Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tech Drop, a roundup of the past week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.
Meta taps MAGA influencer for anti-‘bias’ role
Meta has brought on right-wing influencer Robby Starbuck in an advisory role purportedly focused on rooting out political bias from its artificial intelligence models. The announcement came after Meta settled a lawsuit filed by Starbuck that accused Meta’s AI of wrongly naming him as part of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Starbuck is known for supporting Donald Trump’s 2020 election denialism, for promoting anti-trans and anti-diversity misinformation, and for using his social media accounts to crusade against companies that support diversity, equity and inclusion policies. The Trump administration is pressuring companies to drop policies that root out “bias” (as well as to drop references to misinformation, DEI and climate change).
Starbuck’s new gig also continues the MAGA-fication of Meta under CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has spent several months currying favor among conservatives by hiring right-wingers to key positions while abandoning DEI efforts and policies meant to curb the spread of disinformation.
Read more at The Verge here.
Texas House speaker launches snitch line
Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows said he has launched a tip line for callers to use to help track down quorum-breaking Democratic state lawmakers. Democrats left the state to stave off Republican efforts to force a vote on new gerrymandered congressional districts demanded by Trump, which would add five Republican-favored districts at Democrats’ — and voters’ — expense.
Read more at Raw Story here.
Trump’s attack on free enterprise
Trump met Monday with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan after having posted days earlier on social media that Tan should resign on the grounds he is “conflicted” (Trump’s post didn’t get into details about those alleged conflicts).
Read my blog post about the meeting here.
ICE buys iris-scanning tech
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is instrumental in Trump’s bigoted anti-immigration and mass incarceration agenda, plans to purchase mobile AI-assisted technology that will reportedly allow the agency to scan people’s irises and determine their identities from several feet away.
Read more from NBC affiliate KUSA of Denver here.
Nationalize it
In a disturbing step toward nationalizing independent companies, the Trump administration reportedly reached an agreement with tech companies AMD and Nvidia to receive 15% of the companies’ revenue from the sales of some computer chips to China.
Learn more at NBC News here.
CDC union calls for repudiation of anti-vax disinfo
A union representing workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has demanded the Trump administration unequivocally condemn vaccine disinformation — spread in no small part by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. — after its headquarters were targeted last week in a shooting that killed a police officer and appears to have been motivated by the gunman’s anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.








