Martin L Martens

The web we weave.

People tend to think that European War Three will be nuclear, with vast irradiated, uninhabitable landscapes.

EW3 is much more likey to involve vast landscapes rendered uninhabitable by killer drones and the millions of kilometres of plastic fibre-optic cables they leave behind.

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.

One hundred accounts are behind the majority of conspiracy theory content in Canada Researchers analyzed more than 14 million social media posts from accounts in Canada and found that 87 per cent of conspiratorial claims come from influencers, with just 100 users responsible for near...

One hundred accounts are behind the majority of conspiracy theory content in Canada #Propaganda #Canada

According to the report, just 100 users are responsible for almost 70 per cent of all online conspiracy claims in Canada.

/1 thread

www.nationalobserver.com/2026/02/25/n...

This is who Carney is protecting.

bsky.app/profile/lale...

Frontiers | Association of SARS-CoV-2 infection with long-lasting increase in circulating IL-32 levels Background & aimsSevere Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection has a wide spectrum of clinical presentations ranging from asymptomat...

Direct link to the article mentioned in the post above:

Association of SARS-CoV-2 infection with long-lasting increase in circulating IL-32 levels (Feb 5, 2026)
www.frontiersin.org/journals/imm...

[ FREE PDF available ]

Charlie Kirk repeatedly pushed the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory and regularly made racist comments in his public statements.

If we can't call someone so explicitly racist "a racist" without getting fired, who else is off limits?

Donald Trump? Nick Fuentes? David Duke?

People saying OpenAI reporting a user it banned for posts about gun violence would be mass surveillance are fucking idiots.

The tech industry *is* mass surveillance. There is no genAI or ChatGPT without mass data collection on everyone.

Don’t like mass surveillance? Stop using fucking chatbots.

To Canadians: there are no guardrails down south any more. They WILL do exactly what they are told, including using military force to kill our children. This is vile and real. Look to community and TALK about this problem. We don't want to, but we are Austria to their Nazi Germany. They're coming.

Elbows Up for Indigenous Rights | The Tyee Six years ago BC led the world in addressing harms to First Nations. Why put that progress at risk?

The NDP is losing ground. But is this because it needs to be more centrist? Or is this because the government has been failing to stand behind its own progressive works?

Judith Sayers writes. #bcpoli #canpoli

Yes, that is what they want.

A black-and-white aerial view of the Avro Arrow, a delta-winged jet aircraft marked with "RL-201" and a Canadian maple leaf insignia, displayed on a tarmac surrounded by a large crowd of people and a stage with officials, near a building and parked cars.

On Feb. 20, 1959, the Avro Arrow program was cancelled by the Diefenbaker government.
Thousands of people lost their jobs, and the Canadian aeronautical and aviation sector was decimated. The day became known as Black Friday.
This is the story of the Arrow.

🧵 1/12

Have just found Lisification, which tells you whenever you're added to a list. Which is good because some fucker out there clearly added me to one and now I'm having to block a bunch of accounts that follow thousands of people and I never trust those.

bsky.app/profile/list...

A letter of reprimand does fuck all. The need to issue a warrant for his arrest.

Which God?

I'd bet that companies will keep prices up and pocket the profits.

That assumes that Trump won't continue to impose the tariffs.

I've used that set of stairs a few times on SAR tasks.

My spouse will wake me up if the news of his death arrives when I am asleep.

bold red box with dark red text at center. Three rows of text, from top to bottom: lower class, middle class, epstein class

America has 3 distinct classes:

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.

I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion

People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

Incredible story that is worth your time to read. It exposes the ways in which the Trump admin is turning the legal immigration system into yet another arm of the mass deportation machine, transforming a benefits agency into a trap for those seeking legal status.

Trump's lawyers are already laughingstocks.

Two people in the photo, wearing climbing gear, standing on top of rocks, distant mountains in the background, blue sky with a few clouds above.

Profile photo, uncropped

I still think the best way to think of the ending of US AID is as the single worst genocide committed by any one US presidential administration.

even given all the horrific things the US has done, it's not really that close. 750k dead already; expected 14 million.

The entire goal of Palantir is to become so deeply rooted in every system that even attempting to remove it would cause a collapse.

That's literally their stated goal; they either have the power, or nobody does.

Discovered today that Instagram had turned on (without my opt-in) automatic AUDIO translation of any reel that shows up in my feed not in English USING AI TO MIMIC THE SPEAKER’S VOICE and WOW it was creepy and upsetting.

You can turn it off in “Language & Translations” in Settings. 🙅🏻‍♀️

White fluffy clouds and blue sky above a snow covered mountain and trees.

Five weeks without fresh snow in the mountains is far too long.

Two weekend searches for missing youth end safely in Comox Valley Search and rescue crews in the Comox Valley were kept busy this weekend, responding to two separate searches involving missing youth - both of which ended safely.

Busy weekend with a couple of SAR tasks. At least I managed to get up and do a bit of hiking in the mountains and snow in between.

cheknews.ca/two-weekend-...

This helped me better understand just how vast the distances in space are.

joshworth.com/dev/pixelspa...

How To View Video Files In The DOJ Epstein Library Here's the weird stuff I've found so far.

How many videos have surfaced?

kaburbank.substack.com/p/how-to-vie...

The USA is a fascist country and the MAGAts are going to do anything to increase their grip on it.