Mick West, an expert in unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, analyzes recent "drone" sightings and breaks down what we're really seeing in these selected cases.
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A new survey revealed stark political and behavioral differences between users of rival social media platforms Bluesky and Meta-owned Threads.
Bluesky's user base skews heavily Democratic, with nearly half of its users identifying with the party, according to findings published earlier this month by CivicScience, a research and survey company. In contrast, only 34% of Threads users identified as either Democrat or Independent.
The study also found that Bluesky users are more politically engaged overall. And nearly three-quarters of them said that they experienced higher levels of stress postelection. In contrast, 33% of people who used Threads daily said that their stress levels decreased after Donald Trump's victory on November 5.
"With the surge of Bluesky coming so directly in the wake of the presidential election, it's not surprising that the user base is disproportionately more left-leaning than the user base of Threads," John Dick, CivicScience CEO and founder, told Business Insider.
The survey included 12,188 Threads users and 5,431 Bluesky users. This roughly mirrors the ratio of both platforms' user bases in the adult US population, as 18% of respondents reported using Threads daily, compared to 8% for Bluesky, CivicScience data found.
Both social networks experienced significant user growth following the US election, particularly as billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of X, threw his weight behind Trump and actively promoted misinformation that reportedly garnered over 2 billion views.
Still, Threads seems to be eating Bluesky's lunch. Earlier this month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the platform had more than 300 million monthly active users, compared to Bluesky's 24 million users at the beginning of this month.
Bluesky began life inside Twitter in 2019 as a project started under the company's former CEO, Jack Dorsey. Its goal was to give users more control over moderation. Bluesky has been an independent company since 2021 and is a decentralized social network.
Bluesky is powered by the "AT Protocol" (Authenticated Transfer Protocol), which means that while Bluesky operates the main server, anyone can create and run their own server that can work with Bluesky. This allows users to choose different providers while maintaining a unified social network experience. Crucially, this also means that users can add their own moderation policies on top of Bluesky's built-in moderation systems.
"The decentralized moderation policies of Bluesky, which allow for more proliferation of political content on the platform, could be exacerbating this phenomenon," said Dick of Bluesky's left-leaning user base, "as Democrats and liberals create a sort of tribal safe space for their views and conversations."
Beyond politics, the survey revealed an optimism gap between the two platforms regarding AI. Bluesky users appear to be significantly more bullish on the technology, with 62% believing that AI will have at least a somewhat positive impact on the quality of their lives over the next decade, compared to 51% of Threads users.
Overall, More Bluesky users are likely to use platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and X every day compared to Threads users who gravitate toward Facebook and Instagram, which are both owned by Meta.
Social network Bluesky said on Christmas that it is testing a trending topics view. The trending topics are visible both on the desktop and mobile apps of the social network for users across the world. On the desktop, you can see trending topics on the right sidebar, and on the mobile app, you can tap […]
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On November 15, Peter Wang posted a message requesting ideas for a new incubator and fund to support experimental projects built on the burgeoning Bluesky/AT Protocol ecosystem. Four weeks later, Skyseed emerged with an initial commitment of $1 million. This turnaround, a speed underscored by the fact that the fund doesn’t even have a website […]
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Social network Bluesky has released a new update to its app that includes a separate mentions tab in notifications, protections against username squatting, and new controls for replies sorting. The company announced that it is adding a new mentions tab with the v1.96 rollout to let you see those posts separately. Until now, all notifications […]
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The fund will offer grants to those building on BlueSky’s open source AT Protocol.
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Social magazine app maker Flipboard is reinventing itself for the new era of the open social web. While the company’s original app allowed users to collect content from blogs, news websites, and traditional social media services like Facebook and Twitter in order to create curated magazines, its new app called Surf, launching into invite-only beta […]
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Chicago Sky star Angel Reese revealed on the latest episode of her podcast that prisoners found out her mom’s address and started to write her love letters.
Reese, who attended Maryland before transferring to LSU and winning a national championship, said on "Unapologetically Angel" that her mom had to get police involved.
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"When I was in college, somehow, some way, these men in jail used to send letters – like love letters. Somehow, one of them got my address, my mom’s address. And my mom had to like do all that and call the police and all that," she said.
"He talking about, ‘When I get out I’m coming for you. I’m going to be with you. We going to have kids.’ Sir, take a timeout."
Reese’s guest, Coco Jones, joked that the person who sent her the weird message should get an extra two years in prison for "scary behavior."
CAITLIN CLARK'S BROTHER SEEMINGLY RESPONDS TO MYSTICS OWNER'S SLIGHT OF SISTER'S TIME COVER
"People are crazy," Reese declared.
Reese, who is from Baltimore, played two seasons with the Terrapins before she transferred to LSU for her junior and senior seasons. She led the nation in scoring and rebounding during the 2022-23 season with 23 points and 15.4 rebounds per game.
She averaged 18.6 points and 13.4 rebounds per game.
The Sky selected her with the No. 7 overall pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft. She averaged 13.6 points and 13.1 rebounds per game in 34 games. Her season was cut short due to an injury.
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Bridgy Fed, which is working to connect the social network Bluesky with the wider fediverse (i.e., the open social web), which includes sites like Mastodon and others, will be the first app incubated within a new nonprofit called A New Social. The organization, announced Tuesday, aims to bring together developers, researchers, startups, and industry leaders […]
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Meta’s microblogging platform, Threads, is growing at a quick clip since it was launched last year, and it seems to have benefited from the exodus of users from its rival, X, a couple months ago. The company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday that more than 100 million people use Threads daily, and that it […]
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Now with 25 million users, Bluesky is facing a test that will determine whether or not its platform will still be seen as a safe space and place of refuge from the toxicity of X. In recent days, a large number of users on Bluesky have been urging the company to ban one newcomer for […]
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Meta’s Threads is rolling out its own take on Bluesky’s “Starter Packs,” which are curated lists of suggested accounts that help new users find people to follow. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Thursday that the social network is testing a way for users to find and easily follow collections of profiles that post about […]
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Since the dawn of the generative AI era a few years ago, the march of technology—toward what tech companies hope will replace human intellectual labor—has continuously sparked angst about the future role humans will play in the job market. Will we all be replaced by machines?
A Y-Combinator-backed company called Artisan, which sells customer service and sales workflow software, recently launched a provocative billboard campaign in San Francisco playing on that angst, reports Gizmodo. It features the slogan "Stop Hiring Humans." The company markets its software products as "AI Employees" or "Artisans."
The company's billboards feature messages that might inspire nightmares among workers, like "Artisans won't complain about work-life balance" and "The era of AI employees is here." And they're on display to the same human workforce the ads suggest replacing.
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Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is working on subscriptions. The company first announced plans to develop a new revenue stream based on the subscription model when detailing its $15 million Series A back in October. Now, mockups teasing the upcoming Bluesky subscription, along with a list of possible features, have been published to […]
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Now that the seal is broken on scraping Bluesky posts into datasets for machine learning, people are trolling users and one-upping each other by making increasingly massive datasets of non-anonymized, full-text Bluesky posts taken directly from the social media platform’s public firehose—including one that contains almost 300 million posts.
Last week, Daniel van Strien, a machine learning librarian at open-source machine learning library platform Hugging Face, released a dataset composed of one million Bluesky posts, including when they were posted and who posted them. Within hours of his first post—shortly after our story about this being the first known, public, non-anonymous dataset of Bluesky posts, and following hundreds of replies from people outraged that their posts were scraped without their permission—van Strein took it down and apologized.
"I've removed the Bluesky data from the repo," he wrote on Bluesky. "While I wanted to support tool development for the platform, I recognize this approach violated principles of transparency and consent in data collection. I apologize for this mistake." Bluesky’s official account also posted about how crawling and scraping works on the platform, and said it’s “exploring methods for consent.”
404 MediaSamantha ColeAs I wrote at the time, Bluesky’s infrastructure is a double-edged sword: While its decentralized nature gives users more control over their content than sites like X or Threads, it also means every event on the site is catalogued in a public feed. There are legitimate research uses for social media posts, but researchers typically follow ethical and legal guidelines that dictate how that data is used; for example, a research paper published earlier this year that used Bluesky posts to look at how disinformation and misinformation spread online uses a dataset of 235 million posts, but that data was anonymized. The researchers also provide clear instructions for requesting one’s data be excluded.
If there’s one constant across social media, regardless of the platform, it’s the Streisand effect. Van Strien’s original post and apology both went massively viral, and since a lot of people are straddling both Bluesky and Twitter as their primary platforms, the dataset drama crossed over to X, too—where people love to troll. The dataset of one million posts is gone from Hugging Face, but several much larger datasets have taken its place.
There’s a two million posts dataset by Alpine Dale, who claims to be associated with PygmalionAI, a yet to be released “open-source AI project for chat, role-play, adventure, and more,” according to its site. That dataset description says it “could be used for: Training and testing language models on social media content; Analyzing social media posting patterns; Studying conversation structures and reply networks; Research on social media content moderation; Natural language processing tasks using social media datas.” The goal, Dale writes in the dataset description, “is for you to have fun :)”
The community page for that dataset is full of people saying this either breaks Bluesky’s developer guidelines (specifically “All services must have a method for deleting content a user has requested to be deleted”) or is against the law in European countries, where the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) would apply to this data collection.
I asked Neil Brown, a lawyer who specializes in internet law and GDPR, if that’s the case. The answer isn’t a straightforward one. “Merely processing the personal data of people in the EU does not make the person doing that processing subject to the EU GDPR,” he said in an email. To be subject to GDPR, the processing would need to fall within its material and territorial scopes. Material scope involves how the data is processed: “processing of personal data done through automated means or within a structured filing system, including collection, storage, access, analysis, and disclosure of personal information,” according to the law. Territorial scope involves where the person who is doing the data collecting is located, and also where the subjects of that data are located.
“But I imagine that there are some who would argue that this activity is consistent with the EU GDPR,” Brown said. “These arguments are normally based in the thinking that, if someone has made personal data public, then they are ‘fair game’ but, IMHO, the EU GDPR simply does not work that way.”
None of these legal questions have stopped others from creating more and bigger datasets. There’s also an eight million posts dataset compiled by Alim Maasoglu, who is “currently dedicated to developing immersive products within the artificial intelligence space,” according to their website. “This growing dataset aims to provide researchers and developers with a comprehensive sample of real world social media data for analysis and experimentation,” Maasoglu’s description of the dataset on Hugging Face says. “This collection represents one of the largest publicly available Bluesky datasets, offering unique insights into social media interactions and content patterns.”
It was quickly surpassed by a lot. There’s now a 298 million posts dataset released by someone with the username GAYSEX. They wrote an imaginary dialogue in their Hugging Face project description between themselves and someone whose posts are in the dataset: “‘NOOO you can't do this!’ Then don't post. If you don't want to be recorded, then don't post it. ‘But I was doing XYZ!!’ Then don't. Look. Just about anything on the internet stays on the internet nowadays. Especially big social network sites. You might want to consider starting a blog. Those have lower chances of being pulled for AI training + there are additional ways to protect blogs being scraped aggressively.” As a co-owner of a blog myself, I can say that being scraped has been a major pain in the ass for us, actually, and generative AI companies training on news outlets is a serious problem this industry is facing—so much so that many major outlets have struck deals with the very big tech companies that want to eat their lunch.
There are at least six more similar datasets of user posts currently on Hugging Face, in varying amounts. Margaret Mitchell, Chief Ethics Scientist at Hugging Face, posted on Bluesky following van Strien’s removal of his dataset: “The best path forward in AI requires technologists to be reflective/self-critical about how their work impacts society. Transparency helps this. Appreciate Bsky for flagging AI ethics &my colleague’s response. Let’s make informed consent a real thing.” When someone replied to her post linking to the two million dataset asking her to “address” it, she said, “Yes, I'm trying to address as much as I can.”
Like just about every other industry that relies on human creative output, including journalism, music, books, academia, and the arts, social media platforms seem to be taking one of two routes when it comes to AI: strike a deal, or wait and see how fair use arguments shake out in court, where what constitutes “transformative” under copyright law is still being determined. In the meantime, everyone from massive generative AI corporations to individuals on troll campaigns are snapping up data while the area’s still gray.
Bluesky has blown up this year thanks to a vibrant community of posters, user customization choices, and a decentralized protocol that doesn’t lock users into the choices of a billionaire CEO. But one question mark hanging over Bluesky is how the platform will eventually make money, and whether it will use the most common business […]
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Meta’s X competitor Instagram Threads is gaining an improved search interface, the company announced on Monday. The app, which offers a Meta-run alternative to Elon Musk’s X, but built on top of Instagram’s social graph, is rolling out a new way to search for specific posts, allowing users to filter searches by user profiles and […]
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A new app called GoBlue has launched to help those looking to track their following on Bluesky, the Twitter-like social network that’s rapidly grown in recent weeks to reach nearly 24 million users. Filling in a gap in the Bluesky ecosystem of third-party apps and utilities, GoBlue offers a simple interface for tracking your own […]
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Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russia is treating the first batch of North Korean soldiers sent to aid in its war against Ukraine well, but that it won't last.
Zelenskyy told Japanese news agency Kyodo News on Sunday that Russia was treating the North Korean troops well in order to try to attract tens of thousands more.
But he predicted that the troops would at some stage be sent to the front lines and that it was "indisputable" that Russian President Vladimir Putin would ultimately use them as "cannon fodder."
Officials in the US, Ukraine, and South Korea claim that North Korea has sent thousands of troops to aid Russia.
Zelenskyy said there is evidence that about 12,000 North Korean troops have been deployed so far, and Dmytro Ponomarenko, Ukraine's ambassador to South Korea, said last month that the number of North Korean troops sent to Russia could reach 15,000, with troops rotated out every two to three months.
That could mean around 100,000 North Korean soldiers serving in Russia within a year, he said.
North Korean troops have been deployed in the Russian region of Kursk, where Ukraine made a surprise counteroffensive in August, seizing hundreds of square miles of Russian territory.
Zelenskyy said during the interview with Kyodo News that North Korean troops had been killed there, confirming previous reports.
In June, the Pentagon warned that North Korean troops would be treated poorly by Russia, in response to initial reports that North Korea was considering sending Russia some of its military personnel.
Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at the time that "if I were North Korean military personnel management, I would be questioning my choices on sending my forces to be cannon fodder in an illegal war against Ukraine."
Russia has been accused of treating its own soldiers badly during the conflict.
Zelenskyy also warned Sunday that the use of North Korean troops during the conflict could be dangerous for Asia, since those soldiers would get trained by Russia and would get knowledge about fighting in a modern war, in areas like using drones.
Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at Ukraine's National Institute for Strategic Studies, told BI that even if the soldiers North Korea sends are well trained by their own standards, "I think their training still would be lacking in terms of the modern battlefield they have in the Russia-Ukraine war."
He added: "I think that it's safe to assume that they might be used as expendable infantry or just thrown as a mass of people."
Bielieskov also said that while the estimated number of up to 12,000 North Korean soldiers in Kursk right now was not huge by the standards of the war, it might be enough to make a difference against Ukraine on a single front, if that's how they are used.
Last month, South Korea's defense minister, Kim Yong-Hyun, said that North Korean troops would likely be sent to the war's hot spots.
He said that Russian officers are "likely to send the North Korean platoons to the most dangerous and difficult areas."
According to South Korean intelligence, Russia is paying about $2,000 a month for each North Korean soldier.
But North Korean military experts told BI that the soldiers themselves are not likely to see much of that, with the state likely pocketing most, if not all, of the money.
Eugene Gologursky/Getty
Meetings are the main way Airbnb's Brian Chesky gets work done. Yet he says the one-on-one format with a direct report is fundamentally flawed.
"Almost no great CEO in history has ever done them," the Airbnb chief said in a recent interview.
That's because when an employee "owns the agenda," they bring up subjects managers don't want to discuss — and "you become like their therapist," Chesky said. Topics can also arise that would benefit other people at the company to hear, but instead, they're sequestered in a one-on-one.
Of course, there are certain times when a one-on-one makes sense, Chesky told Fortune in the interview — such as when an employee is having a difficult time personally and needs to confide to a boss privately.
But generally, he said, they're just not productive on a regular basis.
Chesky isn't alone. Although he has many direct reports, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also prefers to skip one-on-one meetings.
"I don't really believe there's any information that I operate on that somehow only one or two people should hear about," Huang said at Stripe Sessions earlier this year.
While some leaders are cracking down, one expert previously told Business Insider that, when conducted correctly, one-on-ones can boost employee engagement, productivity, and overall happiness.
"The outcomes associated with effective one-on-ones are amazing," said Steven G. Rogelberg, an organizational psychologist who's also a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the author of "Glad We Met: The Art and Science of 1:1 Meetings."
Rogelberg previously told BI that one-on-ones are more successful when the worker leads the conversation. He said managers should dedicate roughly 25 minutes a week and focus on the personal needs of employees as well as the practical aspects of the job.
Many managers avoid that first component, Rogelberg said, because it takes more effort.
But at the same time, workers need to do their due diligence, he said — showing up prepared to talk more than half the time. Some fruitful topics include: challenges, how a manager can better support a worker, and what's going well and what could be improved.
Chesky isn't the only boss who's over the one-on-one. In May, Aditya Agarwal, a former Facebook director, wrote in a post on X that after more than a decade of conducting such meetings with those who report to him, he determined they did more harm than good.
"They condition people to do spot checks on happiness and constantly be critical about things that aren't ideal. In practice, 1:1s descend into nitpicking sessions," Agarwal wrote as part of a thread.
Agarwal added that bosses should give feedback every three to six months rather than weekly. That approach, he said, could drive managers to pick up on patterns and give "holistic" guidance rather than weekly spot checks.
