Republicans pay $36K for an influencer video while Democrats pay $2K... The article argues Republicans are way better at structural organizing (vs punctual mobilizing), creating conditions for right-leaning ecosystems
emilyinyourphone.substack.com/p/the-influe...
THREAD: Whenever imperialist governments go to war, they become more authoritarian at home.
That makes censorship bills like KOSA, ID checks, and attacks on Section 230 even more dangerous.
Online protest, documenting war crimes, even news articles could be suppressed.
www.badinternetbills.com
Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.
I was very happy to speak at the AI Ethics conference ACM AIES 2025 in my hometown, Madrid
The program was amazing. I encourage to check out the lineup and proceedings:
www.aies-conference.com/2025/
I shared some highlights in this Bluesky thread🧵
And that's it! There were many more great talks, but sadly I could only attend a limited amount of them. Please check their papers, whose abstracts communicate their work much better than me
A sponsor of this conference has been implicated by the UN in war crimes: Google. Read more at tinyurl.com/un-report-2025
Plenty of speakers, way more than I'd expect, were showing a slide blaming Google for aiding the Palestinian genocide, providing a QR link to the UN report, and highlighting Google is a sponsor of the conference.
That was brave of these mostly young researchers, and they have my admiration
The 4 participants of the roundtable sitting while discussing
I'm happy to highlight our
Pedagogy Panel:
"How (and to Whom) Do We Teach AI Ethics?"
which I shared with brilliant people: @shannonvallor.bsky.social and Julienne LaChance, chaired by @emanuelleburton.bsky.social
We tackled practical challenges on educating the conference topics to the new gen
"How LLM Counselors Violate Ethical Standards in Mental Health Practice: A Practitioner-Informed Framework"
by Zainab Iftikhar et al
A brilliant talk about the malpractices of current LLMs acting as therapists, highlighting the AI is constantly lying when saying "it cares" (since obv it can't)
"No Thoughts Just AI: Biased LLM Hiring Recommendations Alter Human Decision Making and Limit Human Autonomy"
by @kyrawilson.bsky.social et al
It shows how people trust AI hiring proposals blindly, even when the AI's being racist. This highlights the importance to tackle algorithmic bias
"AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights"
by @jiannanxu.bsky.social et al
A surprising bias:
- If a job candidate building their CV uses the same LLM as the evaluator, there is a strong bias to be selected
- And LLMs prefer AI-generated CVs over manual ones
"Govern With, Not For: Understanding the Stuttering Community’s Preferences and Goals for Speech AI Data Governance in the US and China"
by Jingjin Li et al
On an often invisibilized marginalized community: the stuttering community
Harm scores were significantly lower in Hindi, than English
"Disability Across Cultures: A Human-Centered Audit of Ableism in Western and Indic LLMs"
by @mahika.bsky.social et al
was fascinating, exploring how different LLMs categorize ableist comments in different degrees, depending on the language they were written (English vs Hindi).
Image showing stereotypical racism when adding "indigenous" to text-to-image prompts
Image showing expected images when adding "American" or "British" to text-to-image prompts
Image showing stereotypical racism when adding "Mexican" or "Papua New Guinean" to text-to-image prompts
Image showing stereotypical racism when adding "Egyptian" or "Indigenous American" to text-to-image prompts
I enjoyed a lot:
"Documenting Patterns of Exoticism of Marginalized Populations within Text-to-Image Generators"
by Sourojit Ghosh et al
Unsurprisingly, AIs show stereotypical imagery when trying to represent Global South cultures, to the point of absurdity
I was very happy to join the AI Ethics conference ACM AIES 2025 in my hometown, Madrid, at @ieuniversity.bsky.social
The program was amazing, I encourage to check out the lineup and proceedings:
www.aies-conference.com/2025/
I'll share some highlights in this thread🧵
#AIES #AIethics #AI
Work by our PhD student David Davó, post-doc @silviasemenzin.bsky.social, supervised by professor Javier Arroyo and me
from our institutions @ucm.es and Berkman Klein Center @harvard.edu
Article open licensed with CC-BY
We extract a “DAO fragility schema” and recommendations for the next generation: progressive governance by default, anti-plutocracy voting, gas-free voting, non-transferable time-decaying reputation, health dashboards, and redundant open-source UIs.
Builders: please check out the checklist.
Why did DAOstack fade despite early hype? Fee spikes, UX friction, front-end fragility, thin onboarding, and incentive misalignment.
Our interviews surfaced frictions: onboarding, cost/complexity of voting, informal power imbalances via off-platform coordination.
Figure 5: Relationship between the number of votes and the outcome in boosted proposals. Full description in https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.3320/fig-5
Attention is considered the scarce resource. Their Holographic Consensus governance model tried to solve it via prediction-market “boosting.” It filtered well (≈97% precision) but failed to sustain independent stakers. In fact, 83% of the stakes came from insiders
Image showing the paper's Table 1: Characterization of the DAOstack DAOs in Ethereum mainnet and xDAI, sorted by months with proposals. The table is fully readable in the paper, specifically at https://peerj.com/articles/cs-3320/#quantitative-analysis-of-daostack
DAOstack, like other DAO platforms, promised scalable cooperation and democratic governance.
Reality check: most DAOs are tiny, short-lived, and oligarchic-leaning as they grow. In fact, far from democratic:
• ~65% members never voted
• ~8% avg voter turnout/proposal
Figure shoding "Number of proposals created in the past 15 days for Genesis Alpha, Kyber DAO, dOrg, and dxDAO". The full description and analysis is found in the paper, specifically https://peerj.com/articles/cs-3320/#fig-3
We analyzed DAOstack's 92 organizations in terms of size, lifespan, activity, power concentration, and governance model effectiveness. And interviewed core users to better understand their experience.
DAOs aren't just code, but also communities. Technical design is political.
From “WordPress for DAOs” to deprecation: DAOstack’s life cycle offers a rare, data-rich case study. Ideal to see the social implications of techno-determinist views common in #Web3, and theoretical economic incentives.
Blockchain's hype boosted DAO communities, which, a decade later, now manage $16 billion. Did DAO platforms deliver on their initial promises?
Our new paper covers a 7-year mixed-methods postmortem of a first-gen DAO platform. What worked, what broke, what can we learn
doi.org/10.7717/peer...
🧵⬇️
Are you a researcher working at a EU university? Are you fed up with our institutions turning a blind eye to genocide? Consider signing this. uppsaladeclaration.se/europe/
Yesterday, 100,000+ protesters in Madrid for a #FreePalestine managed to cancel the last stage of the international cycling race La Vuelta.
🗣️Today we're launching a campaign to raise $250,000 to keep Global Voices alive and thriving.
👉🏿We’re ad-free, paywall-free, and community-powered — but funding cuts and a tough media landscape are putting us at risk.
#KeepGVStrong🌱
globalvoices.org/2025/07/10/s...
I wish there were more attention and support for projects that have been trying for over a decade to address this problem
Some personal news:
I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting.
Thread incoming.
substack.com/@karenattiah...
Tl;dr they will pay a one-time $1.5 Billion settlement. They're currently valued at $183 Billion so it's a slap on the wrist. No ongoing royalties, no model deletion, no required negotiation with authors or publishers for what happens next.
