Sukrit Venkatagiri

🗳️ Announcing the #CSCW Steering Committee Chair (Elect) Elections! Two exceptional nominees received multiple nominations each: Jessica Vitak and Naomi Yamashita.

Voting is anonymous and closes on *December 18*. You'll need your SIGCHI membership number to vote: karriekarahalios.com/CSCW/ChairEl...

On Tues, former UW postdoc Sukrit Venkatagiri recounted how our team experienced a slew of public records requests with implications for how the design of digital systems that support “seamless” collaboration intersect w/ privacy and the exploitation of public records laws.
bsky.app/profile/sukr...

It’s the last day of #CSCW2025! Come by at 2:30pm at the Perspectives on Data Privacy session to watch me discuss the resistance tactics that workers use to circumvent surveillance and how they build towards collective action

Paper link: dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

🔎 Do you work at a public university or collaborate w/ someone who does? Come learn what happens when your messages are requested through public records laws in my #CSCW2025 paper w/ Rachel, @emmaspiro.bsky.social, & @katestarbird.bsky.social
🕝 2:30pm today
📍Bekken, Core Concepts in Privacy Research

I'm also the Communications Co-Chair and on the CSCW Steering Committee, so please reach out if you have questions or feedback. I would love to hear from newcomers and longtime attendees!

Reach out if you'd like to chat all things CSCW or want to know more about working at a liberal arts college; my research on deepfakes, scams, and surveillance; or just to commiserate about federal grant terminations 🙃

We (@ninalutz.bsky.social, Steven Prochaska, @katestarbird.bsky.social, @joyojeet.bsky.social, @schafer.bsky.social + others) are also running a workshop this Saturday on online participatory culture and information disorder.
cscw2025infodisorder.netlify.app
cscw2025infodisorder.netlify.app

Privacy versus Transparency: Navigating Public Records Requests and Adversarial Dynamics in a Distributed Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration | Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Public records laws are standard for state and federal governments across the U.S. Such laws rest on the core notion that transparency, enacted through access to governmental documentation, will ensur...

I'll be at #CSCW2025 presenting a paper on the impact of public records (FOIA) requests on multi-stakeholder collaborations — co-authored with Rachel Moran, @emmaspiro.bsky.social, and @katestarbird.bsky.social: dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

i hope academics understand very clearly that columbia didn't lose their funding because of protesters against genocide. if they honestly think that, then they're going to get gutted by fascists who played them like the fucking fools they apparently are.

I'm a professor at an Ivy League institution and I think about Ivy League institutions about a tenth as much as the editors of major media outlets do.

I'm begging you, for the love of God:

Touch grass. Somewhere *other* than Harvard Yard.

I spoke to the New York Times about how social media platforms are increasingly difficult for researchers to study because of limited/no data access and why that's bad for society: www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/t...

Omg you're on a roll! So happy to see you're thriving at Bellingcat 😄

I didn't realize you were at Kevin's talk! He did a great job :)

Work led by Himanshu Zade and Spencer Williams, with Theresa Tran, Christina Smith, (me), Gary Hsieh, and @katestarbird.bsky.social.

Ever notice how reposts are used differently vs. replies? In our ACM COMPASS 2023 paper we found that replies *reframed* the conversation of a post compared to quote retweets on Twitter. But retweets from *politically opposed* accounts twisted the OPs' words.

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

I'll be at #CSCW2023 and can't wait to meet old and new friends! Let's talk if you're interested in cross-platform visual misinformation, the (mis)uses of AI-generated photos and video, or what faculty life is like at a liberal arts college. Swarthmore CS is also hiring multiple visiting faculty.

UW misinformation researchers will not buckle under political attacks | Opinion As the 2024 election approaches, misinformation researchers at the University of Washington say they won't be deterred by those seeking to undermine their work.

Researchers of online misinformation (and related topics) aren’t “buckling” to politically-motivated attacks. Our critical work to understand and address online deception and manipulation continues. But only with the support of our colleagues and institutions. www.seattletimes.com/opinion/uw-m...

Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political disinformation but also the quality of medical informa...

Our field is under partisan attack from the right — and it’s working. Funders - govt & philanthropic are cutting support. And academics & universities are unprepared to deal with this. More from @naominix.bsky.social wapo.st/3ZvQNTF

It me

Would love to have join class some time :) Also it was great running into you today!

Welcome to greener pastures! Err... Bluer skies.

Barbie dancing asking "Do you guys ever think about social computing" (used to say "dying." Title is Social and Crowd Computing, CPSC91R, Fall 2023. Dr. Sukrit Venkatagiri.

Barbie standing off her porch, viewing a pink barbie world/city. Overlaid is text "social computing" and the question "how can we design the social systems that we inhabit?"

White background with text overlaid: "About Me" and "I am Kenough" below it (quote from the Barbie movie).

First day teaching Social Computing at Swarthmore College! We did a speculative design exercise — imagining what social technologies will be like in 10 yrs. Students also grappled w/ how we can better design the systems that we inhabit, why we have a responsibility to do so, & why it's so difficult.

Accused: How students respond to allegations of using ChatGPT on... This study explores student responses to allegations of cheating using ChatGPT, a popular software platform that can be used to generate grammatical and broadly correct text on virtually any...

"Accused: How students respond to allegations of using ChatGPT on assessments"

New paper of mine coming soon in Learning: Research and Practice. The publication is in the pipeline, but you can read the preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2308.16374

Hopefully useful as we embark on a new academic year!

In grad school I actually worked on a whole project that was sparked by a conversation about that landmark! Glad I get to finally see it in person for CSCW this year :)

Screenshot of the opt out form

Meta/Facebook/Threads/Instagram is now using your content for generative AI. There is a form to opt out, although I don't know if it'll make a difference, but here it is: www.facebook.com/help/contact...

To Protect Elections, Protect Researchers.

cdt.org/insights/to-...

So excited for you! I worked with a few folks from Bellingcat as part of my dissertation research and they're a great bunch.

I learned that some universities do have much stricter Zoom licenses esp. because of FERPA. I'm sure Zoom charges more for that :)

We’ve become so dependent on technology like Zoom, and that dependence gives the company more power to make change without consulting its users. There's so few easy-to-set-up open source or transparent alternatives to Zoom. Signal (@signal.bsky.social) is a rare exemplar.