Today we beat Stephen Miller’s lawsuit mill in court! For 3 years I’ve been a defendant in a case filed by America First Legal on behalf of Gateway Pundit & a random antivaxxer we’d never heard of until she sued us. The plaintiffs claimed we “censored” them. It was a lie. They just lost.

Why was Cleveland's mayor the only elected official to speak at a conference heavily sponsored by the tech right and defense contractors? And why has he been so quiet about it? deans-list.ghost.io/special-edit...

Treating all opposition to data centers as a national security threat is the wrong move, says Jordyn Abrams, who argues policymakers must address legitimate public grievances about AI—not just police them. www.techpolicy.press/to-mitigate-...

My bank asking the real questions

My main criticism of these sorts of statements is it treatment disinformation and misinformation as a supply side issue, when its really a demand side issue. The solutions need to deal with what drives that demand, which is a sense of humiliation and/or betrayal.

This was super fun to work on! Really pleased with how this edited collection on gaming Trust & Safety came out. Thank you @cdt.org, NYU, and @csint-au.bsky.social for supporting this work. And to @sbradshaw.bsky.social for being a grade A coauthor. 🫶

NYT headline writers REALLY exercising that both sides muscle 🙄

The U.S. government handed a 3-year-old to an abuser to torture him to death, and then his mother was allotted one hour for his funeral.

Oliver Darcy got the audio of the heated 60 Minutes meeting where Scott Pelley dressed Nick Bilton down! "You know what was rude? Black Thursday. That was the absolute definition of rudeness. Telling Tanya Simon she had to be out of here at five o'clock." www.status.news/p/scott-pell...

American politics is bananas. I can’t believe there is a whole generation growing up to think that it’s normal for known criminals to win party nominations and public office.

Amazing?

You would have to explain what a call, text, YouTube, website, and social media account were first. But then they'd probably be pretty upset!

My latest newsletter is a long reflection on an AI and journalism conference I attended in Baltimore last week, including a look at the process by which Tech Policy Press produced a timeline of links between MAGA, Silicon Valley, and the European far right: deans-list.ghost.io/ghost/#/site

Look I can’t help that one of my hobbies is “reading PDFs”

Maybe he ate at the one in DC's Chinatown and just really enjoyed it

Proud of this one: At @techpolicypress.bsky.social, we created an interactive timeline of linkages between the Trump administration, the US tech sector, and the transatlantic far-right. You can view it here: www.techpolicy.press/charting-the...

Joe: I am a 73 year-old retired mechanic in Forsberg, Nebraska. My 3 biggest problems are Iran's uranium enrichment capability, the casting of Helen in Christopher Nolan's "Odyssey," and the ability of Tennesseeans to check out "Roots" from a library 1000 media outlets: can we please talk at length

NEW: A class action lawsuit is accusing OpenAI of sharing ChatGPT chat queries (!) + other personal data with Meta and Google. Reminder: no matter how friendly your chatbot is, it's probably surveilling you. futurism.com/artificial-i...

It's hard to know what the Republican Party is going to look like when Trump is finally out of power, but if these kinds of stories are any glimpse into the future I think it's pretty clear that the GOP is on track to get far, far, far worse www.notus.org/congress/wil...

White people disgusted by this racist display are making pithy jokes in the replies. I want acknowledgment that it’s physically painful to think about our black elders, in particular, enduring the consequences of a Supreme Court decision that augurs a return to the Jim Crow era.

TBF you can do this with any movie concept

For shame. www.cleveland.com/news/2026/04...

This week's newsletter is about the unrelenting march of time, the pervasive sense of instability, and the long-term threats that catch up to you. Plus, if you scroll to the bottom there are dogs! deans-list.ghost.io/unreal-bird-...

Turns out "The DOJ changed hands and our buddies decided to settle" is not the same as "we won the case on the merits" www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what...

With American democracy in free fall and Silicon Valley's imperial ambitions unmasked, @nathaliemarechal.net argues in @techpolicypress.bsky.social that the old politics of tech policy advocacy no longer apply. Experts must pick a side: democracy or fascism. www.techpolicy.press/tech-policy-...

Maybe this sounds crazy, but if your Project 2029 or whatever isn't this ambitious, it's not meeting the moment

Markets and Liberty!

Shitplomat Darren Beattie got this memo signed a few weeks after we learned he was trying to Twitter Files the State Department www.thewayfinder.net/p/the-extrem... 1/

From WaPo a few days ago. Remember Amazon's HQ2? Cities across "middle America" lined up to genuflect to Amazon, which built its headquarters in DC—one of our wealthiest cities. Don't show up only when you want our power water and land. Show up with JOBS. s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/

Thanks i hate it

"The thesis of the book is, effectively, Palantir loves getting big contracts from the Department of Defense. And when you think about it, doesn’t that make Palantir kind of heroic?" www.techpolicy.press/palantirs-ma...

*Laughs in Ohio*

one of the ways the mid to late 20th century political world has distorted the historical memories of even sophisticated observers is in the idea that you can achieve major transformations of american political life through something like bipartisan consensus

This week in unreal birds: My new article with @joncong.bsky.social offers a retrospective on the pathologies of disinfo programming in the Global South. I tackle civic engagement and social media for the @kettering.org. And implications for Orban's defeat: deans-list.ghost.io/unreal-bird-...

Man is anyone taking notes

hawking a line of branded Mountain Goats smart glasses. no matter where you look things look a little bleaker and also the wearer cannot remove the glasses once worn. I’m disrupting this sector

John Eastman was not disbarred for making "allegedly questionable constitutional arguments," and characterizing the decision that way is risible.

Congratulations to those who won the campus speech wars—student protests are punishable by expulsion but we now have hate rallies so vile that even our Republican governor is appalled. signalohio.org/ohio-passed-...

Actions should have consequences exhibit one jillion

Lots of international lessons and resources here for US state and local educators, human rights offices, and civil society organizations worried about online rumors and propaganda: democracywithoutexception.substack.com/p/the-local-... By @theodolan.bsky.social !

Confirming Bloomberg's report from last night that Monarch Tractor is finally kaput, acquired by Caterpillar. All four companies Foxconn once promised to build vehicles for at the former GM plant in Lordstown are now dead. (Fisker, Lordstown Motors, and, lol, IndiEV) techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/m...

In which The Free Press steps on a rake, repeatedly, trying to prevent @noupside.bsky.social from setting the record straight about Jacob Siegel's book, demonstrably false claims, and a pulled review: agentsofinfluence.substack.com/p/i-was-fals... This isn't how responsible media behaves.

Péter Magyar, who unseated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán Sunday in a landslide, shared a bombshell with reporters that the outgoing leader had diverted taxpayer funds to bankroll the American Conservative Political Action Conference. trib.al/ct7GGV3

Oh, yeah, that was the Obama Iran deal.

So Russian interference in Romania is OK But applying EU law in Europe is unacceptable Got it

New on our blog: Social media can both save democracy and destroy it. Both things can be true. @dwj.eurosky.social makes sense of new KF-Gallup survey data on social media & democracy. kettering.org/social-media...

Ten years ago today, in April 2016, the Boston Globe printed a satirical front page imagining a future Trump administration. The page was called "alarmist," "hyperbolic," "dystopian." But we’ve put up with so much since then it now looks like . . . a slow Thursday?

This week in Unreal Birds: An investigative agenda for tech journalists, @himself.bsky.social's excellent piece on "Gooning Toward the Fuhrer" as policy coordination (yes that's the title), The rise of international Project 2025 copycats, and more! deans-list.ghost.io/unreal-bird-...

Claude is down :/ so I’m just running my sink