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henryhenryhenry.com
political scientist, PhD via Vanderbilt // researcher @ UZH Zürich // studying the unfolding dystopia // platforms, political violence, extremism, etc. research & writing: henryhenryhenry.com land of enchantment
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The lack of diversity of thought on X is really hurting usage. X’s decline stems from never hearing from other side. Etc. Why would anyone who isn't interested in being bombarded with white nationalist propaganda stay on there? X stats visualisation via @drewharwell.com.

whenever I read another screed about Twitter as a marketplace of ideas, I think about my data on hate speech from a cross-section of the site from 2020-2023. the dramatic decline in Feb ‘21, and then the steady, steady, steady increase over the next 2 years

Cameron Wolfe, a machine-learning scientist at Netflix, writes incredibly informative essays from the frontier of LLM research -- he's just dropped one about AI agents. However you feel about AI as a technology, we should not ignore what's in development. cameronrwolfe.substack.com/p/ai-agents

People keep telling me that my view of the aesthetics of #AIslop is too bleak and one-sided, that generative AI can't just be used for fascist propaganda, but is a form of caricature, hyper-hallucinatory surrealism, or absurdist vernacular culture that can also be used for emancipatory purposes 1/

yes, thank you. these squabbles over echo chambers and bubbles are fossilized debates from a dead world. virality and reach have very different meanings today than even 5 years ago

www.liberalcurrents.com/trump-alarmi...

As protests spread across the US and the Trump Administration mobilizes the military to repress them, there are lots of lessons to learn from our recent past. This piece explains lessons from the largest period of sustained protest in US history in summer 2020 www.brookings.edu/articles/les...

Ok, I’m no @profpaulpoast.bsky.social but I shall try to do a thread on militaries and protests. Apologies up front to all the brilliant scholars I accidentally leave out - am doing this from memory. 1/

this is zombie social media crit from ten years ago, every concept or buzzword discredited or redefined

the demise of press freedom is at least partially a ritual suicide on the steps of power

It's been 24 hours since the Big Beautiful Breakup kicked off, but the real fracturing of the MAGA base began weeks ago MAGA pretends to be a monolith. It's not. Factions within the movement work at cross-purposes with incompatible goals ALL the girls are fighting, and it's great

our vision is that everyone is forced to buy a chatbot, says owner of chatbot factory

the US will never truly consolidate an enduring democracy until it fixes the rampant impunity of its domestic security state

In addition to funding, which is important, states and feds are passing laws that give preference to law enforcement in every aspect of life -- legal, economic, and social. Just yesterday, Trump met with FOP leaders who praised him for ending accountability and the "no tax on overtime."

NEW: Use of X's Community Notes has plummeted in 2025, with half as many notes being created in May than during peak periods in January. This is as X says Community Notes has expanded globally and is being deployed across other platforms like TikTok and Facebook www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-...

this is fancasting — because all politics is fandom now — from the human equivalent of plain oatmeal

you don’t find a lot of media effects relationships that look this clear. certainly some kind of ancillary indicator of the vastly different incentives that structure “mainstream” and right-wing media spaces

it's times like this i almost wish Q was still posting

YouGov got a poll in the field quickly yesterday. Republicans side with Trump over Musk by nearly a 12 to 1 margin. More numbers here: www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

A new meta-analysis finds that people often believe conspiracy theories because of deeper psychological needs, like wanting clarity, control, or belonging. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/misg...

maybe the party can pay a hive of chittering consultants to tell them entertainment politics drives attention and, ultimately, power

This article is rather strong evidence of what many of us have feared: They broke the agencies and need to rehire. (Some don't even have people to process payroll.) But a significant number of former employees have found new jobs or refuse to return. For those who return, morale is terrible.

An excellent piece (as always) from @jesspish.bsky.social exploring some of the dynamics bear the border www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

A lot of people say generative AI shouldn't infringe on copyright. These researchers actually tried to do it. The result: an 8 terabyte dataset of text that's openly licensed or in the public domain & 7 B parameter model that performs as well as Meta's Llama 7B www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

super interesting thread on AI aesthetics:

the Common Pile paper is super interesting. it turns out training an LLM on only non-copyright material nets you a model about on par with Llama-2 7B -- suggesting that stopping AI companies from strip-mining content only delays frontier development by ~2 years github.com/r-three/comm...

it's times like this i almost wish Q was still posting

Professors at the University of Chicago will be like “you support building a liberal world order? That pales in comparison to my strategy of simply countering potential regional hegemons” and then not counter potential regional hegemons

The thing almost all Democrats have never learned two decades into social media is that you don't make attention, you free-ride on it. You take what the attention is on, and make it about your thing. This is virality 101, and the fact they don't get it is mind blowing.

Americans are piggies at a trough to reality TV type content, and slipping politics in with the slop is arguably the single biggest innovation of Trumpism. voters “care” about Medicaid, but they don’t want to hear about it. they want WWE. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Hey, remember when Trump told a room of Big Oil CEOs he'd make all their wildest dreams of climate denial come true...for $1B in campaign cash? Now the White House war on the environment is the Trump corruption scandal we don't talk about nearly enough My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/trum...

“Poster’s Madness” is now a structural theory of international politics and domestic coalition-maintenance and degradation. Throw out that IR degree.

you can’t help but think about how Alex Jones is taking all of this

something people find difficult to understand about political extremism is that there is no material basis for the "crisis" it is responding to. there might be *some* material crisis *somewhere*, but what extremism centers is entirely of its own creation. an admission wrapped in a distraction.

if you did something like this targeting, say, NYT editors, do we think you’d get a puff piece in the Times?

New, from me: A Brown student built an AI-powered harassment machine of university staff. When the university investigated (and cleared) him, he was presented as a free speech victim. He became a right-wing celebrity, which was his goal all along. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-to-bec...

For @techpolicypress.bsky.social , I tried to connect some dots between AI-related energy investments and other technofascist attempts at concentrating power through land and resources, from nuclear startups to network cities Thanks @justinhendrix.bsky.social @megyoung0.bsky.social for the edits

New piece! Media coverage of Kilmar Abrego Garcia hurt Trump, not Democrats. An actually data-driven analysis of some stale conventional wisdom. Alt title: Matt Yglesias is wrong about Democrats and Abrego Garcia🧵

Want to hear more from fantastic EGEN scholars? Follow this starter pack! go.bsky.app/SeabEZc

After 4½ years, I’m thrilled to announce that I have successfully defended my PhD dissertation titled “Framing Artificial Intelligence: Understanding How AI Is Framed in EU Political and Media Discourse Using Large Language Models.” PhDone! 🎓

blinding the state so rapidly and haphazardly we're going to have to invent a whole new kind of dictator's dilemma