🚨NEW REPORT🚨 datasociety.net/library/deep... Deepfake Financial Fraud: The Global Regulation of AI-Driven Scams - a collab with Anya Schiffrin & Navya Sinha, Anusha Wangnoo, Kaylee Williams, Elnara Huseynova & Audrey Hatfield at @columbiasipa.bsky.social
We run a full AppView + PDS + Relay for ~$1,772/mo. PDS is cheap (~$0.03/user/mo, 4 vCPUs, 32GB RAM). AppView is the expensive part; indexes the entire network (16TB DB), not just your users. Storage scales linearly with network activity. PDS scales linearly with your account count.
There's a good Thought Piece™️ to be written on "writing as thinking" and how deferring large parts of coding and research to agents like Claude can undermine the process through which we come to understand a problem more deeply
New post: Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers? (No. No it can't. Come on, now.)
davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/can-ai-rep...
New 📄 out in @icsjournal.bsky.social
"Safety work repertoires and dating platforms: how users of Tinder and Bumble manage their safety"
Link: doi.org/10.1080/1369...
Thread for more details 🔽
Article abstract: Early enthusiasts imagined a cyberspace free from centralized control. Today, Internet platforms surveil and regulate user activity through systematic governance mechanisms, including content moderation. This article examines how centralized control became the taken-for-granted solution to platform challenges, a shift that abandoned the dream of self-governance. By analyzing the rise of “Trust and Safety” at eBay between 1995 and 2007, I show that platform governance emerged to align eBay with corporate pressures as it transitioned from a startup to a public, multinational corporation. Trust and Safety at eBay came to designate a department, a discipline, and a philosophical approach to questions concerning the governance of users, synthesizing two competing visions: Pierre Omidyar's cyberlibertarian ideal of community self-governance through mutual surveillance, and Meg Whitman's corporate vision of a centrally regulated “well-lit marketplace.” Drawing on internal and external company documents, I demonstrate how Trust and Safety provided a moral justification for centralized governance by framing corporate vigilance as user protection, making control of users compatible with the “community” ethos of early Internet culture. As an early commercial platform, eBay acted as a laboratory for platform governance, where the visions and practices of Trust and Safety were developed and then exported to other major platforms.
Screenshot of eBay's homepage in 2009.
my (first!) article, “From the virtual community to ‘Trust and Safety’: eBay (1995–2007) and the rise of platform governance” is out on Big Data & Society! it is a history of content moderation at eBay, where they coined the term Trust and Safety 🌐 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
increasingly believing much of the communication gap between LLM Enthusiasts and LLM Skeptics on this website boils down to “are you someone who has largely experienced a *reasonable* amount of job security in tech, or are you someone who has not experienced job security and likely aren’t in tech”
I love watching people use LLMs in public. They’ll reply to a breaking news article and say “@grok is this true?” Babe where do you think it’s about to pull its answer from
It’s tiring that we are increasingly stuck organizing our intellectual lives around arguing for the value of having an intellectual life
An absolute banger of an article by @nancybaym.bsky.social out today in Social Media + Society. She astutely captures so much of what I've felt and observed about social media these days.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
If a bunch of people who agree who hang out together is an echo chamber then sure, we’re all in echo chambers all the time. But what’s actually bad is a platform that the world’s richest man has weaponized to make people including “elites” who still use it bigoted and hateful and conservative
The original MyNYPD paper singlehandedly influenced my trajectory more than any other. I found it during my first project and it's how I learned about NetSI + Northeastern
So grateful for all the work you did in this space, and all the work that's been able to grow from it since (including my own)
A photo of a stack of off-white books with a char of colorful hashtags across the cover. The cover reads #HashtagActivism Networks of Race and Gender Justice SARAH J. JACKSON MOYA BAILEY BROOKE FOUCAULT WELLES FOREWORD BY GENIE LAUREN
It’s the 6th anniversary of the publication of #HashtagActivism. Much has changed about social media since @moyazb.bsky.social @foucaultwelles.bsky.social and I started researching the site formerly known as Twitter over a decade ago. Forever grateful we were on the ride together.
For You, For Everyone: we're thrilled to announce that our feed personalization engine is now live — and fully open source. Read our @leaflet.pub announcement below, or follow the 🧵:
All I can think about is Jeff Bezos saying that he slashed jobs at the Washington Post — including those of foreign correspondents in the Middle East — based on "the data," and a few weeks later a whole war breaks out in the Middle East that these laid off folks would have covered as true experts.
Want to learn about computational social science *for free* and identify new research partners across academic fields? Apply to one of the 2026 Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (described in yellow in the attached map) here: sicss.io/locations
Mostly I'm just looking for whether what I'm experiencing is normal...
I'm thinking about things like different teams working on the same thing, the same policies being interpreted by different teams, conflicts across policies, tool sprawl, data governance, etc etc
What I'd do for an insider's history of social media trust and safety focused on the logistics and engineering
There's a lot of moving parts across policy, product, and engineering, and I'd love to understand what problems platforms typically hit, and which they were able to avoid
Below is the response to my question. The funny part of his response is that my research needed a control arm. My study actually did have a control arm (about 80% of the sample never reported discrimination).
So the answer itself makes me even more confused.
SCOOP: A White House staffer appears to be operating the anonymous pro-Trump X account JohnnyMAGA with nearly 300,000 followers.
More here:
www.wired.com/story/a-whit...
I have spent the past several months studying the cutting-edge research on modern democracies that have defeated authoritarian leaders.
I've learned that the conventional wisdom on the topic is wrong — in ways that have clear implications for the US going forward
THREAD www.vox.com/politics/479...
😭
Open sourcing Osprey was an adventure! @discord.com is now powered by the open source community version of Osprey. Read about how Osprey works and what makes a rules engine for fighting abuse powerful:
discord.com/blog/osprey-...
I've been getting a lot of questions recently about optimizing annotation workflows – many new NLP projects are starting atm! ✨
To share some of our tips, I put together a blog post featuring examples inspired by real use cases and a checklist to help you get started.
explosion.ai/blog/optimiz...
cant.stop.laughing
Do science together
It makes me sad when authors don't give attention to their literature review. More than any other section, it's your chance to really put your paper in conversation with others
U.S. Southern Command: On Feb. 23, at the direction of #SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations. Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations. Three male narco-terrorists were killed during this action. No U.S. military forces were harmed. @DeptoWar #OpSouthernSpear UNCLASSIFIED
We murdered three more people in boats today
