- I have raved before about how easily one can access the Bluesky API from R with the help of the very useful atrrr package. This article shows how to analyse the results with the help of Large Language Models. Well above my pay grade, but the end result looks genuinely useful.
- Everyone who is paying attention is worried about social media’s deteriorating effect on democracy. Henry Farrell is worried, too, but not so much about disinformation per se. I’m not sure if I agree with his view of democracy, but all of this is characteristically good, and this sentence is pure gold: ‘The result is that X/Twitter is a Pornhub where everything is twisted around the particular kinks of a specific, and visibly disturbed individual’. Amen to that.
- This is disgusting, and quite telling: the mock plane tickets printed by far-right AfD echo the ones made by the neo-Nazi NPD in the 2010s and ultimately the fake train tickets printed by the original Nazis since the 1920s.
- Vicente Valentim has just published the book on the normalisation of far-right views and talking points in (Western) Europe, and it’s brilliant. If you are pressed for time, he also wrote a very short summary of his research.