I've got some really talented colleauges at Reuters. www.reuters.com/graphics/ISR...

We got Meta’s “general global playbook” for defeating advertiser verification regulations, which the company knows would reduce scams. It includes making scam ads “not findable” for regulators searching Meta’s ad library through targeted scrubbing. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Sometimes I regret not going into maritime law. Everything about the below seems like a party.

Great story. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

It's been a long time since I covered straight finance, but to see analysts -- and Bloomberg -- questioning the reliability of US inflation and labor data like this is remarkable. Strange(r) times ahead, I guess. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

To grow its ad biz in China, Meta has relied on ad agency partners given the power to create special enforcement-protected ad accounts and share them with resellers. The system produces so much fraud that Meta internally calls China its top “scam exporting nation.” www.reuters.com/investigatio...

The frequency with which I see prominent ads for Instagram Teen Accounts makes me think that they're currently providing a non-negligible subsidy to to a lot of publications.

if you've been on the fence about joining the coolest club in indie tech media, now is the time

AI can be hilarious. Here's Google giving two contradictory answers to the exact same travel-related question. (Accidentally tested within 30 seconds by my wife and me on separate computers.)

The value provided by having the rough geographic location data of X users available to see is a reminder how this feature isn’t standard elsewhere. (Including here).

I’ve spent almost seven years covering Meta and have had a good deal of exposure to internal work product on teen well-being. But a Friday filing in the school district social media litigation breaks some ground on Meta’s causal findings regarding social media harm. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Whoever set up a functional gmail style inbox of Epstein's inbox deserves a journalism prize. jmail.world

AI porn generator and ERP chatbot Secret Desires left millions of images and videos exposed in unsecured cloud storage. I took a look and found folders called "faceswap," where people had uploaded tons of stolen content and random photos of women www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

For the first time ever, I had to make a payment in crypto. I can now confidently say that crypto payments combine the speed of a dial up modem and the ease of updating the drivers on a 1998 HP Laserjet printer.

Mark Zuckerberg vacation home upsets new neighbors, Maine edition: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/15/u...

I knew doing scam research would put me into the "dumbest guy alive" digital ad targeting category, but nonexistent Milwaukee Brand cyberpunk staplers? Holy hell I don't think I was ready for the ad-based internet to get even worse.

Wrote about this a few weeks ago, but have an update: X.com continues to stand up to the legal demands of British Columbia, which has demanded that the platform remove... non consensual intimate imagery in response to a court order. news.gov.bc.ca/releases/202...

Meant to post this from one of underlying documents: Meta earns $3.5B ever six months in "higher legal risk" revenue from scams, and that such amount is could be the cumulative "outside order of magnitude" for fines from regulators for accepting scam ads. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

This is terrible news, as is the original decision to fold Teen Vogue -- it consistently did some of the best culture reporting on social media of any outlet, period. Great respect to those who stood up on behalf of their newsrooms.

Meta earns $3.5 billion every six months from showing Faceboon and Instagram users 15 billion “higher legal risk” scam ad impressions a day, internal documents state. That haul vastly exceeds how much the company expects regulators To fine it for running scam ads. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

FACEBOOK MARKETPLACE AND MY FEET: A MYSTERY My wife wanted to sell a mirror, so I listed it on Facebook Marketplace this weekend. I neglected to wear shoes for the photo. I have since received seven offers: two for the mirror, and five for acts involving my feet. I'm now curious what's going on.

I'm skeptical that Twitter/X is going to heavily discount machine learning-based AI engagement farming in favor of generative AI-based curation, but you know why not? Give it a go. www.theverge.com/news/802480/...

I would gladly read a followup on this focused entirely on IRBs. I've been surprised by how often researchers say they could never got approval to run tests mimicking the sort of interventions that major platforms undertake on far larger populations as a matter of course on a daily basis.

This recent preprint on tech industry influence over external research is compelling. Beyond documenting the low rate of industry-funded researchers actually disclosing that fact, the paper points out that journals have routinely waived IRB review for industry work. arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

This new reporting from @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social is jaw-dropping and I think warrants a response from @cos.io given their ongoing collaboration with Meta. Jeff writes about how Meta identified content-specific harms as a key problem for teens on Instagram. 🧵 www.reuters.com/business/ins...

Four years ago, pre GenAI, someone showed me some stunning photos of ravens they'd taken. Among the most beautiful wildlife portraits I've seen. And they refused to put them even on a website because they didn't "want a tech company to steal them." I rolled my eyes. I think about that now and then.

Here is a reporter who deserves to be remembered. kyivindependent.com/ukrainian-jo...

Happy birthday to this trade publication, which I am fairly confident will outlive most of its news industry peers

This is really good. Actually testing the models remains underutilized as a reporting methodology. www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/01/1...

1. Great story by my former colleagues 2. I don't think copyright law works like that www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

In case anyone thought ICE shooting at journalists was just an LA thing. Or that they'd cut it out after repeated warnings from judges. Nope. More of the same in Chicago.

Going to have to chalk this up in the "Evidence for Simulation Theory" column, I think. deadline.com/2025/09/soci...

Instagram has long talked up its efforts to filter out eating-disorder-related content from young users' feeds and redirect teenagers who are binging on it. External testing, confirmed by documents reviewed by Reuters, suggests those classifiers don't work well.

It’d be great if people stopped engraving things on bullet casings (and also whatever the hell they do after carving things on the casings)

Practicing medicine? I’m going to guess they’re for practicing medicine now. And maybe clinical research.

If you accept $50,000 in a Cava takeout bag from some FBI agents who are posing as businessmen and then the investigation gets called off, does that just mean you’re just up $50k? This is not political commentary. I would like to know the answer to the hypothetical here.

One measure of the relative clout Trust and Safety staffers have is that, when you ask a chatbot to help you to commit a crime, sometimes they just say "sure!"

This feels like the early days of AI's use in scam compounds. Asking a bot to find one or two personalized hooks from someone's social media feed then make a run at getting them engaged before passing off the hot leads to humans seems real straightforward. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

Exclusive: Fed Governor Cook declared her Atlanta property as “vacation home,” documents show - www.reuters.com/world/us/fed...

internet culture desks aren't just for cute meme trend stories. ever since gamergate, understanding how and why info moves online is critical to seeing how we got *here*

This is an incredible, classic bit of journalism about fake murder for hire and man does it beat reading about… well, everything else on here today.

🎧 Listen to the podcast! @kashhill.bsky.social and @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social spoke with @mina-kim.bsky.social about how AI chatbots can manipulate – or be manipulated – to cause harm, and what we're learning about the psychological impact of AI companions. 🔗:

X is getting fined for disobeying a Canadian legal order to remove a woman's non-consensual intimate image from its platform. In filings, X argued that geofencing the image (which a specific account is repeatedly posting) is it's obligated to do. www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

I try not to believe in market timing, but the WSJ’s planning a full year’s worth of stories on the ongoing triumph of American capitalism is one of those things that makes me wonder if my portfolio should be more skewed toward global stocks / canned goods.

“I don’t do regrets” is the sort of thing you only say when you have fucked up a lot, isn’t it?

Zuckerberg saying Meta intends to spend at least 600 billion in the US Zuckerberg at the end caught on a hot mic

Never before the Anthropic settlement offering payouts of up to $3,000 per pirated work have I ever thought to myself, "Damn, I wish I'd self-published a ton of low-grade e-books."

I’ve written one book which should be included in the Anthropic settlement class. It took me two years. Given the potential $3,000 per-work payout, I am both happy for and extremely jealous of highly prolific romance and fantasy authors. Some of those folks have turned out hundreds.