Thanks!!

Job Openings - Center on Media, Technology and Democracy News, announcements, and insights from the Penn Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy.

If you're still stuck in the US, you can do a lot worse than to be in Philadelphia (really, a great city!), where Penn is hiring an AI auditor as a summer job infodem.upenn.edu/job-openings/

Ofcom investigates Telegram and teen chat sites Ofcom has launched an investigation into Telegram under the UK’s Online Safety Act, to determine whether it is doing enough to prevent child sexual abuse material being shared.

Online safety enforcement klaxon: Ofcom has opened an investigation into Telegram, alleging the service has failed to adequately manage the risk of CSAM being shared among users.

Note that unlike the DSA, there is no carve-out in the UK rules for messaging apps.

www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safet...

📣 EvolDir is now managed by @eseb.bsky.social!

We are delighted to be taking the reins and express our gratitude to both Brian Golding who began this service to the community in the mid-1980s and to @rdmpage.bsky.social who ran this account until now 👏

You can now find evoldir here: evoldir.net

Do We Collaborate With What We Design? This article critically assesses the accuracy and desirability of using terms like “collaboration” to describe interactions between humans and AI systems. This article concludes that we cannot collab...

collaborate onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Patiency is not a virtue: the design of intelligent systems and systems of ethics - Ethics and Information Technology The question of whether AI systems such as robots can or should be afforded moral agency or patiency is not one amenable either to discovery or simple reasoning, because we as societies constantly rec...

patiency link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I love that people are citing "Patiency is not a virtue" it's perfect for the moment – except 7 years later, I (& others) wrote an even better one "Do we collaborate with what we design."

Robin Dunbar told me early in my career it takes 7 years for an idea to take off, by which time it bores you.

Your chance to say things to @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social, hang out with us all in Berlin, and generally do research things with computer.

Chinese citizens discover facial recognition fines For many people, mass surveillance by the Chinese state primarily targets political dissidents, NGO representatives, or activists of all stripes. However, cameras equipped with advanced technology als...

Li (in contrast) was no dissident, only* a man late for an appointment who road his bike on the pavement [US: sidewalk] and got fined €6 by text message. #surveillance

*of course that can be quite dangerous, good reason for it to be illegal

Article in @lemonde.fr www.lemonde.fr/en/internati...

"When Beijing created a unified digital identity system in 2025, a prominent law professor, Lao Dongyan, who voiced concerns about the move, saw her social media accounts suspended and her critical posts deleted." A 'unified digital ID system' is what #ageVerification demands too.

I thought the administration is trying to eliminate taxes, replacing them with tariffs and a diminished state, presumably in a desperate effort to head off wealth taxes.

Americans spend $146 billion and 11.6 billion hours doing their taxes, and most of it is just filling out paperwork | Fortune There are more than 10,000 forms you have to sort through to file your taxes, and the fear of going to jail over a mistake has never been higher.

Individual tax returns cost American taxpayers a combined $146 billion in time and out-of-pocket expenses this year—roughly $576 per person in labor hours alone, according to a new analysis from Postal. https://bit.ly/47XcqBx

I wrote to Susan and she sent me back Dan's archivist's email and said that certainly Dan's wish was for everything to still be accessible. So maybe we can track it down.

Lander is the first New York politician to speak out after our @wired.com deep dive into Madison Square Garden's surveillance operations.

Yikes. And from a crowd that's on about cancel culture. Automated defamation? Seems like an early tester for governance and legal system by AI. Why judge a case or why vote; AI already knows what's best etc.

Online Social Identities And Collective Action * Complexity Science Hub This workshop aims to unite experts from diverse fields—social scientists, computational scholars, and mathematical modelers working in areas such as game

Excitedly headed to Vienna for this

I don’t know, they were always trivial to websearch. His centre for cognitive studies.

Privacy's Defender
My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance
by Cindy Cohn mitpress.mit.edu/978026205124...

So, unlike Minsky @mit.edu, it seems like Dennett's homepage is no longer @tufts.edu ? It seems expunged from the internet, even @archive.org ? Even if someone for some reason took off all the green open access it linked to, I'd still want to be able to see it. 😢 cc @dennettiancreature.bsky.social

<downloads a PhD dissertation by someone she's never heard of>
<checks the year is before 2022>
<catches herself and sighs>

It only just occurred to me that this might be a great opportunity for francophone countries in @theafricaiknow.bsky.social What is the situation with linux in Africa? I assume low cost, low power solutions are important? There's several months to train up expertise, and similar timezones too.

Well worth the listen to better understand what went down in Hungary 🇭🇺, including 🇪🇺 💶, 🇵🇱, 🇷🇺 🤖 and 🦓!

via American Voices Abroad, Berlin www.avaberlin.org

The damage that Trump has done to the federal government now has a number: $165.6 BILLION. www.govexec.com/workforce/20...

Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial Scientists caution that more research is needed, but nearly all of the patients who responded to the personalized vaccine are still alive six years later.

We have an apparent cure for most people with pancreatic cancer—a profoundly swift, deadly cancer—and the position of the U.S. government is that it should be banned. This is real fall-of-empire stuff.

Kim Lane Scheppele on Hungary Democracy wins big

Interview by @pkrugman.bsky.social of @kimlanelaw.bsky.social about Hungary is superb; well worth 30min (on 2x). Thanks to @hertieschool.bsky.social I had the privilege to hear and & meet her in Berlin not too long ago, but this is just INCREDIBLE analysis about #democracy and how it has been gamed.

EU age verification app: "Worry-free package" with security vulnerabilities The EU Commission wants to revolutionize youth protection online via app. But the promise of anonymity and security quickly proves to be very fragile.

www.heise.de/en/news/EU-a... Someone is looking at the #privacy anyway

Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex X.com #ArtificialIntelligence systems increasingly shape and permeate our mentality and social environments. Like every great historical transformation, this too calls not only for technical competence, but also for a humanistic formation capable of making visible the logic behind economics, embedded biases and forms of power that shape our perception of reality. 1:31 PM • 4/17/26 • 91K Views

Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex X.com Within digital environments — structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses. Dear friends, you, however, are real persons! Creation itself has a body, a breath, a life to be listened to and safeguarded. 1:31 PM • 4/17/26 • 209K Views

Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex X.com When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth. 1:31 PM • 4/17/26 • 696K Views

Pope Leo on AI:

“Within digital environments — structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses.”

This short thread is worth reading:

Full response to the April 2026 UN Consultation artificial and natural intelligence, including politics, policy, ethics and security

I filled in the UN's online consultation too joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2026/04/full...

Ha ha I just accidentally typed "foreign technology superposers." :-)