David Scales

Community expertise is essential for monitoring potential information harms, but current “social listening” efforts often bring community input late in the process. It’s time to update our tracking approaches to foreground that shift. @cward1e.bsky.social and I offer one approach in a new paper.

This is how the Trump administration ended dozens of disinformation and propaganda experts’ careers in government. With an awkward, almost gleeful speech from known white supremacist and conspiracy theorist Darren Beattie. Listen to the rest on DISARMED: www.thewayfinder.net/p/is-the-us-...

At Angel island, the Chinese immigrants left poems on the walls of the prison to support themselves and motivate others who were later held in its walls.

Haaretz's detailed story on the Israeli gulags, in which nearly 10,000 Palestinians are held, vast majority of them have not been charged or convicted. These are crimes against humanity. archive.ph/LdVXQ

This is amazing.

"I believe that science derives its authority from something more than mastering the pipeline from data generation to publication. Rather, it comes from interactions within a community of people trained to interrogate evidence and answer for the conclusions they draw from it."

Simply 🤯 story! In 2024, the FBI sought to launch a sweeping pay-to-play investigation examining interactions between Sen. Susan Collins and a top donor, records and emails show. After Donald Trump returned to office, the investigation died. www.propublica.org/article/fbi-...

The accounting is in: In Oregon there are 111 data centers. The TOTAL number of people employed at data centers is just 2,630, or 0.1% of the labor force. Those 100 data centers consumer 23% of all electricity used in Oregon. Meanwhile, electricity rates skyrocket as more centers are built.

Look outside. Do you see snow? No?  Well, you will soon. You might also see $30/hr more in your pocket if you become an emergency snow shoveler.  Registration begins Saturday, September 19th. Sign up by November 30th for access to paid orientation and expedited payment processing.

The press has been woefully inadequate in covering how Trump is trying to subvert the midterms. @sulliview.bsky.social nails it here: margaretsullivan.substack.com/p/the-truth-...

Anyway, I guess I have to watch this space until November. If you see something, say something! www.ms.now/news/russia-...

The word “Cambridge" appears 45 times in the $17 billion Meta child-harms settlement, notes Jason Kint. Buried inside: a $459,293,017.80 payment resolving Cambridge Analytica claims across at least 46 states and two territories.

Louder for the people in the back

Happy Saturday! For the next 24h, drop any infectious disease and/or vaccine related questions in response to this post, and I will do my best to answer them. Answers are for information only, NOT medical advice. #AskAnIDDoc August 2026 edition.

Yesterday afternoon, a sword attack at a school in Fagersta, Sweden, killed one person and seriously injured two teenagers. Our thoughts are with the bereaved, the survivors, and the affected community. We began structured collection within hours. Observations at the 24h mark 🧵

Honored to be on this episode of The Information Animal with @lageneralista.ca where we also explore some of the origins of her bsky handle in exploring links between generalists in medicine and in (one day, hopefully) the social sciences.

Banger

In our latest @newlinesmag.bsky.social investigation, @baydoun.nl and I used site visits, spatial analysis, testimonies and interviews with military and legal experts to present an anatomy of five Israeli "precision strikes" in Lebanon.

The Continent magazine has published an investigation I carried out alongside Kenyan journo James Okong'o exposing how Rwanda's government manipulates social media - secretly paying influencers - in support of the M23 occupation of DRC. Thank you @pulitzercenter.org for your support.

sports coverage or war reporting?

It should not be lost on anyone that collective punishment was actively used by the Nazis themselves as “atonement exercises.” In 1941, the Nazis killed around 4,000 Serbs as an atonement for attacks that killed German soldiers.

Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting "reviewers" with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts.

50,000 page views/PDF downloads and counting Full blown Streisand effect in play diabetesjournals.org/care/article... #ADAGate continues #ADA2026

🧵 NEW PREPRINT on AI risks: 272 AI experts (I was one of them) used a 3-round Delphi to answer: which AI risks are worst, who's most vulnerable, and who's responsible? Key findings below. 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2606.0... 1/8

"Founded in 2010, Retraction Watch has become a central institution in contemporary science watchdog journalism, conducting sustained investigative reporting on scientific retractions, paper mills, instances of image manipulation, and research misconduct."

👋You can take issue with Haidt’s methodology and still think that elevating the issue of social media/phones/kids so parents start to recognize their own agency and obligations as parents is a very good thing. The cell phone ban in my 16 yo’s high school has transformed her learning experience.

has any man ever been more vindicated? x.com/stuartbuck1/...

Hey folks, I'm starting to think AI might be a tad problematic for the integrity of science publishing! A study published as Correspondence in @thelancet.com found 4,046 fabricated references across 2810 papers, presumably generated by AI By @bruceylee.bsky.social www.forbes.com/sites/brucel...

danah boyd recently argued that social media (as we knew it) is mostly dead; what we have now is parasocial media: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... I agree. Networked social media is disappearing, replaced by a new logic/structure of content creator, creator-centered community, & algorithm.

“In a friend-of-the-court brief, two senior psychiatrists at Mount Sinai Medical Center with a combined 40 years’ experience in emergency psychiatric units identified “exactly one instance” in which they remembered police officers agreeing to remove a patient’s shackles.”

Again, please share. In every aspect of American history you will run smack dab into the critical contributions of Black people. It’s not Black history. It’s American history. Trying to erase it is a fool’s errand. We live it every day. time.com/5836444/blac...

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

“the thing holding the coalition together is a base-line eco-fascist motherhood politics that merges libertarian individualism with consumer choice and frames keeping track of it all as women’s natural, right and proper societal role.”

"As the book goes on, it becomes clear it was more the second explanation rather than the first—DOGE’s destruction of the agency was driven primarily by animosity rather than ignorance." prospect.org/2026/05/22/w...

"approximately 15% of churches in our sample engaged in direct political advocacy during the 2020 and 2024 presidential election cycles, and about 8.4% during the 2022 midterm" www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Many of the babies’ autopsy reports were clear: Vitamin K deficiency was the immediate cause of death, or contributed to it. The reports also included details about parents refusing the vitamin K shot, a long-standard injection, for their newborns.

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com “I’ve seen Ebola up close. I got it while treating patients in West Africa in 2014,” Craig Spencer writes in a guest essay. “I know how destructive the disease can be — and how unprepared we are for its return.”

My essay pairs nicely with @parkermolloy.com's recent piece in @damemagazine.bsky.social: www.damemagazine.com/2026/05/20/s...

The contrast between the number of media requests I got when rich people on a cruise were facing a deadly, but contained outbreak versus now that some of the poorest people in the world are facing a deadly and devastating epidemic is just so so stark and it just really annoys the hell out of me.

Wow, this story. Since 2013, Maricopa County officials have approved $226 million in sheriff’s office spending related to a settlement aimed at rooting out racial profiling. Auditors found that more than 70% of it was misattributed or misappropriated. W/ @azluminaria.org

Where’s your free market now, Moses? www.kcrg.com/2026/05/20/i...

It's also important to see how this is covered across media. Hard to find on WaPo, non-existent on Fox.

I have no words. Actually I do. Just not today. www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

New dataset published: this is the audio + transcripts of AI-generated podcasts using NotebookLM to analyse how it "translated" source documents from different times and cultures. My favourites are the 20 podcasts generated from an empty PDF. The paper about it is in press. doi.org/10.18710/RNT...

Yale undergraduate Mateo Ramírez-Valentini writes about families who travel long distances for experimental treatments. He focuses on how some of these treatments are scams or over-hyped. One Argentinean family raised $350k after being enticed by notorious cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski.

However appalled you are by this, it’s not enough. It’s a frank statement that Trump and Trumpists are above the law and need not even plausible excuses to loot your tax dollars. It’s a total failure of our civic institutions.