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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis
@mantzarlis.com
3.2K followers 1.2K following 1.6K posts
Tech, facts, and carbonara. mantzarlis.com
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 7d
New on @indicator.media: Almost all major platforms have promised to label AI content on their services, but it can be hard to keep track of who said they do what and how.

I collected information for 8 different platforms in one nifty table, that we will keep updating.
The Indicator Guide to AI labels
We’ve collected in one place how and when major platforms label AI content
indicator.media
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 12h
Alexa, define "Quality Void":
mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 12h
"A group of suspected scammers in Brazil using Instagram ads featuring deepfakes of supermodel Gisele Bundchen and other celebrities appears to have made millions of dollars through online fraud, according to police investigators."
Brazilian scammers, raking in millions, used Gisele Bundchen deepfakes on Instagram ads
A group of suspected scammers in Brazil using Instagram ads featuring deepfakes of supermodel Gisele Bundchen and other celebrities appears to have made millions of dollars through online fraud, according to police investigators.
www.reuters.com
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 13h
The limited details in YouTube's blog post published today on "second chances" appears to suggest that Alex Jones' re-platforming is not likely. I hope I'm right.

blog.youtube/inside-youtu...
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 13h
This is the dumbest timeline.

An iOS app is advertising on Meta that it allegedly runs on Sora 2 and can be used to "turn any image into a hot video".
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 14h
kettle, pot, etc
News Corp Australia chair says social media platforms are ‘true monsters’ and ‘torment our children’
Michael Miller also says media must unite against second ‘big steal’ by tech companies seeking changes to copyright law to access content for free
www.theguardian.com
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Reposted by Alexios Mantzarlis
mmitchell.bsky.social
Margaret Mitchell @mmitchell.bsky.social · 16h
"Experimenter bias" refers to a mistake in scientific studies where the experimenter wants to see something, and so unconsciously designs protocols to prove what they want to see. RFK here provides an example, Let me explain what we might see based on this. 🧵
atrupar.com
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 17h
RFK Jr on Tylenol and autism: "It is not proof. We're doing the studies to make the proof."
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Reposted by Alexios Mantzarlis
junoryleejournalism.com
Juno Rylee Schultz @junoryleejournalism.com · 1d
David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)
SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems... SIMON: What? SHAPIRO: ...Or saying... SIMON: You imagine that? SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over. SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this. SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.
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Reposted by Alexios Mantzarlis
mjsdc.bsky.social
Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 19h
It is pretty galling that the Supreme Court spent four years telling Biden "you can't do that without Congress" then allowed Trump to seize a once-unthinkable amount of power from Congress within nine months and concentrate law-making authority almost entirely in the executive branch.
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 20h
As has been amply documented, AI is being used as a tool to harass and (attempt to) shut up women with opinions.

This image partially undressing Greta Thunberg that @facta.news debunked is just one recent example.

www.facta.news/antibufale/g...
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Reposted by Alexios Mantzarlis
alexmahadevan.com
Alex Mahadevan @alexmahadevan.com · 20h
If anything signals that we are truly watching the U.S. crumbling in real time, it’s an AI video of MLK promoting crypto on a fully AI slop platform. Fake, dying empire
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Reposted by Alexios Mantzarlis
tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy
Tom Stafford @tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 22h
New work on Community Notes from Zahra, Alexios and me! Read all about it in Alexios' newsletter

https://indicator.media/p/community-fact-checking-on-x-survived-elon-musk-it-may-not-survive-ai

#communitynotes #factchecking
Screenshot: fact checking on x survived elon musk, will it survive ai?
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 21h
Anyhoo -- today's edition is free to all, check it out: indicator.media/p/community-...
Community fact-checking on X survived Elon Musk. It may not survive AI.
A new working paper looks at the durability of Community Notes
indicator.media
mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 21h
This may become a long-term vulnerability for the platform as it onboards AI contributors whose notes could crowd out human notes and depress the share that get published on X even further. Already, most notes hang out in the "Needs More Ratings" purgatory.
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 21h
So, do users care about getting their notes considered 'helpful'?

Cautiously, I'd say yes:

Through a regression discontinuity analysis, we found that having your first note rated 'helpful' by the algorithm has a positive (5%) impact on going on to write a second note.
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 21h
Churn has been getting worse on the platform, but users are still sticking around.
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 21h
This is especially surprising given that only ~1 in 10 Community Notes are actually published on X after making it through the 'helpfulness' algorithm.
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 21h
What I've been obsessed to find out, though, is why ~30,000 unpaid volunteers contribute to cleaning up a private platform owned by a polarizing gajillionaire who has accused the feature of being “gamed by governments & legacy media.”
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 21h
Monthly active authors are below their 2024 peak. The top 1% of power users contributed almost a third of all helpful notes.
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 21h
In a new preprint with Tom Stafford and Zahra Arjmandi Lari, we tried to learn more about the users contributing to crowdsourced fact-checking program copied by all the major platforms.

arxiv.org/abs/2510.00650
Threats to the sustainability of Community Notes on X
Community Notes are emerging as an important option for content moderation. The Community Notes system pioneered by Twitter, now known as X, uses a bridging algorithm to identify user-generated contex...
arxiv.org
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 21h
Today on Indicator: Is the community behind X's Community Notes cooked?
Community fact-checking on X survived Elon Musk. It may not survive AI.
A new working paper looks at the durability of Community Notes
indicator.media
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Reposted by Alexios Mantzarlis
cornelltech.bsky.social
Cornell Tech @cornelltech.bsky.social · 1d
AI ads are mimicking news to sell legal services — without disclosing what’s real.

“This trend is not encouraging for the pursuit of truth in advertising,” says @mantzarlis.com, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative, in @latimes.com.

latimes.com/business/sto...
Is that a newscast or a sales pitch? New AI videos make it tough to tell
Artificial intelligence is now part of advertisers' arsenal, and some are using it to blur the line between newscast and sales pitch.
latimes.com
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 1d
oh hi! great paper!
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 1d
this is great theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 1d
full paper:
Fun Facts: The Impact of Joke Proximity on Encoding Facts from the Main Stories on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Drawing from Dynamic Human Centered Communication Systems Theory (DHCCST), this study examines how humor influences the acquisition of factual information from comedic news, using an experimental d...
www.tandfonline.com
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 1d
Fascinating study on Last Week Tonight and whether jokes help "embed" facts, as seen on the always interesting RQ1 newsletter rq1.substack.com/p/why-right-...
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