Forgot about that. Adding to the slides :(

Specific NLP connection? Otherwise this will list will contain all tech atrocities.

Big news if you’re an American politics political scientist doing text as data

very cute goodreads alternative

I agree they are concluding a little too much from this but I do think whenever you measure a non-zero treatment effect from a proper RCT it is worth sitting down and figuring out exactly what it means. Why does giving people AI and taking it away make them do worse than if they never had AI at all?

This is a really good point. My main use case outside of "work work" is "care work". Navigating disability stuff in the US is terrible by design, might as well throw AI at it.

Dispatch from my demographic! Working moms have Prompt Parties to swap prompts to automate/outsource mental load. We're served content about how to make ChatGPT a house manager, virtual assistant, etc. Women's uptake isn't slightly surprising, because nothing else has fixed imbalanced mental load.

and in fact, we are only getting a 1% raise while the university scrambles to make up a budget shortfall by increasing tuition, etc. I would love to know how the President and Chancellor manage to randomly fork over $2 million to OpenAI in the midst of all this.

I think this is the first time I've heard this story! Wow.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lernout...

It's frustrating to receive notice after notice that "We're adding AI into your product, but don't worry! Your privacy is protected. No one is allowed to train on your data." As if training on my data were my one and worst privacy fear. I'm way more concerned about how my data is stored and sold.

Say more? I can't remember and haven't been able to easily dig up a clear explanation

Reassessing the Facebook experiment: critical thinking about the validity of Big Data research The Facebook experiment of 2014 manipulated the contents of nearly 700,000 users’ News Feeds to induce changes in their emotions. This experiment was widely criticized on ethical grounds regarding ...

(In addition to ethical problems, that study also had research design problems. The two often go hand-in-hand! The dependence on the LIWC lexicon without validation led to this amazing take-down paper. And reading about this led to one of my own PhD papers.)

8/n

Facebook Fiasco: Was Cornell University’s study of ‘emotional contagion’ a breach of ethics? Chris Chambers: A covert experiment to influence the emotions of more than 600,000 people. A major scientific journal behaving like a rabbit in the headlights. A university in a PR tailspin

While we're on the topic of FB, there's the example of the "emotional contagion" study conducted on 600K FB users by Cornell researchers. Researchers manipulated users' feeds to see if they could make them sad. Not clear that any harm was done, AFAIK, but many questions about consent and IRB.

7/n

That is what I'm realizing while writing this thread!

If you want any info on the 2016 incident, I’m the person who exposed it

You are a hero!!!!!! I felt so personally disgusted and violated by that particular case, especially since users have so little choice or agency when it comes to dating apps.

Of course there's the Cambridge Analytica case, in which Facebook was fined $5B (fun personal fact, during my summer internship at Facebook in 2019). An app took 87M users' data without informed consent and used the data to assist the 2016 political campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

6/n

This one is truly awful. In 2020, the patient database of a Finnish therapy service was hacked. They extorted the company and its patients, emailing 30k victims and threatening to publish their records. At least 300 were published, including incredibly sensitive information.

5/n

FTC Takes Action Against Match and OkCupid for Deceiving Users by Sharing Personal Data with Third Party The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against OkCupid and its affiliate Match Group Americas over allegations OkCupid deceived users of its dating app by sharing their personal information,

Here's a thread digging more into the OkCupid data and its connection with the open science movement. www.metafilter.com/159512/A-Bla...

Unfortunately as I searched for info about the above 2016 incident, I had to rummage through headlines about this new incident! @endless-scream.bsky.social

4/n

what!

Ah yes. I didn't remember that Tay had a face. How nostalgic...

Scientists Leak 70,000 OkCupid Profiles | The Mary Sue Danish researchers scraped data from thousands of OkCupid profiles without asking the website administrators, or any of the users, for their consent.

Next the OkCupid scraping debacle. Researchers from Aarhus scraped 70k dating profiles and released them to the public. Many are identifiable, and many contain *VERY* detailed personal and sexual information. Safe to say that lead researcher Emil Kirkegaard behaved terribly throughout.

3/n

is that a reaction pic (if so yes it really is mind boggling) or an image from some horrible experiment that i should know about?

First the AOL search log release.

In 2006, AOL released 20 million search queries for over 650k users. They didn't identify users but included user IDs to link queries and (obviously!) personally identifiable info was in many queries. Many users were identified, data couldn't be recalled.

2/n

What are the worst ethical disasters in NLP history?

(I'm teaching "ethics of NLP" tomorrow and history is good for teaching this topic.)

Most are data breaches/releases (AOL search logs, OKCupid profiles, Finnish therapy records...) but what others?

I'll put some other examples in thread --> 1/n

The results for #DH Awards 2025 are now live. Sorry if your favoured resource did not win in this openly nominated, openly voted #DigitalHumanities awareness activity. There's no real prize (winners may use the associated icon), other than everyone seeing the resources.
dhawards.org/dhawards2025...

A busy intersection in Utrecht: a daily reminder that when cycling is safe and convenient, it becomes a natural part of how a city moves.

super stars!! 🌟

View over the canal in Nyhavn, Copenhagen

Thrilled to announce CS2Nordics: the First Nordic Conference on Computational Social Science. Copenhagen, September 21-22, 2026.

We invite all CSS researchers in the Nordics as well as in the international research community to submit 2-page abstracts by June 19: nosocss.org/conference.h....