Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ananya Bhattacharya: “Last month, South Africa withdrew its Draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy 17 days after it was published because the document cited fake research, created by AI.

The incident tarnished a historic moment, as South Africa was set to become the first African nation to adopt a policy establishing a formal ethics board to oversee AI outside the West. “The most plausible explanation is that AI-generated citations were included without proper verification,” Solly Malatsi, South Africa’s minister of communications and digital technologies, wrote in a statement. “There will be consequence management for those responsible for drafting and quality assurance.”

This is the first time a government has withdrawn a document over AI hallucinations, but certainly not the first time AI hallucinations have appeared in official materials. AI-generated text or citations have slipped into official or quasi-official documents several times, raising concerns about accountability and highlighting the need for human verification…(More)”.

Paper by Scott A. Brave, Erin E. Crust, Stefano Eusepi, Bart Hobijn & Ayşegül Şahin: “Interpreting real-time labor market conditions is challenging because commonly used indicators are noisy, revised over time, and often send conflicting signals. In practice, policymakers and market participants describe labor market developments using a shared narrative language centered on labor demand, labor supply, and matching frictions. In this paper, we show that empirical measures of these narrative concepts can be recovered from latent factors that summarize the joint movements of a broad set of high-frequency U.S. labor-market indicators. We use ninety-four labor-market indicators, over the period from 1960 to 2026, and construct measures for labor demand, long-run labor supply, short-run labor supply, and matching efficiency by selecting the factors that satisfy a limited set of restrictions on how underlying forces map into observed data. We find that labor demand and short-run labor supply account for most of the common variation in labor-market indicators. Our results also show that assigning narrow interpretations to individual indicators can lead to misleading conclusions about underlying labor market conditions. Applying the framework to the post-pandemic period reveals that although labor demand recovered briskly after the acute phase of the pandemic, it cannot account for the large rise in vacancies and quits. Instead, movements in short-run labor supply and matching efficiency play a central role. We also show that the “soft-landing” episode from 2023 through 2025 was characterized by a joint decline in labor demand and short-run labor supply, which slowed payroll growth while generating only a moderate increase in the unemployment rate…(More)“.

Article by Sara Radin: “For years, the internet sold us the idea that connection doesn’t have to be local to be meaningful. Your people could live anywhere: in a Discord server, a group chat of far-flung friends, or a TikTok comment section. Geography was optional.

Now, more people are turning toward the ones physically closest to them: the neighbor down the block, the parent from the playground, the person whose wifi shows up in your network list. It’s not just about wanting connection; folks are looking for support. Childcare is expensive. Rent and groceries are high. Climate emergencies are more frequent. For many Americans, the difference between stability and crisis comes down to whether someone nearby can help.

Call it neighborism: the growing practice of treating proximity as a resource. Increasingly, digital tools aren’t replacing local relationships — they’re helping activate them.

Sometimes it looks small: introducing yourself to the people on your floor, starting a group chat for your building or block, sharing babysitters, watering a neighbor’s plants. But it can also look overtly political.

In Minneapolis, community responses to ICE activity blurred the line between everyday care and organized resistance. As federal immigration enforcement ramped up this winter, residents organized patrols, filmed arrests, shared alerts, and trained one another to document potential abuses. What emerged was something bigger than “borrow a cup of sugar” friendliness. It was infrastructure: informal, fast-moving, and built on trust. And what happened there isn’t an outlier; it’s a large-scale example of a broader shift already underway.

Getting to know your neighbors isn’t new, but its visibility is. After decades of isolation and a slow drift toward digital, long-distance connection, people are embracing an old-fashioned idea: Communities function best when people feel responsible for one another…(More)”.

Editorial to Special Issue: “Manuel Pérez-Troncoso, Katrina L. Bledsoe, Karen Peterman, Theresa N. Melton, and Rodney K. Hopson: “…People-centered approaches challenge evaluators to “walk the talk” of culturally responsive, equitable, and socially just practices by expanding the role of evaluation in service to society. This means not only studying with communities but also giving back, investing in, and standing side by side with them (Bledsoe 2021, 2014). Similar to many efforts working across multiple sectors, people-centered approaches often take place in communities shaped by a history of colonialism, discrimination, and marginalization, which continues to influence life, opportunity, and culture on a daily basis. Researchers and evaluators must strive to build authentic, collaborative relationships with participants to understand and help tell the story of how they are affected by the programs we work with. We must integrate and prioritize culture, local context, and community perspectives in all aspects of program and evaluation design, implementation, and use.

This issue identifies three key dimensions that differentiate People-Centered Evaluation (PCE) from program-centered evaluation, as outlined in Table 1: Full humanity (the evaluator’s positionality and axiology); prioritizing relationships (investment in relationships vs. extraction); and community engagement (pursues open vs. selective access). These dimensions reflect a relational worldview: ontologically, reality is understood as co-constructed through relationships and contexts; epistemologically, knowledge emerges through dialogue, participation, and lived experience; and methodologically, evaluation practices adapt to community-defined meanings and purposes (Mertens et al. 2025). We contend that evaluation feels and functions differently when it is prioritized using the people-centered distinctions in Table 1. We challenge readers to consider the following: In what ways would your evaluation practice look different if you began a new project with the intention of being an agent of social change versus a distant observer? In what ways would your evaluation practice look different if you began a new project with the intention of fostering and strengthening relationships with community members rather than focusing on creating a context for gathering data? In what ways would your evaluation theories, processes, and communication strategies differ if you prioritized and centered authentic community engagement?TABLE 1. Differences between program-centered evaluation and people-centered evaluation.

This issue aims to push the boundaries of evaluation by focusing on both theoretical advances and practical applications of people-centered approaches, based upon those that are culturally-responsive, indigenous, and equity-driven approaches…(More)”.

Article by Alex Pasternack: “On March 2, two days into the United States and Israel’s air campaign against Iran, CNN published imagery showing a still-smoking operations center at Port Shuaiba in Kuwait, where six American service members had just been killed by an Iranian drone—before the Pentagon had provided details of the strike, including the full death toll. A day later, the New York Times offered a preliminary rundown of damage to US military sites across the Gulf. In the following days, multiple outlets showed that a strike on an elementary school that killed 175 people had likely been carried out by the US—an apparent mistake, which the Pentagon initially disputed. Amid a cascade of restrictions and conflicting narratives, all of these reports relied on a cornerstone of open-source intelligence: commercial satellite imagery, much of it from a single vendor called Planet Labs. 

Then, on March 6, the flow of pictures began slowing to a crawl. Planet Labs, a San Francisco–based company that operates more than two hundred satellites capable of photographing most of Earth’s landmass once per day—an unparalleled frequency among commercial satellites—announced a four-day hold on “all new imagery collected over the Gulf States, Iraq, Kuwait, and adjacent conflict zones.” On March 11, Planet, as the firm is known, told customers the delay would be extended to fourteen days and expanded to include “all of Iran and nearby allied bases, in addition to the Gulf States and existing conflict zones.” Planet said it had made the decision through discussions with experts inside and outside of the government about preventing images from being “tactically leveraged by adversarial actors to target allied and NATO-partner personnel and civilians”—in other words, out of fear that Iran might use them to target the US and its allies in the Middle East.

On April 4, Planet’s stop in service became indefinite—imagery feeds would be halted, retroactive to March 8, local time. (Many outlets reported that the last available images would be from March 9.) “Due to the conflict in the Middle East, the U.S. government has requested all satellite imagery providers voluntarily implement an indefinite withhold of imagery in the designated Area of Interest,” the company told customers in an email, the text of which was provided to CJR by a spokesperson. Going forward, Planet said, it would release imagery on a case-by-case basis and for “urgent, mission-critical requirements or in the public interest.” A spokesperson told me that “this model is in line with the media policies of other remote-sensing companies.”..(More)”.

Paper by Ana Dodik and Moira Weigel: “We put forth a critical theoretical framework for analyzing generative models both descriptively and normatively. Our thesis is that generative models automate the production not only of intellectual labor or intelligence, but of a broader set of human social capacities we name “social doing.” We do this by historicizing the commodification of sociality in the digital economy, leading to the availability of social data as the precondition for generative models. We elaborate our definition of “social doing” by drawing a distinction between “use” and “exchange” sociality and further differentiate between the ways that generative models either substitute for or mediate existing social relations and processes. We then turn to existing empirical research on how people use generative model-based products and the effects that their use has upon them. In this, we introduce the concept of Synthetic Sociality, a social reality in part fabricated by Silicon Valley’s privately owned and undemocratically governed generative models. Lastly, we offer a normative analysis based on our findings and framework, and discuss future design opportunities…(More)”.

Article by Democracy Without Borders: “More than two thirds of people worldwide say it is very important to have democracy in their country, while respondents in most countries identify improving living standards and well-being as democracy’s main purpose, according to the Democracy Perception Index 2026. The survey also found widespread pessimism about the national direction many individual countries were taking, especially in democracies and in Europe.

The annual survey, released by Nira Data in collaboration with the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, is based on interviews with more than 94,000 respondents in 98 countries, representing more than 90 percent of the world’s population.

“What we see is not declining demand, but rising expectations: citizens are looking for systems that deliver security, stability, and economic progress. This growing disconnect between democratic ideals and lived reality is a defining challenge for leaders today”, Nira Data’s CEO Nico Jaspers noted in the survey report’s foreword.

Almost everywhere, majorities consider democracy either extremely or very important

In almost every country included in the poll, a majority said democracy was either “extremely” or “very” important. Support was highest in Greece, Hungary and Sweden, and lowest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam. At the same time, more respondents said their country was moving in the wrong direction. The report finds that pessimism is especially pronounced in democracies. France, Germany, Lebanon, Puerto Rico and Nigeria were among the countries where responses on national direction were most negative. China recorded the most positive responses, followed by El Salvador, Kuwait, Algeria and Belarus.

Asked about the main purpose of democracy, respondents in most countries prioritized material and social outcomes. Improving living standards and well-being was the top answer in 62 percent of the countries surveyed. Promoting a fair and peaceful society was the leading answer in 18 percent of countries, freely choosing the government in 10 percent, and protecting individual rights and freedoms in 9 percent…(More)”.

Paper by Meike Ramon, Bigna Lenggenhager, Marte Roel Lesur, Dila Suay, Linda Baines, and Amanda J. Haste: “Contemporary research systems are increasingly shaped by structural constraints that limit how and where scientific knowledge can be produced. Academic institutions, historically associated with intellectual autonomy, are now frequently governed by metric-driven evaluation, administrative burdens, and competitive funding regimes that prioritize economic productivity over cultural and epistemic value. At the same time, they offer limited and inflexible employment opportunities—often due to funding constraints or a predominant focus on teaching. Public or government-funded laboratories have traditionally been more akin to universities in culture and approach, while industry laboratories, though often well-resourced, prioritize commercial outputs. Between these worlds lies a growing population of practitioners, independent scholars, citizen scientists, individuals working at the intersection of art and science, and retired researchers, who—despite losing formal institutional affiliation—retain deep domain expertise and a continued drive to develop new research ideas. All possess the expertise to conduct meaningful research yet lack access to the institutional conditions required to do so, leading them to seek environments grounded in curiosity, collaboration, and shared inquiry. Despite the widely recognized societal importance of scientific research, very few spaces exist for independent researchers to pursue practices that reach the public in meaningful and sustainable ways…(More)”.

Report by Hugo Leal and Marie Santini: “The report is the first to apply the Social Media Data Transparency Index, a systematic, first-of-its-kind evaluation of data access conditions across 15 major social media platforms in three key regulatory environments — the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. Assessments were conducted between October and December 2025 and validated in early 2026.

The findings are stark. Widely used platforms including Discord, Kwai, Pinterest, Snapchat, and WhatsApp provide no meaningful mechanisms for independent public scrutiny of either user-generated content or advertising data in any of the regions assessed. Even platforms subject to Europe’s landmark Digital Services Act — including X (formerly Twitter) and Snapchat — maintain advertising transparency tools that are either non-functional or produce no results, amounting to what the researchers term ‘performative transparency’.

The report findings include:

1. Social Media Data Transparency Remains Poor: Most platforms are ranked ‘Deficient’ or worst in data access.

2. Regulation helps, but does not guarantee compliance: The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and UK regulators have improved advertising data access conditions, but many platforms including X, Snapchat, and Pinterest — all subject to DSA requirements — still fail to provide functional transparency tools.

3. Stark regional disparities reflect a compliance-driven model of selective transparency: Brazil, which lacks a dedicated platform transparency framework, consistently records the lowest levels of data access.

4. Advertising data tools are too limited for meaningful scrutiny. Many platforms require researchers to search by advertiser name rather than by topic, keyword, or targeting criteria — an architectural choice that functions as a mechanism of opacity, making it effectively impossible to identify fraudulent, misleading, or politically harmful ads without prior knowledge of the advertiser’s identity…(More)“.

Book by Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, Mervi Pantti and Olga Dovbysh: “There is a growing public and scholarly attention to the environmental footprint of digital technologies, and to the climate responsibility of technology corporations and social media platforms specifically. Developing a critical understanding of the environmental responsibility and accountability of digital platforms, Platforms and the Planet focuses on the environmental responsibility of the so-called Big Tech, their digital media platforms and their role in the sustainability transition as a discursive, material, and ethical question.

Written from a much-needed critical and cross-disciplinary perspective, challenging the prevailing perspective on digital platforms as “green” and non-material entities, the chapters unpack their non-sustainable, material essence. Bridging critical platform studies with environmental studies and environmental communication studies, the chapters explore three broad themes. First, the chapters unpack what environmental sustainability means in relation to platforms. The second theme scrutinises the material and infrastructural dimensions of the digital platform society from the perspective of sustainability and global justice. Third, the chapters dive into the discourses of accountability by both digital platforms and actors criticizing them…(More)”.