Anita Gohdes

If you are an advanced PhD student or PostDoc working on AI and global politics/tech/authoritarianism come spend 1-6 months in Berlin this year with @scripts-berlin.eu! We have some funding for you and will help w/ visa and other moving issues.
Info here: www.scripts-berlin.eu/about-us/job...

Offene Stellen / Open Positions

🚨Job alert 🚨

I have an opening for a postdoc in my team at @ipz.bsky.social in the area of digital democracy starting Sep 1, 2026.

If you are working on the impact of the digital transformation on politics, please apply by 🗓️ Mar 1, 2026.

📤 Please share widely!

www.ipz.uzh.ch/de/ueber-uns...

A Comparative Look at Internet Shutdowns in Iran: 2019, 2022, 2025, and 2026 On January 8th, 2026, the Iranian regime implemented an Internet shutdown amidst national protests. This shutdown is the most sophisticated and most severe in Iran’s history. IODA's longitudinal view ...

The IODA team completed a comparative analysis of the ongoing Internet shutdown in Iran to shutdowns during Bloody November in 2019, Women Life Freedom Movement in 2022, and the Israel-Iran War in 2025. Please read and reach out with any questions.

ioda.inetintel.cc.gatech.edu/reports/a-co...

omg the original post, not as the printout version (for ease of reading)

How Doubt Became a Weapon in Iran AI manipulation, and the very suspicion of it, serves those who have the most to hide.

I always learn so much from reading @mahsaalimardani.bsky.social 's work - and you should too. Here she writes about AI and disinformation surrounding the protests and atrocities in Iran: www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

Uganda has shut down the internet again - ahead of tomorrow's elections. This is bad news for those monitoring the elections, it is bad news for the spread of rumours, and it is bad news for holding perpetrators of election-related violence accountable.

Starlink terminals rely on GPS signals to locate themselves and connect to satellites. By disrupting these signals, Iranian authorities can render the devices unreliable without touching the satellites themselves. When Russia tried similar jamming in Ukraine, SpaceX responded within hours with software updates that restored service. So far, no such fix has arrived for Iran. SpaceX has not commented on the disruption.

Amidst mass killings and internet shutdowns the Iranian regime has also found a way to jam access to Starlink:

restofworld.org/2026/iran-st...
@restofworld.org

Access Now - #KeepItOn: Iran plunged into digital darkness, concealing human rights abuses join the international community, including the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission, in calling on Iran to immediately restore internet and mobile communications and in demanding accou...

After taking to the streets, people in Iran have now been disconnected from the rest of the world for more than five days. That’s +120 hours in the dark!

Alongside +19 orgs, we demand that authorities immediately restore internet access and uphold rights.

www.accessnow.org/press-releas...

The End Goal of Trump’s Cringey, Nonsensical Videos Trump’s use of the antiwar song “Fortunate Son” in a video of the military raid in Venezuela was no mistake. It’s part of a very deliberate far-right aesthetic.

«For the far right, what’s more important is an aesthetics of domination. The Trump administration is flooding our senses without regard for coherence, in the hope we exhaust ourselves trying to make sense of something that’s completely contradictory or willfully absurd.» #MemeFascism

How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance Law enforcement has more tools than ever to track your movements and access your communications. Here’s how to protect your privacy if you plan to protest.

Just days into 2026, the killing of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has sparked protests around the US.

If you’re planning to protest, here’s how to safeguard your digital security.

Graph from NetBlocks showing network connectivity in Iran from January 5, 2025, to January 9, 2025. The y-axis represents normalized connectivity, ranging from 0% to 100%, and the x-axis represents the dates. The green line representing Iran's connectivity remains lower than normal most of the time period due to protests, with a sharp drop on the evening of January 8. The drop in connectivity aligns with protests across the nation. The minimum and current connectivity levels are indicated as 1% and 1%, respectively. The chart has a dark background with a red horizontal arrow labeled 'SHUTDOWN', indicates the period of disruption.

⚠️ Update: It has now been 24 hours since #Iran implemented a nationwide internet shutdown, with connectivity flatlining at 1% of ordinary levels. The ongoing digital blackout violates the fundamental rights and liberties of Iranians while masking regime violence ⏱

Fantastic opportunity to join @felixhaass.bsky.social for a PhD position on contentious politics, political violence, or authoritarian politics at HU Berlin: www.hu-berlin.de/universitaet...

As of January '26 I've joined @psrm.bsky.social as an AE, focusing on IR and conflict submissions - I'm excited to join the team and to receive your manuscripts!

After more than 5 years I'm stepping down from being an Associate Editor at the wonderful @jpeaceresearch.bsky.social. It's been an honour and I'm delighted to stay on as an Editorial Board member 🫶🏻!

These technologies can and are being used to create lifelike images and videos of actual living women and girls. For what I think are pretty obvious gendered civil rights reasons, it needs to be a recognized civil cause of action to create an AI image or avatar of a woman without her consent.

Meet the team that hunts government spyware For years, Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline has been aiding journalists and dissidents who have been targeted with government spyware. This is how they operate.

NEW: Meet the folks at AccessNow's Digital Security Helpline, who have been investigating government spyware for more than a decade, helping journalists and dissidents all over the world.

I spoke to Hassen Selmi, who heads the incident response team, to learn how his team fights spyware abuses.

RA Position!
@ozlemtuncel.bsky.social and @osamet.bsky.social are looking for support for a project on opposition coalitions in autocracies. If you are
- interested in opposition politics and electoral dynamics, and
- familiar with data collection
apply by Dec 31: gsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Speaking of wild stories

Never tire of saying how much I appreciate the reporting @404media.co does. Yet another wild story.

EISS - 2026 Conference

#ESSC2026 | Save the date! Thrilled to announce that the European Security Studies Conference is taking place on 11–12 June 2026 at @stockholm-uni.bsky.social The conference is jointly organised by COST Action NetSec, @eissnetwork.bsky.social , & @stockholm-uni.bsky.social eiss-europa.com/2026.html

Thank you Federica!

Surviving The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation - An Airwars Investigation For five months, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was the main distributor of food in Gaza. Backed by the United States and Israel, more than 1,000 people were allegedly killed seeking aid at it...

What made the US-backed aid system in Gaza so deadly?

Our new short film reconstructs two Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid distributions, showing how the militarised aid system resulted in death and injury.

Watch the full video here:

ghf.airwars.org

The Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy, by Michael Geoffrey Asia. Imagine confiding your most private fantasies to what you believe is an unfeeling algorithm that cannot judge or remember. Now imagine that on the other side of that conversation is a man sitting in a...

Now imagine sharing your private fantasies with what you believe is a bot that cannot judge or remember. Just that, on the other side, is a man in a one-room home in Nairobi, pretending to be an AI companion.

That man is Michael, and this is his story: data-workers.org/michael/

On Human Rights Day, we highlight "The Politics of Human Rights" by faculty member @argohdes.bsky.social, Sabine Carey & Mark Gibney. The textbook offers a fresh, empirical take on human dignity & global responsibility.
Interview with Anita: lnkd.in/dTA9TzZ6
Order your copy here: lnkd.in/dHAfrey3

We are seeking a Fellow to lead cutting-edge research on short-form video content and its societal implications. Bridging the gap between computer vision, causal inference, and computational social science, the Fellow will focus on the large-scale analysis of TikTok data (using an existing, massive dataset). The position involves developing novel multimodal methods to understand how short-form algorithmic content shapes public opinion, political polarization, and online culture. This is a unique opportunity to work at the forefront of the field, combining rigorous social science research designs with state-of-the-art computational techniques.

The Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow to work with an interdisciplinary team (me, @bstewart.bsky.social, and @manoelhortaribeiro.bsky.social).

Link: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

Please apply by THIS SUNDAY, Dec. 14!

Fantastic news, congrats Tore!

🚨📆🤓 One more week to apply for our Data4Good Festival @hertieschool.bsky.social! Now in its third year, we’re bringing a fresh set of datasets for this round’s hackathon challenge. If you teach undergrads who might want to join us in Berlin in January, please help us spread the word.

Exclusive: Trump administration orders enhanced vetting for applicants of H-1B visa An internal State Department memo said that anyone involved in "censorship" of free speech should be considered for rejection.

For the last decade, the pervasive spread of bullshit & manipulation of online platforms have been widely recognized societal concerns. Now non US citizens studying those subjects can be labeled “censors” & denied visas or deported from the US. Censorship, indeed. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

👏🏻👏🏻 amazing! By the way, we just read some of your work in one of my courses, more pertinent than ever!

ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants The Trump administration is being open about its plans to violate Americans’ First and Fourth Amendment rights.

The news has entirely failed to grasp the unprecedented scope of the ICE and DHS budgets. Nothing like it in modern history. A galaxy of public/private surveillance and caging institutions for $100,000,000,000s unleashed on a public that will be forever changed. www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...