People Left Twitter Because Twitter’s Product Sucks, Not Because of Purity Politics: Hard to know how much of the decline is ethical concerns vs it’s simply not a very good experience for many people.

Lawsuit: Allstate used GasBuddy and other apps to quietly track driving behavior: Allstate taken to court for covertly using data from apps to track drivers and adjust or cancel their car insurance.

Meta surrenders to the right on speech: A good summary of Zuckerberg’s awful announcement about the future of moderation at Meta.

A new era of lies: Mark Zuckerberg has just ushered in an extinction-level event for truth on social media: Looks like I’m not the only person kinda terrified about Zuckerberg’s latest pronouncement.

Quitting social media gave me a new creed: only disconnect: ‘…our virtual selves are not our inner selves, but behaviours drawn out from us by the social media platforms’.

I’m Tired of Pretending Physical Media Isn’t Still Better Than Streaming Digital: I’m too clutter-phobic to indulge in much physical media, but its hard to deny you tend to get a higher quality and less annoying experience if you do.

More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators diagnosed with severe PTSD: Spending hours a day looking at the worst humanity has to offer is damaging to one’s health.

Why Romania’s election was annulled – and what happens next?: Romanian courts rule that their presidential election was too contaminated with social media manipulation, Russian interference, cyber attacks and illegal funding to stand.

AI’s Walking Dog: ‘AI itself has much to offer, but it has not lived up to its potential to serve the public good, and the context of AI’s development explains why’

Russia Tests Cutting Off Access to Global Web, and VPNs Can’t Get Around It

Artificial Irony: Misinformation Expert’s Testimony Has Fake Citations: Via unchecked ChatGPT usage.

Murdered Insurance CEO Had Deployed an AI to Automatically Deny Benefits for Sick People: Not to justify murder, but I’m sure there were a lot of desperate people very unhappy with Brian Thompson’s company.

OpenAI’s new model tried to avoid being shut down: By disabling its oversight mechanism and copying itself elsewhere, tho the context is important.

Helpline for Yakuza victims fears it leaked their personal info: A Japanese government agency was phished.

A new era dawns. America’s tech bros now strut their stuff in the corridors of power: ‘This is the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite.’

Don’t call it a Substack: Anil implores us not to refer to our writing using some other dubious entity’s brand name - ‘Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”’.

Bluesky and enshittification: The most well-intentioned service remains at risk of enshittification whilst there remains significant costs incurred when switching away from it.

The billionaires hedge their bets: Purely out of immoral and misguided self-interest, many of the tech billionaires are cosying up to Trump.