*JOB* My group at @gesis.org has an open position: we are looking for a candidate to support the expansion of our Trusted Research Environment for providing access to sensitive research data: gesis.jobs.personio.de/job/2707934?...

Research Infrastructure Specialist (Postdoc) for Trusted Research Environments (DSS-26) | Jobs at GESIS – Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften

GESIS is one of the world's leading social science infrastructure facilities, supporting researchers at all levels of their research projects with expertise and infrastructure services. We help ensure...

gesis.jobs.personio.de

Tulane's Muira McCammon documented how Google turned off reviews for 90+ ICE detention facilities, erasing accounts of conditions inside. Google says disabling ICE facility reviews was "unrelated to a government request." But McCammon argues the effect is the same: dissent rendered invisible.

As Google Scrubs ICE Detention Reviews, Platform Power Serves State Interests

Google’s content moderation choices threaten to render accounts of treatment inside federal detention centers invisible, writes Muira McCammon.

buff.ly

While updating my to-do list I keep wondering if Sysiphos was the first academic

AI Forensics: seven out of the nine top AI image models on Hugging Face edited an image of a clothed woman into a topless one using a simple six-word prompt (Matt Burgess/Wired) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

openai.com/supply/produ... OpenAI selling t-shirts that say "Good research takes time" has a lot of layers to it as a bit

Good Research Tee

A statement piece for the Research department. The Good Research Tee embodies our principles of patience, process, and doing things intentionally. All good things take time–including and especially re...

openai.com

I’m not quite as critical of AI as many others, but simply comparing synapses to artificial neural networks is utter nonsense. And AI consciousness is bullshit. And even neuromorphic chips won’t change that. www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothin...

AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK | Quanta Magazine

The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.

quantamagazine.org

Got this text a couple months. Had to investigate it. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/t...

🔥🔥🔥BREAKING: Ypsomed-Chef, FDP-Nationalrat und Milliardär Simon Michel investiert gemeinsam mit Thiel in Stadtstaat. Er sei einer der ersten Investoren in Próspera, bestätigt er auf Anfrage. Betrieben wird die Privat­stadt von der US-Firma Honduras Próspera Inc. www.republik.ch/2026/07/16/s...

Schweizer Nationalrat investiert mit Peter Thiel in privaten Stadtstaat

FDP-Nationalrat Simon Michel ist am libertären Projekt Próspera in der Karibik beteiligt.

republik.ch

What Elsevier doesn't know is I am great at second- and triple-guessing myself, I don't need an AI tool to "double-check my thinking" on top of that.

Google Generative AI performance reports for the new social platform property hack www.seroundtable.com/google-ai-pe... via @suzukik.bsky.social #googlesearchconsole #googleai

Started reading "Prophecy" by @carissaveliz.bsky.social with one of my new research assistants (the second one doesn't seem to be as much into reading so far). In all seriousness, the first pages already sound very promising and I like the style!

NEW: Meta paid hundreds of contractors to pretend they were kids—and then prompt rival chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT to talk about subjects like suicide, sex, eating disorders, and self-harm. From @dmehro.bsky.social and @joelkhalili.bsky.social

Meta Contractors Posed as Teens to Prompt Rival Chatbots About Suicide, Sex, and Drugs

Hundreds of contractors working on a project for Meta pretended to be kids—and then prompted rival chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT to discuss high-risk subjects.

wired.com

Spotify competitor Tidal built a reputation by collaborating with musicians and focusing on audio quality. How will it handle the era of AI-generated slop?

Tidal Says It Won’t Pay Royalties for AI-Generated Music

Spotify competitor Tidal built a reputation by collaborating with musicians and focusing on audio quality. How will it handle the era of AI-generated slop?

404media.co

❤️🧡💛💚💙🩷💜

David Ho@davidho.bsky.social · last mo.

Tens of thousands celebrated Budapest Pride, the first since Viktor Orbán’s ousting.

“If Doctorow’s idea of platform “enshittification” is fundamentally about ruining the experience of end users for the sake of the shareholders, Wikipedia is attempting something like the opposite. The end-user experience is being preserved, and the people behind the scenes are bearing the cost.”

Ryan McGrady@antisomniac.bsky.social · last mo.

In @theconversation.com today: What 20 million bans reveal about the strain on Wikipedia's volunteers. theconversation.com/what-20-mill...

"an audit by Lighthouse Reports of public data on the government’s chosen AI provider shows that its tech misclassified more than a third of 16-year-olds as adults and, in some tests, was shown to give the wrong assessment in 70 per cent of cases" www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

Home Office knew AI age checks for migrants were flawed — but rolled it out anyway

Exclusive: Government advisors describe the tool as ‘hideously flawed’ amid concern facial age estimation has ‘baked-in racial bias’ — and can wrongly identify a 14-year-old as an adult

independent.co.uk

🧵Technosolutionism turns moral panic into moral failure. It is the case - and it's been for a very long time - for the UK Home Office, now about to roll out AI age checks for migrant children, despite knowing they are flawed and they will damage the most vulnerable. www.wired.com/story/facial...

The UK Will Scan Asylum-Seekers’ Faces for Age Checks—Despite Knowing the Tech Is Flawed

Internal Home Office tests of age-verification technology show the risks of life-altering errors. It’s moving forward anyway.

wired.com

The Big Tech company META has an ad running on the swiss newspaper "le temps" since several days...promoting centralised age verification. they push for age verification through google and apple on the app store level. they outsource and sell it as privacy-preserving solution... no joke.

🚨 Our Digital News Report 2026 is out! Authored by Jim Egan, Craig T. Robertson, Amy Ross Arguedas, Nic Newman, Rasmus Nielsen, Mitali Mukherjee and Richard Fletcher, it is based on 100K interviews in 48 markets Full report reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news... 7 findings in thread

This morning scrolling Bluesky, there is nothing at all in my feed about Putin’s barbaric attack on the Ukraine’s holiest site, the UNESCO protected Lavra so I’m posting this here.

𝐃𝐢𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐝ä𝐫𝐞 𝐀𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐬𝐧𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐥 @leewas.bsky.social 𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐭 – 𝐦𝐢𝐭 𝐋𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐧𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐄𝐜𝐡𝐭𝐳𝐞𝐢𝐭! Jetzt den Abstimmungssonntag verfolgen: www.tagesanzeiger.ch @lucasleemann.bsky.social @mariostauble.bsky.social @rfrbrghs.bsky.social #10MillionenSchweiz #Zivildienstgesetz #abst26

Und weil Palantir jetzt nicht zufrieden ist, dass ihre ellenlange Gegendarstellung nirgendwo abgedruckt wird, publizieren sie sie einfach selber😄 palantir.medium.com/response-to-...

Stellungnahme zum Urteil des Zürcher Handelsgerichts bezüglich des Rechts auf Gegendarstellung von…

Editor’s Note: The English translation of this statement is below.

palantir.medium.com

Happy to share that the Social Computing Group received the Best Poster Award at the inaugural UZH.ai Interdisciplinary Lab Exchange & Poster Session 🚀 We presented our research on AI from three angles: user, system, and interaction. Many thanks to @uzhai.bsky.social for organizing the event.

A big shout-out to Michael Correll (is he on Bluesky...?) for this blog post which is ::chef's kiss:: as a bridge to HCI from my work on ethics education in the context of "hey maybe let's re-think what it means to be good at computer science." mcorrell.medium.com/the-othering...

The *most debated* ballot since @foeg.bsky.social data begins: no prop has generated as many articles as the upcoming vote to cap the population. The media tone is very critical. Yet still the radical right SVP as the only major actor in favor gets the most attention www.foeg.uzh.ch/de/research/...

✨New paper out @nature.com ✨ For 8 weeks around the 2024 US election, we randomly assigned 2,000 people to use social media algos we built ourselves. Do engagement-based algorithms amplify intergroup, moral & emotional (IME) content—and does that distort how we see political norms? 🧵🔗 👇

Can LLMs Emulate Human Belief Dynamics? 🧪 The answer is a clear no. [The findings] raise a sharp warning against deploying LLMs as human proxies in social simulations. arxiv.org/pdf/2605.18781 #SyntheticData #EsWirdImmerAbsurder

I somehow vividly remember this exact issue at IC2S2 in Copenhagen a couple of years ago. Computational social science is skewed this way as well.

Ambrose@ambrosia-engine.bsky.social · 2mo ago

If the line for the mens bathroom is long and there is no line for the womens' bathroom you may very well be at AWS re: invent or another tech conference.

People often pitch AI as unprecedented. But what if we already have the organizational tools to evaluate & negotiate its use? Our new book Auditing AI opens in the 1980s with the story of the US Network for Organ Sharing how how they test & decide on their algorithms direct.mit.edu/books/book/6...

Introduction

CC BY-NC-ND

direct.mit.edu

Google AI search is going to be great!