I've repeatedly run into a 4 y.o. tripod husky named Chicken Nuggy at Contra Costa Animal Services. While he's not at risk of euthanasia, I consider the Nug's ongoing availability to be a market failure. Can attest that in person he is the party that his photo indicates. Someone get on this.

I would pay good money never to hear the phrase "maxxing" ever again.

This one was a great read. Nice, @alexsammon.bsky.social

Been getting advertisements for Temu novelty t-shirts a lot, and the concept of a slop-based wardrobe might be growing on me.

Tough. Fair.

Look, when I confidentially file for an IPO none of you are going to know about it. These guys just have no chill.

Maria is wildly talented and I’ve known her since American Banker days. Just an awesome reporter with technical depth and a penchant for simplifying and humanizing complex topics. This sucks, I hate this industry and everyone should hire her.

Some wild details from @courtneyrozen.bsky.social about how social media companies paid child-focused orgs to recommend kids engage with their products. Google sponsored the Girl Scouts "Be Internet Awesome Fun Patch" and a special edition of Highlights Magazine. www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

On X, I'm seeing two dominant strains of Grok interaction. 1. Lazy fact-checking, e.g. "Gork, is this true?" 2. Unconditional positive reinforcement, such as the below:

It's rarely good when "holocaust" is trending on Twitter.

Yes!!!!! @jkbjournalist.bsky.social

We got a Pulitzer! Along with thanking my editors here - Steve Stecklow, Mike Williams and Paulo Prada -- I need to thank Jason Dean, my former WSJ bureau chief who oversaw and occasionally fought for my Meta work. Congratulations to @theinformation.com for hiring him!

Academics find that 3% of Polymarket accounts are driving price discovery, suggesting the platform offers a way for a small minority of informed players to cash in on previously unmonetizable information advantages. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Does Polymarket offer bets on how many people get arrested for illegal behavior related to Polymarket bets?

Over on X, virtually every prominent financial account has accrued multiple copycats that steal their name and avatar and then reply to all their posts with an invitation to "come check out my strategy" and a link to a scam. It's a stable ecosystem, just one that's real heavy on the parasites.

NEW: we @consumerfed.bsky.social are suing Meta in DC for knowingly facilitating massive scam losses through ads and misleading consumers about what they're doing to stop it www.wired.com/story/meta-i... thanks to @tyckozavareei.bsky.social @techjusticelaw.bsky.social for repping us.

Meta will begin keystroke logging US employees at work -- complete with mouse movements and periodic screenshots -- to train better AI agents. This comes after Boz posted about a future in which AI will "primarily do the work" at meta. It's a new era for tech labor. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Nobody's recently asked, but in case anybody's interested I also will agree to buy $100 billion of your future services if you give me $5 billion upfront

The size of Meta's future layoff waves will depend on the speed of improvements in AI tooling and capacity. It sets up a wild workplace dynamic. www.reuters.com/world/meta-t...

i love when content is on platforms

On X, community notes being used to flag X for running allegedly illegal undisclosed ads for Nvidia.

Chinese government decides to regulate AI from the right to personal likeness, child safety and addiction angles. www.reuters.com/world/china/...

Okay so here’s my actual Bluesky-is-dying hypothesis: The entire web is dying. Users aren’t going from BlueSky to another site (x/insta/threada/tiktok). Users are going to chatbots. I know traffic to news sites has cratered (like 90%). My hunch is traffic to all the social platforms is down too.

The compromise @caseynewton.bsky.social is proposing would be a big deal in the tech policy world. The feud between Section 230 absolutists and those seeking to rein in social media companies is a big reason why regulation always withers on the vine.

Elon Musk's lawyers have asked the court to suppress talk of "inflammatory and highly irrelevant topics" like Donald Trump and Rhino Ketamine storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

I'm VERY aware that leaks have consequences, but it's intereesting to see a CDT staffer saying that public scrutiny of internal company documents ultimately harms social media well being work. Sorta feels like many brand-name tech critic orgs are either quiet or resentful of the meta verdicts.

There's an unfortunate tendency to combine speech concerns about negligent platform design lawsuits with a claim that platform design can't be blamed for bad user outcomes. Platforms run A/B tests showing the effects of discrete features and then weigh safety vs growth tradeoffs. That's settled.

Also, beyond the money in the New Mexico case, there will be a bench trial in May to adjudicate NM's claim that Meta needs to change its product to comply with state law.

I should clarify that there were two separate findings of liability involving 37,500 violations. So that's ~$375 million in a state that contains 0.62% of the US population. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

For anyone losing track: the New Mexico Case was running parallel to the LA bellwether social media teen mental health case. Jury finding for the state across the board is, however, a big moment for the crowd arguing that product liability offers a way around Section 230.

New Mexico took a different tack from the other states going after broader youth well being stuff. (It is not part of the massive multi-state case). There is overlap, though, and I don't think there's anything stopping similar cases from being brought by AGs.

Verdict is in for the New Mexico child safety case against Meta. Goes against Meta on every question. Jury finds Meta liable for ~37,000 violations. Maximum liability of $5,000 per violation.

I monitor stuff on Twitter still, and I'm always floored how often the first reply to a post is "@grok, is this true." Just existentially sad.

It's not my lane, but this is a pretty good primer on how the Iran war is likely to spike famine. Poorer countries are the marginal users for fertilizer, and unlike in 2022 there's no USAID to help diffuse the resulting mess. carnegieendowment.org/emissary/202...

Don’t know why reporting on things like this always come together on a Friday, but… Meta is planning large scale job cuts against the backdrop of AI spending / capacity. Exclusive: Meta planning sweeping layoffs as AI costs mount - www.reuters.com/business/wor...

Great story from Bloomberg. I also cannot imagine a better formula for the mass-creation of incels than saddling teenagers with crypto gambling debts. www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

I would have expected that creating a high energy laser capable of shooting things out of the sky would have been harder than the “not shooting down balloons / your own drones” bit.

"We are about to do a bad thing as a company. This is so irresponsible." -- Meta content policy chief Monika Bickert in 2019 on the company's adoption of end-to-end encryption on all messages, per a filing in the New Mexico AG case. www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

Looking forward to explaining to my wife that her 401(k) took a hit today because somebody published a fictional June, 2028 macro analyst note "looking back" on how AI shredded the economy, led to the widespread adoption of crypto payments and caused us to default on our mortgage.

For those of you keeping score at home, the actual cut to the Post newsroom was 45%, not the widely reported one third. Remaining journalists are a bit over 400, down from around 1100 four years ago and 580 when Bezos bought the place.

Here's who the Washington Post just laid off.

Uber Eats asking if you need a loan to pay for this burrito? 😭

Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda with 1.4m followers reports TikTok ban https://aje.news/ljjuww

NEW: In January 2024, a man purchased Meta's newly AI-infused smart glasses. He went on to experience a devastating break with reality that played out across Meta platforms — with Meta AI as his companion, entertaining and affirming his worsening delusional beliefs. futurism.com/artificial-i...

I always think the goal of reporting is to produce work tied as closely as possible to primary sources. I don’t understand why so many folks in my line of work seem to prefer reporting on why official bodies say.

Trying to do some cooking today and the sheer proliferation of sham websites using AI-generated copy to come up with crappier versions of existing recipes is just crazy.

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