Assistant Professor @SetonHall. Former: @AnnenbergPenn @MIC_Center. Platforms, policy, political economy.
Joined October 2012
- Tweets 943
- Following 1,273
- Followers 354
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36 Photos and videos
David Elliot Berman retweeted
May 18
Wrote about the college kids booing AI, and how, in a moment rife with economic precarity, affordability crises, and narrowing job prospects, AI has become the new avatar of American capitalism.
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
Feb 28
I'm going to keep saying it until people get it.
AI *is* mass surveillance.
All AI. Not some. All. By design and by default.
x.com/heygurisingh/status/20…
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
Feb 3
“At some point over the past 15 years, kids stopped reading”—but that’s because not enough teachers are asking them to, Walt Hunter writes: theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0…
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
Jan 22
Everyone is starting to sound like AI, even in spoken language
Analysis of 280,000 transcripts of videos of talks & presentations from academic channels finds they increasingly used words that are favorites of ChatGPT
Model collapse, except for humans arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01754v1
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
Jan 7
Most thoughtful take I’ve seen on sports betting, from the great @liz_franczak
embedded.substack.com/p/my-i…
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
12 Dec 2025
The earnest term paper written in the fevered haze of a caffeine and nicotine fueled all-nighter — of greater worth to me than the entire cumulative output of generative AI.
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
20 Nov 2025
The only good take on Olivia Nuzzi
19 Nov 2025
“We stopped paying journalists and started rewarding performers.”
mediaite.com/opinion/the-oli…
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
19 Oct 2025
The thing about AI I want to press people on is why capital feels compelled to invest in AI *in particular* and to the exclusion of everything else.
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
19 Aug 2025
It’s a loss for humanity as a whole that we are losing cultural critics with keen eyes and sharp wits, then getting nothing in return but AI slop and influencers who ask Pedro Pascal what it’s like to be the Internet’s daddy
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
5 Jun 2025
Every day an ostensibly serious person describes how they use ChatGPT—to write pretty passages, to rattle off fun hallucinated historical slop to them in the car—and it really is as though they’ve voluntarily hung a big, public sign around their neck that says: “I’m illiterate.”
5 Jun 2025
so my despair really never comes from fear of AI's potential — though I think it is considerable — but that so many self-understood aesthetes and cultural gatekeepers are perhaps already essentially illiterate
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15 May 2025
Thrilled that my article “On Optimization: Cultural Labor in Platform Capitalism” has just been published in New Media & Society! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.…
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
29 Apr 2025
Grad school
28 Apr 2025
They need to invent the opposite of a gym. You go there and you just get more frail and sickly. Maybe instead of lifting you just sit in a cold dark room and starve
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
22 Mar 2025
This article title goes extremely hard
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
22 Jan 2025
Excited to announce our Pennsylvania Broadband Research Institute's $1.2M award to partner with the City of Philadelphia to evaluate and support their NTIA-funded initiative to create a more digitally empowered city. @PSUBellisario @_DavidBerman
tiny.cc/bx07001
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26 Sep 2024
All that's solid melts into clickbait and hot takes.
26 Sep 2024
If Zach Lowe doesn’t deserve to be employed by your company then no one does. It’s like month by month we’re watching the company that used to define sports media wither away into nothing of substance
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
6 Aug 2024
After months of digging and reporting, I have learned where Facebook's bizarre AI spam (like "Shrimp Jesus") comes from, who is making it, how it works, and how it is monetized.
Turns out Meta is directly paying people to spam FB with this stuff
404media.co/where-facebooks-…
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14 Jul 2024
RT @ajbauer: We can't joke or snark our way out of what's happening now or what comes next. Organize your friends, coworkers, neighbors — l…
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
31 May 2024
Come work with us at the MIC Center! We have an opening for a postdoctoral researcher who focuses on the political economy of broadband, digital equity, and the future of local media infrastructures. Please spread the good word! asc.upenn.edu/research/cente…
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
17 May 2024
Raising awareness with my Pennsylvania Broadband Research Institute colleagues about a looming legal paradox that's been left to fester, and is now coming to the fore: benton.org/blog/bad-business… @Ali_Christopher @_DavidBerman @SydneyForde @VWPickard
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David Elliot Berman retweeted
30 Apr 2024
Excellent piece by @_DavidBerman & @ppopiel in @techpolicypress: techpolicy.press/america-dis…
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