🚨New article🚨
What if the misguided construction of 'right-wing populism' has prevented us from holding the elite accountable and rejuvenate democracy?
This is what @alexyates2000.bsky.social and I explore in our new article: 'There is no such thing as ‘right-wing populism’'
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shorturl.at/jptiu
"Matthew Goodwin has been paid a salary of up to €10,000 a month [from Hungary's state-funded MCC], according to leaked documents obtained by Hungarian investigative journalists Direkt36 and reported by the Good Law Project"
That could all end if Orbán loses...
open.substack.com/pub/democrac...
Kémy Adé was shocked by the immigration refusal letter she received. In rejecting her permanent residence application, the Immigration Department cited her current job duties, which included wiring and assembling control circuits, building control and robot panels, programming and troubleshooting. The department said these duties didn’t match the Canadian work experience she claimed. Well, no, they didn’t. Adé is a post-doctoral research fellow and guest teacher at McMaster University — and those skills are not part of her repertoire. Nor are they what she submitted in her immigration application a year ago. “I saw this language about this job description that has nothing to do with me,” said the health scientist from France, who has a PhD from Sorbonne University in the immunology of aging. “I was disoriented how this could happen.” But a disclaimer at the bottom of the refusal letter might provide a hint. It’s believed to be the first time that the department explicitly referred to the use of generative AI to support application processing in immigration refusals. The disclaimer also noted that all generated content was verified by an officer and that generative AI was not used to make or recommend a decision.
Today in AI:
Canada rejected the PR application of a McMaster postdoc from the Sorbonne who works in the immunology of aging because the generative AI being used to process applications (😱) entirely hallucinated her credentials.
Everyone involved should be fired.
archive.is/ELrCI#select...
image of a report cover, with a US flag in the background, and the text "The Political Disconnect: Working-Class and Low-Income People on What Politics Means to Them and How They Might be Mobilized”
Today I'm releasing probably the most important scholarly thing I've ever worked on - a report based on talking with 144 people about why they don't vote or only vote regularly, and on what needs to be done to build a democracy that can include everyone.
www.swarthmore.edu/u...
please share!
La izquierda después de Mamdani
"Si la vida se ha encarecido en la mayoría de ciudades del mundo, si la vivienda o la alimentación son cada vez más caras, la agenda de la asequibilidad puede impulsar mayorías políticas".
✍️ Adrià Rodríguez.
ctxt.es/es/20260101/...
This is terrifying.
"[AI agents] can... infer a researcher's latent hypotheses and produce data that artificially confirms them."
...
"We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people" -@seanjwestwood.bsky.social
Scientists and scholars in AI and its social impacts call on von der Leyen to retract #AIHype statement.
@olivia.science
@abeba.bsky.social
@irisvanrooij.bsky.social
@alexhanna.bsky.social
@rocher.lc
@danmcquillan.bsky.social
@robin.berjon.com
& many others have signed
www.iccl.ie/press-releas...
🇺🇸 Este fin de semana abrimos la portada de CTXT con este texto de Fernando Prats sobre ese proyecto distópico del capitalismo extremo en EEUU llamado Trumpismo. ¡Lean!
"Lo importante es descifrar el significado profundo del proyecto global de la ultraderecha estadounidense."
ctxt.es/es/20251101/...
Today I’m very happy to watch @davidbazan.bsky.social brilliantly defend his thesis ”Algorithmic Interaction Ritual Chains on TikTok: Scrolling through Feedback Loops”
👉Es profundamente patológico que una persona sienta un deseo persistente de eludir una tarea agotadora que no le interesa lo más mínimo y que se ve forzada a realizar durante cuatro o más décadas de su vida para poder comer🍽️
Genial aquí, Adri T.✍️
¿Síndrome postvacacional?⁉️
ctxt.es/es/20250901/...
For all the talks about concerns over disinformation, the mainstream media have been a key agent in the mainstreaming of far right politics by:
- covering them disproportionately
- hyping moral panics
- platforming their bad faith actors as legitimate
bylinetimes.com/2025/06/09/b...
“There is no ‘one weird trick’ that removes experts and creates miracle machines that can do everything that humans can do, but better,” Asmelash Teka Hadgu and @timnitgebru.bsky.social write. www.scientificamerican.com/article/repl...
THREAD: Under a new law, thousands of prisoners in Louisiana have been cut off from ever getting a chance at parole.
Why?
Because an algorithm said so. 1/
🦄 Conference Call : (DON'T) BELIEVE THE HYPE
Submit an abstract to the newly founded Hype Studies Group! We're organising the first edition of a Hype Studies Conference in Barcelona, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, the 10th-12th of September 2025.
More info: hypestudies.org/conference
I very much appreciate @dkreiss.bsky.social & @shannimcg.bsky.social on this point. “Polarization can only be seen as a central threat to democracy if inequality is ignored.” journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
A WIRED investigation reveals that billion-dollar scam compounds in Myanmar—where tens of thousands are enslaved—are using Starlink, the satellite internet service from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to stay online and keep their operations running.
New article! It was a treat to be invited to contribute to and working with the editors and co-contributors in this special issue on economic ventures seeking or claiming to do good. valuationstudies.liu.se/article/view...
Also, check out the full issue here: valuationstudies.liu.se/issue/view/496
"TikTok displayed the greatest right-wing skew, per its findings — showing right-leaning content 74% of the time." techcrunch.com/2025/02/19/s...
🔍 How can creative coding techniques like soundscaping and video recomposition help us unpack political issues + influencer practices on TikTok? 🎵📹
📖 Insights from explorations w/ @publicdatalab.bsky.social around the 2024 Romanian elections at @digitalmethods.net winter school:
"Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship."
Curiosamente, un joven que no se deja manipular por nadie defiende las mismas ideas que los tres hombres más ricos del mundo.
Tiktok boosted Republican messages 11.8% more than Democrat messages during the 2024 U.S. Presidential Race according to this new study that employed bots to view ~394,000 videos.
The salary of a 1st and 2nd year Phd student in Spain is now only about 100€ higher that than the minimum wage
“DeepSeek’s results demonstrate that the US Big Tech narrative that the expansion of energy production is what’s required for them to lead in a global ‘AI race’ is utter hogwash,” said @mmitchell.bsky.social. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
Searching #liberal or #democrat on Instagram now returns "We've hidden these results", #Republican has no such problem. Seems bad.
Now that I've slept on it, let's discuss the TikTok ban.
The message popping up on everyone's app is propaganda, plain and simple. And having propaganda involved in something as precarious at the creator economy is very, very dangerous.
Many of the parents blaming social media for their teens’ mental health struggles are just deflecting blame from their own violence and abuse.
And that’s what the report finds. Adults’ violence is one of the major reasons teens struggle.