So Netflix has announced that it’s buying Warner Brothers Discovery (including HBO) for a whopping $82.7 billion. As we’ve well covered, it’s the latest in a long series of pointless Warner mergers stretching back to the 2001 AOL acquisition, which all resulted in oodles of chaos, price hikes, layoffs, and generally a steady erosion in product quality.

Netflix’s deal includes a $5.8 billion breakup fee and promises to maintain Warner Bros. current operations, “including theatrical releases.” The deal doesn’t include Warner Bros Discovery’s struggling linear networks business (CNN, TNT, HGTV and Discovery+) which Netflix wisely wanted nothing to do with. Those are scheduled to be spun out next year into their own sagging sub-company.

Netflix is, of course, making all manner of pre-merger promises about how the deal will be great for everyone, especially creatives:

“Netflix also made its pitch to filmmakers and creatives, writing that “by uniting Netflix’s member experience and global reach with Warner Bros.’ renowned franchises and extensive library, the Company will create greater value for talent — offering more opportunities to work with beloved intellectual property, tell new stories and connect with a wider audience than ever before.”

But as we’ve seen the last three or four times Warner Brothers has been acquired, pre-merger promises mean absolutely nothing. The massive debt created by these acquisitions inevitably results in panicked cost cutting, which usually involves mass layoffs, (even bigger) price hikes, and a general cannibalization of brand and product quality. It happens over and over again.

Of the suitors that could have bought Warner Brothers Discovery (Comcast/NBC and Larry Ellison/CBS/Paramount), Netflix is probably the “best” option. They are (for now) the least up Trump’s ass of the three bidders; and generally may retain more of the core Warner Brothers Discovery infrastructure and staff due to fewer existing redundancies.

That’s not to say the deal will be good, necessarily. If we lived in a non-corrupt country with functioning regulators, the government likely wouldn’t allow any additional consolidation in mainstream corporate media, as the results to date have been nothing but harmful for labor, consumers, and markets. These companies’ journalism arms, if you haven’t noticed, like to downplay or ignore this fact in coverage.

Play a little game with me at home: if you’re reading a story about this deal, stop and notice if the journalist and outlet, at any point, mentions the fact that the decades’ worth of past variants of Warner deals were utterly disastrous for labor, consumers, creativity, and healthy markets. Because that’s kind of important context if your job is informing the public of the truth!

The bungled AT&T acquisition of Warner and DirecTV alone resulted in a massive layoff spree including 50,000 people. But when the consolidated corporate press covers the latest merger, that’s not mentioned. Why is that choice made editorially, do you wager?

Meanwhile Netflix still has a hurdle to face: the weird zealots at the Trump DOJ and FCC. Paramount and/or the Trump administration has spent the last week seeding complaints in Republican-friendly media that the bidding process was unfair to Larry Ellison and CBS/Paramount, and that the Trump administration is concerned about the antitrust impact of a Netflix Warner Brothers combination.

The Trump administration couldn’t give any less of a shit about antitrust or consolidated corporate power; they just want leverage over Netflix and/or to make sure their friend Larry Ellison can acquire HBO and CNN. And they’re mad at Netflix because they put some gay people in shows about the military. The Ellisons may acquire the spun off TV assets, but they may also still want to leverage Trump to get much more.

So I would not be surprised that if in a few weeks or so you see Trump’s FCC lackey Brendan Carr launch some kind of fake inquiry into “irregularities in the bidding process,” where he talks a lot about Netflix’s consolidated power “not being in the public interest.” The goal will be twofold: to force ownership over to Ellison, or at least to (as we’ve seen with CBS mergers) force Netflix to kiss Donald’s ass.

The press (and the usual assortment of useful idiot pundits) will likely then help Trump pretend these inquiries are legitimate “populist” antitrust actions.

If you recall, the first Trump administration sued to stop the AT&T Time Warner deal. That was heralded as a rare example of the administration actually caring about consolidated corporate power by the press; but it turned out it was mostly because Rupert Murdoch had his own acquisition offer for CNN rejected and wanted to scuttle the deal.

Keep your eyes peeled for regulatory shenanigans. Even if the Trump administration doesn’t abuse FCC and DOJ power to help Ellison, they’ll certainly abuse regulatory merger approval power to try and force Netflix to kiss their asses in new and problematic ways (see: CBS, Verizon). And Netflix, no stranger to throwing ethics under the bridge when convenient, will very likely be happy to oblige.

Earlier today, we joined in announcing the Resonant Computing Manifesto: a call for restoring a culture of technology that empowers users and enriches their lives. The manifesto was created by a group led by Alex Komoroske, and today Alex joins the podcast for a deeper dive into what “resonant computing” means and what a better future might look like.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

A cofounder of a Bay Area “Stop AI” activist group abandoned its commitment to nonviolence, assaulted another member, and made statements that left the group worried he might obtain a weapon to use against AI researchers. The threats prompted OpenAI to lock down its San Francisco offices a few weeks ago. In researching this movement, I came across statements that he made about how almost any actions he took were justifiable, since he believed OpenAI was going to “kill everyone and every living thing on earth.” Those are detailed below.

I think it’s worth exploring the radicalization process and the broader context of AI Doomerism. We need to confront the social dynamics that turn abstract fears of technology into real-world threats against the people building it.

OpenAI’s San Francisco Offices Lockdown

On November 21, 2025, Wired reported that OpenAI’s San Francisco offices went into lockdown after an internal alert about a “Stop AI” activist. The activist allegedly expressed interest in “causing physical harm to OpenAI employees” and may have tried to acquire weapons.

The article did not mention his name but hinted that, before his disappearance, he had stated he was “no longer part of Stop AI.”¹ On November 22, 2025, the activist group’s Twitter account posted that it was Sam Kirchner, the cofounder of “Stop AI.”

According to Wired’s reporting

A high-ranking member of the global security team said [in OpenAI Slack] “At this time, there is no indication of active threat activity, the situation remains ongoing and we’re taking measured precautions as the assessment continues.” Employees were told to remove their badges when exiting the building and to avoid wearing clothing items with the OpenAI logo.

“Stop AI” provided more details on the events leading to OpenAI’s lockdown:

Earlier this week, one of our members, Sam Kirchner, betrayed our core values by assaulting another member who refused to give him access to funds. His volatile, erratic behavior and statements he made renouncing nonviolence caused the victim of his assault to fear that he might procure a weapon that he could use against employees of companies pursuing artificial superintelligence.

We prevented him from accessing the funds, informed the police about our concerns regarding the potential danger to AI developers, and expelled him from Stop AI. We disavow his actions in the strongest possible terms.

Later in the day of the assault, we met with Sam; he accepted responsibility and agreed to publicly acknowledge his actions. We were in contact with him as recently as the evening of Thursday Nov 20th. We did not believe he posed an immediate threat, or that he possessed a weapon or the means to acquire one.

However, on the morning of Friday Nov 21st, we found his residence in West Oakland unlocked and no sign of him. His current whereabouts and intentions are unknown to us; however, we are concerned Sam Kirchner may be a danger to himself or others. We are unaware of any specific threat that has been issued.

We have taken steps to notify security at the major US corporations developing artificial superintelligence. We are issuing this public statement to inform any other potentially affected parties.”

A “Stop AI” activist named Remmelt Ellen wrote that Sam Kirchner “left both his laptop and phone behind and the door unlocked.” “I hope he’s alive,” he added.

Early December, the SF Standard reported that the “cops [are] still searching for ‘volatile’ activist whose death threats shut down OpenAI office.” Per this coverage, the San Francisco police are warning that he could be armed and dangerous. “He threatened to go to several OpenAI offices in San Francisco to ‘murder people,’ according to callers who notified police that day.”

A Bench Warrant for Kirchner’s Arrest

When I searched for any information that had not been reported before, I found a revealing press release. It invited the press to a press conference on the morning of Kirchner’s disappearance:

“Stop AI Defendants Speak Out Prior to Their Trial for Blocking Doors of Open AI.”

When: November 21, 2025, 8:00 AM.

Where: Steps in front of the courthouse (San Francisco Superior Court).

Who: Stop AI defendants (Sam Kirchner, Wynd Kaufmyn, and Guido Reichstadter), their lawyers, and AI experts.

Sam Kirchner is quoted as saying, “We are acting on our legal and moral obligation to stop OpenAI from developing Artificial Superintelligence, which is equivalent to allowing the murder [of] people I love as well as everyone else on earth.”

Needless to say, things didn’t go as planned. That Friday morning, Sam Kirchner went missing, triggering the OpenAI lockdown.

Later, the SF Standard confirmed the trial angle of this story: “Kirchner was not present for a Nov. 21 court hearing, and a judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest.”

“Stop AI” – a Bay Area-Centered “Civil Resistance” Group

“Stop AI” calls itself a “non-violent civil resistance group” or a “non-violent activist organization.” The group’s focus is on stopping AI development, especially the race to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and “Superintelligence.” Their worldview is extremely doom-heavy, and their slogans include: “AI Will Kill Us All,” “Stop AI or We’re All Gonna Die,” and “Close OpenAI or We’re All Gonna Die!”

According to a “Why Stop AI is barricading OpenAI” post on the LessWrong forum from October 2024, the group is inspired by climate groups like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, but focused on “AI extinction risk,” or in their words, “risk of extinction.” Sam Kirchner explained in an interview: “Our primary concern is extinction. It’s the primary emotional thing driving us: preventing our loved ones, and all of humanity, from dying.”

Unlike the rest of the “AI existential risk” ecosystem, which is often well-funded by effective altruism billionaires such as Dustin Moskovitz (Coefficient Giving, formerly Open Philanthropy) and Jaan Tallinn (Survival and Flourishing Fund), this specific group is not a formal nonprofit or funded NGO, but rather a loosely organized grassroots group of volunteer-run activism. They made their financial situation pretty clear when the “Stop AI” Twitter account replied to a question with: “We are fucking poor, you dumb bitch.”²

According to The Register, “STOP AI has four full-time members at the moment (in Oakland) and about 15 or so volunteers in the San Francisco Bay Area who help out part-time.”

Since its inception, “Stop AI” has had two central organizers: Guido Reichstadter and Sam Kirchner (the current fugitive). According to The Register and the Bay Area Current, Guido Reichstadter has worked as a jeweler for 20 years. He has an undergraduate degree in physics and math. Reichstadter’s prior actions include climate change and abortion-rights activism. 

In June 2022, Reichstadter climbed the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in Washington, D.C., to protest the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Per the news coverage, he said, “It’s time to stop the machine.” “Reichstadter hopes the stunt will inspire civil disobedience nationwide in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling.”

Reichstadter moved to the Bay Area from Florida around 2024 explicitly to organize civil disobedience against AGI development via “Stop AI.” Recently, he undertook a hunger strike outside Anthropic’s San Francisco office for 30 days.

Sam Kirchner worked as a DoorDash driver and, before that, as an electrical technician. He has a background in mechanical and electrical engineering. He moved to San Francisco from Seattle, cofounded “Stop AI,” and “stayed in a homeless shelter for four months.”

AI Doomerism’s Rhetoric

The group’s rationale included this claim (published on their account on August 29, 2025): “Humanity is walking off a cliff,” with AGI leading to “ASI covering the earth in datacenters.” 

As 1a3orn pointed out, the original “Stop AI” website said we risked “recursive self-improvement” and doom from any AI models trained with more than 10^23 FLOPs. (The group dropped this prediction at some point) Later, in a (now deleted) “Stop AI Proposal,” the group asked to “Permanently ban ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks) on any computer above 10^25 FLOPS. Violations of the immediate 10^25 ANN FLOPS cap will be punishable by life in prison.” 

To be clear, tens of current AI models were trained with over 10^25 FLOPs.

In a “For Humanity” podcast episode with Sam Kirchner, “Go to Jail to Stop AI” (episode #49, October 14, 2024), he said: “We don’t really care about our criminal records because if we’re going to be dead here pretty soon or if we hand over control which will ensure our future extinction here in a few years, your criminal record doesn’t matter.” 

The podcast promoted this episode in a (now deleted) tweet, quoting Kirchner: “I’m willing to DIE for this.” “I want to find an aggressive prosecutor out there who wants to charge OpenAI executives with attempted murder of eight billion people. Yes. Literally, why not? Yeah, straight up. Straight up. What I want to do is get on the news.”

After Kirchner’s disappearance, the podcast host and founder of “GuardRailNow” and the “AI Risk Network,” John Sherman, deleted this episode from podcast platforms (Apple, Spotify) and YouTube. Prior to its removal, I downloaded the video (length 01:14:14).

Sherman also produced an emotional documentary with “Stop AI” titled “Near Midnight in Suicide City” (December 5, 2024, episode #55. See its trailer and promotion on the Effective Altruism Forum). It’s now removed from podcast platforms and YouTube, though I have a copy in my archive (length 1:29:51). It gathered 60k views before its removal.

The group’s radical rhetoric was out in the open. “If AGI developers were treated with reasonable precaution proportional to the danger they are cognizantly placing humanity in by their venal and reckless actions, many would have a bullet put through their head,” wrote Guido Reichstadter in September 2024. 

The above screenshot appeared in a Techdirt piece, “2024: AI Panic Flooded the Zone Leading to a Backlash.” The warning signs were there:

Also, like in other doomsday cults, the stress of believing an apocalypse is imminent wears down the ability to cope with anything else. Some are getting radicalized to a dangerous level, playing with the idea of killing AI developers (if that’s what it takes to “save humanity” from extinction).

Both PauseAI and StopAI stated that they are non-violent movements that do not permit “even joking about violence.” That’s a necessary clarification for their various followers. There is, however, a need for stronger condemnation. The murder of the UHC CEO showed us that it only takes one brainwashed individual to cross the line.

In early December 2024, I expressed my concern on Twitter: “Is the StopAI movement creating the next Unabomber?” The screenshot of “Getting arrested is nothing if we’re all gonna die” was taken from Sam Kirchner.

Targeting OpenAI

The main target of their civil-disobedience-style actions was OpenAI. The group explained that their “actions against OpenAI were an attempt to slow OpenAI down in their attempted murder of everyone and every living thing on earth.” In a tweet promoting the October blockade, Guido Reichstadter claimed about OpenAI: “These people want to see you dead.”

“My co-organizers Sam and Guido are willing to put their body on the line by getting arrested repeatedly,” said Remmelt Ellen. “We are that serious about stopping AI development.”

On January 6, 2025, Kirchner and Reichstadter went on trial for blocking the entrance to OpenAI on October 21, 2024, to “stop AI before AI stop us” and on September 24, 2024 (“criminal record doesn’t matter if we’re all dead”), as well as blocking the road in front of OpenAI on September 12, 2024.

The “Stop AI” event page on Luma list further protests in front of OpenAI: on January 10, 2025; April 18, 2025; May 23, 2025 (coverage); July 25, 2025; and October 24, 2025. On March 2, 2025, they had a protest against Waymo.

On February 22, 2025, three “Stop AI” protesters were arrested for trespassing after barricading the doors to the OpenAI offices and allegedly refusing to leave the company’s property. It was covered by a local TV station. Golden Gate Xpress documented the activists detained in the police van: Jacob Freeman, Derek Allen, and Guido Reichstadter. Officers pulled out bolt cutters and cut the lock and chains on the front doors. In a Bay Area Current article, “Why Bay Area Group Stop AI Thinks Artificial Intelligence Will Kill Us All,” Kirchner is quoted as saying, “The work of the scientists present” is “putting my family at risk.”

October 20, 2025 was the first day of the jury trial of Sam Kirchner, Guido Reichstadter, Derek Allen, and Wynd Kaufmyn.

On November 3, 2025, “Stop AI”’s public defender served OpenAI CEO Sam Altman with a subpoena at a speaking event at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco. The group claimed responsibility for the onstage interruption, saying the goal was to prompt the jury to ask Altman “about the extinction threat that AI poses to humanity.”

Public Messages to Sam Kirchner

“Stop AI” stated it is “deeply committed to nonviolence“ and “We wish no harm on anyone, including the people developing artificial superintelligence.” In a separate tweet, “Stop AI” wrote to Sam: “Please let us know you’re okay. As far as we know, you haven’t yet crossed a line you can’t come back from.”

John Sherman, the “AI Risk Network” CEO, pleaded, “Sam, do not do anything violent. Please. You know this is not the way […] Please do not, for any reason, try to use violence to try to make the world safer from AI risk. It would fail miserably, with terrible consequences for the movement.”

Rhetoric’s Ramifications

Taken together, the “imminent doom” rhetoric fosters conditions in which vulnerable individuals could be dangerously radicalized, echoing the dynamics seen in past apocalyptic movements.  

In “A Cofounder’s Disappearance—and the Warning Signs of Radicalization”, City Journal summarized: “We should stay alert to the warning signs of radicalization: a disaffected young person, consumed by abstract risks, convinced of his own righteousness, and embedded in a community that keeps ratcheting up the moral stakes.”

“The Rationality Trap – Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?” described this exact radicalization process, noting how the more extreme figures (e.g., Eliezer Yudkowsky)³ set the stakes and tone: “Apocalyptic consequentialism, pushing the community to adopt AI Doomerism as the baseline, and perceived urgency as the lever. The world-ending stakes accelerated the ‘ends-justify-the-means’ reasoning.”

We already have a Doomers “murder cult” called the Zizians and their story is way more bizarre than anything you’ve read here. Like, awfully more extreme. And, hopefully, such things should remain rare.

What we should discuss is the dangers of such an extreme (and misleading) AI discourse. If human extinction from AI is just around the corner, based on the Doomers’ logic, all their suggestions are “extremely small sacrifices to make.” Unfortunately, the situation we’re in is: “Imagined dystopian fears have turned into real dystopian ‘solutions.’”

This is still an evolving situation. As of this writing, Kirchner’s whereabouts remain unknown.

—————————

Dr. Nirit Weiss-Blatt, Ph.D. (@DrTechlash), is a communication researcher and author of “The TECHLASH and Tech Crisis Communication” book and the “AI Panic” newsletter.

—————————

Endnotes

1. Don’t mix StopAI with other activist groups, such as PauseAI or ControlAI. Please see this brief guide on the Transformer Substack. ︎
2. This type of rhetoric wasn’t a one-off. Stop AI’s account also wrote, “Fuck CAIS and @DrTechlash” (CAIS is the Center for AI Safety, and @DrTechlash is, well, yours truly). Another target was Oliver Habryka, the CEO at Lightcone Infrastructure/LessWrong, whom they told, “Eat a pile of shit, you pro-extinction murderer.” ︎
3. Eliezer Yudkowsky, cofounder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), recently published a book titled “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.” It had heavy promotion, but you can read here “Why The ‘Doom Bible’ Left Many Reviewers Unconvinced.” ︎

The Trump administration is so sure it can get away with anything that it’s willing to try anything. That misapprehension of the situation has resulted in at least 200 rulings against the administration’s anti-immigrant efforts. Still, the regime persists with its attempts to brute force constitutional rights out of existence.

Like it or not, MAGA faithful, immigrants have rights. They have the rights natural born citizens have access to, which is certainly something the Trump administration doesn’t think is true, even though it is.

The administration got a big win from the Supreme Court in terms of violating Fourth Amendment rights. In a solo concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh made it clear the majority believed there is nothing wrong with rounding up people simply because they look a bit more brown than white on the outside.

Meanwhile, ICE pretends it’s still targeting criminals, even when all data says otherwise. It continues to claim it’s going after known criminals but its paperwork doesn’t match its public statements. If it was really going after criminals, it should be able to obtain arrest warrants. The fact that it rarely has anything more than administrative warrants (self-issued warrants without judicial backing) in its possession at any given time contradicts its assertions about its alleged “targeted” enforcement efforts.

The Trump administration continues to get railed on the regular by federal courts. The latest is no exception:

A federal judge in Denver on Tuesday ordered federal immigration officers to stop making arrests in Colorado without a warrant, unless the detainee posed a flight risk, the latest in a string of lower-court decisions rebuking President Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics.

[…]

In Colorado, Judge Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, found that immigration agents had acted unlawfully by arresting and detaining immigrants — some for as long as 100 days — without showing the required probable cause that they posed a threat of fleeing.

This decision aligns itself with several others. Unfortunately, the body of judicial work ruling against Trump’s anti-immigration programs hasn’t really changed anything. Many rulings have been appealed. What has yet to be heard by the Supreme Court has often been given a pass by appellate judges.

And even if a court rules definitively against Trump, there’s no reason to believe this administration will act in accordance with the ruling. Emil Bove — the former DOJ lawyer who told prosecutors to tell the courts to fuck themselves if they opposed Trump — is now sitting on the Third Circuit. Other rulings delivered by federal courts have been immediately stayed by appellate courts who normally would have allowed things to play out at the lower level before undercutting their findings.

What’s happening here affects a lot of rights beyond the immediate recognition of Fourth Amendment incursion. These warrantless arrests are often followed by indefinite detentions that involve violations of Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

This government is plain nasty. It has zero interest in the rule of law. It wants to be the bully on the block at all times. If the system of checks and balances rears it head, the administration will either ignore the concerns raised or engage in unprecedented attacks on the judiciary itself. Pointing out the incompetency of Trump administration thugs is about as useless as criticizing the GPA of the person beating your skull to pulp with a baseball bat. The end result is the same. Any legitimate points raised mid-beating won’t do anything to reduce the CTE trauma. It’s best to assume bad faith from the beginning because this is the administration’s sole operating speed.

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Everyone’s pissed at the tech industry. And for good reason. The term enshittification is super popular for many valid reasons. Companies that used to provide real value, are now focused on extracting more value from users, rather than improving their products and services. People used to be excited by new innovations. There was a time when many people felt more fulfilled after using new innovations that helped them do new things, communicate with new people, create new wonderful creations.

That feels like an unfortunately rare experience, so much so that some have forgotten about it entirely.

Remember when you’d use something new and feel… good? Empowered, even? When tech made you feel like you could do more, create more, connect more meaningfully?

Yeah, that’s mostly gone. We’ve replaced it with engagement metrics, growth hacks, and AI slop. The tech industry spent the last decade optimizing for shareholder value and calling it innovation.

But, it doesn’t need to be that way.

We can live in a world where technology works for us, not against us. Where we get value from it, rather than having it extract value from us.

So a group of us—organized by entrepreneur Alex Komoroske, who wrote for us this summer about why centralized AI isn’t inevitable—decided to articulate what the alternative actually looks like. Not just “tech should be better” hand-waving that we sometimes see, but actual principles for building technology that works for people instead of extracting from them.

We’re calling it the Resonant Computing Manifesto, and it’s an attempt to reclaim what innovation should mean:

We call this quality resonance. It’s the experience of encountering something that speaks to our deeper values. It’s a spark of recognition, a sense that we’re being invited to lean in, to participate. Unlike the digital junk food of the day, the more we engage with what resonates, the more we’re left feeling nourished, grateful, alive. As individuals, following the breadcrumbs of resonance helps us build meaningful lives. As communities, companies, and societies, cultivating shared resonance helps us break away from perverse incentives, and play positive-sum infinite games together.

For decades, technology has required standardized solutions to complex human problems. In order to scale software, you had to build for the average user, sanding away the edge cases. In many ways, this is why our digital world has come to resemble the sterile, deadening architecture that Alexander spent his career pushing back against.

That word—resonance—is doing real work here. It’s the opposite of what we’ve got now: software that leaves you feeling depleted, manipulated, or just vaguely dirty. Resonant computing is technology that makes you feel more capable, more connected, more like yourself.

This matters because the current narrative is stuck between two equally bankrupt positions: either all tech is inevitably corrupting, or we should just accelerate harder into whatever the VCs are funding this quarter. Both are bullshit. Tech can be good. It requires building for people rather than metrics. And to get there, we need to call it out and demand it.

I know that some of the more cynical among you will say that techies have always cloaked their efforts in the language of “empowering people” and “changing the world.” We don’t deny that. But we’d like to make it real, and to be able to use this conversation to remind everyone that technology can be good. If it follows certain principles.

So what does that actually mean? The manifesto lays out five principles:

1. Private: In the era of AI, whoever controls the context holds the power. While data often involves multiple stakeholders, people must serve as primary stewards of their own context, determining how it’s used.
2. Dedicated: Software should work exclusively for you, ensuring contextual integrity where data use aligns with your expectations. You must be able to trust there are no hidden agendas or conflicting interests.
3. Plural: No single entity should control the digital spaces we inhabit. Healthy ecosystems require distributed power, interoperability, and meaningful choice for participants.
4. Adaptable: Software should be open-ended, able to meet the specific, context-dependent needs of each person who uses it.
5. Prosocial: Technology should enable connection and coordination, helping us become better neighbors, collaborators, and stewards of shared spaces, both online and off.

Notice what’s not in there: no handing over all your data to billionaires, no single solution from a centralized provider, no tech bro buzzwords. What we have here are requirements that take us away from the current ecosystem. Privacy doesn’t mean Mark Zuckerberg has to better protect your data. It means systems where you control your own data. Plural means more than “sprinkle in a few more competitors,” it’s about interoperability and the ability to actually leave with ease.

The “dedicated” principle is particularly important in the age of AI. Your AI tools shouldn’t have dual loyalty to you and to a giant company. It should work for you, period. That seems obvious, but look around: how many products actually meet that bar?

This is also why we’re not just throwing this out there and walking away. Unlike the endless parade of “ethics frameworks” that companies sign onto and promptly ignore, this is meant to be a starting point. It’s kicking off a conversation as well as guidelines for building actual systems. There’s a collaborative doc where people can contribute ideas, and we’ll be talking through what this looks like in practice.

We launched this manifesto yesterday afternoon at Wired’s Big Interview event in San Francisco, and Steven Levy wrote a lovely profile about it, which we spoke about on stage:

Humanity is the glue of the five principles of resonant computing listed in the document. It politely demands that users have control of their tech tools, which should promote social value and true connection. It is, natch, resonant of the idealism that once oozed from every pore of the creators of the early microcomputer revolution and the internet boom, when what was good for the world seemed more important than building scale and maximizing the stock price. “I certainly subscribe to the principles,” says Tim O’Reilly, an early signer who has been urging those same values for years.

Komoroske and his coauthors know that their campaign is only a tiny step toward actually fixing Silicon Valley. “I am under no illusion that some manifesto will magically solve this at all,” he says. (Komoroske himself has cofounded a startup called Common Tools, still in stealth, which presumably will be resonant AF.) Instead, the authors’ goal is to energize and support a new generation of tech professionals who want to be proud of their creations. “When they’re building things, they might start taking these ideas into account,” says Masnick. “And it becomes a tool for people within companies to push back on some of the incentives.”

If nothing else, a few thousand signers would indicate to the idealists that they’re not alone—and some of them might willingly pass on opportunities to make VP and instead make the software that they’d want to use themselves.

There’s the ability to sign onto the manifesto if you’d like. We’ve been thrilled to have folks like Tim O’Reilly, Bruce Schneier, Kevin Kelly and many, many others already sign on. The reaction at the Wired event yesterday from many enthusiastic folks suggested that many more would like to sign on as well.

I’ll have Alex on the Techdirt podcast later today to dig into what this looks like in practice—how you actually build systems that meet these principles, what the tradeoffs are, and why we think this is both necessary and possible.

This was a true group effort, and I want to credit everyone who contributed: Maggie Appleton, Samuel Arbesman, Daniel Barcay, Rob Hardy, Aishwarya Khanduja, Geoffrey Litt, Brendan McCord, Bernhard Seefeld, Ivan Vendrov, Amelia Wattenberger, Zoe Weinberg, and Simon Willison. Our regular meetings brainstorming and discussing all this have been a highlight of this year.

Look, I know manifestos are cheap. They seem to come out every few months. But here’s the thing: we’re at a genuinely weird moment where the biggest players in tech have decided that user empowerment was actually the problem all along. That’s not inevitable. It’s a choice. And we can make different choices.

This feeling has “resonated” with many of the people we’ve shared it with so far, and we hope that it resonates with you as well.

Resonant computing is possible—we’ve experienced it before. The question is whether we’re willing to build it, and whether users will demand it. That’s what this is about: creating a shared language and vision for what better looks like, so we can actually build toward it instead of just complaining about enshittification.

If that resonates with you, and you think that matters, sign the manifesto. Join the conversation. Build a better, more resonant, world.

Not that long ago, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight did a good bit on why public broadcasting is important. The segment features a lot of insight from UPenn media professor Victor Pickard, whose work on the (many) problems with modern consolidated U.S. corporate media has always been essential reading:

But Oliver also walked the talk. Oliver and his staff subsequently held an auction for all sorts of notable items from the show’s history, including a Bob Ross painting, a prop replica of former Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai’s goofy giant coffee mug, Russell Crowe’s jock strap, a bidet signed by a member of GWAR, and a giant gold-plated re-creation of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s balls:

“All told, the auction raised nearly $1.54 million for the Public Media Bridge Fund, which is assisting local public broadcasters in temporarily finding new funds in the wake of the CPB closure.”

After the White House falsely deemed NPR and PBS a “grift” last April, Republicans successfully pushed for a Senate vote that eliminated the CPB’s entire budget in July. That vote rescinded the $1.1 billion that Congress had allocated to CPB to fund public broadcasting during 2026 and 2027, throwing the already shaky U.S. public broadcasting system into complete existential collapse.

As we’ve noted previously, authoritarians loathe journalism. But they really loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based corporate media.

A corporate media that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible corruption and bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times, and countless others). A media that has increasingly stopped serving the public interest in loyal dedication to our increasingly unhinged extraction class.

One of the real harms of the cuts has been to already struggling local U.S. broadcasting stations. While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations.

Many of those news stations operated in places where quality, local news is difficult if not impossible to find. Local papers have usually either closed or been purchased by soulless hedge funds that are buying papers, stripping them for parts, and hollowing out and homogenizing their coverage. Most U.S. “local news” is dominated by right wing propaganda pseudo-journalism broadcasters like Sinclair Broadcasting.

U.S. “public broadcasting” was already a shadow of the true concept after years of being demonized and defunded by the right wing, so even calling hybrid organizations like NPR “public” is a misnomer. Still, the underlying concept remains an ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots and corporations alike, because they’re very aware that if implemented properly, public media often provides a challenge to their well-funded war on informed consensus, as Pickard has long explained.

DC lawmakers and regulators (including Democrats) have been an absolute embarrassment on building and maintaining any sort of coherent media reform strategy. The evidence of that apathy has never been less subtle. So a hearty thank you to John Oliver for giving a shit.

ACIP is meeting this week, which means we all get to clench our sphincters as we await whatever small, medium, or large sized horrors will come out of this panel of clowns.

It wasn’t always this way. ACIP, and the larger CDC, used to be the world standard when it came to government bodies dedicated to fighting infectious diseases. RFK Jr. did away with that earlier this year, when he disbanded every member of ACIP and installed a group mostly comprised of Dr. Nicks from the Simpsons in their place.

The focus of the agenda this week will be the vaccination schedule for hepatitis B, particularly the CDC’s long-held guidance for vaccinations to begin within 24 hours of birth. It’s really, really important to note that CDC guidance on this doesn’t take the form of a mandate. Parents have a choice on the timing of the vaccination. Instead, the CDC guidance does two primary things: it mandates coverage of the vaccine by insurance companies and it informs medical professionals on what to recommend to parents that understandably largely follow their doctors’ advice on the matter.

Because Kennedy has commented in the past that he believes this vaccine is responsible for autism disorder diagnoses, and because ACIP is staffed with his handpicked clowns, the medical community is holding its breath to see what decisions are made this week. Since CDC’s vaccination guidance in 1995, hep B infections among infants have dropped by a great deal and the resulting liver cancer in children has essentially gone away. Despite this, and despite just how brutal hep B is as a disease, Kennedy has been coming out against immunization, wielding misinformation as per usual.

On Tucker Carlson’s podcast in June, Kennedy falsely claimed that the hepatitis B birth dose is a “likely culprit” of autism.

He also said the hepatitis B virus is not “casually contagious.” But decades of research shows the virus can be transmitted through indirect contact, when traces of infected fluids like blood enter the body when people share personal items like razors or toothbrushes.

Hepatitis B causes incredible pain, cancer, and death. In children. And Kennedy is wildly wrong; it is incredibly contagious and particularly resilient on surfaces. And, again, this is a vaccine that is still voluntary by parents at birth. There is no government mandate for vaccination, only the recommended vaccination schedule.

Now, ACIP may be discussing the use of combo shots, as it has done in the recent past. That’s still fairly dumb, but it would be a far cry better than altering the recommendations for the first-24 hours immunization, which is a single vaccine, unpaired with any other. But ACIP is no longer trustworthy.

And that’s not me saying it. Take it from Republican Senator and do-nothing coward Bill Cassidy, who both had a heavy hand in getting Kennedy confirmed to DHS and who can’t be bothered to do more than say words about all the harm that confirmation is causing.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on Thursday called a federal vaccine advisory committee “totally discredited” ahead of a vote on whether to change hepatitis B vaccine guidelines, an issue very close to the Louisiana physician. Writing Thursday on the social platform X, Cassidy specifically decried Aaron Siri, a prominent anti-vaccine lawyer who is presenting before the committee this week.

“Aaron Siri is a trial attorney who makes his living suing vaccine manufacturers. He is presenting as if an expert on childhood vaccines. The ACIP is totally discredited. They are not protecting children,” Cassidy wrote.

Neither are you, Senator. If you are interested in doing so, you can introduce articles of impeachment on RFK Jr. today. You’ll have plenty of support from the other side of the aisle, and likely a decent amount from your own.

I write this on Thursday and ACIP has already met. Because everything Kennedy touches is chaos, however, the panel moved its hep B vote to tomorrow, Friday, due to the panel not actually knowing what the fuck it was voting on.

At one point in Thursday’s session, committee member Dr. Joseph Hibbeln said that the group had seen three different versions of questions to vote on in the past 72 hours. A technical issue prevented the new voting language from being put up on slides. The presentation was later moved to the end of the agenda, to be displayed just before the vote. There were questions of how many questions members would be asked to vote on. There were no hard copies of the language available. 

“We’re trying to evaluate a moving target,” Hibbeln said. 

Panel members presented information on the prevalence of acute and chronic hepatitis B, and discussed transmission and safety data. Former board members and liaisons to medical organizations sharply criticized the presentations and said some data was mischaracterized. 

Dr. Jason Goldman, liaison to the ACIP for the American College of Physicians, called the meeting “completely inappropriate” and accused the panel of “wasting taxpayer dollars by not having scientific, rigorous discussion on issues that truly matter.” Goldman also highlighted that the hepatitis B birth dose is not mandated and that parents are encouraged to make decisions in consultation with their doctor. 

Chaos, confusion, misinformation, and so on. This is American health in RFK Jr.’s America. MAHA has become how it sounds phoenetically: a laugh track. A joke. And a deeply unfunny joke at that.

So now we wait for tomorrow to see just what horrors this gravel-voiced Cthulu of healthcare has in store for us. It seems the best we can hope for is probably advocacy for individual vaccines versus combo-shots. But I fear it’s going to be much, much worse than that. I’ve never seen a child writhing in pain as he or she dies from liver complications due to hepatitis B.

And I pray I never have to.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Ben is joined by Vaishnavi J, former head of youth policy at Meta and founder and principal of Vyanams Strategies, a product advisory firm that helps companies, civil society, and governments build safer age appropriate experiences. Prior to founding Vys, she led video policy at Twitter, built its safety team in APAC and was Google’s child safety polciy lead in APAC. Together Ben and Vaishnavi discuss:

• House overhauls KOSA in a new kids online safety package (The Verge)
• A nationwide internet age verification plan is sweeping Congress (The Verge)
• Grindr supports app store age-verification bill despite censorship concerns (Pink News)
• A summary of the technology sector’s response to the UK’s new online safety rules (Ofcom)
• Age Assurance Implementation Handbook (Vyanams)
• Interoperable Age Assurance (Age Verification Providers Association)
• EU’s non-binding resolution around revamping child safety rules (European Parliament)
• ‘We’ll be watching’: Social media companies warned about complying with ban as teens flock to alternative apps (Crikey)
• The Salesforce of safety: Software vendors as infrastructural/professional nodes in the field of online trust and safety (Sage, Platforms & Society)
• It’s their job to keep AI from destroying everything (The Verge)

Despite all the recent hype about “AI,” the technology still struggles with very basic things and remains prone to significant errors. Which makes it maybe not the best idea to rush the nascent technology into widespread adoption in industries prone to all sorts of deep-rooted problems already (like say, health insurance, or journalism).

We’ve already seen how news outlets have gotten egg on their faces by using AI “journalists” who completely make up sources, quotes, facts, and other information. But earlier this year, Apple also had to pull their major news AI system offline after it repeatedly couldn’t generate accurate headlines, and in many instances just fabricated major events that never happened (whoops!).

Google has recently also been experimenting with letting AI generate news headlines for its Discover feature (the news page you reach by swiping right on Google Pixel phones), and the results are decidedly… mixed. The technology, once again, routinely misconstrues meaning when trying to sum up news events:

“I also saw Google try to claim that “AMD GPU tops Nvidia,” as if AMD had announced a new groundbreaking graphics card, when the actual Wccftech story is about how a single German retailer managed to sell more AMD units than Nvidia units within a single week’s span.”

Other times, it just produces gibberish:

“Then there are the headlines that simply don’t make sense out of context, something real human editors avoid like plague. What does “Schedule 1 farming backup” mean? How about “AI tag debate heats”?

Google has already redirected a ton of advertising revenue away from journalists who do actual work, and toward its own synopsis and search tech. Now it’s effectively rewriting the headlines editors and journalists (the good ones, anyway) spend a lot of time working on to try and be as accurate and inviting as possible. And they’re doing an embarrassingly shitty job of it.

Not that the media companies themselves have been doing much better. Most major American media companies are owned by people who see AI not as a way to improve journalism quality and make journalism more efficient, but as a path toward cutting corners and undermining labor.

Meanwhile, in the quest for massive engagement at impossible scale, tech giants like Meta and Google have simply stopped caring so much about quality and accuracy. The results are everywhere, from Google News’ declining quality, to substandard search results, to the slow decline of key, popular services, to platforms filled with absolute clickbait garbage. It’s not been great for informed consensus or factual reality.

You’d like to think that ultimately we emerge from the age of slop with not just better technology, but a better understanding of how to use and adapt to it. But the problem remains that most of the folks dictating the trajectory of this emerging technology have no idea what they’re doing, have prioritized making money over the public interest, or are just foundationally shitty human beings bad at their jobs.

A new bill sponsored by Sen. Hawley (R-MO), Sen. Blumenthal (D-CT), Sen. Britt (R-AL), Sen. Warner (D-VA), and Sen. Murphy (D-CT) would require AI chatbots to verify all users’ ages, prohibit minors from using AI tools, and implement steep criminal penalties for chatbots that promote or solicit certain harms. That might sound reasonable at first, but behind those talking points lies a sprawling surveillance and censorship regime that would reshape how people of all ages use the internet.

The GUARD Act may look like a child-safety bill, but in practice it’s an age-gating mandate that could be imposed on nearly every public-facing AI chatbot—from customer-service bots to search-engine assistants. The GUARD Act could force countless AI companies to collect sensitive identity data, chill online speech, and block teens from using the digital tools that they rely on every day.

EFF has warned for years that age-verification laws endanger free expression, privacy, and competition. There are legitimate concerns about transparency and accountability in AI, but the GUARD Act’s sweeping mandates are not the solution.

Young People’s Access to Legitimate AI Tools Could Be Cut Off Entirely. 

The GUARD Act doesn’t give parents a choice—it simply blocks minors from AI companions altogether. If a chat system’s age-verification process determines that a user is under 18, that user must then be locked out completely. The GUARD Act contains no parental consent mechanism, no appeal process for errors in age estimation, and no flexibility for any other context.

The bill’s definition of an AI “companion” is ambiguous enough that it could easily be interpreted to extend beyond general-use LLMs like ChatGPT, causing overcautious companies to block young people from other kinds of AI services too. In practice, this means that under the GUARD Act, teenagers may not be able to use chatbots to get help with homework, seek customer service assistance for a product they bought, or even ask a search engine a question. It could also cut off all young people’s access to educational and creative tools that have quickly become a part of everyday learning and life online.

By treating all young people—whether seven or seventeen—the same, the GUARD Act threatens their ability to explore their identities, get answers to questions free from shame or stigma, and gradually develop a sense of autonomy as they mature into adults. Denying teens’ access to online spaces doesn’t make them safer, it just keeps them uninformed and unprepared for adult life.  

The GUARD Act’s sponsors claim these rules will keep our children safe, but that’s not true. Instead, it will undermine both safety and autonomy by replacing parental guidance with government mandates and building mass surveillance infrastructure instead of privacy controls.

All Age Verification Systems Are Dangerous. This Is No Different. 

Teens aren’t the only ones who lose out under the GUARD Act. The bill would require platforms to confirm the ages of all users—young and old—before allowing them to speak, learn, or engage with their AI tools.

Under the GUARD Act, platforms can’t rely on a simple “I’m over 18” checkbox or self-attested birthdate. Instead, they must build or buy a “commercially reasonable” age-verification system that collects identifying information (like a government ID, credit record, or biometric data) from every user before granting them access to the AI service. Though the GUARD Act does contain some data minimization language, its mandate to periodically re-verify users means that platforms must either retain or re-collect that sensitive user data as needed. Both of those options come with major privacy risks.  

EFF has long documented the dangers of age-verification systems:

• They create attractive targets for hackers. Third-party services that collect users’ sensitive ID and biometric data for the purpose of age verification have been repeatedly breached, exposing millions to identity theft and other harms.
• They implement mass surveillance systems and ruin anonymity. To verify your age, a system must determine and record who you are. That means every chatbot interaction could feasibly be linked to your verified identity.
• They disproportionately harm vulnerable groups. Many people—especially activists and dissidents, trans and gender-nonconforming folks, undocumented people, and survivors of abuse—avoid systems that force identity disclosure. The GUARD Act would entirely cut off their ability to use these public AI tools.
• They entrench Big Tech. Only the biggest companies can afford the compliance and liability burden of mass identity verification. Smaller, privacy-respecting developers simply can’t compete.

As we’ve said repeatedly, there’s no such thing as “safe” age verification. Every approach—whether it’s facial or biometric scans, government ID uploads, or behavioral or account analysis—creates new privacy, security, and expressive harms.

Vagueness + Steep Fines = Censorship. Full Stop. 

Though mandatory age-gates provide reason enough to oppose the GUARD Act, the definitions of “AI chatbot” and “AI companion” are also vague and broad enough to raise alarms. In a nutshell, the Act’s definitions of these two terms are so expansive that they could cover nearly any system capable of generating “human-like” responses—including not just general-purpose LLMs like ChatGPT, but also more tailored services like those used for customer service interactions, search-engine summaries, and subject-specific research tools.

The bill defines an “AI chatbot” as any service that produces “adaptive” or “context-responsive” outputs that aren’t fully predetermined by a developer or operator. That could include Google’s search summaries, research tools like Perplexity, or any AI-powered Q&A tool—all of which respond to natural language prompts and dynamically generate conversational text.

Meanwhile, the GUARD Act’s definition of an “AI companion”—a system that both produces “adaptive” or “context-responsive” outputs and encourages or simulates “interpersonal or emotional interaction”—will easily sweep in general-purpose tools like ChatGPT. Courts around the country are already seeing claims that conversational AI tools manipulate users’ emotions to increase engagement. Under this bill, that’s enough to trigger the “AI companion” label, putting AI developers at risk even when they do not intend to cause harm.

Both of these definitions are imprecise and unconstitutionally overbroad. And, when combined with the GUARD Act’s incredibly steep fines (up to $100,000 per violation, enforceable by the federal Attorney General and every state AG), companies worried about their legal liability will inevitably err on the side of prohibiting minors from accessing their chat systems. The GUARD Act leaves them these options: censor certain topics en masse, entirely block users under 18 from accessing their services, or implement broad-sweeping surveillance systems as a prerequisite to access. No matter which way platforms choose to go, the inevitable result for users is less speech, less privacy, and less access to genuinely helpful tools.

How You Can Help

While there may be legitimate problems with AI chatbots, young people’s safety is an incredibly complex social issue both on- and off-line. The GUARD Act tries to solve this complex problem with a blunt, dangerous solution.

In other words, protecting young people’s online safety is incredibly important, but to do so by forcing invasive ID checks, criminalizing AI tools, and banning teens from legitimate digital spaces is not a good way out of this.

The GUARD Act would make the internet less free, less private, and less safe for everyone. It would further consolidate power and resources in the hands of the bigger AI companies, crush smaller developers, and chill innovation under the threat of massive fines. And it would cut off vulnerable groups’ ability to use helpful everyday AI tools, further stratifying the internet we know and love.

Lawmakers should reject the GUARD Act and focus instead on policies that provide transparency, more options for users, and comprehensive privacy for all. Help us tell Congress to oppose the GUARD Act today.

Originally posted to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

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A recent shooting involving a former Afghani US counter-terrorism asset who worked with the CIA (!!!) has become the tragedy the Trump administration apparently needed to go from “consistently racist” to “openly racist.” The wounding of two National Guard troops led directly to the president spending the holiday doing what he always does on holidays: ranting about a bunch of shit rather than just wish the people he supposed to serving a happy Thanksgiving.

Trump went on a multi-day Truth Social bender, beginning with multiple invective-filled posts on Thanksgiving that led to a marathon 158-post (!!!) barrage over a three-hour period starting late Monday (December 1) night.

Trump dropped back-to-back “bangers” on Truth Social, both loaded with bigoted language that made it clear the US — under Trump — is only interested in importing white people.

This post first blamed Biden for some stuff before moving on (within the space of a sentence) to declaring the termination of asylum/visa applications from nations Trump considers to be unworthy of entering the former Land of Opportunity.

I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.

It appears the administration will decide which countries fit the “Third World” descriptor on a case-by-bigoted-case basis. This means the ten countries considered too inherently dangerous to be allowed to be part of the migration ecosystem are (lol) in the minority. If you’ve been paying attention, the original list of countries whose residents are forbidden from entering the US contains a lot of countries this administration wants to send deportees like Kilmar Abrego Garcia to, despite much-friendlier countries (Costa Rica, for example) offering to take Garcia off the US government’s hands.

Mr. Trump’s June proclamation imposed a near-total restriction on the entry of people from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. 

Another 19 countries have been added to Trump’s list of presumable “shit holes” — a list that includes many of his current infatuations:

The Trump administration has halted all immigration applications filed by people from 19 countries, its latest move to restrict legal immigration pathways following the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., last week, according to internal government guidance and a source familiar with the move.

[…]

It also partially suspended the entry of travelers and immigrants from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.

The latest proclamation means all 19 of these countries are on Trump’s shit list. The limitations are now effectively a complete ban on migration. And former residents of the listed nations can expect to be deported ASAFP. (“Feasibly.”)

That’s not even the end of it. The day after Trump’s thumb-wrecking Truth Social posting spree, DHS dog-killer-in-chief stepped up to the mic to promise even more racism and pain.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is recommending that the Trump administration’s travel ban list include between 30 to 32 countries, marking an increase from the current list of 19 countries, according to a source familiar with the matter.

[…]

Noem said Monday that, following a meeting with President Donald Trump, she recommended a “full travel ban” on “every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

Huh. Will the US of A be added to that list, considering it generates plenty of “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” on its own? The simple fact is that immigrants commit fewer crimes, pay more than their share of taxes, and generally do everything they can to stand on their own two feet, even when the government insists on depriving them of their bootstraps every time a bunch of bigots seize an inordinate amount of power.

And that leads us back to what’s always been propelling this mass deportation surge: the GOP’s racism, currently embodied by an aged, obese man with bad hair who has never wanted for anything in his life: Donald Trump.

His immediate follow-up (one [1] minute later [!!]) to his pseudo-Thanksgiving well-wishing was this post, which immediately attacked political opponents not just because they opposed him, but because they were not as white as Trump is (current level of spray tan notwithstanding).

I’m going to quote quite a bit of it (for which I kind of apologize) because you have to see all of this for yourself and ABSOLUTELY KNOW this has all been written by a man who currently holds the office of the President of the United States. (All emphasis mine.)

YOUR WALL OF TEXT AWAITS.

The official United States Foreign population stands at 53 million people (Census), most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels. They and their children are supported through massive payments from Patriotic American Citizens who, because of their beautiful hearts, do not want to openly complain or cause trouble in any way, shape, or form. They put up with what has happened to our Country, but it’s eating them alive to do so! A migrant earning $30,000 with a green card will get roughly $50,000 in yearly benefits for their family. The real migrant population is much higher. This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (Failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc.). As an example, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone. The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both, while the worst “Congressman/woman” in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the U.S.A. illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how “badly” she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of Government, Military, Police, schools, etc…

Yeah. This is “racist grandpa” shit except that it’s being said by perhaps the most powerful man in the world. There are lies about the costs immigrants create, followed by a bunch of stereotypes, the casual use of the word “retarded” to describe another politician, and the well-past-the-point-of-insinuation claims that Ilhan Omar not only married her brother but comes from a country that shouldn’t even be considered a country.

And if you think that’s the worst thing Trump said about Somalia or Somalians within just the past three days, I have the sort of bad news you knew I’d be delivering when you first starting reading this sentence:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he did not want Somali immigrants in the U.S., saying residents of the war-ravaged eastern African country are too reliant on U.S. social safety net and add little to the United States.

[…]

“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters near the end of a lengthy Cabinet meeting. He added: “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”

[…]

Trump also renewed his criticism of Omar, whose family fled the civil war in Somalia and spent several years in a refugee camp in Kenya before coming to the U.S.

“We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way, if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”

Man, I can only hope that when the face-eating leopard party really starts stripping faces off the MAGA faithful, their asylum requests will be rejected with the same callous shrugging about how these people are “garbage” that shouldn’t be allowed to enter other countries because the United States “stinks” and their pasty white nationalists “contribute nothing” to the world at large. And I also hope these little Mussolini wannabes the GOP caters will take a look at history and wonder whether it’s truly worth it to be the worst Americans imaginable just because it plays well with the Nazis.

The Court of Justice of the EU—likely without realizing it—just completely shit the bed and made it effectively impossible to run any website in the entirety of the EU that hosts user-generated content.

Obviously, for decades now, we’ve been talking about issues related to intermediary liability, and what standards are appropriate there. I am an unabashed supporter of the US’s approach with Section 230, as it was initially interpreted, which said that any liability should land on the party who contributed the actual violative behavior—in nearly all cases the speaker, not the host of the content.

The EU has always held itself to a lower standard of intermediary liability, first with the E-Commerce Directive and more recently with the Digital Services Act (DSA), which still generally tries to put more liability on the speaker but has some ways of shifting the liability to the platform.

No matter which of those approaches you think is preferable, I don’t think anyone could (or should) favor what the Court of Justice of the EU came down with earlier this week, which is basically “fuck all this shit, if there’s any content at all on your site that includes personal data of someone you may be liable.”

As with so many legal clusterfucks, this one stems from a case with bad facts, which then leads to bad law. You can read the summary as the CJEU puts it:

The applicant in the main proceedings claims that, on 1 August 2018, an unidentified third party published on that website an untrue and harmful advertisement presenting her as offering sexual services. That advertisement contained photographs of that applicant, which had been used without her consent, along with her telephone number. The advertisement was subsequently reproduced identically on other websites containing advertising content, where it was posted online with the indication of the original source. When contacted by the applicant in the main proceedings, Russmedia Digital removed the advertisement from its website less than one hour after receiving that request. The same advertisement nevertheless remains available on other websites which have reproduced it.

And, yes, no one is denying that this absolutely sucks for the victim in this case. But if there’s any legal recourse, it seems like it should be on whoever created and posted that fake ad. Instead, the CJEU finds that Russmedia is liable for it, even though they responded within an hour and took down the ad as soon as they found out about it.

The lower courts went back and forth on this, with a Romanian tribunal (on first appeal) finding, properly, that there’s no fucking way Russmedia should be held liable, seeing as it was merely hosting the ad and had nothing to do with its creation:

The Tribunalul Specializat Cluj (Specialised Court, Cluj, Romania) upheld that appeal, holding that the action brought by the applicant in the main proceedings was unfounded, since the advertisement at issue in the main proceedings did not originate from Russmedia, which merely provided a hosting service for that advertisement, without being actively involved in its content. Accordingly, the exemption from liability provided for in Article 14(1)(b) of Law No 365/2002 would be applicable to it. As regards the processing of personal data, that court held that an information society services provider was not required to check the information which it transmits or actively to seek data relating to apparently unlawful activities or information. In that regard, it held that Russmedia could not be criticised for failing to take measures to prevent the online distribution of the defamatory advertisement at issue in the main proceedings, given that it had rapidly removed that advertisement at the request of the applicant in the main proceedings.

With the case sent up to the CJEU, things get totally twisted, as they argue that under the GDPR, the inclusion of “sensitive personal data” in the ad suddenly makes the host a “joint controller” of the data under that law. As a controller of data, the much stricter GDPR rules on data protection now apply, and the more careful calibration of intermediary liability rules get tossed right out the window.

And out the window, right with it, is the ability to have a functioning open internet.

The court basically shreds basic intermediary liability principles here:

In any event, the operator of an online marketplace cannot avoid its liability, as controller of personal data, on the ground that it has not itself determined the content of the advertisement at issue published on that marketplace. Indeed, to exclude such an operator from the definition of ‘controller’ on that ground alone would be contrary not only to the clear wording, but also the objective, of Article 4(7) of the GDPR, which is to ensure effective and complete protection of data subjects by means of a broad definition of the concept of ‘controller’.

Under this ruling, it appears that any website that hosts any user-generated content can be strictly liable if any of that content contains “sensitive personal data” about any person. But how the fuck are they supposed to handle that?

The basic answer is to pre-scan any user-generated content for anything that might later be deemed to be sensitive personal data and make sure it doesn’t get posted.

How would a platform do that?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There is no way that this is even remotely possible for any platform, no matter how large or how small. And it’s even worse than that. As intermediary liability expert Daphne Keller explains:

The Court said the host has to

• pre-check posts (i.e. do general monitoring)
• know who the posting user is (i.e. no anonymous speech)
• try to make sure the posts don’t get copied by third parties (um, like web search engines??)

Basically, all three of those are effectively impossible.

Think about what the court is actually demanding here. Pre-checking posts means full-scale automated surveillance of every piece of content before it goes live—not just scanning for known CSAM hashes or obvious spam, but making subjective legal determinations about what constitutes “sensitive personal data” under the GDPR. Requiring user identification kills anonymity entirely, which is its own massive speech issue. And somehow preventing third parties from copying content? That’s not even a technical problem—it’s a “how do you stop the internet from working like the internet” problem.

Some people have said that this ruling isn’t so bad, because the ruling is about advertisements and because it’s talking about “sensitive personal data.” But it’s difficult to see how either of those things limit this ruling at all.

There’s nothing inherently in the law or the ruling that limits its conclusions to “advertisements.” The same underlying factors would apply to any third party content on any website that is subject to the GDPR.

As for the “sensitive personal data” part, that makes little difference because sites will have to scan all content before anything is posted to guarantee no “sensitive personal data” is included and then accurately determine what a court might later deem to be such sensitive personal data. That means it’s highly likely that any website that tries to comply under this ruling will block a ton of content on the off chance that maybe that content will be deemed sensitive.

As the court noted:

 In accordance with Article 5(1)(a) of the GDPR, personal data are to be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject. Article 5(1)(d) of the GDPR adds that personal data processed must be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date. Thus, every reasonable step must be taken to ensure that personal data that are inaccurate, having regard to the purposes for which they are processed, are erased or rectified without delay. Article 5(1)(f) of that regulation provides that personal data must be processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of those data, including protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing.

Good luck figuring out how to do that with third-party content.

And they’re pretty clear that every website must pre-scan every bit of content. They claim it’s about “marketplaces” and “advertisements” but there’s nothing in the GDPR that limits this ruling to those categories:

Accordingly, inasmuch as the operator of an online marketplace, such as the marketplace at issue in the main proceedings, knows or ought to know that, generally, advertisements containing sensitive data in terms of Article 9(1) of the GDPR, are liable to be published by user advertisers on its online marketplace, that operator, as controller in respect of that processing, is obliged, as soon as its service is designed, to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures in order to identify such advertisements before their publication and thus to be in a position to verify whether the sensitive data that they contain are published in compliance with the principles set out in Chapter II of that regulation. Indeed, as is apparent in particular from Article 25(1) of that regulation, the obligation to implement such measures is incumbent on it not only at the time of the processing, but already at the time of the determination of the means of processing and, therefore, even before sensitive data are published on its online marketplace in breach of those principles, that obligation being specifically intended to prevent such breaches.

No more anonymity allowed:

As regards, in the second place, the question whether the operator of an online marketplace, as controller of the sensitive data contained in advertisements published on its website, jointly with the user advertiser, must verify the identity of that user advertiser before the publication, it should be recalled that it follows from a combined reading of Article 9(1) and Article 9(2)(a) of the GDPR that the publication of such data is prohibited, unless the data subject has given his or her explicit consent to the data in question being published on that online marketplace or one of the other exceptions laid down in Article 9(2)(b) to (j) is satisfied, which does not, however, appear to be the case here.

On that basis, while the placing by a data subject of an advertisement containing his or her sensitive data on an online marketplace may constitute explicit consent, within the meaning of Article 9(2)(a) of the GDPR, such consent is lacking where that advertisement is placed by a third party, unless that party can demonstrate that the data subject has given his or her explicit consent to the publication of that advertisement on the online marketplace in question. Consequently, in order to be able to ensure, and to be able to demonstrate, that the requirements laid down in Article 9(2)(a) of the GDPR are complied with, the operator of the marketplace is required to verify, prior to the publication of such an advertisement, whether the user advertiser preparing to place the advertisement is the person whose sensitive data appear in that advertisement, which presupposes that the identity of that user advertiser is collected.

Finally, as Keller noted above, the CJEU seems to think it’s possible to require platforms to make sure content is never displayed on any other platform as well:

 Thus, where sensitive data are published online, the controller is required, under Article 32 of the GDPR, to take all technical and organisational measures to ensure a level of security apt to effectively prevent the occurrence of a loss of control over those data.

To that end, the data controller must consider in particular all technical measures available in the current state of technical knowledge that are apt to block the copying and reproduction of online content.

Again, the CJEU appears to be living in a fantasy land that doesn’t exist.

This is what happens when you over-index on the idea of “data controllers” needing to keep data “private.” Whoever revealed sensitive data should have the liability placed on them. Putting it on the intermediary is misplaced and ridiculous.

There is simply no way to comply with the law under this ruling.

In such a world, the only options are to ignore it, shut down EU operations, or geoblock the EU entirely. I assume most platforms will simply ignore it—and hope that enforcement will be selective enough that they won’t face the full force of this ruling. But that’s a hell of a way to run the internet, where companies just cross their fingers and hope they don’t get picked for an enforcement action that could destroy them.

There’s a reason why the basic simplicity of Section 230 makes sense. It says “the person who creates the content that violates the law is responsible for it.” As soon as you open things up to say the companies that provide the tools for those who create the content can be liable, you’re opening up a can of worms that will create a huge mess in the long run.

That long run has arrived in the EU, and with it, quite the mess.