PSA: Never open a WhatsApp message from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia

Bay Area! I’ll be talking with Anna Wiener about Uncanny Valley, her brilliant new memoir of a life in tech, on February 4th at Manny’s in San Francisco. It’s our second-ever Interface Live event, and it would mean the world to me if you came to say hello and talk tech and democracy with us. Get your tickets here!

Some days, when you write a column about the latest interactions between big tech platforms and the government, you try to make a meticulous and layered argument based on a series of nuanced observations about the world. Other days, you just write down a bunch of facts and say — wait, what?!

The past 24 hours have been a wait, what?! sort of day.

It has been just under a year since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shocked the world with a...

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