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January 28, 2025
A Warning Against Warning Labels on Social Media Platforms
If you can’t constitutionally restrict social media platforms or the speech they convey, force them to transmit some of your own speech they’ll surely dislike. That’s seemingly the strategy of some lawmakers frustrated that the First Amendment’s guarantees of free expression and editorial autonomy have repeatedly stymied their paternalistic efforts to restrict minors’ platform access to lawful, presumptively protected…
January 27, 2025
AI’s Emerging Paradox
While the presidential transition commanded headlines this week, equally significant shifts were occurring in AI technology. Just hours before Donald Trump’s inauguration, DeepSeek released its latest model, achieving a breakthrough in AI reasoning that matches the best models of OpenAI and Anthropic but at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek, which is backed by a Chinese…
January 24, 2025
Trump’s Big, Bold AI Gamble
What a difference a week makes. As others and I have predicted, newly-inaugurated President Trump rolled back much of his predecessor’s policy approach to artificial intelligence (AI). But few forecasted just how stark the contrast has been. Last week, before the inauguration, I argued that Trump should reverse outgoing President Biden’s ill-considered Executive Order on AI. As…
January 22, 2025
Liability Elasticity and Other Policy Concerns Underlying Social Media Addiction Lawsuits
Lurking beneath today’s raft of social media addiction lawsuits blaming platforms for harming minors are three broad public policy concerns. These frets could easily affect corporate liability in areas beyond online media. The first concern is the discretion trial court judges possess––in the absence of explicit legislation or a state high court ruling dictating otherwise––when deciding whether…
January 21, 2025
A Flammable Landscape
Los Angeles continues to burn. As of this writing, the Palisades Fire is spread over 23,713 acres and is 22 percent contained. This means that 22 percent of the fire’s perimeter has been controlled by firefighters through containment lines. The Eaton Fire currently stands at 14,117 acres burned at 55 percent containment. Will Rogers State Park is…
January 17, 2025
Demystifying Social Media Addiction Litigation
The old sales pitch hollered by baseball game vendors was “you can’t tell the players without a scorecard.” Something similar rings true today about not only knowing the litigants but also their theories in more than 1,000 lawsuits wending their way through numerous courts and blaming social media platforms for addicting and harming minors. The…
January 9, 2025
Meta’s Content Moderation Turnabout
Today, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced that it would immediately stop using “fact checkers” to police the content on its platforms, which also include Instagram and Threads. Meta explained: “In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content….
October 24, 2024
Progress and Its Enemies
26 years ago, Virginia Postrel published The Future and Its Enemies, which I still consider one of the most insightful books of our time. The book’s subtitle, The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, has become even more relevant since 1998. Virginia gave a presentation on the ideas in her book at the Progress Conference in Berkeley last…