Politico

The “Disinformation Dozen” are back—kind of. The year 2025 has been good to a group of controversial influencers once widely criticized for causing national harm during the Covid-19 pandemic — stoking concerns about vaccines, discouraging masking, and questioning the severity of the disease.

As artificial intelligence comes to dominate the global conversation around technology, Signal Foundation President Meredith Whittaker has emerged as a contrarian figure; a leader from the industry willing to sound notes of caution about the hype, risks and data-privacy threat of AI. A manager and researcher at Google for more than a decade, Whittaker left in 2019 after leading a number of walkouts and protests around the company’s changing policies on things like AI ethics and military contracts.

Artificial intelligence is in the sights of antitrust enforcers—and, as in many areas, the disruptive technology may force policymakers to reconsider what “antitrust” even is. With AI becoming more and more embedded in everything corporate, from screening job applications to setting business strategy, regulators and state lawmakers are starting to worry that a certain amount of collusion is baked into the technology itself.

So who are the true free-speech warriors: Democrats or Republicans? That argument got a public airing in a Senate hearing that didn’t necessarily turn out the way its organizers intended. Convened by Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX), the hearing was supposed to focus on accusations that the Biden administration improperly pressured social media companies to moderate misinformation, particularly around COVID-19.