@thinkmacro
Thinking about information, technology, policy, and society. @HUJI: Communication, Public Policy and Governance, Cybersecurity www.thinkmacro.org | www.comparativeprivacy.org Also at: @thinkmacro@fediscience.org
This analysis of papers from 1980 to 2025 goes beyond LLMs, but notes one challenge that arises when research questions rely on the same tools and datasets: “the adoption of AI seems to induce authors to converge on the same solutions to known problems rather than create new ones.”
I'm co-chairing the Society for Social Studies of Science @4sweb.bsky.social Conference in Toronto, Oct 2026. #STS #scipol #innovation
Theme: "TechnoPower • Technoscientific Futures".
Open panel submissions portal is open! ls!
Deadline: 2nd February 2026
www.4sonline.org/about_the_co...
Superb piece on why “AI” is bad user design from @sifu.tweety.fish - and why AI proponents and skeptics so frequently seem to be talking completely past each other.
buttondown.com/apperceptive...
🧐
Interested in platform governance, a defining issue of our time?
Dec 1-2, PlatGovNet is hosting its 2025 online conference. 60+ presentations, conversations with civil society, Reddit, Bluesky. It is free to attend.
Program platgov.net/assets/site/...
Registration ucph-ku.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
I wrote an updated guide on which AIs to use right now, & some tips on how to use them (and how to avoid falling into some common traps)
A lot has changed since I last wrote a guide like this in the spring, and AI has gotten much more useful as a result. open.substack.com/pub/oneusefu...
A chart of 25 countries with horizontal green bars showing that majorities see false information on the internet as a significant threat
A median of 72% of adults across 25 nations say the spread of false information online is a major threat to their country. Concern about this issue is widespread in both high- and middle-income countries, and it has remained relatively stable over time.
🌐 Want to understand how countries are prioritizing key issues ahead of WSIS+20? GNI and @gpdigital.bsky.social have published a new summary infographic offering a quick visual guide to where countries stand on key WSIS+20 issues.
globalnetworkinitiative.org/gni-and-gpd-...
These 2 stellar pieces from @techpolicypress.bsky.social are essential for educators thinking through the profoundly new internet our students are experiencing.
techpolicy.press/how-ai-drive...
July roundup on tech policy litigation from Tech Justice Law Project’s Melodi Dinçer! This month covers key legal discussions in generative AI and “digital replicas,” section 230 protections, privacy law enforcement, demise of FTC’s click to cancel, and a resolution in Cambridge Analytica.
🚨 New publication! 🚨 Do people really trust the government? It depends on how you ask.
Happy to share that our paper on why Question Form Matters with KatharinaPfaff (@stawi-univie.bsky.social) is now out in @jssam.bsky.social 📊🇦🇹
🔗 academic.oup.com/jssam/advanc...
We sincerely hope these contributions encourage further engagement with comparative privacy research and meaningful conversations about privacy in our increasingly interconnected world.
Our deepest gratitude to all the authors for their rigorous work, important insights, and patience & effort.
11. In "A Triple-Layered Comparative Approach" @liming1026.bsky.social & Yiming Chen analyze how WeChat, Taobao, and Douyin, implement privacy policies after China's Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL). doi.org/10.1177/2056...
10. In "(Lack of) Patterns in Commitment" @tarnov.bsky.social analyzes and maps the data protection laws across 25 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, discovering large variability that does not follow clear geographic patterns. doi.org/10.1177/2056...
9. In "'(Virtuous) Wives Don't Have Anything to Hide'" Debjani Chakraborty & Chhavi Garg examine how married women in rural India navigate digital privacy, balancing cultural norms of being "hidden" online while having "nothing to hide" from family. doi.org/10.1177/2056...
8. In "AI Privacy in Context" Renwen Zhang, Han Li, Anfan Chen, Zihan Liu, and Yi-Chieh Lee compare public and institutional discourses on AI privacy on Twitter (US) and Weibo (China), revealing divergent patterns shaped by cultural, political, and economic factors. doi.org/10.1177/2056...
7. In "Turn It on! Turn It on?" Leyla Dogruel et al. study how students and teachers in Germany and Israel negotiated privacy and visibility during the shift to emergency remote teaching in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic. doi.org/10.1177/2056...
6. In "Conversation-Related Advertising and Electronic Eavesdropping" @segijn.bsky.social et al. examine the belief that mobile devices eavesdrop on offline conversations across three countries with different regulatory contexts and surveillance histories. doi.org/10.1177/2056...
5. In "Understanding the Motivations of Young Adults" Delia Cristina Balaban, Maria Mustăţea, and Valeriu Frunzaru explore motivations behind young adults' privacy protection behaviors when configuring smartphone apps in Germany and Romania. doi.org/10.1177/2056...
4. In "Online Privacy, Young People, & Datafication" Rys Farthing and colleagues explore how young people’s awareness of datafication shape their understandings of online privacy in 4 countries from global south and north. doi.org/10.1177/2056...
3. In "It's Fine If Others Do It Too" @cphoffmann.bsky.social and @shelleyboulianne.bsky.social nvestigate the relationship between privacy concerns, social influence, and online political expression on Facebook across five Western democracies. doi.org/10.1177/2056...
2. In "Attitudes on Data Use for Public Benefit" Frederic Gerdon compares attitudes on the use of data for public benefit across Germany, Spain, and the UK in a longitudinal survey experiment. doi.org/10.1177/2056...
1. In the editorial we introduce the special issue and the Comparative Privacy Research Framework (CPRF) as a conceptual foundation for context-sensitive #privacy research.
Editorial: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
CPRF: doi.org/10.1080/0197...
The issue hosts 10 contributions and an editorial. Articles explore varied #privacy perceptions, behaviors, & regulations. They draw on theories like contextual integrity & privacy calculus, offering insights into complex relationships between privacy concerns & socio-political/tech forces.
New special issue, "Comparative Approaches to Studying Privacy," edited by #CPRN is now published in Social Media + Society!
journals.sagepub.com/topic/collec...
w/ @lutzid.bsky.social, Lemi Baruh, Kelly Quinn, @masurphil.bsky.social, Carsten Wilhelm (comparativeprivacy.org)
Judgitbu the abstract, this seems like an interesting read..
We find techies to be liberal on cultural issues, such as same-sex marriage and cosmopolitanism, conservative on income redistribution, and inconsistent on attitudes towards economic regulation. They also show surprisingly high institutional trust. Developers emerge as a politically distinct group.
We use large-scale cross-national survey data (ESS & ISSP) to explore the differences both within the tech workforce and between it and other occupational elites. We also test the generalizability of previous US-based results about tech professionals in a more geographically diverse sample.
On politics and policy preferences of tech workers: In a preprint of a study lead by Gilad Be'ery and co-authored with @raanan-sk.bsky.social we show that, despite some similarities, techies do not have a universal policy agenda; developers are particularly distinct.
osf.io/preprints/os...
