President Donald Trump paused a 50 percent tariff on Canadian goods hours before it was scheduled to kick in, saying the two countries had reached a preliminary deal.

In a post on social media late Tuesday, Trump announced that he would delay the duties, set to go into effect at midnight on Wednesday, for three days “based on the fact that Canada and the U.S.A., subject to the finalization of documents, have a DEAL!”

The president teased that the agreement could include resurrecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, a long-stalled pipeline extension intended to pump crude oil from Alberta, Canada to the Midwest of the United States.

This is the latest large-scale DDoS attack to hit the social networking site this year.

PARIS — The Paris prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation into disinformation efforts targeting two prominent candidates in France’s upcoming presidential election, according to Agence France-Presse.

Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, two former prime ministers who are high-profile contenders for the 2027 race, were reportedly the subject earlier this summer of fake news reports posted on social media aimed at undermining their campaigns.

Fabricated videos posted on X that used branding from leading French news platforms claimed Philippe, who suffers from alopecia, was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease, while fake reports on X and TikTok alleged Attal had Parkinson’s disease and was using drugs.

Attal denounced the reports as fake and filed a complaint. Philippe has refrained from publicly commenting on the posts, though his top allies have framed them as likely Russian interference.

Two networks that Western authorities say have links with Russia, Storm-1516 and Matriochka, were involved in the disinformation operations targeting Philippe and Attal, respectively, according to a French official with knowledge of the technical investigation led by Viginum, the French agency responsible for combating digital interference.

Storm-1516, which the French government says is tied to Russian military intelligence, was also involved in a similar disinformation operation targeting center-left MEP and likely presidential contender Raphaël Glucksmann. The prosecutor’s office announced the launch of a separate probe into that case earlier this month.

Viginum alerted the candidates and recommended that they not publicize these operations in order to avoid giving them visibility, according to the same official.

ATHENS — Greece’s attempt to lure top scientists back to their homeland after the trauma of the financial crisis has stalled after an ambitious program to reverse the brain drain descended into fiasco.

A group of professors who hoped to bring back young researchers through a much-advertised program financed with EU funds are now feeling betrayed, having been left waiting for years only to find out the program won’t happen.

To rub salt into the wound, no one from the government bothered to inform them that the scheme was dead, they said.

“All this ‘brain gain’ talk isn’t just a joke; it’s a massive step backward,” Aristides Hatzis, a professor at the University of Athens, said. “During the financial crisis, there was only one area where there was money invested: research, as the EU prioritized this. Now there’s nothing; it’s at the very bottom of the list of priorities — a complete abandonment.”

An estimated 500,000 people moved abroad during Greece’s financial crisis, which began in 2008, shrinking the country’s economy by a quarter and driving unemployment to 28 percent. Greece had experienced mass migration before, including in the decades after World War II, but this time it was many citizens with high levels of education and skills who emigrated.

“Brain Regain,” an initiative by the ruling conservative New Democracy government to reverse the mass exodus of scientists and professionals, comprises several schemes, such as offering a 50 percent income tax exemption for seven years, and is expanding to include high-skilled public sector roles.

And overall, the situation has improved since the crisis era.

According to the survey OECD Diaspora Review Greece, from 2021 onward, there has been a steady increase in the number of citizens returning to Greece, with 2023 marking a milestone year when — for the first time since the start of the crisis — more people returned than left. Specifically, during the two-year period of 2023–2024, 69,000 Greeks left their country while 98,000 returned.

But when it comes to scientists, there is still a major problem.

Star-crossed project

The current fury of many researchers and scientists hinges on a Greek government project called “Trust your Stars” — an €80 million research funding program backed by funds from EU’s post-Covid recovery fund, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).

Research teams were called to submit their proposals, with 145 out of a total 1,241 submissions selected. Thirteen months later, after several complaints regarding the delay, the selected list of projects was finally published on July 22, 2025.

Then, it all started to unravel.

Those not selected for funding reacted fiercely, with some 203 submitted objections and calls for reevaluation. Scientists raised their concerns over the evaluation process itself, and some even submitted complaints to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.

In January 2026, Greece’s development ministry then issued a statement, saying payments of some €40 million had already been made, and that the remaining half of the program’s budget was earmarked for completion by Dec. 31, 2029. But complaints only escalated, with some of those selected for funding sending formal legal notices to the education ministry, seeking details about where the money had been spent since the program had not yet started.

Then, the final bombshell dropped: Trust your Stars was not going to receive the EU funds anymore.

In a statement published in May, Greece’s education ministry said the country’s finance ministry had decided to “remove the project during the review of Greece’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan.” It was later revealed that on the day the list of selected proposals was officially published, the government also delisted the program — but no one informed the applicants for 10 months.

“It was ultimately not possible to implement the project ‘Trust your Stars’ within the time frame set out by the RRF,” said an official from the education ministry. “For this reason, the project was removed, as part of a review of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan by the Council of the European Union.”

“As regards the funds linked to the actions in question, these were redirected to finance other actions undertaken by the RRF and the Education Ministry. Consequently, under no circumstances was there any loss of resources from the RRF,” added the official.

Shattered hopes

On July 15, Greece’s finance ministry issued a statement, saying it was trying to secure funds “to settle any outstanding financial obligations arising from legal commitments entered into at the time of the revocation of the program.”

While the statement rekindled hopes that a solution would be found, Hatzis argues that it was just a legal trick and that the education ministry has no legal commitment since no contracts were signed following the initial announcement of accepted proposals.

“What happened violates a fundamental principle, one that is sacrosanct in states governed by the rule of law: ‘reliance,’ the citizen’s legitimate trust in the state,” he said. “There may be no contractual liability, since we did not sign an agreement, but there is a political, moral and even legal obligation. Many young people turned down other offers or did not take up jobs elsewhere because they hoped they would be paid through the program.”

Hatzis added that with its handling of the situation, the government had managed to turn the entire scientific community against it — both those who had been successful and those who had not.

“If you’re a young scientist and you’re abroad, stay there! If you’re a young scientist and you’re thinking of moving abroad, go for it. Don’t wait a minute!” he wrote in a lengthy social media post.

Pantelis Kammas, an associate professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business who was co-leading one of the teams that had a successful proposal, said the program was a chronicle of a death foretold.

“The perception within the scientific community was that this was EU money and that it could be handed out hastily through nontransparent procedures. There was a sense of mistrust because this was a one-off emergency program,” said Kammas. “The ministry lacked an organized framework for evaluation, the academic community’s objections were based on these well-known shortcomings, and media that seek to oppose the government jumped on that. This was the perfect storm, so the government decided to backtrack and cancel the program.”

Petros Bouras-Vallianatos, an associate professor of the history of science at the University of Athens, said he had gathered a team of 25 young scientists to come to Greece from countries like the U.K. and Germany for a study of medicines used during the Byzantine period, which could serve as inspiration for new pharmaceutical formulations. Fortunately, they had not already traveled by the time the project was canceled.

“The most offensive thing is that the government never bothered to meet us or give us a reasonable explanation about what happened,” he said, noting the government’s handling created even greater problems with the scientific community than those that already existed.

Bouras-Vallianatos himself returned to Greece in 2022 after a 15-year career in Edinburgh, and has not regretted the decision, as he wanted to raise his children in his homeland. However, he added that while many others wanted to return to Greece, the conditions for doing so were not in place. Some of them do but only for sentimental, personal reasons, he said.

“There has been no serious policy by the Greek state to get its scientists back.”

According to preliminary statistics, research spending in Greece has declined, dropping to €1.27 billion — or 0.51 percent of GDP — in 2025, from €1.30 billion in 2024.

“Funding and low salaries is a big issue,” continued Bouras-Vallianatos. “An independent body should be set up, which would allocate funds for research and adheres to international standards in terms of evaluation. We are a small country; we all know each other, so a large proportion of the evaluators should be foreigners.”

The first thing I noticed when I gave up American technology was the silence.

My phone usually starts up before I get out of bed, buzzing every few minutes throughout the day with calls, messages, headlines, calendar reminders and social media alerts. It’s a constant pulse that averages nearly 200 iPhone notifications on weekends and twice as many Monday-to-Friday.

But on this warm mid-summer Sunday, my life was on an unlikely version of mute. After years of reporting on Europe’s push to wean itself off U.S. tech giants and cultivate homegrown alternatives, I had decided to test my own daily habit by cutting myself off from using any American technology for 72 hours.

No iPhone. No Mac. No Slack or Teams. No Google Search or Maps. No ChatGPT. No WhatsApp or Signal. No Facebook or Instagram feeds. No credit card payments.

I wondered if I would turn into a digital monk.

For three days, I set out to live and work in Brussels as if U.S. tech had suddenly become unavailable to me overnight. It was a purposefully fictional scenario rooted in a very real European anxiety: what happens if Washington weaponizes our continent’s Silicon Valley dependence and reaches for the tech “kill switch?”

Limited versions of that scenario have already surfaced. When U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration cut off French-born International Criminal Court judge Nicolas Guillou from U.S.-linked financial and technology services, he called it a form of “civil death.”

Meanwhile, U.S. export controls in June forced Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing two of its most advanced AI models, offering a glimpse of what government bans on access to cutting-edge technology can look like.

Such episodes feed into mounting fears that the Trump administration could use Europe’s overreliance on U.S. tech as leverage in trade fights or disputes over EU regulations. A Proton survey released earlier this month found that 74 percent of European business leaders worry such a cutoff could disrupt their operations.

In my own little experiment, the stakes were much lower. Yet I was about to find out that replacing American tools with those built here in Europe was going to make almost everything harder — and lonelier.

Trying to live without U.S. tech, I would find out, essentially amounts to trying to live without tech at all. That was partly because, like virtually all of my fellow Europeans, I had locked myself into those consumer choices.

Dumbphones and FOMO

The early symptoms of going cold turkey looked suspiciously like withdrawal.

On that first morning, with my iPhone shut off, I reached for a Nokia brick from Finland. The so-called dumbphone is the type of device now enjoying a second life among people detoxing from screen time and is also a favorite of drug dealers seeking to avoid getting busted by any tracking and data collection.

Several hours in, I realized there were no notifications on the Nokia. Nobody calls or texts anymore. Then came the shameful part: a sense of helplessness, followed by FOMO-fueled restlessness. The world had surely kept spinning at full speed, and I was missing it. For the next few days, I would still catch myself checking the phone compulsively like an addict.

“The phone aged you instantly,” my best friend joked later that day as we traded our now-standard FaceTime video calls for a regular one. It was unclear whether he meant the muffled audio or me struggling with a new-but-actually-old device, or both.

I did notice that I was pacing up and down my flat because my usually overstimulated brain apparently couldn’t handle focusing on a voice-only call.

One instant benefit from my dumbphone: no doomscrolling in bed.

It all took me back to my first cellphone at 13, when texting meant tapping the same tiny key several times for a single letter, every SMS cost money and abbreviations and emojis were not just stylistic choices but ways to squeeze more into a message.

I knew my social media life would be at risk in my experiment. European alternatives such as Mastodon have gained traction since Elon Musk turned Twitter into X. But who joins a social network when none of their friends are there?

That was fine. I was actually eager to disappear for a while, well aware of the anxiety social media induces in me and the insecurities created by constantly watching other people’s supposedly perfect lives.

Online shopping was out — but so too was paying by card in stores and restaurants. The payment networks I rely on are American: Visa and Mastercard dominate card payments across Europe, meaning that even a purchase made with a European bank card often still runs over U.S.-controlled rails.

It meant I had to buy everything using cash, which I hadn’t done regularly in ages. Fortunately, unlike in some other European countries, Belgian legislation requires merchants to accept banknotes. The hard part was finding some of those stores without the help of Google Maps, which I’d come to rely on almost as much as my credit cards.

The invisible grip

Swearing off Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and YouTube was also part of the deal — already eliminating a sizable chunk of my leisure time. But it turned out I could barely watch anything at all, or even properly test European streaming platforms, because my television and tablet both ran on Google software.

Thankfully, an offline Nintendo Switch from Japan, good old books and the legendary Snake game kept me company.

These invisible dependencies run deep. Beyond the products we use every day, U.S. systems often serve as gateways to European companies trying to take on Big Tech.

Take Sweden’s Spotify or the Estonia-based rival to Uber, Bolt. Both still heavily rely on U.S.-controlled app stores, operating systems, payment networks and other digital infrastructure.

And then there is the cloud: the data centers and servers that host websites, process data and route traffic. The vast majority of that market is dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, whose infrastructure supports large parts of Europe’s digital economy.

Many corners of Europe would go dark if those services were shut down, with its economy, public administration and communications infrastructure struggling to function normally.

Working outside the stack

On Monday morning, I walked into the office with the slightly misplaced confidence that I had prepared for everything. My efficiency at work, admittedly during a very quiet summer week, took less of a hit than I expected.

I was still working from the office. I used an open-source, Linux-powered computer. I communicated by email through a Switzerland-based Proton address, browsed the web using the Norwegian browser Vivaldi and French search engine Qwant, wrote everything in LibreOffice and even tried Mistral’s generative AI assistant. And there was always a good old notebook.

I felt productive. But the workflow around me was not. The tools themselves worked perfectly well once I accepted that breaking years of habits would take time. The disruption ultimately came from stunted collaboration: meetings, messages, shared documents and the constant stream of small exchanges that keep a newsroom moving.

“It was like you disappeared,” one colleague would tell me later.

European alternatives do exist in that space. The problem is, just like for social media, they only work properly when everyone else uses them too or when competing systems are interoperable — something the EU has long tried to legislate and enforce, often against resistance from large technology platforms.

For this little while, despite technically being able to continue working, I became an outsider within my own team. I had to skip our routine video meetings on Slack and Teams, while missing messages sent over WhatsApp and Signal.

In a trade, a city and an era built around instant messaging, sending a good old SMS felt almost prehistoric — a reminder of the longstanding complaints from the European telecom industry about losing messaging and calling revenues to U.S. tech firms.

Ultimately, this underscored one of the major pinch points in Europe’s push for greater tech independence: digital sovereignty is not an individual project. It only works if people, companies and institutions move together.

On their own, individual efforts are more likely to leave people feeling digitally isolated rather than digitally sovereign.

Relax and relapse

And yet, there was something blissful about these three days.

The initial anxiety slowly gave way to a kind of peace. Of course, that feeling may only reflect that the experiment was temporary and my digital life had not been erased.

The experience nevertheless highlighted how much I had taken these tools for granted. I have placed all my eggs in the same digital basket: my communication channels, the tools I use to authenticate myself and access the digital world, my polished digital self and years of accumulated knowledge, all stored inside one sprawling digital safe.

The concern is no longer simply whether that safe could be broken into from the outside. It is also whether somebody could lock it — or empty it — from within.

Now, as you might wonder how I’ll act on what I’ve learned, I am strangely reminded of Covid.

Many of us emerged from that temporary era of lockdowns and involuntary limits full of healthy new habits and grand ideas about how our lifestyles should change, only to return remarkably quickly to our old routines.

Sadly, the same thing happened here. My iPhone came straight back into my pocket. Messages began flowing through again. My bank card returned to its usual place. Within hours, I had fallen comfortably back into the U.S. technology stack.

As I switched my smartphone back on, my screen lit up with incoming texts inquiring whether my little experiment was over. After 72 hours of old-school SMS exchanges, two different friends were both clearly eager to return to reality, sending me the same final text: “Back to WhatsApp?”

Today I’m talking to Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor.

Everywhere you go, people say they don’t trust the media — and yet they’ve never consumed more of it. Audiences have moved on from legacy names in favor of Substacks and podcasts and TikTok news influencers that seem to be everywhere in our feeds. 

Why would anyone want to start a new global news organization in the middle of all that, when even once-storied brands like CBS News can’t seem to figure it out? 

Well, that’s what Ben did four years ago. He’s the guy who ran BuzzFeed News at the height of the Facebook traffic boom, and even wrote a book about it, called Traffic, which he discussed with me on Decoder back in 2023. 

Around that same time, he cofounded Semafor, which launched in 2022 with a stated goal of reaching 200 million college-educated readers. 

You’re going to hear Ben say that since then, Semafor has evolved into what he calls an anti-scale company. It still doesn’t have a website paywall, but it makes about half its money in the convening business — that’s what media types have taken to calling events lately.

And Semafor throws some big events. It actually has a new one called Silicon Valley & The World, which will feature some of the biggest names in tech and AI. That’s part of the events business: hosting the subjects you cover on your big event stage. 

So I wanted to know how that all works, and what it feels like to navigate the ethical conflicts that seem to be everywhere in media right now. In particular, I wanted to dig into how Semafor’s newsroom is approaching AI,  the ethics and optics of putting people you cover on your conference advisory boards, and whether independence is still something an audience is willing to pay for.

Ben and I usually hash this stuff out over beers, and I think you can tell we really enjoy getting into all this together.

Okay: Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith. Here we go. 

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Ben Smith, you’re the co-founder and editor in chief of Semafor. Welcome back to Decoder.

It is really nice to be back.

I’m excited to talk to you. You were on the show three years ago, just as Semafor was launching. It was right as Buzzfeed News, which you founded and ran for a long time, was shutting down.

I keep talking to media CEOs about what is going to happen. It feels like you have figured something out at Semafor. How are things going over there?

Things are going incredibly well, and knock on wood as I say that, but I think we figured something out. There are a lot of different things to figure out, and we’re in this unbelievably strange and unstable moment in media. 

But I do think we’ve figured out a model that is quality journalism built around great journalists, paired with really large scale convening that is building both great journalism and a really good business, a profitable business — which is something that is, to me as a former BuzzFeed executive, novel.

A profitable digital media business is in short supply these days. It’s funny, I was looking over our conversation from three years ago. You had just published your book Traffic, which was basically about what I would call the millennial digital media moment and everyone chasing massive scale.

“The platforms are going to deliver tons of traffic to us and then we’ll collect pennies and we’ll all get rich.” This was a pretty common thesis. It feels like you’re saying you’ve turned away from that. You’ve learned the lesson of that time.

Our chief revenue officer, Rachel Oppenheim, likes to joke that my next book will be called No Traffic, but we are really building an anti-scale business. The luxury of starting in that moment, in the rubble of the traffic apocalypse, was obviously not the path to success.

We had to think a lot about targeting and building a very specific audience. The thing that I have kind of come to realize in all these conversations… I listen to your show. We have a show about media that we yap about this on. What’s the future of media? Is it live? We were just talking about it. Who knows?

But in journalism, I have a lot of conviction that great stories aren’t going anywhere. The need for high-quality insight isn’t going anywhere. Great reporters aren’t going anywhere. What surface this all lives on is up for grabs, and you can’t be too ideological about that.

You say surface, I always say distribution.

Yeah.

A theme on Decoder that we come back to over and over again is your distribution shapes what you make. It’s just inevitable. The medium is the message, to borrow that framing. If surfaces — if distribution — are up for grabs, what are you holding onto?

I actually don’t buy that thesis, or at least I’m resisting that thesis because for the audience, the pull of distribution is incredibly powerful. The core thesis of BuzzFeed was we cracked the distribution and built for the distribution. Maybe I’m overreacting a little to that, but we definitely think all the time about how we want to reach political leaders and business leaders. We want to reach nonprofit leaders, and we want to reach people making decisions.

We want to reach them in person. We reach them a lot in email. We reach them on the web, we reach them in video, but we’re thinking about that same audience across media, and in fact, I think video is particularly interesting because of the pull. Videos are placed on the web in terms of the place you can get massive scale.

Then conversely, where there’s a pull of massive scale to create the biggest pull is just to be hyper-polarizing and find ways to create polarizing confrontation. That’s how you go viral, or one of the best ways at least, and we’re trying hard to build the discipline to resist that pull of distribution.

We’re already deep into the weeds. I hope that listeners can tell Ben and I like talking to each other about these things.

Please visit Semafor.com.

[Laughs] I’m excited to play some clips for you. So I’m glad that you said you were reacting to BuzzFeed. A few months ago we had Jonah Peretti on the show, and right after he had sold BuzzFeed to Byron Allen and the Weather Channel. There’s a lot going on there. In full disclosure to the audience, I literally had a beer with you just before I sat down with Jonah.

I remember.

I did not ask the questions you told me to ask, but he said—

Were they about running? That’s another show.

I didn’t do it. I was quickly in the weeds of Jonah as well, and I put to him what I think of as the original sin of digital media, which is that I think Jonah thought he could go so viral so consistently that he could crack distribution and that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook would pay him money. 

I’m going to play for you what he said to me in response to that, and I just want to get your reaction to it. Can we go ahead and play it?

Jonah Peretti: Yeah. I mean, first, just as a factual matter, we did get paid millions of dollars by Mark Zuckerberg. The prediction that they would pay for content was accurate, but it was just short-lived. So we got paid for that exploding watermelon.

Okay, so he said that to me and I said, “Yeah.”

That was a good day in the office.

It was a great day in the office, I’m guessing, but everyone knew that Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going to pay forever.

I agree with Jonah on this. Looking back, we all say the social platforms were obviously going to always be dependent on UGC and never pay for anything, and these media companies building on social platforms never made any sense. 

It’s worth remembering these investors’ experience had been shaped by cable, which was a different distribution platform in which companies like Viacom, ESPN, CNN, and MTV had built huge businesses on the back of this new distribution. So they said, “Here’s another new distribution. We’re going to build big businesses on the back of it.”

We now look back and say it was inevitable that Facebook would never pay for content, but it wasn’t. Facebook executives made choices at various times. They experimented with different things. If you are the person in charge of the success of the blue Facebook app, do you think, “It was a great decision to continually rely on low-quality YouTube generated content”? No, that thing is dying, obviously. They should have found a different path. It was a mistake.

Jonah made this argument to me as well, and this is the other—

Obviously I’m brainwashed by Jonah. I worked with him for a long time.

No, I’m just curious. Your paths have diverged and you are building a very different business.  I’m just curious. This is the other clip from Jonah that I want to play for you. It is an argument that Facebook made a mistake. Here’s that clip: 

Jonah Peretti: I actually believe that it was a mistake for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg to not continue with the news tab, to not continue to pay professional content creators. These platforms have tons of resources and could have spent a couple of billion dollars a year on that, sustained a vibrant media ecosystem, really owned media in a way that would have been incredibly powerful for them and given them charisma, relevance, and authority that they just don’t have today.

The claim there is if Mark Zuckerberg had continued to fund BuzzFeed, he would have more charisma.

That the Facebook blue app would be more successful had they done different things? That’s pretty obvious. You could argue which things. That’s true, and then if you look at whether you would rather be Netflix or the blue Facebook app? You’d rather be Netflix, right?

Netflix famously doesn’t invest in these either.

Netflix pays a lot for content.

They pay a lot for content, but they don’t invest in news.

News, I agree. News is a complicated business. We’re a separate question. But they pay for a lot of professional content. YouTube is the biggest and most interesting story here because YouTube has found a way for individuals to build businesses on top of it in a really impressive way. There are occasional news creators like Johnny Harris, but he’s almost the exception that proves the rule, but we just had Kareem Rahma on our show.

These people are building real businesses, real careers, on top of YouTube, paying producers, increasingly moving up market. I guess the thing that I give Neal Mohan, the YouTube CEO, a hard time about, is I do think YouTube with the idea of the creator and the development of the word creator built a system in which media companies, middlemen, can’t really survive. 

There was a company called Maker Studios which Disney bought for half a billion dollars. It was supposed to be a middleman between YouTube and creators, and that’s one way to give a group of media people leverage against the platform. YouTube has designed a system in which it’s sort of like Uber. It deals with atomized individuals, not with collectives who have any kind of power, and there are all sorts of different collectives.

But a media company is one kind, and YouTube has, probably to its own benefit — and to certainly to the detriment of the media industry — built a system where it’s built for individuals, and no one has any leverage except for YouTube.

This is the big question I’m getting at. You’re building a new kind of business, you’re profitable. You’re saying you’re anti-scale, no more chasing traffic.

I’m still personally looking at the traffic.

Who doesn’t?

It’s just a personality flaw.

If you were raised in the swamp, you will always be a creature of the swamp. But I look at some of the other big success stories of our time. TBPN is a big success story of our time. These are not huge numbers that they’re driving.

They’re driving massive influence and they’re charging high rates to advertisers that are integrated into their content, and now they’re owned by OpenAI, who they cover on their show. 

You look at big YouTubers, and Kareem Rahma is a great example. I saw him speak in and around Cannes and he was very much like, “Yeah, I make advertising for our partners. I make videos. The advertising is the thing that I make, it’s the revenue.”

Somewhere in there is a big tension for the news, for media companies, where we can’t say, “We probably shouldn’t make the advertising for the companies we cover,” but that is actually how you monetize all these platforms at scale. I haven’t found anyone who solved it. I’m curious if you’ve taken runs at it.

In the entertainment business, which Kareem is in, that’s always how it’s been. James Bond is wearing whatever kind of watch he’s wearing. Although the fact that I don’t remember is a real failure of marketing. There’s not that inherent tension in the entertainment business that you’re going to sell out by doing a product placement, or cutting, or appearing in an advertisement. 

But for news there really is, and you need to be careful. The answer to that is actually the audience. The traditional advertising business is that you are reaching an audience who the advertiser values. For the scaled advertising business, Google and Meta — and increasingly TikTok — built the best mousetraps, and it’s impossible for publishers to compete on that scale.

If you’re reaching people in a very focused way in various particular environments — in person, in email, in video — that’s a case you can really credibly make to advertisers. We’ve built a big advertising and related convening business that way, and that’s one answer. It’s not the only answer, but it is one.

When you say convening business, that’s your events business.

Yeah. Max Tani always gives me a hard time about the word “convening.”

Everyone loves the word “convening.” It’s good. You’ve gotten pilled by the revenue people because they love to say it. Everyone else says, “It’s parties.”

We’re going to come to it because there’s a relationship between needing to get everyone in the room and then covering them, which I personally find fascinating.

It’s booking. You had to not insult me for weeks to get me here.

[Laughs] Or did I nag you every single day until you showed up?

Tell me about the revenue split between those things. Are you mostly making money on journalism? Are you mostly making money in events? Which is higher?

It’s just about 50/50.

Is there a pull in either direction or are you trying to grow them both the same way?

We’re a startup. We’re opportunistic. The convening business grew a lot faster. My partner, Justin Smith, has been building businesses like that. He was CEO of The Atlantic and Bloomberg. I’s much more his experience than mine. 

But he came in with this thesis, which I bought into, that basically convening was the business that you could stand up fastest and make profitable fastest, that was a journalism business. We launched hard into that space because it takes longer to build a digital advertising business: you’ve got to build that digital audience. We launched with that and then it’s just taken off in a way we, or at least I, didn’t see. I didn’t imagine that we’d be really competing with Davos this soon.

I want to come back to that, too. When you launched, I remember part of the plan was to go to subscriptions. You were going to build this elite audience. You’re going to charge them lots of money. It was there in the very beginning.

Was that part of the plan?

It was early on, it was part of the plan.

Startups, yeah.

You also said, “We barely need a website. It’s all going to be newsletters.”

Oh, we did talk about that. You were one of those website people.

To this day.

The last.

The last website on earth, that’s TheVerge.com. That all changed for reasons that things change with startups, but the media industry and distribution changed around it. Was there a moment where you said, “We can keep it free,” because you are one of the last free websites?

In my memory, we always thought at some point we’d do subscriptions, but in my experience you just cannot be ideological about revenue. It’s hard enough to build a business in news without getting all hung up on the values of the different revenue streams. 

Advertising-based publishers will tell you that democracy can only survive in a world where there aren’t paywalls. Subscription publishers will tell you that advertising is corrupting. At some point you realize everyone’s just talking about their book and that sometimes they’re already in a tough business and they’re talking themselves out of incremental opportunities and really successful media companies. 

If you look at Disney or The New York Times, what business are they in? They’re actually in a bunch of different businesses. They’re managing them all really carefully. Our view is that if at some point it makes sense to do subscriptions, we’ll totally do them, but we don’t really see it as an ideological choice. When you’re starting a company, you just can’t do that many things at the same time.

Also, I would say more broadly, and I got mocked for this at some point, but we are insanely ambitious about our long-term growth. We really are trying to build, over decades, a huge global company, and subscriptions are a trade-off that caps your growth in some ways. That’s something we think about too. But that said, we’re really trying to build a good business, and if subscriptions are a part of that, at some point we’ll certainly be a part of that.

You launched with a lot of ambition. You’re the first news organization of your kind to say, “We’re going to cover Africa a lot, we’re going to cover the Gulf a lot in various ways.”

That ambition was that those markets are under-covered, and you’re going to provide new information that readers aren’t necessarily getting from other places. You’ll build up that audience and then monetize them in some specific way. Has that thesis proved out?

Yes, and I would say when we launched, this was the thing that was most confusing to people. That Justin and I had worked in global news and had these real ambitions for it, but also were very careful about sequencing.

When we launched, we were in the US, Brooklyn, Washington, on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Africa. I remember it would be like me, Justin, and our great Africa editor, Yinka Adegoke doing an interview, and it’d be like, “Oh yeah, we’re American and he’s African,” and people are like, “What are you talking about?” It doesn’t make any sense, but I think we saw there was an opportunity to be very competitive very quickly in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, with great journalists led by Yinka and his colleague Alexis, to figure out that model. 

We’re now in the Gulf, and we’re going to launch in Europe and Asia. Those are growing businesses and they’re part of a network. We see it less as a colonial hub-and-spoke model. They’re not reporting back to New York for what people in New York care about. We’re trying to build a network of audiences in each of these places.

Is that pulling you in different directions in terms of resourcing? If your audience in Africa grows faster than the audience in the United States, are you going to put more resources there?

Yeah, we’re definitely very attentive to what’s working. I would say it’s just a truth that the US is the biggest media market in the world by far. It depends on how you count, but more than half of all revenue associated with media in the world is in the US.

Yeah, that was the pull.

Actually the pull is mostly always here. We fight against it a bit because we think this is a really good long-term investment.

This is ancient history, but when I worked at AOL of all places, there was a lot of pull that—

Oh, Engadget. 

We ran Engadget China. We wanted to be in all these other countries. We would resource and run those operations against much cheaper advertising revenue. Pennies to dollars in some cases.

But the audience was there.

But the audience was there.

We had this experience at BuzzFeed. This is part of why I was so excited to do some of it with Justin, because Justin had successfully built businesses in these other markets. At BuzzFeed we’d gone in, built big audiences, and we’d seen in Brazil, in the UK, in Japan this very intense engagement. People wanted independent journalism of this new digital and independent kind.

I remember in the first meeting we were talking about this, Eric Hippeau, this very smart, long-time digital investor was like, “Do not do this. You will never make any money and you’ll have to shut it all down.” We said, “Ah, forget it, old timer.” He was totally correct. We just never figured out how to reliably monetize them.

Even when you could, you’d say, “The Brazilian edition was profitable this year, but bad news, they have currency controls, so the money stays in Brazil.” “Oh, nobody told us that.”

How have you solved for it now?

We’re pretty careful about keeping the costs low and growing the verticals with local revenue. There’s also a lot of value in these huge gatherings that we’re building, that they are fundamentally global, whether it’s in Silicon Valley or in Washington. Building these global networks of CEOs and political leaders feeds that network. That’s been valuable. But I don’t know, we’re careful as part of it. That’s one thing I learned from BuzzFeed.

The high-flying VC era has produced a generation of very conservative media operators.

That’s right.

I think that’s fascinating. The other big innovation I want to talk to you about from the beginning of Semafor, and then I want to start talking about what you’re doing now, the Semaform.

You launched with this way of writing an article. You still use it to this day. I see it all the time. The thesis was that it would just sort of make it simpler to understand what all the different pieces are. I always thought that was funny because you were chasing the most elite audience possible, and presumably they could already understand what was going on.

That’s the problem. They could understand what was going on. And what is going on in a newspaper article is we have a who, what, where, why sentence.

And then you have another sentence that says the same thing. And then you have a paragraph, and then you have a quote that is from an expert, but it just reflects whatever the reporter thinks and they’ve picked the expert with their bias to repeat. And then you have an unsupported paragraph of random theories called the nut graf.

Everything else is just chronological order. Particularly the “an expert in disinformation says this” or “an expert in democracy says this,” any reader sees, “This is what the publication thinks, this what the journalist thinks. Why don’t they just say it rather than do this weird move of filtering your biases through an expert?” And particularly with a sophisticated audience, they’re in on the joke a bit. There are two sides to it because one is that the journalist is required to smuggle their opinion or their analysis in other people’s voices. The other is that really good beat reporters are real experts.

A sophisticated reader actually wants to know what Maggie Haberman thinks to a really high degree. Because the other deal in the newspaper is that you conceal your own analysis and opinion. On both sides of that, the reader is sort of losing out. You’re treating them like an idiot because you’re smuggling bias and opinion in, and then also — and this is particularly true of really senior experienced beat reporters — people read Reed Albergotti or Burgess Everett and want to know what they think. So tell me what you actually think.

The Semaform is an attempt to separate “here are the facts of the story we can all agree on” and “here’s the journalist’s analysis.” For an analysis to be interesting, there’s got to be some chance it can be wrong. Otherwise, it’s totally banal. We go out of our way to try to find somebody who disagrees with us to include that, too. People like that. It’s a bit of humility also.

Back in my day, we just called this blogging.

[Laughs] Blogging, yes.

I would just write down what I thought all the time.

I would say this was influenced by blogging. I know, we’re all old bloggers now. It’s so embarrassing to explain to people that you used to have a blog.

What do I run to this day? It’s still fundamentally the reporters saying what they think.

Someday you’ll be explaining to people you had a podcast.

It’ll just be my VR avatar talking to your VR avatar.

[Laughs] It will be another silly word, yeah.

No legs. It’ll be great. The reason I ask about the format in particular is that my thesis is that distribution and formats shape each other. Semaform was a new format. It was a way to reach an audience and say, “We know you’re not stupid. We’re going to show you the structure of the story out loud.” Has it been successful? Has it actually succeeded in attracting an audience or is it just the trademark of how you do things now?

We hear a lot about it from our audience. People really like it. We also do a lot of shorter form stuff, and so that’s not always broken out that way. But that value of, “We’re going to be really humble, we’re going to be assertive about what we think, but also very, very open to disagreement, very clear about the difference between a fact and analysis,” is core to our DNA and everything we do, including in the events.

Let me ask you Decoder questions. I want to just talk about what’s going on in this industry now. Because you’ve learned a lot and it’s been almost four years that Semafor has been going. Those are all the big early bets and I just want to check in on them. How big is Semafor now?

We’ve got about 60 journalists, and more than 100 employees.

How is all that structured?

I’d say more than 100. It’s probably about half journalists, half a commercial team that includes revenue and a great events production team. We do all that stuff in-house. Part of the luxury of a startup and part of the challenge in news is that — and I think you’re inside at the moment one or two companies that have cracked this — there’s not a lot of talent on the business side of news for obvious reasons. It’s a terrible business.

You go to Harvard Business School and 30 percent of those people go into enterprise sales and .01 percent go into media, for the obvious reason that they like to make money. They look around for where the money is and it’s not in media.

We’ve been incredibly aggressive about trying to recruit really, really great commercial operators and people on our revenue side. It’s fun to be in a place where the wattage on the business side is really, really high. That’s been a real luxury for us. We have bookers, we have producers, we have people thinking about the vibes and the music. We take all that stuff really seriously.

Do you have an in-house DJ?

Would I call Brigitte Anders-Kraus an in-house DJ? I think that would be a reasonable thing to say.

That’s pretty good.

I think she would object. She does a lot of other stuff too. She’s very efficient.

When we did the code conference, I spent a lot of time thinking about the Spotify playlist.

You got to think about that stuff.

Actually, that brings me to the other Decoder question I ask everybody. You have a lot of decisions to make. You’ve grown up a lot over the past four years at Semafor. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework?

I personally make decisions very, very, very fast at very high volume. But I am very attentive to the people around me when they think it’s a mistake, and I’m quick to reverse them

I care a lot about hiring great journalists and having people who I really trust and I rarely jam a decision down anybody’s throat. I want to be surrounded by people who are deep experts in what they’re doing, whether it’s managing or building AI tools or reporting. But I’m very happy to lose fights.

This is a new kind of business you’re describing. You want to make a lot of decisions fast. You’re growing in a lot of different areas. Every time I see you in person, I bring you a new journalism ethics problem. This is a real recurring theme in our relationship. I’m always struggling to be pure of heart.

You come from the most corrupt corner of journalism, which is gadget reviews. You’ve appropriately figured out that in that dark cave, ethics is this incredible way for The Verge to distinguish itself.

It’s literally what we say to our audience: “We are selling you this policy that we can’t be bought.” Maybe that’s the right thing. I look at some of the creators and I look at some of their Lamborghinis and I think maybe that’s the wrong thing. But that’s the way it goes.

I started by playing you that clip of Jonah Peretti saying if Facebook had only paid for news, the tech CEOs would’ve retained relevance and charisma. Maybe the blue app would be better. I’m looking at a media ecosystem where it feels like actually there’s elite capture of traditional media.

David Ellison bought CBS News, to whatever success or failure that’s going to be. He’s, depending on your point of view, either trying to get out of his Warner Bros. deal or he’s dead set on owning CNN and changing it however he wants to change it. Through his family, there’s ownership of TikTok.

Brendan Carr is fulminating at the FCC about what happens on the broadcast stations. He wrote an entire chapter of Project 2025 about regulating content moderation on platforms. I see more influence on the media from that side of the house than ever before. 

That’s the audience that you aggressively try to go out and attract and monetize in different ways. How do you view all of that right now?

These are really different things. We’re in this moment of politicized wealthy individuals buying media companies and using them to curry favor with the White House. That’s just a very specific thing that is incredible.

In some sense, my view of the media has always been that if you actually are delivering something your audience wants, that gives you independence. They want you to be asking tough questions. They want you to be delivering them true facts and insight. That’s the path. There’s a temptation, particularly for places that don’t have strong business models, to start making ethical compromises and you see it all over the place.

In a way, because you’re in the gadget review space, you see it so clearly. I think it’s true in every space. The core thing of journalism and what makes it interesting is the adversarial quality and the independence and the independence of the people you’re asking questions of, the people you’re covering. Businesses like advertising complicate that, but if you don’t hold onto that independence, you’re giving away the whole story. 

We think obsessively about that. For businesses that like innovating, it’s so important that you actually do not want to innovate in the field of ethics. That’s the one space where nobody should be innovating or you should be very, very careful, because if you think about why marketing conferences are so boring, it’s because they aren’t doing tough independent interviews with the people. Our events are interesting because we’re doing tough independent interviews and giving that away would be an enormous mistake.

Can I ask you a really direct question about that?

You’re doing Silicon Valley & The World, which is the big new conference. This is you saying you’re going to compete with Davos. You’re going to put on a bunch of conferences like this that compete on the biggest stage. You’re convening people, as I’ve been told.

I looked at your announcement, and you were kind enough to invite me to it. On the board are Jensen Huang and Satya Nadella, and they’re advisors, but you’re going to do challenging journalism. How does that work?

It’s a reasonable question and it’s a feature of the convening business that is somewhat new business to me, too. But first of all, we’re thrilled that Jensen and Andy Jassy are going to be there and we’re going to be doing newsy on-stage interviews with them. It is a feature of that business.

If you look at the way The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and our other competitors like Bloomberg do it, part of building a community around these events and getting excitement around them is pulling the newsmakers you’ll be interviewing into the event in some way. The New York Times calls them task forces. The Wall Street Journal calls them a council. Bloomberg actually also calls them an advisory board. But the journalism is totally independent of them.

But how does that work? I did Code Conference and I remember thinking, “I really need to get so-and-so CEO to show up on stage.” If the day before they get on the jet to show up in California, we say, “So-and-so’s CEO is deeply corrupt. Here’s our eight-month investigation…”

They’re probably going to cancel on you.

They’re probably going to cancel. And I thought, “That’s going to be fine. That’d be great actually.”

Yeah, totally.

Because I’ll get on stage and say, “They canceled because they can’t take it.” But at the same time, I knew that the people buying the tickets probably were buying the tickets to see so-and-so appear on stage. This never actually came to a head. This was never actually a problem. It was just always in my mind.

Maybe you weren’t doing enough exposés.

I thought, “Should I be causing this problem more?” How do you think about that? You cover these companies at a really high level.

We do obviously write stories that they don’t like all the time. We try really, really hard to be fair. We try not to sandbag people, but there are two different things. One is, “Did you write a story that upset them and they canceled on you?” You just have to be willing. That’s just the cost of doing business in journalism and that’ll happen and you just can’t think about it. We are trying to be grown up and fair.

One of the things that I’ve noticed is there’s a sense, particularly if you go to these conferences that are not run by journalists, that you don’t want to ask the hard question. You’re a little nervous about there being this core question in the CEO’s business or in this politician’s leadership that is awkward to ask. But of course that’s the question that the CEO spends all his or her time thinking about. Not only are they ready for it, they’ve also thought about it more than anybody else. They’re eager to engage on it. 

It’s like a weird illusion that senior leaders don’t want to be asked hard questions. That’s crazy. The reason they’re in those gigs is because they find it really interesting. They’re much more relaxing jobs.

If you’re interviewing the CEO of Ford and you’re not asking him — and how are you not? — about this crisis of China swallowing their business, what are you doing? There is an impulse, which I think is totally wrong, to tiptoe around the hard questions. I actually think for CEOs, for political leaders, it’s boring for them to go on stage and tell the same canned anecdotes about their personal biographies they’ve told a thousand times. It’s their job to answer hard questions.

I’m always asked by various comms people, “Why do the CEOs come on the show?” In our YouTube comments, people ask, “Why would they show up?” The answer I’ve most commonly gotten is this is the only way their own employees will listen to them.

They want to see the challenge and the stakes and the conflict as you’ve described are present in this format, whereas no one’s listening to the all-hands.

It’s important that you be respectful. There’s a slice of tech journalism that really concluded that the people they cover are monsters. It’s probably hard to get those folks to talk to you then. Conversely, there’s a slice of the tech industry that has concluded all journalists are in a deep conspiracy to destroy them. 

Both of those slices of media culture have run their course and are both toxic and boring at this point. Everybody should stop and just cover these people like important decision makers in the middle of great stories. That’s just the news business.

We care a lot about our independence and other journalists’ independence and build it deeply into the events.

It’s more than a slice on either side. Our own audience says, “All of these people are monsters,” and they’re reading a tech website. I look at most of the politicians in America. They’ve come around to, “Maybe we should stop the data centers, or we should at least talk about it because people will like us if we talk about it.” After a decade of talking about regulating social media—

And not doing it. 

—and clamping down on Big Tech and doing nothing, we’ve never passed a privacy law in this country.

You see there’s a lot of heat around “these guys are monsters, we can just throw sticks and stones at them.” And then on the other side, they own the distribution channels. They’re on X, doing whatever they want to do. There’s a sense that they don’t need the accountability.

Mark Zuckerberg just published a 6,500 word manifesto that in my estimation is freshman year political science thinking. He’s going to get away with it because there’s literally no one around him to say, “Try being smarter than this.”

Do you see that connection at your events, where the thing you need to challenge some of these executives on is people think you have bad values, not your business decisions?

When you are interviewing somebody where there’s a core critique of the thing they’re doing that is the values, you should definitely ask. You always ask them. That’s the question they’ve been thinking about, too.

I actually disagree with you on the AI CEOs though. We’re moving out of an era where you had business leaders. Marc Andreessen is patient zero of this — very, very smart guy, very influential and influenced a lot of people to think this way, but who had this deep paranoia about the media and the sense that it wasn’t relevant.

If you look at the really great business figures of this era, of the new ones — I would say Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang — these are classic showmen who love the media. Or I don’t know if they love the media or they hate the media, but they, like Steve Jobs, understand it, like Donald Trump. 

They’re selling something.

They’re salesmen who see the media as a very important sales channel, which is how business leaders have always been. They’re running circles around the guys and the women who are sitting paranoid, saying, “I don’t know if we can talk to this reporter.”

They just pick up the phone and they’re on the cover and they wear the leather jacket and they do whatever the slightly corny but incredibly effective Time magazine cover style thing is. Obviously the legacy media is diminished and there are new outlets, but fundamentally they’re showmen who aren’t operating out of some kind of deep theoretical relationship with media that they plan to change.

Elon is obviously the big exception to this rule, as of many, but the rest of this new generation of business leaders have a much more normal relationship with the media.

One of the things that I think is really interesting in that context is the rise of the news creator, the news influencer, where they aren’t of the machine the way that you are of the machine. They don’t have a Justin Smith saying, “I’ve built a global news operation. You just do the great reporting, I’ll find new business. By the way, all the big print newspapers have task forces. We will have a global conference and solve independence.”

The influencers and creators I talk to, this is all a first impression for them. The idea that they can be plied with gifts or access or made to seem more important, they feel it.

They struggle with it on a deep level. A lot of our industrialists and politicians now understand that that is a faster route to a bigger audience and that there’s more influence to be had there over the content, over the editorial. How do you compete with that?

You have to have courage in your conviction that people want journalism, that people actually would like true facts rather than lies and independent voices rather than ones that are corrupt. That’s a very optimistic view, but that’s broadly true. You’re seeing that the most interesting and most successful creators are also finding that.

The great Silicon Valley podcaster Dwarkesh Patel’s questions have gotten tougher and tougher because he’s very sophisticated and I think he realizes his audience knows that, if you’re interviewing Jensen Huang about how he thinks about chips in China, you should ask him the hard questions, not the easy ones, and that’s more interesting. It’s so obvious. For journalists who admire or worry about creators, there’s some lacking in the courage of their own convictions that it is more interesting to ask hard questions than easy ones.

Don’t you need the person to show up to be asked the questions of? This is the dynamic that I see in so many places. With the podcasters and the creators, what they’re learning is that their audiences are durable. You don’t need the famous person. You don’t need Apple access to get your big audience. If you have a big audience, you can do whatever you want. My formulation of that is the less access you need, the more you get. But that’s a hard lesson to learn at the beginning.

There’s an old saying that access is a curse, too.

Oh, access is poisonous.

I follow politics very closely, and you see this in Washington. I don’t know if you remember, but in the beginning of the Trump administration, there were all these influencers in the White House press conferences asking Karoline Leavitt how she does her hair. The thing is I think they and their audiences found that that was extremely boring, and they wandered off to talk instead about having paranoid fights with Candace Owens or whatever.

Similarly, the Pentagon in particular brought in all these what they saw as allied, pliable, right-wing influencers to replace the hated mainstream media. And then when the Iran war started, Gateway Pundit is grilling Pete Hegseth about the war and he doesn’t have answers because there are a lot of toxic things about audience capture and you can be pulled all sorts of crazy places by your audience, but also you can be pulled toward journalism by your audience.

What you saw in that Pentagon press room was that their audiences were nervous about the war and did not like it. So suddenly Pete Hegseth is being grilled by these pet outlets that he’d put in there to avoid dealing with real questions. There was some sense that journalism isn’t a trade that you learned at journalism school. It is actually a service to your audience that anybody can figure out if you are paying attention.

One of the really interesting things to me about that dynamic in particular at the Pentagon is so many of the journalists they put in there were video first. They were making clips. I could see them in those press conferences trying to get a clip. They knew the video would play and then the platforms reward conflict, and the comments were, “Why did you ask this question?”

What do you think Sam Donaldson was doing in the White House press room in the 1980s? These are stages for performance.

Sure. Who was it? It was Newt Gingrich who figured out C-SPAN was the stage for him. I understand, but the clip economy in particular. 

They’re going to manufacture a clip, and maybe it’s the audience pulling you towards journalism or maybe it’s just the algorithm pulling you towards conflict.

There are good pulls and there are bad pulls, for sure.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. You’re doing more video now, and that’s right next to the fact that the Semaform is there to expose the structure of journalism because its audience is really smart and some of them are CEOs. And then you’re going to go make video on video platforms and you’re going to experience that other pull. How do you think about managing that? Are you not chasing scale? 

No, we think about it a lot, about not chasing scale on video, but trying to have really high-level conversations. That there’s a big — but not the biggest — audience for really sophisticated conversations with leaders in media or in Compound Interest, our business show; CEOs on our CEO Signal show; and other stuff we’re going to be launching.

Video reminds me so much of the social web, and the allure of infinite scale if you just follow it toward this fixed point that everyone else is also going toward. It’s this incredibly homogenizing force. Everybody on the left is doing Bari Weiss outrage this week, and it’s very, very hyper partisan. No, we just have really had a lot of internal conversations about resisting that.

How do you make money if you don’t chase scale on video?

You have to reach a really high-quality audience.

And you’re just going to bake the ads in? Are you going to do the ad reads? This is the other big problem of the creator world is the platforms don’t pay you any money, and they’ve certainly learned to pay people less money.

Yes, we do integrated campaigns with direct-sold advertisers. I don’t know. You do host reads. I noticed that Odd Lots, my second favorite show, is doing host reads these days.

This is the biggest concept in all of media.

The principle of journalistic independence is incredibly important. The forms change when you’re in these moments. What I remember is that on Google, the ads used to be in yellow and they had a yellow overlay. At BuzzFeed, we said, “Okay, that’s the convention. We’ll have a yellow overlay on our ads. That’s how you know it’s an ad.”

Then Google removed it, and we said, “I guess that’s not the convention. I guess ads can be the same color as everything else.” These things are signals to the audience and the forms change through time. Again, you don’t want to be innovating the field of ethics, but you have to realize that the forms are changing.

My harshest take about all these platforms is Google made the ads not yellow and then it made them look like the content, and then it changed the economics of the web such that the only profitable thing to publish on the web is marketing content and listicles about what shoes to buy when you go hiking, and now that’s all that shows up in AI Overviews.

And then Meta started charging you to distribute those rather than letting them go viral on their own if they were good.

So everything became advertising. YouTube just made it harder to make money on YouTube. They changed the rules of their partner program. The only way you can make real money as a creator on YouTube and have your big staff is if you do the integrated brand campaign — if you become an advertiser or an ad agency.

That is the pull of all these platforms: “We’re not going to pay you anything, we’re going to take the content for free, maybe we’ll even train our AI on it, and you will integrate advertising it somewhere.” I get what you’re saying about not innovating in ethics, but as someone who has resisted the many, many, many demands that I do the host reads and the checks that come along with it, that’s the innovation is we’re making the reporters read the ads now.

In the old days of TV and radio, the hosts read the ads, and then they stopped. Now they do it again. Maybe there’s some study saying they were more corrupt.  But I haven’t really seen any evidence of that. I just think these are different kinds of forms.

It used to be that front page advertising in newspapers was considered horrifically corrupt and now they do it all the time. Some of this stuff is people get caught up on the forms in a medium that’s just changing really, really fast. No, we want to create amazing advertising that our advertisers are really happy with and works for them. That’s just core to the business. It is another nice thing about starting from scratch. 

There’s a difference between when you’re building a media company, as you have done, thinking about, “This is a product that our audience is going to love and that our advertisers are going to love.” And in that neonatal state, church and state can talk to each other a lot. Once you launch the thing, they’ve got to be really independent.

This is the core challenge of our time, especially if you want to make something that gets wide distribution. If you want to start a newsletter on Substack or Ghost or Beehiiv and charge a lot of money to a small audience, I think you can do pretty well. Your ability to have a massive impact gets immediately limited, as you’ve said. There’s a cap on your audience size. It seems like Semafor wants to have the big impact, but retain the elite audience.

That is a way to build a big business without reaching a huge scale is to reach a very, very valuable audience. Again, that’s not the only way to build a media company, you wouldn’t want to be in a world where that was the only kind of media company, but we are totally, totally focused on that. It is working and it is allowing us to hire great journalists to break stories.

One of the things that I consider with our audience all the time, because we were free until about a year ago, is that we had a huge audience and they were very aware of any of our potential biases. Maybe this is just the tech audience, and we have lots of commenters. But if you love Apple, everything is going to be pro-Apple. That is just the firmament in which a tech publication stands.

But also Comcast was an investor in Vox Media and Vox, and we would have to disclose it. Comcast didn’t like me, but we would disclose it all the time. There’s just some part of, “Well, we think the audience is smart, they’re an elite audience, they understand the structure, they might understand the biases that come with having Jensen on the board of advisors, having a bunch of Saudi royalty on your board of advisors.” How do you feel about that?

No, they understand what we’re doing quite clearly. 

Do they think that that gets some influence? Because that’s what the consumer audience definitely believes.

I don’t know what they think, but our promise to them is that it doesn’t, and that we’re covering these people very independently. In fact, a lot of the people on these advisory boards have diametrically opposed interests to one another. 

There’s no journalistic followthrough, not any more than I think being on the DealBook task force influences what you see in The New York Times. I do think though, in the biggest sense like this, as you said, just to go back to something you said earlier, that everything is marketing.

Everything is corrupt.

In corners of media, including our corner, we’ve managed to really hold the line on this, but if you look at a lot of social video in particular and platforms like TikTok, totally undisclosed advertising is everywhere and it really distorts how people see the world. Just in terms of people’s judgment about what’s working, what’s real, what’s not real. 

I think about this a lot in the AI space actually, because there are so many anecdotes out there or videos of people doing incredibly cool things with this tool or that tool, and you just never really know. It’s just hard to know what’s marketing and what’s not, what’s just literally paid for and what’s not. We are doing a project that I’m very excited about called the Semafor Innovation Atlas. It’s just literally trying to report, “Here are some cool particularly public sector AI projects that are real.” Because there’s so much out there that’s just unreal but that tells a good story, which is in a way the job of marketing.

I had a partner at a very, very large consulting firm tell me they had done hundreds of AI deployments and less than two dozen had yielded positive ROI.  I said, “Can you just tell me that on the record?” And he said, “Absolutely not. We want hundreds more.” 

We’re in that moment where everything feels marketing, everything feels corrupt. The thing I’m just pushing at is the audience, their base assumption, regardless of how elite the audience is, is that everything is corrupt. I find the higher up we go, the assumption that things can be bought and paid for increases.

We live in a very populist moment, in this widespread belief that everything is corrupt. It just diffuses through society and it’s partly justified. It’s partly not. My favorite example of this is the congressional stock trading thing, where there’s been a lot of research. There are, I’m sure, corrupt Congress people front-running stocks. It’s never been a big problem and there’s no study showing that it’s widespread. 

To try to disabuse people of this, they passed a law several years ago saying that members of Congress have to disclose their stock trades. And now there are all these accounts. There’s 400 whatever members of Congress, some of them are winning, some of them are losing. If you only look at the ones who are doing well, you can tell a story about widespread corruption.

Now, everyone believes it’s incredibly corrupt as a result of a transparency measure that actually showed it wasn’t. We’re in a moment where there’s this deeply baked-in sense that every institution is corrupt. We try by being really transparent and really direct and, by not compromising on this stuff, sending a message to counter that. But you’re swimming against a big cultural tide right now.

For us, a big part of the marketing of our events and the way we make them good is that it’s going to be a festival of news, we’re going to ask real questions, it’s going to be exciting. Justin at some point I think called Semafor World Economy “Davos with follow-up questions.”

That’s pretty good.

That to me is like you guys saying, “We don’t take freebies in reviewing gadgets.” That’s a huge selling point for you. You got to really lean into that, not away from it.

The thing that gets me now, the reason I think we can market it, is that if this was 10 years ago saying, “The Verge has an ethics policy,” all of my competitors would say, “So do we.” I think Wired is doing great reporting. 

A lot of the way they market their great reporting is they just say out loud, “Look at all this reporting, we do it. Buy our subscription.” It’s totally effective. They’ve cracked some code there by just saying out loud that they do the reporting, people will pay for it. 

Turns out people like journalism.

I think that’s very smart. What has occurred to me in all of that is particularly our youngest audience does not know. They did not come up the same way. The water they’ve been swimming in their entire lives is social media, integrated brand campaigns by creators, and a feed that is increasingly fake and bought and paid for. I’m not sure about us showing up and saying, “There’s an old way of doing this.”

See, I disagree. People don’t want to be lied to and don’t want to be fed slop. We’re headed for some kind of reckoning like the big payola scandals in the radio industry.

Everybody inside the radio industry knew and it was a totally open secret that the way you got your song on the radio is you pay off the DJ, but it turned out the audience was not in on the joke. So when Congress held hearings into it totally blew up the industry and upended everything. 

Particularly with political influencer marketing, people hate that. You’ve got to think Congress is going to come in and crack down on it. I’m actually optimistic about that. Adam Schiff just recently introduced a bill on it. That probably won’t be the one, but everybody hates this. The idea that your favorite influencer is being bribed by some politician to lie to you, people do not like that. 

That disclosure, which is mostly in effect or somewhat in effect with big brand marketing, if PepsiCo buys an ad, they’re going to disclose it. There’s a lot of shady stuff happening around the margins. And then politics, because there’s this chasm between the Federal Elections Commission, which sort of collapsed, and the FTC, which regulates other advertising. There’s all this undisclosed and undisclosable political advertising. I just do not think people like that. That’s going to wind up having to be regulated. It makes people angry. It makes you angry.

I’m curious about this. There was a recent story, I think it was Politico, saying all of the young staffers on the right have no idea how to do anything, because they’re all comms people. They’re all influencers and there’s a talent shortage. 

I think Madison Cawthorn was the bellwether. He came into office and he said, “I’ve got more comms people than policy people.” And then it very quickly became clear that wasn’t going to be great. But now that’s the norm that we’re all just tweeting policy into existence. We’re going to stop the Iran war with tweets. It’s a real thing that happens once a week in this country.

There’s something there that’s broken. Political influence operations, maybe we hate when they’re paid for, but they are politics now. And they’re part of the feed in a very real way.

Sometimes in really damaging ways, this administration is incredibly responsive to social media. A story goes viral on Twitter and somebody gets their immigration status pulled — I just read a piece from a woman who’s in ICE holding because there was a sort of misleading campaign saying her husband’s mother had been a translator for the Iranians in the ’70s, and so she’s now in an ICE holding cell. The administration acted because this went viral on social media.

There’s always been a very intense relationship between the media and the politicians. The New York Times publishes a story and then Chuck Schumer the next day introduces a piece of legislation, which is the oldest trick in the book. 

Actually, it’s not been my experience that Republican staffers in Washington are incompetent. I live in New York and often go to Washington, and I’m in Washington a lot. People in my liberal Brooklyn neighborhood will say, “God, it must be so horrible to deal with those Trump people.” The reality is actually they’re incredibly polite and responsive. 

It was a nightmare often to deal with the Biden people, because Democrats think that journalists work for them. That writing something independent is an act of betrayal. I suppose Republicans have either appropriate or lower expectations. That’s sort of always been true.

Communication has always been a pretty important part of politics, but there’s a way in which the disorganization of this administration in particular just means that they’re totally reactive to random pieces of media that somebody plays Donald Trump on an iPad. That is really different.

I just see that we’re going to tweet policy into reality as a feature of this administration. There’s not a lot of rigor under that policy often.

Or often somebody else just tweets something and it goes viral. This was the story of DOGE. Musk was just seeing tweets and making policy based on it.

Do you think that has come to an end? We’re saying people hate these political influence operations, that probably they will get regulated in some way because both sides hate the idea that all the influencers are getting paid by politicians.

No, right now we’re in the worst part of it. Although you’ve seen a federal government that had had a lot of momentum and ability to execute things, it lost all of that. At the White House, there’s much less able to do anything right now, so there’s less happening.

This is where I wanted to wrap up. It’s going to break somehow. There’s some kind of reckoning coming where people want the truth. People don’t trust the tech companies. The antipathy towards AI in particular is high, but the tech companies and a bunch of billionaires own all our distribution in very significant and serious ways. Something is going to happen. The audiences are going to change in some way. There will be some reaction somehow. Do you have a view of that?

This stuff keeps changing. There is a temptation to validate the populist impulses of the moment that I actually think journalists should probably resist sometimes. I heard your interview with Gaby Del Valle about data center politics. I loved her anecdote about a rumor going around that the data centers were killing cattle, and she tracked it down to one Texas farmer who had lost one cow. 

I actually think the role of journalism is not always to amplify the populist reaction, even though it’s so easy and social media validates that. It’s a little more complicated. I actually hesitate to predict whether things are getting better or worse.

Your event Silicon Valley & The World is coming up. If I had to make one prediction about the midterms, it would be that surveillance and data centers will cause some sort of left-right realignment. They scramble the lines in very populist ways.

But they also cause alignment. They bring together very disparate groups of people. How do you expect that class of billionaires, which all want things, to react to what I feel like will be a surprising story in the midterms?

There are different strains of this. The data center story is so hot right now, and I’m in the minority here. Most people think this will be a huge political issue for a long time. Companies try to build facilities in people’s neighborhoods and then they go in and they sponsor the Little League team and they pay a bunch of carpenters and they sponsor the parade. That is actually something corporate America is pretty good at. And it’s unbelievable how badly they screwed this up, these data centers.

Yeah, it’s very bad.

But that is because they aren’t actually causing stillborn cattle. Fundamentally, with the exception that they’re going to have to navigate the energy issue, they’re going to have to find a way to not elevate energy prices. But some of that probably does fade as companies figure out how to do this without infuriating neighborhoods and doing it in places people want it. Maybe it will become less of an issue.

The big questions around regulating AI are just fascinating. And you’re right, after, as you said, not regulating social media and then beginning the [second] Trump administration with this incredibly accelerationist point of view, they are now just doing it. They’re just regulating this technology day to day. They’re going to have to figure out a framework for it. Every political candidate will have to have some point of view on it.

It’s pretty unpredictable what this is going to be, but I do think we’re in a new era. Particularly the biggest part of the new era is just that the federal government is now this huge participant in the economy and in the economy of tech. It owns a big chunk of intel and is trying to shape technological policies and picking winners and losers. Executives are in Washington constantly trying to make their case. I think that whoever the next president is, that probably doesn’t change. And that’s a really massive structural shift that we’re all going to be covering.

Do you think that you can run as a populist if you want to take a big stake in our AI companies? Or is that a redistributive move? 

I don’t think populism is necessarily that. I wouldn’t get too far into the details. It just depends how you talk about it.

That does seem like the theme of the day in Washington.

What do they say about simple solutions to complex problems?

Yeah, Trump has compared those stakes in companies to the sovereign wealth funds.

Yeah, that’s reasonable.

A lot of Gulf states have that. I actually wanted to ask you about this. You cover the Gulf deeply, you’ve got events in the Gulf. The United States, I would say, is in some kind of free speech crisis that is modeled a lot after the control that Gulf states have over their media and what people are not allowed to say. The Kushner family is all wrapped up into that.

How do you think about all of the things you talked about independence when you have that money in your organization, when you have those folks on your various boards at events, when you have journalists on the ground in those places?

We cover Saudi and the Emirates in particular a lot and pretty aggressively. We hired the great reporters from Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal and places like that in the region. We don’t have any investment money from the Gulf and for many sovereigns. I’m not sure that’s what you meant, but just to be clear about that.

They’re on your board for these events.

They’re advisors. There are some executives from that part of the world on advisory boards. But we cover them independently. The same as the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal and others do in that region, and in The New York Times. If you talk to reporters who work in the region, it’s very, very hard and complicated. And there are local laws that you have to be careful about.

We were the only ones to write about a very interesting story, the way in which the Emirates, I believe, were preventing photojournalists from distributing images. That’s just the law. If your photographer goes and takes a picture of a drone that hit a building, they will arrest them. Every news organization that operates in that region, that operates in China, you just have to be really, really careful and thoughtful about it, but you can’t let it compromise the reporting.

Do you feel like it compromises the reporting here in the United States?

No. I think that global news organizations actually — and if you think about The New York Times, which has reporters in Tehran — have thought really hard about this. There are stories that you have your correspondent in Washington write that you wouldn’t have somebody on the ground in Tehran write. And obviously, we think a lot about the safety of our reporters, but it’s a complicated question.

I asked that question because I see what the Trump administration does to journalists here.

It’s funny, because I think that we obviously are in this, as you said, free speech crisis here in all sorts of ways. I don’t think it’s like a monarchy that doesn’t have the First Amendment. I think we’re a long way from that. 

To me, the closer parallel to the Gulf is personalist rule. People talk a lot about corruption, but when you think about these relationships, often it’s a totally different style of doing business where you’re helping your friends and family. But it’s like a totally different modality that obviously in the American tradition is incredibly corrupt. In other parts of the world, that’s just the nature of business. I think that’s how parts of the Trump administration operate. 

The Trump family in particular sees that as a model. That was the comparison I was making. You can see them enriching themselves, particularly in that part of the world.

I do think that elements of that style of doing business are more like other parts of the world. Obviously a lot of the speech stuff here is terrible, but it’s really not like… I mean, just as somebody who operates there, it’s not like being in a country without the First Amendment.

Fair enough. Lastly, I just want to talk about AI in your newsroom for one second. We’ve talked a lot about AI in the industry. You make a lot of stuff. The pull, especially when you go make a bunch of video, is to fire ever more content into these algorithms. We haven’t really talked about it. Maybe the only journalistic ethics crisis I’ve never brought to you is, how should we use AI?

Because I know that you’re such a purist. It’s funny, I go back and forth on how high impact it will be, but right now I’m like all the way forth on this. A colleague of mine built this great internal tool that is too boring to explain, but it’s going to totally change all of our lives internally. And I’m now a huge believer in the SaaSpocalypse. It’s all going away. 

You cancel your Trello contract and you’re done.

Some of this internal tooling is amazing. We also produced this report out of Semafor World Economy where it was a five-day event with three simultaneous stages and 300 interviews. 

On Saturday morning, I texted the team, “Hey, I know you’re all tired, but could everybody write a little like ‘what I learned at Semafor World Economy’?” And everyone said, “Ugh.” And then Reed Albergotti, our great tech editor, said, “Give me a couple of hours.” He dropped all the transcripts into Codex or Cowork and then produced something that said, “Here are the most commonly made statements. Here are some disagreements.”

We then spent a week hammering through that and actually wound up creating a lot more work for humans. But the notion of, “What’s the takeaway from these 300 conversations?” That’s a job for AI basically. It’s a very hard thing, because no one was in all of them. They were simultaneous.

That was a great product that we then released and will continue to build on. I’m actually very bullish about AI, but fundamentally the best parts of reporting are gathering new information that isn’t on the internet and then communicating it with people. Everything in between is production and is very vulnerable to AI. Those things I think are pretty defensible.

It’s a good argument. I’m going to come around to it, I promise. I’m going to come around to it. This very much was a conversation exactly like the conversation we have over beers all the time.

Okay. I have an AI question for you.

There’s a tool that allows you, on a podcast — if you screwed something up, if you’ve mispronounced somebody’s name — to drop it in with your own voice so you don’t have to go back into the studio and rerecord that sentence. Is that okay or not? This is an argument we’re having internally.

It depends on exactly how misleading you think you’re going to be.

No, just like you mispronounced my name in the intro, and your producer said, “Hey, can you come back into the studio?” It’s Saturday morning.

So if I mispronounced your name to you on air?

No, in your intro.

No, because then that’s just an edit. I would just pick it up.

No, I know, but you have to go into the studio and rerecord that. But you’re on a boat doing whatever it is you do. And your producer can just take your voice and redo it.

That’s fine. I honestly think that’s fine.

I think that’s fine too. Okay, good.

The deception comes if I mispronounce your name to you here, and then you leave, and then I make it better. If I’ve done something misleading. If I’m just picking up audio that you would have never heard and we’re just going to do an edit, we’re editing that anyway.

Okay, good. I feel the same way.

To me, the line always comes down to who is being deceived. And if you’re literally going to deceive the guest and you’re going to create a moment that never happened, probably you’re way over the line.

Although honestly, that’s a standard practice in television. They’ll recut the questions.

I’ve heard this. Although, now they’re all getting in trouble and I have to publish the full transcript, or the Trump administration sues them.

Ben, this has been great. Like I said, this is very much like many of the conversations we’ve had in private. I hope the audience can feel it. Thank you so much.

I really enjoyed it. I love the show, and thank you for having me on.

_{Questions or comments? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!}

Germany’s political parties have converged on an unusual point of agreement: A law penalizing citizens for insulting politicians needs to change, following controversial investigations of people who mocked Chancellor Friedrich Merz as “Pinocchio” and “Lying Fritz.”

But while politicians across the spectrum agree the law needs fixing — they just can’t agree how, or when, to change it, according to a POLITICO survey of the lawmakers responsible for the issue from each of the parties represented in the Bundestag. 

“We take seriously the criticism that, in practice, it may have created the impression of a special legal privilege for politicians,” said Susanne Hierl, a lawmaker from Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). “Such preferential treatment was never the intention of the legislature.”

Moritz Oppelt, the CDU justice minister of Germany’s southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg echoed the sentiment, arguing the law should serve only its original intent of protecting local politicians, who are often subject to particular vitriol.

“Top politicians can and must be able to withstand tough criticism,” he said. “It is fundamental to our democracy, and part of our understanding of democracy in Germany, that people are free to discuss political decisions at the federal and state levels and criticize them very harshly. That does not mean that insults in the political sphere should become normalized. There are, of course, limits.”

Variations of this view find consensus across Germany’s fractured political spectrum. The far-left Left Party and far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party want the law abolished outright, while the CDU, Greens and center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) all support revising it. 

“Politicians like Friedrich Merz insult ordinary people in this country every day by calling them lazy or malingerers,” said Luke Hoss, a Left lawmaker, referring to the chancellor’s remarks that Germans should work more to boost economic growth. “The provision creates a special criminal offense that applies only to politicians and should be abolished.”

Tobias Peterka, an AfD lawmaker, said tough criticism comes with the job. “Anyone who voluntarily enters politics and exercises public authority must — as Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court has repeatedly emphasized — tolerate harsher criticism than private citizens, not less,” he argued.

While a version of the law giving special protection to politicians, Section 188 of the criminal code, has existed since 1951, former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government in 2021 strengthened the legislation as part of broader efforts to combat right-wing extremism and hate speech.

The reform came after the 2019 murder of CDU lawmaker Walter Lübcke by a far-right extremist and amid verbal and physical attacks on local politicians amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Lübcke had been an outspoken supporter of Germany’s refugee policy under Merkel.

The law applies to insults made publicly or through social media posts when they are linked to the politician’s public role and are deemed to significantly impede their work. Offenders face up to three years in prison or a fine for insulting politicians; defamation and “malicious gossip” carry stronger penalties.

But opinion has turned against the law following several recent investigations and prosecutions of regular people for insulting politicians. One man was fined for calling Merz “Lügenfritz,” or “Lying Fritz,” another for calling him “Fotzenfritz” (“pussy-hound Fritz”), a defamatory nickname coined by a satirical magazine. “Fritz” is a common nickname for Friedrich.

Andy Hüttner, a 66-year-old retiree from southwestern Germany, was investigated for writing “Pinocchio is coming” on a local police Facebook post about security measures for a planned visit by Merz.

“I thought calling Mr. Merz ‘Pinocchio’ was absolutely fitting because he promised so much and delivered so little,” Hüttner told POLITICO. “It never crossed my mind that anything could happen because of that comment.”

After the news of the investigation kicked off a media furor — and condemnation from U.S. Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers — the case was dropped.

Under German law, insulting any person (Beleidigung) can be a criminal offense, but the law for politicians makes the potential punishment for insults and defamation more severe.

But there’s growing agreement that the law attempting to provide extra protections for politicians has gone too far.

CDU lawmaker Hierl said local politicians still need protection. “We will therefore carefully review both the wording of Section 188 and the way it is applied,” she said.

The opposition Greens agree that the law should focus on protecting local politicians.

“Repealing Section 188 of the German Criminal Code would send the wrong signal,” Lena Gumnior, one of the party’s lawmakers, wrote in a statement. “I could, however, envision reforming Section 188 so that it applies only to elected officeholders at the municipal level.”

SPD Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig said in June that politicians must be able to bear more criticism than regular citizens, broadly echoing the position of the Greens and CDU. In June, Germany’s state justice ministers called for the law to be narrowed so that it applies to municipal officeholders. 

For the moment, however, neither Merz’s governing CDU nor the opposition Greens are preparing a legislative push for after the summer recess. 

An AfD bill to abolish Section 188 was voted down by the Bundestag, and while the party has since introduced another bill, centrist parties have vowed not to work with the far right, maintaining a so-called “firewall” around the party.

The Left party has also introduced a parliamentary motion addressing Section 188, more evidence of the broad consensus around changing the law — even if mainstream politicians haven’t gotten around to it yet.

A court in France on Friday shot down a bill seeking to ban access to social media for under-15s from September — a major blow to President Emmanuel Macron that raises fundamental questions about efforts to protect kids on the internet.

The Constitutional Council, which reviews the constitutionality of French legislation, said the restrictions in the bill disproportionately infringe on minors’ right to freedom of expression and communication.

Europe’s would-be first social media ban, which sought to prohibit access to anyone in France under the age of 15 from next month, had been a flagship policy of Macron’s second and final term.

The French president has also pushed restrictions to the top of the EU agenda, with an expected announcement of bloc-wide measures by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in September.

In a statement late Friday, the French presidential office said the government would not be giving up on the bill. It has set a new target date for spring 2027, which coincides with when Macron will leave office.

The statement said Macron “has instructed the Prime Minister to work, as quickly as possible, on a legally sound draft that takes into account” the court’s decision. The ruling hinted at what would make the age restriction align with fundamental rights: giving parents more flexibility.

Peter Craddock, a senior Brussels-based attorney advising social media firms, said the French court decision could have far-reaching implications.

“What they’re basically saying here is: ‘Listen, government, if you want to get this to succeed, you can’t just work on the basis of a general ban. There have to be limitations,” said Craddock, a partner at Keller & Heckman. “There have to be ways for people to say, ‘well, actually, in my case, my son, my daughter is of a certain degree of maturity and is able to use this properly.'”

The government bill had passed through the French legislative procedure after a lengthy back-and-forth earlier this summer. It was set to bring forward Europe’s first social media age restrictions, with Greece and Denmark planning to follow suit.

But Article 1 of the French bill essentially rendered it a blanket ban, without sufficiently distinguishing between the risks of each social media platform or the varying levels of vulnerability among minors themselves, said the court. The ban would also apply to online platforms that have not been proven to have risks to the health and safety of minors.

Craddock warned the court’s judgment may not bode well for other national bans or restrictions coming from the European Commission, since the decision is framed around fundamental rights, which are harmonized across the bloc.

“The reasoning is actually equally relevant internationally,  throughout the EU, because this fundamental freedom is not specific to France,” he said.

This article has been updated.

X is expanding the open source code behind its 'For You' feed and launching new transparency tools that show users when its ranking systems have affected their accounts or posts.

The social media giant says it was time for a sharper and more modern look after a decade.

LONDON — Nigel Farage billed it as a “people vs the establishment” by-election. But before he wins back the seat he resigned in July, there’s the small matter of convincing Clacton’s voters he can help them with their shabby beachfront stairs.

POLITICO analysis of the Reform UK leader’s digital campaign messages shows that Farage has run a twin-track strategy in the seaside seat as polls open Thursday. The two key themes of the digital air war have been painting Farage as a champion for local residents — as well as an insurgent leader harried by the “establishment” machine.

Farage and his party have spent more than £10,000 pushing those messages via ads on Meta’s platforms — which include Facebook and Instagram — in the campaign so far.

It’s a similar amount to that spent by the party in the crunch Makerfield by-election in June, where Reform unsuccessfully attempted to halt Andy Burnham’s march on Downing Street by denying the Labour candidate a Westminster seat.

But in Clacton, Farage’s chief opponent is Count Binface, a satirical candidate who sports a silver cape, wears a rubbish receptacle on his head, and claims to be from outer space.

The Reform leader triggered the special election in a bid to bolster his personal standing amid questions about his finances, including whether he broke parliamentary rules by not declaring a £5 million donation from a crypto-entrepreneur. Britain’s other mainstream parties refused to field candidates in the contest as a result, leaving Farage running against independents and comedy characters.

In his paid ad content, the Reform leader makes no mention of his Count Binface, whose policies include capping the price of ice cream and holding a referendum on returning Pluto’s planetary status.

Instead, a spate of campaign videos have been pushed out showing Farage as having his finger on the pulse of local concerns.

Tackling low-level crime, housing problems, shabby infrastructure and veterans’ issues all get mentions in the paid ads targeted specifically at users living in the area.

One Meta ad suggests he is the only candidate to have visited forgotten areas of the constituency. A further clip shows a local resident giving Farage a positive review of his work — and is presented as proof that opposition complaints he has neglected the patch since his 2024 general election victory in the seat are “cobblers.”

With over 7 million followers across the leading social media platforms — making him by far the most-followed U.K. party leader — Farage has also been churning out election content across TikTok, Instagram and X.

Even with that reach, the Reform UK leader appears to be the only candidate running in Clacton who has used paid Meta features to bolster his online campaign.

Almost £1,000 has been spent on videos of Farage urging local supporters to request the party deliver and install an “I’m with Nigel” garden sign. Meanwhile, around £500 went to ads asking voters to return their postal votes and “send a message to the establishment.”

The largest single sum — between £4,000-£4,500 — was spent on an almost five-minute campaign video in which Farage waxes lyrical about the connection he’s made with local constituents, while claiming his party’s surging success has resulted in the powers-that-be using “foul means” to hamper him.

“Rather than being judged by the political class and the mainstream media, I am going to let you, the voters in the Clacton constituency, make a decision,” he said. “I want you to be my judge, not the political elite.”

Farage also used the same piece of campaign content to try and take on questions about his funding head-on. In the clip, the Reform leader argued that the furor over a £5m donation he received from crypto-entrepreneur Christopher Harborne before the 2024 election — now the subject of a House of Commons investigation — amounts to merely a failure to fill out a parliamentary form.

The Clacton candidate also argues in the same clip that the murder of a senior Reform figure proves such funding is needed for his personal security. “Surely in the wake of the death of the elderly Ann Widdecombe, you can see that I am going to need money to protect myself for the rest of my life,” he said.

With a result due in the early hours of Friday, Farage does not have long to wait to find out whether his online spend has paid off.

A news organization and free speech nonprofit sued President Donald Trump over his social media platform’s program that offers paid early access to his posts after the scheme went live at the beginning of August.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the left-leaning nonprofit newsroom The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, alleges the practice “is extraordinary, corrupt, and unconstitutional.”

The plaintiffs also say the controversial $100,000-a-month program violates their First Amendment rights to access presidential statements “on equal terms with other members of the press and public.”

In announcing plans to introduce the program, Truth Social — whose parent company Trump founded in 2021 after being kicked off social media platforms and owns a plurality stake in — described the initiative as valuable for “organizations that place a premium on immediate, verified access to information.” But critics allege it amounts to insider trading on advanced access to the president’s market-moving words.

The service gives traders and other entities high-speed access to the president’s Truth Social account in addition to the nine other most-popular accounts on the platform, including Vice President JD Vance, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

A spokesperson for Truth Social, which isn’t named as a defendant in the complaint but is referenced throughout it, said in a statement that “information from President Trump is disseminated by countless platforms and news outlets, many of which offer subscription APIs.”

“One of those channels is Truth Social, which was founded as an uncancellable haven for free speech after the President was unjustly deplatformed,” the statement continued. “Now, left-wing activists are trying to wrongfully weaponize the courts to censor him again and harm our shareholders.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The Intercept’s chief legal officer, David Bralow, in a statement said “nothing could be more antithetical to the free, independent press than the president charging for early access to his public announcement.”

Natalie Harp, an executive assistant to Trump who media reports suggest is responsible for authoring many of the president’s social media posts, is named as a defendant in the suit alongside deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, the Executive Office of the President and the White House Office.

The subjects of the president’s Truth Social posts can range from squabbles with federal judges to hiring and firings within his administration and threats against foreign adversaries. They also provide a glimpse at the issues of the day that occupy Trump’s attention.

Such announcements have had the ability to sway markets, like when oil prices plunged after Trump posted that he was calling off an attack on Iran in April. He has also occasionally touted specific companies on the platform, causing their stock prices to rise.

The plaintiffs also express concerns that the program would give outlets willing to pay for the service an unfair advantage over other newsrooms and hinder efforts to catalog the president’s posts by scraping Truth Social.

The company said in an August earnings report that despite a $238 million loss in the second quarter of 2026, 10 customers had already registered for the service.

The program has caught the eyes of Democratic lawmakers on the Hill. Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) introduced a bill Tuesday seeking to ban social media companies from selling early access to government employees’ accounts and specifically invoked the Truth Social program.

CLACTON-ON-SEA — Voters seeking to re-elect Nigel Farage Thursday will have to scan past an array of comedy characters and oddballs on the longest ballot paper in British history.

The man who hopes to be the U.K.’s next prime minister is all but certain to retain his seaside fiefdom of Clacton — but his self-styled “people versus the establishment” electoral gambit is sowing some seeds of discontent even among loyal supporters.

Fear of Clacton becoming a “laughing stock” is a common refrain during a pair of focus groups POLITICO attended in the run-up to this week’s election.

The feeling that the town has been made to look daft was apparent even among those preparing to vote once again to return the Reform UK leader to parliament. And it’s not the rival candidate wearing a trash can on his head that they’re holding responsible for the “farce.”

Thursday may not be the end of the matter, either. A parliamentary investigation into Farage’s alleged failure to declare millions of pounds of donations in the run-up to his 2024 election could mean yet another by-election — and a tougher battle for the right-wing populist next time around.

Bid for absolution

This self-inflicted campaign is taking place because of Farage’s decision to resign his parliamentary seat and put his fate in the hands of Clacton’s residents.

Ordinary punters, he argued, should be the ones to have their say as he faced mounting questions over undeclared donations. The gamble was that such a vote would absolve him of wrongdoing in the eyes of the public, regardless of the findings in two parliamentary probes — one over a £5 million donation from a crypto-entrepreneur, and the other into support from a convicted fraudster. Farage has denied wrongdoing in both instances, arguing that help was given in a personal capacity.

But Britain’s main political parties took one look at this ploy and opted out. That’s how Count Binface, one of the most enthusiastic inheritors of a rich British tradition of standing as a satirical candidate in elections, ended up as Farage’s most high-profile rival. 

Others risking their £500 deposit to get their names on the 90-cm-long ballot paper include rival jokesters with names ranging from Howling Laud Hope, Nick the Incredible Flying Brick and Baron Von Thunderclap. Broadcast rules mean the 34-strong candidate list needs to be read in full at every mention of Farage’s by-election on TV.

A seaside town back on the map — in ways unwanted

The first focus group arranged by the More in Common think tank that POLITICO observed was made up of nine constituents who all voted for Farage in the 2024 general election, and are minded to do so again in the by-election. (Their names were withheld so they could speak candidly).

It was a retiree who was first to volunteer regret at Farage’s decision, blaming him for provoking an “influx of idiots” into the constituency. “Unfortunately, the action of causing a by-election has,” the former shopkeeper offered, “really made Clacton, in my opinion, a bit of a laughing stock.”

Two others repeated that same phrase, with one dog groomer-by-trade adding: “I think it was all a bit of a farce. I think he should have admitted that he was given this £5 million.”

“I guess it makes it very hard to trust him,” a delivery driver chimed in. “Most of my friends have gone towards Count Binface as opposed to Farage.”

Farage has since given varying explanations for some of the money he’s received, including as a “reward” for Brexit, or to cover lifelong security in the perilous world of modern politics. The veteran campaigner has been tetchy about the “unconditional gift” during media appearances, telling a radio interviewer he could spend it on Ferraris or bet on the horses, adding: “What’s it got to do with you?”

The dog groomer was among those lamenting the cost of running the by-election too. Reform had offered to pay for it, but in reality there is no mechanism to do this. The sheer number of candidates running has some extraordinary consequences.

Tendring Council, which is presiding over the vote, said even the cost of printing the ballot papers is four times that of a typical election because of their sheer length. Additional planning has had to go into every stage, from how the ballot is printed, folded and actually cast at polling stations — and counting will go on through the night and possibly past breakfast.

Then there are the Reform voters who have now been forced to choose whether to cast a vote for a comedy candidate or for Farage.

“From what I can tell about Binface, he seems like an okay guy from the research I’ve done,” said one local businessman. “And I do think there would be some tourism involved because of the absurdity of having that candidate as the MP of Clacton.”

That influx could already be observed, to some extent, on Tuesday this week. Even though it’s a school holiday, the pier and the amusement arcades in town weren’t exactly heaving with holiday-makers. 

But there was a steady stream of journalists — so many that they even tried to vox pop each other at times. Then there was an obscure mobile phone network that set up an ice cream van selling “99s for 99p” — in a publicity stunt echoing one of Binface’s manifesto pledges. A vintage Jaguar painted all over with the Union Jack (and used in the Austin Powers franchise) is touring the streets all day in support of Binface.

Farage’s social media has done a good job of showing how much support he still commands from the diehards — at times at messiah-like levels. And it’s not hard to find his “I’m with Nigel” placards outside homes, a picture of the candidate ringed with a halo-like ferris wheel.

But supporters in the first focus group suggested that the sheen could be coming off a man who has, just this year, been enough of a campaigning force to send the governing Labour Party searching for a new leader.

Old-school Tories’ views harden

The second focus group, held in a community garden overlooking the town, featured right-wing voters, and comprised largely of former Conservative supporters who, though discontented with their old party, aren’t eager to back Farage any time soon.

They roundly agreed with the “farce” analysis of the by-election. “People see this by-election as a total joke. If you talk to anyone, then that is their view,” said a retired printer.

They all lamented having no proper choice, though they generally backed the decision by Farage’s mainstream rivals not to contest the vote.

One bridge player with a firm grasp on politics described playing “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” with her postal vote to randomly pick a candidate who wasn’t Farage. Another spoke of spoiling her postal ballot and writing that the whole affair is a waste of time and money.

These were all the kind of right-wingers who Farage would want to win over to elevate himself from an insurgent outsider to true contender for high office — but their stances only seemed to have hardened in response to the by-election.

Anything but a crushing Farage victory would be a major upset. Constituency polling has him on course to win 73 percent of the vote to Binface’s 20 percent. Turnout in this bizarre by-election will also be closely looked at, as will spoiled ballots.

Reform aides have already been planning a victory speech to take place after the votes have finally been counted on Friday. But first their candidate will have to undergo that British ritual of standing next to an array of comedy characters on a stage in a leisure center to hear the results.

Should Farage make it back to parliament as expected, then the standards commissioner’s investigation into the donations resumes. That means yet more scrutiny at a time when Labour is riding a polling bounce after Andy Burnham took over as prime minister.

For the first time since March last year, Labour has topped POLITICO’s poll of polls ahead of Reform. The government’s apparent rehabilitation — combined with Reform being squeezed on the right by the splinter Restore Britain party — is adding to a worsening picture for Farage.

If the Reform UK leader is found to have committed wrongdoing and ends up being suspended from parliament, the next by-election — should he choose to fight it — could pose a far greater challenge. Not only would he come up against real opposition, but voters will have read yet more headlines about mega-bucks donations as they’re forced to the polls once again.

“It’ll be bad for us and it’ll make us look even more stupid,” said a Reform-minded instrument salesman when asked about the prospect of another by-election. “But then he [Farage] was the one that called it.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated to amend the number of constituents taking part in the first focus group.

Over a year following its post-election surge, Bluesky’s mobile app is seeing a continued decline in active users, though its remaining community is still relatively engaged.

Bluesky has added a new feature that lets you hide reposts from a specific person in your feeds. The tool might be helpful if you want to stop seeing reposts from that one person who clogs up your feed with reposts of things you don't care about. If you follow me, I may be that person, I'm sorry. I try not to be.

You can hide reposts from individual users by going to their profile, clicking the three dots button, and selecting the option to "Hide reposts in feeds." (X offers a similar toggle.)

Bluesky also says that it's launching a beta feature that will automatically add post numbers to threads. For long threads, it could be a useful w …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Platforms like Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google are facing a long road of litigation.

X is ending its controversial revenue-sharing program for content creators, which has seen numerous revisions under Elon Musk's reign. In its place, it's launching a new Original Content Rewards program on September 8th. To be eligible, creators must have at least 500 verified followers and at least 500,000 Home Timeline impressions from verified users in the last 90 days, among other requirements.

Creators will then earn revenue based on "qualified impressions" on "original content." Qualified impressions are unique impressions from Premium subscribers "on the Home Timeline feed, where at least 50% of the post is visible." What qualifies …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Perez Hilton always wanted to be famous. This is a statement of fact and not meant to make light of his self-harming incident broadcast via TikTok livestream on Tuesday—quite the opposite. Videos and images of Hilton, 48, covered in blood and cutting himself with a knife should be interpreted as a cry for help, not attention. A person can understand that much without seeing the footage.

But many who watched didn’t have a choice. Although Perez’s livestream proceeded for around 15 minutes before it was shut down, screenshots and clips rocketed across the internet, invading countless social media feeds. Some saw those disturbing images simply by picking up their mobile devices.

Fortunately, Hilton was transported from his Miami home to a hospital to receive medical attention, according to the local sheriff’s office. But such incidents have become increasingly commonplace to the point of numbing us.

While Wednesday morning Google search trends data showed that people were hunting for images of Hilton, I went to YouTube to see what he was up to in 2002. That year, he starred in a short film called “Dating Up,” which is not listed under his IMDb or Wikipedia filmographies.

He describes it in the video summary as “A short film about gay dating. In a world before Grindr!” It’s also a glimpse of the time before YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and before the man born Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. launched PerezHilton.com in 2004 and quickly became one of the world’s most popular, controversial and despised gossip bloggers. 

I chose 2002 because that year’s most famous video captured the Feb. 1 execution of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Footage of his beheading circulated in the bowels of the internet for months, until the now-defunct Boston Phoenix published a link to it on its website, igniting furious debates about the morality and journalistic ethics of that decision.

Such discussions seem quaint in an age in which the video of Charlie Kirk’s assassination was posted to social media moments after it happened, and a gunman in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreamed his killing of 51 worshippers at two mosques on Facebook.

An age, it bears adding, when X and Meta—Facebook and Instagram’s corporate owner—no longer emphasize stalwart moderation guardrails in the name of reducing “censorship” on their platforms.

The circumstances leading to Hilton’s distressing livestream and Pearl’s filmed execution are entirely dissimilar. But what brought the 2002 video to mind was that it marked the first time in modern history, at least that I can remember, that the public questioned what purpose watching something too horrible to fathom ultimately serves. Such discussions helped establish the difference between witnessing as a matter of civic responsibility and leering voyeurism.

Images of Sept. 11, 2001, were still fresh and traumatizing for millions who watched the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers collapse on live TV when Pearl was murdered.

But his death was an intimate injury to his loved ones first and foremost. Making it public, therefore, was viewed as a ghoulish act by many, including Salon’s former national correspondent Bruce Shapiro. “The idea that tossing the desires of Pearl’s family into the ashcan is ‘just what journalists do’ is only a cover for indiscriminate National Enquirer logic,” he said in a June 2002 column.

Months after that, the Phoenix’s media critic Dan Kennedy contended that it is our obligation to watch such difficult accounts in an essay for Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. “We turn away from such evil at our own peril,” Kennedy maintained.

Somewhere in the middle, the rest of us wondered how absorbing such horror would change us, whether as individuals or as a society.

Twenty-four years ago, it was very easy to turn away from something you had to go digging for in the first place. YouTube would not exist until 2005. Instagram’s founding happened five years after that. TikTok turns 10 this year.

In the years between those companies’ founding and now, social media has given us plenty of opportunities to take up those debates again. But when such content is widely available, and we have so little choice as to whether we can avoid it, conversations about the ethics of it all seem like a luxury.

In exceptional cases, disseminating footage that’s hard to stomach serves a noble objective. Graphically violent video pouring out of 2011’s Arab Spring uprisings opened the world’s eyes to the deadly state violence people suffered under the repressive regimes of Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and other Arab nations.

In the United States, bystander videography has been bringing incidents of police brutality into American living rooms since at least 1991, when Los Angeles resident George Holliday captured cops viciously beating Rodney King on videotape. But the first cellphone equivalents to go viral were the 2009 videos of a police officer fatally shooting 22-year-old Oscar Grant III in the back at Fruitvale Station in Oakland.

And the list of people whose last living, breathing moments were captured on cellphone videos and shared with the world has only gotten longer. In 2014, the nation watched Eric Garner suffocate to death as a New York City police officer subdued him using a prohibited chokehold. In 2016, Diamond Reynolds filmed the moment that a police officer shot her boyfriend Philando Castile to death during a traffic stop in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and posted it to Facebook Live.

In 2020, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier recorded Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. And earlier this year, multiple bystanders recorded the shootings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti, footage that contradicted Trump administration officials’ claims that Good was a “domestic terrorist” and Pretti was an “assassin.”

In all those incidents, bearing witness galvanized the public. The international furor over Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests and briefly mainstreamed the Movement for Black Lives. Videos of Good and Pretti’s killings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents turned all eyes to Minnesota, leading to the ouster of Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security.

At the same time, our social media algorithms were not as loosely regulated a decade ago as they are now. Teams of human moderators once employed by all the major platforms have been gutted. Nobody should be shocked to know that the easiest place to find Hilton’s self-harm videos is X.  As for TikTok, a spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, the platform relies on automated moderation systems. They flagged Hilton’s alarming livestream within minutes, closed other live streams within 90 seconds and banned the account, the spokesperson said, but its removal was delayed by what was characterized as “a moderator error.” (TikTok previously banned Hilton in 2020 for violating its community guidelines. At the time, his account had 1.6 million followers and averaged 10 million views per week.)

---

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.
Sign up here

---

The twin forces of cellphone footage and instantaneous social posting have long cultivated what is now understood to be a society-wide problem: the separation between the reality unfurling mere feet in front of us and the filter provided by electronic screens and lenses.

Knowing this, the fact that the top search terms on Wednesday morning indicated that people were looking for images of Hilton’s self-harm instead of contextualizing reporting is telling but, sadly, not surprising.

Lurid real-world footage of people harming others or themselves is being served directly to us whether we want to see it or not. What we might debate, as we did 24 years ago, is what that’s doing to us.

The post The end of looking away from violence on social media appeared first on Salon.com.

Today's links

• Eternal Sloptember: Mark Zuckerberg and the fantasy of social media without socializing.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Delany x The Onion; Duran Duran x Second Life; Spammers x blog pings; Privacywashing v Doordash; Good ideas are popular.
• Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

---

Eternal Sloptember (permalink)

I'm sure that working in social media – dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – is a cognitohazard, the sort of thing that could make anyone a little solipsistic, convinced that everyone else is a kind of stimulus-responding automaton lacking the interiority that you yourself experience.

But when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, I'm increasingly convinced that he didn't acquire his worldview through the self-inflicted brain damage of his long exposure to the back-end of a vast social media system. I think the causal arrow points in the other direction: I think that Zuck founded Facebook because he doesn't really believe that other people are truly real, at least not as real as he is.

We see this in Facebook's very earliest days, as we see it today, as we see it at every critical juncture in Facebook and Zuckerberg's history.

Consider Facebook's origins, founded by a young Zuckerberg in his dorm as a means to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads:

https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-lying-about-facebook

The boy Zuck was delighted and surprised that so many of his fellow students entrusted him with their data but even then, he had no inkling as to why they would do so. Privately, he jeered at his users for trusting him, calling them "dumb fucks":

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2010/05/14/facebook-founder-called-trusting-users-dumb-fcks/294365

Zuck has since prosecuted history's most ruthless war on privacy, a surveillance campaign that would put the Stasi to shame and make Orwell scoff at the hacks butchering his work with over the top absurdities.

Zuck doesn't think you deserve any privacy, but boy does he ever value his own. This is a guy who bought the four houses surrounding his San Francisco home and left them empty in order to form a buffer zone:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/us/mark-zuckerberg-palo-alto.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3VA.4Avp.cVm3LUnvajRK&smid=url-share

When a single candid photo of Zuck and his family in their kitchen leaked (from Facebook!), Zuck, his lawyers, and his operatives treated it as a three-alarm fire:

https://abc7news.com/archive/8933289/

Zuckerberg's acquired a vast Hawaiian acreage and left most of it undeveloped, fenced off and patrolled by guards to prevent anyone from catching a glimpse of his private life. In order to acquire this acreage, Zuck exploited a dirty legal tactic called "heirs property," which leverages the informal basis of indigenous land claims by locating a single person with a colorable claim to their distant relatives' territory in order to force an auction of the ancestral land:

https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-secretive-hawaii-compound-burial-ground/

If Zuck thought other people are as real as he is, he wouldn't spy on them in ways he himself could never tolerate. He certainly wouldn't pay fancy white-shoe lawyers to steal their land out from under them. At heart, Zuck is a billionaire solipsist to beat all other examples of the form – a billionaire social media solipsist who sees others as manipulable collections of statistical abstractions, and not as people at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

When Zuck is forcibly reminded that other people do indeed exist, he takes it very badly. He's insisted that Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former FB exec turned whistleblower, must pay him $111,000,000 as punishment for her excellent tell-all memoir Careless People. His lawyers say that Wynn-Williams violates the non-disclosure and non-disparagement "agreement" of her old Facebook employment contract merely by standing motionless and silent for an hour on-stage:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand-2/#autodisparagement

Once you realize that Zuck doesn't really think other people exist, "the metaverse" starts to make a lot more sense. Why would Zuck light $61b on fire in a bet that we will all stand still while he converts us and everyone we love into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters that he imprisons in a virtual world he stole from a 25 year old satirical dystopian cyberpunk novel? It's easy to understand if we're all non-player characters – if that's true, then the metaverse is surely our native habitat.

For Zuck, people aren't co-equals with needs that are as real and important as his own. For Zuck, people are problems to be solved. He embodies Terry Pratchett's maxim (voiced by Granny Weatherwax) that "sin is when you treat people like things."

Nowhere is this sin more on display than in Zuck's relationship to the social connections that bind together the users of his platforms. Zuck has benefited enormously from the fact that you love your friends more than you hate him, but (because hell is other people), you can't all agree on when to leave and where to go next, so you stay put on Facebook and Instagram:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/

For Zuck, the fact that you and your friends have trapped one another in a mutual hostage-taking is maddening, because those friends who've tied you to his platform refuse to organize their social contact with you to "maximize your engagement" with Facebook and Insta, which would let him maximize the number of ads he shows you. Rather, these friends just want to be your friends, which means that they don't want to get into stupid endless fights to keep you replying or stage little entertaining skits to keep you scrolling.

At first, Zuck tried tweaking his algorithm to replace your friends with trolls who'd bait you into flamewars. When that petered out, he stole a march from Tiktok and recruited an army of theater kids to do amateur dramatics for you in exchange for the promise of an intermittent reward schedule payment for the sketches that got the most views:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/17/for-youze/#forever

The problem (for Zuck) is that theater kids are also people and they resent being jerked around by the algorithm and ripped off by Meta's rigged revshare slot-machine. Last year, he started signaling that he would replace the theater kids – and your friends – with chatbots:

https://sfist.com/2025/05/01/mark-zuckerberg-gets-roasted-for-saying-the-average-american-has-fewer-than-three-friends-while-pushing-ai-chatbots/

Chatbots have been a catastrophic bet for Meta, far worse than the metaverse. Meta shares are in a death-spiral as investors figure out that when Zuck fired all his coders and replaced them with chatbots while spending $300b on AI, he was excising the heart of the company's skilled workforce, pissing away all its free cash-flow, and sinking into a bottomless pit of debt to produce a substandard product that no one wants, at the expense of the company's only profitable lines of business:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-bubble-tech-selloff-investment-consumer-business-demand/

But Zuck is sure that chatbots can solve his most pernicious problem: the search for a gimmick that will keep you locked to his platform that is under his complete control. Zuck doesn't want to rely on your friends with their unwillingness to maximize your engagement. He doesn't want to depend on volatile and unpredictable trolls to bait you into sticking around to argue and see more ads. He wants to be shut of theater kids and their amateur dramatics that inevitably come with demands for decent treatment.

For Zuck, chatbots dangle the promise of social media without socializing. Zuck thinks he can solve all his problems by imprisoning you in a house of mirrors where you interact with LLMs that are tuned to keep you scrolling no matter what, chatbots that will never demand anything of Meta.

He's been at this for a while, and each generation of chatbots was worse than the last. How bad? The last batch had to be killed off after they took to luring children into explicit sexual role-play:

https://archive.is/fopCh

Nevertheless, the dream of a world without people is one that Zuck can't let go of. Solipsism's seductive song convinced him to buy a company called Social.ai, which specializes in trapping people in conversations with chatbots, and now he's announced his plan to flood Facebook and Instagram with LLM slop:

https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/402263/

The amazing thing about this is that Zuck is talking about chatbots as a way to capture a younger audience for his graying platforms. Kids hate chatbots. My 18 year old and her friends use "that's so AI" as a pejorative to dismiss anything distasteful or ugly:

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/gen-z-attitude-ai

For Zuck – who owns a controlling share of voting stock in his company and need not answer to his board – it's a spectacular act of delusional self-sabotage. Zuck refuses to understand that the majority of his users are on his platform because they love their friends more than they hate him. Zuckerberg is on a relentless quest to isolate you from the friends who keep you on his platform and transfer your bond to groups of people (and now chatbots) who can be commanded by Zuckerberg.

Only someone who doesn't think other people are real could believe that you'd prefer to talk to chatbots rather than your friends – or that a habit of talking with chatbots would be so hard to break that you'd endure an ever-increasing number of advertising interruptions to maintain those pointless conversations.

In 1993/1994, AOL connected its millions of users to the public internet. These users were unaccustomed to the internet's conversational and technical norms, and they kept coming. It wasn't that the old internet was incapable of absorbing surges of new users: every September, an incoming class of undergraduates found their way online through their universities' computer labs.

But the AOL bridge was different: the flood of users was much larger, and it never stopped. The old internet people who struggled to transfer the culture and techniques of the internet to that flood of newbies called it the "Eternal September."

For the Facebook and Instagram users who are about to be buried in an endless botshit avalanche, this is the beginning of the "Eternal Sloptember." From here on in, the slop only gets worse and thicker and harder to avoid. Zuckerberg refuses to acknowledge that he owes his fortune to the fact that his users love each other more than they hate him, so he has set out to shatter those bonds of love and sharpen that hatred.

It won't end well. Zuck and people like him call themselves "high agency," a disgusting bit of jargon meant to denote someone who has real interiority, wishes and desires (as opposed to the rest of us, who do as we're told and stay where we're put). Zuck's "agency" isn't higher than yours or mine. The difference between him and us is that he doesn't think we're really real, and we know that he's really a monster.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Can AI agents conduct open-ended AI research? Early evidence from two case studies https://cruxevals.com/crux/can-ai-agents-conduct-research/

• Meta Adding Millions Of AI-Generated 'Users' To IG, Facebook https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/402263/

• The Oligarchs are Doubling Down on Republicans https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-oligarchs-are-doubling-down-on

• rent, always rent https://backofmind.substack.com/p/rent-always-rent

• I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968606

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Samuel Delany interviewed by The Onion https://web.archive.org/web/20010810115550/http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3727/bonusfeature1_3727.html

#25yrsago Evil Burger King customers https://web.archive.org/web/20010805001648/http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2645/index.html

#25yrsago Definitive search engine optimization primer https://web.archive.org/web/20011006095612/https://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/templates/print_template.htmlt?meta=/webmonkey/01/23/index1a_meta.html

#20yrsago Only traitors try to make us afraid of terrorists https://web.archive.org/web/20060418102222/https://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv27n3/v27n3-5.pdf

#20yrsago Swingin’ big band song about rejecting surveillance https://web.archive.org/web/20060818220142/http://movies.crooksandliars.com/HYHEMix.mp3

#20yrsago Duran Duran moves to Second Life, will gig there http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5253782.stm?ls

#20yrsago Seventy percent of blog-pings are from spammers https://web.archive.org/web/20060820151227/http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000436.html

#20yrsago London’s derelict cinemas https://web.archive.org/web/20060809210918/https://www.derelictlondon.com/cinemas.htm

#10yrsago Foreign influence: how a Chinese businessman funneled $1.3M to Jeb Bush’s campaign https://web.archive.org/web/20160803180101/https://theintercept.com/2016/08/03/gop-lawyer-chinese-owned-company-us-presidential-politics/

#10yrsago Researchers learn about wire-fraud scam after scammers infect themselves with their own malware https://spectrum.ieee.org/nigerian-scammers-infect-themselves-with-own-malware-revealing-new-wirewire-fraud-scheme

#5yrsago End bankruptcy shopping https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

#5yrsago Doordash privacywashes its war on workers https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

#1yrago Good ideas are popular https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• The AI Enshittification Bubble (Hidden Forces)
  https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-ai-enshittification-bubble-cory-doctorow/

• F@#$ the AI Overlords (On The Media)
  https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/f-the-ai-overlords

• Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy (Smart Cookies)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRmUuxJolY

• AI and the Enshittification Era (The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw

• AI is not inevitable (Betakit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 604 (1940 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Reddit is expanding its moderation tools and building stronger abuse prevention systems that it says could eventually reduce communities’ reliance on karma and account-age requirements, making it easier for legitimate newcomers to participate.