Eliot Higgins

German soccer federation official wants World Cup boycott considered because of Trump A German soccer federation executive committee member says it’s time to consider a World Cup boycott because of the actions of U.S. President Donald Trump.

A German soccer federation executive committee member says it's time to consider a World Cup boycott because of the actions of U.S. President Donald Trump.

🧵 @jburnmurdoch.ft.com is spot on about the conditions in his FT piece. Liberal democracy held it together thanks to growth, good demographics, and the promise of a better future. Those days are gone, and that’s the "why" behind the erosion. However...

Bari Weiss’s CBS News Won’t Even Condemn Israel for Killing a CBS Contributor Instead, the network’s new top anchor Tony Dokoupil peddles Israel’s talking points about it killing a Palestinian journalist. A CBS source calls it a ‘disgrace.’

— Israel kills 3 journalists, including CBS contributor
— AFP, the other impacted outlet, condemns killing & calls for investigation
— CBS doesn't, instead peddles Israel's claim that they were targeting a group with "a drone affilliated with Hamas"

Inside the Bari Weiss-led CBS response:

TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes According to its new privacy policy, TikTok now collects more data on its users, including their precise location, after majority ownership officially switched to a group based in the US.

According to its new privacy policy, TikTok now collects more data on its users, including their precise location, after majority ownership officially switched to a group based in the US. www.wired.com/story/tiktok...

Lots of caveats of course, including opt-in biases to the campaign and quiz so operational challenges remain but we hope it's a useful guide for rolling out and evaluating inoculation campaigns on social media feeds! Made possible by the great work of our partner Reality Team @deblavoy.bsky.social!

Key findings:

✅ Inoculated users showed a 21 ppt increase in their ability to spot emotional manipulation (baseline ability was low)

✅ These effects remained detectable 5 months.

✅ We also increased information-seeking behavior, treatment users were 3x more likely to click on the ad.

3/3

We assigned users to a treatment or control group using birth month as a pseudo-randomization mechanism (assuming those born in e.g. May aren't more or less capable in spotting misinfo than those born in e.g. Dec). Those who engaged with the 19-sec ad were then targeted with a quiz vs control 2/3

New real-world field study *inoculating* against misinformation in live social media scroll feeds out in Harvard Misinfo Review @misinforeview.bsky.social

We targeted +375k users with a short ad on Insta using a novel quasi-experimental method (1/3)

misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/preb...

AI nudification: the latest weapon of violence against women and girls In Julie Burchill’s recent article in the Spectator, Does it really matter if Grok undresses us all?, she makes the argument that those who, like me, have repeatedly had their clothes removed by socia...

This week, an X user created an AI video of me being chloroformed and prepared for rape.

Victims are told it's not real and they're getting offended for no reason.

But nudification tools are weapons of sexual assault, and the harm they cause is real 👇

jessasato.substack.com/p/ai-nudific...

Gavin Newsom just announced that California will be the first state to join the World Health Organization.

This is in direct defiance of Donald Trump, who just pulled the United States out of the organization.

Her tone for ‘Are you crazy?’ is perfect. It really should go viral.

They ARE crazed, and repugnant.

Illustration of Weird Al playing his accordion in front of Batman and Superman. Superman seems way more into it.

Variant cover by Dan Mora for the upcoming DC Comics title Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #50

It was the Frank Zappa song I was listening to when I registered an online account on some game or forum years back and I just kept using it.

Starmer rebukes Trump over ‘frankly appalling’ remarks on Nato troops in Afghanistan PM joins veterans in condemning claim that troops avoided frontlines and suggests US president should apologise

Starmer rebukes Trump over ‘frankly appalling’ remarks on Nato troops in Afghanistan www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

skywriter.blue/pages/did:pl...

That uncertainty is your problem.

The Horizon scandal is a good example. Organisational debt, incentives, and culture mattered, but what allowed them to persist was epistemic failure, evidence couldn’t travel, contestation was blocked, and accountability lagged years behind reality. That’s exactly the failure mode I’m pointing to.

I agree complex systems have multiple causes. My claim isn’t monocausal. It’s about which factor becomes decisive once others are present. Economic, organisational, and moral failures all matter, but the information environment determines whether those failures are corrected or compounded.

Have a larger story on this coming, but I’ve been embedded with this group, and this story from yesterday is part of what they’ve been doing in the city: religionnews.com/2026/01/22/h...

The sharpest, most ludic insight within a must-read thread.

No doubt we'll be discussing this in detail in Bellingcat's upcoming Stage Talk
bsky.app/profile/bell...

Judging today by today’s prism is exactly the point. In a real-time, attention-scarce environment, even good standards fail if they operate too slowly or without consequences. The problem isn’t quality of media alone, but loss of mechanisms that turn knowledge into constraint.

I’m not arguing standards were higher in the past. Many were awful. The claim isn’t moral decline. It’s functional mismatch. Institutions that once absorbed bias and delay still produced binding outcomes. Today they don’t, regardless of standards.

I agree completely, the hollowing out of democracy and rise of neoliberalism goes hand in hand in my opinion.

But here’s where the debate usually gets stuck, people mistake the weather report for the mechanic’s diagnosis. Economic stagnation explains the climate, but it doesn’t explain the machine. I've spent the last couple of years thinking about the systems behind the collapse.

Focusing on social media, bots, or legacy media treats symptoms as causes. Even with perfect moderation, the core problem remains: democratic systems can no longer stabilise shared outcomes fast enough.

Higher standards and technological progress aren’t the issue. The problem is where those standards bind. We can demand more transparency, accuracy, and ethics than ever, yet still lack institutions that can convert those demands into consequences for power at speed.

Then every moral-epistemic system just has their own wiki that supports what they already believe, which is what happens already to an extent, for example : wikispooks.com/wiki/Main_Page

Yes, there's definitely other factors, but acknowledging the massive change in the information ecosystem and how that impacts epistemic systems is really the foundation of any response, even if there's other social and economic factors. The democratic fish rots from the head.

Hillsborough.