Violent metaphors abound for what’s happening in Washington: Elon Musk and his allies have taken a “slash-and-burn” approach to the government and a “sledgehammer” to government institutions, doing away with supposed waste and excess while leaving the fundamental structure intact. All of this is being done with the stated goal of ridding the federal workforce of the scourge of wokeness and “DEI” — diversity, equity, and inclusion, a term that has become a catchall for anything Musk and other MAGA insiders don’t like. USAID is DEI. The National Institutes of Health is DEI. The National Endowment for the Arts? Obviously DEI. We can probably all agree that the woke word cloud at the FBI Academy in Quantico is DEI. Major broadcasters are pushing DEI on their viewers; public school teachers are using it to indoctrinate impressionable young students. The only solution to this is, of course, to defund and dismantle everything.

The war on DEI is a smoke screen; it’s an opportunity to unite various conservative factions under a single rallying cry, giving them a common enemy on which to blame their myriad concerns. It unites recent converts to the cause, like Musk, wit …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A week after this story was first published, Apple removed its Advanced Data Protection feature in the UK in response to government demands, calling itself “gravely disappointed” with the move.

Originally published February 13th.

The encryption wars have reached a fever pitch, and the most contentious battle is not happening in the United States, where much of the action has been in the past — like the government’s efforts to restrict exports of encryption software until the 1990s and the FBI’s standoff with Apple in 2016. It’s in the United Kingdom, where the government has reportedly ordered Apple to give officials blanket access to iCloud users’ encrypted backups. And the order allegedly didn’t just apply to UK users — it demanded backdoor access for users worldwide. 

The secret order, first reported by The Washington Post, was issued in January under the auspices of the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act of 2016. Apple’s compliance or refusal will have ramifications far beyond the UK, potentially making users less safe and signaling to other governments that they, too, can seek backdoor access — a way of bypassing encryption — to users’ information via …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Within the past week, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-affiliated staffers have gained unprecedented access to sensitive US financial systems with data on millions of Americans, claimed to shut down one federal agency without an act of Congress, and invaded numerous government agencies. They’ve been opposed by lawsuits, public protests, and resistance within those agencies — and the situation remains constantly in flux. 

As a deadline for workers to accept a so-called “deferred resignation” looms on Monday, here’s where the rest of Musk’s government takeover attempt stands.

What has DOGE accessed?

Musk’s pseudo-department has reportedly deployed employees to at least 11 agencies: the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the General Services Administration, the Department of Labor, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Small Business Administration, and the Treasury.

Last week, he attempted to trim the federal workforce by offering legally dubious “def …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Marko Elez — the 25-year-old Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffer who has reportedly been combing through the Treasury Department’s payment systems — resigned from his position after the Wall Street Journal uncovered an old social media account linked to him with numerous posts promoting racism and eugenics.

“99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs, they’re going back don’t worry guys,” the user of the since-deleted X account @nullllptr posted in December, amid the H-1B debate that divided the tech-right. The account’s previous handle was @marko_elez, according to the Journal’s report.

Other posts called for repealing the Civil Rights Act and reinstating a “eugenic immigration policy.” 

Elez — a former employee of SpaceX, Starlink, and X — was one of the young DOGE employees tasked with spearheading Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal government. As Wired previously reported, Elez was among the DOGE staffers who had direct, administrator-level privileges on the Treasury Department’s payment systems. Far from an apolitical effort to cut down expenses, DOGE has attempted to root out so-called “DEI” — short for …

Read the full story at The Verge.

President Donald Trump’s administration is being sued over Elon Musk’s alleged “massive and unprecedented” intrusion into the American government’s payment systems. The suit, filed in a Washington, DC federal court Monday evening by the advocacy group Public Citizen, calls for the court to stop the “unlawful, ongoing, systematic, and continuous disclosure of personal and financial information … to Elon Musk and other members of the so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), or to any other person.”

Public Citizen filed the suit against the Treasury Department on behalf of the Alliance for Retired Americans, American Federation of Government Employees, and the Service Employees International Union days after reports emerged that Musk and DOGE had gained access to federal payment systems — and to millions of Americans’ Social Security numbers. The suit claims that the Treasury Department, led by recently appointed Secretary Scott Bessent, violated the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Internal Revenue Code’s regulations surrounding taxpayer information by letting Musk and DOGE access these systems.

“People who must share information with the federal …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Federal Communications Chair Brendan Carr has ordered investigations into NPR and PBS with the goal of slashing the money given to the government-funded organizations, The New York Times reports. 

The investigations are ostensibly about PBS and NPR’s member stations’ sponsorships, according to a letter from Carr obtained by the Times. “I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials,” the letter reads. “In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.” Both PBS and NPR’s chief executives told the Times that their advertising complies with the FCC’s underwriting regulations. 

“To the extent that taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements,” the letter continues, “then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars.”

Carr is already facing pushback. In an emailed statement to The Verge, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says the investigation is “yet another Administration effort to weaponize the power of the FCC. The FCC has no business intimidating and silencing broadcast media.”

Carr’s move is in line with other Trump administration efforts to cut funding for public goods and services. Carr — who Trump appointed to the commission in 2017 — wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC. While Carr’s chapter largely focused on using the commission to rein in big tech, a separate chapter on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting called for cutting off the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government-funded nonprofit that supports PBS and NPR. The document, written by Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez, called out public media’s “demonstrated pattern of bias” against conservatives.

The Heritage Foundation is by no means the only conservative organization to target with NPR. The public radio station and its local affiliates have long been targets of the right. Most recently, in 2024, on the heels of his successful ouster of Harvard president Claudine Gay, right-wing strategist Chris Rufo launched a “campaign to expose” NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s “anti-speech, anti-truth philosophy.” As writer Renee DiResta pointed out, Rufo’s beef with Maher began with an essay by now-former NPR editor Uri Berliner published in the Free Press about how his employer had gone woke. Rufo then accused Maher of “following the Claudine Gay playbook,” and published two posts about Maher in City Journal, the Manhattan Institute’s in-house magazine — including one in which he implied Maher was a CIA asset.

Update, January 30th: Added comment from FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez.

Fitbit is paying a $12.25 million fine over its Ionic smartwatches, which the company recalled in 2022 after reports that the watches’ lithium-ion batteries overheated and, in some cases, burned customers.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has provisionally accepted the settlement. The commission worked with Fitbit to recall 1.7 million Ionic watches in 2022 after receiving 115 reports of overheating batteries. Of those reports, 78 mentioned burn injuries, including two instances in which consumers received third-degree burns from their watches and four instances of second-degree burns. Despite complaints throughout 2018, 2019, and 2020 — that continued after a firmware update to address the issue in 2020 — the government agency says “Fitbit did not immediately report to the Commission as required.”

The recall only affected Fitbit’s Ionic watches, but some consumers say other Fitbit devices have similar issues. In 2023, consumers sued Google — which owns Fitbit — claiming that all its devices had battery issues that led to overheating, creating fire hazards and even burning customers. The complaint claims that Fitbit tried to blame the watches’ issues on “consumer hygiene” and included multiple accounts of Fitbit customer support ghosting customers who asked about issues with their watches.

Per the settlement, Fitbit will now be required to maintain internal controls to ensure all its devices are compliant with the Consumer Product Safety Act.

Google worked with the Israeli military in the immediate aftermath of its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, racing to beat out Amazon to provide AI services, according to company documents obtained by the Washington Post.

In the weeks after Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel, employees at Google’s cloud division worked directly with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — even as the company told both the public and its own employees that Google only worked with civilian government ministries, the documents reportedly show.

Weeks after the war began, an employee with Google’s cloud division escalated the IDF’s military’s requests for access to Google’s AI technology, according to the Post. In another document, an employee warned that Google needed to quickly respond to the military’s requests, or else Israel would turn to Amazon for its cloud computing needs. In a November 2023 document, an employee thanks a coworker for handling the IDF’s request. Months later, employees requested additional access to AI tools for the IDF.

Amid this, Google was punishing employees for protesting Project Nimbus, Israel’s $1.2 billion contract for Google and Amazon’s cloud computing services. Google fired 28 employees who staged sit-in protests at the company’s offices in New York and California, some of whom were also arrested during the demonstrations.

At the same time, Google denied that it was working with the Israeli military. “We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy,” Anna Kowalczyk, the external communications manager for Google Cloud, told The Verge in April 2024. “This work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services,” Kowalczyk said.

Google did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

One of President Donald Trump’s first moves in office was an executive order repealing birthright citizenship — something he promised to do but didn’t deliver on during his first term. The move, which is almost certainly unconstitutional, would affect more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country as well as people in the US on non-immigrant visas, including more than 580,000 people with H1-Bs. The executive order is slated to go into effect 30 days after its announcement, though two lawsuits filed in federal courts could slow or halt its implementation.

Trump floated the idea of doing away with birthright citizenship in 2018. At the time, his critics pointed out that the move would require a constitutional amendment since birthright citizenship is enshrined under the 14th Amendment. “No president can change the Constitution with the stroke of a pen,” Beth Werlin, then-executive director of the American Immigration Council, said at the time. To get around this, Trump’s executive order attempts to reinterpret the 14th Amendment rather than amending or repealing it altogether.

As the order notes, the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The courts have historically taken “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to mean anyone who is present in the country, regardless of their immigration status — but Trump’s order claims that the amendment:

does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

Put simply, under Trump’s order, the children of most undocumented immigrants wouldn’t be US citizens, nor would the children of people in the country on student, work, or tourist visas. This is more than a reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment — it’s an attempt to do away with the jus soli principle that undergirds US citizenship.

Since the country’s inception, the United States has had jus soli citizenship; anyone born in the country or its overseas territories is a citizen, regardless of their parents’ nationality or immigration status. This is different from jus sanguinis citizenship, under which only people whose parents are nationals of a certain country are granted citizenship. There have been some historical exceptions to jus soli citizenship in the US — most notably, the exclusion of enslaved African Americans and their children, as delineated by the Supreme Court’s decision in the landmark 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case. After the end of the Civil War, Congress enacted the 14th Amendment, granting citizenship to anyone born on US soil.

Two lawsuits have already been filed challenging the executive order. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a host of other organizations filed a suit in a New Hampshire federal court on Monday night, hours after the order was announced. Attorneys general from 18 states — along with San Francisco and Washington, DC — filed a separate suit on Tuesday in a federal district court in Massachusetts.

“Neither the Constitution nor any federal statute confers any authority on the President,” the ACLU lawsuit reads. The ACLU argues that allowing the executive order to stand “would ‘promot[e] the creation and perpetuation of a subclass’ of children who were born in the United States but lack fundamental legal recognition and face stigma as a result of their novel and uncertain status.” Moreover, the suit claims, the order “will invite persistent questioning of the citizenship of children of immigrants—particularly children of color.”

Both the ACLU lawsuit and the suit filed by 18 states ask the courts to block the executive order before it goes into effect.

Two major tech trade groups are challenging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) effort to treat payment apps and digital wallets like banks. In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, DC, NetChoice and TechNet claim that the CFPB’s digital payment regulation, announced on November 21st, 2024, is arbitrary and capricious.

“The CFPB’s unlawful power grab undermines the rule of law, further bloats the administrative state and puts American consumers and innovation at risk,” Chris Marchese, NetChoice’s director of litigation, said in a statement. “The CFPB’s actions create unnecessary roadblocks for businesses striving to meet consumer needs and set the stage for increased prices and reduced options.”

This is the second lawsuit related to the regulation. Google filed a lawsuit in December after the CFPB placed Google Payment Corp. under federal supervision. In a statement to The Verge, Google spokesperson José Castañeda called the rule “a clear case of government overreach.”

The rule, which went into effect in late December, lets the CFPB oversee digital payment processors’ compliance with federal privacy and fraud laws through “proactive examinations.” The bureau estimated that the apps included under the rule — including Apple Pay, Google Wallet, PayPal, Venmo, and CashApp — collectively process more than 13 billion transactions a year.

But NetChoice and TechNet claim that the CFPB didn’t sufficiently identify consumer risks or gaps in oversight that would justify the rule. “The bureau failed to show that consumer risks the rule was even meant to alleviate in its haste to dream up a problem in search of a solution,” the suit claims.

More than 700,000 US-based users have downloaded RedNote, a popular Chinese social app, as the TikTok ban deadline looms — but they may find themselves looking for yet another TikTok alternative soon. A US official told CBS News that Xiaohongshu, the app more commonly referred to as RedNote, has many of the same issues that caused Congress to ban TikTok and that the app could eventually face a similar ban unless it divests from its China-based parent company.

“This appears to be the kind of app that the statute would apply to and could face the same restrictions as TikTok if it’s not divested,” the anonymous official told CBS News on Thursday, referring to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, the bill under which Congress banned TikTok.

Among the problems lawmakers raised in the lead-up to the TikTok ban was the Chinese government’s sway over TikTok’s content moderation practices — an issue that appears to apply to RedNote as well. Per The Information, RedNote has begun removing US users’ posts that are considered “too sensitive” for the app, including posts discussing LGBTQ topics. Three people with knowledge of communications between RedNote and officials with the Cyberspace Administration of China told The Information that regulators are concerned about politically sensitive posts — and Chinese officials told RedNote’s government relations team to ensure that users in China can’t see US users’ posts.

Privacy advocates are also warning against using RedNote. In an emailed statement, Cooper Quintin, the senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said “anyone for whom privacy is a matter of personal safety” should think twice before downloading RedNote, adding that the EFF has similar concerns about US-based apps like Facebook.

“People looking for alternative social media apps should be cautious about the privacy implications of sharing information with an app that has not yet seen substantial public scrutiny outside of China,” Quintin said. “This is certainly not a platform which values free speech – it’s a heavily censored application on which topics such as political speech, drugs and addiction, and sexuality are more tightly controlled even than similar social networks. This is also not a platform that will protect you from US-based surveillance capitalism as it shares data with Facebook and Google ad networks.”

As fires rage across Los Angeles and tens of thousands flee their homes, the usual suspects have decided to blame the blazes on their political enemies. In a series of posts on Truth Social, President-elect Donald Trump claimed firefighters’ inability to get the fires under control was due to California Governor Gavin Newsom’s water policies, including an effort to “protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!).” Meanwhile, on X, Elon Musk suggested that the fires were spreading due to the city fire chief’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. “DEI means people DIE,” Musk wrote in a Wednesday night post.

Five people have indeed died in the Eaton fire thus far, and upward of 130,000 Los Angeles County residents are under evacuation orders, according to the Los Angeles Times. But the rampant spread of the fires isn’t due to the delta smelt, DEI, or even — as Trump, Musk, and scores of mainstream publications have falsely claimed — cuts to the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget. These claims aren’t without consequence. Last year, FEMA workers received threats on TikTok and other social media platforms as rampant disinformation spread in the wake of the devastation caused by hurricanes Milton and Helene.

The first wave of disinformation focused on fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades, which abruptly ran out of water on Tuesday night as firefighters attempted to put out the initial blaze. The hydrants, Trump said, were running dry because of Newsom’s water policies. “I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday. “He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!” In a separate post, Trump claimed Newsom had “refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.”

Newsom’s office responded on Wednesday, clarifying that the declaration Trump referred to in his post didn’t exist. “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration – that is pure fiction,” Newsom communications director Izzy Gardon told CalMatters. “The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.”

Mark Gold, a board member of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, told the outlet that statewide water management policies, including efforts to protect the delta smelt, had nothing to do with the lack of water in the hydrants. “Tying Bay-Delta management into devastating wildfires that have cost people’s lives and homes is nothing short of irresponsible, and it’s happening at a time when the Metropolitan Water District has the most water stored in its system in the history of the agency,” Gold said. “It’s not a matter of having enough water coming from Northern California to put out a fire. It’s about the continued devastating impacts of a changing climate.”

The lack of water in the Pacific Palisades hydrants was instead due to a reduction in water pressure caused by increased demand, the LA Times reported. Janisse Quiñones, the chief executive and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, told the paper that so much water was being used that the utility wasn’t able to fill the tanks quickly enough. The demand for water at lower elevations was also preventing the utility from refilling tanks at higher elevations, according to the LA Times.

Wednesday night, as powerful Santa Ana winds spread the fires to Altadena, Pasadena, and the Hollywood Hills, right-wing influencers accused city officials of slashing the fire department’s budget and prioritizing diversity programs over sound fire prevention policy — which Musk reposted on X.

But as Politico pointed out, Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass didn’t cut $23 million from the fire department’s budget, a claim that has been repeated by critics on both the right and the left, some of whom said Bass cut fire department funding to pay for a new police contract. The fire department’s budget actually increased by more than $50 million over the previous year, according to Politico, though others have noted that LA fire chief Kristin Crowley criticized Bass’ decision to cut $7 million from the department’s overtime budget just a few weeks before the Palisades fire. “The reduction … has severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires,” Crowley wrote in a December 4th memo.

This nuance is, of course, being lost on X, where influencers have also begun posting AI-generated images of looters descending upon the Palisades and the Hollywood sign engulfed in flames. Disinformation is spreading like... you can probably guess what.

Google and Microsoft are the latest tech companies to donate to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration. Each company contributed $1 million to the fund — the same amount pledged by Meta, Amazon, Sam Altman, and Tim Cook.

In a statement to CNBC, Karan Bhatia, Google’s global head of government affairs and public policy, said the company is supporting the inauguration “with a livestream on YouTube and a direct link on our homepage,” as well as with a financial contribution. The donation may be part of Google’s larger strategy to win over Trump, who has threatened to break up the tech giant or shut it down altogether.

Microsoft, which is also giving $1 million, previously contributed $500,000 to Trump’s first inauguration and donated the same amount to President Joe Biden’s inauguration fund, a company spokesperson told CNBC. Per CNBC, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has met with Trump multiple times, and was involved in negotiations over acquiring TikTok in 2020, when Trump tried to ban the app in the US.

Texas is suing a New York doctor for prescribing mifepristone and misoprostol — the pills used for medication abortion — to a Texas resident via telemedicine, an alleged violation of the state’s strict abortion law.

Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit against Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter, founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedecine, in Collin County civil court on Thursday. Carpenter doesn’t face criminal charges, but the state is seeking up to a $250,000 fine.

This is the first time Texas has sued an out-of-state doctor for providing abortion services to a Texas patient via telemedicine. Notably, New York, where Carpenter is based, has a “shield law” that’s designed to protect doctors who prescribe and send abortion pills to patients in other states, including those that, like Texas, have outlawed abortion.

“Regardless of what the courts in Texas do, the real question is whether the courts in New York recognize it,” Greer Donley, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told the Texas Tribune.

According to the complaint, a 20-year-old woman who became pregnant sometime in mid-May was prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol by Carpenter at an undisclosed time. The woman, who is not named in the lawsuit, experienced adverse side effects from the pills and asked her partner to take her to the hospital because of hemorrhage or severe bleeding on July 16th.

At the hospital, the woman’s partner was told that she “‘had been’ nine weeks pregnant before losing the child,” the complaint says, which made him conclude that she “had intentionally withheld information from him regarding her pregnancy, and he further suspected” that the woman “had in fact done something to contribute to the miscarriage or abortion” of the pregnancy. According to the complaint, she had not previously told her partner she was pregnant. Upon returning to their home, the woman’s partner found the two medications Carpenter allegedly prescribed to the woman.

The complaint does not say when the woman obtained the medication.

Texas has one of the strictest abortion laws in the country. The state has a near-total ban on abortion at all stages of pregnancy, with narrow exceptions if the life of the mother is at risk but no exceptions for cases of rape and incest. According to the complaint, the unnamed 20-year-old woman “did not have any life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from the pregnancy that placed her at risk of death or any serious risk of substantial impairment.”

Meta has donated $1 million to president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration fund, The Wall Street Journal reports. Zuckerberg’s team reportedly told Trump’s inaugural committee about Meta’s planned donation before Zuckerberg and Trump dined together at Mar-a-Lago in November.

Before the dinner, Zuckerberg showed off Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses and gifted a pair to Trump, according to the Journal. Zuckerberg’s advisers also met with incoming White House officials, including incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

The donation marks a significant shift for Zuckerberg, who has until recently shied away from politics. Zuckerberg called Trump to congratulate him on his election victory. But he didn’t publicly endorse a candidate in 2020 — and as Meta spokespeople have repeatedly emphasized, he also didn’t endorse anyone in 2024, despite Trump’s claims that Zuckerberg called him to say there’s “no way” he could vote for a Democrat after the attempt on Trump’s life at a Pennsylvania rally. (Zuckerberg also called Trump’s reaction to the shooting “badass.”) Still, Zuckerberg has made increasingly unsubtle overtures to Trump, who has threatened the Facebook founder over the years.

The dinner — and the donation — are signs that the notoriously rocky relationship between Zuckerberg and Trump is starting to soften. Trump has had it out for Zuckerberg since Facebook banned his account in the wake of the January 6th riots, and at one point said Zuckerberg should be jailed due to Facebook’s alleged interference in the 2020 election.

Nearly half of US teens are “almost constantly” online, though the platforms they spend their time on vary significantly, according to a new Pew survey.

Despite some variety in their overall online habits, virtually all teenagers use YouTube. Of the 1,391 teenagers polled by the Pew Research Center, 90 percent said they use the site, a slight decrease from 95 percent in 2022. And 73 percent of them go on YouTube every day, making it by far the most popular platform for teenage users. The second-most popular app is TikTok, which 63 percent of teens say they use.

Pew Research Center

But there’s a gender divide, especially among teenagers who say they “almost constantly” use either app: 19 percent of girls say they use TikTok that often, while the same share of boys are constantly on YouTube.

And even this extremely online demographic isn’t using all websites equally. Just 6 percent of teenagers polled said they use Threads, Meta’s microblogging app, and only 32 percent use Facebook — down from 71 percent a decade ago. The only Meta product a majority of teenagers use is Instagram, whose popularity has increased since 2014.

There seems to be a preference for image- and video-based platforms among the teenagers polled: X and Reddit were also much less popular, with 17 percent and 14 percent of teens saying they use them, respectively. And teens’ X usage has declined significantly over the past decade: a decade ago, when it was still called Twitter, 33 percent of US teens used it. But teens’ use of some image-based apps — including Snapchat — is on the decline as well. In fact, the only app that has experienced a rise in popularity is WhatsApp, which is now used by 23 percent of teenagers.

Police have arrested Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old software developer, in connection with the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Mangione, of Maryland, was detained at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania on Monday morning.

Mangione was taken into custody on local firearm charges, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters. He has not been charged in connection with the shooting but is “believed to be our person of interest,” Tisch said.

Police have been searching for Thompson’s killer for nearly a week, despite the shooting taking place in public outside a Manhattan hotel. The manhunt has thus far relied on just a few grainy images of a man whose face is largely obscured by a mask and hoodie. Investigators have reportedly been looking for more surveillance images of the suspect to load into facial recognition software.

Police were led to Mangione via a “combination of old-school detective work and new age technology,” Tisch said. “We deployed drones, K9 units, and scuba divers. We leveraged the domain awareness system, argos cameras, and conducted aviation canvases.”

Despite scant visual evidence, a McDonald’s employee recognized Mangione on Monday morning and called police, the New York Times reports. “He was just sitting there eating,” Joseph Kenny, the New York Police Department’s chief of detectives, said at a press briefing Monday.

Mangione reportedly had a gun, a silencer, and four fake IDs in his possession. The gun appeared to be a 3D-printed “ghost gun,” Kenny told reporters. After being apprehended, Mangione showed police a fake New Jersey ID, Kenny said. The ID was the same one used to check into a hostel in Manhattan on November 24th, eight days before the shooting. Sources also tell the New York Post that he was carrying a “manifesto” criticizing the US healthcare industry.

Three bullets recovered from the scene of the shooting had “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” written on them in permanent marker, two police officials told the Associated Press last week. Police later clarified that one of the bullets had “delay” written on it, not “defend.” The words are reminiscent of Delay, Deny, Defend: What Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It, the title of a 2010 book by Rutgers Law professor Jay M. Feinman.

The shooting’s apparent anti-insurance motivation has led to expressions of support across the political spectrum for the assailant. Online sleuths have identified several online profiles that appear to be linked to Mangione, including a Goodreads account on which he left a favorable review of Industrial Society and Its Future, the manifesto written by Ted Kaczynski.

Anker is recalling its Soundcore and PowerConf Bluetooth Speakers after receiving 33 reports of the speakers’ lithium-ion batteries overheating and, in some instances, emitting smoke or causing small fires.

The affected models — A3102016, A3302011 and A3302031 — were sold exclusively on Amazon in 2023 and cost between $28 and $130, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). Approximately 69,000 speakers were sold in the US, and an additional 9,764 were sold i Canada.

Anker and Amazon have contacted all known purchasers, according to the CPSC. The affected speakers can be identified by an SN code that is printed on the underside of the speakers. To check whether your devices were affected, type the SN code on Anker’s website. Anker said it will offer free replacement speakers to those affected.

Consumers who own the recalled speakers are advised to stop using them immediately, power them off, and disconnect them from chargers or other external power sources.

OpenAI, the AI model maker that used to describe its mission as saving the world, is partnering with Anduril, a military contractor, the two companies announced Wednesday.

As part of the partnership, OpenAI will integrate its software into Anduril’s counterdrone systems, which detect and take down drones. It’s OpenAI’s first partnership with a defense contractor — and a significant reversal of its earlier stance towards the military. OpenAI’s terms of service once banned “military and warfare” use of its technology, but it softened its position on military use earlier this year, changing its terms of service in January to remove the proscription.

“OpenAI builds AI to benefit as many people as possible, and supports U.S.-led efforts to ensure the technology upholds democratic values,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. “Our partnership with Anduril will help ensure OpenAI technology protects U.S. military personnel, and will help the national security community understand and responsibly use this technology to keep our citizens safe and free.”

As the Wall Street Journal notes, Anduril — currently valued at $14 billion — has a $200 million counterdrone systems contract with the Marine Corps. But OpenAI won’t just benefit financially from its Anduril partnership; it also stands to gain political clout. Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey was an early supporter of president-elect Donald Trump, and also has ties to Elon Musk, one of the heads of the still-nebulous (and still nonexistent) Department of Government Efficiency. And the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think-tank working closely with the Trump transition team, has proposed that Trump embrace AI to create a new “Manhattan Project” for defense.

A misinformation expert accused of using AI to generate a legal document admitted he used ChatGPT to help him organize his citations, leading to “hallucinations” that critics said called the entire filing into question. Jeff Hancock, the founder of the Stanford Social Media Lab who wrote the document, says the errors don’t change the “substantive points in the declaration.”

Hancock submitted the affidavit in support of Minnesota’s “Use of Deep Fake Technology to Influence an Election” law, which is being challenged in federal court by Christopher Khols — a conservative YouTuber who posts under the name Mr Reagan — and Minnesota state Rep. Mary Franson. After discovering that Hancock’s filing seemed to contain citations that didn’t exist, attorneys for Khols and Franson said it was “unreliable” and asked that it be excluded from consideration.

In a subsequent declaration filed late last week, Hancock acknowledged that he used ChatGPT to draft the declaration but denies he used it to write anything. “I wrote and reviewed the substance of the declaration, and I stand firmly behind each of the claims made in it, all of which are supported by the most recent scholarly research in the field and reflect my opinion as an expert regarding the impact of AI technology on misinformation and its societal effects,” Hancock wrote.

As for the citation errors, Hancock explained that he used Google Scholar and GPT-4o “to identify articles that were likely to be relevant to the declaration so that I could merge that which I knew already with new scholarship.” Hancock says he used GPT-4o to create a citation list, not to write the document, and didn’t realize the tool generated “two citation errors, popularly referred to as ‘hallucinations’” and added incorrect authors to another citation.

“I did not intend to mislead the Court or counsel,” Hancock wrote in his most recent filing. “I express my sincere regret for any confusion this may have caused. That said, I stand firmly behind all the substantive points in the declaration.”