One outbreak of concern and the entire “sane” side of the public health immediately resorted back to the paternalism of telling us not to worry, this isn’t another COVID, etc. They didn’t learn a thing. We didn’t appoint them to be our therapists or parents. Provide info, don’t dictate how to feel.

I am honored to share the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Best International Reporting with Dake Kang, Byron Tau, Aniruddha Ghosal and Garance Burke for our reporting revealing how Silicon Valley largely designed and built China's surveillance state and enabled human rights abuses.

NEW: FCC to direct eight Disney-owned TV stations to file early license renewals, a source says, adding that the "unprecedented" action was directly tied to ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel's recent joke about first lady Melania Trump.

Tufekci's keynote here remains the best framing for how to think about AI, IMO. The key changes will be in what things become cheap/easy and what things remain expensive/hard. AI will remove a lot of friction. Some of that friction is load bearing. bsky.app/profile/zey....

“A whole civilization will die tonight,” Trump declares.

I reviewed @mollycrabapple.bsky.social 's terrific new history of the Bund — a great read but more importantly, a book that could not have arrived at a more urgent moment. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/b...

The AP is reporting that Sharif University in Tehran has been bombed. This is Maryam Mirzakhani’s alma mater — the first woman to win a Fields Medal in math, and only one of two so far. The university is also a leading center of opposition to the government. apnews.com/video/ict-bu...

Some science cuts in Trump's proposed FY27 budget ❌ NIH: -$5B, including all of NIEHS, NIMHD, FIC & NCCIH. ❌ EPA: -4.6B ❌ NSF: -3.8B ❌ NASA Science: -3.4 Billion ❌ NOAA: -1.8B, including the entire Oceanic and Atmospheric Research budget ($605M) ❌ AHRQ: All of it. -$296M, 100% And there's more.

The article makes this fairly explicit, but it's worth emphasizing that Grammarly doesn't have any clear option to request a specific reviewer (hence you can't easily check if you're included) and even a cursory attempt gets it to produce a bunch of random scholars from my or adjacent fields.

Well, there it is.

"This firm’s special treatment is a stark example of the way that the second Trump administration has used taxpayer money to benefit people close to the president or his top officials." www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/u...

Trump's DOJ this month quietly backed Alexander Smirnov's bid to withdraw his guilty plea & wipe out his sentence. Smirnov had admitted lying to the @FBI about Burisma's owner arranging to pay $5m in bribes to both Joe & Hunter Biden. 👀 @davidcorn.bsky.social catch:

The State Department is considering withholding lifesaving assistance to people with HIV in Zambia as a negotiating tactic to force the government of the southern African country to sign a deal giving the United States more access to the country’s critical minerals. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/h...

I was impersonated by Grammarly as well. Besides the lack of consent, a big problem is that the LLMs do a highly plausible impersonation of my views for anything not specific to me but miss exactly where my views differ from many AI experts or critics. So worse than useless. Actively misleading.

PSA: One consequence of AI language models is that you should check your spam folder regularly. LLMs can generate targeted/tailored outputs at scale, resulting in a growing overlap between spam and email meant for you. Filters are failing: more spam in your inbox AND more of your mail in spam.

When a federal judge (finally) put ICE officers under oath, they admitted that they are given daily detention quotas and rely heavily on a Palantir-supplied AI tool to select targets, without warrants and without enough evidence to obtain one. They simply go into neighborhoods and round people up.

What a mystery. ❌”Military analysts” who never looked at a map or read a line about perhaps one of the most intensely studied naval choke points in history? ✅Somebody attempting to talk down the markets (was asked to) and fill air while perhaps buying some options?

Five-byline alert: 🚨 “.. An ongoing military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings.” www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/u...

Whistleblower complaint says the DOGE engineer "told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal." www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

NYT reports pardons going to the wealthy and politically connected who can pay $$ for insider lobbyists. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/u...

If you read the bill, it attaches liability to the chatbot answer ONLY IF the same answer would attach liability to the person making the same statement. Complicated new issue but seems AI companies want Section 230 type immunity. I don’t think that’s where the public (and juries) are, at all.

Some of the most beautiful hand-drawn diagrams i've ever seen. Turkish "Justice Gazette", 1920, artist: Cerîde-i Adliyye. Source [substack] casualarchivist.substack.com/p/poetic-jus... #türkiye #infographics #stunning

My Princeton AI and society team is at the AI Safety summit in Paris. My Neurips keynote for our approach: slideslive.com/39055698/are... Our paper: ai.sociology.princeton.edu Say hi especially if you are *utterly* unimpressed by the current doom or hype models. Wrong nightmares!

NEWS: Meta is about to start a $65 million midterms push — its biggest political effort in its 20 years in business. Meta is standing up two super PACs that this week will drop money in races in Texas and Illinois to push A.I. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/t...

Stephen Colbert said that the FCC and CBS - which is in no way a compromised or complicit organization - wouldn’t allow him to broadcast an interview with Democratic State Rep James Talarico. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/a...

New story up on the Homeland Security Department’s new tactic: flood social media companies with subpoenas to unmask anonymous accounts that criticize ICE or monitor the movements of ICE agents. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

When the subtitle is actually the headline: “In an internal memo last year, Meta said the political tumult in the United States would distract critics from the feature’s release.” www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

BREAKING: Jimmy Lai, the pro-democracy former Hong Kong media tycoon and a fierce critic of Beijing, is sentenced to 20 years in prison in one of the most prominent cases prosecuted under a China-imposed national security law.

Last week's New Yorker did a scary deep dive. She's on the hook for $1 million in legal fees, leaving her little for her reelection campaign. #unrigthesystem www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

“agents told hospital staff that Castaneda Mondragon was “laying down in handcuffs when he attempted to flee, and then, for unknown reasons, purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.’” sahanjournal.com/health/ice-d...

Scoop: Federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/u...

A second journalist was arrested by federal agents because she covered the anti-ICE church protest in St. Paul. Georgia Fort is an independent journalist and three-time Midwest Emmy Award winner.

Former CNN anchor Don Lemon has been arrested, a Justice Department official said. Lemon livestreamed a demonstration that interrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month that protested Trump's immigration crackdown in the area reut.rs/4q3X1FL

FBI searching Fulton County elections office, per Reuters www.reuters.com/world/us/fbi...

Peer review science relies, more than we care to admit, on what @zey.bsky.social calls "load bearing frictions" that make it difficult to fake good science, and on trust that most ppl also value science itself & won't cheat just for personal gain. This creates the wrong environment for that to hold.

New: Amid the escalating situation in Minneapolis, ICE posted in the Federal Register asking companies to provide info about “commercial Big Data and Ad Tech” products that would “directly support investigations activities” www.wired.com/story/ice-as...

Incredible headline.

Wrote a summary of a great keynote by @zey.bsky.social at NeurIPS, arguing that we’re having the wrong nightmares about AI: not AGI or superhuman benchmarks, but good-enough genAI at scale threatens "load bearing frictions" society relies on to signal effort, authenticity, sincerity, credibility.

I think this is likely to require a wholesale change in the peer review system. The signals of authenticity and effort are no longer useful. Zeynep Tufekci gave a great talk related to this at #NeurIPS2025

BREAKING: Hong Kong court convicts Jimmy Lai, founder of former pro-democracy newspaper, in landmark national security trial.

Invited talk by Zeynep @zey.bsky.social Tufekci at @neuripsconf.bsky.social was really very good! Title: Are We Having the Wrong Nightmares About AI? Spoiler: yep! 😉 Very thoughtful! Thanks!🙏

„Making things easy breaks systems that use difficulty as signaling“ @zey.bsky.social @neuripsconf.bsky.social

Tomorrow's frontpage

AI and the Future of Work (10/7/25). It's a wrap! Thanks to our expert panelists: @dacemoglumit.bsky.social, @pkrugman.bsky.social, Danielle Li, @zey.bsky.social & @sgreenhouse.bsky.social. #AI. Who will win and who will lose? How worried should we be? Stay tuned for the video, coming soon.

The picture we've all been waiting for: #AlaaIsFree h/t: Mohamed Elbaqer

Egyptian authorities announced the presidential pardon of prominent activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah after six years in prison, according to his lawyer Khaled Ali and an announcement by state TV.

Social Media Reduced Two Horrific Killings to Cheap Snuff Films By Zeynep Tufekci www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/o...