Dominic DiFranzo
@difrad.bsky.social
Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University. I'm an HCI researcher that explores prosocial design in online communities, AI Mediated Communication, and Digital Literacy.
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
At 10 over 75? Non-zero chance his 'trial' is a note read aloud next to a burn pit.
You know the joke that in some extreme circumstances you 'stop being biology and start being physics'?
There is a point where your politics stop being law and start being history. It is not a good place to be.
You know the joke that in some extreme circumstances you 'stop being biology and start being physics'?
There is a point where your politics stop being law and start being history. It is not a good place to be.
November 25, 2025 at 3:20 PM
At 10 over 75? Non-zero chance his 'trial' is a note read aloud next to a burn pit.
You know the joke that in some extreme circumstances you 'stop being biology and start being physics'?
There is a point where your politics stop being law and start being history. It is not a good place to be.
You know the joke that in some extreme circumstances you 'stop being biology and start being physics'?
There is a point where your politics stop being law and start being history. It is not a good place to be.
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
In a personalist regime, the leader always gets a taste.
Republican administrations literally backed death squads to fight communism. And now Trump is expropriating domestic companies and it's just 🦗🦗🦗
Republican administrations literally backed death squads to fight communism. And now Trump is expropriating domestic companies and it's just 🦗🦗🦗
November 25, 2025 at 1:27 PM
In a personalist regime, the leader always gets a taste.
Republican administrations literally backed death squads to fight communism. And now Trump is expropriating domestic companies and it's just 🦗🦗🦗
Republican administrations literally backed death squads to fight communism. And now Trump is expropriating domestic companies and it's just 🦗🦗🦗
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
🚨 New WP 🚨:
All states monitor the political activity of their citizens. But who do they choose to surveil, and why?
We study this question with the universe of Italian political surveillance files: 152,000 individuals born 1816–1932, across democracy and autocracy.
🧵 1/11
All states monitor the political activity of their citizens. But who do they choose to surveil, and why?
We study this question with the universe of Italian political surveillance files: 152,000 individuals born 1816–1932, across democracy and autocracy.
🧵 1/11
Studying the logic of state surveillance based on the universe of Italian files finds that states target educated and subaltern groups, with mobilization and radical change potential, from Gemma Dipoppa and Annalisa Pezone www.nber.org/papers/w34492
November 24, 2025 at 11:41 PM
🚨 New WP 🚨:
All states monitor the political activity of their citizens. But who do they choose to surveil, and why?
We study this question with the universe of Italian political surveillance files: 152,000 individuals born 1816–1932, across democracy and autocracy.
🧵 1/11
All states monitor the political activity of their citizens. But who do they choose to surveil, and why?
We study this question with the universe of Italian political surveillance files: 152,000 individuals born 1816–1932, across democracy and autocracy.
🧵 1/11
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
“Experimental data from largest online survey of Irish Americans reveal learning about African Americans with Irish ancestry reduces prejudice among white Irish Americans who identify with Irish American identity, and effects are mostly driven by Republicans…” www.jasmineenglish.net/uploads/1/4/...
November 24, 2025 at 9:52 PM
“Experimental data from largest online survey of Irish Americans reveal learning about African Americans with Irish ancestry reduces prejudice among white Irish Americans who identify with Irish American identity, and effects are mostly driven by Republicans…” www.jasmineenglish.net/uploads/1/4/...
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
Here it is, the most damning academic figure in the history of all figures: Russian IRA accounts deeply embedded in both sides of the 2016 Twitter BLM "discussion" (by @katestarbird.bsky.social & team, 2018).
THIS is what our information ecosystem supports. Twitter just made it 1% more visible.
THIS is what our information ecosystem supports. Twitter just made it 1% more visible.
November 25, 2025 at 1:30 PM
Here it is, the most damning academic figure in the history of all figures: Russian IRA accounts deeply embedded in both sides of the 2016 Twitter BLM "discussion" (by @katestarbird.bsky.social & team, 2018).
THIS is what our information ecosystem supports. Twitter just made it 1% more visible.
THIS is what our information ecosystem supports. Twitter just made it 1% more visible.
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
I have a lot to say about the X location feature/scandal but in the meantime @cwarzel.bsky.social is here to remind you that it was not a surprise (see next post), the incentives are misaligned, and the corporations generally do not want to fix it.
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Elon Musk’s Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors
How X blew up its own platform with a new location feature
www.theatlantic.com
November 25, 2025 at 1:24 PM
I have a lot to say about the X location feature/scandal but in the meantime @cwarzel.bsky.social is here to remind you that it was not a surprise (see next post), the incentives are misaligned, and the corporations generally do not want to fix it.
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
'"There is no good way to say this" but to say this: AI is the antithesis of education. It is the antithesis of the future. As such, it is a kind of epistemological death, and I recognize... we have long been surrounded by such efforts; we are grieving already. And yet, we go on.'
November 13, 2025 at 2:11 AM
'"There is no good way to say this" but to say this: AI is the antithesis of education. It is the antithesis of the future. As such, it is a kind of epistemological death, and I recognize... we have long been surrounded by such efforts; we are grieving already. And yet, we go on.'
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
'But much to the detriment of learning... we have seen education redefined as something else -- as a product, not a process. As certification, not transformation. The liminality has been shattered; instead of ritual, society has demanded “outcomes” and “optimization.”'
November 13, 2025 at 2:11 AM
'But much to the detriment of learning... we have seen education redefined as something else -- as a product, not a process. As certification, not transformation. The liminality has been shattered; instead of ritual, society has demanded “outcomes” and “optimization.”'
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
"This is why you elected us, isn’t it? To stand firm for your future and your family’s future. To make sure that no matter what happens, you can feel confident you’ll have to pay way more to keep that family alive."
Great News: We Got Them to Agree to Their Own Deal
“Eight senators in the Democratic caucus broke with the party late Sunday to vote with Republicans and advance legislation to end the government sh...
buff.ly
November 13, 2025 at 2:40 AM
"This is why you elected us, isn’t it? To stand firm for your future and your family’s future. To make sure that no matter what happens, you can feel confident you’ll have to pay way more to keep that family alive."
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
Would be a good time to watch this with @eliothiggins.bsky.social from a couple of weeks ago.
"Demanufacturing Consent: How Disordered Discourse is Destroying Democracy"
youtu.be/4rZx4YJ7pvA
"Demanufacturing Consent: How Disordered Discourse is Destroying Democracy"
youtu.be/4rZx4YJ7pvA
November 8, 2025 at 12:05 PM
Would be a good time to watch this with @eliothiggins.bsky.social from a couple of weeks ago.
"Demanufacturing Consent: How Disordered Discourse is Destroying Democracy"
youtu.be/4rZx4YJ7pvA
"Demanufacturing Consent: How Disordered Discourse is Destroying Democracy"
youtu.be/4rZx4YJ7pvA
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
This account also feels in line with some of what other people that have been in Broadview have shared.
Lawsuit Alleges Inhumane Conditions at Broadview ICE Facility
Federal authorities moved two plaintiffs in the suit out of state; a judge has ordered they be returned Monday.
southsideweekly.com
November 7, 2025 at 3:40 AM
This account also feels in line with some of what other people that have been in Broadview have shared.
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
As researchers, we have been trying to flag the harm of these scammy ads for years. socialmedialab.ca/2025/04/21/t... We made an app to enable others to expose these types of scammy ads. socialmedialab.ca/2025/03/31/p... But nothing ever changes, see other ex. here: polidashboard.org/how-to-use-p...
The Hidden Game: How Scammers Use "Chameleon Ads" to Bypass Meta's Moderation - Social Media Lab
Over the last few weeks, a series of stories by The Guardian, CBC, and The Logic has highlighted an explosion of fraudulent Facebook and Instagram ads that mimic the likeness of high-profile Canadian ...
socialmedialab.ca
November 7, 2025 at 4:22 AM
As researchers, we have been trying to flag the harm of these scammy ads for years. socialmedialab.ca/2025/04/21/t... We made an app to enable others to expose these types of scammy ads. socialmedialab.ca/2025/03/31/p... But nothing ever changes, see other ex. here: polidashboard.org/how-to-use-p...
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
When deception’s more profitable than honesty, users lose.
Internal documents suggest that Meta earns $3.5B(!) every 6 mo. from scam ads, revealing a deeper systemic problem: the economic incentive to tolerate “higher legal risk” content still outweighs any penalty. www.reuters.com/investigatio...
Internal documents suggest that Meta earns $3.5B(!) every 6 mo. from scam ads, revealing a deeper systemic problem: the economic incentive to tolerate “higher legal risk” content still outweighs any penalty. www.reuters.com/investigatio...
Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show
Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, and it internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day, company documents show.
www.reuters.com
November 7, 2025 at 4:14 AM
When deception’s more profitable than honesty, users lose.
Internal documents suggest that Meta earns $3.5B(!) every 6 mo. from scam ads, revealing a deeper systemic problem: the economic incentive to tolerate “higher legal risk” content still outweighs any penalty. www.reuters.com/investigatio...
Internal documents suggest that Meta earns $3.5B(!) every 6 mo. from scam ads, revealing a deeper systemic problem: the economic incentive to tolerate “higher legal risk” content still outweighs any penalty. www.reuters.com/investigatio...
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
“We conduct the largest pretraining poisoning experiments to date, pretraining models from 600M to 13B parameters on chinchilla-optimal datasets (6B to 260B tokens). We find that 250 poisoned documents similarly compromise models across all model and dataset sizes…”
arxiv.org/abs/2510.07192
arxiv.org/abs/2510.07192
Poisoning Attacks on LLMs Require a Near-constant Number of Poison Samples
Poisoning attacks can compromise the safety of large language models (LLMs) by injecting malicious documents into their training data. Existing work has studied pretraining poisoning assuming adversar...
arxiv.org
November 7, 2025 at 12:39 PM
“We conduct the largest pretraining poisoning experiments to date, pretraining models from 600M to 13B parameters on chinchilla-optimal datasets (6B to 260B tokens). We find that 250 poisoned documents similarly compromise models across all model and dataset sizes…”
arxiv.org/abs/2510.07192
arxiv.org/abs/2510.07192
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
It’s another day. Are you passing the Ms Rachel test?
November 5, 2025 at 12:38 PM
It’s another day. Are you passing the Ms Rachel test?
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
"[Chicago mom] Andrea Soria... overheard her 6-year-old whisper to her dolls: 'We have to be good or ICE will get us.'"
apnews.com/article/chic...
apnews.com/article/chic...
Chicago's children are getting caught in the chaos of immigration crackdowns
In Chicago, children and families have been traumatized by an immigration enforcement action involving tear gas.
apnews.com
November 3, 2025 at 5:42 PM
"[Chicago mom] Andrea Soria... overheard her 6-year-old whisper to her dolls: 'We have to be good or ICE will get us.'"
apnews.com/article/chic...
apnews.com/article/chic...
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
🧪 Data visualizations are often treated as objective, but they are frequently appropriated to mislead.
This new study examines "Data Visualization Lineages" to show how charts are remixed to support political frames; topics like anti-immigrant discourse, for example.
Worth checking it out!
This new study examines "Data Visualization Lineages" to show how charts are remixed to support political frames; topics like anti-immigrant discourse, for example.
Worth checking it out!
Really excited to share this new paper on "Data Visualizations as Propaganda", co-led by PhD students Priya Dhawka and Nina Lutz, which just won a Best Paper award at the CSCW conference: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
[Short thread]
[Short thread]
Data Visualizations as Propaganda: Tracing Lineages, Provenance, and Political Framings in Online Anti-Immigrant Discourse | Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Along with other visual content, data visualizations are increasingly used within
online discourse, including political communication. Though often considered to be
''objective'', data visualizations ...
dl.acm.org
October 27, 2025 at 11:13 PM
🧪 Data visualizations are often treated as objective, but they are frequently appropriated to mislead.
This new study examines "Data Visualization Lineages" to show how charts are remixed to support political frames; topics like anti-immigrant discourse, for example.
Worth checking it out!
This new study examines "Data Visualization Lineages" to show how charts are remixed to support political frames; topics like anti-immigrant discourse, for example.
Worth checking it out!
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-...
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🧵
The official home of the Python Programming Language
www.python.org
October 27, 2025 at 2:47 PM
TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-...
🧵
🧵
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
stellan skarsgård seems like a good dude
October 27, 2025 at 11:48 PM
stellan skarsgård seems like a good dude
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
Not holding back ... "In the end, generative AI might be a blip in tech history, over-promising and under-delivering until finally the cash runs out. But it seems it’s arrived just in time to shove universities over a cliff edge they’d already walked themselves up to." defector.com/higher-eds-r...
Higher Ed’s Rush To Adopt AI Is About So Much More Than AI | Defector
If you don’t work at a university or have college-age kids, you may have missed the flurry of news stories and social media banter about AI adoption in higher ed, stories which have snowballed into th...
defector.com
October 23, 2025 at 11:51 PM
Not holding back ... "In the end, generative AI might be a blip in tech history, over-promising and under-delivering until finally the cash runs out. But it seems it’s arrived just in time to shove universities over a cliff edge they’d already walked themselves up to." defector.com/higher-eds-r...
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
Tomorrow at #cscw2025, I'll be briefly taking off my General Chair hat to present a paper led by my student Sunyup Park on smart tech/incidental use/privacy. Read more about the paper here (it's open access!): dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Session: Perspectives on Data Privacy
Wed 14:30, Dovregubben-1
Session: Perspectives on Data Privacy
Wed 14:30, Dovregubben-1
In Search of
Smart devices--including speakers, cameras, TVs, and sensors--are increasingly used to enhance comfort, efficiency, security, and entertainment in and outside the home. These devices collect significant audio, video, and environmental data, and that data ...
dl.acm.org
October 21, 2025 at 10:07 AM
Tomorrow at #cscw2025, I'll be briefly taking off my General Chair hat to present a paper led by my student Sunyup Park on smart tech/incidental use/privacy. Read more about the paper here (it's open access!): dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Session: Perspectives on Data Privacy
Wed 14:30, Dovregubben-1
Session: Perspectives on Data Privacy
Wed 14:30, Dovregubben-1
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
Money, muscles and anxiety: why the manosphere clicked with young men – a visual deep dive
Money, muscles and anxiety: why the manosphere clicked with young men – a visual deep dive
The manosphere is known for misogyny, but that’s not the only thing that influencers in this space offer. Young men explain the allure and the problems of the manosphere in their own words
www.theguardian.com
October 21, 2025 at 9:20 AM
Money, muscles and anxiety: why the manosphere clicked with young men – a visual deep dive
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
We welcomed new CSCW Steering Committee members, Sue Fussell (Chair) and Nat Poore. Karrie Karahalios ended her term as Chair. There was a lively discussion around governance, the need for senior member to volunteer to join the program committee, and the transition to rolling deadlines. #CSCW2025
October 21, 2025 at 9:30 AM
We welcomed new CSCW Steering Committee members, Sue Fussell (Chair) and Nat Poore. Karrie Karahalios ended her term as Chair. There was a lively discussion around governance, the need for senior member to volunteer to join the program committee, and the transition to rolling deadlines. #CSCW2025
Reposted by Dominic DiFranzo
Wake up, babe, the least subtle visual metaphor in history just dropped
October 21, 2025 at 4:18 AM
Wake up, babe, the least subtle visual metaphor in history just dropped