Ryan J. Gallagher
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ryanjgallag.com
Ryan J. Gallagher
@ryanjgallag.com
Applied scientist trying to make the internet a little better. PhD. Trust & safety, platform manipulation, networks, fingerstyle guitar. I use my hair to express myself. He/they
My whole PhD ended up being about online amplification. Really cute to look back and realize the first sentence of my first paper during my Masters before I even knew what I was doing has the word "amplified" in it
October 24, 2025 at 1:11 AM
Getting there. I always forget how much configuration can be done for plots, which means long function signatures

The "autoscale_axes" is the most deceptively simple bit. Most of the tricky work on the bar chart is automatically adjusting the axes so that the word labels fit
September 2, 2025 at 1:28 PM
big if true
August 11, 2025 at 12:36 PM
it's happening
July 28, 2025 at 1:02 PM
this is objectively the worst kind of citation format. I feel attacked when I see it
July 16, 2025 at 11:57 AM
If you use CPM, you can interpret its parameter as finding communities of a certain density. You could start with a low density general communities, and then iteratively reapply Leiden with a higher parameter values to get more dense subcommunities
leidenalg.readthedocs.io/en/stable/re...
July 3, 2025 at 2:18 AM
when is Sage Journals gonna pull it together and make a link preview that actually has the title and abstract of a paper
June 25, 2025 at 12:21 PM
It took 1 min to find these replies to @schumer.senate.gov on X for his Memorial Day post. Conspiracies, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and mockery in the "top" replies

I have a hard time believing politicians aren't on Bluesky just because they're getting "yelled at" in the replies here
May 26, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Another place X unfortunately leads Bluesky on "verification" is through "affiliates," accounts that a verified government or business account has verified itself are affiliated with it

They get a custom icon that points back to the account that affiliated them
April 22, 2025 at 1:11 PM
I think the idea of an all powerful Blue Check verification is a bit dated and it's disappointing to see Bluesky chasing it

Even X has multiple types of verification now. Of course their blue check is infamously useless, but they have a grey check for government, and a gold check for businesses
April 22, 2025 at 1:11 PM
Some Sunday guitar trying out a new tripod
April 20, 2025 at 7:17 PM
Research on misinformation does not infringe on anyone's free speech!

Blatantly anti-scientific reasons for blocking this research
April 18, 2025 at 9:14 PM
Three of my articles are in here
March 20, 2025 at 3:35 PM
said screenshot
March 12, 2025 at 5:33 PM
logging on today after a full day of meetings
February 19, 2025 at 9:53 PM
We recently got a new cat :) taking up a lot of brain space making sure she's introduced to our other cat properly
February 6, 2025 at 1:20 PM
The reporting pipeline on Bluesky is... Not Great

If I see a post literally advocating for someone to be murdered, I should be able to report it for "violent behavior"

"Anti-social behavior" is too broad, it's more than someone using a slur. "Illegal and urgent"... It's urgent but is it illegal?
February 5, 2025 at 5:23 PM
having to put on my information theory hat to read another network science paper based on the minimum description length
January 17, 2025 at 6:53 PM
Why doesn't Community Notes work without fact checkers?

It was never meant to be standalone. It's meant to be part of a swiss cheese model of misinfo
@leticiabode.bsky.social @ekvraga.bsky.social

It's just one layer. It catches some things, and misses others

thebulletin.org/premium/2021...
January 7, 2025 at 1:08 PM
blocking spam follow bots one by one
December 10, 2024 at 1:40 PM
The default Bluesky Moderation service has 22 different labels for posts and profiles, but you can only report posts/accounts to Bluesky for 5/3 categories, and these categories don't align with the labels

This makes it hard for users to file reports, and I'm sure it slows down Bluesky moderators
December 6, 2024 at 7:34 PM
This week, I started with TikTok as a data scientist in their Trust & Safety org!

My work will focus on detecting and disrupting coordinated, deceptive networks targeting US users
December 3, 2024 at 1:40 PM
Progress! I got Ozone up and running using my (new) domain and an instance from Digital Ocean

I mostly followed the steps here, which were very helpful
github.com/bluesky-soci...

Next step is actually figuring out how to label things... can't figure out how to do it through reports or Ozone
November 28, 2024 at 5:45 PM
@aendra.com thank you for your work on your screenshot labeler and open sourcing it!

I'm trying to understand how the pieces fit together so I can create my own labeler

To label from the firehose, do you need 2 pieces: Ozone and a "bot"? Is there somewhere I can read more about this architecture?
November 26, 2024 at 2:51 PM
types of network science papers
November 19, 2024 at 11:51 PM