This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss advertising, protests, and aircraft.

EMANUEL: On Thursday Meta announced that it has filed a lawsuit in Hong Kong against Joy Timeline HK Limited, the company that operates a popular nudify app called Crush that we have covered previously. 

Meta’s position is that it hasn’t been able to prevent Crush from advertising its nudify app on its platform despite it violating its policies because Crush is “highly adversarial” and “constantly evolving their tactics to avoid enforcement.” We’ve seen Crush and other nudify apps create hundreds of Meta advertising accounts and different domain names that all link back to the same service in order to avoid detection. If Meta bans an advertising account or URL, Crush simply creates another. In theory, Meta always has ways of detecting if an ad contains nudity, but nudify apps can easily circumvent those measures as well. As I say in my post about the lawsuit, Meta still hasn’t explained why it appears to have different standards for content in ads versus regular posts on its platform, but there’s no doubt that it does take action against nudify ads when it’s easy for it do so, and that these nudify ads are actively trying to avoid Meta’s moderation when it does attempt to get rid of them. 

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the phrase "activist reporter," waiting in line for a Switch 2, and teledildonics.

JOSEPH: Recently our work on Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company, produced some concrete impact. In mid-May I revealed that Flock was building a massive people search tool that would supplement its ALPR data with other information in order to “jump from LPR to person.” That is, identify the people associated with a vehicle and those associated with them. Flock planned to do this with public records like marriage licenses, and, most controversially, hacked data. This was according to leaked Slack chats, presentation slides, and audio we obtained. The leak specifically mentioned a hack of the Park Mobile app as the sort of breached data Flock might use.

After internal pressure in the company and our reporting, Flock ultimately decided to not use hacked data in Nova. We covered the news last week here. We also got audio of the meeting discussing this change. Flock published its own disingenuous blog post entitled Correcting the Record: Flock Nova Will Not Supply Dark Web Data, which attempted to discredit our reporting but didn’t actually find any factual inaccuracies at all. It was a PR move, and the article and its impact obviously stand.

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss an exciting revamp of The Abstract, tech betrayals, and the "it's for cops" defense.

EMANUEL: Most of you already know this but we are expanding The Abstract, our Saturday science newsletter by the amazing Becky Ferreira. The response to The Abstract since we launched it last year has been very positive. People have been writing in to let us know how much they appreciate the newsletter as a nice change of pace from our usual coverage areas and that they look forward to it all week, etc. 

First, as you probably already noticed, The Abstract is now its own separate newsletter that you can choose to get in your inbox every Saturday. This is separate from our daily newsletter and the weekend roundup you’re reading right now. If you don’t want to get The Abstract newsletter, you can unsubscribe from it like you would from all our other newsletters. For detailed instructions on how to do that, please read the top of this edition of The Abstract. 

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the benefits of spending 14 hours a day on the internet, getting cozy for AI slop, and a what a new law in Sweden means for the rest of us.

JOSEPH: So I don’t cover generative AI anywhere near as much as Emanuel, Sam, or Jason. Sometimes I think that’s a benefit, especially for the podcast, because I can ask questions more as an outsider or observer than someone deep in the weeds about all these different models and things, then the others can provide their expertise.

As a general outsider or just ordinary passive consumer of AI slop now that it’s ubiquitous, I saw videos this week that I’m sure many other people did: those from Google’s Veo 3.

Here’s a quick selection of ones I came across:

• A musical about garlic bread
• A very British newsreader announcing the presumed death of J.K. Rowling
• Interviewing people at this car show (except the misspelling of Hell’s Angels on the biker’s jacket)

This week, we discuss Star Wars' weird little guys, catharticles, and spectacular views.