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Ross Weistroffer

@libraryofbabble.bsky.social
1.9K followers 4.6K following 178 posts

🗳️ #DemocracyScience nerd for an incrementally better world, reporting from the intersection of info & action. Pro-🏳️‍🌈,🏳️‍⚧️, 🇺🇸, and 🇺🇳 🌎🌏🌍 🔎 Researcher @ discourselabs.org 🌇 Urbanist & governance reform advocate @ fairrepla.bsky.social 📍 San Francisco

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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Can't wait to tune in to LA City Council's first round of deliberations on how to improve city government! ...unfortunately, that's because I'll be watching the not-very-accessible 8:30 AM PDT meeting from Europe at 5:30 PM. 😅 Maybe some/any meeting times for working Angelenos are in order...?
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Thibault Clérice @ponteineptique.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Want to play with corpora of the French 3rd Republic ? Want to join a nice team ? Want to do something else than LLM and have fun with smaller models as well ? Want to work with people in the humanities and the digital humanities ? Well, this might be for you 😄: jobs.inria.fr/public/class...
jobs.inria.fr
NLP Post-doc / Engineer for Information Mining in Historical Data (French 3rd Republic)
Offre d'emploi Inria
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Jan Schwalbach @janschwalbach.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
🚨New article in Nature Scientific Data: The ParlLawSpeech Parliamentary Text Data Collection > 3 Million Parliamentary Bills, Laws, and Speeches from 8 Legislatures: doi.org/10.1038/s415... with @lukashetzer.eurosky.social @sopro.bsky.social @chrauh.bsky.social @miklossebok.bsky.social 1/6
doi.org
The ParlLawSpeech Parliamentary Text Data Collection > 3 Million Parliamentary Bills, Laws, and Speeches from 8 Legislatures - Scientific Data
Scientific Data - The ParlLawSpeech Parliamentary Text Data Collection > 3 Million Parliamentary Bills, Laws, and Speeches from 8 Legislatures
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Artjoms Šeļa @artjomshl.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
a PhD position in LLMs, annotations, language and benchmarking @ University of Tartu. please share! digits.ut.ee/join-the-team/
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
True data nerds love data enough to know that data doesn’t change things, people do.
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Fariba Karimi @frbkrm.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I’m excited to share our new preprint about network fairness and its ethical challenges. We spent many years thinking about this topic and shaping our arguments. /w @lespin.bsky.social @eliassi.bsky.social Ricardo Baeza-Yates , Pak Wong , Erich Prem , Meike Zehlike ,Suresh Venkatasubramanian
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
LA's Congress of Neighborhoods is a great example of how hyperlocal democracy can create incredible intra-city coalitions -- and Alex Levy's and @publicdemocracyla.bsky.social's work shows how deliberative democracy fits into and builds on those coalitions. Angelenos, attend if you can!
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bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 20/09/2026
pretty interesting project by @s0hw.bsky.social and @andresmh.com building an ontology of community guideline decision points. I think this will be very relevant to high-context moderation within atmospheric groups
bonfirenetworks.org
Making Community Governance Legible: A Semester with Bonfire
A collaboration with Princeton explores how Governance Cards can help communities explain how they organise, make decisions, and care for their shared spaces.
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Thorsten Sterk @thorstensterk.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Citizen engagement processes can be transformative. But what is their impact on policymaking, democratic systems and the broader public? This JRC report maps a range of impacts across policy, institutions and society. publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/h... #CitizensAssembly
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Amy Zhang @axz.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
We were interested in studying the Bsky custom feed ecosystem, with a focus on feed creators, as arguably the first real instantiation of the vision of middleware providers for social media services like recommendation. The idea always seemed great in theory, but how sustainable is it really?
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Nicholdav @nicholdav.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
wow can't believe Jinping will just host all China's open models on DataBRICS
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Boris @bmann.ca · 11/09/2026
Oh yeah, and @mosh.bsky.social has done some great writing about building for organizers - absolutely "Build transformative tools that empower your community like never before"
mosh.leaflet.pub
Building for Organizers
The most enduring social networks aren’t the prettiest or the most addictive – it’s the ones that empower organizers.
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angela zhou @angelamczhou.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Big step for auditable AI in California: Newsom signed SB 813, creating infrastructure for credible independent AI verification. Now we need researchers involved in making that verification meaningful - and eventually mandatory.
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The #Infomocracy will not be televised, but only because there isn't enough bandwidth for that.
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Citizens' Track on AI @ai.citizens-track.org · 08/09/2026
Who gets to shape the conversation about artificial intelligence? Join the Citizens' Track on AI for a co-design workshop: "Community Assembly Toolkit Co-design: Briefing & workshop" 📅 Monday, Sep 14 (15:00 UTC (16:00 BST / 9:00 Mexico City / 20:30 Delhi)) 📍 Online (Zoom) 🧵 (1/3)
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dan bateyko @dbateyko.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Local law still formally mandates racial segregation. In 2026. We built the largest dataset of local laws and used LLMs to search for discriminatory provisions across the nation. What we found should not still be on the books. hai.stanford.edu/policy/makin...
hai.stanford.edu
Making Local Law Legible: LLM-Assisted Detection of Discrimination | Stanford HAI
This brief demonstrates the potential of LLM-assisted review to accelerate legal reform.
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
The combined support from scientific experts + social consensus is the most effective at mobilizing Americans’ actions on environmental, health, and technological challenges—even in cases where powerful actors like governments and companies vocally oppose taking action. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
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Kavitha Rajagopalan @kxraja.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
The Mayor’s office has always diverted government agency advertising to NYC local media. In 2013, CUNY J-school produced groundbreaking research that @90% of this $$ went to traditional media (like NYT) which did not serve or reach most diverse NYer, so city hall then city council 1/
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Rebuild Local News @rebuildlocalnews.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
In the latest issue of The Press Advocate... 🏛️ CA’s supermajority passage of AB 2222 🌎 New global evidence linking a free press to community safety and economic resilience ⚖️ The legal fights over ad taxes that could reshape how states fund essential public goods 🔗: mailchi.mp/rebuildlocal...
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Maria Farrell @mariafarrell.eurosky.social · 02/09/2026
in a development that will surprise nobody this piece by @eryk.bsky.social on OpenAI's model being accessed by bad actors from (ok, "escaping") a poorly secured sandbox is excellent.
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Bastian Becker @beckerbastian.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
💡Affective polarization research so far focused on the highly polarized, but the politics of "cool citizens" are just as important for democracy. ➡️ @versteegenluca.bsky.social, @polpsychjoe.bsky.social & @lilymasonphd.bsky.social in @polbehavior.bsky.social #openaccess @scilove.bsky.social
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
If you have time on or before Election Day, you can be a part of the backbone of fair and accessible elections by helping to make them happen! Californians can sign up by submitting a single, simple form at: pollworker.sos.ca.gov. Eligibility criteria at the link or below.
California Poll Worker Application
County elections officials depend on reliable, dedicated teams of poll workers to make every Election Day run smoothly. Poll workers are critical to elections and for a functioning democracy. Sign up today to serve your community!

    A registered California voter
    A legal resident of the United States who would be eligible to vote except for their citizenship status
    An eligible high school student

    Sets up and closes a polling place
    Helps voters understand their rights
    Protects ballots and voting equipment

    Get involved and assist voters
    Contribute to your community
    Earn extra money (amount varies by county)
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Nothing makes a research trail grow cold faster than finding a fantastic report or study that somehow has NO YEAR and/or NO AUTHOR. 😵‍💫
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Laura K. Nelson @lauraknelson.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Guys this thread is up to 64. 64 DAGs that look like record covers.
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Feeling old while having a flashback to my days setting up honeypots to collect data about botnet attacks…🤖
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Claire E. Robertson, PhD @crobertson500.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Is social media truly making us more politically polarized, or does it simply over-represent our most extreme opinions? In our new preprint, @small-schulz.bsky.social and I present *punishing evidence* that social media systematically overrepresents users’ most extreme political opinions. 1/n
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
With the intersection of democracy, participation and public administration on my mind, a book on all three with a systems-oriented perspective couldn’t come at a better time. Looking forward to diving in! 😁
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Kevin Collins @kwcollins.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Another new paper on AI-moderated (and AI prompting within) online interviewing academic.oup.com/poq/advance-...
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
To answer the question: because Bass drops out of debates that aren’t HOA-hosted while her campaign claims ‘it’s time to move past debates’, despite said debates being planned around her schedule. *Still* no apology by @mayor.lacity.gov or offer to @lwv.org to reschedule. lamag.com/news-and-pol...
May 9, 2026 letter from linked article announcing Bass dropping out of debate.
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Björn Lindström @bjornlindstrom.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
When is language needed for human culture to accumulate? When observing successful behavior is not enough to recover the mental model behind it! This is an incredibly ambitious project, involving large-scale experimentation, RL and ABM modeling, and computational language analyses.
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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Enjoyed discussing policy as futures with @adambecker.bsky.social. Policy is the articulation of desired future states and enables them. We can all design policy.
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Drew Dimmery @ddimmery.com · 13/08/2026
AI evaluation is all the rage these days. I'm excited to be teaching a class on it this Fall; I wrote up how I'm thinking about it: ddimmery.com/posts/ai-eva...
ddimmery.com
AI Evaluations for conviviality – Drew Dimmery
A new class at Hertie on the human use of AI systems
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Sarah Gilbert @sarahagilbert.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
#CSCW2026 attendees we are organizing a workshop on public scholarship, where we'll talk the importance (and risks) of public scholarship in 2026. The application is a short form. More info on our website: sites.google.com/cornell.edu/...
sites.google.com
CSCW Public Scholarship 2026
🎶 Wake up in the morning gotta check that feed Like that study, share that blog, we gotta get up to speed Before we leave, post a vid critiquing the AI stack ‘Cause CSCW researchers, we aint holding ...
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Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 08/08/2026
"for every dollar spent to make AI systems more capable, a tiny fraction goes toward the ... institutional infrastructure needed to integrate these systems into society productively and safely... It is time to build as ambitiously for our social systems as we have for our algorithms."
noemamag.com
What Humanity Needs To Flourish In The Next Decade | NOEMA
We are headed toward a world of productivity without prosperity, execution without verification and capacity without constraint. But this outcome is not inevitable.
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Matthew Facciani @matthewfacciani.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
A new study finds that warning people about sycophantic AI makes them trust and like it less, but it does not make them any less likely to be persuaded by it. This suggests AI literacy and warning labels alone may not be enough to protect people from the influence of overly agreeable AI.
arxiv.org
Individual-level interventions against sycophantic AI reduce its appeal but not its persuasiveness
AI chatbots can be "sycophantic," or overly agreeable and flattering toward users. Sycophantic AI has been shown to entrench attitudes, yet users frequently fail to recognize it (a phenomenon we call ...
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Have a little spare room in your Thursday or Friday? There's still time left to register for what promises to be an excellent series of online sessions exploring technology, with a focus on education as a field, and technology education as a practice.
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Michael Ekstrand @md.ekstrandom.net · 04/08/2026
This is interesting work, and important question! It's also a question we touch on, briefly & much less formally, in our paper on LLM fairness: we argue that general model providers should have an affirmative responsibility to support downstream auditing. md.ekstrandom.net/pubs/acl-llm...
md.ekstrandom.net
The Impossibility of Fair LLMs
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Benjamin Laufer @laufer.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
One intuition behind many AI policy proposals is that downstream AI applications -- the companies deploying AI in healthcare, finance, education, customer service, etc. -- should bear responsibility for ensuring safety. Our paper asks: What incentives does that create for the firms building AI?
Illustrative example of our game-theoretic model. This numeric instance of the game consists of one general-purpose producer and three domain-specialists. Each player has a different utility in performance-safety space which dictates the path of development. Within this setting, the no-regulation game (Upper Left) reveals the players’ investment efforts when no floor is imposed on safety. Regulating the domain-specialist alone (Upper Right) exhibits backfiring for all three domains, meaning the regulated safety level is lower than it would be without regulation. In this particular example, the same floor is assumed for all three domain-specialists. Regulating the generalist alone (Lower Left) improves the safety level slightly across all three domains, compared to no-regulation. Finally, a regime that targets both generalists and specialists with regulation (Lower Right) is able to 1) retain the improved safety performance from regulating the generalist, 2) improve the safety level of least-safe domain-specialist, while 3) avoiding backfiring. The purpose of this figure is to visualize the model’s incentive mechanisms; none of these panels represent real regulations.
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Be kind to the academics in your life and try to help them pretend it's still July
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Moriah Harman @moriahjharman.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Have you written or read an article (published since 2016) that you think belongs on the reading list of a political behavior seminar? If so, please share your recommendations!
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Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) @mmb-journal.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb
direct.mit.edu
Minds, Machines, and Brains | MIT Press
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Coming out against sewer socialism because sewers make cities WAY too CLEAN
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
AI can‘t truly be said to ”democratize” anything if its governance is reserved for shareholders instead of stakeholders. Thrilled to see a first step towards involving those impacted by AI in guiding its regulatory future.
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rish @rishkebab.blacksky.team · 29/07/2026
Excited to announce that I'm a speaker in MIT Media Lab's upcoming AHA Seminar Series! I'll be presenting on @blackskyweb.xyz's moderation and how we are navigating the nuances around automated content moderation that is community-governed
media.mit.edu
AHA Seminar Series: Rishi Balakrishnan | Who Moderates? Community Control of Automated Content Moderation – MIT Media Lab
Join us for our online seminar series event hosted by MIT Media Lab's Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) research program! This event features Rishi…
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Ross Weistroffer @libraryofbabble.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
If Bluesky feels dead to you, bring it alive by following accounts sharing anything that excites you. Follow *thousands.* Create a small town filled with nothing but people who do and say the most interesting things. You control the information velocity of your Bluesky feeds. That's the best part.
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Flintheart Glomgold @flintheartglomgold.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
always and forever thinking of rideshare/taxi apps realizing that preplanned stops and preplanned routes increases efficiency and then accidentally reinventing the bus
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Urban Land Rent 🇸🇴🚰 @urbanlandrent.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
>Cities are humanity’s greatest invention That’s right.
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Lily Xu @lilyxu.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Congrats to all of the winners of the AI for Public Goods grants program!! So inspired to see the breadth of work being done on biodiversity, mental health, democratic engagement, and better funding mechanisms for public goods (very meta!).
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JaeWon Kim @jaewonk.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Positech is back #CSCW2026 ! Join the wonderful group of organizers for a day of collaborative discussions on how social technologies can help people build the capacity to care about global challenges in ways that are both effective and sustainable :)
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Robert Gulotty @bobbygulotty.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
J.D. Vance boasted that Watergate would be a 12-hour news story if it happened today. @luozhaotian.bsky.social and I show why. It turns out oversight is difficult when prospective autocrats can excuse their undemocratic behavior as mere trolling...
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