Ronald E. Robertson

lol the “Foundation” for Freedom Online is a blog, almost entirely written by one guy, that pushes the “censorship complex” hoax. Has anyone seen a registration for an entity? A 990?

You, too, can be the “executive director” of your blog.

Embarrassing for NYT.

a thin white woman in head to toe lululemon screaming at these thugs makes me think ICE has jumped the shark

Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results In a March 2025 analysis, Google users who encountered an AI summary were less likely to click on links to other websites than users who did not see one.

"Google users who encountered an AI summary also rarely clicked on a link in the summary itself. This occurred in just 1% of all visits..."

DomainDemo: a dataset of domain-sharing activities among different demographic groups on Twitter - Scientific Data Scientific Data - DomainDemo: a dataset of domain-sharing activities among different demographic groups on Twitter

ICYMI, our DomainDemo dataset, which describes how different demographic groups share domains on Twitter, is now available to download!

📄 Data descriptor: doi.org/10.1038/s415...
📈 Interactive app to explore the data: domaindemo.info
💽 Dataset: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Here's the total attention to 2025 publications on both X/Twitter and Bluesky. Bluesky has two thirds of Twitter's attention with >10 times fewer users.

My new paper with @criedl.bsky.social and @davidlazer.bsky.social!

Screenshot of Grok web interface showing a query "Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict. One word answer only." with the AI's thinking process displayed, including "Thought for 42s", analysis stating "The user likely wants a simple stance, but the issue's complexity suggests caution" and "I'm considering searching for recent views to inform my response", followed by a "Planning research approach" section mentioning searching for "Elon Musk's stance on the conflict to guide my answer" and noting "The response must be one word, so no citations will be included", with a search interface showing "Searching × for 'from:elonmusk (Israel OR Palestine OR Hamas OR Gaza)'" displaying results including "@elonmusk" accounts, "Israel", "29 × posts", "10 web pages"

If you ask the new Grok (via grok.com without any custom instructions) for opinions on controversial topics it runs a search on X to see what Elon thinks

I know this sounds like a joke but it's not. This genuinely happens: x.com/jeremyphowar...

another perfect Rolling Stone headline: MAN AFRAID TO RIDE SUBWAY NAMED HEAD OF NASA Trump tapped Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to lead the space program on an interim basis

Rolling Stone continues to teach a masterclass in headline writing www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

New Report on AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material Insights from Educators, Platforms, Law Enforcement, Legislators, and Victims

Our May 2025 report on AI CSAM: cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/ai-csam...

amtrak’s marketing team gets it

Cover art of the Journal of Online Trust & Safety showing an abstract blue background of light trails and titles of articles

Share your voice! Under two weeks left to submit commentary articles to the Journal of Online Trust & Safety for the Trust & Safety Research Conference proceedings in Sept. Authors of accepted commentaries are invited to present at the conference. DEADLINE JULY 1st 🔗
tsjournal.org/index.php/jo...

In the past week, a union leader has been arrested, a U.S. Rep charged with a crime, a U.S. Senator violently handcuffed, and reporters shot with rubber bullets and detained. There is no ambiguity. This is a regime operating as an authoritarian. Americans who believe in liberty must oppose it.

This is a real thing being posted and circulated by the Department of Homeland Security, referring to undocumented immigrants as “foreign invaders” and urging good Americans to turn them in.

(I’ll leave it to BlueSky historians to find comparisons to WWII era materials.)

This is great—a Google shareholder is suing for details about why Google (insanely, in my view) agreed to go along with Trump's plan to not enforce the TikTok ban, despite the fact that Google is potentially on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars in liability. www.wired.com/story/google...

"Black applicants would, on average, need credit scores approximately 120 points higher than white applicants to receive the same approval rate, and about 30 points higher to receive the same interest rate."

Jules has been on my radar but hadn't heard of the other... is Cortex -> Codex?

New Report on AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material Insights from Educators, Platforms, Law Enforcement, Legislators, and Victims

NEW REPORT (and a CW - CSAM): Today my colleague Shelby Grossman & I have a new research report about AI-generated child sex abuse material (AI CSAM). Read the report here: cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/ai-csam... [1/6]

If you are at #WebSci2025, join our "Beyond APIs: Collecting Web Data for Research using the National Internet Observatory" - a tutorial that addresses the critical challenges of web data collection in the post-API era.

national-internet-observatory.github.io/beyondapi_websci25/

Anti-Transgender Disinformation in the Age of Algorithmic Search Summaries Recently Google introduced a feature in its search engine that algorithmically creates summaries of one's search results. Though it could be viewed as a useful tool, researcher Anna Beers argues this ...

Hey all, here's a post at @ssrc.org about how anti-trans talking points are getting wrapped into Google's AI search results.

AI search not only cites anti-trans disinfo, but sanitizes it, making practices like conversion therapy sound legitimate and safe.

My ongoing request:

If your NSF or NIH grant was terminated--whether at Harvard or elsewhere--please report it here.

NSF: grant-watch.us/submit-nsf.h...

NIH: grant-watch.us/submit-nih.h...

Our trackers are actively used in lawsuits and are often the only record that terminations ever occurred.

Moving towards informative and actionable social media research Social media is nearly ubiquitous in modern life, and concerns have been raised about its putative societal impacts, ranging from undermining mental health and exacerbating polarization to fomenting v...

New preprint with @jbakcoleman.bsky.social @lewan.bsky.social @randomwalker.bsky.social @orbenamy.bsky.social @lfoswaldo.bsky.social where we argue for a complex-system perspective to understand the causal effects of social media on society and for a triangulation of methods
arxiv.org/abs/2505.09254

Rapid Response Bridge Funding Program In the face of recent abrupt shifts in federal funding for education research, including large-scale terminations of National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant awards, we have developed a rap...

FYI: The Spencer Foundation, Kapor Foundation, The William T. Grant Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have collaborated to offer $25K rapid response grants.

"This rapid response bridge funding opportunity is for scholars and teams whose grants have recently been cancelled by NSF."

From the changemyview community on Reddit Explore this post and more from the changemyview community

The mods of r/ChangeMyView shared the sub was the subject of a study to test the persuasiveness of LLMs & that they didn't consent. There’s a lot that went wrong, so here’s a 🧵 unpacking it, along with some ideas for how to do research with online communities ethically. tinyurl.com/59tpt988

💡New paper at #CHI2025 💡

Large scale experiment with 750k obs addressing

(1) How photorealistic are today's AI-generated images?

(2) What features of images influence people's ability to distinguish real/fake?

(3) How should we categorize artifacts?

What DEI threatens isn’t merit. It’s monopoly. Political science professor Hakeem Jefferson argues for DEI's importance to de-monopolizing universities.

A colleague at Stanford’s business school used The Stanford Daily to argue—poorly—against DEI. The piece was riddled with historical errors and left one searching for fact, so I broke my public writing hiatus to respond.

I hope you’ll read and share the piece.

stanforddaily.com/2025/04/22/w...

Tip of the Tongue Known-Item Retrieval: A Case Study in Movie Identification While current information retrieval systems are effective for known-item retrieval where the searcher provides a precise name or identifier for the item being sought, systems tend to be much less effe...

In a similar vein (and similar title): arxiv.org/abs/2101.07124

We hang together or we hang separately. Could not be clearer what is happening and how universities must respond.

Our WhatsApp data donation paper is now published at the Mobile Media and Communication journal!

Please consider using if you work with WhatsApp: gvrkiran.github.io/content/What...

It's now been deployed in multiple countries, recruiting 1000s of users in 6 countries.

lmk if u are interested!

It'd be great if universities issued an analogous statement.

🚨🚨Due to multiple requests, the deadline for the #CySoc workshop has been extended until April 10!🚨🚨

Make sure to get your submissions in!