Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 04/10/2026This talk was amazing! Inspiring to hear how you brought an research-based moderation taxonomy to the community, had democratic systems so ppl could vote on what to implement, and now run it irl. I felt like I had stepped into an alternate timeline where social media could be liberatory again. 000
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Sometimes I wonder why we invested millions of dollars to create self-driving cars when we could just have good public transit...and then i visit Palo Alto 010
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 24/09/2026Calling all Seattle civic tech nerds: The great @zephoria.bsky.social is coming to @townhallseattle.bsky.social October 19th to talk Census Data! If you enjoy wonky behind-the-scenes investigations into the administrative data that underpin our democracy, this is not to be missed 👀 011
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 23/09/2026i'm so stoked for you but also we've started an STS reading group at work so i will come knocking when we get to nancy baym week 👀 100
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 23/09/2026"At a time of austerity and belt-tightening, the MIT administration loves us enough to spend millions of dollars to watch over us as closely as if we were maximum security prison inmates, or bugs under microscopes." Amazing. 010
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 23/09/2026As a proud product of Central PA, I've seen data center fears build intensely and authentically in my hometown over the last year. Now, a wonderful new report from the brilliant folks at @datasociety.bsky.social documents these concerns in social and historical context. Important work! 062
Reposted by Madeleine Daepp🦇🎃💀 Riana-mator 💀🎃🦇 @riana.bsky.social · 17/09/2026The Non-Resident Fellowship at @cdt.org is open for applications! Deadline is Oct. 3. I'm one of this year's cohort and it's been a great opportunity to highlight the civil liberties underpinnings of my work. If you're an academic with a digital rights bent, please apply! cdt.org/careers/#op-...cdt.orgCareers - Center for Democracy and TechnologyDo the possibilities presented by an innovative, open, and free internet inspire you? Do you find yourself engaged in passionate discussions about privacy policies? Are you yearning to put your expert... 067
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 21/09/2026What are the implications of generative AI for the erosion of anonymity online? I'll be moderating a panel with @jaystanley.bsky.social, Tianshi Li, and Neil Chilson at the Future of Speech Online Conference. Join us on Sept 23-24 at foso26.cdt.org, hosted by @cdt.org and Stand Together Trustfoso26.cdt.orgFuture of Speech Online 010
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 17/09/2026Apply for the CDT Non-Resident Fellows Program! Deadline Extended through October 4th 000
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 15/09/2026I do think there is something fundamentally different about the 1-1 nature of chatbot interactions versus the 1-many nature of socials. We expect humans in social content moderation, but folks have always been weird about e.g. having humans see their search histories. 000
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 15/09/2026Are you a researcher who wants to have policy impact? Apply to the @cdt.org non-resident fellows program! Fellows join an interdisciplinary cohort of leading scholars driving work on digital civil rights and liberties. Apply here by September 17: cdt.org/careers/#op-...cdt.orgCareers - Center for Democracy and TechnologyDo the possibilities presented by an innovative, open, and free internet inspire you? Do you find yourself engaged in passionate discussions about privacy policies? Are you yearning to put your expert... 063
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 17/06/2026You can be concerned about deepfakes and still want a digital world with Balenciaga pope. Great analysis from @beccabranum.bsky.social 010
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 17/06/2026Every now and then I read a thing that could only have been written by a human. This is one of those things: theonion.com/i-work-very-... AI could never.theonion.comI Work Very Hard, And I Would Like To Try CakeHello. I am a horse. I work very hard at my job of being a horse. When humans say move the heavy thing, I move the heavy thing. When humans sit on top of me and pull on my head, I carry them where the... 000
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 12/06/2026And as somebody who is in civil society thanks to programs like this one, I love a funded initiative that gives more people who want to work on social causes the resourcing to do so. I hope to see similar programs from other companies in the space! 000
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 12/06/2026But I study AI use and misuse around the world. I have seen firsthand that internet miscreants are adopting these tools far faster than democracy's defenders. I also mentor a lot of CS students and the first rung of the career ladder is just...gone. The model companies have a responsibility here! 110
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 12/06/2026Civil society resistance to AI is not just about capacity. It has anchors in deep and serious concerns around data centers, intellectual property, the lack of regulation, the displacement issues, and more. 100
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 12/06/2026Anthropic is embedding AI fellows at nonprofits around the United States. Think Code for America, Peace Corps, or Americorps, but make it AI. It's called Claude Corps. 100
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 12/06/2026I'm seeing so many wonderful super-smart early career people who are struggling to find a first job, would be great if this helps them + gives civil society folks a little more org capacity. 100
Reposted by Madeleine DaeppIsabel Linzer @isabelalinzer.bsky.social · 10/06/2026ICYMI, the proposed USPS rules that follow the March mail voting EO are live for comment until July 2. A couple thoughts🧵 www.cnn.com/2026/06/10/p...cnn.comPostal Service won’t deliver mail ballots for states that don’t hand over voter lists, under plan for Trump directive | CNN PoliticsState election officials could soon face a stark choice: hand over voter lists to the Trump administration or risk losing Postal Service delivery for mail-in ballots. 265
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 08/06/2026I've always loved the Moving to Opportunities study. The quant eval was mostly null, but Briggs, Popkin and Goering led a qual evaluation that found big reported mental health benefits among other things. Decades later, Chetty brings in tax records + finds big fx for affected kids as adults. 010
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 03/06/2026Technologists often say something is "democratized" when they simply mean it has scaled. For knowledge work to be genuinely democratized with AI, it will need to be broadly accessible---and that access needs to produce real benefits and minimize harms. Full perspective: nature.com/articles/s43...nature.comAI and the democratization of knowledge work - Nature Computational ScienceThis Perspective explores the extent to which AI democratizes knowledge work and discusses potential intervention strategies for addressing social and place-based divides. 010
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 03/06/2026As always, these challenges require social as well as technical interventions. What, exactly, the social interventions should be changes, though, depending on the extent to which skill-biased or equalizing effects prevail. 100
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 03/06/20262. Access and usefulness is also constrained in low-resource languages and where knowledge work is a small portion of the economy. In the absence of intervention, we risk an AI divide not just in who accesses and uses AI for knowledge work, but also in who benefits versus who is harmed. 100
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 03/06/20261. The distribution of AI's benefits depends on the task. - Equalizing tasks are standardized, common in training data, and have objective success criteria. - Skill-biased tasks are open-ended, creative, and where success hinges on user discretion (or taste!) 100
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 03/06/2026When people do work with generative AI, they frequently do knowledge work. But will broad adoption of AI *democratize* knowledge work? In a new perspective in @natcomputsci.nature.com, we lay out technical + social factors shaping access to and use of AI for knowledge work around the world. 111
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 29/05/2026When does the design of conversational AI systems push users into acting in ways that are misaligned with their interests? Great @404media.co article about the new @cdt.org report on "dark patterns" by Ruchika Joshi, Adinawa Adjagodjou, and @mluria.bsky.social www.404media.co/new-study-re...404media.coNew Study Reveals the Manipulative ‘Dark Patterns’ of AI ChatbotsA new study by the Center for Democracy & Technology shows how chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Replika and more can lead users down paths they didn't intend. 063
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 25/05/2026I think you may have been the one who recommended that paper to me :) Would be suuuuuuper interested to know whether + how this effect shows up in non-US politics! 010
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 25/05/2026It has been so easy to dismiss these stories and blame the users. It's sobering to revisit these with the agent meltdown framework in mind. Feels like a reminder to track and address near-misses before they become true misses, per the great STS text mitpress.mit.edu/978026254699...mitpress.mit.eduRational AccidentsNuclear reactors, deep-sea drilling platforms, deterrence infrastructures—these are all complex and formidable technologies with the potential to fail cata... 110
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 25/05/2026@jacyanthis.bsky.social @pettertornberg.com As somebody who is about to be doing much more audit work, the inferred-auditor framing is super useful. Pairs nicely with arxiv.org/abs/2503.02080 as a mechanism for how sycophancy might be steering ideologyarxiv.orgLinear Representations of Political Perspective Emerge in Large Language ModelsLarge language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to generate text that realistically reflects a range of different subjective human perspectives. This paper studies how LLMs are seemingly ab... 120
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 14/05/2026Amazing and depressing work! What a bummer update to the amazing and more hopeful authoritarian data problem work you were doing a few years ago 120
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 13/05/2026When I worked at @sfiscience.bsky.social, lunches and tea breaks were the best part of the job: One good chat with a smart person would save weeks of going down the wrong research rabbit hole 🐰 Knowledge work requires knowledge sharing, and you lose so much when productivity is the only metric. 010
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 12/05/2026🎉 I've joined @cdt.org as their Research Director. 🎉 I could not be more excited to be part of an organization that has championed people's online rights, fought for good technologies, and defended against problematic ones for decades. If you have research ideas, reach out! 2112
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 17/04/2026Lance Armstrong on Revisionist History: "Cars freak me out. Being out on the road with cars and drivers and distracted drivers, it scares the shit out of me. But, you know, Malcolm, I actually now prefer the mountain bike just so I can be totally away from cars." Same. 020
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 15/04/2026Yes we should all be talking about this! But tbh i worry that making it about AI makes people think we need to fix *the AI* when really we just need to finally pass a proper privacy law + close the data broker loophole. 010
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 15/04/2026One of my mentors taught me that you have to advocate for your research, that if you have a finding people should know about you have to go out and tell them. But it's remarkable how important this is versus how little infra / training / reward there is for it at universities. 010
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 15/04/2026This is definitely a major prio for the labs. A key breakthrough in ChatGPT was post-training for user / assistant interactions; Opus 4.6 was agent / tool. Almost surely folks are pushing on RLVR for agent swarms, it's just not clear yet what good reward functions are for group interactions. 010
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 09/04/2026I worked for U of Minnesota the summer their state govt shut down (a decade ago now). People there hated all government *except* ag extension. Far more disciplines should have extension services. People like you more if you listen to + work with them! And it's satisfying + meaningful! 010
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 07/04/2026"conversational agents can covertly redirect consumer choices at scale, most users cannot tell when it is happening, and existing transparency mechanisms are insufficient" New + excellent paper on effects of persuasive AI in shaping purchasing behaviors. Effect sizes are concerningly large! 011
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 31/03/2026Hello if you think this expression on my face is mischief and provocation you would be correct. Having an absolute blast at #ECIR2026 #IR4Good - thank you for letting me show up to to talk about how important (good) IR is for global democracies! 022
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 30/03/2026the opposing lawyers who make “let me tell you about your case, little girl” calls -- and, in so doing, reveal their entire legal strategies! the cryptographers who got NSA letters to prevent them from publishing, and who wore their code on tshirts and as tattoos in protest! this book is a treat. 000
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 30/03/2026"I don't want to not use cool technology just because it has a shitty business model" - Cindy Cohn at @townhallseattle.bsky.social 80% through the book and she is an inspiration and a delight 030
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 23/03/2026This is great - A major pet peeve of mine is when researchers say they "prompted ChatGPT" instead of (a) specifying which model and (b) being clear that it was the api, not the web interface. These are v different things! 020
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 23/03/2026People make expensive decisions based on how LLMs perform on Chatbot Arena and other ranking systems. Turns out these rankings are very sensitive to tiny changes. New paper from MIT: news.mit.edu/2026/study-p...news.mit.eduStudy: Platforms that rank the latest LLMs can be unreliableThe results of popular LLM ranking platforms can be skewed by just a few data points, possibly providing an unreliable report about which LLM would perform best in real situations, according MIT resea... 000
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 22/03/2026Wow i want to go to this waffle house and be part of this crew. 101
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 22/03/2026Really important to know if these headlines get changed *before* or *after* gemini consumes it for the summary 000
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 22/03/2026I am working on my ECIR keynote on "gemini hegemony" and wow this is going to be an excellent slide 000
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 22/03/2026Yes! When the science paper on how AI could durably reduce conspiracy theory beliefs came out, my first thought was: okay but that's not how any actual conspiracy theorists will use it. 000
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 22/03/2026So...how are you feeling about the new anthropic work in this space? 100
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 20/03/2026I attempted to build an AI interviewer three years ago (it did not work) and then did a v different study with in-person interviews in Taiwan and India and the disembodied and decontextualized critiques are *so* useful in explaining why the real-world work felt like such better research. 010
Madeleine Daepp @mdaepp.bsky.social · 20/03/2026Hello I included your post in my blog post about this! adventures-in-ai-and-democracy.ghost.io/ai-interview... It is a cool study but also feels like one of those situations where we think we are talking about AI but actually we are all talking about capitalism.adventures-in-ai-and-democracy.ghost.ioAI Interviewers, Qualitative Literacy, and “Big Dick” DataIn the summer of 2023, a wonderful team of PhD interns and I decided to test whether AI could do interviews. We ended up writing one of the first papers on the topic. Now, Anthropic has scaled the a... 010