Super important work.

My May paper with @shelbygrossman.bsky.social on AI-generated CSAM recommended that state lawmakers update mandatory-reporter laws to cover "nudify" incidents in schools. Now, Pennsylvania lawmakers are working to do just that, spurred by an incident our paper discusses. www.witf.org/2025/10/07/l...

Agree with Riana. NCMEC staff are truly doing god's work, but many actors in this space lose their mind with the language NCMEC is using here. ⬆️ in CyberTips ≠ ⬆️ increase in harm. Claiming otherwise is misleading. And the AI problem is real, but many of these AI CyberTips may be failed generations.

🎒 My team is hiring for two positions! Your colleagues will be amazing, the Cronkite School is amazing, ASU is amazing, Phoenix is amazing. 👇

🍺 Are you a journalist in the Phoenix area thinking about AI? The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the Cronkite School at ASU is hosting a happy hour on Thursday, October 9 from 4-6pm. RSVP here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I've been playing around with Google Workspace with Gemini, and asked Gemini to make an image for a slide on LLM benchmarking.

You know I would go out on a limb and say that a bot shouldn't do that to a 13 year old child either but I'm not a Meta AI policy person

If you're not already subscribed to ‪@indicator.media‬, it's worth it. It's helping me stay up to date on OSINT stuff. Today's newsletter was wonderfully in the weeds and fascinating. indicator.media/p/ai-enabled...

New NYT piece says NCMEC got 75,000 CyberTips from OpenAI w/ AI CSAM in 1st half of 2025. Our research suggests many involve failed generation attempts, but NCMEC can’t always clarify due to legal limits. AI companies should publish this breakdown. Right now, all reports are assumed to contain CSAM.

Today’s App Store ad for nudify searches has the word “girls”

Can anyone recommend an under sink reverse osmosis filtration system?

The Apple App Store not only doesn’t block a “nudify” search, it accepts ads for this query

I’m so excited to have joined the Howard Center for Investigative reporting at the Cronkite School! cronkite.asu.edu/news/2025/ne...

🎒 Check out our new report - a year in the making - on AI CSAM. Insights on schools & nudify apps, trends re: adults creating AI CSAM, and platform responses. Thank you to @safeonlinefund.bsky.social‬ for supporting this project.

I am one of the world’s biggest fans of This American Life, but it feels a little insane to me that none of this context was provided with this story www.kens5.com/article/news...

New Platformer article highlighting research by my colleague @rer.bsky.social

Reporters for these kind of stories need to find an expert who can provide a “this is complete nonsense” quote.

My totally amazing nanny is moving to Boston in March. If you’re looking for a nanny send me an email, [email protected]

I’m a little late to this but I’m so grateful to Jimmy Carter for investing in The Carter Center’s “Educational Programs,” which includes their internship program. Their internship program changed my life, and I bet there are hundreds of intern alumni out there with a similar experience.

I went to a post office today and had a…positive experience. It was inside a compounding pharmacy. There was a check out counter for the pharmacy and a counter for the US Postal Service. And the phrase compounding pharmacy doesn’t capture the vibe - it was the kind of place that sold essential oils.

Love that WSJ is on the pig butchering scam beat. Wild details here, including that a co-founder of the firm running the scam previously ran…a pig farm. www.wsj.com/world/asia/h...

Cinder builds a cutting edge operations platform used for Trust & Safety, Responsible AI, etc. But we also were one of the only companies to publicly and proactively announce that we'd caught folks from DPRK surreptitiously trying to get into our hiring pipeline. www.cinder.co/blog-posts/n...

New insights from a local journalist in CAR who describes working for Prigozhin’s group.

New Human Rights Watch report on webcam studios in Colombia www.hrw.org/sites/defaul...

Tough but important read

I puzzled over this for a bit, as I had a baby on August 3, but then remembered I used Spotify for white noise in the hospital.

Promoting favorable views of Russia in the post-Prigozhin era - an interesting case of an effort called Africa Initiative in Burkina

Lots of useful Bluesky OSINT tips here 👇

Anyway here’s my brand-new case study with my coworker about some of the harms of AI-generated imagery, the latest entry in an entire body of work I’ve done at Stanford about AI policy that, if you believe today’s on-the-record congressional testimony, does not exist. 😘 to our haters

Over a million new Bluesky accounts were created yesterday. Unsurprisingly, some fakes are popping up here and there, such as this set of nine accounts with identical biographies and repeated banner images.

It has now been >3 weeks since Blinken attributed African Stream to RT. TikTok, Meta, and Google have suspended African Stream. Twitter/X has not. African Stream continues to use their X account (88,000 followers and high engagement) to spread polarizing content about the U.S. elections.

It has now been a week since Blinken attributed African Stream to RT and its account (with almost 1 million followers) is still up on TikTok

African Stream has already respawned on Instagram

Our first analysis that really overlapped significantly with the tankiesphere: aside from the staff largely coming from state media of autocratic nations, African Stream cross-promotes with Grayzone and George Galloway, and pushed many of the same narratives. 1/4

The @stanford.io just published a quick analysis of African Stream, a media operation that Blinken attributed to RT (formerly Russia Today) on Friday. cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/afri...

👇

New important reporting today from Chris Bing and Joel Schectman at Reuters reveals another covert influence operation on social media run by the US military.

There are people who read every word of our 84 page report, & it's been very gratifying to hear from them. But if you aren't in that group, @riana.bsky.social, @sarashah19.bsky.social & I wrote this piece for Lawfare. It highlights CyberTipline challenges from the perspective of law enforcement.

Great coverage on our report from @mmasnick.bsky.social

SIO's report on the NCMEC CyberTipline pipeline is out today, the result of almost a year of work. There are a lot of findings for improving the ecosystem from platforms to NCMEC to government to law enforcement.

NEW REPORT: The Strengths and Weaknesses of the Online Child Safety Ecosystem: Perspectives from Platforms, NCMEC, and Law Enforcement on the CyberTipline and How to Improve It

Big New Report: Today, my colleagues and I at @stanfordio.bsky.social, led by @shelbygrossman.bsky.social, are publishing a comprehensive report about the CyberTipline, the pipeline by which platforms report child sex abuse material (CSAM) they find on their services. io.stanford.edu/CyberTipline...

Musk lashing out at Xandão was apparently a bridge too far: Brazilians (save for the Bolsonaristas) are hopping over to Bluesky. Too early to tell how sticky it'll be, but it's not gaining the immediate traction of the JP userbase.

The CyberTipline is the main line of defense for children who are exploited on the internet. It leads to the rescue of children and the arrest of abusers. Yet many believe that it does not always live up to its potential.

Happening this morning (Tuesday) at 9am PT!

🎓Faculty: Want to learn about free trust and safety teaching resources? Register for a webinar on Tuesday highlighting new material created by the Trust and Safety Teaching Consortium, then please steal it for your own class! stanford.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

New paper from me and @samlai.bsky.social out today in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, looking at the moderation capabilities of federated and decentralized social media, and what needs to happen to make these platforms resilient to online harms. doi.org/10.54501/jot...

The Winter 2024 issue of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety is live! tsjournal.org/index.php/jots

🌟 Hear from authors published in the latest issue of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety today (leap day!) at 9am PT. Register for the fast-paced webinar here: stanford.zoom.us/webinar/regi...