Twitter 1.0 was particularly notable for standing up to government censorship around the world. Twitter 2.0 under Elon Musk is actively complying with authoritarian government censorship demands ahead of elections. Well done. This is what hell looks like.
AI is one of the deepest platform shifts ever, says Google’s CEO, and he’s not worried about being first.
It’s one of the hottest concept cars in years, and now a report from Korea’s Money Today says a production version will hit on May 27th (via The Drive). Please be real!
After brief deliberations, a Manhattan federal jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and ordered him to pay $2 million in damages, as well as $3 million for defaming her on his social media site Truth Social when he denied it. It is very rare for social media posts to hit the high bar for defamation; Trump himself has called for libel laws to be “opened up.” Maybe he feels differently now.
[The] jury also found that Mr. Carroll proved, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Ms. Carroll was injured as a result of Trump’s publication of his denial of her accusations on his Truth Social account in October 2022.
The jury determined that Ms. Carroll had proved, by clear and convincing evidence, that Mr. Trump knew his statement was false when he said her accusation was a hoax, a legal standard known as “actual malice.”
[The New York Times]
Airbnb is revamping its Rooms feature while eyeing AI and betting on work from anywhere.
After controlling how information has been distributed for the past 25 years, Google Search faces a set of challenges that will change the company — and the internet — forever.
The new E-Class has an updated version of Mercedes’ MBUX infotainment system that runs Zoom... and TikTok. Gaze upon the future of transportation.
Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab, summing up Elon barging in to two decades of conversation about media micropayments. (emphasis mine):
Nearly all news sites will let a random web user read a story (or two, or five) for free. It’s only after a given number of clicks that the wall goes up.
If you want to think of that as “news sites already offer micropayments for those first five articles — they’ve just set the price at $0,” be my guest. And for those times when someone really wants to read just one article, that free allotment allows all the paywall workarounds that the savvy digital news consumer knows about. (We’re all adults here; we can talk about incognito windows.) If most paywalls aren’t that hard, there’s little pressure for a paid product to get around them on a single story.
The Supreme Court is about to take a case with enormous consequences for how the federal government works — potentially shifting the balance of regulatory power from agencies like the FTC and FCC to the courts themselves. What’s fascinating to me is how many crypto people I’ve seen flag this case, since it would defang the SEC as well. Wild times ahead.