All true. He was so very inspiring and prescient. If you’ve ever asked me why I believe that people with power may choose to sacrifice it to end violence - I learned that from Conor in 2008 when he showed us all how. It was such a privilege to be his student- I’m still trying to earn it.

Every time you ask ChatGPT to proofread your email you quietly borrow from the labour of millions. In this sense, cultural production has already become a planetary co-operative. Updating its funding mechanism accordingly is necessary: it is time to socialise AI’s inputs. @faustogernone.bsky.social

The entire point of Elon's takeover of Twitter, @mcmegan.bsky.social, was to tilt the playing field, which he has done. The whole point of @bsky.app was not to create an alternative space, but an *alternative system* underpinning it so that a future Elon couldn't do that again.

Court clash between Meta and NSO ends in $168m defeat for spyware firm

My Stanford Journal of International Law article, the Silicon Valley Effect, argues that Silicon Valley operates like a fourth digital empire, shaping the transnational legal order to protect its business interests. law.stanford.edu/publications...

Thank you to everyone who joined us for our annual Freedom of Expression Scholars Conference! We’re grateful to the incredible scholars, discussants, and attendees who made this past weekend such a valuable exchange of ideas on speech, technology, and democracy. #FESC2025

A transnational approach for a transnational company. I’ll be following this case with interest.

No great surprise but it seems officially that the AI Liability Directive is now about as lively as Mr Praline's Norwegian Blue.

I couldn’t agree more. You wouldn’t believe the amount of pushback this framing got just a year ago carnegieendowment.org/research/202...

Such a treat to visit Tulane Law and discuss the Silicon Valley Effect with Matheusz Grochowski’s class. Until next time, NOLA.

Classic academic life. You wake at an ungodly hour because there’s so much to do, you can’t sleep. By the end of the day, you’re walking down a street in New Orleans listening to busker perform a gorgeous electro swingy cover of Nina Simone.

French publishers, authors and composers are taking Meta (formerly Facebook) to court in Paris for allegedly using copyrighted work without permission from creators or their publishers in order to develop its generative artificial intelligence (AI) model. 👇 #BookSky

ISP Executive Director @chinmayiarun.bsky.social published a must-read book review in @lawfare.bsky.social : ‘Data Colonialism’ and the Political Economy of Big Tech: www.lawfaremedia.org/article/data...

many thanks to @chinmayiarun.bsky.social for her very thoughtful engagement with @ulises-mejias.bsky.social and my recent book #DataGrab. The review just came out in LawFare: www.lawfaremedia.org/article/data...

This week at @yaleisp.bsky.social

While the U.S. law banning ByteDance's TikTok is on hold (forever?), America's top downloaded iPhone apps include: #4 Temu, owned by a Chinese company 8. TikTok 9. Gauth, the AI homework aide by ByteDance 10. Shein (China origin) 12. Lemon8 by ByteDance 13. CapCut by ByteDance (SensorTower data)

My review of Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry’s book “Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back” for @lawfare.bsky.social www.lawfaremedia.org/article/data...

Looking forward to my short trip to DC next Friday for the Georgetown Journal of International Law symposium where I’ll discuss the Silicon Valley Effect and the global south. Imagine if the cherry trees decide spring is here 🤞🏾

Are you going to #SXSW? Don't miss my panel on Saturday morning! schedule.sxsw.com/2025/events/...

I was going to say that DeepSeek making $200 million/year on >500% profit margins is almost as big a deal as its model performance to training cost improvement. Then I saw that's "theoretical." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

At the Institute for Ethics in AI, we’re looking to hire a postdoc fellow in law working on AI ​law/regulation together with the fabulous Oriel College, starting ​this fall (2-3 ys). Oxford will announce the details in the coming weeks but please share with people who might be interested

Gathering the influencers is a TikTok strategy that Meta is adopting (based on research for my most recent paper)

The Silicon Valley Effect. Admittedly even I didn’t imagine it would go this far this soon, but if this reordering of tech regulation doesn’t convince states that they can’t regulate transnational companies as if they’re domestic, nothing will. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.....

Paywalled but this is a story I want to read.

At last year’s PLSC I got a preview of this this works as respondent to a version of this paper dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml... Can’t wait to see how this turns out.

I don’t know if this new chatbot is better than the others but it’s got the best name.

And we discussed this in the AI and the law seminar yesterday. Enjoying how the speaker series enriches the class.

Our Executive Director @chinmayiarun.bsky.social Arun writes about The Silicon Valley Effect (forthcoming in the Stanford Journal of International Law) papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

My new article- the Silicon Valley Effect argues that Silicon Valley operates like a fourth digital empire, shaping the transnational legal order to protect its business interests. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... (I’ll share a thread highlighting arguments later)

The important part of the EO

Guess who has to rewrite her essay about TikTok.

Oral arguments in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton just started. I'm listening here. www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1Jf... Debriefing with @brianfung.me and @htsuka.bsky.social here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wEf... Live-posting about it here on this thread 🧵

That’s a vivid picture for those who think divestment will leave TikTok largely unchanged.

Bluesky has been found to have the res juice-icata

T-15 minutes to oral argument! I'll be covering it in this thread. And @lawfare.bsky.social will be doing a post-argument live event at 3 PM ET. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/lawf...

No one knows more about Meta’s content rules and their history than Dave. If you read nothing else about the changes, read this.

Dave wrote Facebook’s first content moderation rules and is the least hysterical person I know. If he says Meta’s changes are politically designed to accommodate Trump, believe him. 👇🏻

The real issue is not the sexually explicit ads themselves — though many do seem quite shady — but that Meta is apparently failing to enforce its own policies and live up to its claims under the DSA, says ex-Facebook official @yaeleisenstat.bsky.social. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Does anyone know how much the Oversight Board spends per year? www.oversightboard.com/news/1111826...

Very helpful thread by @klonick.bsky.social about the changes Meta is making to its hate speech rules. As someone who witnessed the time and effort journalists and civil society put into these rules, I’m wondering what we can learn from these displays of corporate caprice.

Fact-checking wasn’t “biased” against conservatives. Conservatives just shared more false content. If there’s a sportsball game and one team fouls four times as much, it’s not “biased” for the ref to call four times as many fouls against that team.

Genuinely baffled by the unempirical assertion that Community Notes “works.” Does it? How do Meta know? The best available research is pretty mixed on this point. And as they go all-in on an unproven concept, will Meta commit to publicly releasing data so people can actually study this?

The LPE Program at Harvard Law School is hiring an Executive Director! Highlights: - Scholarly and organizational role - Open to JD and/or PhD graduates - Work with superb faculty and students - Preferred start in July 2025 - Rolling application Full details at: lpe.law.harvard.edu/executive-di...

Excited to continue the conversation on AI governance at the Sociotechnical AI Governance workshop at #chi2025! Come discuss research and practice spanning purely social to purely technical (+ everything in between) approaches to making AI beneficial for and representative of society. ➡️

Caltech UC Riverside study finds that tech companies report ai carbon consumption but diesel and other particulates data centers generate go unreported. Public health costs from cancers, asthma, other diseases, and missed work and school days approach ~$20 bil a year. news.ucr.edu/articles/202...

As expected, SCOTUS grants the request for TikTok and the TikTok creators to split argument time on Jan. 10, meaning Noel Francisco will get 30 minutes for TikTok, Jeffrey Fisher will get 30 minutes for the creators, and Elizabeth Prelogar will get an hour for the government.

I am on a university panel tasked with providing recommendations for faculty about using AI/LLMs. I insisted that students have the option to opt out of any assignment that requires their use and listed eight reasons (with research links) not to use chatbots. Happy to send the list!

I know academics who use AI regularly, for work and play, and I'd really like them, and universities, to tell me how they contend with AI's bottomless appetites for power and water. Is asking ChatGPT to interpret a Xmas song or making it write your syllabus worth this to you?

Italy's DPA fines Chat GPT $15.5 million because of its use of personal data to train its AI model www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ital...