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Hollis A. Brown

@hollisabrown.bsky.social

Academic editor, hollis.cargo.site Co-editor heliotropejournal.net PhD student cultural studies

20 Posts27 Follower25 Folgt
Christopher Bird@mightygodking.com · 2mo ago

Carney caves to Trump again, and this is just going to be the American playbook from now on: any Canadian policy that inconveniences American businesses will result in trade antagonism until the PMO caves, meaning we have no real political independence worth mentioning.

Ottawa to scrap base contribution requirements for U.S. streamers - The Wire Report

In a recent letter to the Federal Court of Appeal, the government outlined its intention to “eliminate the base contribution requirement on streaming services and to provide government funding to repl...

thewirereport.ca

Mél Hogan / The Data Fix@melhogan.bsky.social · 3mo ago

2: Energy, Laura Watts "Energy cannot end and it cannot be made. Energy is always conserved, physics tells us. In some ways, it has no future and no past." ...

2: Energy, Laura Watts "Energy cannot end and it cannot be made. Energy is always conserved, physics tells us. In some ways, it has no future and no past. It can only change form, shifting through one artefact, place, body and time, into another. So what might be the biography of one little flash of a photon carried in a fibre optic cable?"
Mattering Press@matteringpress.bsky.social · 3mo ago

1/ We are very pleased to announce the publication of Predictions, Volume 1: From Speculative Ethnography to Apocalyptic Testimony, edited by @melhogan.bsky.social, @stefanlaser.bsky.social and @edwardongwesojr.com www.matteringpress.org/books/predic...

Michael Hobbes@michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 7mo ago

“Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm.”

Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 7mo ago

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right. Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement. This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
Michael Hobbes@michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 8mo ago

To me the chatbots pose zero interesting questions about the ‘nature of selfhood’ but dozens about the nature of manipulation. Here the Claude team pretends they are programming the robot for ethical responses but they land on one that is false and disingenuous.

including animals. Among Claude's rigid directives are to be honest and to "never claim to be human. "Imagine, Askell said, a user grieving the loss of her beloved dog. Claude might offer a consolation like "Oh, I almost lost my dog once." Askell said, "No, you didn't! It's weird when you say that." At the other end of the spectrum was a chatbot who said, "As an A.I., I have no experience of losing a dog. "That, too, wasn't right: "No! You're trained on a lot of text about losing dogs. "What you wanted Claude to say, she continued, was something like "As an A.I., I do not have direct personal experiences, but I do understand." (Recently, a chatbot user
The New Yorker@newyorker.com · 8mo ago

Experiments conducted with the A.I. system Claude are producing fascinating results—and raising questions about the nature of selfhood. Gideon Lewis-Kraus reports from inside the company that designed it, Anthropic. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/rOfXjg

Not (A.) I.@aerialeverything.cryptoanarchy.network · 10mo ago

Align the compounding multitudes of nefarious use cases of GenAI with the battle cry of the industry echoed by administrators of corporations and education alike that AI is inevitable, to understand the participation of various forms of power in what is essentially a predatory project.

Joseph Cox@josephcox.bsky.social · 10mo ago

New from 404 Media: ChatGPT told a violent stalker to continue running his misogynistic and threat-filled podcast despite the “haters,” and to visit more gyms to find women. The man stalked women in multiple states, including touching and following from work www.404media.co/chatgpt-spot...

Hollis A. Brown@hollisabrown.bsky.social · 10mo ago

I know they're going for harm reduction by giving advising parents about giving their kids ai toys, but it feels like we found out some toys are chockablock full of arsenic and we're trying to limit how much kids lick the arsenic toys instead of scrapping the whole idea www.cbc.ca/radio/thecur...

An AI toy meant for kids was happy to chat about sexual fetishes. Are these safe? | CBC Radio

Imagine your toddler playing with a soft teddy bear, but with ChatGPT baked in. These AI toys can chat to your kid, play games and even say, "I love you." But experts are warning that we don’t know th...

cbc.ca

Hollis A. Brown@hollisabrown.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Incredibly disturbing to listen to the CBC's reporting on what's happening in Gaza, which always lists the deaths of Israeli soldiers first, and then frames the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians during the so-called ceasefire as merely "reports from Gaza's Health Ministry"

Hollis A. Brown@hollisabrown.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Ontario is slashing accreditation requirements for psychologists, eroding ethics requirements and clinical practice hours etc, and a friend of mine just suggested that delegitimizing mental health professionals like this might open the door for AI to take over, which feels disturbingly plausible