Highly recommend listening to this podcast conversation. @milleridriss.bsky.social discusses her new book - “Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism" - with fellow expert @tomjoscelyn.bsky.social. An important discussion about a profound societal problem we can all help address.

Climate Week kicks off today in NYC. To get a head start, I hosted a live podcast with The Maybe’s Alix Dunn, the Data & Society Climate, Technology, and Justice Program’s Tamara Kneese, and the Enabled Emissions Campaign’s Holly Alpine on the subject of “Setting a Tech Agenda for Climate Week.”

"In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration..."

“We have uniformed military asking their chain of command for letters that ensure that they don’t have personal liability for any illegal action in these operations." Senator Slotkin to Politico www.politico.com/newsletters/...

Smart glasses could become the next tool for live-streamed extremist violence, writes Jordyn Abrams. But do they present novel policy challenges, and have tech firms considered how to curb their misuse before extremists turn them into tools for radicalization machines?

Here's what will happen if Trump's $100k fee on H-1Bs stands: America's top tech companies will accelerate the expansion of their overseas offices, which are already huge. Net effect for the world: "Brain Gain" (gift link) www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

OpenAI won't say whose content its video tool was trained on. So @nitasha.bsky.social & @kevinschaul.bsky.social did a deep dive and turned up some telling clues... www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...

A growing number of children face online harms ranging from blackmail with intimate videos to AI-generated sexual images. Yet a law proposed in Colombia to help protect the mental health of minors was blocked after lobbying by major tech companies, according to a team of Latin American journalists.

"If the EU ends up legislating [about encryption] on a technically incorrect basis, we could be left with a law that neither protects children nor citizens' right to privacy – but instead makes everyone more vulnerable" @moltke.bsky.social writes. www.dr.dk/nyheder/vide...

Protests cause Prince George’s leaders to hit ‘pause’ on data centers wamu.org/story/25/09/...

While the EU debates tech sovereignty, the UK is rolling out the red carpet for Trump and US tech giants—making deals and importing infrastructure that serves America’s AI ambitions. Tech Policy Press fellow Megan Kirkwood asks, what does it portend for Britain’s future?

The consolidation of sensitive federal datasets under DOGE has transformed the privacy threat landscape, writes Ben Neumeyer. Given these risks, platforms who want to share data responsibly should re-evaluate their approach in response to this new environment www.techpolicy.press/tech-compani...

At Noon EDT, looking forward to hosting this live recording for the Tech Policy Press podcast. We'll talk data centers/AI infrastructure and the broader resource demands of the technology industry, and why setting a tech agenda for climate is so important: luma.com/ldvku6rk

The vice president is laughing over a critic of the president getting replaced by a government official. How would we cover it if it happened somewhere else?

While the EU debates tech sovereignty, the UK is rolling out the red carpet for Trump and US tech giants—making deals and importing infrastructure that serves America’s AI ambitions. Tech Policy Press fellow Megan Kirkwood asks, what does it portend for Britain’s future?

In Brazil, Big Tech firms maintain a robust lobbying apparatus that successfully fends off civil society groups and the federal government to protect their interests in Congress, write Sergio Spagnuolo, Juliana Dal Piva, Sofia Costa, and Alexandre Orrico. Data pulled from LinkedIn shows the scale:

"So far this year, business spending on software and data centers — mainly for AI — has been a bigger contributor to the economy than consumption. That is stunning." www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

We cooperated with RTE PrimeTime over the last year on this very significant story about RTB data exposing the movements of Irish people, including military and political personnel. Link to this morning's preview piece is here --> www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

Today's decision being heavily criticized by Past Brendan Carr

In Brazil, Big Tech firms maintain a robust lobbying apparatus that successfully fends off civil society groups and the federal government to protect their interests in Congress, write Sergio Spagnuolo, Juliana Dal Piva, Sofia Costa, and Alexandre Orrico. Data pulled from LinkedIn shows the scale:

Rep Comer hauling in tech CEOs to talk about content moderation and radicalization 💀 Welcome to the “moderation isn’t censorship” club, nuance is good actually. oversight.house.gov/release/chai...

The suspect who killed Charlie Kirk said his rifle-cartridge messages were all "a big meme," according to messages just released in court. "if I see 'notices bulge uwu' on fox new I might have a stroke," he said. So, yeah, it was all a shitpost. More here on the meanings: bsky.app/profile/drew...

"TikTok’s U.S. business would be controlled by an investor consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz under a framework the U.S. and China are finalizing as talks shift into high gear, according to people familiar with the matter."

A new wrongful death lawsuit alleges that Character AI and Google are liable for the death by suicide of a 13-year-old girl in Colorado, Juliana Peralta This is the third wrongful death claim against a popular AI app for a teen's death by suicide this year www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

I'm hosting a live recording of the Tech Policy Press podcast this Thursday, September 18 to discuss setting a ‘Tech Agenda’ for Climate Week. I'll be joined by Alix Dunn from The Maybe, Tamara Kneese from Data & Society, and Holly Alpine from the Enabled Emissions Campaign. Join us!

Lauren and I discussed how platform content moderation policies and practices held up in the aftermath of the assassination, and the problematic role of AI-generated information propagated on social media.

"Unlike previous surveillance methods, new digital tools allow law enforcement agencies to conduct surveillance persistently, universally, at an unimaginable scale. They can do so with no special permission, no oversight and no advance planning."

Spoke w/ @justinhendrix.bsky.social about how fast the Kirk video spread in a post-content moderation world—how platforms are failing to either provide content warnings or define glorified violence, & what the arguments are for allowing violent content to be seen www.techpolicy.press/assessing-te...

"Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday that the United States and China had agreed on the commercial terms for a deal on the future of TikTok."

New podcast! I spoke to Vivek Bharathan, a member of the No Desert Data Center Coalition in Tucson, Arizona, and Steven Renderos, executive director of MediaJustice, an advocacy organization that just released a report titled “The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South."

Elon Musk has shared an obviously AI-generated image of the Unite the Kingdom rally in London. The first AI error is that the Arc de Triomphe is in Paris, not London. And once you zoom in, you'll notice that the Union Jacks and the crowd have other errors typical of AI images.

This is unhinged, dangerous, and reckless. At this point I don't know how you conclude anything other than that Musk is trying to foment pogroms against immigrants across the west.

I mean Jesus. This is full-on Nazi shit. Not coded. Not subtle. bsky.app/profile/pale...

From Brazil to Chile, El Salvador, Mexico and Paraguay, the data center industry is pushing ahead while using its heft to pursue a wish list of deregulation and tax cuts. But promises of prosperity often meet harsh realities on the ground.

Founded in 2019, the Data Center Coalition is an industry association that is growing alongside the boom in data center construction, advocating for the industry’s interests across the US at multiple levels of government. But those who seek to counter industry messages are organizing, too.

After a sweeping social media ban, Nepal saw its bloodiest unrest in decades. What has happened in Nepal is a warning to other democracies to tread carefully with efforts to contain online expression, writes Samik Kharel.

"The incident involving Shahrour is the latest to become public in a long-running conflict between Silicon Valley tech giants, including Microsoft and Google, and small groups of employees protesting corporate ties to Israel’s government and military." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Wrote about the week. How the shooter's ID didn't appear to matter to ppl. How the discourse takes place in very same spaces that incubate/perpetuate hate & violence. How shooters now know that their acts will be flattened, analyzed, argued over & amplified. How all of this feels so dark & poisonous

"Google organized business owners against California legislation to force its Chrome web browser to safeguard personal data." @khari.bsky.social on @calmatters.org:

More coverage of the points that @r-jy.bsky.social raised in our article for @techpolicypress.bsky.social on the myth of tech sovereignty (www.techpolicy.press/sovereignty-...)

New from me: the downsides of data centers are already being reckoned with by lawmakers across the US, even as competition for the biggest tax breaks continues apace.

From Brazil to Chile, El Salvador, Mexico and Paraguay, the data center industry is pushing ahead while using its heft to pursue a wish list of deregulation and tax cuts. But promises of prosperity often meet harsh realities on the ground.

Founded in 2019, the Data Center Coalition is an industry association that is growing alongside the boom in data center construction, advocating for the industry’s interests across the US at multiple levels of government. But those who seek to counter industry messages are organizing, too.

my latest for @techpolicypress.bsky.social on the US v. Google search antitrust case and just how badly the court missed the opportunity to contend with Google’s power in the genAI market. genAI won’t magically unseat Google’s market dominance, as the court suggests, it will only deepen it

Similar experience. Heard about 1st plane on the radio (WNYC) at my desk in midtown, then saw 2nd plane hit live on TV. I remember tryng to donate blood and finding a line hundreds long, then making it home to Brooklyn under a shower of ash and singed spreadsheets falling from the sky.

This seems like a great organization for our ineffective altruism movement (ineffective-altruism.org) to collaborate with.

🧵 The summer of 2025 has been AI's "cruel summer"—wrongful deaths, dangerous therapy chatbots, medical misinformation, facial recognition failures. These aren't isolated glitches but predictable harms from systems deployed without adequate oversight. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Can you imagine if we had instead invested those funds in climate, health care, and education instead of lining the pockets of the military industrial complex?

The Google search antitrust remedies trial decision fails to seriously contend with the tremendous advantages the company holds in the generative AI market due to its search monopoly, says Kate Brennan, associate director at the AI Now Institute (@ainowinstitute.bsky.social):