Behind the Blog: The TikTok Letter, Brand Safety, and AI Girlfriends Gone Offline

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the bin Laden TikTok controversy, how brand safety shapes the internet, and Instagram's enforcement of its own rules (or lack thereof).

EMANUEL: First of all a housekeeping note: I said this on the last episode of our podcast but you are probably going to see a lot less of me on the site in the coming weeks while I’m away for parental leave. I suspect it’s going to be very hard to stay away, so I might write something briefly here and there, but mostly I’ll be offline raising a human child, which is exciting and terrifying. Apologies in advance if I come back and all I want to blog about is baby monitor cybersecurity or labor conditions at the Pampers factory…maybe that’s not a bad idea actually.

Anyway, this week was very exciting because of my other children: blogs.

There have been very important developments on beats we’ve been following closely since we launched the site, like Civitai raising $5.1 million in seed a funding round led by a16z right after the site introduced “bounties” for making AI models of real people, or the previously viral AI girlfriend CarynAI breaking down after that company’s CEO went to jail, but without a doubt the most talked about story we published this week was about The Guardian taking down Osama bin Laden’s “letter to America” 20 years after it was first posted to its site, after it went viral on TikTok. 

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