NEW: 404 Media is suing ICE. We have filed a lawsuit demanding the agency release its $2 million contract with Paragon, a company that makes powerful spyware to break into phones and read messages from encrypted chat apps www.404media.co/were-suing-i...

How MAGA Killed Foreign Influence Research, But Now Demands Social Media Stop Foreign Influence Campaigns It's fascinating how quickly the tune changes when the shoe's on the other foot. For years, we've been treated to endless screaming about how any effort to identify and counter foreign…

hey so this is insane

I'll say it: against all expectations, the media are covering the Trump censorship story right. They're not pretending it's about Kirk, they're covering Trump as a broad threat to free press and speech, and they're speaking broadly about the stakes. It can be done!

An unprecedented assault on freedom of speech and American democracy. What you choose to do tomorrow is what you will have done when autocracy came to America. Do something that will make you proud.

Btw very important to say that the FCC has not at all said what Kimmel said that was so objectionable! This is classic chilling effect - there are no rules so everyone stops talking www.theverge.com/news/780471/...

Right out of the modern authoritarian playbook www.unpopularfront.news/p/this-is-it

This is jawboning. This is what the Freedom Caucus fascists of the Weaponization Committee and their Substack lackeys pretended was happening under some “Biden regime,” but it wasn’t. It was always projection.

We cannot make the headlines blunter people www.theverge.com/policy/77979...

Report: You To Be Fired For Reading This Headline About Charlie Kirk

at the center of the efforts to destroy civil society in russia, hungary, georgia and elsewhere is the stigmatization, harassment, & criminalization of NGOs. that's what this is about, a full-on assault on democratic debate & freedoms. this is not hyperbole. it's right here.

Once again, I ask, sincerely & without trying to be overly alarmist, what anyone has seen since January to make them truly believe that the 2026/28 elections are going to be free, fair, & democratic by any meaningful definition of the words: bsky.app/profile/mcop...

Washington Post’s commitment to personal liberties does not extend to employing people who criticize gun violence or accurately quote, without comment, Charlie Kirk’s words

The Trump administration knew that they could fire thousands of people, and by the time courts got around to issuing a ruling, it would be too late for any meaningful action to be taken. That's precisely what has happened. Now they'll keep doing it, because it works.

Violence is abhorrent in all forms - and political violence is further the antithesis of democracy. We must be unified in its condemnation, or else find ourselves all less safe and less safe.

I'm horrified to hear that Charlie Kirk was shot at an event in Utah. Democratic societies will always have political disagreements, but we must never allow America to become a country that confronts those disagreements with violence. Mark and I are praying for Charlie's recovery.

USTA to Broadcasters: DO NOT show Trump getting booed. Streisand effect:

"In a landmark settlement, Anthropic, a leading artificial intelligence company, has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors and publishers after a judge ruled it had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books."

📢2026 Fellowship applications are OPEN!📢 If you are someone looking to inform technology policy through rigorous original reporting or policy analyses, we want to hear from you! Apply here: airtable.com/appIrc1F9M5d...

Here is the public procurement record showing that ICE is to regain access to its $2 million purchase of Paragon spyware. Paragon sells powerful mobile phone spyware to governments. Biden admin stopped ICE at time; now lifted (jackpoulson.substack.com/p/exclusive-...)

Someone please kill me right now.

This @beijingpalmer.bsky.social post reminded me I have been meaning to update @pewresearch.org's estimate of total newspaper newsroom jobs - which was 30,820 as of 2020 Using BLS OEWS data (w/ same methodology as Pew) the 2024 number is 29,260 - down another 5% www.pewresearch.org/chart/sotnm-...

🧵 Authoritarianism, Democratization, and Coalition Politics. The consensus around here is, more or less, that the United States is currently a consolidating authoritarian regime controlled by a mix of reactionary populists and fascists.

Yellen not at all pulling her punches in this op-ed for the FT www.ft.com/content/d2ea...

New, from me: America is no longer a functioning democracy. It is a competitive authoritarian system, hurtling rapidly toward authoritarianism. This was a hard piece to write but we can't move forward if we don’t acknowledge where we are. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-author...

i find this image so fascinating. it is both a literal example of authoritarianism but also a second-hand reproduction of the aesthetics of other authoritarian states. it's like a simulacra of authoritarianism whose purpose is to attempt to make the simulacra real.

Here's what the third day of elementary school looked like in Mount Pleasant, Washington DC.

Less than 2% of the world gets any news from BlueSky, per @reutersinstitute.bsky.social, far lower than the big six. I'm not saying we all need to go fight on X specifically, but we cannot just stay here, either.

Dear journalists: The President has not fired Lisa Cook. The President is *trying* to illegally fire her. Your words shape people’s reality. Please be accurate in your reporting.

Pritzker: To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story.

Republican support for ignoring opposing court orders has roughly doubled, and with as many as 25-30% of MAGA republicans supporting non-compliance, according to @prl.bsky.social prlpublic.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/reports/Cour...

More evidence of strong asymmetry in partisan news diets. 18% of Republicans exclusively consume right-wing media, while only 1% of Democrats regularly consume only left-leaning media, per U. Wisconsin Center for Comms and Civic Renewal cccr.wisc.edu/wp-content/u...

Republican support for ignoring opposing court orders has roughly doubled, and with as many as 25-30% of MAGA republicans supporting non-compliance, according to @prl.bsky.social prlpublic.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/reports/Cour...

First they came for the immigrants, and I did not speak out (because the message test performed at a low percentile rank compared to other messages in our testing bank for non college men who opt into online surveys through various consumer reward programs)

If you believe that keeping your head down and being quiet will spare you from this fate, you are mistaken. This will be all of us.

Props to @wired.com for writing this. Also, third-party AI-detection tools are worthless www.wired.com/story/how-wi...

Some incredibly good news: One year ago this week, The Onion returned to print. In that one year, we’ve grown to the 13th largest print newspaper in the United States, just ahead of the Boston Globe, and growing fast. In short, it’s working. So… thank you. Thank you for helping save this thing.

The fact that the thing we're calling artificial intelligence *can't do math* and yet we're jamming it into programs that successfully *have done math* for decades, then warning people against using the AI to do math, seems like an excellent summary of where we are.

Like something out of the civil rights movement or worse. Utterly unacceptable in a democracy.

Drug Enforcement Administration officers patrolling the National Mall. If you know DC you understand how tremendously goofy this is (h/t @lorenzohall1.bsky.social)

Fuck it. I’m releasing these. The police seized all of my lasers during this operation. I have a court date in my future. #FreeLordLaser #FreeLadyLaser I will tell the whole story later. But it was all worth it to release these images on this day. “Good men must not obey the law too well.”

Confession time: I've been working on a secret side project at Vox Media for the past 18 months and it launched yesterday

Elizabeth Spiers with the crystal ball, from three months ago...

Holy shit, they did it. They wrote the headline.

Faculty who wrote to defend their president and object to a DOJ investigation of their university...are now being investigated by the DOJ. The most banal defense of free speech and academic freedom will trigger the full wrath of the US government now. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal — and we as a nation are directly implicated in the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. In response, the United States must stop all military assistance to Israel. There's no moral clarity in wreaking vengeance on innocent people.

Really interesting working paper showing that running simple penalized logistic regression on LLM word embeddings can outperform bigger LLMs using only output text. This intuitively makes some sense to me, plus it's more stable and cheaper! Intriguing. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....