PSA: @readingsbooks.bsky.social is offering a 10% discount for recent books of authors who have chosen to withdraw from the 2026 Adelaide Writers' Week: www.readings.com.au/collections/...

We got Meta’s “general global playbook” for defeating advertiser verification regulations, which the company knows would reduce scams. It includes making scam ads “not findable” for regulators searching Meta’s ad library through targeted scrubbing. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

The 2025 Headline of the Year Nominees 🧵

For many, the end of the year is an opportunity to catch up on reading or to purchase books as gifts. In 2025, a number of authors joined the Tech Policy Press podcast, providing fresh insights into how technology interacts with people, politics, and power. Check out the list:

Some of these redactions are almost like modern art

🚨 THE BATTLE BEGINS 🚨 Your favorite year-end contest is back. It’s time to choose who will be this year’s Worst Person In Tech for 2025! Each day of this week new matchups will drop until we choose the winner on Friday. 🗳️ Cast your ballot: twsu.forms.app/worst-person...

Add to this that social media age checks in Australia are being outsourced to KWS, a US-based subsidiary of Epic Games -- created by startup SuperAwesome (youth-targeted ad strategies). "We may share your information with our Epic Games family of companies" www.kidswebservices.com/en-US/partne...

Labour strikes aren’t new! The first recorded strike in history took place in Egypt some 3,200 years ago! The ‘Strike Papyrus’ records that tomb workers of King Ramesses III downed tools over pay and conditions circa 1157 BC! Museo Egizio, Turin 📷 by me #Archaeology

Myanmar’s regime is hunting down those who oppose its upcoming election by using a law criminalising any criticism of the poll, detaining and handing long jail sentences to a wide array of people, from film stars to ordinary citizens.

"Australia passes a shameful milestone: over one million children now living in poverty" #ThePoint thepoint.com.au/news/251212-...

New! We worked with the Public Interest Research Group to test a bunch of LLM-driven toys ahead of the Christmas. That sexual talking teddy bear wasn't a one-off; it turns out disturbing behavior is deeply built into these toys across the board.

Australia will not get a permanent advisory body on artificial intelligence as promised, with the federal government abandoning the plan despite growing calls for stronger AI oversight www.innovationaus.com/govt-abandon...

The decline of democracy in the US means you can’t visit the US if you commented on the decline of democracy in the US

Mike Benz, the pathological paranoiac who never did find the 22 million tweets Stanford supposedly censored, or explain how the CIA ran me as an asset, is now “investigating” USAID — the agency he boasts about being instrumental in killing — from the inside. www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Absolutely buzzing over this new video of a rarely seen giant squid

Sydney Water has estimated up to 250 megalitres a day will be needed to service datacentres planned by 2035, more than Canberra's entire drinking water. Second feature with @petrastock.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Australia is paying $750m to a US prison company and $2.5bn in a secret deal to Nauru, yet the hundred or so asylum seekers in Nauru are starving. It’s called corruption, and someone in authority should look into it.

“This award belongs to the people of Myanmar.” At the Right Livelihood Award Presentation, 2019 Laureate @thunberggreta.bsky.social read fellow Laureate @justiceformyanmar.org’s speech, dedicating the Award to youth, survivors and communities still resisting the junta. We stand with them.

Holy shit. Reuters reporting that new admin instructions on visas are if you worked at a platform in trust & safety or content moderation or on fact checking or online safety at an platform you *and your loved ones* are ineligible for H-1B visa. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

Our new ASPI report 'The Party’s AI' is out now. It shows how China’s LLMs, vision models and “AI+” governance architecture are hard-coding censorship and control into the future of AI. www.aspi.org.au/repo...

And congrats to Michael Koziol for writing this advert for Woodside

This seems like a version of hell

‼️ Brilliant, brilliant work by my @qutdmrc.bsky.social colleagues @kimosman.bsky.social, Lynrose Genon, and @dezuanni.bsky.social. Asking _actual_ young people about the #SocialMediaBan, rather than their ignorant parents or ill-advised politicians ? Who knew ! 🔥

The benefits of #GenAI for media should not be ignored. Framing it as a fix for society’s information challenges? Even worse. Our Senior Technical Advisor on why these technologies disrupt global & local information ecosystems ⬇️ 🔗 bit.ly/4inZd90 #ArtificialIntelligence #Journalism #TechForGood

good summary of where AI is at, lol

This is your periodic reminder that Google continues to provide single-sign on services to several of the most popular AI nudifiers. Clothoff has been used to create non consensual deepfake nudes in schools around the world.

What a great headline

Which means within the last month Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines have all had devastating flooding of varying degrees. Climate change an obvious, enormous factor here but so is a total lack of implementation of environmental regulations. Which STINKS!

Premium: This is The Hater's Guide To NVIDIA: A 14k word guide to how NVIDIA makes its money, how millions of Blackwell GPUs have been sold with nowhere for them to be installed, and how NVIDIA's future relies on companies raising hundreds of billions in debt. www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...

Incredible headline.

In 2022, archaeologists at @uni-kiel.de's @neolithicbodies.bsky.social found 34 decapitated skeletons piled in a space the size of a parking spot. In the 3 years since, they’ve found 50 more. The mass grave is evidence for the collapse of the 1st pan-European culture 7,000 years ago. @science.org 🏺💀

It was a three-man team that took the Grok hardpoint that day, and two of us were just there to guard the poet.Whistler was a sonnet slinger fresh from the Guatemalan meter wars, still waking up with the taste of a bloody metonym on his tongue.

The Australian Government for the past five years has been pushing weapons sales into the UAE at an astonishing scale. This is the result. Australia tying itself to more appalling war crimes, now in Sudan.

I spent 8 months waiting for an FOI from the NDIA on how they're using AI. This is what I found. Machine learning is used in developing draft plans for participants. Robodebt concerns loom large over the Copilot trial, but staff reported favourably on it. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Some astonishing details in here. It’s like reading a recipe for pure corruption.

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

Corruption watchdog being watched by its watchdog again. Would be good if they investigated corruption as much as they investigate their own conduct imo

“Individuals on the ground sent a message that reached us Monday morning that 1,200 were dead,” Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, said. “By that evening, they said 10,000. By Tuesday, we couldn’t reach them anymore. We assume our ground contacts are dead.”

Fighters from the Rapid Support Forces have filmed themselves committing mass killings in Darfur’s El Fasher – even as their leaders sat in US-sponsored peace talks. The city’s fall marks a new horror in Sudan’s war, reports journalist and human rights defender Ahmed Gouja. ⬇️

We need to talk about Sudan. After more than 18 months of an inhumane siege and starvation in El Fasher, the RSF militia are committing mass killings of civilians on an unimaginable scale. There is so much blood it can be seen from space.

'"No child is safe," said UNICEF chief Catherine Russell. "While the full scale of the impact remains unclear... estimated 130,000 children in El Fasher are at a high risk of grave rights violations, with reports of abduction, killing & maiming, and sexual violence."' allafrica.com/stories/2025...

📢 Media outlets in Thailand and Indonesia: EJN is offering €8,000 grants to support media programming initiatives that cover corporate greenwashing, climate action & innovation as an opportunity for growth, challenges enforcing ESG frameworks, and more. Apply by November 10: https://loom.ly/ku88IRM

these are not "AI clips of European cities changed by migration", these are constructed videos designed to propagate a certain worldview - designed by the people this subhead describes as "seizing on" them

They're literally installing Racism Dial bsky.app/profile/numb...

As of now there is nothing Albanese's govt has done that has changed the country in any structural way. No change at all to how the fundamental debates of the nation are addressed.

BTW this National Press Club story hasn't been reported in any major news outlet yet. Indies like Lamestream, We Used to Be Journos, Pearls and Irritations etc all over it.

More detail here on the NPC cancellation of a journalist who was booked to speak about Gaza. Incredible how badly our cultural institutions have failed us.

Hard to figure out sometimes whether submissions were made using AI, but then sometimes they make it fairly easy.

I started a project earlier this year looking at generative AI as a national security risk. Now that Sora is being publicly tested, more media outlets will have to cover and debunk AI slop and disinformation: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...