Davey Alba

@davey.bsky.social

14570 Followers 1214 Following

Bloomberg tech reporter / Google, Big Tech, misinfo / https://daveyalba.com / ask for my Signal

Me with my new bb
Davey Alba In 2026, AI will outwrite humans “It’s a story about volume value, and what journalism becomes when ‘content’ grows functionally infinite.”
George Farmer, who runs the Candace podcast and is Owens’ husband, cast YouTube’s role in stark terms. “YouTube is the printing press of the digital age, if you want to call it that,” he said. He added that podcasting has leaned more conservative in part because many right-leaning voices were “pushed out of the mainstream orbit.” That dynamic has also shaped which advertisers show up: “If you’re pitching to a conservative listener, you’re going to want to be a more conservative brand.” Farmer is also the former chief executive officer of Parler, the social media site that had billed itself as a platform for “uncancelable free speech.”
The top 10 advertisers spending the most on host-read ads on the right-leaning podcasts are investing nearly four times more per month in 2025 than they did on average in 2023. So far this year, those brands have collectively spent about $5 million a month on podcast advertising, according to Bloomberg’s analysis of Podscribe data.
Three in 10 advertisers relied on ideological appeals — emphasizing “pro-life,” Christian, pro-gun, “America first,” or pro-military themes, or attacking Democrats, gender identity or policies they described as liberal. Roughly a quarter promoted the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda or pushed health and wellness products that they framed as natural or an alternative to conventional medicine. About 16% leaned on safety and security themes, while another fifth invoked anti-establishment rhetoric, railing against big corporations, public agencies, or institutions in medicine, education and finance. Several also catered to a distinctly masculine audience, tapping into a segment of the population that, polling data show, came out in force for Trump last year — many of them electrified by the podcasts that were part of this analysis. The strategy of using ideology to persuade someone to make a purchase — especially through an influencer — is powerful, said Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who studies online networks. “American culture has built up the idea of brand choice as a political act,” he said. The rise of political — and often right-wing — podcasts, which are an extremely influential force in listeners’ lives and opinions, has “opened the door to a whole industry of politically coded kitsch products that seek to target this exact demographic,” he said.
YouTube’s Right-Wing Stars Fuel Boom in Politically Charged Ads By Davey Alba Priyanjana Bengani Leon Yin Ashley Carman Julia Love Rachael Dottle Elena Mejía Technology Big Tech November 20, 2025 On YouTube’s conservative airwaves, podcast hosts tout products that let people buy into the MAGA crowd: Republican Red Winery vintages for toasting the “silent majority;” Black Rifle Coffee for caffeinating gun owners; XX-XY Athletics for workout clothes symbolizing opposition to the “lunacy of the left social agenda.”
Trump’s team has already overseen a massive scale back of FEMA’s staffing, funding and programming. As part of a review of contracts, FEMA ended its agreement with ZeroFox, according to a former official familiar with the situation. A FEMA spokesperson confirmed that it ended the ZeroFox contract in April. For Melissa Ryan, founder of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation, the current political climate — in which public officials who attempt to provide transparency are often politicized and attacked — is a bigger obstacle than budget cuts in the fight against false claims. “So many of the new government appointees are Trump loyalists, and attempting to actually respond effectively to disinformation would make whoever made the attempt a target for MAGA and the administration,” she said.
Afterwards, FEMA put together a Workplace Protection Task Force involving security, intelligence and communications professionals to manage incoming threats. Protective measures included using specialized software to flag personnel previously targeted online as at risk of more harassment. But there were limits to how far the government could influence content moderation. At the time, outspoken Republicans led by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan were investigating tech companies, alleging that the platforms were censoring conservative viewpoints under federal government pressure. After initially approving ZeroFox to assist with facilitating takedowns, FEMA later asked that the company end all social media content removal requests. Per internal documents, the move came after staff discussions that it wasn’t advisable for the agency to contract for services that took any action beyond passive threat monitoring. ZeroFox declined to comment.
Headline: Chaos Inside FEMA as Death Threats Distract from Hurricane Response
Headline: Reddit seeks to strike next AI content pact with Google, OpenAI - Moving past a dollars-for-data model, Reddit seeks new deals - The social platform looks to bring new users into its forums
In the history of antitrust rulings over the past few decades, Mehta’s order on remedies could prove to have an even more minor impact than when Microsoft Corp. lost its antitrust case a quarter-century ago, said Mitch Stoltz, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who focuses on antitrust issues. “Even though the court didn’t order a breakup of the company following the appeals, I think the case overall had a really significant effect on Microsoft’s conduct,” he said. Some of the conduct remedies that were imposed on Microsoft ironically kept it from hobbling a younger Google 25 years ago, Stoltz argued. “This ruling, I think, is going to be less consequential than that,” he said. “I don’t think it will change Google’s corporate culture.”
Even the data-sharing idea was defanged to the point that it is unlikely to meaningfully help competitors, critics said. “A snapshot of Google’s search index and some query data will be helpful for competitors, including OpenAI, by giving them data that will improve their results,” said Yory Wurmser, an analyst with Emarketer. But Google hasn’t been compelled to reveal its more sensitive website and personal data that lets it provide tailored responses and run its massive advertising business. “So, it could give smaller competitors a needed boost, but it probably won’t undermine Google too much.”
Bloomberg Law analyst Eleanor Tyler called the decision “terrible” in the judge’s refusal to actually attack the market imbalance. “We’re talking about a tech behemoth whose power is in the interlocking businesses,” she said. “He was clear about how bad things are, but then the ruling doesn’t do anything.” While Mehta ordered some data-sharing, “he brushed aside almost everything else the government asked for,” said Bill Kovacic, a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission who now teaches antitrust at George Washington University Law School. “You can tell Mehta was worried about doing too much rather than too little. The race to prevail on AI overshadowed everything.”
A new analysis of federal lobbying data by the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project shows that Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc. used an internal reorganization to exclude the value of lobbying by its senior executives from disclosures. The move helped keep Google off the top of the lobbying charts even as it maintained a robust network of advocates pushing its interests in the capital, during federal challenges to its dominance in search and advertising and the beginnings of artificial intelligence regulation. The findings, which were confirmed by a Bloomberg analysis of lobbying records, show that the effect of the accounting change was to lower the amount that Google reported spending to influence the federal government, likely by millions of dollars.
Soon after news of the test program surfaced, creators made their concerns known, said Tomiko Harvey, a travel and food blogger at Passports and Grub, who attended a Google creator summit in May. “I’m actually feeling hopeful about this decision from Google,” Harvey wrote in an email. “Canceling the Quick View Recipe feature feels like a rare but welcome acknowledgment that creator feedback matters.” Although Google’s decision has some creators feeling relief, they likely haven’t seen the last of the search giant’s experimentation in a vibrant corner of the web. In recent years, many food bloggers have padded their recipes with lengthy preambles to ensure their content ranks well in Google Search, irritating readers in the process. As it crawls the web, Google will glean information about recipes’ core principles — say, the basic proportions of broth and meat in a recipe for chicken noodle soup — which it can then use to inform its own answers, Slater said. “Recipes are, by definition, facts, and facts are not copyrightable,” Slater said. For Google, “there’s always going to be a tension between giving the user exactly what they want,” he added, “and directing the user to another site.”
Google said the feature is an attempt to help users determine whether they are interested in a recipe before visiting a site. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai stressed in a recent interview that Google is focused on sending publishers high-quality clicks, or readers who genuinely want to visit their sites. But Danielle Coffey, president of the News Media Alliance, questioned whether Google is in a position to know what’s useful to publishers. “Why are they unilaterally deciding what is a high-quality click and how we should engage our readers when we’re the ones creating the content?” she said.
Google denied that the rollout of AI Overviews had harmed websites’ traffic, saying it was “misleading to make generalizations about the causes” of declining traffic “based on individual examples.” A spokesperson added that traffic can fluctuate for a number of reasons, including seasonal demand, users’ interests and regular algorithmic updates to search. But the traffic drops have been widely felt across the web and have spanned topics — fashion and lifestyle, travel, DIY and home design, and cooking, according to Bloomberg’s interviews and data from web-analytics firm Similarweb, which analyzed traffic to a sampling of small- to mid-sized websites in each of these categories over the past two years. It’s possible that AI Overviews were a factor, said Similarweb, which carried out the research at Bloomberg’s request.
Dave Bouskill and Debra Corbeil, a Toronto-based couple, launched travel blog The Planet D in 2008. For the first few years, the pair relied on TV appearances and newspaper features to find readers, but in 2015 they woke up to the potential of Google Search, which eventually drove 90% of their traffic. Their luck ran out in 2024, when Google launched AI Overviews. In the first few months after the product’s introduction, Planet D’s traffic fell by half, and the pair watched their fellow travel bloggers go out of business one by one. Bouskill and Corbeil at first thought they’d be able to survive with a smaller business, but their readership continued to crater, forcing them to lay off staff. Finally, when traffic fell by 90% of prior levels and revenue almost as much, they decided to stop updating their blog.
At the October 2024 web creator meeting, Hardaker told Google’s chief search scientist, Pandu Nayak, that most of the group had struggled with little to no web traffic for more than a year, according to detailed notes of the event that were reviewed by Bloomberg. Hardaker himself had made $250,000 in gross revenue in 2023. But by the time of the meeting, he said he was relying on a food bank. “I need to know as a business owner, and personally, if you think there’s a chance that some of our sites have the ability to recover,” he said at the event. Nayak apologized, according to attendees. Then he said it wouldn’t be reasonable for him to make any guarantees to the publishers, because he couldn’t predict what would happen.
Gisele Navarro, managing editor for the air purifier review site HouseFresh, said that based on internal web analytics, which she shared with Bloomberg, it appears more people are seeing her content via AI Overviews. But it’s happening at the expense of them clicking the link to visit her site. Sites don’t make money unless users click through and see ads or buy products. This same trend — more views of a website owner’s content on Google, but fewer clicks through to their sites — is occurring broadly, according to Nick Eubanks, a vice president at the digital marketing company Semrush Holdings Inc. He said AI Overviews is one of several factors that have contributed to this, and the trend would likely continue as summaries are shown for more queries.
Google is making other changes to get its users answers without having to click through to a website. The company has begun testing a new recipe feature that summarizes food bloggers’ content directly in Google search. Creators who are participating in a pilot with Google are being directly compensated, but not nearly enough to offset declines in their advertising revenue, according to Marc McCollum, Raptive’s chief innovation officer. If the feature is implemented in full, Raptive estimates that traffic to food blogs would fall by half.
In March 2024, website owner Morgan McBride was posing for photos in her half-renovated kitchen for a Google ad celebrating the ways the search giant had helped her family’s business grow. But by the time the ad ran about a month later, traffic from Google had fallen more than 70%, McBride said. Charleston Crafted, which features guides on do-it-yourself home improvement projects, had weathered algorithm changes and updates in the past; this time, it didn’t recover. McBride suspected people were getting more of their renovation advice from the artificial intelligence answers at the top of Google search. The now-ubiquitous AI-generated answers — and the way Google has changed its search algorithm to support them — have caused traffic to independent websites to plummet, according to Bloomberg interviews with 25 publishers and people who work with them. That’s disrupting a delicate symbiotic relationship that’s existed for years: if businesses create good content, Google sends them traffic.
In October, Google convened a group of about 20 website creators at its Mountain View headquarters, in what it called the “Web Creator Conversation Event.” The company invited product reviewers, travel bloggers, and entertainment and lifestyle writers, and set up a series of meetings with its search engineers. “They told us that our content and our websites are exactly the kind of thing that Google wants to reward and that they need to do better,” says Gisele Navarro, the managing editor for HouseFresh, a website that specializes in in-depth reviews of air purifiers. The engineers asked the creators for tips on how to recognize when content was made by humans rather than generative AI, according to three people who were at the meeting. But Nayak, Google’s chief search scientist, also advised publishers to take advantage of AI tools to help them write content, they said. At one point an attendee pleaded with Google to roll back some of the updates it had made to search, arguing that it must want to remedy the harm it was doing to its partners. But Navarro remembers a Google engineer saying the company couldn’t make piecemeal adjustments to core changes to the algorithm. Since then some attendees have folded, and others are struggling to adjust. Google framed it as a broad conversation about the changing nature of search, but the message in the mind of at least some creators was starker, according to Navarro: “Something they told us in that meeting was to never expect to go back to our old levels of traffic,” she says, “because search has changed.”
Some of the strongest reactions are coming not from users but from that other core Google constituency: independent website publishers. Since it became big enough to matter, Google has been in a delicate dance with the people making the sites, videos and articles that its products help surface. The company has consistently—and accurately—described its search as a vital way for websites to attract new users. But it’s also steadily been providing more information on the search page itself, obviating the need for users to click through. Supporting publishers has always been incidental to Google’s larger aims, according to one former senior executive. “Giving traffic to publisher sites is kind of a necessary evil. The main thing they’re trying to do is get people to consume Google services,” the former executive says. “So there’s a natural tendency to want to have people stay on Google pages, but it does diminish the sort of deal between the publishers and Google itself.” Google contests this characterization, but AI Overviews may take it to its logical conclusion. Because Google’s AI is trained on the web, its answers are a kind of remixed version of the web itself, while also distorting the economy that gave rise to the modern internet by potentially cutting the sites out of the equation entirely.
Googlers were well aware of the tension between the preferences of users, who liked getting information quickly, and the needs of websites that produced that information. “I don’t know what the right answer is,” Cornet says. “I would say that, at least as an employee, I felt like the focus on the user was a good enough reason for me to think that Google wasn’t trying to do anything nefarious—even though it may put some companies out of business.” On the flip side, Google’s business model also supported services that were distinctly not useful for users but were tuned to extract ad revenue, like scammy product affiliate sites and clickbaity news aggregators. Within the past several years blog posts began appearing about the declining quality of Google Search. Users started trying to avoid low-quality sites with tricks such as appending the term “Reddit” to their queries in the hope of locating threads where the information was coming from real people.
Other times they toiled on projects they knew were pointless. In 2020 a former Google manager was charged with helping a team of dozens of engineers who were working on a project to make web search infrastructure more efficient. About six months in, a vice president let slip that he had no intention of releasing the project. But he advised the manager to keep going so the engineers would have something to show their bosses at the end of the year. Not everyone at Google hated such assignments. One former employee says people sometimes found it relaxing to work on projects for which everyone knew the stakes were low. But the barriers to introducing products hurt morale among engineers and sparked tension between management and rank-and-filers. In 2021, Manu Cornet, a search engineer who was also Google’s resident cartoonist, captured the dynamic by sketching an image of a massive cargo ship with cannons, towers and cranes grafted on top of an aging hull patched with duct tape. Surveying the horizon from the deck, the captain remarks, “Poor execution speed. The rowers need a culture shift.”
Prior to ChatGPT, Google’s search team was deep into what Arvind Jain, who held the title of distinguished engineer at Google until 2014, called “maintenance mode.” Thousands of engineers tended to an internal code base to keep the profits rolling in. It was vast and full of relics from years past, including 100,000 lines of code to make a feature that allowed people to vote in the 13th season of American Idol. (The initial code base for Uber Technologies Inc. numbered about 10,000 lines.) Search engineers fought over the currency of the realm: latency, or how long a web page takes to load. New features risked increasing load times, so Google invented a system that one former manager likened to cap-and-trade schemes for carbon emissions. To release new projects, teams first had to show they’d reduced latency elsewhere, sending engineers on missions to make unrelated parts of Google Search slightly faster.
One day in 2021, Google’s web search team presented leadership with what was, at the time, a novel proposal: Rather than just have the search engine serve up its familiar list of links, have a chatbot greet visitors at the search results page and offer to answer questions directly. This wasn’t necessarily a shocking idea. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai had been talking for years about redesigning Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, around artificial intelligence, and the organization ran DeepMind and Google Brain, two of the world’s most sophisticated AI labs. Still, the team’s management bristled at the proposal, according to a former employee with direct knowledge of those conversations. Googlers rarely suggested tinkering with the search engine’s fundamental design. “It was self-regulation. People just weren’t daring to think the thoughts,” the former employee says. The division’s leadership worried that its latest AI, though promising, wasn’t accurate enough. And even if it worked perfectly, answering users’ questions with AI risked upending Google’s core business of mixing so-called organic links with a healthy dose of targeted ads. The idea died, at least for the time being.
An image of the April 2025 Bloomberg Businessweek cover, featuring Google search boss Liz Reid. The cover title reads, "Searching for a new Google." The smaller type reads, "Liz Reid is shaping Alphabet's profit engine before it loses everyone to ChatGPT."
What made Cristy’s stint as a cleaner remarkable was the figure atop the operation where she worked: the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who over the past year has stoked and harnessed anti-immigrant sentiment to vault himself to political power alongside President Donald Trump. Cristy was one of many undocumented workers who powered the rapid expansion of Musk’s business empire on the outskirts of Austin, according to interviews with labor advocates, contract construction managers, and unauthorized laborers themselves. Bloomberg Businessweek spoke with 10 undocumented immigrant workers who said they’d been employed by outside companies to work at Tesla and SpaceX facilities in the Austin area. (Cristy asked that Businessweek withhold her last name, while other unauthorized workers quoted in this story have been identified only by a pseudonym to shield them from reprisal. Several other sources were granted anonymity to protect professional relationships.) To verify workers’ ties to Tesla, Businessweek reviewed photos and videos some had taken on the job; a few people spoke alongside friends and family members who confirmed details of their stories. Nine of the sources worked on Tesla’s massive site in Austin. Another helped build a SpaceX outpost. Sweeping debris, laying plumbing and pouring concrete, these workers built facilities that helped make Musk’s roughly $400 billion fortune, sometimes at great personal sacrifice.
Cristy was in her early 50s when she took a job with a cleaning subcontractor on a construction project, reporting for 12-hour shifts vacuuming, mopping floors and scrubbing toilets. Despite her exposure to dust and other debris, most days she wasn’t provided with gloves, face masks or other personal protective gear, and she had only limited access to water. The shifts included two 15-minute breaks and a half-hour lunch, with managers keeping strict watch on the time. Workers who were tempted to complain had to mind the threat of deportation. Conditions such as these are commonplace for the nation’s vast undocumented workforce, which underpins pillars of the American economy—construction, agriculture, manufacturing, meatpacking. What made Cristy’s stint as a cleaner remarkable was the figure atop the operation where she worked: the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who over the past year has stoked and harnessed anti-immigrant sentiment to vault himself to political power alongside President Donald Trump.
Matt Fitzgerald, a 35-year-old stonemason from a suburb of Boston, started listening to Rogan during the Covid-19 pandemic. He said he now listens to more than a dozen podcasts, including by Von and Bet-David, most of which he discovered through Rogan and his guests. Once a registered Democrat who voted for President Barack Obama, Fitzgerald supported Trump in 2016 and has stuck with him ever since. Fitzgerald said he is better informed because of the podcasts he listens to. “I started listening to Rogan, and he has on all types of different guests from different walks of life,” he said, noting guests who said they were lifelong Democrats until recently. “It kind of opened my eyes a little bit to what was going on.” Kurtis Gunther, a 35-year-old Californian, said he voted independent, but Vance’s appearance on the Rogan show tempted him to support the Trump ticket. “It’s absolutely crazy that all we get from most politicians is soundbites and short clips,” Gunther said. “I thought JD Vance was an idiot and a weirdo based on how the internet talks about him and the few little things that we hear from interviews or stories… And I listened to his interview… and it just gave me a totally different perspective on the guy.” Kevin Cooper, the 31-year-old Republican party chair of Miami-Dade County, which in November turned red for the first time in decades, said Trump’s appearances on podcasts challenged Harris’ portrayal of him as a threat to democracy. “You get there and he’s like ‘No, I love America, and I want to make it better,’” Cooper said.
Graphic title: 30% of Top Guests Are Politicians or Pundits
Trump’s personality and history are compatible with the programs’ messaging on masculinity, according to Alice Marwick, director of research at the Data & Society Research Institute. “It’s like, don’t be ashamed of your base manly desires. Don’t let anyone make you feel guilty, don’t let anyone take you down,” she said. “You should be proud and strong, and you should also go after the people criticizing you.” On the shows, hosts connect to their audiences using humor and vice, and provide a framework for viewers on navigating their world, including their relationships with women, work and popular culture. They challenge institutions, reinforce old-fashioned gender roles and glorify men who appeared to have fallen out of favor with the public. Ahead of the presidential election, the shows naturally championed Trump — a convicted felon running for president who survived multiple assassination attempts.
Graphic title: Most guests aren't political pundits or politicians. Dek: Share of categories of guests for each channel
Zuckerberg, for his part, recently loosened Meta’s policies on Facebook and Instagram to allow more of the type of rhetoric that’s common among the podcasters, such as disparagement of transgendered people. He added Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, who encouraged Trump to join as a guest on such podcasts, to Meta’s board. Elon Musk, the owner of X, has made product changes to allow longer video streaming, in support of podcasters — and joined several as a guest himself. Google, meanwhile, wants to work through some Republican perceptions of its liberal bias and show that YouTube has already long been popular with conservatives, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking. Over the weekend before the inauguration, many of the podcasters were coveted guests at parties hosted by YouTube, Spotify and other organizations. YouTube declined to comment. Spotify said “podcasts offer candidates a direct and influential way to engage with their audiences,” noting that both Trump and Democratic rival Kamala Harris took advantage of the medium.
Graphic showing the highly viewed videos we reviewed. Title: 37% of Highly Viewed Videos Mention Voting or Elections. Caption: Hosts and guests frequently discussed voting and elections over the past two years
To hear them tell it, America is in a desperate place, destabilized by soaring inflation, migrants streaming across the border and the beginnings of a third world war. Gender politics have gotten out of hand while schools and the medical establishment duped the public. The same messages were communicated in Trump’s inaugural address on Monday. Now that Trump is back in power, the broadcasters are well-positioned to help build support for his political agenda, transforming grievances into policy that could have lasting effects even beyond Trump’s term in office. In the months leading up to election, hosts had more politicians and pundits on their shows and discussed the issues more frequently. Of the broadcasters’ videos that reached over 1 million views on YouTube during the time span Bloomberg reviewed, more than a third of videos mentioned voting or the US elections — often with the host explicitly calling on listeners to vote.
Cutout heads of nine broadcasters and streamers: Adin Ross, Andrew Schulz, The Nelk Boys, Logan Paul, Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Theo Von, Patrick Bet-David and Shawn Ryan
Welcoming The Athletic to the Times Guild Editorial workers at The Athletic sent a letter to Times management this morning announcing that a supermajority of their U.S.-based staff of 200 people have signed union cards to join the NewsGuild of New York and are calling on Times management to recognize them as members of the Times Guild. We couldn't be more thrilled. Since The Times acquired The Athletic in 2022, journalists at The Athletic have been doing sports coverage for The New York Times. After the Times sports desk was disbanded and its members reassigned in our newsroom, The Athletic team began functioning as The Times's sports desk but without the protections afforded by the Times Guild contract. This has created a two-tier system
A screenshot of a copyright violation and appeal process notice for my account on X, stating that if I don't respond, my account will probably be suspended
A screenshot with some text highlighted: "today marks the 21st anniversary of Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan going on their first date together when they were back at Harvard. They were at a party and T-Pain's 'Get Low' was playing when they met."
Mark Zuckerberg in a recording studio, screenshot of his recording artist profile on Spotify