I was in the United States on OPT until the Trump administration wrongfully denied my STEM Extension request. Charging my institution (*not* the employer) $100,000 per head is disturbing and basically ends all forms of legal immigration unless you're Polish, Hungarian, or white South African

Michael Clemens@mclem.org · 4w ago

The US President's new proposal to tax international students has been approved by the White House for release this week. It's an unprecedented $100,000 tax on int'l grads who stay to work after graduation on Optional Practical Training (most grads do), a crucial bridge to remaining by any channel.

There are four overlapping scandals here: 1. Fundraising spam tactics are hallmarks of elder financial exploitation 2. The Dem establishment is in on it 3. Most of what is raised goes to fundraising consultants 4. Capitulation to legal threats by NYT and The Bulwark on a fully vetted story 🧵👇

Hook and Squeeze

How Democratic consultants, committees, and party leaders built a fundraising spam pipeline that funnels money from a captive pool of elderly donors into their own operations.

data4democracy.substack.com

Thank you @meharpist.bsky.social. It was a pleasure working with you on this paper.

Mary Elizabeth Sutherland@meharpist.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Millions of people(including me) turn to LLMs for information and advice. But who shapes their output? A @nature.com paper shows the influence of state controlled media on LLM output. Read all the details in the article here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thank you so much @jenjennings.bsky.social !

Jen Jennings@jenjennings.bsky.social · 5mo ago

“Here we show through six studies that government control of the media across the world already influences the output of LLMs via their training data.” This is, hands down, the best paper I’ve read about AI. Kudos to this rockstar team!

Wonderful to work on this with you @jatucker.bsky.social !

Joshua Tucker@jatucker.bsky.social · 5mo ago

1/ Excited to report we have a new paper out @nature.com today! The bottom line: training data for LLMs does not just fall from the sky - it is created in the context of existing social political institutions - and that has consequences for LLM output. nature.com/articles/s41...

New in Nature: LLMs give "the party line" in the languages of authoritarian regimes. This works when they control the media, which feeds pretraining data. We show more state control over the media means less critical LLMs. 6 studies spanning 38 languages & 13 models. Details ↓

1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses.

Here's a free link to the paper: rdcu.be/fiyrF

State media control influences large language models

Nature - Government-controlled media influences the output of large language models via their training data, and models queried in the languages of countries with lower media freedom show a...

rdcu.be

Hannah Waight@hwaight.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I’m excited to share a new paper in Nature that shows how large language models launder the strategic rhetoric of authoritarian states. Paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... A thread.

I’m excited to share a new paper in Nature that shows how large language models launder the strategic rhetoric of authoritarian states. Paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... A thread.

Retractions never get proportional attention. This one should.

Influential study touting ChatGPT in education retracted over red flags

The retracted study on ChatGPT in education was already cited hundreds of times.

arstechnica.com

"Residents in Fayetteville, Georgia, noticed low water pressure last year. The utility discovered two unaccounted-for water connections at one of the nation’s largest data center campuses."

A data center drained 30M gallons of water unnoticed — until residents complained about low water pressure

Residents in Fayetteville, Georgia, noticed low water pressure last year. The utility discovered two unaccounted-for water connections at one of the nation’s largest data center campuses.

politico.com

“The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote.” hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-s...

USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, accord...

hsph.harvard.edu

Joshua Foust 🪖🎮@joshuafoust.com · 5mo ago

The single most defining thing Elon Musk has ever done is killing untold numbers of people by having DOGE illegally raid and disband USAID. Not rickets, not cars, not even the CSAMbot on X. It’s this, and so many media pundits just choose to unsee it.

Excited to announce that Tyler McCormick and I are organizing a Summer Institute in Computational Social Science at the University of Washington, with a focus on AI and social science research. July 6-17 We encourage applications from PhD students, postdocs, and junior faculty: sicss.io/2026/uw/

Earlier today, @uofmpress.bsky.social sent me the front cover design of Xiaohong Xu’s forthcoming book. It will come out in October 2026. Gorgeous art by Dahong Liu. Provocative foreword by Ho-fung Hung. Brilliant scholarship by Xiaohong Xu.

The US loses its status as a liberal democracy for the first time in 50 years. V-dem now classifies the US as an electoral democracy.

Claes de Vreese@claesdevreese.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Just out: the new @vdeminstitute.bsky.social is clear: "The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history" V-dem uses a global dataset on democracy with over 32 million data points for 202 countries, from 1789 to 2025. www.v-dem.net/documents/75...

morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/blm-announ... there's info on who to complain to to try to stop this at the end of the article, lets share this message and try our best to stop it.

BLM Announces Plan to Fell Oregon's Last Great Forests

One billion board feet per year... 30 days to make your voice heard.

morethanjustparks.substack.com

Less than two years ago, Texas Tech University suspended me for speaking out against genocide. Today I found out I was denied tenure.

Last week the story was that TikTok censored anti-Trump/ICE/Pretti videos after the U.S. ownership change. We investigated with a large set of US TikTok data and found some interesting results, short thread...

ICE is changing tactics in Maine: "Now, the volunteers in Maine say federal agents have started showing up at their homes and intimidating them or threatening arrest. Some of them, masked and wearing tactical gear, have issued stark warnings not to follow them." www.pressherald.com/2026/01/23/i...

ICE watchers in Maine say they were threatened by federal agents

Community members have been monitoring the activity of immigration agents in Greater Portland.

pressherald.com

Don’t let the holidays hide this story Here’s part of the plot to steal the midterms. stateline.org/2025/12/18/t...

Trump’s DOJ offers states confidential deal to remove voters flagged by feds • Stateline

The U.S. Department of Justice has sent confidential draft agreements on voter data sharing to more than a dozen states, part of the Trump administration’s effort to obtain unredacted voter rolls, wit...

stateline.org

There is an absolute fucking scandal going down at The New School, wherein at appears that the university is funnelling to a MEMBER OF THE SCHOOL’S BOARD while purging faculty and staff. This should be headline news. x.com/uaw7902/stat...

We recently wrote a follow blog post summarizing this @amjsoc.bsky.social article. Please follow this link to read more: blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/20...

Americans’ shifting perceptions of income inequality are a story of class and partisan identity | USAPP

Income and class inequality have played an increasingly prominent role in American political discourse since the financial crash of 2008. In new research, Hannah Waight and her co-author Adam Goldstei...

blogs.lse.ac.uk

American Journal of Sociology@amjsoc.bsky.social · last yr.

Hannah Waight and Adam Goldstein show that inequality perceptions have become increasingly polarized by partisanship.This gap has been driven by Republicans, whose increasing disavowal of growing inequality contributed to an overall decline in Americans’ perceptions in the new gilded age.

Sociology we have to talk about ASA/Footnotes' decision to publish an article about how *checks notes* a sociologist in upper admin *checks notes* used Sociology to *checks notes* cut the Sociology Program at their university. 🙃 www.asanet.org/footnotes-ar...

Sociology in the Provost’s Office: Leading through Contraction | American Sociological Association

Across the United States, higher education is contracting. Since 2010, colleges and universities have lost more than two million students. The

asanet.org

New blog post summarizing my recent paper with Adam Goldstein in the AJS: blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/20...

Americans’ shifting perceptions of income inequality are a story of class and partisan identity | USAPP

Americans’ shifting perceptions of income inequality are a story of class and partisan identity Income and class inequality have played an increasingly prominent role in American political discourse s...

blogs.lse.ac.uk

the USA built a system of higher education so good that smart/rich people from across the world came here, spending billions to learn here, subsidizing education for Americans while spending money to live in our cities and towns. our government arbitrarily decided we should stop doing that

Steve Herman@w7voa.journa.host.ap.brid.gy · last yr.

The US could see a 30-40% decline in new international student enrollment, resulting in nearly $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer American jobs. https://www.nafsa.org/fall-2025-international-student-enrollment-outlook-and-economic-impact

Thank you @thomasdavidson.bsky.social and Danny Karell for all your hard work on this! Really thankful to have been a part of this special issue!

Thomas Davidson@thomasdavidson.bsky.social · last yr.

I’m delighted to share that the August 2025 special issue of Sociological Methods & Research on Generative AI is out now. Along with my co-editor, Daniel Karell, we put together this issue to build on the conference we organized last year. Here's a thread on each of the ten papers:

I’m delighted to share that the August 2025 special issue of Sociological Methods & Research on Generative AI is out now. Along with my co-editor, Daniel Karell, we put together this issue to build on the conference we organized last year. Here's a thread on each of the ten papers:

✨New✨ postdoc opportunity to collaborate with @mollycopeland.bsky.social and myself on an exciting project on geography, community, and mental health at @ndsociology.bsky.social. Happy to talk to anyone interested. Please resky (or whatever retweeting is called here)! apply.interfolio.com/169206

Excited to share “Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages” was just published! Amazing work by my wonderful coauthors — read more below!

Hannah Waight@hwaight.bsky.social · last yr.

I am thrilled to share a new article in Sociological Methods & Research, “Quantifying Narrative Similarity Across Languages”. My co-first author Sol Messing and our collaborators developed a new approach to measuring “narrative similarity” between texts: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...