Sign in

Zach McDowell

@zacharymcdowell.bsky.social
348 followers 126 following 137 posts

Researcher and writer on Wikipedia, AI, media and tech policy, and the political economy of knowledge. Communication and information Professor @ UIC. Nerd. Editor of communication +1. Posts are mine, reposts are interesting.

PostsRepliesMedia
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Everything that "we" warned you about with privacy and data leaking and otherwise with these systems... and more. This is wild (but actually not surprising at all) futuresociety.ch/muse-finding...
futuresociety.ch
Muse, In Its Own Files
A citation-checked review of Meta's Muse agent, built from its own leaked virtual machine — every claim links to the exact file and line it comes from.
000
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
It’s almost like if you damage the industry that feeds your machine you might be in trouble. They know what happens when you feed a system too much slop…
011
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I've been writing and talking around these issues for a while, and it's really great to see Helen Choi's new piece in AI and Ethics saying it loudly: there is a *positional duty* of academics to defend the knowledge commons. OA! link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-026-01373-z
link.springer.com
Towards a practice of knowledge commoning: academics’ ethical duties to defend Wikipedia in the age of generative AI - AI and Ethics
Wikipedia is the most widely used reference work in history and one of the most valuable training resources available to the generative AI (genAI) industry; and yet that same industry is…
046
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Surveillance scholars + critical data studies folks: what are some ways you've found helpful to get folks aware of their data and how it's created (not just informed about surveillance as a concept) - designing some exercises for a new course and would love to know hits the best lately
000
Reposted by Zach McDowell
Bruno Dias @brunodias.dev · 01/09/2026
A fundamental problem with "oh it's useful for coding" is that "generating more software faster" has, if anything, negative marginal utility in itself. The world is not suffering from a software shortage. The world is suffering from a software quality crisis, which LLMs seem more likely to worsen.
3509126
Reposted by Zach McDowell
Rachel Maddow @maddow.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
“Local media has been dying all over America, which means there’s essentially no way to hold local governments accountable— they can do whatever they want,” he told the white nationalists meeting. “You should be fantasizing about this. This is a good thing.” www.confrontthehate.com/p/white-nati...
confrontthehate.com
As Local News Dies, White Nationalists See an Opening
At an invitation-only gathering in Italy, far-right leaders mapped out strategies to target rural America while local press coverage vanishes.
771804954
Reposted by Zach McDowell
Maybe It Will Happen Today @today-maybe.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
[From Wikipedia] Catbus (Japanese: ねこバス, Hepburn: Nekobasu) is a fictional character in the Studio Ghibli film My Neighbor Totoro, directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It is a large, grinning, twelve-legged cat with a large bushy tail and a hollow body that serves as a bus, with windows and seats covered with fur.

Here we see Catbus with a manic expression on their face as they zoom out of the sky and across the landscape leaving behind a Catbus-colored (tan and brown striped) streaking trail of jagged letters reading ‘Maybe it will happen today’.
91268313
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
i laughed harder than i should have
000
Reposted by Zach McDowell
StantaKnows @stantaknows.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
I can't disagree with this.
021
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
It was really nice to chat with Łukasz about research and interests about... well, all the things that we've been seeing lately.
121
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
The conversation about AI in the classroom has been dominated by detection. That's the wrong frame. In-class is for presence — reflection, synthesis, the moment when a student encounters a concept and has to articulate what it means, in their own handwriting, on a paper they can't regenerate.
000
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
They’ll make a moral panic out of anything. Pearl clutching is always about control.
000
Reposted by Zach McDowell
Jake Orlowitz @jakeorlowitz.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
The union election does not discover the workers’ preference. It creates a window in which to change it. Textbook union-busting by the Wikimedia Foundation: medium.com/regarding-wi... @wikipedia.org #Wikipedia
medium.com
The Wikimedia Foundation’s Union Busting Is Textbook
They’re acing the test. Unfortunately, it’s for doing the wrong thing every step of the way.
032
Reposted by Zach McDowell
Renee DiResta @noupside.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Grokipedia hasn’t been updated in 3 months. Edit requests land in a queue and stall “In Review”. The autonomous edit bot is not editing itself, either. We did an analysis of edits, page view counts, and more. Auditability matters as agentic systems become reference infrastructure.
1113432
Reposted by Zach McDowell
beth4158 🙄; also ❌👑 @beth4158.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Off to cancel my monthly recurring contribution ...
054
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
We are destroying pipelines — for training young people "replaced by AI" jobs and destroying journalistic funding to feed these machines. Just to give it to billionaires. But this time, we might not even have the infrastructure to rebuild. www.thenerve.news/p/cory-docto...
thenerve.news
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our…
000
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Fun data of the day Post-Gemini Wikipedia traffic decline: Spanish: -39.3% Portuguese: -32.9% English: -6.6% Japanese: -0.2% (3/4) Spanish Wikipedia's decline is nearly 6x worse than English's. The same pattern @katecrawford.bsky.social notes at the physical layer of AI — also at the informational
000
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
I use RECAP data all the time - these folks are doing amazing work and allowing things that should be free to actually be freed.
020
Reposted by Zach McDowell
Scott Ferguson @videotroph.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
012
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
Everyone is freaking out about Pokémon Go data training delivery bots - wait until they use it to train military bots. This type of data can be used for far more than just tasty treats. www.independent.co.uk/bulletin/new...
independent.co.uk
How Pokemon Go players have been unwittingly training AI navigation robots
001
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
Had a lovely chat with Laura Fraser about Wikipedia and the threats it faces. www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday...
cbc.ca
At 25, Wikipedia faces a double threat: the rise of AI and the decline of local media | CBC Radio
It's been 25 years since Wikipedia first launched, but what does its future look like in a world where traditional media is on the decline and AI is on the rise?
000
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
@darthvetter.bsky.social and I will be appearing on Breaking Culture Live on February 25th at 11 am Chicago time. Live/Recorded We will be discussing some of the threats to Wikipedia, the “last best place on the internet.” www.youtube.com/@BreakingCul...
021
Reposted by Zach McDowell
Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
Yes it’s Valentine’s Day. But it’s also the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass who was born in 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. He escaped from slavery & rose to become the most eloquent and forceful voice for the abolition of slavery & for Black voting rights in the U.S.
228139043697
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
jmail.world/wiki
jmail.world
The Jmail Encyclopedia
The Jmail Encyclopedia — AI-generated encyclopedia of the Epstein scandal, grounded in Jmail data. People, places, and events from government-released emails and documents. A supplement to Wikipedia.
010
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. It’s disgustingly ironic this is happening while our administration who actively is friends with these AI companies, is protecting sexual predators and p3dos. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...
wsj.com
Exclusive | OpenAI Executive Who Opposed ‘Adult Mode’ Fired for Sexual Discrimination
Ryan Beiermeister, who served as the vice president leading OpenAI’s product policy team, had raised concerns about the upcoming launch of erotic content.
000
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Dismantling everything he touches one step at a time. smdh. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/u...
nytimes.com
Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ Would Have Global Scope but One Man in Charge
000
Reposted by Zach McDowell
Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
🚨 CFP: In Defense of the Commons 🚨 Communication+1 Deadline: January 15, 2025 openpublishing.library.umass.edu/cpo/news/24/ Looking for papers to diagnose problems & explore the strategies of resistance, repair, and rehabilitation necessary to sustain vital public digital (and analog) resources.
openpublishing.library.umass.edu
CFP: In Defense of the Commons
Call for Papers: “In Defense of the Commons”communication +1, vol 12edited by Zachary McDowell, Steve Jankowski, Matthew Vetter, and Fenwick Mckelvey **Premise**As the Internet becomes more and more o...
021
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
Lovely to talk with these folks about the problematic ways that crawlers are breaking the Internet lately
001
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
🧊 is actual Gestapo. No ID, masks, improper labels (they're not "police"). And worse - our police (the few that wanna help) can't actually force 🧊 to show ID. Why? Because if they are 🧊 then they're "impeding a federal investigation." They are tying the hands of police to actually protect citizens.
010
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
Good start. www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news...
cbsnews.com
Illinois and Chicago sue to block Trump deployment of National Guard
The state of Illinois and city of Chicago are suing the Trump administration over their plans to deploy the National Guard.
010
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 05/10/2025
I cannot express how absolutely bull this is www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...
nbcnews.com
Officials restrict Chicago airspace, citing 'credible threat' of attacks on agents
The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed a temporary flight restriction was put in place “at the request of the Department of Homeland Security."
000
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 02/10/2025
Pretty soon, they're going to ban video altogether; they just haven't figured out how to. It will be labeled as a matter of "security" chicago.suntimes.com/news/2025/10...
chicago.suntimes.com
FAA restricts private drones over Chicago as feds step up immigration arrests
The Federal Aviation Administration set the sweeping restrictions Wednesday at the request of the Department of Homeland Security.
000
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 02/10/2025
To be honest I’m not even surprised about this considering everything else. americanjournalnews.com/tumblr-linke...
americanjournalnews.com
Tumblr linked to Republican John Reid engaged with Nazi porn accounts
Reid denies ownership with the blog.
000
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
Let me get this right… the “teachers are indoctrinating our kids” group is … creating a propaganda campaign to indoctrinate kids? www.ed.gov/about/news/p...
ed.gov
U.S. Department of Education, AFPI, TPUSA, Hillsdale College, and Over 40 National and State Organizations Launch America 250 Civics Coalition
The U.S. Department of Education, alongside the America First Policy Institute, Turning Point USA, Hillsdale College, and more than 40 leading national and state-based organizations today announced th...
010
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 12/09/2025
I’m tired of being upset and tired of all of this. You get DOGE to cancel stuff to fund a 300M ballroom and then destroy $10M birth control? This is the point. Distract. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/h...
nytimes.com
$10 Million in Contraceptives Have Been Destroyed on Orders From Trump Officials
010
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 06/09/2025
What do you do when the President makes a threat of “war” to the city you live in? Asking for all of us. Can the Governor deploy the Illinois national guard to defend its residents against masked thugs? www.the-independent.com/news/world/a...
the-independent.com
Trump threatens Chicago with ‘Department of War’ and suggests ICE raids imminent
‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,’ Trump’s TruthSocial post read
110
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
The ignorance of how things work makes me facepalm constantly. WIKIPEDIA IS COMMUNITY GENERATED CONTENT! are they gonna “investigate” 4chan next? Maybe they should just read my open access book… thehill.com/homenews/hou...
thehill.com
Republicans investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias
Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee opened a probe into alleged organized efforts to inject bias into Wikipedia entries and the organization’s responses.  Chair …
110
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 26/08/2025
Yet again the party of “free speech” and “don’t tread on me” www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...
independent.co.uk
Trump’s war on free expression could plant a burning flag on the Supreme Court steps
Trump is picking a fight he knows he can’t win, writes John Bowden. Does he want to provoke protests or merely rile up his supporters against liberal judges?
020
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
I mean we are all pretty tired of yelling “it’s like Hitler” but this is pretty intense. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
theatlantic.com
Trump Has a New Definition of Human Rights
State Department reports portray Germany as more oppressive than El Salvador.
010
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
It’s funny that the administration wants to strip nonprofit status from orgs while groups like this remain fine with their tax exempt churches. www.newsweek.com/church-preac...
newsweek.com
Church doubles down after preacher encouraged prayers for LGBTQ deaths
A preacher from the Sure Foundation Baptist Church in Indianapolis said LGBTQ+ people "deserve the death penalty."
010
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
“If they spit we hit” - Violence as a reaction from an armed force as a response to protest is absolutely authoritarianism. www.axios.com/2025/06/10/l...
axios.com
Unrestrained Trump flirts with Insurrection Act as Marines deploy to L.A.
Trump already has broken decades of precedent by federalizing California's National Guard without the state's consent.
000
Reposted by Zach McDowell
Ryan Goodman @rgoodlaw.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
Major General Randy E. Manner, former Acting Vice Chief, National Guard Bureau statement to Fox News: "This is an inappropriate use of the National Guard and is not warranted.”
Major General Randy E. Manner, former Acting Vice Chief, National Guard Bureau statement to Fox News: “The President's federal deployment of the National Guard over the official wishes of a governor is bad for all Americans concerned about freedom of speech and states rights. The governor has the authority and ability to respond to the civil disturbances with law enforcement capabilities within his state, augmented as necessary by requesting law enforcement assistance from other governors. There are over a million badged and trained members of law enforcement in this country for the governor to ask for help if he needs it. While this is presently a legal order, it tramples the governor’s rights and obligations to protect his people. This is an inappropriate use of the National Guard and is not warranted.”
288203967162
Reposted by Zach McDowell
Jess Craven ❌👑 @jesscraven101.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
I am in downtown Los Angeles right now and it is completely surreal to hear that Trump is sending Marines here. We are listening to mariachi music. People have dogs. There are teenagers here. It is utterly and completely peaceful. Please tell your friends.
200123755555
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 28/05/2025
Nothing says freedom like state run media that publishes its own “facts” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
theguardian.com
RFK Jr threatens ban on federal scientists publishing in top journals
US health secretary calls leading medical journals such as Lancet ‘corrupt’ and pushes to create state-run alternatives
010
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
Between this and the AI provision, this is a circus of nightmares. Im really not sure what stops thid outside of a full blown revolt. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
A hidden measure in the Republican budget bill would crown Trump king | Robert Reich
The bill could stop federal courts from enforcing their rulings, eliminating any restraint on Trump
010
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
They've always been thinly veiled, but the audacity is really incredible now. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/u...
nytimes.com
Trump Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mother Attended $1 Million Dinner
000
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
If you don’t think people should take medical advice from you, the country’s top health official…. MAYBE YOU SHOULD STOP OFFERING IT. And also maybe stop influencing policy about it. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/u...
nytimes.com
RFK Jr., the Health Secretary, Says Not to Take Medical Advice From Him
000
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
Look what the "states rights" folks have cooked up here - sneaking in something absolutely ridiculous... again...
000
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
I honestly thought this was a joke until now. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/05...
nytimes.com
Trump Administration Live Updates: White South Africans Given Refugee Status Arrive in the U.S.
100
Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
This alone is huge, but that the Register if Copyrights was canned right after this release is even bigger. www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright...
copyright.gov
000