Power User with Taylor Lorenz

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Last week we witnessed the public blowout between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. After pouring hundreds of millions into Trump’s campaign and serving as a special adviser on the “Department of Government Efficiency" Musk is now on the outs with Trump and his future within the MAGA movement is uncertain.

Brace Belden is the co-host...

Welcome back to Free Speech Friday!

All across the internet, parents and lawmakers are calling for tech companies to verify users' ages online. They frame these efforts as a smart, reasonable, and harmless way to keep kids safe. But that's not what age verification does!!!

Age verification efforts are a major threat to privacy, freedom, and the very idea of an open web. No one knows this better than Eric Goldman. He is the a...

As Elon Musk's influence has grown, so too has a darker, more troubling side of his persona: his rampant egomania.

Faiz Siddiqui is a former colleague of mine at The Washington Post and he's the author of the new book Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk.

In this episode of Power User we break down exactly how Musk's narcissism has evolved throughout his career, and the key moments that reveal just how deeply Elon's self-obse...

Welcome back to my new series Free Speech Friday! :)

Right now, lawmakers in congress are trying to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a dangerous censorship bill that would give the government unprecedented control over the internet and force platforms to spy on youth.

KOSA claims to make kids "safer" online, but don't let the name fool you. This law would give the government unprecedented power to censor speech ...

Every week, there’s a new warning: TikTok is poisoning the youth, Facebook is radicalizing your uncle, and the only way to save ourselves is to log off.But what if that’s exactly the opposite of what we should be doing? What if this push to disconnect isn’t about protecting us, but instead about disempowering us?

Aidan Walker is a meme researcher and author of the Substack newsletter How to Do Things With Memes. Today, he joins me t...

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The stated goal of the Take it Down Act is to combat non consensual intimate images (NCII), colloquially known as revenge p**n. This includes things like AI generated nude deep fakes and other explicit imagery shared without a person's consent.

Cracking down on this seems great right? Sadly that's not what this law does. What the Take It Down Act *actually* does is ...

Students are using ChatGPT for everything. Parents are freaking out and the media is calling it the end of education as we know it. But are students really outsourcing their minds to machines? Are we witnessing the collapse of critical thinking, or are we just afraid of what change actually looks like?

In this episode, I’m joined by journalist Kat Tenbarge to break down the rise of ChatGPT in schools. We talk about whether school st...

Imagine messaging a friend on Snapchat about how to get abortion pills, or tweeting about reproductive rights and getting fined hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's only part of what a proposed law in Texas that seeks to criminalize discussing abortion online aims to do. It's called HB5510, and it would essentially criminalize speech about abortion in emails, on websites, in social media posts, and even private messages...

If you’ve ever wondered why news media obsesses over shoplifting but ignores wage theft, or why media outlets report a "shortage" of prison guards without questioning why we imprison so many people, you've probably encountered copaganda.

In this episode, award-winning civil rights lawyer and author Alec Karakatsanis joins me to discuss his phenomenal new book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, a...

American police departments are using secretive AI technology to create lifelike AI personas designed to interact with real people online —like protesters and activists— for intelligence gathering.

This tech is becoming more popular amid crackdowns on student protests against the war in Gaza. Leaked presentations reveal AI personas posing as various individuals, from divorced activists to teenage boys, in attempts to infiltrate onl...

From middle schoolers riffing on school lunch to kids interviewing political figures, podcasting is no longer just for adults. With high-end mics, massive TikTok followings, and brand deals from major companies, tween podcast hosts are building real media platforms from their bedrooms and local studios.

New York Magazine's EJ Dickson joins me to break down who the major players are in this growing space, including the MD Foodie Boyz...

From Ohio to North Dakota, thousands of people have suddenly gotten brand new newspapers delivered to their doorsteps out of the blue. These newspapers are fake news outlets created by the oil and gas industry to influence public opinion in key districts, and they're having a major impact.

Top investigative journalist Miranda Green has been uncovering these schemes. She joins me to talk about how these shady publications are mimicki...

Since Trump took office, the official White House social media accounts have been posting a bit… differently. Drew Harwell, my former colleague at The Washington Post, has been covering the Trump White House's digital strategy.

Today, he joins me to unpack the White House's hyper-online social media cruelty, the inner workings of its digital team, how the Trump administration has transformed its traditional press shop into a...

Ever since Ashton Hall's morning routine went viral last week, I've been dying to chat about it with my friend Matt Bernstein of the podcast A Bit Fruity to about it all.

We joined up to break down the history and evolution of modern masculinity, the allure and absurdity of the modern "alpha male" archetype, the rise of isolationist masculinity and exactly how things ended up this way, and what videos like Ashton Hall's can tell us...

Over the past few weeks, Tesla has been crumbling. The company's stock, which was once considered invincible, has now plunged to around $250 a share, down from nearly double that in December. Sales are plummeting, dealerships are overrun with protests, and Teslas on the street are being subject to petty vandalism.

All of this is happening because of Elon Musk. Since Trump took office and appointed Musk as the head of the very poorl...

Chair of the Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr has quietly positioned himself as one of the most dangerous figures in the Trump administration’s ongoing war on free speech.

Carr is using his government position to intimidate journalists, punish media outlets, and pressure tech companies into cracking down on free expression. And he has done all of this while building his profile as a "free speech" influencer o...

In 1964, the Supreme Court passed a landmark case called The New York Times v Sullivan, that established the right to a free press by protecting the media against erroneous lawsuits. The ruling has been instrumental in allowing journalists to scrutinize public figures, powerful corporations, and political leaders without undue fear of litigation.

But now, that landmark decision is in jeopardy thanks to a coordinated right wing legal...

Have you been bombarded with non stop content about Blake Lively vs Justin Baldoni? The Misogyny Slop Ecosystem is a sprawling network of online creators and communities that manufacture and boost smear campaigns against women who speak out for women's rights, or have been victims of gender-based crimes like sexual assault, harassment, or abuse. 

Though you might have never heard of it, the misogyny slop ecosystem has radically tran...

The 2000s were a formative decade for tech. From the dot com bubble to the rise of social media, to the chaotic days of early blogging, the iMac, and emergence of the PayPal Mafia, the 00s shaped our online world in ways we’re still reckoning with.

Colette Shade is the author of the brand new bestselling book Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was). Today she joins Taylor to unpack the lasting impa...