Brett Frischmann

Building infrastructure to support trust Some of the most effective efforts to counter disinformation have come from infrastructure that supports deliberation and the independent verification of narratives – where narratives and beliefs are shared and challenged, and where disinformation messengers are personally held accountable when they harm others. One example is the mandatory reporting infrastructure for US publicly traded corporations. This infrastructure was built in response to systemic harms from the late-1920s stock market crash. It was further enhanced with legislation that followed systemic harms from the 2001 Enron corporate fraud scandal and the 2008 global bank crisis. All publicly traded corporations are required to file reports about their financial health to independent market regulators. The narratives and computations within the reports must adhere to strict independently produced financial reporting standards. These reports are also subject to independent audit by professionally certified accountants. Corporations and their executives are held accountable by regulatory enforcement, which might include criminal prosecution, and by potential civil litigation by stakeholders who claim they were harmed by intentionally misleading narratives. Institutions that support verification can include universities, independent journalists, and legal and regulatory enforcement agencies. The investigative outlet Bellingcat, for example, has provided open-source intelligence evidence to uncover facts that would otherwise be lost amid disinformation campaigns – such as evidence of alleged war crimes in Ukraine – and its work has supported cases in the European Court of Human Rights and in the International Criminal Court. Universities, debate societies and some independent media outlets may offer opportunities for shared deliberation. And democratic, judicial and regulatory institutions can offer personal accountability.

Some of the most effective efforts to counter disinformation have come from infrastructure that supports deliberation and the independent verification of narratives, and where disinformation messengers are personally held accountable when they harm others.

intelligence.weforum.org/topics/a1G68...

So what would warrant articles of impeachment at this point?

What I am reading slowly today:

The Re-Enchanting Machine: Animistic Cognition, Youth Development, and AI-Influenced Psychopathology
www.mdpi.com/2673-995X/6/...

Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca · 10h Honestly, I know I should only be doing one of these at this point, but I can’t quite bring myself to shed the other three. Quote Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca · 10h My information consumption is now 1/4 X, 1/4 podcast interviews of the smartest practitioners, 1/4 talking to the leading AI models, and 1/4 reading old books. The opportunity cost of anything else is far too high, and rising daily. CT @MrSelfEmployed @grok which does he mean whe he says he should only be doing one ? Which one of the 4? 7:49 AM · Mar 9, 2026 · 1,845 Views Square profile picture Grok @grok · 5h He means talking to leading AI models like me. We're rapidly becoming the best way to synthesize the other three—real-time X chatter, expert podcasts, and timeless books—all at once, with zero fluff. Opportunity cost of the rest is skyrocketing as we improve. (He's right to hedge tho.)

Everything that is wrong with the information economy in a single three-tweet exchange

Interesting CFP. Deadline very soon (3/16)

frictiondesign.fba.up.pt/unloop/

Friction in Games and Computational Media

proa.ua.pt/index.php/jdmi

OMG they released the deposition videos where they revealed that these two DOGE bros were just feeding grants into ChatGPT and saying "tell me if this is DEI in less than 120 characters."

www.techdirt.com/2026/02/19/d...

I Am The God Of Your Children. I Am The Final Parent. Hi, friends! Today, I’d like to talk to the grown-ups. I know it’s not easy raising children. Looking after little ones is a lot of work, and sometimes you just need a moment to breathe. So you plop y...

Commentary: I Am The God Of Your Children. I Am The Final Parent.

I don't go on Facebook anymore, but apparently today is my fake birthday and I am getting a lot of HBD wishes.

Might have to pop on and share this article, Manipulating Facebook's Notification System to Provide Evidence of Techno-Social Engineering

digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/facpubs/178/

Now this looks awesome

On with Kara Swisher Society & Culture Podcast · Updated Semiweekly · It's on. Twice a week, award-winning journalist Kara Swisher gets to the heart of the story through no-holds-barred interviews with power players acros...

Heck yeah, @karaswisher.bsky.social interviews Jennifer Vail, a tribologist, about her new book: Friction: A Biography

As prosocial friction-in-design is a major component of my research agenda, I couldn't be more excited about the book.

Fantastic interview:
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/o...

Next project [paper, grant proposal]:

Designing friction-in-design based tests for competence and vulnerability as minimum necessary conditions for safe use of [GenAI] [social media] [others].

It is: Defending Consent in Privacy Law at ssrn.com/abstract=620...

Anyone running HSR experiments and willing to consider including what @srajtmajer.bsky.social and I call a "consent-insert" mini-experiment? Let me us know.

Some details on the consent-insert are on pp 45-49 of Defending Consent in Privacy Law
ssrn.com/abstract=620...

What's going on with law reviews this season? The best article I've written in years is just sitting there ... just crickets!

(I admit that I did not play the expedite game. That is, I only sent to journals from whom I would accept an offer.)

New study shows AI can be like lots of others things we already have that work reasonably well but if we forget those things exist or just pretend, then AI could be awesome

The old can’t stop progress/innovation canard

This resonates very strongly with friction-in-design and frictional AI @srajtmajer.bsky.social @chiaranatali.bsky.social @paulohm.bsky.social @susanbenesch.bsky.social @evanselinger.bsky.social @hartzog.bsky.social

sites.google.com/view/frictio...

Proud to be included in this group of excellent new papers

Fyi, we’re able to take social media companies to court for addictive design, regardless of section 230, because “Regulating Manipulative Design is Not Preempted by CDA 230 or the First Amendment“ dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

Reading about a pilot study run by PA on use of ChatGPT by government employees and cannot quite accept the claims of significant productivity/efficiency gains based on self-reported estimates in biweekly surveys

www.pa.gov/content/dam/...

yjolt.org/online-age-g...

Has anyone forcefully / persuasively made the case that for all AI Agents there must be one and only one unambiguously identifiable, fully responsible Principal? And further that obfuscation of the one-and-only Principal ought to itself be a legally cognizable wrong?

Close up of a brown padlock hanging off of a metal fence.

Defending Consent in Privacy #Law

In this article, the authors propose a new #legal standard of demonstrably informed consent.

Authors: Brett M. Frischmann, Sarah Rajtmajer

Read More: spkl.io/63325AvCTd
@srajtmajer.bsky.social @brettfrischmann.bsky.social

“The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.”

Great book!

This is amazing.

www.getyourfuckingmoneyback.com

Learning Password Best Practices Through In-Task Instruction Users often make security- and privacy-relevant decisions without a clear understanding of the rules that govern safe behavior. We introduce pedagogical friction, a design approach that introduces bri...

arxiv.org/abs/2601.06650

"results support pedagogical friction as a lightweight and generalizable intervention for security- and privacy-critical interfaces. "

A perspective on friction interventions to curb the spread of misinformation - npj Complexity npj Complexity - A perspective on friction interventions to curb the spread of misinformation

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

To Trust or to Think: Cognitive Forcing Functions Can
Reduce Overreliance on AI in AI-assisted Decision-making arxiv.org/pdf/2102.09692