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Ryan J. Gallagher

@ryanjgallag.com

4.6K followers 970 following 440 posts

Applied scientist trying to make the internet a little better. PhD. Trust & safety, platform manipulation, networks, fingerstyle guitar. I use my hair to express myself. He/they

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · Nov 12

With more people migrating to Bluesky (and my general quietness since Twitter fell apart), I want to reintroduce myself!

I'm an applied scientist in online trust & safety. I specialize in detecting coordinated/harmful/deceptive networks, and bridging domain expertise with machine learning systems

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 4h

Unfortunately the stakeholders yearn for hairballs

Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 4h

My post was a honeypot, and this is the only correct take

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 6h

I think there are 3 main things

1. You need a barrage of different layout algorithms. They need to have good default params and work well out of the box

2. You need good default plotting params. It needs to look pretty out of the box

3. You need a good API that you don't have to hack around

Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 6h

It pains me there isn't a dedicated network plotting library in Python. I'm reminded of it every time I use networkx (which to be fair, they make very clear plotting is not a priority)

If I had the patience for it I'd write it myself but it's so tedious

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Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 18h

The entire incident is infuriating and terrifying. She’s a Latina woman who was working a service job. On her way home late at night, with her headphones in, she was detained for an hour by masked federal agents who wouldn’t give her their names.

Maria Greeley, 44, had just finished working a double shift at the Beach Bar on Ohio Street
earlier this month when she said she was surrounded by three federal agents who grabbed her, forced her hands behind her back and zip tied her.
Headphones in, Greeley had been focused on getting home to her two dogs for a walk.
Instead, she said she was detained by masked agents who did not answer when she asked for names. They questioned her for an hour, she said.

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 21h

Quote tweets are a form of "remixing" another person's content. On TikTok, stitches and duets are also forms of remix

If you view it from the lens of "remix," there are probably a lot of fun features you could do even with text-based social media

Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher

Network Science Society @netscisociety.bsky.social · 1d

This month, no colloquium but a special session about careers in network science! Join us and an all-star panel on October 29. Register here for a Zoom link: iu.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

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Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher

tef @tef.bsky.social · 1d

it's kinda weird that all the software i am expected to use for work are all written by distributed teams, go, python, postgres, linux, chrome, k8s etc

and despite being told "the best teams work in an office together" i don't know of any software i use that's actually written that way

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Joshua Foust 🪖🎮 @joshuafoust.com · 1d

Recently had a chapter published in the Handbook of Gender and Digital Media, where I develop a theory of “affective masculinity” to try to better understand what masculine genders are doing in video games. It tries to answer the question: what work do feelings do for men who play games? 1/9

New Research: Masculinity as an Affect, and What It Means for Video Games

I contributed a chapter in a new volume, The Handbook on Gender and Digital Media, about how we can start to use affect theory to better understand how men behave the way they do with video games. …

joshuafoust.com

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Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher

Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 1d

Conservatives have built their own social media platforms, Trump has his own Twitter alternative, his allies are buying major social media platforms to weaponize for their propaganda and influence and we’re still arguing if having a left-leaning social media platform is a bad thing

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Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher

Mel Andrews @bayesianboy.bsky.social · 6d

What problem is explainability/interpretability research trying to solve in ML, and do you have a favorite paper articulating what that problem is?

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Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher

Marisa Smith @smithmarisaa.bsky.social · 2d

Support for dismantling DEI didn’t happen overnight. It’s the outcome of narratives recoding CRT as a threat to white Americans. My article (w/ @meredithdclark.bsky.social) in @pgi-wpsa.bsky.social examines how this strategy became sentiment.
🔗 doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2025.2556104

From strategy to sentiment: examining the role of partisan news in fostering white racial consciousness and shaping attitudes toward critical race theory

Fox News has dedicated considerable attention to Critical Race Theory (CRT), recoding it as indicative of anti-white racism. This study examined whether exposure to these narratives is associated w...

doi.org

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Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher

Dmitry Grozoubinski @explaintrade.com · 2d

This is an exact encapsulation of why I moved to Bluesky.

No amount of handwringing in the Atlantic about how I owe some eternal Promethean suffering to the discourse is going to make me stay on a site I hate, that stopped doing anything for me professionally years ago.

Well – no. Bluesky may or may not be, as one centre-right friend who felt unwelcome put it, “self-righteous island”. But the idea that’s why we went is nonsense. That I’ve largely stopped posting on a site that’s done more to shape my career and social circle than the rest of the internet combined is less about avoiding rival opinions (I love arguing with people who are wrong!) than with the fact the site simply became unusable. It stopped generating the things (good jokes, interesting debate, clicks) I wanted; it became extremely good at generating the things (racists, pornbots, racist pornbots) I did not.

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Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher

Laura Jedeed @laurajedeed.bsky.social · 4d

This video is everywhere because it's a hilarious visual refutation of Portland being on fire. You can't get a mass movement going without convincing the masses

so yes, this does do something actually

Post

Dallas Steele

@Cherrykickstart

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This literally does nothing. You are not beating fascism by dressing up in inflatable suits and dancing

Quote tweeting Claude Taylor @TrueFactsStated

Follow

|

Portland is leading the way. This is how you (non violently) beat Fascism. Humor and ridicule are key.

Stillframe from a video of Portland protesters dancing in inflatable suits

9:17 AM 08 Oct 25 758K Views

13:01 09 Oct 25 32.6K Views

88 Reposts

11 Quotes

1,049 Likes

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Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher

Oliver Darcy @oliverdarcy.bsky.social · 4d

News: Bari Weiss just sent a memo to staffers at CBS News asking them to produce a memo explaining "how you spend your working hours—and ideally, what you've made (or are making) that you're most proud of."

One CBS News staffer puts it like this to me: "We just got Elon Musked."

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Mike Stabile @mikestabile.bsky.social · 4d

"Deceptive trade practices" is the latest end-run around the First Amendment. It's being used arbitrarily to target platforms that allow disfavored speech, by finding some statement or policy — either a TOS or interview — and then citing an example where it was violated.

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Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher

Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 5d

New from 404 Media: the Discord hack is every users' worst nightmare. Yesterday the hackers started posting Discord users' selfies, identity documents, email addresses, phone numbers, more. I watched in real time. This is risk of tech storing ID for age verification
www.404media.co/the-discord-...

The Discord Hack is Every Users’ Worst Nightmare

A hack impacting Discord’s age verification process shows in stark terms the risk of tech companies collecting users’ ID documents. Now the hackers are posting peoples’ IDs and other sensitive informa...

www.404media.co

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 5d

I know it's all dust in the wind now but I thought Twitter was doing some really thoughtful work at the intersection of Reddit-like communities and live streaming that would have been fun for content creators and everyone else

Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 5d

Elon buying Twitter was obviously always about controlling information, but it was such an obvious lie that he was going to spark product innovation. I can't believe people (the board, investors) bought it

It's been 3 years and what new features are there? Hidden likes and a racist chat bot?

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Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher

Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 6d

I really really really liked The Oatmeal’s take on AI here theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

A cartoonist's review of AI art - The Oatmeal

This is a comic about AI art.

theoatmeal.com

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Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher

Chris Bail @chrisbail.bsky.social · 6d

New jobs for computational social scientists at UNC and USC: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307... amd uscjobs.sc.edu/postings/194...

Assistant Professor

This Assistant Professor position will teach graduate and undergraduate courses, conduct research in the field of Sociology, participate in departmental service, and mentor graduate students.

unc.peopleadmin.com

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Reposted by Ryan J. Gallagher

Anne Bertucio @annebdh.bsky.social · 6d

Want to work on open source full time? The @roost.tools engineering team is starting to hatch! Come build OSS tools making a difference in Trust & Safety.

This is a fully remote role, though some schedule overlap with North American time zones is expected.

www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/43...

ROOST.tools hiring Staff Software Engineer in United States | LinkedIn

Posted 8:52:18 PM. About ROOSTROOST is a community effort to build scalable and resilient safety infrastructure for…See this and similar jobs on LinkedIn.

www.linkedin.com

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 7d

what could go wrong with talking about moderation on substack

Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 7d

Of course, people don't agree on what is "safe" and "fair" and that's why moderation is hard. But you can't solve a network-level problem with individual-level tools

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Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 7d

Moderation isn't simply about taking things down, it's also about building a collectively safe space. Telling someone they can just "label" (or hide/block) something they don't like won't address their concern that their community isn't safe

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