Policy Soup stir the pot ALPHA

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Alex Hern@hern.bsky.socialFeb 4(source)

I’m sure someone else has said this better but it is insane how close the experience of reporting on the Epstein files is to playing a database mystery Her Story or The Roottrees Are Dead

Alex Hern@hern.bsky.socialFeb 4(source)

'this is how you spell "hahaha we destroyed the hopes and dreams of a generation of faux-romantics"' has to be an alltimer

Richard Waite

@waiterich.bsky.social

Deleted a post about “what’s your least favorite song” because the vibes are bad enough already. Instead: what’s your favorite song that has a long title, say at least 6 words long? Mine: “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town” (Pearl Jam)

Reposted byAlex Hern

Jo Kibble (Political Animal)@politicanimal.bsky.socialFeb 3(source)

The clunking fist is five years younger than the president of the United States.

Alex Hern

@hern.bsky.social

Hear me out: can we have Gordon back

Unknown

@unknown

I know last time didn’t end great but it wasn’t his fault mostly

lmao just copping a retweet for the laziest post ever

Has anyone actually asked him

@andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social

Hear me out: can we have Gordon back

Andrew Sparrow

Gordon Brown writes to Met to back case for investigation into Mandelson's 'inexcusable and unpatriotic' leaking - www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

Ffs David I didn’t even make a joke

I very much do not want that shit

I basically think about 95% of the rage directed at AI should be pointed at shortform video instead

It’s so bad, pals

John Herrman

@jwherrman.bsky.social

once you start looking for it, you see evidence and consequences of online desocialization everywhere nymag.com/intelligence...

n the mundane course of modern life, you might occasionally find yourself glimpsing the dark abyss
- that is, catching a few seconds of a stranger's phone screen. A peek over a shoulder, through a car window at a dash-mounted phone, or perhaps, pointedly, at the hands of a distracted person whose eyes you're trying to raise, will likely reveal a version of the same thing: not, in 2026, a wall of text, a feed, or even a slideshow of stories, but an endless scroll of tall videos.

contrast with the Parisian prosecutors office, which used the same tweet to announce a raid on X as it did to announce that it would no longer be posting on X

Jim Waterson

@jim.londoncentric.media

Information Commissioner launches formal investigation in X / Grok over use of people's personal data to create sexual images of children without consent. (The government will continue to post through it, no doubt.)

that's fine. bluesky doesn't need to win. twitter needs to lose.

this is obviously a bit self-important i guess but — it is such a bizarre quirk of world history that Brexit was both so incredibly influential in getting us to this shit place, and also so _incredibly_ avoidable.

You cannot kill it in any way that matters

The extent to which Labour has doubled down on a transphobia policy that it didn’t run on, and was bounced into by a Supreme Court ruling that woefully misunderstood the intent of the law, is genuinely shocking to me. I know there will be an “I told you so” but I don’t think this was foreseeable.

@paulhutcheon.bsky.social

Fucking hell

Paul Hutcheon

EXCLUSIVE: Anas Sarwar has promised to ban trans prisoners from female jails if Scottish Labour wins the Holyrood election. On the eve of a key court case, he says would ensure prisons are single-sex "within days" of becoming FM.

my (36m) agents (0.1nb, 0.1nb, 0.1nb) have unionized