New research on Twitter (right before rebranding to X) shows right leaning accounts got outsized visibility from the algorithm & suggests this bias stemmed from different content production techniques (more sensational, outrage-bait) and from direct interaction w/ the new king of the platform: Musk.

STS/Communications scholar Morgan Ames (whom these authors don't cite) has repeatedly demonstrated that OLPC was ineffective at best, and harmful at worst, including in an award-winning book published in 2019. The real question is why economists don't acknowledge work in other fields.

UW CIP postdoc @mertcanbayar.bsky.social explains how a high-profile scientist's statements about the 3l/ATLAS comet harnessed uncertainty and attention dynamics, and spawned widespread speculation about an alien visitor, an "alien of the gaps" in human knowledge: www.cip.uw.edu/2025/12/03/3...

A note for cognitive researchers interested in the spread of misinfo and disinfo. A lot of our research uses text-based presentation of information. Most of what people use on social media is video-based. I suspect more people watch news than read papers. Maybe we should consider this?

Academia is really just juggling lots of things and being like "Wow I'm so good at juggling!" and ignoring the fact that still means you are a clown.

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.

It was such an honor to co-lead this paper w/ @priyadhawka.bsky.social. We do a fun mix of our research here -- looking at the visual participatory nature of data visualizations and the non-neutral underpinnings and infrastructures of the (open) data and actors behind them. (thread)

For Seattle folks… I’m giving a talk tonight at Obec Brewery (6:30) about science funding, the history of human computer interaction, and the future of AI. I’m off the clock, so I may get a little spicier than usual. If you’re around, please come!

Hi Seattle! Come see my talk on the history of human-computer interaction. I'll explain U.S. gov funding of science has led to many of the innovations that power our economy & shape our lives — and call out the short-sightedness & hypocrisy of efforts to defund science in this field & so many others

Happy refresh email for CSCW 2026 results for all who celebrate.

Does your work explore mis/disinformation, scams, hate speech, or other forms of harmful information online? We are convening a CSCW workshop to bring together a global community focused on information disorder. We welcome short submissions, due August 8th. cscw2025infodisorder.netlify.app

Interesting new study from researchers at the UW Center for an Informed Public finds that AI-generated persuasive messaging (AI-Pasta) is more effective in key ways (e.g. creating a false sense of consensus) and harder to detect than traditional CopyPasta.

Join us online or in person in Bergen, Norway!

Really excited to draw attention to this dissertation by Melinda McClure Haughey (@melm.cc‬). Melinda's research explored collaborative infrastructure for supporting the "sensemaking" work of journalists working on high-stakes, fast-paced & often data-driven beats. www.melm.cc/research/dis...

We’ve seen this repeatedly. QAnon. COVID denial. Election lies. War crimes denial. In each case, the problem wasn’t just what people believed, it was how those beliefs hardened into identity and made correction impossible.

Does your work explore mis/disinformation, scams, hate speech, or other forms of harmful information online? We are convening a CSCW workshop to bring together a global community focused on information disorder. We welcome 2-6 page submissions, due August 1. cscw2025infodisorder.netlify.app

Trying to write about anti-immigrant visual propaganda nothing to see here.

“The net effect of these technological forms has been to nudge us into seeing one another as the machines see us: fungible, expendable parcels of data open to classification and judgment.” Another fabulous blog post from @aidanwalker.bsky.social howtodothingswithmemes.substack.com/p/fossil-foo...

Trump operates almost uniformly in the epistemology of spectacle. Entertainment. Theatrics. Images of chaos in the streets of major U.S. cities is exactly what this administration wants. It reinforces the conflation of “urban” with “violence” like this is where lawlessness reigns.

The administration’s vision of science in America is that we do 75% less of it. That means more death, less progress, more ignorance, fewer experts, fewer educated people, all to make billionaires wealthier.

It’s Fustilarian Friday again. This week: NSF all but abolished in the President’s proposed budget.

The goal is plainly and literally to cut the number of people involved in basic science in the US by 70%

Here’s something we can all do: every time we see something about the Trump administration’s attacks on science — and the impacts of those attacks — boost it. People, and even faculty, have no idea how bad it is and how much worse it’s going to get. We need to let people know…

Perhaps relevant as scientists weather a range of attacks, our team (led by UW research scientist Rachel Moran) published a paper describing how a slew of public records requests impacted our work & what that means for collaborative research in adversarial spaces & times: dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Been thinking about methods for my whole PhD but esp the last 3ish months. A big takeaway is that publish or perish, hype around diff types of data and fads, and having less dedicated time to methods in interdisciplinary spaces can create running around with a hammer seeking nails. (1/n)

I love this view of "hostile filters" -- the translation and dissemination of frames and facts into these piecewise and diffused visuals is really at the root of what makes so much of today's rhetoric sticky and hard to study and build muscles around.

Was a very brave girl and actually got a discussion section down from 2000+ words to 800. Growth? 🥹

Harvard today, your institution tomorrow. It's all part of the Project 2025 plan to destroy high education in America. All leading US universities depend on federal funding and tuition dollars from international students. They severely curtailed the former. Now they're eliminating the latter.

Name a better feeling than moving a paper from "In Prep" to "Under Review" on your CV....it's officially out of sight and mind for a few months!

New graphs just dropped. Can't say what they mean yet but new graphs!

Studying elections is an extremely humbling temporal moment because you realize your undergrads were like...9 in 2016. You also find out that you are older than the Polymarket CEO.

I have found it difficult to get writing done and articulate work in this new reality. And overwhelming to think about the future of research. But I'm proud that today I was able to sit down with all of my anti-immigrant data from 2024 and make a lot of good strides on that paper. Some insights...

Ah yes, the Trump regime is so busy "protecting women" that they can't afford to fund research into women's health issues anymore.

The last 5% of the paper really is like 70% of the work, huh?

I think a lot about the conversation of college aid and tuition in the US -- especially how it works between private vs public. My qualifications? I went to a private undergrad and am a PhD student at a public school. This quarter I am funded by TAing aka tuition. (1/n)

Are you an organizer of an online group/community thinking through governance strategies for resisting online information manipulation? Join @communitydata.science for our next Community Dialogue!

Yup -- we see again and again that there is just not a participatory culture that can compare to right-leaning ones.

For over a year now I have mulled over how when I was a teen girl we would vision board with stock images and collages. Now men in power use those same tactics with AI slop and (still) collages to picture themselves as knights and heroes and buff legends while derailing democracy. (1/n)

As someone in HCI/Info who came from computer vision -- I'm actually not surprised CV is one of the first to REALLY put their foot down on this. I wonder how and if other conferences in the broader computing universe will take similar measures; both in clearing up review rules and accountability.

Congratulations to all awardees, including UW colleagues @katestarbird.bsky.social and James Fogarty on their induction to the SIGCHI Academy, @alexishiniker.bsky.social on the SIGCHI Social Impact award, and Nadya Peek and Cecilia Aragon on special recognitions!

A fun (and needed) boost! One of these papers (visual propaganda) is myself, @disprishinee.bsky.social, and @katestarbird.bsky.social. More (and preprint) soonish but this paper is also the first out of my larger border crisis project AND a dream come true to mix mine and Priya's research together.

With both RFK Jr and Gabbard confirmed, two people who rose to prominence spreading conspiracy theories about public health and national intelligence will now run the U.S. government agencies in charge of those areas. For someone studying these conspiracy theories for a decade... this is nauseating.

So like...when are the #CSCW2025 results coming out?

If you followed Wired and US politics in the last few years it totally makes sense that Wired now leads the resistance. And still a surprise if you were also there in the 90s.

We want to use data from social media platforms to understand their effects on democracy. AI companies use data from social media platforms to build giant, resource-guzzling bullshit generators. When platforms block the second, they end up blocking the first: www.techpolicy.press/ai-companies...

Today in anti-immigrant rhetoric -- "post raid" based "evidence" is being created. There are several TikTok videos posted of empty waiting rooms and Walmarts, claiming these amenities are now clean and safe and available after ICE raids. This isn't surprising for a few reasons...

@katestarbird.bsky.social and my other colleagues have discussed the gap in the left vs right social media and infrastructure machine in terms of production, but there is also a gap in terms of defense and spin. (thread)

Reading some headlines right now just feels like two sentence horror stories from reddit. I have a paper in review about immigration and propaganda and I am just feeling so bad for the reviewers opening it up this month and thinking about how everything we covered months ago only gotten worse.

Having been the focus of false allegations used to motivate some of this "censorship" narrative, I'll say this: My colleagues & I will continue to use our free speech to study and report on how social media platforms facilitate the spread of falsehoods & are manipulated for political/financial gain.