Action News

Minor updates:
* Feed server was briefly offline tonight due to a breaking maintenance update which has since been fixed
* Bugfix: malformed URLs were crashing a worker job and preventing new posts from being analyzed/processed.

I'll soon have this auto-posting weekly. There may also be another weekly post or two with other data of potential interest.

Top hashtags in Action News feeds this week:
#mayday (154) #resist (152) #protest (112) #26apr2025 (97) #teslatakedown (54) #handsoff (45) #25apr2025 (44) #maydaystrong (39) #action (36) #24apr2025 (32) #mayday2025 (31) #freedomoverfascism (29) #upcomingprotest (28) #getloud (28)

Hey everyone!

Right now Action News is basically running itself and I'm just continuing to make iterative improvements to the classifier and location inferencing components.

Looking forward, do any of you all have any suggestions for making things better/more useful? I'd love to hear them.

A US map in which states are colored a deeper shade of blue the more posts they've had in the past week. The raw post numbers are as follows: AK 10 AL 13 AR 18 AZ 37 CA 200 CO 60 CT 21 DC 129 DE 5 FL 120 GA 41 HI 9 IA 26 ID 16 IL 113 IN 33 KS 13 KY 16 LA 19 MA 109 MD 27 ME 34 MI 75 MN 44 MO 37 MS 7 MT 8 NC 86 ND 2 NE 15 NH 17 NJ 51 NM 10 NV 14 NY 109 OH 55 OK 14 OR 65 PA 123 RI 15 SC 9 SD 9 TN 25 TX 62 UT 14 VA 52 VT 20 WA 135 WI 126 WV 3 WY 5

Breakdown of posts per state from the Action News feeds this week, as completely and as accurately as the code can identify states from posts presently (a subject of continuing improvements). Every state has seen at least 2 posts; CA takes the lead at 200 exactly as of this posting.

Site links mobilize.us 1235 theblop.org 140 secure.actblue.com 47 docs.google.com 38 handsoff2025.com 38 actionnetwork.org 37 l.smartnews.com 30 yahoo.com 24 reddit.com 24 newsweek.com 23 peoplesworld.org 21 usatoday.com 21 share.newsbreak.com 20 flip.it 19 apple.news 18 threads.net 18 bit.ly 17 open.substack.com 16 youtube.com 15 resist.bot 15 axios.com 15 cbsnews.com 13 facebook.com 12 sign.moveon.org 12 act.womensmarch.com 11

Top 25 sites linked to in Action News feed posts this week

Hashtags #handsoff 776 #resist 295 #bluecrew 121 #protest 120 #fucktrump 120 #gverse 110 #democrats 108 #trueblue 108 #𝐇𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬𝐎𝐟𝐟 79 #05𝐀𝐏𝐑2025 78 #handsoff2025 60 #indivisible 55 #protestevent 51 #getloud 51 #upcomingprotest 49 #trump 44 #50501 38 #resistance 36 #april5 35 #protests 34 #50501movement 33 #teslatakedown 32 #democracy 29 #musk 26 #boston 23

Top 25 hashtags appearing in Action News feed posts this past week

For anyone who cares, at the moment I can block all posts from specific bsky accounts, and/or all posts linking to specific sites. Blocked posts get discarded very early in the process and don't get put into the database or receive any further processing.

I saw a couple posts linking to a site that really shouldn't be in the feeds. One from a well-intentioned poster, the other, not. I used this as an opportunity to beef up the Action News admin tool's blocking capabilities. If you ever see anything that shouldn't be in the feeds, let me know. Thanks!

Protesting Under Fascism Planning to attend a protest but concerned about your security? We’ve rounded up a list of helpful resources below, from legal aid and doxxing support to our top security checklists, so you can take n...

Mass movements are mobilizing tomorrow. Whether you're taking direct action or showing in solidarity, it's important to prep.

We put together a resource w/ or favorite guides- from securing your tech to getting bail support or knowing what to wear: touchgrass.fightforthefuture.org/protesting-u...

Ok, so that came out pretty janky for a first pass, but I'm thinking of posting info like this here in some form once a week or so for anyone who might be interested.

reproductivefreedomforall.org
act.womensmarch.com
usatoday.com
wisdems.org
yahoo.com
fiftyfifty.one
action.momsrising.org
resist.bot
newsweek.com
act.aclu.org
mvn.to
marketwatch.com
kcra.com
pdamerica.org
rally.co
uniteagainstbookbans.org
boston.com
fastcompany.com

Here's a rundown of the sites most frequently linked to from posts in the Action News feeds this week, in order from most common:
mobilize.us
theblop.org
secure.actblue.com
handsoff2025.com
actionnetwork.org
peoplesworld.org
l.smartnews.com
sua.fm
action.aclu.org
sign.moveon.org
...

Hands Off! COVID Long-Haulers Fights Back · Hands Off **Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them.** We are fighting back! They're taking everything they can get their hands on—our health care, our data, our jobs, our services—and da...

Can't go in person to any of the Hands Off protests? Looking for a virtual event? I'm attending this one:

"Hands Off! COVID Long-Haulers Fights Back"

Saturday, April 5
1 – 2:30 pm Central Time
Virtual event

www.mobilize.us/handsoff/eve...

#USPol #HandsOff #Virtual #LongCovid #Disability #Resist

Americans of Conscience Checklist: Special Edition: Reproductive Justice – April 4, 2025 - Americans of Conscience Reproductive rights in the U.S. are eroding. This Checklist is designed to help you take bold, informed steps to protect reproductive justice now and in the future.

Things you can do to support #reproductivefreedom. americansofconscience.com/04-04-2025/

New posts coming in are now excluded from the feed if they're replies. Among other benefits, the feeds should start to look a little tidier now. Let me know if you notice any anomalies.

So, in short, I'm increasingly convinced that the many benefits of excluding replies from the feeds outweigh the potential missed information, and I tentatively plan to implement that behavior this weekend unless there are any objections.

Which is to say, *at least* 2/3 of all replies are links that are already very well represented elsewhere on this site as root (non-reply) posts, and many are already being inhibited anyway for URL cooldown purposes. Even with cooldown, 46% of the uninhibited replies still contain mobilize links.

Option 2 is what I'm leaning towards and also the the preferred option in the feedback I've been getting.

However, I ran some stats and at the moment almost exactly 25% of all posts in the Action News full feed are replies.

However however, a full 65% of those replies are links to mobilize URLs.

Things like mobilize are already getting plenty of attention, which is freakin' awesome, but that means I've been shifting my focus to trying to surface more things flying under the radar and/or comprising underrepresented modalities of action. But that puts me in slightly murkier territory.

That's pretty much where my thinking is now. I'm still having a bit of an existential struggle over the fact that certain juggernaut resources I wished had existed when I envisioned this tool suddenly became extremely prevalent while i was developing it.

What I don't have offhand is an objective sense of how prevalent that scenario is; I only know I've seen that happen more than just once or twice.

The content I'm concerned about losing is someone will make a post saying "Anyone know of any groups doing good work on [issue]?" and someone replies with a really good link. In option 2, absolutely nothing from that thread will appear in the feed, and for more niche stuff, that may be all there is.

Just to make sure we're on the same page, the feed code currently doesn't understand or care if a post is a regular post or a reply. It'll happily ignore a post and its first 4 replies and then for the fifth one say "this post should be in the feed." It's bluesky that then fills in upstream posts.

Does anyone have any strong opinions on this, or any other suggestions? At the moment I'm most drawn to option 2 for a number of reasons, but I'm open to other arguments.
9/9.

Option 3 should theoretically include more of those things, which I really like because I'm trying to also surface smaller/niche stuff that might be getting pushed to the sidelines by the juggernauts. But it'll require more careful classifier training and more aggressive feed-watching on my part.
8/

RIght now I'm learning towards #2 or #3. 2 is easiest and keeps the overall tone of the feeds closest to what I envisioned, at the cost of the feeds sometimes missing out on really useful info.
7/

I'm pondering 3 possible options.
1. Leave everything as-is, intervene when needed, hope that continued training of the classifier will help mitigate the problem cases.

2. Don't process replies at all and don't include them in the feeds.

3. Make the classifier more rigorous wrt replies.
6/

And this exacerbates the one I'm really starting to worry about:
* replies in what I'll call "devolving" threads where bad actors start participating and linking dis/misinformation. Already, stuff that really really really shouldn't be in the feeds has made it or nearly made it there.

So.
5/

* mixed-tone / "high-noise" posts that carry both action-related language and what I call "ranty" language, usually following on from the non-action thing that started the thread. It's hard for me to determine what the right thing is to do with these, and it's even harder on the classifier.
4/