“the Cloudflare “Bot Traffic” chart many people have cited is really about automated web crawlers operated by Yandex accessing the web. It’s not connected to “bots” posting”

Did “Russian bot traffic” really disappear after Ukrainian strikes on Yandex servers?

Despite multiple Ukrainian strikes hitting Yandex servers in Russia, a thread by antibot4navalny, which has long tracked state-sponsored social media campaigns and troll farms, explains that the Cloud...

theverge.com

Out now: my book, about the institutional and localized impact of anti-trans campaigns in the UK. C1 + 4 analyse the anti-trans outputs of JKR and R.Gervais; C2 + 3 about GC ideology and anti-trans campaigns on a uni campus; C5 about media; C6 about the beauty and magic of being trans in Edinburgh.

Samara Rafert@rafertess.bsky.social · last mo.

@ginagwenffrewi.bsky.social's JK ROWLING AND THE ANTI-TRANS PANIC, just published by Ohio State Press, is an @autostraddle.bsky.social most anticipated queer book for September! www.autostraddle.com/our-most-ant...

intensive lobbying by BigAI has left the AI Act hollow. risks like “loss of control” are mandatory for providers to assess while risks to fundamental rights & society as a whole including privacy, data protection, non-discrimination & risks from CSAM & non-consensual intimate imagery are left out

No soft fingernail touches allowed, meanwhile Crowder is having the time of his life joking about people being thrown from helicopters

Sam Cole@samleecole.bsky.social · 2mo ago

a bunch of popular ASMR artists lost their channels forever this week, after YouTube cited them for violating terms against "sexually gratifying" content: www.404media.co/youtube-asmr...

"Much of the escalation no longer requires secrecy – it is photographed, filmed, and disseminated by its own perpetrators, turning the thousands of members of Israeli society who daily consume and share the footage into co-participants." www.thekeymagazine.com/p/israel-rap...

“Everything Is Legitimate”: How Israel Uses Rape as a Tool of Genocide

The rape of Palestinian detainees is so commonplace that it’s no longer hidden. It’s filmed, joked about, and celebrated in parliament. This is no mistake; it’s core to Israel’s colonial project.

thekeymagazine.com

By the numbers, I’ll try to get some expert estimates … but I’d ballpark that there are many many many more trans people who’ve fled from red state to blue than those who’ve fled abroad, just based on the ease of doing one versus the other. This is partly why I seek to close this gap in coverage.

Sandy Ernest Allen@sandyernestallen.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The reason I’m focused on trans people who’ve moved from red states to blue ones is that such stories are being mostly ignored by the mainstream press. Folks who’ve fled abroad—especially families with cis people and trans/gnc kids—your stories are receiving the bulk of what coverage I encounter.

Ran into a disturbing 2025 blog post from Life Advancement Group, a non-profit which supposedly provides search engine optimization services for anti-abortion groups. Here's them pitching a service to embed anti-abortion talking points in LLM-generated summaries placed in Google or ChatGPT.

Quilicura, Chile, one of the communities I wrote about in EMPIRE OF AI, has launched a brilliant initiative to inspire more responsible AI prompting. Today, don't use AI; ask the townspeople instead: quili.ai. So heartened to see this creative act of resistance.

Excited my most recent article is out now! In it, we talk about our work to combat anti-trans misinfo at @transstudies.bsky.social and the research my students are I are doing advancing a new framework for understanding misinfo effects. Give it a read here: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/R6MNB...

Combating anti-transgender misinformation: A sociological approach

Anti-transgender misinformation has become a defining feature of political discourse across the Anglosphere, driving a surge in harmful legislation and public attitudes. Learning from the change-ma...

tandfonline.com

📣 New publication! The second article of my postdoc project on the far right and anti-gender mobilization is now out #openaccess in #GermanPolitics doi.org/10.1080/0964... It examines antifeminism in far-right party politics through the case of AfD Key findings: Antifeminism ✅ Radicalization ✅

The story told here--one where anecdata suggests agency and autonomy have run amok and nameless activists are to blame--certainly rhymes with the NYT's disastrous panic about trans kids. Then you realize it's literally being written by the same author.

The New York Times@nytimes.com · 11mo ago

Autism rates have increased in recent decades, but the reasons are more complicated than what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has presented. Hear more on today's episode of "The Daily." nyti.ms/480eqtm

NEW: For months, my colleagues and I dug into YouTube's conservative airwaves and found a flourishing network of host-read ads on right-leaning podcasts. This phenomenon has enriched hosts, YouTube, and businesses that use ideology to sell. bloom.bg/3Kaio9w

The "jokes" and general callousness in response to the Epst*in emails just affirms my belief that the gulf between survivors of sexual violence and those who aren't / or otherwise do not recognize their experiences as violent is WIDE.

The latest Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies is out, and it's a doozy: a special issue on "Dynamics of Transphobic Content and Disinformation". With topics including Youtube, Mumsnet, LGB Alliance, Chinese TERFs, and transvestigators, this is an vital read! bulletin.appliedtransstudies.org

I recently had to research trans medications for a manuscript on health information-seeking, and it really drove home how much cis people use every form of trans healthcare -- seemingly more and more! Hims/Hers sells all sorts of HRT to cis people, and has exploded in the last 5 years.

Melissa Gira Grant@melissagiragrant.com · 11mo ago

for those puzzling out why an administration hostile to HRT for transition is super pro HRT for menopause, their claims that menopause ruins women and marriages seems pretty key

Loads of evidence that Grok is purposefully biased towards white supremacist ideas, but it's important to note that you can get answers like these out of most chatbots. Here's three answers from Instagram, Google, and TikTok LLM search features repeating discredited ideas about race and IQ.

Kevin Bird@stairwaytokevin.bsky.social · 11mo ago

"The world's richest man continually manipulates his company's AI to lie about science and promote white supremacism" sounds like some hack sci-fi writing, but it's just our current reality

“Retrieving Trans and Gender Diverse Literature” our protocol paper on developing TGD search hedges for Ovid MEDLINE and APA PsycInfo is up now in @jmirpub.bsky.social Protocols Been a labor of love for a couple years now! Check out protocol below 👇🏻 preprints.jmir.org/preprint/760...

Retrieving Trans and Gender Diverse literature: A protocol for the development and validation of two search hedges in Ovid MEDLINE and APA PsycInfo

Background: Searching for Two-Spirit, Transgender, and Non-binary (2STGNB) articles within large academic databases can be a challenging process, partly due to the dynamic and diverse...

preprints.jmir.org

📣 I am hiring a postdoc! aial.ie/hiring/postd... applications from suitable candidates that are passionate about investigating the use of genAI in public service operations with the aim of keeping governments transparent and accountable are welcome pls share with your networks

AI Accountability Lab @aial.ie · 12mo ago

The AIAL is looking for a highly driven Post-Doctoral Researcher who can design and implement research that improves transparency and accountability regarding the use of generative AI in public services Application closes on Dec 02, 2025 More information: aial.ie/hiring/postd...

I have watched as so-called "compromise" positions on transgender people's rights have failed over and over--in statehouses, the Biden White House, and in liberal rhetoric. There is no middle ground acceptable to the politicians, activists, and billionaires obsessed with trans people and our lives.

I’m glad Bray is getting support of colleagues and I don’t begrudge anyone leaving, I’d do all I can to keep my family safe. I do want to emphasize tho that doxing & death threats have become normal for minoritized activists who get little support from colleagues as they stay & continue to fight.

Karl Jacoby@karl-jacoby.bsky.social · 12mo ago

History faculty at Columbia & Barnard decrying the harassment of @mark-bray.bsky.social: "This is the first case in recent memory of a historian who has fled the country after receiving death threats on account of the history that they teach."

Something that keeps popping up in my research on search+LLMs is how they mix-and-match quotes from completely unrelated papers. Here's a response on detransition that pulls a limitations section from an unrelated paper on childhood traumatic experiences to claim that current research has flaws.

remember there’s always a lucrative position for the seeming critic of the tech industry who doesn’t actually challenge its power and foundational ideas. the prodigal tech bro is one example. there’s a whole industry of academics and journalists who serve in this role too.

The Prodigal Techbro

Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good…

conversationalist.org

Increasingly I think a major function of “masculinity” IS its crisis — a vehicle for the dominant & dominating group to justify focusing their social attentions primarily on themselves

One fascinating thing about the most self-serious newspaper in America with its staff of the winning journalistic meritocrats is that it routinely, institutionally publishes completely made-up bullshit speculation about pure abstractions, based on zero reporting, written as if it were plain facts

ProPublica spoke to about 150 people who had lived in homeless encampments when cities cleared them out in “sweeps.” We distributed notecards so people could tell us about the toll in their own words. ➡️ This is what they wrote: projects.propublica.org/impact-of-ho...

Just finished this awesome essay from @citap.bsky.social postdoc Jaylexia Clark on @ssrc.org. On "racialized emotions" in gig work like Uber and DoorDash, and how these apps surveil and punish Black gig workers' personal and emotional expression.

the parent of a trans kid in missouri begged the new york times not to use an audio clip in The Protocol podcast of a verbal confrontation with professional transphobe Jamie Reed out of fear of safety for her kid and NYT management refused her request.

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem.com · last yr.

Always curious to see who gets to be an anonymous source!

I don't think NYT should know peace until they divulge the full chain of decision making that led to the laundering of Nazi propaganda against a leading anti-fascist politician the same day fascism was codified in Congress.

Really excited to draw attention to this dissertation by Melinda McClure Haughey (@melm.cc‬). Melinda's research explored collaborative infrastructure for supporting the "sensemaking" work of journalists working on high-stakes, fast-paced & often data-driven beats. www.melm.cc/research/dis...