Simon Willison’s Weblog

Private School Labeler on Bluesky. I am utterly delighted by this subversive use of Bluesky's labels feature, which allows you to subscribe to a custom application that then adds visible labels to profiles.

The feature was designed for moderation, but this labeler subverts it by displaying labels on accounts belonging to British public figures showing which expensive private school they went to and what the current fees are for that school.

Here's what it looks like on an account - tapping the label brings up the information about the fees:

These labels are only visible to users who have deliberately subscribed to the labeler. Unsurprisingly, some of those labeled aren't too happy about it!

In response to a comment about attending on a scholarship, the label creator said:

I'm explicit with the labeller that scholarship pupils, grant pupils, etc, are still included - because it's the later effects that are useful context - students from these schools get a leg up and a degree of privilege, which contributes eg to the overrepresentation in British media/politics

On the one hand, there are clearly opportunities for abuse here. But given the opt-in nature of the labelers, this doesn't feel hugely different to someone creating a separate webpage full of information about Bluesky profiles.

I'm intrigued by the possibilities of labelers. There's a list of others on bluesky-labelers.io, including another brilliant hack: Bookmarks, which lets you "report" a post to the labeler and then displays those reported posts in a custom feed - providing a private bookmarks feature that Bluesky itself currently lacks.

Update: @us-gov-funding.bsky.social is the inevitable labeler for US politicians showing which companies and industries are their top donors, built by Andrew Lisowski (source code here) using data sourced from OpenScrets. Here's what it looks like on this post:

# 22nd November 2024, 5:44 pm / apis, bluesky, moderation, politics, political-hacking

Spevktator: OSINT analysis tool for VK. This is a really cool project that came out of a recent Bellingcat hackathon. Spevktator takes 67,000 posts from five popular Russian news channels on VK (a popular Russian social media platform) and makes them available in Datasette, along with automated translations to English, post sharing metrics and sentiment analysis scores. This README includes some detailed analysis of the data, plus a link to an Observable notebook that implements custom visualizations against queries run directly against the Datasette instance.

# 5th September 2022, 8:48 pm / political-hacking, bellingcat, datasette, observable

Digitizing 55,000 pages of civic meetings (via) Philip James has been building public, searchable archives of city council meetings for various cities—Oakland and Alamedia so far—using my s3-ocr script to run Textract OCR against the PDFs of the minutes, and deploying them to Fly using Datasette. This is a really cool project, and very much the kind of thing I’ve been hoping to support with the tools I’ve been building.

# 22nd August 2022, 4:26 pm / archiving, ocr, fly, datasette, political-hacking

Video speech matching on TheyWorkForYou.com. Launched this morning at BarCamp London by Matthew Somerville—TheyWorkForYou now has video from BBC Parliament but they need your help matching it exactly to their transcripts from Hansard. Neat example of a game that helps process large amounts of data.

# 1st June 2008, 1:52 pm / barcamplondon, barcamplondon4, matthew-somerville, theyworkforyou, mysociety, video, timestamping, government, political-hacking

WhatDoTheyKnow (via) New from mySociety: a site for submitting and publically tracking Freedom of Information requests to the UK government.

# 4th March 2008, 11:38 pm / political-hacking, mysociety, whatdotheyknow, government, foi