Ashlyn B. Aske

CDT‘s @alexreevegivens.bsky.social: “Only Congress can preempt state laws, and it has now twice correctly decided not to pursue this misguided and unpopular policy. State officials should not be deterred in their efforts to provide guardrails for #AI.”

Image (clearly manipulated) of an orca that seems to be jumping out of shallow flood waters (that could clearly not transport an orca).

The flooding happening in WA state right now is extreme. Homes under water. Evacuations underway. We also have new, PNW-flavored competition for the "shark in the flood water" image from so many hurricanes past. (Just to be REAL CLEAR here, this photo is NOT REAL, and not meant to look real.)

Perhaps relevant today, a framework for understanding how many election rumors mislead.

Couldn’t get a more clear example of Wilhoit’s theory of conservatism: “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

I've had this headline rattling around in my brain since January and I finally wrote it. Been hearing too many people in the startup world buying into the neoractionary nonsense that maybe a little light fascism is good for silicon valley. It's not. It's very, very bad.

Who Goes MAGA?

With apologies to Dorothy Thompson, whose 1941 essay in Harper’s, “Who Goes Nazi?” remains a worthwhile read on the cultural archetypes of who is drawn to fascism, and who would never go down such a path. It felt like it could use a modern updating, however. Update: Just after I…

And while the election is over, we note that efforts to invoke and distort the law in service of conspiratorial narratives continue in 2025 with ongoing efforts to restrict voting rights (amongst the Trump administration’s other policymaking efforts).

We examine the role litigation plays in the right wing media ecosystem — MAGA uses the judicial process to frame fringe rumors about election fraud in legal language that gives them a persuasive air of legitimacy in the court of public opinion.

Drawing on some of my work from the past year at the Center for an Informed Public, I published a piece in Lawfare with my colleague Stephen Prochaska.

The Minnesota shooter apparently used data broker websites to find the home addresses of the people he shot and murdered.

Congress has had years to do something about data brokers and they've sided with the tech lobby over and over again.

Their inaction is deadly.

This is an extraordinary and courageous piece of writing that wrestles with one of the great challenges of this moment: How do you decide whether to remain a part of broken institutions to try to fix them from within?

whenever i hear mark zuckerberg says the research meta is funding says social media isn’t bad for people, i think of tobacco execs saying smoking isn’t bad for your health

let’s be clear that personalisation amounts to determining a person’s future based on recurring patterns of the past. if you belong to a groups that society has not been kind to in the past (black & brown, LGBTQI, poor, disabled, etc), AI personalisation ensures your future encodes past injustice

Cantwell leads bipartisan push to give Congress control over tariffs Under the new legislation, all new tariffs would expire in 60 days unless they are approved by Congress. Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley is a co-sponsor.

WA Sen. Maria Cantwell is leading a #bipartisan push to give Congress more authority in setting #tariffs. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

Black background with white text centered reading "Ai Boom poses threat to trans community, experts warn. By Eduardo Salazar Uribe." The blue, black, and white logo for NYCity News Service is underneath the text. An image of Lady Dariana, a trans woman who came to the U.S. to flee threats against her in Ecuador, is featured with Dariana in the middle of a cobblestone street. Underneath this image, white text reads, "#TransDayofVisibility"

Black background with white and red text reading "When we are thinking about how A.I. discriminates, we have to think about how machine learning systems are built. The mathematical patterns in the data are the same mathematical patterns in the world. So any kind of discrimination that exists in the world or has existed historically is likely going to be reflected in the data that’s used to train the system up." White text under this reads "Meredith Broussard, Author of 'More Than a Glitch' & 'Artificial Unintelligence'"

1/ 🏳️‍⚧️ Today is #TransDayOfVisibility so let’s talk about the disparate impact of AI on this community. From security checkpoint systems that use a binary definition of gender to biased facial recognition technologies, AI is failing transgender and nonbinary people in critical ways.

Exclusive: Trump fires both Democratic commissioners at FTC, sources say President Donald Trump fired the two Democratic commissioners at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, two sources familiar with the situation said, in another major test of the independence of regulatory agencies.

Just so we’re all clear, the Supreme Court *expressly ruled* that the president cannot fire FTC commissioners without cause in 1935’s Humphrey’s Executor. Trump’s action here is brazenly illegal under any interpretation of the law as it stands. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

Democratic FTC commissioners say they were just ‘illegally fired’ by President Trump It’s the latest power grab over the independent agency.

I can't believe we're gonna relitigate humphrey's executor. what's next. marbury v. madison? www.theverge.com/news/632267/...

Trump's freezing of all civil rights cases at the DOJ is not part of an anti-DEI agenda, but an anti-civil rights agenda. DOJ was *founded* to protect Black rights during Reconstruction. That this difference is unclear speaks to the success of conservative propagandists and the failures of liberals.

A really powerful thread 🧵

Breaking News in the Hands of a Few: Newsbrokering on X During the Trump Assassination Attempts Research Report

BREAKING NEWS 🚨: Who supplied information to X users during the Trump assassination attempts?

Our latest report dives deep into this and discovers that the news supply on X is becoming oligarchical, where few prominent accounts dominate the news supply and shape the discourse in key events.

The book that explains how the Springfield cat rumors put people at risk Knopf's Rumors, Race, and Riots (1975) remains one of the best works on how misinformation fuels and sustains hate.

A quick read from @mikecaulfield.bsky.social on the pet eating rumors in Springfield. Do rumors cause violence? The answer Knopf provides and Mike summarizes here makes perfect sense to me ad a political scientist where rumors have potential but not sufficient to cause violence on their own.

Heritage Foundation Spreads Deceptive Videos About Noncitizen Voters The right-wing think tank has been pushing misinformation about voting into social media feeds. The Georgia secretary of state’s office called one video “a stunt.”

The false narrative of "non-citizen voters" is a major theme of election rumors (and outright misinformation) in 2024. There's a whole cottage industry of creators generating "non citizen voters" content and the Heritage Foundation is getting in on the action: www.nytimes.com/2024/09/07/u...

Also, thanks to @mertcanbayar.bsky.social for editing support & promoting the post! :)

Examining mischaracterizations of voter registration data in Washington state There are often many explanations for why patterns and outliers occur in a dataset.

Claims that "strange" anomalies and/or patterns in voter registration data indicate fraud are often unfounded, and reflect misconceptions about data or election law.

Read my recent piece w/ @katestarbird.bsky.social here! ⤵️
www.cip.uw.edu/2024/05/14/w...