Since the inauguration of Donald Trump in January, tens of thousands of people have downloaded the “Simple Sabotage Field Manual”, a guide written by a US intelligence agent in 1944 to help the allied resistance during World War II. Its newfound popularity comes amid an emerging grassroots opposition to waves of executive orders from the new president.

Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered an impassioned floor speech decrying "America's dangerous movement toward oligarchy, authoritarianism, and kleptocracy."

Donald Trump's demand for billions of gallons (liters) of water to be released in California, in what he said was a move to help combat fires in Los Angeles, was wasteful and pointless, experts say.

Salvage crews have recovered the bodies of all 67 people killed when a passenger plane and a US Army helicopter collided near Washington and plunged into the Potomac River, officials said Tuesday.

The site calls out workers who have been involved with DEI initiatives. A majority are Black.

Internet Archive makes it easier to track changes in CDC data online.

The world’s richest man doesn’t want anyone knowing his right-hand people who are disrupting government.

Democratic lawmakers have said buyouts or deferred resignation offers to federal workers by the Trump administration are legally dubious.

Darren Beattie, who's claimed the FBI was responsible for the 2021 attack on the Capitol, has been named acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.

The latest version of a bill spurred by a 2022 ProPublica-Chicago Tribune investigation would explicitly prevent police from ticketing students for violations such as vaping or truancy, and require districts to track and disclose police activity.

The Waffle House restaurant chain is putting a 50 cent per egg surcharge in place temporarily because of the biggest bird flu outbreak in a decade.

Archived link

TikTok’s algorithm exhibited pro-Republican bias during 2024 U,S, presidential race, study finds

TikTok, a widely used social media platform with over a billion active users worldwide, has become a key source of news, particularly for younger audiences. This growing influence has raised concerns about potential political biases in its recommendation algorithm, especially during election cycles. A recent preprint study examined this issue by analyzing how TikTok’s algorithm recommends political content ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Using a controlled experiment involving hundreds of simulated user accounts, the study found that Republican-leaning accounts received significantly more ideologically aligned content than Democratic-leaning accounts, while Democratic-leaning accounts were more frequently exposed to opposing viewpoints.

...

“We previously conducted experiments auditing YouTube’s recommendation algorithms. This study published at PNAS Nexus demonstrated that the algorithm exhibited a left-leaning bias in the United States,” said Yasir Zaki, an assistant professor of computer science at New York University Abu Dhabi.

“Given TikTok’s widespread popularity—particularly among younger demographics—we sought to replicate this study on TikTok during the 2024 U.S. presidential elections. Another motivation was the concerns over TikTok’s Chinese ownership led many U.S. politicians to advocate for banning the platform, citing fears that its recommendation algorithm could be used to promote a political agenda.”

...

The analysis uncovered significant asymmetries in content distribution on TikTok. Republican-seeded accounts received approximately 11.8% more party-aligned recommendations compared to Democratic-seeded accounts. Democratic-seeded accounts were exposed to approximately 7.5% more opposite-party recommendations on average. These differences were consistent across all three states and could not be explained by differences in engagement metrics like likes, views, shares, comments, or followers.

“We found that TikTok’s recommendation algorithm was not neutral during the 2024 U.S. presidential elections,” explained Talal Rahwan, an associate professor of computer science at New York University Abu Dhabi. “Across all three states analyzed in our study, the platform consistently promoted more Republican-leaning content. We showed that this bias cannot be explained by factors such as video popularity and engagement metrics—key variables that typically influence recommendation algorithms.”

Further analysis showed that the bias was primarily driven by negative partisanship content, meaning content that criticizes the opposing party rather than promoting one’s own party. Both Democratic- and Republican-conditioned accounts were recommended more negative partisan content, but this was more pronounced for Republican accounts. Negative-partisanship videos were 1.78 times more likely to be recommended as an ideological mismatch relative to positive-partisanship ones.

...

President Donald Trump on Tuesday suggested that displaced Palestinians in Gaza be "permanently" resettled outside the war-torn territory and proposed the U.S. take "ownership"