AI is insensitive to threats to press freedom and creates new ones for good measure
Prof Columbia J School. Director Tow Center . Writes Guardian + elsewhere. Lives in airports…views are my own, thank goodness
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AI is insensitive to threats to press freedom and creates new ones for good measure
Joan Donovan is one of the foremost experts on the extremist online subcultures around Charlie Kirk’s killing - well worth paying attention to these details. Online platforms are (surprise) not so far on the right’s list of radicalizing forces….
For those with long memories, I believe the AI hype cycle has reached the ‘Boo.com’ stage of hypergrift
I’m sorry guys it was me. I signed Donald Trump’s name in my good pal Jeff Epstein’s birthday book. I was in college and it seemed like a fun gag. I thought people would like it
Look if you’re shaving pennies off dollars to run an AI podcast bot farm, one way to boost profits would be to have the operation run by Albanian teenagers and not a former Wondery executive. www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...
‘A nightmare 7th inning’ …does not really cover this situation
In a very dark time there is nothing quite like spending 5 minutes at the end of a meeting introducing colleagues to the concept of Sylvanian Family Drama TikTok accounts….
Asphyxiation risk
Exhibit B: cover-ups are as potent as lies. Awaiting clarification on this…might be some time
SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in a college applicant's file is blatantly unconstitutional ALSO SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in targeting whom to detain and deport is cool cool cool
Exhibit A. Newsrooms that pursue stories despite legal threats from the President. WSJ produce the ‘birthday message’ from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein . Awaiting the CBS/FreePress/Skydance robust follow up
lol …poor man. I almost feel sorry for him
In fairness Google (YouTube) also handed out shiny ‘gold disc’ type awards to the likes of Alex Jones in the past, so excitement about hosting extremist grift is nothing new
That is a great shot …hang it in the Louvre, or better - on the wall of the Leaking Boot
One might say a little of Column A, a little of Column B…
Let the record show ….
Illinois has banned AI therapy, making it the first state to regulate the use of AI in mental health services. www.engadget.com/ai/illinois-...
Ask Google Overviews if this statement from Liz Reid is accurate…because it reads like the most audacious piece of corporate gaslighting blog.google/products/sea...
17 drug companies just got this letter. We're now on to White House vs pharma in addition to White House vs auto OEMs, White House vs dropshippers, White House vs the construction and hospitality industry, etc.
Another banger from @klaudia.bsky.social - and by ‘banger’ I mean detailed look at the latest slew of research and reporting into the ways Google Overviews is strangling reporting www.cjr.org/analysis/tra...
It seems to be contagious. Now the Sun is also having to correct it heavily biased coverage of net-zero in response to, you know, actual facts...
The rise of the ‘Super Journalist’ or as we like to call them, just er ‘good journalists’ Jim Van Der Hei trying to make fetch happen www.axios.com/2025/07/22/j... Jim VandeHei: Rise of Super Journalists
"Joblessness among highly educated [young adults] everywhere from the US to the UK and beyond has climbed above the overall unemployment rate for the first time on record" on.ft.com/412S3zk
The rescission bill has passed the Senate. Once it passes the House, as expected, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's budget will be zeroed out for the first time since 1967, back when TV stations still broadcast in black and white.
Oh I almost forgot, Donald Trump sent Jeffrey Epstein a special 50th birthday message wishing him that ‘every day be a wonderful secret’ (WSJ exclusive) …
Muzzle speed today: Senate votes to stop funding for public media Colbert Show cancelled for ‘purely financial reasons’ Executive order to target ‘woke AI’ (Grok’s Hitler fan account presumably exempted) …
The ‘may every day be another wonderful secret’ chapter is now open
Flipping the kill switch on swathes of journalism is apparently not enough for some people….
‘Purely financial ‘ is doing so much heavy lifting here
One of the great paradoxes of the modern world, and the way a tiny number of individuals hold sway over vast reserves of wealth and now political power, is that truth be told …PayPal is rubbish, even by the mediocre standards of payment apps
‘Dismissed by many people not just his supporters….’ ….fixed it. it’s quite something to write a justification of your own terrible journalism which layers on yet more ordure . Though maybe not that unusual now I come to think of it.
💯
A 17yo fills in a university app for a college he *failed to get into*….
If Joe Kahn thinks this piece is news worthy, it would be good to hear him describe why. And why the NYT ‘mended’ the description of the source but failed to identify him even when others had published his name.
NYT ‘standards’ editor. Okay, some journalistic standards for ya : flimsily reported with ‘newsworthy’ stated as a fact, without evidence. And fails in its basic journalistic mission to answer the question of ‘doesn’t this breach your own standards?’
So pleased to see this. Varsha Bansal developed this story and interview in our class on Information Warfare Reporting - thanks to @wired.com for publishing and Jo Ellis for standing up to disinformation
A thing that makes that Times story especially odious is that Zohran Mamdani's father was LITERALLY expelled from Uganda during Idi Amin's fascist effort to scapegoat Asian Ugandans as not really African www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Me to one of my sons : ‘if you want to write a first person essay in the NYT about what it’s like to be a Bronx Science student who ends up at a liberal arts college because your ‘child of a professor’ status held no sway with Columbia admissions ….NOW IS THE TIME’
Don’t contradict the paranoid fever dream with inconvenient facts…
so let me get this straight—the NYT accepted hacked information given to them by a substack white supremacist to be used against a mayoral candidate?
It strongly implies he is trying to trick his way into a university where,by the very fact he is a prof’s child, his application would *automatically* be treated differently (not necessarily more favorably, but with added attention and full knowledge of who he is).
The Mamdani ‘college admissions’ coverage in the NYT is beyond shoddy. Despite three bylines (how many reporters does it take to lift hacked material from a eugenicist’s blog?) the story omits context about the admissions process that would further undermine their own crass take.
Here are some details from TPM about the source who worked with the NYT to attack Zohran Mamdani that could maybe have made it into their piece. talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things...
London
Sunday
404 are the best
David Goodhart’s bad opinions on race still find column inches …..so some decades long traditions still hold.
The main thing broken about London is its godawful ‘local’ newspaper
BREAKING: Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were fatally shot in a "politically motivated" shootings at their homes in Minnesota, officials said. The suspect, who is still at large, allegedly impersonated a police officer with a uniform and a cruiser. nbcnews.to/3HV9A5L
All the worst people in a collective flop sweat
It took just 15 years to get from Citizens United to this
Hostile work environment
‘words in car’ on the Miller household commute tonight
‘A meeting in the Oval Office’ ……
No more questions your honor
I'm just glad one of these men has the nuclear codes and the other has all our personal data.
You did not TRY ….I bet you set up an alert
I just fucking KNEW you would make this point JB …. But it’s fair to say he didn’t have apps in mind either …. *so there*
Yes - we will go out not with a bang but a Heat mag-style celebrity beef
survivor solidarity
Fwiw, I do not think this is what Tim Berners Lee had in mind
Sadly old enough
…To think how much time I wasted in seminars in the oughts on how ‘storytelling’ was going to save us, and now the military industrial narrative complex is threatening (what’s left of) civilization
This feels like an end of season episode ….
Anyone who followed the NetChoice v. Paxton challenge to Texas's must-carry law (the one the S Ct ruled on in Moody) will be deeply disoriented by the Fifth Circuit's new en banc ruling, in Little v Llano, that it's OK for govt to remove books from libraries. 1/ reason.com/wp-content/u...
A case study in textbook authoritarianism: Day by day, we’re seeing the Justice Department effectively decriminalize and wave away crimes by Trump’s friends and instead selectively focus investigatory resources on Trump’s adversaries and enemies. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/crime-is-n...
Ohio State has over three thousand at the moment, representing around 6% of the student body. Congrats to all the American families who will get to pick up the tab now.
And no, it doesn't matter if this is struck down in court. The immediate effect of all these policies against international students, already in precarious positions, is immediate fear, panic, and uncertainty, and no court can change that. Would you send your child here under these circumstances?
Like me, the bodega cat is thinking about what happened in the final two minutes of game 1
There’s so much AI data scraping to build nonsense AI that humans can no longer access data. Sorry humans!
North London Forever
That is spot on
Counterpoint : libraries could be of great use to WSJ oped writers should they ever choose to use them
Decompressing today by catching up on reading …I know I am late to the Careless People party (started it ages ago only just getting round to properly reading it) …..holy forking shirtballs
New DCN research out. Too much of the conversation around Gen Z assumes they aren’t interested in media brands. The reality is simpler: they aren’t finding us. If you’re not in their algorithmic feed, you’re not in their world. That has to change. /1
aura farming…….
Wonderfully written by @aidaalami.bsky.social , an empathetic piece on an enraging situation
…resist the temptation to get ChatGPT to summarize…..
Google rejected giving publishers more choice to opt out of AI Search
OPT is the program that allows foreign students graduating with STEM degrees stay and work for up to three years. Because of the oversubscribed H-1B lottery, OPT is one of the main ways that foreign students manage to transition to jobs in the US. Ending it would destroy a major STEM pipeline.
Starving vast tracts of land of water for this kind of shit. (bTW Knicks starts at 8pm)
Enormous credit to the women who risked a lot by coming forward with such painful stories, and to Betsy Morais who carefully reported out a terrible but all too familiar story
We at the Tow Center have a major report out on AI in the newsroom - (absent any funding influence from the providers or users of the technology). ‘Journalism Zero’ is not too much of a stretch from the abstraction created by LLMs summary from @niemanlab.org www.niemanlab.org/2025/05/were...
Unironically they should buy up the domains for about 60 defunct local newspapers in swing states. Hire two reporters to write almost exclusively about highschool sports and new restaurants opening with every 10th article about how the local GOP is screwing over people.
This is what happens when you move to Journalism Zero ….
DOGE cuts ⤷ tornado forecast offices closed overnight ⤷ 27 Americans dead after overnight tornadoes
Catching up with the Grok white South African genocide analysis. This from @zey.bsky.social is excellent. In particular the point lower down here about the corrupt influence of ‘engagement metrics’ ….a blight that has got worse if anything www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/o...
Mets go down 6-2 to the Yankees. Knicks in 6 against the Celtics at MSG. Bad night to be a New York hipster who made poor team choices
Has anyone seen Bill Simmons?
The junk bond meme stock themed administration continues to deliver
BREAKING: The Supreme Court holds that the Trump administration violated the due process rights of Venezuelan migrants last month in its rushed effort to expel them to El Salvador in the middle of the night (which SCOTUS blocked). Alito and Thomas dissent. www.documentcloud.org/documents/25...
My god. What an abomination. www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...
I am operating on purely fantastical assumptions here ….
"The proposed moratorium on state AI policymaking would be far worse than Congress’s inaction....States play an essential role in AI regulation — eliminating that will leave Americans more exposed to risks and with fewer avenues to influence AI policies." www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...
Ahhh audited. Great data project for someone - Trump enemies /IRS audits compared
Now they’re playing Empire State of Mind …a recent Columbia tradition, (somewhat ironic…as my son, then 6, once said in a critique of the song: ‘seems there is a lot of things you actually can’t do here’)
Is Springsteen going to be put in secondary at Newark airport and have his social media scrutinized?
There is the first ‘class day’ at Columbia (graduating schools doing their own ceremonies). Very dystopian experience of sitting in my office, being blasted with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ on loop at sonic warfare sound levels
She does! This is a great example