Ryan J. Gallagher

This network of hijacked Bluesky spam accounts with repetitive biographies has continued to expand. The growth can be monitored by watching the Bluesky firehose for changes to the biographies and display names of established accounts.
bsky.app/profile/cons...

Slowly rolling out the new suite of Blacksky tools... ⏳
- @blackskyweb.xyz People's Assembly: We'll use this tool to gather feedback and collectively govern Blacksky, democratically
- Login using your atproto account (bsky.social, blacksky.app, w.e.)
- Serves as both poll and forum for the community

The paper is open access—I’ve summarized some points on my blog 👉 www.nicolarighetti.net/research/new...

#polsky / #polisky / #polcomsky / #policommsky

New blog post! 📍 Ever wondered how ATProtocol could handle messy location data or reference massive external datasets? I explore using off-protocol data references to bridge structured and unstructured worlds.

blog.smokesignal.events/posts/3lve7m...

*New publication in @sscratsage.bsky.social!*

The deaths of Black victims of police violence have become focusing events for #BlackLivesMatter. We wanted to know why some victims receive a high amount of social media attention wile others do not.

Available #OpenAccess: doi.org/10.1177/0894...

Screenshot reading: Waves of Attention to Racial Injustice on Social Media: Extrajudicial Police Killings in the United States as Focusing Events Authors: Annie Waldherr, Nicola Righetti, Ryan J. Gallager, Kira Klinger, Daniela Stoltenberg, Sagar Kumar, Dominic Ridley, and Brooke Foucault Welles Abstract: The deaths of Black victims of police brutality, such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and Philando Castile, have become focusing events and symbols for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, catalyzing wide-spread public attention to racial injustice. While prior studies on hashtag activism predominantly focus on single and widely known cases, less is understood about why some incidents draw massive public attention while others do not. Addressing this gap, our study investigates the factors influencing the likelihood and size of public attention on Twitter (now X) following extrajudicial police killings. We analyzed 1.5 million tweets in response to 795 police killings between January 1, 2015, and December 8, 2016, in the United States. By examining cases on all scales, from unnoticed to prominent, we provide large-scale empirical evidence on disparities in public attention to police killings and their victims. Results indicate two distinct processes in the emergence of focusing events: While victims’ attributes such as race, age, and gender increased likelihood of receiving any attention (thresholding), variables of context and social construction were related to overall wave size (focusing).

Second, with a large team of authors, led by @anniewald.bsky.social, we study which (personal, temporal, spatial, affordance-based) properties of incidences of extrajudicial police killings facilitate public attention on social media.

Abstract and figure from preprint linked below

🧵New research! People now use AI chatbots for therapy, friendship, and romance. These days, both specialised and general-purpose chatbots are built with a friendly, empathetic tone to best comfort users. We find this new trend is not just cosmetic but seriously harms user safety.

It might (?) be ok for surfacing content that is generally "agreeable" to everyone, but I don't see how well this plays with showing people content they want personally. If I want to see stuff about data engineering or the video game I'm playing recently, I don't see how I'd get it this way

Social Media: Fixing What's Broken · Luma Join Communia at Soho Works for a forward looking panel discussion on creating a better digital world! Featuring a panel with a variety of industry…

August 20th in Brooklyn I'll be on a panel discussing potential futures for social media alongside experts from orgs like Snap, OF, and @techcrunch.com

Register below ⬇️

And LLMs can be really good text classifiers! They make some problems way more tractable than ever before

It's just the branding that's killing me

I know LLMs have other uses than content classification, but I'm deeply tired of this particular branding

At least half the time, "LLM/AI" can just be replaced with "text classifier"

"we solved this with AI!"

translation: "we made a content classifier"

117. Alondra Nelson, Biden's Head of Science and Technology Policy, talks AI, Trump's research funding cuts, and how memes replaced Happy Days - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass A... Alondra Nelson is arguably the most important sociologist of science in America. She isn’t just a brilliant researcher of how race and racism has shaped public health in America, nor just a thoughtful...

This is probably the last episode of "Reimagining the Internet", the podcast Mike Sugarman and I have produced for the last five years. Talk about going out on a high note: I interview Alondra Nelson on AI, universities and the Trump administration:

publicinfrastructure.org/podcast/117-...

Substack has a much laxer definition of hate speech (at least in public documentation) than services like Patreon, Twitch, or YouTube. The platform considers hate speech only material that *incites violence*, a much narrower band than is typical.

I've been getting slammed by the everdark bosses after putting it down for a bit

More talk today about leaving Substack. You should do it. If you’re trying to do local news, head over to www.tinynewsco.org and apply to join the @tinynewscollective.bsky.social. We’ll get you set up with Ghost, fiscal sponsorship, and a community of support. The best deal in journalism.

Scientist on green card detained for a week without explanation, lawyer says A Korean citizen studying in Texas on a green card was detained in San Francisco after a trip overseas. His lawyer says authorities won’t give a reason.

Tae Heung Kim, 40:
- Lived in US since he was 5
- Has green card
- Getting PhD at Texas A&M
- Researching vaccine for Lyme disease
- Has 1 minor pot charge from 2011, since sealed

Also: Detained incommunicado by DHS after returning from wedding in Korea

www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

A Second Tea Breach Reveals Users’ DMs About Abortions and Cheating The more than one million messages obtained by 404 Media are as recent as last week, discuss incredibly sensitive topics, and make it trivial to unmask some anonymous Tea users.

It's very alarming that this is happening at all, but especially happening in the context of government-ordered ID checks to use vast swaths of the internet

www.404media.co/a-second-tea...

Candidates Be Posting: Multi-Platform Strategies and Partisan Preferences in the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections - Josephine Lukito, Maggie Macdonald, Bin Chen, Megan A. Brown, Stephen Prochaska, Yunkang ... In this multi-platform, comparative study, we analyze social media messages from political candidates (N = 1,517) running for Congress during the 2022 U.S. Midt...

🚨New publication in Social Media + Society🚨

Candidates Be Posting: Multi-Platform Strategies and Partisan Preferences in the 2022 U.S. Midterm Elections

And it's open access!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

I'm trying Altair this time instead of Matpl*tlib. Its API is pretty easy to work with and I've already figured out some tricks to clean up a ton of code

Previously I had to do something like plot 6 different bar charts on top of each other. With a dataframe pivot, I can do that all at once now

it's happening

Everyone wants to do the fancy machine learning thing without any of the data to actually do it

Today PornHub introduced mandatory age verification for UK users - as demanded by the Government's new Online Safety Act.

In other news, searches for "VPN" in the UK just went through the roof.

According to three people familiar with the command, Musk told a senior engineer at the California offices of SpaceX to cut Starlink coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic region Ukraine was trying to reclaim during a pivotal counteroffensive reut.rs/45mrXK8

The persuasive potential of AI-paraphrased information at scale Abstract. In this article, we study how AI-paraphrased messages have the potential to amplify the persuasive impact and scale of information campaigns. Bui

Excited to announce that my paper "The persuasive potential of AI-paraphrased information at scale" with my wonderful collaborators @yiweixu.bsky.social, @maddyjalbert.bsky.social, and @emmaspiro.bsky.social has been published at PNAS Nexus!

Link: academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

the humility of being known (server knowing your go to sandwich order without needing to ask)

This, and it doesn't work.

Now, it is possible to address the harms of mass engagement-driven platforms. But doing so requires pushing back on the core biz models of the platforms, not tinkering on the edges w surveillant 'solutions' that increase surveillance w/o addressing the root cause.

This is good. Great work by @baileytownsend.dev in the Rust port of the statusphere tutorial. It's great seeing the community fork and adapt for knowledge sharing.

Kind of gets me thinking about XRPC services deployed as Cloudflare Workers ...

this says 20 going 8 interested

there's gotta be at least 1-2 more protocol enjoyooors among y'all that will be in NYC on the 22nd, u should come. a bunch of cool people will be there, I'll present a bit about payments stuff.

It's well known that big tech contracts out its human (and AI) moderation. In this new paper @lucas-wright.bsky.social describes a pivot to moderation infrastructure, giving these companies a lot of power over trust & safety papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....