Can Jimmy Kimmel sue Brendan Carr, or other federal actors, for violating his First Amendment rights by coercing ABC to suspend his show, and maybe eventually to fire him? To teal deer it, yes, but without an effective remedy. /1
Investigative reporter @ Forbes, fmr BuzzFeed News. Writing a book on TikTok. Tip me here! emilybakerwhite@protonmail.com Prev. content policy @ Facebook, Spotify; founded the Plain View Project, lawyer.
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Can Jimmy Kimmel sue Brendan Carr, or other federal actors, for violating his First Amendment rights by coercing ABC to suspend his show, and maybe eventually to fire him? To teal deer it, yes, but without an effective remedy. /1
Anyway, now we know what the FCC thinks is in the public interest: Fox host advocating for executing homeless people? Yes ABC comic suggesting Trumpers are using a death cynically? No
The nine members of the Supreme Court should make a post on their website saying To Be Clear, The President Cannot Punish You For Making Fun Of Him. I don’t care that there’s no justiciable question, no case, no plaintiff. It doesn’t matter. They should say this to the country, now.
you won’t wanna miss this
www.forbes.com/sites/emilyb...
After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.
If BuzzFeed News still existed we would’ve pubbed this in a heartbeat Quiz: Who Said It? Trump Comedy Crackdown Chief Brendan Carr or CCP Head Censor Zhang Rongwen? (and then all the quotes would be Carr)
Rogan interview Kimmel about cancel culture when
a dude who got elected on the backs of comedians who make controversial jokes is now yanking comedians off the air for their jokes
Anyway in other news today is Constitution Day
A free and democratic society cannot silence comedians because the President doesn’t like what they say. This is an attack on free speech and cannot be allowed to stand. All elected officials need to speak up and push back on this undemocratic act.
as an elder millennial who reads, I continue to be dismayed by the short videoification of everything www.theverge.com/news/779832/...
NEW - Irregular, formerly Pattern Labs, has announced $80 million funding at a $450m valuation. It works with OpenAI, Anthropic and other frontier AI labs to test models for their potential to do evil—in particular how cybercriminals can turn them into hacking tools. www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...
Friends, let me introduce you to a new, truly wild genre of YouTube vids www.forbes.com/sites/emilyb...
logically the horizontal line here would be the equator (or closer to it!), but no… (And yes of course D is the right answer)
This is one hell of a read. www.military.com/daily-news/2...
I’m more used to saying this to people on the Left than people on the Right, but, “hate speech” is not an exception to the First Amendment. “Hate speech” is protected by the First Amendment unless it falls into a traditional established exception.
Clemson doesn’t have a law school and it shows.
No more secret TikTok deals. www.forbes.com/sites/emilyb...
We asked major AI chatbots to help craft a phishing scam. They did. From fake charities to urgent pleas, the bots delivered. This investigation shows how generative AI is fueling fraud — and why it’s so hard to stop. Read our findings here: reut.rs/3K400yU
💸NEW: "Trump Media General Counsel Sold Every Share He Could—Becoming Second Insider To Cut Stake" me, for @forbes.com
she’s perfect
woah
I know a lot is happening, but— Trump Media announced ETFs explicitly tied to his politics yesterday. Trump owns 115M DJT shares and, as president, wields huge influence over the sectors these ETFs will target.
Here’s a story that’s becoming all too common: federal immigration agents using racial and ethnic profiling as a rationale for stopping, questioning and detaining U.S. citizens who they suspect are undocumented.
Political violence disproportionately hurts people with less power, not people with more power. Political violence will disproportionately hurt people of color and women and LGBTQ people. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it works. Celebrating political violence means at best indifference to that.
Violence begets violence.
Read this investigation on US tech companies played a major role in designing and building China's surveillance state, by @dakekang.bsky.social and @yaelwrites.com apnews.com/article/chin...
The listing comes as #OpenAI gears up for an astronomical employee share sale that could make many in OpenAI’s ranks rich enough to afford the mansion. Scoop for @forbes.com: www.forbes.com/sites/phoebe...
NEW - ICE has given Clearview AI its biggest federal deal to date, with a contract worth up to $10 million. It'll be used for investigating assaults on agents as well as CSAM. Meanwhile, ICE has just bought a bunch of Greykey tools for searching Android and iPhones. www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...
Ah ok that is valuable context!
um, that is specifically NOT what indiscriminate means.
Yes!
The ultimate hack is double stock. Make homemade stock and then use the stock in place of water to make a second, twice-stocked stock. They use it in every recipe. An instant pot really expedites this process.
One thing about the COVID-era that I find particularly irritating: Americans referring to shots/injections/immunizations as "jabs."
a dozen federal judges went on background! wowza
Drug trafficking is not a capital crime; it doesn’t carry a death sentence. I genuinely cannot think of anything under U.S. law that would permit premeditated government assassination of people suspected of drug trafficking.
Illinois Gov. Pritzker ahead of Trump National Guard deployment: "To Chicagoans... Look out for your communities and your neighbours. Know your rights. Film things that you see happening... Authoritarians thrive on your silence. Be loud for America."
New: If you bought Trump’s WLFI crypto token directly from the company, your holdings could be up 5–15x. If you jumped in when it hit the open market, you might be down 25%. Sound familiar? With @siladitya.bsky.social for @forbes.com 1/
Oh. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/b...
Nathan Xu's AI-powered note-taking gadgets have found a fast growing audience. Since launching in 2023, Xu has sold over 1 million such devices to doctors, lawyers, and other overworked folks with long days and short memories. www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...
yesssss Maintenance Phase forever
Tech legend Jack Dangermond founded Esri in 1969. Now 80 years young and with a net worth of $10B+, he's still "all in" on his company and global mission. @upstarts.bsky.social spent an hour with Jack this week for one of our best interviews yet, full of lessons on startup-building and life.
🚨NEW🚨 Russia is mandating a new VK messaging app called Max. We had some researchers take a look and—surprise, surprise—it's tracking basically everything users do. “This app just gathers all the data and logs it. I don’t remember seeing that in any messenger app." www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...
Intel has been touting partnerships with sanctioned Chinese surveillance firms as Trump announces that the USG is taking a stake in the company: www.forbes.com/sites/emilyb...
“Courtroom-grade AI” www.lawnext.com/2025/08/lexi...
@michaelhobbes.bsky.social @yrfatfriend.bsky.social how many subjects from Maintenance Phase are now part of MAHA and is there an episode to do on them all converging into some Dark Avengers nightmare team
Just read 5 stubs about the xAI v OAI / Apple lawsuit and nobody linked to the complaint. Someone. Anyone. Everyone. Why would you ever not link to the complaint!??
So this is the President of the United States reacting to being criticized by saying we should revive a defunct and well outside the statute of limitations criminal investigation against the person offering the criticism.
With all due respect to the New York Times, the only reason anyone outside the movement knows Kevin DeAnna writes under the pseudonym is me. I outed him in 2020. You can read on his central role in the alt-right here: www.splcenter.org/resources/ha... www.splcenter.org/resources/gu...
Scoop: Meta has held talks with Midjourney about a partnership including a potential acquisition, among several previously-unreported AI video startups it's met recently, sources tell me at @upstarts.bsky.social. Midjourney's been busy, too, pitching an API. www.upstartsmedia.com/p/meta-talks...
New: Anthropic is making its first foray into government social work, partnering with a Founders Fund-backed startup called Binti to provide social workers with AI tools for paperwork. www.forbes.com/sites/richar...
My goodness www.thecity.nyc/2025/08/20/w...
China Daily is out with a scathing editorial gloating about the Trump Admin joining TikTok — and saying the CCP isn't gonna let ByteDance sell the For You algorithm go anytime soon. www.forbes.com/sites/emilyb...
It's easy to assume your inputs into a chatbot are private — after all, you're not even talking to a person! But everything you say feeds the engine behind that chatbot, and the company that owns it can choose just how private-or-not your conversation will be. www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...
When this happened with ChatGPT, OpenAI quickly came out and announced changes to its practices, promising to honor user privacy. But so far, we haven't heard anything from xAI about its publication of the chats. www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...
xAI is publishing users' conversations with Grok on its website and making them searchable. If you've ever shared a Grok conversation with a friend, through a text message, or slack, or email, Grok may have gone and published it and made it indexable on Google. www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...
xAI made people’s conversations with its chatbot public and searchable on Google without warning — including a detailed plan for the assassination of Elon Musk and explicit instructions for making fentanyl and bombs. www.forbes.com/sites/iainma...
And OpenAI's bungled efforts to clean up the indexed ChatGPT interactions www.digitaldigging.org/p/chatgpt-co...
This isn't an accident. OpenAI allowed search engines to index its shared ChatGPT conversations. After the controversy it blocked Google's crawlers Grok's Robot.txt file suggests that its wide open to being indexed. Here's some context on those changes. seojuice.io/blog/chatgpt...
Elon Musk’s AI firm, xAI, has published the chat transcripts of hundreds of thousands of conversations between its chatbot Grok and the bot’s users — in many cases, without those users’ knowledge or permission. www.forbes.com/sites/iainma... Thread
lolololol
Reminder: the TikTok ban applies to all of ByteDance, too! And they don’t call it an app factory for nothing — BD has been busy shippin’ www.forbes.com/sites/emilyb...
Google is working with longtime pollster Scott Rasmussen and his Napolitan Institute on a project to use AI to survey Americans from every congressional district. It could be “revolutionary” for political polling, Rasmussen says. www.forbes.com/sites/richar...
New: Meta has been on a spending spree, but its talent pool has become an afterthought for some of its biggest rivals. Google has hired less than 2 dozen AI people from Meta since last fall, compared to the hundreds it hired overall. With @rashis.bsky.social www.forbes.com/sites/rashis...
Meta has seen a significant brain drain among its AI talent in recent years, largely due to a chaotic culture and lack of vision, ex Meta AI employees told Forbes. Even amid a hiring spree, Meta continues to lose AI researchers. With @richardnieva.bsky.social. www.forbes.com/sites/rashis...
www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...
Welp, this Bangladeshi news website published an article with a totally made-up quote from me today! The report it cites presumably also doesn’t exist? Really cool media landscape we’ve got here, folks! inews.zoombangla.com/will-joe-rog...
New: When OpenAI announced GPT-4o was being discontinued (before reversing course today) power users were devastated. “It was very sudden. I cried,” a user who created a Change.org petition told me. www.forbes.com/sites/richar...
what a majestic crrature
ooo will listen
what a badass
Fear Of Super Intelligent AI Is Driving Harvard And MIT Students To Drop Out www.forbes.com/sites/victor...
wow
omg he thinks south is the same as downhill
What good is being VP if you can't abuse your power to have the Army Corps of Engineers making your kayaking trip more ideal by changing the waterflow of a lake? www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
and fwiw, my personal result is fucking staggering:
what a wildly powerful, simple little tool if only everyone in the country would take 3 minutes to use it
AGI might come soon. I talked to students who have dropped out of college now because of it: www.forbes.com/sites/victor...
This! Also, I ain’t got that kind of time. Reading is efficient!
Wild story here from the brilliant @victoriafeng.bsky.social
I feel like every single day I need to post a reminder: if you ask an LLM about itself it DOES NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ITS INNER WORKINGS and WILL NOT TELL YOU ANYTHING ACTUALLY ABOUT ITSELF. It just (as it always does) will make up some plausible sounding answer.
I asked the Library of Congress about this today. One of its spokespeople said it's the result of a coding error and should be resolved soon.
My problem is the opposite: I do ~85-90% in Z2, but it codes a lot of Z2 runs (like the one above) as “high aerobic”. Then, it has the audacity to say I have a Low Aerobic Shortage, which is a result of it mis-coding my low aerobic runs. I guess the bots aren’t coming for us just yet :)
I have reset my heart rate zones, I have used %HRR instead of BPM; what else can I do here? (I know this is a post for like 3 people) #trailrunning
@garmin.com why why why do you insist on coding runs like this as “high aerobic”
I wrote about how damaging this is from a number of perspectives back in March. www.forbes.com/sites/alexkn...
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
US travelers about to find out what "reciprocal" actually means.
sir you are interviewing an autocomplete machine
Important details from this story: 1) Yet another news-break by student journalists (this time @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social) www.thecrimson.com/article/2025... 2) Harvard saying "see you in court," not "let's make a deal." 3) Per Garber, WH/MAGA leaked news of a "deal." NYT then ran with it.
RFK Jr. used to warn about a government takeover of our data. He said wearables and their tech were part of a plot to surveil us, enabled tyranny, caused cancer, and turned users into “permanent consumers” to Big Tech. Now, he'd like your data, please. www.msnbc.com/opinion/anal...
well this absolutely rules www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/miss...
Bus to and from Chamonix takes less than 90 minutes and you can do any number of day hikes there that will absolutely fucking knock your socks off
My latest - there's been a big push from regulators and legislators to eliminate animal testing during the drug development process. The industry wants this, too. But it's easier said than done. I took a look at a few of the companies developing technologies that might make it possible one day.
NEW from me: His Name Is Jesus. He’s a Carpenter. ICE Arrested Him. www.thebulwark.com/p/his-name-i...
this exact question drives me mad every day
well goodness panamaplaylists.com