Last week, Pump.fun, a platform where you can buy and trade meme coins, launched Pump Fun GO, a new service where you can “pay ANYONE to do ANYTHING.” Users can create and complete on bounties “for ANY task.” The company claimed that this new feature would “leverage the power of humans and money across the globe.”

What it has actually done is create a new dystopian market where poor and desperate people debase themselves and others for small sums of money. As many online have pointed out, this is literally the plot of a famous Black Mirror episode.

Pump Fun GO is just the latest in a new class of platforms that are defining the next phase of the attention economy. Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi are part of this new era, as is the rise of so-called “UGC marketing.” I think we can call it the bounty economy. All of these platforms— Pump Fun, Polymarket, SideShift and others— are building a new synthetic reality where an increasing number of the things we witness IRL or encounter online are not spontaneous occurrences. They are commissioned performances designed to generate attention, engagement, and ultimately financial returns.

If you think my work is valuable, please buy a paid subscription to this newsletter or support me on Patreon.

Unlike other independent journalists, I have ZERO advertisers, ZERO outside funding, and accept ZERO political money. My work is entirely funded by people like you. Please become a paid subscriber today or support me on Patreon and ensure I can continue to do independent journalism.

Read more

By Taylor Lorenz & Tyler Johnston

Last July, ten days after Build American AI, a dark money group tied to pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future, filed its articles of incorporation in Nevada, a new meme page called “Doomers are dumb” cropped up on X. At first, it appeared to be a standard meme account attempting to go viral by posting generic content like “Gay son or thot daughter?“ and joking about getting cheated on by their waifu.

But in October, around the time Build American AI began publicly campaigning, the account pivoted. Suddenly, it began posting relentlessly about AI and sparring with “Jonathan Doomer,” a self-proclaimed AI skeptic who says he quit his job to spread warnings about the technology on Twitter (and who also began posting about AI on the exact same day).

Read more

Over the past several weeks, campaign disclosures have revealed that California Gov candidate Tom Steyer has been paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to influencers, almost none of whom initially included proper disclosure on their posts.

Progressive YouTuber Carlos Eduardo Espina received $400,000 from the Steyer campaign. FOOS GONE WILD, an Instagram page with 3.3 million followers that posts viral clips received $50,000. Instagram tea page The Shade Room received another $25,000. Earlier this month, a report from The Sacramento Bee revealed that, in addition to Steyer’s direct influencer marketing, the campaign is also utilizing a UGC platform, paying regular people, some of whom live out of state, $10 to post in support of Steyer on TikTok and Instagram.

After Kamala Harris’ loss in 2024, Democratic insiders finally began to meaningfully dip their toes into the new media landscape. Well paid consultants began pitching donors on a slew of new initiatives aimed at helping Democrats “win back the internet.” Last year, I reported for WIRED on one disastrous initiative funded by the powerful liberal dark money group The Sixteen Thirty Fund called the Chorus Creator Incubator Program. Content creators in that program accepted thousands of dollars per month to take part in a program aimed at boosting Democratic messaging online, all without disclosure.

When the story broke, the response from the influencers was indignant. The content creators, who signed contracts that some in the program described as restrictive, claimed that they “deserved to be paid for their work.” The Steyer campaign echoed this rhetoric more recently. “We compensate [influencers] for their work and their time, just like campaigns pay staff, consultants, media firms, strategists, and vendors across every part of politics,” the campaign posted after their disclosures were made public. “We’ve never paid for an endorsement, and we never will.”

This seems to be the new cut-and-paste response from Democratic political campaigns as they veer deeper into influencer marketing. Yes, we paid that influencer nearly half a million dollars to be a “strategic advisor” and he happened to post favorably about our campaign online, do you not think influencers are doing real work? Do you not support creatives being paid for their labor?

As someone who’s reported on the influencer industry for over 16 years, wrote a book on it, and has argued relentlessly for labor protections in the space, I find this new line of response lacking. Saying “creators deserve to be paid for their work” obscures the central question: what work? Because the type of “work” these creators are currently producing, I would argue, is not something influencers should be paid for under a fair political system.

When a political campaign or affiliated super PAC or LLC pays an influencer to produce content in support of a campaign, it’s usually classified as “digital advertising”. But the content produced is hardly recognizable as an ad. It is usually organic-seeming hyper-personal content. Often, the creator weaves details about their own life into the political messaging.

“I’ve dreamt of the day that I would be able to press a billionaire,” one influencer’s recent sponsored post with Steyer is captioned. “I was brought in to ask Tom Steyer some questions myself, and many of my followers needed answers to! What do you guys think?” The disclosure that the post was wholly paid for by Steyer was hidden at the bottom of the caption, only visible to users who clicked “see more.”

Larry Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, who has dedicated much of his career to getting money out of politics, told me that the proliferation of this type of influencer marketing in politics is “terrible, because it weakens the ability of people who are not being paid to be heard credibly. If everybody thinks that everybody’s being paid and nobody’s going to pay attention to what anybody says.”

Subscribe now

Lately, several campaigns have avoided the few disclosure requirements that exist by hiring influencers on as “consultants” or paying them vague “appearance fees.” They issue payments through management companies or throwaway LLCs to obscure who is being paid for what.

But fundamentally, what the campaigns are buying is a new form of highly effective political advertising where influencers will promote a candidate or their messaging to parasocial audiences in an organic-seeming, often hyper-personal format that does not read to the average viewer as an ad. That is the “work” that these creators are being paid for, whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

The campaigns are not exchanging money for the creator’s time or their editing skills. The value the influencer is offering is access to their parasocial audience who doesn’t realize they’re being marketed to.

If the work the creator was being compensated for was merely making a video, the honest version of that work already exists: create an overt ad for the campaign, co-post the ad with the campaign page, use the paid partnership label, and clearly disclose the content as the ad that it is. The reason campaigns and influencers don’t do this, is because a clear political ad is nowhere near as effective as the covert advertising they’re producing instead.

“If Tom Steyer paid CBS $10 million and then CBS ran ads for Tom Steyer and Steyer said, well I didn’t pay CBS for the ads, I just paid CBS, I mean, nobody would believe that,” Lessig said.

Subscribe now

The entire influencer industry is built on simulated intimacy and audience trust. These political campaigns are buying access to that trust and those relationship dynamics. In any healthy democratic system, there would be an understanding that this type of thing should not be for sale.

I do think content creators should be free to endorse whichever candidates they support as citizens, and I think politicians should absolutely engage more with the creator economy. Candidates should appear (for free!) on podcasts, go on YouTube livestreams, make Twitch appearances, and speak to the new media. If campaigns want to explicitly promote their candidate or message, there are many legitimate digital avenues to do that. They can buy ads on podcasts and YouTube channels, they can pay to promote their own advertising content directly across Instagram, TikTok and X in posts that are clearly marked and presented as ads.

What should not be normalized is this ethically dubious middle ground where campaigns covertly purchase access to parasocial trust networks while pretending they are merely compensating creators for “labor.”

In any just political system, this kind of advertising would be heavily regulated, if not outright illegal. The entire point of campaign finance and advertising law is supposed to be ensuring that the public understands when they are being advertised to. Influencer political marketing is explicitly designed to blur that line.

Subscribe now

Unfortunately, because political advertising is regulated by the FEC, which is functionally non-existent, we are left with a patchwork of state regulations. California’s Fair Political Practices Commission has launched an investigation into Steyer’s influencer campaigns to determine if they violated state transparency rules. However, the results will likely have zero consequences.

I realize that my stance on this is unpopular in the political world. When I bring the topic up, Democratic political strategists all argue that they should not hold themselves to higher standards than the Republicans, who have a long history of leveraging dark arts digital marketing tactics to amass online power. Doing so will cause them to lose. Liberal and left-leaning creators also say that they don’t want to turn down paid opportunities with Democratic candidates when so much of the right wing creator ecosystem is pay to play. I’m sympathetic to those arguments, and I think the Democratic consultants are right, they will lose if they avoid keeping pace with the Republicans. But I also think we need to think bigger.

Right now, we are in race to the bottom that Democrats, of all people, should understand they cannot win. The more that campaigns and political groups normalize this type of dubious influencer advertising, the more they erode public trust in our entire online media and information landscape. Audiences are already drowning in ragebait, AI slop, and sponsored content. Injecting undisclosed or barely disclosed political messaging into that ecosystem only accelerates the total and complete collapse of trust.

Eventually, voters will tap out. You’re already seeing this nihilism take hold. The public cannot discern who is bought or what is paid for. The Democrats might not realize this now, but refusing to fight for more transparency and regulation on the vast amount of money flooding the influencer advertising ecosystem is suicide for their movement long term.

Poorly mimicking the far right’s most unethical online marketing schemes is not an effective way to rebuild public trust in democracy or elections. Democrats cannot claim to care about protecting democratic institutions and the integrity of our information ecosystem while insisting that creators "deserve to be paid for their work” dismantling both.

What I’m reading

Read more

In late February, Alexis Rose Hinkley, a Los Angeles influencer with over 1.1 million followers on TikTok and more than half a million on Instagram, sent an email to Rae Huang’s campaign with a proposal. She touted her “large, highly engaged following” and asked the campaign for payment. She wanted $2,000 per month for a minimum of six months for “strategic messaging” and helping to “translate policy priorities into compelling, authentic content,” according to an email verified by the campaign.

“If the campaign can help build a platform and framework that allows me to put my audience behind Rae without compromising the trust I’ve established, this collaboration can expand,” she wrote. That expansion “would include a full public online endorsement and a coordinated push to galvanize other creators and influencers.”

Huang’s campaign balked. They had not yet hit the city’s matching program for fundraising and were subsisting entirely on small dollar donations. They certainly didn’t have the money to pay an influencer thousands of dollars per month. They made it clear to Hinkley that she would not be paid. Hinkley stopped responding and soon began consulting for Nithya Raman, whom she now uses her platform to support.

Subscribe now

Read more

The Bulwark’s Will Sommer joined me on this week’s episode of Power User to dive deep into the rise and fall of Ben Shapiro. We break down the details of Shapiro’s explosive feud with Candace Owens, the catastrophic failure of his Hollywood ambitions, how a changing Facebook algorithm killed their traffic overnight, and what Ben Shapiro’s fall reveals about the future of conservative media.

What I’m reading

Read more

Subscribe now

The Violent History of Resisting Technology

What if everything you've been told about technological progress is a lie? AI is changing our lives faster than ever, but resistance to technology is not new. For this week's Free Speech Friday I spoke with academic Thomas Dekeyser, author of the new book Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, about the history of anti-technology movements, from ancient Greece to Luddites smashing machines in the Industrial Revolution to anarchist groups bombing computer companies in the 1980s.

We discuss AI, labor automation, surveillance, moral panic, Silicon Valley ideology, tech CEOs, machine breaking, environmental destruction, and why backlash against technology keeps returning throughout history. We also explore whether technological progress actually benefits ordinary people, or mainly serves corporations and power. Sometimes it's not what you think!

What I’m reading

Read more

Read more

In March 2025 an alleged debate between Elon Musk and Keanu Reeves went viral on Substack. The post amassed 25,000 likes and nearly 5,000 reposts. Even today, it continues to spread. But the debate between Musk and Reeves never happened. The Substack post was entirely generated by AI.

Lately it feels like I’m encountering more and more AI-generated conte…

Read more

Kat Tenbarge of Spitfire News joins me on this week’s Power User episode to discuss the AI “Hot Girl Economy” and how tech giants are using aesthetic trends to Trojan-horse AI into our daily lives. We cover everything from viral Studio Ghibli filters and the AI puppy photo craze, to how startups like Higgsfield are targeting fashion influencers.

We also discuss what this “AI girly pop era” is designed to distract you from: extreme labor displacement, massive energy consumption, and the tech industry becoming increasingly intertwined with the US War Machine. [WATCH]

What I’m reading

Read more

I investigated this question for a story in Vanity Fair. I dug into the rise of AI digital clones and how more influencers and celebrities are seeking to scale their digital likenesses. You can read the full story here! One quote that really stuck with me:

Robert Freund, an attorney in California who works with content creators and talent agencies, said that influencers may be a canary in the coal mine for problems that all of us might soon face with the rise of this tech.

“The typical person does not want to see their face on billboards without their consent,” he said, “and that’s effectively what can happen if you sign up for one of these AI platforms without understanding what you’re doing.”

Subscribe now

Inside Iran’s Gen Z Meme Army

We are living in an era where global internet culture and meme warfare are even more influential than the mainstream media, and LEGOs are being used to create the most effective messaging around the US-Iran war.

I sat down with Areeba Fatima, a journalist for Dropsite News, who’s been reporting on the team behind “Explosive Media,” the group of seemingly Gen Z Iranians producing this viral content. Areeba got inside access to the Explosive Media Telegram channel, and was able to reveal clues about the identities of the young content creators producing these videos.

We dive deep into how these LEGO videos are actively reshaping Americans’ perceptions of modern warfare, and why this content is uniquely bridging the gap across the American political spectrum. [WATCH]

What I’m reading

Read more

What I’m reading

Read more

I’ll be writing about some of what I see/learn at this conference later this week or next depending on how hectic things get. In the meantime, here’s this week’s newsletter…

After his Wichita school district began installing AI cameras in school busses, local bus driver Kent Myrtle began been fighting back. He got himself thrown out of a safety hearing and has been trying to sound the alarm to local press about potential privacy concerns with the new AI surveillance tech.

From Wichita to Massachusetts, school districts are partnering with AI companies to implement "real-time monitoring" and "hazard detection” AI cameras.

I had Myrtle on to discuss what’s happening in his district, the "safety" claims around AI threat detection, AI systems mistaking bags of chips for weapons, how school buses are being turned into roving surveillance machines for law enforcement, and more. [WATCH]

What I’m reading

Read more

As every top free speech lawyer in the country and the writer Peter Suderman has noted, “tobacco is a chemical that is ingested into the body with specific, measurable, physical effects. Social media is a delivery system for speech—speech that will be different for every user, and speech that is protected by the First Amendment because, well, it’s speech.”

My former Atlantic colleague Derek Thompson wrote similarly last week explaining that, social media “isn’t a toxin that we can isolate and test and ban. It is an information-delivery system — a relentless, inescapable IV drip of news, connection, outrage, friendship, conspiracy, solidarity, and garbage — whose effect on any individual depends entirely on what’s in the drip.”

The New York Times Opinion section also ran a piece attempting to make this distinction. Titled, Don’t Cheer Too Hard for the Facebook Verdicts, they write, “a social media site isn’t a bottle of alcohol or a cigarette. It’s not delivering a drug. It’s delivering speech. Sometimes that speech is silly and harmless. Sometimes it is toxic and harmful. Sometimes it’s educational or inspiring. But it’s all speech, and in America speech traditionally can only be blocked, censored or regulated in the narrowest of circumstances.”

Still, proponents of censorship and mass surveillance laws claim that there’s some magical way social media is providing “dopamine” that makes the content uniquely “addictive” and worthy of mass government censorship.

Christopher J. Ferguson, a psychologist and researcher who studies this topic, wrote about how delusional these claims about dopamine are in a fantastic piece for RealClearInvestigations:

There’s a problem with this scientific-sounding explanation for an alleged explosion in addictive behaviors: It is not supported by science.

Solid research connecting dopamine spikes to drugs and alcohol – that is, the capacity of one chemical to ignite another – has not been shown to occur in similar ways with other behaviors. Drug use is fundamentally and physiologically different from behaviors that do not rely on pharmaceutical effects. This has been confirmed in humans: Technology, such as video games or social media, simply doesn’t influence dopamine receptors the way illicit substances do.

Experts say what we are seeing instead is pseudoscience that appears to legitimize a moral panic about behaviors that trouble certain segments of society. By falling for this pseudoscience, parents and others are at risk of missing more fundamental mental health issues that could be at the root of the obsessive behavior, potentially harming the very children they seek to help.

“Addiction is an important clinical term with a troubled and weighty history,” said Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist and coauthor of a brief explainer of what dopamine does and doesn’t do. “People enduring genuine addiction struggle to be taken seriously or viewed sympathetically at the best of times, so to apply their very serious condition to much more benign actions like scrolling TikTok makes this worse.”

Burnett likens current narratives about dopamine and technology to “science garnish,” effectively adding a dash of scientific language to nonsense beliefs. “It’s the informational equivalent of sprinkling parsley on a lasagna that’s 90 percent horse offal,” he said. “It may look nicer, but it isn’t.”

The pseudoscience, however, does play a useful role for parents and others who seek to restrict the behaviors they find disturbing. After all, “Don’t do X because it will dangerously rewire the reward circuits of your brain and cause addiction” is more compelling than “Don’t do X because I don’t like it and think you are wasting your time.”

Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology at Bath Spa University in England and author of “Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time,” says research doesn’t support the claim that dopamine drives addiction in other pleasurable behaviors that don’t rely on pharmaceutical effects.

“The role that it plays is really complex, to the point that neuroscientists no longer really consider it the sole or universal factor to consider,” he said. “So, when we try to say dopamine ‘surge’ = pleasure surge = addiction, that doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny.”

You can read the full piece here. I think of a conversation I had with a safety researcher a couple weeks ago, who said that she thinks the entire framing of “dopamine” is deeply misleading. Using social media is nothing like listening to a pleasurable song or playing with a puppy, she said. Instead, it often causes us stress.

She said that, from what she’s seen, social media causes frequent cortisol spikes (sorry Clavicular!) which keep people engaged. This isn’t because of some harmful “design feature,” it’s because much of the information users confront online is stressful, and so they have a stress response. This is very different than the “dopamine” narrative that many grifters are pushing. I’d love to speak to anyone else doing work in this area.

Ari Cohn and Tyler Tone, also highlighted a really good thread over on Bluesky, where a user named lizardky.bsky.social basically asked the question, (as Ari and Tyler summarized): Wouldn’t a platform like Bluesky, where there is no content-recommendation algorithm and users can tailor their feeds to contain precisely the people and types of posts they want to see, even more addictive?

As Cohn and Tone write, “it seems clear that the actual complaint is: the specific content being delivered by the content-recommendation algorithms is the source of the harm.”

Of course, that’s the entire goal of these “social media addiction” lawsuits. We know that those pursuing them aren’t actually interested in changing the design of social media, their goal is to censor “harmful content.”

We know this in part because minutes after the verdict was announced in L.A., the parents of “social media victims” held a press conference. At that press conference, they didn’t mention a single thing about laws that would alter “design features.” Instead, they immediately began advocating for mass online ID verification, repealing Section 230, and passing the Kids Online Safety Act with a strong “duty of care.” All three of these policy proposals would lead to mass censorship and surveillance, and none of them would do anything to change the alleged “addictive design” of the platforms.

Cindy Cohn, former director of the EFF for 30 years, who has a great new book out called Privacy’s Defender, went on The Daily Show last night and attempted to explain these issues to Jon Stewart. He didn’t seem to really get it, and the audience clapped and cheered when the “social media addiction” verdict was mentioned, but she did her best and it’s worth a watch!

Protect your data with Proton

Big tech scans your emails, documents and photos, and uses that data to do things like train AI, profile you and sell your information to advertisers.

Proton Mail is end-to-end encrypted email, which means your email content can’t be scanned. There’s no email trackers to tell senders and advertisers what you read and click on.

Proton Drive is the same principle applied to your files. You can securely store things like tax documents, family photos, sensitive files, because even the file metadata is encrypted.

Sometimes it feels like big tech is tracking us everywhere we go, but you don’t have to move to the woods and go off grid to escape.

Proton brings secure email and private cloud storage together in one simple subscription. Take control and protect your data!

Sign up for Proton today for FREE! 👈👈👈

What I’m reading

Read more

We also discuss how the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the repeal of Section 230 will lead to mass surveillance and censorship, the disturbing testimony from the LA trial that the media completely ignored, and the link between these lawsuits and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. [WACTH]

Subscribe now

Protect your data with Proton

Big tech scans your emails, documents and photos, and uses that data to do things like train AI, profile you and sell your information to advertisers.

Proton Mail is end-to-end encrypted email, which means your email content can’t be scanned. There’s no email trackers to tell senders and advertisers what you read and click on.

Proton Drive is the same principle applied to your files. You can securely store things like tax documents, family photos, sensitive files, because even the file metadata is encrypted.

Sometimes it feels like big tech is tracking us everywhere we go, but you don’t have to move to the woods and go off grid to escape.

Proton brings secure email and private cloud storage together in one simple subscription. Take control and protect your data!

Sign up for Proton today for FREE! 👈👈👈

What I’m reading

Read more

Subscribe now

It’s Cheaper Than You Think to Bribe The Right Wing Media

It’s no secret that the right wing media ecosystem is flooded with writers, influencers, and media outlets that will happily accept bribes or dark money payments in exchange for positive coverage.

Read more

What I’m reading

Read more

As some readers of this newsletter know, I’m extremely immunocompromised, so, travel is difficult and takes a lot out of me. I usually need at least a day or two to recover, even after short trips. But, now here it is Wednesday and I have not sent the newsletter out in a week.

At SXSW this year a lot of people were asking me about how it feels to go independent. I tell them all the same thing: it sucks never being able to take a week off. It’s the biggest thing I miss about a full time job. Right now, I work 7 days a week, usually from the moment I wake up until well past midnight. Aside from a part time freelance podcast editor who helps with Power User, I do every single aspect of content production myself. It’s exhausting! 😵‍💫

Subscribe now

I’ve also noticed a phenomenon especially here on Substack, where, I think because people feel like they’re paying for a product (the newsletter) rather than to support my work as a whole, they unsubscribe or cancel their paid subscription if I don’t send the newsletter frequently enough. This is totally understandable! But, it also creates this system where the creator can never take a week off or work on larger projects without losing income.

This system is a huge bummer. I have a ton of investigative projects that I wish I could work on related to online freedom and mass surveillance, but there’s simply no funding structure for these bigger projects. So, I’m trapped on this newsletter hamster wheel.

A few months ago I launched this same newsletter on Patreon, and I have noticed that Patreon supporters, perhaps thanks to years of conditioning by YouTubers, are far more forgiving of breaks.

That’s great, because sending this newsletter is the only way I’ve been able to produce all of my videos covering censorship and surveillance laws online, as well as my weekly Free Speech Friday podcast and livestream, my internet culture coverage, my section 230 series and more. All of these things otherwise lose money, so this newsletter subsidizes them.

I’m going to keep publishing on both Patreon and Substack, but TLDR if you support any of my work or advocacy across the internet, please please buy a paid subscription to this newsletter or support my work on Patreon! I have:

• Zero long term brand partnerships.

• No outside funding.

• My work is 100% funded by people like you who want to see the coverage I do out in the world.

Thank you for supporting me!! <3

How Powerful People Became Obsessed w/ Section 230

Today, the Senate is set to hold a hearing on Section 230 that many lawmakers hope will result in repealing it. This would be awful, for all the reasons I have outlined previously. But how did this one little internet law become so controversial?

In the latest episode of my Section 230 mini-series I’m joined by Mike Masnick, founder of Techdirt. Mike and I break down how the whole drama surrounding Section 230 began and how this extremely important law became vilified by the mainstream media. (TLDR, it all started with a very bad and very misleading WIRED article a decade ago, a well-timed book!) We also debunk the biggest myths about Section 230, break down how the law actually works, and explain why removing it would make Big Tech even more powerful.

You’re going to be hearing a lot more about Section 230 in the coming year, and Mike did an amazing job myth-busting a lot of social media talking points!

What I’m reading

Read more

Most people don't even understand what an algorithm even is. Eric discusses how even the beloved "reverse chronological order" feed is an algorithm, and how it actually rewards spammers, trolls, and bad actors.

We dive deep into how politicians are using the techlash to amass more power, how censorship has become a bipartisan value, and how companies like Meta actually want Section 230 amended so they can wipe out their smaller competitors.

From the dangers of age verification laws to the truth about how algorithms protect us from a dystopian, miserable internet full of spam and scams, Eric and I discuss the real existential threats to the open web, and how arguments about "algorithms" miss the real powers at play. [WATCH]

What I’m reading

Read more

Read more

In the US, online age verification laws have passed or are being considered in more than half of the nation’s states. This week, a package of 19 “child safety” bills, several which require identity verification for social media, are set to move forward in the House of Representatives. Big tech platforms such as Meta, Google and Discord have begun pre-complying with these mass surveillance laws in order to get ahead of regulation.

While social media bans may seem like a smart idea to “protect children,” they are not only ineffective, they endanger both children and adults. There is zero evidence that social media is driving any type of widespread mental health crisis in children. Studies have repeatedly shown the opposite.

Removing anonymity from the web, which inevitably happens when tech companies are required to identify and ban children, allows for complete government tracking and censorship of journalists, activists, whistleblowers, and countless marginalized people and groups who rely on online anonymity.

Read the full piece here!! 👈👈👈👈👈👈👈👈👈👈

How Anti Abortion Groups Target the Internet

The fight against age verification and the efforts to dismantle Section 230 are deeply intertwined with the fight for reproductive rights. Today, I released the next installment of my Section 230 mini-series where I break down how anti abortion groups are targeting the internet itself.

From the 1873 Comstock Act to modern day efforts to repeal Section 230, there is a long history of using censorship laws to suppress reproductive health information. The fight for reproductive justice and bodily autonomy has always been deeply connected to free speech and open access to information online. And I sat down with Sarah Philips from Fight for the Future to uncover the real agenda behind the push to repeal Section 230.

While politicians, the media, and so many uninformed people on the left constantly frame weakening Section 230 as a way to "hold Big Tech accountable," these efforts actually undermine our right to access vital information related to reproductive justice and abortion online. Sarah and I dive deep into the history of speech law, and talk about where the fight stands today.

We discuss how early internet censorship efforts were disguised as protecting kids from indecent material, the devastating impact of SESTA/FOSTA and how it led to mass content takedowns of sex education and LGBTQ+ resources, and how the narrative of "tech addiction" is being weaponized to pass restrictive internet laws.

Speaking out against Big Tech and challenging institutional power is not lucrative, and these videos are entirely self-funded. If you value this content, please buy a paid subscription to this newsletter so that I can continue making this series!!! [WATCH HERE]

Subscribe now

‘Opensource Palantir’

Read more