Claude Code is so fun. Two random projects I did over the weekend:
What do Super Bowl ads tell us about the economy: brandonsilverman77.github.io/superbowlads/
What values do we sing about during half-time? brandonsilverman77.github.io/halftime/
Spoiler alert: Bad Bunny was great.
A few years ago I tried to build the RSS reader I always wanted: author-based and delivered over email. RSS was ultimately too unwieldy to make it super feasible...but LLMs have offically solved that.
So, here's the newly revamped and souped up version! www.joinbyline.com
My second post about researchers’ rights to scrape data under DSA Article 40.12 is up! This is dense with legal arguments for researchers to use if they get sued. Or to show their lawyers before that.
www.techpolicy.press/how-the-mean...
verfassungsblog.de/dsa-fine-x-r...
Leaving this here...
👇👇👇👇
EU has fined X $140m for breaking European laws and refusing to address that when warned. Likely Musk won't pay and the Trump regime will pressure EU, but if so, they should stand strong and ban the website.
And oh the irony that this won't cover the UK, where Musk is stoking division and violence.
If you include the earlier Reuters deal, then 50% of the sourcing of U.S. news-related AI answers for Meta chatbots will come from outlets ostensibly trying to serve a broad, diverse national audience...and the other 50% come from explicitly, self-defining conservative outlets. Good times.
This is basically Shattered Glass but for academia? All the way down to creating fake company websites...www.wsj.com/economy/aidan-toner-rodg...
Just finished Brother's Karamazov for the first time. As Dostoevsky is to Tolstoy, Tolkien is to G.R.R. Martin?
NEW REPORT 💻 @annalenhart.bsky.social and @brandonsilverman.bsky.social interviewed 18 high-profile social media figures about how they view privacy. Many policymakers assume that public data from prominent accounts involve lower expectations of privacy. Is that the case? Read here: bit.ly/4peorZB.
We live in a two-tiered system—where corporations & brands buy access to the data they need and public interest researchers are locked out.
One customer representative candidly admitted: "Even when they added more restrictions on Facebook, we found a way to get more data."
Needless to say, strongly agree with @ebakerwhite.bsky.social in this op-ed in the Times this morning!
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/o...
Same...but I went with Blood Meridian.
lol
This new report from @brandonsilverman.bsky.social and @naomishiffman.bsky.social is great. It documents numerous concrete cases in which platform transparency (or scraping-based research) has had significant real-world impact.
iddp.gwu.edu/sites/g/file...
Unsubscribe from campaign text messaging is obviously broken. We need a mechanism for more upstream unsubscribes...campaigns should have to tell you *where* they got your number and you should be able to remove yourself from the source list.
The worst happened. We were DOGE’d. Our NSF funding is gone.
So now there’s nothing stopping me from sharing Expert Voices Together, a crisis response system for US-based researchers and journalists facing harassment.
It's a true passion project. 🧵 1/
expertvoicestogether.org
My useless contribution to the Qatar plane news cycle is that people are severely underestimating the economics of private jet ownership.
Link to the full report here: iddp.gwu.edu/sites/g/file...
Of course, the kicker to the entire paper is that most of the data sharing programs that empowered all these specific examples and the subsequent impact...are mostly completely shuttered.
We detail 20 case studies where transparency led to impact in four core areas: (1) impacting platform decision-making, (2) contributing to academic understanding of key issues, (3) helping shape government and regulatory actions, and (4) contributing to a more informed public.
This morning, @naomishiffman.bsky.social and I published a report that helps make the case for why online platform transparency is so important by looking at *specific, concrete case studies* where data sharing led to real-world impact.
Link to the report and 🧵 with more details below!
Looks like we finally found the censorship industrial complex. I'm sure the Twitter Files conspiracy theorists will be all over it any day now. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
You can now specifically add citations!
👍
Yes please!
Yup! Just discovered that and reached out to them...otherwise, I'll definitely just link to it!
Just submitted my first suggestion. Super easy process and such a useful tracker.
Thanks for the bump @mmasnick.bsky.social! And whole thing started with a BlueSky post from @moskov.goodventures.org. Have had a ton of user submissions and just need to go through and approve them all now...
