👀 ICE deported two U.S. citizen children with their mother to Guatemala, even though she had apparently elected to leave them with their grandmother in Florida.
The govt is now arranging their return under court order: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
For months, we warned DOGE's access to Americans' private data was ripe for abuse. And here it is:
A former DOGE employee stole the Social Security numbers & personal info of over 500 MILLION Americans.
Musk, Trump, & their DOGE lackies must be made to answer for this, NOW.
I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public.
I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are.
1/ Here's what I can share:
Is there a new episode of Gilmore Girls on the WB this week? Just wondering since we’re living through 2003 again.
Elizabeth Warren: "I am a hard no on a supplemental. This is not a war the American people want us to engage in. This is not a war that makes us safer ... No. No more money. The only thing Congress has the power to do is to stop actions like this through the power of the purse."
Holy shit - this would be very, very bad:
"The databases, called “Numident” and the “Master Death File,” include records for more than 500 million living and dead Americans, including Social Security numbers, places and dates of birth, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and parents’ names."
🔥 POSTDOC POSITIONS ON CHILDREN'S POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION 🔥
Wanna understand young people's beliefs about political leadership, politics, and power? Then this is your chance! I'm looking for two 2-year postdocs to join my ERC-funded research project @au.dk
international.au.dk/about/profil...
So far the war on Iran has cost $9.4 billion.
That's $1 billion per day.
$41,666,667 per hour.
$11,574 per second.
Thousands of lives lost.
People don't want this. They want a living wage. They want healthcare. They want to be able to afford a home. They want their basic needs met.
"By July 2025, more than 300,000 Black women had exited the workforce, and that number scaled to 600,000 in November."
The guy who voices Master Chief from the video game "Halo," who was featured in a White House meme video showing missiles blowing people up in Iran, calls it "disgusting and juvenile war porn" wapo.st/3NhffGm
NBC’s Richard Engel: “The White House meme campaign is outraging many former US military commanders… they say only someone who has never really seen combat would think it’s a joke and put out material like this.”
oh good i was worried it was white supremacy and capitalism
“The Times analysis found 300 billionaires and their families donated more than $3 billion—19% of all contributions—in federal elections in 2024. The billionaire families gave an average total of $10 million each in 2024, roughly equal to what 100,000 typical political donors gave, combined.“ Gift:
This is not true—driver’s licenses aren’t acceptable under the SAVE Act without additional proof of citizenship. The fact that they keep doing this sleight of hand should make clear that the SAVE Act is not something that “every American gets”
A Berlin court has ordered X to grant researchers API access under the Digital Services Act. Daniela Alvarado Rincón, Simone Ruf and Jürgen Bering explain how they won the case, and why it’s a major step for researcher data access.
Meanwhile, Spain's massive investment in renewables is paying dividends now: with prices for Spanish industry and consumers low and stable compared with other European economies.
www.ft.com/content/ac77...
An analysis of over 14 million social media posts from accounts in Canada found that 87% of conspiratorial claims come from just 100 influencers.
This minority of users impacts politics, influencing what people view as normal and leads to self-censoring to avoid attacks from conspiracy theorists.
Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes."
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I had my students play an election game to see if they became better forecasters. They did not! They DID become good citizens though and that's even better. My new, not depressing, piece in Good Authority. goodauthority.org/news/can-ele...
mount. Figure 1 presents two plots. Panel (a) displays the percentage of donors in each wealth rank that contributed to each of the six campaigns (i.e., Democratic and Republican nominees in 2012, 2016, and 2020).Footnote 17 Panel (b) displays the per capita dollars from each wealth bin, by campaign (including those who donate nothing). As Figure 1 shows, the association between wealth and contributions is approximately exponential. The wealthiest are much more likely to contribute, and the wealth gradient is even steeper in dollars because the top 0.1% contribute very large sums. This is one of the most robust findings in the campaign finance literature, but the figure demonstrates it with considerably more precision. By measuring wealth independently of contribution size, we avoid misattributing smaller contributions to non-wealthy donors and underestimating wealthy dollars. Most relevant to our analysis, Figure 1 compares the wealth gradients for Trump versus other candidates. In 2016, compared to other candidates, Trump’s wealth gradient is far flatter, because Trump elicited far fewer wealthy contributors and per capita dollars. For example, among the top 0.1%, Trump’s donors and per capita dollars represent about one third of Romney’s. While Trump did worse than all other candidates among nearly all wealth groups, that deficit was larger among the wealthy. In short, in 2016, wealthy donations to Trump are low compared to other presidential candidates. In 2020, Trump’s performance among the wealthy improved considerably over 2016 (Figure 1). Consider donation rates (Panel a). Among the wealthiest 0.1%, for example, Trump roughly doubled his rate, though he still significantly lagged Biden and Romney. He did even better in per capita dollars (Panel b) than in rates. Open access link to paper: http://cup.org/4cfm0Az
The wealthy dominate political donations. Our co-authored research found the top 0.1% contribute at rates 10-15x higher than bottom 90%. They’re not just more likely to donate, they give exponentially more per capita. The wealth gradient in politics is real. cup.org/4cfm0Az
Graphic with text: Only 14% of all youth under 18 in the US are Black, yet 47% of boys and 39% of girls in juvenile facilities are Black. The US is failing Black children.
Black & brown kids do not have a greater propensity toward lawbreaking. Instead, they are targeted for surveillance, arrest, and punishment in ways that white kids are not.
The racially disproportionate confinement of children starts with policing, not criminality.
The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.
Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.
This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.
Thousands of institutions abandoned programs, ended or rewrote scholarships, closed down clubs and publications, all in pre-emptive compliance.
And you know why?
Mostly because they wanted to do it if they thought they could blame someone else for it.
A bar graph showing billionaire political contributions as a percent of total contributions from 2000 to 2024.
As typical, @pkrugman.bsky.social gets at the crux of the problem with concentrated wealth and rising illiberalism. He lays it out so clearly here.
"any project to save American democracy must include a push to reduce the extreme concentration of wealth at the top."
open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...
BJPolS abstract text discussing economic inequality in the United States, focusing on its impact on the belief in the American dream among adolescents. It highlights findings from a study related to socioeconomic factors and belief systems.
NEW -
Adolescent Exposure to Economic Inequality and Belief in the ‘American Dream’ on Entering Adulthood - https://cup.org/4rmfyyE
- @sldemora.bsky.social & Benjamin J. Newman
#OpenAccess
Infographic that says more than 40% of unhoused people booked into jail were booked again within the year
A single day in jail can derail someone's life – imagine the horrific consequences of multiple bookings in a single year.
As we enter 2026, it's time for the U.S. to embrace housing-first solutions, not increased policing & criminalization.
New paper out in the @thejop.bsky.social with @rafaelahlskog.bsky.social & @grahn.bsky.social
Your neighbours shape your politics — but can living near people like *cause* higher turnout?
We studied 20,000+ queer individuals across the entire Swedish population to find out
doi.org/10.1086/740816
Worth adding that there's some more downstream and awful consequences from all of this. In an effort to "address" this "issue" - Jen Brown proposed (& EL City Council decided to consider) an ordinance that would in effect ban unhoused people from the city.
statenews.com/article/2026...
An excellent place to work/study for PhD
Logged into my Uppsala University email for the first time in 6 months and saw people living in normal times, and oh my god am I jealous.
