Will Oremus

In the predawn hours of July 1, the Senate voted 99-1 to strip from the sprawling tax and immigration bill a provision that would have blocked states from regulating artificial intelligence for the next decade. The provision’s resounding defeat came after Sen Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) backed out of a compromise she had previously struck with Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) that would have reduced the pause to five years from the original 10 and exempted some categories of AI regulations.

For almost a year, Elon Musk marshaled the full force of X, his $45 billion social media platform, to boost Donald Trump’s political fortunes and second presidency. As he two men publicly fought in a flurry of furious online posts, Musk revealed X to be a double-edged sword. Musk spent hours firing off mocking memes, curt put-downs and explosive allegations to his 220 million followers, just as he did during Trump’s candidacy and as a member of his administration.

Republicans’ push to ban state AI regulations for the next 10 years as part of the party’s massive tax and immigration bill is forging ahead after the House narrowly passed it, but obstacles are mounting. Notable among them: the specter of opposition within the party.

President Donald Trump fired the only two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, handing the remaining Republican commissioners exclusive control over the agency that oversees antitrust and consumer protection laws and serves as the U.S. government’s primary regulator of the tech industry. FTC  Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter announced their dismissals on the social media site X, with both calling their firings illegal.

X owner Elon Musk seemed to confirm what sharp-eyed users have suspected for months: that putting a link in your post on his social network is a good way to ensure it won’t go viral. Musk was replying to a post by the influential Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham, who opined that “the deprioritization of tweets with links in them is Twitter’s biggest flaw.” X’s main draw, Graham said, is “to find out what’s going on, and you can’t do that without links.” Musk’s 

A legal battle over the Biden administration’s influence on social media companies looks set to spill into the next Trump administration—and no one knows quite how that will play out. A district judge allowed the case known as Missouri v. Biden to resume even as the Biden administration winds down. The Supreme Court vacated his previous ruling in the case in June, but the new one means the plaintiffs can now pursue additional discovery.

Senators of both parties are focusing their criticism on a law that Congress passed in 1996—a law that paved the way for social media as we know it. That law, said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), “needs to change.” The statute in question is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives online service providers broad immunity from lawsuits over their users’ posts, with the goal of promoting free expression online. Over the years, it has survived court challenges, legislative pushes, and an executive order by President Donald Trump. Now, it is in Congress’s sights once again.

As wildfires ravage western Canada, Canadians can’t read the news about them on Facebook or Instagram.

One day after a Louisiana federal judge set limits on the Biden administration’s communications with tech firms, the US State Department canceled its regular meeting with Facebook officials to discuss 2024 election preparations and hacking threats. State Department officials said all future meetings, which had been held monthly, have been “canceled pending further guidance." The cancellation shows the immediate impact of the order by US District Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee.

Klout, the service which measured online influence and assigned people a zero-to-100 score based on their social media followings, will shut down on May 25. Everyone’s Klout scores will go away, and with them, any remaining chance that businesses will treat us better or worse based on those scores. But the data Klout gathered from people presumably lives on. Lithium Technologies, the social-media marketing company that bought Klout in 2014, implied in its announcement that it has integrated Klout’s software and data into its own products.