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Reposted by Nathalie Van Raemdonck

Daphne Keller

@daphnek.bsky.social

I haven't read the leaked 183-page Commission Decision against X, but I am reading the House Judiciary Committee's X posts about it and the worst stuff they could find is... preposterously weak.

judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

x.com/JudiciaryGOP...

x.com

January 29, 2026 at 3:06 PM

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@NewsJennifer (Jennifer Schulze)

@newsjennifer.bsky.social

A reminder that one of the new owners of TikTok is Larry Ellison who also now owns CBS News…

Chris Murphy @chrismurphyct.bsky.social · 4d

I know it's hard to track all the threats to democracy out there right now, but this is at the top of the list.

January 26, 2026 at 4:16 AM

Nathalie Van Raemdonck

@nathalievanraemdonck.com

3am, best time to change my bio here from "PhD student" to "freshly minted PhD" since that still hadn't properly sunk in... I may be slightly burnt-out from having worked on projects all the way through and after my defense to financially survive 🥹 but a few days in the mountains definitely helped!

Picture in the mountains of Gran Canaria. in the picture you see the back of a woman's head (which is me). I'm sitting on a balcony, looking out at a vast panorama of mountains, one of them has a large rock on top which sticks out above all other mountains, clouds are hanging over the mountains.

January 24, 2026 at 12:16 AM

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Mike Masnick

@mmasnick.bsky.social

To that end, I've teamed up with my friend @j12t.org, who runs @fediforum.org to put together an online "un-workshop" to explore different ways of growing the open social web! fediforum.org/2026-03-grow...

FediForum | Growing the Open Social Web:<br>An Online FediForum Un-Workshop

fediforum.org

January 23, 2026 at 6:55 PM

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Reece

@thiccreese.bsky.social

BREAKING: Now that TikTok is under US-based ownership, the social media app potentially collects more detailed information about its users, including precise location data.

My latest for @wired.com:

www.wired.com/story/tiktok...

TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes

According to its new privacy policy, TikTok now collects more data on its users, including their precise location, after majority ownership officially switched to a group based in the US.

www.wired.com

January 23, 2026 at 9:48 PM

Reposted by Nathalie Van Raemdonck

patak

@patak.dev

Good read. A submission to the European Commission's call for evidence on Towards European Open Digital Ecosystems (importance of OSS for EU tech sovereignty, security and competitiveness). It ends with:
> If you work in OSS, consider adding your voice. The feedback period ends February 3, 2026.

patak @patak.dev · 8d

> When governments buy Open Source services, the money rarely reaches the people who actually build and maintain it. Procurement rules favor large system integrators, not the maintainers of the software itself.

Funding Open Source for Digital Sovereignty

Open Source alone won't deliver digital sovereignty. Europe must fix procurement and fund those who actually build it.

dri.es

January 21, 2026 at 5:30 PM

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Robin Berjon

@robin.berjon.com

It's also *deliberately* disingenuous because we did explain AT and Eurosky at great length to their primary funder.

If I were launching a social media about truth and verification I'd, like, try not to lie but that's just me.

Anyway, some of us have work to do.

Eli Mallon @iame.li · 8d

ATProto/ActivityPub rivalry notwithstanding, omfg if I were Mastodon today I'd be so angry at this

January 21, 2026 at 5:33 PM

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Ethan Zuckerman

@ethanz.bsky.social

Why do tech billionaires want server farms in orbit? So that they don't have to deal with communities trying to defend their energy grids, water supplies and well being: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/techno...

Why tech billionaires dream of servers in the sky

Behind the hopes for artificial general intelligence is the desire for a world without obligations to governments, workers or fellow citizens

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk

January 20, 2026 at 3:50 PM

Reposted by Nathalie Van Raemdonck

noyb

@noyb.eu

📃🚌 We have just published version 2.0 of our report on the #DigitalOmnibus, now including recommendations for EU legislators on each of the most important articles, including whether the proposed changes should be rejected or retained.

Read more here 👉 noyb.eu/en/digital-o...

Digital Omnibus Report V2: Analysis of Select GDPR and ePrivacy Proposals by the Commission

Version 2 of our report includes specific recommendations for the EU legislator on each of the most important articles, including on whether to reject or maintain proposed changes

noyb.eu

January 20, 2026 at 2:16 PM

Nathalie Van Raemdonck

@nathalievanraemdonck.com

This whole Greenland situation is truly insane, but I made a bet with a friend almost exactly one year ago that Trump would really try to take Greenland, and the prospect of my friend having to make a speech in a full beerhall that he was ignorant about Trump's insanity somehow helps me cope?

Joni Askola @joniaskola.bsky.social · 12d

Trump is basically putting tariffs on Denmark and its allies for deploying troops on Danish territory

January 20, 2026 at 5:50 PM

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Axel Bruns

@snurb.info

Can't hit the repost button often enough on that one.

Great takedown of his _Anxious Generation_ airport book in none other than Nature, BTW:
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 16d

Banning social media for kids may be good or bad but that guy is a comically obvious bullshit artist with entire books full of trite lessons extrapolated from anecdotes that are themselves barely half-true.

January 14, 2026 at 11:14 AM

Reposted by Nathalie Van Raemdonck

Jeff Hamilton

@jeffhamilton.bsky.social

German bundestag all getting verified today

screenshot of the verified account tracker showing a bunch of German politicians getting verified

January 11, 2026 at 4:05 AM

Nathalie Van Raemdonck

@nathalievanraemdonck.com

Belgium will participate in Eurovision.
So disappointing. @rtbf.be fails to see that its platform is being weaponized by the state of Israel to maintain the impression that the country holds a large support for its genocide and occupation by the European population. www.rtbf.be/article/euro...

Eurovision : la RTBF a tranché et elle participera - RTBF Actus

La Belgique participera donc au concours de l’Eurovision. Une décision attendue puisque, pour rappel, il revenait à...

www.rtbf.be

December 5, 2025 at 12:27 PM

Reposted by Nathalie Van Raemdonck

Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher, PhD

@mbonsma.bsky.social

This explains something that has always mystified me about drivers who rail against bike lanes and transit. Why WOULDN'T you want people to have options not to drive? It would make your own driving better! But they don't just want good traffic, they want to reinforce the NORM of driving

Brian Hughes @bmhughes.bsky.social · Dec 1

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

December 1, 2025 at 1:04 PM

Reposted by Nathalie Van Raemdonck

Boris

@bmann.ca

HELP WANTED: We need a remote / hybrid experience lead for #ATmosphereConf

Leave a comment in the forum and/or DM me discourse.atprotocol.community/t/atmosphere...

FAQ entry discourse.atprotocol.community/t/atmosphere...

November 27, 2025 at 6:43 PM

Reposted by Nathalie Van Raemdonck

Carl T. Bergstrom

@carlbergstrom.com

And now AI slop is taking a serious bite out of SocArXiv.

Thread:

SocArXiv @socarxiv.bsky.social · Nov 27

In light of record submission rates and a large volume of AI-generated slop, SocArXiv recently implemented a policy requiring ORCIDs linked in the OSF profile of submitting authors, and narrowing our focus to social science subjects. Today we are taking two more steps:
/1

November 27, 2025 at 7:28 PM

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Marcus Bösch

@boesch.bsky.social

Citarella noted that he’s been warning, for more than half a decade, that too many people remain under the mistaken impression that “what happens on the internet isn’t real.” www.newyorker.com/culture/podc...

The Leftist Podcaster Who Studies Online Radicalization

Joshua Citarella sees his YouTube show “Doomscroll” as a “tactical media experiment” to funnel young internet users toward esoteric left-wing ideas.

www.newyorker.com

November 27, 2025 at 9:59 PM

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Nico Mara-McKay 🦇 (they/iel)

@nicomaramckay.com

tl;dr: Bluesky began with genuine promise: a new social media platform where users could feel safer, but inconsistent moderation quickly eroded trust.

When systemically marginalized users pushed back, Bluesky’s leadership minimized concerns and began to target them for bans.

Bluesky’s CEO meltdown: How leadership continues to fail its most marginalized users

tl;dr: Bluesky began with genuine promise: a new social media platform where systemically marginalized users could feel safer, but…

plutopsyche.medium.com

October 6, 2025 at 4:54 PM

Nathalie Van Raemdonck

@nathalievanraemdonck.com

These companies truly belong in hell.... internal documents showed META calculated that regulatory fines would be smaller than revenue from scam ads, so they just... keep running them at a higher price. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show

Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, and it internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day, company documents show.

www.reuters.com

November 20, 2025 at 3:10 PM

Reposted by Nathalie Van Raemdonck

Jason Koebler

@jasonkoebler.bsky.social

This is one of the worst, most horrifying exposures we have ever seen. It is hard to overstate how bad the things that people are using tools like for are, and it's insane to pretend like these tools are anything other than nonconsensual porn machines

www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

Massive Leak Shows Erotic Chatbot Users Turned Women’s Yearbook Pictures Into AI Porn

Chatbot roleplay and image generator platform SecretDesires.ai left cloud storage containers of nearly two million of images and videos exposed, including photos and full names of women from social me...

www.404media.co

November 19, 2025 at 5:11 PM

Reposted by Nathalie Van Raemdonck

fucking bitch

@scriban.bsky.social

When you recreate Twitter, you shouldn't be surprised that you've recreated Twitter.

Boggles my mind that Bluesky's leadership seems to have done very little forward thinking about these issues.

Bluesky announces moderation changes focused on better tracking, improved transparency — TechCrunch

Bluesky is making moderation changes, including the addition of new reporting categories, strikes, and more clarity when communicating with users about violations.

apple.news

November 19, 2025 at 6:46 PM

Nathalie Van Raemdonck

@nathalievanraemdonck.com

I became a Doctor yesterday 🥳 presented my thesis "What Others afford: sociotechnical shaping of normative processes on social media platforms". In it I describe how the way we all shape each other's behavior on social media is shaped by the architectures of the digital environments we inhabit.

Picture of me in front of my thesis cover with the title

November 14, 2025 at 1:55 PM

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Brendan Nyhan

@brendannyhan.bsky.social

A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?

Mark A. Hanson @hansonmark.bsky.social · Nov 11

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below.

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time.

1. The four-fold drain

1.2 Time
The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce,
with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure
1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material
has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs,
grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for
profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time.
The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million
unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of
peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting
widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the
authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many
review demands.
Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of
scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in
‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow
progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to
volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier,
local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with
limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging
with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks
intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below:

1. The four-fold drain
1.1 Money
Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for
whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who
created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis,
which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024
alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit
margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher
(Elsevier) always over 37%.
Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most
consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial
difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor &
Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American
researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The
Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3
billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised
scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers
first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour
resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

November 12, 2025 at 1:58 PM

Reposted by Nathalie Van Raemdonck

rasmuskleis.bsky.social

@rasmuskleis.bsky.social

"Conversations about “internet sovereignty” should not mistakenly assume that the exercise of sovereign state power over corporations will necessarily translate into greater agency for its people", @prateekwaghre.com writes www.techpolicy.press/indias-searc...