Month: August 2026

The End of Google Search as We Know It ⇥ theringer.com

Katie Baker, the Ringer:

Look, there’s maybe nothing less cool than waxing nostalgic about Google of all things. It’s like mourning the Astor Place Starbucks (or getting sentimental about any Blockbuster Video — although most people aren’t ready for that conversation). But I don’t think I’m really missing Google Search as much as I’m missing the days when it was mining more fertile and open ground.

As Baker writes, it is not simply the effect of declining Google traffic on publishers that is concerning. It is also the effect A.I. tools and features — including those from Google itself — are having on the web at large. Many websites have attempted to restrict traffic from scrapers and automated services, a side effect of which is that they become more difficult to use for people, and less findable through advanced search queries like the site: operator.

It is hard to reckon with the notion that Google was only incidentally a utility. It worked so well for so long and for so many different audiences that it now seems positively quaint to think of a time when I could use it for deep research into other stuff. It still is the best we have simply because of its longevity: there is no competitor with a usable index dating back to the 1990s. (Bing’s date picker, for example, was designed by someone who hates you, your family, and your friends.) But Google has abused the trust of publishers so thoroughly that it has effectively sabotaged its most specialized and helpful use cases. It is a shame.

Judge Orders Meta to Create $567M Abatement Fund for Child Harms in New Mexico ⇥ santafenewmexican.com

Phaedra Haywood, the Santa Fe New Mexican:

A state district judge in Santa Fe on Thursday ordered social media giant Meta Platforms Inc. to pay $567 million into an abatement fund to address public harm to New Mexico children and teens.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid’s ruling resolves the second of a two-part civil proceeding in a landmark case filed in 2023 by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who argued Meta’s social media platforms have led to a youth mental health crisis in the state and have exposed kids to exploitation by sexual predators.

This is in addition to a $375 million penalty issued by a jury in March.

The judge’s orders are worth reading, I think, because they show the careful reasoning that guided the state’s new requirements of Meta. People like Eric Goldman and Techdirt’s Mike Masnick who worried that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would be fundamentally undermined by the verdict of this case might be pleased. For example, the judge declined to mandate changes to “features designed to maximize screen time, such as autoplay videos [and] infinite scroll” because it would risk “running afoul of the First Amendment and Section 230 because of the direct effect those features have on content presentation”. If features like those — or algorithmic recommendations, about which the state’s proposed changes “are vague and aspirational” — are to be altered, it is something this judge punted to the two other branches of U.S. government.

Similarly, the judge declined the state’s proposal to restrict or eliminate end-to-end encryption in Instagram messages. In part, that is because Meta already removed the feature in March. But it is also because the evidence did not point to end-to-end encryption being of particular concern (paragraph 149):

Fundamentally, regarding sextortion, grooming and other exploitative activities, it is the algorithmically recommended connections of adults and adolescents that creates the most significant harm.

To that end, the judge says children’s accounts must not be recommended to adult users (paragraph 143), something Meta apparently does not already do.

Meta must make many other changes to the way it handles accounts belonging to children, including this curious restriction (paragraph 170):

Meta shall implement a mandatory usage time limit for accounts belonging to users under 18 years of age. Meta shall restrict the usage of all such users to not more than 90 hours of use per month cumulatively across Facebook and Instagram.

However, because of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, the judge cannot order that Meta “request children to submit personal data or be passively tracked online, even for age-verification purposes”. Therefore, all of these age-based limitations will be based on estimations or information derived from other interactions.

Many of the most damning statements in this decision are quotes from internal Meta research, and the company could have made lots of positive changes itself. Instead, it exploited its own findings. A May 2020 presentation, for example, “explicitly connected notifications to time spent: a graphic included in the presentation shows the phrase ‘Fewer Notifications,’ which is then followed by an arrow pointing to ‘Fewer Sessions,’ which is followed by an arrow pointing to ‘Less Time Spent.'” while a presentation from June 2023 found “[p]erceived life interference from app use is highest for younger users”. Now that it has been forced to react by this court, it suggested a bunch of stuff it could do, which often agreed with its recommendations: limiting push notifications during school hours and at night, removing like counts, comparing itself to a polluting factory, and so on. Meta and its peers cannot and will not self-govern, even when they have the research. I have low expectations these changes will be rolled out to child users worldwide.

Marketers Are Hoping Brand Mentions on Reddit Will Influence Chatbots ⇥ theverge.com

Mia Sato, the Verge:

When web traffic is funneled through LLMs instead of a traditional search results page, as Google has been doing, being cited by a chatbot becomes ever more important. Now, a whole host of startups, brands, and agencies are coming to Reddit to try to promote their companies in hopes that they will get picked up by AI. In an effort to try to manipulate LLM responses and stuff AI search results with brand-friendly answers, marketers have descended upon Reddit, a pseudo-anonymous platform that users have come to associate with authenticity and unfiltered, truthful opinions.

Marketers and search optimization specialists have been doing this kind of thing for years but, as Sato explains, their strategies have become more surreptitious in recent years. Because they are no longer as singularly focused as juicing the ranking position of a client’s website in search results, they no longer need to include links or other common tells of search marketing spam. They merely need to mention the brand name in a positive context — a lot — with the hope of influencing what A.I. search will regurgitate.

I have noticed this kind of thing on Wikipedia, too. According to a presentation given last year by NP Digital, the search optimization company run by Neil Patel, Wikipedia.com [sic] is the second most commonly cited domain in Google’s A.I. Overviews. In a different presentation, this one from December 2024, NP Digital “highly recommend[s]” treating Wikipedia as a marketing opportunity. I stumbled across a result of their work recently when I was reading the article for James Hoffmann. There are two mentions of Bellwether Coffee that seemed out of place and, when I checked the page’s revisions, saw that they had been made by an employee of NP Digital to promote Bellwether. The employee tried creating a page for the company, too, but it was deleted, but the company still has those critical brand name mentions on one of the world’s most visited web domains.

Sato interviewed Mike Moschella, director of analytics at marketing firm DKC, about the wisdom of the crowds at Reddit and Wikipedia:

“The starting point of all business analytics is this idea that you can have a better price, you have better service, or you can have better quality, but you can’t have all three,” Moschella says. “If you say [your company’s stock] is the best stock ever in the universe, you can issue that press release a million times, but WallStreetBets [the subreddit] isn’t going to buy it if the fundamentals don’t agree.” Reddit should force brands to be more “honest and authentic,” Moschella says — at least in an ideal world.

Remind me again: the users of which website succumbed to mass hysteria based on a conspiracy theory about mall video game retailer GameStop and, subsequently, applied the same formula to Bed, Bath & Beyond? Top minds, I tell you.

Digital-Only Media Is a Loss for Libraries, Too ⇥ arl.org

Sally Sax, writing for the Association of Research Libraries:

Twenty-five years after the US copyright office’s first DMCA review, libraries operate in an increasingly non-competitive digital information environment. A lack of digital ownership rights remains a critical barrier to libraries serving their missions as memory institutions. The closest libraries can get to ownership of commercial digital content is a perpetual access license (PAL), and the marketplace may be deciding that PALs are no longer viable from its perspective. […]

If libraries are restricted from keeping working copies of digital media due to software restrictions, prohibitive costs, and legal concerns, people are going to look back a hundred or more years from now and wonder why we decided we no longer wanted to keep a cultural record. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders.

Who Is Legally to Blame for Autonomous A.I. Hacks? ⇥ techcrunch.com

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch:

Under current U.S. hacking laws, a human can face criminal charges for breaking into someone else’s computer without permission. But when an AI agent autonomously hacks into a company’s computers, determining who is liable is much murkier.

The surprise admissions by OpenAI and Anthropic that their unreleased AI models autonomously hacked into several companies have upended our understanding of America’s computer hacking laws, prompting discussions over whether the companies could face legal reprisals.

You can add Meta to the list of companies that have done some light digital breaking-and-entering because they insufficiently secured an A.I. model. In any case, I am fascinated by the seemingly pervasive idea that obviously illegal things somehow become a grey area when a highly-valued A.I. company is responsible. Corporations now allegedly authorize mass piracy at the highest levels and use illicit movie rips as though it is just another day.

EchoFeed is Shutting Down ⇥ rknight.me

Robb Knight:

I’m shutting down EchoFeed within the next 12 months when the final subscriptions expire. It will continue to run as it is until then so if you’ve already paid you have access until the end of your subscription.

EchoFeed was launched just a couple of years ago and I have been using it ever since to automatically publish links to the latest posts on Bluesky and Mastodon. It has been a really good service — the kind of thing I happily paid for and, in the best way, would forget about.

But the reasons Knight gives for shutting it down are completely understandable. Trying to manage this kind of service with, say, hundreds of normal users would probably be challenging; with lots of abusive users, too, it sounds like a nightmare.

If you know of a similar service, please let me know.

Uber’s Strategy for Fighting Sexual Assault Suits Is Leering and Traumatic ⇥ nytimes.com

Emily Steel, New York Times (gift link):

More than 4,000 lawsuits have been filed, so many that thousands were combined to streamline procedural matters. Most remain in the early stages. The New York Times reviewed documents from the three cases that reached trial and about a dozen others that have advanced to the stage when the parties start exchanging documents and conducting depositions.

The litigation has revealed a clear pattern: Uber’s lawyers scour women’s private communications, medical records, therapy notes and other sources for sensitive details, including other sexual assaults, childhood abuse and domestic violence. They grill the women about those issues, their sex lives and their behavior on the night of the incident.

If Uber’s defence counsel wants to look at any history, it should be that of the company they represent.

There is a brief exploration in this article about why victims and their family members, therapists, and friends are deposed in these cases. In short, these are civil lawsuits that, per Steel, are filed by people “seeking compensation for pain and suffering”, thereby giving Uber great latitude in its defence. This is more limited in criminal trials. Perhaps my true frustration here is with a justice system that leaves sexual assault victims with few options that treat them with dignity and provide a chance at closure.

A TikTok A/B Test Proves It Is Responsible for What Users See ⇥ bloomberg.com

In 2023, Bloomberg Businessweek asked TikTok for comment as it reported out a story about users who were recommended videos about self-harm and suicide, particularly teenagers like Chase Nasca. It is a difficult read. As a result of this press outreach, TikTok analyzed Nasca’s account and why he was given so much of this material that it likely played a role when he took his own life at just sixteen years old.

Olivia Carville, of Bloomberg Businessweek, recently obtained that internal report:

Chase’s account was stuck in a so-called filter bubble, an online echo chamber that pumped out repetitive content the algorithm predicted he’d want to watch. There he received an “onslaught” of suicide and self-harm content, according to the document. Because Chase was in the control group, it says, “TikTok’s filter bubble prevention strategies did not take effect on this user by design.”

Those two words, “by design,” carry extra weight against the backdrop of litigation over social media addiction that’s playing out in US courts. The crux of the legal argument being wielded against the world’s biggest social media platforms is that their products are dangerous by design. The companies, including TikTok, vehemently deny this and point to safety features they’ve introduced to protect users. But the document shows TikTok intentionally withheld a safety feature from millions of people, and why.

The “why” is simple: TikTok made a change to its recommendations system and wanted to see how it performed. TikTok rolled out this change to 90% of its users but kept 10% as a control group; Nasca’s account was in that group.

That split is odd to me — when Google experiments with new features, it first tries them with a “small” and “narrow” group, only expanding them later. Trying a new feature with nearly every user suggests to me that TikTok had a hunch this was a promising enhancement and it only needed to keep a small number as validation. In the report obtained by Carville, one consideration was “the ability to measure impact on [daily active users] and core metrics”, which suggests an alarming followup question: if a better-moderated feed hurt these metrics, would TikTok have considered rolling it back?

A steelmanned argument in TikTok’s favour is that such metrics are only one consideration in adjusting recommendations, and that depressive material was probably still seen by users who were using the newer system. And, yeah, those two things may be true, but the simple fact is that TikTok differed its recommendations system for different users, and one of them was fed an obsessive number of similar videos advocating suicide. That is a choice the company made about what videos would be seen by which users. TikTok has agency, and it should have responsibility.

Sony Gives Its Disc-Loving Customers a Giant Middle Finger ⇥ kotaku.com

Ethan Gach, Kotaku:

It’s been almost a month since Sony announced the end of PlayStation discs for new games starting in 2028, and a loud contingent of angry fans has continued to criticize the company for going all-digital. Asked about the ongoing backlash during its latest earnings call, Sony said it understands why people have strong feelings about physical games, but it’s still going to move forward with getting rid of them.

“There are various reasons we made this decision, the biggest being that the digitalization of content overall has been progressing, that’s the big factor,” Sony chief financial officer Lin Tao said through an interpreter during a Q&A on July 31. “It’s not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of content, digitalization is progressing.”

Via Timothy Geigner, at Techdirt:

No concern for preservation efforts. No concern for the 20% or so customers who still want to buy physical media. No concern for any brick and mortar retail partners and what will happen to them.

It appears Sony is going to listen to anyone but its own customers on this one.

In pure market forces terms, Sony is arguably listening to the overwhelming majority of its customers by moving to a digital-only distribution strategy. Most people will not notice, at least in the short-term, that they can only acquire new games through downloading them and agreeing to some onerous digital rights restrictions. None of that matters until Sony has more licensing disagreements or shuts off some servers. But then it will matter.

We need government agencies that actually take seriously these kinds of power transfers and advocate for consumer rights. There should at least be a time-based limit to how long DRM can protect something, after which it should be possible to keep a wholly local copy to the greatest possible extent.

F.T.: Apple Filed a Legal Complaint in the U.K. Over Revised iCloud Backdoor Demand ⇥ ft.com

Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times:

Apple has launched a new legal challenge against the UK’s latest attempt to create a “backdoor” to access encrypted customer data, a year after the Home Office agreed to drop a previous order after a row with Washington.

As a reminder, this is different from the order made in February last year that would have demanded Apple create a backdoor to encrypted iCloud data globally. The current order reportedly applies just in the U.K., so this is effectively a domestic issue there. But because the orders and hearings are so secretive — the Home Office did not even want their existence shown on the calendar — few external parties know exactly what those demands are. Britons have to trust their government’s intentions, and the rest of the world has to assume it does not apply to their data.

Apple has not again made Advanced Data Protection available to U.K. iCloud users.