In 2021, I reported on an internal meeting at Facebook about discussions to put facial recognition on new smartglasses. One of their execs complained about the coverage and said the co would have a "very public discussion" about the tech. They never did. And now: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

New story up on the Homeland Security Department’s new tactic: flood social media companies with subpoenas to unmask anonymous accounts that criticize ICE or monitor the movements of ICE agents. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

During the social media addiction trial today in LA, a lawyer for Meta pressed psychiatrist Anna Lembke on the witness stand about what apps besides Instagram can hook people. “Can people become addicted to Netflix? Can someone get addicted to outtakes of American Idol?”

Meta's plan for launching glasses that people can use to secretly identify strangers on the street is to do it "during a dynamic political environment" when people who care about why that's bad are "focused on other concerns." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

The Tel Aviv indictment is the first publicly known instance of people being accused of leveraging military secrets to place bets on the popular prediction market. n.pr/4kvG3yW

“Such bets can put your own military at greater risk because you are signaling to your enemies what may happen, and that puts your own troops in danger" www.npr.org/2026/02/12/n...

You could talk for hours about the bizarre ways prediction markets could go wrong. Enjoyed exploring that on @whyy.org along with @bobbyallyn.bsky.social: whyy.org/episodes/pol...

Apple News is an enormous driver of traffic for many publishers that have seen link referrals crater with the rise of AI Overviews/LLMs. If Apple News responds to this by promoting a fever swamp of far-right partisan outlets, many news sites are gonna get utterly walloped

Kalshi loves to say it is federally regulated. But here’s some perspective. Before the Kalshi boom, the CFTC listed around a dozen or so new event contract markets *a year* for crude oil futures etc Today there are 346,056 active Kalshi event contracts. 4/5 CFTC commissioner seats remain vacant.

“If I was a different person I would launch a crypto scam right now, because there’s no cops on the beat,” said one laid-off CFTC lawyer finance.yahoo.com/news/cftcs-t...

appears to have been a degen, but this is the new norm: large anomalous trades are made on world events, creating speculation about whether it’s intel or speculation, which could in theory influence whether officials do act or not, if it is insidered. impossible to distinguish signal from noise

In prediction market spaces, traders are debating whether the person who has placed a $115k Polymarket bet on the US striking Iran tonight is a pseudonymous military insider or a “degen,” a degenerate nihilist trader. If the strike happens, the payout is $4M.

Days ago someone bet $500k on Kalshi Gaga would perform at halftime show. Wow what luck. Had to be random!!

The Super Bowl in Silicon Valley "is tech billionaires who got picked last in gym class paying $50,000 to pretend they’re friends with the guys who got picked first in gym class." Ken Belson @mikeisaac.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/b...

OK so now the former CEO of Tumblr is running the Washington Post. Tumblr. A company whose history is a textbook case study in corporate value destruction.

This is a doozy: "If Plaintiffs want to argue Musk bought Twitter to make money rather than to promote free speech, they may do so without dragging DOGE, Trump, and allegations of racism into the courtroom." www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

One of @ering.bsky.social's great file finds: Epstein tried to help create an tech fund shortly before he was arrested in 2019 with two tech types. One of his partners, however, was worried about the "optics" of telling founders that Epstein was involved. So they suggested Epstein conceal himself.

not that time in 2013 when someone strongly recommended Epstein go to Berghain…

wonder what Bezos could possibly want from the WH

Today, the Washington Post laid off more than 300 people. If you think this is abt Jeff Bezos's concern that the paper losing money, you're wrong. So wrong that you should be disqualified from expressing opinions in public. Billionaires *like* losses. They *need* losses.

My story on Elon Musk cutting safeguards at xAI is on the front page of today's @washingtonpost.com. I’m also among 100’s of reporters laid off. I absolutely loved my job my brilliant coworkers & the thrill of reporting @ the center of forces upending the world: AI & Silicon Valley’s political power

A retiree wrote this email to a DHS attorney. Within five hours, DHS demanded Google turn over records for his account. A Kafkaesque form of domestic surveillance, intimidating Americans for lawful speech. New from us at the Post: www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio... @johnwoodrowcox.bsky.social

"Every American should be worried about that, because if they can lie about this, what else could they lie about? And if it's your family member who gets killed, what recourse do you have?" www.npr.org/2026/01/31/n...

Jeffrey Epstein asks Elon Musk if Solar City can electrify his island or ranch. www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

Kalshi and the prediction market industry are thriving now, but their future is uncertain — the company is locked in 19 federal lawsuits over its status in the U.S., where they argue state laws don’t apply to them and that betting on sports is not a “game” www.npr.org/2026/01/30/n...

Please listen to this story from my @npr.org colleague Adrian Florido about a fruit seller named Jesus

"Although the list of prohibited [Super Bowl ad] categories is not public, it’s known to include tobacco, pornography, firearms" and now prediction markets frontofficesports.com/nfl-wont-all...

A source close to TikTok tells me that the local Oracle data center outage would've bounced to Singapore, which was a "failover backup," under old TikTok setup. The thing that made everything go haywire was losing that Singapore backup under the only-in-the-US new structure.

The Trump admin has quietly gutted nuclear safety regs amid a big reactor push that could expose workers to more radiation before an investigation is triggered, slash groundwater rules and scrap record keeping. @gbrumfiel.bsky.social has the goods www.npr.org/2026/01/28/n...

Twitter shareholders are taking Elon Musk to federal court next month in a big securities fraud trial and hooo boy jury selection should be interesting. Here’s a sampling of some proposed voir dire questions:

"Bitcoin is down...the crash sapped energy and attention from the crypto scene. Prediction markets, by contrast, are pulling in the same speculative crowd, offering a sharper hit: binary odds, real-world stakes, fast resolution." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

TikTok tells me they have no rules against using “Epstein” in DMs & that they’re “investigating why some users are experiencing issues.” It does appear anecdotally and from what TikTok can tell to be happening inconsistently. Some can’t send it in DMs, some can. Strange indeed.

SCOOP: Palantir Defends Work With ICE to Staff Following Killing of Alex Pretti WIRED obtained Slack conversations + an updated internal Palantir wiki defending the company's work for ICE to outraged workers. More here: www.wired.com/story/palant...

i often hear “Bezos just doesn’t care” as an explanation of his looming evisceration of the paper, but is that really the leading theory here? he’s approving this out of apathy? a man worth $249B who oversees a global business empire is giving a 🤷🏼‍♂️ to this being an unforgettable part of his legacy?

good to be vigilant about content moderation / algo changes with new TikTok ownership, but also good to hold creators to a burden of proof when they say they’ve been newly “censored,” which creators claim for all sorts of reasons all the time, often with no evidence.

A 911 call WaPo obtained through a public records request reveals that when detention center staff reported the death of Lunas Campos in El Paso, employees told the operator it was a suicide, when the medical examiner concluded someone else killed him. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

China is outlawed from having an "operational relationship" w TikTok, but the finalized deal keeps ByteDance a minority investor & lets them own the algorithm. Far from a clean break from China. What it DOES do is hand Larry Ellison's Oracle, the Emiratis and Silver Lake enormous sway over the app.

Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on a Reddit AMA a year ago, before it had partnerships with CNN and CNBC in which Kalshi markets are read on live television alongside real polls: "Artificially inflating the odds of your preferred candidate doesn’t help them win the election"

Polymarket's CEO has called it a "global truth machine," but its X strategy is anything but. It pushes bogus stuff, like the Bezos example below, mixed with real news, and warped nuggets of news. It's shitposting for its audience, which juices engagement leading to, they hope, more brand awareness.

"Nearly half of all American men aged 18 to 49 maintain an online sports-betting account...Emerging research suggests that the spread of sports gambling portends a huge increase in gambling addiction, which has the highest rate of suicide of any addictive behavior." harpers.org/archive/2026...

well this could get interesting

it’s times like these when i really miss old twitter, a single site where everyone can post their Davos selfies and i could not open the app for five days

Prediction market apps are thriving in Trump's second term, with traders betting on migrant deportations to election outcomes. A community of young, mostly male and very online traders are driving the industry's bonanza. n.pr/4b3JdYb

i talked to die-hard traders on Kalshi and Polymarket and spent some time in prediction market spaces on Discord and Reddit to try to understand how this techno-financial wild west is utterly flourishing right now www.npr.org/2026/01/17/n...

one of the funnier federal court docket updates i’ve gotten recently

An AI search engine that claims its value-add is having a real human follow up with you is bilking hundreds of thousands of consumers with dark pattern trickery that locks people into reoccurring monthly fees, the FTC alleged today www.npr.org/2026/01/13/n...

NEW: Here is the alleged video from Jonathan Ross's cell phone synched with the main eyewitness video we've all seen. As you can see it synchs perfectly. I don't think any internal cuts were made. I have left audio for both videos in this synch so that you can hear them aligned.

I reached out to more than three dozen X advertisers, xAI investors, politicians, and government agencies about the growing library of sexualized deepfakes generated with Grok—now including Renee Good. I only heard back from four, with three declining to comment. spitfirenews.com/p/grok-deepf...

it’s utterly grim that i got this push alert from gen ai

The image of the blood-soaked airbag next to the glove compartment overflowing with stuffed animals is going to stick with me for a very long time.