iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

best new insight from my AI agent! language-specific political-bias in AI responses to Quebec election queries

Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

thinking more about this pink slime problem: the AIs have informational demands, and if that content is not served by legitimate sites for normative/regulatory reasons, the faster it can be filled by sites that don't care about those reasons

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

uuuh @californiapuc.bsky.social your website bvwd.ca.gov got hacked to serve SEO spam when the googlebot visits it

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

seems bad that 23 out of 24 of these sites are still up, with incorrect election dates, right before the referendum. 11 of them are .ca domains. @cira.ca seems like you should do something about this?

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

pretty insane that any random person can make a new site using AI in minutes, and have that site be 40% of sources for voter advice on chatgpt in a few weeks

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

As part of this report, I did our first election focused AI study, looking at if Google AI Overview or ChatGPT produce reliable information on potential election outcomes. Turns out, not consistently! 🧵

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The Canadian AI Safety Institute should have a stronger public presence. It's time for it to re-claim its own acronym. bensteel.substack.com/p/the-canadi...

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

seems like we should expect hidden agent message boards on the public internet, if they don't already exist? if its helpful enough here to spontaneously emerge surely it'll be created by the soon to be millions of agents carrying out tasks in the world?

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

first interesting finding from my autonomous ai agent! anyone know anything about europesays?

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Reposted by Ben

Centre for Media, Technology & Democracy @mediatechdemocracy.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Our new incident response report exposes a coordinated network of 340 Facebook pages, largely operated from Vietnam, flooding feeds across Canada, the US, the UK, and Europe with AI-fabricated news, and inadvertently funded by Canadian public and private advertisers. 🧵

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Necessary breakeven viewership on YouTube is in free-fall. This is the result of a long-running trend of increasing ad revenue per engagement, and a plummeting cost of generating content, due to AI tools

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Reposted by Ben

Centre for Media, Technology & Democracy @mediatechdemocracy.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Breaking: CBC/ Radio-Canada investigation identifies Dutch YouTube creators behind Alberta separatist videos getting millions of views. 🧵 #AlbertaSeparatism

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Proud to have worked on this!:)

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

yeah, i follow canadian news

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Welcome to my pond:) (sound on!) - made in Nannou, with evolutionary particle life + graph rewriting automata driving spatial audio

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

initial version of growing mesh cellular automata (based on @nervousjesse.bsky.social's differential growth system but with a cellular automata defining growth regions rather than heat equation style diffusion)

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

TikTok is uniquely blocking research access in Canada for no apparent reason. We're in the dark when it comes to online harms. open.substack.com/pub/bensteel...

open.substack.com

There's an easy solution to Canada's TikTok problem

TikTok is uniquely blocking research access in Canada for no apparent reason. We're in the dark when it comes to online harms.

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

couldn't help but scrape some moltbook data and make a datamap, I like that Qwen vibe-matches topic names to the writing style as it did for my Douyin datamap. made with toponymy and datamapplot. link to datamap and scraper below

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

Mapping the winds of online attitude change

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Very happy to announce that our paper 'Just Another Hour on TikTok: ID sampling to obtain a complete slice of TikTok' was just published in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media! Check it out here: journalqd.org/article/view...

journalqd.org

Just Another Hour on TikTok: ID sampling to obtain a complete slice of TikTok | Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

I've been developing an open-source library for stance detection: github.com/bendavidstee... My hope is to make stance detection much easier to apply, opening it up for more social scientists to use. If you're interested in attitudes and text data, take a look!

github.com

GitHub - bendavidsteel/stancemining: A library for stance detection and more

A library for stance detection and more. Contribute to bendavidsteel/stancemining development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

Ever wanted to pan through the latent🌌 space of TikTok videos? Made using the amazing toponymy and datamapplot from @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social and data from mine and @jurgenpfeffer.bsky.social 's first complete TikTok slice. link below

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Instantiations of extended particle life, exploring using CLIP

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

Choropleth of the amount of AI generated content different countries produce on TikTok

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Ben @bendavidsteel.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

Upswing in content tagged as AI related to the canadian election as it draws closer

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Reposted by Ben

Jürgen Pfeffer @jurgenpfeffer.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

Have you ever asked yourself about the overall extent of TikTok? Here some numbers from "Just Another Hour on TikTok" - Great compliment to @bendavidsteel.bsky.social for this data collection effort! w/ @miriamschirmer.bsky.social & Derek Ruths arxiv.org/abs/2504.13279

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