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Salomé Viljoen

@salome.bsky.social
6.5K followers 2.1K following 1.7K posts

Assistant Prof at Michigan Law || I think about how the law thinks about data || pro science and technology, anti scams

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Reposted by Salomé Viljoen
Paul Fairie @paulisci.bsky.social · 11h
I'm glad we're finally outsourcing the horrible bits of life like making plans with friends so we can have more time to consume ads.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 11h
Counterpoint: It would be great if people read some of the things that have been written about AI surveillance of workers! press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hilke... www.cambridge.org/core/books/q... www.ucpress.edu/books/uberla... jacobin.com/2026/09/amaz...
press.princeton.edu
Data Driven
A behind-the-scenes look at how digital surveillance is affecting the trucking way of life
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 11h
Pete Hegseth removing tenure protections shows precisely why they are needed. He wants to silence dissent by being able to fire anyone who questions his vision of the military. www.militarytimes.com/news/pentago...
militarytimes.com
Hegseth halts tenure appointments for civilian faculty at military academies
Military academies will no longer appoint civilian faculty to tenured positions as Hegseth says it can contribute to “academic stagnation.”
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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 13h
Omigod, this is the most heartwarming story possible! Backpack (bear 89) is the son of the 2019 winner of Fat Bear Week, Holly (bear 435). In 2007, he injured his foot & a practice of riding on momma's Holly's back had a new meaning: he was mobility-restricted while it healed. So Holly moved him.
From DISCVR blog's Facebook page, a momma bear & a yearling cub on her back in the shallow water.  I think the background has been swapped out, and I can't rule out some AI use there?  God, Facebook has become the social media for AI slop : (

The title of the article, which I link below, is "How Bear 89 earned the name Backpack"
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 13h
Tech industry is laser focused on solving the problem of humans enjoying each other’s company bsky.app/profile/down...
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David Kaye @davidakaye.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
to be clear, the admin is alleged to have deported AT LEAST 25,447 individuals TO COUNTRIES THAT ARE NOT THEIR OWN with, evidently, ZERO PROTECTIONS. this is a scandal and crime of historic proportions.
forbiddenstories.org
The Deportation Project Map
Between 2025 and August 2026, the Trump administration deported over 25,000 people to countries other than their country of origin. Very few of these removals were publicly announced by the US. The De...
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Hannah BW @hbwhbwhbw.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
new preprint: The Public Interest in Private Science. It explores how government grants & contracts became central ways to fund scientific research; argues that these agreements fail to effectively protect either scientific independence or the public interest; & sketches a few possible reforms
papers.ssrn.com
The Public Interest in Private Science
The federal government primarily relies on grants and contracts to fund scientific research. This arrangement emerged as a political compromise after World War
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Salomé Viljoen @salome.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
many such cases
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Salomé Viljoen @salome.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
today, SCOTUS essentially agreed that willful violations of the 1974 Privacy Act the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act, resulting in the transfer of sensitive SSA data on basically every American, is fine...as long as you're handing that data off to ICE
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Hannah BW @hbwhbwhbw.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
If ever there were a post to force tenure and hiring committees to confront hard questions this might be it
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 25/09/2026
really fascinating to see isgur conduct this interview as if conservative election mistrust has materialized out of nowhere or as if liberal claims of voter suppression are totally baseless. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | How Worried Should We Be About the Midterm Elections?
And how we learn to trust elections again.
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Salomé Viljoen @salome.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
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Salomé Viljoen @salome.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
good to know his justification for massive fossil fuel expansion was just "trust me bro, and later well...we'll see"
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Max Berger @maxberger.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
One of my most galaxy-brained takes is that politicians and political groups should talk more about workers’ share of national income. It's one of the clearest, simplest ways to describe how billionaires and corporate elites captured so much of the economy--and something policy can change.
axios.com
U.S. workers' share of national income falls to a new low
Labor's bargaining position has worsened markedly in the last half-decade.
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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The old line that analytic philosophy is answering questions that come naturally to toddlers via methods that come naturally to lawyers remains undefeated.
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Eric Columbus @ericcolumbus.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
On two fronts—WH press access and third-country removals—the administration appears to be ignoring court orders.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Remember when they said (lied) that USAID was corrupt? $400 million was handed out to 30 countries, with no real oversight and with workarounds to bypass human rights safeguards typically given to U.S. foreign assistance payments. Immigration is just a giant trough of corruption right now.
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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
trump can solve this by renaming "disapproval rating" to "approval rating"
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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 21/09/2026
12. it is usually better to focus on people, and why people are doing things a) why are tech CEOs saying these things? b) why are bosses so excited about it? c) why do we write, draw, and make art? d) what is the fucking point?
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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 21/09/2026
7. "some people find LLMs useful" is a different claim than any of the following: a) LLMs are good at doing the things people use them for b) LLMs are well suited to the tasks for which they are advertised c) LLMs "can do" something
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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Last week all my students hand-wrote their own pledges, according to their terms, to write in my courses without AI. Some of them were quite moving—their anger at AI’s attempt to steal their educations, their determination to learn & create anyway.
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Salomé Viljoen @salome.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I find it genuinely odd that people think claiming "full responsibility" for 100% AI written text is an adequate response?
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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
We’ve got an Ivy League provost over here who can’t use his own brain to write an OpEd, he needs ChatGPT to help him with his sentences and thoughts. He needs the bot to write emails clearly. I’m so disgusted and also laughing so hard somehow
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davidrlurie @davidrlurie.com · 18/09/2026
Voters are angry and concerned about the consequences of the emerging AI economy (including rapidly growing wealth disparities, inflation and invasions of communities by tech lord infrastructure); and Trump's blithely dismissing Americans' concerns. The emergent issue's sitting there for Ds to seize
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Salomé Viljoen @salome.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
This framing is revealing re: who these university leaders view as their adversaries or "opposition to be convinced". The people saying "let's slow down" on AI are her own students and faculty. The people saying "go go go" are doners and AI billionaires.
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Salomé Viljoen @salome.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
what I find frustrating about this isn't so much where she lands (some balanced approach to AI) but the presumption behind how she frames getting there. Just once I'd love a leader who says "The right answer to AI is not just 'yes.' It can't be."
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 18/09/2026
This is why I hate "just a tool" so so so much. You can make a calculator without access to every calculation. You can make photoshop without access to all photos. Someone show me a genai tool that didn't require all of our labour in its production. It's plagiarism software.
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Salomé Viljoen @salome.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
ugh! www.wired.com/story/a-trum...
wired.com
The Census Bureau Is Overrun With Staffers From a MAGA Think Tank
The US Census is home to vast troves of sensitive data on nearly every person living in the country, which is used for apportioning and drawing congressional districts as well as allocating federal fu...
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Quinn Slobodian @quinnslobodian.com · 17/09/2026
“More than a third of the $2.8bn raised for the current 2025-26 election cycle comes from the 20 biggest mega-donors” giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...
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Salomé Viljoen @salome.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
very important and highly recommended read here!!
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sarah jeong @sarahjeong.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
hugging face is the most terrifying indicator of where the ai race is, in the sense that the industry is facing completely solvable collective action problems while guided by entrenched, unoustable leaders with the foresight and moral fortitude of above-average pigeons
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Salomé Viljoen @salome.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Republicans really just rattling the shiny keys of islamaphobia and trans bashing and hoping its enough to make their voters not look around
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
A decade ago, if you aimed to predict Supreme Court decisions, which has proven a better heuristic? 1) Follow legal text and precedent according to a logically consistent judicial philosophy 2) Ignore or distort law to maximize GOP/right-wing power while mitigating risks of future court expansion
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Salomé Viljoen @salome.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
incredible shot / chaser here
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Josh Shepperd @joshshepperd.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
The professors and instructors who turn classrooms back into spaces for reading and discussion, are going to leave the biggest legacies in this world. Everyone one else will disappear into LLM wallpaper proxies and derivatives. 
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Salomé Viljoen @salome.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
it would be cool if this kind of thing had consequences
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Stephen James @stephen5150.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
yahoo.com
Elon Musk is Running a Fake Voter Registration Site Designed to Steal and Sell Data
Musk's "VoteSafe.org" is a scam that doesn't actually register voters
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Denny Carter @dennycarter.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
a nice little summary of our Moment gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/o...
The philosopher Susan Neiman’s new book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” is a useful companion to “Profiles in Cowardice.” Like Weisberg, Neiman wanted to explain why so many institutions caved to Trump. She believes it begins with an ethos that disdains virtue as hypocritical or naïve. “When self-interest becomes the basis of reason, evil no longer needs to justify itself,” she writes. “It’s already been mistaken for rationality.”

Neiman cites research showing that “the longer people study economics, the more selfish they become.” The reason, as she interprets it, is that they grow convinced that maximizing self-interest is normal, and that to do otherwise makes you a sucker. The more the logic of capitalism pervades the rest of life, the less room there is for compassion, honor or heroism. Maybe that’s why some of the people most financially able to defend liberal democracy have decided it’s one of the few luxuries they can live without.
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Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Yes, every billionaire is a policy failure. You know who else is a policy failure? Your Berkeley hippie grandpa who pays $100 in annual property taxes on a $2.5 million house and uses the leftover cash to sue people who try to build apartments in his neighborhood.
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Salomé Viljoen @salome.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
now this is the thought leadership on AI I want to see
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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
We started a trade war with these people because the president, who has some sort of degenerative brain disease with visible bruises on his hand's injection site that the press doesn't talk about, was bored.
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 11/09/2026
If you put ten children in a room with a single large red button that launches all nukes, it would be a genuine threat to humanity. But it doesn't mean children are a human extinction risk. It means the person who puts them near the nuke button is a human extinction risk.
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
to make decisions about where AI is going. Something that came up every semester was that students would start to think about the difference between assuming the tech itself could just..do things and expecting that the humans building it would be responsible for it. /4
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
In my writing course "To What Problem is AI the Solution?" I always assigned the 2023 pause letter from the Future of Life Institute, signed by most of the people building AI and the rebuttal from the authors of the Stochastic Parrots article. Students wanted to weigh in on "who was right" but /1
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Salomé Viljoen @salome.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 09/09/2026
I’m old enough to remember people calling them the ethical ai company.
prospect.org
Anthropic Is Building a Predictive Surveillance System to Monitor Activists - The American Prospect
New hires and comments in interviews show that the AI giant is using its capabilities against dissenters.
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Luke Herrine @lookheron.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I thought @bridgetgillard.bsky.social’s book on MLMs was great to think with on how right wing movement building is intertwined with grifting in the US. And I couldn’t help but think in terms of consumer protection. My (long) review: lpeproject.org/blog/big-lit...
lpeproject.org
Big Little Lies
What the history of multilevel marketing can teach us about our political moment — and potential ways out of it.
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
It's finally happened: the improved quality of machine transcription and the greater ability to extract value from unlabelled data means "your tech is eavesdropping on you for marketing purposes" has crossed from "false conspiracy theory" to "true and concerning" www.theverge.com/tech/991190/...
theverge.com
LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby
Gamers Nexus comes for LG again.
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