So I sat down with New York Times technology reporter Mike Isaac, who has covered Meta for more than a decade, to unpack what Zuck is really proposing and why Meta is making such an aggressive push into AI right now.

We discuss Meta’s battles with OpenAI and Anthropic, Zuckerberg’s renewed embrace of open models, the company’s massive data center buildout, the backlash against AI infrastructure, and why Meta may be trying to position itself as the alternative to the AI safety movement.

We also get into the biggest problem with Zuckerberg’s vision, and Mike explains why Zuckerberg is suddenly talking to the media again (he called Mike and a few other reporters personally), how far behind Meta really is in the AI race, what the company’s next generation of AI agents could look like, and what to watch for at Meta Connect. If you like my work, please buy a paid subscription to support my reporting!

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A complete stranger can buy your home address right now for a few dollars and it’s totally legal. They can get other sensitive information on you like your birthday, phone number, and even see family members you’re connected to. All of this data can be used by bad actors, because data broker websites don’t distinguish who’s buying the data. This raises your risk of scams, harassment, and doxing.

That’s why I use DeleteMe – the sponsor of this post. It’s a hands-free service and their team removes your personal information from hundreds of data brokers.

It’s easy to use you and their privacy reports reveal just how much information they can find on you. DeleteMe also verifies that your data is on a broker’s site before sending a removal request, so your info isn’t being spread around unnecessarily. They also use their own tech and don’t outsource to third parties. Most of all, they’re trusted by people who take safety seriously including journalists and creators like me.

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Over the past several months, Flock Safety, the company that makes those cameras you might’ve noticed all over street poles in your town, has been in hot water. The $7.5 billion startup currently operates camera systems in thousands of cities recording millions of people. Finally, after years of outcry from privacy activists, the public has begun to realize that we are living in a mass surveillance hellscape.

There are good reasons to be angry at Flock. Flock’s system allegedly let ICE agents access license plate data that local police departments had collected. The company couldn’t give the LAPD clear answers on who actually owns the data collected by its cameras. One Flock employee falsely told a Wisconsin city council the cameras couldn’t track where a car had been over time when they actually can. A Milwaukee police officer secretly used Flock to track his romantic partner’s location 124 times and her ex’s location 55 times. The detective assigned to investigate that officer was later found to be misusing Flock himself (!!), including planting a GPS tracker on someone’s car. Officers in at least 12 different states have been accused of misusing Flock data, often to track people they had personal relationships with. And, horrifyingly, one Texas sheriff’s deputy searched 83,000 Flock cameras across multiple states, to hunt down a woman who had an abortion.

But as anti-surveillance content has become more popular, it has also become a boon for grifters and right wing influencers exploiting the public’s legitimate anger at the rapid expansion of video surveillance in order to amass views and money.

Take the account Right Now Views. Last year, the account was praising Charlie Kirk, attacking progressive activists, and promoting anti-immigrant slop. But in June, it pivoted. Suddenly, the page began talking about mass surveillance. “FLOCK CAMERAS are quietly logging your ordinary daily errands into a centralized digital trail 🚗💨,” the account’s admin posted. “A massive wave of lawsuits is hitting businesses across California for deploying these advanced tracking networks without posting legally required data policies. While businesses claim it’s just for catching crime and finding stolen cars, privacy advocates are warning about a permanent corporate dragnet tracking law-abiding citizens.”

While the assertion is correct, Right Now Views is just one of dozens of far right creators who have begun capturing progressive audiences by creating content about Flock. Networks of influencers on X and notorious right wing YouTuber Tyler Oliveria also hopped on the trend. Last week, he published a video titled “I Exposed Flock: America’s Mass-Surveillance Dystopia” that amassed millions of views.

Flock, and other surveillance companies like their primary competitor Axon, are undeniably profiting off of mass surveillance, but these right wing influencers don’t actually care about that. They see anti-Flock content is trending, and they hop on board. They’re not advocating for privacy laws, they’re not seeking to defund the police (who continue to abuse these camera systems), they’re not backing any organizations like the EFF or the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, who have spent years fighting against invasive camera systems.

Non-profit privacy organizations and the journalists who report on these topics (I cover Flock constantly on my Free Speech Friday podcast and livestream!) are barely scraping by. These influencers. meanwhile, generate outrage and money, usually by pushing misleading information.

Many of them cosplay as journalists doing on the ground reporting and some are even pretending to be persecuted by Flock Safety itself in an effort to solicit more views and money from their audiences.

As 404 media recently reported, a slew of influencers have begun posting fake cease-and-desist letters from Flock in an effort to make it seem like the company is after them for their “hard hitting” coverage. In reality, these creators have never even interacted with the company. It’s all a grift where they cosplay journalistic persecution for views.

Former American Idol contestant and Instagram influencer Noah Orion, for example, has posted the same fake cease-and-desist letter from Flock to his Instagram account 16 separate times. He is also now posting videos of himself peeing on the ground next to the Flock cameras.

A week ago, he began offering his fans $50 to directly vandalize Flock cameras. “Day one of Venmoing my fans $50 for the first person that goes and fucks up a Flock camera,” he posted. And, he has begun raising money for a “bail fund” since he claims he’s in danger of arrest for his Flock videos.

Orion is just one of dozens of influencers who have amassed tens of thousands of new followers in the past few months from creating anti-Flock content. Some are also selling anti-Flock stickers and merch.

While it’s tempting to see this as a good thing (we love the public turning against mass surveillance!!), what these influencers are doing is ultimately harmful. They are leveraging the public’s very real anger over these systems and channeling it into profit and social media views instead of action. Many are also doing blatant audience capture for the far right.

The irony is that this influencer gold rush actually makes it harder to hold Flock accountable. It becomes incredibly easy for Flock’s PR team to convince a city council that the backlash to the company is illegitimate and nonsense when the loudest voices online are offering cash bounties for vandalism. (Just FYI, Flock gets paid every time one of their cameras is ripped down and destroyed. There are plenty of other ways to physically disrupt the cameras’ ability to surveil us that don’t result in Flock getting $$).

Most importantly, these influencers are siphoning away attention and money from the people actually doing the work of fighting surveillance and reporting on it. Nonprofits and us journalists reporting on these issues survive on donations, and lately it’s been harder and harder to get people to fund independent reporting. The result is an incredibly a lopsided ecosystem where the people with the least expertise and the least accountability are shaping the public narrative around surveillance technology, while the rest of us are struggling to compete.

If the goal is to actually dismantle the mass surveillance camera system that cops are constructing, we need a lot more journalism and a lot less outrage slop. Please support my work by buying a paid subscription. And you can support the EFF here.

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This past weekend, OpenAI took a bunch of influencers on a luxury brand trip to upstate New York, and the backlash has been massive.

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There is a particular kind of video that has plagued my timeline for the last eighteen months. It could best be described as AI slop, but it’s not quite AI slop. A human created it and often these videos feature real human creators, but they’ve been heavily warped by AI. It’s a fashion influencer levitating in the middle of a street or a guy walking across the wing of an airplane, a woman laughing while her small dog explodes into a cloud of confetti.

These videos consistently go viral because of their shocking visuals and seemingly Zach King-level editing magic, but when you scroll to the caption you’ll notice something else: nearly every single one is selling an AI tool.

The generative video AI category which includes platforms like Higgsfield, Runway, Luma, OpenArt, Artlist, Freepik, ByteDance’s Seedance, Soup Video, the now-dead Sora, has spent two years pitching itself as the death of Hollywood. “Within a year, [AI] will be how films get made at every major studio, every production house, and every marketing team on the planet,” the CEO of Higgsfield posted on X in April.

These lofty promises have been supported by a tsunami of viral content online and have allowed companies in this category to raise an extraordinary amount of venture capital.

Runway has raised $860 million across seven rounds since 2018 and was most recently valued at $5.3 billion in February 2026. Luma AI closed a $900 million Series C in November 2025 at a $4 billion valuation. Higgsfield itself has raised roughly $138 million since 2023, most recently at a $1.3 billion valuation, and Pika Labs has pulled in about $135 million across six rounds. According to Crunchbase, global funding for AI-related video companies hit $3.08 billion in 2025, up 94.6% from the year before.

But as these products have expanded, backlash to them has too. “Your AI slop bores me,” Instagram user Matsvandergraaf commented below one video of a content creator using AI to change the background of a scene filmed in his bedroom. But slop discourse is running dry. AI slop has almost become an artform in itself, with its own unique visual tropes, aesthetics, and characters. And some real filmmakers and creators are making some very impressive videos seemingly leveraging these tools, while underlying models are improving.

The problem is that for average users, small business owners, or marketers seeking to leverage these tools, the promises and hype never match reality. These tools, which claim to allow users to generate Hollywood-level videos with a single prompt and a few clicks of a button, are selling a fantasy aimed at boosting inflated metrics to promote an extremely expensive product.

Inside the Higgsfield hype machine

Higgsfield is, by its own telling, the fastest-growing AI startup in history. The company claimed it doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $200 million in just two weeks, and by early February 2026, its annual revenue run rate crossed $300 million. The company says it serves over 20 million users who have created more than 50 million videos. Its CEO has stated publicly that he expects to hit $1B in run-rate by year-end.

But in February 2026, Forbes published an investigation that revealed a darker side. Reporting found that creators recruited to promote Higgsfield received marketing kits that included clips that weren’t AI generated at all. Instead, they were video templates that appeared to have been lifted from a stock site called Envato, which Higgsfield pasted its own logos on top of. Creators also allegedly received Google Drive folders filled with racist and obscene videos and nonconsensual deepfakes of public figures like Sydney Sweeney, Zendaya and President Trump.

Higgsfield’s co-founder told Forbes, “We fully admit that we push the envelope. We learn from what works on platforms like X, and very explicitly, it’s more controversial content that gets attention.”

Outrage-bait marketing aside, my fundamental issue is with the product itself. They basically seek to charge you hundreds of dollars before you even begin. Even if you pay for the lowest tier, you’re immediately hit with prompts to upgrade or limits placed on what content you can actually generate.

When I signed up for Higgsfield I was bombarded with ads encouraging me to commit to a 55% OFF LIMITED OFFER on Ultimate & Creator Plans. I considered doing the $70 per month aimed at creators, until I read the fine print saying it would be billed annually. That’s $840! I decided to just get into the tool and play around, but I was blocked again. I clicked into the UGC studio and was immediately hit with the prompt: YOU’RE IN 5% WHO RECEIVED THIS PERSONAL 55% OFF WITH NANO BANANA 2 & PRO UNLIMITED & Kling 3.0 UNLIMITED. I tried the page from several other browsers on multiple devices and received the same offer. Immediately, Higgsfield began spamming me with emails saying I needed to act now or my “offer” would expire in three hours.

While Air, the creative services platform I’m partnered with, agreed to cover the cost of my AI video tools, before shelling out nearly $1,000 I decided to investigate the company’s reviews and hear what people who had paid for plans had to say. Multiple users who bought Higgsfield’s “unlimited” subscription tier told Forbes that after generating a few videos in a day, processing speeds slowed to a crawl, with the platform effectively unusable unless you bought more credits. I experienced similar wait times and slow processing speeds, but it’s hard to know how fast these AI tools should generate content at this point.

Reviews on product review website Trustpilot validated this pattern. A slew of users complained that Higgsfield’s “unlimited” tier stops being unlimited within days of paying, and that it’s almost impossible to easily cancel once you’re being charged.

All of this is infuriating to regular users who want to experiment with AI video generation, but end up paying hundreds of dollars and feeling dejected after not being able to create videos like they’re seeing on their For You page all day.

Jake In Motion, a motion designer in Denver, posted a video in April eviscerating Higgsfield’s tools, explaining that average users would have no way of recreating most of the viral social media content promoted by the company, because they have the requisite knowledge actual motion designers have. “It comes down to animation principles,” he commented below the video. “Without knowing why good motion works, you can’t direct any tool, AI or otherwise, to create it.”

After a wave of backlash, Higgsfield’s CEO posted a statement on his personal account saying the team had simply made mistakes while scaling fast. The issue is that the underlying foundation of paid hype and dark-pattern subscriptions and seemingly throttled “unlimited” plans seems to be their entire growth strategy, and consumers suffer for it.

Higgsfield’s playbook is indicative of a broader pattern that’s been building since early 2025, which I will call the Cluely-fication of consumer AI. Cluely, the “cheat on everything” startup, pioneered this practice of leveraging online attention in Silicon Valley. That mass consumer interest generated by the viral content is meant to fuel aggressive growth as people download the app to see if it will live up to the hype. Then, they’re bombarded with aggressive marketing, baiting them to sign up for expensive recurring payment plans. By the time consumers realize the hype doesn’t live up to reality, it’s too late. The high download numbers and revenue stats inflated by new sign ups are subsequently touted in the media as a sign of the product’s success.

Cluely’s founder eventually admitted that he deliberately lied about his company’s revenue numbers. But the same pattern applies, in less brazen form, across this whole AI tools wave. For instance, a $200 million ARR sounds impressive. But if this “revenue” consists of annual prepayments obtained through aggressive marketing from users who will leave at the first opportunity, it is not actually recurring revenue in the classical sense. It’s functionally a one-time cash grab. Churn in these types of businesses can be 80-90% after the first year, but by then, the company has used its big numbers and virality to lure in more customers.

Many of these AI video generation apps also make cancellation deliberately hard. For instance, instead of a “Cancel” button, users will be presented with a “Downgrade to Basic” button. Users on Trustpilot and the Better Business Bureau have vented about the money and marketing budget they wasted on the tool.

“When I subscribed to the ‘Creator Plan’ in November for a staggering $1,000, key features such as ‘Access to all models’ and an ‘Unlimited Video Model’ were explicitly guaranteed as core parts of my contract,” one review reads. “Today, I have to realize that these promises are being systematically devalued. New models like Seedance 2.0 are being withheld from existing subscribers and locked behind new, additional paywalls. Furthermore, the ‘Unlimited Video Model’ promised in my plan has been effectively deactivated and is no longer usable. When I contact support about this, I am simply told that the feature is ‘currently not available’.”

Another user who attempted to use the tool to create content for commercial ad work for clients hit a wall immediately. “The moment you generate a single test output to see if the product works, you forfeit your right to a refund,” he wrote. “It’s specifically designed so the refund window is technically advertised but practically impossible to use, because you cannot evaluate a generative AI tool without generating anything.”

Please stop asking me to upgrade

These testimonials across the web matched my own experience. I effectively couldn’t generate anything without paying and paying and paying. After buying the Higgsfield Ultra plan, for $129 per month, I was immediately flooded with offers to upgrade. I encountered no less than five upgrade ads and prompts before even being able to step foot into the platform and start creating my first AI video.

Once I was in, the platform kept spamming me to purchase the SECRET ULTRA PLAN ADD-ON. The add-on offered a slew of extra options that I wasn’t sure I’d even need since I hadn’t been able to generate even my first prompt. Yet the platform kept pushing to charge me a few hundred extra dollars for things like “50 FREE gens on Kling Motion Control 2.6, up to 10s”. I clicked “skip monthly offer” and another pop up blocked my screen reading, “SAVE $541 AND GET 2X BETTER RESULTS WITH ULTRA MONTHLY ADD-ON.”

Finally, I was able to temporarily prevent the add-on offers from dominating my screen. I decided to start off with something easy. I’d seen a viral trend going around social media of people using AI video editing tools to generate a fan cam style video of themselves at a sports game. It was Higgsfield’s top trending format, and seemed to just require you to upload a video of your face.

I uploaded half a dozen images of myself, waiting about 10 minutes until finally the video was ready. It was an eight second video clip of a woman in a sports stand looking out into the distance. The woman generated by Higgsfield had a slight resemblance to me. She could have been a distant cousin. But it did not look like me.

I went into the prompt box to try to fix things. “Make it look more like me. My face does not look like that,” I typed, then hit “regenerate.” It wouldn’t regenerate without a reference video. I tried to upload the video Higgsfield had just created. It wouldn’t let me, saying the video specs were wrong. I uploaded a different video of myself that I recorded on my phone. I got an error message reading, “Media height of 3840 pixels is too high. Maximum height is 2160 pixels.” In other words, Higgsfield wouldn’t let me edit a video that was recorded in the default format of my phone.

I cropped the video using CapCut and tried again. I received the error message two more times before it finally uploaded after being cropped into a square. I typed again, “Make the video you generated of me in the sports stand look more like me. My face does not look like that.” I smashed the “regenerate” button. Again, the platform generated a video of… someone. The woman had a giant combover and less makeup this time, but was very clearly not me.

At this point I started to try to edit other videos of mine. I tried adding puppies to a fit check video I did (a trend that went viral shortly after Nano Banana first released). The results were bizarre and uncanny. I couldn’t imagine actually posting this stuff!?

You can’t edit an AI video, you can only make a new one

My biggest frustration with AI video generation is something I’ve heard many in the creative world talk about before, basically there is basically zero ways to tweak an AI video. Each time you attempt to tweak something, you’re effectively generating an entirely new video. After several prompts you might fix your original problem with the video, but in the meantime your new generations have created a zillion other problems. The entire experience makes me wonder how many of these tools’ annual revenue is simply generated by users who can’t figure out how to cancel.

The App Store has been a casino of dark-pattern subscriptions for a decade, and we all know to expect these kinds of tricks in something like a Facebook mobile game, but now, dark pattern and deceptive marketing is being leveraged by mainstream consumer AI products that are being pitched to enterprise buyers.

Aside from the shady upselling that’s rampant among these products, there’s also the fact that a lot of what seems possible to create with them, isn’t actually possible. So many viral videos claim that just one or two prompts will get you an award-worthy finished product, and that’s just not true.

Almost every clip you see online promoting one of these AI tools is likely the result of dozens, if not hundreds, of generations. Often this footage has also been tweaked further, color graded, and features expert sound design. Average users have no chance of replicating these results, at least not without burning through thousands of dollars worth of tokens on these products.

By the end of my experiment, after I eventually successfully uploaded footage of myself, Higgsfield blocked me from turning myself into a “character” that I could insert into AI videos. This apparently has to do with deepfake or IP protections, however there was no way to verify my identity and prove that I actually am Taylor Lorenz and have permission to make these videos, so I just gave up. I’d used 79% of my credits at that point to make about two dozen videos that Grok could probably generate for free.

I decided to cancel. After clicking through five promotional offers aimed at getting me to stay, I was successful. My main takeaway from the whole Higgsfield experience was that until these products become truly consumer friendly, they’re simply not worth it. I think that if these generative AI tools really are the future of content creation, then they shouldn’t have to rely on so much hype and predatory pricing to convince people.

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The debate is primarily centered around open weight models. After the release of China’s powerful Kimi K3 open-weight model and OpenAI’s autonomous hacking fiasco, there has been a growing lobbying effort from Anthropic to restrict access to open weight AI models. (Open-weight models are AI models whose trained parameters are publicly available. This means anyone can run, study, modify, and build on them without relying on the company that created them).

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft, Meta, Google, IBM, Hugging Face, Mozilla, Palantir, Dell and dozens of other massive techn companies have come together to publicly back open weight AI models, while Anthropic argues against them.

Is Anthropic trying to lock down AI before their IPO, or are open-weight models genuinely a threat to global safety? In this episode of Power User, Matthew Berman, co-founder of the tech media outlet Forward Future, joins me to break down the massive debate rocking Silicon Valley and Washington DC. Even Denny’s Diner got involved!

Ultimately, whoever wins will control the future of the tech landscape for decades to come.

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Join DeleteMe and get your data off the internet for 20% off

A complete stranger can buy your home address right now for a few dollars and it’s totally legal. They can get other sensitive information on you like your birthday, phone number, and even see family members you’re connected to. All of this data can be used by bad actors, because data broker websites don’t distinguish who’s buying the data. This raises your risk of scams, harassment, and doxing.

That’s why I use DeleteMe – the sponsor of this post. It’s a hands-free service and their team removes your personal information from hundreds of data brokers.

It’s easy to use you and their privacy reports reveal just how much information they can find on you. DeleteMe also verifies that your data is on a broker’s site before sending a removal request, so your info isn’t being spread around unnecessarily. They also use their own tech and don’t outsource to third parties. Most of all, they’re trusted by people who take safety seriously including journalists and creators like me.

Get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com/TAYLOR20 and use promo code TAYLOR20 at checkout.

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Over the past few months, as excitement behind Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has built organically online, a slew of influencers have suddenly begun promoting his primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, a right-leaning Democrat who’s been a staunch supporter of Israel.

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I think what’s different this time around, and what gives the Meta AI glasses staying power, is the AI integration and the plausible deniability around the intention of the device.

Previously, it was easy to label people who chose to wore recording devices on their face creeps. When the glasses only existed to film and record the world around us for content’s sake, the devices could be effectively stigmatized. The way the glasses are being framed now, however, and the capabilities they offer are starkly different.

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These are atrocious numbers. This comes on the heels of the Democrats announcing a new Project 2029 plan, that is the EXACT SAME tech policies outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, but I guess the Democrats are going to try to force them through now under their blue team. It’s all very bleak.

Because of this, I wanted to run this piece by Molly Buckley, a legislative analyst at the EFF on how and why we should reject these bans. I hope that you’ll read the full piece and consider the implications of what these bans would actually mean.

How and Why to Fight Back Against Social Media Bans

This post is by Molly Buckley, a legislative analyst at the EFF

Several U.S. states are pushing to ban young people from social media entirely. This marks the latest wave of censorship bills masquerading as “children’s online safety” measures, with states like Massachusetts, Idaho, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, and EFF’s home state of California leading the charge.

Just a few years ago, lawmakers supporting age-gating laws insisted their efforts were narrowly targeted at limiting young people’s access to adult content. At the time, we warned that they would not stop there: once the government established the authority and built the infrastructure to collect and “verify” massive troves of user data, it would inevitably sweep broader and broader categories of lawful speech into this mass surveillance and censorship system.

Unfortunately, our predictions came true. As legislators across the country advance proposals that would block all young people from accessing the “modern public square,” the Overton window has shifted dramatically towards mass censorship—and the speed of this shift should concern all of us.

This primer breaks down this dangerous wave of social media bans: how they work (and why they don’t), who they harm, and how we can fight back.

How to Spot a Social Media Ban

The details of these bills vary from state to state. Some (like California’s AB 1709) are a flat-out social media ban for all young people under a certain age, while other states (like South Carolina and Minnesota) allow access to young users who hand over even more data to show verifiable parental consent. Many bills regulate certain social media features, too, including by setting default privacy settings, time limits, or notification preferences for all accounts that fail the age-gate.

As for the age-gating mechanism itself, most proposals fall into two broad categories: age verification bills and behavioral age estimation bills.

Age Verification Bills require online services to collect highly sensitive data, including government ID and biometric information, from all users before either restricting or allowing them access.

For example, take California’s social media ban (AB 1709). Starting in January 2027, operating systems will be required to collect enough information from users to sort them into age groups, or “brackets.” Under AB 1709, social media apps would then use that age bracket information to completely block anyone under 16, while supposedly letting everyone else through. By contrast, Florida’s law (HB 3) takes a more aggressive route by forcing platforms to verify users’ identities directly, usually by contracting with private third-party companies to perform verification services.

Behavioral Age Estimation Bills, on the other hand, are a more recent innovation of states like Minnesota (HF 1438) and South Carolina (H 4591). These bills require platforms to estimate the ages of users based largely on data that they already collect, including self-attested age, behavioral information, and account history and activity. In practice, these bills enable tech companies to use algorithms and/or AI to analyze our online behavior and estimate age based on that.

Proponents of behavioral age estimation bills claim that their proposals avoid the massive security risks that come with mandatory age verification bills. However, much of the data that social media platforms collect from us “in the ordinary course of operation” is collected in order to serve us targeted behavioral ads. If we force platforms to use this imperfect data to make more important judgments about who can access their services, we risk entrenching those insidious data collection practices. Surely we don’t want to give social media companies more reasons to justify and sustain their reliance on this exploitative business model.

If you want to dig into the nuance here, our terminology guide sheds more light on the technical differences between age verification and age estimation bills.

Overall, it’s a lose-lose scenario: either platforms collect new forms of our most sensitive and immutable data, or they unleash their AI and algorithms on our existing behavioral data to make creepy guesses about who we are and what we deserve to see. No matter which age-gating method your state chooses to execute its social media ban, there will be lots of error at the margins—and lots of users who will be blocked or chilled from access to lawful online speech.

Why Social Media Bans Are So Dangerous

Social media bans are unconstitutional, discriminatory, and deeply misguided. They reinforce existing structures of oppression, and they are broadly unsupported by young people, whose voices are conspicuously absent from this conversation. They undermine parental decision-making and replace tailored family-level solutions with a one-size-fits-all band-aid. And, in the places we have seen social media bans go into effect, early reports show that they don’t even work.

For example, in Australia, where a social media ban has been in effect since late 2025, a majority of young people can still access social media, those who can’t have lost their access to the news, and crisis helplines are reporting skyrocketing numbers of calls from youth left stranded without online community or resources.

We could go on and on about all of the inherent harms here, but we’ll try to keep this short as we walk through some of the major issues.

1. Security Risks and Privacy Harms

In order to ban some users, social media platforms first must confirm the ages of all users, regardless of age. Bans thus incentivize companies to force users of all ages to hand over government IDs, face scans, and other sensitive information. When parental consent is required, companies must collect even more verification data and often create explicit links between child and parent accounts—further destroying users’ anonymity.

Both of these databases create massive data “honeypots” that invite identity theft and permanent surveillance. We’ve already seen repeated data breaches involving age- and identity-verification services. Yet these laws would force both adults and the youth they claim to protect to feed their most sensitive data into this growing surveillance ecosystem.

If we don’t trust tech companies with our private information now, we shouldn’t pass laws that force us to give them even more of it.

2. Disproportionate Harm to Vulnerable Communities

Age-verification technology is deeply flawed and prone to discrimination. These systems frequently misidentify or lock out people of color, people with disabilities, and trans or gender-nonconforming individuals whose IDs may not match their appearance.

Where these bills require parental consent, they impose disproportionate access barriers on low-income, non-traditional, and immigrant families. These sorts of families are more likely to share a single family device or have strong reasons to not want the government to track family associations and ID documents.

Beyond the technical failures, these bans cut off a vital lifeline. For LGBTQ+ youth, foster kids, and those stuck in unsupportive home environments, social media is often the only place to find community, explore their identity, or access life-saving resources. Forcibly removing young people isolates those who need connection the most, while creating massive new barriers for adults.

You can read a breakdown of the diverse groups vulnerable to these laws here.

3. Based on Shoddy Science

The current legislative push to ban young people from social media relies heavily on the idea that the “great rewiring” of the adolescent brain is a proven fact. This simply isn’t true.

Social science indicates that moderate internet use is a net positive for teens’ development, and negative outcomes are usually due to either lack of access or excessive use. For LGBTQ+ and marginalized youth in particular, social media offers an essential space to access support they might lack offline. By forcing youth into digital isolation, these bans cut off vital access to political news, community, and health resources. They also completely ignore the calls of young people themselves who favor digital literacy and education over restrictive government control.

Instead of cutting off these lifelines, we should support measures that arm all youth (and the adults in their lives) with the knowledge they need to navigate online spaces safely.

4. Reckless Free Speech Violations for Users of All Ages

No matter your age, the First Amendment protects your right to speak and access information.

Blanket social media bans immensely and unconstitutionally chill all users’ exercise of this right. They cut off young people’s access to lawful speech, or ruin their privacy in the home by mandating parental consent and sometimes even parental access to their account activities and settings. They force all users (adults and young people alike) to hand private information over to tech companies before speaking or accessing information on social media platforms, imposing annoying obstacles on lawful online expression and wrongfully blocking some adults outright.

Critically, these bans destroy our right to online anonymity—a cornerstone of our right to free expression that protects whistleblowers, journalists, activists, immigrants, and everyone who has ever used a private browser or account to ask the internet an embarrassing question.

How to Fight Back

Social media bans weaponize parents’ concerns about children’s safety to justify unprecedented levels of surveillance and censorship. In the process, these laws deny young people their rights, threaten online anonymity for everyone, expose our sensitive personal data to breach and abuse, and replace parental decision-making with state authority. This is a battle over the future of the open, private, and free internet, and we must act now to protect it.

Here’s how you can help us fight back: Talk to your community (including young people!) about what’s at stake. If you’re a parent, lean on open conversations and platforms’ existing tools to tailor your child’s experiences instead of handing that power over to the government. And no matter where you live, contact your government representatives and tell them clearly that social media bans are not the answer to kids’ online safety.

This piece originally ran on EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

The KIDS Act Will Require ID Checks To Get Online

On Monday night, the House passed the KIDS Act, a big package of mass surveillance censorship laws that will affect every single American. It’s awful. I can’t begin to describe how bad this law is!! (Call your senators!!)

I sat down with Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), to break down the terrifying reality of what’s happening in Washington D.C. right now.

Adam, who has been fighting for internet freedom since the 1990s, explains how these laws demand mass age verification (which applies to adults too), regulate design features like infinite scroll, and even target messaging apps and VPNs.

We also dive into the 1,800 AI bills popping up across states, Bernie Sanders' misguided plans for AI, and why the government is moving to create an identity layer for the entire internet. Finally, we discuss the toxic brew of "moral panic," fake anti-big tech sentiment, and censorship that is driving this and other bad tech legislation forward. [WATCH]

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Over the past few months, Peter Thiel has become fully infatuated with Argentina. He bought a house there, enrolled his kids in school, has been attending local soccer matches, playing chess with locals, and the Argentine government is exploring offering the billionaire permanent residence and citizenship.

But why Argentina? Why now?

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We discuss:
• The rise of online censorship around the world
• The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)
• Government surveillance and digital ID requirements
• The future of online anonymity
• Section 230 and why it matters
• TikTok, Big Tech, and content moderation
• Government pressure on social media platforms
• Free speech on the left and the right

As governments push new regulations in the name of “online safety” the debate over free speech, privacy, censorship, and freedom is becoming more important than ever.

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Why Timothée Chalamet Is Shilling Kalshi

Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have become one of the most powerful forces in American media, politics, and culture. In the latest episode of my Power User podcast, I sit down with NPR’s Bobby Allyn, the country’s top prediction-markets reporter, to break down how Kalshi went from a tiny startup that 50 lawyers refused to represent to an inescapable cultural juggernaut backed by the Trump family, celebrities, and major news organizations.

We dig into how Kalshi exploited a legal loophole to bring sports betting and election betting to every state, why Donald Trump Jr. became an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket, and how the companies called the 2024 election for Trump before the mainstream media would, cementing their place in the MAGA universe. Bobby explains the rise of Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, Polymarket’s offshore “crypto bad boy” founder Shane Coplan, and the regulatory war happening right now inside the CFTC.

We also cover the dark side nobody is talking about: undisclosed influencer marketing flooding your feed, the Timothée Chalamet Kalshi deal, secret ads during the NBA playoffs, the Mr. Beast video editor insider trading scandal, betting markets on wildfires and war, and the casinoification of the entire economy. We dig into the lawsuits, the looming Supreme Court showdown, and whether this whole gambling empire could vanish overnight! WATCH NOW.

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Last week, Pump.fun, a platform where you can buy and trade meme coins, launched Pump Fun GO, a new service where you can “pay ANYONE to do ANYTHING.” Users can create and complete on bounties “for ANY task.” The company claimed that this new feature would “leverage the power of humans and money across the globe.”

What it has actually done is create a new dystopian market where poor and desperate people debase themselves and others for small sums of money. As many online have pointed out, this is literally the plot of a famous Black Mirror episode.

Pump Fun GO is just the latest in a new class of platforms that are defining the next phase of the attention economy. Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi are part of this new era, as is the rise of so-called “UGC marketing.” I think we can call it the bounty economy. All of these platforms— Pump Fun, Polymarket, SideShift and others— are building a new synthetic reality where an increasing number of the things we witness IRL or encounter online are not spontaneous occurrences. They are commissioned performances designed to generate attention, engagement, and ultimately financial returns.

If you think my work is valuable, please buy a paid subscription to this newsletter or support me on Patreon.

Unlike other independent journalists, I have ZERO advertisers, ZERO outside funding, and accept ZERO political money. My work is entirely funded by people like you. Please become a paid subscriber today or support me on Patreon and ensure I can continue to do independent journalism.

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By Taylor Lorenz & Tyler Johnston

Last July, ten days after Build American AI, a dark money group tied to pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future, filed its articles of incorporation in Nevada, a new meme page called “Doomers are dumb” cropped up on X. At first, it appeared to be a standard meme account attempting to go viral by posting generic content like “Gay son or thot daughter?“ and joking about getting cheated on by their waifu.

But in October, around the time Build American AI began publicly campaigning, the account pivoted. Suddenly, it began posting relentlessly about AI and sparring with “Jonathan Doomer,” a self-proclaimed AI skeptic who says he quit his job to spread warnings about the technology on Twitter (and who also began posting about AI on the exact same day).

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Over the past several weeks, campaign disclosures have revealed that California Gov candidate Tom Steyer has been paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to influencers, almost none of whom initially included proper disclosure on their posts.

Progressive YouTuber Carlos Eduardo Espina received $400,000 from the Steyer campaign. FOOS GONE WILD, an Instagram page with 3.3 million followers that posts viral clips received $50,000. Instagram tea page The Shade Room received another $25,000. Earlier this month, a report from The Sacramento Bee revealed that, in addition to Steyer’s direct influencer marketing, the campaign is also utilizing a UGC platform, paying regular people, some of whom live out of state, $10 to post in support of Steyer on TikTok and Instagram.

After Kamala Harris’ loss in 2024, Democratic insiders finally began to meaningfully dip their toes into the new media landscape. Well paid consultants began pitching donors on a slew of new initiatives aimed at helping Democrats “win back the internet.” Last year, I reported for WIRED on one disastrous initiative funded by the powerful liberal dark money group The Sixteen Thirty Fund called the Chorus Creator Incubator Program. Content creators in that program accepted thousands of dollars per month to take part in a program aimed at boosting Democratic messaging online, all without disclosure.

When the story broke, the response from the influencers was indignant. The content creators, who signed contracts that some in the program described as restrictive, claimed that they “deserved to be paid for their work.” The Steyer campaign echoed this rhetoric more recently. “We compensate [influencers] for their work and their time, just like campaigns pay staff, consultants, media firms, strategists, and vendors across every part of politics,” the campaign posted after their disclosures were made public. “We’ve never paid for an endorsement, and we never will.”

This seems to be the new cut-and-paste response from Democratic political campaigns as they veer deeper into influencer marketing. Yes, we paid that influencer nearly half a million dollars to be a “strategic advisor” and he happened to post favorably about our campaign online, do you not think influencers are doing real work? Do you not support creatives being paid for their labor?

As someone who’s reported on the influencer industry for over 16 years, wrote a book on it, and has argued relentlessly for labor protections in the space, I find this new line of response lacking. Saying “creators deserve to be paid for their work” obscures the central question: what work? Because the type of “work” these creators are currently producing, I would argue, is not something influencers should be paid for under a fair political system.

When a political campaign or affiliated super PAC or LLC pays an influencer to produce content in support of a campaign, it’s usually classified as “digital advertising”. But the content produced is hardly recognizable as an ad. It is usually organic-seeming hyper-personal content. Often, the creator weaves details about their own life into the political messaging.

“I’ve dreamt of the day that I would be able to press a billionaire,” one influencer’s recent sponsored post with Steyer is captioned. “I was brought in to ask Tom Steyer some questions myself, and many of my followers needed answers to! What do you guys think?” The disclosure that the post was wholly paid for by Steyer was hidden at the bottom of the caption, only visible to users who clicked “see more.”

Larry Lessig, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, who has dedicated much of his career to getting money out of politics, told me that the proliferation of this type of influencer marketing in politics is “terrible, because it weakens the ability of people who are not being paid to be heard credibly. If everybody thinks that everybody’s being paid and nobody’s going to pay attention to what anybody says.”

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Lately, several campaigns have avoided the few disclosure requirements that exist by hiring influencers on as “consultants” or paying them vague “appearance fees.” They issue payments through management companies or throwaway LLCs to obscure who is being paid for what.

But fundamentally, what the campaigns are buying is a new form of highly effective political advertising where influencers will promote a candidate or their messaging to parasocial audiences in an organic-seeming, often hyper-personal format that does not read to the average viewer as an ad. That is the “work” that these creators are being paid for, whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

The campaigns are not exchanging money for the creator’s time or their editing skills. The value the influencer is offering is access to their parasocial audience who doesn’t realize they’re being marketed to.

If the work the creator was being compensated for was merely making a video, the honest version of that work already exists: create an overt ad for the campaign, co-post the ad with the campaign page, use the paid partnership label, and clearly disclose the content as the ad that it is. The reason campaigns and influencers don’t do this, is because a clear political ad is nowhere near as effective as the covert advertising they’re producing instead.

“If Tom Steyer paid CBS $10 million and then CBS ran ads for Tom Steyer and Steyer said, well I didn’t pay CBS for the ads, I just paid CBS, I mean, nobody would believe that,” Lessig said.

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The entire influencer industry is built on simulated intimacy and audience trust. These political campaigns are buying access to that trust and those relationship dynamics. In any healthy democratic system, there would be an understanding that this type of thing should not be for sale.

I do think content creators should be free to endorse whichever candidates they support as citizens, and I think politicians should absolutely engage more with the creator economy. Candidates should appear (for free!) on podcasts, go on YouTube livestreams, make Twitch appearances, and speak to the new media. If campaigns want to explicitly promote their candidate or message, there are many legitimate digital avenues to do that. They can buy ads on podcasts and YouTube channels, they can pay to promote their own advertising content directly across Instagram, TikTok and X in posts that are clearly marked and presented as ads.

What should not be normalized is this ethically dubious middle ground where campaigns covertly purchase access to parasocial trust networks while pretending they are merely compensating creators for “labor.”

In any just political system, this kind of advertising would be heavily regulated, if not outright illegal. The entire point of campaign finance and advertising law is supposed to be ensuring that the public understands when they are being advertised to. Influencer political marketing is explicitly designed to blur that line.

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Unfortunately, because political advertising is regulated by the FEC, which is functionally non-existent, we are left with a patchwork of state regulations. California’s Fair Political Practices Commission has launched an investigation into Steyer’s influencer campaigns to determine if they violated state transparency rules. However, the results will likely have zero consequences.

I realize that my stance on this is unpopular in the political world. When I bring the topic up, Democratic political strategists all argue that they should not hold themselves to higher standards than the Republicans, who have a long history of leveraging dark arts digital marketing tactics to amass online power. Doing so will cause them to lose. Liberal and left-leaning creators also say that they don’t want to turn down paid opportunities with Democratic candidates when so much of the right wing creator ecosystem is pay to play. I’m sympathetic to those arguments, and I think the Democratic consultants are right, they will lose if they avoid keeping pace with the Republicans. But I also think we need to think bigger.

Right now, we are in race to the bottom that Democrats, of all people, should understand they cannot win. The more that campaigns and political groups normalize this type of dubious influencer advertising, the more they erode public trust in our entire online media and information landscape. Audiences are already drowning in ragebait, AI slop, and sponsored content. Injecting undisclosed or barely disclosed political messaging into that ecosystem only accelerates the total and complete collapse of trust.

Eventually, voters will tap out. You’re already seeing this nihilism take hold. The public cannot discern who is bought or what is paid for. The Democrats might not realize this now, but refusing to fight for more transparency and regulation on the vast amount of money flooding the influencer advertising ecosystem is suicide for their movement long term.

Poorly mimicking the far right’s most unethical online marketing schemes is not an effective way to rebuild public trust in democracy or elections. Democrats cannot claim to care about protecting democratic institutions and the integrity of our information ecosystem while insisting that creators "deserve to be paid for their work” dismantling both.

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In late February, Alexis Rose Hinkley, a Los Angeles influencer with over 1.1 million followers on TikTok and more than half a million on Instagram, sent an email to Rae Huang’s campaign with a proposal. She touted her “large, highly engaged following” and asked the campaign for payment. She wanted $2,000 per month for a minimum of six months for “strat…

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The Bulwark’s Will Sommer joined me on this week’s episode of Power User to dive deep into the rise and fall of Ben Shapiro. We break down the details of Shapiro’s explosive feud with Candace Owens, the catastrophic failure of his Hollywood ambitions, how a changing Facebook algorithm killed their traffic overnight, and what Ben Shapiro’s fall reveals about the future of conservative media.

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The Violent History of Resisting Technology

What if everything you've been told about technological progress is a lie? AI is changing our lives faster than ever, but resistance to technology is not new. For this week's Free Speech Friday I spoke with academic Thomas Dekeyser, author of the new book Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine, about the history of anti-technology movements, from ancient Greece to Luddites smashing machines in the Industrial Revolution to anarchist groups bombing computer companies in the 1980s.

We discuss AI, labor automation, surveillance, moral panic, Silicon Valley ideology, tech CEOs, machine breaking, environmental destruction, and why backlash against technology keeps returning throughout history. We also explore whether technological progress actually benefits ordinary people, or mainly serves corporations and power. Sometimes it's not what you think!

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