Musk & Starlink are circumventing the Iranian govt's internet shutdown. Given Trump's vocal support for Iranian protesters, it's hard to imagine they are operating without tacit US approval. After similar involvement in Russia & Ukraine, this brand of state-platform intervention is here to stay.

Governments are no strangers to opacity. But it's worth noting that the merging of platforms and the U.S. govt is playing out not only through the sharing of data and tech but also the black-boxing of policy and decision-making, as the Trump regime sheds Biden-era standards on the use of AI.

Yet another knot of entanglement in the state-platform apparatus, as former Trump adviser Dina McCormick -- who pushed for AI development in her previous role at Meta -- is made president and vice chairman of Meta.

Just a few things that jumped out at me as "contrary to the interests of the United States" according to the Trump regime:

- combating use of children and sexual assault in armed conflict
- climate change and renewable energy
- empowerment of women
- Africa
- peacebuilding
- rule of law
- democracy

Are tech companies simply incapable of true innovation? When asked to conform to the barest minimum of protection of rights and society, they seem unable to meet the challenge. The truth is, they're at least capable of doing better -- only perhaps not these iterations, nor these current leaders.

It's not a surprise that differences between Europe, the US, and China are being problematized as "Europe regulates too much." It couldn't possibly be that unchecked private power has hoovered up wealth and legislative affordances at the expense of deteriorating populaces and infrastructures.

The removal of ICE-tracking apps from Apple and Google stores because they threaten "vulnerable groups" (ICE) is concerning, not only for the selective application of policy features intended to help those whom society typically disadvantages, like elderly, children, poor, and racial minorities.

New: Google has chosen a side in Trump's mass deportation campaign. Google is hosting a CBP facial recognition app to hunt immigrants; no indication Google will remove. At same time Google takes down apps for reporting ICE sightings

“Big tech has made their choice”

www.404media.co/google-has-c...

Our position statement rejecting the use of GenAI for reflexive qualitative research can be found here

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

This is already happening in research to an alarming degree: researchers, for various reasons, using gen AI to interpret results and write up studies, forcing assistants and coauthors to screen and correct "their" work or passing that labor debt to future researchers encountering their studies.

Publicly-funded research and data continue to be deleted. What steps can we as researchers take to effectively communicate the findings, significance, and veracity of our research as datasets and reports are cut out from under us? As if effective communication was not already a challenge.

The professor has been fired and senior administrators removed from their post. No mention of this in the New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic or other outlets who drove the campus speech moral panic.

Paper alert: in one or our latest apers, #AndrewWirzburger writes about #reviewbombing on the game #platform #Steam, arguing that review bombing serves as a political tool while being problematized by Steam as social misconduct. Read more at journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...