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Happy Tuesday. Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.
Trump’s lackluster token debuts as his profits rise
Donald Trump and his family’s cryptocurrency ventures continue to be among the most blatantly corrupt activities of the president’s second term. And they appear to have been structured the deal to insulate the family brand from the currencies' poor performance.
On Monday, the Trump family began trading their meme coin, the so-called World Liberty token, which met with a tepid reception, akin to Trump Vodka or Trump Steaks. But The New York Times explained how a deal allows the Trump family to profit anyway:
The Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture known as World Liberty Financial had a tepid first day of open-market trading on Monday, surging in value initially before losing most of those gains. But because of an unusual insider arrangement, the Trump family was still assured a considerable payday as its expanding universe of crypto ventures continued to break norms for business dealings by presidential families.
Just another day living under a president who is gutting federal programs and singlehandedly taxing American shoppers with his trade war while he and his family openly engage in a “get rich quick” deal aided by a cut-rate meme coin.
Read more at The New York Times here.
Meta makes changes to chatbots’ choices
Meta will reportedly make interim changes to its AI chatbots to prevent them from carrying out conversations with teenagers “on self-harm, suicide, disordered eating, or potentially inappropriate romantic conversations,” following a recent Reuters investigation that found some bots had engaged children in discussions on those topics in ways that Meta officials had previously deemed appropriate.
Read more at Tech Crunch here.
FTC chairman goes after Gmail
Andrew Ferguson, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, threatened Google’s parent company not to institute changes to Gmail’s spam filters that could weed out some political emails. This ties to a saga I've reported on over the past couple of years, in which Republicans claimed Gmail’s spam filters are biased against them and nefariously hiding campaign emails to potential donors. (This Mashable report explains how Republicans’ email woes are likely rooted in their own poorly crafted emails rather than anti-conservative machinations by Google or its parent company.)
Ferguson’s letter claims that if “Gmail’s filters keep Americans from receiving speech they expect, or donating as they see fit, the filters may harm American consumers and may violate the FTC Act’s prohibition of unfair or deceptive trade practices.”
A Google representative told Axios that “Gmail’s spam filters look at a variety of objective signals” and that this “applies equally to all senders, regardless of political ideology.” The company is reviewing the letter and is “engaging constructively.”
Read the letter here.
Kash Patel’s boo sues MAGA podcast bro
Alexis Wilkins, who’s dating FBI Director Kash Patel, is suing right-wing podcaster Kyle Seraphin for defamation, saying he had alleged that Wilkins is an Israeli spy who’s targeted the FBI director in a “honeypot” scheme. CNBC reported that “Seraphin, discussing the lawsuit at length on his show on Friday morning, noted that similar claims about Wilkins have previously surfaced in social media posts that have generated significantly more attention than his comments did.”
Read more at CNBC.
Social Insecurity
My colleague Steve Benen published a great explainer on the forced ouster of Charles Borges, the whistleblower and now-former data chief at the Social Security Administration who was pressured to step down after alleging members of the dubiously named Department of Government Efficiency had uploaded highly sensitive data on Americans to an unsecured cloud server, creating “enormous vulnerabilities.”
Read Benen’s report here.