Giovanna Mascheroni

Creepy AI Crawlers Are Turning the Internet into a Haunted House | TechPolicy.Press The question is no longer whether AI crawlers are disrupting the internet, but what we can do about it, write Tanu I and Corinne Cath.

Creepy crawlers collecting data for generative AI are making the internet work less well for everyone, write Article 19's Tanu I & Corinne Cath. AI crawlers slow sites, strain libraries, and push journalism behind paywalls, they write. But there are solutions, if AI firms choose to respect them.

evidence is piling up that LLMs are culturally biased, since traiend on data from Western, Educated, Industrialized,
Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries, thus unsuitable to understand people from different regions and cultures, study finds: coevolution.fas.harvard.edu/sites/g/file...

Be Careful What You Tell Your AI Chatbot | Stanford HAI A Stanford study reveals that leading AI companies are pulling user conversations for training, highlighting privacy risks and a need for clearer policies.

AI companies are pulling user conversations for training, with great privacy risks hai.stanford.edu/news/be-care...

People are using AI to talk to God In India and around the world, worshippers are turning to purpose-built AI for religious worship and spiritual guidance.

www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic...

Fighting the Colonial Extractivism of Artificial Intelligence | Snurblog — Axel Bruns The second day at the

A very comprehensive critique of the AI moment by @couldrynick.bsky.social to start off Day Two of the #ZeMKI2025 20th anniversary conference.

Liveblog here:

🎤 The first keynote speech of the day is presented by Nick Couldry and titled “Media and the Corporatization of Everything“. The focus is on the question of how media and communication have become part of a comprehensive process over the past two decades!

#ZeMKI20 #ZeMKIAnniversary

And our paper on talking politics with Communicative AI

Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

Wikipedia is seeing a significant decline in human traffic because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking to the site

www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

Silicon Valley's capture of our political institutions is all but complete The tech lobby kills off two key California AI bills, and why it matters. Plus: How Sam Altman played Hollywood with Sora 2, organized mass social media deletions, and more.

CA governor Gavin Newsom vetoed both of the major AI bills on his desk that Silicon Valley meaningfully opposed—one making it illegal for bosses to use AI to fire workers with no oversight, one requiring chatbot sellers to ensure their products do not harm children before marketing to them.

How AI-Powered Emotional Surveillance Can Threaten Personal Autonomy and Democracy | TechPolicy.Press If we do not regulate emotional AI surveillance now, we might soon have to fake how we feel to protect our privacy, writes Oznur Uguz.

Newly emerging AI laws fail to provide adequate safeguards against emotional AI surveillance, only imposing narrow bans and restrictions that contain loopholes and broad exemptions. www.techpolicy.press/how-ai-power...

Two years after school phone bans were implemented in Australia, what has changed? Phone bans are now well-established in many Australian primary and secondary schools. Have they made a difference?

@neilselwyn.bsky.social “Young people spend way more time outside school, so really we should be talking about how parents and families regulate their children’s device use at home,” he says. “Unfortunately, this isn’t something that most politicians want to do." www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Money talks: the deep ties between Twitter and Saudi Arabia The long read: Saudi Arabia’s investment in Twitter increased its influence in Silicon Valley while being used at home to shut down critics of the regime

Must-read piece in @theguardian.com (h/t @dpcarrington.bsky.social). In #ScienceUnderSiege, we describe how petrostates Saudi Arabia & Russia leveraged Musk's buyout of twitter so they could weaponize it for climate denial propaganda & attacks on renewables.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Rising Use of AI in Schools Comes With Big Downsides for Students A report by the Center for Democracy and Technology looks at teachers' and students' experiences with the technology.

“One of the negative consequences AI is having on students is that it is hurting their ability to develop meaningful relationships with teachers, the report finds. Half of the students agree that using AI in class makes them feel less connected to their teachers.”

Study links greater inequality to structural changes in children’s brains Researchers say findings show inequality creates toxic environment and reducing it is ‘a public health imperative’

"children living in areas with higher levels of societal inequality, ..., were linked to having a reduced surface area of the brain’s cortex, & altered connections between multiple regions of the brain ... regardless of their economic background. www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

The EU has a secret weapon to counter Trump’s economic bullying. It’s time to use it | Johnny Ryan The anti-coercion instrument, or ‘trade bazooka’, is designed to shield against foreign pressure, says civil liberties campaigner Johnny Ryan

"Trump is putting Europe under pressure to water down its digital rulebook. But now more than ever, Europe should hold large US tech firms accountable for anti-competitive market rigging, snooping on Europeans, and preying on our children" www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The Anthropic settlement list is up. Authors, check here to see if your books are included: www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com

What This Means for the LMS and EdTech Markets For campus leaders: Blackboard will continue operating through the case, but the ownership and investment thesis behind the LMS are changing. This could affect long-term product direction and stability. For EdTech executives: This is a textbook example of distressed-debt control in our sector. It shows how private equity cycles, first driving aggressive expansion, now dictating asset sales, reshape vendor landscapes.

If your institution requires you to use Blackboard for teaching (like me), be aware its parent company is broke and it's getting new private equity owners whose plans for the platform, and how they'll capitalize on it, remain unknown (bet it includes "AI") onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/anthology-...

Take Action: Stand Against Online Hate Call on social media giants and lawmakers to stop the spread of online hate. Add your name.

Social media companies are letting hate flood our timelines.

Their algorithms amplify hate to play with our emotions & biases, keeping us glued to their platforms.

Call on social media giants & lawmakers to stop the spread of online hate. Take action today ⤵️

From zero to neo-Nazis: what under-16s may see under Australia’s social media ban, simply by not logging in Guardian Australia test finds scrolling shortform videos while logged out of YouTube and TikTok quickly leads to gambling, violent and far-right content

On TikTok and YouTube “children may still be exposed to gambling content, violent images, far-right material and conspiracy theories simply by not logging in to the sites… ‘The law does not prevent under 16s from accessing or viewing content without an account.” www.theguardian.com/media/2025/s...

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

Beyond proving #hallucinations were inevitable, the OpenAI research revealed that industry evaluation methods actively encouraged the problem… binary grading that penalized “I don’t know” responses while rewarding incorrect but confident answers. www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits."

www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

Communications Volume 50 Issue 3 Volume 50, issue 3 of the journal Communications was published in 2025.

Great 50th anniversary issue of Communications. @goranbolin.bsky.social, @giovannamas.bsky.social, @blurky.bsky.social and others revisit and assess articles and reviews published in the journal in previous decades. Very stimulating discussions!

www.degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/...

Social media ban trial data reveals racial bias in age checking software: just how inaccurate is it? Young people from Indigenous and Asian backgrounds are more likely to be miscategorised as over the age limit and older people as underaged, analysis finds

as AUS is about to introduce a #SocialMediaBan a trial of age verification sw reveals age and racial bias: Asian & indigenous youth are more likely to be miscategorised as above the age limit www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se... Read @eukidsonline.bsky.social statement www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-co...

Turkle, S. (1997). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. Simon & Schuster. 352 pp. Article Turkle, S. (1997). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. Simon & Schuster. 352 pp. was published on September 30, 2025 in the journal Communications (volume 50, issue 3).

Had fun writing a review of Sherry Turkle's Life on Screen almost 30 years later for the Jubilee issue of Communications The European Journal of Communication Research doi.org/10.1515/comm...

Actually studies (few, initial, certainly limited) suggest the opposite: that AI may reduce cognitive abilities

Extremist murders by ideology, 2013 to 2022. www.pbump.net/o/reassessin...

Rethinking screen time and academic achievement: gender differences and the hidden benefit of online leisure through digital skills Concerns about the detrimental effects of screen time on adolescents’ academic achievement are widespread. However, this perspective often overlooks the potential educational benefits of online lei...

New longitudinal study by Keith Hampton & Gabriel Hales shows social media use and screen time have a small negative effect but a strong indirect effect on academic performance through digital skills www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The Australian eSafety Commissioner published a summary fo consultations on the social media ban: 1 parents want a strong narrative to postpone access 2 expert raise privacy, inclusion, equity and wellbeing issues 3 children demand platform responsibilities to protect them from harmful content

Disney to Pay $10 Million to Settle FTC Allegations the Company Enabled the Unlawful Collection of Children’s Personal Data Disney will pay $10 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that the company allowed personal data to be collected from children who viewed kid-directed videos on YouTube without not

Disney to Pay $10 Million to Settle FTC Allegations the Company Enabled the Unlawful Collection of Children’s Personal Data www.ftc.gov/news-events/...

which is why it is extremely problematic from an ethical and rights perspective.