This is the biggest, toughest article I’ve done about so-called “AI psychosis.” It’s the story of a man who committed a horrific crime in his youth but served his time and against all odds found love and a new life—one that completely unraveled after he started talking to Google’s Gemini chatbot.

Okay, as someone who is writing his dissertation on #Discord, this is fascinating:

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/w...

1. Discord is really good for directing a specific activity in a large bounded group; it's a pattern of activity *broadly* different from the one-to-many networks of 2010's protests.

One of the smallest thing I hope comes from the 50501 protests is that folks doing network analysis of social movements stop calling everything "connective action".

Discord just hired Kantar to "help advertisers understand the true impact of their Quests campaigns"

Kantar has also done extensive laundering for the Tobacco industry over the years.

Interesting stuff

www.tobaccotactics.org/article/kant...

Update on the Discord dataset: It's no longer online (zenodo.org/records/1517...) though no way to know if the researchers removed it or the platform where they posted it did. The 404 Media article was also updated with Discord clarifying that the researchers did violate their policies.

Another week, another research ethics controversy.

TL;DR Researchers released a public dataset of 2B+ messages from 4M+ users on 3k+ "public" Discord servers. Usernames/IDs are anonymized.

But let's unpack this one... 🧵

www.404media.co/researchers-...

Workign on a paper on the ethics of researching semi-public spaces and this drops: arxiv.org/abs/2502.00627

This seems to be grounded in a misrepresentation of Discord's norms of interaction. The title is "Discord unveiled"; it tacitly posits that the data is not public while claiming it as such

I am excited to share my open access collaboration with @ekj.bsky.social, *Critical Making in the Age of AI*, available today from Amherst College Press. It includes theory and practice from our own pedagogy, as well as examples from our own amazing students: www.fulcrum.org/concern/mono... #dhmakes

The 🦇 D/ARC 🦇 server reached a huge milestone this week: 700 members! 🥳 So proud of this kind and wonderfully supportive community, and thrilled it continues to be found by those who need it! 🥹 Huge thanks to Dan and @iceberge.bsky.social for being the best Mod team a gal could ask for. 💯✨

🚨New AI for Humanists tutorials just dropped!🚨

We have new code notebooks for using LLMs to:
- measure document similarity
- classify texts with zero-shot prompting

We explore narrative vs non-narrative texts, historical poetry, ChatGPT poetry, & book reviews.

Tutorial effort led by Greg Yauney!