The velocity with which RFK Jr. continues to break the promises he made during his confirmation hearings is simply incredible. As we get further and further away from those hearings, which amazingly occurred only 21 months ago, we may lose sight of the assurances Kennedy gave directly to Congress about his plans if appointed to lead HHS. For the purposes of this post, here are two we’ll key in on.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) grilled Kennedy about the money he’s made in the private sector from lawsuits against vaccine makers and accused him of planning to profit from potential future policies making it easier to sue.

“Kennedy can kill off access to vaccines and make millions of dollars while he does it,” Warren said during the Senate Finance Committee hearing. “Kids might die, but Robert Kennedy can keep cashing in.”

Warren’s statement prompted an assurance by Kennedy.

“Senator, I support vaccines,” he said. “I support the childhood schedule. I will do that.”

Days later, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, declared Kennedy had pledged to maintain existing vaccine recommendations if confirmed. Cassidy, a physician specializing in liver diseases and a vocal supporter of vaccination, had questioned Kennedy sharply in a hearing about his views on shots.

“If confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ recommendations without changes,” Cassidy said during a speech on the Senate floor explaining his vote for Kennedy.

Kennedy was lying. He almost immediately went about violating those promises at HHS and its child agencies. He dismantled ACIP and rebuilt it with like-minded conspiracy theorists. He went about altering the childhood vaccine schedule. He has failed to actually support vaccines in America. He violated his pledge with the thoroughness of a completionist playing a video game. When hauled before Congress to ask just what the hell his problem was and why he did literally the opposite of what he’d promised, he yelled at Congress and lied some more.

And now he’s doing it all over again by disallowing states to get childhood COVID vaccines through the CDC’s Vaccine for Children program.

As respiratory virus season nears and fall vaccination drives get underway, more than half of US children are facing uncertainty over access to this year’s COVID-19 shot. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has unexpectedly delayed the distribution of the shots to a key federal program and some states.

Usually, the CDC would allow states to order the newly available seasonal COVID-19 vaccines through the federal Vaccine for Children (VFC) program, which provides vaccines at no cost to children who are uninsured, underinsured, Medicaid-eligible, or Indigenous people in the US. Approximately 52 percent of all US children are eligible for vaccines through the program.

“The delay in VFC means delays in these states’ ability to get vaccine for all children,” Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases and chief medical officer at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, told The Guardian.

Now, when the federal government blocks vaccines for the greatest pandemic in several generations to potentially half of the children in the entire country and American territories, you’d have to think they have a good reason for doing so. Your guess is as good as mine as to what that could be, because HHS ain’t talking.

In a statement, the Department of Health and Human Services told Ars Technica that “CDC has not yet finalized procurement decisions for COVID-19 vaccines through the Vaccines for Children and Section 317 programs.” The department—currently run by ardent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—declined to answer the question of why there was a delay in the decision. But the statement suggested that Trump officials were questioning whether children should get the vaccine.

“HHS and CDC are committed to … ensuring that vaccines purchased through federally funded programs are appropriate for the populations those programs serve,” the department said in the statement. It added that additional information about the decision will be released “soon.”

This is bullshit and it should result in congressional hearings. Kennedy must answer for this generally and explain yet another broken promise. He told senators, to their faces, that he would not be taking anyone’s ability to get vaccinated away from them. That was a promise made to the representatives of the American public and he lied about it. That must be answered for, or else there is no longer any point to having confirmation hearings, or perhaps to having oversight of the Executive Branch at all.

And Kennedy isn’t the only one who should be answering questions. Where the hell is Erica Schwartz in all of this? The new CDC Director was supposed to be one of the adults in the room. She was pitched as a bulwark against Kennedy’s insanity. Here, she appears to be completely out to lunch.

To the American Senate: do you all like being played for fools so publicly? Is this some sort of kink? If ever there was a cabinet secretary in the modern era worthy of being fired from his position, isn’t Kennedy it?

Don’t you have any pride?

Over the last few years, it has become accepted knowledge that the internet — mainly social media and, lately, AI tools — was damaging the mental health of kids and increasing the suicide rate among that demographic. To hear the media and politicians talk about it, this was the biggest issue on the planet and we had to do basically everything possible to block social media (and AI) from kids.

Of course, the narrative was always bullshit. While there had been an uptick in suicide rates among teens between 2010 and 2020, they were way below the rates in the 80s and 90s. And by the time Jonathan Haidt’s “moral panic in a book” came out blaming social media for teen mental health problems, the data already didn’t support his claims, as I pointed out in my review of the book right after it came out.

In that review of the book, I highlighted that while suicide rates among teens had ticked up in the US, they had actually declined in many other countries — including France, Spain, New Zealand, and elsewhere — despite plenty of social media usage in those countries. Similarly, the data on mental health issues was clouded by (1) much more openness to talking about mental health, and (2) importantly, new guidance under the Affordable Care Act that mandated increased screening for depression in adolescent girls, while simultaneously instructing clinicians to record suicidal ideation differently than in the past, which resulted in a massive uptick in such numbers.

And now the narrative violation continues, as the latest CDC survey data shows that mental health concerns among teens have been declining since their 2021 peak (i.e., as we were coming out of the worst of the COVID crisis).

Continuing a trend first observed in 2023, teenagers surveyed at high schools across the country in 2025 reported improvements in several key measures, including persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, serious thoughts of suicide and attempting suicide in the last year.

Some might argue that this is due to the work of Haidt and politicians banning social media for kids, but the data doesn’t seem to show that at all.

Thirty-six percent of teenagers said that they used social media every hour or more, a similar percentage to what was seen in 2023, when the data was first reported.

And while this survey doesn’t track AI usage, we know from other research that a large majority of teens now use AI chatbots, with roughly three in ten using them daily.

This does not mean, of course, that we can declare victory. There are still, clearly, plenty of teens dealing with mental health challenges.

But the data show that many teenagers, especially girls and teenagers who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual, are still struggling. Thirty-three percent of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the last 12 months, down from a peak of 42 percent in 2021. Fourteen percent of teenagers reported that they had seriously considered attempting suicide, down from 22 percent in 2021.

As actual experts have been pointing out for years, the reality around mental health and suicidal ideation is extremely complicated and not fully understood. But, over and over again it seems that the approach recommended by actual experts is not blanket bans on technology or simply “blaming” anything, but rather better efforts at identifying those going through mental health challenges while simultaneously making more mental health resources available to all who need them.

But, the narrative is the narrative. Hell, it was just weeks ago that a judge in New Mexico took it as irrefutably proven that social media was damaging to kids’ mental health. Does anyone get to go back and show him the latest data suggesting that maybe something else was driving this? Or do we just keep treating the narrative as fact?

This is what I’ve been saying for years: when we misdiagnose the problem and blame the wrong thing, the “solutions” we get are not solutions at all. Indeed, they could be making the problem worse by not actually putting in place the tools and resources to help those in need while, simultaneously, doing real damage to groups that rely on internet communities for their own mental health support.

I’d like to think that as more data like this comes out, further debunking Haidt’s narrative, we could get back to a serious discussion about how to actually help kids who are struggling. But I fear the easy comfort of a moral panic is too strong a pull for people to give it up that quickly.

Originally published as an op-ed in The Mercury News. Republished here with permission from the author.

Meta’s settlement with the state attorneys general (currently awaiting court approval) has been touted as industry-redefining. Indeed, Meta desperately hopes it will be. Although Meta was the only industry player to negotiate its terms, the settlement agreement is structured to broadly reshape the social media industry. In addition to Meta’s guaranteed settlement payments of $12 billion, Meta will pay the state AGs a total of $5 billion in additional bonuses — if the state AGs restrict minors’ usage of Meta’s key competitors (and make comparable settlement payments).

The settlement’s quid-pro-quo effectively places a bounty on the heads of Meta’s competitors — and deputizes the state AGs as Meta’s bounty-hunters. Meta wants the government to hit Meta’s rivals. If state AGs deliver the results Meta wants, Meta pays them off. The quid-pro-quo is not subtle. It’s out in the open for everyone to see, but that doesn’t make it any less corrupt or corrosive.

It’s easy to understand why Meta dangled the bounty in front of the state AGs. For years, Meta has urged governments to increase their regulation of social media—but only so long as any new regulation doesn’t disadvantage Meta more than its rivals. By unilaterally entering into the settlement agreement, Meta has exposed itself to a risk that it ends up as the only major industry player hindered by the agreement’s restrictions.

This would put Meta in a precarious market position, especially given the settlement agreement’s time limits on use and the fact that Meta’s competitors are just a click away for consumers. The economic benefits of having its competitors equally restricted are surely worth far more than $5 billion to Meta. That’s why Meta will happily share a piece of its financial upside with the state AGs if they deliver their end of the bargain.

While it’s clearly in Meta’s interests to pay off the state AGs to impose the settlement terms on Meta’s rivals, why are state AGs so eager to become Meta’s bounty-hunters?

To be fair, the state AGs have plenty of motivation to prosecute Meta’s social media rivals without any additional bounties from Meta. Indeed, prior to the settlement, several state AGs had already initiated enforcement actions against some of Meta’s rivals. The state AGs might view the $5 billion bounty as a financial windfall for doing work they were willing to do for free.

Unfortunately, any windfall from Meta’s bounty arrangement comes at a high cost to the state AGs and their constituents.

First, the quid-pro-quo taints all further social media-related state AG enforcement efforts against Meta’s rivals. Going forward, judges, juries and Meta’s rivals will justifiably wonder: Are the state AGs bringing the enforcement action because they genuinely believe their constituents are being harmed, or because they hope to cash in Meta’s bounty?

Second, the state AGs have shown how justice is for sale in their offices. The state AGs will do the anticompetitive work of controlling the marketplace activities of a company’s rival — if enough money is on the table. Putting a price on justice this way degrades the rule of law.

In promoting the settlement, the state AGs have proudly claimed that they are working to protect the children in their states. Instead, Meta’s bounty demonstrates that the state AGs are actually working for Meta. This is a good reason for the courts to think carefully about whether the settlement should be approved.

Our society needs to have difficult and high-stakes conversations about how we can improve children’s welfare online. By selling out the integrity of their enforcement decisions, the state AGs have discredited themselves as contributors to those conversations.

Eric Goldman is a law professor and associate dean for research at Santa Clara University School of Law. He has been teaching and researching internet law for over 30 years.

You may recall that after he had won the 2024 Presidential election, the sorest winner in the history of sore winners, Donald Trump sued retiring pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register for… having reported the — admittedly surprising and, in retrospect, wildly off — poll results suggesting that Kamala Harris actually had a chance to win over Donald Trump in Iowa. As we pointed out at the time, this was utter nonsense for multiple fairly obvious reasons. Poll data isn’t defamatory. It’s just the result of a poll. Also, what fucking damages could he possibly argue, given that he won?

Anyway, an Iowa state judge has now dismissed the case, while calling out what kind of chilling effects allowing it to proceed would have had on speech. The ruling is pretty thorough and fairly obvious, even if it sucks that Selzer had to deal with it for the past two years.

This case sets a President, a member of Congress, and a former state senator against a pollster and a newspaper, and it arises out of an election. A case of that kind invites the reader to look for a political result. The Court’s role is narrower. It is to sit as an impartial arbiter, to apply the law without passion or prejudice, and to rule without regard to the politics of the day. As such, the only question before the Court is whether the Petition states a claim the law recognizes. At its core, the Plaintiffs’ Petition seeks to stretch both Iowa statutory and common law beyond their current bounds, turning speech that enjoys the highest category of First Amendment protection into a liability. After considering the parties’ arguments, the Court must conclude that the protection is too great and the reach is too far. The case must therefore be dismissed.

We had previously covered some of the extremely shady procedural maneuvers that Trump’s lawyers had made in the course of the case, including dropping the federal case and refiling in state court in an attempt to dodge Iowa’s new anti-SLAPP law. But the state case was dead on arrival as well, even as Trump’s lawyers did a ridiculous “there’s no First Amendment implication here at all” shrug:

Plaintiffs’ initial argument is that the First Amendment has no relevance to this case. They say this litigation has nothing to do with a government attempt to chill private speech; no claim involves government suppression; and that Defendants’ argument over the absence of a general government power to punish political falsehoods is beside the point, because the parties on both sides are private. If Plaintiffs were right about this, the rest of this Part would be unnecessary. They are not right.

Under First Amendment principles, the identity of the party seeking the court to sanction speech is irrelevant. What matters is whether state law, applied by a state court’s judgment, will be used to do so. That principle was set in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which was itself a private tort action between private parties. In that case, the Supreme Court set the precedent that what a State may not constitutionally accomplish through a criminal statute is likewise prohibited in its civil law, and the prospect of damage awards may inhibit speech more effectively than the threat of prosecution. It makes no difference that a State is acting solely through its judicial branch, because the Constitution asks a court to scrutinize the application of state power.

This point has been applied to tort claims in the decades since, and it is clear that the Free Speech Clause may serve as a defense in state tort suits.

We occasionally hear this kind of nonsense from internet trolls, arguing that “defamation has nothing to do with the First Amendment, because it’s between two private parties, not the government.” But as the judge explains here, that’s not how any of it works. What matters is that the state, through its courts, is being asked to punish speech. That’s why NYT v. Sullivan (itself a lawsuit between private parties) made it clear that the First Amendment is quite relevant to any defamation claim.

In response to this case law, the Plaintiffs cite no authority for the contrary proposition, and the Court is aware of none. The rules are simple. Just because a private party rather than a prosecutor seeks the sanction does not remove the constitutional protection.

The First Amendment clearly applies in this case.

The fact that the polls turned out to be “false” also doesn’t change things, because the Supreme Court has made it clear that the vast majority of false speech is still protected by the First Amendment, with only a few narrow categories of false speech (like defamation and fraud) carved out. And, you should want it that way, because otherwise, any time anyone is aggrieved about someone’s speech, they could take them to court and spend years and millions of dollars fighting over truth vs. falsity. It would be a recipe for non-stop SLAPP suits.

In particular, this case turns on the principle that falsity alone does not create a category of unprotected speech. The Supreme Court has never recognized that false statements by themselves are not entitled to First Amendment protection, and it refused to do so when squarely presented with the opportunity. The Eighth Circuit held that even knowingly false campaign speech is not excluded from the Amendment’s protection.

Plaintiffs attempt to rebut this authority on falsity with a listing of statements from decisions in other contexts as support for the proposition that there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact, and that false speech is not protected for its sake.

This line of argument is unpersuasive because the Supreme Court has considered those very statements and explained that they do not support the conclusion that false statements are, generally, outside the Constitution’s protection. The passages Plaintiffs cite were written in the context of an area of speech that is unprotected for its own sake, and they do not stand for the general proposition that falsity is unprotected.

But, even more importantly, a poll isn’t the kind of thing that can be “true” or “false” in the first place. It’s an estimate, a snapshot of what a sample of people said at one moment, with a margin of error, about an event that hasn’t happened yet. It’s no more “false” when the result differs than a weather forecast is “false” when it doesn’t rain, which the judge notes:

A poll is simply an estimate. A poll reports responses from a sample of voters and includes a reported margin of error. It is based on a known methodology, and concerns an event that has not yet happened. Things of that nature are not the sort of things that can be said to be true or false in the manner required by the fraud exception. Opinion polls of random samples of voters are snapshots with margins of error, and campaigns are dynamic. A statement of conjecture about a future state of affairs is not provably false, even when the speaker is alleged to have known better. Ratings, forecasts, and predictions that reflect a subjective weighing of objective data points are not sufficiently factual to be susceptible to proof, and predicting uncertain future events is not an exact science for which a publisher may be held to account.

Honestly, this ruling by Judge Scott J. Beattie does a really excellent job cleanly and clearly explaining basic First Amendment principles. Too often in First Amendment cases, the judges get caught up in the details and legalese, which often makes it harder for lay people to understand the basic concepts. But Judge Beattie’s writing is very direct and on point regarding how the First Amendment actually works.

Is there actual malice? Of course not. Actual malice means they published it knowing it was false, or with reckless disregard for whether it was, meaning they actually had serious doubts about its truth. Trump, as per usual, presented zero evidence of actual malice:

Plaintiffs are public figures, and the Iowa Poll dealt with a matter of public concern. The privilege which bars defamation actions thus applies to Plaintiffs’ claims, and Plaintiffs must allege that Defendants published the poll knowing it to be false, or with reckless disregard as to the truth of the poll.91 Reckless disregard is not whether a reasonably prudent publisher would investigate further; it must be supported by facts that a publisher actually had serious doubts as to the truth of the publication.

The Petition does not contain such facts of actual malice. Although Plaintiffs have asserted that manipulation and falsification occurred in their pleadings and at oral argument, the Petition alleges no facts that support the notion that samples were manipulated, responses falsified, or the questionnaire slanted. What it alleges is that the result proved badly wrong and that Defendants harbored political animosity toward the Plaintiffs. Neither suggests the required state of mind. A published estimate that proves to be inaccurate is evidence only of error; ill will directed at the subject of a publication is not evidence of doubt as to its truth.

Would granting the injunction Trump sought against future “false polls” be an unconstitutional prior restraint? Certainly:

Plaintiffs seek an injunction against Defendants’ further publication of any false polls. The threat of prior restraint on publication is the gravest and least attractive encroachment on the First Amendment and is subject to a strong presumption of unconstitutionality. The scope of the relief sought would require this Court to determine the accuracy of unmeasured polls and to prevent the publication of speech yet to be made. Other courts asked to provide such relief have refused, and this Court would refuse.

Would applying the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act to the publishing of this poll violate the First Amendment under “strict scrutiny” (the standard required for the suppression of speech in a context like this)? Abso-fucking-lutely:

The Press Defendants argue, as to Count I alone, that Plaintiffs’ construction of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act could not survive strict scrutiny. The Court agrees. The Plaintiffs’ construction of the Act would have subjected a pollster to liability for publishing an estimate that turned out to be inaccurate. Such a construction would constitute content-based regulation of core political speech, and the State would have the nearly impossible burden of justifying it. Although protection of the integrity of elections is a compelling interest properly considered in the abstract, the State must demonstrate that the particular restriction it seeks to impose is narrowly tailored to advance that interest. The Eighth Circuit has held that punishing false political speech is not permissible because the remedy for false speech is true speech. Plaintiffs’ construction would not meet that narrowly tailored test.

Basically, no matter how you look at it, no matter which standard you use, this whole mess of a censorial lawsuit was clearly designed to chill speech. As the judge points out, there’s effectively zero limit to Trump’s argument here:

The Court put the consequence of the Plaintiffs’ theory to their counsel directly. Asked whether the theory would expose meteorologists and sports commentators to liability to anyone who acted on a forecast or a prediction, counsel answered that it would not, “as proven by the fact that you don’t see those cases being brought.” The absence of such suits is not a limiting principle. It is the reason a limiting principle has not yet been needed.

Basically, the reason we don’t see such cases is because they’re obviously bullshit. And yet Trump, then the president-elect, brought his anyway, and kept pushing it as the sitting president. Solely because he wanted vengeance and pain brought on someone who issued a poll (speech) he didn’t like.

Unfortunately, though, the court refused to issue sanctions on Trump and his lawyers for bringing such a bullshit lawsuit in the first place, saying that even though Trump asked the court to extend existing law into new realms, it will give him the benefit of the doubt that the request was done in good faith. The court did leave the door open, though: a separate motion arguing the case was brought “for an improper purpose” might fare better. That question just isn’t ripe yet.

We’ve covered dozens upon dozens upon dozens of examples of Donald Trump’s anti-free speech actions over the years. It’s nice to see a court clearly call bullshit on this one.

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Guantanamo Bay has always been shorthand for disappearing people. It’s a place where people cease to exist, along with any rights they may have been afforded if they’d been imprisoned inside the United States. Its name is synonymous with torture and indefinite detention. And the excuse has always been the same: it’s impossible to secure the nation without becoming just like our enemies.

What’s happening now is far more terrifying. It’s no longer just a dumping ground for suspected terrorists. As this report from Mother Jones explains, it’s now just another place to dump deportees in hopes of denying them anything resembling due process. This isn’t exactly new, as Amanda Moore’s report points out:

For years, ICE has operated its own, separate facility at Guantanamo called the Migrant Operations Center, which, according to a 2024 report by the International Refugee Assistance Project, was used to confine refugees apprehended at sea in “prison-like conditions.”

What is new is Trump’s actions during his second term. He ordered the Pentagon to “expand” its detention operations to handle an expected influx of migrants, merging ICE’s operations with the military’s Gitmo detention center.

What’s also new is who the administration has decided to send to this migrant-focused joint Gitmo operation. It’s exactly the sort of people you’d expect Trump to want to be treated the worst: Somalis. Trump has frequently referred to Somalia as a “shithole country.” And the large Somali population in Minneapolis, Minnesota became the instant focus of Trump’s anti-blue state surge efforts in that state.

Late last month, ICE put 12 Somali men on a plane and told them they were being deported to Somalia, according to interviews with community leaders, friends, and family members who are in touch with the detainees. Instead, they arrived at the notorious US military base in Cuba, where seven or eight of them remain. Since then, the men have said, they have been subjected to frigid temperatures, and they are shackled at all times.

It hasn’t been a complete disappearance of these Somali men, although I imagine the administration would have preferred none of them were ever heard from again. The detainees have been given some phone call privileges, which is likely the only reason anyone outside of the administration is aware that this is happening.

Given the history of the Gitmo facility, you might assume the people being sent there now are somehow more dangerous than the thousands of migrants with no criminal records being arrested by ICE officers. Certainly, the DHS would prefer you to believe this:

In an email, a DHS spokesperson claimed that the Somalis flown to Guantanamo in late August “included some of the worst of the worst, with criminal histories including aggravated assaults, weapons offenses, robbery, multiple larcenies, police obstruction, possession of burglary tools, receiving stolen property, trespassing, unauthorized use of a vehicle, multiple drug charges, and DUIs.”

Ah, the “worst of the worst.” Of course. That old thing. And the statement goes on to claim everyone sent to Gitmo after being told they were being deported to their homeland was given “due process” and were subject to final orders of removal.

But the pretense doesn’t hold up because it never does. While Mother Jones can’t speak for all of the people sent to Gitmo, it’s safe to believe this has more to do with them being Somali than it has to do with them being criminals so dangerous they needed to be removed from the country (but still held in US territory) until… whatever ICE decides to do with them next.

It’s far more likely that none of these people have ever been accused, much less convicted, of committing a violent crime.

At least some of the detainees have told people they have spoken to that they are not criminals and have not been charged with crimes. MPR reported last week that one of the men, Adam Abdullah, had received two parking tickets but had no criminal record. Several of the men at Guantanamo were applying for asylum and had work authorization…

That’s just what’s been discovered by other reporting. Moore’s investigative work for Mother Jones did not come across any criminal records for two other Gitmo detainees who arrived on the same supposed deportation flight. Assuming the worst, at best maybe half of the seven or eight remaining detainees had some sort of criminal record. This could, of course, all be cleared up by the DHS releasing criminal records pertaining to the Somalis sent to Gitmo. But it hasn’t, which is extremely telling, since ICE and DHS officials are always posting stuff to Facebook and X about arrestees if they can find any dirt at all on someone now in ICE custody.

The Trump administration still has a couple of years to go before it runs out of Trump. This is a leading indicator, rather than the belated accounting of a temporary effort the administration no longer considers viable. The faster the moves and the further the distance, the less likely it is that detainees can make their case in court. This robs them of jurisdiction and the distance makes it all but impossible to make personal appearances in court. It also allows the government to pretend the burdens of returning detainees to the US outweighs whatever harms courts declare to be supportive of ongoing litigation.

The administration can’t win without cheating. A nearly unanimous majority of court decisions have sided with migrants and their due process rights. In response to the legal reality, we should expect the administration to do more of this: the “disappearance” of migrants to off-shore detention centers before their cases can be heard.

After burning $80 billion on the failed metaverse pivot — and billions more on desperate “me too” offerings in the AI space — Meta is looking to leverage its massive ad dominance to colonize the agentic AI (or personal assistant) market. So they recently introduced Muse, an AI agent represented by cutesy and personalized avatars, capable of doing semi-complex tasks like booking appointments and shopping.

The capabilities and novelty of the agent, as usual, tend to overshadow the potential privacy threats of giving unethical companies access to even more personal accounts and data. And right on cue, security researchers found a massive zero-day flaw in Muse that allowed any app or terminal command to gain access to the authentication token linking users to their Muse account. 

That not only created potential access to the Muse account (and everything it had access to in turn), it allowed for user surveillance that wasn’t transparent to the Muse user. Great stuff!

Meta marketing had spent a lot of time claiming they’d kept security and privacy at the forefront of Muse’s design so it was a bit of an embarrassing launch. And it certainly didn’t assuage fears about giving big companies like Meta access to even more personal information and login data:

“To me, the bar is infinitely higher in terms of the security of these apps. They don’t have to be perfect, but when you take a look at Muse, it’s like they didn’t, in my opinion, think about security, which is really worrisome,” Wardle said. “At the very least, they should be thinking about security from the very start, and they are just not.”

Meta’s adventure in mass-appeal agentic AI also ran into a roadblock when Amazon announced it was banning the agent from shopping on Amazon. Amazon’s announcement, made about 12-hours before Wardle discovered the vulnerability, claimed Muse was an “unauthorized AI agent” that “violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use:”

“We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate. This helps ensure a safe, secure, and reliable customer experience, and it is how others operate including food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders for, delivery services apps and the stores they shop from, and online travel agencies and the airlines they book tickets with for customers. Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience.”

Amazon had already sued Perplexity over its comet browser (though unsuccessfully so far), and taken steps to block shopping agents from both Google and OpenAI. You can see how this could steadily devolve into an annoying walled-garden arms race that erodes the functionality of everybody’s agents.

There’s obviously interesting potential in agentic AI (aka software), but like so many other arenas, our failure to enforce antitrust law, and obsession with lobotomizing our regulators, means the market is likely to be dominated by the biggest companies. Companies that already spent the last decade making it clear they have very little ethics. And are keen to anti-competitively ratfuck their way to market domination.

Which is to say that Amazon’s blockade of Muse is likely only the beginning. In that sense, the future is going to, in a lot of ways, look very much like the past. It’s also another reason why you’d like to see the sector disrupted by cheaper, on-device, open source, open weighted AI alternatives where ideally the end user gets more transparency, better potential security, and more control.

Instead, I suspect 2027 is going to be heavily dominated by companies like Meta (and Amazon) scaring the government about China, resulting in terrible, protectionist, new AI legislation ghost written by its own lawyers.