The Open Web (1993-2026) Detailed and informative as usual from my colleague @jtlg.bsky.social

Reminds me of when I climbed (well, walked up) Bridger Peak, the tallest peak in Rich County, Utah Which is the shortest tallest peak of Utah counties Which is the tallest shortest tallest county peak of all US States Now worried about the veracity of these facts www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/s...

Catching up late on this from @natematias.bsky.social and Avriel Epps. As federally funded grants to study these issues disappear, another case of a company offering "measly" grants that at best will offer limited insights while hurting researcher credibility. www.techpolicy.press/beware-of-op...

What happened in digital deception this year (gift link): survey of experts (+me) by the people of @indicator.media. Already highlighting a dire state, even if missing the (recent) most troubling development of U.S. going after Trust & Safety people abroad indicator.media/p/elon-musk-...

Catching up late on this from @natematias.bsky.social and Avriel Epps. As federally funded grants to study these issues disappear, another case of a company offering "measly" grants that at best will offer limited insights while hurting researcher credibility. www.techpolicy.press/beware-of-op...

One way in which our society is showing signs of post-hype AI is that the corporations are finally depicting socially acceptable use-cases* for AI in their campaigns. www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9qP... *Mere Santa-level deception and environmental costs notwithstanding

"the researchers found that withdrawing support for rapidly advancing mRNA vaccine technology could result in over 49,000 preventable deaths annually among patients diagnosed with four major cancers"

How well did X's Community Notes handle misinformation about the identity of Ahmed al-Ahmed, the man who disarmed one of the Bondi Beach terrorists? It's complicated... new on @indicator.media:

Ok the practice of "grab the first reference you find that seems to support your point" is now not just lazy but actually dangerous to your own reputation, as slop citations are infesting both Scholar and otherwise-legit papers. Thanks, AI, I guess?

I haven’t looked at all of mine, but of the couple I did, one seemed fine and one had a small error that was fairly inconsequential. I’d be interested in what kinds of mistakes folks who have mentioned them are seeing!

It is wild that the ACM shows these AI summaries as the *default* article view, overriding the authors' own summary aka the abstract. Having said that, I scanned the summaries for my own papers since the beginning of 2024. They are accurate AND well-written, and I would likely have approved them.

I took a deep dive into Meta’s “Hyperion” data center in Richland Parish, LA. The story of a tech behemoth coming bearing billions to a poor community like Richland Parish is complex and worthy of scrutiny. 🧵 1/7 sherwood.news/tech/hyperion/

The Big Three (JP Morgan, One Vanderbilt, @empirestatebldng.bsky.social) are dressed for Hanukkah it seems. JP Morgan in high-res.

What authoritarianism looks like - directing government prosecutors to find any basis to bring charges against political targets, then seek to shake them down and cripple them

Main source -- I kid you not: Ben Horowitz www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/t...

From the moment Zuck shot his hostage video on Jan 7, the tone was set for a year of rampant digital deception. Platforms rolled back interventions on misinformation, bad actors embraced AI, brainrot infected startup culture, and scam states thrived. Indicator's 2025 Wrapped for Digital Deception:

The enshittification is here

I spoke with @kattenbarge.bsky.social for this @wired.com piece about my research into reddit moderators' experiences moderating AI-generated content. Moderators are working hard to keep Reddit "one of the most human spaces left on the internet," but it's a trying and often thankless task.

The most human place on the Internet... Or is it? Great story at @wired.com about the challenges faced by Reddit moderators and users due to AI content. Quotes @travislloydphd.bsky.social and our research. www.wired.com/story/ai-slo...

And, if you are a non-US citizen who did this work, you and your entire family will be banned from the United States. (I know this is incredible, but read the order—that’s what it says!)

Check out @isabelcorpus.bsky.social's fantastic thread on our paper studying the effects of a "write with AI" button on change.org! ✍️ Spoiler: the effects of AI aren't always positive.

#genAI makes your outputs more average. Obviously could be of benefit to some but certainly not to all. And in general, I suspect we can each make ourselves more valuable by being specialised in some way, so it may hurt more people than you might guess.

Really excited about this 🔔new paper🔔 where we had a chance to leverage Change.org 's staggered rollout of a "write with AI" tool to causally (aka "once and for all") measure the impact of such tools on global platform outcomes. Summary: with AI, petition length ⬆️, homogeneity ⬆️, Outcomes ⬇️. More:

Really excited about this 🔔new paper🔔 where we had a chance to leverage Change.org 's staggered rollout of a "write with AI" tool to causally (aka "once and for all") measure the impact of such tools on global platform outcomes. Summary: with AI, petition length ⬆️, homogeneity ⬆️, Outcomes ⬇️. More:

Legally sanctioned harassment. McCarthyism 2025.

Also damning (and perhaps even more meaningful in retrospect) is how Jack was in there RTing Crystal1Johnson, revealing how the “new elites” of Twitter have long been high on their own supply (of disinformation). Jack just got his from the Gabbard wing of the “left” and now Elon from the hard right

I have a lot to say about the X location feature/scandal but in the meantime @cwarzel.bsky.social is here to remind you that it was not a surprise (see next post), the incentives are misaligned, and the corporations generally do not want to fix it. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Many people don't know this but arXiv is maintained and operated by @cornelltech.bsky.social (that does NOT mean you can send me complaints or feature requests!) Everyone in the community should be excited that arXiv got $7M to upgrade from Schmidt Sciences, NASA news.cornell.edu/stories/2025...

I was visiting @destrin.bsky.social at (then) UCLA the day MacBook Air was first launched. Saw her turn to her admin and say "please get me one". Meanwhile, as (then) Yahoo researcher, to replace a broken mouse I'd need sign-offs from three different SVPs. Academia instantly became more attractive

Our postdoc search is open! socialmediacollective.org/2025/11/20/s...

This story alone may have completely justified my annual subscription

Summary: a (rather simple) AI bot can not only successfully evade survey-level protections, it can also mimic personas accurately across questions, parse photos/videos, and infer the researcher’s hypotheses to produce data that confirms them. The official paper link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Changing the culture (w/a fist on the scale), one LLM at a time. "Elon Musk's Grokipedia cites a neo-Nazi website 42 times, researchers say. An analysis by researchers at Cornell University is the first comprehensive look at Grokipedia since Musk launched his project" www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-mu...

Calling NYC parents -- after years of requests we finally offer a summer high school program on campus.

Calling NYC parents -- after years of requests we finally offer a summer high school program on campus.

This from @craigsilverman.bsky.social's story nails it. The companies generally do not like spam ads or need the revenue from them. They simply can't fight the spam effectively without adding friction that will result in “too much good revenue flushed out”. So they make it OUR problem. #Regulation

Creative brown-nosing the likes of which we've never seen! apnews.com/article/fifa...

Wow this speech is incredibly bold and unapologetically ambitious. #Mamdani

Made a math worksheet for the kid. How evil am I? Answer on a scale of 1--6.7

In which Palantir recruits high school students for fellowships by telling them to skip college because its holds little value and then puts them through a cherry-picked curriculum that oddly resembles… college

Our daily progress towards a @nealstephenson.bsky.social society

Ok if the stupidest possible tech reporting is happening, at least let it be in the Athletic www.nytimes.com/athletic/676...

One could jokingly say some of the same people would also say they've been at Woodstock. Ironically, based on this survey, some of them could very possibly have!

AI-mediated communication -- apology edition: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/u... And yes, there's academic research too: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #AIMC

Cornell Tech researchers @informor.bsky.social and @travislloydphd.bsky.social earned a Best Paper Honorable Mention at #CSCW2025 for their study on how Reddit moderators respond to AI-generated content. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/10/ai-generated-content-triple-threat-reddit-moderators

But I thought Trump cared so much about protecting Americans from illegal drugs. Also, this story's detail of corruption goes way beyond the headline and the quote. Unbelievable.

Reposting for the morning crowd and due to the tight deadline. Several postdoc positions available for technical AI development at Cornell -- both the NYC Tech campus and Ithaca academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30971 ✈️ Spread the word! ✈️

Cornell (NYC and Ithaca) is recruiting AI postdocs, apply by Nov 20, 2025! If you're interested in working with me on technical approaches to responsible AI (e.g., personalization, fairness), please email me. academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30971

Ok JP Morgan new building do we have a reason to be alarmed?

This is most literally the LOWEST HANGING FRUIT of AI detection: read (or maintain) the already-available metadata. Alexios' investigation shows that most of the platforms can't even do that.