• Trump Campaign Threatens To Sue NY Times For Sharing His 1995 Tax Returns
• Yahoo Secretly Built Software To Scan All Emails Under Pressure From NSA Or FBI
• Yahoo Issues Tone Deaf Non-Denial Denial Of Email Scanning Report
• Trump Joins Clinton In Pushing For Cyberwar
• Trump Adds To His Anti-First Amendment Legacy In Threatening To Sue Clinton For Campaign Ads
• Details Of Charges Against Backpage Execs For ‘Pimping’ Look Totally Bogus

This Week in 2011

• Merger Of The Also Rans: Rhapsody Buys Napster
• Copyright Trolls Invading Australia
• Amanda Knox Is Guilty… Of Making Newspapers Jump The Gun On Guilty Headlines
• Former ‘Anti-Piracy Investigator’ Explains How He Fed Police Cases, Inflated ‘Piracy’ Stats
• RIAA Law Lets Law Enforcement Ignore 4th Amendment, Search Private Property With No Warrants
• No, The Supreme Court Did Not Legalize Downloading

This Week in 2006

• Facebook Says Leave The Innovation To Us, Please, And Quit Using The Word Face While You’re At It
• Wal-Mart’s MySpace Clone Gone, Missed By Nobody
• The Problem (Insert Ad Here) With Advertising (Insert Ad Here) On YouTube
• If Terrorists Could Please Tag Their Blog Posts ‘Death To America’, The US Government Would Appreciate It
• Falsely Accusing Your Customers Of Software Piracy Is Not A Victimless Crime
• George Lucas Announces The Death Of The $200 Million Feature Film

The first is that Kennedy is a miserable communicator, in a way that is totally purposeful. He talks out of both sides of his mouth all the time, such that he’s able to claim to both sides of the vaccine “debate” that he’s said what they want him to say. “Go get the MMR vaccine” he’ll say when confronted by a measles crisis that is spinning out of control. Then he’ll get in front of anti-vaxxer groups and brag about how he is changing the childhood MMR vaccine schedule, while claiming it is untested and dangerous. This leaves the public confused. It’s how you get outbreaks of once-defeated diseases.

The second is that the public generally understands that Kennedy is a problem and doesn’t like what he’s doing. We saw that trend begin in polling going back to the middle of 2025, as well as when the White House briefly flirted with understanding that Kennedy’s bullshit was becoming a massive liability for the now-approaching midterms.

Well, more recent polling demonstrates both of these things together in one poll. The public is generally confused about what Kennedy’s stance on the MMR vaccine is, but they are not at all confused about the fact that they hate him. Let’s start with the MMR vaccine.

Americans’ uncertainty of where Kennedy stands on the MMR vaccine might in large part be traced back to Kennedy himself. He has rarely provided unflinching support for the highly effective vaccine.

More than 1,900 adults responded to the poll, conducted from August 4 to 17. Of all participants, 31% correctly stated that Kennedy recommends the MMR vaccine, up from 23% in August 2025. But most indicated that Kennedy either doesn’t recommend the vaccine (29%) or are unclear about his position (40%).

I will quibble slightly with the wording in the post, specifically the word “correctly.” This is putting way, way too much weight on Kennedy’s statements that people should in fact get the vaccine. While he’s done that, I’ve already described how Kennedy talks out of both sides of his mouth on the subject. Kennedy has spent his entire career claiming that vaccines are dangerous in part because they aren’t tested. He’s made other claims about the ingredients in the MMR vaccine being deadly or causing other afflictions like autism, even long after those ingredients were removed. To view his statement that he wants people to get a vaccine that he claims is dangerous and untested as though it came with a wink and a pair of crossed-fingers isn’t in any way unreasonable. To claim the only correct answer to the polling question is that Kennedy recommends the MMR vaccine is simplifying things in the extreme.

Later in the post, CIDRAP even acknowledges much of this when talking about the current measles outbreak.

On August 2, after years of unproven claims about the MMR vaccine and an assertion that childhood vaccines cause autism, Kennedy denied responsibility for the measles outbreaks. “I’ve never questioned the efficacy of the MMR vaccine,” he said on CNN. “A measles vaccine is effective. It stops measles in about 97% of the cases.”

But the overall point here is that Kennedy’s purposeful waffling is the direct cause of a public that is confused on what Kennedy actually wants them to do to combat the measles outbreak and plays a huge part in the outbreak existing to begin with. This resurgence absolutely is his fault. It’s his life’s work, in fact.

And the public appears to be very aware of that in his favorability polling and the negative side of the respondents is getting more extreme.

A total of 23% of respondents said that their opinion of Kennedy is favorable, unchanged from August 2025. Half report an unfavorable view of him, with 42% saying they see him very unfavorably and 8% somewhat unfavorably. While the public’s overall unfavorable rating of Kennedy has not changed since August 2025, significantly more participants said their opinion is very unfavorable in 2026 than in 2025 (42% vs 37%).

That the White House hitched its wagon to this absolute turd of a cabinet secretary is strategic political suicide. It makes no sense. Trump could raise his favorability ratings full points almost immediately by firing this clown and committing to actually sound healthcare policy. That may sound like a small thing overall, but in the current climate of political inertia, it really isn’t.

I can’t explain why Kennedy has such as grip on Trump. I don’t know why it is that the White House is so enamored with this kind of political weight as it swims towards a midterm election that sure looks like it’s going to be a GOP ass-kicking.

But I do know we’re all worse off for it.

But that’s no reason to let this slide by without pointing it out. The government (at all levels) has a lot of vehicles. People in the government (at all levels) are now asking with increasing frequency, “why not put a camera on it?”

That’s why we’ve got city sanitation vehicles wielding cameras for the purpose of generating “blight” citations. And that’s why we now have the Postal Service do a trial run with always-on cameras attached to delivery vehicles. Joseph Cox has the details at 404 Media:

The United States Postal Service is running a pilot program to put cameras in its mail carrier trucks that continuously scan roads and signs, map roadways and sidewalks, and improve “community safety,” according to a letter posted by a labor union and a statement from the agency to 404 Media. The idea is that, since the trucks are constantly traveling anyway, they can be used as a way to collect data, eventually potentially across the nation.

“The purpose of this pilot is to leverage the Postal Service’s unique ability to collect this valuable data due to the scale and frequency with which our fleet of postal vehicles travel the streets of every community across the country,” the letter, posted by NALC Branch 238 to Facebook, reads.

I always love it when the people laying the groundwork for a persistent, abusable surveillance network say things like “leveraging unique [collection] abilities.” For the most part, I think we we’re all fine with the USPS mainly being in the delivery business, with collection limited to getting the stuff that needs to go to somewhere else.

It all seems pretty innocuous, at least at first. And, to be sure, there’s a use case for what the USPS says it intends to do with the cameras:

A spokesperson for the USPS told 404 Media in an email “The Postal Service is conducting a limited pilot to assess whether vehicle-mounted cameras can help identify roadway conditions and support community safety. The pilot includes privacy safeguards and requires no additional action from employees. Findings will inform any future decisions.”

But that’s what everyone says when they want to add cameras to places and things that didn’t have them before: mumble mumble “community safety” and maybe something vague about privacy. Pervasive surveillance rarely rolls out fully developed. It develops incrementally. But the most important thing is to get the ball rolling and wait for mission creep to set in. If this hangs around long enough, it just becomes another set of cameras and recordings other agencies with less respect for “privacy safeguards” and even less interest in “supporting community safety” can access and, eventually, abuse.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week’s episode, Mike and Ben cover:

• The Official Sonic Discord Server’s Launch Went About As Poorly As You’d Expect (Kotaku)
• Vladimir Putin’s Forkiverse (Search Engine)
• They trade child sex abuse material. They find each other on TikTok (Prospect)
• Meta rolls out new AI tools to detect ads that secretly lead to child sexual abuse material (TechCrunch)
• TikTok gave teens, children placebo safety feature in experiment, New York alleges (Reuters)
• DNS Resolver Quad9 Rejects French Piracy Blocks, Weighs Exit as beIN Seeks Up to €580K a Day (TorrentFreak)

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

• EU drops sponsorship of disinformation conference at Trump officials’ request (The Guardian)
• EEAS runs scared of US ‘disinformation’ debate (Rapporteur)
• Canada drops sponsorship of conference that cites U.S. as foreign-interference actor (The Globe and Mail)

Our fun links this week include the Job Trail game and Mike Tomlin’s Minecraft City.

Follow us on Instagram, YouTube, and Bluesky for video clips from this week’s episode!

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

It didn’t get nearly as much attention, but TikTok did somewhat quietly settle with one state: Alabama. They came to a $100 million settlement in a case that Alabama brought last year, claiming that the features of TikTok were “addictive.” The settlement came out on a Friday, just before the first such trial was set to begin against TikTok the following Monday. Given how we’ve seen juries more than willing to blame social media platforms for anything bad that happens to kids using the platform, it’s clear that TikTok was under the gun to work out a settlement that avoided an expensive trial and possibly more expensive verdict.

On Friday, Alabama announced that TikTok had agreed to safety measures including a two-hour daily limit for underage users and additional parental controls to further limit time on the site. The settlement also restricts unlimited scrolling and overnight access, as well as the use of beauty filters and other features that social media experts have said are harmful to teenagers’ mental health.

Most of those sound pretty similar to Meta’s settlement. But there are some key differences in the full settlement agreement. And the biggest, as first pointed out by Stanford’s Daphne Keller, is that whereas the Meta settlement encouraged Meta to convince TikTok and YouTube (and possibly Snap) to sign similar deals and to pay similar amounts, the TikTok settlement… appears to encourage Alabama to convince other Attorneys General to go after TikTok.

It’s… weird.

The agreement sets up multiple “funds” that are wholly dependent on other state AGs coming to similar settlements. The headline $100 million number is “fund 1.” The $100 million is supposed to go towards compensating people “harmed” by TikTok, but it appears that the Alabama Attorney General gets to decide how that works, and based on past settlements in other cases, I’m going to assume there won’t be much transparency there. Then there’s another $16.2 million going to outside lawyers and litigation costs:

Fund 1 is paid to resolve the State’s claims under the Alabama Deceptive Trade Practices Act (Ala. Code § 8-19-1 et seq.). $14,200,000.00 is allocated to attorneys’ fees and $2,000,000.00 is allocated to litigation expenses associated with this action (to be paid to outside counsel directly). The remaining $100,000,000.00 of Fund 1 is designated as compensatory restitution and remediation for the benefit of Alabama consumers within the meaning of Section 162(f)(2) of the Internal Revenue Code and shall be paid to the Office of the Alabama Attorney General to be used in the Attorney General’s sole discretion for any lawful purpose, including compensatory restitution and remediation for the benefit of Alabama consumers.

“Sole discretion for any lawful purpose.” In other words, the AG’s office can spend it however it wants, and there’s no requirement that a dime reach anyone “harmed” by TikTok. Indeed, the chief counsel in the case has more or less admitted that the Alabama has no intention of actually using the money to help kids at all:

Chief Counsel Katherine Robertson, who oversees the case for the Attorney General’s Office, said the money will likely land in the state’s general fund, though her office wants lawmakers to steer it toward Alabama youth.

“It will probably go to the general fund, but we hope to have discussions with our legislative leadership about using this to really remediate the harm that’s been done to our youth here in Alabama,” Robertson said.

But then it gets really bizarre. There’s a second fund, Fund 2, that TikTok agrees to pay, up to an additional $183.8 million, depending on if and when certain “tiers” of other AGs convince TikTok to settle:

Fund 2 Contingent Payment Pool & Sequential Tiered Vesting

(a) Total Contingent Amount: In addition to Fund 1, Defendants shall establish a contingent payment allocation pool of $183,800,000.00 (“Fund 2” or “Contingent Amount”).

(b) Vesting Tiers and Sequential Timeframes: Fund 2 shall vest incrementally across four (4) distinct tiers based upon state participation in qualifying agreements (including any consent judgment and settlement agreements) or Assurances of Voluntary Compliance (“AVCs”)

(i) Tier 1 (30% / $55,140,000.00): Vests when ten (10) State Attorneys General execute qualifying agreements, provided the tenth (10th) agreement is executed within twenty-four (24) months following the Effective Date (“Tier 1 Window”).

(ii) Tier 2 (30%/$55,140,000.00): Vests when twenty (20) State Attorneys General execute qualifying agreements, provided the twentieth (20th) agreement is executed within twenty-four (24) months following the Tier 1 Vesting Date (“Tier 2 Window”).

(iii) Tier 3 (20%/$36,760,000.00): Vests when thirty (30) State Attorneys General execute qualifying agreements, provided the thirtieth (30th) agreement is executed within twenty-four (24) months following the Tier 2 Vesting Date (“Tier 3 Window”).

(iv) Tier 4 (20%/$36,760,000.00): Vests when forty (40) State Attorneys General execute qualifying agreements, provided the fortieth (40th) agreement is executed within twenty-four (24) months following the Tier 3 Vesting Date (“Tier 4 Window”).

I can’t recall ever seeing anything even remotely like this. As regular Techdirt commenter John Roddy noted, TikTok and the Alabama AG here basically created an affiliate program for settlement enforcement. I honestly can’t even wrap my head around the logic here. “Here, we’ve agreed to pay you a ton of money to settle this case… and if we agree to pay more money to other states, you also get a cut for being first in line.”

Think about the incentive structure here: Alabama’s AG now has a direct financial stake in recruiting 39 other states to pressure TikTok into the same deal, on a deadline. I can’t see how anything good comes of that.

And, just as with the Meta settlement, this appears to be painfully unconstitutional. The settlement requires the suppression of clearly constitutionally protected speech at gunpoint. “Agree to suppress this content we don’t like or we will make you suffer through a painful trial, and possibly an even more painful verdict.”

The Meta settlement was concerning enough on its own, but now this model of AGs extracting speech restrictions through settlements is becoming a template, and it’s picking up weird gamified bounty structures along the way. The state AGs may get their headlines and their billions, but the real losers are everyone who uses social media and the First Amendment.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

But there is one angle here that we can talk about that most other places won’t: whether hosting the livestream would violate the platforms’ own rules — and whether they’ll simply ignore (or rewrite) those rules to do it anyway. While it’s probably perfectly legal in the US to stream the execution, it still might violate the various platform rules that most sites have set up for themselves. (Hosting it globally may also create legal headaches in countries with stricter rules on violent, extremist, and terrorist content, but that’s a separate question.)

But let’s look more closely at the possible platforms Hegseth might use, since the Pentagon hasn’t yet said where this “livestream” is supposed to occur.

X

Elon Musk’s X is (duh) a likely choice. In theory, X has a “violent content policy,” but it leaves a lot of wiggle room for Elon to claim the barbarous execution doesn’t violate its policies:

You may share graphic media if it is properly labeled, not prominently displayed and is not excessively gory or depicting sexual violence, but explicitly threatening, inciting, glorifying, or expressing desire for violence is not allowed.

X is a place where people can express themselves, show and learn about what’s happening, and debate global issues, often sharing images and videos as part of the conversation. However, healthy conversations can’t thrive when Violent Speech is used to deliver a message, and not every participant wishes to be exposed to Violent Media. As a result, we may remove or reduce the visibility of Violent Content to ensure the safety of our users and prevent the normalization or glorification of violent actions. We also do not allow sharing Violent Content in highly visible places such as profile photos, banners or bio.

I would argue that livestreaming a government firing squad is “excessively gory” and, depending on how it’s packaged, “glorifying” violence, though there’s clearly room to argue otherwise. And I’m sure Elon will claim it’s not. The policy does do a little more of an explanation of what it considers “glorification” as well:

• Glorification of Violence: Glorifying, praising, or celebrating acts of violence where harm occurred, including expressing gratitude or praising that someone experienced physical harm by Violent Entities. This also includes glorifying animal abuse or cruelty.

Again, I would argue the execution counts, because it is clearly celebrating an act of violence. The policy also says that it prohibits violent content “in live video” but again, I expect that to be ignored by Elon’s team.

There is one concrete area of X’s policy that is interesting:

• Moment of Death: We may request the removal of images or videos that were taken at the point of, immediately before, or after an identifiable individual’s death, if we receive a request from their family or an authorized representative.

In theory, Hasan’s family could ask X to remove the video, and then the question is whether Elon would honor that request. And since the policy only says X “may” remove such content, it leaves plenty of wiggle room to say no.

In short, the video will likely be shared on X, and whether or not it violates the company’s policies really depends on a very subjective set of decisions.

YouTube

YouTube is the other most likely choice for streaming the execution. Here, it seems pretty clear that the execution video, on its own, would violate YouTube’s stated policy.

Violent or gory content intended to shock or disgust viewers, or content encouraging others to commit violent acts, are not allowed on YouTube.

That said, YouTube leaves itself an out in saying there’s an exception for “content that is in the public interest.”

In some cases, we may make exceptions for content with educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic context, including content that is in the public’s interest.

Looking through that linked exceptions page, the obvious hook is that YouTube lists “government proceedings” as public-interest material that may get an exception, and you can bet that’s what it would point to. But the same page lists content that’s barred from exceptions no matter the context, including “the act of decapitation.” While this isn’t quite decapitation, it’s still a pretty gruesome public execution.

Meta (Instagram / Facebook)

Zuck has spent the past couple years sucking up to Donald Trump after Trump threatened to put Zuck in jail for life. But Meta’s “Violent and Graphic Content” policy is the clearest of the bunch in ruling out hosting a livestream of the execution. In the list of things that it says “Do not post” is literally:

Live-streams of capital punishments.

The policy does allow still imagery of such content behind a warning screen and limited to adults, but livestreams of capital punishment are banned outright.

I don’t see any exceptions or language that Meta can wiggle out of for this, meaning that if it does allow such a livestream, it would only be either by ignoring its current policies or changing them.

TikTok

TikTok has less detail than the others in its policy, but does say they don’t allow “glorification of violence” among other things.

• Violent and Criminal Behavior: We don’t allow threats, encouragement or glorification of violence, promotion of crime, or instructions on how to commit harmful acts.

Again, the company (now backed by Trump’s investor friends) can probably wriggle around that language and try to claim that the execution isn’t a “glorification” of violence, though it would be wrong.

Truth Social

I guess we need to consider that the Pentagon might try to post it on the president’s personal social media and propaganda site, Truth Social. Truth Social has very unhelpful terms of service and community guidelines, that do say that when you upload content you “represent and warrant” that your content isn’t violent:

your Contributions are not obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, violent, harassing, libelous, slanderous, or otherwise objectionable.

your Contributions do not depict violence, threats of violence or criminal activity.

But that is only the agreement with the user. It says nothing about whether or not the site will take such content down. In the community guidelines, it only notes that you can “report” “content that depicts violence or threat of violence,” but says nothing about whether or not that’s actually allowed.

In short, depending on how much these services want to bend over backwards (or should I say, bow down?) to appease Donald Trump and the bloodthirsty Pete Hegseth, all of them except Meta can make unfortunately credible claims that livestreaming an execution by firing squad doesn’t technically violate their policies. Meta cannot say that. I’d argue that the videos likely do violate YouTube, X, and TikTok’s policies as well, but it very much depends on subjective calls for all three.

Again, as a reminder, in the US, all of these platforms are free to set their own editorial policies, including both what to allow and what not to allow.

Remember, some of the earliest moral panic over how “bad” social media is came from US elected officials losing their minds about terrorist execution videos on YouTube. It’s kind of incredible how far we’ve come: Now the US government itself is planning to stream a gruesome execution of its own, and any platform that pushes back will likely be attacked by the president and his supporters for not being patriotic enough.

Consumer groups, media reformers, and activists have obviously been disgusted by the efforts. But the efforts have also repeatedly pissed off other Trump-friendly companies. Right wing propaganda “news” outlet Newsmax, for example, recently complained to Carr because they feel the elimination of media consolidation rules will make their local broadcast competitors in the right wing propaganda space too powerful.

Carr’s moves have also ironically pissed of bigger cable companies, which are now saying Carr’s attempt to greenlight a monopoly over local TV broadcast news will result in the bigger, combined broadcasters extracting significantly more money from them. As such, a lobbying org representing cable giants like Comcast and Charter say they’ll soon be filing suit against the agency over the changes:

“The TV ownership rule prohibits any single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. Congress directed the FCC to set the cap at 39 percent in 2004. On Friday, cable lobby groups submitted a petition asking the FCC to keep the TV ownership cap in place until litigation over the FCC’s authority to repeal the rule is over.”

There’s no shortage of irony that this is what passes as media policy in the U.S.

Cable giants like Comcast and Charter, which have actively (and successfully) lobbied for reduced scrutiny of their own monopolization and consolidation across broadband and TV, are now complaining that other illegal efforts at consolidation will be bad for them personally. They like it when Carr obliterates oversight of their own monopolization, but don’t much like it when the shoe is on the other foot.

This is all the embarrassing gesticulations of obvious regulatory capture and corruption.

Trump’s first FCC boss, Ajit Pai, was basically just a revolving door regulator whose interests fully lined up with industry. Brendan Carr is most certainly that — but he’s also a radical authoritarian zealot keen on censoring voices critical of his autocratic boss, and helping right wing propagandists dominate U.S. media — much to the chagrin of some other, equally terrible companies.

The cable lobby won’t be alone in suing Carr and the FCC over its attack on media consolidation limits. Media reform group Free Press is also planning to sue the agency over its effort:

“Changing this limit requires congressional action, but Carr doesn’t care,” Free Press General Counsel Matt Wood said at the time. “He’ll do whatever it takes to clear the way for Trump-aligned billionaires to swallow up stations wherever and whenever they please. The result would be just one or two dominant broadcasters in every market, deep job cuts for journalists, and an influx of bargain-basement content disguised as local news.”

Several of these bigger cable giants (like Comcast NBC Universal) have been lobbying the FCC to also eliminate rules preventing the big four major networks from merging as well. The plus side is that Comcast and Charter taking a stand against Carr policies is another indicator that big companies are starting to gain in confidence as Trump’s health and political power wanes.

In no time at all we’ll be back to ordinary corruption and regulatory capture, slightly less tainted by the unpleasant, lingering odor of autocratic extremism.

The reality is different, of course. Human rights in America in the modern era were never blazing any new trails, and religious liberty specifically has been on the decline for decades, particularly since the 9/11 attacks. Certain populations and sects of Christianity have enjoyed general freedom, no matter the gnashing of teeth you might hear over a fucking wedding cake or website on occasion, while many other faiths have faced all kinds of headwinds. Including, I might add, those with no faith whatsoever, who find their contributions to federal coffers routinely misused for religious purposes of which they want no part.

Such as the faith-based offices that have sprung up within federal government departments ever since George W. Bush decided that faith had a place in the American government after all. It was inevitable that charlatans like Donald Trump would use that sort of thing to his advantage, of course, but the practice was also continued under Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And now we have Pete Hegseth injecting a religious office directly into the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is launching an office of religious affairs, the latest of his faith-related reforms at the Pentagon. He announced in a speech Wednesday that the office will help offer “first-class religious support” and will report directly to him.

“Our department is, you might say, putting on the full armor of God, because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual,” he said.

If a chill didn’t just run down your spine, you’re not paying attention to history. There is nothing more dangerous, as Christopher Hitchens used to say, than a man with a powerful army who believes he has god on his side. To cloak the Pentagon in religiosity is a dangerous mistake so obvious that it barely needs arguing. So much so, in fact, that the Pentagon’s PR department attempted to clean this up and make it all sound more benign.

The Office of Religious Affairs, or ORA, will advocate for military chaplains and religious support “at the highest level of the Department,” according to a Pentagon statement. It will not “compel religious participation, favor one faith, or diminish the rights of personnel of any faith or lack thereof.”

Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and call bullshit on that one. Go read Hegseth’s remarks again and tell me if that doesn’t sound like someone who is going to compel participation. As for the favoring of one religion over another, or of the faithless, that’s already happened. And this office, bound by the arbitrary determinations made under Hegseth’s DoD, will be compelled to follow suit.

The Defense Department also slashed the number of religious affiliations it officially recognizes, down to 31 from more than 200 previously recognized traditions. The list no longer includes atheists, Unitarian Universalists, pagans and Wiccans.

And then add to it all that the military is currently in a bit of a crisis over mental health and suicides. Chaplains have been tasked in recent years to help guide soldiers in a therapeutic way for those suffering, but Hegseth is tired of that namby-pamby bullshit.

The memo mentions “faith-based initiatives supporting Department-wide suicide reduction.” In recent years, the military has become increasingly dependent on chaplains to help address the growing numbers of troops in mental health distress. Hegseth has said he wants chaplains to focus more on God and less on therapeutic “self-help and self-care.”

This is what happens when you let religion creep its way into secular organizations. Religion is evangelical and expansionist by its very nature. That isn’t meant to be a criticism; it just is, definitionally. The original sin, as it were, was allowing Bush to open the door just enough to get a more benign version of this established. Perhaps it was even earlier, when the Continental Congress approved the very first military chaplains, even as they fought the Revolutionary War.

The fascistic takeover of that religious infrastructure is, and always was, inevitable.

The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.

Part VI: The Illusion of Knowing Us
Part V explored what is lost when an open system becomes a finished one. Part VI returns to the question at the heart of the series: what happens when the ability to measure human behavior creates the illusion that human beings themselves have become fully understood?

There is an old temptation that accompanies every period of technological progress: the belief that a sufficiently complete collection of facts will eventually become indistinguishable from understanding. It is an idea that predates computers by centuries. Enlightenment thinkers imagined that careful observation might reveal the laws governing society just as Newton had revealed the laws governing motion. Nineteenth-century bureaucracies believed that censuses, maps and statistics would render increasingly complex populations legible to governments. Twentieth-century corporations discovered that markets could be segmented, modelled and predicted through ever more sophisticated forms of consumer research. Every era has entertained, in one form or another, the hope that enough information might finally dissolve uncertainty.

The digital age inherited that ambition and expanded it beyond anything previous generations could have imagined. Never before have private organizations possessed such detailed knowledge of everyday human behavior. The major technology platforms know what captures our attention, how long we hesitate before making a decision, which conversations draw us back repeatedly, what time we wake, when we travel, where we shop, what we read, which videos we abandon after twenty seconds and which ones persuade us to remain for twenty minutes. Individually, these fragments appear almost trivial. Collectively, they amount to one of the most ambitious efforts in history to observe human behavior at planetary scale.

The achievement is extraordinary. It is also deeply misleading. Observation and understanding are not the same thing. The distinction is easy to overlook because the predictive power of these systems has become genuinely remarkable. Recommendation algorithms often anticipate our preferences before we consciously recognize them ourselves. Navigation applications predict our journeys with astonishing accuracy. Streaming platforms learn our habits so quickly that their suggestions can feel almost uncanny. The practical success of these systems encourages a subtle but important assumption: if behavior can be predicted with sufficient precision, perhaps behavior itself has been understood.

And this may be the most consequential consequence of the platform age. The more of human behavior platforms learned to measure, the easier it became to believe that human beings themselves had become legible. Clicks became preferences. Networks became communities. Attention became interest. Prediction became understanding. Metrics became meaning. The platforms could see more of us than any institution in history and gradually became less capable of seeing what their measurements left out.

Yet this conclusion rests upon a philosophical confusion that extends far beyond technology. More than half a century ago, the economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek argued that modern societies possess a form of knowledge that can never be fully centralized. Much of what people know is contextual, local and often impossible to articulate explicitly. A shopkeeper understands the rhythms of a neighborhood without reducing them to data points. A teacher recognizes the confidence of a struggling student before it becomes measurable through examination results. A parent notices subtle changes in a child’s mood that no questionnaire could adequately capture. This knowledge is not irrational. It is simply embedded within lived experience rather than abstract information.

Around the same time, the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi expressed the idea even more succinctly. “We know more than we can tell,” he wrote. Human understanding depends not only upon explicit facts but upon intuition, memory, culture, relationships and forms of judgement that resist codification. Much of what makes societies function exists precisely because it cannot be reduced to a formal rule.

Technology has always struggled with this distinction because computation requires representation. Before an algorithm can optimize anything, the world must first be translated into variables that can be measured. Human beings become profiles. Relationships become networks. Interests become categories. Attention becomes duration. Influence becomes engagement. These abstractions are indispensable because without them computation would be impossible. Yet every abstraction also excludes dimensions of reality that prove difficult to quantify.

The political scientist James C. Scott devoted an entire book to this problem. Modern states, he argued, simplify the societies they govern in order to make them administratively manageable. Forests become inventories of timber rather than ecosystems. Cities become grids. Citizens become statistics. These simplifications are not inherently malicious; they are necessary for governing large populations. Problems arise when institutions begin mistaking their simplified representations for reality itself. The map becomes more authoritative than the territory it was intended to describe.

Digital platforms confront a remarkably similar dilemma. Their models of human behavior are necessarily simplified because every computational system requires simplification. The question is not whether these models are imperfect; they are. The more consequential question is what happens when organizations become so successful within their own representations of the world that they gradually lose contact with the world those representations were created to explain.

One sees hints of this throughout the contemporary digital landscape. Platforms confidently predict what will retain our attention while appearing increasingly uncertain about what earns our trust. They identify emerging trends with astonishing speed while repeatedly struggling to distinguish civic participation from performative outrage. They optimize conversations according to measurable interactions while overlooking qualities such as reflection, empathy, restraint or wisdom because none of these can easily be incorporated into engagement metrics.

This should not surprise given that trust is not merely repeated interaction. Community is not simply network density and friendship is not the frequency of communication. Curiosity is not equivalent to clicking.

These distinctions may sound obvious when expressed in ordinary language. They become far less obvious once organizations begin making billions of decisions each day through computational systems that necessarily privilege what can be counted over what can only be experienced.

There is another irony here that deserves attention. For decades, Silicon Valley celebrated itself as uniquely capable of understanding people because it possessed unprecedented quantities of behavioral data. Traditional institutions, like governments, universities or newspapers, were often portrayed as slow, hierarchical and detached from ordinary life. Technology companies, by contrast, claimed to learn directly from users. Every click became feedback, every interaction generated insight and every product update reflected continuous adaptation to human behavior. For many years, this confidence appeared justified.

Today, however, one encounters an increasingly curious paradox. Never have companies measured human behavior so exhaustively, and never have so many users felt so profoundly misunderstood by the systems surrounding them. Social media platforms seem endlessly surprised by phenomena that emerge beyond the boundaries of their models: declining public trust, digital fatigue, growing skepticism toward artificial intelligence, the desire for smaller communities, renewed interest in newsletters, blogs, private messaging groups and slower forms of communication that escape the logic of algorithmic optimization.

These developments often appear puzzling only because they are interpreted through behavioral models that assume more engagement necessarily reflects greater satisfaction. Yet anyone familiar with modern cities knows that constant traffic does not indicate affection for the road network. Congestion may simply reveal that people have few practical alternatives. Likewise, continued use of social media reveals remarkably little about whether users believe these platforms enrich their lives. Behavior alone cannot answer that question because behavior is shaped not only by preference but also by dependency, habit, professional necessity and the absence of viable substitutes.

This may be the deepest misunderstanding at the heart of Big Tech’s current predicament. The companies continue to believe that they understand society because they observe so much of its behavior. Increasingly, society appears unconvinced. People do not feel recognized merely because they have been accurately profiled. They do not experience prediction as understanding. If anything, the extraordinary precision with which platforms anticipate our habits has heightened our awareness of everything they fail to perceive: our uncertainty, our changing aspirations, our moral dilemmas, our search for meaning, and our persistent desire to belong to communities that are valued for something more enduring than their ability to generate engagement.

History suggests that this moment arrives sooner or later for every dominant institution. Power often produces the illusion of comprehension. Success encourages organizations to believe that because they have mastered the mechanics of a system, they have also grasped its purpose. Yet societies are not machines, and human beings have an inconvenient habit of changing the questions they ask long before institutions notice that the answers they continue providing have ceased to satisfy.

Perhaps that is the quiet reckoning confronting Big Tech today. Not that it has forgotten how to build extraordinary technology. Rather, it has become so accomplished at modelling human behavior that it has begun to overlook the one thing behavior can never fully reveal: what it actually means to be human.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.