While people scrambled to the livestreams and, whenever possible, posted updates as they happened, the sheer size and scale of the project was too much for any one person. Even the most well-resourced groups felt a strain this year trying to keep up with the pace. One of the side effects of this has been a renewed interested in amateur archivists who preserve history as it happens. As December draws to a close, and I think about what I have to add to the moment relying on the lessons from last year, what came to mind was that we need to get as many eyes on the system as possible.

In the past two years, large language models have replaced traditional information search and delivery systems in increasingly jarring ways. As they become more integrated into our everday lives, it will likely become harder to distinguish fact from fiction. Simultaneously, corporations like Meta have moved away from efforts to stop misinformation under the thin guise of “free speech.” While this will be dangerous for everyone, it offers particularly worrying prospects for groups most routinely targeted by intentional disinformation efforts.

One of the projects I’ve been working on in the background as I try and keep up with the maelstrom is figuring out how to get notifications in real-time about bills being introduced. I’m still working the bugs out, but this calendar is based on an IFTTT applet using the same general principle as the news tracker, part of the GayAgenda suite of tools.

You can read more about the main project — which tracks news coverage of trans-related topics and generates data visualizations — here, or visit the GitHub repo here.

Well, I did it. I finally switched completely to a “dark mode” dashboard. I sort of had to, after downloading this absolutely gorgeous RStudio theme. Regardless, there’s something about seeing things slightly differently that affords you different perspective and I’m starting to get the impression that there is something truly, terrifyingly wrong with the way Google serves and curates news items in the index.

When I search for “google news content guidelines” I get the official Google News content policy where they claim that Google will not provide content for hate sites or sites that peddle disinformation (written here as misinformation). But is that really true?

As usual, the trans news tracker, started as one of those “I wonder if…” projects. Partially inspired by the potential imminent demise of twitter, and having recently started using automation platform IFTTT for tracking the hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills sweeping the country, I wanted to see how easy it would be to create a dashboard that would visualize the discourse in real-time.