Adi Robertson

The parties held a conference call to argue about whether the nonprofit’s anti-hate speech researchers illegally scraped data from Elon Musk’s social network, and a judge seems dubious.

As mentioned yesterday, Tumblr now has info about opting out of AI data scraping on its help page — it’s available via the “prevent third-party sharing” toggle. For visual artists who are still worried about the prospect of AI tools training on their work, there are less official ways to stop that, too.

The advertising for “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” looks like peak AI-generated spectacle, promising “cartchy tuns,” “encherining entertainment,” and “a heart-pounding experience you’ve never experienced before” for £35 a ticket. The reality is... well, take a look. At least the kids are getting refunds.

Corbin Barthold at The Daily Beast has a good piece on Brett Kavanaugh’s role at yesterday’s Supreme Court arguments: the only one in the room (besides NetChoice’s own lawyer) treating government censorship as a unique and serious concern.

Amy Coney Barrett is bringing up the Hotel California clause yet again, and I’m actually grateful — she points out the plain language of the law seems to specifically say you can’t ban Texan users. Nielson says it’s a conditional rule. “If you choose to do business in Texas, then this provision kicks in,” but “if you don’t want to do business in Texas at all” you’re okay to geofence the state. “You can’t darn well discriminate” against Texas users if you operate in there, he says.

Or in his words, “intensely competitive” — which he says doesn’t change the fact they could be considered common carriers, so the existence of multiple social networks shouldn’t save those from regulation either. But there are basically three mobile networks in the country! It’s not an outright national monopoly, but it’s a pretty consolidated space.

Nielson says it’s not an accurate read of the law, but Roberts expresses apprehension about whether it would really be possible to pull out of the state in a way that satisfies its requirements. “I don’t see how they can wall off Texas,” he says.

Amy Coney Barrett suggests HB 20’s scope is more limited than Florida’s equivalent law, saying it only covers the “classic social media sites” like Facebook, not platforms like Etsy. Nielson agrees with her, and weirdly nobody brings up Wikipedia — whose operators have expressed concern they’d be covered by the law.