Scaling Laws

Last week the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that would require ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the popular social media app TikTok, to divest its ownership in the pla…

Today, we’re bringing you an episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem.

On March 18, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, concerning the potential …

In May 2023, Montana passed a new law that would ban the use of TikTok within the state starting on January 1, 2024. But as of today, TikTok is still legal in the state of Montana—thanks to a prelimi…

In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a monster scoop: a series of articles about Facebook’s inner workings, which showed that employees within the famously secretive company had raised alarms a…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard a great deal over the last year about generative AI and how it’s going to reshape various aspects of our society. That includes elections…

Over the course of the last two presidential elections, efforts by social media platforms and independent researchers to prevent falsehoods from spreading about election integrity have become increas…

Today, we’re bringing you an episode of Arbiters of Truth, our series on the information ecosystem. And we’re discussing the hot topic of the moment: artificial intelligence. There are a lot of less-…

How much influence do social media platforms have on American politics and society? It’s a tough question for researchers to answer—not just because it’s so big, but also because platforms rarely if …

Earlier this year, Brian Fishman published a fantastic paper with Brookings thinking through how technology platforms grapple with terrorism and extremism, and how any reform to Section 230 must allo…

Generative AI products have been tearing up the headlines recently. Among the many issues these products raise is whether or not their outputs are protected by Section 230, the foundational statute t…

In 2018, news broke that Facebook had allowed third-party developers—including the controversial data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica—to obtain large quantities of user data in ways that users pro…

If someone lies about you, you can usually sue them for defamation. But what if that someone is ChatGPT? Already in Australia, the mayor of a town outside Melbourne has threatened to sue OpenAI becau…

Over the past few years, TikTok has become a uniquely polarizing social media platform. On the one hand, millions of users, especially those in their teens and twenties, love the app. On the other ha…

On the latest episode of Arbiters of Truth, Lawfare's series on the information ecosystem, Quinta Jurecic and Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Ravi Iyer, the Managing Director of the Psychology of Technol…

During recent oral arguments in Gonzalez v. Google, a Supreme Court case concerning the scope of liability protections for internet platforms, Justice Neil Gorsuch asked a thought-provoking question.…

You've likely heard of ChatGPT, the chatbot from OpenAI. But you’ve likely never heard an interview with ChatGPT, much less an interview in which ChatGPT reflects on its own impact on the information…

Tech policy reform occupies a strange place in Washington, D.C. Everyone seems to agree that the government should change how it regulates the technology industry, on issues from content moderation t…

On November 19, Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk announced that he would be reinstating former President Donald Trump’s account on the platform—though so far, Trump hasn’t taken Musk up on the offer, pr…

When Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen shared a trove of internal company documents to the Wall Street Journal in 2021, some of the most dramatic revelations concerned the company’s use of a so-c…