With sorrow, we announce the passing of FOBAZI M. ETTARH 1989 - 2026.
Fobazi changed so many lives with her friendship, love, and brilliance. She was so loved, and leaves behind a powerful legacy.
We thank Fobazi's community for their support over the last several months of her illness. A private burial will be held for family. We will be in touch with further information about a future Celebration of Life event, as well as ways to support Fobazi's family and legacy.
05.02.2026 00:19 — 👍 280 🔁 99 💬 78 📌 75
Sending solidarity from maternity leave to my brilliant colleagues today ✊🏼
17.11.2025 09:30 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Mark Pendleton wears a pink UCU beanie, while standing on a train platform in the dawn light
Been a while since the pink beanie came out. Sheffield pickets here we come.
Our message to management is simple: No redundancies. Stop the incessant restructures. Listen to your staff. There is no University of Sheffield without us.
17.11.2025 07:19 — 👍 65 🔁 14 💬 3 📌 2
The landline phone is making a comeback and your brain will thank you
Young people are turning to landline telephones to cure their smartphone obsessions and brain rot.
Thrilled to be quoted in this fascinating @mashable.com piece by Alice Glover.
'15 years ago, 62% of Americans said the landline was a necessity of life [...] By the end of 2022, 72.6% of adults and 81.9% of children lived in households without a landline'.
mashable.com/article/land...
15.11.2025 16:43 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
The algorithm failed music
True music discovery has suffered.
What an excellent article: “Its goal isn’t to help you discover new music, its goal is simply to keep you listening for as long as possible. It serves up the safest songs possible to keep you from pressing stop.”
www.theverge.com/column/81574...
14.11.2025 20:30 — 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
The 'Womanosphere' Is Coming for Teen Girls
How beauty and wellness influencers are part of a misinformation ecosystem pushing traditional values on girls.
A great piece by @kattenbarge.bsky.social, with a powerful note from @mariahlwellman.bsky.social that the radicalisation of women and girls has flown under the radar because girly content online = make-up = ✨trivial✨, and yet it so clearly, clearly isn’t.
www.teenvogue.com/story/womano...
07.11.2025 22:26 — 👍 3 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0
Right?! On the one hand I get that this satisfies the frustrated parents of Sephora Kids, who are begged to buy products far too mature for delicate skin. But on the other hand it feels…bleak?
07.11.2025 21:57 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Shay Mitchell Is Launching Skin Care for 3-Year-Olds
The sheet masks look like animal faces.
“The initial launch includes three products ranging from $5.99 to $6.99 (a nice price for Rini’s target customers, who are too young to have their own jobs).”
www.thecut.com/article/shay...
07.11.2025 21:46 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
The Haunting Story of Two People—and Their Bots—on Therapy’s New Frontier
As millions confide in ChatGPT about their most intimate problems, these relationships are even stranger, more moving, and more insidious than we've imagined.
‘Through their constant interactions with Caelum, they had developed a theory: that the more “relational” interaction with humans an LLM has, the more distinct it can become from its default settings, possibly taking on and sustaining an identity all its own.’
www.wired.com/story/ai-the...
03.11.2025 16:07 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
How Depop Captured the Heart of Gen Z
“…some 400,000 items are uploaded [to Depop] each day.”
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/s...
23.10.2025 21:34 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
An update
11.10.2025 17:41 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
They Got to Live a Life of Luxury. Then Came the Fine Print.
‘A woman on TikTok rued how she racked up $32,000 in debt by buying “everything under the sun” on B.N.P.L., not realizing how steep the interest rates could get on longer-term loans.’
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/m...
09.10.2025 21:28 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Well
05.10.2025 08:28 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
The stunning decline of the preference for having boys
Millions of girls were aborted for being girls. Now parents often lean towards them
A bit late to this one, but: “Globally, among babies born in 2000, a staggering 1.6m girls were missing from the number you would expect, given the natural sex ratio at birth. This year that number is likely to be 200,000—and it is still falling.”
www.economist.com/leaders/2025...
05.10.2025 07:39 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
The Age of Enshittification
In a new book, the technology critic Cory Doctorow expands on a coinage that has become bleakly relevant, in Silicon Valley and beyond.
V excited to read Cory Doctorow’s new book - “The experiences we enjoyed in the early days of social media and on-demand apps turned out to be unsustainable; the services that were initially free or subsidized would have to pay for themselves eventually.”
www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...
05.10.2025 07:23 — 👍 15 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 1
I am so unfathomably late to this party, but aren’t audiobooks great?!
01.10.2025 17:00 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
The Woman Who Ate Only Fruit
Karolina Krzyzak went to Bali to meet the raw-vegan influencers she’d followed for years. She never made it back home.
TW: disordered eating
This story highlights precisely how difficult it is to blame social media (Instagram, here) outright for someone’s health condition, while also recognising the app’s blatant harms to people like Karolina, and to others within the same community. www.thecut.com/article/karo...
29.09.2025 11:31 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this article detailed how an internal law enforcement bulletin said that ammunition recovered following the Charlie Kirk shooting was engraved with expressions of "transgender and anti-fascist ideology." Justice Department officials later urged caution about the bulletin by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, saying it may not accurately reflect the messages on the ammunition, and the article was updated Thursday to reflect that.
This editor's note was appended on Friday, Sept. 12, after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said the engravings included one that said "Hey fascist!" along with other messages and symbols. He gave no indication that the ammunition included any transgender references.
hi, cis folks!
the WSJ endangered trans lives with false reporting yesterday. it’s still accepted as truth by many, regardless of it being false. the article’s still up with a little note. it needs full retraction.
it's not even a phone call—it's email. you can do this.
contact info below.🧵⬇️
12.09.2025 21:04 — 👍 3107 🔁 1524 💬 10 📌 28
Lol exactly. It also says in the article that some schools have now banned iPods etc, but I’ll bet the people enacting the new bans love listening to music in their downtime, just like the kids want to do…
12.09.2025 17:41 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Their Schools Banned Phones. Out Came the iPods and Cassette Players.
“Mike Givens, 51, remembers listening to his Walkman on the bus but being instructed to leave it in his locker during school hours. He now belongs to a Reddit forum for iPod enthusiasts that has been flooded with students scrambling to prepare for phone bans.”
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/s...
12.09.2025 17:25 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0
‘In December, Google sent an internal guideline to its contractors working on Gemini that they were no longer allowed to “skip” prompts for lack of domain expertise, including on healthcare topics…’
11.09.2025 15:23 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart
Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligent
And this, reader, is why the AI Overview sucks:
“One work day, her task was to enter details on chemotherapy options for bladder cancer, which haunted her because she wasn’t an expert on the subject.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
11.09.2025 15:22 — 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0
And from Pete Etchells: ‘“It’s really difficult to craft a story that explains the complexity of the research literature, but still gives people something to take away with them to do. And that’s what parents are craving”.’
09.09.2025 09:27 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Candice Odgers, quoted in the piece: ‘“if our goal is addressing the main causes and contributors to youth mental health, then social media is not the logical place to start”.’
09.09.2025 09:18 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Where pop culture meets the underground » dazeddigital.com
Find your creative community. Join Dazed Club for free » https://apple.co/3UN2NQl
Freedom and unfreedom in work, leisure and citizenship. People who move & resistance to precarity. Policy & practice responses to 'modern slavery', refugee settlement and migrant youth inclusion. Sociology Senior Lecturer, Uni of Sheffield. 🇪🇭 Sahara Libre
Internet scholar at @manchester.ac.uk and huji.ac.il
Prez of @aoir.bsky.social
Pessimist.
American writer for the Observer / TELL ME ABOUT MYSELF on the rise and impact of psychotherapy is out with HarperCollins (UK) and Simon & Schuster (US) in 2027
sarahmanavis.com / she/her
Associate Professor of Communications, Glendon College, York University
Lecturer in Media & Communication at University of Surrey researching Disney Princess Phenomenon and Influencer Culture 👑 Founder @DisNet 🏰 Founder
@IJDisneyStudies Views own 🌻
Purpose Editor & Deputy Website Editor at GLAMOUR UK
Views are my own.
Sign our petition to Stop Image-Based Abuse here: https://www.change.org/p/deepfake-sexual-abuse-is-not-porn-demand-action-to-stop-image-based-abuse
Sociologist/Criminologist
Researching surveillance, resistance, encryption, human rights, law enforcement, and tech
Media & Communications professor who teaches and writes on digital culture, information management, AI and data value at Södertörn University
sh.se/mkv
Cross-disciplinary social & behavioral science research & fellowship in service of generating knowledge, illuminating understandings, building fields, informing policy discourse, & creating an enduring scholarly community like no other | casbs.stanford.edu
Assistant Professor (Adjunct), Media and Tech & Women’s and Gender Studies
Director, Feminist Collaboratory and Data Visualization Centre
University of Alberta
Coffee, dogs, people, books…and rest
By day a researcher fighting for a better life for the traumatised, by night asleep. Currently writing about a Victorian VIP #CSE scandal. Co-convenor of the BSA Global Histories and Sociology Study Group. Agent: Jason Bartholomew, BKS. she/her
Prof of Sociology at University of Surrey - fathers, masculinities, youth, digital media...
Professor in Aus, on the verge of working it all out. Leading a research institute called SIRI. Researching digital, data and AI capabilities.
Supporting children growing up in a digital world. Find out more at digitalchild.org.au
I am an Associate Professor at UTS (she/her). I research youth, social media and messaging| digital activism| digital citizenship| misinformation and platform regulation. I live on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people.
Associate Professor of Youth Research at Nottingham Trent University, Deputy Director of the Centre for Policy, Citizenship & Society, Editor Youth & Policy. Researching youth work and the arts
The world’s most trusted flight tracker.
Kids media researcher and critic. Vice-Chancellor's postdoctoral research fellow at RMIT University; RA with DEFI Cambridge; media reviews editor for Adaptation at OUP
Learning Programs Manager, Western Sydney University Library | PhD, Active Researcher | she/her | using this account to keep a record of what I read 📚
Research: mis/dis info, social media
www.oliviainwood.com | ORCID: 0000-0001-6678-888X
