Favorite For two years, Hannah Byrne was part of an invisible machine that determines what over 3 billion people around the world can say on the internet. From her perch within Meta’s Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations team, Byrne helped craft one of the most powerful and secretive censorship policies in internet history. Her work adhered…
Favorite In the days after Donald Trump’s election, business leaders across a swath of industries celebrated the victory of a man they thought would bring them a financial bonanza. Crypto bros, oil and gas honchos, and tycoons looking to orchestrate mergers all did a victory dance. Now, a new report details how private equity companies…
Favorite Five Palestinians from the Israeli-occupied West Bank, along with the councils of three villages they hail from, filed a formal regulatory complaint in Germany accusing the media giant Axel Springer of contributing to human rights abuses in Palestine. The villagers said that Axel Springer’s Israeli subsidiary Yad2, a classified ads platform akin to Craigslist,…
Favorite When questioned about its controversial cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, Google has repeatedly claimed the so-called Project Nimbus deal is bound by the company’s general cloud computing terms of service policy. While that policy would prohibit uses that lead to deprivation of rights, injury, or death, or other harms, contract documents and…
Favorite President-elect Donald Trump vows to start his second term with the immediate mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. Like everything else, deportations of the 21st century are an increasingly data-centric undertaking, tapping vast pools of personal information sold by a litany of companies. The Intercept asked more than three dozen companies in the…
Favorite The nation’s largest private prison company, the GEO Group, has seen its stock soar in the weeks since Donald Trump’s election in anticipation of new contracts linked to mass deportation. Trump’s new choice for U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, worked as GEO’s lobbyist as recently as 2019. Her list of corporate clients also includes…
Favorite After campaigning on the message that journalists are the “enemy of the people,” President-elect Donald Trump has come out against a bipartisan bill that would protect reporters and their sources from government interference. In a social media post on Wednesday, Trump bellowed that Republicans “MUST KILL THIS BILL.” The PRESS Act, a federal reporter…
Favorite President Joe Biden meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 13, 2024. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images The leadership of the Democratic Party deserves significant blame for the return of Donald Trump to the White House. While there were multiple factors at play, it must…
Favorite California voters chose harsher sentencing, the continuation of forced labor in prisons, and tough-on-crime prosecutors this week in overwhelming numbers. Proposition 36, a bill that upgrades a raft of petty theft and drug crimes from misdemeanors to felonies, was approved by 70 percent of voters in the initial counts. It is designed to incarcerate…
Favorite The cryptocurrency industry took a victory lap Wednesday. Devotees of digital currencies had cause to celebrate: An ally in Donald Trump had taken the White House and a slew of pro-crypto congressional candidates won races that included at least two Senate seats. Only two years after the spectacular collapse of frauds like Sam Bankman-Fried…
