Weekly Roundup: Self Harm, Domestic and Abroad
War on openness, war on children, and the hidden labor behind AI's "blood data."
Open societies are a funny thing—even authoritarian places like the PRC recognize they have inherent advantages. It’s why it is a bit ironic that the U.S.’s decision to try to close itself off from the free movement of goods, people, and capital is met with a seemingly impossible resistance from the global trade network it has worked so hard to build and defend for the past 80 years.
Chinese manufacturers are flooding TikTok and other social media apps with direct appeals to American shoppers, urging people to buy luxury items straight from their factories…The pitch in the videos is that people can buy leggings and handbags exactly like those from brands like Lululemon, Hermes and Birkenstock, but for a fraction of the price. They claim, often falsely, that the products are made in the same factories that produce items for those brands.
Apple races to shift iPhone production for the US to India by 2026. The move is meant to insulate the American company from American tariffs, as 80% of the iPhone is made in the PRC.
It’s also telling that the PRC knows the value of free trade.
China has exempted some U.S. imports from its 125% tariffs and is asking firms to identify critical goods they need levy-free, according to businesses that have been notified, in the clearest sign yet of Beijing's concerns about the trade war's fallout.
A more solemn aspect of the attack on the post-WWII order prosperity is the attack on immigration. Silicon Valley is beginning to feel the pains—an OpenAI researcher who helped build ChatGPT 4.5 had their green card denied.
ChinaTalk published a phenomenal piece with tons of facts you can reference on immigrant talent, particularly in the American university system.
Here are some highlights from the piece (emphasis and bullet points added):
In the past month, roughly 1,400 international students and scholars have had their visas revoked or exchange records terminated. Students are being forced out for infractions as minor as dismissed traffic tickets with no link to antisemitism, protesting, criminal charges or anything else labeled a safety threat by the White House.
Foreign talent is a core contributor to the scientific discovery and technological progress that have upheld American leadership over the past century.
International students make up about 42 percent of STEM PhD graduates in the United States, and rather than “stealing seats,” they are subsidizing Americans’ education by paying full tuition.
In recent years, about 75 percent of these students have been choosing to stay.
The National Bureau of Economic Research attributed 36 percent of American innovation…in recent decades to immigrants.
One-half of advanced STEM graduates working in the defense industrial base were born abroad, and 60 percent of top U.S. artificial intelligence companies were co-founded by immigrants — most of whom arrived on student visas.
I’ve argued on this substack before that authoritarians have an asymmetric advantage over open societies. For example, how does a democracy maintain a free speech regime when its enemies flood it with propaganda? The free flow of information presents challenging problems. Immigration and capital movements are much less complex asymmetries. It’s clear people and capital want to stay in the US, else why would President Xi Jinping declare:
that his country must win the global battle to cultivate “human capital.” China has spearheaded dozens of initiatives to recruit talent, including Chinese workers who left for schools and companies abroad. These programs offer funding, family support and resources for research, aimed at making it easy for Chinese and foreign scientists working overseas to move to China.
National security concerns are real; we probably should be careful on training students from adversarial nations in certain areas, but the Trump administration’s scorched earth tactics on immigration are precisely the opposite policy solution this asymmetric area needs.
Child safety
Last week, a report said Meta’s celebrity-voiced chatbots could discuss sex with minors. While online child safety continues to take a backseat at the federal level, thanks in no small part to Meta’s lobbying effort in a Republican Congress, state governments are pushing ahead, even though the laws have had mixed success when challenged (usually) by Net Choice, a Big Tech group masquerading as free speech advocates.
The National Conference of State Legislators produced a 10-minute short on the “State of Play” of state-level child safety legislation. They also have a comprehensive tracker on social media and child safety legislation. Some highlights from the NCLS tracker and other feeds:
Judge strikes down an Ohio law limiting kids’ use of social media as unconstitutional
Tech group urges Youngkin to veto kids’ social media safety bill
Alabama Senate passes bills requiring device filters, app store age checks for minors
Adult Safety
AI doesn’t happen on its own. While the West’s images of AI developers are often along the spectrum of AI archetypes like a “philosopher-billionaire” or a smug “wunderkind,” they never see the data labeling industry that has unfortunate parallels to the blood diamond industry. Two stories came out this week on the damage the AI industry imposes on the workers, layers and layers below the end user.
Rest of World reveals a vast, obscured labor network where African workers across 39 countries perform essential tasks like data annotation and content moderation for tech giants such as Meta and OpenAI. These workers, often employed through layers of subcontractors, face low wages, minimal labor protections, and a lack of transparency about their employment conditions. Efforts to obtain personal data from employers have been met with incomplete disclosures, highlighting the opacity of these arrangements.
The Guardian reports on impending lawsuits against Meta in Ghana, where content moderators employed by contractor Majorel allege severe psychological harm from constant exposure to graphic content, including violence and child abuse. Workers report depression, anxiety, and PTSD, compounded by inadequate mental health support and substandard living conditions. This legal action follows a similar case in Kenya, signaling a growing movement to hold tech companies accountable for the welfare of their outsourced workforce.
In other news
An open source AI site was pressured by payment processors to clean up its sharing of AI-generated pornography models. The U.S has long used the leveraging of payment processing systems in coercive actions.
OPM proposes rule to formally revive Schedule F. “The federal government’s dedicated HR agency estimates that 50,000 federal workers will be stripped of their civil service protections and become at-will employees.”
Apple and Meta Are First to Be Hit by E.U. Digital Competition Law. “Apple was fined 500 million euros ($570 million) and Meta was fined €200 million ($230 million).”
F.T.C. Sues Uber Over Billing for Its Premium Subscription Service
US to loosen rules on self-driving vehicles criticised by Elon Musk
In an effort to end on a lighter note, here is a synopsis of government internet faux pas:
Government officials are kind of bad at the internet
