Tech is reshaping the world — and not always for the better. Whether it’s the rules for Apple’s App Store or Facebook’s plan for fighting misinformation, tech platform policies can have enormous ripple effects on the rest of society. They’re so powerful that, increasingly, companies aren’t setting them alone but sharing the fight with government regulators, civil society groups, and internal standards bodies like Meta’s Oversight Board. The result is an ongoing political struggle over harassment, free speech, copyright, and dozens of other issues, all mediated through some of the largest and most chaotic electronic spaces the world has ever seen.
Prosecutors allege Gannon Ken Van Dyke had sense his Polymarket bets would pay off, since he was part of the operation.
The FCC is asking loaded questions about ‘transgender and gender nonbinary programming’ aimed at kids.
He threatened to “put a big tariff on the UK” if it doesn’t drop its tax on the revenue of tech giants, despite the Supreme Court ruling that he can’t actually do that. The president still thinks the tax, which brought in £944m ($1.3bn) last year, unfairly targets US companies.
[The Telegraph]
As first reported by ABC News and now confirmed by the DOJ, federal investigators believe special forces soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke put down $33k on prediction market bets about Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro being removed from office, just before Trump announced his capture in January, profiting over $400,000.
RFK Jr. has declared that AI could make the FDA “irrelevant,” with entirely predictable effects on The Verge’s long-suffering health and wearable expert Victoria Song.
Jose Kent:
I just know Victoria screamed into a pillow when she read this.
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In a blog post, Proton CEO Andy Yen calls out the privacy and security concerns about the rapid expansion of age verification, but says “the scope of places where age verification is required must be strictly confined to areas like pornography and social media:”
If as a society we conclude that a narrowly drawn age-verification system is both necessary and inevitable, it must be done right. Checks must be conducted entirely client-side, on the user’s device. They should rely on facial scans, not uploaded IDs, that are instantly discarded once processed. The answer to the binary question of whether the user is “of age” must be fully anonymized.
The prediction market took action against a handful of congressional candidates: Ezekiel Enriquez (a Republican running in Texas); Mark Moran (an Independent in Virginia, who says he meant to get caught); and Matt Klein (a Democrat in Minnesota) for betting in markets related to their political races. Each was banned from the platform for five years and fined modest amounts ranging from several hundred to several thousand dollars.
Sullivan and Cromwell, the law firm representing President Trump in many of his cases and which handled the SpaceX and xAI merger, was just forced to apologize to a federal judge for filing documents full of fake case citations hallucinated by AI. The list of errors ran three pages long, the NYT reports. Just the latest in the legal profession forgetting that language is not actually intelligence.
[The New York Times]
Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) have written a letter to TikTok USDS CEO Adam Presser, urging the platform to estimate users’ age using their account activity or require parents to confirm their child’s age. The lawmakers also suggest that TikTok works with OS-makers like Apple and Google to implement age verification:
For example, if a user is designated as a child in their iCloud account, meaning they are under 13, Apple could share that information with TikTok and the user therefore would not be able to create a TikTok account.
Correction, April 22nd: The name is Josh Gottheimer, not John.
Dan Crenshaw was supposed to be the future of the GOP. Instead, he proved politicians really can be too online.
Once championed by the Trump family after heavily bankrolling their crypto ambitions, Justin Sun is now unhappy with his chosen bedfellows. Suing Trump-linked World Liberty Financial, Sun alleges in a federal lawsuit that his former allies maliciously froze his $75 million investment, denouncing the platform as “World Tyranny.”
Following Nevada’s settlement on Friday, West Virginia and Alabama have settled with company to address alleged child safety issues, as reported by Bloomberg. Last week, Roblox announced a bunch of new safety updates, including dedicated Kids accounts with increased restrictions.
Governor JB Pritzker signed an executive order today dealing specifically with prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. State employees were already barred from using insider information for personal gain, but this executive order specifically bans them from using it to make bets on prediction markets.
I wrote about that — and other Catholic concerns — at my friend Rusty’s newsletter while he took the day off.
[Today in Tabs]
President Donald Trump had some interesting words to say on Truth Social about Tim Cook’s announced departure, claiming the Apple CEO personally requested his aid on several occasions during his presidency. “He makes these calls to me, I help him out (but not always, because he will, on occasion, be too aggressive in his ask!).”
Uber lost the first of thousands of cases seeking to hold it responsible for sexual misconduct tied to its services. Similar to ongoing social media trials, these cases are bellwethers that could later inform a broader settlement. Uber spokesperson Matt Kallman told The Times it has “strong grounds for appeal.”
[The New York Times]
The Washington Post analyzed more than 1,400 of the far-right provocateur’s streams and found that he’s generating more than $400,000 in revenue. Much of those donations are coming from people who are struggling economically, including one 57-year-old Air Force veteran who told the Post she thought he was struggling financially — and who is struggling herself.
NPR issued prediction market guidance to staff, according to media reporter Ben Mullin, banning employees from betting on news events as well as NPR-related topics (like future Tiny Desk guests — yes, there’s a small market for that).
I reported last week that newsrooms are adding prediction market-specific rules to their code of ethics, even as some of those same news outlets partner with platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi.
Over the weekend, Congress voted to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — for 10 days. President Trump has demanded a clean renewal of the controversial wiretapping authority, but he’s been stymied by Republicans who want to include reforms, including closing a loophole that lets the government spy on Americans without a warrant.
The new deadline is April 30th.
Fresh off the loss of its antitrust trial, the company settled with the DC attorney general over claims it “hid the true price of tickets” before checkout. The AG says Ticketmaster has since changed the practice. The settlement is similar to one between StubHub and the Federal Trade Commission.
[Office of the DC Attorney General]
Sources told Axios that the agency was among the roughly 40 organizations granted access. This, despite the Pentagon arguing that Anthropic is a threat to national security. The NSA has reportedly been using it primarily to identify vulnerabilities in its own network, but considering its track record, it’s understandable if you’re wary.
The schemes and shenanigans behind the Nexstar-Tegna deal.
The New York Times has found hundreds of fake accounts on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook that appear to be a pre-midterm push to get conservative voters to the polls in support of Trump’s agenda. The accounts often use the same captions and awkward phrasing.
It’s not clear who created the A.I. accounts, and determining whether they are the product of a hired content farm, a foreign influence operation, an experiment or something else is difficult, experts said. They all agree, however, that creating such avatars is becoming easier, especially for contractors and marketing companies that now specialize in developing and dispatching A.I. avatars in bulk for increasingly low prices.
[New York Times]
Pilots have apparently been meowing and barking at each other over air traffic control radio, but the Federal Aviation Administration isn’t amused by the bit. Some in the industry fear pilots will tune out the jokes and miss timely safety information, according to CNN.
[The New York Times]
Union leaders across industries joined the Vermont senator to push for jobs protections as the technology quickly evolves. Sanders has called for a pause on data center construction and warned that left unchecked, within ten years, “the idea of a manufacturing job will no longer exist.”
