Alexios Mantzarlis

interesting. sources close to lula say he's not in alignment with justice moraes' order to seize flavio's passport, thinks it may reinforce the right's rhetoric of persecution.

Our research ahead of US midterms got a shout in @indicator.media's newsletter this morning. Check it out here, alongside the other great resources Craig and Alexios compiled: indicator.media/p/briefing-p...

The wildest one of these I got was a three PDF "press release" rollout from someone who said his ChatGPT sometimes got something wrong and that OpenAI didn't respond to his support ticket and fashioned himself as a kind of big tech whistleblower

wth is going on with all the ai-generated podcast invites these days

Supporters of Serbia's student-backed protest movement celebrate in the streets of Belgrade as veteran leader Aleksandar Vucic concedes defeat for his ruling party in snap elections. The vote is the culmination of nearly two years of student-led protests

Lula wins fourth term as Brazil president after historic upset over far-right Flávio Bolsonaro

The time to determine whether Dan J. Sullivan Jr. could appear on the Alaska ballot for U.S. Senate was months ago, and Alaska courts did so. What's additionally batshit about this is that the candidates' names are printed on the ballot in a way which makes abundantly clear who's who.

The Trump administration is preemptively suing to block Alaska from certifying a Mary Peltola victory, should she win. Their argument is that the double Dan Sullivan thing is confusing voters. www.reuters.com/world/trump-...

btw @indicator.media's AI Community Notes live tracker now breaks out the share of notes written by X's own bots Check it out at: indicator.media/ai-community...

È stata diffusa principalmente da una rete internazionale di profili di estrema destra e rilanciata in più lingue sui social media, raggiungendo milioni di visualizzazioni | @azitelli.bsky.social

The immigration doom loop, summed up here by @gabyhinsliff.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

"It took immigration attorney Mohammad Saleem more than two years to shut down a scam TikTok account impersonating his legal practice — one that swindled immigrant clients into paying thousands of dollars in fake legal fees through CashApp and Zelle."

What we all knew was coming has finally begun www.semafor.com/article/10/2...

In *every* election for *both* House and Senate since 1998, polls have overestimated Democrats by more in red states than blue states (and vice versa) www.economist.com/graphic-deta...

A timely read given Musk’s promise to hand out SpaceX shares. (Gift link.) Elon Musk's foundation is opaque, miserly and self-serving

"Joel Kaplan fought a long battle against those ideas at Meta, and in the end he succeeded. He is not leaving the company now because he fears the wrath of Democrats. He is leaving the company because his work is done."

Sold!

I'm looking to speak with a Constitutional Scholar about the Article VI oath and its role in swearing in new members of Congress. If that's you, or you have someone to recommend, reply here or reach out. Signal: marisakabas.04 Email: marisa@thehandbasket.co

X's Community Notes are increasingly submitted by AI writers. In a new preprint, X open-sourced its Community Writer tool. A dive into the data underpinning it revealed that in Sept, six AI writers run by X's team wrote 90%+ of all AI-written notes, and 55% of notes that showed up on posts.

I’m sorry to have to be the bad guy here but we need to recognize that we live in a compressed air thrusters world now. If you’re not finding ways to teach the critical use of compressed air thrusters in your classroom, you’re setting your students up to fail when you could be setting them up to fly

Big, with @noupside.bsky.social: It turns out that the majority of Community Notes published on X aren’t just AI-generated, they’re AI-generated by X itself! Renée and I discuss how this happened and what it might take to course correct a program we — despite everything — continue to see value in.

If someone worth $1M contributed the same portion of their net worth as Elon Musk on politics, they'd spend about $350. I think it's hard for people to understand the scale of $920 billion in wealth.

Courageous stuff here. Real leadership. www.ft.com/content/5862... US business leaders are waking up to the perils of plutopopulism

I have been skeptical of the European sovereigntist argument to embrace Mistral, mostly because I don’t think it’s very good, and here’s more evidence of that from a new GDI report www.disinformationindex.org/files/LLMs_D...

pop

The largest single Republican donor owns the platform X and uses it to spread false rumors about Democratic candidates. Here's why Bluesky has an intellectual diversity problem.

My man ended USAID, condemning millions to death

two things can be true, imo 1/ using abusive language may be a proxy for other harmful behaviors, more easily lead models astray, make for lousy training data) 2/ there are legit people at the big AI labs in a para-religious trance who think their cool toys are conscious

Good summary of what the US state dept has been up to from @mantzarlis.com "To recap: The US government didn't like a panel that discussed its potential interference in foreign information environments. So it interfered in a foreign information environment." indicator.media/p/briefing-u...

TFW the sentence you added at the last minute to your newsletter has a typo

Guess what? I had some *thoughts* on Michael Shellenberger & the State Dept's Sarah Rogers losing their minds about a disinfo conference in Lithuania having a panel exploring if the US interferes in foreign information systems... and then interfering to get the conference sponsors to pull out.

New on @indicator.media: There's a whole lot of online manipulation on Wikipedia that's just sitting there ready to be explored. With much help from journalists, researchers, and Wikipedians, I put together a guide on how to dig into the data.

Great quote by @mantzarlis.com at #disinfo2026: "We are now in the YOLO-age of platform moderation"

Is this enough free speech for everyone

I got the same questions from Shellenberger but do not have Ben’s patience and did not respond

oh woof

I've heard people make claims that AI would lead to a new Renaissance, but I didn't imagine it'd happen like this:

I'm looking to chat to people who know a lot about Wikipedia manipulation for a piece on @indicator.media. Who should I speak to?

Grokipedia is back! But I would still avoid using it to prepare for trivia night. From this week’s free @indicator.media briefing: indicator.media/p/briefing-g...

The EAE create "a pinned location in Sweden on Google Maps that displays an image of a stately academic building with large block letters on its facade that say European Academy of Engineering in Swedish ... it is actually a doctored image of the main building of the nearby University of Gothenburg"