iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 02/09/2026

The people who keep track of this stuff *are* worried about being fined or arrested. Ethan Zuckerman, one of America's foundational internet scholars, has just accepted Canadian government funding to move his lab from UMass to McGill in Montreal: ethanzuckerman.com/2026/08/27/m... 57/

ethanzuckerman.com

My personal contribution to the US/Canada trade war - Ethan Zuckerman

I've accepted a position at McGill University and will be moving my lab there from UMass in summer 2027... with excitement and some sadness.

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 02/09/2026

Zuckerman studies platform power: "using data to answer hard questions about social media, search engines and AI tools." He leads a team that is documenting exactly, precisely how tech companies collude with authoritarians to spy on us, manipulate us, and control us. 58/

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 02/09/2026

And his methodology is something called "unpermissioned research," which is what academics call scraping: www.techpolicy.press/ai-companies... 59/

techpolicy.press

AI Companies Threaten Independent Social Media Research

UMass Amherst researchers argue that researcher access to social media data should be one of the rare things all political factions in the US can agree on.

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