The Trump Administration has perfected a particular type of political content drop: take a pile of documents, strip them of context, pace the release for maximum drama, and narrate it with insinuations that travel faster than any correction. It’s part opposition research dump, part conspiracy serial, and the audience
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Someone is wrong on the internet so I thought I’d send out a newsletter. This time, it’s about European tech regulation…a topic that rightly makes any normal person’s eyes glaze over, but in 2025 is part of the culture wars and trade wars simultaneously. So, it
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Ten years ago, a measles outbreak at Disneyland sickened 125 people – a quarter of them under 5 years old. Nearly 20% were hospitalized. Fortunately, no one died. This happened as California was emerging from its worst whooping cough epidemic in 70 years. At the time, I was a new mom,
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This past Wednesday marked the deadline for public comments in the FTC’s Request for Public Comment Regarding Technology Platform Censorship. Calls for comment are always an interesting exercise in democratic participation: you get industry professionals and policy wonks with a stake in the outcome, and very passionate citizens who
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Two days ago Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok developed a singular fixation with white genocide in South Africa. No matter what users asked it, it found a way to connect the issue to its preferred topic of conversation. A user posted a video of a kitten playing with water
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In an alternate universe, I run a sprawling cabal. I wrote about it last year: my supposed secret double life as a CIA agent orchestrating a Censorship Industrial Complex from within Stanford University. The full mythology of the nonexistent censorship complex spans dozens of serialized posts, forming a sprawling cinematic
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“We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law.” - Arthur Miller, The Crucible Hello! Two months have gone by since my last newsletter post. 🙈 In that time, Congress - the Senate and the
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Hey all! Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2025 just came out, and it crystallized something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Instead of trying to time a newsletter around the never-ending series of dramatic events from the DOGE Administration, this is a post that is perhaps more about
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Hello! Happy new year! It was a busy week in tech policy land. Yesterday was the SCOTUS hearing on TikTok (interesting legal takes). Also, Some Personal News: I've joined Lawfare as an editor and will be doing a lot more posts and podcasts. I'd kind of
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So I fired up Ghost to write this post and noticed that the last time I sent a newsletter was Aug 26th. I really thought it had been a month; this is why I don't do this professionally. Since I've last posted, some things happened, we
Read moreFirst, hi to all the new newsletter subscribers this week! I recently had the pleasure of joining Sam Harris and Kara Swisher on their podcasts to chat about my book, influencers, and how public opinion is shaped. Both are fantastic interviewers with distinct perspectives, and I am happy more folks
Read moreHello! I’m just back from a little over two weeks in Asia…vacation in Tokyo with the kids, and then a week of work in Taiwan. It was a great trip. I’m gathering my thoughts about the week in Taiwan, where disinformation campaigns from China are a chronic
Read moreHello everyone! It feels like a year has happened in the last week. On Monday, I published an op-ed in the New York Times, which laid out how the Stanford Internet Observatory's work was targeted by influencers who misrepresented it as "censorship," leading to congressional
Read more"In an alternate universe, I run a sprawling cabal. Its goal, according to the contrarian newsletters, crank blogs, and breathless podcasts where the fantasy plays out—is to silence right-wing populists on behalf of the deep state. Each morning, Google Alerts arrive in my inbox detailing the adventures
Read moreHi! First, thanks to everyone who’s subscribed recently. For those who don’t follow me on socials, I did Meet the Press two weeks ago to talk about election integrity in 2024 — if you found me that way, I’m glad you’re here. It was a very well-
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