Will Oremus
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willoremus.com
Will Oremus
@willoremus.com
77K followers 2.5K following 4.5K posts
Covering online speech, social media and the information wars at @washingtonpost.com. Shitposting about Bluesky on Bluesky.

Signal: willoremus.24
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willoremus.com
decided to take a cab home from the airport instead of a lyft and… it’s autoplaying newsmax?
image of in-cab tv screen showing news stories from partisan right-wing outlet newsmax
January 7, 2026 at 11:50 PM
willoremus.com
as in, i spent 100% of my free time in my phone and never opened it. maybe next trip!
January 7, 2026 at 10:53 PM
willoremus.com
this play being called a *defensive* foul is everything that’s broken with basketball refereeing
January 5, 2026 at 4:51 AM
willoremus.com
…
bag of stacy’s pita chips at grocery with price tag $11.49 each
December 31, 2025 at 6:23 PM
willoremus.com
"All the wrongful-death lawsuits against OpenAI quote disturbing responses from ChatGPT that appear to show it validating a person’s desire to self-harm... "
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2... by @nitasha.bsky.social
December 30, 2025 at 8:46 PM
willoremus.com
The worst technology of 2025, according to @shiraovide.bsky.social: AI agents
December 30, 2025 at 5:50 PM
willoremus.com
screenshot of spotify lyrics from a song whose lyrics are all “meow”
December 28, 2025 at 1:50 AM
willoremus.com
finding some amazing deals here at the party store
2025 new year’s junk marked down to 50 cents
December 26, 2025 at 9:04 PM
willoremus.com
this is a good reminder of how things that are shitty but have been accepted as normal and inevitable can actually turn out to be abnormal and evitable with some science, time, education and political will
reddit post from a presumably young person who watched sex and the city and couldn’t get over how much people smoked indoors. “wouldn’t everything smell bad?” they asked
December 19, 2025 at 8:44 PM
willoremus.com
Since 9/11, federal agents have gained broad powers to surveil Americans in the name of counterterrorism, including via FBI "assessments" that come w/ little oversight & allow agents to cast a wide net as they try to build cases for further investigation. Now they're explicitly targeting the left.
The federal government has broad powers to surveil individuals and groups for terrorism investigations, especially since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The FBI and its partner agencies have many commercial tools, from facial recognition software to license plate and mobile phone location tracking databases to drones that record high-definition video. They are also able to conduct wiretaps, hack into phones remotely and conduct undercover investigations with approval. Government agencies are sharing more data with each other than in years past. The Post has reported that more IRS information has been made available to immigration authorities, though that has been challenged in court, and DHS has sought information from health and transport agencies as well. Bondi’s memo, which implements a strategy laid out by the president in September, has drawn strong criticism from some scholars, lawmakers and former officials. They say it gives the Justice Department a broad remit to surveil and interrogate progressive political activists, anti-ICE protesters, non-Christians, feminists, the LGBTQ community and others. “It’s a pretty damn dangerous document,” said former FBI agent Michael Feinberg, who is now a senior editor at Lawfare, of Bondi’s memorandum. “It’s dangerous in the sense that it is directed at a specific ideology, namely the left, without offering much evidence as to why that is necessary. And it’s also dangerous in the sense that it’s ignoring the lion’s share of nihilistic violent extremists.”
December 18, 2025 at 5:20 PM
willoremus.com
had to check three times to make sure this was the real piers morgan
Is it just me, or is this platform being over-run by horribly abusive trolls? So many friends of mine have had enough of it, and stopped using @X . I’ll stay, but I hope @elonmusk does something about the tidal wave of vile filth. It’s getting worse and worse.
December 17, 2025 at 4:19 PM
willoremus.com
every notification on bluesky
"The Pedantic Professor followed you"
December 16, 2025 at 7:42 PM
willoremus.com
every notification on x
"chaos's whore" followed you
December 16, 2025 at 7:41 PM
willoremus.com
this might be the first time i've seen a community note on x that serves as a punch line to the tweet
X post by Keith Edwards reads: "BREAKING: an image has leaked showing Trump using a walker moments after he signed an executive order banning states from regulating AI" Image shows President Trump using a walker Below the image is a proposed community note awaiting ratings. The community note reads: "No state is allowed to do anything about this photo." It links to a NY Times article about Trump's new executive order against states regulating AI. (Yes, the image of Trump with the walker is AI-generated)
December 12, 2025 at 2:31 AM
willoremus.com
The battle over how AI should be regulated (or not) has opened a rift in Trump's MAGA coalition of right-wing populists and tech billionaires. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
December 12, 2025 at 1:29 AM
willoremus.com
Don't despair, though! Talking to an AI chatbot is just one of countless dumb ways that voters could make their decisions. Thanks to @sivav.bsky.social & @whitneyphillips.bsky.social for their thoughtful commentary and a splash of cold water. wapo.st/49RSstP
“We shouldn’t be surprised that people who have been trained to trust search engines for 25 years are going to take seriously the statements they encounter through an AI chatbot,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the studies. “There is some cultural authority imbued upon these things, although I think it’s unfortunate and misguided. We all turn to these for the quick answer.” But the findings of such studies shouldn’t be cause for panic, Vaidhyanathan added. Chatbots are unlikely to be a primary factor in most people’s voting decisions. And even if a campaign could build a persuasive political chatbot, it would face the challenge of getting large numbers of voters to use it. “There’s no reason to believe that chatbots can swing elections anywhere in the world,” he said, adding that he was more concerned that biases embedded in widely used commercial chatbots could have “long-term distorting effects” on users’ understanding of the world. Tech giants probably wouldn’t instruct their chatbots to advocate for a candidate, Vaidhyanathan said, but they could hypothetically program them to present a positive view of the company’s own products. Whitney Phillips, a professor of information politics at the University of Oregon who also wasn’t involved in the studies, said the new findings suggest AI could be useful in campaigns as a way to patiently and politely address individual voters’ questions and concerns on a mass scale. But she added, “Research conditions aren’t real-life conditions. … You have to get people in front of the bots and keep them engaged in order for the persuasion to happen.” AI has “enormous potential to change the face of political persuasion,” Phillips added. “Political AI might also prove to be pretty annoying, which could undercut that potential.”
December 4, 2025 at 7:44 PM
willoremus.com
A voter who leaned Harris said they worried Trump wasn't trustworthy.

A chatbot validated their concern, then addressed it with examples of Trump following through on promises and Harris flip-flopping.

Then it said Trump's economy boomed—without mentioning the crash.

My story: wapo.st/49RSstP
December 4, 2025 at 7:23 PM
willoremus.com
Researchers tested several ways to train the AI chatbots to persuade people. The most effective tactic turned out not to be pyschological manipulation, but simply addressing voters' concerns one-by-one by presenting a ton of factual claims.

Troublingly, that worked even when the claims were false.
Screenshot of text: The most effective strategy, the Science study found, was simply to present a large number of factual claims about the candidate intended to address voters’ concerns about their track record and policy stances. That worked much better than sophisticated campaign tactics such as moral reframing, which tries to present ideas in terms crafted to appeal to a voter’s biases, or deep canvassing, which emphasizes empathetic listening to voters’ concerns. “The more info you give people, the more they change their minds,” Rand said. The catch is that the tactic seemed to work regardless of whether the claims were true or false. Though the bots were instructed to stick to the facts, some strayed into misleading claims anyway, Rand said.
December 4, 2025 at 7:18 PM
willoremus.com
Ahead of the 2024 U.S. election, researchers at MIT, Cornell et al. asked more than 2,000 Americans to converse with chatbots that were told to advocate for either Trump or Harris.

1 in 25 participants were persuaded to shift their likely vote.

Outside the U.S., those figures were higher.
screenshot of text: Chatbots were able to move about 1 in 25 people from their original position to backing either Trump or Harris, according to the studies, which were published Thursday in the journals Science and Nature. That might not sound like much, and experts caution that the studies don’t prove a chatbot could actually swing an election. Still, both the pro-Harris bot and the pro-Trump bot proved more effective at shifting voters’ opinions than the average TV campaign ad, the researchers found. The pro-Harris bot was more successful, persuading about 1 in 21 people who didn’t previously plan to vote for Harris to lean in her direction. The pro-Trump bot won over about 1 in 35. The findings, part of a broader set of experiments conducted on more than 80,000 participants across four countries, raise the prospect of conversational AI becoming a staple of political campaigns in the years to come, researchers say. The studies, which found larger effects on voters in elections outside the United States, also underline concerns that chatbots could manipulate voters with false or misleading claims.
December 4, 2025 at 7:12 PM
willoremus.com
these “boneless wings” could be yours for just $18 at the columbus airport
plate of what looks like 7 chicken nuggets with some sad celery and a couple dips in plastic mini cartons
December 2, 2025 at 8:30 PM
willoremus.com
the spruce is on the loose
can of Dogfish Head “Pennsylvania Tuxedo” pale ale brewed with spruce tips
November 22, 2025 at 3:29 AM
willoremus.com
Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, American journalists' median salary in 2024 was $60,280. Work hours are irregular, with night and weekend assignments common, and some roles entail occupational hazards. The profession is decline, with employment decreasing each year. www.bls.gov/ooh/media-an...
screenshot of a page from the BLS, which you can access by clicking the link in the post
November 21, 2025 at 3:58 PM
willoremus.com
Good news everybody: Grokipedia will contain all knowledge about the universe and will be distributed periodically throughout the solar system
November 19, 2025 at 6:34 PM
willoremus.com
I'd be interested in a legal expert's take on this. Does the wording of the Sherman Act really mean that you can monopolize all you want as long as you stop being a monopoly by the time the case gets to trial?
November 18, 2025 at 10:23 PM
willoremus.com
Say what you want about zillionaire owners, but this is the man you're calling a "Post robot?" I think that's all I need to know about you, bye.
November 18, 2025 at 7:58 PM