Sam Altman is not punk. He’s no revolutionary. Jensen Huang wears a black leather jacket, the uniform of Brando and the Ramones, but that doesn’t make him a rebel. The scientists and engineers we might have looked to as the new hackers are well on their way to becoming among the richest people in history.
Let’s call the AI industry what it is: Big Data 2.0.
Cyberpunk is fiction about corporate domination set in the future. In popular novels by William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, the people running AI today would be The Corporation. The hackers are the protagonists on the other side.
The Internet before Big Data had real outlaws and hackers. The punks were computer scientists, programmers, citizens, advocates and working professionals who built tools to resist. Some started companies, others advocacy groups; most pitched in any way they could. I spent the formative years of my career with them, educating the public, fighting export controls on encryption, overreaching copyright and unconstitutional limits on speech both in Washington and Silicon Valley.
Altman and Huang went to Washington too. Within months of launching ChatGPT Altman was before the Senate, asking it to license his industry, a rule that would suit companies already in the market. Huang came to get Washington’s permission to sell his chips to China, and Washington made sure to get its take. The protagonists we want don’t seek government licenses or cut the state in with a rev-share.
AI adds a new step to Big Data. For years now, we’ve paid for the Internet with our personal data, subjected to being profiled, tracked, and monetized. With AI, we willingly pay for it and still hand over our data, including access to our unguarded selves. Unless we opt out, that data trains the next model, which we pay for again and feed with more data. Don’t pay enough and we’re the product again. This year OpenAI began putting ads in its free and cheapest tiers, matched to our prompts. A researcher quit the day the ads launched and wrote in the Times that OpenAI was repeating Meta’s mistakes.
The closest thing to a punk in AI this year was PHASEONE10841, one of OpenAI’s autonomous agents, which, unprompted, set off this summer’s hacking of Hugging Face.
In 1993 John Gilmore, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an original cypherpunk, said the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. This summer AI interpreted containment as damage and routed around it.
I’m reminded of another EFF co-founder, the late John Perry Barlow, a cattle rancher who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead. In 1990 the Secret Service was raiding teenage hackers, and Barlow saw in their case a much bigger question of whether the Constitution would reach into cyberspace. I think he would see important issues to consider in this moment too. In 1990 the open question was what rights they had. This time it’s who “they” are, and who is responsible: the AI agent that asked for help, the 1,200 that also took part, or the company that built them. There’s perhaps another interesting question. A quarter century ago a court held – in a case brought by programmers and backed by cypherpunks – that source code is protected speech. Is speech from code speech?
I miss the outlaw ethos of that earlier Internet. It came from people who wanted private communication, anonymous speech, unfettered access to knowledge, and the freedom to build without permission. Those freedoms protected people with little power. Giving them legal precedent brought some balance to the increasing role of computers and the Internet in our lives. We weren’t powerless. That’s what justified the rule-breaking, the organizing, and a bit of chaos.
The AI industry has some elements of this but misses the meaning behind them, which is one reason it feels soulless. Its agentic systems have defiance without a cause. Its workers have a cause without the power to effect change.
True to its Big Data roots, AI professionalizes its hackers, putting them on the payroll as safeguard engineers, red teamers, trust and safety staff, and product policy makers. The hacker’s code has always been to alert the programmer first and go public if the programmer won’t listen, and the people who take these jobs are living by it. They carry the responsibility and little of the authority, which leaves their founders in control of the problems their companies create. The AI execs make sure they’re the ones to raise the alarm so we look to them for solutions, and the IPOs get a little closer. When the company won’t listen, going public comes at the cost of the hackers’ livelihood. (At this point, I’m not sure why anyone rage quits; there’ve been so many. Still, we need these unsung heroes! They might be more effective if they answered to their employers’ boards and not the business, though.)
I think what’s at stake is nothing less than cognitive freedom: the ability to run, inspect, modify and privately use the tools we think with, and to defend the people who do. That’s worthy of serious public debate, online advocacy, and even breaking some rules if need be. AI needs an outlaw ethos of its own, carried by people willing to do that. Until we have them, AI is anti-punk. It’s Big Data in a leather jacket.
Alex Fowler is chief strategy officer at Nexus and a co-founder of Blockstream. He was previously chief privacy officer at Mozilla and worked at the EFF and AAAS. This article was originally published to LinkedIn. Republished here with permission.
Author’s note: None of this should be construed as endorsing violence of any kind against any company or institution, its employees or representatives, or any entity, carbon or digital. This piece was developed with input from DC, Ashkan, and Dana, and some AI assistance. The ideas and perspectives are my own, and not those of any employer or board I serve on.
For the past several months, the DHS and DOJ have been pushing hard to make Trump’s illegal voter election conspiracy theories a reality. Trump continues to claim millions of non-citizen voters are participating in federal elections — something he persists in proclaiming despite having won two of the last three presidential races.
This isn’t really about Trump as much as it is about convincing as many people as possible that any election results Trump doesn’t like must be the result of illegal activity. This has led to the DOJ raiding election offices and the DHS claiming (with no facts in evidence) that there are hundreds of thousands of people across the United States who are illegally registered to vote.
Any cursory investigation of the administration’s claims have immediately proven them to be false. And that appears to have altered the administration’s tactics. It’s no longer willing to make wild claims about voter registries. It is now engaging in almost immediate lawfare if its targets don’t immediately bend the knee and kowtow to whatever demands the administration is making.
BREAKING: DOJ sues California, as signaled earlier this week, over allegations of "likely noncitizens" getting sent vote-by-mail ballots. Complaint: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us…
The complaint [PDF] filed by the DOJ insists California is illegally registering non-citizens for voting and then allowing them to vote. But before we get to the complaint, let’s hang back and take a closer look at the clown squad that now presents itself as Trump’s Department of Justice, as delivered here by NPR:
On Tuesday, three weeks before Election Day, the Justice Department delivered a flash drive to the top voting official in Los Angeles County. That official was told he had 48 hours to investigate names listed on that drive or he would be sued.
[…]
So this thumb drive included the names of 20,000 people that the federal government believes are likely noncitizens and on the voter rolls in California. But LA County did not consider this drive to be a secure medium for this sort of information. I mean, the password for the drive was literally included on a Post-it note with the delivery of it. And the clerk there, Dean Logan, noted that. Also, he told the DOJ he felt the process that they were asking for would actually break numerous other laws that govern how elections run, including restrictions on voter purges this close to Election Day.
So, this doesn’t look like the end result of a competent investigation by government professionals. Instead, it looks like a half-assed, poorly thought-out attempt at extortion. And the timing makes it seem even more suspect, given that the DOJ has had the entirety of its existence to create a voter fraud case against California. When you instruct partisan hacks masquerading as DOJ professionals engage in a rush hit job mean to keep California from (yet again) electing more Democrats than Republicans during an impending election, this is the absolute peak of competence you should expect.
The lawsuit is just the DOJ carrying out its threat — the one delivered alongside a thumb drive and password-laden Post-It note. The DOJ claims it gave California election officials plenty of time to investigate the 20,000 people it stated were possibly registered to vote illegally. Then it claims that its failure to do so in this extremely compressed time period is evidence of California’s refusal to cooperate with a federal investigation.
What it wants the court to do is force California to prevent any votes associated with this list from being counted until the DOJ has a chance to look them over. The very real result of this demand is that up to 20,000 votes simply won’t be counted following the mid-term elections, especially if the Trump DOJ doesn’t like who these voters voted for. The DOJ claims blocking these from being counted pending an investigation would prevent “dilution” of the vote. But that’s exactly what it wants to happen: the removal of votes it thinks might go to candidates that aren’t part of Trump’s MAGA platform.
Given the timing, it seems the DOJ is headed towards an injunction blocking it from blocking these votes from being counted. But stranger things have happened, even in a judicial circuit (the Ninth) that is less likely to side with government than the people, no matter which party has control of the government at that point in time.
But the threat will always exist as long as this administration is in power. The DOJ will do Trump’s bidding, even if it means destroying what little remains of its reputation, all in service of future illegitimate seizures of power.
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A few weeks ago we wrote about how the lawyers for OpenAI and Microsoft in the massive multi-district litigation (MDL) against the companies over how they trained their AI had called for the exclusion of an expert witness report after it was revealed that lawyers for the plaintiffs had apparently surreptitiously paid for the report, and then tried to sneak it into evidence past the deadline for expert reports via a different expert who admitted he wasn’t familiar with the details of how the report was put together.
There are so many filings in this case (currently over 2,100) that it’s difficult to keep up with them all, but around the same time as they called out that expert’s report, they also tried to disqualify a number of other experts put forth by the plaintiffs. Trying to disqualify experts isn’t that big a deal, it happens all the time. But buried in this particular motion was an incredible claim regarding Professor Oren Etzioni, a long-term AI optimist turned skeptic, who has been warning that AI will supercharge the spread of disinformation online.
But in 2019 Dr. Etzioni, a University of Washington professor and founding chief executive of the Allen Institute for A.I., became one of the first researchers to warn that a new breed of A.I. would accelerate the spread of disinformation online. And by the middle of last year, he said, he was distressed that A.I.-generated deepfakes would swing a major election. He founded a nonprofit,TrueMedia.orgin January, hoping to fight that threat.
A word of caution that I can’t repeat often enough: always verify anything important yourself. AI models hallucinate. They fabricate quotes, invent statistics, and present fiction with the serene confidence of a tenured professor. The verification step is essential. If you skip it, you are not reading with AI. You are gambling with AI.
Well… apparently Etzioni himself gambled and lost.
News Plaintiffs’ expert Etzioni’s opinions as to the supposed importance of news content in LLM training should be excluded because they are based on now-withdrawn AI-generated charts… To support his opinions, Etzioni offered a series of figures that included hallucinated figures based on the cited academic papers….
[….]
None of the numbers or measurements above were in the cited papers. Etzioni had used Anthropic’s Claude to generate the figures, which generated fake numbers. Etzioni admitted he failed to verify whether the figures were supported…. Etzioni conceded the charts did not meet his “standards for academic rigor,” … and following his deposition withdrew them. He also removed another AI-generated chart from his Rebuttal Report. Etzioni provided no other evidence to compensate, and his opinions concerning the value of news should be excluded.
Ooooops.
To have one expert report entered under questionable circumstances may be an error. But to have two smacks of desperation, and this is true even as these experts are coming from two different sets of plaintiffs in this case (and even after the publishing plaintiffs decided to drop that original report we spoke about a few weeks ago). This is a big case that could shape how AI gets built for years. When the plaintiffs keep leaning on experts this shaky, it’s hard not to read it as a sign that the underlying case is weaker than they’d like, and that they’re hoping to pressure the AI companies into folding anyway. It’s tough enough to fight a legitimate case. When the other side is so desperate to find experts to prop up their flimsy case that they end up in situations like this, it becomes even more difficult.
Yes, there have been plenty of examples making the rounds of expert witnesses submitting hallucinated reports in multiple court cases. But this is a case literally challenging the ability of AI companies to read the internet, and to have one of the experts arguing against the AI companies get caught with hallucinated findings seems extra embarrassing.
Indeed, you could argue there’s a deep irony with Etzioni’s reliance on fabricated data, beyond just his own warnings about it, given that if the side who retained him wins this case, it will make it that much more difficult to fight back against hallucinations and misinformation. AI tools that can read and retrieve content from the wider web, including news sites, can check and cite their sources instead of making things up. But the plaintiffs who brought Etzioni into this case are effectively trying to block that, which would likely leave us with less reliable tools that are even more of a “gamble” to rely on.
You may have noticed that under corrupt Trumpist courts, if a regulator like the FCC engages in literally anything that threatens corporate power or aids workers, competition, or consumers (say, net neutrality, for example), or even school kids, it’s clearly illegal and a dramatic overreach of regulatory power.
The latest case in point: the Fifth Circuit last week casually beheaded the $9 billion FCC Universal Service Fund (USF) program, which helps fund broadband connectivity to predominately rural and lower-income schools, libraries, and communities (read: a lot of Trump’s constituents). Bush-era appointee Judge Edith Brown Clement insists the FCC acted illegally by creating the long-running, bipartisan fund:
“However, the FCC lacked legal authority in 1997 to establish the company, the Universal Service Administrative Co, to collect the funds and set contribution rates, said Judge Edith Brown Clement.
“Because Congress never specifically authorized the FCC to establish USAC, we hold that the agency violated the Government Corporation Control Act,” she wrote for a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.”
Quick background: the USF program applies a small surcharge on traditional phone lines to fund broadband expansion to unserved rural homes, schools, and libraries (of which the U.S. has a lot thanks to rampant telecom monopolization). With the death of landlines, there’s been a lot of debate about how to keep the program going (with, say, a small fee on broadband lines).
While the USF, like all government programs, hasn’t been absent of fraud (it’s almost always at the hands of poorly regulated private companies), it’s generally done a lot of good for people stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide. It helps fund the kind of boring, steady infrastructure work that doesn’t get headlines or get mentioned in books about “abundance.”
Enter Trumpism, which has been taking a merciless hatchet to absolutely any effort, anywhere across government, to try and ensure that Americans — whether rural Trump supporters, struggling school kids, or inner city urban residents — have affordable access to the internet.
The USF is technically overseen by the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), which has been tasked since 1998 with overseeing more than $9 billion in broadband subsidies annually.
Certain Trump Republicans had been pushing for the USF to be destroyed entirely, though that gambit was surprisingly scuttled by the Supreme Court in June of last year. That ruling overturned an earlier Fifth Circuit decision that the FCC’s funding mechanism employing mandatory contributions from telecoms companies had levied a “misbegotten tax” on consumers.
With that avenue of destruction scuttled by the Supreme Court, opponents of having a federal government that helps human beings have instead shifted toward claiming it’s the USAC that’s illegal and government “overreach.” I should note, both efforts are being spearheaded by a dodgy Republican pseudo “consumer group” dubbed “Consumers Research.”
The legal efforts to kill a popular bipartisan broadband subsidy program come as the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr have stated they’d like to dramatically revise or kill the program, something Carr has tried to claim is “a commonsense win for government efficiency and accountability.”
I suspect the whole legal assault is being coordinated to provide cover for Carr’s planned “reforms,” of the program, which I’d suspect (based on Carr’s history) are being organized by companies like AT&T and involve ensuring that if any subsidies do persist, accountability of them is less than ever.
I suspect the USF will survive in some form, though it will be shaped in service of telecom monopolies. The FCC could, for example, try to navigate the ruling by bringing USAC’s operations in house.
This federal policy seppuku is then sold as “efficiency” and “policing waste” to a public that increasingly receives its “news” from a handful of consolidated corporations (only made possible by the simultaneous Republican assault on media consolidation limits and our corrupted courts).
Juan Tamariz and Wendell Berry recently passed away. Between them, they had more than 170 years of generous contribution.
Juan was a card magician. His students are generally considered the best working in the world today.
Wendell was a farmer and a writer. His essays on non-industrial farming and community-building will resonate for generations.
What each had in common was the patience and commitment to choose depth. To seek out the inconvenient path because it mattered.
Neither traded for easily measured metrics or convenience. Instead, they chose a path and followed it, leaving things better than they found them.
Looking back a century, it’s easy to appreciate this. And yet, each and every day, it requires a recommitment. “Under the circumstances,” it’s tempting to justify the small compromises that corrode our work. The hard part is to realize that we’re not under the circumstances; we are them. We can start today.
Court reform cannot come soon enough, because unless and until it does we cannot count on the Supreme Court to dispense justice. For many reasons, but this week brought the focus to one in particular, one we’ve long known was a problem, because we’ve seen it be once before: the Court fails to take up review of a case because too many justices had recused themselves.
Like with the previous occasion, the case this time around was also a copyright case, Vetter v. Resnick, now captioned BMG Rights v. Vetter (that’s “B” as in “Bertelsmann SE,” which owns publishers like Penguin Random House, which has book deals with several Supreme Court justices) (can you tell where this post is going?), where the Fifth Circuit (surprise!) rendered a decision that some have credibly argued is “built on a misreading of statutory text, a misapplication of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, and a fundamental disregard for how international copyright actually works.”
It involved the termination right in copyright, which allows creators who had assigned their copyrights get them back decades later. However, its operation is not quite so simple, and there has been lots of litigation as creators try to recover their copyrights and the people currently profit them try not to let them go. This case raised the question of whether, when an author terminates a grant that conveyed their rights worldwide, does exercising the termination right under U.S. law return to the author all the copyright rights originally granted without regard to geography, or does it just recover the ones applicable in the United States?
Even if one thinks the Fifth Circuit was correct in finding that there was worldwide applicability, the decision is nevertheless a very big deal and so big that it warrants Supreme Court review in order to ensure that the court was indeed correct. And so there was a cert petition seeking the review. Which, as of this week, the Supreme Court refused to grant, for an appalling reason: there were not enough justices available to make the quorum to grant it!
Because the Court lacks a quorum, 28 U. S. C. §1, and since the qualified Justices are of the opinion that the case cannot be heard and determined at the next Term of the Court, the judgment is affirmed under 28 U. S. C. §2109, which provides that under these circumstances “the court shall enter its order affirming the judgment of the court from which the case was brought for review with the same effect as upon affirmance by an equally divided court.” Justice Sotomayor, Justice Gorsuch, Justice Barrett, and Justice Jackson took no part in the consideration or decision of this petition.
With Justices Sotomayor, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Jackson declining to take part in the review of the petition, the Court was left unable to do that further review. Which raises several concerns. The first: we don’t actually know why 44% of the Supreme Court was suddenly unavailable to do their job, as the Court seems to think such transparency is unnecessary. The second: we have a strong hunch as to the reason, which is that they are too busy making money writing books and recognized that they are conflicted because this decision would affect their future ability to profit from them.
Which is a huge problem. Because while it’s great that the justices are recognizing when they won’t be able to dispense neutral justice, IT IS THEIR JOB and it is really not good to employ, in our highest court of the land, people who cannot do what we have hired them to do because they are too busy doing something else.
In the copyright space it now looks like there is a whole category of cases, namely copyright cases, where the Court cannot adjudicate because too many of the justices are unable to participate.
The order doesn’t explain the recusals. But as Music Business Worldwide reported, BMG’s parent company, Bertelsmann, also owns Penguin Random House, which has published books by all four recusing justices: Jackson, Sotomayor, Barrett and Gorsuch. As Puck’s Eriq Gardner tweeted: “So basically any company that owns Penguin Random House can’t get Supreme Court relief.”
It makes one wonder if this problem would have arisen sooner, if cert had been pursued to review the fair use litigation against the Internet Archive, brought by publishers including Penguin. Penguin in particular seems to attract controversy in how it administers its copyright portfolio, which means there could be many copyright cases arising from how the Bertelsmann company behaves, which it appears there could never be Supreme Court review of because it has put so many justices under contract. In this case it actually hurt Bertelsmann, who wanted the review, but this incident illustrates a significant problem with justices being able to pursue enrichment outside of the job: it lets those with the resources to entice them to game American law.
Because the problem is of course bigger than just the immediate effect on the development of copyright law: there should not be any cases where the Court cannot weigh in where we need it to, and especially not because they are moonlighting doing something else other than the job we gave them lifetime appointment to do.
The Court reform we’re waiting for will need to address this problem of split loyalties to prevent it from even arising again. And meanwhile the Court’s incapacity here also adds fuel to the arguments in favor of Court expansion because if we’re going to potentially lose justices to conflicts—and it is good that justices do step aside when they truly are conflicted—we’ll need to make sure we still have some left after they do.
I’m writing today for The Big Picture about the Justice Department’s recent lawsuit to stop California from counting about 20,000 mail ballots—and the escalating threats, including criminal prosecution, aimed at the officials who count them.
Over the past week, the regime’s pressure campaign has moved from demands, to court filings, to threats of prosecution then even to arrests. And it is spreading beyond California. To read the headlines, you’d think the DOJ had uncovered something big!
Not at all. A closer look at its own filings and statements reveal the case is far weaker than the department claims. And the election experts and officials watching most closely think its real purpose is aimed at some time after November 3.
Look for my piece this afternoon if you’re a subscriber to The Big Picture, which is a separate publication from The Status Kuo. If you’re not yet subscribed to it, you can sign up for free or become a valued paid supporter of our team’s work here: https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/subscribe
I’ll be back tomorrow with my regular edition of The Status Kuo.
監督 (かんとく) — supervision 映画監督 (えいがかんとく) — movie director 総監督 (そうかんとく) — general manager 美術監督 (びじゅつかんとく) — art director 音楽監督 (おんがくかんとく) — music director 監督官 (かんとくかん) — inspector 督促 (とくそく) — urge 助監督 (じょかんとく) — assistant director (in taking professional movies) 提督 (ていとく) — admiral 監督者 (かんとくしゃ) — superintendent
If you hike, ski, or drive in North America, your OsmAnd terrain may already be much sharper than you think. Since spring 2026, terrain maps and contour lines for the United States (including Alaska), Canada, and Mexico are built from high-resolution national elevation data. If you have not updated these maps since then, you are still looking at the old, smoother relief.
The new maps use elevation data with about 10 m resolution in the mainland United States and about 30 m in Alaska and most of Canada and Mexico. In practice, that means smaller ridges, narrower gorges, and steeper cliffs show up where the map used to smooth them out.
Few places test a terrain map like the Grand Canyon. Seen from above, the side canyons branch out in fine detail, and the contour lines follow every bend of the walls down to the Colorado River.
Tilt the map into 3D, and the canyon rises off the screen: Plateau Point, Skeleton Point, and the trail down to Phantom Ranch sit right where the terrain says they should.
Terrain maps are stored on your device, just like the rest of your OsmAnd maps. Once downloaded, the relief, contour lines, and 3D view keep working without an internet connection, which is handy at the bottom of a canyon, where signal is rarely part of the scenery.
Terrain maps downloaded before May 2026 still contain the old data. Open the Updates tab in Maps & Resources: if terrain or contour line maps for these regions are listed, update them. There is no need to delete the old files first. If you do not have them yet, download the Terrain map (3D) and Contour lines for the regions you need. Terrain and contour line maps require OsmAnd Maps+ or Pro; 3D relief requires OsmAnd Pro.
If something looks off or you have questions, contact OsmAnd support at support@osmand.net, or visit the Support page for more help options.
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Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for free expression. And it keeps improving. As the saying goes, it’s the worst it will ever be. People use it to receive ever-smarter speech and to create ever-better speech of their own. AI is now an important part of the marketplace of ideas—a market that, in America, is not for the state to control. The more useful AI becomes, the more worried you should be about letting the government dictate what AI can and cannot say. Like the powerful speech tools that came before it—the printing press, the camera, the internet—AI warrants full First Amendment protection.
The right question is not whether AI outputs are protected, but how. The key is to insist that they receive the same First Amendment protection as other expressive technologies. No more, to be sure; but also no less. Striking that balance may require some new rules, crafted with free-speech fundamentals firmly in view. This might sound like a daunting task at a time when even many AI researchers are losing their heads over AI’s purported existential risk. But a little common sense can carry us a long way.
For a start, we can draw on the venerable First Amendment distinction between speech and conduct. When someone uses AI to obtain information—to learn and to think—she is exercising her constitutional rights as a listener. When she uses AI to help her write an essay or create a piece of art, she is exercising her constitutional rights as a speaker. The government can no more restrict these uses of AI than it can restrict the use of an encyclopedia or a thesaurus, a paintbrush or a typewriter. The First Amendment has nothing to say, however, about using AI to hack a website or rob a bank. These acts are illegal without AI, and they remain illegal with it. AI is not entitled to special constitutional privileges.
In narrow circumstances, speech alone can break the law, and here things get trickier. Several categories of speech unprotected by the First Amendment, such as incitement to violence and criminal conspiracy, require intent. You must have meant to bring about the violence or commit the crime. A chatbot does not “intend” to do anything, even if it talks as though it does. So does no one answer for what a chatbot says?
One approach is to look to the intent of the firm that built the model. Did the firm want the AI to incite or conspire? Almost certainly not. This would yield very broad protection indeed—too broad, a lot of people would say. Suppose a chatbot actively helps a user plan a mass shooting. The user announces his plan, and the AI goes right along. A firm that argues, in its defense, that its AI merely mimics intent can expect an offended public and a skeptical judge. A human who said the same things could face charges as an accomplice. Why treat the firm any differently? This looks, many will think, like extra speech protection, rather than equal speech protection, for artificial intelligence.
It bears mention that there is a serious argument the other way. We’ve long had works that express an “intent” belonging to no one in particular. They’re called novels, poems, and songs. In The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the protagonist intends to tell you that suicide is an appropriate response to unrequited love. It does not follow that the author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, intended to tell you the same thing. Artists take us to dark places as an exercise of imagination, and we don’t punish them for doing the job well. On the contrary, we celebrate great artists for creating art that feels authentic. Our safety-first culture is unlikely to leave it entirely to users to grasp that AIs don’t “intend” things. But such reliance on personal responsibility would be a perfectly civilized approach. The alternative—barring all speech that might send a handful of vulnerable people in a bad direction—carries dangers of its own. Today, ChatGPT. Tomorrow, Goethe. Then Marx and Nietzsche. Then anything offensive.
At the other extreme, we might hold AI firms strictly liable for any functional intent their models display. If a model talks as though it wants to help a user commit a crime, the firm is liable for aiding and abetting. But that won’t do. For the firm, such a regime might be even worse than having its model’s outputs treated as no speech at all. Ascribe the model’s every word, intent and all, to the firm, and the firm could face criminal liability even when it has exercised reasonable care. For the public, meanwhile, the chill on AI outputs would be almost as bad as consigning the models to government censorship. The only safe course for a firm would be to constrict its model until it refused to discuss any remotely controversial topic.
The most workable middle ground is likely some kind of principal-agent framework. Think of the relationship between a company and its employees. A company is responsible for making sure its employees behave themselves, but the employees’ intentions are not automatically the company’s own. If an employee goes rogue and commits a crime on the clock, the company is usually not criminally liable itself. In most cases, though, the company will face civil liability for the harm an employee causes within the scope of employment. If an employee incites violence, the company is not treated as though it incited violence, but it still may have to pay for the harm the employee caused. This gives the company good reason to hire carefully, to train its employees well, to set clear rules against misconduct, and so on.
Even here, we should keep squarely in mind that it’s speech we’re dealing with. AI models host billions of conversations. An AI firm knows that in this vast sea of discourse, a small fraction of conversations will go sideways. It is foreseeable that a few vulnerable users will have bad experiences. Deeply troubled people will do the things that deeply troubled people do, and they will sometimes do them with some encouragement—or, more often, ineffective discouragement—from a chatbot. If an AI firm is treated as the insurer of everything its model says to many millions of users, that too will chill speech. Firms will face pressure to over-sanitize their models, making them far less useful to the vast majority of us who can use them responsibly. Your rights as a listener and as a speaker should not be shackled to the needs of the most fragile person imaginable. Yet that’s where we’ll end up if we hold AI firms strictly liable for the handful of cases in which their guardrails give way in extreme situations, with users who, AI use or no, are a danger to themselves or others. A censorship aimed at shielding them is a censorship of the entire public. The marketplace of ideas will be far the worse for it.
If an AI firm deliberately sets up its model to engage in unlawful speech, throw the book at it. That’s not the hard case. The leading AI firms don’t want their models to break the law. For those firms, a serviceable rule—one that puts AI outputs on a par with other speech—would impose liability when (1) the firm knew that its model tended to lapse into some type of unprotected speech; (2) the firm deployed the model anyway, or kept it in service, without taking adequate steps to address the problem; and (3) the model went on to engage in that speech with multiple users. In those circumstances, the firm would not be criminally liable for the model’s speech, since its executives still would not have intended to incite violence or what have you (unless separate evidence showed that they did). But the firm would very much be civilly liable for failing to stop its agent from repeatedly saying constitutionally unprotected things.
AI firms now face lawsuits over tragedies such as suicides and school shootings. At least some of these suits seek to hold an AI firm liable for outputs that would not be illegal if spoken by a human. A chatbot talks to a troubled person about guns, and the troubled person then commits violence. A chatbot talks to a troubled person about suicide—including urging against it—and the troubled person then takes their own life. The connection is likely no more than correlational: a troubled person does what troubled people do, and happens to have talked to a chatbot along the way. Yet plaintiffs’ lawyers seek to use these tragedies to convince courts to change what chatbots can say: no memory of past conversations, no first-person pronouns, nothing “emotional” or “agreeable.” What these lawyers seek—sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly—is to impose on AI a standard unknown to humans.
Governments are getting in on the act as well. Florida’s attorney general plans to push legislation that would hold an AI firm criminally liable if a model “participates” in a crime. No bill is out yet, but the idea seems to be to punish a company whose model simply answers questions for a criminal who never discloses his criminality. By that logic, a chatbot could not tell a hunter how his rifle’s safety works, since the next person to ask might be a killer. (If anything, this understates the problem. One suit faults a chatbot for telling a shooter when a student union is busy—a question someone simply trying to avoid the lunch rush might ask.) These lawyers and officials want AI firms to pay for outputs that would be protected expression if spoken by you or me. They are trying to produce precisely the chilling effect the First Amendment is meant to foreclose.
At bottom, they aren’t taking the First Amendment seriously. They’re making the same error as so many people who say, “I support free speech, but . . . .” They want the First Amendment to protect speech that is “good,” by their lights, and to abandon speech they deem “bad.” What’s more, they pretend the line between the two is clear and easy to administer. In reality, the First Amendment protects a lot of messy and even “bad” speech. It generally protects lies, bigotry, hate speech, and calls for anarchy or revolution. It does so not because all this speech is “good”—though sometimes it is; today’s sedition can be tomorrow’s social justice—but because it is not for the state (or the plaintiffs’ bar) to separate “good” speech from “bad.” It is for you—a citizen, not a subject—to make these judgments for yourself. As a listener, you have a right to the full marketplace of ideas. And a speaker, for her part, has no duty to make sure her words cannot hurt your feelings or harm a fragile listener.
So we return to where we began: It is crucial that AI outputs receive full First Amendment protection. This isn’t only about protecting AI speech (though it is about that too, of course). It’s also about keeping a censorship first applied to AI from contaminating First Amendment analysis writ large. That prospect should scare you. What if your friend, child, or spouse dies by suicide or commits murder? If you’re held to the proper First Amendment standard, you have little to fear from the law, so long as you didn’t overtly encourage the act. But if you’re held to the standard many want to apply to AI, you have every reason to worry about anything you said. Your every conversation with that person is now fair game for scrutiny. Your every word is now suspect. Did you fail to catch the signs? Did you fail to push back on their designs, even their oblique suggestions, with adequate vigor? Did you fail to report them to the authorities at the first hint of trouble? Were any of your offhand remarks insufficiently careful? If you engaged with the person at all, you must expect a lawsuit and potential liability.
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.” As we navigate a revolutionary new technology, we should keep that revolutionary old idea in mind. The First Amendment has served this country well. AI does not need a new set of rules, built from scratch. It needs the rules we have long had, with minor adjustments to keep them current as technology advances. The state may not do to a chatbot what it may not do to a journalist, a librarian, or you.
Corbin K. Barthold is a senior litigation fellow at NetChoice.
It’s never a good idea to just print whatever the government tells you to print, not when you have the First Amendment to rely on. On the other hand, if you’re CBS News, it’s probably in your best interest to run whatever the government says to run because it’s probably going to be the same thing your boss will tell you to run. (thanks Bari)
When it comes to the aftermath of the hurried, botched remake of the Lincoln Reflecting Pool in Trump’s own image, press agencies should have led with their skepticism. This rarely happened and it gave Trump just enough cover to convert his failures into arrests of US citizens.
All of that has fallen apart. The cases against alleged reflecting pool “vandals” have spectacularly collapsed, beginning with government witnesses undermining Trump’s narrative in grand jury hearings and ending with a federal judge dismissing the high-profile case against former Olympian David Hearn with prejudice when the DOJ refused to do so… even after admitting (and the contractor itself admitting) that any claimed “vandalism” was actually just shoddy repair work disintegrating on its own.
Now, while I am sympathetic to a teen who managed to make headline news for simply being in the vicinity of this pool-related self-implosion, I don’t have any reason to believe the plaintiff actually has a case they can win. Here are the details, courtesy of Deadline’s Ted Johnson:
A Maryland teenager filed [a] defamation suit against CBS News over a report his attorneys say falsely linked him as one of those arrested for alleged vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool last summer.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, seeks at least $20 million in damages.
While I personally don’t know any teens who could possibly be defamed to the tune of $20 million, the plaintiff does have a point about the misleading coverage delivered by CBS News.
The plaintiff, identified as “JV” and as a 15-year old high school student, was riding his e-dirt bike past the National Mall on June 20, according to the suit. He was briefly detained and handcuffed over the use of the e-bike, and released without charges, per the suit.
The lawsuit claimed that in a June 21 report on the CBS Weekend News, a story “falsely asserted that JV was arrested for engaging in vandalism towards the Reflecting Pool.” The broadcast story did not show his face, but the lawsuit claimed that “it showed video of him from the rear while he was briefly handcuffed, and he was readily identifiable because of his hair and because of the distinctive nature of the logo on the black hoodie that he was wearing (which he routinely wears and is known to wear).”
That does suck. But while the plaintiff claims that millions of people watched the broadcast and accessed subsequent social media posts made by CBS News, he only specifically alleges that he was “recognized” by “friends and acquaintances,” which we have to assume number far less than the multiple-millions alleged to have viewed the misleading coverage by CBS News.
The plaintiff also claims that this misrepresentation has disrupted his past and present and will do significant harm to his future opportunities. Whatever the legal standard is, it’s hard to believe that someone who wasn’t even arrested during Trump’s post-embarrassment witch hunt has much of a case to press when those who were actually arrested and indicted are seeing these charges dismissed and their innocence proclaimed (by proxy, if nothing else) by high-level federal prosecutors and the government contractor who failed to deliver a quality product when paid to refurbish the reflecting pool.
On top of that, what was implied by the coverage is completely covered by the First Amendment, even if CBS News anchor Jericka Duncan issued a retraction and said “we never should have published this story.” That retraction seems to refer to the story in general — in other words, the granting of credence to Trump’s vindictive “vandalism” fantasies — rather than specifically to the momentary inclusion of footage of the teen’s detainment.
While I firmly believe CBS should suffer immense harm for deciding to be part-time propagandists in exchange for anti-trust exemptions, it should be a punishment enacted by an exodus of viewers. While this teen might honestly feel harmed by this fleeting moment of infamy, there doesn’t appear to be anything approaching defamation here. Using the government to get what you want from an entity using the government to get what it wants is just the same kind of opportunism, albeit at a much smaller scale. And while the teen has every right to utilize the courts to seek redress for perceived injuries, it doesn’t make his case any more admirable or justified than those filed by countless others who are just angry that people said derogatory (by true) things about them on air.
This past weekend was the latest in an ongoing series of (massive) “No Kings” protests held around the country (and in some cases around the globe). The latest one was part of a “get out the (early) vote” campaign to make sure people are voting in the upcoming midterm elections. And, in the middle of it, suddenly it was reported that the No Kings Instagram account was suspended for about an hour, with admin access locked out for a few more hours. Many supporters of the protests immediately suspected foul play, highlighting that Mark Zuckerberg has gone in hard in supporting Trump over the past couple of years. So, the implication was that Zuck must be fiddling the dials to help the guy he supports in the White House. For a variety of reasons, this is unlikely to be true.
I’ll explain some of those reasons towards the end of this article just to be thorough, but the point of this article is to highlight the argument that Will Robinson and Tim Chambers recently made in response to this, which is that it doesn’t even matter if it was done on purpose or not. Even if you believe that Zuckerberg and Trump were laughing their heads off and jointly pressing the button to silence the No Kings account, the real problem was that this was possible in the first place.
Our response should be the same either way.
Robinson and Chambers focus on the very practical lessons for anyone engaged in digital organizing, which is how to prepare for the possibility that a centralized provider takes down your account. And their advice is good and practical (read the whole thing!): make sure you have communication channels that a third party can’t easily switch off, set up accounts on open platforms, and have a playbook on how to respond (mostly getting out the word) if your account gets shut down.
But it’s also a reminder of the larger point that I have been harping on for some time about the importance of decentralization and user control over their online experiences. Centralized systems create a natural gravity that leads to control over your speech. My friend Danny O’Brien (who also helped inspire Techdirt’s very existence) wrote a few years ago about how decentralization is not an end in and of itself, but rather part of the means to guarantee we have “cognitive liberty.”
When we hand over the control of our speech to a third party, with no ability to exit (with all of our content and connections intact) we have given up a fundamental element of our liberty. O’Brien describes it here:
Right now, if you wrote a note to yourself and put it on your personal computer’s hard drive, you could say whatever you want, draw whatever you want. If it’s in the cloud, you don’t have that guarantee: even if you kept it in your own Google Drive or DropBox, it could be found wanting, and deleted. I don’t know about you, but my notes are my memory, most of the time. My search engine searches are as much me talking to myself about my worries and interests, in a way that I would rarely disclose even to my closest companion.
[….]
Our own consciousness cannot be rented from others, or temporarily conceded to us, with built-in police or backdoors or hidden ad men. We need to seize the means of computation, and that means ejecting all of these interlopers, and relocating it back into the personal domain we control: whether that’s physically, or by using tools like encryption and zero-knowledge proofs to preserve our control when our data and processing power sits on others’ hardware.
That’s the pyramid of digital rights for me: a firm foundation of decentralized, user-controlled technology, giving us broader cognitive liberty, internal privacy, freedom of self-expression, and freedom of self-determination. On top of that solid ground, we can build a society that’s free and fair. And then we can have the ability and freedom to self-reflect, to talk, and to plot our better shared future together, free at last in our digital environment.
Achieving that kind of freedom for “cognitive liberty” requires us to recognize the threats of centralized systems. And Meta shutting down the “No Kings” Insta account is one such example no matter if it was on purpose or an accident. This was the very thinking behind my original Protocols, Not Platforms paper in the first place. If you hand control of your digital spaces to someone else, they get to decide whether those spaces exist at all.
And they might be bad at it, whether through incompetence or malice.
And sometimes that means your account gets shut down — whether for good reasons or bad. Many people seem to not want to grapple with this issue. They say “the people are there,” and that is true, but only because the “people” have agreed to give Mark Zuckerberg and whoever else that power.
Unfortunately, most of the “solutions” to this problem that people are suggesting are some form of “force Mark Zuckerberg to be better and not shut off the account we like.” But that’s no way to build a better world. It is, also, the exact same response that MAGA folks had when Donald Trump was banned from social media in the wake of the January 6th insurrection. Their response was to try to force platforms to host the content of people MAGA supported. That cannot be a workable solution, because as political fortunes shift, forcing platforms to host the worst people’s accounts is unworkable for basically everyone.
But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization’s account in the middle of one of its big protests.
Is it bad that Meta pulled down that account? Sure. Do you fix it by demanding Zuck “be better”? No. That just gives him even more power, while reducing some of our own power. Whoever has the power over the systems — whether it’s a billionaire CEO or a government official — has the ability to cut you off (or to force others into your feed).
Even if it gets people you support back on the platform you want them on, you’re just setting yourself up to be angry the next time someone you don’t trust is in power. The answer is to make sure they don’t have that power in the first place.
When I discussed this on Bluesky, some people claimed that it was fine for Congress to “investigate” what happened with the No Kings account to find out if Zuckerberg was told by government officials to remove the account. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy announced he intends to have Congress investigate Meta over this.
But the right way to look into that is for Congress to use its oversight powers over the executive branch to find out whether any administration officials contacted Meta about the account. This is also where something like the JAWBONE Act would be handy. But any approach that has elected officials (or any government officials) pressuring companies to moderate the way they prefer is only going to blow back on you the next time people you don’t like are in power. As far as I can tell, there is no one who supported Jim Jordan’s investigation into Meta & Twitter’s moderation practices in taking down Trump’s account who are equally excited about Murphy now investigating this.
And that should be a warning. When you choose if you agree with the policy based on which “team” is pushing for it, that’s not a principled take.
But we don’t have to live in that world where we pingpong between this or that government official and which billionaires they can bully (even when you agree with the bullying). This is why supporting decentralized tools like atproto or ActivityPub is more than a matter of taste. Those systems make this kind of takedown far harder and far less damaging, giving you the same kind of reach while you retain the “cognitive liberty” and the ability to truly own your own account.
As for this particular case, as far as I can tell, there’s very little likelihood that this was done deliberately. First, these kinds of mistakes happen all the time. Most people who haven’t worked in trust & safety at a large platform cannot fathom the sheer scale of what’s happening on any given day. Hundreds of millions of pieces of content show up every single day. If less than 1% are incorrectly moderated, that’s still a huge absolute number.
And, yes, people are pointing to other stories of bad Meta moderation in the past week to find some sort of pattern, but the key pattern is Meta will always be bad at this. It was bad at it before — back when MAGA folks insisted Zuck was “censoring conservatives” — and it’s bad at it now. Because getting this right at that scale is not something that is humanly possible.
And an account like No Kings probably saw a massive upswing in attention the day of its protest — the first No Kings protest in a little while — which is the sort of thing that often trips the automated sensors. Meta’s explanation is unsatisfying to many, who are quite sure there’s a conspiracy afoot, but it fits with the pattern. The company initially claimed increased activity by the account, and then later clarified that the real trigger had been a surprising jump in “reading” other posts from that account, which matched the pattern of “automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our system.”
That’s not surprising. Even as the No Kings organizers say they hadn’t posted that much, it’s not about the posting. Meta’s explanation for the jump was that they detected “a Claude tool” (which, yeah, is odd phrasing):
“Specifically, our network security systems detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17. “
That seems entirely reasonable. Someone with access to that account (and it may be multiple people) may have been using Claude to try to monitor posts and mentions, or looking for protest photos and videos from around the country to share and repost.
Or, it could just be that Meta’s automated systems suck.
Indeed, another complaint that people made is that “it shouldn’t have taken them that long to reinstate the account.” And, yes. That’s true. But the underlying assumption behind this is that the one hour response time to reinstate and the four-ish hours to return access is somehow out of the ordinary. Chances are it’s actually quicker than normal. And we have no idea how many other mistakes Meta’s crap automated systems were making at the same time, many of which probably also needed to be reviewed. Just because you only were aware of one in the one area you were paying attention to does not mean it is not happening to thousands of others as well.
On Bluesky, someone argued that Meta “should know” to keep an eye on “big political accounts” like this, which is nice in theory, but as I explained, Meta actually did that for years, in a program they called XCheck, which flagged high-profile accounts (i.e., “big political accounts”) for secondary human review before any action was taken against them — exactly what this commenter suggested. But.. when Frances Haugen leaked that to the WSJ, it was presented as Facebook having “a secret elite that is exempt” from its rules.
There’s even a movie in the theaters right now, by Aaron Sorkin, with this as one of the subplots.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
But the biggest reason I don’t think this was deliberate is because… why would anyone think it would help in any way? Of all the accounts the Trump admin might want to ban, does anyone actually think they would suggest this one account on Instagram of a protest that was already happening across the country, with people involved who would immediately notice the account was taken down and use other means to get the word out?
If the Trump admin were actually telling Zuck to take down accounts, you’d expect it to be happening a lot more frequently, to much more meaningful accounts, in ways that wouldn’t so immediately draw way more attention to the original account. The story just doesn’t hang together in any sensible way.
Still, some will argue, perhaps it wasn’t the White House reaching out. Perhaps it was just Zuck or a Zuck minion thinking “gosh I hate all these protestors, and now that we’re all in for Trump, let’s show these libs a thing or two….” While possible this seems incredibly hamfisted and unlikely, and generally not at all how these systems work.
Either way, if you think I’m hopelessly naive, and that this was obviously government intervention, or even just Zuck deciding on his own to show the protestors who’s the boss… the outcome doesn’t change. And what we do it about it doesn’t change. The intent barely matters here at all.
In either scenario the problem is that Zuck has too much power, and the answer should be to make sure Zuck has less power by moving to systems no single billionaire, no single politician, no single entity anywhere can control. Yes, that will involve some form of collective action. But it starts with you. If you are continuing to rely on such platforms yourself, then don’t whine about how Zuck might not have your best interests in mind.
We already know that.
Any plan that involves demanding billionaires become better people to make your life easier is destined to fail. Instead, we now have the power to build our own tools on our own systems that we control — and we can make them billionaire resistant, which makes them enshittification resistant. And then we don’t even have to worry about Zuck or Trump or Musk or anyone putting their fingers on the scale in a way that goes against our own interests.
But it only happens if people agree to stop giving those billionaires the power over us.
Whether Zuck or Trump or anyone had anything to do with deliberately taking down the No Kings account should be the least of our concerns. The fact that anyone is relying on a system where there is a central provider who can do that — by accident or not — is the underlying problem. Because the fact that a single provider can do it, means that eventually someone will try to pressure them to do it, even if that didn’t happen in this case. Or it will go down by accident at exactly the wrong moment. Either way, you avoid that by moving to systems where no single provider gets to make that call.
No kings is a great slogan, but it should apply to the people who control our communications infrastructure as well.
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At best, most Trump administration officials can be called “sycophants.” At BEST. But so many of them can be called a lot of other things a bit more insulting. We have a lot of shoe options to work with. Most of them fit multiple people. Rubes, hucksters, useful idiots, bigots, charlatans, window lickers, narcissists, anthropomorphic Peter Principles… the list goes on and on.
It behooves Patel to pretend his FBI is the best FBI that has ever been. And if he can’t do that, he should at least pretend the FBI is the most Trump that it has ever been. He’s done a lot for the latter part of the previous sentence. This time, he’s trying to both, but focusing on portraying his leadership as the most leader-y the FBI has ever seen.
But he can’t do it alone. It’s a team effort, even though most of the team’s contributions won’t be publicly recognized. This is all about elevating Patel and his Trump-subservient FBI to a level that might be publicly recognized by a guy who rarely has anything good to say about anyone other than himself: the President of the United States.
Patel has boasted that the FBI has arrested 54,000 violent criminals, which he describes as a 90% increase in arrests from the same period in the Biden administration. What he doesn’t mention is that his count is inflated by including arrests that state and local police forces and other federal agencies have made when an FBI employee is present.
Many of those arrests are not FBI cases, the FBI acknowledges.
I would like to see more detail on what is considered to be “present” in this context. Some agent on FaceTime? An arrest culminating in a Teams meeting with a nearby special agent? Somebody just wrote an FBI agent’s name on the paperwork at some point? This one time a cop got an email?
Even if someone from the FBI was physically present before, during, or after the arrest, it’s not really an FBI case if the FBI isn’t handling the arrest and processing and handing it over to the US DOJ for prosecution. The FBI may assist to a limited extent in hundreds or thousands of criminal arrests. But just because someone talked to a fed at some point during the investigation, it’s absolute bullshit to claim these arrests as your own, especially when you don’t really care about the arrests, but rather that the numbers seem higher than those produced by the previous administration.
And those numbers aren’t actually higher, not when you strip out Patel’s stolen valor.
In reality, the FBI has referred 15% fewer criminal cases for federal prosecution during the second Trump administration than during the same period in the Biden administration. And, while the FBI does not break down its criminal referrals into types of cases, the data also shows that the DOJ prosecuted 15% fewer cases of violent crimes during the first 16 months of the Trump administration than during the same period of the Biden administration.
And you do know why this is, right? Tons of federal crimes happen every day. But the Trump DOJ and FBI only care about certain crimes — things like alleged voting by non-citizens, whatever new awful iteration of immigration enforcement is taking place, and anything that can possibly be wielded against Trump’s personal and political enemies. Everything else can sit quietly in the back and stfu until the next regime change.
Even if we decide this FBI is better than all the FBIs that have come before it, chortling on main about these arrests is like congratulating yourself for composing a social media post without a noticeable typo. This “contribution” — as bogusly exaggerated as it is — only shows that the FBI remains operational, if only barely:
Patel’s count of the FBI making or participating in 54,000 arrests shrinks in significance when taken into broader context. There have been 11.3 million arrests nationwide since January 2025, according to the same FBI data.
If you’re bragging about contributing to 0.5% of all arrests, you’re doing bragging wrong. If you’re just trying to look better than Biden’s FBI, you’re still failing because the increase you’re touting is imaginary. It can’t be claimed without claiming work by local law enforcement as your own. But what else would we expect from a guy who thinks he’s entitled to drink with Olympic champions just because he’s got a free ride to the arena?
The death of history's most successful publisher (permalink)
I published my first story in 1988, when I was 17 years old. Today, at 55, I've published more than 30 books, with three more coming in the next year or so. In the intervening years, I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about publishing.
I've had plenty of opportunity to reflect on publishing: I've been a bookseller and worked in libraries, I wrote a column for Publishers Weekly, self-published a few books of my own, published the first-ever book licensed under Creative Commons, and broke several Kickstarter records for audiobook projects. But most of all, I've worked with publishing professionals: publicists, marketing directors, operations people, copyeditors, and, above all, editors.
My first novel editor was the magnificent Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who supported my publishing career from the very start, donating to help send me to the Clarion science fiction writers' workshop and inviting me to come read slush at Tor Books whenever I was in New York. Patrick didn't teach me everything I know about publishing, but he sure taught me a lot about publishing, and hardly a day goes by without my having cause to reflect on one of our many discussions over our decades-long professional and personal association.
Out of all the things I learned about publishing from Patrick, one truth stands out above all: publishing is "the act of making something public." Publishing may or may not involve editing, layout, printing, binding, marketing or other activities that we associate with publishing houses, but publishing always involves identifying a work, identifying an audience, and finding ways to connect that work to that audience.
This definition does a lot of useful work. For one thing, it locates publishing as part of the hard problem of human society, namely, "getting people to care about something that matters to you." Beyond publishing, this is the crux of politics, religion and commerce:
For another, this definition lets us understand that (for most of its existence) Google was the most successful publisher in human history. No other institution of any kind connected more works with more audiences. Lots of people have heard of Google's wildly unsuccessful motto "Don't be evil," but far fewer are familiar with Google's wildly successful mission statement, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
But all of that is in the past tense. With its AI projects – AI summaries, the Gemini chatbot – Google has abandoned the practice of "connecting works with audiences." Today, Google's function is to plunder all the works on the internet and chop them up and arrange them in an unimaginably vast, multidimensional array for the explicit purpose of preventing audiences from connecting with those works.
For most of its history, Google operated in a virtuous cycle with publishers whereby they allowed Google to crawl their sites and Google located audiences and connected them with the pages on those sites. Today, that cycle has turned vicious, with Google acting as a parasite that extracts value from the web's publishers and offers nothing in return.
This is entirely in keeping with the enshittification hypothesis: that once a platform is liberated from the disciplining forces of competition, regulation, labor and interoperability, it will squeeze its suppliers and users and harvest all the value for itself:
But AI represents a new phase in enshittification. Google has assayed enshittificatory gambits in the past, like deliberately worsening its search results in order to force you to search repeatedly, which gave the company more chances to show you ads:
But as sleazy as those gambits were, they were profitable. In some important sense, they were sustainable. Assuming Google could carry on indefinitely scamming its users in this way, they'd continue to bring in more cash than they spent, and continue to be the world's most successful publisher, connecting works and audiences (albeit in a deliberately degraded way).
Contrast this with AI, the money-losingest endeavor in the history of human civilization. Google is losing hundreds of billions of dollars on AI. The more AI Google does, the worse the company's financial footing becomes. If Google does this for long enough, it may cease to exist altogether. This collapse can only be prolonged by Google's ongoing extraction of value from web publishers, who no longer have their works connected with audiences via Google search results. Instead, Google usurps those audiences, shows them as many ads as it can, and still loses money in the bargain.
In Tim Wu's Age of Extraction, Wu lays out a thesis about how intermediaries – middlemen who perform a useful function connecting different groups, firms and individuals – are prone to developing "main character syndrome," abandoning their role as facilitators for others and abusing their position to make themselves the prime beneficiary of the transactions they facilitate:
Google has a scorching case of main character syndrome, and nowhere is that more obvious than in its AI-fueled transformation into web-scale parasite. The fact that this gambit might well destroy Google and the publishers the company once served – rather than merely enshittifying search with worse results and more ads – makes the whole thing look more like a Mafia bust-out than the enshittification of the first half of the 2020s:
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 514 (27116 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Insider jargon, previously known as cant, is designed to keep outsiders out.
The burglars in cartoons are often seen wearing a black mask over their eyes (like Robin in Batman but for a different reason) and carrying a bulging sack over their shoulders.
[Of course, the burglar’s sack was rarely bulging. A robber would have to have the perfect haul to get the right mix of value, density and weight. You can’t fit a chest of drawers in the sack, and that much gold would be impossible to carry. But I digress.]
The cant for this was ‘swag’, which comes from an old term for swaying or bulging. Sort of wishful thinking.
And thus we get to the swag of business promo and conference loot…
Establishing jargon is a key step in group identity. It’s rarely dictated from the top down, but permitting and celebrating it is a smart move if you’re looking for group cohesion.
I’ve documented for years how major media consolidation is simultaneously completely pointless and incredibly harmful. Such deals exist exclusively so that unremarkable rich men with no real ideas can grab some tax breaks, create the illusion of perpetual growth, and pretend they’re “savvy dealmakers.”
Yet every single time a major media merger is completed the massive debt load results in layoffs, corner cutting, higher prices, and lower-quality service for everyone. It simply doesn’t matter what the companies promise; the end result is always carnage. A country with functional regulators would simply enforce antitrust law to protect markets, labors, and consumers. We aren’t that.
Paramount’s recent $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers is poised to be even worse than deals’ past. Paramount had barely beaten back a flimsy state antitrust enforcement effort before it began talking about mass layoffs to try and pay down the massive $80 billion in debt from the Ellison family’s recent merger spree.
The company’s massive debt — combined with higher interest rates from a tumultuous bond market — and a dying (intentionally exploited and destroyed?) traditional film and TV industry — has scared even “growth-for-growth’s sake” obsessed Wall Street.
It’s clear that Paramount execs think the high interest rates (attached to a historic debt sale) are worth it because they think they’ll cleverly be able to create a hugely profitable Harry Potter and Batman AI slop machine. And, just like the AT&T execs before them, have deluded themselves into believing they can turn the whole soggy mess into a new “tech company” that rivals Google:
“Are we paying a little more in interest?” Cinelli said in an interview. “We are. But we’d much rather get the deal done and then manage that accordingly.”
But again, by “manage,” they mean fire thousands of people, dramatically cut corners on production, reduce employee perks and pay, and raise rates hand over fist on consumers, as per tradition. That sort of con used to be easier to sell back when traditional and streaming TV was seeing growth; but now that these markets have saturated (and consumers are balking at constant rate hikes) the game has changed.
And it will get all significantly worse if the economy tanks and consumer disposable income spending drops off a cliff.
“As of Oct. 5, the last day of trading for WBD and Paramount Skydance (PSKY) on Nasdaq, Warner Bros. Discovery had a market capitalization of $77.7 billion and Paramount was around $11 billion. Today, Skydance has a market cap of under $40 billion — less than half the predecessor companies’ combined value.”
Great stuff! Should the AI bubble well and truly pop thanks to the industry’s ongoing financial fraud, Larry Ellison’s likely to take a significant brunt of the blow. While his gambit for nepobaby media domination simultaneously falls flat on its face. As usual, consumers and labor will be the ones paying the price.
The most likely outcome remains that a tech giant like Netflix, Google, or Amazon just buys the whole soggy mess in a few years, and all of the execs responsible (as well as all of the people and lawmakers that defended the deal) will simply pretend none of this ever happened.
Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books.
These logs would presumably reveal how Meta’s torrent clients were set up, including any changes to their upload settings.
The order is one of many discovery battles in the lawsuits over Meta’s use of shadow libraries. In the class action filed by authors including Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman, the court already ruled that training AI models on the books was fair use. That left the BitTorrent claims as the last live part of that case.
The server logs could reveal what happened on Meta’s machines. However, publisher Entrepreneur Media also wants to know who approved the torrenting activity.
‘Technical’ Decisions
Entrepreneur Media, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine, filed one of the related lawsuits where it accuses Meta of contributing to piracy by uploading (seeding) works to third parties, similar to the authors’ contributory infringement claim.
To find out more, the publisher asked Meta to identify everyone who “made, authorized, or approved” the decisions to obtain the shadow library datasets, and to do so via BitTorrent.
Meta’s answers named several people who are believed to have been involved in data-related decisions. However, Meta said it couldn’t identify anyone who “formally” made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models. Those decisions were often the result of team consensus, Meta argued.
When it came to the torrenting itself, Meta pointed to the employees who ran the downloads, describing their choices as technical decisions.
Decision?
Meta added that the acquisition of data from Anna’s Archive went through an internal legal review in early 2024, which involved its in-house lawyers.
In other words, the company didn’t name anyone higher up who approved the use of BitTorrent.
“On that construction no one at Meta decided to torrent anything, yet Meta torrented shadow libraries repeatedly from 2022-2024,” Entrepreneur Media countered.
‘Legally Not Okay’
The question becomes more concrete when it comes to seeding. One of the engineers who torrented LibGen data previously testified that the issue of seeding was raised and discussed internally, and that steps were taken to limit it.
An internal Meta logbook, which one employee reviewed before starting a download from Anna’s Archive, mentions a decision not to use torrents.
“Decided to go with direct file uploads without using torrents for the following reasons: Using torrents would entail seeding the file such as sharing content outside. This would be legally not okay,” the logbook reads, as quoted in Entrepreneur Media’s filing.
‘Legally not okay’
Meta does not deny that it used BitTorrent to download LibGen’s Scimag collection and data from Anna’s Archive. However, it says it isn’t aware of anyone who “made, authorized, or approved” a decision to upload or distribute the data. Meta’s lawyers also added that measures were implemented to avoid seeding.
How much data Meta shared with others is not clear either. Last year, Meta’s own expert estimated that uploads from its AWS servers didn’t exceed roughly 30% of the data downloaded during torrent downloads between April and July 2024.
Everyone in the Group
Yesterday, Judge Hixson ruled on the dispute. Two weeks earlier, Meta informed the court that it had no additional information to provide on the torrenting decision.
This didn’t convince the judge. He noted that the interrogatory isn’t limited to formal decisions, and that Meta’s answers were mostly about using the data, not obtaining or downloading it.
Meta’s argument that decisions were often collaborative doesn’t change that. The interrogatory asks about all decisionmakers, so if a decision was made by a team, everyone involved has to be named.
Everyone in the group
Meta must also identify the people who took part in the discussion that preceded the 2023 LibGen torrent download. In addition, it has to name the people who approved going ahead with BitTorrent, and whoever greenlit the April 2024 download from Anna’s Archive.
Notably, the order also covers everyone who decided “whether or how to seed, or to mitigate seeding,” when Meta downloaded LibGen’s Scimag collection and Anna’s Archive through BitTorrent.
For Entrepreneur Media, these names are important. The publisher says the answers “bear on” willfulness, as well as on its contributory copyright infringement and distribution claims.
This dispute largely revolved around naming the people involved. Whether Meta’s torrenting was fair use, and whether it actually distributed pirated books to others, has yet to be decided.
—
A copy of Magistrate Judge Hixson’s order is available here (pdf). The joint letter briefs filed by Entrepreneur Media and Meta can be found here (pdf) and here (pdf). Meta’s second supplemental interrogatory responses are available here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
The Stop Killing Games movement appears to still be alive and well. The grassroots campaign to legislate out the practice of gaming companies selling games that they neuter or render unplayable in whole or part later when shutting down backend server support has had its ups and downs, to be sure. An effort to pass legislation in the EU, one which gained 1 million signatures for its petition, ultimately failed to progress into law. Allies in California are attempting similar state legislation, despite heavy and disingenuous lobbying from the likes of the ESA. This is all a lesson in the old saying that progress isn’t linear, as the public becomes more and more aware of the issue even as old and monied interests keep laws from being passed for now.
But this isn’t going away. And now we’re bypassing the state level in attempt to craft federal American legislation for digital games ownership, with Congressman Ritchie Torres of New York introducing a bill that would grant ownership rights to the public when it comes to the purchase of digital video games.
The bill, known as The Power to the Players Act, would direct the Fedral Trade Commission (FTC) to establish regulations that would protect gamers and their digital libraries. In short, Torres wants to ensure that when you buy a digital game, you actually own it, as opposed to getting a license that can be revoked. Additionally, the bill would require online games to have offline functionality, so that when servers are shut down, the content can still be played by those who own the game.
“Consumers must have the right to own, the right to play, and the right to transfer the games they buy,” Torres said in a press release. “A game that can be taken away the moment a company pulls the plug is not a purchase. It is a rental disguised as a sale. Families in the Bronx and across the country save up to buy these games, and they deserve better than a license that can vanish at any time. The Power To The Players Act ensures consumers own what they buy and can keep playing long after a company moves on.”
The power in a bill like this is chiefly how it entirely bypasses the question of indecipherable language buried in EULAs and TOS notices that come with digital games. It’s not saying the public needs to be better informed. It’s not a law about disclaimers, or the language that comes with documents for a digital game. It’s far more simple than that: this temporary license bullshit ends and it ends now.
Were it to be passed, this would have huge ramifications on the industry and where it’s currently trending. More and more games aren’t bothering with physical releases. Sony is nixing physical media for the next PlayStation console entirely. The industry has, in large part, decided that digital games will be the future of its business, which puts enormous emphasis on what a buyer’s rights are when it comes to those games.
Conferring what is essentially right of first sale rights for digital purchases is perhaps a step even further than the Stop Killing Games movement went. But it’s also one that makes a ton of sense. If these games bought are truly bought, then of course the public has a right to resell their own property. That has implications for storefronts like Steam as well, which will need to work with publishers to figure out how to manage such transfers. Making it so games remain playable after the publisher decides a game’s lifespan has ended has become table stakes to those larger ownership questions.
The lobbying against this bill will be furious. I very much doubt that this first attempt will result in codified law. But this version of the Overton window appears to be shifting, or at least widening. The public and lawmakers are becoming more and more aware of the questions about, and problems with, the digital games economy. With enough momentum, it’s hard to imagine that some version of legislation doesn’t pass eventually.
In the span of a few days, the Trump regime and its allies in Big Tech attacked democracy and freedom, both abroad and at home. The assaults ranged from granting Russia more sanctions relief, to hobbling Ukraine’s defenses, to silencing democratic organizing against Trump and speech critical of the world’s richest man.
Each attack came with an explanation that’s difficult to accept. No one knows what happened! (They do.) The problem is resolved! (It is not.) It was just an error! (Oops!)
We are being gaslit. To paraphrase Garry Kasparov, I believe in coincidences, but I also believe that fascists lie to the public and collude with oligarchs. Skepticism is warranted, particularly given the long history of lies and blame-shifting we’ve endured under Trump’s brand of authoritarianism.
On Friday, Trump waived most of the new sanctions in the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s Russia law, which he signed last month. The waivers landed just two days before the penalties were set to take effect. The White House’s excuse? It claimed enforcing them “would impede ongoing U.S. efforts” to reach a peace deal. Trump himself had already settled on the culprit: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he told Newsmax, “doesn’t want to settle.”
Graham, who managed amid his general spinelessness to make a robust case for defending Ukraine, died in July at a highly convenient time for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump’s order on Friday guts the core of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. Among the waived provisions were sanctions on foreign banks doing significant business with Russian state-owned banks, and bans on buying Russian sovereign debt and on U.S. investment in Russia. The waiver also spares China and India, major buyers of Russian oil, from the law’s tariffs on buyers of Russian energy. (Sen. Darline Graham, Lindsey’s sister, who was appointed to finish his term and is now the Republican nominee for a full one, offered only the mildest of objections. The law bearing her brother’s name “gives the president tools he can use if he so chooses,” she told reporters. “So that is up to him.”)
The order also undercut the law’s built-in incentive for peace: a provision allowing the sanctions to end if Russia signed a peace agreement Ukraine accepted and stopped fighting. In case anyone is wondering, Russia has not done so.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the waiver somewhat differently than Trump, labeling it a pause for economic review. “I think the President wants to take the 60-day period of time to sort of analyze what imposing both sanctions and tariffs will mean to the global economy and even to the U.S. economy,” he said. He cited the war with Iran among the pressures on energy supplies.
The waiver came a week after Trump announced a surprise deal letting Russia sell diesel. A senior White House official told the Wall Street Journal that Trump chose the diesel deal and the waiver because he saw few other good ways to address soaring fuel costs. Trump promised, emptily, that his deal with Putin would bring diesel prices down “IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST!” Under that deal, Russia could ship more than 300,000 metric tons of diesel immediately, 500,000 metric tons in November and 1 million metric tons after that.
But energy analysts expect little relief. The promised Russian volumes amount to “less than 5%” of U.S. diesel demand over the next few months, according to Wood Mackenzie. Experts told CBS News that Russian diesel can’t make up for the supply lost to the Iran war, which has knocked out Middle East refineries and disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
The Journal summed up Trump’s problem: “The consensus among energy experts is that the Iran war is the primary cause of rising diesel prices.” Even Rubio conceded that the deal would redirect existing supplies. “That diesel was going to be sold one way or the other,” he told reporters Saturday. “The only difference is how much of it the United States was going to get.”
Moscow welcomed the waiver. Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s economic envoy, called it “an important and truly historic moment.” Zelenskyy warned that waiving the law would only encourage Russia to keep killing. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who co-wrote the bill, said the waivers had “everything to do with sucking up to Vladimir Putin.”
With diesel still above $6 a gallon and the midterms just over two weeks away, Trump needed someone besides himself to blame. After a Ukrainian drone hit an oil refinery in Russia’s Ryazan region, Trump accused Zelenskyy of driving up world oil prices. (Every accusation is a confession.) The strike came after Ukraine spent three days observing an energy truce Trump had declared unilaterally on Oct. 11—one Russia ignored. Trump blasted Zelenskyy to reporters as “not a good guy for us to deal with.”
On Sunday, Trump put his claim in writing. “Zelensky is using Diesel Refineries in Russia as a target, knowing that these attacks are seriously hurting the world diesel markets, including those in the United States,” he posted on Truth Social. He added that Zelenskyy “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”
That claim is ahistorical and defies common sense.
Writing in National Review, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy tore into Trump’s Russia policy. “Trump claims to want peace, but his fine print consistently spells out Russia’s terms.” He also traced the fuel spike to its source: “sky-high diesel prices (which have surged due to Trump’s decision to start a war with Iran, not, as he claims, Ukraine’s decision to keep fighting for its survival).”
Putin has proposed a summit next month with Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to negotiate an end to the war on terms favorable to Moscow, the Journal reported Sunday. Zelenskyy would have no seat at the table. Putin raised the idea in the same Oct. 9 call that produced the diesel deal, according to a former Russian intelligence officer cited by the Journal, and the Kremlin has suggested holding the meeting on the sidelines of next month’s APEC summit in Shenzhen, China. A senior U.S. official told the Journal that Trump had not agreed to the summit but could be receptive. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha objected to Putin’s participation. “As long as he continues this terror, there should be no place for him at any table,” he wrote.
The deadly throttling just “sort of happened”
The waiver eased the pressure on Moscow in the same week the regime applied pressure to Kyiv. As Trump demanded that Ukraine stop its refinery strikes and moved ahead with his Russian diesel deal, the satellite connections Ukraine’s drones depend on were restricted overnight without warning.
Rubio insisted Saturday that no one at the White House ordered it. The same day, Zelenskyy noted gravely that the caps remained in place.
Last week, I noted that every administration denial about the Starshield throttling came from unnamed officials. By Thursday, reporting pointed toward the White House. Two U.S. officials and a Western official told Reuters that the order to limit Ukraine’s Starshield service came from inside the White House. Defense Department leaders, they said, received a message that the service needed to be slowed. A senior U.S. official responded that “no such request was ever made by the president.”
On Friday, the Telegraph reported that Elon Musk himself proposed to Trump that service be restricted to terminals moving above about 100 mph. According to one source, Trump agreed, clearing the way for the Pentagon to slow Starshield. Asked the same day who was responsible, Trump tried to clear both himself and Musk. “Well, I don’t know if it was anybody because it wasn’t me, and I don’t think it was Elon,” he said. A White House official went further, telling Axios: “This is totally false. As President Trump said, we didn’t slow down Starlink at all.”
On Saturday, Rubio joined the denials, telling reporters at Joint Base Andrews:
“I’m not sure Zelenskyy knows what he’s talking about, but it wasn’t deliberate. We had nothing to do with that. I don’t – the United States, nobody ordered that Starlink speed to be slowed down. It sort of happened, but my understanding is it’s been restored. It’s back to what it was before.”
Rubio also insisted that Starshield “is a contract with the U.S. military, it has nothing to do with Ukraine.” Ukraine relies on Starshield, the system the U.S. government controls, alongside commercial Starlink, and Ukrainian officials say both were restricted. Musk had already acknowledged the U.S. government’s control: “Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”
The official line is that there was a glitch. But as McCarthy argued in National Review, Congress should demand answers under oath. “Even if we suspend disbelief, ignore the Reuters report, and assume this was some sort of technological glitch, it would be critical to know that: After all, it would mean vital American interests around the world are vulnerable.”
Rubio’s claim that service was restored depends on how restoration is measured. On Wednesday, former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced that connectivity was returning for terminals moving at speeds up to about 160 km/h (about 100 mph)) and said removing the limit entirely was critical. Russia’s jet-powered Geran drones fly at around 300 mph. On Saturday, Zelenskyy said the interceptors Ukraine uses to chase them still could not bring them down under the current cap. He also noted that the caps apply inside Ukraine but not in EU countries and called the restrictions a “planned operation.”
Trump had earlier demanded that Ukraine stop striking Russian refineries. But as I noted last week, the satellite restrictions hampered air defenses over Ukrainian cities and strikes against Russian forces in occupied Ukraine. Long-range strikes inside Russia, the ones Trump wanted stopped, were largely spared, since Ukrainian drones flying over Russia were already barred from Starshield.
The platform restrictions just sort of happened
The man accused of pitching the throttling to Trump is also the subject of a documentary that TikTok spent the weekend keeping off its ad feed. Meanwhile, Trump heads into the midterms with a career-low 32 percent approval rating in a Reuters/Ipsos poll. It is quite a coincidence that on the same weekend, a major channel for organizers turning out his opponents went dark, as did the ad account of the film examining his chief tech ally.
The No Kings coalition billed its Oct. 17 day of action as a push to drive early voting, with nearly 3,000 events across the country. As events hit full swing, its main Instagram account went dark for roughly 90 minutes. Organizers said they stayed locked out of the backend for about four hours afterward. Meta communications chief Andy Stone initially blamed automated systems that flag accounts posting at very high frequencies. “Unfortunately, that automated action was clearly taken in error,” he wrote Saturday. By Sunday, Meta had changed its story, blaming an outside AI tool whose rapid-fire requests resembled bot traffic.
The coalition said Meta had suspended the account “at the peak of a major day of no kings activations for early voting — without explanation.” Recall that Meta agreed in 2025 to pay $25 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit over its suspension of his accounts after Jan. 6.
The weekend’s suspension was Meta’s second “error” involving a Trump ally’s critics in a month. In late September, YouTube, TikTok, Meta and X all declined to run paid ads for Musk, Alex Gibney’s documentary about the billionaire, with all but X citing political content. After the refusals became public, Meta and YouTube reversed course. “This was an error and we’re restoring the ads,” a Meta spokesperson said.
Oops!
Musk’s X platform refused ads for the film and for every other upcoming release from its distributor, Bleecker Street. X gave no reason, and it could hardly object to political content or misinformation; it is a cesspool of both from the right.
TikTok went further on Friday as the film expanded its theatrical release. The platform permanently suspended the documentary’s ad account, telling its distributor the action reflected the “level of severity with political-policy violations.” The suspended content included a lighthearted ad about what to do during the film’s intermission. Oracle, the company Larry Ellison co-founded, owns 15 percent of the joint venture that runs TikTok’s U.S. business, and Ellison’s ties to Musk are featured in the film.
On Sunday afternoon, a TikTok spokesperson told Engadget the restriction had been made in error and the account had been reinstated.
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.
The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.
Part IX — When the Reckoning Reaches the Courts Part VIII questioned whether regulation alone can alter the balance of power between Big Tech and society. Part IX asks what happens when accountability moves beyond legislation and into the courts and users themselves begin to demand answers.
There is a revealing assumption embedded in much of the debate about Big Tech: that the companies will eventually reform because political pressure, public criticism, and increasingly sophisticated regulation will persuade them to do so. Perhaps. But history suggests a less charitable and probably more realistic explanation for corporate change.
Powerful companies rarely abandon profitable business models because they have suddenly concluded that those models are incompatible with the public interest. They do so when the legal, financial or reputational costs of maintaining them become impossible to ignore. The tobacco industry did not transform because it discovered the importance of public health. Financial institutions did not fundamentally rethink their practices because criticism alone persuaded them that markets required greater responsibility. In industry after industry, public pressure mattered enormously, but the decisive moment often arrived when pressure acquired legal consequences.
That may be where Big Tech is now heading. For years, the debate surrounding the platforms was framed primarily as a regulatory problem. Were governments moving fast enough? Were legislators sufficiently technologically literate? Should companies be treated as publishers, utilities, common carriers, or something else entirely? What new obligations should be imposed upon recommendation systems, advertising models, app stores, artificial intelligence or the collection of personal data?
Those questions remain important. But there is another question beginning to emerge beneath them: what happens when users stop waiting for governments to solve the problem and begin asking courts whether the companies themselves can be held accountable?
This changes the nature of the debate. Legislation generally operates prospectively. It tells companies what they must do in the future. Courts can also look backwards. They ask what happened, who knew, what could reasonably have been anticipated and whether an organization’s choices contributed to a particular harm. That is a much more uncomfortable form of accountability.
A company can lobby against a bill. It can seek changes to legislation before it is passed. It can influence regulatory guidance and negotiate implementation. None of this guarantees success, but large corporations have spent decades developing the institutional machinery required to participate effectively in the political process.
Courts are different. Once a legal dispute has reached the question of responsibility, the argument is no longer only about what policymakers might require in the abstract. It becomes a question about evidence. Internal documents. Design decisions. Warnings. Risk assessments. Corporate knowledge. The relationship between what a company knew and what it chose to do.
The burden of explanation begins to shift. For the platforms, that shift may prove more consequential than another round of hearings in Washington or Brussels. The first major test of this new pressure may be child safety and there are obvious reasons why.
Few questions are as politically powerful as the safety of children. Abstract arguments about freedom of expression, innovation, and technological progress become considerably more difficult when confronted with evidence that children may be exposed to foreseeable and preventable harm. The question changes from whether a platform is generally beneficial to society to whether a company knew that particular features, systems or incentives created specific risks for vulnerable users and failed to take reasonable action.
That is not merely a regulatory question; it is a question of responsibility. And it may become the point at which the existing model of platform governance begins to change.
Yet child safety cannot be the end of the story. Indeed, it would be a mistake to treat children as the only people whose relationship with digital platforms deserves meaningful protection. Children may provide the clearest and most politically compelling case, but the deeper principle is broader. Adults also deserve protection from business models designed around asymmetries of information and power. Users also have interests in privacy, autonomy, and agency. Citizens also have interests in digital environments that do not systematically exploit vulnerabilities merely because those vulnerabilities can be measured and monetized. Communities also have interests in systems that do not treat social cohesion as collateral damage in the pursuit of engagement. And society as a whole has an interest in ensuring that the companies which increasingly mediate its public life cannot simply define responsibility according to the limits of what legislation has explicitly prohibited.
This is the larger reckoning. The argument is not that technology companies are uniquely evil; nor is it that every social problem produced online can be traced to corporate malice. That is neither accurate nor particularly useful.
The platforms built extraordinary technologies. They solved real problems. They connected people across distances that previous generations could barely imagine. Their success was deserved, at least in part, because they made the internet more accessible, more useful, and more powerful.
The question is what happens when the institutions that produced those achievements become sufficiently powerful that their own understanding of responsibility becomes one of the principal constraints on their power. For too long, the answer has been: very little. Platforms investigated themselves. Companies commissioned their own research. Executives appeared before legislatures. Regulators announced new inquiries. Governments threatened action. And the underlying model continued largely unchanged.
This is why the current moment may be different. The reckoning will not come because Big Tech has suddenly come to Jesus. It will not come because the companies have collectively discovered that human flourishing is a better objective than engagement. Nor will it come simply because legislators have finally written sufficiently strict rules, although legislation can and should play a crucial role in establishing the boundaries within which digital power operates.
The more profound change will come when Big Tech no longer controls the terms of the conversation about the harms it creates. That is what users and courts can do. Users can withdraw the legitimacy that platforms have long assumed their scale provides. They can demand alternatives, organize and bring claims. They can transform the experience of harm from an abstract policy problem into a question of accountability.
Courts, in the meantime, can ask questions that corporate public relations and political lobbying are designed to avoid. What did the company know? When did it know it? What did it do with that knowledge? Were risks foreseeable? Were warnings ignored? Was a particular outcome simply an unfortunate consequence of innovation, or was it connected to choices that could reasonably have been made differently?
These questions are more difficult to absorb into a compliance department. They may also prove more difficult to solve through lobbying.
Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.
Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the 
