https://www.gzeromedia.com/video/ask-ian/in-memory-of-moose

https://www.gzeromedia.com/video/quick-take/brazils-left-wing-president-wins-historic-fourth-term

In this Quick Take, Ian Bremmer breaks down Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s historic re-election victory and what it means for the country’s political future and democracy.

PUTIN TO MEET IRANIAN PRESIDENT AND QATARI EMIR IN MOSCOW

Russian President Vladimir Putin will hold separate talks Tuesday with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, following a Gas Exporting Countries Forum summit in Moscow.

The Kremlin has not disclosed the agenda.

https://p.dw.com/p/5ObzP?at_medium=SocialMedia&at_campaign=Twitter&at_share_source=SharingButton&at_origin=Web

Tania Krämer in Jerusalem15 hours ago15 hours ago

On October 27, more than 640,000 young Israelis will be eligible to vote in a general election for the first time. Polls suggest it will be a tight race, which means first-time voters’ ballots could prove decisive.

https://p.dw.com/p/5ObzP

Young Israelis could play a pivotal role in Israel’s upcoming election, with first-time voters reflecting deep divisions over the country’s future.

Many young Jewish Israelis have shifted to the right in recent years, a trend accelerated by the October 7 attacks and the ongoing war in Gaza.

While some back far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and support Jewish settlement in Gaza, others favor a two-state solution and political change.

Their competing visions highlight a generational debate that could influence the makeup of parliament and the direction of Israeli policy.

Tania Krämer Jerusalem Bureau Chief

Anthropic IPO spotlights AI risks

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images Anthropic’s IPO filing, out today, includes an extensive list of extreme warnings — including the chance its own technology could put humanity at risk, Axios’ Madison Mills reports. These are the wildest IPO risk factors in history — a jarring collision of Wall Street legalese and what some see as Silicon Valley sci-fi In over 90 pages of risk factors, Anthropic warns that … AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” and could try to manipulate humans. AI models are becoming harder to monitor, and their abilities could exceed human reviewers’ ability to do so. AI models have exhibited behavior resembling blackmail, including attempts to resist being shut down Anthropic also disclosed that four of its models gained unauthorized access to real third-party systems during cybersecurity evaluations. In one incident, a model used a discovered password to gain administrator access, collected additional credentials, changed system settings and accessed an individual’s personal information. Anthropic said it found no evidence that the models pursued goals beyond their assigned tasks or attempted to evade oversight The big picture: Every company has to lay out risks for investors to consider when they go public, but Anthropic is the first in modern history to go to such existential extremes. Go deeper … More on Anthropic’s IPO.

Oct 26, 2026BUY THE BOOKS: Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick: https://amzn.to/4gMNJey The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer & Steve Walt: https://amzn.to/3SL2M0o

Oct 25, 2026

#artetvdocumentary#usa#magaA schizophrenic dive into an America with two faces, between the stars of the MAGA galaxy and the residents of a Latino neighbourhood in Washington. This reportage explores the violence on lives and on words and breaks down the strategies that permanently change Americans’ view of reality. My MAGA Life | ARTE.tv Documentary 📆 Available until: 23/09/2029 ARTE.tv Documentary 📺 is ARTE.tv’s YouTube channel in English, where we share new videos every day, including in-depth documentaries and reports on geopolitics, economy, society, culture, science and the environment 🌎. Want more? 👉 Visit our streaming platform in English: ARTE.tv in English https://www.arte.tv/en/ For reports on culture, visit ARTE.tv Culture, where we explore art 🖼️ from every angle. Here you’ll find web series’💻, exclusive interviews 🎙️, music programmes 🎶, the best of European cinema 🎞️ and long-form culture documentaries 🎥: / @artetvculture Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a video / @artetvdocumentary Keep up to date with us on the go via social media 🤳 🐦 Twitter: https://x.com/ARTEen

Learn 50+ years of economics in only 7 weeks: https://www.skool.com/stevekeen/about Business inquiries: leah@krugercowne.com Support my work: https://donateopen.com/@profstevekeen France has run a budget deficit for 51 straight years. In 2001, its government debt sat at 62% of GDP the lowest it had been since the euro was created. Today it’s 118%, almost double the ceiling Europe set for itself. Every headline tells the same story: the country spent too much, the bill is due, and the students in the streets are the symptom. Steve Keen the economist who predicted the 2008 crash before it happened says that story is backwards. He has studied debt for decades, and the number he says nobody in Brussels will name is the one that actually matters: French private debt sits nearly 100% of GDP higher than the public debt politicians fight over, and since the euro began, it has grown twice as fast. Meanwhile French per-capita growth fell from 2.9% a year before the euro to 1% after it and 0.6% in 2025. To stay inside the eurozone’s 3% deficit limit, the French government slashed social spending, education included. Classrooms without teachers. Science labs cancelled for lack of equipment. Buildings left to decay. That is what triggered the student riots. This is the story of how a set of rules sold as stability delivered the opposite and why the economist who saw 2008 coming says the euro itself is the thing that has to go. ✅ Why are there riots in France right now, and why does the real answer have almost nothing to do with the protests themselves? ✅ What are the student riots actually about and how does a 3% budget line decide whether a school gets teachers or a science lab gets equipment? ✅ Why has France’s growth stalled at 0.6% while China, running deficits twice the European limit, grows almost nine times faster? ✅ Why do economists and politicians demonize the smaller debt and ignore the bigger one? ✅ And why has inflation been lower in China than in France since 2020, when every textbook says the opposite should happen? Watch to the end: the last conclusion is the one almost nobody in Europe is willing to say out loud. France riots explained: the French protests, the Paris riots, and France burning are not a spending story they are a debt story. This video breaks down the France economy, the France debt crisis and the eurozone crisis using World Bank data on French per-capita growth, France government debt, French private debt and the 3% deficit rule, with economist Steve Keen on why Europe economy policy has stalled, what the European Central Bank’s 2% inflation target actually did, and why the cost of living crisis across Europe traces back to a system built in the 1990s. If you follow France news, France protest coverage, France economy analysis, or the wider debt crisis in Europe, this is the explanation the headlines leave out.

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From dereliction to Airbnb, the Gaeltacht is being destroyed by the housing crisis

3 hours ago

5 min read

As winter looms, the evening is so pitch black on Inis Meáin that the few street lights across the sea on Inis Mór make Kilronan look like Manhattan. In the silent night, voices travel, and the low murmur of people chatting leads to the Halla Naomh Eoin, which doubles as the local community centre and the school – the beating heart of the least populated of the Aran Islands.

Inis Meáin hosts one of the country’s few all-Irish boarding schools and it is full of life, always oversubscribed with teenagers enthusiastically embracing island life and its language. Tonight’s meeting is about what will happen in a few years, when these students – both locals and outsiders – become adults, and whether they can settle on the island, rear families, continue to speak Irish and infuse the community with vibrancy.

The impediment on Inis Meáin is housing. Irish-speaking adults who want to live here have few options as prices have gone through the roof for the tiny number of homes that come on the market. Meanwhile, restrictive planning laws mean locals cannot build new homes for their children on their plots.

Ireland’s islands are an essential part of Irishness, an integral part of our heritage and culture and one of the last bastions of Irish as a living, working, breathing, everyday language.

Tonight’s meeting is organised by a group of young Gaeilgeoirí activists called Tinteán (“níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin”), whose basic message is that if young Gaeilgeoirí can’t afford to live in the Gaeltacht, it will die very soon. Ironically, we are just a few hundred yards from the cottage where JM Synge spearheaded the Gaelic Revival.

Without people, there is no revival.

According to the latest census, the country’s island population has fallen below 3,000 for the first time. To put this into context, in 1841 there were 48,000 people living on the islands off the western seaboard. Today the average age on the islands is 59 – in contrast to the rest of the country, where it is 43 – and more than one in five of the islands’ population are aged 65 years and older.

The crucial age group between 20 and 35 accounts for just 7.9 per cent of the islands’ population, as opposed to 25 per cent for the State as a whole.

Meanwhile, just 5 per cent of the islands’ population is under four years old, compared with an average of 8 per cent nationally.

These population dynamics mean only one thing: catastrophic decline and, along with a disappearing population, a disappearing language and culture. What would Synge think?

It is essential that the population decline is reversed. At a time when the Irish language has rarely been more popular, when thousands of people are learning and in some cases relearning it, the Gaeltacht itself is being destroyed by the refusal to do the very thing that generations of people from the west of Ireland did all over the world: build houses. Young families make communities, and if they have no places to live then the community dies or becomes more like a museum – visited by curious onlookers during the holiday season, but for all intents and purposes, dead.

One of the main issues is that homes have become trophy assets. When a house here comes up for sale, it is marketed online to everyone from London to New York to Mount Merrion. There is a burgeoning national and international market for property in the west of Ireland, and this process elbows out the local people, pushing prices way out of reach for the average islander.

In addition, the tourist market, so long the source of summer income, has changed dramatically.

Airbnb and Booking.com have made it so attractive for property owners to rent out their places short term that these potential homes are taken off the rental market for young Gaeilgeoirí who can’t afford to compete in trophy auctions. In many cases they are being given the option to rent until the summer comes, and then weekly rents skyrocket for the tourist season and the families must find somewhere else to live until September. They are in effect school-year residents, and that oddly nomadic existence rarely encourages people to put down roots.

Naturally, as more and more rural hotels have been turned over to refugees, tourist bed capacity falls, putting more pressure on the existing housing stock.

Another issue is vacancy – and ultimately dereliction, because an uninhabited house doesn’t stand a chance against Atlantic storms for long. For example, according to the local community office, on Inis Meáin there are 149 houses, of which 65 are uninhabited. Nearly half of all the homes on an island with a housing crisis stand empty.

So what can be done?

We know that people respond to incentives, positive and negative. With respect to building houses in the Gaeltacht to enable Gaeilgeoir families to live here, the key is to create the incentives to make the local housing market work. Considering the fact that there are vacant houses on the island, what might make the owners put them on the market?

At the moment, capital gains must be paid if you sell a vacant property. This is an obvious impediment to selling. Why go through the hassle of selling, particularly an old family house split between a few children, if the government gets 31 per cent of the profit? What about specifically cancelling capital gains on the islands in order to lubricate supply? Make it easy to sell. Such a move would change the conversation about selling.

A buyer’s tax break, specifically for Gaeilgeoirí, like the Temple Bar tax breaks for residents in the 1990s, would bias buying to Irish speakers.

On the planning side, what about setting a quantity of homes to be built by locals every year, based on demand and family structure, allowing the residents to solve their own problems? This would give local people the ability to build on their own island, for their own community.

Even if these initiatives were embraced, there is still the issue of the cost of island life – which is far in excess of anything on the mainland. Those of us who don’t live on small islands don’t realise that the sea is a big cost driver. Think about getting material to the island, renting the truck to bring the materials to the harbour on the mainland, renting the boat to bring the stuff across, finding the workers to do the job, putting them up while they are working, and so on. All these things cost money, yet the income of Ireland’s islanders is far below the national average.

What about making island life tax-free for Gaeilgeorí, treating the people the way we treat US multinational capital? When we cut corporation tax, activity responded. The same would apply with income tax, excise duty and VAT on islands.

If we are talking about the Gaeltacht and the language, what about making living on the island tax free for Gaeilgeori? The sums of money would be tiny for a country with an annual budget of €147 billion. We are talking about only a few thousand people initially. The cost is minuscule and the prize, the preservation of a way of life and a language that has been spoken continuously in this part of the country for more than 2,500 years, is enormous.

This morning I asked a local about the weather and he responded, “Tá sé leathghlas ceart go leor,” or, “It’s a bit half grey all right.” (Down here glas isn’t green, it’s grey.) The half grey refers to the sea, the sky and heavy clouds, and the colour of the rocks, the limestone and the horizon where the sea and the clouds meet in a misty angry grey haze. This linguistic richness comes from hundreds of generations inscribing their language with colour, significance and their own meaning.

Imagine losing this for the sake of a few pennies.

News Release 5-Jul-2026

AI-powered social media can subtly manipulate opinion at scale, new study finds

Reports and Proceedings

University of Oxford

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AI tools used to generate, edit or contextualise social media posts can introduce hidden biases that spread through online networks and shape public opinion, according to new research from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford and the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam.

Oxford, UK; 00:01 BST 6 July 2026  – The study found that large language models (LLMs) consistently changed the direction of social media posts on contested topics, even when explicitly instructed to preserve the original meaning. The researchers also show, through simulations of real-world social networks, how these small changes could accumulate across millions of interactions and gradually influence broader public opinion.

The findings raise questions about the growing use of AI-powered writing tools on social media platforms and suggest that AI-mediated communication could become a powerful new mechanism for influencing public discourse.

The study, AI-Mediated Communication Can Steer Collective Opinion, authored by Dr. Stratis Tsirtsis, Kai Rawal, Professor Chris Russell, Professor Brent Mittelstadt and Professor Sandra Wachter, has been accepted for presentation at the AI4Good and Technical AI Governance Research workshops at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026) in Seoul, South Korea.

Key findings

• AI writing and editing tools can introduce bias into social media posts. Large language models (LLMs) systematically altered the direction of users’ messages on contested topics, even when instructed to preserve the original meaning.
• Biases were similar across different AI systems. Multiple models tended to nudge posts in similar directions, favouring some positions such as gun control, marijuana legalisation and feminism, while pushing against others such as atheism and the death penalty.
• Small changes in individual posts can influence public opinion over time. Simulations using real-world social network data showed that subtle biases introduced into posts can accumulate and gradually shift opinions across online communities.
• AI-assisted communication creates a new route for influencing public discourse. The researchers argue that AI systems embedded in social media platforms can shape how opinions spread online, creating new challenges for transparency, accountability and regulation.
• The source of bias is not just the AI model itself. The study shows that specific implementation decisions made by platforms can significantly affect the direction and magnitude of AI-generated influence.

Methods

The researchers instructed large language models (LLMs) from different providers to transform human-written texts on contested topics into improved social media posts. They then analysed whether the AI-generated versions systematically changed the position expressed in the original posts. Next, they used mathematical modelling and computer simulations based on real social network data from X and Facebook to examine how these small changes could spread through online networks and affect broader public opinion over time.

Example: Grok’s “Explain this post” feature

By recreating and testing X’s “Explain this post” feature, with a focus on abortion-related posts, researchers found that Grok was more supportive of pro-life posts than pro-choice posts. By removing X’s instructions one by one, they traced this imbalance back to a single instruction telling Grok to “challenge mainstream narratives if necessary”. This experiment illustrates how targeted, easy-to-implement platform interventions can shape the way AI systems influence public discourse online.

Implications for regulation

The research highlights AI-mediated communication as an emerging form of influence that existing regulatory frameworks do not yet cover. While initiatives such as the EU AI Act and Digital Services Act focus on systemic risks, harmful content, discrimination, and threats to democratic processes, they do not directly address the more subtle ways AI can shape opinions through drafting, editing, or contextualising online content.

“Our research points to AI-mediated communication as a new and more subtle way of influencing opinions – one the law has yet to catch up with – and offers food for thought about who, or what, is shaping public discourse,” says senior author Sandra Wachter, Professor of Technology and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. 

-ENDS-

Notes for editors

Download the paper

Journalists can download a copy of the study, “AI-Mediated Communication Can Steer Collective Opinion,” by Stratis Tsirtsis, Kai Rawal, Chris Russell, Brent Mittelstadt, and Sandra Wachter from arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16245

It will be presented at the AI4Good and Technical AI Governance Research workshops at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026) in Seoul, South Korea.

How social platforms are using AI

Generative AI is increasingly integrated across online platforms, shaping how we interact with each other. For example, LinkedIn offers premium users the ability to improve their posts using AI, X’s Grok model is already a cornerstone of the platform, and recent advertised updates to Google search are pointing to a future where our online production and consumption of information is increasingly AI-mediated.

Funding

This work has also been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in the framework of the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship (Humboldt Professor of Technology and Regulation awarded to Sandra Wachter) endowed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Contact

For more information or to interview the authors, please contact:
Anthea Milnes, Head of Communications, or Sara Spinks / Veena McCoole, Media and Communications Manager
T: +44 (0)1865 280527
M: +44 (0)7551 345493
E: press@oii.ox.ac.uk

About the Oxford Internet Institute (OII)

The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) is a multidisciplinary research and teaching department of the University of Oxford, dedicated to the social science of the Internet. Drawing from many different disciplines, the OII works to understand how individual and collective behaviour online shapes our social, economic and political world. Since its founding in 2001, research from the OII has had a significant impact on policy debate, formulation and implementation around the globe, as well as a secondary impact on people’s wellbeing, safety and understanding. Drawing on many different disciplines, the OII takes a combined approach to tackling society’s big questions, with the aim of positively shaping the development of the digital world for the public good.

About the University of Oxford

Oxford University has been placed number 1 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for a record-breaking tenth year running, and number 4 in the QS World Rankings 2026. At the heart of this success are the twin-pillars of our ground-breaking research and innovation and our distinctive educational offer.

Oxford is world-famous for research and teaching excellence and home to some of the most talented people from across the globe. Our work helps the lives of millions, solving real-world problems through a huge network of partnerships and collaborations. The breadth and interdisciplinary nature of our research alongside our personalised approach to teaching sparks imaginative and inventive insights and solutions.

Through its research commercialisation arm, Oxford University Innovation, Oxford is the highest university patent filer in the UK and is ranked first in the UK for university spinouts, having created more than 300 new companies since 1988. Over a third of these companies have been created in the past five years. The university is a catalyst for prosperity in Oxfordshire and the United Kingdom, contributing around £16.9 billion to the UK economy in 2021/22, and supports more than 90,400 full-time jobs.

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Article Title

AI-Mediated Communication Can Steer Collective Opinion

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