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Meta to spend millions backing pro-AI candidates – media

US tech giant Meta will launch a California‑focused super‑PAC to support state‑level candidates who favor looser technology regulation, especially regarding artificial intelligence, according to media reports.

A super PAC is an independent political committee that can raise and spend unlimited funds from individuals, corporations, and unions to support or oppose candidates. It cannot coordinate directly with campaigns or parties and was created after 2010 US court rulings that loosened campaign finance rules.

The group, named Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across California, will reportedly back candidates from the Democratic and Republican parties who prioritize AI innovation over stringent rules.

According to Politico, the Facebook and Instagram parent plans to spend tens of millions of dollars through the PAC, which could make it one of the top political spenders in the state in the run‑up to the 2026 governor’s race.

The initiative aligns with Meta’s broader effort to safeguard California’s status as a technology hub amid concerns that strict oversight could stifle innovation.

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University of Melbourne Broke Victoria’s Privacy Law by Using Wi-Fi to Monitor Protesters on Campus

The University of Melbourne’s covert surveillance tactics during a campus protest have been declared unlawful, following a ruling by Victoria’s deputy information commissioner that the institution broke the state’s privacy laws.

The decision condemns the university’s quiet use of digital tracking tools against students and staff involved in a pro-Palestine demonstration, raising serious concerns about the growing use of surveillance technologies in academic settings.

We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.

Prompted by media attention earlier this year, the investigation focused on how the university responded to a May protest held inside the Arts West building.

Rather than relying on open dialogue or standard disciplinary processes, university officials resorted to monitoring individuals through the campus Wi-Fi network, matching connection data with student ID photos and security camera recordings.

A total of 22 students were identified through this process, all without prior warning or a clear legal basis. Staff were surveilled as well, with the contents of ten employees’ email accounts examined to uncover involvement in the demonstration. Three of them later received formal warnings.

Although the commissioner’s office accepted that CCTV footage was used within legal boundaries, it found the use of Wi-Fi tracking in disciplinary investigations to be unjustified.

The monitoring of staff emails was also flagged for breaching expected privacy norms.

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Should the Government Restrict ‘Harmful’ Speech Online?

The First Amendment prohibits the federal government from suppressing speech, including speech it deems “harmful,” yet lawmakers keep trying to regulate online discourse.

Over the summer, the Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill to allegedly protect children from the adverse effects of social media. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took procedural steps to end the debate and quickly advance the bill to a floor vote. According to Schumer, the situation was urgent. In his remarks, he focused on the stories of children who were targets of bullying and predatory conduct on social media. To address these safety issues, the proposed legislation would place liability on online platforms, requiring them to take “reasonable” measures to prevent and mitigate harm.

It’s now up to the House to push the bill forward to the President’s desk. After initial concerns about censorship, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce advanced the bill in September, paving the way for a final floor vote.

KOSA highlights an ongoing tension between free speech and current efforts to make social media “safer.” In its persistent attempts to remedy social harm, the government shrinks what is permissible to say online and assumes a role that the First Amendment specifically guards against.

At its core, the First Amendment is designed to protect freedom of speech from government intrusion. Congress is not responsible for determining what speech is permissible or what information the public has the right to access. Courts have long held that all speech is protected unless it falls within certain categories. Prohibitions against harmful speech—where “harmful” is determined solely by lawmakers—are not consistent with the First Amendment.

But bills like KOSA add layers of complexity. First, the government is not simply punishing ideological opponents or those with unfavorable viewpoints, which would clearly violate the First Amendment. When viewed in its best light, KOSA is equally about protecting children and their health. New York had similar public health and safety justifications for its controversial hate speech law, which was blocked by a district court and is pending appeal. Under this argument, which is often cited to rationalize speech limitations, the dangers to society are so great that the government should take action to protect vulnerable groups from harm. However, the courts have generally ruled that this is not sufficient justification to limit protected speech.

In American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut (1986), Judge Frank Easterbrook evaluated the constitutionality of a pornography prohibition enacted by the City of Indianapolis. The city reasoned that pornography has a detrimental impact on society because it influences attitudes and leads to discrimination and violence against women. As Judge Easterbrook wrote in his now-famous opinion, just because speech has a role in social conditioning or contributes loosely to social harm does not give the government license to control it. Such content is still protected, however harmful or insidious, and any answer to the contrary would allow the government to become the “great censor and director of which thoughts are good for us.”

In addition to the protecting children argument, a second layer of complexity is that KOSA enables censorship through roundabout means. The government accomplishes what it is barred from doing under the First Amendment by requiring online platforms to police a vast array of harms or risk legal consequences. This is a common feature of recent social media bills, which place the responsibility on platforms.

Practically, the result is inevitably less speech. Under KOSA, the platform has a “duty of care” to mitigate youth anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and addiction-like behaviors. While this provision focuses on the covered entity’s design and operation, it necessarily implicates speech since social media platforms are built around user-generated posts, from content curation to notifications. Because platforms are liable for falling short of the “duty of care,” this requirement is bound to sweep up millions of posts that are protected speech, even ordinary content that may trigger the enumerated harm. While the platform would technically be the entity implementing these policies, the government would be driving content removal.

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RFK Jr. investigating if drugs taken in Robin Westman’s transition played ‘a role’ in Minneapolis mass shooting

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revealed Thursday that he has ordered an investigation into whether drugs that transgender shooter Robin Westman was taking during his transition could have played “a role” in his depraved violence.

“We are doing those kind of studies now,” he told “Fox & Friends” when asked if it was possible drugs taken during Westman’s transition played “a role” in him shooting up his former Catholic school’s first Mass of the year Wednesday.

“We are launching studies into their potential contribution,” he said in a response to a question noting that another recent school shooter, Audrey Hale, was also transgender.

The Health and Human Services secretary did not reveal if it was known what drugs Westman or Hale had taken, if any.

However, he noted a wider concern about Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) used to treat depression.

“Some of the SSRI drugs and some other psychiatric drugs might be contributing to violence,” he warned.

“Many of them have black-box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation. So we can’t exclude those as a culprit, and those are the kind of studies we are doing,” he said.

Such studies had been slowed by strict patient confidentiality rules, he noted — while stressing that his department had authority to go around them to investigate possible links between such medications and mental diseases

“There was no time in the past when people would walk into a church or a classroom and start shooting people,” he said. “It’s not really happening in other countries, it’s happening here. And we need to look at all of the potential culprits that might be contributing to that.”

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Germany: Economist Thomas Vierhaus Fined €16,100 for Sarcastic X Posts

A Düsseldorf-based economist has found himself at the center of a criminal case for making sarcastic remarks online about high-profile public figures.

Thomas Vierhaus is being prosecuted under Section 185 of the German Criminal Code for three separate X posts that government officials and journalists deemed insulting.

The total fine, delivered in the form of a penalty order from the Düsseldorf District Court on August 12, amounts to €16,100.

This is part of a growing trend in Germany where speech that irritates those in power increasingly results in legal consequences.

The first incident dates back to June 2023. Katrin Göring-Eckardt, Vice President of the Bundestag and a leading figure in the Green Party, had issued an alarmist post about climate change.

She cited droughts, wildfires, and high sea temperatures as proof that the climate crisis was unfolding “with full force.” Vierhaus, unimpressed, replied that “there is indeed an extreme drought, namely in Katrin Göring-Eckardt’s head.”

This offhand remark would likely have disappeared unnoticed if not for a doctoral student who had taken it upon himself to patrol the internet.

The student filled out a criminal complaint form on Göring-Eckardt’s behalf and sent it to her. She signed and forwarded it to the police, setting off the first of several investigations into Vierhaus’s social media activity.

The second charge came after Vierhaus discovered the identity of the same doctoral student and referred to him online as a “little snitch.”

Given that the student had already been submitting complaint forms to politicians for them to sign, the label was hardly unprovoked. Nevertheless, the student filed a personal complaint and claimed insult.

A third post earned Vierhaus further legal trouble when he criticized ARD journalist Moritz Rödle on July 7, 2023.

Rödle had defended Economics Minister Robert Habeck’s decision to skip a Bundestag debate on Germany’s heating law, attending a Bundesrat session instead.

Vierhaus responded with a post calling Rödle a “nincompoop” and added, “You still have a lot to learn in order not to be constantly fooled.”

Rödle filed a complaint through Hessen gegen Hetze, a government-operated online platform that encourages users to report speech deemed hateful or offensive.

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Double-dip: Senator demands crackdown on feds pocketing unemployment checks and salaries

A Labor Department employee is the latest federal worker to be accused of claiming unemployment benefits while holding down a full-time job with Uncle Sam, highlighting what one leading senator said has become a persistent problem of double-dipping.

Mo Yuong Kang, who worked as an industrial hygienist for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 2020 and 2021, was paid a $90,000 annual salary as millions of other Americans were being laid off during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency.

Federal prosecutors said he also applied for and received pandemic unemployment benefits from April 2020 through September 2021. According to the federal indictment, he collected nearly $46,000 in extra cash.

Sen. Joni Ernst, Iowa Republican, said thousands more who held government jobs may have collected unemployment benefits on the side.

She asked the Labor Department inspector general, who helped investigate Mr. Kang, to review the government’s lists of employees and unemployment beneficiaries and see where they overlap.

“Hundreds, even thousands, of government employees appear to have been ripping off the unemployment system by claiming to be unemployed,” she said.

She said the problem extends beyond federal workers.

In Ohio, an inspector general this week reported on a contract employee at the state’s unemployment benefits agency who was found to be collecting benefits for eight months while she held her government job.

The inspector general said Sandra Schnieders, a customer service assistant, also manipulated eight claims, leading to higher payouts for friends and associates. In one case, she boosted the weekly payout from $189 to a maximum of $480. In another case, she approved a file that had been halted, leading to $21,323 in bogus payouts.

Investigators said she was responsible for $112,240 in fraudulent payments, nearly $19,000 of which went to her own pocket.

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The 10th Circuit Agrees That Prosecuting Cannabis Consumers for Gun Possession May Be Unconstitutional

On a Friday in May 2022, Jared Harrison was on his way to work at an Oklahoma medical marijuana dispensary when a police officer stopped him for running a red light. When Harrison rolled down his window, the officer smelled marijuana. A search of the car discovered a loaded revolver, a pill bottle containing a few partially smoked joints, another joint in a console tray, and a backpack containing marijuana, THC gummies, and two THC vape cartridges.

Because Harrison did not have a state-issued medical marijuana card, he was charged with illegal possession of cannabis under state law, a misdemeanor. But he also faced a felony charge under 18 USC 922(g)(3), the federal law that bars illegal drug users from possessing firearms. That charge, he argued, violated the Second Amendment. A federal judge agreed, ruling in February 2023 that the government had failed to show Harrison’s prosecution was “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation”—the constitutional test that the U.S. Supreme Court established in the 2022 case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

This week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit reversed that ruling and remanded the case for further consideration. The 10th Circuit’s decision in United States v. Harrison, because it endorsed U.S. District Judge Patrick Wyrick’s reasoning in nearly all respects, nevertheless represents another in a series of blows to a policy that affects millions of peaceful Americans, depriving them of the constitutional right to armed self-defense for no good reason.

As it has in other Section 922(g)(3) cases, the government argued that cannabis consumers are not part of “the people” whose “right to keep and bear arms” is guaranteed by the Second Amendment because they are not “law-abiding.” Wyrick made short work of that claim, noting that the Supreme Court has said “the people,” as used in the Bill of Rights, “unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset.”

The government’s argument amounted to “an outright declaration of the federal government’s belief that it can deprive practically anyone of their Second Amendment right,” Wyrick added. “Who among us, after all, isn’t a ‘lawbreaker’? For sure, there
may well exist some adult[s] who [have] never exceeded the speed limit, changed lanes without signaling, or failed to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, but they are few and far between.”

The three-judge 10th Circuit panel unanimously agreed with Wyrick on this point. “A contrary conclusion would defy law and logic,” Judge Veronica Rossman, a Joe Biden appointee, writes in the majority opinion, which was joined in full by Judge Michael R. Murphy, who was nominated by Bill Clinton, and in part by Judge Paul J. Kelly Jr., who was appointed by George H.W. Bush. “The First and Fourth Amendments also refer to the ‘people,’ and nobody contends only ‘law-abiding citizens’ enjoy the rights protected by these constitutional guarantees….Restricting the Second Amendment to ‘law-abiding’ citizens—as the government urges us to do—would make it harder to administer and would risk turning it into ‘a second-class right.'”

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MSNBC guest blames COVID lockdowns and video games for latest trans shooting

Leftists are twisting themselves into knots trying to explain away the cause for a mass shooting in Minnesota as anything but another transgender who acted out murderously against innocent children.

In the aftermath of the shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, MSNBC featured a guest who suggested that Robin Westman – formerly Robert Westman – may have been influenced to open fire on kids in a religious setting by bad parenting, playing video games and the COVID lockdowns.

During Wednesday’s edition of “Chris Jansing Reports,” national security analyst Christopher O’Leary speculated about the possible motivations of the alleged shooter who had posted disturbing video online along with a manifesto that was quickly removed after the incident that left two kids dead. The MSNBC expert also pointed to online radicalization in forums on Reddit during the conversation.

“So when you talk about radicalization, you talk about writings that reference suicide, extremely violent thoughts and ideas, and those multiple videos that are posted online. What do these groups do when you say they radicalize?” Jansing asked.

“So, you know, whether it’s a terrorist organization or, you know, the variety of ideologies that different people follow, they’re following them because they have susceptibility,” O’Leary responded. “There’s various push-pull factors. Maybe it’s some kind of mental break. Maybe it’s their life has, you know, gone down the toilet and they have no hope.”

“Maybe they have bad parenting, a variety of things,” he continued. “The effects of COVID and the isolation and what’s called the gamification influence, where young men are growing up, you know, being raised by video games, all of those things are involved in really people mobilizing towards violence more routinely in these things.”

“But you will also see people get radicalized solely on these video games through headsets. They may never go on the Internet otherwise. So there’s a variety of things that, you know, threat professionals look at now and trends. But we’re seeing this repeated,” O’Leary said.

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Michigan Supreme Court Rules Unrestricted Phone Searches Violate Fourth Amendment

The Michigan Supreme Court has drawn a firm line around digital privacy, ruling that police cannot use overly broad warrants to comb through every corner of a person’s phone.

In People v. Carson, the court found that warrants for digital devices must include specific limitations, allowing access only to information directly tied to the suspected crime.

We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here (the opinion starts on page 5).

Michael Carson became the focus of a theft investigation involving money allegedly taken from a neighbor’s safe.

Authorities secured a warrant to search his phone, but the document placed no boundaries on what could be examined.

It permitted access to all data on the device, including messages, photos, contacts, and documents, without any restriction based on time period or relevance. Investigators collected over a thousand pages of information, much of it unrelated to the accusation.

The court ruled that this kind of expansive warrant violates the Fourth Amendment, which requires particularity in describing what police may search and seize.

The justices said allowing law enforcement to browse through an entire phone without justification amounts to an unconstitutional exploratory search.

Smartphones now serve as central hubs for people’s lives, containing everything from health records and banking details to travel histories and intimate conversations.

Searching a device without limits can expose a volume and variety of personal information that far exceeds what a physical search could reveal.

Groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACLU National, and the ACLU of Michigan intervened in the case, filing a brief that called on the court to adopt strict rules for digital searches.

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‘Demonic’ Minneapolis mass shooter Robin Westman walked around saying ‘praise Hitler’ as a child: ex-friend

Minneapolis school shooter Robin Westman used to horrify classmates by walking around saying “praise Hitler,” according to a former friend who denounced him as “demonic.”

Josefina Sanchez said she is still tormented by how “erratic” and “off” Westman was when they were briefly friends in seventh grade at a school in St. Paul.

Even when that young, the soon-to-be trans killer showed signs of the hateful antisemitism that would later see him fantasizing about attacking “filthy Zionist jews.”

“He would put up his hand and say, like, ‘praise Hitler,’” Sanchez told local outlet KTSP, fighting back tears at the thought she could have raised the alarm and prevented Wednesday’s mass shooting.

“Something I knew was off, but I was a kid. How would I know, like, what to do in the seventh grade?” she asked. “When you see something erratic, it doesn’t leave your mind.”

Sanchez said that Westman was known to write in code so that nobody could understand his writing — similar to the mix of Cryllic seen in his twisted manifesto and troubled writings he shared on YouTube before the massacre.

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