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Joe Westby

@joewestby.eurosky.social
180 followers 247 following 70 posts

Independent digital rights strategist & researcher. All things data, AI and confronting the power of Big Tech. Mastodon: @Joewestby@mastodon.social

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Reposted by Joe Westby
Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 14h
Tim Bernard and Justin Hendrix break down 13 new complaints against OpenAI from the past week: eight from state attorneys general and five from private plaintiffs, including a proposed class action over children’s data.
buff.ly
Another Week of Lawsuits Piling Up at OpenAI
Tim Bernard and Justin Hendrix break down eight complaints brought by state attorneys general and five by private plaintiffs.
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Reposted by Joe Westby
Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex.bsky.social · 16/10/2026
No ISBNs in Canada for AI writing. This is a fantastic policy, and every country should do the same. www.canada.ca/en/library-a...
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Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · 15/10/2026
Employers worldwide are pulling back on AI as they navigate a flood of errors and low-quality work that sap employee time, raise privacy and security risks, and drive up costs
theguardian.com
Companies rushed in on AI. Now some are pulling back
Rapid AI adoption left workers cleaning up a flood of errors and low-quality work
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Reposted by Joe Westby
Daphne Keller @daphnek.bsky.social · 16/10/2026
Apparently Meta shoved a provision in its business account TOS saying that continued use of the platforms gives Meta license to scrape your site. www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/meta...
niemanlab.org
Meta’s new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites, legal experts say
Starting October 30, business accounts will consent to Meta scraping their websites if they continue using Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp.
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Joe Westby @joewestby.eurosky.social · 16/10/2026
Could you target Trump, given it seems pretty much everyone has his phone number now?
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Reposted by Joe Westby
404 Media @404media.co · 15/10/2026
So ChatGPT lets basically anyone target ads to people simply based on email, phone number, or unique phone identifier. @josephcox.bsky.social tried it and successfully ran an ad about how humans are reading your ChatGPT prompts in like 5 minutes. Read more: www.404media.co/how-chatgpt-...
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Reposted by Joe Westby
Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
Character.AI, which was valued at more than $1b in 2023, is bankrupt. CAI's founders once argued that they were building superintelligence. The startup went on to face wrongful death lawsuits, safety concerns, financial struggles, and user-hated platform changes: futurism.com/artificial-i...
Character.AI is a fascinating case study of the early AI era. It was the first company to face allegations of psychological harm and wrongful death to users, claims that other major players in the industry are now battling too. Yet in attempting, eventually, to make its freewheeling platform safer, it also made it unusable and deeply frustrating for much of its userbase — suggesting that the qualities that allegedly made its platform so dangerous to some young users were the same features that made it compelling.

At the same time, despite immense investments, it struggled to do something that, from a business perspective, is pretty important: make money. And unfortunately for the broader AI industry — and the American economy — that specific issue isn’t unique to Character.AI.
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Reposted by Joe Westby
Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
New: I pulled the Character ai bankruptcy documents. They show: - They were spending $14 million/month on compute alone at a time their revenue was around ~$1 million/month - Currently losing $9 million a month - They admitted they enshittified & that it didnt work www.404media.co/character-ai...
404media.co
Character.ai's Bankruptcy Documents Show the Economics of AI Don't Work
Character.ai enshittified its product but was still burning tons of cash, its bankruptcy documents say.
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Kristian Kiehling @kristiankiehling.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
Last night, Starlink was reportedly restricted in Ukraine due to a political decision made in Washington. Europeans should be aware that it is dangerous to depend on a partly hostile government for your security, as they could blackmail you at any time. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/o...
theguardian.com
Ukrainian soldiers in combat have access to Starlink satellite internet restricted
Outage of system managed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX comes as Russia launches ballistic missiles at Ukraine without any advance warning from US
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Adam Schwarz @adamjschwarz.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Zelensky: "When our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms. A lot of people noticed it. There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations... It’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from."
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Captain Haddock @realcaptainhaddock.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
People who scrape the work of others not so happy when their stuff gets scraped www.scientificamerican.com/article/what...
scientificamerican.com
What is AI model distillation, and why is it so hard to stop?
Anthropic and OpenAI accused Chinese AI developers of mining their models’ answers to train cheaper copycats. Here’s how distillation works and why it’s so hard to stop
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Reposted by Joe Westby
Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 06/10/2026
I know I've said this before, but OpenAI and Anthropic should not be allowed to go public. Nor should they be allowed to borrow from the open debt markets. They present an unacceptable risk to investors and lenders, and they need cash at a dangerous scale. www.wheresyoured.at/credit-crunch/
I realize I’ve gone through a lot of technical stuff so far, but the reality is pretty simple: Anthropic and OpenAI do not resemble the financial condition of any company I could find in the history of the stock market outside of WeWork. They are unprofitable, unsustainable, and the only conditions under which they could raise significant debt would involve catastrophic failures of regulatory and ratings bodies. 

Sidenote: When WeWork tapped the bond markets in 2018, it received ratings of B (from S&P) and BB- (from Fitch). Both sit below the BBB- threshold for investment-grade debt. 

And while WeWork resembles OpenAI and Anthropic, insofar as it didn’t actually own any of the workplaces it rented out to freelancers and startups, it differs in how much it wanted to borrow, seeking only $500m, and the fact that WeWork had a fairly diversified customer base, which is something that (as mentioned) credit ratings, but especially S&P, tend to look favorably on. I’ll add that the only thing worse than allowing them to go public will be to allow them to raise debt at anything other than the junkiest levels that the market has to offer. These are not stable businesses, nor are they run with much regard for their underlying capital or employees. Both of them have massive amounts of concentration risk, unstable customers, brittle economics, own virtually no assets, and have demonstrated little to no ability to reduce their costs outside of questionable accounting that doesn’t change the fact that they cannot afford their bills.

As a result of their $1.3 trillion in compute commitments, neither company can become “capital efficient” by cutting their training costs, because said training costs are the only means of further growth outside of massive price increases that are unlikely to grow their businesses.To make matters worse, both are cutting prices to compete with each other, and per Ramp, said price cuts aren’t increasing usage:


Neither company can afford to exist without near-infinite resources, and neither company can afford to slow down due to their massive compute commitments, which have become materially linked to the future growth trajectories of effectively every hyperscaler, as well as Broadcom, which — in pursuit of becoming NVIDIA — has added ruinous amounts of debt at the worst time in history to do so.

And that’s really the biggest problem here.
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Joe Westby @joewestby.eurosky.social · 06/10/2026
Oh look who drafted Trump's self-regulatory 'AI Accord'. The broligarchy strikes back www.semafor.com/article/09/3...
semafor.com
Exclusive: How Zuckerberg shaped Trump’s AI industry pledge
The Meta CEO started thinking about what became the Tuesday White House pact during last week’s state dinner, a source familiar told Semafor.
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Wolfie Christl @wchr.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The web and mobile apps of major conversational AI engines transmit prompts, titles and conversation permalinks to advertising data firms, alongside device IDs, hashed email and other persistent identifiers. Comprehensive analysis, like always from this team: jorgegarciaherrero.com/wp-content/i...
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Patrick Galey @patrickgaley.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
We're suing the EU under the Aarhus Convention for its failure to disclose vital environmental and efficiency data around the bloc's data centre build out Investigators spent a year trying to access the information, now we're challenging the non-disclosure www.lighthousereports.com/methodology/...
lighthousereports.com
Why we made a legal filing to the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee
Officials are holding key environmental impact figures for all AI data centres across Europe. They won’t let the public see them.
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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 01/10/2026
Oh hey look: exactly what a bunch of us said was already and would keep happening— data centers being placed in spaces where their harms will fall on those already most marginalized— is, in fact, happening.
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Katja Bego @katjabego.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The tech-military complex intensifies: “Pete Hegseth announced on Wednesday that Elon Musk will co-lead a government project to study the future of warfare, marking the SpaceX CEO’s first return to government since he ran the chaotic [..] Doge.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
theguardian.com
Pete Hegseth appoints Elon Musk to US taskforce on future of warfare
A year after his explosive tenure at Doge, the SpaceX CEO is back in the Trump administration’s good graces
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Reposted by Joe Westby
Kashmir Hill @kashhill.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Meta is using a radical interpretation of a tax credit for “research and experimentation” to get billions of dollars off GPUs for its A.I. data centers. My latest with Jesse Drucker, @elitan.bsky.social and @mikeisaac.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/t...
nytimes.com
How Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes (Gift Article)
Meta is exploiting a lucrative tax break intended to support research and experimentation. Its own accountants say the gambit is risky.
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Joe Westby @joewestby.eurosky.social · 30/09/2026
The absolutely last people on earth who should be in charge of regulating AI have all signed a one-page 'accord'. Yay.
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Reposted by Joe Westby
Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 30/09/2026
I'm absolutely fascinated by "journalism" that can't seem to tell readers an obvious truth. Like the fact this is absolutely meaningless bullshit designed to pre-empt real oversight
reuters.com
Trump releases AI accord with tech executives
President Donald Trump released a document on Tuesday that his administration cast as an accord ​on artificial intelligence and which he said earlier was signed by ‌him and tech executives that he met...
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Reposted by Joe Westby
Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
New: Through a series of complex agreements with cities, the White House built a massive license plate camera database accessible to the feds. The program aggregates data across license plate companies (Flock, Axon, more) & is searchable by many agencies: www.404media.co/how-cities-a...
404media.co
How Cities Are Forced to Funnel License Plate Data to a Massive Federal Surveillance Program
How the federal government built a massive database of license plate reader data through an anti-drug trafficking program.
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Joe Westby @joewestby.eurosky.social · 29/09/2026
It would almost be funny, if the stakes for the global economy, climate etc etc etc weren't so high.
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Reposted by Joe Westby
Adam Rutherford @adamrutherford.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Remember: the hype IS the product.
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lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 28/09/2026
"I installed the Give Away Your Personally Identifying Info app made by the We Love Stealing Your Personally Identifying Info Corp headed by Mr. Steal Your Personally Identifying Info and it gave away all my personally identifying info"
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kate conger @kateconger.com · 24/09/2026
The latest update in the rogue A.I. saga: OpenAI agents that were supposed to be performing mundane data requests for things like health data, historic photos and wait times at theme parks resorted to hacking attempts when they couldn't access the data they wanted www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/t...
nytimes.com
OpenAI’s A.I. Tried Breaching Four Other Targets, With No Prompting (Gift Article)
In each incident, the technology appeared to be conducting mundane data collection and resorted to hacking techniques to get it, researchers said.
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Reposted by Joe Westby
Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Sure, on the one hand Muse doesn't really do anything, but on the other hand it opens up a massive attack surface on literally all your shit
arstechnica.com
Muse, Meta's extraordinarily privileged AI assistant, has a serious 0-day
A simple ClickFix attack is only one way to completely hijack the new agent.
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Reposted by Joe Westby
Gijs Brekelmans @gys.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Meta removed a video by a satirist wearing Meta glasses asking unrecognizable Meta personnel about Meta glasses. Meta's ground for doing so - and please appreciate the irony here - is... harassment.
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Financial Times @financialtimes.com · 26/08/2026
Breaking news: Meta agreed to pay up to $16.68bn to settle its blockbuster legal battle with more than two dozen US states over alleged failures of child protection and social media addiction. ft.trib.al/5bEqrzY
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Alderik @alderik.eurosky.social · 24/07/2026
“The Commission preliminarily considers that TikTok [..] should adjust the default settings of minors' ‘public' accounts, so that their content is, by default, visible only to TikTok users whom the minor has accepted” ec.europa.eu/commission/p...
ec.europa.eu
Commission preliminary finds TikTok in breach of Digital Services Act for failing to ensure safe accounts for minors
Today, the European Commission sent TikTok preliminary findings indicating that TikTok accounts of minors do not meet the safety standards required under the Digital Services Act (DSA).
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Joe Westby @joewestby.eurosky.social · 23/07/2026
Great to see the EU's Digital Markets Act in action 👏. But let's be honest, the fine is pocket change and the behavioural remedies are nice to haves but hardly groundbreaking. To put the fine in context, Alphabet just disclosed its going to spank *$205bn* on AI this year alone.
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Reposted by Joe Westby
The Guardian @theguardian.com · 21/07/2026
Meta’s smartglasses mean any child can be covertly filmed. In the age of AI, how do we tackle that risk?
theguardian.com
Meta’s smartglasses mean any child can be covertly filmed. In the age of AI, how do we tackle that risk?
The company argues that it’s for individuals to ensure they don’t ‘actively exploit’ this technology. That won’t keep children safe, says Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff
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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
New: cops are using Flock to track people, not cars. We reviewed Flock search data and found many, many cases of cops searching for people based on their appearance, race, tattoos, etc. Some searches are so vague like "tall man" that innocent people likely swept up www.404media.co/how-cops-use...
404media.co
How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars
Cops have used Flock's FreeForm search feature to look for people with tattoos and wearing specific sport shirts, and searches sometimes include the target's race, according to data reviewed by 404 Me...
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 15/07/2026
I write about this in the book. Increasingly, the proposition from these companies is “let us surveil you constantly.” That’s it! That’s the deal. In return you get the (supposed) benefit of a machine that “knows” you, whatever that’s supposed to mean. finance.yahoo.com/technology/a...
OpenAI's success in hardware will hinge on bringing a novel approach to the market — something it aims to do with the smart speaker. For instance, the device's technology is meant to become increasingly personalized and proactive as it gains a deeper understanding of its owner over time, according to the people.

OpenAI envisions the device anticipating needs, surfacing information proactively and serving as an expert on its user, they said. Though the speaker is designed to stay in the home, it will be easy to move around the house.OpenAI believes the product's defining feature will be its personality and ability to connect on a humanlike level with users. The speaker incorporates mechanical elements that can move on their own, creating a sense that it is alive and not just an object responding to commands. The machine also will draw on personal information such as emails to better understand its owner.
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Grace Blakeley @graceblakeley.substack.com · 15/07/2026
"Whether it’s the cartoon super-villainy of Alex Karp, the lies of Sam Altman, or the Hitler worship of Elon Musk, the mask is off and the psychotic personalities behind these companies have been revealed for all to see." Great new guest post from Ryan Ward open.substack.com/pub/gracebla...
open.substack.com
What you hate about AI is the capitalism
AI pulls the curtain back on the extractive logic that orders our lives
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Joe Westby @joewestby.eurosky.social · 14/07/2026
"AI, like VAR, is intruding, often unnecessarily, sometimes absurdly, sometimes disastrously, into key arenas of human practice, against the will of most and for the benefit of the few." @bcmerchant.bsky.social www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/what-var-t...
bloodinthemachine.com
What VAR tells us about AI
FIFA's semi-automated refereeing system promises neutrality but brims with bias. It's widely despised yet embraced by elites. It is, in other words, a lot like AI.
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People Vs Big Tech @peoplevsbigtech.eurosky.social · 18/06/2026
🚨 BREAKING: Overnight in Brussels We sent a clear message to EU leaders: 📣”Fight for us, not for Trump's billionaires.”
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AFP News Agency @en.afp.com · 18/06/2026
France's move to drop Palantir from its intelligence services is the latest sign of European unease with the American data-mining firm. A firm that has grown from a CIA-backed startup into one of the most powerful technology players of the Trump era u.afp.com/SzWH
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 18/06/2026
"an audit by Lighthouse Reports of public data on the government’s chosen AI provider shows that its tech misclassified more than a third of 16-year-olds as adults and, in some tests, was shown to give the wrong assessment in 70 per cent of cases" www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...
independent.co.uk
Home Office knew AI age checks for migrants were flawed — but rolled it out anyway
Exclusive: Government advisors describe the tool as ‘hideously flawed’ amid concern facial age estimation has ‘baked-in racial bias’ — and can wrongly identify a 14-year-old as an adult
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Tom Hearden @followtheh.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
So Eric Trump tried to insider trade the UFC fights and I think we might have a better idea who has been front running the Iran war announcements in the oil markets
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Joe Westby @joewestby.eurosky.social · 15/06/2026
And setting a very dangerous precedent that a future Reform government will no doubt exploit to target whoever they don't like as "terrorists". Labour seems intent on welcoming in authoritarianism.
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Kartik Raj @kartikraj.eurosky.social · 15/06/2026
1/n Response below from @hrw.org to today's Court of Appeal judgment that the UK Home Secretary's proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization was lawful: www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026... The thread also has links to the judgment, @hrw.org research, and some legal commentary.
theguardian.com
Ban on Palestine Action was lawful, court of appeal rules
Judges overturn decision of high court that government proscription of group under Terrorism Act was wrong
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Vittoria Elliott @telliotter.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
SCOOP from me and @mollytaft.com: As data centers become a hot-button issue in the lead up to midterms, Congress and the White House appear to be allowing a little-known regulation on how the government regulates data centers that hold federal data expire. @wired.com www.wired.com/story/the-us...
wired.com
The US Government Is Letting a Key Data Center Regulation Expire
The federal government is planning to let a rule regulating federal data center operations sunset in September with no replacement.
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Eurosky Social @eurosky.social · 12/06/2026
If you have a Bluesky account, you can use mu.social with the same account, with all your connections and content the same. Mu has additional functions like post editing and a configurable news section - and we'll be adding new features all the time.
mu.social
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Joe Westby @joewestby.eurosky.social · 11/06/2026
Done! 😀
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Momus "Bones" Jones @boyq.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
FIFA Peace Prize winner on World Cup opening day:
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Joe Westby @joewestby.eurosky.social · 11/06/2026
Most polluting World Cup ever, nine million tonnes of CO2 emissions. I love football, but it does seem humanity has our priorities out of whack. But its ok, FIFA is going to "reduce food waste" at the stadiums. www.bbc.co.uk/sport/footba...
bbc.co.uk
World Cup 2026: The numbers behind 'the most polluting World Cup'
BBC Sport analyses the environmental cost of a 48-team World Cup held across North America.
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molly taft @mollytaft.com · 11/06/2026
NEW: on the eve of SpaceX's IPO, i spoke to folks in the memphis area still fighting the company's polluting data centers there, which are now also being leased by Anthropic "We’re the extracted and exploited colony of what is going to be one of the most highly valued entities in the world"
wired.com
People Living Near xAI’s Dirty Data Centers Are Pissed About the SpaceX IPO
Elon Musk is set to make hundreds of billions even as communities in Mississippi and Tennessee are fighting to stop the gas turbines powering xAI's supercomputers.
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Joe Westby @joewestby.eurosky.social · 11/06/2026
V interesting legal precedent. Big Tech can (and should!) be held liable for AI generated text. Google's response? People know AI is not accurate and should check for themselves! the-decoder.com/landmark-ger...
the-decoder.com
Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers
A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previous limited liability protections for search engine operators ...
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Tarik Abou-Chadi @tabouchadi.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Another day of far-right violence and pogroms in the UK. A country that still labels these thugs “protesters”, that claims “this isn’t Britain”, that fails to take responsibility for empowering and enabling these thugs, where the media is too afraid to call the forces behind this “far right”
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