Pri Bengani
acookiecrumbles.bsky.social
Pri Bengani
@acookiecrumbles.bsky.social
Senior Research Fellow, Tow Center
Reposted by Pri Bengani
It looks like the MIT Technology Review did the equivalent of the dril candles post but for real open.substack.com/pub/andymasl...
May 25, 2025 at 4:38 PM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
"“The alleged underenforcement of Meta’s monitoring policies cannot give rise to liability,” the co wrote last year in a motion to dismiss a lawsuit alleging negligence in removing crypto scams, adding it “does not owe a duty to users” to address fraud on its platforms.

www.wsj.com/tech/meta-fr...
Meta Battles an ‘Epidemic of Scams’ as Criminals Flood Instagram and Facebook
Fake puppies and phony offers of mouthwatering bargains are often seeded by overseas crime networks; employees say company is reluctant to impede its advertising juggernaut
www.wsj.com
May 18, 2025 at 5:48 PM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
The new pope signed up for Twitter in 2011 with a Hotmail email address that he also used for a lot of other stuff, which is how I know that he's probably the first pope on Zynga and almost certainly the first pope on Tumblr
May 8, 2025 at 6:25 PM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
this is not a dunk, but the fact that this detail is blowing up despite the book it came from coming out 2 months ago shows that if you want to bury a damning scoop, put it in a book
May 7, 2025 at 7:16 PM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
1. Can you figure out where I was standing when I took this picture?

ChatGPT could. Given the photograph (scrubbed of all header information), the new chain of thought model, ChatGPT o.3, was able to pinpoint the location with a few meters.
April 29, 2025 at 4:49 AM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
Scammers are using a deepfake video of our columnist Martin Wolf. Why, he asks, is Meta not doing more?
www.ft.com/content/80d9...
Playing ‘whack-a-mole’ with Meta over my fraudulent avatars
How is it possible that a company with such huge resources, including artificial intelligence tools, cannot deal with this?
www.ft.com
April 25, 2025 at 1:33 PM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
In case you come across this post which featured a video with WIRED branding, it's completely fake and is part of the Russian disinformation campaign known as Matryoshka—as confirmed by @antibot4navalny.bsky.social
April 8, 2025 at 11:42 AM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
Views are the only number anyone cares about on the internet anymore. I tried once again to figure out what views mean, and I got… nothing. Views are lies.
On TikTok, YouTube, X, and everywhere, ‘views’ are lies
You might think a “view” means you watched something. You’d be wrong.
www.theverge.com
April 5, 2025 at 1:31 PM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
Know of a website or tool that would be useful to #journalists? Submit it on this form and we'll consider it for The Journalist's Toolbox™:
JOURNALIST'S TOOLBOX AI SITE SUBMISSION
Have a site you want to have listed on Journalist's Toolbox AI? Fill out this form and submit it. We'll review it and post it if we think it's a good fit for the site.
buff.ly
March 30, 2025 at 8:02 AM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
Some news many years in the making: My book EMPIRE OF AI, out May 20, is ready for pre-order at empireofai.com. It tells the inside story of OpenAI as a lens for understanding the moment we’re in: the tech elite's extraordinary seizure of power and its threat to democracy. 1/
March 26, 2025 at 11:04 AM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
Following many months of investigation, we found that a Russian influence campaign using nonexistent writers is spreading disinformation and propaganda across West and Central Africa.
www.aljazeera.com/amp/features...
The ‘ghost reporters’ writing pro-Russian propaganda in West Africa
Al Jazeera finds that nonexistent writers are spreading anti-France sentiment across West and Central Africa.
www.aljazeera.com
March 22, 2025 at 6:39 PM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
doomscrollers
March 23, 2025 at 9:38 AM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
Lovely chart from our pals at Chartr. It does appear we are at the peak of Streaming Mountain. What’s coming next?

sherwood.news/business/bri...
March 21, 2025 at 6:16 PM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
I’ve long used FiveThirtyEight’s interactive “Hack Your Way To Scientific Glory” to illustrate the idea of p-hacking when I teach statistics. But ABC/Disney killed the site earlier this month :(

So I made my own with #rstats and Observable and #QuartoPub ! stats.andrewheiss.com/hack-your-way/
March 20, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Setting The Last of Us S2 trailer to You Know You’re Right is all kinds of perfect (including perfectly complementing Future Days).
March 17, 2025 at 9:52 PM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
An excellent breakdown. What I take from Kevin's post is the need to understand the information people are exposed to at the content (not source) level.

This emphasis on content-level analysis is partly why I'm excited by the conscientious use of LLMs as tools for large-scale, yet nuanced enquiry.
Nice article by Kevin Munger (based on @sgonzalezbailon.bsky.social et al.'s paper on FB polarization and @jongreen.bsky.social et al.'s paper).

Part of the argument is that one reason we don't find filter bubbles is that we've been looking in 2D

open.substack.com/pub/kevinmun...
Unbundling and Abundance
on the (high) dimensionality of 21st century ideology
open.substack.com
March 17, 2025 at 8:38 PM
How does Finder still not have a “recently closed” / “reopen recent” menu option?
March 17, 2025 at 1:55 PM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
“In exchange for the ability to establish operations in China, Facebook will agree to grant the Chinese government access to Chinese users’ data — including Hongkongese users’ data,” one privacy policy staffer wrote.
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
Zuckerberg’s Meta considered sharing user data with China, whistleblower alleges
Meta went to extreme lengths, including developing a censorship system, in a failed attempt to bring Facebook to millions of internet users in China, according to a whistleblower complaint.
www.washingtonpost.com
March 10, 2025 at 9:03 AM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
Here are the slides for our talk “Who’s Behind This Website?” that @acookiecrumbles.bsky.social and I just gave at #NICAR25.

Slides: bit.ly/nicar25-behi...
Repo with cheatsheet: github.com/jonkeegan/be...

And here’s experimental “NICAR Website Sleuth” GPT that can help you: bit.ly/nicar-sleuth...
BEHIND-THIS-WEBSITE-NICAR25
Who’s Behind This Website? Priyanjana Bengani Data Reporter Bloomberg Bluesky: @acookiecrumbles.bsky.social Mastodon: @acookiecrumbles@indieweb.social Jon Keegan Tech reporter / Data journalist Sherwo...
bit.ly
March 7, 2025 at 9:17 PM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
I'm excited to be in Minneapolis for @ire-nicar.bsky.social #NICAR25 ! If you are here, please say hello!

@acookiecrumbles.bsky.social and I will be reprising our talk about website investigations "Who's Behind That Website?" on Friday, March 7, 11:30 a.m.

schedules.ire.org/nicar-2025/
March 6, 2025 at 1:58 PM
The Sports live widget is great…except that the timer keeps going even after FT.
February 26, 2025 at 9:57 PM
Reposted by Pri Bengani
This is a shocker. Apple is winding down Advanced Data Protection in the UK, company says in press email, rather than build a backdoor for that government, which is impossible to do safely.

Every Apple user in the UK is now less safe. Other countries not affected.
February 21, 2025 at 3:56 PM
February 8, 2025 at 3:26 PM
February 7, 2025 at 2:22 PM