Maura Conway

Child soldiers take Sudan's civil war to TikTok - The World from PRX Videos of children in Sudan are going viral on social media sites, but the TikTok stars appear to be child soldiers caught up in the country’s civil war. The videos show adolescent boys wearing camouf...

This is a story that sits with you: Child soldiers are taking Sudan’s civil war to TikTok. @bellingcat.com identified 12 accounts linked to child soldiers, some with millions of views.

@theworld.org learned more from Bellingcat's @sebkilli.bsky.social. theworld.org/segments/202...

What’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework? The creator of the AI agent “Einstein” wants to free humans from the burden of academic labor. Critics say that misses the point of education entirely.

The creator of the AI agent “Einstein” wants to free humans from the burden of academic labor. Critics say that misses the point of education entirely.

Russia launches terror probe into Telegram chief Pavel Durov Moscow claims the messaging platform has been used in thousands of cases of sabotage, terrorism and extremism.

Durov’s problem is that while the claim that Telegram has been used in c.33K cases involving sabotage, terrorism or extremism since 2022 is probably inaccurate. And most of the 150K takedown requests from Russia’s media regulator are bogus. The basic premise is true. www.politico.eu/article/russ...

Delays, failures, and 'half-funded' plans put Ireland's security in jeopardy Despite all the incidents and all the analysis and warnings, we don’t have an actual structure in Ireland to counter hybrid threats

The Taoiseach said the presidency would see the largest political summit ever held in Ireland: “We have obligations obviously to protect the security of the meetings.” Better yet, they have obligations to protect the security of this state. www.irishexaminer.com/news/spotlig...

Senator Alice Mary Higgins asked the CnaM Chairman why his organisation didn’t take action under the Irish Online Safety Code against Grok generating CSAM.

Apparently, it didn’t appear to them to be a breach of the code.

What , then, is it good for?

Headline - students deserve more than a hollowed out student experience

My response to the Minister - and his suggestion that universities compress lectures into fewer days so students commute less. No way he’d agree for affordable and available student housing so students could have the full third level experience! #spéirgorm

Meet Diarmuid Tourney, Director of the Institute for Climate and Society at Dublin City University and DCU lead for the Co-Centre for Climate + Biodiversity + Water. Diarmuid talks about his… Diarmuid Tourney | Green Careers

🌱 Green Careers Series | Ep 8

Meet Diarmuid Torney, Director of DCU Institute for Climate & Society and DCU lead for the Co-Centre for Climate + Biodiversity + Water.

From politics & economics to fair transitions, he explains why inclusive decision-making matters.

Watch here: buff.ly/IVO4hkP

Are AI-generated summaries suitable for studying and research? Despite didactic, ethical, and environmental concerns, the use of GenAI is on the rise in academia. For most applications, the jury is still out on whether and how they will benefit education and rese...

Tired of AI hype posts? You might like my sober assessment of whether AI-generated summaries are suitable for studying and research. Spoiler alert, they are not.

The text is primarily aimed at students and researchers, but has much broader relevance. So share freely!: www.tue.nl/en/our-unive...

Deepfake celebrity videos used to pressure Europe over Ukraine Edited videos of Hollywood actors are being used to push a pro-Kremlin narrative targeting European leaders. Researchers say the campaign is coordinated. #TheCube

"Edited videos of Hollywood actors are being used to push a pro-Kremlin narrative targeting European leaders. Researchers say the campaign is coordinated." www.euronews.com/my-europe/20...

Global (Dis)Order Evidence Hub In this hub you will find collections of discussion papers commissioned by the British Academy and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on topics and themes relevant to the programme’s workstrea...

Some projects are long in the making because the questions are complex, the process iterative, and the answers not simple. The first batch of interventions from @britishacademy.bsky.social 'Global Disorders' is here - feat. a paper by yours truly 👇: www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/programmes/g...

How rightwing rhetoric has risen sharply in the UK parliament – an exclusive visual analysis In the past five years, MPs’ attitudes in the House of Commons towards immigration have swung harder to the right than at almost any other time in the last century Labour and Conservative MPs are speaking in a more hostile way about immigration than at almost any other time in the last century, the Guardian can reveal. An unprecedented analysis of 100 years of parliamentary speeches has shown a sharp shift to the right on the issue – with the biggest swing from positive to negative attitudes coming in the past five years. Continue reading...

How rightwing rhetoric has risen sharply in the UK parliament – an exclusive visual analysis

OpenAI considered alerting Canadian police about school shooting suspect months ago Company behind ChatGPT last year flagged Jesse Van Rootselaar’s account for ‘furtherance of violent activities’

“OpenAI said the threshold for referring a user to law enforcement was whether the case involved an imminent and credible risk of serious physical harm to others. The company said it did not identify credible or imminent planning.” www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

Generative AI is the production of synthetic content based on existing content. It's, almost by definition, a zombie technology, and turning us all into online zombies, neither alive nor dead, endlessly churning out content, is its perfect use case
#PlatformRealism

me and my RCFP lawyers outside the courthouse this morning

BREAKING — WE WON! DC Superior Court Judge Darlene Soltys ordered the DC Metropolitan Police to produce ALL body cam footage of the March 2025 DOGE raid on the US Institute of Peace within 14 days.

Thanks to my @rcfp.org lawyers for their tireless work.

Details on thehandbasket.co later today!

notorious radical left communist rag says tax the rich

#DIBLives Known as ‘Mr Cable’, Wicklow man Robert Halpin (b. #OTD 1836) oversaw the laying of the first transatlantic cables from Ireland to America in 1866, French cable in 1869 & Bombay to Suez cable in 1870 - in all more than 26,000 miles of cable connecting the world. www.dib.ie/biography/ha...

post by Rutger Bregman (@rutgerbregman.com‬) reads: Absolutely brilliant piece about the Left's TOTAL blindness on AI. Their dismissal of AI risks mirrors how climate deniers treat CO2. Will probably get a lot of nastiness for this on Bluesky, but I guess that's part of the same problem.

i shouldn’t give this piece any more attention than it has already garnered but i feel like it is worth pointing out some flaws in the argument/unquestioned assumptions

thread 1/

Summer School of the Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy, University of Bologna, 6 – 10 July 2026 European Consortium for Political Research

⏳ Only one week left to apply!
☠️Deadline: 25.02.2026

Join us at the 5th @ecpr.bsky.social @ecpr-ead.bsky.social Summer School on ‘Concepts & Methods for Research on Far-Right Politics’

📍 Hosted by @unibo.it
📅 6–10 July 2026

Apply here: ecpr.eu/Events/353
@andreapirro.it

"It's not artificial intelligence. It's African intelligence."

Michael Geoffrey Asia, the secretary general of the Data Labelers Association in Kenya tells @jasonkoebler.bsky.social about the notoriously brutal and underpaid work of training AI.

Watch now: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH65...

Loosing patience with X 📉

New poll shows 70+% support for taking further actions against X and amongst those supporting action, many consider not only fines but also a ban.

The investigations by the @ec.europa.eu into X are backed and poll corroborates public support for platform regulation.

Europeans are dangerously reliant on US tech. Now is a good time to build our own | Johnny Ryan By trusting the US, we handed Trump a kill switch. Yet Europe’s digital sovereignty is an achievable goal, says civil liberties campaigner, Johnny Ryan

My piece in The Guardian this morning: Europe’s path to technological independence from the U.S.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

ICC judge sanctioned by US urges EU to fight back Nicolas Guillou said the Trump administration’s use of sanctions undermines European democracy and called for Europe to curb reliance on American tech.

“It has a chilling effect and it’s very much intened“, ICC judge Guillou said, after being sanctioned by the United States. He urged the European Union to push back.
www.politico.eu/article/nico...

Irish watchdog opens EU data probe into Grok sexual AI imagery The inquiry concerns potential breaches of the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation

Irish watchdog opens EU data probe into Grok sexual AI imagery

Two indicted for using classified info to place online bets on military operations Reservist and civilian charged with 'severe offenses' for actions on Polymarket; Kan had reported major bets were made on Israeli strike on Iran just before June 2025 war

This kind of direction was always the only one in which these 'markets' were going to go. And it's only going to get worse from here, unless they're regulated out of existence. And fast... www.timesofisrael.com/two-indicted...

Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash. Free unsplash license. https://unsplash.com/fr/photos/une-jeune-femme-afro-americaine-deposant-son-bulletin-dans-lurne-en-1964-_4us-wUwO30?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink

[New paper] Election research in the age of regulated data access under the EU #DSA, By Philipp Darius @hertieschool.bsky.social, Johannes Breuer @cais-research.bsky.social, Simon Kruschinski & Sebastian Stier @gesis.org, Felicia Loecherbach, & Jasmin Riedl policyreview.info/articles/ana...

Perhaps we should all be banned from social media Focusing only on under-16s obscures the lack of internet safeguards for everyone else

The major misread, I think, is that governments are treating the harms that can befall children online as like having a glass of wine or learning to drive. But essentially all the harms that can befall children online are more like drinking moonshine or driving at 100pm through a school playground:

I'm pretty sure I know. They aren't. We're not going to really be able to make a lot of progress in dealing with the implications of this tech unless and until we get rid of all this "woo-woo" talk about LLMs. Anthropic pushing this line is PR, unserious.

The UK ban on Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation is UNLAWFUL, high court judges have ruled.

The decision by the government to categorise the group alongside the likes of Islamic State has seen the greatest number of counterterror arrests in UK since the introduction of counterterrorism.

As an Irish person who lived through the Great Financial Crisis, I have an instinctive antipathy towards banks. But on the subject of online financial scams - for which banks are subject to duties to compensate customers - I feel genuine sympathy. They're effectively carrying the can for Big Tech.