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Trump and Ross stream from the interior of a Tesla Cybertruck, a gift from Ross to Trump. | Image: Kick / Adin Ross

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign took an interesting detour today as the former president appeared in a livestream hosted by streamer Adin Ross. The livestream was hosted on Kick and, at its peak, had over 580,000 viewers.
Ross is a streamer known for courting controversy. At the height of his popularity on Twitch, he accumulated over 7 million followers. He’s hosted influencer Andrew Tate, who is currently facing charges in Romania for rape and human trafficking. He was repeatedly banned from Twitch for using racial slurs, before being permanently banned last year after featuring a chat stream where users spammed racial and antisemitic slurs. Ross migrated to the alternative streaming site Kick, where continued his antics which included hosting known white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
Ross’ terms-of-service-breaking content, like streaming the Super Bowl and scrolling through PornHub, has made him popular with Gen-Z males and thereby a perfect conduit for Trump to reach a younger audience — something his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is herself attempting by hosting rallies featuring rapper Megan Thee Stallion.
The stream with Trump may drive just as much controversy. At one point in the interview, Ross presented Trump with Rolex watch. Shortly after gifting him the watch, Ross brought up Fani Willis, a district attorney in the state of Georgia, who has filed an indictment against Trump for alleged election interference during the 2020 presidential election.
“I have a friend who’s currently being treated very unfair by [District Attorney Willis]. He’s a rapper named Young Thug,” Ross said during the livestream, referencing Williams’ racketeering case against the rapper. “I was just wondering if there’s a way that we could make sure he gets treated fair?”
Observers wondered if Ross was attempting to bribe Trump.
Donald Trump has a precedent for getting rappers out of sticky legal situations. At the end of his term in 2021, Trump pardoned the rapper Lil Wayne after he pled guilty to illegal gun possession. He also commuted the sentence for rapper Kodak Black, who was sentenced to 46 months after lying on federal forms in an attempt to purchase firearms.
Trump didn’t directly respond to Ross’ question, saying, “He’s gotta be treated fair.” As the details of the stream spread across social media, observers wondered if Ross was attempting to bribe Trump or whether accepting such an expensive gift constituted some kind of campaign finance violation.
The two continued the livestream with Trump offering one word comments on a list of celebrities and politicians, including Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Finally, at the end of the stream, Ross presented Trump with another gift: a Tesla Cybertruck with a custom wrap featuring the now famous picture of Trump after he was shot at during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The stream ended with Ross and Trump streaming from the Cybertruck as “YMCA” played them out.

Trump and Ross stream from the interior of a Tesla Cybertruck, a gift from Ross to Trump. | Image: Kick / Adin Ross

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign took an interesting detour today as the former president appeared in a livestream hosted by streamer Adin Ross. The livestream was hosted on Kick and, at its peak, had over 580,000 viewers.

Ross is a streamer known for courting controversy. At the height of his popularity on Twitch, he accumulated over 7 million followers. He’s hosted influencer Andrew Tate, who is currently facing charges in Romania for rape and human trafficking. He was repeatedly banned from Twitch for using racial slurs, before being permanently banned last year after featuring a chat stream where users spammed racial and antisemitic slurs. Ross migrated to the alternative streaming site Kick, where continued his antics which included hosting known white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

Ross’ terms-of-service-breaking content, like streaming the Super Bowl and scrolling through PornHub, has made him popular with Gen-Z males and thereby a perfect conduit for Trump to reach a younger audience — something his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is herself attempting by hosting rallies featuring rapper Megan Thee Stallion.

The stream with Trump may drive just as much controversy. At one point in the interview, Ross presented Trump with Rolex watch. Shortly after gifting him the watch, Ross brought up Fani Willis, a district attorney in the state of Georgia, who has filed an indictment against Trump for alleged election interference during the 2020 presidential election.

“I have a friend who’s currently being treated very unfair by [District Attorney Willis]. He’s a rapper named Young Thug,” Ross said during the livestream, referencing Williams’ racketeering case against the rapper. “I was just wondering if there’s a way that we could make sure he gets treated fair?”

Donald Trump has a precedent for getting rappers out of sticky legal situations. At the end of his term in 2021, Trump pardoned the rapper Lil Wayne after he pled guilty to illegal gun possession. He also commuted the sentence for rapper Kodak Black, who was sentenced to 46 months after lying on federal forms in an attempt to purchase firearms.

Trump didn’t directly respond to Ross’ question, saying, “He’s gotta be treated fair.” As the details of the stream spread across social media, observers wondered if Ross was attempting to bribe Trump or whether accepting such an expensive gift constituted some kind of campaign finance violation.

The two continued the livestream with Trump offering one word comments on a list of celebrities and politicians, including Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Finally, at the end of the stream, Ross presented Trump with another gift: a Tesla Cybertruck with a custom wrap featuring the now famous picture of Trump after he was shot at during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The stream ended with Ross and Trump streaming from the Cybertruck as “YMCA” played them out.

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The Ultra 2 is like a souped-up Apple Watch Series 9 with better battery life and durability. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

It’s possible Apple may release a slew of new wearables in the fall, but, until then, the 49mm Apple Watch Ultra 2 remains the most capable smartwatch in Apple’s arsenal. It’s also the most expensive at $799, but right now you can pick it up at Amazon with an Ocean Band, an Alpine Loop, or a Trail Loop for $699.99 ($99 off). That’s not its lowest price to date — we’ve seen it fall to $642 in select configurations before — but the Ocean Band model rarely dips below $719, unlike the others.

Powered by Apple’s S9 SiP processor and second-gen ultra wideband chip, the Apple Ultra 2 allows for onboard Siri processing and Apple’s new double tap feature, which lets you control the watch by tapping your index fingers and thumb together twice. However, the LTE-enabled Ultra 2 is more capable than the Series 9 despite sporting the same chipset, with a brighter 3,000-nit display, better performance, and a battery that can last days at a time.
As a rugged watch geared toward adventurers, the Ultra 2 also includes a number of features built with outdoorsy, active types in mind. These include sensors for measuring various dive metrics and a customizable Action Button, as well as more robust water resistance and durability. The wearable even offers a useful siren you can activate should you need help, which could come in handy if you’re hiking off the grid.
Read our Apple Watch Ultra 2 review.

The Ultra 2 is like a souped-up Apple Watch Series 9 with better battery life and durability. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

It’s possible Apple may release a slew of new wearables in the fall, but, until then, the 49mm Apple Watch Ultra 2 remains the most capable smartwatch in Apple’s arsenal. It’s also the most expensive at $799, but right now you can pick it up at Amazon with an Ocean Band, an Alpine Loop, or a Trail Loop for $699.99 ($99 off). That’s not its lowest price to date — we’ve seen it fall to $642 in select configurations before — but the Ocean Band model rarely dips below $719, unlike the others.

Powered by Apple’s S9 SiP processor and second-gen ultra wideband chip, the Apple Ultra 2 allows for onboard Siri processing and Apple’s new double tap feature, which lets you control the watch by tapping your index fingers and thumb together twice. However, the LTE-enabled Ultra 2 is more capable than the Series 9 despite sporting the same chipset, with a brighter 3,000-nit display, better performance, and a battery that can last days at a time.

As a rugged watch geared toward adventurers, the Ultra 2 also includes a number of features built with outdoorsy, active types in mind. These include sensors for measuring various dive metrics and a customizable Action Button, as well as more robust water resistance and durability. The wearable even offers a useful siren you can activate should you need help, which could come in handy if you’re hiking off the grid.

Read our Apple Watch Ultra 2 review.

Read More 

Polymetallic nodules rich in nickel, manganese, and cobalt that could be used for batteries. | Photo by Pallava Bagla / Corbis via Getty Images

Scientists discovered ‘dark oxygen’ in the ocean’s abyss, where companies want to mine battery metals. The discovery of “dark oxygen” in the ocean’s abyss is raising the stakes in negotiations over whether to mine the seafloor for battery materials — and how to protect sensitive marine life in the process.
Rules for deep-sea mining have been at the heart of talks during the International Seabed Authority’s (ISA) annual meetings in Kingston, Jamaica, that ended Friday. A mining company has already said that after the meetings end, it would submit the first-ever application to exploit minerals from the deep sea.
The company’s plans have triggered a race to get rules in place before any mining starts. But there’s so little that humans know about the deep sea that a growing chorus of scientists, advocates, and policymakers are sounding the alarm that there could be grave, unforeseen consequences. Evidence of mysterious “dark oxygen” from the abyssal seafloor was published in a prestigious journal in July. It raises new questions about the risks mining might pose to life at the bottom of the ocean that scientists are still trying to understand and is amplifying calls for a moratorium on mining.
“We are at a crossroads.”
“Today, we are at a crossroads. The decisions we make at this Assembly will shape the future health and productivity of our oceans for generations to come,” Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. said in his opening statement during the ISA Assembly on July 29th. “Whether it is the undiscovered biodiversity that might unlock the cures for cancer, or the recent discovery just last week of ‘dark oxygen’ being produced in the deep ocean, by the nodules on the seafloor, we have so much to learn about the deep seabed and the vital role it plays for our planet.”
What is dark oxygen?
Oxygen is a product of photosynthesis. Plants and plankton use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to create sugars and oxygen. That’s what makes the discovery of dark oxygen at the bottom of the abyss, with depths between 9,842 to 21,325 feet (3,000 to 6,500 meters), so incredible — what’s down there that can produce oxygen without sunlight? A paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience last week suggests that there’s a completely different and previously unknown process for producing oxygen on Earth, and it comes from arguably the most unexpected of places.
The findings were so surprising the authors themselves were initially skeptical of their own data. They’d set out to document how much oxygen deep-sea organisms use up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, in an area between Hawaii and Mexico that companies are eyeing for mining. They’d sent landers down some 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) to take measurements in spaces closed off to outside currents that would typically bring oxygen from the surface of the sea. The method is sort of like placing a can upside down on the bottom of a pool and documenting what happens inside. They expected to see oxygen levels drop over time in the enclosed area, but they documented the opposite. Thinking something must be wrong with their sensors, they swapped out the equipment and yet kept getting similar readings. When they lifted those landers up, oxygen bubbled out.

Photo: Camille Bridgewater/Northwestern University
Polymetallic nodules, collected from the ocean floor, sit in chemist Franz Geiger’s laboratory at Northwestern University. Platinum electrodes measure the nodules’ voltages.

They still don’t know for sure how the oxygen is produced. But they have a hypothesis. Polymetallic nodules rich in nickel, copper, cobalt, iron, and manganese are strewn across the seafloor — exactly what mining companies are interested in exploiting and have even described as “batteries in a rock.” They might just be able to produce enough of an electrical charge to split seawater, releasing oxygen through electrolysis.
There’s a lot more research to be done to test that hypothesis. The authors of the paper were taking oxygen readings and weren’t looking for higher levels of hydrogen — which you’d expect to see if these rock batteries are actually capable of splitting water. They brought some nodules up to land to see if they could replicate the process in a lab. That’s how they were able to rule out other possibilities like microbes producing dark oxygen. Again, the results were surprising.
“The readings were off the chart.”
“I had approached the problem from the perspective of, you know, there’s no way that these things have this high voltage … and the readings were off the chart,” says Franz Geiger, one of the authors of the paper and a professor of physical chemistry at Northwestern University.
The team documented voltage as high as around 950 millivolts — just shy of the 1.3 to 1.5 volts that would be needed to split seawater or at least get an oxygen-producing half-reaction — called an oxygen evolution reaction. Out in the ocean where there are vast networks of nodules, the voltage might get high enough to trigger those reactions, they hypothesize.
The research was funded in part by The Metals Company (TMC), the same company planning to apply for a license to start deep-sea mining. The company says it’s conducting “one of the most comprehensive deep-sea research programs in history,” spending more than $200 million on environmental assessments. But now, they’re disputing the findings of the paper published in Nature Geoscience last month — picking a fight with researchers whose findings might not jive with the company’s claim that mining the ocean’s abyss would be a less harmful alternative to mining on land.

When The Verge reached out to the company, it pointed us to a statement it released saying it was “surprised to see the questionable paper” published. The company says it’s still “preparing a comprehensive rebuttal” but is so far questioning the researchers’ “flawed” methods in part because the data was “collected under conditions not representative” of the seafloor area where it’s interested in mining. It also says that the paper contradicts other studies and was rejected by other journals.
The research team stands by its work. “We were the worst critics of this paper for a long time. For eight years I discarded the data showing oxygen production, thinking my sensors were faulty. Once we realized something may be going on, we tried to disprove it, but in the end we simply couldn’t,” lead author Andrew Sweetman, a professor at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, says in his own statement responding to The Metals Company.
Why there still aren’t rules for deep-sea mining
Dark oxygen has already made waves in Kingston, observers who attended the ISA meetings with advocacy groups and intergovernmental delegations tell The Verge. Delegations representing several countries have brought the research up in their opening statements, and there’s reportedly also talk of the research in negotiation rooms and at side events. “It has come up quite a lot along the corridors as well,” says Pradeep Singh, an expert on ocean governance and a fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability at Helmholtz Centre Potsdam.
Unsurprisingly, it’s spurring calls to pump the brakes on mining. “The significance [of this research] can’t be overestimated,” says David Santillo, a marine biologist and senior scientist at the Greenpeace Research Laboratories based at the University of Exeter. Greenpeace is one of the environmental groups opposing deep-sea mining. “Clearly, it’s going to have implications also for the natural systems and the processes on which not just deep sea ecosystems depend, but on which the whole planet depends. We know the value and the importance of oxygen as an element on Earth,” Santillo says.

So far, 32 countries have expressed support for either an all-out ban, moratorium, or “precautionary pause” on deep-sea mining either until there are rules in place to prevent unnecessary harm or until there’s a better understanding of what mining might disturb. That includes five new countries joining the cause during this year’s ISA meeting.
The ISA missed a key deadline last year to craft rules — two years after the island nation of Nauru sent everyone into a tizzy by announcing that it would sponsor The Metals Company’s deep-sea mining aspirations. That’s what enables TMC to apply for a mining license now.
Whether the ISA will give TMC the green light if it applies this year is another story. Though it missed its initial deadline, the ISA set out an aspirational timeline for getting rules in place by 2025. The ISA Council also put out language at last year’s negotiations saying commercial mining shouldn’t move forward until those rules are set in place, although that’s not necessarily a legally binding decision. So there’s still a push to put a more official moratorium in place and also to establish a more general conservation policy under the ISA for protecting marine environments.

Deep-sea mining could find rare elements for smartphones — but will it destroy rare species?

The ISA also voted in a new secretary-general on Friday, replacing one who faced allegations of getting too cozy with mining companies with an oceanographer who will become the first scientist to hold the post. For now, it looks like there are still too many disagreements among delegates on what rules should look like for the ISA to hit its 2025 goal, observers tell The Verge. “They are really far apart on issues of who’s going to pay for damage if it happens? How much liability would the damage incur? Would they simply be required to clean up the mess, if indeed that was even possible?” says Matthew Gianni, who cofounded the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition now calling for a moratorium.
Geiger, the study author, isn’t convinced the world may be able to avoid deep-sea mining forever, especially as electric vehicles and renewable energy drive up demand for battery materials. “The materials are needed, there’s absolutely no question about it. So we may be forced sooner or later to take this step as a society. This work, we hope, informs where and when and how often to do this with the minimized impact on the ecology down there,” he says.
“It’s not like you can wait 100 million years and have these nodules grow back. Once you take them out, they’re gone.”

Polymetallic nodules rich in nickel, manganese, and cobalt that could be used for batteries. | Photo by Pallava Bagla / Corbis via Getty Images

Scientists discovered ‘dark oxygen’ in the ocean’s abyss, where companies want to mine battery metals.

The discovery of “dark oxygen” in the ocean’s abyss is raising the stakes in negotiations over whether to mine the seafloor for battery materials — and how to protect sensitive marine life in the process.

Rules for deep-sea mining have been at the heart of talks during the International Seabed Authority’s (ISA) annual meetings in Kingston, Jamaica, that ended Friday. A mining company has already said that after the meetings end, it would submit the first-ever application to exploit minerals from the deep sea.

The company’s plans have triggered a race to get rules in place before any mining starts. But there’s so little that humans know about the deep sea that a growing chorus of scientists, advocates, and policymakers are sounding the alarm that there could be grave, unforeseen consequences. Evidence of mysterious “dark oxygen” from the abyssal seafloor was published in a prestigious journal in July. It raises new questions about the risks mining might pose to life at the bottom of the ocean that scientists are still trying to understand and is amplifying calls for a moratorium on mining.

“Today, we are at a crossroads. The decisions we make at this Assembly will shape the future health and productivity of our oceans for generations to come,” Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. said in his opening statement during the ISA Assembly on July 29th. “Whether it is the undiscovered biodiversity that might unlock the cures for cancer, or the recent discovery just last week of ‘dark oxygen’ being produced in the deep ocean, by the nodules on the seafloor, we have so much to learn about the deep seabed and the vital role it plays for our planet.”

What is dark oxygen?

Oxygen is a product of photosynthesis. Plants and plankton use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to create sugars and oxygen. That’s what makes the discovery of dark oxygen at the bottom of the abyss, with depths between 9,842 to 21,325 feet (3,000 to 6,500 meters), so incredible — what’s down there that can produce oxygen without sunlight? A paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience last week suggests that there’s a completely different and previously unknown process for producing oxygen on Earth, and it comes from arguably the most unexpected of places.

The findings were so surprising the authors themselves were initially skeptical of their own data. They’d set out to document how much oxygen deep-sea organisms use up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, in an area between Hawaii and Mexico that companies are eyeing for mining. They’d sent landers down some 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) to take measurements in spaces closed off to outside currents that would typically bring oxygen from the surface of the sea. The method is sort of like placing a can upside down on the bottom of a pool and documenting what happens inside. They expected to see oxygen levels drop over time in the enclosed area, but they documented the opposite. Thinking something must be wrong with their sensors, they swapped out the equipment and yet kept getting similar readings. When they lifted those landers up, oxygen bubbled out.

They still don’t know for sure how the oxygen is produced. But they have a hypothesis. Polymetallic nodules rich in nickel, copper, cobalt, iron, and manganese are strewn across the seafloor — exactly what mining companies are interested in exploiting and have even described as “batteries in a rock.” They might just be able to produce enough of an electrical charge to split seawater, releasing oxygen through electrolysis.

There’s a lot more research to be done to test that hypothesis. The authors of the paper were taking oxygen readings and weren’t looking for higher levels of hydrogen — which you’d expect to see if these rock batteries are actually capable of splitting water. They brought some nodules up to land to see if they could replicate the process in a lab. That’s how they were able to rule out other possibilities like microbes producing dark oxygen. Again, the results were surprising.

“I had approached the problem from the perspective of, you know, there’s no way that these things have this high voltage … and the readings were off the chart,” says Franz Geiger, one of the authors of the paper and a professor of physical chemistry at Northwestern University.

The team documented voltage as high as around 950 millivolts — just shy of the 1.3 to 1.5 volts that would be needed to split seawater or at least get an oxygen-producing half-reaction — called an oxygen evolution reaction. Out in the ocean where there are vast networks of nodules, the voltage might get high enough to trigger those reactions, they hypothesize.

The research was funded in part by The Metals Company (TMC), the same company planning to apply for a license to start deep-sea mining. The company says it’s conducting “one of the most comprehensive deep-sea research programs in history,” spending more than $200 million on environmental assessments. But now, they’re disputing the findings of the paper published in Nature Geoscience last month — picking a fight with researchers whose findings might not jive with the company’s claim that mining the ocean’s abyss would be a less harmful alternative to mining on land.

When The Verge reached out to the company, it pointed us to a statement it released saying it was “surprised to see the questionable paper” published. The company says it’s still “preparing a comprehensive rebuttal” but is so far questioning the researchers’ “flawed” methods in part because the data was “collected under conditions not representative” of the seafloor area where it’s interested in mining. It also says that the paper contradicts other studies and was rejected by other journals.

The research team stands by its work. “We were the worst critics of this paper for a long time. For eight years I discarded the data showing oxygen production, thinking my sensors were faulty. Once we realized something may be going on, we tried to disprove it, but in the end we simply couldn’t,” lead author Andrew Sweetman, a professor at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, says in his own statement responding to The Metals Company.

Why there still aren’t rules for deep-sea mining

Dark oxygen has already made waves in Kingston, observers who attended the ISA meetings with advocacy groups and intergovernmental delegations tell The Verge. Delegations representing several countries have brought the research up in their opening statements, and there’s reportedly also talk of the research in negotiation rooms and at side events. “It has come up quite a lot along the corridors as well,” says Pradeep Singh, an expert on ocean governance and a fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability at Helmholtz Centre Potsdam.

Unsurprisingly, it’s spurring calls to pump the brakes on mining. “The significance [of this research] can’t be overestimated,” says David Santillo, a marine biologist and senior scientist at the Greenpeace Research Laboratories based at the University of Exeter. Greenpeace is one of the environmental groups opposing deep-sea mining. “Clearly, it’s going to have implications also for the natural systems and the processes on which not just deep sea ecosystems depend, but on which the whole planet depends. We know the value and the importance of oxygen as an element on Earth,” Santillo says.

So far, 32 countries have expressed support for either an all-out ban, moratorium, or “precautionary pause” on deep-sea mining either until there are rules in place to prevent unnecessary harm or until there’s a better understanding of what mining might disturb. That includes five new countries joining the cause during this year’s ISA meeting.

The ISA missed a key deadline last year to craft rules — two years after the island nation of Nauru sent everyone into a tizzy by announcing that it would sponsor The Metals Company’s deep-sea mining aspirations. That’s what enables TMC to apply for a mining license now.

Whether the ISA will give TMC the green light if it applies this year is another story. Though it missed its initial deadline, the ISA set out an aspirational timeline for getting rules in place by 2025. The ISA Council also put out language at last year’s negotiations saying commercial mining shouldn’t move forward until those rules are set in place, although that’s not necessarily a legally binding decision. So there’s still a push to put a more official moratorium in place and also to establish a more general conservation policy under the ISA for protecting marine environments.

The ISA also voted in a new secretary-general on Friday, replacing one who faced allegations of getting too cozy with mining companies with an oceanographer who will become the first scientist to hold the post. For now, it looks like there are still too many disagreements among delegates on what rules should look like for the ISA to hit its 2025 goal, observers tell The Verge. “They are really far apart on issues of who’s going to pay for damage if it happens? How much liability would the damage incur? Would they simply be required to clean up the mess, if indeed that was even possible?” says Matthew Gianni, who cofounded the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition now calling for a moratorium.

Geiger, the study author, isn’t convinced the world may be able to avoid deep-sea mining forever, especially as electric vehicles and renewable energy drive up demand for battery materials. “The materials are needed, there’s absolutely no question about it. So we may be forced sooner or later to take this step as a society. This work, we hope, informs where and when and how often to do this with the minimized impact on the ecology down there,” he says.

“It’s not like you can wait 100 million years and have these nodules grow back. Once you take them out, they’re gone.”

Read More 

Illustration: The Verge

Apple’s latest developer betas launched last week with a handful of the generative AI features that were announced at WWDC and are headed to your iPhones, iPads, and Macs over the next several months. On Apple’s computers, however, you can actually read the instructions programmed into the model supporting some of those Apple Intelligence features.
They show up as prompts that precede anything you say to a chatbot by default, and we’ve seen them uncovered for AI tools like Microsoft Bing and DALL-E before. Now a member of the macOS 15.1 beta subreddit posted that they’d discovered the files containing those backend prompts. You can’t alter any of the files, but they do give an early hint at how the sausage is made.

In the example above, an AI bot for a “helpful mail assistant” is being told how to ask a series of questions based on the content of an email. It could be part of Apple’s Smart Reply feature, which can go on to suggest possible replies for you.

Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge

This sounds like Apple’s “Rewrite” feature, one of the Writing Tools that you can access by highlighting text and right-clicking (or, in iOS, long-pressing) on it. Its instructions include passages saying, “Please limit the answer within 50 words. Do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information.”

Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge

This brief prompt summarizes emails, with a careful instruction not to answer any questions.

Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge

I’m pretty certain that this is the instruction set for generating a “Memories” video with Apple Photos. The passage that says, “Do not write a story that is religious, political, harmful, violent, sexual, filthy or in any way negative, sad or provocative,” might just explain why the feature rejected my prompt asking for “images of sadness”:

A shame. It’s not hard to get around, though. I got it to generate a video in response to the prompt, “Provide me with a video of people mourning.” I won’t share the resulting video because there are pictures of people who aren’t me in it, but I will show you the best picture it included in the slideshow:

Photo: Wes Davis / The Verge
Rest in peace, little buddy.

There are far more prompts contained in the files, all laying out the hidden instructions given to Apple’s AI tools before your prompt is ever submitted. But here’s one last instruction before you go:

Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge
“It will not be helpful.”

Files I browsed through refer to the model as “ajax,” which some Verge readers might recall as the rumored internal name for Apple’s LLM last year.

Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge
“Hey, Ajax.”

The person who found the instructions also posted instructions on how to locate the files within the macOS Sequoia 15.1 developer beta.

Expand the “purpose_auto” folder, and you should see a list of other folders with long, alphanumeric names. Inside most of those, you’ll find an AssetData folder containing “metadata.json” files. Opening them should show you some code and — occasionally, at the bottom of some of them — the instructions passed to your machine’s local incarnation of Apple’s LLM. But you should remember these live in a part of macOS that contains the most sensitive files on your system. Tread with caution!

Illustration: The Verge

Apple’s latest developer betas launched last week with a handful of the generative AI features that were announced at WWDC and are headed to your iPhones, iPads, and Macs over the next several months. On Apple’s computers, however, you can actually read the instructions programmed into the model supporting some of those Apple Intelligence features.

They show up as prompts that precede anything you say to a chatbot by default, and we’ve seen them uncovered for AI tools like Microsoft Bing and DALL-E before. Now a member of the macOS 15.1 beta subreddit posted that they’d discovered the files containing those backend prompts. You can’t alter any of the files, but they do give an early hint at how the sausage is made.

In the example above, an AI bot for a “helpful mail assistant” is being told how to ask a series of questions based on the content of an email. It could be part of Apple’s Smart Reply feature, which can go on to suggest possible replies for you.

Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge

This sounds like Apple’s “Rewrite” feature, one of the Writing Tools that you can access by highlighting text and right-clicking (or, in iOS, long-pressing) on it. Its instructions include passages saying, “Please limit the answer within 50 words. Do not hallucinate. Do not make up factual information.”

Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge

This brief prompt summarizes emails, with a careful instruction not to answer any questions.

Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge

I’m pretty certain that this is the instruction set for generating a “Memories” video with Apple Photos. The passage that says, “Do not write a story that is religious, political, harmful, violent, sexual, filthy or in any way negative, sad or provocative,” might just explain why the feature rejected my prompt asking for “images of sadness”:

A shame. It’s not hard to get around, though. I got it to generate a video in response to the prompt, “Provide me with a video of people mourning.” I won’t share the resulting video because there are pictures of people who aren’t me in it, but I will show you the best picture it included in the slideshow:

Photo: Wes Davis / The Verge
Rest in peace, little buddy.

There are far more prompts contained in the files, all laying out the hidden instructions given to Apple’s AI tools before your prompt is ever submitted. But here’s one last instruction before you go:

Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge
“It will not be helpful.”

Files I browsed through refer to the model as “ajax,” which some Verge readers might recall as the rumored internal name for Apple’s LLM last year.

Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge
“Hey, Ajax.”

The person who found the instructions also posted instructions on how to locate the files within the macOS Sequoia 15.1 developer beta.

Expand the “purpose_auto” folder, and you should see a list of other folders with long, alphanumeric names. Inside most of those, you’ll find an AssetData folder containing “metadata.json” files. Opening them should show you some code and — occasionally, at the bottom of some of them — the instructions passed to your machine’s local incarnation of Apple’s LLM. But you should remember these live in a part of macOS that contains the most sensitive files on your system. Tread with caution!

Read More 

Illustration: The Verge

Apple is adding a new feature to Safari called “Distraction Control” that lets you remove distracting things like cookie preference pop-ups while you’re browsing, MacRumors reports. The new feature is available with the fifth iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia developer betas that launched on Monday.
You can get an idea of how Distraction Control works thanks to a video from MacRumors. From a menu, you can choose an option to “Hide Distracting Items” and then select items you want to hide from the page you’re looking at. When items are hidden, they dissipate away with a very slick animation.

In a pop-up shown in the video, Apple notes that “hiding distracting items will not permanently remove ads and other content that updates frequently,” so you won’t be able to use this feature to hide every ad you see for good. Parts of a website that you hide also don’t sync across your devices, MacRumors says.
The new iOS 18 beta also brings changes to the redesigned Photos app, including removing the new carousel view feature.

Illustration: The Verge

Apple is adding a new feature to Safari called “Distraction Control” that lets you remove distracting things like cookie preference pop-ups while you’re browsing, MacRumors reports. The new feature is available with the fifth iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia developer betas that launched on Monday.

You can get an idea of how Distraction Control works thanks to a video from MacRumors. From a menu, you can choose an option to “Hide Distracting Items” and then select items you want to hide from the page you’re looking at. When items are hidden, they dissipate away with a very slick animation.

In a pop-up shown in the video, Apple notes that “hiding distracting items will not permanently remove ads and other content that updates frequently,” so you won’t be able to use this feature to hide every ad you see for good. Parts of a website that you hide also don’t sync across your devices, MacRumors says.

The new iOS 18 beta also brings changes to the redesigned Photos app, including removing the new carousel view feature.

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Laura Normand / The Verge

A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” the court’s ruling, which you can read in full at the bottom of this story, reads. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”
Judge Amit Mehta’s decision represents a major victory for the Department of Justice, which accused Google of illegally monopolizing the online search market. It’s not yet clear what specifically this will mean for the future of Google’s business, as this initial finding is only about Google’s liability, not about remedies.
The decision is the first in a wave of tech monopoly cases brought by the US government in recent years. While two decades passed between the Department of Justices’ antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft and its next tech anti-monopoly case against Google, filed in 2020, several more such cases quickly followed. Amazon, Apple, and Meta all now face their own monopolization lawsuits from the US government, and Google will go to trial against the DOJ a second time this fall over a separate challenge of its advertising technology business. That makes Mehta’s decision in this case even more consequential for how other judges may consider how to apply century-old antitrust laws to modern digital markets.
Mehta oversaw a 10-week trial in the Google search case last fall, which culminated in two days of closing arguments in early May. The trial, which took place in DC District Court, convened many big players in Silicon Valley, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Apple executive Eddy Cue. The DOJ argued that Google illegally monopolized the general search advertising market by effectively cutting off key distribution channels for rivals through exclusionary contracts. For example, Google has deals with browser makers like Mozilla and phone manufacturers like Apple and Samsung to make their search engine the default on their products. Google also makes default status for some of its apps a condition of access to the Play Store for phone-makers using its Android operating system.
Google argued throughout the trial that it has not acted anticompetitively and that its large market share is a result of creating a superior product that consumers enjoy. It contended that the Google search business should be compared to a much larger range of peers than the government proposed in its market definition, suggesting it competes directly with other platforms where search is a big part of the business, even if they don’t index the web (such as Amazon).
One of the most significant revelations from the case was the size of Google’s payments to Apple to secure the default search engine spot on iPhone browsers. An expert witness for Google let slip that the company shares 36 percent of search ad revenue from Safari with Apple. In 2022, Google paid Apple $20 billion for the default position, according to Apple’s Cue.
During closing arguments, Mehta homed in on those payments, wondering how other players in the market could possibly displace Google from that position. Since only a company with enough capital to offer Apple a comparable or better deal and the ability to create a quality search engine with limited user data could stand a chance, Mehta asked, “If that’s what it takes for somebody to dislodge Google as the default search engine, wouldn’t the folks that wrote the Sherman Act be concerned about it?”
The next antitrust trial between the DOJ and Google is set to begin on September 9th.

Developing…

Laura Normand / The Verge

A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.

“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” the court’s ruling, which you can read in full at the bottom of this story, reads. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”

Judge Amit Mehta’s decision represents a major victory for the Department of Justice, which accused Google of illegally monopolizing the online search market. It’s not yet clear what specifically this will mean for the future of Google’s business, as this initial finding is only about Google’s liability, not about remedies.

The decision is the first in a wave of tech monopoly cases brought by the US government in recent years. While two decades passed between the Department of Justices’ antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft and its next tech anti-monopoly case against Google, filed in 2020, several more such cases quickly followed. Amazon, Apple, and Meta all now face their own monopolization lawsuits from the US government, and Google will go to trial against the DOJ a second time this fall over a separate challenge of its advertising technology business. That makes Mehta’s decision in this case even more consequential for how other judges may consider how to apply century-old antitrust laws to modern digital markets.

Mehta oversaw a 10-week trial in the Google search case last fall, which culminated in two days of closing arguments in early May. The trial, which took place in DC District Court, convened many big players in Silicon Valley, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Apple executive Eddy Cue. The DOJ argued that Google illegally monopolized the general search advertising market by effectively cutting off key distribution channels for rivals through exclusionary contracts. For example, Google has deals with browser makers like Mozilla and phone manufacturers like Apple and Samsung to make their search engine the default on their products. Google also makes default status for some of its apps a condition of access to the Play Store for phone-makers using its Android operating system.

Google argued throughout the trial that it has not acted anticompetitively and that its large market share is a result of creating a superior product that consumers enjoy. It contended that the Google search business should be compared to a much larger range of peers than the government proposed in its market definition, suggesting it competes directly with other platforms where search is a big part of the business, even if they don’t index the web (such as Amazon).

One of the most significant revelations from the case was the size of Google’s payments to Apple to secure the default search engine spot on iPhone browsers. An expert witness for Google let slip that the company shares 36 percent of search ad revenue from Safari with Apple. In 2022, Google paid Apple $20 billion for the default position, according to Apple’s Cue.

During closing arguments, Mehta homed in on those payments, wondering how other players in the market could possibly displace Google from that position. Since only a company with enough capital to offer Apple a comparable or better deal and the ability to create a quality search engine with limited user data could stand a chance, Mehta asked, “If that’s what it takes for somebody to dislodge Google as the default search engine, wouldn’t the folks that wrote the Sherman Act be concerned about it?”

The next antitrust trial between the DOJ and Google is set to begin on September 9th.

Developing…

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Photo by VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images

Actors have once again picked up their picket signs. But this time, members of the screen actors guild are striking against the video game industry after negotiations for a new contract governing interactive media and video games fell through. The guild began striking on Friday, July 26th, preventing over 160,000 SAG-AFTRA members from taking new video game projects and impeding games already in development from the biggest publishers to the smallest indie studios.
Negotiations broke down due to disagreements over worker protections around AI. The actors union, SAG-AFTRA, negotiates the terms of the interactive media agreement, or IMA, with a bargaining committee of video game publishers including Activision, Take-Two, Insomniac Games, WB Games, and others that represent a total of 30 signatory companies. Though SAG-AFTRA and the video game bargaining group were able to agree on a number of proposals, AI remained the final stumbling block resulting in the strike.
SAG-AFTRA’s provisions on AI govern both voice and movement performers with respect to digital replicas – or using an existing performance as the foundation to create new ones without the original performer – and the use of generative AI to create performances without any initial input. However, according to SAG-AFTRA, the bargaining companies disagreed about which type of performer should be eligible for AI protections.

SAG-AFTRA chief contracts officer Ray Rodriguez said that the bargaining companies initially wanted to offer protections to voice, not motion performers. “So anybody doing a stunt or creature performance, all those folks would have been left unprotected under the employers’ offer,” Rodriguez said in an interview with Aftermath,
Rodriguez said that the companies later extended protections to motion performers, but only if “the performer is identifiable in the output of the AI digital replica.”

SAG-AFTRA rejected this proposal as it would potentially exclude a majority of movement performances. “Their proposal would carve out anything that doesn’t look and sound identical to me,” said Andi Norris, a member of SAG-AFTRA’s IMA negotiating committee, during a press conference. “[The proposal] would leave movement specialists, including stunts, entirely out in the cold, to be replaced … by soulless synthetic performers trained on our actual performances.”

The bargaining game companies argued that the terms went far enough and would require actors’ approval. “Our offer is directly responsive to SAG-AFTRA’s concerns and extends meaningful AI protections that include requiring consent and fair compensation to all performers working under the IMA. These terms are among the strongest in the entertainment industry,” wrote Audrey Cooling, a representative working on behalf of the video game companies on the bargaining committee in a statement to The Verge.
SAG-AFTRA’s strike rules include a number of exceptions for struck companies and work, which makes it difficult to know the true scope of the strike, especially the games it affects.
For example, work done under SAG-AFTRA’s Tiered-Budget Independent Interactive Media Agreement or an Interim Interactive Media Agreement are exempt from the strike. Additionally, a specific clause in the IMA called “side letter six” grants an exemption to games in production before August 2023. This means that though Take-Two is a struck company, Grand Theft Auto VI is not considered struck work. However, members of SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee have encouraged others to refrain from working on side letter six games.

@gameperformancematters lf you are unclear about your contractual obligations, or what it means to be engaged, check the FAQS first then email videogamestrike@sagaftra.org. If you ever have any questions, please email videogamestrike@sagaftra.org. Stay strong, stay connected, ask for the help you need, I love you. #videogamestrike #sagaftrastrong #gameperformancematters #levelupthecontract ♬ original sound – Game Performance Matters

“Side letter six permits but does not require performers to render services during a strike,” said Sarah Elmaleh, a video game performer and chair of SAG-AFTRA’s IMA negotiating committee in a TikTok video. “This language made its way into our contract for one reason only, to undermine our union’s most valuable tool: a strike.”
The last SAG-AFTRA video game strike was in 2016 and lasted 11 months, earning performers fixed rate increases, improved safety assurances on set, and better oversight to prevent vocal stress in voice performers.

Photo by VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images

Actors have once again picked up their picket signs. But this time, members of the screen actors guild are striking against the video game industry after negotiations for a new contract governing interactive media and video games fell through. The guild began striking on Friday, July 26th, preventing over 160,000 SAG-AFTRA members from taking new video game projects and impeding games already in development from the biggest publishers to the smallest indie studios.

Negotiations broke down due to disagreements over worker protections around AI. The actors union, SAG-AFTRA, negotiates the terms of the interactive media agreement, or IMA, with a bargaining committee of video game publishers including Activision, Take-Two, Insomniac Games, WB Games, and others that represent a total of 30 signatory companies. Though SAG-AFTRA and the video game bargaining group were able to agree on a number of proposals, AI remained the final stumbling block resulting in the strike.

SAG-AFTRA’s provisions on AI govern both voice and movement performers with respect to digital replicas – or using an existing performance as the foundation to create new ones without the original performer – and the use of generative AI to create performances without any initial input. However, according to SAG-AFTRA, the bargaining companies disagreed about which type of performer should be eligible for AI protections.

SAG-AFTRA chief contracts officer Ray Rodriguez said that the bargaining companies initially wanted to offer protections to voice, not motion performers. “So anybody doing a stunt or creature performance, all those folks would have been left unprotected under the employers’ offer,” Rodriguez said in an interview with Aftermath,

Rodriguez said that the companies later extended protections to motion performers, but only if “the performer is identifiable in the output of the AI digital replica.”

SAG-AFTRA rejected this proposal as it would potentially exclude a majority of movement performances. “Their proposal would carve out anything that doesn’t look and sound identical to me,” said Andi Norris, a member of SAG-AFTRA’s IMA negotiating committee, during a press conference. “[The proposal] would leave movement specialists, including stunts, entirely out in the cold, to be replaced … by soulless synthetic performers trained on our actual performances.”

The bargaining game companies argued that the terms went far enough and would require actors’ approval. “Our offer is directly responsive to SAG-AFTRA’s concerns and extends meaningful AI protections that include requiring consent and fair compensation to all performers working under the IMA. These terms are among the strongest in the entertainment industry,” wrote Audrey Cooling, a representative working on behalf of the video game companies on the bargaining committee in a statement to The Verge.

SAG-AFTRA’s strike rules include a number of exceptions for struck companies and work, which makes it difficult to know the true scope of the strike, especially the games it affects.

For example, work done under SAG-AFTRA’s Tiered-Budget Independent Interactive Media Agreement or an Interim Interactive Media Agreement are exempt from the strike. Additionally, a specific clause in the IMA called “side letter six” grants an exemption to games in production before August 2023. This means that though Take-Two is a struck company, Grand Theft Auto VI is not considered struck work. However, members of SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee have encouraged others to refrain from working on side letter six games.

“Side letter six permits but does not require performers to render services during a strike,” said Sarah Elmaleh, a video game performer and chair of SAG-AFTRA’s IMA negotiating committee in a TikTok video. “This language made its way into our contract for one reason only, to undermine our union’s most valuable tool: a strike.”

The last SAG-AFTRA video game strike was in 2016 and lasted 11 months, earning performers fixed rate increases, improved safety assurances on set, and better oversight to prevent vocal stress in voice performers.

Read More 

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Folks are beginning to receive checks from Apple to compensate them for having to spend money when their MacBook butterfly keyboards malfunctioned. As the payments go out, Apple is closing the book on an issue with stuck or otherwise unusable keys that plagued owners of Mac laptops made between 2015 and 2019.
The checks are the result of Apple’s $50 million settlement of a class action lawsuit over the keyboards in 2022. People who filed during the claims window starting late last year were eligible for payments of $50, $125, or $395, depending on how extensive or frequent the repairs were. A court in June ordered Apple to begin paying out. Verge reporter and smart home expert Jennifer Pattison Tuohy received one for the maximum amount, offered to anyone for whom the issue recurred after having the keyboard replaced. 9to5Mac’s Michael Burkhardt reported getting two checks over the weekend as well.

Starting with the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, Apple started doing away with the butterfly switch keyboards, which had extremely low key travel but seemed to be deeply unreliable and prone to failure. The whole saga finally ended when Apple released a 13-inch MacBook Pro without butterfly switches in 2020.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Folks are beginning to receive checks from Apple to compensate them for having to spend money when their MacBook butterfly keyboards malfunctioned. As the payments go out, Apple is closing the book on an issue with stuck or otherwise unusable keys that plagued owners of Mac laptops made between 2015 and 2019.

The checks are the result of Apple’s $50 million settlement of a class action lawsuit over the keyboards in 2022. People who filed during the claims window starting late last year were eligible for payments of $50, $125, or $395, depending on how extensive or frequent the repairs were. A court in June ordered Apple to begin paying out. Verge reporter and smart home expert Jennifer Pattison Tuohy received one for the maximum amount, offered to anyone for whom the issue recurred after having the keyboard replaced. 9to5Mac’s Michael Burkhardt reported getting two checks over the weekend as well.

Starting with the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, Apple started doing away with the butterfly switch keyboards, which had extremely low key travel but seemed to be deeply unreliable and prone to failure. The whole saga finally ended when Apple released a 13-inch MacBook Pro without butterfly switches in 2020.

Read More 

Photo: Sean Hollister / The Verge

Lenovo seems to have unintentionally bolstered rumors of a new Legion Go PC gaming handheld with details published on its own product page in a since-removed FAQ spotted by Videocardz. The page hinted at a console with a “7-inch or 8-inch display,” an HDMI port, and dual fans — things the original Legion Go lacks — before it was apparently removed.
You can still find the FAQ on The Internet Archive, where I found snapshots as far back as May 4th, 2024, and as recently as yesterday. In addition to those details, Windows Central suggests that the console will be named the Lenovo Legion Go “S,” not “Lite,” as has been rumored until now.

The current version of the Legion Go features an 8.8-inch screen, a single fan, and outputs video over USB-C. The FAQ only mentions dual fans, which led Windows Central to speculate that the slip represents an overall refresh for the system. Lenovo hasn’t announced these details, however, so do take this all with a grain of salt.

Photo: Sean Hollister / The Verge

Lenovo seems to have unintentionally bolstered rumors of a new Legion Go PC gaming handheld with details published on its own product page in a since-removed FAQ spotted by Videocardz. The page hinted at a console with a “7-inch or 8-inch display,” an HDMI port, and dual fans — things the original Legion Go lacks — before it was apparently removed.

You can still find the FAQ on The Internet Archive, where I found snapshots as far back as May 4th, 2024, and as recently as yesterday. In addition to those details, Windows Central suggests that the console will be named the Lenovo Legion Go “S,” not “Lite,” as has been rumored until now.

The current version of the Legion Go features an 8.8-inch screen, a single fan, and outputs video over USB-C. The FAQ only mentions dual fans, which led Windows Central to speculate that the slip represents an overall refresh for the system. Lenovo hasn’t announced these details, however, so do take this all with a grain of salt.

Read More 

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

Here at The Verge, we’ve been doing our best not to uncritically publish every random statement and half-cocked idea that comes out of former President Donald Trump’s mouth for several years now. He just says stuff, especially about tech, and most of it doesn’t come to anything.
But last week, Trump casually mentioned to Fox’s Maria Bartiromo that “Google has to be careful” because “they’ve been very irresponsible” and that he had “a feeling Google is going to be close to shut down, because I don’t think Congress is going to take it.”
In classic Trump fashion, he said this after noting that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had called him after the attempt to assassinate him, and “nobody called from Google.” So it’s tempting to put this down as classic transactional Trump rambling — after all, he was calling Facebook “the enemy of the people” as recently as March as he backtracked on banning TikTok. One phone call and “badass” comment, and you’re back in his good graces, it seems.
“Does Google need to have YouTube?”
But scratch the surface even slightly, and there’s a direct line from Trump’s comments about Google to the same group of newly unmasked Silicon Valley VCs pumping money into the Trump campaign. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz openly worried about the company’s power while announcing their support for Trump, saying it was “more powerful than probably 95 percent of countries in the world.” Peter Thiel has been funding anti-Google regulatory action for years now, at one point even calling the company “treasonous.”
And Thiel-funded Trump running mate JD Vance has appeared at antitrust conferences praising Biden FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she was “doing a pretty good job” and openly supporting breaking up the big platform companies. “Does Google need to have YouTube? Does Google need to have all these other platforms that are built underneath the Google umbrella? You can make the same argument with Instagram, Facebook, other services of Meta,” he said last month at a Y Combinator event in Washington, DC.
And why does Vance feel this way?
Well, because, like almost every conservative, Vance is irritated at how the big platforms moderate content.

Here are @JDVance1’s full remarks to RemedyFest. Worth a watch for anyone trying to understand what his pick as VP on the GOP ticket might mean for tech. pic.twitter.com/5sMT3jmcO5— Luther Lowe (@lutherlowe) July 16, 2024

“Google and Facebook have really distorted our political process,” he says. Noting that people might search for President Joe Biden’s fitness for office, he added that “whether Google provides a fundamentally unbiased search result is, I think, at the heart of American democracy.”
In fact, Vance thinks Google’s search results are a bigger threat to democracy than, say, mass deportations or forcing people to give birth. “If the new mode of of acquiring information is fundamentally biased, I think it’s a far bigger threat to democracy than almost anything that’s called a threat to democracy in 2024,” he said.
In what is now classic ham-fisted Vance fashion, he was far more reckless with these ideas in proximity to the safe space of right-wing influencer media, responding to the baseless claim that “Google is rigging the election” by tweeting that breaking up the company is “long overdue” because “monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company.”

Long overdue, but it’s time to break Google up. This matters far more than any other election integrity issue. The monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company. https://t.co/vfXbL8f545— JD Vance (@JDVance) February 23, 2024

It should go without saying that politicians turning to antitrust threats because they’re mad at whatever moderation decisions YouTube makes is a direct affront to the First Amendment, but it’s all just part of a long line of conservative attempts to directly regulate speech on various platforms, whether through overzealous speech laws, stirring up nonsensical controversy, or just up and buying them, to variable results.
Those attempts recently hit the Supreme Court, which ruled that most content moderation is protected free speech. “When the platforms use their Standards and Guidelines to decide which third-party content those feeds will display, or how the display will be ordered and organized, they are making expressive choices,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the majority opinion sending Moody v. NetChoice and Moody v. Paxton back to the lower courts for additional proceedings. “And because that is true, they receive First Amendment protection.”
And in what can be read as a direct refutation of Vance’s ideas, Kagan wrote that “the government cannot get its way just by asserting an interest in better balancing the marketplace of ideas.”
Here’s the unedited transcript of Trump saying Google might be shut down. Keep all of that in mind as you read it.

So Mark Zuckerberg called me, first of all he called me a few times. He called me after the event, and he said that was really amazing, very brave. You know, and he actually announced he’s not going to support a Democrat because he can’t, because he respected me for what I did that day. I think what I did maybe was, to me it was a normal response. But I was called by Mark Zuckerberg yesterday, the day before or this same subject… and he actually apologized. He said they made a mistake, etc. etc., correcting the mistake.
Google, nobody called from Google.
One of the things like, doing a show like yours. Your show, you know, you see it on Fox, but where you really see it is all over the place, they take clips of your show that you’re doing right now with me. And if I do a good job, they’re gonna vote for me, they’re gonna vote for me. Because it’s not just on Fox. Fox… it’s a smaller part of it. You on all over the — those little beautiful cellphones all over the place. You have a product. You have a great product, you have a great brand. So you have to get out, you have to get out to do things like your show, and other shows, and…
Google has been very bad, they’ve been very irresponsible. I have a feeling Google is going to be close to shut down, because I don’t think Congress is going to take it, I really don’t think so. Google has to be careful.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

Here at The Verge, we’ve been doing our best not to uncritically publish every random statement and half-cocked idea that comes out of former President Donald Trump’s mouth for several years now. He just says stuff, especially about tech, and most of it doesn’t come to anything.

But last week, Trump casually mentioned to Fox’s Maria Bartiromo that “Google has to be careful” because “they’ve been very irresponsible” and that he had “a feeling Google is going to be close to shut down, because I don’t think Congress is going to take it.”

In classic Trump fashion, he said this after noting that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had called him after the attempt to assassinate him, and “nobody called from Google.” So it’s tempting to put this down as classic transactional Trump rambling — after all, he was calling Facebook “the enemy of the people” as recently as March as he backtracked on banning TikTok. One phone call and “badass” comment, and you’re back in his good graces, it seems.

But scratch the surface even slightly, and there’s a direct line from Trump’s comments about Google to the same group of newly unmasked Silicon Valley VCs pumping money into the Trump campaign. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz openly worried about the company’s power while announcing their support for Trump, saying it was “more powerful than probably 95 percent of countries in the world.” Peter Thiel has been funding anti-Google regulatory action for years now, at one point even calling the company “treasonous.”

And Thiel-funded Trump running mate JD Vance has appeared at antitrust conferences praising Biden FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she was “doing a pretty good job” and openly supporting breaking up the big platform companies. “Does Google need to have YouTube? Does Google need to have all these other platforms that are built underneath the Google umbrella? You can make the same argument with Instagram, Facebook, other services of Meta,” he said last month at a Y Combinator event in Washington, DC.

And why does Vance feel this way?

Well, because, like almost every conservative, Vance is irritated at how the big platforms moderate content.

“Google and Facebook have really distorted our political process,” he says. Noting that people might search for President Joe Biden’s fitness for office, he added that “whether Google provides a fundamentally unbiased search result is, I think, at the heart of American democracy.”

In fact, Vance thinks Google’s search results are a bigger threat to democracy than, say, mass deportations or forcing people to give birth. “If the new mode of of acquiring information is fundamentally biased, I think it’s a far bigger threat to democracy than almost anything that’s called a threat to democracy in 2024,” he said.

In what is now classic ham-fisted Vance fashion, he was far more reckless with these ideas in proximity to the safe space of right-wing influencer media, responding to the baseless claim that “Google is rigging the election” by tweeting that breaking up the company is “long overdue” because “monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company.”

It should go without saying that politicians turning to antitrust threats because they’re mad at whatever moderation decisions YouTube makes is a direct affront to the First Amendment, but it’s all just part of a long line of conservative attempts to directly regulate speech on various platforms, whether through overzealous speech laws, stirring up nonsensical controversy, or just up and buying them, to variable results.

Those attempts recently hit the Supreme Court, which ruled that most content moderation is protected free speech. “When the platforms use their Standards and Guidelines to decide which third-party content those feeds will display, or how the display will be ordered and organized, they are making expressive choices,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the majority opinion sending Moody v. NetChoice and Moody v. Paxton back to the lower courts for additional proceedings. “And because that is true, they receive First Amendment protection.”

And in what can be read as a direct refutation of Vance’s ideas, Kagan wrote that “the government cannot get its way just by asserting an interest in better balancing the marketplace of ideas.”

Here’s the unedited transcript of Trump saying Google might be shut down. Keep all of that in mind as you read it.

So Mark Zuckerberg called me, first of all he called me a few times. He called me after the event, and he said that was really amazing, very brave. You know, and he actually announced he’s not going to support a Democrat because he can’t, because he respected me for what I did that day. I think what I did maybe was, to me it was a normal response. But I was called by Mark Zuckerberg yesterday, the day before or this same subject… and he actually apologized. He said they made a mistake, etc. etc., correcting the mistake.

Google, nobody called from Google.

One of the things like, doing a show like yours. Your show, you know, you see it on Fox, but where you really see it is all over the place, they take clips of your show that you’re doing right now with me. And if I do a good job, they’re gonna vote for me, they’re gonna vote for me. Because it’s not just on Fox. Fox… it’s a smaller part of it. You on all over the — those little beautiful cellphones all over the place. You have a product. You have a great product, you have a great brand. So you have to get out, you have to get out to do things like your show, and other shows, and…

Google has been very bad, they’ve been very irresponsible. I have a feeling Google is going to be close to shut down, because I don’t think Congress is going to take it, I really don’t think so. Google has to be careful.

Read More