Alexios Mantzarlis
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mantzarlis.com
Alexios Mantzarlis
@mantzarlis.com
Tech, facts, and carbonara.

mantzarlis.com
Ashley St Clair claims to have lost all of her X monetization privileges. This comes after she publicly complained about X users using Grok to sexualize several photos of her
January 8, 2026 at 9:33 PM
Two weeks into Grok being used for a mass harassment and CSAM-generating campaign, Elon Musk is 100% unrepentant.

Over the past two days he has posted 0 times about the abuse. He has posted or reposted 22 times about Grok's popularity and product features.

Shameless doesn't begin to describe it.
January 8, 2026 at 8:03 PM
what on earth is Satya Nadella even saying here
January 7, 2026 at 4:12 PM
Indicator has covered this subject extensively. Here's all of our reporting on AI nudifiers, platform failures, and countermeasures in one place: indicator.media/nudifiers-un...
January 7, 2026 at 2:11 PM
However, the Take It Down Act obligations on platforms to remove nonconsensual synthetic nudes kick into effect later this year.

As this guerrilla audit showed, X does act when it's legally required to.

arxiv.org/abs/2409.12138
January 7, 2026 at 2:04 PM
Now, new evidence from a high-touch study of AFP Factuel suggests that fact-checking reduces future engagement on fact-checked stories by as much as 11%. The study also found some limitations, including turnaround times.

indicator.media/p/an-18-mont...
January 7, 2026 at 12:56 PM
This Italian FB page that posts Catholic AI slop shared a new deepfake where the lips of the statue of Mary also (unintentionally) briefly move to mouth the same words the deepfake nun is saying.

stuff of nightmares.

www.facebook.com/reel/7980401...
January 6, 2026 at 10:21 PM
We're rolling out a cool new look for Indicator!

Check it out and share @indicator.media with your friends.
January 5, 2026 at 9:24 PM
this argument is playing out on Wikipedia, too.

The editors have for the moment gone for a more NYT-like "2026 United States strikes in Venezuela" but not everyone agrees

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Un...
January 3, 2026 at 11:15 PM
I'm sure NYT editors spent a lot of time deciding what to call the regime change in Venezuela but I do think this word choice evokes the Putinist "special military operation" and understates what is in practice an invasion
January 3, 2026 at 11:14 PM
I had written a little bit about Tenet Media back in September

indicator.media/p/faked-up-17
December 31, 2025 at 3:43 PM
Unsurprisingly the top "repeat offenders" in terms of inaccurate notes were accounts seemingly based in India. The hoax took a life of its own on Indian X -- for sectarian and nationalistic reasons -- and the false "Edward Crabtree" identity was substantially more Googled than elsewhere
December 22, 2025 at 3:03 PM
The bad news is that high precision comes at the expense of terrible recall. 80% of tweets that misidentified the Bondi beach hero did not show a crowdsourced fact check even though one was readily available.

Like this one:
December 22, 2025 at 2:32 PM
The good news is that the combination of negative ratings and X's "bridging" algorithm prevented any inaccurate note from being appended to a tweet. Conversely, 20 accurate notes did get shown on tweets.

indicator.media/p/how-the-cr...
December 22, 2025 at 2:32 PM
There were certainly a lot of notes about al-Ahmed.

In fact, 10% of *all* notes proposed on December 14 were about him.

Especially in the early hours, there were as many inaccurate notes as correct ones.
December 22, 2025 at 2:28 PM
This preprint suggests the introduction of Grok may have reduced both the demand and the supply for Community Notes on X (h/t @dgrand.bsky.social). And if I had to bet on which of the two is going to get more resources in the future...

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
December 18, 2025 at 10:30 PM
hm. is anyone else having trouble downloading Community Notes data on X?
December 18, 2025 at 6:52 PM
io glieli auguro 685,000 abbonati a @ilpost.it ma credo che l'IA di Google abbia preso una bella cantonata citando un articolo scritto dal Post ma riguardante il Corriere della Sera
December 18, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Despite a 2025 that's been generally gloomy for information quality, I came out of this article buoyed by responses like this one by @marklittle.bsky.social about what is possible in 2026

indicator.media/p/elon-musk-...
December 17, 2025 at 2:36 PM
Generally unimpressed with Community Notes, the group was on average far more positive about the filters to reduce AI content in feeds that Pinterest and TikTok trialed this year

indicator.media/p/elon-musk-...
December 17, 2025 at 1:57 PM
Our expert respondents were far more worried about AI impersonation than AI slop.

indicator.media/p/elon-musk-...
December 17, 2025 at 1:55 PM
Elon Musk easily won the "worst tech CEO" category, with Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman battling it out for second place.

indicator.media/p/elon-musk-...
December 17, 2025 at 1:54 PM
in chess as in the rest of my life, i'm a creature of habit
December 15, 2025 at 6:36 PM
December 11, 2025 at 8:18 PM
I love this rallying cry by @davey.bsky.social on the value of humans in journalism.

www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/in-2...
December 11, 2025 at 8:16 PM