A new study finds that fact-checking often has limited coverage, arrives too late, and reaches too few people to keep up with political misinformation. Corrections can still provide useful information, but they often don't reach enough people in time to have their greatest impact.

Political Fact-Checking Efforts are Constrained by Deficiencies in Coverage, Speed, and Reach

Fact-checking has been promoted as a key method for combating political misinformation. Comparing the spread of election-related misinformation narratives along with their relevant political fact-c...

tandfonline.com

Can reading non-fiction books reduce partisan hostility? We tested 25 books using simulations and the winners are: “Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness” + “Facing the Fracture: How to Navigate the Challenges of Living in a Divided Nation”. www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/can-ai-hel...

Can AI Help Us Find the Books That Bridge Political Divides?

We used language models to screen 26 nonfiction books. They agreed on the broad winners, disagreed on the details, and helped us choose two finalists for a human trial.

powerofusnewsletter.com

I sometimes hear people express concern that bridging-based ranking will homogenize discussions, flattening minority perspectives. Many answers to this, but the first one is: not all minority perspectives are worth preserving. I'm sure you can think of a few. We need a criterion besides "minority."

It's surely just regurgitating from the many counterexamples to the Jacobian Conjecture that were in the training data

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · 2w ago

Well, the Jacobean Conjecture appears to have just been proven false by Fable.

I have high hopes for @mu.social as a proving ground for democratic social media, given ample support from the atmosphere community. With the help of civilized-discourse expert @jonathanwarden.com we can have Community Notes on atproto, starting with mu.

Mu for democracy

designing for social cohesion

notes.erlend.sh

big fan of this model of the human body

“Expect the unexpected.” I just realized that this is a declaration of entropy—the expected value of surprisal.

This is an interesting and well-thought-out proposal for a pro-social feature. Another kind of annotation to add context, like community notes. But not a fact check — a “community check” to help people see the disconnect between the vocal minority and actual community sentiment. @newpublic.org

Jay Van Bavel, PhD@jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 3mo ago

This website visualizes social media as a room with 100 people 3 people are producing most toxic content Most people assume 43 are producing toxic content, because these 3 are hyperactive and amplified by engagement based algorithms. The other 97 quiet voices disappear thenoisyroom.com

Age verification laws are based in magical thinking. Full stop. All legal considerations, privacy, and human rights concerns aside, there is simply no safe, reliable or practical way for social media companies to verify the age of every single user. Full stop. www.politico.eu/article/age-...

Resist ‘dangerous and socially unacceptable’ age checks for social media, scientists warn

Computer scientists are campaigning against the global march toward age checks online.

politico.eu

I am so underwater with work-wrangling and thought-wrestling so this is just bubbles rising from the deep, but: what I am excited about right now in the networks zone is that we have a real shot at a do-over on the social internet, which means we have a chance to make new and better mistakes.

As usual a careful, neutral, but honest take by Jonathan Stray. www.betterconflictbulletin.org/p/learning-f...

Learning from the WHCD Assassination Attempt

Look to alienation, not just partisanship, and beware inflated measures of support for violence - BCB #188

betterconflictbulletin.org

The morally right choice here depends on mutual expectations. If everyone agrees beforehand to press red there is no problem. If some people signal that they will press blue other people will follow in order to try to save them. People saying they will press blue puts others at risk…

Big Joel@bigjoel.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Just in case this happens, I want you to know that I will be choosing red. so guys think about people like me before you pick blue. Thank you, look out for yourselves out there

New paper from Jay J Van Bavel, Steve Rathje, and Raunak M. Pillai osf.io/preprints/ps... A small fraction of online actors now exerts outsized influence over what the public sees, believes, and argues about. We trace how social media influencers can turn fringe claims into viral narratives…

I am a big fan of Walter Lippmann, and I think the Verification, Deliberation, Accountability model that @drnataliemartin.bsky.social and @eliothiggins.bsky.social have developed here is a constructive way to democracy, polarization and public opinion today. skywriter.blue/@eliothiggin...

Realtime and search API for post embeddings! Just copy to your coding agent and it should be able to make sth out of it. Happy for any kind of feedback, especially if sth does not work. Weekend project and so on. Rate limits and physics apply. divepool.social/api/v1/openapi

Divepool API

Search Bluesky posts by meaning, cluster them by topic, and tap into a real-time stream.

divepool.social

Did "hate" go up on X/Twitter after they changed their content moderation rules post-Musk? What is "hate" anyway, and what data do we actually have? I've got all the charts and analysis I know you crave! New by me for @techpolicypress.bsky.social www.techpolicy.press/what-are-the...

the unfortunate thing about the ai conversation is one group will say "no AI, ever! all AI is bad, ALWAYS" and then the other group says "if you say ANYTHING bad about AI, you're just a dumb LUDDITE" and i just want us to use AI in a pro-social way that doesn't harm communities and the planet

Goodbye Vancouver! And the elevator at Gage Suites at UBC. I think the elevator track at the #ATmosphere conference is where I made the most interesting connections.

There is some interesting discussion in the replies to this post. I think @masnick.com com makes some good points here, but I don't agree that algorithms that just show you want you want to see are simple "conduits of speech". These innocuous-seeming algorithms have tremendous social consequences.

Mike Masnick@masnick.com · 4mo ago

It's okay to hate Meta and wish for its collapse and failure. But the two jury verdicts this week are not the vehicle for that. They're going to have widespread impact across the internet, and will do real damage to every other internet service.

Could social media make us less polarized instead of more? We tested 5 algorithms on 3 platforms with 10,000 people for 6 months during the 2024 election, and found that the answer is yes. 🧵

Come see my talk about bluenotes.social -- Community Notes for atproto -- at the Atmosphere conference in Vancouver next week! atmosphereconf.org/event/1AzdYWM

ATmosphereConf 2026

ATmosphereConf is the global atproto community conference. Join us in Vancouver, Canada, March 26th - 29th, 2026.

atmosphereconf.org

We are about to find if we are intelligent enough to create a computer program that is intelligent enough to create a computer program that’s more intelligent than we are.

Either ICE has started cruelly arresting beloved community members, or ICE is merely enforcing existing laws to remove murderers and rapists. Both of these are only half-right. Whatever side you’re on, you probably have something to learn. www.betterconflictbulletin.org/p/annoying-f...

You're Probably Wrong About The Deportations

We've switched from mostly arresting criminals to mostly not. Obama was deporting just as many. But interior enforcement has exploded - BCB #181

betterconflictbulletin.org

@bnewbold.net , @pfrazee.com, @alex.bsky.team check out this proposal for oEmbed support in other ATProto lexicons! It builds on lexicon publishers for web embeddings. Thoughts? Should I post this somewhere? #atproto

Jonathan Warden@jonathanwarden.com · 8mo ago

I've been thinking about how oEmbed could work for ATProto records. Currently, you can embed a Bluesky post on any website by passing the post's bsky.app. URL to the oEmbed service. It would be nice if you could also embed records from other ATProto lexicons. Here's a possible solution... (1/8)

I've been thinking about how oEmbed could work for ATProto records. Currently, you can embed a Bluesky post on any website by passing the post's bsky.app. URL to the oEmbed service. It would be nice if you could also embed records from other ATProto lexicons. Here's a possible solution... (1/8)

I bought my ticket to #ATmosphereConf - join me in Vancouver March 2026 atmosphereconf.org

ATmosphereConf 2026

ATmosphereConf is the global AT Protocol community conference Join us in Vancouver, BC, Canada, March 2026 at the UBC campus. Come early for two days of extended events, deep dives, and local activiti...

atmosphereconf.org

Would anyone be interested in an ATProto embeddings API service? I calculate it would cost maybe $3/day to produce embeddings for every post using OpenAI's text-embedding-3-small. But this cost could be shared, so an "embeddings firehouse" could cost each customer just pennies a day.

Another takeaway from @eurosky.social live conference in Berlin: @rose.bsky.team says Bluesky does not hate advertising.

@sherifea.com and @seabass.bsky.social just demoed EuroSky’s moderation infrastructure. But I'm wondering: how much of this work must be replicated? Bluesky must comply with the DSA for EU users, and they already run a labeler for the posts distributed through the Bluesky app... #euroskylive

@eurosky.social conference in Berlin just finished. One of the main themes seemed to be European independence from US big tech companies. Including from Bluesky. #euroskylive