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Katie Furl

@katherinefurl.bsky.social

880 followers 230 following 89 posts

Assistant professor of sociology, University of North Dakota | PhD, UNC-Chapel Hill | gender, race, class, & digital inequality | she/her | views my own katherinefurl.com

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Katie Furl @katherinefurl.bsky.social · Jul 22

New work from @alicetiara.bsky.social‬, Courtlyn Pippert, Elaine Schnabel, and me recently published in Social Media + Society! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... (1/6)

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

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Katie Furl @katherinefurl.bsky.social · 18h

I like to teach through my mistakes! In a recent attendance poll, students selected which natural disasters they knew of. One student hadn't heard of any & asked what to select. I acknowledged my biases, added a "none" option, & encouraged them to note both what's there & what's missing in surveys.

Reposted by Katie Furl

Eric Reinhart @eric-reinhart.com · 2d

New article out this month on how doctors become fascists.

50% of German physicians joined the Nazi Party––twice the proportion of any other profession. US doctors today are arguably the most conservative in the world, and we're heading along a similar path.
drive.google.com/file/d/1CAk9...

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Khashoggi's Ghost @urocklive1.bsky.social · 2d

Just a reminder that Wikipedia is the only remaining reliable source of information that right wing billionaires can't control. (Although they'll never stop trying.)

Please donate to them whenever you can. Even a little bit helps.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

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Kevin Hearne @kevinhearne.bsky.social · 3d

The reclaiming/reframing of frogs as Antifascist after enduring years of the execrable Pepe is glorious and I am here for every scrap of new heroic frog art

Christopher Doll @blackbirdcd.bsky.social · 3d

This is Space Frog

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Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 5d

twice a year the entire U.S. press becomes a marketing extension of a single billionaire-owned retailer, and nobody in any position of editorial power thinks it's weird or gross

photo of Google News search results for Amazon Prime Day (the second this year)

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LSE Impact Blog @lseimpactblog.bsky.social · 8d

💥New: Academic careers have become a professional sport

✍️ @swallaschek.bsky.social

#AcademicSky #ECRchat #AcademicCareers

Academic careers have become a professional sport - Impact of Social Sciences

Academia like professional sports is increasingly a system defined by competition, precarity and quantification does this lead to a loss of meaning?

blogs.lse.ac.uk

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Katie Furl @katherinefurl.bsky.social · 8d

It’s the weirdest mix of relief and regret when the grading you’ve been putting off far too long only takes a couple minutes.

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Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social · 10d

One thing that comes through awfully clearly in these ICE videos is how many of these goons gravitated toward the job because being able to assault people with impunity is a big thrill for them.

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Sexy CHOAM Nomsky costume @samthielman.com · 12d

it's funny to me that the people who talk about the criminal mindset, which is not a real thing, are the same people who talk about the success mindset, which is just crime

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Cas Ⓜ️udde @casmudde.bsky.social · 12d

As long as the far right shapes public opinion, and mainstream parties follow public opinion, the far right dominates politics, whether in government or not.

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Gil Durán @gilduran.com · 19d

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it).

But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

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Adam Sharp @adamcsharp.bsky.social · Sep 23

Happy Bi Visibility Day! Interesting fact for you... bisexuality was first discovered in 1995, thanks to the hard-hitting investigative journalism of Newsweek

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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 22d

“What fascisms old and new have in common is they tend to look to women to fill in the gaps that the state misses."

And, I'd add, they get women to fill these gaps by making patriarchy's coattails the only way means by which women can achieve security or esteem.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

From Nazi Germany to Trump’s America: why strongmen rely on women at home

Fascist regimes pushed narratives of domestic bliss, yet relied on women’s unpaid labor. In the US today, ‘womanosphere’ influencers promote the same fantasies

www.theguardian.com

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Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans) @iwriteok.bsky.social · 24d

welcome to The Resistance,

*checks notes*

*sighs*

*weeps gently*

...michael eisner

Yashar Ali 🐘 @yasharali.bsky.social · 24d

Michael Eisner, who served as CEO of Disney for 21 years and acquired ABC while he was in charge, slams his successor Bob Iger for bending the knee.

Michael Eisner
@Michael Eisner
X.com
Where has all the leadership gone? If not for university presidents, law firm managing partners, and corporate chief executives standing up against bullies, who then will step up for the first amendment? The
"suspending indefinitely" of Jimmy Kimmel immediately after the Chairman of the FCC's aggressive yet hollow threatening of the Disney Company is yet another example of out-of-control intimidation. Maybe the Constitution should have said, "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, except in one's political or financial self-interest." By-the-way, for the record, this ex-CEO finds Jimmy Kimmel very talented and funny.
10:17 AM • 9/19/25 • 208K Views

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Katie Furl @katherinefurl.bsky.social · 26d

Hi all, my younger sister’s cat recently required emergency surgery totaling thousands of dollars.

I wouldn’t typically share something like this on bsky, but Meredith is a kind, hardworking graduate student, and even the smallest bit would help her weather this.

www.gofundme.com/f/ivy-recove...

Donate to help cover the costs of Ivy's emergency surgery!, organized by Meredith Furl

Help cover the cost of Ivy's foreign body surgery! For those … Meredith Furl needs your support for Donate to help cover the costs of Ivy's emergency surgery!

www.gofundme.com

Reposted by Katie Furl

Paul Nadeau @pauljnadeau.bsky.social · 28d

Relevant that this photo's a staple of my class slides to illustrate how expanding media in early America allowed postcards with images like this to be circulated, taking slavery from an abstract phenomenon to a concrete horror show that inflamed public opinion and helped build abolitionism

Jim Goldgeier @jimgoldgeier.bsky.social · 28d

www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

National park to remove photo of enslaved man’s scars

The Trump administration is ordering the removal of information on slavery at multiple national parks in an effort to scrub them of “corrosive ideology.”

www.washingtonpost.com

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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · Sep 14

This may explain why there’s an aggressive response to people who merely post Kirk’s own words. It threatens the existence of the alternate Kirk - the motivational speaker that had been marketed to young kids and white Christian groups through selective quotation & clips.

ML @mlpoole.bsky.social · Sep 14

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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · Sep 11

@bluesky moderation is suspending people for posting Kirk's own words which tells you everything you need to know.

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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · Apr 15

"AI work is just as good as human work" is a statement that *always* flows from the direction of power. Employers to workers, producers to consumers, but not the reverse.

Because it's not a thing people actually believe, but an argument: slop is good enough for you; you are slop.

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Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · Sep 8

"How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?"

A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons.

Presented by The Gilded Age's Morgan Spector.

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Katie Furl @katherinefurl.bsky.social · Sep 2

Pictured: window, glorious window. After so many years of windowless fluorescence, your view of the outside world is deeply cherished.

An office window, with a view of other office buildings, and a small plant.

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Benjamin Balthaser @blbalthaser.bsky.social · Aug 30

My students, who attend a working-class rust-belt college, openly talk abt how much they hate AI & are afraid of its consequences. I wonder how much of the oft-reported student enthusiasm for the tech is the merely result of the NYT’s Ivy League bias

We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.

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ghost malone ergo propter malone @proptermalone.bsky.social · Aug 29

well this is exceptionally gross

Reuters @reuters.com · Aug 29

Exclusive: Meta has appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities — including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez — to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission, Reuters has found reut.rs/3JWb00R

Exclusive: Meta created flirty chatbots of Taylor Swift, other celebrities without permission

Meta has appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities – including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez – to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission, Reuters has found.

reut.rs

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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · Aug 28

Call for Papers!

"Technology and Inequality in Culture, Media, and the Arts"-a special issue of Poetics, coedited with @jticona.bsky.social + Angèle Christin

www.ias.edu/stsv-lab/pla...

Technology and Inequality in Culture, Media, and the Arts

Call for Papers Technology and Inequality in Culture, Media, and the ArtsA Special Issue of Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts

www.ias.edu

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