Little fights everywhere

I didn’t set out to wrap a theme around the stories that I shortlisted for the first issue of this newsletter but one emerged anyway: Fights.

Perhaps it’s symptomatic of the times, with a trade war and recession that no one really saw coming now seeming fait accompli.

Organizations throughout history have looked to the prevailing culture for permission on how to behave. Our culture is giving off some seriously dystopian vibes right now.

Hope you enjoy this issue!

Brave braces for a legal fight with News Corp over IP

⚖️ Brave has had quite a run building a business by standing over the carcass of legacy media, but looks like they finally landed in some hot water with a heavyweight. News Corp sent Brave a cease-and-desist letter, asking them to stop scraping their sites to power the AI snippets in their search engine.

🥊 To avoid more pain later, Brave is seeking a judgment that “web scraping, indexing, and AI-generated summaries are lawful under fair use”. News Corp’s letter alleges that not only is Brave showing these snippets to its users, but also selling them as training data to LLMs via its Search API. I imagine it will be hard to spin that as fair use.

💡 There have always been some deeply unsettling questions at the heart of how Brave operates. For example, stripping out ads and then swapping them for its own, then offering publishers the option to receive its crypto token, BAT, for the inconvenience. I’d try to count the levels on which that is wrong but likely to run out of fingers.

(Read more on MediaPost)

Discord’s IPO plan sends its users into a fit of rage

💸 Discord is reportedly preparing for a $15 billion IPO, after making key ad tech hires last year and building a rewarded monetization product called Quests. Many users worry that going public could introduce intrusive tracking, aggressive advertising, and paywalling of existing features.

😡 On Reddit, users have called Discord’s leadership “sellouts,” fearing the platform will prioritize profits over its original mission. This has reignited discussions about the risks of relying on centralized platforms, with some advocating for community-focused decentralized alternatives.

💡 The controversy highlights the tension between corporate growth vs. prioritizing a user-first experience. Gamers tend to be unforgiving of being monetized indirectly. The way that Discord has attempted this is far more considerate of these needs, than say, the ads on Twitch. Nevertheless, they have run into the same wall.

(Read more on GameRant)

Digg gets a change of hands and a new lease on life

🤝 Remember Digg? After more than a decade of fading into the shadows, founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian have teamed up and bought it back from its current owner, ad tech company BuySellAds.

🤖 The new Digg will use humans and AI for content moderation, addressing persistent issues like bias, transparency, copyright infringement, and rewarding community moderators. You know, things that most others have either swept under the rug or shrugged off as too hard, not important, or both.

💡 With X unlikely to ever regain its lost credibility with advertisers, Reddit’s missteps with pricing its API, and TikTok under 24/7 regulatory scrutiny—time is ripe for a challenger to enter the ring and win a slice of the social media attention pie.

(Read more on Digiday)

Google wants you to use your reputation responsibly

🤫 Google never shares how the sausage gets made on its ranking algorithms. But every once in a while, marketers will overplay their hand, prompting Google to update its policies. One such addition is the “search reputation abuse policy”.

🍎 Let’s say you made your search authority talking about oranges. You’re feeling good about your chances in the fruit cluster, so you hire a ton of freelance writers (or ChatGPT) to cover apples. And then—absolutely nothing happens. The algorithm knows what you’re doing and does not like it.

💡 So, how do you beat this? Stick to a judicious mix of in-house and freelance writers and ease slowly into adjacent topics instead of going all in. Follow the golden rule, as always: “Will humans think that this is the best piece of content on this topic?”

(Read more on Search Engine Land)

Russian propaganda has infiltrated AI chat bots

📈 A Moscow-based disinformation network, “Pravda”, has been working to indirectly infect the most popular Western AI chat bots. Since 2022, the network has released 3.6 million articles containing pro-Kremlin falsehoods.

🔍 The articles were scraped by search engines, which in turn are scraped by the chat bots as training data. It highlights the inherent weakness of chat bots to supply information without applying fact-checking standards or disclaimers.

💡 LLM grooming, the practice of manipulating chat bot responses by finding ways to inject corrupted information (garbage in, garbage out) is likely to intensify with time. Ironically, it’s the same technology that’s enabling bad actors to create those millions of articles. We are firmly in the era of runaway information wars.

(Read more on NewsGuard)