Issie Lapowsky’s Post

NEW: The Supreme Court just ducked a major opportunity to rule definitively on the First Amendment rights of online platforms

NEW: The field of research on tech and democracy has exploded in the last few years. But is it making any difference? For this Knight Foundation paper, I interviewed dozens of sources across government, media, civil society, and tech to find out:

NEW: How exactly could GenAI mess with the election? I went to Arizona to play election official for the day. I left Arizona relieved it was only for a day. https://lnkd.in/ewXgu_yu

NEW: The Affordable Connectivity Program has helped more than 23 million households get online, has broad bipartisan support, benefits people in red and blue states equally, and serves ~4M households in key swing states. So why is Congress letting it end?

NEW: European spyware firms are targeting people in the EU and openly advertising their surveillance services, according to Meta's latest threat report. So why isn't the EU — which has far more robust privacy laws than lots of places — doing more to stop them? https://lnkd.in/ec3sZu9f

NEW: The actual impact of congressional big tech hearings is all the little product and policy changes companies make right before they testify. They add up! To be clear, this is not the reform we need, but for now, it's the one we've got. https://lnkd.in/e2fqhHbS

NEW: Nearly half a million people were placed on electronic monitoring in 2022 — a 3x increase from 2015, according to a new study. It's the most comprehensive estimate to date of a booming, deeply fragmented, unregulated industry. The majority of that uptick came from ICE, which tripled its use of electronic monitoring — both ankle monitors and an app called SmartLINK — between 2021 and 2022. Electronic monitoring is often framed as an alternative to incarceration. More people on EM = less people in jail. But this report shows that's often not the case. In fact, most places with higher rates of EM also had higher jail populations. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/exdJgxNC

NEW: The number of lawsuits trying to circumvent Section 230 by charging tech companies with selling defective products has been growing steadily. Now, a spate of early rulings in those cases over the last few months suggests it may be a winning approach. https://lnkd.in/dYaWw6Be

NEW: Plenty of people are worried about AI's brain — that it will steal our jobs or somehow destroy humanity. But given the record global expansion of data centers, there's an argument to be made that it's AI's body that will catch up with us first. My deep dive on the data center boom, how AI is poised to accelerate the trend, and the toll our digital addiction takes on our physical world. https://lnkd.in/ebJvfrn5