Senior Policy Reporter
Lauren Feiner is the senior policy reporter at The Verge, where she covers the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill from Washington, D.C. Prior to that, she spent five years at CNBC, where she covered the Google search antitrust trial, industry lobbying, tech Supreme Court cases, and many efforts to enact new privacy, antitrust, and content moderation laws.
When she's not writing about Congress, she's probably catching up on her many podcasts on 2x speed.
Signal: laurenfeiner.64
This time from the Department of Justice, after the Federal Trade Commission said it was referring a complaint to the agency based on an investigation involving a children’s privacy law. The FTC said it doesn’t usually make this kind of referral public, but believed it in the public interest. TikTok said it “strongly disagree[s]” with the allegations and said many of them are outdated.
[Federal Trade Commission]
The media group, which owns wide swath of TV networks around the country, has leveraged that reach to syndicate stories about Biden’s fitness for office, Popular Information reports. The stories, which sometimes included misleadingly-edited clips, published at the same times on dozens of local news sites Sinclair owns. Sinclair called claims it’s deceived its audience “outrageous and offensive.”
It’s a police-operated drone. WIRED took a deep look into how one California city is using the aerial devices to collect information before responding in-person to some incidents. After analyzing 10,000 flight records over a two-year period, WIRED found poorer residents had more contact with the drones. But most Chula Vista residents interviewed said they supported the program.
The state legislature is expected to vote this week on a bill preventing social media companies from using the recommendation tools to serve kids content, unless parents give the OK, according to The Wall Street Journal. States across the country have implemented a range of safeguards from limiting data collection to imposing age verification requirements.
[Twitter]
In case you need the chance to scream, cry, breathe, or just go to the bathroom during the presidential debate, CNN will offer commercial breaks during the June 27 event, two sources told Variety. That’s a break from tradition for presidential debates, but then again, so is plenty about this presidential debate.
The New York Times followed the harrowing journey of John Mark Dougan from his time as a deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Florida to his new residence in Moscow. From there, he reportedly he runs a vast network of largely AI-generated websites that spout disinformation. He’s apparently managed to build over 160 fake websites, according to The Times.
[The New York Times]