@naomishiffman
data & implementation at the Oversight Board | formerly academics + researchers at CrowdTangle / Meta | fellow at the Integrity Institute and Atlantic Council’s DFRLab | advisor at Connect Humanity, a fund for digital equity
The real story is that foreign govts try to "interfere" all the time. In 2020 and 2024 we had mechanisms to catch them, call them out, & mitigate damage. Now, those mechanims are gone & the Trump admin would prefer to exploit "foreign interference" to justify a federal take-over of elections.
imagine having one of the best tech reporters of all time on your staff and then choosing to lay them off
We just shipped image classification on Zentropi!
You can write your criteria in plain English, then analyze images against them at scale using cope-b-12b, a new multimodal model we trained
Critically, @samidh.bsky.social used it to make a cat detector: blog.zentropi.ai/zentropi-now-labels-images/
Reminder: our Techdirt fundraiser is going on right now. Unlike some, we won't pull, or even water down, the stories we write about CECOT.
In case you missed this earlier this week, our team put out a report documenting our approach to "rapid research" during elections, crises, & other breaking news events. It demonstrates a role for university researchers — relying on contextual and methodological expertise — to act as "sensemakers".
My second post about researchers’ rights to scrape data under DSA Article 40.12 is up! This is dense with legal arguments for researchers to use if they get sued. Or to show their lawyers before that.
www.techpolicy.press/how-the-mean...
verfassungsblog.de/dsa-fine-x-r...
A wrong Grok post making up a white guy who stopped the Australian mass shooting.
BBC 'Hero' who wrestled gun from Bondi shooter named as Ahmed al Ahmed Emily Atkinson Sun, December 14, 2025 at 1:06 p.m. CST 2 min read A "hero" bystander who was filmed wrestling a gun from one of the Bondi Beach attackers has been named as 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed. Video verified by the BBC showed Mr Ahmed run at the gunman and seize his weapon, before turning the gun round on him, forcing his retreat. Mr Ahmed, a fruit shop owner and father of two, remains in hospital, where he has undergone surgery for bullet wounds to his arm and hand, his family told 7News Australia.
This is fucking grim. Somebody invented a white guy, an "IT professional" named Edward Crabtree, who stopped the Bondi shooting and spread it all over the internet, which was picked up by AI agents and slop aggregation sites.
The real hero is a fruit stand owner named Ahmed el Ahmed.
And perhaps worse than their inherent weaknesses, these tools are their outputs are being actively manipulated by influence operations that exploit ambiguous events for political gain. bsky.app/profile/benc...
Gen AI tools are not good sources for information during rapidly unfolding, novel events. Words associations aren't helpful for discovering ground truth. These tools are more likely to echo and contribute to the inherent uncertainty and ambiguity of crisis events.
Absolutely chilling read (as a disinformation researcher):
The systematic crackdown on disinformation scholars, newsrooms, factcheckers and NGO’s. All in the name of so-called free speech.
By @jamesrball.com @theverge.com
www.theverge.com/features/839...
Don't let anyone tell you that the Commission's DSA enforcement against X is about speech or censorship.
That would, indeed, be interesting. But this is just the EU enforcing some normal, boring laws that would get bipartisan support in the U.S. (I bet similar bills *have* had that support.) 1/
Hey all,
The Onion is accepting applicants for our writing, video and graphics fellowships.
Fellowships last six months, pay well, and provide full benefits.
You can apply at theonion.com/fellowship.
Two years into Europe’s Digital Services Act, data access for researchers is on life support, write Mark Scott and LK Seiling. Yet an alternative future is possible—one built on openness, interoperability, and platforms that treat data access as a civic and scientific good.
Not sure about everyone else, but I’m encouraged today (elated?) that we learned last night that we can beat candidates/parties of bullshit, AI slop, corruption, and authoritarianism without emulating them and without tacking towards a false center between us and them.
Just thinking back to how I was feeling a year ago.
This is better.
Normal people are just sick to fucking death of the cruelty and meanness
Good things are possible and we don’t have to settle.
mamdani is human. he'll fuck up and fail, especially with a hostile press and the giant mess that is nyc's politics. but today is a great day for the brave women who told what cuomo did, and for those of us who care that it should matter. that power shouldn't go to those who hurt the poweless.
Who can take advantage of the DSA’s protections for researchers? Ultimately, protecting legitimate online research overall will require navigating legal barriers beyond the DSA, writes Daphne Keller.
buff.ly/fdUwxOH
If I were running the DNC, there would be Democratic Party sponsored food relief banks across the country right now that specifically welcomed anyone regardless of party affiliation.
Along with the food, there could be voter registration and links to runforsomething.net
GreenEarth is creating open source AI-driven recommender infrastructure for BlueSky. Type a prompt, see your feed change. We are here for the users, the builders, the dreamers. Join us.
greenearthsocial.substack.com/p/introducin...
🖥️ 📈 The SMM market thrives on secrecy. Some tools have privileged access, most scrape, few disclose. We need standards that put the public interest first. Read the report by @cmilez.bsky.social, @brandonsilverman.bsky.social, and @annalenhart.bsky.social
at iddp.gwu.edu/dashboard-data-acquisition
"Because the wolfhound century is on us now, and we have to choose how to face it."
I have never seen so many public servants protest the mismanagement of a government. Trumpists will point to this as proof of the deep state, but the reality is that these are professionals who are desperately trying to get the public to understand how bad things are.
New report out from IDDP on using pervasive data ethically in research — I was grateful for the opportunity to contribute. Congrats to @annalenhart.bsky.social!
🚨 Workshop update 🚨
We're excited to announce that @naomishiffman.bsky.social will be joining to share her experience with designing and passing implementable tech policy.
Our half-day agenda is up (ci-x-tp.github.io) and early registration for @acmci.bsky.social ends on 23 June — don’t miss out!
A really excellent, clear guide with concrete scenarios and potential alternatives to AI.
This new report from @brandonsilverman.bsky.social and @naomishiffman.bsky.social is great. It documents numerous concrete cases in which platform transparency (or scraping-based research) has had significant real-world impact.
iddp.gwu.edu/sites/g/file...
"Platform transparency has had significant positive impact for public awareness and civic engagement, academic understanding [of] platforms, government and regulatory action [and for] platforms themselves" @naomishiffman.bsky.social & @brandonsilverman.bsky.social write iddp.gwu.edu/case-transpa...
New report out from @brandonsilverman.bsky.social and myself making the case for platform transparency and the ways it leads to real-world change— not only in the public sphere, but also for the platforms themselves. Check it out!