Brett Frischmann

Lawyers have been publicizing a new term to describe ICE's racially targeted detainments: a “Kavanaugh stop.”

Mother Jones reporter Pema Levy explains in this new video:

I'm also interested in different types of engineered sycophancy? Emergent vs designed?

Sycophancy in Generative-AI Chatbots Large language models like ChatGPT can lie to elicit approval from users. This phenomenon, called sycophancy, can be detected in state-of-the-art models.

www.nngroup.com/articles/syc...

Is sycophancy properly characterized as a design feature?

Any research leads on the topic?

just watched a dozen people ask microsoft copilot experts their most pressing questions and those questions were 90% “how do i turn it off?” and “when i turn it off, is it really off or is it spying on me?”

All In Our Heads: On Losing Our Democracy and Life Beyond Our Imaginations Our language has to meet the moment, and we have to be relentless about dispelling the fiction MAGA is selling.

“There is no degree of acquiescence to Trumpism that will satisfy this administration or MAGA at large. All there is is a choice between offering a faint echo of the false reality they’re selling and creating dissonance by speaking the reality of the situation to the public.”

Pretty flowers at the downtown farmers’ market.

My wife @pattyskuster.bsky.social is in Portland today. It’s a war zone, insurrectionists and sunflowers everywhere.

NYT: A Campaign to 'Bring Back Bullying' On social media, some are arguing that bullying deserves a second look. Trolling or not, the push seems to reflect a general turn away from sensitivity.

wtf is wrong with these people

There’s no rule of journalistic neutrality that requires you to say something is “unclear” when that is objectively untrue. It would be illegal. There’s absolutely zero ambiguity about that fact. Saying it’s unclear is making a false statement in your reporting.

This social app can put your face into fake movie scenes, memes and arrest videos The new Sora social app from ChatGPT maker OpenAI encourages users to upload video of their face so their likeness can be put into AI-generated clips.

OpenAI is essentially a social arsonist, developing and releasing tools that hyper scale the most racist, misogynistic, and toxic elements of society, lowering the barriers for all manner of abuse. The so called guardrails make a pinky swear look like an ironclad contract.

“The book’s lessons are pretty much the opposite of what its author claims, but the methods that Meta has used to maintain its power and influence demand attention.”

Again, not the most important thing, but ICE cosplaying SWAT is truly pathetic. The most dangerous thing in Millennium Park is the big slide.

Google to Pay $24.5 Million to End Trump Lawsuit Over Jan. 6 Ban Google agreed to pay $24.5 million to resolve Donald Trump’s claims that being banished from his YouTube channel after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol was illegal censorship, according to a c...

Another craven act of surrender by Big Tech. There is exactly zero merit to this lawsuit. For Google to pay Trump off adds it to the long list of companies that have decided to be complicit in his attack on free speech
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

OpenAI's rapid rush into education has been achieved by habituating users through training programs, institutional lock-ins, strategic marketing partnerships, and third party integrations that together are helping it become infrastructural to teaching and learning. It's going to be hard to get out.

Lower Than Cowards The surrender of America’s elites

"The sheer number of American elites willing to acquiesce to the destruction of democratic institutions is demoralizing. But it’s worth noting that many ordinary people seem to be made of sterner stuff."
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Updated version of Better Digital Contracts with Prosocial Friction-in-Design available at ssrn.com/abstract=491...

Download, read, share, comment, etc.

UCLA’s funds reinstated after yesterday’s court order! Thanks to the brave researchers and their amazing counsel, including Dean Chemerinsky, who brought suit. This is just another turn in the ongoing fight, but a great result for now.

Why Won’t America’s Business Leaders Stand Up to Donald Trump? www.newyorker.com/news/the-fin...

The Supreme Court devalues democracy. Thirty-seven state constitutions block public funds from supporting religious entities. Richard Schragger, Micah Schwartzman & Nelson Tebbe, Reestablishing Religion, 92 U. Chi. L. Rev. 199, 211 (2025) . The Court aims to federally-repeal these state constitutional provisions. The Court's beliefs meddle with local and state governments. Forcing states to send public funds to religious entities federalizes public policy. By unprincipled fiat. See also New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022) (zero to superpower). Taxpayer funds now flow to religious institutions. So, the government collects money from nonbelievers (under the threat of jail), and uses some of it to support religion. And since not all religions will receive public funds, the government forces minority faiths to support other faiths, or else. The Court twists text, history, purpose, precedent, and public meaning to offend the First Amendment's character-of- government structure and the Constitution's separate sovereignty structure. As it steamrolls both, the Court says nothing about church- state separation and federalism principles. The Court's nevermind stance to the structural features of the Constitution "has unfolded with little engagement with, and occasional

Check out Justice Eddins’ complete repudiation of the Roberts Court here. It’s worth reading in full. It’s quite brave—and exceedingly rare—for a sitting judge to speak so candidly and scathingly about SCOTUS’ partisan contortions of law, history, and fact.
www.courts.state.hi.us/wp-content/u...

Michael Eisner @Michael Eisner X.com Where has all the leadership gone? If not for university presidents, law firm managing partners, and corporate chief executives standing up against bullies, who then will step up for the first amendment? The "suspending indefinitely" of Jimmy Kimmel immediately after the Chairman of the FCC's aggressive yet hollow threatening of the Disney Company is yet another example of out-of-control intimidation. Maybe the Constitution should have said, "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, except in one's political or financial self-interest." By-the-way, for the record, this ex-CEO finds Jimmy Kimmel very talented and funny. 10:17 AM • 9/19/25 • 208K Views

Michael Eisner, who served as CEO of Disney for 21 years and acquired ABC while he was in charge, slams his successor Bob Iger for bending the knee.

Antisocial friction in design to support Uniformed / misinformed consent?

I had some thoughts about people saying that "debate me bro" trolling is somehow the height of democratic discourse.

Conspiratorialism's causal chain

pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/c...

Looked at my data collections for state-backed activity. If the report were a picture:

Important Ninth Circuit decision largely upholding California's Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act (SB 976),
www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1066...

Having a lot of trouble summoning sympathy for folks who now pretend they thought Trump was only going to go after violent criminal immigrants. It was alway obvious that wasn’t true. You just mean you didn’t think he’d go after white people.

New diet app just dropped: watch this 1-minute video and you’ll be too nauseated to eat for at least two hours.

www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-ord...

The Trumpist majority on SCOTUS, like Trump himself, is spending down a trust fund they did not create, apparently believing it refills automatically. But it doesn’t. The whole system depends on other key institutions treating their rulings as legitimate.