This entire “the left is losing on AI” discourse is a straw man at best and pure gas-lighting at worst

Agreed. And I really hope every Dem candidate understands that the central, maybe only, issue that matters is restoring the rule of law, and every aspect of their platforms need to stem from that premise.

🚨ICYMI🚨 Meta is trying to embed facial recognition technology into its smart glasses as soon as this year, according to reporting from @nytimes.com. The implications of this feature are dire. EPIC urges the FTC and the states to investigate and block Meta’s plan. Read more here:

The Department of Homeland Security is flooding social media platforms with subpoenas demanding they unmask the people behind anti-ICE accounts. This crackdown on speech shows EXACTLY why online age verification laws are so dangerous. Here's why: 🧵

As ever, it’s the business model!

LOVE THIS

BRING IT. This lawsuit -- or at least the part about FTC's unconstitutional abuse of antitrust authority -- is long overdue. They literally *conditioned a merger* on advertisers' agreement to spend money in accordance with the administration's preferences about speech.

It's a story of magical thinking in assuming we could ever rely on benevolent billionaires to save journalism. It's also a story of oligarchs turning their backs on democracy and exploiting their media assets to advance class interests. Above all, it's a tragedy for news workers and for all of us.

With the awful WaPo layoffs and the state of journalism more broadly, if it's useful for any writers and reporters considering going indy, @molly.wiki, @xoxogossipgita.bsky.social of Aftermath, @jasonkoebler.bsky.social of 404 Media, @edzitron.com and me will do a little workshop next week.

If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don't tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff. Democracy dies in oligarchy.

I think it's best for everyone to understand that the unified class project of billionaires right now is to do to white collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue collar workers.

I keep saying to people in my life that the problem with writing in these days is that you sound absolutely off your nut for simply saying what is happening.

…Also also, I'm frankly disappointed that the idea of "human-like/-level intelligence" is still being used or taken seriously as a metric At All. It's a meaningless cipher that Looks like it should mean something but which adds up to nothing, the more we examine it. Its roots are eugenic and racist…

put another way, platforms that collected and arranged communities in order to monetize them with targeted ads are now entirely *ordered* by the logic of an ad network. a wild thing to watch happen over the last decade.

Complicit finds that top media companies caved after Trump issued anti-DEI EOs on Jan. 20 and 21, 2025. "Trump's anti-DEI executive orders form the foundation of his regime's efforts to dismantle our democracy. Outside of Trump and his enablers, no one is safe from attack." - @rlivier.bsky.social

“Constitutional rights and democratic norms don’t disappear all at once; they erode slowly. The next three years of this presidency will require Americans to vigilantly defend free speech and open debate.” - @attorneynora.bsky.social + @nytimes.com Read: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/o...

A reminder that the Kennedy Center is the literal and legal and congressional designated presidential memorial to JFK. This would be like Trump tearing down the Lincoln Memorial to build something “better.”

We've been saying this for nearly a year - since over 1,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grants were summarily terminated in April 2025, affecting every cultural corner of the United States (and then the same for most of our jobs as civil servants). #NEH

He also basically quoted MLK, saying hate can’t drive out hate; only love can do that. Bad Bunny is brave and he has given the world so much beauty. Respect to this man.

Data protection, as a concept, grew out of post-war legal scholarship in Germany which reflected on the use of data about people by the Nazi Govt, and formulated a set of limits on data use which recognised that to collect and use data about people was to impact the people’s lives.

Takeaway: Any time the Trump administration says "AI" or anything about software or data, what you should hear is "repression as a service" This has 2 parts: 1. AI as an excuse to consolidate data 2. AI to execute orders that humans would refuse

The violent occupation of Minneapolis started with a vlog. I've wanted to find a framework to describe Nick Shirley & others like him: "Influencer" is too quaint. "Journalist" is obviously wrong. I landed on "slopagandist." Gift link (open in a web browser) www.theverge.com/news/869824/...

my son is five, same age as Liam Ramos. you don't need to have a child the same age to be fucking horrified by the violence we are doing (and HAVE BEEN doing) upon immigrant children in this nation. but that he keeps asking for his spidey backpack is the kind of detail that rips my heart in two.

This is your regular reminder that the data broker industry must be destroyed.

They’re akshuallying Anne Frank.

With the execution of Alex Pretti, the lines have been clearly drawn. Defenders of the killing will be defenders of state terror, through and through. Benefactors and enablers of the state carrying out this killing—particularly those in Silicon Valley—must decide which side they are on

it is remarkable that these employees somehow do not know that their company literally engineers the mass deportation machine for ICE. Literally "ImmigrationOS." And a targeting app. Incredible.

Adtech is almost everything you do online. They’re using Adtech to track and investigate. Every little thing you do — shopping, browsing, checking health information, connecting on social, ChatGPT — is on Adtech.

This is a good speech for someone to make. Not holding my breath though

Also, may I say that I don’t agree with people saying ICE and CBP need “more training.” They’re doing exactly what this administration has trained them to—impose a reign of fear in blue cities. They don’t need more training. They need to be ripped up root and branch.

FYI if any journalists are doing stories about reactions to TikTok’s ownership change in the U.S. I would love to talk to you about the terms of service component, I think it’s interesting

CITR's @geurkink.bsky.social on @techpolicypress.bsky.social podcast breaking down why researchers need #BetterAccess to public platform data to better understand our digital information environment 🎟️ Sign up for the Better Access webinar next Weds January 28: kgi.georgetown.edu/events/bette...

8. You cannot have both a free market in media ownership and a free market in information and ideas. The oligarchs who dominate the sector stifle inconvenient thoughts and promote the policies that protect their fortunes.

Profiles in cowardice

The picture of that little boy with his little hat is like a sleeper cell activation for any parent worth their salt in this country.

Today @rlivier.bsky.social @freepress.bsky.social releases new research showing that every major U.S. media and tech company (except one) has eliminated or backpedaled on commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion in the face of Trump administration threats. www.freepress.net/policy-libra...

I’m tired of being talked down to by people like this. They are doing the Elon Musk Mars In 2 Years bit but have tied the entire U.S. economy to a bespoke compliment generator. It’s time to start talking about these AI mutants like delusional babies.

Spare me the centrist pearl-clutching. Abolish ICE. There is no reforming an institution this deeply corrupted.

Huge, sweeping report from my colleague @sarageoghegan.bsky.social and the @epic.org team on how unregulated tech, mass surveillance, and yawning gaps in privacy law have created a health privacy crisis, as covered by WIRED’s @dell.bsky.social: www.wired.com/story/survei...

Yesterday it was Satya Nadella, today it’s Jensen Huang; what with the world burning around me I can take some pleasure in the fact the AI bros are both mad and sad

THRILLED that Brian Chen's new policy brief, "The Big AI State: How the Trump Administration is Shaping US Industrial Policy toward 'Global Technological Dominance'" is live! Trump is not "deregulating"; his admin is intervening in the market BIG TIME to bolster AI. datasociety.net/library/the-...

Glad to speak with @theguardian.com along with other experts about authoritarianism in America: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

A lot of people are going to spend this decade trying to convince you to put your ID on the device you carry in your pocket and they're all wrong and you should tell them so loudly.

I was present for the birth of the web, the explosion of personal sites, and the blogging revolution, and you know what we never had to do? Beg people to use our shit.

Tech policy orgs & professionals need to grapple with the implications of technofascism’s profoundly anti-human ideological roots. TESCREAL should be part of all AI policy debates.

🧵 Trump administration AI policy is widely described as deregulatory. This description is misleading. What's happening is not the absence of governance but its rearrangement--intensive state intervention operating through mechanisms we don't typically call regulation. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

"Surely companies would never intentionally make their products worse for profit" I say to myself while replacing a light bulb that went out.

Been thinking about the t-shirt for a while.

Nobody gives anything away for free in corporate world. Everything is done with one aim: to make money. It's a classic bait and switch.