Billy the Elder
@billy-the-elder.bsky.social
PhD. data science. political sociology. tech. regulation. EU. trust & safety. wtf is disinformation (measurement), and is it the problem (causality)? 🇺🇦🇪🇺
Reposted by Billy the Elder
In case you were wondering...
December 8, 2025 at 10:49 AM
In case you were wondering...
Reposted by Billy the Elder
The news that #x has suspended the #eu's advertising account on the platform after it issued a 120m EUR fine against X for breaking the #DSA is beyond hilarious.
And it might even be kind of good in the sense that politicians in Europe maybe finally realise how shitty it is to depend on such a […]
And it might even be kind of good in the sense that politicians in Europe maybe finally realise how shitty it is to depend on such a […]
Original post on eupolicy.social
eupolicy.social
December 7, 2025 at 6:28 PM
Reposted by Billy the Elder
Don't let anyone tell you that the Commission's DSA enforcement against X is about speech or censorship.
That would, indeed, be interesting. But this is just the EU enforcing some normal, boring laws that would get bipartisan support in the U.S. (I bet similar bills *have* had that support.) 1/
That would, indeed, be interesting. But this is just the EU enforcing some normal, boring laws that would get bipartisan support in the U.S. (I bet similar bills *have* had that support.) 1/
December 5, 2025 at 2:58 PM
Don't let anyone tell you that the Commission's DSA enforcement against X is about speech or censorship.
That would, indeed, be interesting. But this is just the EU enforcing some normal, boring laws that would get bipartisan support in the U.S. (I bet similar bills *have* had that support.) 1/
That would, indeed, be interesting. But this is just the EU enforcing some normal, boring laws that would get bipartisan support in the U.S. (I bet similar bills *have* had that support.) 1/
Reposted by Billy the Elder
More nonsense. X faces liability under the 🇪🇺 Digital Services Act for (1) deceiving users by selling blue ✔️ for "verified" users (2) inadequate ad transparency, and (3) researcher access to data. The Commission has not moved past investigating how X handles unlawful content or Community Notes... 🧵
December 5, 2025 at 2:24 AM
More nonsense. X faces liability under the 🇪🇺 Digital Services Act for (1) deceiving users by selling blue ✔️ for "verified" users (2) inadequate ad transparency, and (3) researcher access to data. The Commission has not moved past investigating how X handles unlawful content or Community Notes... 🧵
Reposted by Billy the Elder
And what does this say about all the social media research based on Twitter/X, which has helped fuel the moral panic about the role of social media in contemporary politics?
The location ID on twitter revealing that 99% of the horrible shit on that website is just posted by people in India honestly soothed me a lot. Its literally all just fake.
November 24, 2025 at 12:50 PM
And what does this say about all the social media research based on Twitter/X, which has helped fuel the moral panic about the role of social media in contemporary politics?
Reposted by Billy the Elder
I co-sign everything about this article so hard
We Failed The Misinformation Fight. Now What? | NOEMA
Defending democracy in the digital age will require moving beyond the focus of fighting online misinformation.
www.noemamag.com
November 9, 2025 at 6:57 PM
I co-sign everything about this article so hard
Reposted by Billy the Elder
I can’t be the only one who just straight up isn’t interested in incorporating anything we learn from synthetic “social” science experiments conducted on LLM facsimiles of human text because I simply don’t think the epistemology of it has any bearing on the world, regardless of any similarity
LLMs are now widely used in social science as stand-ins for humans—assuming they can produce realistic, human-like text
But... can they? We don’t actually know.
In our new study, we develop a Computational Turing Test.
And our findings are striking:
LLMs may be far less human-like than we think.🧵
But... can they? We don’t actually know.
In our new study, we develop a Computational Turing Test.
And our findings are striking:
LLMs may be far less human-like than we think.🧵
Computational Turing Test Reveals Systematic Differences Between Human and AI Language
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in the social sciences to simulate human behavior, based on the assumption that they can generate realistic, human-like text. Yet this assumption rem...
arxiv.org
November 7, 2025 at 2:40 PM
I can’t be the only one who just straight up isn’t interested in incorporating anything we learn from synthetic “social” science experiments conducted on LLM facsimiles of human text because I simply don’t think the epistemology of it has any bearing on the world, regardless of any similarity
Reposted by Billy the Elder
Europe is rapidly rolling out age-verification — in the name of “child safety.” 🚷 But is it actually working?
Our first audit found AgeGO’s selfie feature streamed biometric data straight to Amazon. 🪪
Our new report examines AgeVerif: What we found raises serious concerns.
👇
Our first audit found AgeGO’s selfie feature streamed biometric data straight to Amazon. 🪪
Our new report examines AgeVerif: What we found raises serious concerns.
👇
October 28, 2025 at 1:25 PM
Europe is rapidly rolling out age-verification — in the name of “child safety.” 🚷 But is it actually working?
Our first audit found AgeGO’s selfie feature streamed biometric data straight to Amazon. 🪪
Our new report examines AgeVerif: What we found raises serious concerns.
👇
Our first audit found AgeGO’s selfie feature streamed biometric data straight to Amazon. 🪪
Our new report examines AgeVerif: What we found raises serious concerns.
👇
Reposted by Billy the Elder
Mon reportage sur la Syrie Libre et démocratique - épisode 2 est en ligne. - la vérité est toujours révolutionnaire osintoine.substack.com/p/la-verite-...
On parle armes chimiques, vrais témoignage et fabrication de faux témoins
On parle armes chimiques, vrais témoignage et fabrication de faux témoins
October 19, 2025 at 8:12 AM
Mon reportage sur la Syrie Libre et démocratique - épisode 2 est en ligne. - la vérité est toujours révolutionnaire osintoine.substack.com/p/la-verite-...
On parle armes chimiques, vrais témoignage et fabrication de faux témoins
On parle armes chimiques, vrais témoignage et fabrication de faux témoins
Reposted by Billy the Elder
Mon reportage sur la Syrie libre et démocratique - épisode 1 - Ahlan en Syrie Libre est en ligne
osintoine.substack.com/p/ahlan-en-s...
osintoine.substack.com/p/ahlan-en-s...
October 19, 2025 at 8:08 AM
Mon reportage sur la Syrie libre et démocratique - épisode 1 - Ahlan en Syrie Libre est en ligne
osintoine.substack.com/p/ahlan-en-s...
osintoine.substack.com/p/ahlan-en-s...
Reposted by Billy the Elder
Take Back Our Digital Infrastructure To Save Democracy
Watch the tech oligarchs who lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, and you'll see the most important story of our time: the fascists are winning because they've built a direct pipeline from concentrated technological power to…
Watch the tech oligarchs who lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, and you'll see the most important story of our time: the fascists are winning because they've built a direct pipeline from concentrated technological power to…
Take Back Our Digital Infrastructure To Save Democracy
Watch the tech oligarchs who lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, and you'll see the most important story of our time: the fascists are winning because they've built a direct pipeline from concentrated technological power to concentrated political power. This isn't about technology being inherently dangerous—it's about how distorted Wall Street incentives drove us toward digital infrastructure that mirrors authoritarian power structures.
www.techdirt.com
August 5, 2025 at 6:09 PM
Take Back Our Digital Infrastructure To Save Democracy
Watch the tech oligarchs who lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, and you'll see the most important story of our time: the fascists are winning because they've built a direct pipeline from concentrated technological power to…
Watch the tech oligarchs who lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, and you'll see the most important story of our time: the fascists are winning because they've built a direct pipeline from concentrated technological power to…
Reposted by Billy the Elder
It is no accident that the early use cases for "genAI" consumer products revolve around the sexual harassment, abuse, and exploitation of women in power. It is no accident that the technology is immediately embraced as a tool of patriarchy and gender-based violence.
www.theverge.com/report/71897...
www.theverge.com/report/71897...
Grok’s ‘spicy’ video setting instantly made me Taylor Swift nude deepfakes
I didn’t even ask it to take her clothes off.
www.theverge.com
August 5, 2025 at 5:07 PM
It is no accident that the early use cases for "genAI" consumer products revolve around the sexual harassment, abuse, and exploitation of women in power. It is no accident that the technology is immediately embraced as a tool of patriarchy and gender-based violence.
www.theverge.com/report/71897...
www.theverge.com/report/71897...
Reposted by Billy the Elder
Reposted by Billy the Elder
Silicon Valley’s alliance with Donald Trump was a mask off moment and showed the world we can’t depend on US tech companies.
For the past few months, I’ve been trying to get off US tech and I put together a guide so you find alternatives too. I hope you find it helpful!
For the past few months, I’ve been trying to get off US tech and I put together a guide so you find alternatives too. I hope you find it helpful!
Getting off US tech: a guide
I’m in the process of dropping US tech services. Here’s how I did it, and options you should consider.
www.disconnect.blog
July 18, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Silicon Valley’s alliance with Donald Trump was a mask off moment and showed the world we can’t depend on US tech companies.
For the past few months, I’ve been trying to get off US tech and I put together a guide so you find alternatives too. I hope you find it helpful!
For the past few months, I’ve been trying to get off US tech and I put together a guide so you find alternatives too. I hope you find it helpful!
Reposted by Billy the Elder
EU-U.S. trade talks sparked fears that enforcement of the DSA will be haltered altogether.
Is it time to rethink the Commission's enforcement role? JAN-OLE HARFST, TOBIAS MAST (@tobiasmast.bsky.social) and WOLFGANG SCHULZ think so and offer three alternatives.
verfassungsblog.de/dsa-enforcem...
Is it time to rethink the Commission's enforcement role? JAN-OLE HARFST, TOBIAS MAST (@tobiasmast.bsky.social) and WOLFGANG SCHULZ think so and offer three alternatives.
verfassungsblog.de/dsa-enforcem...
July 16, 2025 at 9:43 AM
EU-U.S. trade talks sparked fears that enforcement of the DSA will be haltered altogether.
Is it time to rethink the Commission's enforcement role? JAN-OLE HARFST, TOBIAS MAST (@tobiasmast.bsky.social) and WOLFGANG SCHULZ think so and offer three alternatives.
verfassungsblog.de/dsa-enforcem...
Is it time to rethink the Commission's enforcement role? JAN-OLE HARFST, TOBIAS MAST (@tobiasmast.bsky.social) and WOLFGANG SCHULZ think so and offer three alternatives.
verfassungsblog.de/dsa-enforcem...
Reposted by Billy the Elder
📢 Big news for platform researchers across Europe and beyond:
Today, the @ec.europa.eu adopted the Delegated Act for Article 40 of the Digital Services Act (DSA) – a long-anticipated milestone enabling researchers to request access to non-public platform data under Article 40.4.
Today, the @ec.europa.eu adopted the Delegated Act for Article 40 of the Digital Services Act (DSA) – a long-anticipated milestone enabling researchers to request access to non-public platform data under Article 40.4.
July 2, 2025 at 6:28 PM
📢 Big news for platform researchers across Europe and beyond:
Today, the @ec.europa.eu adopted the Delegated Act for Article 40 of the Digital Services Act (DSA) – a long-anticipated milestone enabling researchers to request access to non-public platform data under Article 40.4.
Today, the @ec.europa.eu adopted the Delegated Act for Article 40 of the Digital Services Act (DSA) – a long-anticipated milestone enabling researchers to request access to non-public platform data under Article 40.4.
Reposted by Billy the Elder
A Glastonbury chant caused a national meltdown, but the Bear’s incisive analysis reveals the real story.
Don't miss this insightful dive into Britain's moral panic.
Don't miss this insightful dive into Britain's moral panic.
Who decides what’s ‘hate speech’ and what’s dissent?
A single Glastonbury chant shattered the illusion of free speech, exposing Britain's fragile moral panic machine
eastangliabylines.co.uk
July 1, 2025 at 5:24 AM
A Glastonbury chant caused a national meltdown, but the Bear’s incisive analysis reveals the real story.
Don't miss this insightful dive into Britain's moral panic.
Don't miss this insightful dive into Britain's moral panic.
Reposted by Billy the Elder
“The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying and dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before.”
If you agree with our 5 requests to our universities, please sign 🖊️ the open letter and don’t forget to confirm your email! ☺️🙏
openletter.earth/open-letter-...
openletter.earth/open-letter-...
June 29, 2025 at 12:19 PM
“The goal of academic training is not to solve problems as efficiently and quickly as possible, but to develop skills for identifying and dealing with novel problems, which have never been solved before.”
Reposted by Billy the Elder
The team at @dairinstitute.bsky.social are some of the most inspirational people out there. Infinitely proud to have worked with them on this academic paper, highlighting colossal failures of social media giants in curbing the spread of genocidal speech in Ethiopia, inflaming genocide in Tigray.
The Role of Expertise in Effectively Moderating Harmful Social Media Content | Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
dl.acm.org
April 24, 2025 at 8:17 AM
The team at @dairinstitute.bsky.social are some of the most inspirational people out there. Infinitely proud to have worked with them on this academic paper, highlighting colossal failures of social media giants in curbing the spread of genocidal speech in Ethiopia, inflaming genocide in Tigray.
Reposted by Billy the Elder
A major danger of LLMs is that humans are SO predisposed to attribute knowledge to any entity that uses natural language fluently. We cannot imagine that a machine that outputs natural-seeming speech/text doesn't have cognition. Brilliantly articulated by @emilymbender.bsky.social et al. (2021).
![Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind. It can’t have been, because the training data never included sharing thoughts with a listener, nor does the machine have the ability to do that. This can seem counter-intuitive given the increasingly fluent qualities of automatically generated text, but we have to account for the fact that our perception of natural language text, regardless of how it was generated, is mediated by our own linguistic competence and our predisposition to interpret communicative acts as conveying coherent meaning and intent, whether or not they do [89, 140].”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:uj2g526vwfe3qnpuskjexeyp/bafkreiappchidtcrrumnegykz4uq6chvznuu6fg4pbutw5y7yjaab2iczu@jpeg)
June 17, 2025 at 3:33 PM
A major danger of LLMs is that humans are SO predisposed to attribute knowledge to any entity that uses natural language fluently. We cannot imagine that a machine that outputs natural-seeming speech/text doesn't have cognition. Brilliantly articulated by @emilymbender.bsky.social et al. (2021).
Reposted by Billy the Elder
What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders?
You absolutely can lie via data & math & everything about how you present data is an argument for how to interpret/understand it
Everything we know is founded on best guesses & analogies
All technoscience is enmeshed with human values
You absolutely can lie via data & math & everything about how you present data is an argument for how to interpret/understand it
Everything we know is founded on best guesses & analogies
All technoscience is enmeshed with human values
What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders?
In general, it takes about 1000 years to form 1cm of new soil.
In general, it takes about 1000 years to form 1cm of new soil.
What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders?
We’re not clear on what *information* is, at all
We’re not clear on what *information* is, at all
June 17, 2025 at 6:01 AM
What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders?
You absolutely can lie via data & math & everything about how you present data is an argument for how to interpret/understand it
Everything we know is founded on best guesses & analogies
All technoscience is enmeshed with human values
You absolutely can lie via data & math & everything about how you present data is an argument for how to interpret/understand it
Everything we know is founded on best guesses & analogies
All technoscience is enmeshed with human values
Reposted by Billy the Elder
WhatsApp zeigt künftig personalisierte Werbung. Die Anzeigen sollen auch auf Daten von Facebook und Instagram basieren. Die Datenschutzorganisation noyb kritisiert die Entscheidung.
netzpolitik.org/2025/messeng...
netzpolitik.org/2025/messeng...
Messenger-Update: Auf WhatsApp läuft künftig personalisierte Werbung
WhatsApp, die Messenger-App von Mark Zuckerbergs Meta, zeigt künftig personalisierte Werbung an. Die Anzeigen sollen auch auf Daten von Facebook und Instagram basieren. Die Datenschutzorganisation noy...
netzpolitik.org
June 16, 2025 at 2:46 PM
WhatsApp zeigt künftig personalisierte Werbung. Die Anzeigen sollen auch auf Daten von Facebook und Instagram basieren. Die Datenschutzorganisation noyb kritisiert die Entscheidung.
netzpolitik.org/2025/messeng...
netzpolitik.org/2025/messeng...
Reposted by Billy the Elder
🧵 Several people have raised questions about what I meant by "deservedly so" when referring to the decline of institutional trust. It's a fair question, so I want to explain that, because it sits at the heart of my work on how democracies collapse when their epistemic foundations rot.
The conditions that have led to what’s happening in the US today exist in democracies around the world.
They are an inevitable outcome of our collective failure to adapt to fundamental changes in the information ecosystem on which our democracies were originally built.
They are an inevitable outcome of our collective failure to adapt to fundamental changes in the information ecosystem on which our democracies were originally built.
June 9, 2025 at 7:39 PM
🧵 Several people have raised questions about what I meant by "deservedly so" when referring to the decline of institutional trust. It's a fair question, so I want to explain that, because it sits at the heart of my work on how democracies collapse when their epistemic foundations rot.
Reposted by Billy the Elder
I want to add another layer of nuance here. Ethan writes "But the world we live in now, in which we struggle to understand and constrain our machines, is anything but normal."
I don't think the LLMs are actually mysterious at all >>
I don't think the LLMs are actually mysterious at all >>
Every so often, my editors get a headline just right. My column in Prospect this month: "Artificial Intelligence isn't magic. It's just weird." It's about the excellent "AI as Normal Technology essay and the ways in which AI is absolutely not normal: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/techno...
AI isn’t magic. It’s just weird
A new paper argues that AI should be treated as a ‘normal’ technology like electricity or the internet. But it’s far more unknowable
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
June 3, 2025 at 2:36 PM
I want to add another layer of nuance here. Ethan writes "But the world we live in now, in which we struggle to understand and constrain our machines, is anything but normal."
I don't think the LLMs are actually mysterious at all >>
I don't think the LLMs are actually mysterious at all >>
Reposted by Billy the Elder
Biggest commitment to a 3 second joke I've ever seen
April 9, 2025 at 6:33 AM
Biggest commitment to a 3 second joke I've ever seen