Europe’s data center push could deepen inequality and strain already fragile energy systems. Tech Policy Press fellow William Burns asks why energy is devoted to data centers when it’s needed so desperately elsewhere.

"Is it in the room with us now?"

By resisting surveillance and extraction and pursuing goals such as affordability, dignity, and justice, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani can show how technology can truly serve the people, writes Rebecca Williams. The first step, she says, is to protect immigrants.

Facial recognition errors can have life-altering consequences. In @techpolicypress.bsky.social, CDT’s @jakelaperruque.bsky.social warns that ICE’s new approach — treating AI matches as definitive IDs — violates currently-understood DHS policy and endangers civil liberties.

Lots of very good ideas in here for @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social about what it might look like to have a tech policy agenda aligned with human rights principles.

By resisting surveillance and extraction and pursuing goals such as affordability, dignity, and justice, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani can show how technology can truly serve people, writes Rebecca Williams. The first step, she says, is to protect immigrants. buff.ly/Mwk8vRu

"As the home of those long-trusted movie ratings, we at the Motion Picture Association immediately refuted that announcement — and are demanding that Meta stop citing our trademarked 'PG-13' as the basis of its '13+' setting or claiming that its own content restrictions 'align' with movie ratings."

Online platforms shape what we know, how we connect & who gets heard. In partnership with Knight Georgetown Institute, we are launching a new series, Seeing the Digital Sphere: The Case for Public Platform Data. The series starts today, with an essay from KGI’s Leticia Bode and Peter Chapman.

There are many ways individuals and organizations can resist oppression, including technologists and tech policy advocates, who must use their skills to identify and interrupt the use of technology in service of authoritarianism, writes Tech Policy Press fellow Dia Kayyali.

Incredible- Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day."

“It is outrageous that YouTube is furthering the Trump administration’s agenda to remove evidence of human rights violations and war crimes from public view,” said Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

"Society needs a deeper understanding and greater transparency of AI and social media recommendations. We currently lack insights that could be key to uncovering intended or unintended manipulation," writes @marietjeschaake.bsky.social:

"Trump has ramped up his use of artificial intelligence-generated content on his Truth Social channel since starting his second White House term, making his administration the first to deploy hyper-realistic fake visuals as a core communications strategy."

Grateful to @rebeccawilliams.info for staying up late to do this on election night- her proposed tech agenda for NYC Mayor-elect @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social:

“A bill that’s expected to pass early next year would change copyright law by imposing a ban on the sharing of deepfakes to protect citizens’ personal characteristics — such as their appearance or voice — from being imitated and shared online without their consent” apnews.com/article/denm...

Sat in a room last week with human rights defenders from Gaza and Sudan saying how to get, transmit and verifiably archive video of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide People are risking their lives to report on drones wiping out families as GenAI destroys the ability to believe them.

"Sarah Friar, the CFO of OpenAI, says the company wants a federal guarantee to make it easier to finance massive investments in AI chips for data centers. Friar spoke at WSJ’s Tech Live event in California." www.wsj.com/video/openai...

Oh hell yes. This is like in a movie when two giant, comically inept, and heavily armed bad guys face off.

Former FTC chair Lina Khan was just named to NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's transition team—just one sign that his new administration will take tech matters seriously, writes Rebecca Williams. She offers a tech agenda for the new mayor to advance his campaign goals:

Interview with former Google executive Richard Gingras by @antelava.bsky.social at the International Press Institute is worth your time. Many interesting segments.

"The Democratic sweep of gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey and public service commissioner races in Georgia offers an early glimpse of what could be a sleeper issue in the 2026 midterm elections: the politics of AI infrastructure."

Great piece from @awinston.bsky.social: "One area where Mamdani is guaranteed to clash with Tisch is on the NYPD’s massive technical surveillance apparatus and intelligence-gathering methods, which have metastasized since 9/11 to levels that rival the capabilities of a midsize country."

For @techpolicypress.bsky.social I laid out a tech agenda for Mayor-elect zohrankmamdani.bsky.social that resists surveillance and extraction while advancing his goals for affordability, dignity, and justice.

Could errors from an AI surveillance tool cause ICE to grab and detain you? The agency’s use of facial recognition — and alarming new details on its reckless procedures for doing so — make that sci-fi-sounding nightmare an all too real risk, writes CDT surveillance expert Jake Laperruque.

Grateful to @rebeccawilliams.info for staying up late to do this on election night- her proposed tech agenda for NYC Mayor-elect @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social:

One minor take-away from the NYC mayor's race for those concerned with AI/synthetic media and its effects on politics and elections might be that, in this particular instance, the guy who made a malicious deepfake lost and the guy who made authentic videos won.

By resisting surveillance and extraction and pursuing goals such as affordability, dignity, and justice, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani can show how technology can truly serve the people, writes Rebecca Williams. The first step, she says, is to protect immigrants.

A new paper analyzes the “production-consumption gap” on social media, where a small subset of users produce most of the content, and considers its implications for the study of phenomena such as political polarization, and for the design of policy interventions. Prithvi Iyer considers the results:

"Virtually all investigations have also ground to a halt, including three probes into Andreessen-backed companies, according to the records and the people familiar with the cases, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters."

"Deutsche Bank is exploring ways to hedge its exposure to data centres after extending billions of dollars in debt to the sector to keep up with demand for artificial intelligence and cloud computing."

"Repeated and systematic lethal attacks by the United States military on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific raise grave concerns about the commission of potential international crimes, UN experts warned today."

"But doubts about the AI trade have clearly been growing. And judging by the selloff in Palantir shares on Tuesday, the skeptics seem to be gaining more converts among investors."

NEW: The notorious 287(g) task force program has finally reached the Texas Department of Public Safety, raising fears of widespread racial profiling. In other words: Texas is deputizing some of its state officers to act as roving ICE agents. www.texasobserver.org/texas-dps-28...

"With significant funding from tech leaders, Rockbridge aims to equip MAGA to outlive Trump. The group has no website or public-facing entity, but it has assembled pollsters, data crunchers, online advertisers and even a documentary film arm."

"By noon, 1.19 million voters had already cast their ballots on Tuesday and during nine days of early voting, already matching total turnout for the last four mayoral elections, with still nine more hours left of voting."

What could possibly go wrong? OpenAI Wants Brands to Allow Their Mascots to Appear in Gen AI Videos www.wsj.com/articles/ope...

Erich Mische argues that the US national strategy to prevent suicide failed to address the risks posed by social media and AI. That's why he's come to regret signing it — and calling for a new plan. Read more: buff.ly/V1uub65

New: The FBI is quietly urging ICE agents to properly ID themselves in the field. In a bulletin to law enforcement last month, it warned of criminals posing as ICE to rob, rape, kidnap—a problem it says now demands national coordination to confront. By me & @carolinehaskins.bsky.social:

If you are someone who has the privilege to do this, DO IT. Incremental retreat from constitutional rights by the powerful endangers everyone else's rights in the long term.

According to Priorities USA post-election polling, "Between 2020 and 2024, people who consumed at least three hours of YouTube a day had moved 10 points toward Trump — a bigger swing than Black voters, Black men, young voters and a slew of other categories that were dominating headlines."

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia is one of many experiments designed to replace human-generated writing with LLMs. But Ryan McGrady argues that its defining feature is its use of technological power to re-exert top-down authority over information and knowledge. buff.ly/odvgs4q

"[Chicago mom] Andrea Soria... overheard her 6-year-old whisper to her dolls: 'We have to be good or ICE will get us.'" apnews.com/article/chic...

"Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has said it will vote against a $1 trillion pay package for the Tesla chief executive, Elon Musk... 'We are concerned about the total size of the award, dilution and lack of mitigation of key person risk–consistent with our views on executive compensation,' it said."

Brussels presses China in talks as rare earth and chip controls expose EU’s vulnerability in the global AI race, reports Raluca Besliu for Tech Policy Press. The restrictions come as the EU rolls out its €1 billion Apply AI Strategy across healthcare, robotics, and defense.

Feels good to vote!

"In the process ... Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this—as well as masking the actual contents of its archives."

NEW: Common Crawl, the massive archiver of the web, has gotten cozy with AI companies and is providing paywalled articles for training data. They’re also lying to publishers who have asked for material to be removed. “The robots are people too,” CC’s exec director told us when we asked about this.

Dick Cheney, one of the most polarizing vice presidents in US history, has died. bloom.bg/4oqCbR4

Digital spaces shape how democracy functions and the need to protect pluralism, free expression, and civic participation has never been greater.