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Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of tech and politics.
Warren’s dire warning about the crypto bill
On Monday, a bipartisan group of senators approved a major procedural vote to advance a bill that stands to make cryptocurrencies a larger and more official part of the U.S. financial sector. As NBC News reports, the bill “would establish the first regulatory framework for issuers of stablecoins, digital tokens pegged to fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s speech ahead of Monday’s vote on the GENIUS Act was chock-full of the kind of warnings we may look back on as prescient. The senator argued the bill does nothing to “rein in the president’s crypto corruption” and warned that a “financial meltdown” — akin to what Americans saw in 2008 and in the crypto crash of 2022 — becomes more likely if the bill passes without amendment.
She said:
A financial meltdown triggered by crypto instability isn’t some alarmist fever dream. In fact, it nearly happened just a few years ago. Crypto markets abruptly lost $2 trillion — that’s trillion with a T — after the collapse of several major crypto firms. In 2022, two of the largest stablecoins failed to maintain their pegs. Luckily, these cryptocurrency markets were mostly separate from the rest of the financial system, so we avoided mass economic destruction. That ends today if we enact this bill. The GENIUS Act folds stablecoins directly into the traditional financial system, while applying weaker safeguards than banks or investment companies must adhere to. Make no mistake: We are likely to see another financial crisis in the coming years. And we are virtually certain to see another set of wild swings in cryptocurrency values. And it will be the American people who will bear the costs of a massive financial crash facilitated by the stablecoin market if Congress passes this bill.
Sounds scary.
Watch the senator’s speech denouncing the GENIUS Act here.
Trump signs revenge porn bill
On Monday, Donald Trump signed into law the Take It Down Act, a bill designed to shield victims of revenge porn. There’s widespread agreement about the need to thwart the spread of such content, but there’s also an open question about how feasible or effective the law’s requirement that platforms remove such content within 48 hours will be.
Read more at Ars Technica.
Trump’s AI ambitions in the Middle East
The president’s plan to turn the Middle East, particularly the United Arab Emirates, into a hub for U.S. artificial intelligence industries is catching bipartisan backlash.
Read my blog on the blowback here.
'Sesame Street' relocates to Netflix
After getting dumped by HBO, the popular children’s show “Sesame Street” has inked a deal to distribute its new season and past episodes on the streaming platform Netflix, amid Trump’s threats to pull funding from the program’s longtime distributor, PBS.
The deal appears to keep measures in place to ensure the program remains accessible. According to The Daily Beast:
Under the new Netflix agreement, new episodes will premiere on Netflix and PBS on the same day, ensuring the educational program stays accessible for millions of children across the country. That in itself is a gesture of goodwill between the streamer and the public broadcaster that could be construed as a political gesture amid Trump’s cuts.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
The tricky timing of Trump officials’ stock sales
Stock sales by Trump administration figures continue to raise concerns. Following reports that Attorney General Pam Bondi made questionable stock sales ahead of Trump’s Liberation Day tariff announcement, ProPublica dropped a report saying Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy did the same thing. A spokesperson for Duffy told the outlet that an account manager made the trades and that Duffy had no input on the timing.
Read more at ProPublica.
Verizon abandons diversity efforts
Verizon bent the knee to the Trump administration, killing its diversity, equity and inclusion programs to gain approval for a $20 billion acquisition of broadband provider Frontier Communications. The FCC approved the deal on Friday. Trump’s FCC Chair Brendan Carr this year has opened investigations into Comcast (which is spinning off MSNBC and other cable properties from their current parent, NBCUniversal) and Disney, which owns ABC, over their DEI policies.
Read more at NPR.
Fortnite’s parent company faces lawsuit
On Monday, SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents tens of thousands of screen performers and media professionals, filed an unfair labor complaint against Epic Games, the developers of Fortnite, after the game featured an AI-generated voice meant to sound like that of James Earl Jones, who provided the voice for the character Darth Vader in "Star Wars." James died last year at 93.
Read more at The Verge.
Young men go mad over ‘Adolescence’
A new study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate shows how Netflix’s series “Adolescence,” which tackles the rise of misogyny among young people, spurred activity on one of the most well-known platforms for incels on the internet.
The report shines light on how online spaces can easily become cesspools of toxic masculinity.
Read the report here.
Orgs warn about hands-off AI approach
A coalition of academic, advocacy and labor groups are warning that a clause in the Republicans’ budget that would block state-level regulation of artificial intelligence tools for a decade poses a host of security risks.
Read more on CNN.
The FBI’s AI warning
The FBI said “malicious actors” have been found using generative artificial intelligence tools to impersonate government officials while contacting other officials and their associates.
Read more at CNBC.
Pill-pushing podcasts
Spotify has reportedly removed several fake podcasts on its platform that appear to have been designed to peddle opioids.
Read more at Business Insider.