Can't wait for this panel between @laraputnam.bsky.social @anetv.bsky.social and Zachary Horton next Wednesday, March 25 at noon! If you are a historian, writer, or just interested in what our evolving relationship with AI looks like down the road, you don't want to miss this!

You don't think a book review can be must-read for people just trying to make political change? This one is. @daschloz.bsky.social spells out the vexed underlying dilemma of democratic (& Democratic) politics in a world where increasingly "the choirs & brass bands reach only into the educated base."

New numbers: In the month of October, net voter registration trends turned positive for Dems in Pennsylvania. Unprecedently [in recent memory], Dem gains have outpaced Republicans every single month since then

Take this fwiw, but the last month of partisan voter registration shifts in Pennsylvania have looked better for Dems than any month in recent memory🤷‍♀️

More reporting on more tragedies created by smartphones with cameras in children's hands www.cbc.ca/news/marketp...

Ok, big reveal: Allegheny, Montco, Chester, Delco, Cumberland, Dauphin, Northampton, Lancaster, Erie, Centre, & Montour counties are the only counties in PA where Kamala Harris improved on Hilary Clinton's net vote totals

I am deep in the weeds, working on a thing, so please join me in being obsessed with this #PAelection fun fact. What do Allegheny, Montgomery, Chester, Delaware, Cumberland, Dauphin, Northampton, Lancaster, Erie, Centre, & Montour counties have in common, & in that order?

The is a technical social science term for what @adambonica.bsky.social has laid bare here, and that is "absolutely fcking insane" Seriously. Read and weep.

I participated in an event about the upcoming judicial races, & two nice people came up afterward & specifically asked me to post more on Bluesky 😅. I live to serve, so here is one quick PA judicial fun fact: In Nov 2021, 70,000 of the people who cast ballots in Philly DECLINED to vote on retentions

Working on a new article about online harms to children & intl human rights w/@jenatmartin.bsky.social so I jumped over to Fb to see if there'd been improvement & immediately found these in a 17k public group I reported on months ago with @justinhendrix.bsky.social how's your dystopian morning going

Always worth reading @antoniascatton.bsky.social for clear eyed guidance about how to map communication to strategic goals

It's understandably not the SWPA election result getting headlines this week, but: the continued Democratic rise (and stark GOP decline) in Pittsburgh's once rock-ribbed Republican northern suburbs is remarkable

In honor of tomorrow's election a few charts fr Pittsburgh & surrounds. First, the big picture: there are 31,000 fewer registered Dems in Allegheny County today than 4 ys ago. There are 2,000 more Republicans & 10,000 more Indep/3rd party (who cannot vote in tomorrow's primaries)

I interrupt your regularly scheduled doom about all things Democratic Party to report that Something is Happening in Pennsylvania

Meanwhile... worrying about real-world harms to kids from online interactions got me into a long series of conversations with the brilliant @jenatmartin.bsky.social that ended us up here yjolt.org/everything-n...

Coming up tonight: Not-very-🔥 takes from me about electoral trends & shifts that shaped 2024 in PA, and what that might mean looking forward www.mobilize.us/promotethevo...

To Pennsylvanians here: Do you have local school board races next month that you care about and/think are important? There are literally hundreds of races in May, and hard to keep up. I got some very helpful answers when I asked about Texas yesterday, so I'm switching gears to Pennsylvania!

Union County Dems are running 29 candidates for municipal office this year, a 190% increase from 2023.

Another day, another invaluably unvarnished post about public opinion & electoral math from @charlotteeffect.bsky.social .

I hear there are folks on here muttering about protests being cringe... or "resistance Libs" likewise (or middle aged women in general maybe?)... so reupping this descriptive piece about how the 2017 protests shaped local social networks & from there, elections washingtonmonthly.com/2019/07/12/h...

Hands Off protest this afternoon in Pittsburgh was the largest I have personally attended in Pittsburgh, ever. I posted a bunch of clips over on the Other Site but will share at least a few highlights here?

A few weeks/lifetime ago I did an obsessively long thread re the new Bonica et al paper that examines the vote penalty paid by individual candidates for extremism & makes assertions [to my eye, ungrounded ones] about a potential broader turnout boost extremism might bring to the party as a whole.

I'm going to stake out the apparently-edgy-onhere position that the voter shifts described by David Shor here are real, & should be cause for genuinely difficult rethinking of strategies based on no-longer-accurate assumptions about the 'rising American electorate' www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/o...

I am grateful that anyone at all is following me on here, & assume maybe most are interested in Dem grassroots activism—in which case I am going to reiterate that @charlotteeffect.bsky.social is must-read: including her recent commentary on this 👀 paper cauldronllc.substack.com/p/the-specte...

Really informative article from Lara Putnam in Tech Policy Press detailing how celebrity and TV show fan groups on Facebook are used to solicit and spread sexualized child content across Latin America. www.techpolicy.press/latin-americ...

Another must-read post from @charlotteeffect.bsky.social , working really hard to clear away comforting Dem-side narratives (like, "we just needed better GOTV" or "the base stayed home bc Harris ran too far to the right") so that urgent rethinking can begin cauldronllc.substack.com/p/the-19-mil...

Possibly you did not have "Democratic Women of Fayette County’s monthly meeting breaks records with 98 enthusiastic attendees" on your Winter 2025 bingo card? Nor Democratic Women of [Trump+ 38] Fayette County becomes THE largest Democratic Federated Club in Pennsylvania 🤷‍♀️

This from @adamjentleson.bsky.social is very good & also points to an ancillary takeaway: leaders (elected or otherwise) who have a clear-eyed vision of what terrain they want Dems to be fighting on... need to step forward & create hands-on opportunities to channel energy towards *those* fights

200+ people rallied in support of Ukraine today outside the downtown Pittsburgh office of Senator Dave McCormick

New: Pablo Medina Uribe of @elclip.bsky.social & I spoke with @justinhendrix.bsky.social @techpolicypress.bsky.social about the persistence of child endangerment on Facebook; why Meta seems addicted to bad actors & their use cases; & the real-world harms Latin American NGOs are seeing on the ground

Yesterday in Trump+32 Butler County👀 "The planned protest started around noon & by 12:45 the crowd reached around 130 people chanting in support of the VA & the US Office of Personnel Management & against President Donald Trump, Elon Musk & the Department of Government Efficiency"

[email protected] should have a gazillion more followers over here: this is really valuable, clear-eyed work

Professor Lara Putnam documents how Spanish-language Facebook groups centered around popular celebrities present predators a chance to target children. The analysis is published by Tech Policy Press, along with independent reports coordinated by the investigative journalism consortium EL CLIP.

This was one of the craziest things I learned from Meta child safety staff -- after the "People You May know" algorithm, one of the dominant ways that gross dudes tried to meet young girls was by joining Taylor Swift fan clubs. So not just LatAm.

Meta pushed its platforms in Latin American with a "Free Basics" program, TTP's Katie Paul tells @techpolicypress.bsky.social. Predictably, the company didn't scale trust & safety. Now, @laraputnam.bsky.social & @elclip.bsky.social journalists reveal widespread child endangerment on Meta platforms.

Back in 2022, @laraputnam.bsky.social alerted Meta to public, Spanish-language FB groups designed to target children for sexual exploitation. Out in the open, users solicited sexual contact with children, alongside explicit cartoons and memes. When she reported the groups, Meta did nothing.

I never meant to have a side job tracking child endangerment on Facebook. I thought basic guardrails must be working? But since 2021, I have repeatedly run into child luring out in the open in real time, & been unable to get Fb to act. New reporting from me today www.techpolicy.press/latin-americ...

Tech Policy Press joins @elclip.bsky.social in exposing alarming patterns of child endangerment in Spanish-language #Facebook groups. The collaboration includes a report from @laraputnam.bsky.social documenting the groups and articles from Spanish-language news organizations across Latin America.

Some recommended reading from my friend @antoniascatton.bsky.social -- (for starters, stop calling it a coup when it's a crime spree) open.substack.com/pub/reframin...

Theda Skocpol on what to learn from the first resistance, & where to now. Her suggestion for spreading persuasive, corrective information about "truth & consequences" builds on organic connection but focuses on outreach to those outside the bubble: good politics 101 newrepublic.com/article/1905...

I genuinely don't know how to think of pieces such as👇 that argue that [thing that actually happened, 2017-present] is the key to fightng Trump 2.0. At a minimum need some "necessary but not sufficient" caveats? Probably, should address limits/unintended consequences? newrepublic.com/article/1891...

Always read @daschloz.bsky.social & @samrosenfeld.bsky.social about political parties & the practice of politics. (This is joining a few other short & important arguments along similar lines from the past few weeks: I'll try to gather them below in a thread...)

"Any theory on the future of The Resistance™ depends on how you understood it to begin with." @rtraister.bsky.social looks out over a national panorama of organizations, actions, and impacts that look nothing like the caricatures (or engagement farmers) online

people are writing about The Resistance but it seems like some of them aren't referencing @laraputnam.bsky.social's work, which means you can mostly ignore them the test of the actually-existing Resistance will be the stability of the institutions it's built www.nybooks.com/online/2024/...

Some initial observations: In 2024, not only did Kamala Harris hang on to Joe Biden's massive increase over Hilary Clinton's net vote gain in Allegheny County's whitest precincts: Harris improved on it, netting over 1,000 votes more than Biden in Allegheny County precincts that are 90% or more white

New from me: Whatever happened to 'the Resistance'? Actually, it's continuing to reshape the face of the Democratic Party in communities across Pennsylvania, and to rebuild the possibilities of local democracy www.nybooks.com/online/2024/...

A quick update on the balance of PA voter registration data, as we near the deadline to register & be able to vote in November (last day: Oct 21). 1) Registration trends have radically improved for Democrats since Kamala stepped in: but Republicans are still gaining net registrants faster than Dems

The closest thing to a national point of convening for all the born-as-anti-Trump grassroots orgs that have survived (& even thrived!) up to the present is the Grassroots Collaboration Project, run by folks you've probably never heard of www.grassrootscollaboration.org/all-voluntee...

🤔so did ChatGPT write this? Actually, not kidding. Random/dissonant usage of tapestry/woven/threads metaphor in 2024? Check! I guess the IHS is putting its money where its mouth is re "The Significance of AI in Academia & Society’s Path to Progress": fine, maybe?🤷 www.theihs.org/blog/the-sig...

At Tech Policy Press we've been thinking about how large language models may be deployed for tasks such as content moderation, counterspeech, and other forms of political communication, for better or worse. So Prithvi Iyer and I put together this draft "syllabus":