Ryan McGrady

@antisomniac.bsky.social

Posts

The internet, Wikipedia, NYC, birds, media... Researcher at UMass Amherst, Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, Media Cloud.
Antisomniac here, Mastodon.social, and what's left of the bird place.
Rhododendrites on Wiki, Instagram, Threads

Posts Replies Media

So what platform [other than twitter] are people using to live-[tweet/toot/post/whatever] the debate tonight?

YouTube is being used to train AI, but YouTube has a ton of obscure personal, social, and incidental content alongside the popular creators and news clips. See our piece in @us.theconversation.com today theconversation.com/ai-companies... @ethanz.bsky.social

AI companies train language models on YouTube’s archive − making family-and-friends videos a privacy risktheconversation.com Many videos people upload to YouTube aren’t really meant for public consumption, but they’re available for AI companies to vacuum up. Many of these personal videos are posted by children.

"ChatGPT is bullshit" is easily the best journal article title I've seen this week. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

ChatGPT is bullshit - Ethics and Information Technologylink.springer.com Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persist...

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Ryan McGrady

2002: "Careful, kids, the Internet is forever!" 2024: "Oh, hey, all the work you did for a decade of your life was just deleted from the Internet for Business Reasons." latenighter.com/news/paramou...

Paramount Axes Comedy Central Site, 25+ Years of Daily Show Clips Gonelatenighter.com One of the richest repositories of late-night videos—including 25 years of clips from 'The Daily Show' and the entire run of 'The Colbert Report'—is no longer.

The new planet of the apes (like the last couple) is 2.5 hours of marveling at just how believable and expressive CG apes can be while some forgettable story happens in the background involving Ciri and Jerry Lundegaard.

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Ryan McGrady

With my brilliant friends at the Knight First Amendment Institute, I filed suit against Meta today, asking a federal court to find that CDA section 230 gives users rights to control what they see on social media via third party tools. See our complaint at: knightcolumbia.org/cases/zucker... .

Zuckerman v. Meta Platforms, Inc.knightcolumbia.org

Someone jokingly asked me if I knew how much YouTube would weigh after Alito's question during the Battle of Tortured Media Analogies (i.e. NetChoice SCOTUS). "Haha" I said. Turns out, Philip Bump answered it in WaPo using our data. :) washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

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Ryan McGrady

With Truth Social going public and Trump's net worth soaring as a result, timely research from @yinizhang.bsky.social @jolukito.bsky.social Suk & @antisomniac.bsky.social finds that Trump's engagement on Truth Social drives news coverage across ideologies doi.org/10.1080/1933...

Test post from gobo!

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Ryan McGrady

Twitter was essential for Donald Trump to gain media attention. Now he's on Truth Social (an alt-tech platform), can he use it to obtain comparable levels of news attention as he could with Twitter? From our latest paper w/ @jolukito.bsky.social @JiyounSuk, @antisomniac.bsky.social🧵

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Facebook/Meta has announced that they are closing down their Crowdtangle app, which provided access to their public data to journalists and researchers. It hasn’t been well-supported for a few years, but it was still useful. This will be another big loss to platform transparency.

9 arguments against the "TikTok Ban" which just passed the House, ranked: [1/15] #tiktok #tiktokban #PAFACAA

Unsurprisingly, Moderated Content has one of the most useful takes on the NetChoice content moderation cases (i.e. the laws where state governments tell businesses who they can ban and what speech they can host) law.stanford.edu/podcasts/the...

New York City passed 1,000,000 iNaturalist observations! www.inaturalist.org/observations... If you haven't played with the Seek app, check it out -- identify basically any living thing by pointing your phone camera at it.

I always appreciate the research report part of the Wikipedia Signpost. In this issue, a write-up about the @Nature "Online Images Amplify Gender Bias" paper and a mention of a new Wikipedia-covered "event" corpus I hadn't seen yet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

Kavanaugh asked about terrorist speech. Nielson said yes, the Texas law would mean platforms would be required to host terrorist propaganda if they wanted to host criticism of terrorism (or the flip side, that in order to prohibit pro-terrorist messaging, you'd have to ban criticism of terrorism).

Nielson seems to be dodging the hypotheticals as "vile" and providing his own examples that seem difficult to reconcile with reality ("kick someone off facebook because their grandma says something offensive", "platforms kicking someone off because they don't like their race"...)

The Supreme Court needs to go do some grinding to level up its characters' "Internet Stuff" stats.

A good summary of why arguments that rely on referencing or analogizing "the dark ages" is almost always goofy and wrong.

It is with a heavy heart that I once again repost this. I AM SO TIRED. going-medieval.com/2017/05/26/t...

There’s no such thing as the ‘Dark Ages’, but OKgoing-medieval.com As a very serious adult, with a respectable career and life, and a healthy ability to let petty shit slide, I spent much too much time last week arguing with strangers on the internet who believe in t...

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Ryan McGrady

The other place has never been funnier.

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Ryan McGrady

Reply to

Dave Karpf

There’s a really interesting book to be written by a rogue venture capitalist declaring “what we’re building is ruining the internet!” But that’s not this book. This book is 250 pages of Chris Dixon-in-a-hotdog-costume, shouting “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this.”

Flaco the celebrity owl is on the main page of Wikipedia right now! Thanks Roy for the nomination and Nan Knighton for sharing her photo of Flaco the peeper!

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Ryan McGrady

From @antisomniac.bsky.social in The Atlantic: a deep dive into YouTube as Infrastructure -- "something you have to use, because basic elements of society have organized around it" -- despite never being designed that way. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

What We Discovered on ‘Deep YouTube’www.theatlantic.com The video site isn’t just a platform. It’s infrastructure.

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Ryan McGrady

YouTube has over 14 billion videos. The lab's very own Ryan McGrady (@antisomniac.bsky.social) and Kevin Zheng (@ze.vin) joined the show to tell us about their groundbreaking work trying to understand and visualize what exactly is on YouTube. publicinfrastructure.org/podcast/97-r...

97. There are 14 billion videos on YouTube. Mr. Beast, we hereby challenge you to watch them all. - ...publicinfrastructure.org Our lab's Ryan McGrady and Kevin Zheng are taking a victory lap around some amazing work they're doing here at the lab. Ryan just published an article in The Atlantic about the research he's leading t...

Excited to have this piece in The Atlantic today! www.theatlantic.com/technology/a... A few of us at @idpiumass.bsky.social did a lot of work to produce a truly random sample of YouTube videos and wrote a really long paper to paint a portrait of YouTube as a whole [1/3]

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Ryan McGrady

I wrote about how platforms killed Pitchfork www.platformer.news/why-pitchfor...

Did you know that @wikipedia.bsky.social has a system that makes it easy to add captions to audio and video files? For the best conceivable example of wikicaptions (technically "timedtext") in action, here's a clip from Darude's Sandstorm en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Da...

At #wikipediaday, Amir Aharoni is floating the idea that if LLMs are good at helping humans write cover letters, maybe cover letters aren't actually that important -- maybe LLMs indirectly identify genres of writing that we should reconsider #wikimedianyc @wikipedia.bsky.social

Nobody is better than Lane Rasberry at communicating the importance and influence of @wikipedia.bsky.social (at #wikipediaday NYC, Brown Institute) #wikimedianyc #wikipedia #wikipediaday

At @wikipedia.bsky.social Day NYC at the Brown Institute / Columbia, @eryk.bsky.social is talking about the importance of archives like WikiCommons and its contributors in AI training data (which we should be thinking about as an archive)