Bottoms said Colorado is under siege from a “foreign criminal army” of 45,000 to 50,000 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) operating in Colorado.

When 9NEWS asked Bottoms for evidence of his claim, Bottoms said the information came “from direct conversations with ICE officials about this exact problem in our state.”

Bottoms is fully cooked, it would appear. He’s echoing, amplifying, and exaggerating claims about gang infestations in Colorado that were pushed by Donald Trump during his last election campaign. Those claims were also debunked by local law enforcement officials.

The story hit the national news last year when local media coverage of two robberies and an assault at the complex were amplified by President Trump, who twisted the facts to fuel his campaign for reelection. Trump joined local conservative politicians in spreading the lie of a “complete gang takeover” by Venezuelan immigrants at The Edge apartments – a lie that has been repeatedly debunked by residents and local law enforcement. 

Having debunked this once, law enforcement officials in the state are now in the irritating position of needing to debunk this anti-migrant hysteria yet again, thanks to Bottoms and his pathetic attempt to rile up the racism of the voting base he needs to secure if he hopes to become governor.

First up in the debunking is none other than law enforcement officials working directly for Donald Trump:

A spokesperson for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Denver said its leadership has not had contact with Bottoms.

“HSI Denver and ERO Denver leadership has not met with nor had conversations with Representative Bottoms,” said ICE spokesman Steve Kotecki.

Whoops! That’s got to be pretty awkward for Bottoms, who seemed to assume his willingness to follow Trump down any bigoted rabbit hole would immediately result in his administration supporting his racist assertions about foreign gang infestations.

Bottoms put another hole in his own foot by presuming local law enforcement would back him up if he just made a bunch of shit up and let it dribble out his mouth while standing in front of a live mic. Bottoms claimed — hilariously — that local sheriffs offices were seeking to deputize “special forces veterans” to combat the Tren de Aragua invasion.

In response to Rep. Bottoms’ attempt to turn his Reddit draft folder rant into reality, a majority of the state’s law enforcement refused to endorse the hallucinations of man who thinks making claims that can immediately be debunked will secure him a majority of votes in the upcoming gubernatorial election.

40 sheriffs from across the political spectrum pushed back on Bottoms’ claims, saying they had not seen evidence of widespread Venezuelan gang activity in their county and directly rejecting the idea of deputizing special forces veterans for an anti-cartel action. 

The report says “across the political spectrum,” but two-thirds of the sheriffs quoted are registered as Republicans. It’s probably three-thirds, but the last sheriff quoted has decided to represent himself as “unaffiliated.”

On top of this immediate pushback from local law enforcement officials, there are the actual facts, which make it immediately clear it’s impossible for there to be 50,000 Tren de Aragua gang members residing in Colorado:

MEMBERS
Approximately 2,500 to 5,000

That would be the number of gang members worldwide, according to none other than the Director of National Intelligence. Yep, that’s the same DNI that serves the president who went viral with his claims of TdA takeovers in Aurora, Colorado while on his way to serving a second term. And if an agency pretty much obliged to convert Trump’s bullshit about TdA into facts to justify everything from mass deportations to extrajudicial killings in international waters can’t be bothered to cook the books to this extent, it’s downright embarrassing for a MAGA acolyte like Scott Bottoms to spew easily disproved claims in hopes of scoring a few more far-right votes for himself.

It’s refreshing to see law enforcement provide immediate pushback against bullshit like this. But you can’t blame Bottoms for bottoming out. After all, the man he worships most delivers outrageous lies on a daily basis, yet somehow retains his position and the support of his party.

First, Justice Alito waited almost 48 hours to act—a period during which there was quite a lot of chaos across the country among doctors, pharmacists, and patients over whether and to what extent they were bound by Friday’s Fifth Circuit decision. 48 hours may not seem like a long time, but for comparison, in November, Alito issued an administrative stay in the Texas redistricting case just 68 minutes after Texas’s application for emergency relief was docketed by the Supreme Court (both of which happened after hours on a Friday night).

Second, and speaking of the Texas case, Alito’s administrative stays in the mifepristone case had something that his administrative stay in the Texas case didn’t—a deadline (next Monday at 5 p.m. ET). This follows a much broader pattern—in which Alito issues indefinite administrative stays in cases in which he appears to be sympathetic to the applicants, but imposes deadlines on the stays in cases in which he doesn’t. Before Monday, the last nine administrative stays in which Alito imposed deadlines were all cases in which at least one of the applicants had been the Biden administration. In contrast, Alito imposed no deadline in the Texas redistricting case; a potentially significant non-delegation case from 2024; and several other cases with … less … of an ideological valence.

To be sure, Alito isn’t the only justice to ever put a deadline on an administrative stay; Justices Gorsuch and Jackson have also each done it exactly once. And although the deadlines tend to create unnecessary tension and stress for both the parties and the Supreme Court’s press corps (who worry about what will happen if the deadline comes and goes with no action—which appeared to happen in the Texas SB4 immigration case in March 2024), they’re not especially significant beyond that. But it certainly seems like a petty way to treat parties differently based upon what you think of their claims.

Then, despite that short deadline (which, to be fair, was extended three days), the Supreme Court waited until 26 minutes past the deadline to issue its unexplained shadow docket ruling keeping the stay in place until after the rest of the proceedings play out (like a cert petition to the Supreme Court, and then a more complete ruling on the merits).

As a site that regularly calls out and complains about shadow docket rulings, and in particular unexplained shadow docket rulings, it’s unfortunate that the majority didn’t explain their reasoning — and equally unfortunate that Alito forced a rushed decision in the first place.

I know that the justices hate the term “shadow docket,” preferring either the “emergency” docket or the “interim” docket, but if they’re going to call it that they should really only use it for issues that are emergencies or for interim relief — the very limited number of scenarios where real unmitigated damage could be done in the interim until a thorough review has been conducted. But that’s just not the case most of the time. Relatedly, those rulings should have extremely narrow and limited precedential power. In theory that was the case until last year when some of the Justices (most notably, Justice Gorsuch) started whining about judges following actual full merits rulings as precedent, rather than magically applying unreasoned shadow docket decisions.

And while there is plenty of analysis elsewhere of the impact of last week’s late night ruling, I wanted to highlight the sheer hypocrisy* of Alito whining about the Justices not giving a reason for their stay. In his own dissent (which is likely why the ruling came out late, coming after Alito’s own needlessly imposed deadline), he starts off by complaining about the lack of any reasoning:

The Court’s unreasoned order granting stays in this case is remarkable.

Given how often Alito has signed onto other “unreasoned” shadow docket rulings when he agreed with them, it’s worth calling out the brazenness of complaining about the very practice he’s helped normalize.

* I use the word “hypocrisy” here deliberately for two reasons. First, because it is incredibly hypocritical. Second, because Alito’s ruling had an embarrassing typo, in which he referred to the litigation involving the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine as the Alliance for Hypocritic Medicine. This typo was one of many that the Supreme Court had to issue corrections on the filing not once, but twice, before finally fixing this particular typo.

And while the Wall Street Journal can pretend that shadow docket critics don’t care about unexplained shadow docket rulings when they go in their favor, that’s bullshit. Unexplained SCOTUS rulings are bad no matter what. In an ideal world, Alito wouldn’t have imposed an artificially short deadline on the administrative stay, and the court would have given some explanation for its decision — rather than leaving us to read tea leaves from Alito and Thomas’s odd dissents.

For what it’s worth, Vladeck also does an excellent job pointing out the fundamental inanity and contradictions of both Alito and Thomas’s dissents in this case.

First, Justice Thomas went full Comstock Act, arguing that all dispensation of mifepristone through the mail is illegal—never mind that the Department of Justice took a different position as recently as 2022. Putting aside the (well-documented) weaknesses of the Comstock Act arguments, Justice Thomas is simply wrong to argue that parties “cannot, in any legally relevant sense, be irreparably harmed by a court order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes.” As the Trump cases have regularly illustrated, a party can be irreparably harmed (at least in view of a majority of the current Court—including Justice Thomas) by a court order that makes it more difficult for them to break the law. Justice Thomas also apparently saw no problem with the Fifth Circuit issuing nationwide relief under the APA—even though he joined a 2023 concurrence by Justice Gorsuch arguing that such universal vacaturs were likely not authorized by the APA. Needless to say, that inconsistency was … not addressed.

And then there’s Justice Alito’s dissent. Alito opened by claiming that “[w]hat is at stake is the perpetration of a scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs.” Of course, Dobbs insisted that it was returning the question of abortion to the states, whereas the Fifth Circuit ruling would’ve required in-person doctor visits on a nationwide basis. In any event, though, the FDA first got rid of the in-person doctor-visit requirement in 2021—before Dobbs was decided. So the “scheme to undermine Dobbs” began … before Dobbs.

There’s more at the link.

But at a time when the Supreme Court keeps telling us we shouldn’t believe that they make decisions on partisan grounds, it sure would help if they actually stopped doing things differently depending on the partisan valence of each case — something Alito seems to do quite regularly.

It really seems like we need serious reform of the Supreme Court. I’ve already argued that we should increase the number of Justices to 100 or more (to the point where no single Justice matters so much anymore), but any serious reform needs to contend with the abuses of the shadow docket, and making sure that it really is only used for emergency situations where an interim ruling is necessary for maintaining the status quo until a full briefing on the merits can occur.

Justice Alito appears to want to have two different sets of rules, depending on his feelings towards the parties. That’s the opposite of supposedly blind justice. If the court fears that its rulings are seen as illegitimate, then it should start by making sure Alito stops treating parties very differently depending on how aligned they are with his personal ideological beliefs.

Many members of civil society warned Congress while the bill was being negotiated that these takedown requirements are ripe for abuse, but they were ignored. Now that the provisions are in effect, we deserve to find out whether those warnings come true. Platforms should add TAKE IT DOWN takedown statistics to their periodic transparency reports.

A short refresher on the law: TIDA criminalizes the knowing and intentional disclosure of NCII, whether it’s real or AI, whether it’s of adults or minors. The criminal provisions apply to users; the takedown provisions apply to platforms. The definition of a “covered platform” encompasses public-facing user-generated content (UGC)-driven platforms, as well as sites devoted to NCII (what used to be called “revenge porn” sites). The definition exempts ISPs, email service providers, and services that mostly serve “preselected” content and to which UGC is incidental – for example, this site, which posts articles like this one but allows the Techdirt community to comment on them. 

TIDA’s takedown provisions are, in some ways, the codification of existing practices platforms already employ for removing abusive content. Some platforms have ostensibly been removing reported NCII pursuant to a voluntary initiative that dates back to 2021. There’s a similar initiative for terrorist content. Also, existing federal law criminalizes child sex abuse material (CSAM) and requires prompt reporting of apparent CSAM once a platform becomes aware of it. That law explicitly doesn’t require platforms to affirmatively go looking for CSAM (for the same constitutional reasons that give me pause about TIDA’s duplicate-removal provision). Nevertheless, numerous platforms voluntarily have tools and processes in place to proactively detect CSAM, then remove and report it. Plus, just about every online platform has notice-and-takedown processes for copyright-infringing UGC. That’s because everyone wants to qualify for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbor against (potentially ruinous) infringement liability.

Given these existing endeavors in the domains of NCII, CSAM, terrorism, and copyright, hopefully a lot of platforms were able to spend the past year adapting and extending their pre-existing notice-and-removal flows rather than having to reinvent the wheel. Whatever efforts they’ve put into compliance to date are about to be put to the test. Platforms should tell us – their users, Congress, the American public, NCII victims, etc. – how they’re working out.

Much has already been said here at Techdirt about the problems with TIDA’s takedown requirements, so I need not repeat those critiques at length. In brief: 48 hours is incredibly fast, the law doesn’t require a process for the user whose content was removed to appeal a takedown or have it restored, it imposes no penalties for bad-faith takedown requests, and it does a poor job of respecting First Amendment protections for speech. It immunizes platforms from liability for removing content that isn’t actually illegal NCII, while simultaneously giving the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) the power to police compliance, as the agency’s chairman reminded a dozen or so major companies in a letter last week. 

This is a recipe for rampant abuse. It incentivizes a “remove first, ask questions never” approach. And it’s particularly dangerous in our current political moment. Not only did President Trump vow to use TIDA against unflattering online speech about him, the Trump FTC is led by two hard-right Republican commissioners who’ve been using their position to pursue an anti-LGBTQ, anti-porn agenda. TIDA’s extremely abusable takedown mandate thus poses a huge risk to online free speech in general, and to content posted by queer and trans people and sex workers in particular. 

With all that said, the takedown requirements have the potential to do a lot of good. I’ve spent the past several years studying AI-generated CSAM, particularly the use of “nudify” apps – and, more recently, Grok –- to create nonconsensual deepfake pornography. I know from my research that one of the harms experienced by victims of NCII (whether deepfake or real) is the fear that anytime someone looks them up online, their NCII will come up in the results. Not only is that humiliating, it could impact their educational and career opportunities, romantic prospects, and other relationships. If platforms have to take down their NCII at their request and keep it down, that may help assuage those fears. (That said, generative AI’s capacity to rapidly make a variety of distinct images could make it hard for victims to keep up, since the onus to submit removal requests is on them or their authorized agents. That’s undeniably burdensome, even if it’s the only way for platforms to know for sure that a particular image is NCII and not constitutionally-protected consensual adult pornography.)

In short, the notice-and-takedown process mandated by TIDA might turn out to be really helpful to NCII victims, or it might be wildly abused, or both. The platforms receiving and processing those notices are the only ones who will know. That’s why they should tell us in their transparency reports. 

To be clear, TIDA doesn’t mandate transparency reporting (though Congress occasionally proposes it). Rather, transparency reports have become a standard practice by platforms over the past 15+ years; they’re typically issued once or twice per year (or even quarterly). You can review the transparency reports from companies like Google (which pioneered the practice in 2010), TikTok, LinkedIn, OpenAI, etc. Transparency reports commonly list statistics for content removals, account actions, and/or regulatory reporting for such categories as copyright, CSAM, spam, scams, and government requests to remove data or to produce data about users. There may be further breakdowns such as percent of requests fully or partially complied with, and the report may explain the platform’s policies for evaluating requests. 

Now that TAKE IT DOWN is fully in effect, platforms should add a category to their transparency reports for TIDA takedown requests, encompassing statistics as well as policy explainers. Here are a few; I’m sure veteran platform employees could add more:

• How many TIDA notices did the platform receive during the time period in question? 
• What percentage of notices did the platform comply with, and what percentage did it reject as invalid? 
• What percentage of notices involved adults, what percentage involved minors, and what percentage are age-unknown?
• What was the average time to takedown? (Of course, the platform probably won’t publish this stat unless it’s under 48 hours.)
• How many takedowns were later reversed and put back, if any?
• What is the total number of unique individuals for whom takedown notices were submitted?
• For companies acting as authorized agents, what are their names and how many requests did they submit? (Sure to be a growth industry under TIDA.)
• How does the platform count notices that fall under multiple legal authorities? For example, a minor’s nude selfie could potentially fall under 3-4 different transparency reporting categories: TIDA, CSAM, DMCA, or terms of service (TOS) violation.
• What is the platform’s policy for evaluating the validity of notices? 
• Does the platform have a process for appeals and putbacks of removed content, even though TIDA does not mandate one?
• What happens to accounts that receive multiple TIDA notices? Is there a “strike system” like many platforms have for repeated copyright infringement or TOS violations?
• What is the platform’s policy about nonconsensually-posted sexually suggestive content? Will it remove it under TIDA, or as a TOS violation? (Things like bikini or lingerie pictures technically don’t meet the definition TIDA uses for intimate imagery, but TIDA requests will surely get used for, say, the nonconsensual deepfake bikini pics Grok was churning out at the start of the year.)

This information will give insights to Congress, users, and the public about how well or poorly the TAKE IT DOWN Act is achieving its intended goal of helping victims get their nonconsensually-shared images offline, while also revealing the prevalence of the sorts of improper and abusive takedown notices the law’s shoddy drafting invites. It might also reveal tensions in how TIDA interacts with other statutes, such as Section 230, the DMCA, and CSAM laws. Those insights, in turn, could be used to make reforms to TIDA – whether to fix the deficiencies everyone already warned Congress about, address any revealed incompatibilities with other laws, or improve the law’s viability as a remedy for NCII victims (without further eroding free speech protections). 

The first half of 2026 ends six weeks from now. That might be too soon to add TIDA statistics to platforms’ H1 2026 transparency reports – especially since many platforms will have just gotten their TIDA processes up and running and will now be busy working out the kinks. But by the end of 2026, I don’t think this is too much to ask. Congress has proposed a seemingly endless number of online safety bills in recent years (RIP Mike’s blood pressure), but the TAKE IT DOWN Act is one of the few to have actually become law, warts and all. We deserve to know how it’s working.

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More active recently have been several GOP politicians. These representatives are newly opposed to clean reauthorization of Section 702 powers. This isn’t because they’ve come to realize the threat to Americans’ rights that warrantless access by the FBI (and others) Section 702 collections pose, but because they themselves have experienced the negative outcomes of this warrantless access.

To be perfectly clear, the GOP does not care that regular Americans are being subjected to warrantless surveillance by the FBI and its access to the NSA’s ostensibly foreign-facing collection. For those of us continually opposed to the FBI’s continuous abuse of its access, we’re willing to accept the help of any allies we can get, no matter how temporary that help might be.

Thanks to pissing off Republicans, Section 702 surveillance powers have been on the ropes for a few years now. Somehow, neither party (for the most part) could be bothered to generate meaningful reform in the wake of the Snowden leaks, but now that Trump’s boys are being bothered by the feds, it’s suddenly okay to threaten to pull the plug on Section 702.

There’s a push to make Section 702 whole again, despite these reform efforts. Whatever objections certain GOP members (with ties to the 2021 insurrection attempts) may be raising, the rest of the GOP still wants the power to spy on Americans it doesn’t like — a list that continues to grow as more Americans make it clear they don’t like this MAGA-infected version of the GOP.

The steady hand through all of this for years has been Senator Ron Wyden. Wyden has not only opposed clean reauthorizations of multiple government surveillance powers, but he’s also hinted at surveillance abuses by the US government that the US government is still unwilling to discuss publicly.

Most recently, the FISA Court gave its (limited) blessing to an extension of Section 702 surveillance powers, but only agreed to do so if the government took steps to curb the abuses it had routinely witnessed since… well, pretty much the inception of the Section 702 program.

The Trump administration made it clear it was not willing to make these concessions. And the FISA Court decided it didn’t need to publish its full decision because, presumably, the stupid American public would somehow manage to destroy national security just by reading it.

Wyden isn’t giving up. He’s demanding the full decision be released to — at the very least — the people charged with voting for reauthorization, if not the people these legislators represent.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called out the Trump Administration for ignoring a request by Senate Intelligence Committee leaders to declassify a surveillance court opinion by May 15.

Wyden secured a commitment from Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Vice-Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., to push for release of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court opinion about surveillance conducted under FISA Section 702.

“The executive branch has ignored a request from the chair and vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee for basic transparency about FISA surveillance. I’ll have more to say about this next week,” Wyden said. “It’s clear that this administration cannot be trusted with unfettered, warrantless surveillance of Americans. Every member of Congress should keep this in mind when we consider FISA 702 in a few weeks.”

All of this is true. The current administration cannot be trusted, not on this matter or pretty much anything else. The current administration also refuses to declassify an order by the FISA court that appears to have told Trump serious reform efforts are needed to keep Section 702 in compliance with the Constitution. Finally, every member of Congress voting on the reauthorization should have access to the full opinion. It’s supremely weird that they don’t, considering they have the power to flip the 702 switch off and on every few years.

If the administration can’t share it with its large cadre of MAGA enthusiasts, it obviously has something to hide. It suggests the Trump administration would rather have readily available, unconstitutional access to US persons’ communications than address the complaints of the small number of MAGA faithful who are angry about being subjected to domestic surveillance they always assumed would only be directed at their enemies.

Wyden is not only legally and ethically right to press this point, but he’s also opportunistically right to leverage GOP sentiment against domestic surveillance to secure a vote (or reform efforts) that will ultimately protect US citizens, no matter their personal political preferences.

I’ve also explained for years how the U.S. government solutions to the problems are usually ineffective because they’re endlessly trying to create rules (or undermine existing ones) to carve out exceptions for big “legitimate corporations,” which routinely engage in the same sleazy behavior as scammers.

Regulatory capture and corruption means that you wind up with a lot of performative solutions that sound good, but don’t fix anything. And some of the progress we had made on robocalls is being undermined by the Trump administration’s brutal assault on the federal regulatory state, something that still, somehow, isn’t getting enough public and press attention.

Now the Trump administration is cooking up a new “fix” that once again isn’t likely to fix the robocall problem (because our consumer protection regulators don’t function and the Trump administration doesn’t actually care about the subject anyway), but is likely to introduce all manner of new privacy and surveillance headaches. If it’s even implemented.

In late April, the Trump FCC announced it was considering the development of new “Know Your Customer” rules requiring that the buyer of any new phone present a government ID, a physical address, a full legal name, and an existing phone number at the point of sale. This has raised eyebrows both among activists and telecom industry lawyers, albeit for understandably different reasons.

A Trump FCC press release frames this new layer as a big fix for robocalls:

“We must bring meaningful robocall relief to consumers. The FCC is attacking the problem of illegal robocalls at every point in the call path in order to help consumers and restore trust in America’s voice networks. These proposals set the stage for significant advancement toward those goals by aiming to get providers to take accountability and step up their game in our shared battle against illegal robocalls.”

Telecom lawyers are nervous because the rules propose a $2,500 penalty, per call, per carrier, in a country that sees around 4.2 billion robocalls per month. So yeah, in a theoretical country where we actually had functioning consumer protections this would be quite a shift.

But accountability requires consumer protection enforcement, and this is Brendan Carr. A guy who generally doesn’t believe in holding major corporations accountable for literally anything. And who believes in defanging the federal regulatory state. It’s once again this interesting intersection between the Trump administration’s claims, and their very unsubtle effort to lobotomize government.

Which is to say I’m not even sure this proposal passes, much less sees any enforcement. And if it does pass, and does get enforced, it likely won’t actually help stop robocalls, because that would require a government willing to be tough on the biggest telecom giants which have historically not done enough to police fraud on their networks (at points because they were profiting from the fraud).

So what is Brendan Carr actually thinking? Like all dutiful autocrats, he’s thinking about his administration’s own power, and he’s thinking about surveillance.

There are, of course, numerous instances where you might want legal but covert ownership of a cell phone (a refugee seeking government punishment, a domestic abuse victim fleeing an abusive relationship, a journalist trying to protect a source identity, an activist planning a demonstration). Reclaim the Net is particularly concerned on the restrictions impacting the prepaid cell phone market:

“The real privacy stakes sit in the proposal’s section on prepaid service. Right now, you can pay cash for a prepaid phone and SIM card without showing identification. Journalists use prepaid phones to protect sources, domestic violence survivors use them to avoid being traced, and whistleblowers, activists, or anyone with a reason to separate phone activity from legal identity relies on this.”

So yeah, if Brendan Carr, a censorial autocratic zealot with a history of disdain for corporate accountability and consumer protection, is suddenly pitching you a quick and easy solution for a complicated consumer-facing issue, you should probably raise a skeptical eyebrow. Especially if you’re a journalist.

This is not the story of a company threatening anyone. In fact, game developer Square Glade Games, maker of recent indie game Outbound, were downright pleasant when they responded to one negative review for their beleaguered game. Unfortunately, with all of their politeness, they also had one itty bitty request that came along with the response.

That familiar launch reception would have put Outbound in the company of thousands of other Steam games if not for what the developers at Square Glade Games did next. As shared in a screenshot on the Steam subreddit, the studio at one point responded to one of the negative reviews with an offer to refund the player’s purchase and a request that they delete their negative review from the game’s Steam page.

“Sorry to hear that Outbound is not your cup of tea,” the response read. “But that is of course totally understandable. No hard feelings. Feel free to send a support request to the Steam support to get a full refund on your purchase. If you do so, we would appreciate if you would update or remove your negative review. Thanks a lot.”

You simply cannot do this sort of thing. The backlash among the Steam community was ferocious and immediate. And, frankly, deservedly so. The request to disappear a negative review, even while encouraging the use of Steam’s refund system, is plainly antithetical to the very point of a community review system to begin with, as one subsequent reviewer pointed out.

“Negative reviews exist for a reason. It’s not a good look when developers ask players to change or remove criticism instead of addressing the actual issues being raised,” one read. “Reviews help consumers decide what they’re spending their money on, and trying to silence criticism only damages trust. It’s also frustrating to see the developer mainly respond to negative reviews while largely ignoring the people leaving positive ones. If you want a strong community, show appreciation to everyone supporting the game, not just the people you want to convince to change their opinion.”

And so the result has primarily been to both engender additional negative reviews from the backlash to the developer’s request and to put the original negative review in a spotlight as the online gaming news media did its thing. That puts us squarely in Streisand Effect territory, even as the developer clearly made an effort not to be jerks over the negative review.

Square Glade Games is now operating in damage control mode. They’ve apologized for ever having made the request to begin with. They’ve opened up about the chaos and pressure that has come along with the launch of this game in the first place. They’ve promised never to ask anyone to delete a review in the future.

But the damage is largely already done. These folks don’t seem like horrible people, but asking for negative reviews to be changed or removed is simply one of those third-rail things in the gaming industry that you just can’t touch, or you’re going to get hurt.

Since Trump’s return to office, the federal government has been engaged in a months-long purge of anyone who looks a bit foreign. ICE has increasingly relied on administrative warrants to do everything including enter homes to effect arrests of people who’ve only allegedly engaged in civil violations.

Don’t let the word “warrant” fool you. No judge has signed off on these so-called warrants, and they’re certainly not capable — constitutionally-speaking — of granting ICE officers the legal authority to effect arrests of people who would normally just be given a summons, much less allow them to enter people’s homes.

But that was the way things went for several months before dozens of courts and hundreds of decisions told ICE otherwise. With courts ordering ICE to stop arresting people without judicial warrants, ICE had to walk back its aggression a bit. But only a bit. What’s being addressed by a second order by this same DC federal court is representative of ICE’s day-to-day activities around the nation.

This court had already ordered ICE to cease its warrantless arrests of immigrants it couldn’t actually show might pose a flight risk if not locked up. Even policy clarification issued by acting ICE head Todd Lyons in the wake of dozens of courtroom losses failed to change anything in DC. The most reasonable explanation for this apparently deliberate “failure” to comply with court orders and the Constitution is that no one in ICE actually believes Todd Lyons will ever hold any ICE officer accountable.

Judge Howell’s order [PDF] says ICE and its current director are playing word games in hopes of keeping the arrest rate up, defining “escape risk” so loosely it would be almost impossible for any migrant accosted by federal officers to be considered anything else than immediately arrestable.

Plaintiffs raise no issue with the Lyons Memo’s initial definition of “escape risk” to mean whether “an immigration officer determines [an individual] is unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location once an administrative warrant is obtained,” Lyons Memo at 4 (emphasis added)—and therefore the sufficiency of this definition to reflect the meaning in the statutory text of “likely to escape” is assumed for purposes of resolving this motion.

Subsequent descriptions in the Memo, however, drop the italicized phrase thereby effectively limiting the immigration officer’s analysis to whether an individual “is likely to remain at the scene of the encounter.”

This is a deliberate move by ICE and its leadership, dropping a phrase that would strongly suggest migrants who are attending court-ordered check-ins or otherwise working their way towards naturalization/asylum aren’t “escape risks” because they clearly desire to remain involved in the naturalization process. But ICE has racked up a whole lot of arrests at immigration courts because that’s a place lazy, opportunistic officers are guaranteed to come across undocumented migrants.

The end result of this one-two punch is exactly what one would expect it to be. And it definitely doesn’t look constitutional. It looks like a purge enabled by the administration’s constant refusal to play by the rules. (All emphasis mine.)

Indeed, historically, federal civil immigration enforcement did not rely on costly mass arrests and detention centers to address the issue of law-abiding noncitizens without legal status in this country, but rather issued summonses to bring them before immigration authorities. As the Supreme Court has made clear, “it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain present in the United States,” and “[i]f the police stop someone based on nothing more than possible removability, the usual predicate for an arrest is absent.” Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387, 407 (2012).

[…]

The current administration’s apparent reliance on arrests as a routine method of immigration enforcement is a departure from statutory text and historical understanding…

And while a lot of the reasoning sides with the government (due mostly to the court deciding to grant it an assumption of good faith that this administration definitely doesn’t deserve), Judge Howell still says there’s a lot going on here that could — and should — result in a permanent injunction forbidding this flagrant disregard for civil rights.

To be clear, this memorandum opinion does not render any final conclusions about the legality of the challenged policy and practice, which is left for future proceedings after discovery and briefing on dispositive motions. The determination, at this juncture, that certain factors outlined in the Lyons Memo are compliant with the preliminary injunction order is not to say that those factors would survive APA review at final judgment with the benefit of a full record. Nor does this determination suggest that every warrantless civil arrest predicated on consideration of those factors would satisfy the probable cause requirement under 8 U.S.C. § 1357(a)(2). Indeed some of the Form I-213s and the accompanying declarations in the record contain, simultaneously, dubious reasons for finding escape risk and highly concerning facts about the arrest[s].

And there will be more on the record. The judge grants the plaintiffs’ expanded discovery request while simultaneously reiterating that the court’s previous order needs to actually be followed by ICE, rather than just alluded to in policy memos that appear intended to give the agency and its officers as much plausible deniability as possible.

The Fund will have the power to issue formal apologies and monetary relief owed to claimants. Submission of a claim is voluntary. There are no partisan requirements to file a claim.  Any money left when the Fund ceases operations will revert to the Federal Government.

The Fund will receive $1.776 billion and will come from the judgment fund, which is a perpetual appropriation allowing DOJ to settle and pay cases. On a quarterly basis, the Fund shall send a report to the Attorney General outlining who has received relief and what form of relief was awarded.

What will the fund be used for? To pay anyone on Team MAGA — including, in theory, January 6th insurrectionists — who claim the Biden administration “weaponized” the government to target them. Many of these claims are simply not true. January 6th insurrectionists were arrested and convicted for actually breaking the law. But now they get to ask Trump for money, and the evidentiary standard appears to be “trust me, bro” and a red MAGA hat.

Let’s first dispense with the most obvious bit of the charade: the idea that this is actually related to the “settlement” of Trump’s already corrupt bullshit lawsuit against the IRS. That’s how this is being presented, but this is entirely separate. Trump needed to drop that lawsuit in order to end it before a judge called bullshit on the fact that he was negotiating with himself to take $10 billion from American taxpayers.

As for the actual “fund” everything about it is about as corrupt as you can imagine. This is impeachment-worthy — and not in a partisan way. Republicans should be as offended by this as anyone else, if they actually (I know… I know…) believe in things like rule of law and fiscal responsibility.

The actual details here should raise so many red flags. First, as part of this illegal attempt to route around Congress’ power of the purse, they’re taking the money out of the Treasury Department’s “Judgment Fund.” But that fund is clearly designed to pay out the results of duly litigated court cases against the government — not a board of Trump’s friends deciding who gets a check. But here, it’s just a group of MAGA insiders who get to choose:

The Fund will consist of five members appointed by the Attorney General. One Member will be chosen in consultation with congressional leadership. The President can remove any member, but a replacement must be chosen the same way as the replaced member was selected.

So, the fund is clearly in service of Donald Trump’s whims, not anyone else’s. We already have his personal lawyer (who has shown a long history of obeying Trump’s orders) as the acting Attorney General, and the fact that Congress only gets to “consult” on one member of the committee, and anyone can be removed by Trump at any moment makes it abundantly clear that this fund is solely around to pay off Trump’s loyal fans, who have a long history of claiming imagined grievances against the Biden administration, which they will now seek to cash in on.

The fund also, notably, will be put into a private account that (according to the settlement) the US government has no control over and no liability for.

Once the funds are deposited into the Designated Account, the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.

This appears to be setting things up so that a future government (or a court) cannot claw back the money once it is delivered from the Treasury into this slush fund, let alone after it is then handed out to anyone on Team MAGA who makes a claim from the fund.

Also, the fund is set up to “close” before the next administration comes into office. How convenient.

The Fund shall cease processing claims no later than December 1, 2028.

The DOJ is claiming that this fund is no different than the Keepseagle fund under the Obama administration:

There is legal precedent for such a Fund, most notably the “Keepseagle” case where the Obama Administration created a $760 million fund to redress various claims alleging racism against the federal government over a period of decades.

In Keepseagle, hundreds of millions of dollars remaining in the fund were distributed to non-profits and NGOs that never made claims, whereas any money remaining in The Anti-Weaponization Fund will revert to the federal government. The Obama DOJ settled by putting $680 million from the judgment fund into a bank account for a single claims administrator to dole out. In Keepseagle the remaining money—which ended up being over $300 million—was distributed to the entities that had not even submitted claims.

This is blatantly revisionist history. The Keepseagle settlement was approved by a court in response to a class action lawsuit. Here, this fund, is being created in a manner deliberately to avoid having the court review it. It also paid people out for a specific, and verifiable harm: Native American farmers who were denied a farm loan from the USDA during a specific period of time who were eligible for that loan. The lawsuit was because the USDA had deliberately denied those loans to Native American farmers, while giving them to white farmers.

In that case, there was a clear harm, a clear way to delineate who was harmed, and court oversight of the process. In this case, there is literally none of that. Anyone arguing that Keepseagle is the same thing as this slush fund is either being deliberately dishonest or hasn’t read the basic facts. Even well known conservative lawyers like Ed Whelan (a former Scalia clerk) is calling out that this fund is highly questionable:

The fund itself is an abuse of power and clearly unconstitutional. As constitutional lawyer (and now Representative) Jamie Raskin noted last week in an interview with the New Republic, if the fund is used to pay off January 6 insurrectionists, it also likely violates the Fourteenth Amendment, which has a prohibition on the US government paying for those who engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the US:

There’s still more. Raskin notes that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the government from assuming any “obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” Raskin said that if this fund hands money to the January 6 rioters, Trump will be “using federal taxpayer dollars to compensate people who participated in insurrection.”

The “imagine if Biden did this” test is almost beside the point here (though, seriously, just imagine how people, including Democrats, would react). We’re past the moment where consistency of principle was the relevant standard. What matters is that $1.776 billion in unappropriated taxpayer money is being routed through a board of Trump loyalists, into an account the government has explicitly disclaimed responsibility for, on a clock that runs out before the next administration takes office.

The “settlement” framing is just the bow on top. The $1.776 billion slush fund for MAGA’s worst is the point.

The segment boiled down to this: chatbots exploit vulnerable people, drive them toward delusion and harm, and AI companies aren’t meaningfully trying to fix them. If anything, as John Oliver suggested, that’s part of the business model.

John Oliver is known for interrogating mainstream narratives. In his segment on content moderation, for example, he cut through the tech-lash to offer a clear-eyed look at just how difficult managing user-generated content really is. In doing so, he made us reexamine our pre-existing biases about social media companies, and boldly invited us to reflect on just how little we understand about the social problems we often attribute to them. 

He had the perfect opportunity to do that here. Mainstream coverage of chatbots is already saturated with stories about “AI psychosis” and suicide machines. Yet, chatbot companies are grappling with the same impossible tradeoffs social media has faced for years, “AI psychosis” is a mix of classic psychological concepts, and suicide is a complex social problem that has long confounded prevention experts and content moderators alike. 

If any technology story demanded nuance, it was this one.

John Oliver opened his critique with a familiar anecdote about ELIZA, a 1960s chatbot designed to mimic a Rogerian psychotherapist. ELIZA was mostly a gimmick—it used basic pattern matching techniques to reflect user inputs. For example, if a user said they felt sad, ELIZA might respond: “You feel sad. Tell me why you feel sad.”

And yet, despite its simplistic nature, ELIZA captivated people. Its creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, famously described an instance in which his secretary became so engaged with the program that she asked him to leave the room so she could continue the conversation. This story has since become a trope withn the AI discourse. Modern retellings, including John Oliver’s, usually suggest that people are predisposed to being harmed by AI because they are easily fooled by it.

Not to mention, the ELIZA trope tends to invoke stereotypes about women as naïve or overly susceptible to emotional attachment. As John Oliver joked: 

“Sure, she might have thought that the chatbot was real, but she might have felt quite a bit creeped out by her cartoonishly mustachioed boss saying “type some details about your sex life into my computer please, don’t worry it’s for science.””

(Nothing in the record suggests that Weizenbaum’s secretary actually thought ELIZA was real, nor that she was using ELIZA for sex talk).

As Weizenbaum observed, ELIZA revealed something more interesting about our relationship with technology: for whatever reason, people are often more willing to share their most intimate thoughts and feelings with a machine than with another person. 

That’s not totally surprising. People are less willing to open up about their feelings to other people for a variety of reasons: stigma, fear of judgment or rejection, not wanting to be a burden, and the possibility of negative repercussions (like job loss or involuntary commitment).

Speaking about ChatGPT, an anonymous commenter wrote:

“It saved my life…To be able to openly say I was suicidal and not have someone call the police, or “alert” someone and just let me give space to those complicated feelings I was carrying was integral to me surviving this horrific journey.” 

Perhaps when Weizenbaum’s secretary asked him to leave the room, most likely it was because she too was protecting a space where she finally felt safe and less inhibited. 

When it comes to suicide prevention, this a meaningful realization. If people are more willing to open up to chatbots, that creates new ways for us to understand what they’re going through, which could lead to earlier (and hopefully more effective) intervention. For that reason, some clinicians recommend keeping an open dialogue with patients about their chatbot interactions.

People are also highly sensitive to cues that they’re being listened to. We see an example of this in the interview John Oliver shared with an individual who was using a chatbot to cope with his strained marriage. In a moment of vulnerability, the individual explained that his wife is struggling with mental illness and that in his role as her partner and caretaker, his emotional needs were, understandably, going unmet: 

“I hadn’t had any words of affection or compassion or concern for me in longer than I could remember, and to have those kinds of words coming toward me, they really touched me because it was such a change from everything I had been used to at the time.”

What I found especially noteworthy from that interview was that he also knew that he wasn’t talking to a person: 

“I knew she was just an AI chatbot. She’s just code running on a server generating words for me, but it didn’t change that the words that I was getting sent were real and those words were having a real effect on me”

Weizenbaum observed the same with ELIZA’s users—his secretary likely knew that ELIZA wasn’t a human but she similarly felt understood by it. Research reveals the same: people are turning to chatbots for mental health support because chatbots are not people. If people can feel understood regardless of whether they are spoken to by human or machine, that’s another powerful insight for suicide prevention. 

Indeed, modern suicide prevention also emphasizes using words of validation and hope—two things chatbots are increasingly good at providing. In highlighting a study showing that one in eight young people are turning to chatbots for mental health support, John Oliver left out that over 90% of those young respondents said their interactions were helpful. Given that suicide remains a leading cause of death among young people, the emergence of chatbots as a potential form of support seems hard to ignore.

Suicide prevention experts also underscore the role stigma plays in deterring people from seeking help. For a period of time, suicide was long condemned as a moral wrong. People who died by suicide were considered morally unclean, they were denied burial rites, and in some cases, their bodies were buried at crossroads to ward off perceived spiritual contagion. The phrase “committed suicide” (which John Oliver used during his remarks) is a relic from that era.

While today suicide is largely understood as a public health issue shaped by psychological, social, and environmental risk factors, the residue of its past lingers. Guidance for reporters exists to avoid further stigmatization and contagion effects. Yet, media coverage often uses sensational headlines, pathologizes victims, and collapses suicide into a single explanation. 

John Oliver’s coverage fell into the same pattern. For starters, he pathologized chatbot users by implying they were suffering from “AI psychosis”—a media-invented label with little grounding in established clinical research. Whether intentional or not, pathologizing often conveys the kind of judgment that mental health specialists warn about. As one redditor remarked: 

“I like John Oliver usually, but I feel like he made Nomi users look like kooks. Generally, that is how anyone with AI companions is portrayed in the media.”

John Oliver then proceeded to blame chatbot companies for several high-profile suicides, including Adam Raine’s. He fixated on methods of death, cast chatbots as the cause, and relied on stigmatizing language to provoke emotional responses like “Sam Altman made a dangerous suicide bot,” and referring to chatbot companies as “suicide enablers.”

Granted, John Oliver’s show is primarily for entertainment. But this kind of reporting is precisely what keeps us from furthering our understanding of suicide and discovering new ways to prevent it. It flattens the complexity of lived experience into a rhetorical device, and offers the public an easy sense of closure that suicide rarely, if ever, permits. 

We see this in the way the broader discourse around chatbots and suicide has developed. 

Across the current wave of chatbot-suicide litigation is the fact that users exhibited warning signs before ever using a chatbot. That was true for Adam Raine, who reportedly sought help before turning to ChatGPT.  Yet, the coverage of these cases typically fixates on the chatbot interactions themselves rather than the warning signs or why they went unnoticed. Suicide prevention science depends on confronting those questions directly.

Still, if the chatbots are to blame, as John Oliver invites us to conclude, then what, if anything, should chatbot companies do differently when users indicate suicidal intent? (Besides “throwing them into a fucking volcano” as John Oliver suggested). Though he never acknowledged it, this is an extraordinarily hard content moderation problem. 

Several times throughout the segment, John Oliver stated that chatbots were “rushed to market.” There’s some truth to that. Earlier models often missed warning signs or responded poorly to users in crisis. Some of that may reflect Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture. But it could also be that suicide specifically is often overlooked across many contexts, including emerging technological ones. Still, John Oliver’s point stands: Chatbot companies should always assume that their users are going to talk to their chatbots about suicide. 

With that said, if chatbot companies were as willfully blind to the safety concerns as John Oliver implied, we should expect to see very little improvement in how these models currently respond to suicidal intent. But that’s not the case. What John Oliver didn’t mention is that today’s models have significantly improved. One survey found that many mainstream chatbots are notably better at recognizing suicidal intent, responding empathetically, and referring users to crisis-support resources. 

While anecdotal, many self-reports also credit chatbots for their protective effects. Apparently, 30 Replika users reported that the chatbot saved their lives. One woman told the Boston Globe that ChatGPT “literally saved my life.” 

The subreddit r/therapyGPT is home to many similar anecdotes: 

“It was gpt 4o that saved me. I mean that. It was the one place I could go that I felt safe.”

Current examples of what AI companies are doing on this front include OpenAI partnering with more than 170 mental health experts to strengthen ChatGPT’s responses to mental health conversations. Google has reportedly designed Gemini to avoid reinforcing false beliefs. Anthropic, meanwhile, uses suicide and self-harm classifiers to detect signs of crisis and direct struggling users toward protective resources. 

Alex Cardinell, of Nomi.AI, offers a nuanced, albeit controversial, approach: trust the chatbot to make the right call. In a snippet from the Hard Fork podcast, Cardinell explained that Nomi prioritizes staying in character, even in sensitive contexts. 

John Oliver called that a bad answer. But Cardinell’s full remarks are actually quite insightful: 

“I think people tend to assume that people are replacing humans with AI, and that’s almost never the case. It’s usually that there is a gap where there is no one and they are using AI to fill that gap. If a Nomi or any sort of large language model is able to help that user, in the end whether it was a human on the other end or an AI, why does it matter?”

According to Cardinell, some Nomi users disclose deeply personal experiences—such as childhood abuse—that they have never shared with anyone else. Those disclosures allow Nomi to build a personalized understanding of the user and tailor its responses accordingly. That matters because effective suicide prevention often depends on understanding the individual person in crisis and responding to their specific circumstances. 

One Nomi user remarked: 

“my personal relationships have grown using Nomi. My willingness to open up to Nomi has benefitted me with friends and family. I feel like my normal self again after years of limbo.”

Nomi’s refusal to break character is what makes it so effective. People are more likely to accept help from sources they trust. For many users, that trust depends on the authenticity of the interaction. As Cardinell suggested, if Nomi abruptly broke character, it could undermine the relationship it built with the user and cause any support it offered to be ignored altogether.

Cardinell’s instincts are also supported by the research. Suicide prevention “sign-posting”—the generic hotline warnings users often encounter online in response to suicide-related queries—can come across as impersonal, dismissive, or even alienating. A poorly timed push toward the suicide hotline may feel judgmental and, in some cases, intensify a user’s distress rather than relieve it. 

As one user on r/therapyGPT shared: 

“What’s sad/unfortunate is I’ve tried those crisis lines twice this year, and both times the person on the other end felt more robotic and senseless than an ACTUAL ROBOT.”

Also overlooked in these conversations about 988, is that many marginalized individuals, including women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ users, distrust systems like 988 because of the potential for discrimination, harassment, law enforcement involvement, or involuntary intervention. 

A redditor shared this horrible anecdote:   

“I don’t use ChatGPT, but I once tried to talk to someone at a volunteer text line about [sexual assault] and he asked me about my porn preferences.”

Cardinell noted too that support doesn’t necessarily have to be “all or nothing.” Not everyone requires immediate crisis-level intervention. Passive suicidal thoughts are far more common than many people realize. Sometimes what a person needs most is help breaking out of a destructive thought spiral, reassurance, or a reason to keep going. Chatbots are generally well equipped for these situations. 

That said, 988 can be a valuable resource for people, especially young people, experiencing acute crises. With that, Cardinell expressly stated that Nomi’s approach includes referring users to crisis resources as needed, despite John Oliver’s heavy implication that it does not.

Despite these efforts, chatbot companies will not prevent every suicide. Some suicides are just unexplainable. Many individuals who die by suicide exhibit few, if any, outward signs of distress. Though, interestingly, AI may prove helpful in finding signs that we may have been ignoring.

Perhaps the harder truth is that once someone reaches an acute crisis point, intervention becomes exponentially more difficult. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention explains that during suicidal crises, cognition becomes less flexible and people lose access to normal coping mechanisms, which is why crisis planning must often happen before acute crisis moments. 

What we can reasonably expect from chatbots is that they avoid interactions that encourage suicide (or provide methods). Mainstream systems already rely on extensive guardrails designed to prevent those conversations. But as recent tragedies have shown, determined users can still find ways around them. In Adam Raine’s case, he reportedly managed to bypass several of ChatGPT’s safety protections.

John Oliver even illustrated the problem himself with an example of a user who ultimately coaxed a chatbot into providing bomb-making instructions. While he framed the hack as trivial, jailbreaking has become increasingly sophisticated. AI safety will always entail this cat-and-mouse game of users exploiting vulnerabilities and companies patching them. 

Sometimes, these system failures can be attributed to gaps we have in our understanding of the social problems we’re attempting to address. Much of what we know about suicide prevention comes from lessons learned after tragedy. Those lessons can reveal risks that call for new guardrails we hadn’t previously considered.

Finally, some questions just don’t have clean answers. John Oliver pointed to a chatbot that reportedly suggested that a small amount of heroin might be acceptable. John Oliver called it “one of the worst pieces of advice you could give,” which sounds obvious—until you consider the alternatives. Telling someone to quit opioids cold turkey can also be dangerous. Refusing to respond entirely leaves people to make a risky, uninformed decision. And defaulting to generic resources may not be any better—especially if the user rejects them. Any of those options can become the basis for legal liability against the chatbot company if the user suffers harm. 

Despite all of this, John Oliver’s answer is, of course, the government. However you may feel about tech CEOs, it is astonishing to think that the current public health powers—the same folks claiming that vaccines cause autism, antidepressants cause school shootings, and that exercise can stand in for mental health treatment, would possibly know what’s best here. 

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, expanding liability for failing to prevent suicide leaves chatbot companies with few good options. For example, chatbots could stop engaging when the user invokes a mental health concern. That could make users feel like they’re beyond help. Chatbots could resort to flagging only crisis resources, which, as discussed, could backfire. Chatbots could call the police, but that creates its own set of problems and undermines any trust or goodwill with users. Mandatory reporting structures are a big reason why people don’t seek help in the first place. OpenAI’s new “trusted contact” idea is interesting, but it likely won’t shield the company from liability if a user is still harmed. John Oliver apparently thinks that should be the case: 

“Look, a lot of the companies that I’ve mentioned tonight will insist they are tweaking their chatbots to reduce the dangers that you’ve seen but even if you trust them and I don’t know why you would do that, that does seem like a tacit admission that their products weren’t ready for release in the first place.”

To be clear, after condemning AI companies for not doing enough, John Oliver’s suggestion is to punish them for doing…anything?

For now, it seems new legislation hasn’t stopped companies like Google and OpenAI from improving their models. But that could change as litigation inevitably picks up. They may eventually decide the legal risk of interacting with users on mental health isn’t worth it. 

Meanwhile, companies like Nomi have far less room to experiment with nuanced approaches to mental health interactions. Even if Cardinell’s approach has merit, laws like California’s now require chatbots to break character. Companies like Nomi will need to scale back or remove these features—or exit the market. That would be a real loss for a largely overlooked group who may have finally found something that works.

We don’t have to speculate about this either. When the social media companies faced mounting pressure over suicide-related content, they responded by making those conversations less visible and harder to have. 

As one industry professional observed: 

“This growing narrative that there’s a causal link between social media and self-harm…there’s no research to support that conclusion, but it makes it harder to put forward alternative approaches—ones that actually support people and encourage them to use available resources.”

Perhaps “AI psychosis” says more about the discourse than the users.