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ECP NetHappenings Newsletter NewsBytes
TRUMP IS NEVER LEAVING
A Trump judicial nominee was asked point blank: is Trump eligible to run for a third term?
Their answer: “I would have to review the actual wording…”
Sen. Chris Coons then asked every nominee in the room to confirm the Constitution bars a third term. Silence.
Every single one of them refused to say it.
Trump is appointing judges who won’t affirm the 22nd Amendment to his face.
TRUMP IS BUILDING THE BUNKER/BALLROOM
@thedreydossier
The anatomy of a… ballroom? Back in October, I started pulling the donor list for Trump’s ‘ballroom’ expecting the usual suspects- luxury brands draining their marketing budgets for a White House photo op But there was no Steinway. No Hermès. No Baccarat. In their place were names like Caterpillar, Booz Allen Hamilton, Blackstone, and Union Pacific. Companies that build classified networks, industrial generators, and military infrastructure. That was the first moment it clicked for me, and I realized I wasn’t looking at a party planning committee. I was looking at a procurement order for a classified data center.
Jim Stewartson @jimstewartson
30 years ago, Elon Musk immigrated to become a parasite on the U.S. economy. We kept rewarding him for his greed—and his impossible stories.
When SpaceX goes IPO, he will to be too big to fail.
He is the poster child for our systemic failure to filter out malignant narcissists.
They call them “data centers”..
Because if they called them mass surveillance centers, people might begin to see what’s going on..
The LARGEST “hyperscale” data center in the world is being proposed in Box Elder County, Utah.
It’s approx. 40,000 acres/62 square miles, backed by Canadian millionaire Kevin O’Leary.
The Epstein files show officials working in sync to apply “clear and specific guidance” on redactions—shielding the names of Trump, former presidents, and a former Secretary of State.
There are millions of files that are still being withheld.
ESSAY
Nav Toor @heynavtoor
If you use TikTok, you should read this once.
In October 2024, a court clerk in Kentucky uploaded the lawsuit against TikTok with the confidential sections still visible. NPR downloaded it before anyone caught the mistake. By the time the court resealed it, the internet had a copy.
What was inside was TikTok’s own engineers, in their own words, describing what their app does to a human brain.
Not a critic’s brain. Yours.
Here is what they wrote down.
— TikTok ran the math on how long it takes to develop “compulsive use” of the app. The number is 260 videos. With 8-second videos played in rapid-fire succession, that works out to roughly 35 minutes. The company’s internal documents call this the compulsive-use threshold.
— TikTok’s own research describes what compulsive use causes: “diminished analytical ability, impaired memory, contextual reasoning, conversational depth, empathy, and heightened anxiety.” That is not a quote from a critic. That is TikTok’s own language, in its own internal documents.
— A team inside the company called “TikTank” wrote in an internal report that compulsive use on the platform was “rampant.”
— After 30 minutes of continuous use in one sitting, the company’s own documents state that users are placed into “filter bubbles” — algorithmic loops the user did not choose and cannot easily escape.
Then there is the screen-time tool — the one TikTok publicly markets as proof it cares.
— TikTok ran an experiment on the 60-minute screen-time prompt. Daily teen usage dropped from 108.5 minutes to 107. A reduction of 1.5 minutes.
— Internally, the screen-time tool was not measured by whether it reduced screen time. Its top success metric, in writing, was “improving public trust in the TikTok platform via media coverage.”
— A project manager wrote in internal chat: “Our goal is not to reduce the time spent.” Another employee added that the goal was “to contribute to daily active users and retention.”
— A TikTok executive approved the screen-time feature only on the condition that its impact on the company’s “core metrics” was minimal. The lawsuit alleges the company planned to “revisit the design” if the tool ever reduced usage by more than 10%.
The “Are you still scrolling?” break videos? An executive admitted in an internal meeting they were “useful talking points” for lawmakers, but “not altogether effective.”
Then there is the algorithm itself.
— An internal report flagged that the For You feed was showing what the company called “a high volume of not attractive subjects.” TikTok then retooled the algorithm to suppress those users. Kentucky authorities wrote: “By changing the TikTok algorithm to show fewer ‘not attractive subjects’ in the For You feed, [TikTok] took active steps to promote a narrow beauty norm even though it could negatively impact their Young Users.”
That sentence is the entire pitch of the platform, said out loud.
— Internally, TikTok also acknowledged that its publicly reported content moderation metrics were “mostly misleading,” because they only measured the content the company successfully moderated — never the content it missed.
Now read those bullet points again as one continuous case.
The company knows the addiction threshold. The company measured it. The company ranked engagement over mental health in writing. The company built a screen-time tool whose internal success metric was PR. The company suppressed people it deemed unattractive to keep you scrolling. The company called its own moderation numbers misleading.
None of this is a leaked rumor. None of this is a journalist’s interpretation. This is a court filing. The documents are TikTok’s. The words are TikTok’s. The math is TikTok’s.
The 14 state attorneys general who signed onto this lawsuit aren’t fringe activists. They’re a bipartisan coalition.
Sources at the bottom: NPR, CNN, AP, Mashable, OPB, The Independent. All citing the same accidentally-unsealed Kentucky filing from October 11, 2024.
The next time the company tells you it cares about your wellbeing — the screen-time prompts, the break videos, the safety features, the careful PR statements — remember that its own engineers wrote down, in court-admissible language, that the safeguards were never meant to work.
The app is not broken.
It is performing exactly as designed.
You were the spec.
▓▓▓—▓▓▓—▓▓▓
Leon Black told investors he had ‘limited contact’ with Epstein.
His calendar shows 86 scheduled meetings between 2012-2017.
Apollo board minutes reference ‘estate planning services.’
Black paid him $158 million.
Another day, another f^cking MAGA Trumper pervert and pedophile arrested! Joel Lyons Jr of Chauvin, Louisiana was arrested and faces serious charges of distributing child abuse material of victims under 13 and sexual abuse of animals. https://kqkinews.com/chauvin-man-arrested-on-child-exploitation-and-animal-abuse-charges/
NEW: In wake of Supreme Court voting rights act ruling, Rep. Johnny Olszewski (D-MD) introduces new term limits legislation for Supreme Court Justices
18-year terms to ensure “regular and predictable turnover”
Graham Platner: “The system we live in, it isn’t broken. It’s functioning exactly as it was intended to. It is a system built by policies passed by establishment politicians that are meant to enrich the ultra-wealthy on the backs of the working people of this country”
Raise a glass to
@halfin
!
Today would have been Hal’s 70th birthday.
Hal Finney is one of the most important cypherpunks in the history of Bitcoin. When the whitepaper was published, most people ignored it. Hal Finney was the one of the few cryptographers who believed in it.
FUCK Bill Gates on whether we’ll still need humans with the rise of AI:
“Not for most things. We’ll decide.”
Herein lies the problem with capitalism: It has resulted in a handful of billionaires controlling the entire economy and making life or death decisions that impact all of us.