calamity-adam.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

On that 3am system prompt update to Grok, Elon’s anger at Gemini, & the politics behind prompts. ‘The solution, is transparency. Not bc we can, or should, attempt to strip out values that the owner decides to encode but bc the values shouldn’t be obscured.’ open.substack.com/pub/agentsof...

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

🧵 I’ve talked a lot about disordered discourse, conspiracies, polarisation, denialism. But maybe the better question is: why does this keep happening? Why does our shared reality keep fracturing? What are the drivers I talk about as a dimension of disordered discourse?

submitted 2 days ago • 20 comments

Great initiative by @richardburgon.bsky.social. The super-rich and huge corporations are putting communities at risk from flooding, extreme heat and food shortages - time for them to start paying up! #MakePollutersPay www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

submitted 2 days ago • 7 comments

Here’s how we found the identity of a key figure behind MrDeepfakes —one of the largest providers of non-consensual deepfake pornography in the world. Our latest investigation is out on YouTube now: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTMa...

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

Absolutely wild read

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

When will Starmer learn that no matter how good his Nigel Farage impression gets, it won't save him from wipeout at the hands of Reform? Here's another idea - how about doing the work that's needed to actually make people's lives better? 🧵

submitted 6 days ago • 84 comments

“When Reform are unfortunately managing to sell the lie that tackling climate change is somehow going to be bad for ordinary people, it’s really important that we Greens challenge that – and I am worried the Labour government is backsliding on climate policy,” says @carladenyer.bsky.social.

submitted 8 days ago • 11 comments

Some people are developing very unhealthy relationships with chatbots. There is much about this article, and the phenomenon it portrays, that is worth discussing and thinking about, but three elements stand out for me. 👇 #AIEthics www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

submitted 7 days ago • 2 comments

Good piece here by Jack McCarron on the worrying trend of anonymous super influencers using disinfo and exploiting crisis to promote xenophobia in Europe - case studies involving Wales, Ireland and the grifter RadioEuropes www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

1/14 New Investigation! Facebook is quietly being overrun by co-ordinated networks of AI slop, hijacked celebrity pages, and engagement-baiting fake news spreading polarizing disinfo and propaganda. Upwards of 22 million users have been exposed. #ReadIfYouLoveJesus👇 #disinfo

submitted 8 days ago • 9 comments

poisoning a community with uncontrolled methane emissions to nonconsensually “remove her clothes” www.404media.co/elon-musks-g...

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

Well, well, well: Meta is building facial recognition tech for its Ray-Ban smart glasses. Incredible about-face when last year a Meta spokesperson lost their shit at me for reporting students had married facial recognition to the glasses. My comms with Meta here: www.404media.co/well-well-we...

submitted 9 days ago • 18 comments

[DECODED] On Facebook, Duterte’s Senate bets go all in as Bam Aquino steps up www.rappler.com/philippines/... via @rappler.com.web.brid.gy

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

Meta also blocked the accounts of Bollywood movie stars, a slew of famous cricket players, and social media influencers who posted “anti-national content.” www.usermag.co/p/meta-bans-... top @techmeme.com

submitted 11 days ago • 11 comments

SCOOP: Meta bans the largest Muslim news page in India. The company is working hand in hand with the government to censor social media influencers and journalists in the region for 'anti-national content' following the terror attack in Kashmir.

submitted 11 days ago • 18 comments

Exclusive: Bellingcat in partnership with @tjekdet.dk , @politiken.dk and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) can reveal the identity of a key administrator behind MrDeepFakes, one of the world’s largest providers of non-consensual deepfake pornography. www.bellingcat.com/news/2025/05...

submitted 11 days ago • 16 comments

I was interviewed for this piece, where I stress the importance of engaging audiences, not just as consumers, but as collaborators, and why creating and engaging with discourse around topics is essential in the current information era. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/these-n...

submitted 12 days ago • 4 comments

New from 404 Media: the Signal clone the Trump administration uses was just hacked. TeleMessage makes a modified version of Signal that archives messages for government agencies, Waltz used it. A hacker got some users' messages, group chats. Hugely significant breach www.404media.co/the-signal-c...

submitted 13 days ago • 165 comments

(... which is more than Reform, by the way)

submitted 15 days ago • 28 comments

Interesting to learn more about how beginner biology I learned in school simplified down complex concepts / just got things wrong. Obvious parallels to people confusing sex with gender

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

The BBC is institutionally biased towards the right and the far right, and here's the proof: the results of an almost perfect before-and-after experiment. My column today. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

submitted 17 days ago • 155 comments

Attending a conference where researchers in my field (studying online misinformation and manipulation) are commiserating over all of our canceled grants, all in service of this: so this man and his regime of propagandists and conspiracy theorists can dictate (un)reality without challenge.

submitted 18 days ago • 70 comments

New from me: in the First 100 Days we gutted America’s capacity to respond to foreign interference. Rubio, whose own campaign was targeted by Russia, chose fealty to the fiction of a “stolen” election & the myth of a “censorship complex” over 🇺🇸 interests. thenextmove.substack.com/p/americas-i...

submitted 18 days ago • 6 comments

1. Can you figure out where I was standing when I took this picture? ChatGPT could. Given the photograph (scrubbed of all header information), the new chain of thought model, ChatGPT o.3, was able to pinpoint the location with a few meters.

submitted 19 days ago • 53 comments

New from 404 Media: researchers secretly ran massive, unauthorized AI-powered persuasion experiment on Reddit users. Researchers planted bots posing as a sexual assault survivor, a Black man, etc into a popular debate subreddit. We spoke to the mods, said unethical www.404media.co/researchers-...

submitted 20 days ago • 9 comments

Some creators of these apps have argued that they are technically “only” supposed to be used to nudify adults. There’s a whole lot wrong with this ecosystem. App stores play whack a mole but the keywords return results, ads for them appear on socials, etc. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

submitted 20 days ago • 2 comments

NEW—In late Feb, Chris Rufo published leaked chats between queer/trans employees at US intel agencies. Then Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said she’d fire all involved. I spoke to chat members who were fired, are on admin leave, and who kept their jobs about the new lavender scare:

submitted 20 days ago • 54 comments

NEW INVESTIGATION: Uyghurs targeted with digital attacks far from #China's borders... Impersonating legit software developers to solicit "feedback" on a language app. Then sending a trojan. Clever + well-informed.. 👇Thread by @citizenlab.ca colleague @pdxbek.bsky.social. bsky.app/profile/pdxb...

submitted 20 days ago • 0 comments

The most fitting possible punishment for these guys is to all be locked in a group chat together www.semafor.com/article/04/2...

submitted 20 days ago • 15 comments

"The moderators claim mental health care offered by the firm was unhelpful, was not delivered by medical doctors, and that personal disclosures made by staff about the effects of their work were circulated among managers." www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

submitted 21 days ago • 1 comment

1. Because this issue is critical, but has received remarkably little coverage, here's a thread pulling out the key themes from my article yesterday, on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which puts decades of environmental protections to the torch. 🧵 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

submitted 23 days ago • 58 comments

This is why we need many social platforms. The idea of one massive “public square” should be squarely over & dead by now -didn’t work, won’t work, can’t work. The whims of a billionaire shouldn’t be the rules. But on a centralized platform, they are. So here we are. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

submitted 25 days ago • 14 comments

Unspeakable evil. "Twenty-four hours before she was killed, it was announced that a documentary focusing on Hassouna’s life in Gaza since the Israeli offensive began would be debuted at a French independent film festival that runs parallel to Cannes." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

submitted 28 days ago • 6 comments

A short article of mine on civil-military relations and democratic backsliding had been accepted for publication in the journal "Connections". Then I received an email that the editors can't publish the paper unless I "remove the case study/examples of the United States" (1/x) #CivMilSky

submitted 29 days ago • 25 comments

Just finished the Credible Threat by @sobieraj.bsky.social. Amazingly detailed and approachable explanation of the harms experienced by women on the internet, I highly recommend it

submitted 29 days ago • 1 comment

Timely new paper from UW Center for an Informed Public's PhD student @sydneydemets.bsky.social & current Director @emmaspiro.bsky.social looking at "trajectories" of guests acoss political podcasts, showing how many move from the periphery into the center. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

submitted 31 days ago • 2 comments

Hard to overstate the extent to which we have handicapped our ability to deal with adversarial abuse because “ceNsOrsHiP!” screamers have cowed people into ceasing to study, and companies into ceasing to mitigate, the most transparently manipulative things. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

submitted 30 days ago • 8 comments

American police departments are spending hundreds of thousands on Massive Blue’s unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected traffickers.

submitted 31 days ago • 48 comments

New in Media, War and Conflict by @apavliuc.bsky.social: Gender and narrative in digital political communication during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine - read here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

My latest —

submitted 31 days ago • 137 comments

Sad read

submitted 32 days ago • 0 comments

"Images generated by artificial intelligence have the potential to rewrite history, experts are warning. Free online tools can create fake depictions of events such as the Holocaust and 9/11 within seconds." www.aap.com.au/factcheck/fe...

submitted 33 days ago • 0 comments