Full Transcript: Big Tech Accountability is Having a Big February
A billionaire getting served outside a courthouse, a public fight about social media harm, and an AI CEO summoned to the Pentagon. Here's the full transcript of today's video post.
A lightly edited transcript of this week’s free video. Paying subscribers get video, a transcript, and written analysis of every story as news breaks.
Last week was all about accountability in tech. We watched Meta go to trial in Los Angeles. We saw Mark Zuckerberg take the stand. And then I got into a public fight with one of the most prominent journalists covering the internet about how we should be holding these companies accountable. And then, just when I thought we’d exhausted the topic, this morning a whole new twist broke.
I’m Jake Ward. This is The Rip Current. We look at the big invisible forces shaping our lives.
The social media trial
Social media has been one of those forces for quite a while, which is why we paid close attention last week to the trial in Los Angeles, where a 20-year-old plaintiff and her mother are trying to hold Meta accountable — not for content, but for the features built into how Meta’s products work.
This is a potential crack in what has been a very bulletproof defense. Section 230, the federal telecommunications provision, basically says these platforms are neutral carriers — they’re not responsible for what users put up there. But this case is the first of an estimated 1,600 cases making the argument that Section 230 doesn’t protect you when you’ve been using specific design features to put dangerous people together or facilitate addictive behavior.
The internal documents already emerging from discovery are remarkable. We can’t reach scientific consensus on whether social media has a causal relationship with harm to young people — but what we’re seeing is that the internal documents of these companies very clearly spell out that they believe it does. That’s why we’re calling this the Big Tobacco moment for Big Tech. The internal knowledge of harm is coming to light, and the plaintiffs are arguing these companies proceeded with their tactics anyway.
In the middle of all that, Mark Zuckerberg got served — literally walking into court, a process server dropped papers in front of him. We don’t know what lawsuit yet. But the people I’ve spoken to who’ve worked as process servers say that guy is not paying for his own drinks for a very long time. You couldn’t get in front of Mark Zuckerberg once upon a time. Even getting into the building required signing an NDA. The fact that he was out in public, being held accountable in court, and then gets served in the middle of it — that’s a totemic moment.
The Taylor Lorenz debate
On Friday I had a debate with Taylor Lorenz, a very prominent and excellent journalist covering internet culture and the influencer world. We disagreed, pretty passionately, about how to take on the threat these companies pose.
Taylor believes the threat to young people is overblown — that there isn’t a proven causal connection, and that the outrage constitutes a moral panic, in the tradition of past panics about comic books, rock and roll, and baggy jeans. More importantly, she worries that if we move toward regulation, we’ll inadvertently give these companies more power and wipe out more of our choices.
I think the difference here isn’t one of degree — it’s one of kind. We are seeing behavior encouraged and facilitated by these platforms move into people’s lives and psychology in ways that are very hard to kick. And the internal documents from these companies show their own researchers were sounding alarms that management was ignoring. That’s not a cultural overreaction. That’s a paper trail. Watch the debate — it’s free for everyone.
The Anthropic story
And then this morning, news broke that Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, is being summoned to the Secretary of Defense’s office — to be essentially told to drop his ethics or lose the contract. Anthropic has said it doesn’t want its AI used for mass surveillance of Americans or for autonomous weapons. Hegseth is threatening that if they don’t drop those guardrails, they’ll be declared the equivalent of a supply chain risk — persona non grata — and the Pentagon will cut ties.
I have a long paid piece up analyzing the stakes and why this is a trap Amodei named in his own writing and is now living inside. There’s also a video companion to the piece. I think this is a genuinely important moment — instructive for generations of people thinking about technology and power.
What’s coming
On Tuesday night, while President Trump delivers the State of the Union, I’ll be delivering mine — what I would say from that podium about technology, AI, and the regulations that are woefully behind. That’s up Tuesday evening at TheRipCurrent.com.
For the full written analysis of the Anthropic story, including details about Anthropic’s AI being used in a covert military operation without the company’s knowledge, read this week’s paid piece: The Trap Closes on Anthropic