It seems like the most obvious thing to say in the world, but people need to be held accountable for the murder of children during an illegal war. Yet any real accountability for this will clearly require a radical political break.
whomst could possibly have predicted this
from Olga Tokarczuk's Flights
For politically active billionaires and their allies in Washington, social media is becoming an instrument of political power, writes Paddy Leerssen. Broadly, a new regulatory paradigm for content moderation is emerging: the EU writes laws, the US buys shares.
Forcing half a million people to leave their homes and then destroying their homes is ethnic cleansing.
Why are you just sat here watching?
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
Great write up of the tremendous work by my colleague @cashman.bsky.social showing the absurdly huge cost that Europeans are paying for hitching their wagon to US LNG instead of going all-in on renewables.
“Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences” is a genuinely stunning statement given current events both at home and abroad
Today's evacuation orders in Beirut displace 100,000s - including elderly people, children, people with disabilities, etc. etc., all having to leave in a hurry with no idea what will happen to their homes. This kind of mass forced displacement is illegal under international law.
6246 criminal charges under Germany’s highly controversial offence of insulting politicians were filed in 2025 alone, an all-time high and a troubling signal for freedom of expression. www.stern.de/politik/poli...
❌Non à la guerre impérialiste !
Depuis samedi, l'escalade guerrière au Moyen-Orient s'accélère d'heure en heure.
Contre la folie guerrière, construisons la réponse populaire :
Non aux interventions militaires impérialistes !
Soutien aux peuples d'Iran, du Liban et de Palestine !
We join our fellow global union federations in calling for an immediate ceasefire and a stop to escalation in Iran, the Middle East and beyond.
⬇️Full statement
uniglobalunion.org/news/global-...
Text excerpt from NYT article linked in second skeet saying: “Most of the profits are flowing to the very affluent Americans, who are not subject to this cost-of-living crisis anyway because they’re so rich. They’re getting richer, and everyone else is dealing with inflation,” said Gregor Semieniuk, associate professor of University of Massachusetts Amherst who led the study. The United Kingdom responded to fossil fuel companies’ bumper year by adding a windfall tax designed to capture some of the excess profits and use the money to ease the burden on households facing higher bills. Semieniuk’s team calculated what would have happened if the U.S. government redistributed the portion of the fossil fuel industry’s 2022 profits that exceeded its 2021 returns. They found that the move would send $1,715 to every American household, which, they argued, could have helped ease the burden of inflation on lower-income households.
![Text excerpt from the FT article in the second skeet saying:
Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/.
https://www.ft.com/content/43fe2f44-d3ea-45c9-a641-e6f0e68949af?accessToken=zwAAAZy4l4RPkc9D_i9E0-pFydOmQebw5olJrw.MEUCIH4nsXTramXEOh6tWM6n9rrMqI0FnMfHQsz7tU0HufXAAiEAx8x5MmOYujURIqdhdxGDYHysYSEB2eVuSpM9n1iDuhA&segmentId=e95a9ae7-622c-6235-5f87-51e412b47e97&shareType=enterprise&shareId=a96149bb-d68a-4bc5-b023-2174a60fd9c5
Research on the oil and gas crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 showed that the gains of the boon on energy producers were not equally shared.
The wealthiest 1 per cent of the US population eventually received more than 50 per cent of energy companies’ windfall from that particular surge in prices, according to a paper published in September 2025.
“If anything [the US has] become a more powerful exporter and producer of fossil fuels since 2022. And of course, their oil majors are active globally. So I think [US shareholders] are poised to take advantage even more [now],” said Gregor Semieniuk, a professor at the University of Massachusetts who was one of the authors of the research. “Wealth distributions don’t change overnight.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:zzkt72yllokx7rstuph6rlrw/bafkreigrlauo2i24owltmckxgpdt4gyzzwwu6hvotpslz57hqdbodogxba@jpeg)
Text excerpt from the FT article in the second skeet saying: Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://help.ft.com/faq/gifting-and-sharing-an-article/what-is-a-gift-article/. https://www.ft.com/content/43fe2f44-d3ea-45c9-a641-e6f0e68949af?accessToken=zwAAAZy4l4RPkc9D_i9E0-pFydOmQebw5olJrw.MEUCIH4nsXTramXEOh6tWM6n9rrMqI0FnMfHQsz7tU0HufXAAiEAx8x5MmOYujURIqdhdxGDYHysYSEB2eVuSpM9n1iDuhA&segmentId=e95a9ae7-622c-6235-5f87-51e412b47e97&shareType=enterprise&shareId=a96149bb-d68a-4bc5-b023-2174a60fd9c5 Research on the oil and gas crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 showed that the gains of the boon on energy producers were not equally shared. The wealthiest 1 per cent of the US population eventually received more than 50 per cent of energy companies’ windfall from that particular surge in prices, according to a paper published in September 2025. “If anything [the US has] become a more powerful exporter and producer of fossil fuels since 2022. And of course, their oil majors are active globally. So I think [US shareholders] are poised to take advantage even more [now],” said Gregor Semieniuk, a professor at the University of Massachusetts who was one of the authors of the research. “Wealth distributions don’t change overnight.”
Who stands to profit as energy prices are rising due to the escalating war in the Middle East? NYT and FT quoting our research on the 2022 energy crisis! Spoiler: in the West it's mainly affluent shareholders.
High time to dust off the discussions on excess profit taxes & strategic price controls.
Re: stupidity
Deux articles de Romaric Godin en un jour ? C'est clairement un symptôme d'une récession
New from Picketty's lab: The world can raise incomes toward global equity & stabilize the climate under "under very strict conditions"
—reduction of work hours
—consumption shift toward immaterial sectors
—major change in food habits
—a fast energy transition requiring massive low-carbon investment
"Of those who voted Labour [in 2024], just 37% would vote Labour again".
Read that again to absorb the full, astonishing weight of what it means.
Starmer, Reeves and co have burnt their house down.
news.sky.com/story/greens...
An important article - in an era of asymmetric warfare and dramatic power imbalances on the world stage, Western democratic leaders, so often in public, will likely come to regret the degradation of the norm against Head of State/Govt assassination by other states much more than autocrats will...
calling all early career researchers interested in critical perspectives on AI! I'm very excited to take part in this summer school in london in june alongside such a great lineup ⬇️ applications open now
www.kcl.ac.uk/events/summe...
Thanks :) I can email it if you're interested - is your potsdam uni address still current?
And thanks also for sharing your additional thoughts on the article!
...political landscape, but I think in the current context of rising authoritarianism, we need to at least oppose further expansion of state + corporate surveillance.
...but also actually seriously restricts children's rights and interests in a lot of ways). I think these proposals actually entrench rather than challenging the current corporate platform landscape. And ofc, I don't hold out much hope for more radical/progressive reform of social media in today's..
...we can't imagine any social media landscape other than the current one, all we can imagine is for it to be the same but exclude a certain subset of users that we deem particularly vulnerable (and I think the article does a good job explaining why this raises serious privacy issues for everyone...
...are serving to legitimise not to challenge the current system. right-wing govts like Macron's love announcing this because it's crowdpleasing but it substitutes for any real discussion of how platforms could be governed in a way that is more democratic or geared towards public interests...
I also don't particularly agree with that particular aspect of the framing - my whole PhD was about how exploitative & unequal the current system of corporate social media is and how inadequate the current regulatory regime is. But in my personal view the proposed social media bans for under 18s...
Finally, the article is obviously an op-ed meant to be accessible to a wide audience, not an academic assessment. Here are a couple of resources that give some more systematic background & expert views on the points I made:
kgi.georgetown.edu/research-and...
edri.org/wp-content/u...
...when I look around the dire & worsening political situation in the countries I've lived in (France, UK and most of all Germany) I'm v concerned about any proposal to intensify state surveillance of online activity. Which is not to say that the situation in the absence of that proposal is ok!
...and linking it to their online activity at a vastly larger scale than happens atm. I'm very sympathetic to your point that the corporate-dominated internet is already a nightmare for privacy and freedom of expression, but does that mean we shd ignore any proposal that could make things worse? ...
...I think it's pretty clear in the context of the article that Lorenz is arguing that AI systems can't reliably/precisely assess age *without using official ID* (e.g. based on facial recognition), which means that age verification requirements will inevitably mean collecting people's official ID...
Hi Pavlos, thanks for sharing your thoughts :) I respectfully disagree with most of the points you raised though. Just to clarify a couple of things: where you say the statement 'The problem with age verification is that AI systems cannot accurately pinpoint one's precise age?' doesn't make sense...
