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Ryan J. Gallagher

@ryanjgallag.com

4.6K followers 970 following 440 posts

Applied scientist trying to make the internet a little better. PhD. Trust & safety, platform manipulation, networks, fingerstyle guitar. I use my hair to express myself. He/they

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · Nov 12

With more people migrating to Bluesky (and my general quietness since Twitter fell apart), I want to reintroduce myself!

I'm an applied scientist in online trust & safety. I specialize in detecting coordinated/harmful/deceptive networks, and bridging domain expertise with machine learning systems

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Laura Jedeed @laurajedeed.bsky.social · 11h

This video is everywhere because it's a hilarious visual refutation of Portland being on fire. You can't get a mass movement going without convincing the masses

so yes, this does do something actually

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Dallas Steele

@Cherrykickstart

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This literally does nothing. You are not beating fascism by dressing up in inflatable suits and dancing

Quote tweeting Claude Taylor @TrueFactsStated

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Portland is leading the way. This is how you (non violently) beat Fascism. Humor and ridicule are key.

Stillframe from a video of Portland protesters dancing in inflatable suits

9:17 AM 08 Oct 25 758K Views

13:01 09 Oct 25 32.6K Views

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11 Quotes

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Oliver Darcy @oliverdarcy.bsky.social · 9h

News: Bari Weiss just sent a memo to staffers at CBS News asking them to produce a memo explaining "how you spend your working hours—and ideally, what you've made (or are making) that you're most proud of."

One CBS News staffer puts it like this to me: "We just got Elon Musked."

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Mike Stabile @mikestabile.bsky.social · 1d

"Deceptive trade practices" is the latest end-run around the First Amendment. It's being used arbitrarily to target platforms that allow disfavored speech, by finding some statement or policy — either a TOS or interview — and then citing an example where it was violated.

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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 1d

New from 404 Media: the Discord hack is every users' worst nightmare. Yesterday the hackers started posting Discord users' selfies, identity documents, email addresses, phone numbers, more. I watched in real time. This is risk of tech storing ID for age verification
www.404media.co/the-discord-...

The Discord Hack is Every Users’ Worst Nightmare

A hack impacting Discord’s age verification process shows in stark terms the risk of tech companies collecting users’ ID documents. Now the hackers are posting peoples’ IDs and other sensitive informa...

www.404media.co

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 1d

I know it's all dust in the wind now but I thought Twitter was doing some really thoughtful work at the intersection of Reddit-like communities and live streaming that would have been fun for content creators and everyone else

Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 1d

Elon buying Twitter was obviously always about controlling information, but it was such an obvious lie that he was going to spark product innovation. I can't believe people (the board, investors) bought it

It's been 3 years and what new features are there? Hidden likes and a racist chat bot?

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Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 2d

I really really really liked The Oatmeal’s take on AI here theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

A cartoonist's review of AI art - The Oatmeal

This is a comic about AI art.

theoatmeal.com

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Chris Bail @chrisbail.bsky.social · 3d

New jobs for computational social scientists at UNC and USC: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307... amd uscjobs.sc.edu/postings/194...

Assistant Professor

This Assistant Professor position will teach graduate and undergraduate courses, conduct research in the field of Sociology, participate in departmental service, and mentor graduate students.

unc.peopleadmin.com

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Anne Bertucio @annebdh.bsky.social · 3d

Want to work on open source full time? The @roost.tools engineering team is starting to hatch! Come build OSS tools making a difference in Trust & Safety.

This is a fully remote role, though some schedule overlap with North American time zones is expected.

www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/43...

ROOST.tools hiring Staff Software Engineer in United States | LinkedIn

Posted 8:52:18 PM. About ROOSTROOST is a community effort to build scalable and resilient safety infrastructure for…See this and similar jobs on LinkedIn.

www.linkedin.com

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 3d

what could go wrong with talking about moderation on substack

Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 3d

Of course, people don't agree on what is "safe" and "fair" and that's why moderation is hard. But you can't solve a network-level problem with individual-level tools

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 3d

Moderation isn't simply about taking things down, it's also about building a collectively safe space. Telling someone they can just "label" (or hide/block) something they don't like won't address their concern that their community isn't safe

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 3d

Do I start a blog simply to write why "labelers" aren't enough?

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Col. Boozy Badger @boozybadger.lawyersandliquor.com · 3d

Dunno man, seems a little misleading to write an article about Trump describing activity in Portland and Chicago as “insurrection” with a 33 year old photo of a burning donut shop taken in the 1992 LA Riots (sans caption explaining that) as the header on all your posts about it.

The picture from
The article with a picture of an armed men standing in front of a burning donut shop. You must click through to read the caption “
Two National guardsmen stand guard outside a burning donut shop in Los Angeles on April 30, 1992.
The National Guard was called in to aid police during the second day of rioting in the city.”

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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 4d

This is the Libs of Tiktok problem that Yoel Roth wrote about and the problem of legal formalism in content moderation.

This isn't some new issue to moderation teams. It's a well-known problem.

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/cont...

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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 5d

The media trots out the "deplorable" comment from a decade ago to castigate the left. Once a week now Trump implies that the military should destroy democrats, and it is just how things are.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 5d

Trump to the Navy: "We have to take care of this little gnat that's on our shoulder called the Democrats."

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Grudgie the Whale @grudgie.bsky.social · 4d

Look. Invading our own country is about as straightforward a case as you can have for impeachment. The GOP abandoning the Constitution is kind of the only story there is and it gets no coverage.

Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 4d

Guys. I just had a crazy idea. What if the President DIDN’T deploy troops in American cities. Just a thought. Have we tried that before?

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 4d

for atproto devs and protocol watchers, I published an overview of the network moderation architecture.

it tries to cover all the mod actions possible for each service type. this design has been around a while, but not well documented.

this doc is not very polished, but could clarify some details

AT Moderation Architecture | bryan newbold

The AT network is becoming more heterogeneous in practice, with independent PDS hosts, apps, and alternative bsky AppViews establishing themselves. This means that more complex inter-service moderatio...

whtwnd.com

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 4d

a bunch of folks are wondering about how mod comms work for other PDS instances. this is also a problem for, eg, labelers trying to reply to appeals.

the plan is this proposal, which we have been making slow progress towards (it has been a very very busy 12 months for mod eng team)

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Thot Leedurr @docdre.distributedblackness.net · 6d

Wanna contribute to BlackSky? Here’s your chance:

https://opencollective.com/blacksky/contribute/backer-59760/checkout?interval=month&amount=7&name=&legalName=&email=

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 7d

The tech-centric solution to “everybody is always yelling at us” is “let’s make it so they can run their *own* platform”, with the idea that they can then say: If you don’t like it, go run your own service with rules you like better. That’s literally one of the design goals Bluesky was made for.

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 7d

"but Ryan the whole point of ATProto is that you can just do it, why don't you???"

because I work a full time job and I don't love coding enough to do it 24/7

Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 7d

I think Bluesky is building dated approaches to moderation and resolution, compared to how modern the other aspects of the protocol feel

It feels like they pull in the latest tech innovations for the protocol, but none of the latest cutting edge ideas for moderation and trust & safety governance

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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 7d

i actually prefer it when the mods actively hate the user base and vice versa, that’s how every great message board worked for years and i think we should give it a whirl

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 7d

There are a few challenges here, though. Building an ecosystem of alternate moderation systems requires third parties — both devs _and_ moderation experts — to trust in you all as both stewards of the infrastructure for that ecosystem *and* operators of the biggest/default instance of that system.

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 7d

I get that it's a different skill set than the engineering that's been needed to get things running to date, but I think that's more worthy than going down the ambiguous rabbit hole of "healthy discourse"

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