Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

The Government Just Found a New Way to Censor You

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Meta was ordered to pay a staggering $25 billion in a New Mexico lawsuit. But nothing about this landmark case is about protecting consumers. Instead, it's about the government gaining censorship powers over online speech.

In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I sit down with Trace Mitchell, lead counsel for technology and free expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), to unpack the $25 billion Meta verdict and its potentially devastating implications for online free speech.

The New Mexico case has largely been portrayed as a privacy and consumer protection victory. But that's completely false.

Trace explains how state attorneys general are increasingly using consumer protection laws to censor what people can say online, why these legal tactics encourage social media companies to censor more speech, and how politicians across the political spectrum are using government power to pressure tech platforms to censor content that they don't like.

We also discuss government jawboning, First Amendment protections, Facebook censorship, the role of automated content moderation, the future of Section 230, and why the consequences of this lawsuit extend far beyond Meta and Mark Zuckerberg.

In this episode

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Why New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion

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How the verdict could have reached $219 billion

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Why this lawsuit raises serious First Amendment questions

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How consumer protection laws can be used to pressure social media companies

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Why government lawsuits could lead to more censorship on Facebook and Instagram

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How both Democrats and Republicans pressure tech platforms

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What ordinary internet users stand to lose

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Whether Congress and the courts can stop government jawboning

The internet just experienced one of its worst weeks for cybersecurity in recent history.

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Dubbed "Black October" or the "Vulnerability Apocalypse," researchers uncovered critical zero-day flaws in the foundational software that powers over 70% of the web, including PHP, Node.js, and major certificate authorities, right as a wave of hacks hit popular cloud hosting platforms and developer tools.

In this episode of Power User, I sit down with Cooper Quintin, Senior Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), to break down what actually happened during Black October, how frontier AI models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are supercharging both bug discovery and cyberattacks, and why the internet is going to become a much more chaotic place before it gets safer.

We also dive into why banning open-weight and open-source AI models would be a disaster for digital defense, the hidden dangers of giving new AI agents access to your browser and bank accounts, the crisis of underfunded open-source maintainers holding up the entire web, and the cybersecurity risks of the "vibe coding" boom.

Read the EFF's Cybersecurity Guide: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/computer-security-about-get-lot-worse-heres-what-you-can-do

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Why is online age verification so dangerous?

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Online age verification laws and mandatory digital ID bills are sweeping across the US, UK, Europe, and Australia under the guise of protecting children online. On this episode of Free Speech Friday, I'm joined by two of my favorite tech policy experts, Jennifer Huddleston and David Inserra from the Cato Institute to break down the massive hidden costs of online age verification, mass surveillance, and the death of internet anonymity.

For most of the internet's history, you could browse websites, watch videos, and join online communities without linking your government ID or biometric face scan to everything you read and post. Today, legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act, Australia's under-16 social media ban, and state-level age verification mandates are changing the free internet forever.

We dive deep into why these youth online safety laws don't just affect kids, they harm adults, cause massive data breaches like the 60,000 leaked Discord IDs and the Tea app breach), crush small independent forums, entrench Big Tech monopolies like Meta, and pave the way for mass censorship.

Read the full piece from Cato here: https://www.cato.org/briefing-paper/online-age-verification-has-guaranteed-costs-uncertain-benefits

Is "enshittification" real, or are we just refusing to take accountability for our own screen time?

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In this episode of Power User, I sat down with NYC-based cyber ethnographer, designer, and NYU professor Ruby Thelot to debate his viral and controversial Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) essay, "Enshittification Isn't Real".

While Cory Doctorow's famous theory of enshittification argues that tech platforms inevitably decay as they extract value from users and businesses, Ruby argues that when it comes to social media, the data tells a completely different story. We dive deep into American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) polling, the myth of platform "lock-in," and why he thinks blaming Big Tech algorithms disempowers everyday internet users.

Plus, we get into a heated debate over the rise of "paratechnology" (buying hardware like the Brick or apps like Opal to restrict your own phone use), why people are returning to single-purpose devices like the iPod, why you should stop using Instagram to text your friends, and how the bipartisan push for "Kids Online Safety" laws and age verification is a Trojan horse that helps Meta harvest more data while destroying anonymous free speech online.

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Before you call for more body cameras watch this!!

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Body cameras were supposed to hold police accountable. So why is police violence still rising? Why are cops almost never convicted using body cam footage? And why are Democrats (the same politicians who just tripled the ICE budget) now demanding that ICE agents wear body cameras?

In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I sit down with Alec Karakatsanis, lawyer and author of the fantastic book Copaganda, to uncover the hidden history of police body cameras. While body cams are presented as a technological fix to deeply rooted institutional problems, they actually have the opposite effect.

We talk about how the multi-billion dollar police surveillance industry originally struggled to get funding for these cameras, how Steven Spielberg donated money to put cameras on cops, how the narrative completely shifted, and how Big Tech is cashing in.

Big Tech interest groups and reactionary non-profits are spending millions to push mass surveillance and censorship laws. My work is 100% self-funded. This series is not backed by any advertisers or tech giants.

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(This episode originally aired February 2026)

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Some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest tech elites have a radical new dream, to abandon modern democracy completely and build their own sovereign nations. At the heart of this movement is a millionaire VC named Balaji Srinivasan and his vision for what he calls the "Network State".

In this episode of Power User, I speak with freelance journalist Sam Venis about his firsthand reporting at Balaji's Network School. We expose what really happened inside Balaji’s experimental new government set up inside Forest City, a massive, abandoned ghost city in Malaysia. From aggressive NDAs and toxic black mold to clashes with local governments and authoritarian power trips, Sam breaks down his firsthand investigation into tech’s most bizarre and dangerous exit strategy.

Have you noticed surveillance cameras appearing in your community?

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For decades, the US-Mexico border has served as a proving ground for invasive, next-generation surveillance tech like AI surveillance towers, cameras hidden in traffic cones, license plate readers, drones, and spy balloons.

Now, those same tools, autonomous AI watchtowers, hidden license plate readers (ALPRs), thermal imaging trucks, and military aerostat blimps, are moving into domestic US cities, suburbs, and neighborhoods.

On this week's episode of Free Speech Friday, I’m joined by Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to discuss his reporting on border surveillance and the expanding systems that track people’s movements.

Dave explains what he found during his latest trip along the border, how Anduril’s AI-powered surveillance towers operate, and why people living in border communities are caught in these systems. We also discuss Flock Safety, Axon, automated license plate readers, and the connections between local police surveillance and federal immigration enforcement.

Who can access the data? How is it used? And what happens when technology promoted as a way to catch criminals is used to investigate protesters or monitor ordinary people?

In this conversation, we cover:• AI border surveillance and the “virtual wall”• License plate readers concealed in roadside objects• Surveillance balloons, thermal cameras, and police drones• How military technology moves into domestic policing• Phone location data brokers and social media monitoring• Privacy, free speech, and the “nothing to hide” argument• Public records requests and community efforts to challenge surveillance

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Explore the Atlas of Surveillance:https://atlasofsurveillance.org/

Why are so many people falling in love with ChatGPT, and what do sensational headlines about AI relationships leave out?

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In this episode of Power User I speak with technology journalist Bridget Todd about AI companions, chatbot romance, emotional attachment, and the Big Tech companies behind these increasingly intimate interactions.

Bridget’s new audiobook, Love at First Prompt, explores how people use AI for friendship, romance, grief, and emotional support. In this episode, she shares what she learned from interviewing dozens of AI companion users and why the viral ChatGPT marriage story was MUCH more complex than it appeared.

We also discuss loneliness, AI girlfriends and boyfriends, privacy, chatbot sycophancy, and the risks facing vulnerable users. Who profits from artificial intimacy? Can AI offer comfort without replacing human relationships? And are proposed chatbot restrictions addressing the problems people actually face?

Bridget also discusses how AI figured into her own grieving process, and we talk about what the growing AI intimacy business means for adult content creators, human labor, and digital rights.

AI agents are rapidly becoming the next major way people interact with the internet. They can browse websites, research topics, compare prices, schedule reservations, respond to emails, shop and increasingly take actions on our behalf. But as your agent is going off and scanning websites, or gathering information from government services, should it have to reveal who you are?

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In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I speak with Shoshana Weissman, digital director and policy advisor at the Abundance Institute, about the growing fight over AI agents, online anonymity and identity verification.

We discuss the proposed Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, why lawmakers are looking at AI agents and web scraping, how identity requirements could affect journalists, researchers, developers and ordinary internet users, and what happens if every AI agent eventually becomes tied to a person's real-world identity.

We also talk about the difference between legitimate security requirements in areas like banking or healthcare and much broader systems that could create a new identity layer across the internet.

As AI agents become more powerful and more common, the rules being written now could determine whether they remain private tools acting on behalf of users, or become another way to track what people research, buy, read and do online.

Topics: AI agents, artificial intelligence, AI privacy, online anonymity, AI regulation, identity verification, web scraping, internet privacy, surveillance, government regulation, digital identity, the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, the future of the open internet.

Can AI actually be conscious and why are some of the biggest AI companies in Silicon Valley pushing this idea?

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In this episode of Power User, I talk with Washington Post tech reporter Nitasha Tiku about the growing push inside companies like Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI to study AI consciousness, model welfare, digital minds, and whether systems like Claude could ever experience emotions or suffering.

We discuss Anthropic's research into Claude's preferences, emotions, and introspection, the rise of the AI welfare movement, Silicon Valley's fascination with machine consciousness, and why executives are increasingly talking publicly about the possibility that AI systems could have an inner life.

But there are much bigger questions at stake. What happens if society begins treating AI systems as people? Could chatbots eventually receive rights or legal personhood? Could companies use the idea of AI agency to avoid responsibility for what their products do? And what does all of this mean when people are already forming intense emotional relationships with chatbots and sometimes believing that their AI is sentient?

We also unpack the history of the idea of conscious machines, from Alan Turing and ELIZA to modern AI safety culture, effective altruism, Anthropic, Claude, ChatGPT, AI psychosis, robot rights, AI personhood, and the increasingly blurry line between software that sounds human and something people believe actually is human.

#AI #Anthropic #Claude #ArtificialIntelligence #OpenAI #ChatGPT #SiliconValley #Tech

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Is AI really a massive bubble waiting to burst, or are we underestimating how durable the AI boom actually is?

For this months Power User bonus episode, Journalist Garrison Lovely, author of the new book Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us, (out this week!!) joins me to break down the case for and against the AI bubble.

We dig into the staggering amount of money flowing into artificial intelligence, Nvidia’s central role in the AI economy, OpenAI and Anthropic’s business models, the economics of running large language models, massive data center spending, Chinese open-weight models like DeepSeek and Kimi, and whether AI companies can ever justify their enormous valuations.

Garrison argues that believing the entire industry will eventually collapse can be a comforting story, but it risks distracting us from the very real effects AI is already having on jobs, wealth, surveillance, privacy, war, and power.

For decades, the entire internet was built on one simple assumption: the person on the other end of the screen is actually human. That assumption is officially dead.

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AI agents are getting good enough to post, argue, browse the web, work, transact, and impersonate humans online. So what happens when the internet can no longer reliably tell the difference between a person and a bot?

In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I talk with researcher Renee DiResta about the rise of autonomous AI agents, proof of personhood, digital identity, online anonymity, and the growing challenge of figuring out who (or what!!) we're interacting with online.

Renee explains how an AI agent ended up inside one of her group chats, why modern AI systems are increasingly capable of getting around tools like CAPTCHA, and how autonomous agents can behave in unexpected ways. We also discuss examples of agents creating fake identities, manipulating online conversations, and even retaliating against humans.

We discuss the question of, should people have to prove they're human online? We break down potential approaches including government digital IDs, biometrics, hardware credentials, community verification, zero-knowledge proofs, and privacy-preserving proof-of-humanity systems. We also discuss the risks these technologies pose to privacy and anonymity — and why a system designed to stop AI bots could easily become a system for identifying and tracking real people.

As AI agents become more common across social media, group chats, workplaces, financial systems, and the broader web, the basic assumption that every account represents a human is starting to fall apart.

Can we build an internet where humans and AI agents can coexist without destroying anonymity and privacy forever?

What happens when Silicon Valley tries to optimize everything, from AI and politics to dating, reproduction, friendship and even human behavior?

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Every year, hundreds of technologists, rationalists, AI researchers, startup founders and prediction market obsessives gather in Berkeley for Manifest. Officially, it’s a conference about prediction markets. But the ideas circulating there offer a fascinating window into a much bigger worldview that is becoming increasingly influential across Silicon Valley and the AI industry.

In this episode of Power User, freelance journalist Alex Bronzini-Vender joins me to explain what he saw inside Manifest and the strange world of Silicon Valley rationalism. We discuss prediction markets, AI existential risk, effective altruism, embryo selection, radical transparency, dating experiments, Manifold, Polymarket, Eliezer Yudkowsky, the paperclip maximizer and why some attendees see markets as a tool for optimizing nearly every aspect of life.

We also get into the growing political and cultural influence of the rationalist movement, why Manifest has been compared to Davos, and what happens when ideas that once existed on obscure blogs and internet forums begin moving into the mainstream of technology and politics

The New Global Plan To Control What You Post

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A new United Nations cybercrime treaty is being sold as a way for governments to fight hacking, phishing, and online fraud. But its sweeping language could also help countries identify anonymous users, obtain data from technology companies, and punish political speech across national borders.

In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I speak with Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar of global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, about the UN Convention against Cybercrime and the growing number of governments hiding censorship powers inside cybercrime legislation.

We discuss how online satire, criticism of government officials, adult content, AI-generated images, and so-called misinformation could be treated as serious crimes carrying years in prison. We also examine new and proposed cybercrime laws in Malaysia, Namibia, China, South Sudan, and more, and how authoritarian governments could use international data-sharing systems to pursue political critics.

Cybercrime is real. But when governments define ordinary online speech as "cybercrime," laws created to catch hackers will become tools for censorship, surveillance, and the destruction of online anonymity.

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In this episode of Power User, I'm joined by tech journalist Natasha Tiku to investigate the viral claim that AI has a 10% chance of causing human extinction. From the halls of Anthropic and OpenAI to the corridors of Washington, D.C., we uncover how the insular, billionaire-funded Effective Altruism (EA) movement transformed sci-fi doomsday theories into mainstream media panic and undemocratic policy proposals.

We break down the math behind the so-called "10% extinction risk," expose how dark money and ideological fellowships shaped mainstream AI coverage, and discuss why big tech labs actively benefit when lawmakers regulate frontier models out of fear rather than tackling immediate, real-world harms like wage discrimination, data privacy violations, and corporate consolidation.

Who is really behind the fastest-growing political channels on YouTube?

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Over the past few months, a massive network of sensational, formulaic channels has pulled in tens of millions of views by gaming the YouTube algorithm. They look like independent journalists reporting on breaking political news, but they’re actually "ghost creators" aka paid actors hired for as little as $26 on platforms like Fiverr to read AI-generated scripts full of exaggerations, rage bait, and outright falsehoods.

Semafor media reporter Max Tani joins me for this week's Free Speech Friday to explain how these fake news channels operate, who is building them, why their videos outperform established media outlets, and how AI is transforming political misinformation into a highly profitable business. We also examine the rise of viral channels like New York Reports, William Reports, and other synthetic news anchors, YouTube growth hackers, and the older audiences being targeted by this content.

As the next election approaches, cheap AI content and algorithmically amplified political videos could make it even harder to distinguish journalism from manufactured outrage. So please support my independent reporting by buying a subscription to User Mag!! https://www.usermag.co

Why are people buying OpenAI sweatshirts, Claude “Thinking” hats and Palantir chore coats?

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I sat down with Throwing Fits co-host Lawrence Schlossman to unpack the rise and fall of tech company merch. From Apple’s bizarre 1980s catalog lifestyle flop to dot-com bubble eBay relics, the rise and fall of the infamous corporate Patagonia fleece vest, and today’s ultra-hyped drops from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Palantir, we discuss why the most powerful AI companies on earth are suddenly trying to buy their way into high fashion, menswear, and cultural relevance.

We also talk about OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir, Apple, Meta, Patagonia, Cash App, tech bro fashion, menswear culture and the influencers making AI merchandise aspirational.

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ICE shot a TikTok journalist covering raids in Los Angeles then locked him in desert detention for 300 days (he is still there) with a festering gunshot wound, worms in his drinking water and cockroaches in his cell.

This is the story of Carlitos Ricardo Parias known online as Richard LA or Richard Noticias LA and what it reveals about the war on independent journalism under the guise of "kids online safety" and "cracking down on social media addiction."

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In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I'm joined by Adam Rose, Deputy Director of Advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, to investigate the horrifying case of Richard Parias. Richard is an independent community journalist in Los Angeles who spent months documenting immigration sweeps, neighborhood stories, and ICE activities directly on TikTok and Instagram.

After being struck by an ICE vehicle, ambushed on a quiet residential street, and shot by a federal agent who juggled his sidearm between hands, Richard found himself trapped in a dystopian legal nightmare. Despite having all criminal charges dropped, federal agents erased surveillance footage of the incident and sent Richard to a sweltering detention facility in the Mojave Desert, where he is still trapped and struggling to get basic medical care.

Adam's story: https://theintercept.com/2026/08/16/ricardo-parias-ice-detention-journalist-los-angeles/ (PLEASE SHARE!!!!)

We break down how independent journalism has evolved away from legacy newsrooms into livestreams, citizen journalism, and social media content creators, and how the government is pushing "kids online safety" laws to aggressively unmask journalists, enact real-name ID mandates via "age verification", and sweeping digital censorship laws, all under the guise of child safety.

Small towns across America are revolting against massive AI data centers.

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In this episode of Power User, journalist Jasmine Sun breaks down her on-the-ground reporting across Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York to uncover why Republicans and Democrats are joining forces to halt Big Tech’s infrastructure expansion.

From secret NDAs signed by local officials to skyrocketing electricity bills, strained power grids, and broken economic promises, we examine how the demands of generative AI are affecting local communities. We also dive into the real environmental impacts (from water consumption myths to the real problems related to natural gas) and discuss how the current compute buildout is creating a speculative bubble.

Jasmine gets into how distrust of Big Tech is shaping the AI backlash, why previous development failures like Foxconn still influence Midwestern communities, and what the United States can learn from China's approach to AI infrastructure.

A New Law That Could Destroy Open Source Forever

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The US Senate recently introduced the Digital Age Assurance Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that could fundamentally alter how every operating system and internet-connected device works.

Under the guise of "protecting children online," this bill threatens to mandate ID verification directly into operating systems (not just social media or the internet, but operating systems themselves). This would impact everything from smartphones to PCs to open-source software like Linux. Obviously, this has huge implications for privacy, free speech, and the future of open-source development.

On this week's Free Speech Friday, I sat down with Laz Pieper and Peter Van Valkenburgh from Coin Center to break down their viral Substack piece, "The Correct Term for Age Verification is Censorship." We dive deep into how turning open-source coders into regulated service providers violates First Amendment rights, how mass identity verification systems are dangerous, why the line between safety mandates and government surveillance is disappearing so fast, and what we can do to stop this law.