Ryan J. Gallagher
Applied scientist trying to make the internet a little better. PhD. Platform manipulation, deceptive behaviors, disinformation, networks, fingerstyle guitar. I use my hair to express myself. He/they
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherIf you are a US-based researcher or journalist facing online or hybrid harassment—or know someone else who is—please visit and share our website. You are not alone. Your work matters, and we are here to help. 22/ expertvoicestogether.org
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherThe worst happened. We were DOGE’d. Our NSF funding is gone. So now there’s nothing stopping me from sharing Expert Voices Together, a crisis response system for US-based researchers and journalists facing harassment. It's a true passion project. 🧵 1/ expertvoicestogether.org
- I spoke with Science about scholars—myself included—self-censoring. In my case, my team and I feared losing our NSF funding for Expert Voices Together (expertvoicestogether.org), a program, ironically, built to support researchers and journalists under attack. www.science.org/content/arti...
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherThe cost of Grok: "I can't breathe at home, it smells like gas outside. How come I can't breathe at home and y'all get to breathe at home?"
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherThis is so fucked up. Sorry that’s the academic description for it. They are really dismantling everything
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherDuring a recent interview with Theo Von, Zuckerberg admitted a startling revelation. While talking to his daughter about the news, he realized understanding politics and law is important to fully understanding technology. What a discovery! www.disconnect.blog/p/mark-zucke...
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherHas anyone written anything about *scraping and text processing* for internet pretraining data? Practical details, which tools are used, which webpage elements are considered, how HTML to text conversion is done? (I know about work on quality filters, relevant but not quite what I'm looking for)
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Sometimes I think "wow it's really good I left academia because my work on social media and marginalization would have definitely been defunded by the government" and then I remember I work at the one social media platform banned by said government
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherMeta quietly restarting its facial recognition work and discussing its use on its smartglasses is exactly why you should never trust a company's proclamations about putting your privacy first. www.theinformation.com/articles/met...
- A lot of academic work on detecting online coordination uses all sorts of fancy methods but then hardly validates them For the past 3 years I've worked with analysts who can spend weeks validating a single network is actually coordinated. Academia should be using the same level of rigor
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherI became a very uninteresting party guest recently when I started pointing out that everyone was just talking about what we used to call machine learning and why don’t we still call it machine learning and also it would be more accurate to call it machine copying and anyway
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher"We identified Do by cross-referencing data from massive credential leaks, which are publicly available via breach databases....burner emails, IP addresses, repeated usernames, and a unique password reveal a more than decade-long digital trail that allowed researchers to link him to MrDeepFakes."
- Our latest investigation, with @tjekdet.dk , @politiken.dk and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reveals the real identity of the man behind Mr Deepfake, the notorious site where non-consensual deepfake pornography is published www.bellingcat.com/news/2025/05...
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher“everyday information that is based on federal data, such as weather forecasts, "doesn't have a label that says 'brought to you by the federal government'." And now we know it should! But it’s too late. Anyhoo, we see yet again the usefulness of @smettler.bsky.social “submerged state” thesis…
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherWe've been given an amazing opportunity with our round of funding to build out the next generation of the social web. Today, we're starting an experiment in paying that forward. Introducing Graze Grants, a project to help get other ATProto projects off the ground.
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherI'm excited that I can finally share what I've been working on for the past 9 months: The United Nations 2025 Human Development Report: "A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI" 🧵 hdr.undp.org/content/huma...
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherIt's like every website, app and piece of software has developed its own Clippy. Clippy is following me around every day from Google to Zoom to Adobe Acrobat, telling me it looks like I'm trying to exist and would I like help with that
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherWe are delighted to share the publication of Risky Research: An AoIR Guide to Researcher Protection and Safety, the culmination of over two years of collaborative effort by the AoIR Risky Research Working Group. aoir.org/riskyresearc...
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherI think people genuinely don’t actually know that kids used to die all the fucking time!
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherThe border state of Chihuahua has recorded 713 confirmed cases, with its outbreak linked to the ongoing cluster of cases north of the border in Texas. www.wired.com/story/as-mea...
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherThe US government doesn't subsidize university research. Rather, universities subsidize government research. I've seen recent threads deceiving the first half of this, but nothing recent describing the extent to which universities are doing the subsidizing.
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagherwhat will stay with me the most is this quote. institutions are based on trust. if this data is continually used against the ppl who trusted the govt enough to comply & give it to them, the contract is breached. if you were creating a program to further hurt trust in govt it would look like this.
- The researchers mostly appeal to the harm that will occur if they *don't* do the research ("rampant bad actors might do this anyway"), which is self serving They hardly seem to reflect on the harms that can come from *actually doing* the research (deception, violating community norms, active harm)
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherThrilled to be at the CHI conference this week where PhD student @schafer.bsky.social will present our paper — co-authored w/ Rachel Moran (1st author) & @mertcanbayar.bsky.social — titled, "The End of Trust and Safety?" dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherMeta's new celebrity-voiced AI bots, which Zuckerberg has touted as the "future of social media" are engaging in explicit role-play with accounts identified as minors. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta...
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- The r/ChangeMyView LLM experiment is an ethical mess There's a lot to say but I'm really frustrated with how the IRB dropped the ball. Lots of social media studies get this "minimal risk, go ahead" assessment, but they're usually NOT interacting with users. Doing so completely changes the stakes
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherThe mods of r/ChangeMyView shared the sub was the subject of a study to test the persuasiveness of LLMs & that they didn't consent. There’s a lot that went wrong, so here’s a 🧵 unpacking it, along with some ideas for how to do research with online communities ethically. tinyurl.com/59tpt988
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher
According to three members of Congress, Rumeysa Ozturk has been repeatedly denied access to her lawyer, refused asthma medication despite attacks, forced to endure extreme temperatures, and denied religious accommodations. Her ‘crime’? An oped in a school newspaper. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/o... - Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherPhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081
- the mass layoffs at Twitter ruined me because I still think it's funny to use the salute emoji 🫡
- Having a PhD is funny because once in a blue moon someone brings up the one very specific thing that your dissertation is on and they have no idea what they've just stumbled into
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Feature from Twitter that I miss on Bluesky: getting a notification when something I reposted leads to my followers liking or reposting it I amplify a lot more than I write myself. I like seeing that has an impact too
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. GallagherThe Bluesky Jetstream is great - and we just made it better. Introducing the Graze Turbostream, an enriched Jetstream that includes *all* stale referenced objects, and completely skips the need for redundant hydration API calls!
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
- Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher[Not loaded yet]
