Media needs to stop with "critics say" and just quote the actual language of the bill. HB 249 creates a new category of "seminudity" which can be used to arrest women who aren't nude, but are wearing clothing — leggings, t-shirts without bras — that religious groups feel is too provocative.

For those hereabouts scrambling to remediate course materials in order to meet the end of the month deadline for compliance with new federal ADA Title II standards, here is the endgame as I see it: 🧵

"At the same time that softcore fruit porn is dominating the algorithm, real sex workers are continuing to face social media censorship, even when it comes to safe for work content."

Let’s go! Virginia should expand its collective bargaining inclusion criteria too @abigailspanberger.com It’s no secret that the academy has fundamentally changed, that it’s run on the backs of underpaid, overworked, unprotected contingent faculty and graduate students who deserve better.

New from me: Thousands have swooned over this pro-Trump Army dream girl. She’s made with AI. "She's the apotheosis of what MAGA fantasizes about, all packed into one channel" wapo.st/3NtfbUi

“The VA General Assembly voted to give over half a million public sector workers collective bargaining rights. But not me. I'm an adjunct faculty member who was just left behind to endure the exploitation of higher education.” @abigailspanberger.com, please correct course & add us back in.

Governor @abigailspanberger.com you can right this wrong with a stroke of your pen. Please add faculty and graduate assistants back into the collective bargaining bill!

This war against Iran is costing US taxpayers approximately $11,500 per second. According to iran-cost-ticker.com the total cost has already reached $5.5 billion.

The US murdered >60 little girls in their elementary school in Iran overnight. Our strikes will not be precise. They will only liberate Iranians from their lives and Americans from their tax dollars to benefit a cadre of elites. America cannot build nations anymore, only hatred.

Well would you look at that! 🥰📚 Hot Connections is real! It was a blast to research & write with @jenmadelene.bsky.social & @susannapaasonen.bsky.social ❤️❤️ blurbs by @alexmonea.bsky.social Tarleton Gillespie & @katha.bsky.social Big thanks to @noahspringer.com & everyone at @mitpress.bsky.social

Starbucks has scrapped a $250,000 limit on its CEO's use of the company jet for personal travel. CEO Brian Niccol uses the jet to commute from his house California to corporate HQ in Seattle. The company is lifting the cap while refusing thousands of baristas a union contract.

some exciting news: announcing CREATOR & INFLUENCER STUDIES, the first open-access peer reviewed journal dedicated to creator and influencer culture research. I'm honoured to be named as one of the journal's inaugural associate editors. submissions open Feb 12.

I’m ok. I’m a survivor so this small agitator isn’t going to intimidate me from doing my work. I don’t let bullies win. Grateful to my incredible constituents who rallied behind me. Minnesota strong.

Reddit rises up

If you have seen your favorite sex subreddit become abolish ICE overnight please DM me so I can write about it for The Verge dot com ✨

LLMs are not sentient, are not human. Grok cannot “apologize” or explain how or why any of this is happening. But of course major outlets such as Bari Weiss’s CBS News wrote that Grok “acknowledged ‘lapses in safeguards'." @jasonkoebler.bsky.social with more: Listen: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT9l...

Yes, it should be illegal. Sora does similar things. AFT should sever its partnership with OpenAI. www.wired.com/story/people...

THIS THIS THIS. ALL OF THIS THIS is why faculty resist technological strategies for teaching. There is no engaging with Edtech without this context

cool milestone alert: half the country is under restrictive age verification law www.404media.co/missouri-age...

If anyone is curious about the current list of search terms being used by right wing activist organizations to harass university professors, here's a public records request I received today from Mike Howell of the Heritage Foundation. Not intimidating or meant to curtail by my speech at all, right?

Excuse me what? The RIAA is now funding NCOSE to file bullshit amicus briefs before the Supreme Court?!? That is way more fucked up than even usual RIAA nonsense. Let me explain...

AI porn generator and ERP chatbot Secret Desires left millions of images and videos exposed in unsecured cloud storage. I took a look and found folders called "faceswap," where people had uploaded tons of stolen content and random photos of women www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

WE WON. I am *begging* you to take note of who did this. *Not* UCLA admin—they’re still scuttling around behind closed doors, attempting to appease—but FACULTY AND STAFF, led by AAUP.

Big day at U.S. District Court in D.C. where Sean Dunn, the D.C. Sandwich Guy, is on trial for misdemeanor assault of a federal officer. Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore is on the stand narrating surveillance video of the sammie toss. 'Now he’s struck me with the sandwich,' Lairmore says.

In fairness, the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees regularly “hallucinate” bogus facts without using AI. The praying coach ruling shows that Gorsuch doesn’t need a sloppy robot to make shit up that’s directly refuted by the record!

NEW: Our latest in @teenvogue.com on the key ways top Democrats like @durbin.senate.gov @schumer.senate.gov @blumenthal.senate.gov are continuing to enable Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ tech agenda. www.teenvogue.com/story/some-d...

And here’s a startup offering influencing/propaganda services. Called it ;) www.404media.co/a16z-backed-...

The ‘Womanosphere’ Is Reshaping the Conservative Dating Landscape www.wired.com/story/the-wo...

Here’s the final part of our four part Better Offline case against generative AI. I walk you through how there’s not enough money in the world to pay for OpenAI’s $1 trillion 4-year burn, and how retail investors are at risk as a result. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b... Linktr.ee/betteroffline

Be aware that when the Missouri AG says protect children from "online pornography," the law actually reads "material harmful to minors" — the same legal term used to pressure Target to discontinue Pride merchandise. hoodline.com/2025/09/miss...

If *your department head and your dean* can be removed for supporting your colleague in teaching in their area of expertise, then you have no academic freedom. In a functional sense, you don't work at a university at all.

Can't get this horrific stat from Emily Steel's article on Uber's sexual assault problem out of my head: "Uber received a report of sexual assault or sexual misconduct in the United States almost every eight minutes on average between 2017 and 2022". www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/b...

Extremely depressing to see how mainstream the Sinophobic “we might lose the ai race to China” narrative has become.

"It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual." Meta removed that language from its internal guidelines after I raised it. AI experts worry financial incentives will blur the line between human relationships and bot engagement. www.reuters.com/investigates...

This is why I don’t spend much time on Meta’s Threads. So beyond repulsive.

meta's strategy these days seems to be: get away with as much abhorrent shit as possible for as long as possible, wait for the press to find out, say oops, keep printing money, repeat

Spotify is now instituting face scans and ID checks ... to listen to music. Porn was only ever the excuse. The only thing that surprises me is how quickly the government surveillance mandate has spread to absolutely every service we use. www.404media.co/spotify-uk-a...

Just finished @haimson.bsky.social's new book Trans Technologies over the weekend and really enjoyed it. If you want an insightful and comprehensive ethnographic account of trans tech - its creators, its creation, its affordances and constraints, and ideas for a better future, it's a must read.

"The MAGA movement and its allies aim to seize control of public higher education in Virginia . . . They don’t want independent thought — they seek obedience." www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

When @zeerak.bsky.social shared this I thought it was satire like RocketAI @ NeurIPS 2016. I recognize some names listed as organizers. This can't be real. Right? "The 1st open conference where AI serves as both primary authors & reviewers of research papers" agents4science.stanford.edu/index.html

📣 CFP ALERT 📣 SIGCIS 2025: ⚡POWER SURGE⚡ // CFP Due 7/14 📆 get in the car losers, the BEST conference in the history of computing IS BACK ONLINE! PAY-WHAT-YOU-CAN registration! v v grad student friendly! If your work is anywhere close to the history of computing, you should apply!!!

"This is part of a coordinated attack from the highest branches of the federal government down through the state...through the Governor & Attorney General's office to the Board of Visitors at our campus. This is an attack on our institution. We know the game.” — Bethany Letiecq, George Mason AAUP

Tremendous, meticulous, disturbing reporting here on India’s Hindu nationalist government deporting Muslim citizens by literally forcing them to walk the plank into the sea. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

I'm proud to share my newest study, completely open-access. "When collaborating turns into dishonesty: A data-driven heuristic comparing human and AI collaborators"

Good day as any to delete Facebook, Instagram, and/or Threads if you have not already The fact that Meta will not rule out using private photos on your camera roll to train AI is abominable, full stop futurism.com/meta-sketchy...

AI bot scrapers are hitting every site on the web in search of training data. This report is the first good attempt to evaluate the impact of these AI scrapers, especially on smaller institutions that are trying to make their collections open to the public www.404media.co/ai-scraping-...

Also 8 years ago I suggested educational theory itself, not just classrooms or infrastructure, would end up "owned" by organizations with the capacity to generate and analyze data. Google is certainly out to own "learning science" to justify its AIED incursions journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

LAST NIGHT AT UCLA - On the one year anniversary of the violent encampment raid, UCLA admin called in riot police to break up students watching The Encampments documentary on campus. These schools are at war with their students. Movies are illegal.