SHE’S SO GOLDEN 🥇

Alysa Liu wins GOLD and becomes the first U.S. woman to medal in figure skating since 2002.

Brutal community note

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

@gabbiboyd - i love a man with a bedtime. boys don't need to be staying up late and having thoughts. that's how we ended up with the stock market

One missed bedtime and he’s inventing Bitcoin

Undefeated!

The End of Books Coverage at the Washington Post Becca Rothfeld, a former critic at the Washington Post, on the death of the paper’s books section.

“Publics are made and maintained, not discovered preformed, like rock formations. It is a sign of a fatally limited imagination to assume that we can only ever desire the pittance to which we are currently reconciled.”

ily Becca Rothfeld

catherine has proven what so many creators can and should learn:

that the most authentic version of you has the potential to capture a unique a unique, underserved, and dedicated audience.

That sucks!

Dennis nedry jurrasic park "see nobody cares" meme reads Hey everybody, this guy still posts on X! See? Everyone is horrified and disappointed. They feel it speaks directly to your values.

Oh no! And it has to be surgically removed?

red vibrant drawing of a wolf in chain, a sword broke apart from its mouth and it's holding a severed hand that is bleeding golden ichor. stylized fire and chains are some of the elements in the image.

bite your oppressors

#berensart2025

Love that AI, a thing we hate and don’t want, steals everything, ruins everything, shittifies everything. Drinks our water, plagiarizes our art, pisses all over our information fidelity, drives kids to suicide, serves the right-wing, and fucks up our devices and services. Good job, techbros!

Sorry to get radical but I don’t think it’s my job or yours to embrace, accept, understand - and certainly not to use - the thing being sold to us as AI. I don’t like any part of it, so I won’t. I’m missing out? Good, that’s what I want. You’re worried about me missing out? That’s fuckin weird, man.

Grammarly Is a Cheating Machine - Daily Nous Grammarly is sometimes thought by instructors to be a relatively benign writing tool app, akin to a sophisticated spelling and grammar checker. That may have once been true, but as Kieran Barker, an e...

Profs, Grammarly is NOT the benign writing assistant you may have thought it is, but a powerful cheating machine that includes tools explicitly designed to help students hide the cheating done with it...

the overseer of project 2025 is telling you out loud that every inch you cede on trans rights is part of the plan to create a white christian fascist state

I’m sorry, but if we hold everyone in the Epstein files accountable for their involvement and punish each one for their crimes to the fullest extent, we will begin to collapse a long-standing system that has only given power to elitist excrement and I don’t see a motherfucking problem with this

Hey so this is important. Amazon is removing ALL erotica and new queer books from its Amazon associates program, which seems to be a first step towards delisting these books a la itchio.

This includes my book, your books, and the books you like to buy.

This is bad news, and we can expect worse

Swiss Olympic bobsled commentator broke a century of neutrality and spent the entire run of the Israeli bobsled team recounting all the pro-genocide remarks and social media posts by Adam Edelman, one of the apartheid state athletes.

Absolute legend. More of this in sports please!

Crossing all the things for you!

Claims that AI can help fix climate dismissed as greenwashing Industry using ‘diversionary’ tactics, says analyst, as energy-hungry complex functions such as video generation and deep research proliferate

Excellent work @ketanjoshi.co 🎯

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

The Escapist seems cursed to have owners that just don't know what to do with it other than gut it and make it worse over and over again.

That's awesome

📢 NEW RANT: Attempting to silence James Talarico’s interview with Stephen Colbert last night was an incredibly stupid thing for the Trump administration to do. All they’ve done is breathe more life and attention into the interview and give Talarico a prime opportunity to win the primary.

YouTube video by Headline USA Jesse Jackson 'I Am Somebody' on Sesame Street

RIP Jesse Jackson
youtu.be/zuZV7ES4VE8?...

A small raccoon poking its head out of a trashcan.

Truth Coming Out Of Her Well To Shame Mankind - 2025.

The John Wick series is so effective because it fully embodies the three major tenets of dumb guy fantasy: 1. being able to kick anyone’s ass, 2. living by a code of honor, and 3. paying for things with gold coins

Here's the thing - the entire FIELD is woo-woo. The notion of 'artificial intelligence' - ie abstract math as sentient, at least when represented by electronic pulses - is magical thinking; when a group of people tried to rebrand it as 'machine learning' in the 0s/10s, they were gradually pushed out

I'm still seeing Cloudflare handshake errors when I try to navigate to the site.

YOU CAN PEACEFULLY GO FUCK YOURSELF