Eleonora Benecchi

4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere It’s likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again. But everything now—from X and YouTube to global politics—seems to carry its toxic legacy.

4chan is dead. Long live 4chan.

Releasing Conclave the day after the Pope’s death is something else. @amazonprime.bsky.social timed that drop like it had a seat at the Vatican.

My fan-heart is full to the brim with this stunning new Anne of Green Gables adaptation. It’s a cottagecore vision brought to life, true to the soft, windswept beauty of Prince Edward Island’s highlands, with colors that breathe like old film and fresh air.
#anneofgreengables

We talked about separating the author from the text but should we talk about separating the fandom from a narrative they once loved? Will the new Harry Potter reboot collapse under the weight of its own legacy? Comments are off in every official social media, but the fandom is loud
#harrypotter

It is official.
My project on Swiss Fan worlds and social exclusion got funded.
Looking forward to the next 4 years of research.

Italian reality TV takes a step back. The Couple, a new 24/7 format, will reintroduce paid SMS-only voting to curb the influence of online fandoms seen in the last editions of Big Brother ITA.
A sign that when fandom becomes gameplay, producers must rethink the rules.
#fandom #realitytv

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Radical-right #populism is the strongest determinant for the propensity to spread #misinformation. Populism, left-wing populism, and right-wing politics are not linked to the spread of misinformation.
Based on 32M tweets from parliamentarians in 26 countries, spanning 6 years and several elections.

5. Being glad that a human learns from your work is a relational, dialogic, and ethical stance. Being critical of AI systems that exploit your work without consent is a form of resistance to extractivist infrastructures that profit from cultural labor while erasing its origins.

4. AI doesn’t understand your writing, it reconstructs patterns to simulate meaning. Your text is transformed into training data, stripped of context, intention, and voice. It is semantic colonization, a process that favors automation over interpretation.

3. The ethical issue lies not in the act of learning, but in the exploitative logic by which AI systems scrape texts indiscriminately from the web without your permission or awareness. When a person chooses to engage with your work, there is at least an implicit recognition of authorship and intent.

2. A human reader gains knowledge from your work; an AI company gains profit. Your writing becomes part of a dataset used to build proprietary tools, monetized by corporations without your consent, attribution, or compensation. It is data colonialism at its best.

This is my 5 cents. 🧵
1. When AI systems “learn” from your writing, they extract linguistic patterns and semantic structures to train predictive models. This is not learning; it is data appropriation. Your intellectual labor is absorbed into systems that generate value elsewhere

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Naming matters, and so does narrative.
Our new open-access article explores how CERN actively worked to combat the "brand confusion" between the World Wide Web and the Internet.
A story about infrastructure, discourse, and institutional power.
#web #history

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Steal now, worry later.
That’s the unspoken motto behind how Meta has trained its AI systems.
Yes, they used my writings.
And, most likely, yours too.
#meta #AI #AItraining

Adolescence.
That’s it.
That’s the message.
#adolescence

And how to use it to gain momentum:

Her new album “I Said I Love You First" opens up with the last speech Selena Gomez gave in "Wizards of Waverly Place".
#selenagomez #fandom

Finally a celebrity who understands the gift economy of fandom.
#faneconomy #fandom

OII | It’s quality not quantity that predicts gamers’ wellbeing, new study finds New analysis finds that the number of hours spent playing Nintendo games did not significantly affect adults’ mental well-being, life satisfaction, emotional state, or depressive symptoms.

Quality, quality, quality.
#gaming

Virtual Ethnography in the Age of Algorithms and AI As a researcher, I’m always excited to talk about my favorite theories and methods. In fact, one of my passions is sharing information about virtual ethnography! It’s a method that I have often use…

The community you see online isn’t the same as the one I see. Algorithms shape our realities. But what does that mean for virtual ethnography? How do we study cultures when the digital lens is so personalized? Killer insights from @nicolleness.bsky.social in this read #Algorithms #VirtualEthnography

Social media bans for teens: Australia has passed one, should other countries follow suit? A block for under-16s would soothe many parents’ concerns, but experts are divided over the evidence in support of it, and how it might work in practice

Social media seems the fixable problem

Spotify, you’re just as obsessed with Sanremo as we are and I respect it.
Adding those iconic flowers to the listening bar?
Chef’s kiss.
🌸🎶 #Sanremo #spotify #flowers
Pic by @trashitaliano.it

Not an horror movie

Oh my cinephile heart!
In season 2 Helly is working on a file named Santa Mira. The fictional town from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
One of the questions on the movie posters read: 'Was this his woman?'
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
Like the aliens replacing humans in the film, Helena replaces Helly
#severance

This is the best piece of content about that story I’ve seen so far
#blackdevil

How do you explain Sanremo to a non-Italian? You don’t. The most iconic headline of the festival says it all: 'Sanremo is Sanremo.' It defies explanation. It just is.
#sanremo #sanremoweek #thisisgoingtobecomeastanaccount

Lady Gaga’s 'Abracadabra' is blowing up with 86.4K TikTok posts—16K in the last 24 hours. Somewhere, a Gen Alpha kid is about to have their life changed, just like we did. Full circle. And back to the future.
#abracadabra #ladygaga #backtothefuture

Lost walked so Severance could run.
“Everything is connected” just hit differently.
Severance 2 episode 4 they will never make me hate you.
#Severance #Lost

Comedy at its peak.
#severance #adamscott #talkingaboutboybands

Ok. Now I’m scared.
#buffy #revival