Last month a BBC study found that “AI” assistants are terrible at providing accurate news synopses. The BBC’s study found that modern language learning model assistants introduced factual errors a whopping 51 percent of the time. 19 percent of the responses introduced factually inaccurate “statements, numbers and dates,” and 13 percent either altered subject quotes or made up quotes entirely.
This month a study from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that modern “AI” is also terrible at accurate citations. Researchers asked most modern “AI” chatbots basic questions about news articles and found that they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries.
It should be noted they weren’t making particularly onerous demands or asking the chatbots to interpret anything. Researchers randomly selected ten articles from each publisher, then asked chatbot from various major companies to identify the corresponding article’s headline, original publisher, publication date, and URL. They ran sixteen hundred queries across eight major chatbots.
Some AI assistants, like Elon Musk’s Grok, were particularly awful, providing incorrect answers to 94 percent of the queries about news articles. Researchers also amusingly found that premium chatbots were routinely more confident in the false answers they provided:
“This contradiction stems primarily from their tendency to provide definitive, but wrong, answers rather than declining to answer the question directly. The fundamental concern extends beyond the chatbots’ factual errors to their authoritative conversational tone, which can make it difficult for users to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate information. “
The study also found that most major chatbots either failed to include accurate citations to the information they were using, or provided inaccurate citations a huge portion of the time:
“The generative search tools we tested had a common tendency to cite the wrong article. For instance, DeepSeek misattributed the source of the excerpts provided in our queries 115 out of 200 times. This means that news publishers’ content was most often being credited to the wrong source.”
That’s not to say that automation doesn’t have its uses, or that it won’t improve over time. But again, this level of clumsy errors is not what the public is being sold by these companies. Giant companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Elon Musk’ Nazi Emporium have sold AI as just a few quick breaths and another few billion away from amazing levels of sentience, yet they can’t perform rudimentary tasks.
Companies are rushing undercooked product to market and overselling its real-world capabilities to make money. Other companies in media are then rushing to adopt this undercooked automation not to improve journalism quality or worker efficiency, but to cut corners, save money, undermine labor, and, in the case of outlets like the LA Times, to entrench and normalize the bias of affluent ownership.
This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund. If you’re in London on Thursday 27th March, join Ben, Mark Scott (Digital Politics) and Georgia Iacovou (Horrific/Terrific) for an evening of tech policy, discussion and drinks. Register your interest.
Editor’s note: Mike Masnick is on the board of Bluesky, and took no part in editing or reviewing this piece.
Here it is: the dumbest take to date on Bluesky v. xTwitter. There’s been plenty of stupid offered up before by bitter xTwitter users who are trying to pretend they’re not still splashing around in white nationalist dumpster juice while surrounded by bots. Their favorite coping method is to claim Bluesky users are afraid to engage in the marketplace of ideas. But all they offer is a limited market in the darkest alley in town.
None of these arguments are being made in good faith. No one criticizing Bluesky users for routinely rousting Nazis and their fans from this social media platform is making intellectually honest arguments. They’re just bitter that the people they actively dislike (and actively harassed on xTwitter) are no longer willing to slog through the sewage just to have a meaningful interaction or two with their fellow, non-bigoted human beings.
When Bluesky opened to the wider public in 2023, more left-leaning users flooded in, many of them hoping to escape the increased visibility of conservative views on Musk’s now laissez-faire platform redubbed “X.”
I mean, it’s right there. This is yet another person who thinks people are closed-minded because they prefer not to engage with “conservative views,” while failing to acknowledge that “conservative views” is a coded term that refers to open racism, white nationalist ideology, anti-trans hatred, bigoted beliefs covering pretty much every race, color, creed, or sexuality, and a general enthusiasm for MAGA-based autocracy.
These are not “conservative views.” These are bigoted views that far too many people hold — people who think they might be perceived as rational if they use this phrase, rather than something more specific that would reveal what these “views” actually are.
The bad faith argument continues, broad-brushing Bluesky users as liberal elites, skeeting from the relative safety of their ivory towers in the general direction of the internet’s peasantry.
Having emerged from the intersectional hothouses of academia, many progressives today view policy disputes through a therapeutic lens: They see themselves—and the marginalized groups they claim to speak for—as victims of trauma. The solution to that trauma is not rigorous debate. Quite the opposite; they need protection. Exposure to dangerous speech could threaten their mental stability. So progressives now treat opposing ideas not as errors that need to be rebutted with facts, but as dangerous contagions that must be quarantined.
Bro, there has been actual trauma inflicted by social media users. It happens on every social media platform, but Bluesky’s robust moderation tools (many of which are controlled by users themselves) — including a Block button that actually works — do offer protection to people who’d rather have a pleasant online experience, rather than one routinely interrupted by harassment from ugly trolls and outright bigots who seem to feel the “marketplace of ideas” obligates the harassed to indefinitely endure harassment.
At least Meigs says there’s some “dangerous speech” out there. That he won’t equate it to the “conservative views” he name-checked earlier is disingenuous. The entry fee for social media interaction should never be subjecting yourself to bigotry and hatred. If the bigots want a playground, they’ve got several to choose from. This just sounds like the whining of bullies who are finding fewer and fewer people to push around.
After a diversion into a bunch of stuff that’s so barely worth discussing even Meigs can’t be bothered to do it any length (and that’s in an op-ed that runs more than 2,400 words) — de-platforming, Biden Adminstration allegedly demanding accounts be blocked or removed, COVID origin conspiracy theories, the banning of Trump from Twitter after the January 6th insurrection) — he goes right back into pretending xTwitter is the only place real social media interaction still takes place. And, of course, he uses phrasing that glosses over the irredeemable shithole xTwitter has become under Musk’s ownership:
When Bluesky gave them an escape hatch from the increasingly freewheeling—and sometimes raucous—debates on X, many jumped through it without looking back.
Oh yeah. “Freewheeling.” “Raucous.” Those are some mighty fine words. But they don’t fool anyone who isn’t already deep in the throes of self-delusion. There’s no “debate” on xTwitter. What’s being referred to as freewheeling, raucous debate is just a steady stream of open racism, transphobia, sexual harassment, death/rape threats, and a bunch of dudes with philosopher bust avatars declaring that everyone calling them bigots are just low-IQ liberal NPCs. And that’s if you can even get past the massive ad load, Bitcoin hucksters, and emoji-laden responses that clutter every single thread on the platform.
There’s more of this throughout the rest of it. The guy speaking on behalf of his fellow “conservatives” continues to proclaim Bluesky is the platform of intolerance and fragility — again, using phrases that refuse to acknowledge the genuine ugliness that is the day-to-day business of xTwitter.
I don’t love X’s somewhat uglier vibe, but I accept the trade-off. I’m willing to tolerate a few angry or idiotic posts in exchange for knowing that right-wing views aren’t being deliberately buried.
[…]
I suspect that the progressives who feel threatened by right-wing “hate” have simply never experienced a cultural environment where conservatives speak as loudly as liberals.
“Right-wing views.” Hate in scare-quotes. “Somewhat uglier vibe.” But who’s really threatened here? It seems to be the “right-wing view” people who are running into a wall of resistance that’s no longer going to engage in the mutual lie of “freewheeling debate.” These are the same people whose “conservative views” make them angry about preferred pronouns, sexual identity, diversity, inclusion, women having personal agency, and any flag that doesn’t have a thin blue line, MAGA logo, or swastika on it.
Once again, Meigs goes back to his core complaint: Bluesky users don’t want our “conservative views” bullshit wrecking up their mostly-pleasant Bluesky experience. And, in doing so, Meigs accidentally advertises what makes Bluesky better than its competitors.
I quickly learned that the site’s core innovation is not finding ways to facilitate thoughtful conversations. Instead, Bluesky’s secret sauce is the powerful tools it gives users to shut down voices they disagree with. Block lists—featuring the names of people you will not permit to see your posts—are public and widely shared and discussed. “People make nasty lists and lists and lists there,” a Bluesky user in Germany explained to me. Many Bluesky regulars import other users’ lists wholesale, allowing them to block hundreds of people they’ve never even heard of.
That’s the real problem Meigs has with Bluesky: it won’t give him a platform to harangue people whose ideas he disagrees with. That’s always been the case, even back when “conservatives” were complaining about being muted, blocked, or banned from (original) Twitter and Facebook. They all carry the same sense of entitlement: a firm belief that if they’ve been given a platform to speak, everyone else should be forced to listen.
And this follow-up makes it clear Meigs is willfully ignoring what has already happened on xTwitter to pretend this is a uniquely Bluesky problem:
In real-world social circles, being a total flaming, um, jerk brings social costs. But in a hermetically sealed social-media bubble, it’s a way to build your status. Bluesky adds another perverse incentive: Anyone adding nuance or pushing back against violent statements risks being ridiculed and even mass-blocked by the online community. This combination of positive and negative rewards creates a one-way ratchet, always pushing users toward extremism.
Exactly. But you only like the bubble that includes you, rather than the one that doesn’t. That’s a pretty universal human trait — resentment towards any group that excludes you. Unfortunately, it’s also a pretty human trait to spend 2,400+ words trying to turn your personal bad experience with Bluesky (if this ever even happened — there doesn’t appear to be an account linked to Meigs on the service at the moment) into a universal experience that reflects a vast majority of internet users.
What’s never even considered in this column is that people are embracing Bluesky for all the reasons you’ve chosen to treat as negatives. Everyone can curate their own experience — something that’s definitely not possible anywhere else. Both Facebook and xTwitter allow pay-to-play amplification for posts, as well as sloppy, profit-first algorithms that shove whatever these sites think will increase “engagement,” rather than assist in curation by being more attentive to what users actually want to see on their timelines. What’s absolutely insane about Meigs’ assertions above is that he’s ignoring his own complaints about xTwitter so he can pretend the real problem here is Bluesky:
If you can’t see the embed, it’s a screenshot of Meigs on xTwitter in 2019 saying:
Twitter’s goal with every change is to have us spend less time doing what WE want to (interact with the people we actually follow) and spend more time doing what Twitter wants them to do (get sucked into “trends” and #StupidHastags and viral outrage mobs).
Here’s a platform that doesn’t pull that bullshit. And Meigs shits on it because “conservative views” (you know the ones…) aren’t gaining a foothold at Bluesky.
I’m a Bluesky user. I don’t mind honest debates. But I’d much rather have a timeline I can closely control — one that gives me access to what I’m looking for and allows me to remove any detritus I come across with a couple of swift clicks — than whatever’s passing itself as “social media” elsewhere.
What’s on display here is the amazing fragility of people who can dish out tons of abuse but just can’t take it. It’s also exposing the people who are facing the uncomfortable fact that lots of internet users don’t like what they post or the people they identify with. Worse, they’re finding out they don’t like they people they identify with much either. Echo chambers aren’t great, but I’m sure people would prefer an echo chamber where most people are polite, helpful, and supportive, rather than the alternative xTwitter provides: a dark pit filled with the worst people you know. Meigs, for some reason, prefers the pit. At least there, he can soak in some tepid applause for owning the liberal snowflakes currently enjoying a site he doesn’t feel obliged to listen to him speak.
Let me start this off with a brief confession: while I’m not particularly into conspiracy theories in general, the JFK assassination is an outlier for me. I’ve been fascinated with JFK since I was a child and I don’t believe the official version of the story is the entire story, at a minimum. That throat clearing isn’t the main topic of this post, but it will inform you as to why any new information that comes out about the topic is of great interest to me.
So, while I’m no fan of the current administration, I did sit up and take notice when Trump released additional government files about the assassination in his first term, and again recently when the administration announced the release of the rest of the documents it has on the matter. I’m also completely unsurprised that the main reaction to what has been reviewed in the new files thus far has been mostly “meh.” I have not seen anything that remotely looks like a counterfactual to the official story in these documents and I didn’t expect to. There wasn’t going to be some secret document in there entitled, “Here’s how we killed him and who was involved.”
But I also didn’t expect to learn that the administration released the documents in such a disorganized and careless manner that they essentially doxxed a bunch of people who are very much still alive today.
And in typical Trump fashion, the release has been chaotic and slipshod. The files aren’t organized, summarized, or labeled in a way that makes sense. It’s just raw PDFs with a long numeric string uploaded onto a website. Click the PDF and see what you get. And, according to one lawyer going through them, they include the sensitive personal information of living people.
“The Trump Administration dox’d countless people who served on the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations back in 1977-79 by releasing their SSNs in full,” Mark Zaid, an attorney who works on National Security issues, said on Bluesky. “Some of these people are alive. I know them. This was totally unnecessary & contributed nothing to understanding 11/22/63.”
What is darkly funny about all of this is that the only reason Trump didn’t release these very files the first time around was, according to the man himself, so that the government could go through the documents to redact anything that pertained to current security concerns or corporeal human beings. Five years later, upon release, we learn that said review either wasn’t done at all, was done exceptionally poorly, or that this sensitive and personal information of living human beings was done purposefully.
Given the disorderly manner in which this release occurred, I would guess the last of those was not the actual intention. Never assume malice where incompetance is an equal or better explanation, as the saying goes. But with this adminstration, one fueled by grievance and revenge, you never can tell, I guess.
To be clear, more government transparency is a good thing, even if it has to come with several decades worth of baggage. But just like the supposed aim to reduce government spending, there is the orderly and intelligent way to approach it all, or the Trump way. The latter is done so incompetently so as to cause collateral damage. That’s the problem.
A startling government surveillance program that involved government investigators embedded in AT&T offices was accidentally released in response to an FOIA request (seeking documents about something else entirely) more than a decade ago.
But, since 2013, there’s still plenty that’s unknown about the DEA’s Hemisphere program. What’s known is this: the DEA was able to collect phone records in pretty much real-time, on-demand from AT&T. This went further than even the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records under its Section 215 authority — something that was ultimately shuttered by the agency after it found it impossible to comply with legislated reforms. On top of that, pulling data from landlines was far less useful than it used to be before everyone moved to mobile phones.
The DEA’s program, however, may still be running. If it is, it certainly can’t have improved over the last decade. We do know its problematic and easily abused — something made (almost) clear by a 2019 report by the DOJ Inspector General.
We still don’t have access to a fully un-redacted report. Unbelievably, the Inspector General’s office allowed the DEA to tell it what to redact from its 2019 report, allowing it to control the narrative, at least to a certain extent. Fortunately, some of those redactions have been excised, thanks to FOIA litigation by the Cato Institute.
In apparent response to a successful Cato Institute administrative appeal under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Department of Justice Inspector General’s (DoJ IG) office released today additional, highly revelatory data on a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) mass electronic surveillance program code-named HEMISPHERE.
[…]
Today, that less redacted version of the DoJ IG report was released on the IG’s website, and it provides further disturbing evidence of the symbiotic relationship between federal law enforcement and major telecommunications providers in the employment of warrantlessly obtained commercially collected data for surveillance and investigative purposes.
The full(er) report [PDF] provides a few more details to the Hemisphere picture. What’s known is that AT&T has generated “billions” of call records and provided access to them for more 15 years. Unlike the phone data harvested by the NSA under Section 215, there’s no expiration date on this data and, since it’s technically held by a private company, it’s up to AT&T to decide when (or if) the phone records are purged. Additionally, AT&T provided location data for mobile service users, something the NSA’s bulk collection didn’t contain.
What gets a bit more revealed here is the massive legal gray area that the program operated in. Both the DEA and the FBI requested more legal clarity from the DOJ. The FBI seemed to have genuine concerns about possible illegal misuse of this database. The DEA seemed a bit more interested in just getting a blanket “this all looks legal to us” green light from the office of legal counsel.
Even though the program had been in use since early 2007, it was more than a half-decade later that any sort of legal memo was issued. What arrived was way too little, far too late. Here’s the Inspector General’s take on the so-called legal authority the DEA relied on to exploit this ultra-cozy relationship with AT&T:
We found no evidence of any written legal analysis of the legal issues described above or of any other expected DEA use of Hemisphere in advance of the program. Indeed, it was not until January 2013, more than 5 years after the program began, that the DEA completed a robust written legal assessment, albeit in a draft memorandum that [name redacted] never memorialized into a final product or distributed to users. We believe that several earlier events should have alerted the DEA to the need for a careful legal review.
The 2019 report notes that the program is inactive. But it does state that — due to this lack of legal clarity — there’s nothing preventing the DEA (or FBI) from seeking this sort of arrangement with phone service providers in the future. It recommends the DEA seek a full legal assessment of this program, as well as any others it might be pursuing to replace it and have that in place before it moves forward with similar bulk record access. As Senator Ron Wyden made clear in 2023, the DEA has already moved forward with a program that’s basically Hemisphere 2.0. And, given that the DEA has refused to discuss this newer program with congressional leaders, it’s a safe bet there’s no controlling legal assessment in place to prevent history from repeating.
The Database Administration Super Bundle has 9 courses to help you go from data novice to expert administrator. You’ll discover how to build and manage databases with MySQL and MongoDB. Courses also cover Microsoft SQL Server, Informatica, Minitab, Tableau, and regression modeling. It’s on sale for $60.
Note: The BestNetTech Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from BestNetTech Deals helps support BestNetTech. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
There is no question that you are a dedicated public servant. You believe in our democracy. You believe in the norms that maintain it. You believe in its mission of bringing us together to promote the general welfare. There are many, many favorable things that can be said about you, your service, and your leadership up to now.
But you are not up for this fight for our nation’s future. And we need in leadership someone who is ready for it, right now, if any of those things that you value are going to survive.
That person is not you. You do not even seem to recognize that the fight for our country’s survival is already upon us. While people take hit after hit, to their livelihoods, physical well-being, freedoms and futures, and already countless have rolled up their sleeves to try to stem the onslaught, you continue as though everything is business as usual and there is not already an existential threat to our country that has landed at our door. “We will fight, and we will win!” you say, as if the moment to begin that fight has yet to come. You keep conjugating the Constitutional crisis in the future tense, apparently oblivious to the fact that it has been unfolding, at greater and greater cost, every day for the past two months, from the moment Trump took office—if not also long before.
And all you have done is greased the skids for it, as you have allowed a lawless tyrant the privilege of normal order that he has otherwise been upending with his every other move. You have allowed him, with only the most minimal resistance, to lawfully embed the corrupt and incompetent into the highest official roles in government, while also effectively allowing his most dangerous henchman to evade Senate supervision entirely as he attacks, without lawful authority or restraint, the country’s infrastructure and resources, as well as Congress’s own legislative and fiduciary roles.
Yet it is not clear that you have even noticed. Because while you acknowledge the role of the courts in trying to, belatedly, clean up the mess, at no point do you seem to understand your own. You have done almost nothing to resist, nothing to fight back, nothing to say no to all of these Trump-driven assaults on our Constitutional order. Your silence instead keeps saying yes.
Worse, you keep undermining anyone else’s ability to stand against it. No matter how right you thought you were on the continuing resolution, to undercut your party as unilaterally as you did is inexcusable. Even if you were right on the merits of the risked shutdown—and at best it was dubious, both legally and in terms of calculating the political cost to the GOP if it were pursued—you could not have been right enough to justify such destructive hubris to blow up the unity and momentum that at last had finally started to coalesce and surrender, for nothing, the power it possessed.
It’s a hubris that also expects voters to be fools. “We will win in 2026,” you predict, while daily negating any reason voters should reward you or your party with such victory and leaving the democratic institutions that would enable such an election to further erode. By refusing to flex your power in any even slightly meaningful way you teach the electorate that there is no point in voting for Democrats, no point giving them any more power, when you so adamantly refuse to use what power you already have. Yet you seem to hope voters somehow won’t notice, that they won’t notice how unqualified you are as stewards of the rule of law, when you cannot even recognize that it has been attacked when laws themselves aren’t obeyed and not just orders, or how ill-equipped you are to do anything but stand idly by while Trump dissects the nation. You do nothing but dull the alarm you should be raising, and yet still you assume the public will flock to Democrats when your silent complicity with all the harm he has already wrought obviates the primary need to elect Democrats at all: to stop it. It will garner no votes to continue down this road of inaction. It will only cause Democrats to lose and the country to be lost—in 2026, or, at this rate, even sooner.
It is time to meet the moment; the only question is how you will decide to. If you stay this course, tightly gripping the reins of power while you sabotage the fight your party and your people are ready and desperate to enter, few will see you as any sort of hero. No message you could hope to deliver will ever be taken seriously if you persist in behaving in this obstructive way. Whatever you may have accomplished in your career will be lost to the sands of time and you will be written into history as a Vichy clown, plagued by obtuse cowardice, who used his own power to make sure the nation would suffer the consequences of his own personal failures.
But if you are the public servant, the statesman, and the man you want to be remembered as, or indeed anywhere near qualified for the leadership role you are trying so hard to hold onto, then the true power play of such a leader is to stand aside. Even if you are at last ready to step up, to lead the fight that must be led, giving way to another may still be the best medicine, to bring something new to the calcified corridors of Congress. How things once were is no longer how they are now, and it is time for a different playbook than the one you had mastered. But you of all people should of course understand the importance of getting out of the way; after all, if you could yield to the GOP on the continuing resolution because you thought it was the right thing to do for the future, then you can yield to your own party for the same reason.
But if you do yield, now, under your own power, with the gratitude of the nation, you can do so knowing that we are a country that understands and appreciates the value of a noble sacrifice for the public good. And how for nearly 250 years we have celebrated those who set aside their power voluntarily, which is a lesson we all would benefit from being reminded of through your example.
Choose, then, to stand down as Senate Minority Leader, as the affirmative gift you are giving to the country you love.
And choose it before it is chosen for you.
WATCH: Schumer says "our democracy will be at stake" if Trump disobeys the Supreme Court—but "we're not there yet."
Just so we’re very clear up front: despite a lot of bullshit to the contrary, the Trump administration is completely dismantling whatever’s left of U.S. consumer protection and corporate oversight. That’s not hyperbole; between recent Supreme Court rulings, Trump executive orders, and the actions of radical agency bosses like Brendan Carr, they’re not being at all subtle about the goal.
They’re utterly disinterested in protecting consumers or smaller competitors from the harms created by shitty giant telecom monopolies. Gone is even the pretense of concern about the impacts of unchecked corporate power. Gone is any effort to protect consumers and healthy markets.
In their place is a weird fusion of rank corruption and radical zealotry, with Carr spending most of his time abusing FCC authority to threaten companies and journalists that refuse to kiss Trump’s ass, or launching fake “investigations” into telecom companies for not being racist enough.
Now Carr is looking to apply the final, killing blow to the FCC’s role as any sort of consumer watchdog, something it already didn’t do all that consistently, or well. In a public notice issued last week, Carr proclaimed he’s taking public comment on his plan to follow through on Trump’s executive order and basically completely defang the agency.
The goal is to make the FCC largely decorative on consumer protection, much to the pleasure of shitty regional telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast. Of course, Carr and friends phrase it somewhat differently:
“Specifically, we are seeking public input on identifying FCC rules for the purpose of alleviating unnecessary regulatory burdens. We seek comment on deregulatory initiatives that would facilitate and encourage American firms’ investment in modernizing their networks, developing infrastructure, and offering innovative and advanced capabilities.”
This is all dressed up as very serious adult policy thinking in some policy circles and in our feckless media. But it’s just overly verbose corruption in a shitty hat.
For 50 years, an underlying right wing (and “free market libertarian”) lie has been that basically all oversight of shitty giant telecom monopolies constitutes an “unnecessary regulatory burden.” And if you just strip away oversight of a giant shitty company like Comcast, innovative magic happens.
That magic, of course, never materializes; monopolized broadband access continues to be spotty, expensive, and unreliable due to regulatory capture and limited competition. Travel to nearly every town or city in America and behold the pretty widespread broadband industry market failure that’s resulted from this sort of coddling of consolidated corporate power.
It’s because if you strip away regulatory oversight of consolidated regional monopolies, they just double down on the shitty behavior. With neither competition nor regulatory oversight in place to constrain their worse impulses, they just perpetually exploit captive customers in increasingly “creative” ways. It’s why U.S. broadband remains more expensive and shittier than a long list of developed nations.
Still, the lie that large telecom giants face uniquely terrible, burdensome oversight in the U.S. remains a useful fiction for captured lackeys like Carr. But this mindless deregulation and defanged oversight of corporate power has very real, very obvious harms that go beyond high prices and shitty broadband. As we saw recently with the biggest Chinese hack of U.S. telecom infrastructure in recorded history.
These “mindless deregulation” folks have dressed up greed as some elaborate ethos, and like to pretend that competent regulatory oversight is radical extremism. It’s all in service to the singular goal of improved quarterly returns at absolutely any cost. There is zero interest in the real world harm of such a narrow ideology. They simply ignore the harms when they arise.
Except in this instance U.S. companies like AT&T and Comcast have finally bitten off more than they can chew. They signed up for Trump 2.0 thinking they’d just get more of what was common during the first Trump turn: tax cuts, rubber stamped merger approvals, and mindless deregulation.
But with Trumpism unconstrained by the courts or needs of re-election, they’re instead getting a heaping dose of authoritarianism: weird radical zealots who can ruin your businesses on a whim if you’re not suitably deferent to the mad child king; massive societal destabilization and chaos; weird, pointless tariff wars; recessions that ensure the public can’t pay for your already-overpriced broadband access. Enjoy.
