about this session and our series: loom.ly/8uP1AMk

Generally love vox.com and don't mean to pick on them but this article states that 40% of marriages lead to divorce, a fact which comes with a hyperlinked citation. What happens if you click on that citation? Spoiler: it's not great...🧵

KGI’s submission builds on crucial work to expand platform transparency by the Coalition for Independent Technology Research @geurkink.bsky.social, European Digital Media Observatory, @rebekahtromble.bsky.social, @knightcolumbia.org, @persily.bsky.social, @brandonsilverman.bsky.social & many others