Quilicura, Chile, one of the communities I wrote about in EMPIRE OF AI, has launched a brilliant initiative to inspire more responsible AI prompting. Today, don't use AI; ask the townspeople instead: quili.ai. So heartened to see this creative act of resistance.

Excited my most recent article is out now! In it, we talk about our work to combat anti-trans misinfo at @transstudies.bsky.social and the research my students are I are doing advancing a new framework for understanding misinfo effects. Give it a read here: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/R6MNB...

📣 New publication! The second article of my postdoc project on the far right and anti-gender mobilization is now out #openaccess in #GermanPolitics doi.org/10.1080/0964... It examines antifeminism in far-right party politics through the case of AfD Key findings: Antifeminism ✅ Radicalization ✅

The story told here--one where anecdata suggests agency and autonomy have run amok and nameless activists are to blame--certainly rhymes with the NYT's disastrous panic about trans kids. Then you realize it's literally being written by the same author.

NEW: For months, my colleagues and I dug into YouTube's conservative airwaves and found a flourishing network of host-read ads on right-leaning podcasts. This phenomenon has enriched hosts, YouTube, and businesses that use ideology to sell. bloom.bg/3Kaio9w

The "jokes" and general callousness in response to the Epst*in emails just affirms my belief that the gulf between survivors of sexual violence and those who aren't / or otherwise do not recognize their experiences as violent is WIDE.

The latest Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies is out, and it's a doozy: a special issue on "Dynamics of Transphobic Content and Disinformation". With topics including Youtube, Mumsnet, LGB Alliance, Chinese TERFs, and transvestigators, this is an vital read! bulletin.appliedtransstudies.org

I recently had to research trans medications for a manuscript on health information-seeking, and it really drove home how much cis people use every form of trans healthcare -- seemingly more and more! Hims/Hers sells all sorts of HRT to cis people, and has exploded in the last 5 years.

Loads of evidence that Grok is purposefully biased towards white supremacist ideas, but it's important to note that you can get answers like these out of most chatbots. Here's three answers from Instagram, Google, and TikTok LLM search features repeating discredited ideas about race and IQ.

“Retrieving Trans and Gender Diverse Literature” our protocol paper on developing TGD search hedges for Ovid MEDLINE and APA PsycInfo is up now in @jmirpub.bsky.social Protocols Been a labor of love for a couple years now! Check out protocol below 👇🏻 preprints.jmir.org/preprint/760...

📣 I am hiring a postdoc! aial.ie/hiring/postd... applications from suitable candidates that are passionate about investigating the use of genAI in public service operations with the aim of keeping governments transparent and accountable are welcome pls share with your networks

I have watched as so-called "compromise" positions on transgender people's rights have failed over and over--in statehouses, the Biden White House, and in liberal rhetoric. There is no middle ground acceptable to the politicians, activists, and billionaires obsessed with trans people and our lives.

I’m glad Bray is getting support of colleagues and I don’t begrudge anyone leaving, I’d do all I can to keep my family safe. I do want to emphasize tho that doxing & death threats have become normal for minoritized activists who get little support from colleagues as they stay & continue to fight.

Something that keeps popping up in my research on search+LLMs is how they mix-and-match quotes from completely unrelated papers. Here's a response on detransition that pulls a limitations section from an unrelated paper on childhood traumatic experiences to claim that current research has flaws.

remember there’s always a lucrative position for the seeming critic of the tech industry who doesn’t actually challenge its power and foundational ideas. the prodigal tech bro is one example. there’s a whole industry of academics and journalists who serve in this role too.

Increasingly I think a major function of “masculinity” IS its crisis — a vehicle for the dominant & dominating group to justify focusing their social attentions primarily on themselves

One fascinating thing about the most self-serious newspaper in America with its staff of the winning journalistic meritocrats is that it routinely, institutionally publishes completely made-up bullshit speculation about pure abstractions, based on zero reporting, written as if it were plain facts

ProPublica spoke to about 150 people who had lived in homeless encampments when cities cleared them out in “sweeps.” We distributed notecards so people could tell us about the toll in their own words. ➡️ This is what they wrote: projects.propublica.org/impact-of-ho...

Just finished this awesome essay from @citap.bsky.social postdoc Jaylexia Clark on @ssrc.org. On "racialized emotions" in gig work like Uber and DoorDash, and how these apps surveil and punish Black gig workers' personal and emotional expression.

the parent of a trans kid in missouri begged the new york times not to use an audio clip in The Protocol podcast of a verbal confrontation with professional transphobe Jamie Reed out of fear of safety for her kid and NYT management refused her request.

I don't think NYT should know peace until they divulge the full chain of decision making that led to the laundering of Nazi propaganda against a leading anti-fascist politician the same day fascism was codified in Congress.

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...

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/

How the New York Times Bet Against Transgender Rights and Won

it's so cool there's a direct line from Jesse Singal to Justice Thomas's brainworms

I'm at #ica25! Doing a high-density session on Saturday morning about how Google launders anti-trans orgs via their AI summaries. HMU if you want to chat about trans/media things, or just going to war with the far-right in general.

The health of trans young people has already been negatively impacted by all this. NYT stories have been repeatedly cited in lawsuits. They underpin laws banning treatments for gender dysphoria by creating an excuse for lawmakers and judges to ignore the opinions of major medical organizations.

The number of times a week now I have to correct the wild shit people are saying about Harvard, which apparently is a magical perfect land full of unicorns and honey, not a giant financial entity that was until a few days ago holding photos of enslaved people against the will of their descendants

If you go on Google Trends right now, and look at the "Rising" related queries for any low-volume search, you'll probably find kids looking up their homework questions. ..and why not, because Google will answer them lol.

something i've been thinking about is how lots of AI commentary, especially as it pertains to measuring "capabilities", borrows from a sort of neoliberal skills discourse, where skills are commensurable and measurable insofar as they have market value

Hey all, here's a post at @ssrc.org about how anti-trans talking points are getting wrapped into Google's AI search results. AI search not only cites anti-trans disinfo, but sanitizes it, making practices like conversion therapy sound legitimate and safe.

It's alarming to me, as someone who understands that good intentions outweigh imperfect language, that covert transphobia has been so normalized because cis people hear more about us from transphobes than from trans people ourselves. This supportive message using "trans-identified" is a siren.

"Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will direct federal health agencies to limit treatments for gender dysphoria to talk therapy. Experts fear the decision could have grave consequences, as studies show hormone treatments are effective for 97% of patients." Life could be so easy

I started tracking paper numbers on 16 April 2024. On 14 April 2025, with one day left to complete the year, the total for the Telegraph, Times, Mail, and Guardian/Observer stands at 1,074 articles about trans people, nearly all of which were attacks and barely any with quotes from a trans person

truly one of the most disgusting ledes I’ve ever read in the NYT

People can stay mad about the following but if Democrats hadn’t run around normalizing this kind of language, the American public wouldn’t be as primed as they are to accept it.

Appalling and unacceptable. The targeting of student activists and academics is from the old fascist playbook. We must say loud and clear: Free Mahmoud. No to fascism and political repression.

breaking via inbox: “On March 8, Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and recent grad student at Columbia, at his place of residence, an apartment building owned by the university. The DHS agents said that the State Dept revoked Khalil’s green card.”

I wrote about how right wing creators are dominating the coverage of Lively vs Baldoni and how it has become a massive growth engine for the right wing media pipeline. Liberal creators are either ignoring the biggest story in pop culture or regurgitating Candace Owens’ coverage to their audiences.

When we looked at 15 years of news articles about student loans (focused on the 8 papers that were top in circulation or in metro area Black resident share), we found that 32% of authors attended Ivy Plus even though they're less than 1% of national enrollments. 2/ edworkingpapers.com/ai23-856

Another weird AI search fuck-up today. Have been testing how Google's AI writes about detransition (spoiler: awfully). In this paragraph, in order to criticize a study it cites, it pulls in the limitations sections from.. completely unrelated studies. Also, the paper it's criticizing isn't real 🤷‍♀️.

18-year-old Jude on laws banning gender-affirming care: "On the more extreme end, for a lot of kids it's the possibility of severe mental-health struggles and suicidal ideation - but I also think on a smaller scale, kids, because they cannot be themselves, would rather choose to not be anyone."

However much you hate the New York Times, it isn't enough

Galleanisti is back and so is the attendant sub-whiteness of the 19th/early 20th century Italian in the U.S.!

Interesting comments here from Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, saying that Trump "surrounds himself by some of the smartest innovators around." He mentions Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Elon Musk. h/t @ericacbarnett.bsky.social: publicola.com/2025/02/27/s...

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

transphobia is gauche and more importantly extremely boring, the first tell of a brain terrified of novelty

fuck google

📄 Excited to share a new dataset preprint! WikiReddit: Tracing Information and Attention Flows Between Online Platforms A collaboration with @beeeeeers.bsky.social, Viviane Ito, Agustin Orozco, and @ftripodi.bsky.social at @citap.bsky.social .