In case you missed it, the dates for the India election were announced yesterday. Voting will happen on April 19, 26, May 7, 13, 20, 25, and June 1, with Counting Day on June 4. This means we’ll know the results two days after Mexico and a few days before the European Parliament elections.
I think I may have mentioned this before, but at Facebook, one of my favorite posters was:
This week definitely felt that way. I was exhausted already on Tuesday, given a full weekend of SXSW stuff, and then decided to launch a report, do a talk in Philadelphia, and do a bunch of work. I’m writing this on Friday afternoon with a glass of wine and the Taylor Swift Eras Tour Movie in the background.
This was also one of those weeks where I could not sleep because I was processing everything from the last few months. On the flight home I re-watched “On the Basis of Sex” - the movie about Ruth Bader Ginsberg - and there’s a quote from the late Paul Freund, who once said the U.S. Supreme Court “should never be influenced by the weather of the day but inevitably they will be influenced by the climate of the era.”
I haven’t gotten that out of my head since then. It's not necessarily about the courts, but thinking about current tech regulation and how so many of the solutions being signed into law right now are reacting to the weather of the day rather than thinking about where the climate is going the next ten years.
For instance, at 2 am another night, I couldn’t sleep because I had talked to a reporter about AI, social media, and news earlier in the day. I started thinking about how, in probably not too long, we’ll log into Facebook, X, Threads, or Instagram, and before we see individual posts, we’ll get an AI summary of them. I wrote down:
Imagine you go to your feed, and at the top, you see a summary of your friends and family
Your mom and dad saw the Beach Boys
It is Jacob and Mathew’s birthday
Amy posted a video of her dogs getting into the flour and making a mess.
Then, you click on the post if you want to see it.
Recently, Superhuman has introduced many ways to do this with email, such as summarizing email threads or writing drafts based on your own writing.
This all led me to put a post it on my desk that says:
I'm definitely dorky, but I want to start thinking more and more about how I can use AI to help me be more efficient.
Apologies for the longer post before we get to the links; it's just two more things. First, Meta is really good at getting people mad at them from all sides. A few years ago, Biden said they were killing people, and this week, Trump told CNBC, “I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people,” and that a TikTok ban would help it. I remember a time when this would have been a 10-alarm fire. I doubt it made anyone blink inside the company.
Lastly, Meta announced this week it would officially sunset Crowdtangle - a tool used to help all sorts of organizations understand what content was trending - in August. I first worked with this team in 2016 before they were acquired. It’s never easy for something you poured your soul in to end, but I’m so proud of them. Brandon Silverman - one of the co-founders - has a piece worth reading. This work lives on even if the app does not.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! 🍀
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What I’m Reading
New York Times: How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation
Wall Street Journal: OpenAI's Sora Made Me Crazy AI Videos—Then the CTO Answered (Most of) My Questions
Wall Street Journal: The Rough Years That Turned Gen Z Into America’s Most Disillusioned Voters
Morning Consult: Growing Up Alpha: The Youngest Generation’s Media & Entertainment Habits
SCOTUS Blog: Public officials can be held liable for blocking critics on social media
SeedAI: Hack the Future | SXSW 2024
Sen. Bennet: Letter to Musk, Chew, Zuckerberg and Pichai on how protecting elections from AI harms
U.S. House of Reps: Letter to Justice, Homeland Security and Election Assistance Commission for more information on agencies’ efforts to address the use of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) to intimidate, threaten, or misinform voters during the 2024 election cycle
Politico EU: European lawmakers rubber-stamp EU’s AI rulebook
U.S. State Department: Preview of U.S. Participation in the Third Summit for Democracy
National Democratic Institute: Democracy in the Age of GenerativeAI
Wired: Politics News: 2024 US Elections, Global Elections, Tech Policy, Disinformation (New newsletter from Wired)
Bloomberg: X Removes Graphic Video Elon Musk Shared Over Rules Violation
Center for American Progress: Free Speech or Free Rein? How Murthy v. Missouri Became a Soapbox for Misinformation Advocacy
Wall Street Journal: Meta to Replace Widely Used Data Tool—and Largely Cut Off Reporter Access
PBS Newshour: AI image-generator Midjourney blocks images of Biden and Trump as election looms
Washington Post: TikTok contribution to economy detailed in Oxford Economics report
Axios: College Republicans and Democrats agree: Defend speech that hurts feelings
Discord: Important Policy Updates
Nieman Lab: Mexican journalists launch a new outlet from the ashes of the country’s shuttered state news agency
Axios: TikTok ban timeline: Congress' yearslong case against ByteDance
Center for Democracy and Technology: Trustworthy AI Needs Trustworthy Measurements
MIT Technology Review: Let’s not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media
Wired: Yoel Roth, Twitter's Former Trust and Safety Chief, Is Trying to Clean Up Your Dating Apps
- : These 12 women have the power to bring Big Tech's bros to their knees
Meta: Debunking claims about news content on Meta’s platforms
New York Times: Sprouts of Hope in a Gloomy Media Landscape
TechCrunch: Google won’t let you use its Gemini AI to answer questions about an upcoming election in your country
Washington Post: Trump asked Elon Musk if he wanted to buy Truth Social
New York Times: Spate of Mock News Sites With Russian Ties Pop Up in U.S.
Financial Times: Telegram: social media giant or the new ‘dark web’?
TechCrunch: Bluesky launches Ozone, a tool that lets users create and run their own independent moderation services
Protect Democracy: The Shortlist: Practical Ways Platforms Can Prepare for the U.S. 2024 Election
Foreign Policy: In Haiti, as Elsewhere, Elections Alone Are Not the Answer
Bloomberg: How Investigators Solved the Biden Deepfake Robocall Mystery
CSMonitor: How mistrust explains all those frustrating things about US politics
Integrity Institute: Legislative Tracker on Tech Policy
Politico: Secretaries of state worry about AI impersonating them
Wall Street Journal: Underdog Who Beat Biden in American Samoa Used AI in Election Campaign
MIT Tech Review: Africa’s push to regulate AI starts now
Politico: In 2020, the Biden Campaign Knew Age Was His Achilles’ Heel. Here’s What They Did.
Tech Policy Press: Can AI Rescue Democracy? Nope, it’s Not Funny Enough
Please support the curation and analysis I’m doing with this newsletter. As a paid subscriber, you make it possible for me to bring you in-depth analyses of the most pressing issues in tech and politics.