Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র

I am delighted to be keynoting the IR-for-good track at @ecir2026.eu

I will be talking about what I learned from studying generative AI's use during the biggest election year in history. (Spoiler: the problem is not just deepfakes.)

The talk is called gemini hegemony, expect a little 🌶️

Oh,ok

Western civilization was a MISTAKE.

Nothing to Declare Making big public statements is always fun and people who think themselves to be important love doing it as a way of trying to influence public opinion and/or politics. They are a way for institutions...

By @tante.cc who is on point as always.

"So there is a new declaration in town called the “The Pro-Human AI Declaration“...before we go into the details, let’s look at who is pushing this for a second because the declaration keeps talking about how broad their coalition is"
tante.cc/2026/03/05/n...

The IR-for-Good Invited Talks and Panel Session on Monday, March 30 (16:00-17:15) will feature
@danachatter.bsky.social, @djoerd.idf.social.ap.brid.gy, @mdaepp.bsky.social, @sannevrijenhoek.bsky.social, @mariaheuss.bsky.social, and @bmitra.bsky.social.

See you in Delft! #ECIR2026 #IR4Good

🗓️ Monday, March 30
10:30-12:30: IR-for-Good Paper Session I
13:30-14:30: IR-for-Good Paper Session II
16:00-17:15: IR-for-Good Invited Talks and Panel

🗓️ Tuesday, March 31
09:00-10:00: IR-for-good Keynote by @mdaepp.bsky.social on "Gemini Hegemony"
10:30-12:30: IR-for-Good Paper Session III

Cont...

If you are attending #ECIR2026, @mariaheuss.bsky.social and I invite you to join us at the IR-for-Good Track. This year, we are revamping IR-for-Good as a core track at the conference and we have a really exciting agenda lined up for you! #IR4Good

Cont...

Tech companies have until August 2026 to comply with the EU AI Act's rule requiring public summaries of AI model training data.

New analysis shows that the big AI players (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft) have so far neglected this requirement for GPT, Gemini, Claude, and other models.

i suspect many liberal uk journalists rolled their eyes at this line 6 months ago

Like: men who I thought were very dedicated to science, investigation, journalism or any conceptually truth-seeking field, who dropped that pretence in milliseconds once someone gave them a software lying machine that mimics correctness and also gives them oozing compliments

People who are not tax resident in the UK should not be allowed to donate to UK political parties.

Companies should not be allowed to donate to UK political parties.

No one should be allowed to use crypto to donate to UK political parties.

The point of this thread is that i am uninterested in their usefulness in their stated tasks.

However I will add that I think there is another layer besides moral judgment and task utility, which is political utility.

i think these tools provide enormous political utility to fascists

1 Inquiry for New York Times Good afternoon, My name is [REDACTED] and l am a reporter for the New York Times. I am researching how much money the Palestinian diaspora community has sent to support Gazan families since the war in Gaza began. Does your team track this figure? I really appreciate it. With gratitude, [REDACTED]

Palestine Diaspora Movement Hello [REDACTED] We do not collaborate with The New York Times. Your email asks about money sent to Gazan families "since the war in Gaza began." Let us first correct the premise. This is not a war. It is a genocide. Calling it a war is part of the problem. It obscures the reality of a colonized people being massacred by a military machine backed by the United States and defended, sanitized, and rhetorically softened by institutions like yours. The New York Times has spent far too long parroting Zionist propaganda and laundering Israeli state narratives while Palestinians bury their dead. That kind of coverage does not merely misinform. It helps create the political climate in which Palestinian slaughter becomes explainable, defensible, and forgettable. So no, we will not be sharing any figures, internal data, or community information with a paper that has so thoroughly damaged its credibility on Palestine. Quite frankly, we would rather chew jeans than help The New York Times extract from our community while continuing to fail it. Do not contact us again for this purpose, The Palestine Diaspora Movement Team

“Quite frankly, we would rather chew jeans than help The New York Times extract from our community while continuing to fail it”

lmaooo GET EM

1953. It would appear that absolutely NOTHING has changed

So ChatGPT tells people to kill themselves, and OpenAI's response is to shift responsibility to unpaid, untrained, non-professional friends and family members.

So if you get designated as the "trusted contact," you're doing terrifying unpaid work for this evil company.

Shut it all down.

But since we are there, having some uses for accessibility does not make it accessibility tech because accessibility includes thoughtful, transparent affordances for safety, wellbeing, privacy, and autonomy.

ICE has spun a massive surveillance web. We talked to people caught in it The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Border Patrol, is using a broad web of surveillance tools — purchased as its budget has ballooned under this administration — to monitor, ap...

ICE is using mass surveillance on American citizens, activists

www.npr.org/2026/03/04/n...

Yes, we must. You are right, Yoda. Yes, we must. #JEDIWorkshop #SIGIR2026
jedi.inertial.science

Spanish PM Sánchez responds to Trump:

"Spain is against this disaster... Govts are here to improve people's lives... It is absolutely unacceptable that those leaders who are unable to fulfill that mission use the smoke of war to hide their failure, and in the process, fill the pockets of a few."

It's infuriating and frankly ignorant to ignore the reality that police in the United States have always been a key tool in upholding racial capitalism, maintaining the prison industrial complex, and murdering Black people with impunity

SCOOP: Anthropic was among the AI companies that submitted a proposal earlier this year to compete in a $100 million Pentagon prize challenge to produce technology for voice-controlled, autonomous drone swarming, acc to people familiar w/ matter.

And everyone is running around praising them for being "ethical"

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I've repeatedly said this in the past: the end goal of all AI is surveillance, specifically to influence and control

a bright orange canvas jacket with bright blue, green, and magenta letters in a 3x4 pattern reading a b c d e f u c k i c e

finished embroidering my jacket :)

Yesterday was my last day at MSR. We recently learned that our roles were eliminated, and with them our little FATE Montreal team.

I joined MSR a bit over 7.5 years ago while on active chemotherapy, and being at MSR has overlapped with so much change in my life.

Another open-book test of spine and moral backbone that will be failed en masse by the people who are supposed to be watchdogs of democracy.

You turn down invites from Nazis, kids. It’s the easiest call to make. Imagine if Trump walked into a room empty aside from ten Fox News clowns.

The phrase “every conservative influencer in the business” tells you everything you need to know.

The entire modern conservative movement descends from snake oil salesmen and prosperity gospel revival tent preachers.

It’s nothing more than a con, and that’s all it will ever be.

Seeing Matt discovering in real time that Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia is a sight to behold.

Starmer Is Repeating Blair’s Iraq Catastrophe By allowing US forces to use British bases to bomb Iran, Keir Starmer is echoing Tony Blair’s obedience to Washington — dragging Britain into yet another criminal war.

By allowing US forces to use British bases to bomb Iran, Keir Starmer is echoing Tony Blair’s obedience to Washington — dragging Britain into yet another costly, catastrophic and illegal war.

My piece for @tribunemagazine.bsky.social.

tribunemag.co.uk/2026/03/star...

It’s so fucking gross that the first thought from these deranged losers is how dystopic scenes of war and bloodshed are a “massive opportunity” for Canada’s oil oligarchs to make a quick buck.

"Irans Red Crescent Society said nearly 800 people have been killed so far, 170 of them are said to be children"