This is a fantastic (and very, very funny) interview of @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy by Trevor Noah (who I guess isn't here?). www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QLy...
Zohran Mamdani: New York's New...
So congrats @durbin.senate.gov@bsky.brid.gy, brilliant fucking plan: you make it MORE DIFFICULT to protect kids, hand the internet over to the internet giants you claim to hate, and kill off smaller companies.
It'll be great for the trial lawyers, though.
And that's only for the companies big enough to try to stick around without 230. For smaller companies, the threat of lawsuits becomes existential. The whole thing gets how this works exactly backwards.
Because without 230, you have tied companies hands. They cannot take steps to protect kids without having to go through careful legal review *because* of that newly opened up "litigation." That makes the companies *slower* to respond and less willing to figure out better ideas.
Speaking of trial lawyers... take a wild guess who are the biggest contributors to @durbin.senate.gov@bsky.brid.gy's campaign coffers?
Dude, you're retiring. You don't have to keep giving them gifts.
https://oyster.us-east.host.bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.getBlob?did=did:plc:cak4klqoj3bqgk5rj6b4f5do&cid=bafkreibvp6s4rxcyw6td5oglhlko6m27lx6hkho4wyfcxse23yuzg6pykyThen a story of Meta "experimenting" with making certain accounts pay for links as part of its "pay for verification" program, further enshittifying Facebook by siloing itself from the wider open web & extracting more from business users.
Then we have the story of OpenAI hiring George Osborne, allowing Ben and I to chronicle all the ex-British pols who seem to end up on big tech payrolls. Nick Clegg, obviously, but also Rishi Sunak (who is working with Anthropic). It's all political these days.
Then a story about Meta's new approach to age verification which is (actually) *technically* interesting, but only inasmuch as the technically interesting bits obscure that there's still real problems with age verification systems and that you have to trust someone somewhere to care for your data.
New Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Have Yourself a Very Meta Christmas
This week, we're overloading on Meta stories, starting with reports of Meta aggressively banning marginalized groups. Remember the days when everyone insisted it was all "anti-conservative bias"?
podcast.ctrlaltspeech.com/2315966/epis...
Have Yourself a Very Meta Chri...