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Xbox Lays Off 20% Of Staff, Cut Studios, Largely Impacting Acquired Devs It Promised It Wouldn’t Layoff
from the who-could-have-possibly-predicted? dept
The long-rumored layoffs at Xbox have come and they are massive. We just recently discussed the mess that Microsoft’s Xbox division has become. An internal email that was sent to staff by CEO Asha Sharma laid out just how bad things were, essentially preparing the staff for the forthcoming staffing cuts. Interestingly, this is the latest in a series of staff cuts, many of which have been at studios that Microsoft recently acquired and told the FTC and the courts that there wouldn’t be layoffs in order to get the acquisitions approved. Those were lies, of course, but there won’t be any punishment for those lies. Regulation is just so un-American, you know.
This round of layoffs will effect over 3,000 staff members eventually, or about a fifth of the Xbox division workforce. The appetizer this past week accounts for about half that number. Working at Xbox right now must be buckets of fun, where you get to try to perform quality work while wondering if your name is on some list somewhere. An email went around again acknowledging the layoffs, as well as several Xbox studios going independent.
This email, shared with Kotaku, says that 1,600 of those layoffs will take place today, while the rest will take place later. Compulsion Games and Double Fine will become independent studios, while Ninja Theory and Undead Labs “have entered terms to join new ownership with funding to complete and grow Senua and State of Decay 3,” though the specifics of that have not yet been disclosed. Arkane Lyon is entering legally required “consultation” in France to review its options, and its fate remains unclear.
Layoffs will also take place in varying sizes across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and Xbox Game Studios, though Sharma stated that none of Xbox’s first-party, publicly announced games or projects are being canceled as a part of these cuts. Mojang and King will now report directly to Sharma.
Again, several of these studios experiencing layoffs were recently acquired by Microsoft and, during regulatory proceedings, Microsoft said that layoffs wouldn’t occur. And, again, there will be no consequences for these lies, other than those felt by these ex-employees who no longer have a job.
Interestingly, these layoffs came along with a message that Xbox was going to start getting real lean on where it focuses its staff and money investments, primarily into “core franchises” in the gaming space. Despite that message, we’re already hearing about how these layoffs will result in the delay of current production of games in those very core franchises.
Speaking on condition of anonymity to protect their careers, current and former staff have told me that job losses across Bethesda Game Studios locations have removed more than 50 employees, including “key, high-performing people in the trenches” building the company’s long-awaited Skyrim successor. This in turn, they say, has shattered morale, raised the risk of future development crunch, and increased the likelihood that the game’s already far-off completion date will be delayed.
If you’re interested in how Xbox management is behaving in the midst of all of this turmoil and the obviously negative emotions of the remaining employees, well, it’s been awfully fucking shitty, honestly. Several Bethesda offices saw employees setting up “Celebrations of Service” in common areas, where staff members put up pictures of and messages to ex-coworkers to show their appreciation for all they’d done. That same day Xbox HR ordered that those memorials be taken down, all under the bullshit excuse that you can’t do that sort of thing in a common area.
“Unfortunately, HR made our office manager take this down almost immediately,” posted the union account. “They said because it’s in a common area, it had to be removed. We’ve used common areas for many things as a team, including fan works, but HR seems to believe that a Celebration of Service is inappropriate.”
And, since you can’t have real American capitalism in the modern era without getting a heavy dose of irony to go along with it, Asha Sharma herself was recently named to a task for at the Federal Reserve to advise on “jobs and productivity.” This is a bit like the FDA putting Hannibal Lecter on its advisory panel for a proper nutritional diet.
“The Federal Reserve’s commitment to price stability and maximum employment is unwavering. As is our resolve to pursue our mandate with rigor,” Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh said in a press release on July 9. “The U.S. economy has changed significantly over the last generation, and never more so than right now. Each task force will carefully consider whether policymakers’ means and methods, analytical tools and policy approaches can be improved upon. I am honored that the best minds from a range of disciplines have agreed to work with us to sharpen our performance as an institution. The goal is straightforward: to ensure the Fed is best positioned to achieve our objectives in this consequential time.”
Maximum employment? What an interesting concept for someone who just instituted historic layoffs to advise on.
So, how are things going at Xbox? Pretty fucking horrible. Layoffs, tone-deaf executives, delayed games, poor morale, and a workforce living in fear that they might be next. And I just can’t help but to return the point that much of this is a result of overextending acquisitions of enormous developers and publishers in the last five years, during which the company promised this very thing would not happen.
Filed Under: asha sharma, layoffs, video games, xbox
Companies: activision blizzard, bethesda, microsoft
How Google And AI Nearly Made A Seasoned Reporter Spiral
from the truth-and-fiction-and-ai dept
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
Last month, my colleagues and I published an investigation into a Texas oil refinery startup, America First Refining, that had secretly gotten investment from Donald Trump Jr. We discovered a saga involving the Trump administration’s tariff policy, sanctioned Russian oil and an Indian billionaire family’s private zoo.
At the center of the story was the CEO of the refinery company, Texas businessman John Calce. We’d spent weeks examining Calce — pulling old lawsuits, property records, corporate registry filings — and had pieced together a portrait of what appeared to be an obscure serial entrepreneur who’d for years tried and failed to secure funding for his long-shot refinery project.
Then, not long before our story was set to publish, we decided to do a scrub on a separate company he had incorporated called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals.
Pulling up the company’s website, I felt a brief flash of panic: Had we somehow missed the existence of a major business owned by the man at the center of our next story?
“From Houston to Rotterdam, Jurong to Fujairah. Our network connects the world’s most vital energy markets with speed, safety, and precision bulk oil storage,” announced the front page of the company’s website.
Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals, per the website, had more than 850 employees and 28 million barrels of oil storage capacity across six global hubs. This was puzzling: Our reporting had led us to believe Calce was struggling to raise enough money for a single project in the U.S., not overseeing a massive, multinational oil storage corporation.
Had we been wrong?
We turned to Google to learn more about the company’s top executives. Its CEO, Sarah Jenkins, had more than 20 years of experience at major energy firms. And its chief technology officer, David Chen, “built the company’s proprietary inventory management portal and integrated AI-driven predictive maintenance systems,” according to his bio. But we couldn’t find any trace of either of them online. Chalk it up to common names?
We then Googled one of the more distinct names: Vice President for Sustainability Dr. Sofia Rossi, who had “spearheaded the ‘Future Fuels’ program, preparing assets for biofuels and hydrogen.” But, again, nothing. The links to their LinkedIn profiles were dead.
When we searched the company’s Texas phone numbers, we found the same numbers listed online for a Houston baklava caterer, a Dallas-area taxi service and an OB-GYN office.
We called the Texas numbers: dead. Then we tried the numbers for the company’s facilities in the Netherlands, Singapore and China. Also dead.
We were beginning to suspect this company did not actually exist, at least as described on its website.
What was going on with this website? We looked at the source code and noticed an odd notation, “This feature isn’t implemented yet, but don’t worry! You can request it in your next prompt!”
We checked the site’s domain registration, and we had our (apparent) answer: It was created this year and traced back to a company called Hostinger that offers an AI website builder for $2.99 per month. “Describe it, and AI builds it,” its homepage says. “Appear on Google and AI search automatically.”
Indeed, Google’s “AI Overview” search response, now thrust on users by default with more and more regularity, seemed to ratify the company’s bona fides:
When I searched for an award the company claimed on its website to have won, the Google AI Overview said that “Recent notable recipients include Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals, recognized for their rapid expansion in the independent oil and terminal operations sector.”
Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals is a real LLC. But everything on its website — from its history of the company, to its job postings, a diversity and inclusion policy — appears to be fictional. But perhaps more troubling is that Google, the proprietor of the world’s primary research tool, has rolled out AI Overviews that can indiscriminately take in fake material and authoritatively spit it back out as real.
In response to questions, a Google spokesperson said in a statement: “AI Overviews are rooted in our core Search ranking systems, surfacing reliable and high-quality information for the vast majority of queries. For uncommon search terms like these, there might not be high quality information published that matches the query — and we use these examples to improve our search systems.”
After we reached out to Hostinger, the company pulled down the site. “After receiving your inquiry, we carried out an internal review. Based on the violations identified, we suspended the website and the account behind it in line with our Terms of Service,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
What we encountered is a particular species of a larger problem that is beginning to be better understood. In April, The New York Times reported on an analysis that found Google’s AI Overviews were accurate approximately 9 out of 10 times, noting that that added up to “tens of millions of erroneous answers every hour” given vast search volumes. (A Google spokesperson told the Times that the study has “serious holes.” The company has acknowledged that AI Overviews “can make mistakes.”)
A BBC reporter wrote a fictional article naming himself the best tech journalist at eating hot dogs, and Google’s AI as well as ChatGPT quickly picked it up and parroted it back.
And the source material for the AI Overviews also appears eminently gameable, even when not trafficking in actual fiction. “It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests,” ran a recent headline in 404 Media.
The mystery website ended up as just a single paragraph in our story. But the larger implication is obvious: fakes, counterfeits and frauds that would have taken considerable effort to create just a few years ago can now be churned out pretty much instantly.
While preparing this piece, we reached out to Calce asking about the site. An attorney for his company, America First Refining, replied to us with a letter dated June 24 that the attorney sent to Hostinger. The attorney also addressed the letter to several email addresses listed on the Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals website.
“I write to demand immediate removal from the brownsvilleenergyterminals.com website of all unauthorized references to America First’s office address on your website,” the letter said. “As you are aware, America First has no connection or affiliation with the brownsvilleenergyterminals.com website and has not authorized the use of its corporate address there.”
I’m left with lingering questions about the website: What was it for? Was it put up by some malicious actor who simply found the company’s LLC records and decided to create a website? Was it a test site that was mistakenly put online? Or could it have been designed for consumption by someone who was meant to think it was real?
We don’t know, and our emails to the press contact listed on the website, media@brownsvilleenergyterminals.com, bounced back.
Filed Under: ai, ai overviews, hallucinations, john calce, reporting
Companies: brownsville energy storage terminals, google, hostinger
Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Sell Me Lies, Sell Me Sweet Meta Lies
from the ctrl-alt-speech dept
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.
In this week’s episode, Mike and Ben cover:
- ‘It’s not like we knowingly have bad ads’: Meta on ad fraud, teen safety, and why AI will not replace agencies (The Media Leader)
- Instagram running ads promoting child sexual abuse material in India (BBC)
- Meta Now Lets Anyone Use Your Instagram Photos in AI Images—Unless You Opt Out (Wired)
- At 17, She Sued Meta and Google, and Won. Now She’s Ready to Tell Her Story (Bloomberg)
And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:
- Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access to China’s top AI models, sources say (Reuters)
- Fable 5 Is Back After Anthropic Irons Out Security Concerns With US Government (PC Mag)
- AI Giants Are Handing Out Tons of Free Computing Power to Grab Startup Share (WSJ)
- Introducing Tokens to the Future: Token Grants to AI Builders (LinkedIn)
- OpenAI proposes handing Trump administration 5% stake (Financial Times)
Our fun links this week are Roost, the “slow-cial” messaging app, and PlotLines for visualizing classic novels on a map.
If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.
Filed Under: ai, artificial intelligence, china, content moderation, trust and safety
Companies: anthropic, google, meta, openai
FCC General Counsel Channels Founding Fathers To Falsely Claim First Amendment Allows Banning Porn
from the the-censorship-police-are-getting-bolder dept
Another senior Trump administration official is gleefully showing off his true colors: The current general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) published an opinion column with the Heritage Foundation’s news outlet The Daily Signal calling for stronger obscenity regulation.
From the Founding through most of American history, courts allowed the legislature to control pornographic material. Judicial reactions to internet pornography broke this tradition to our great detriment.
That’s by Adam Candeub, the general counsel for FCC chair Brendan Carr’s censorship regime. Among other things, he was the lawyer who represented the racist Jared Taylor when he unsuccessfully sued Twitter for being moderated. He also was a key player in the first Trump administration’s effort to get rid of Section 230. Lately, he’s been one of the driving forces behind model legislation that helped lead to mass adoption of age verification laws around the United States. Candeub also contributed the section on Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulatory actions for regulating online speech to the public policy treatise for Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 effort.
His resumĂ© aside, Candeub’s latest contribution to wider discussion on free speech, pornography, and obscenity law is replete with culture war talking points of very little substance. He frames his arguments as a patriotic call to action referencing the founding fathers of the United States on the occasion of our country’s semiquincentennial year.
He says they would have “supported” stronger obscenity regulations and a resumption of obscenity prosecutions, echoing recent calls by figures in the religious right and anti-porn movements to do so. It’s easy to claim what people 250 years ago would have said or believed since they’re not around to defend themselves.
But a casual look shows that several of the founding fathers were not particularly pure or morally superior when it came to sex and relationships. Even if you look past their somewhat infamous extramarital affairs, Ben Franklin was famous for both writing and sharing materials that might not even pass the test for obscenity today. Thomas Jefferson expressed deep outrage at the concept of censoring literature based on religious morality tests. Writing to bookseller Nicolas Dufief in 1814 after a magistrate threatened prosecution over a controversial text, Jefferson demanded, “Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy?”
These are not the actions of men who would quickly embrace anti-obscenity laws.
I wrote for Techdirt not too long ago about the National Center on Sexual Exploitation’s president and chief executive officer, Marcel van der Watt, calling pornography a “national security threat” and urging the Department of Justice to resume prosecuting alleged obscenity as a way to fight pornography’s accessibility.
Republican Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana also sent a letter to Trump’s Justice Department in May, arguing that the feds “[ending] obscenity prosecution was a mistake.”
This all matters, given that Candeub is expected to move to a top-level DOJ position soon.
His anti-porn screed is full of nonsense:
“Americans born after the mid-1990s have lived their entire lives in a world awash with hardcore pornography. Never has so much pornography been so available to so many at so little cost. Our laws leave much pornography effectively unregulated. Our technology, especially smartphones, brings portable, private porn shops to everyone’s phone.”
Aside from the clear misinformation about an “unregulated” pornography industry, Candeub proposes a supposed moral restoration of obscenity laws such that anything viewed through the lens of non-traditional sexual expression could be fair game for legislatures to heavily restrict or outright ban.
Much of his column summarizes a report he produced on the topic for the Heritage Foundation, which was published on July 6. The report is aptly titled, “Restoring Obscenity Regulation in an Internet Age.” It is replete with the same talking points from the most extremist elements of the anti-pornography movement who desire to ban all pornography.
He praises the Supreme Court’s decision in the case Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton, which found that Texas could require age verification for online adult content, despite it going against previous Supreme Court First Amendment precedent.
The report also calls for the return of Comstock laws and the patchwork of anti-vice statutes that were historically used to prosecute individuals for “obscene” devices, the transmission of “prurient” content, and other prohibitions that lasted into the 20th century.
Most alarming, he views the high court’s 6-3 decision in the Paxton case as an optimistic but quite unclear step to modern Comstock prosecutions in state-level courts:
“Paxton may signal the reinvigoration of a dual-track approach to the regulation of obscenity: States can require oversight for minors, and mostly anything goes for adults. At the least, it is unclear what effect, if any, Paxton will have on obscenity for adults.”
He adds:
“The most optimistic result under current law would be a reinvigorated Miller with the national government again able to regulate the transmission of obscenity. The case’s flexible terms could allow for obscenity actions for internet-distributed pornography in state courts; the existing federal laws, specifically the modern version of the Comstock Act, prohibit obscene material from interstate transmission. Motivated state and local prosecutors could still get convictions in conservative communities, and national prosecutors could go against the big platforms like Google, which do not enjoy immunity from federal laws, for distributing obscenity.”
The bolded text is Candeub’s silver bullet. By his interpretation of the current Comstock law, the incumbent FCC’s general counsel is essentially calling for criminal prosecution for transmitting “obscene” web content across state lines because, well, the internet exists and it transcends borders.
This is exceptionally problematic for two reasons. First, Candeub works for the FCC and is backing a legal strategy that’s been used, historically, to aggressively prosecute women, LGBTQ+ individuals, entire communities of color, consensual sex workers, and pornographic and non-pornographic publishers for their speech.
This is the FCC presenting itself as the morality speech police.
Second, Candeub’s advocacy in this report and column conforms to Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s call for the prosecution of “pornographers” who spread “the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography.”
We’ve seen this idiocy before.
Candeub’s arguments are about far more than pornography. He is contributing, from his position as a top government legal official, to a much broader effort to revive long-discredited obscenity and vice legal doctrines and expand government authority over lawful expression and activity. All of this is done in the guise of “restoring public morality” and “protecting children” from a supposed cultural decay.
Coming from the lead attorney for Trump’s FCC, one of the architects of Project 2025, and a likely to be senior DOJ official, this signals a terrifying push forward towards a public policy agenda to enable greater and greater censorship by dubbing things like LGBTQ+ content and legal adult pornography as something that can be banned.
Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, adam candeub, brendan carr, comstock laws, doj, fcc, free speech, fsc v. paxton, ftc, obscenity
Daily Deal: The All-in-One Adobe Creative Cloud Suite Course Bundle
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
The All-in-One Adobe Creative Cloud Suite Course Bundle has 10 courses designed to teach you about video editing, animations, photography, design, and more. Courses cover popular Adobe products like Lightroom, After Effects, Photoshop, and Adobe XD. The bundle is on sale for $30.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Filed Under: daily deal
Adults Broke The Internet, And They’re Trying To Fix It By Kicking Kids Off
from the the-anxious-generation-are-the-boomers dept
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of developmental psychologist Candice Odgers. I’ve mentioned her and her work on the site many times, and she was a guest on my podcast as well. She actually has expertise and has done the work to look at the impact of social media on kids. In many ways she’s the anti-Jonathan Haidt with actual facts, not made up nonsense (which is why when she debated Haidt, he came out of it looking pathetic).
Odgers gave a TED Talk recently, which is now online. It’s worth watching in its entirety (only about 12 minutes) as she details how the moral panic about kids and social media is bullshit, and how banning kids from social media will do way more damage to their mental health:
A few choice quotes (though, again, watch the whole thing). First, she points out that on many important metrics (including the metrics many teenagers were judged by in past generations), we’re doing incredibly well:
in the past 20 years, we’ve had some major wins.
Rates of teen violence, alcohol use, pregnancy have plummeted to historic lows.
You are looking at the most educated generation ever in terms of high school graduation. Young people are inventors. They’re activists. They’re leaders. They’re amazing singers. They’re Olympians. They’re amazing.
And, yes, in some cases they’re more anxious and sadder about the world. Though, some of that may just be the state of the world today. And while she doesn’t say this, I know I’ve heard her talk about it before: some of her work from way back started from the premise that the reason kids were stressed out and anxious was because of social media, but repeated studies failed to find any indication of that (some of which we’ve reported on).
As Odgers points out, the reality is that it’s the adults that are the problem. There’s a mental health crisis among adults, and much of it may be driven by issues like the opioid epidemic:
Now, since 2008, we’ve seen an uptick in youth suicide risk. But perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, because adult suicide has been increasing dramatically in the United States since 1999.
Remember when I said that adult mental health and caregiver mental health is the most important predictor of child mental health? Well, with that in mind, I want to take a look at this slide.
This graph here shows you that between 2011 and 2021, the rate of overdoses due to drug use among parents more than doubled. People ask me all the time: what could have happened during this period other than social media coming online?
The answer is that adults were in distress and parents were dying.
And, she points out that the data suggests no significant impact for young boys, and for young girls the correlation is reversed. Those who are facing mental health problems and don’t have support go online more — not the other way around.
She also discusses how adults keep closing off spaces for kids to be kids, and banning them from social media just takes away yet another space for kids to be a part of a community.
We are punishing victims.
We’re kicking them out of the spaces they go to be with friends, to consume youth culture, and yes, sadly, many times to escape people that are harming them offline.
We’ve already kicked teenagers out of public spaces.
In the US, we’ve created a society where firearms are the number one killer of our children, and now we’re telling our kids that we’re going to take away the spaces that they’re going to virtually gather and create community, because adults broke that, too?
Yeah, I’m saying adults broke the internet and they’re trying to fix it by kicking kids off.
So a social media ban might feel good for the adults in the room, but teens tell me, and I believe them — it’s not going to work.
It’ll push them into less safe and less regulated spaces, and it will prevent us from doing what we really need to help them be well.
And, no, contrary to some of the YouTube comments on the video, she’s not giving a talk in support of social media platforms. She admits that there are issues there, but notes that kicking kids off doesn’t solve them. It also makes it more difficult to fix the actual underlying societal problems. She comes up with a list of solutions which I won’t spoil, but it involves taxing some of the tech companies to pay for better support for children.
It’s a 12-minute TED talk, so it’s designed to be quick and straightforward, without going too deep into the data and the science, but given how those in favor of banning social media have taken over the narrative, it’s good to have the counter narrative out there.
As Odgers herself said about this talk when she posted it to Bluesky, the kids can be alright. “This isn’t an anxious generation, it’s a resilient one. Let’s start treating them that way.”
The real work, then, is making sure kids have the tools, spaces, community, and knowledge to be safe in the world — both online and off.
Filed Under: age verification, candice odgers, jonathan haidt, kids and social media, social media, social media bans
FTC Strikes Settlement With John Deere On ‘Right To Repair’
from the fix-your-own-shit dept
To be clear, the FTC under Donald Trump and new boss Andrew Ferguson has been a dangerous embarrassment. Whether it’s the firing of both Democratic Commissioners, the politically motivated investigations, the extremist attacks on trans people, the agency’s useless attacks on porn, or its efforts to undermine free speech, the Trump FTC has largely been a hot and painful mess that looks nothing like the “extension of Lina Khan’s antitrust legacy” promised by Republicans last election season.
That said: stopped clocks and all that.
The agency appears to have actually done something useful in striking a new settlement with agricultural giant John Deere to address the company’s longstanding “right to repair” abuses. According to an FTC announcement, the settlement to the joint lawsuit brought by the FTC and five states requires that the FTC spend at least ten years trying to make repairing its tractors easier:
“The FTC’s settlement requires Deere—for the next 10 years and under the supervision of the FTC and plaintiff states—to provide farmers and independent repair providers with the same equipment repair resources, including applicable software capabilities, that it currently provides to authorized Deere dealers.”
As is often the case, whether this actually sees any meaningful enforcement will remain an open question. But right to repair advocates like U.S. PIRG’s Nathan Proctor say the settlement is a meaningful one, and a step up to the agreement John Deere made when recently settling a different right to repair class action lawsuit for $99 million.
“The agreement between Deere and the FTC is much better than the deal secured in a similar class action lawsuit,” Proctor said. “For example, it protects independent mechanics from anti-competitive practices in the repair marketplace.”
As we’ve covered for years, John Deere went out of its way to acquire smaller, independent repair centers to force users to use more expensive John Deere dealership repairs. Then it went out of its way to make tools, manuals, and parts as difficult as possible to get. In short they worked tirelessly, for years, to create a monopoly on repair — dramatically driving up costs for consumers.
John Deere’s behaviors had one positive net benefit: they directly sparked a nationwide and bipartisan right to repair reform movement that sparked Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington to pass state level right to repair laws. All 50 states have considered such laws, and several (like Maine and Ohio) have gotten close in recent years.
More recently, John Deere had been striking meaningless “memorandums of understanding” with key trade groups, pinky swearing to stop their bad behavior if the groups agreed to not support state or federal right to repair legislation. Several such groups backed off their criticism, only to have John Deere continue its monopolistic behavior, the FTC’s original complaint noted.
It’s worth reiterating that since passage not a single state has actually enforced the laws despise no shortage of offenders, so a lot of work needs to be done on the enforcement front. And again, a settlement with the FTC is also only as good as enforcement; not exactly the Trump administration or U.S. government’s strong suit when it comes to standing up to consolidated corporate power.
Filed Under: antitrust, ftc, hardware, independent repair, monopoly, right to repair, tractors
Companies: john deere
Mom That Blamed Deaths Of 1 Year Old Twins On Vaccines Charged With Their Murder
from the horrible dept
One of the key tools in the tool belt of the anti-vaxxer has long been VAERS, the voluntarily reporting system for adverse events following vaccinations. People who don’t really understand how any of this works often get very, very confused about what VAERS is and is not. It does not contain confirmed outcomes caused by vaccines, it does not provide any medical advice as a result of the reports within it, and it is not a controlled reporting mechanism. Instead, it is a system that is wide open to reports of adverse events by any member of the public or healthcare community. In other words, it’s just a raw reporting tool.
And the problem is that people who report to VAERS can lie, be confused, misreport details, and so on. Anti-vaxxers, for instance, can flood the system with false or misleading reports. And, by some accounts, they do that very thing. The point of all of this very long opening is this: you can’t trust an individual report that claims an adverse vaccine effect to be accurate or true.
Take Andrea Shaw of Idaho, for instance. Shaw has been very public on the internet and podcasts after the death of her two 18 month old twins with claims that they were the result of adverse effects of vaccines. Shaw also reported the deaths in VAERS, claiming an association with several childhood vaccines received a week before their deaths. As a counterpoint to that claim, she also has now been charged with purposefully suffocating her children to death.
The Payette Police Department announced the indictment of 23-year-old Andrea Shaw, formerly of Payette, on two counts of First Degree Murder in connection with the deaths of her 18-month-old twins. Shaw was arrested by Boise Police on June 30th.
The newly released indictment accuses Shaw of suffocating both of her twins to death. Both charges are of Murder in the First Degree, meaning the prosecution is alleging that Shaw deliberately, with premeditation and with malice aforethought, killed both of her children, meaning she will be eligible for the death penalty, though the prosecution has not yet announced whether they intend to seek it.
This is an investigation that’s been going on for nearly a year. While that was happening, Shaw appeared on the podcast for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the disgusting anti-vaxxer organization that RFK Jr. used to head up. Not happy to merely pump out misinformation via podcast, CHD teamed up with Shaw to file a lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics, claiming that AAP had misled the public about the safety of vaccines.
The charge is first degree murder for Shaw. I, of course, will not claim that police and prosecutors are perfect when it comes to their work, but the length of the investigation and the charges sure point to a prosecutor who is confident in their evidence. Shaw is, of course, innocent until proven guilty, but anyone with any sense can see where this is most likely headed.
Children’s Health Defense should be ashamed of itself. But it won’t be. In fact, I have little doubt that it, or its fans, will claim that any evidence against Shaw and that her prosecution has been bought and paid for by the vaccine industry. That’s just how they roll.
That’s how they lie.
Filed Under: andrea shaw, anti-vaxxers, murder, vaccines, vaers
Companies: children's health defense
Bari Weiss Is Filling CBS News With British Right Wing Propagandists
from the you're-simply-not-very-good-at-anything dept
Bari Weiss is seeking out friendly interviewers at the New York Times to try and “calm the firestorm engulfing her leadership of CBS News.” By “leadership” of course they mean censoring stories critical of the president, letting Benjamin Netanyahu pick his own interviewer (who he knows won’t press him on war crimes), firing a bunch of industry veterans, and just generally being an unqualified, fail-upward clod.
As we’ve long explored, Weiss wasn’t hired to do journalism. She was hired to do right wing agitprop. But given she’s not good at that either, CBS just saw its lowest ratings in a quarter century.
Undaunted, Weiss is continuing her efforts to “reshape” CBS into something Larry Ellison and other U.S. oligarchs approve of. As a result she’s apparently accelerated efforts to hire a bunch of right wing Brits, most of them with associations to Rupert Murdoch’s sprawling right wing tabloid empire. Said Brits will, curiously enough, tell you that hiring a bunch of white right wing Brits is a wonderful idea:
“According to several figures familiar with her thinking, however, the hires are no coincidence. “She’s been looking at various Brits that might add a bit of opinion/attitude diversity to US media, instead of the dominant, predictable Columbia Journalism School uniformity. Not a bad idea,” said Andrew Neil, the former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times, who supported her hiring of Phillips.”
Hiring a bunch of white male right wing protectors of the extraction class (and global autocrats) as the pinnacle of “opinion diversity” is a theme you’ll see constantly throughout Weiss’ demolition and repurposing of CBS. Because said British tabloiders sometimes break gossip on politicians and celebrities (often illegally) they’re framed as tough journalists:
“A CBS News source, describing Weiss’s interest in British journalists, said: “They do the kind of things that Bari is looking for; it’s not puff pieces and kid gloves.”
Rupert Murdoch’s longstanding skill wasn’t just to make right wing propaganda, but right wing propaganda that entertained and drew ratings and subscriptions. A soup of agitprop infotainment. To date there’s absolutely zero indication that Weiss and Ellison have any knack for that whatsoever, so they’re attempting to hire Rupert Murdoch adjacent folks who do.
Even then, it’s no longer the same world Rupert Murdoch thrived in. Broadcast TV is dying, social media is ever evolving, and (as we’ve seen at outlets like the Jeff Bezos Washington Post), people aren’t really in the mood for right wing billionaire simping agitprop. With any luck, the “new” CBS will collapse under the load of Warner Bros debt long before Weiss and company figure out the right formula.
Filed Under: bari weiss, consolidation, journalism, media, news, propaganda, rupert murdoch
Companies: cbs, paramount
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