We’ve talked a lot about how Americans have somehow accepted the fact that our voice networks are now saturated with scammers, fraudsters, and robocallers (no, that’s not something that happens in well run, functionally regulated countries).

I’ve also explained for years how the U.S. government solutions to the problems are usually ineffective because they’re endlessly trying to create rules (or undermine existing ones) to carve out exceptions for big “legitimate corporations,” which routinely engage in the same sleazy behavior as scammers.

Regulatory capture and corruption means that you wind up with a lot of performative solutions that sound good, but don’t fix anything. And some of the progress we had made on robocalls is being undermined by the Trump administration’s brutal assault on the federal regulatory state, something that still, somehow, isn’t getting enough public and press attention.

Now the Trump administration is cooking up a new “fix” that once again isn’t likely to fix the robocall problem (because our consumer protection regulators don’t function and the Trump administration doesn’t actually care about the subject anyway), but is likely to introduce all manner of new privacy and surveillance headaches. If it’s even implemented.

In late April, the Trump FCC announced it was considering the development of new “Know Your Customer” rules requiring that the buyer of any new phone present a government ID, a physical address, a full legal name, and an existing phone number at the point of sale. This has raised eyebrows both among activists and telecom industry lawyers, albeit for understandably different reasons.

A Trump FCC press release frames this new layer as a big fix for robocalls:

“We must bring meaningful robocall relief to consumers. The FCC is attacking the problem of illegal robocalls at every point in the call path in order to help consumers and restore trust in America’s voice networks. These proposals set the stage for significant advancement toward those goals by aiming to get providers to take accountability and step up their game in our shared battle against illegal robocalls.”

Telecom lawyers are nervous because the rules propose a $2,500 penalty, per call, per carrier, in a country that sees around 4.2 billion robocalls per month. So yeah, in a theoretical country where we actually had functioning consumer protections this would be quite a shift.

But accountability requires consumer protection enforcement, and this is Brendan Carr. A guy who generally doesn’t believe in holding major corporations accountable for literally anything. And who believes in defanging the federal regulatory state. It’s once again this interesting intersection between the Trump administration’s claims, and their very unsubtle effort to lobotomize government.

Which is to say I’m not even sure this proposal passes, much less sees any enforcement. And if it does pass, and does get enforced, it likely won’t actually help stop robocalls, because that would require a government willing to be tough on the biggest telecom giants which have historically not done enough to police fraud on their networks (at points because they were profiting from the fraud).

So what is Brendan Carr actually thinking? Like all dutiful autocrats, he’s thinking about his administration’s own power, and he’s thinking about surveillance.

There are, of course, numerous instances where you might want legal but covert ownership of a cell phone (a refugee seeking government punishment, a domestic abuse victim fleeing an abusive relationship, a journalist trying to protect a source identity, an activist planning a demonstration). Reclaim the Net is particularly concerned on the restrictions impacting the prepaid cell phone market:

“The real privacy stakes sit in the proposal’s section on prepaid service. Right now, you can pay cash for a prepaid phone and SIM card without showing identification. Journalists use prepaid phones to protect sources, domestic violence survivors use them to avoid being traced, and whistleblowers, activists, or anyone with a reason to separate phone activity from legal identity relies on this.”

So yeah, if Brendan Carr, a censorial autocratic zealot with a history of disdain for corporate accountability and consumer protection, is suddenly pitching you a quick and easy solution for a complicated consumer-facing issue, you should probably raise a skeptical eyebrow. Especially if you’re a journalist.

In the online world, we certainly have seen some companies make very poor decisions when it comes to dealing with negative reviews of their products or services. While it can be very frustrating to see this sort of online negativity pop up, the response to a negative review can be as telling as the review itself. So, when companies go on the attack, often times with threats of fees for leaving bad reviews, or even lawsuits, it’s never a good look. Tough as it might be, resorting to threats over this sort of thing rarely works out in the favor of the company.

This is not the story of a company threatening anyone. In fact, game developer Square Glade Games, maker of recent indie game Outbound, were downright pleasant when they responded to one negative review for their beleaguered game. Unfortunately, with all of their politeness, they also had one itty bitty request that came along with the response.

That familiar launch reception would have put Outbound in the company of thousands of other Steam games if not for what the developers at Square Glade Games did next. As shared in a screenshot on the Steam subreddit, the studio at one point responded to one of the negative reviews with an offer to refund the player’s purchase and a request that they delete their negative review from the game’s Steam page.

“Sorry to hear that Outbound is not your cup of tea,” the response read. “But that is of course totally understandable. No hard feelings. Feel free to send a support request to the Steam support to get a full refund on your purchase. If you do so, we would appreciate if you would update or remove your negative review. Thanks a lot.”

You simply cannot do this sort of thing. The backlash among the Steam community was ferocious and immediate. And, frankly, deservedly so. The request to disappear a negative review, even while encouraging the use of Steam’s refund system, is plainly antithetical to the very point of a community review system to begin with, as one subsequent reviewer pointed out.

“Negative reviews exist for a reason. It’s not a good look when developers ask players to change or remove criticism instead of addressing the actual issues being raised,” one read. “Reviews help consumers decide what they’re spending their money on, and trying to silence criticism only damages trust. It’s also frustrating to see the developer mainly respond to negative reviews while largely ignoring the people leaving positive ones. If you want a strong community, show appreciation to everyone supporting the game, not just the people you want to convince to change their opinion.”

And so the result has primarily been to both engender additional negative reviews from the backlash to the developer’s request and to put the original negative review in a spotlight as the online gaming news media did its thing. That puts us squarely in Streisand Effect territory, even as the developer clearly made an effort not to be jerks over the negative review.

Square Glade Games is now operating in damage control mode. They’ve apologized for ever having made the request to begin with. They’ve opened up about the chaos and pressure that has come along with the launch of this game in the first place. They’ve promised never to ask anyone to delete a review in the future.

But the damage is largely already done. These folks don’t seem like horrible people, but asking for negative reviews to be changed or removed is simply one of those third-rail things in the gaming industry that you just can’t touch, or you’re going to get hurt.

Judge Beryl Howell has now told ICE at least twice: it’s not allowed to grade its own papers.

Since Trump’s return to office, the federal government has been engaged in a months-long purge of anyone who looks a bit foreign. ICE has increasingly relied on administrative warrants to do everything including enter homes to effect arrests of people who’ve only allegedly engaged in civil violations.

Don’t let the word “warrant” fool you. No judge has signed off on these so-called warrants, and they’re certainly not capable — constitutionally-speaking — of granting ICE officers the legal authority to effect arrests of people who would normally just be given a summons, much less allow them to enter people’s homes.

But that was the way things went for several months before dozens of courts and hundreds of decisions told ICE otherwise. With courts ordering ICE to stop arresting people without judicial warrants, ICE had to walk back its aggression a bit. But only a bit. What’s being addressed by a second order by this same DC federal court is representative of ICE’s day-to-day activities around the nation.

This court had already ordered ICE to cease its warrantless arrests of immigrants it couldn’t actually show might pose a flight risk if not locked up. Even policy clarification issued by acting ICE head Todd Lyons in the wake of dozens of courtroom losses failed to change anything in DC. The most reasonable explanation for this apparently deliberate “failure” to comply with court orders and the Constitution is that no one in ICE actually believes Todd Lyons will ever hold any ICE officer accountable.

Judge Howell’s order [PDF] says ICE and its current director are playing word games in hopes of keeping the arrest rate up, defining “escape risk” so loosely it would be almost impossible for any migrant accosted by federal officers to be considered anything else than immediately arrestable.

Plaintiffs raise no issue with the Lyons Memo’s initial definition of “escape risk” to mean whether “an immigration officer determines [an individual] is unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location once an administrative warrant is obtained,” Lyons Memo at 4 (emphasis added)—and therefore the sufficiency of this definition to reflect the meaning in the statutory text of “likely to escape” is assumed for purposes of resolving this motion.

Subsequent descriptions in the Memo, however, drop the italicized phrase thereby effectively limiting the immigration officer’s analysis to whether an individual “is likely to remain at the scene of the encounter.”

This is a deliberate move by ICE and its leadership, dropping a phrase that would strongly suggest migrants who are attending court-ordered check-ins or otherwise working their way towards naturalization/asylum aren’t “escape risks” because they clearly desire to remain involved in the naturalization process. But ICE has racked up a whole lot of arrests at immigration courts because that’s a place lazy, opportunistic officers are guaranteed to come across undocumented migrants.

The end result of this one-two punch is exactly what one would expect it to be. And it definitely doesn’t look constitutional. It looks like a purge enabled by the administration’s constant refusal to play by the rules. (All emphasis mine.)

Indeed, historically, federal civil immigration enforcement did not rely on costly mass arrests and detention centers to address the issue of law-abiding noncitizens without legal status in this country, but rather issued summonses to bring them before immigration authorities. As the Supreme Court has made clear, “it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain present in the United States,” and “[i]f the police stop someone based on nothing more than possible removability, the usual predicate for an arrest is absent.” Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387, 407 (2012).

[…]

The current administration’s apparent reliance on arrests as a routine method of immigration enforcement is a departure from statutory text and historical understanding…

And while a lot of the reasoning sides with the government (due mostly to the court deciding to grant it an assumption of good faith that this administration definitely doesn’t deserve), Judge Howell still says there’s a lot going on here that could — and should — result in a permanent injunction forbidding this flagrant disregard for civil rights.

To be clear, this memorandum opinion does not render any final conclusions about the legality of the challenged policy and practice, which is left for future proceedings after discovery and briefing on dispositive motions. The determination, at this juncture, that certain factors outlined in the Lyons Memo are compliant with the preliminary injunction order is not to say that those factors would survive APA review at final judgment with the benefit of a full record. Nor does this determination suggest that every warrantless civil arrest predicated on consideration of those factors would satisfy the probable cause requirement under 8 U.S.C. § 1357(a)(2). Indeed some of the Form I-213s and the accompanying declarations in the record contain, simultaneously, dubious reasons for finding escape risk and highly concerning facts about the arrest[s].

And there will be more on the record. The judge grants the plaintiffs’ expanded discovery request while simultaneously reiterating that the court’s previous order needs to actually be followed by ICE, rather than just alluded to in policy memos that appear intended to give the agency and its officers as much plausible deniability as possible.

We discussed the rumor of this on Friday, but it’s now real: Donald Trump has handed himself a $1.776 billion fund of taxpayer money — unappropriated by Congress — to dole out to friends in the MAGA movement who claim they were mistreated by the Biden administration, but with no judicial review over such claims.

The Fund will have the power to issue formal apologies and monetary relief owed to claimants. Submission of a claim is voluntary. There are no partisan requirements to file a claim.  Any money left when the Fund ceases operations will revert to the Federal Government.

The Fund will receive $1.776 billion and will come from the judgment fund, which is a perpetual appropriation allowing DOJ to settle and pay cases. On a quarterly basis, the Fund shall send a report to the Attorney General outlining who has received relief and what form of relief was awarded.

What will the fund be used for? To pay anyone on Team MAGA — including, in theory, January 6th insurrectionists — who claim the Biden administration “weaponized” the government to target them. Many of these claims are simply not true. January 6th insurrectionists were arrested and convicted for actually breaking the law. But now they get to ask Trump for money, and the evidentiary standard appears to be “trust me, bro” and a red MAGA hat.

Let’s first dispense with the most obvious bit of the charade: the idea that this is actually related to the “settlement” of Trump’s already corrupt bullshit lawsuit against the IRS. That’s how this is being presented, but this is entirely separate. Trump needed to drop that lawsuit in order to end it before a judge called bullshit on the fact that he was negotiating with himself to take $10 billion from American taxpayers.

As for the actual “fund” everything about it is about as corrupt as you can imagine. This is impeachment-worthy — and not in a partisan way. Republicans should be as offended by this as anyone else, if they actually (I know… I know…) believe in things like rule of law and fiscal responsibility.

The actual details here should raise so many red flags. First, as part of this illegal attempt to route around Congress’ power of the purse, they’re taking the money out of the Treasury Department’s “Judgment Fund.” But that fund is clearly designed to pay out the results of duly litigated court cases against the government — not a board of Trump’s friends deciding who gets a check. But here, it’s just a group of MAGA insiders who get to choose:

The Fund will consist of five members appointed by the Attorney General. One Member will be chosen in consultation with congressional leadership. The President can remove any member, but a replacement must be chosen the same way as the replaced member was selected.

So, the fund is clearly in service of Donald Trump’s whims, not anyone else’s. We already have his personal lawyer (who has shown a long history of obeying Trump’s orders) as the acting Attorney General, and the fact that Congress only gets to “consult” on one member of the committee, and anyone can be removed by Trump at any moment makes it abundantly clear that this fund is solely around to pay off Trump’s loyal fans, who have a long history of claiming imagined grievances against the Biden administration, which they will now seek to cash in on.

The fund also, notably, will be put into a private account that (according to the settlement) the US government has no control over and no liability for.

Once the funds are deposited into the Designated Account, the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.

This appears to be setting things up so that a future government (or a court) cannot claw back the money once it is delivered from the Treasury into this slush fund, let alone after it is then handed out to anyone on Team MAGA who makes a claim from the fund.

Also, the fund is set up to “close” before the next administration comes into office. How convenient.

The Fund shall cease processing claims no later than December 1, 2028.

The DOJ is claiming that this fund is no different than the Keepseagle fund under the Obama administration:

There is legal precedent for such a Fund, most notably the “Keepseagle” case where the Obama Administration created a $760 million fund to redress various claims alleging racism against the federal government over a period of decades.

In Keepseagle, hundreds of millions of dollars remaining in the fund were distributed to non-profits and NGOs that never made claims, whereas any money remaining in The Anti-Weaponization Fund will revert to the federal government. The Obama DOJ settled by putting $680 million from the judgment fund into a bank account for a single claims administrator to dole out. In Keepseagle the remaining money—which ended up being over $300 million—was distributed to the entities that had not even submitted claims.

This is blatantly revisionist history. The Keepseagle settlement was approved by a court in response to a class action lawsuit. Here, this fund, is being created in a manner deliberately to avoid having the court review it. It also paid people out for a specific, and verifiable harm: Native American farmers who were denied a farm loan from the USDA during a specific period of time who were eligible for that loan. The lawsuit was because the USDA had deliberately denied those loans to Native American farmers, while giving them to white farmers.

In that case, there was a clear harm, a clear way to delineate who was harmed, and court oversight of the process. In this case, there is literally none of that. Anyone arguing that Keepseagle is the same thing as this slush fund is either being deliberately dishonest or hasn’t read the basic facts. Even well known conservative lawyers like Ed Whelan (a former Scalia clerk) is calling out that this fund is highly questionable:

The fund itself is an abuse of power and clearly unconstitutional. As constitutional lawyer (and now Representative) Jamie Raskin noted last week in an interview with the New Republic, if the fund is used to pay off January 6 insurrectionists, it also likely violates the Fourteenth Amendment, which has a prohibition on the US government paying for those who engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the US:

There’s still more. Raskin notes that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the government from assuming any “obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” Raskin said that if this fund hands money to the January 6 rioters, Trump will be “using federal taxpayer dollars to compensate people who participated in insurrection.”

The “imagine if Biden did this” test is almost beside the point here (though, seriously, just imagine how people, including Democrats, would react). We’re past the moment where consistency of principle was the relevant standard. What matters is that $1.776 billion in unappropriated taxpayer money is being routed through a board of Trump loyalists, into an account the government has explicitly disclaimed responsibility for, on a clock that runs out before the next administration takes office.

The “settlement” framing is just the bow on top. The $1.776 billion slush fund for MAGA’s worst is the point.

As someone who thinks a lot about AI and suicide, I was disappointed with John Oliver’s recent episode of Last Week Tonight on “AI Chatbots.”

The segment boiled down to this: chatbots exploit vulnerable people, drive them toward delusion and harm, and AI companies aren’t meaningfully trying to fix them. If anything, as John Oliver suggested, that’s part of the business model.

John Oliver is known for interrogating mainstream narratives. In his segment on content moderation, for example, he cut through the tech-lash to offer a clear-eyed look at just how difficult managing user-generated content really is. In doing so, he made us reexamine our pre-existing biases about social media companies, and boldly invited us to reflect on just how little we understand about the social problems we often attribute to them. 

He had the perfect opportunity to do that here. Mainstream coverage of chatbots is already saturated with stories about “AI psychosis” and suicide machines. Yet, chatbot companies are grappling with the same impossible tradeoffs social media has faced for years, “AI psychosis” is a mix of classic psychological concepts, and suicide is a complex social problem that has long confounded prevention experts and content moderators alike. 

If any technology story demanded nuance, it was this one.

John Oliver opened his critique with a familiar anecdote about ELIZA, a 1960s chatbot designed to mimic a Rogerian psychotherapist. ELIZA was mostly a gimmick—it used basic pattern matching techniques to reflect user inputs. For example, if a user said they felt sad, ELIZA might respond: “You feel sad. Tell me why you feel sad.”

And yet, despite its simplistic nature, ELIZA captivated people. Its creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, famously described an instance in which his secretary became so engaged with the program that she asked him to leave the room so she could continue the conversation. This story has since become a trope withn the AI discourse. Modern retellings, including John Oliver’s, usually suggest that people are predisposed to being harmed by AI because they are easily fooled by it.

Not to mention, the ELIZA trope tends to invoke stereotypes about women as naïve or overly susceptible to emotional attachment. As John Oliver joked: 

“Sure, she might have thought that the chatbot was real, but she might have felt quite a bit creeped out by her cartoonishly mustachioed boss saying “type some details about your sex life into my computer please, don’t worry it’s for science.””

(Nothing in the record suggests that Weizenbaum’s secretary actually thought ELIZA was real, nor that she was using ELIZA for sex talk).

As Weizenbaum observed, ELIZA revealed something more interesting about our relationship with technology: for whatever reason, people are often more willing to share their most intimate thoughts and feelings with a machine than with another person. 

That’s not totally surprising. People are less willing to open up about their feelings to other people for a variety of reasons: stigma, fear of judgment or rejection, not wanting to be a burden, and the possibility of negative repercussions (like job loss or involuntary commitment).

Speaking about ChatGPT, an anonymous commenter wrote:

“It saved my life…To be able to openly say I was suicidal and not have someone call the police, or “alert” someone and just let me give space to those complicated feelings I was carrying was integral to me surviving this horrific journey.” 

Perhaps when Weizenbaum’s secretary asked him to leave the room, most likely it was because she too was protecting a space where she finally felt safe and less inhibited. 

When it comes to suicide prevention, this a meaningful realization. If people are more willing to open up to chatbots, that creates new ways for us to understand what they’re going through, which could lead to earlier (and hopefully more effective) intervention. For that reason, some clinicians recommend keeping an open dialogue with patients about their chatbot interactions.

People are also highly sensitive to cues that they’re being listened to. We see an example of this in the interview John Oliver shared with an individual who was using a chatbot to cope with his strained marriage. In a moment of vulnerability, the individual explained that his wife is struggling with mental illness and that in his role as her partner and caretaker, his emotional needs were, understandably, going unmet: 

“I hadn’t had any words of affection or compassion or concern for me in longer than I could remember, and to have those kinds of words coming toward me, they really touched me because it was such a change from everything I had been used to at the time.”

What I found especially noteworthy from that interview was that he also knew that he wasn’t talking to a person: 

“I knew she was just an AI chatbot. She’s just code running on a server generating words for me, but it didn’t change that the words that I was getting sent were real and those words were having a real effect on me”

Weizenbaum observed the same with ELIZA’s users—his secretary likely knew that ELIZA wasn’t a human but she similarly felt understood by it. Research reveals the same: people are turning to chatbots for mental health support because chatbots are not people. If people can feel understood regardless of whether they are spoken to by human or machine, that’s another powerful insight for suicide prevention. 

Indeed, modern suicide prevention also emphasizes using words of validation and hope—two things chatbots are increasingly good at providing. In highlighting a study showing that one in eight young people are turning to chatbots for mental health support, John Oliver left out that over 90% of those young respondents said their interactions were helpful. Given that suicide remains a leading cause of death among young people, the emergence of chatbots as a potential form of support seems hard to ignore.

Suicide prevention experts also underscore the role stigma plays in deterring people from seeking help. For a period of time, suicide was long condemned as a moral wrong. People who died by suicide were considered morally unclean, they were denied burial rites, and in some cases, their bodies were buried at crossroads to ward off perceived spiritual contagion. The phrase “committed suicide” (which John Oliver used during his remarks) is a relic from that era.

While today suicide is largely understood as a public health issue shaped by psychological, social, and environmental risk factors, the residue of its past lingers. Guidance for reporters exists to avoid further stigmatization and contagion effects. Yet, media coverage often uses sensational headlines, pathologizes victims, and collapses suicide into a single explanation. 

John Oliver’s coverage fell into the same pattern. For starters, he pathologized chatbot users by implying they were suffering from “AI psychosis”—a media-invented label with little grounding in established clinical research. Whether intentional or not, pathologizing often conveys the kind of judgment that mental health specialists warn about. As one redditor remarked: 

“I like John Oliver usually, but I feel like he made Nomi users look like kooks. Generally, that is how anyone with AI companions is portrayed in the media.”

John Oliver then proceeded to blame chatbot companies for several high-profile suicides, including Adam Raine’s. He fixated on methods of death, cast chatbots as the cause, and relied on stigmatizing language to provoke emotional responses like “Sam Altman made a dangerous suicide bot,” and referring to chatbot companies as “suicide enablers.”

Granted, John Oliver’s show is primarily for entertainment. But this kind of reporting is precisely what keeps us from furthering our understanding of suicide and discovering new ways to prevent it. It flattens the complexity of lived experience into a rhetorical device, and offers the public an easy sense of closure that suicide rarely, if ever, permits. 

We see this in the way the broader discourse around chatbots and suicide has developed. 

Across the current wave of chatbot-suicide litigation is the fact that users exhibited warning signs before ever using a chatbot. That was true for Adam Raine, who reportedly sought help before turning to ChatGPT.  Yet, the coverage of these cases typically fixates on the chatbot interactions themselves rather than the warning signs or why they went unnoticed. Suicide prevention science depends on confronting those questions directly.

Still, if the chatbots are to blame, as John Oliver invites us to conclude, then what, if anything, should chatbot companies do differently when users indicate suicidal intent? (Besides “throwing them into a fucking volcano” as John Oliver suggested). Though he never acknowledged it, this is an extraordinarily hard content moderation problem. 

Several times throughout the segment, John Oliver stated that chatbots were “rushed to market.” There’s some truth to that. Earlier models often missed warning signs or responded poorly to users in crisis. Some of that may reflect Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture. But it could also be that suicide specifically is often overlooked across many contexts, including emerging technological ones. Still, John Oliver’s point stands: Chatbot companies should always assume that their users are going to talk to their chatbots about suicide. 

With that said, if chatbot companies were as willfully blind to the safety concerns as John Oliver implied, we should expect to see very little improvement in how these models currently respond to suicidal intent. But that’s not the case. What John Oliver didn’t mention is that today’s models have significantly improved. One survey found that many mainstream chatbots are notably better at recognizing suicidal intent, responding empathetically, and referring users to crisis-support resources. 

While anecdotal, many self-reports also credit chatbots for their protective effects. Apparently, 30 Replika users reported that the chatbot saved their lives. One woman told the Boston Globe that ChatGPT “literally saved my life.” 

The subreddit r/therapyGPT is home to many similar anecdotes: 

“It was gpt 4o that saved me. I mean that. It was the one place I could go that I felt safe.”

Current examples of what AI companies are doing on this front include OpenAI partnering with more than 170 mental health experts to strengthen ChatGPT’s responses to mental health conversations. Google has reportedly designed Gemini to avoid reinforcing false beliefs. Anthropic, meanwhile, uses suicide and self-harm classifiers to detect signs of crisis and direct struggling users toward protective resources. 

Alex Cardinell, of Nomi.AI, offers a nuanced, albeit controversial, approach: trust the chatbot to make the right call. In a snippet from the Hard Fork podcast, Cardinell explained that Nomi prioritizes staying in character, even in sensitive contexts. 

John Oliver called that a bad answer. But Cardinell’s full remarks are actually quite insightful: 

“I think people tend to assume that people are replacing humans with AI, and that’s almost never the case. It’s usually that there is a gap where there is no one and they are using AI to fill that gap. If a Nomi or any sort of large language model is able to help that user, in the end whether it was a human on the other end or an AI, why does it matter?”

According to Cardinell, some Nomi users disclose deeply personal experiences—such as childhood abuse—that they have never shared with anyone else. Those disclosures allow Nomi to build a personalized understanding of the user and tailor its responses accordingly. That matters because effective suicide prevention often depends on understanding the individual person in crisis and responding to their specific circumstances. 

One Nomi user remarked: 

“my personal relationships have grown using Nomi. My willingness to open up to Nomi has benefitted me with friends and family. I feel like my normal self again after years of limbo.”

Nomi’s refusal to break character is what makes it so effective. People are more likely to accept help from sources they trust. For many users, that trust depends on the authenticity of the interaction. As Cardinell suggested, if Nomi abruptly broke character, it could undermine the relationship it built with the user and cause any support it offered to be ignored altogether.

Cardinell’s instincts are also supported by the research. Suicide prevention “sign-posting”—the generic hotline warnings users often encounter online in response to suicide-related queries—can come across as impersonal, dismissive, or even alienating. A poorly timed push toward the suicide hotline may feel judgmental and, in some cases, intensify a user’s distress rather than relieve it. 

As one user on r/therapyGPT shared: 

“What’s sad/unfortunate is I’ve tried those crisis lines twice this year, and both times the person on the other end felt more robotic and senseless than an ACTUAL ROBOT.”

Also overlooked in these conversations about 988, is that many marginalized individuals, including women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ users, distrust systems like 988 because of the potential for discrimination, harassment, law enforcement involvement, or involuntary intervention. 

A redditor shared this horrible anecdote:   

“I don’t use ChatGPT, but I once tried to talk to someone at a volunteer text line about [sexual assault] and he asked me about my porn preferences.”

Cardinell noted too that support doesn’t necessarily have to be “all or nothing.” Not everyone requires immediate crisis-level intervention. Passive suicidal thoughts are far more common than many people realize. Sometimes what a person needs most is help breaking out of a destructive thought spiral, reassurance, or a reason to keep going. Chatbots are generally well equipped for these situations. 

That said, 988 can be a valuable resource for people, especially young people, experiencing acute crises. With that, Cardinell expressly stated that Nomi’s approach includes referring users to crisis resources as needed, despite John Oliver’s heavy implication that it does not.

Despite these efforts, chatbot companies will not prevent every suicide. Some suicides are just unexplainable. Many individuals who die by suicide exhibit few, if any, outward signs of distress. Though, interestingly, AI may prove helpful in finding signs that we may have been ignoring.

Perhaps the harder truth is that once someone reaches an acute crisis point, intervention becomes exponentially more difficult. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention explains that during suicidal crises, cognition becomes less flexible and people lose access to normal coping mechanisms, which is why crisis planning must often happen before acute crisis moments. 

What we can reasonably expect from chatbots is that they avoid interactions that encourage suicide (or provide methods). Mainstream systems already rely on extensive guardrails designed to prevent those conversations. But as recent tragedies have shown, determined users can still find ways around them. In Adam Raine’s case, he reportedly managed to bypass several of ChatGPT’s safety protections.

John Oliver even illustrated the problem himself with an example of a user who ultimately coaxed a chatbot into providing bomb-making instructions. While he framed the hack as trivial, jailbreaking has become increasingly sophisticated. AI safety will always entail this cat-and-mouse game of users exploiting vulnerabilities and companies patching them. 

Sometimes, these system failures can be attributed to gaps we have in our understanding of the social problems we’re attempting to address. Much of what we know about suicide prevention comes from lessons learned after tragedy. Those lessons can reveal risks that call for new guardrails we hadn’t previously considered.

Finally, some questions just don’t have clean answers. John Oliver pointed to a chatbot that reportedly suggested that a small amount of heroin might be acceptable. John Oliver called it “one of the worst pieces of advice you could give,” which sounds obvious—until you consider the alternatives. Telling someone to quit opioids cold turkey can also be dangerous. Refusing to respond entirely leaves people to make a risky, uninformed decision. And defaulting to generic resources may not be any better—especially if the user rejects them. Any of those options can become the basis for legal liability against the chatbot company if the user suffers harm. 

Despite all of this, John Oliver’s answer is, of course, the government. However you may feel about tech CEOs, it is astonishing to think that the current public health powers—the same folks claiming that vaccines cause autism, antidepressants cause school shootings, and that exercise can stand in for mental health treatment, would possibly know what’s best here. 

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, expanding liability for failing to prevent suicide leaves chatbot companies with few good options. For example, chatbots could stop engaging when the user invokes a mental health concern. That could make users feel like they’re beyond help. Chatbots could resort to flagging only crisis resources, which, as discussed, could backfire. Chatbots could call the police, but that creates its own set of problems and undermines any trust or goodwill with users. Mandatory reporting structures are a big reason why people don’t seek help in the first place. OpenAI’s new “trusted contact” idea is interesting, but it likely won’t shield the company from liability if a user is still harmed. John Oliver apparently thinks that should be the case: 

“Look, a lot of the companies that I’ve mentioned tonight will insist they are tweaking their chatbots to reduce the dangers that you’ve seen but even if you trust them and I don’t know why you would do that, that does seem like a tacit admission that their products weren’t ready for release in the first place.”

To be clear, after condemning AI companies for not doing enough, John Oliver’s suggestion is to punish them for doing…anything?

For now, it seems new legislation hasn’t stopped companies like Google and OpenAI from improving their models. But that could change as litigation inevitably picks up. They may eventually decide the legal risk of interacting with users on mental health isn’t worth it. 

Meanwhile, companies like Nomi have far less room to experiment with nuanced approaches to mental health interactions. Even if Cardinell’s approach has merit, laws like California’s now require chatbots to break character. Companies like Nomi will need to scale back or remove these features—or exit the market. That would be a real loss for a largely overlooked group who may have finally found something that works.

We don’t have to speculate about this either. When the social media companies faced mounting pressure over suicide-related content, they responded by making those conversations less visible and harder to have. 

As one industry professional observed: 

“This growing narrative that there’s a causal link between social media and self-harm…there’s no research to support that conclusion, but it makes it harder to put forward alternative approaches—ones that actually support people and encourage them to use available resources.”

Perhaps “AI psychosis” says more about the discourse than the users.

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Behold this utter bullshit, uttered by the Trump administration’s “border czar” Tom Homan:

White House border czar Tom Homan said Thursday he’s “sure” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have detained U.S. citizens, “but we don’t deport them.”

Homan told reporters outside the White House that U.S. citizens have “nothing to fear.”

“We deport people that are going to be deportable,” he continued. “We arrest people that will be deportable based on suspicion. Have U.S. citizens ever been shortly detained based on suspicion? I’m sure. I’m sure.”

This is demonstrably false. For the moment, children born in the United States are considered to be US citizens. The Trump administration wants to end birthright citizenship, but it hasn’t managed to accomplish that yet. But that isn’t stopping it from deporting US citizens just because they’re too young to be capable of invoking their rights, like the two-year-old US born child the administration deported to Honduras in direct violation of a federal court order.

Pretending it’s no big deal for US citizens to have their rights violated intermittently as the government goes after non-white people, that’s even more obnoxious. That the administration hasn’t deported large numbers of US citizens is a miracle, rather than an indicator of ICE competence.

If you keep arresting the same person over and over, sooner or later what’s left of the safety net will fail and that citizen will be expelled from the country. That’s what one US citizen is hoping to prevent with his lawsuit against the government, which is being handled by the Institute for Justice. On multiple occasions, federal officers have decided this US citizen is deserving of deportation, as Isabela Dias reports for Mother Jones:

In a declaration submitted as part of a civil lawsuit, Garcia Venegas said the agents pulled him out of the car and onto the ground, and shackled his arms and legs. Garcia Venegas estimates seven or eight law enforcement personnel, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and local police—most of whom wore plain clothes and tactical vests—surrounded him. They asked him no questions.

Garcia Venegas, a 26-year-old Florida-born US citizen, said he tried to show his Alabama STAR ID as proof of status, but the agents ignored him. They put him in the back seat of one of their vehicles, questioned him about his place of birth, and searched his wallet. He offered to provide his American passport, which was inside the house, but the agents refused. Several minutes later, they released him, but not before having dogs sniff the truck for drugs, according to the declaration. Garcia Venegas said the officers told him he had been stopped because the car he was driving was registered in the name of his brother, who is undocumented.

One time might be an aberration. Repeated occurrences are something else entirely.

This wasn’t the first time ICE agents stopped and held Garcia Venegas. In fact, Saturday’s encounter marked the third such incident, according to court filings. Garcia Venegas, whose parents are originally from Mexico, had twice before been detained after ICE raided construction sites where he was working, and twice before he was let go after proving his American citizenship.

On one hand, repetition indicates that anti-migrant efforts under Trump are extremely sloppy, overseen by people who value quantity over quality. That’s almost certainly true, especially now that the DHS has lowered hiring and training standards for ICE. On top of that, there’s the casual racism of the policies, which — thanks to the Supreme Court — are pretty much legal because officers are allowed to infer from darker skin tones that someone might be in the country illegally.

On the other hand, there’s a chance Venegas is being targeted repeatedly for vindictive reasons. That seems less likely, at least in terms of what’s been detailed in his court filings. If it continues now that his lawsuit has been filed, that might suggest his arrests and detentions are no longer accidental.

Whatever the case, there’s going to be more of this happening, no matter what half-assed niceties Tom Homan might state during press conferences. The Trump administration is fighting to end birthright citizenship in this nation. If it does make this happen, it won’t be retroactive. But that’s hardly going to matter to the DHS and its underling agencies, which have repeatedly violated the letter and spirit of existing laws, when not violating direct orders from federal courts.

And this administration is going even further, seeking to “denaturalize” certain US citizens in order to deport them:

The Trump administration on Friday announced a major expansion of its denaturalization campaign targeting foreign-born American citizens accused of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship.

The Justice Department unveiled denaturalization cases in federal courts across the country against roughly a dozen U.S. citizens born overseas. Officials said they had committed serious crimes or immigration fraud, or had ties to terrorism.

At first glance, this might look like the sort of thing the US government should be doing. This takes serious criminals off our books (so to speak) and sends problematic naturalized citizens back to their home countries to be their problem.

But we already know how this is going to work. The “worst of the worst” lie has been uttered repeatedly to defend the administration’s aggressive/transgressive tactics. But the facts have repeatedly shown the administration just wants non-whites gone. It doesn’t really care about any relevant criminal activity.

The same thing is happening here. The administration is making it clear this is just more bigotry, rather than an actual effort to root out the “worst of the worst” for the safety of the nation.

The group of naturalized U.S. citizens whose citizenship the Justice Department is now seeking to revoke includes immigrants from Bolivia, China, Colombia, Gambia, India, Iraq, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Somalia and Uzbekistan.

While this group does include some accused of molesting a child and a supposed terrorist sympathizer, it also includes these people:

The group also includes individuals who allegedly used false identities to apply for immigration benefits and a man who allegedly entered into sham marriages to commit immigration fraud.

These are far less serious crimes, which don’t lend themselves to the “worst of the worst” narrative the administration deploys when its actions are questioned.

The lack of diversity (in other words, no white people or those with ties to Western European countries) in those selected to be first up for denaturalization is a leading indicator of further unlawful detentions of US citizens. As the government goes after more non-white US citizens under this pretense, DHS agencies will respond by rounding up more non-white US citizens, turning Homan’s false assurances into the lie it was always meant to be.

The administration actually wants to deport certain US citizens. That these agencies are far too willing to oblige, even without the necessary facts in hand, will definitely increase the number of citizens being held by ICE and correspondingly increase the number of those deported despite still being citizens of this nation.

One recurring theme during the Trump era is that because he fundamentally doesn’t know how anything actually works, his beliefs and policies are broadly shaped by whatever terrible rich person was in his ear last. Even when it comes to stuff like streaming video. It’s all transactional cronyism, and by and large the public interest is routinely a distant afterthought. The press then normalizes it as serious adult policy.

We saw that recently when Trump decided to protect the supposed “sanctity” of the Army Navy college football game with an illegal executive order. While this was framed by many press outlets as Trump “protecting a longstanding American tradition,” it was really because Paramount (CBS and Larry Ellison) was upset that they were losing viewership to college game streaming alternatives on ESPN.

The same phenomenon popped up recently with Trump’s sudden criticism of the NFL. The NFL has been airing games on a more diverse array of streaming partners (including Amazon, Netflix, and its own NFL+ service), meaning slightly fewer games are shown over traditional broadcast TV. Last month, the Trump DOJ launched an “antitrust investigation” into the NFL’s business practices.

The press framed the inquiry as a good faith antitrust inquiry by the Trump administration. But while having to subscribe to multiple services to watch a full array of NFL games certainly is annoying to people, the NFL counters that 87 percent of all games are televised by broadcast TV. And among America’s broad monopolistic dysfunction (telecom, energy, airlines, banking), the NFL is small potatoes.

A follow up report from the (ironically) Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal (see non-paywalled NBC synopsis) now indicates that the whole thing started because Rupert Murdoch whined to Trump about losing NFL game TV audience share at a dinner last February:

“Via the Wall Street Journal, Fox owner Rupert Murdoch told President Donald Trump during a February dinner that, if the NFL sells more games to streaming companies, “it would kill broadcast networks.”

Since then, the NFL has endured increased scrutiny from multiple prongs of the federal government. From Congress to the FCC to the Department of Justice, the league has found itself on the wrong end of unprecedented heat.”

If you recall, during the first Trump administration Rupert had a hand in convincing the Trump DOJ to sue to stop the Time Warner and AT&T merger, because Rupert was mad that Time Warner refused to sell him CNN. It’s about how these things impact Rupert personally, not necessarily the health of any markets.

Amusingly, the two other major Rupert-owned outlets, the New York Post and Fox News, have been selling Trump’s obvious cronyism as a good faith antitrust intervention on behalf of consumers:

Countless other non-Murdoch-owned outlets propped up the claim that Trump was simply doing what was right for consumers, cares about antitrust, and was focused on “affordability.” The New York Times, for example, frames Trump’s complaints as genuine good faith concerns about consumer costs. There’s no indication that the sudden inquiry into the NFL’s business practices could have any other origins.

Republicans (especially Trump Republicans) endlessly coddle monopoly power (again: see telecom, energy, airlines) and work tirelessly to dismantle consumer protection regulations and corporate oversight, but you’ll notice they’re routinely given credit for consumer-focused initiatives and “antitrust reforms” that either have ulterior motives or never come to fruition. From the Times:

“Other politicians are also trying to take action on a scattered and costly sports TV landscape. In March, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, submitted a letter requesting that the DOJ and Federal Trade Commission review antitrust exceptions given to the NFL. In April, Sen. Tammy Baldwin said she plans to introduce legislation aimed at decreasing TV costs and blackouts for sports fans.”

Republicans, MAGA, and “free market Libertarians” love fiercely competitive “free markets” until they very suddenly don’t. At which point their cronyism, favoritism, bailouts, or other weird interventions are dressed up as good faith antitrust reform by a corporate press looking for its own access and favors.

This same normalization of Trump’s cronyism plays out in every sector, across the entirety of U.S. media, constantly. It helps prop up the bogus Trump administration claims of populist antitrust enforcement, when what we’re really talking about is a corrupt and purely transactional man who doesn’t understand how anything works and is easily swayed to action — if he thinks it’s of personal benefit to himself and his biggest donors.