At the University of Vermont for IC2S2, where I will co-host a tutorial on detecting influence campaigns on social media this afternoon. Say hi if you are here! ic2s2-2026.org/program/

Breaking: A federal court has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from enforcing an immigration policy targeting noncitizen researchers, advocates, fact-checkers, and trust and safety workers based on their work. knightcolumbia.org/content/fede...

Federal Court Suspends Trump Immigration Policy Targeting Technology Researchers

knightcolumbia.org

Syllabus fodder! Our book is out NOW and open access for 2 weeks. Download it and take your pick of any of my FIVE amazing coauthors to lecture in your comparative politics, American politics, social movement, research methods, or digital politics syllabus. doi.org/10.1017/9781...

Protests and Radicalization in the Digital Age

Cambridge Core - Political Sociology - Protests and Radicalization in the Digital Age

doi.org

ArXiV has a new LLM policy (Screenshots with alt text so you don’t have to click through to the other place and see all the stupid responses)

I like this. If the paper contains hallucinated references, how can we trust anything else in it? By the way, I'll present our experience developing and using the hallucinator tool next week at MetaCrisp (co-located with IEEE S&P)! 📄 seclab.bu.edu/people/gianl... 💾 github.com/gianlucasb/h...

anil oza@aniloza.bsky.social · 3mo ago

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

My university administrators censored a student who put “environmental justice” and “communities disproportionately affected by climate change” on an Earth Day flyer. I really have no words to express my anger and disappointment anymore

In rare move, University of Utah faculty say school leaders should apologize to student over Earth Day flyers

The student was told to remove phrases including “environmental justice” from the flyers.

sltrib.com

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

Gptzero thinks that the ACM copyright block is written by AI...

a cartoon of a chef with a needle in his mouth is playing at 4:32

Alt: chef's kiss

media.tenor.com

🚨 NSF is already quietly eliminating the SBE Directorate, despite Congress’ mandate that NSF support the behavioral & social sciences. Steps to counter this are in motion. If you - have an SBE proposal under review - serve on an SBE grant panel You can help! Fill out this form: shorturl.at/xuKw2

Boston University’s student paper, The Daily Free Press, reports about the multiplication of pride flags on campus following the administration’s attempted crackdown on free speech.

‘The people have spoken’: Pride flags multiply as BU students, staff protest against signage policy

Boston University community members protested against BU’s administration by placing pride and other flags in windows across campus after the University removed several over spring break and later ins...

dailyfreepress.com

If you are interested in doing high-impact, public-facing research ... Join Our Research Team! We are hiring a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. socialmedialab.ca/2026/03/04/p... #PhDSky #AcademicSky #comsky

Join Our Research Team! @SMLabTO is Hiring a Postdoctoral Research Fellow - Social Media Lab

The Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) invites applications for a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. The successful candidate will join a vibrant and interdisciplinary research lab l...

socialmedialab.ca

This Fall, I’m joining the University of Georgia as an Assistant Professor! I want to push on the fundamentals of software reverse engineering, from decompilation to how humans actually understand code. I’m looking for PhD students, collaborators, and sponsors. More below.

The US and Canada go to Daylight Savings Time tomorrow morning.

Our paper "Loki: Proactively discovering online scams by mining toxic search queries" won a Distinguished Paper Award at NDSS 2026! 📜 arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12181

Together with @mrjimmyblack.com (and Claude) we developed a tool that helps detecting hallucinated references in academic papers! This evolved from a simple python script into a full system written in Rust to quickly go through thousands of citations. Check it out! github.com/gianlucasb/h...

Together with @mrjimmyblack.com (and Claude) we developed a tool that helps detecting hallucinated references in academic papers! This evolved from a simple python script into a full system written in Rust to quickly go through thousands of citations. Check it out! github.com/gianlucasb/h...

“If America’s university presidents believe that their foremost responsibility is simply to keep their institutions operational — collecting tuition and protecting endowments — they are mistaken… presidents and chancellors are stewards of intellectual freedom and democratic norms.”

Jameel Jaffer@jameeljaffer.bsky.social · 6mo ago

"Appeasement is being coordinated while resistance is not" is exactly right. (This op-ed from Arne Duncan and David Pressman is excellent; I hope university leaders will read it.) www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

💥The year starts with great news:💥 🍾Àlex' paper accepted at USENIX Sec🎉 He demonstrates how suppression (and: sampling as one special case) may amplify privacy but yields disproportionate utility loss. It's been hard work: 🚀per aspera ad astra🌟 Congrats, we're proud! arxiv.org/abs/2601.05180

The way I interpret this, is that this is finally the year of Linux on the desktop

Mark Chadbourn@chadbourn.bsky.social · 6mo ago

There are many serious governments in the world. The US is not one of them. (There are no penguins in Greenland.)

🚨 New working paper 🚨 What happens when you add money + competition to generative AI creation? On Civitai—a prominent platform for gen-AI content/tools w. millions of users—you get a growing marketplace for NSFW requests and a nontrivial stream of deepfakes. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2601.09117 🧪

Universities, companies, and government agencies that continue to operate on X, now that this is clearly documented (majority of content included sexualized images of women and children) are actively supporting "industrial-scale abuse." Paid subscribers can still do this.

kate conger@kateconger.com · 7mo ago

We set out to determine how many images of women and girls Grok created during its nudifying spree. What we found was “industrial-scale abuse,” experts said. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

Happy start of the semester!

a cartoon dog is sitting at a table with a cup of coffee in front of a fire with the words this is fine .

Alt: a cartoon dog is sitting at a table with a cup of coffee in front of a fire with the words this is fine .

media.tenor.com

1/ Thoughts on the state of federal higher ed policy: Showing the limits of Trump’s power, he asked Congress to gut research funding, cut access programs, and end support for MSIs. Congress said no. But … the government will need to stay open and Trump will have to approve the funding packages.

Congress Proposes Increasing NIH Budget, Maintaining ED

Appropriators have released legislation that wouldn’t defund Education Department programs or slash the National Institutes of Health budget. And it would prohibit the federal government from capping ...

insidehighered.com

⏰ Less than two weeks left to apply! @isi.it & CRT Foundation offer 10 one-year scholarships in data science & AI, applied to: 🩺 public health · 🌍 humanitarian response · 🏙️ urban development · ♻️ sustainability 📅 Deadline: Feb 2, 2026 🔗 Details here: sites.google.com/view/lagrang...

Lagrange Fellowship Call

The Lagrange Project started in 2003 and it is regarded as one of the pioneering and most innovative European projects on complex systems science and data science. It is promoted and funded by Fondazi...

sites.google.com

Senior academic roles in Cyber Security at De Montfort University Leicester (ACE-CSE Gold; 20+ academics in cyber; great facilities; research links with AI and with social responsibility), professor and associate professor. Closing 18 Jan.

Eerke Boiten@eerkeboiten.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Professor careers.dmu.ac.uk/job/Professo... and Associate Professor careers.dmu.ac.uk/job/Associat... roles available at De Montfort University. Closing 18 January. Contact me (eerke.boiten@dmu.ac.uk) to discuss. Prof interviews 1 April.

Folks, she brought a whole plate of spaghetti to the broadcast center to do her headshot. She then houses that spaghetti. Mattia sips on an espresso during his. Truly the heroes we need during these times.

Ken Childs@thekenchilds.com · 7mo ago

Alessandra Fumagalli with a tough start, likely some wind there. Hit into 8, and this is a tough run for her today, she's had a really great season. She and Mattia Gaspari are two of the more fun people on tour. They also have amazing headshots for the broadcast Fumagalli is into 16th

My daily audience while writing grant proposals

The fun thing about watching the movie 2001 in 2025 is you realize HAL is just an LLM and so *obviously* it’s going to murder its crewmembers every few flights due to malformed JSON.

2025 was a tough year, but we are still here. To all academics out there, may 2026 be a great year! 🎉

a man singing into a microphone with the words but i get up again above him

Alt: a man singing into a microphone with the words "but i get up again" above him

media.tenor.com