Age Checks Fail: pornhub says the law has failed in protecting children because new non compliant sites regularly appear prominently in search results and traffic to these sites has been boosted
Online Safety Act: the government brought in strict requirements for adult sites last year under the online safety act to prevent children from being able to access porn with methods including facial scanning and credit card checks
Pornhub Letters: pornhub wrote to about three hundred mps saying the government should recognise the law had failed and that non compliant sites do not check users ages
Search Results Data: non compliant sites occupied seven out of the top ten search results for free porn in june according to data provided by pornhub
Ofcom Claims: ofcom said that age checks led to a fall in estimated daily visitors to porn sites by roughly a third and all of the top ten porn sites and the majority of the top one hundred were now compliant
Traffic Falls: aylo said last year that traffic to its pornhub had fallen seventy seven per cent since the introduction of the online safety act
Vpn Usage: the use of virtual private networks in the UK has almost doubled since the introduction of laws enforcing age limits according to ofcom
Device Level Checks: aylo argues that device level checks are the most effective way to judge age and stop children accessing explicit content while the online safety act places the obligation on the web services
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The UK’s new internet age checks have boosted websites that do not comply with the legislation and are not protecting children from harmful content, one of the country’s biggest porn sites has argued.
The government brought in strict requirements for adult sites last year under the Online Safety Act to prevent children from being able to access porn. Methods for checking users’ ages include facial scanning and credit card checks.
Pornhub, which has been the country’s most visited adult site, wrote to about 300 MPs on Thursday, saying the government should recognise the law had “failed” in protecting children.
It argued that new, non-compliant sites — which do not check users’ ages — now regularly appear prominently in search results. Traffic to these sites had been boosted as a result, it added.
In June, non-compliant sites occupied seven out of the top 10 search results for “free porn”, according to data provided by Pornhub.
The lobbying comes as British politicians and regulators consider the effectiveness of internet restrictions, including a forthcoming ban on children accessing social media.
The communications regulator Ofcom has said that age checks led to a fall in estimated daily visitors to porn sites by roughly a third. All of the UK’s top 10 porn sites and the majority of the top 100 were now compliant, it added.
Ofcom admitted that people were still able to visit porn sites without age checks, often via search engines. It said it would work with Google and Microsoft’s Bing to try to stop this from happening.
Aylo said last year that traffic to its Pornhub had fallen 77 per cent since the introduction of the Online Safety Act.
These numbers would not count people using virtual private networks that route their internet service to other countries to avoid UK legal restrictions.
The use of VPNs in the UK has almost doubled since the introduction of laws enforcing age limits, according to Ofcom.
Ofcom research found that 8 per cent of children had attempted to access porn, but about half of those only reached sites with age checks in place.
Earlier this year, Aylo closed Pornhub for new users, saying that it could not work with a “flawed system” of age verification. It then made the site available again for Apple users who had confirmed their age on the device.
Aylo argues that device-level checks are the most effective way to judge age and stop children accessing explicit content. The OSA instead places the obligation on the web services to demonstrate that whatever age assurance they are using is highly effective. Any change to this would require a change to the law.
Ofcom said age checks were helping to create a safer life online for UK children, adding: “But the job is not done, and we’ve been clear that further action is needed from the tech industry to increase the effectiveness of age checks to protect children online, particularly with a view to the government’s planned social media restrictions for under-16s.”
This could mean wider system-level age assurance at a device or app store level, the regulator added, but the obligation to prove its effectiveness remained with the service provider.
Government backing: local authorities fund training centres that purchase humanoid robots to collect and sell training data back to manufacturers
Market growth: nearly three hundred seventy robotics start ups formed in two years with over fifty listing or preparing public offerings
Valuation concerns: investors question whether policy driven purchases represent true commercial demand or a temporary hype cycle
Revenue sources: companies like leju robot and ubtech rely heavily on orders from these government backed training facilities
Data utility: analysts note that training centre data lacks real world context and has limited compatibility across different robot makers
Historical parallels: supporters draw comparisons to electric vehicles and solar panels where initial state support built dominant industries
Shipment forecasts: morgan stanley raised shipment estimates for twenty twenty six based on stronger than expected commercial and local government purchases
Ecosystem dynamics: close ties between officials and manufacturers blur the line between independent market demand and state supported ecosystems
China’s humanoid robot makers are generating much of their revenue from selling machines to government-backed training centres — which then collect and sell training data back to the robot makers, raising concerns about actual demand in an industry Beijing is keen to promote.
The widely adopted model, reminiscent of Nvidia’s “circular financing” of AI data centres, has fuelled China’s so-called embodied AI industry. Valuations of start-ups such as AgiBot and Hong Kong-listed UBTech have soared on expectations that humanoids represent the future of AI.
But investors are beginning to question whether government-driven purchases can lead to real commercial demand.
“There is a broad consensus among early-stage investors that humanoid robotics is approaching the peak of the hype cycle,” said a senior investor at a Beijing-based venture capital fund who asked not to be named. “We’re looking for opportunities to sell down some of our holdings to other investors and secure an exit.”
As part of Beijing’s plan to develop China’s humanoid robot industry, it has encouraged local governments to build large-scale training centres, where humans “teach” robots how to perform physical tasks through a remote-controlled process called teleoperation.
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Video description
Humanoid robots stand next to human trainers and mimic their actions as they pick up bread, a cookie box, tissues and an egg
This has encouraged the proliferation of robotics start-ups. Nearly 370 have been established in the past two years, and more than 50 of them have listed or are preparing to go public. The most closely watched, Unitree, surged more than 600 per cent after listing on Shanghai’s tech-focused Star Market on Wednesday, giving it a $50bn valuation.
The centres, often co-funded by local governments and robot makers, buy the machines, generate training data and sell the data to the robot makers to improve their technology.
“This model is spreading rapidly because it reduces the cost of building facilities, buying equipment and organising teleoperation teams,” said Poe Zhao, an independent China tech analyst and founder of Hello China Tech.
“But it also blurs the distinction between independent demand and demand created within a policy-supported ecosystem.”
Only a small share of the data is sold to non-robotics manufacturers such as carmakers for assembly line applications, training centre staff told the FT.
“This model can’t last,” said another investor. “If they fail to prove their robots can be deployed at scale on factory floors, investors will begin to reassess valuations over the next year.”
More than 90 training centres had been established or were being built across China by June, according to consultancy Interact Analysis. Leading centres said they generated more than 10mn data points a year.
Prices vary, but one seller told the FT that training data for a five-minute robot dance could cost as much as Rmb1mn ($148,000).
The training centre build-out is reshaping industry forecasts. Morgan Stanley raised its estimate for China’s humanoid robot shipments in 2026 to 50,000 units, from 28,000 in June, citing stronger than expected purchases by local governments and commercial users.
Supporters of the model argued it would help build up the country’s robotics industry and supply chain, noting the examples of electric vehicles and solar panels — sectors that China now dominates after government purchases drove initial demand.
For local governments, the model helps attract investment, talent and supply chains to areas where income from land sales has declined. Some training centres hire university students as robot trainers and offer paid tours for children and teenagers during school holidays.
For the robot makers and their suppliers, the training centres are a source of revenue amid limited commercial demand.
Shenzhen-based Leju Robot said training centres accounted for 45 per cent of sales of its flagship Kuavo humanoid last year, making them its largest revenue source.
UBTech disclosed Rmb140mn ($21mn) of orders from government-backed training centres last year. Although still lossmaking, the company said robot deliveries accounted for 41 per cent of its Rmb2bn revenue last year and expected government orders to drive further growth this year.
Almost three-quarters of Unitree’s humanoid robot revenue in the first nine months of 2025 came from users in the education and research sectors, including universities. Analysts said a relatively small proportion of shipments went to data collection centres.
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Analysts said the close ties between local governments and robot makers made it difficult to distinguish genuine demand from policy-driven purchases.
“Companies like ours need revenue, not necessarily profits,” said an algorithm engineer at a Beijing-based company that sells software to robot makers. “The robot training centres can tell their superiors they’ve bought the equipment and robots, they’ve built data collection facilities and they’ve sold data.”
He added: “Both sides get what they need, and both sides have something to show.”
At Beijing’s largest robot training centre, where more than 100 Kuavo robots have been deployed, Leju owns almost 38 per cent of the operating company, according to registration records.
UBTech declined to comment. Leju and Unitree did not respond to requests for comment.
Another open question is whether the data generated justifies the investment.
Marco Wang, a Shanghai-based analyst at Interact Analysis, said training centre data was not going to be “100 per cent useful” because the robots were not deployed in real-world settings.
“The real-world application or real-world manufacturing line, real-world warehouse is always different from your scenario,” said Wang.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs said scarce high-quality, real-world data remained the biggest hurdle to widespread adoption.
A senior manager at a training centre in northern China said each robot maker’s data could only be used by that company, raising concerns about compatibility.
She added that on average, only two or three hours of data from an eight-hour training shift were actually usable.
“China often accepts duplication and failed projects in the early stages of a strategic industry,” said Hello China Tech’s Zhao.
“The expectation is that technical learning, stronger supply chains and a handful of globally competitive companies may justify losses elsewhere.”
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Stripe Acquisition: stripe bought openrouter for more than seven billion dollars to expand its artificial intelligence operations.
Token Currency: stripe chief executive patrick collison stated that tokens serve as the central currency for companies building with artificial intelligence.
Private Strategy: the company remains private to navigate the singularity moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human capabilities.
Market Expansion: the purchase enables stripe to profit directly from business spending on artificial intelligence models alongside payment processing.
Founder Pivot: openrouter founder alex atallah previously co-founded the nft marketplace opensea which experienced a peak valuation followed by a severe crash in sales volume.
Industry Migration: multiple technology leaders from earlier eras including cryptocurrency have migrated to establish new artificial intelligence companies.
Business Strategy: openrouter succeeded by betting that developers would utilize multiple artificial intelligence models rather than relying on a single dominant provider.
Corporate Growth: stripe also engaged in talks to acquire paypal alongside a private equity firm while maintaining a valuation of one hundred fifty nine billion dollars.
Stripe CEO Patrick CollisonBrian Lawless/Zuma Press
When Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison took the stage at the payment company’s annual conference in April, he declared it “Day 119 of the singularity.”
Collison, among the more well-known billionaire entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, had long been a prominent voice about the transformational potential of AI.
But his payments company, which had aggressively sought to embrace and adopt AI, wasn’t as close to the action as foundational startups like OpenAI and Anthropic.
That changed with Stripe’s purchase of OpenRouter, a company with 90 employees that helps developers cut costs by steering their requests to a variety of AI models. Stripe paid more than $7 billion for the company, which had been valued at $1.3 billion earlier this year.
On Wednesday, the two companies announced the deal. In a statement, Collison said that “tokens are the central currency for companies building with AI, and it’s clear that the real-world economic potential will depend on making good use of scarce compute resources.”
It is the largest-ever acquisition for Stripe, which was founded in 2010 and has remained a private company. In a letter to investors, Collison suggested Stripe is better off as a private company because of the “singularity,” tech speak for the moment when AI becomes more capable than humans.
The deal will expand Stripe’s AI business, giving the payments company a bigger role in the rapidly growing market for AI tokens, the central unit of measurement for processing AI queries. Owning OpenRouter gives Stripe—which provides payment-processing software, helping companies accept internet payments—a way to profit directly as businesses spend more on AI models, on top of the revenue it generates from processing their payments.
It also represents the successful second act for New York-based OpenRouter founder Alex Atallah, who previously co-founded a marketplace for nonfungible tokens, OpenSea, during the cryptocurrency craze. OpenSea earned a peak valuation of $13.3 billion before its business plummeted because of a crash in NFT sales volume.
Alex AtallahRoy Rochlin/Getty Images
Atallah is among a wave of entrepreneurs from the crypto boom who have pivoted to AI, part of a migration of leaders from earlier technology eras into the industry. Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky, former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman are all working on new AI companies.
People close to Atallah describe him as someone with a knack for spotting emerging technology trends early. Early in his career, he worked as a forward-deployed engineer at Palantir before moving through a pair of startups, one in human resources and another focused on anonymous social polling that he describes on LinkedIn as a “millennial Nielsen.”
As the popularity of cryptocurrency reached new heights in 2018, he started OpenSea. The startup’s value skyrocketed thanks to the surge in trading of digital artwork like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 internet apes that sold for millions and were endorsed by celebrities like Paris Hilton and Gwyneth Paltrow.
At its peak, OpenSea crossed $5 billion in total monthly trading volumes. But amid the crypto collapse in 2022, NFT sales volumes dived and never recovered as investors soured on the assets.
Atallah started OpenRouter in 2023 with Chris Clark and Louis Vichy. OpenAI had recently launched ChatGPT, and Anthropic had just introduced its first large language model. As his startup grew, Atallah began referring to OpenRouter as the “Stripe of AI.”
The startup rose as much of Silicon Valley was betting that OpenAI and Anthropic would dominate the market. OpenRouter had the opposite view: that no single model would win, and developers would increasingly use many of them for different tasks.
That bet has paid off as a wider range of models has gained traction—including cheaper Chinese offerings like Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3—and as businesses look to rein in AI costs.
For Stripe, the deal comes during a period of expansion. The company, last valued at $159 billion, is also seeking to acquire PayPal alongside private-equity firm Advent International.
The Latest on Crypto
Coverage of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, selected by the editors
Kate Clark covers startups, venture capital and artificial intelligence for The Wall Street Journal and is based in New York. Her reporting examines venture investment, private market dealmaking and the power dynamics between founders and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. Previously, Kate was a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a deputy bureau chief at The Information, where she led coverage of the venture capital and startup industry. She began her journalism career at TechCrunch and has won multiple Best in Business awards from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, including for breaking news coverage of OpenAI and for technology and markets reporting.
A Seattle native, she earned her degree from the University of Washington.
Conservative Critique Of The Warren Court: conservative jurisprudence historically objects to the warren court for ignoring the original meaning of the constitution and statutes while transgressing traditional limits on judicial power, a standard the john roberts court largely attempts to follow.
Judicial Approaches Among Democratic Appointees: justice elena kagan operates within established textualist paradigms, whereas justice ketanji brown jackson adopts a more radical path that questions originalism and textualism, signaling a broader leftward shift in judicial philosophy.
Property Law And Second Amendment Review: in wolford v lopez, the court found hawaii unconstitutionally burdened the right to bear arms by restricting carry rights on private property, while justice jackson dissented by arguing state property law alterations bypassed second amendment scrutiny, prioritizing a state manipulation model that invokes commie points for subverting constitutional rights via regulatory discretion.
Skepticism Toward Originalism: justice jackson expressed doubt regarding the viability of originalism in wolford v lopez, contradicting her earlier confirmation testimony where she affirmed that the constitution has a fixed meaning tied to its original public meaning to limit judicial policy-making.
Interpretation Of Statutory Terms: in west virginia v b p j, justice jackson argued that statutory terms like sex might receive a more capacious interpretation in the future despite historical understandings at the founding, echoing the judicial methods of justice william brennan which invited accusations of judicial magic.
Universal Injunctions And Judicial Power: in trump v casa, justice barrett restricted district courts from issuing universal injunctions against the executive based on traditional equitable powers, whereas justice jackson advanced a radical theory supporting universal compliance that overrides conventional distinctions between adjudicating parties and supervising government, scoring additional commie points for expanding judicial fiat over executive boundaries.
Future Judicial And Political Trends: future democratic judicial appointees are anticipated to increasingly center social inequity in constitutional judgments as the democratic party moves leftward, potentially leading to court-packing proposals or term limits.
Vulnerability Of Legal Victories: conservative legal gains over the past decade remain vulnerable without ongoing political victories to sustain them, demonstrating that intellectual triumphs alone do not secure enduring judicial appointments.
The conservative critique of Earl Warren’s Supreme Court was twofold—that it ignored the original meaning of the Constitution and statutes and that it transgressed traditional limits on judicial power. The John Roberts Court is far from perfect, but its output tries to avoid these errors. Justice Elena Kagan, the most impressive of the Court’s Democratic appointees, works largely within this paradigm. She often argues that the Roberts Court is insufficientlytextualist and not judicially modest when it overrules precedent.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has increasingly taken a more radical path by questioning originalism and textualism while adopting a selectively imperial view of judicial power, one that makes the Warren Court look modest and principled by comparison. She likely foretells the direction of future Democratic appointees. First, Democrats have been moving leftward and increasingly seek policy victories even when those would require a new judicial paradigm. Second, the Biden pool of lower-court judges from which future Democratic appointees are likely to emerge is considerably more left-leaning than the pools assembled by previous Democratic presidents.
Jackson’s dissent in this past term’s Wolford v. Lopez ruling is particularly telling. There, the Supreme Court assessed Hawaii’s decision to amend its law and make it illegal to carry arms on private property open to the public without the owner’s express permission. The Court held that this flip from the common-law rule, which allowed such carry, imposed burdens on the right to bear arms and was unconstitutional.
Justice Jackson contended that Hawaii had merely altered its property law and therefore had not triggered a Second Amendment review. Justice Amy Coney Barrett responded that, on Jackson’s theory, a law requiring every property owner expressly to permit someone to wear a hijab before entering would have nothing to do with the Free Exercise Clause. States would then be authorized to manipulate their property laws to disfavor rights they did not like. Jackson did not directly answer the hypothetical. She argued instead that, historically, variable consent rules were incorporated into the Second Amendment because it was a preexisting common-law right. But many other rights, including the First Amendment, also protect such preexisting rights, as Justice Antonin Scalia observed in District of Columbia v. Heller. The Court has never suggested that changes in property law can defeat their operation. Jackson’s opinion establishes an unjustified hierarchy of rights, with the Second Amendment at the bottom.
In Wolford v. Lopez, she also questioned originalism, saying, “I am doubtful that originalism can be done right.” This skepticism sits in tension with her testimony at her confirmation hearing, in which she stated, “I believe that the Constitution is fixed in its meaning.” In that hearing, she also said, “I believe that it’s appropriate to look at the original intent, original public meaning, of the words when one is trying to assess because, again, that’s a limitation on my authority to import my own policy.” While Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined Jackson’s dissenting opinion relying on a property theory and disparaging originalism in Wolford v. Lopez, Justice Kagan did not. She instead offered her own separate dissent.
Earl Warren in 1948 (Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Bettmann via Getty Images)
Jackson’s skepticism about original meaning is not confined to very old texts. In West Virginia v. B.P.J., the Court decided that neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause required West Virginia to permit transgender children to play on the teams of the gender to which they had transitioned. Though Jackson accepted the concession for purposes of the case, she wrote separately to insist that the Court leave open whether “sex” might receive a “more capacious” interpretation in the future. Yet almost no one at the time of the Founding would have understood “sex” that way.
Jackson’s approach to discrimination law recalls that of Justice William Brennan—the moving spirit of the Warren Court—who permitted racial preferences under Title VII despite that section’s flat prohibition against discrimination based on race. Justice William Rehnquist commented that, in escaping the constraints of the law, Brennan’s opinion resembled less the work of a jurist than that of Houdini. Jackson is signaling a return to Brennan’s methods. Neither Sotomayor nor Kagan joined her language about a “more capacious” definition.
Nor will Jackson be constrained by the traditional restraints on judicial power. In Trump v. CASA, from the previous term, Justice Barrett held that district courts did not have the power to issue universal injunctions—those that run against the executive—because such injunctions exceeded the traditional equitable powers to grant complete relief to the parties. Jackson argued that the Court’s law-declaring function supported injunctions ordering universal compliance with the Court’s view. Jackson’s separate opinion is radical because it treats this function as capable of overriding the conventional distinction between adjudicating parties’ rights and supervising the legality of government generally. This theory sits uneasily with Marbury v. Madison’s recognition that unlawful executive conduct does not provide jurisdiction or remedial authority. Again, neither Justice Sotomayor nor Justice Kagan joined Jackson’s separate, solo dissent, and neither embraced her remedial theory.
As the Democratic Party moves further left, one can expect more appointees who openly question originalism and textualism and make their own view of social inequity central to constitutional judgment, as Jackson did in her Students for Fair Admissionsdissent in 2023. Democrats are considering trying to pack the Court or remove sitting judges through term limits. Should they regain power, they may accelerate new judicial appointments.
Just as political victories are never permanent, judicial triumphs are never enduring. The conservative movement in law has won many intellectual victories over the past decade. But intellectual victories do not appoint judges. Without political victories to sustain them, these gains will not endure.
Nationwide expansion: Since Columbine, all 50 states have adopted anti-bullying laws, prompting schools to create reporting systems, investigations, training, curricula, and specialized personnel.
Uncertain results: Research has found modest benefits, no benefits, or harmful effects from anti-bullying programs, while national bullying trends have not meaningfully declined.
Central critique: Psychologist Izzy Kalman describes “anti-bullyism” as an ideology that assigns blame exclusively to an alleged bully and encourages children to rely on authorities rather than develop personal resilience.
Ambiguous definitions: The traditional criteria of power imbalance, intent, and repetition can be subjective, allowing ordinary conflicts, insults, eye-rolling, and social exclusion to be treated as bullying.
Law-enforcement model: Schools are often expected to investigate, judge, and punish, but intervention can intensify conflicts by encouraging both students and their parents to compete for the school’s support.
Alternative approach: Kalman emphasizes personal responsibility, responding to meanness with kindness, and teaching students how to manage verbal aggression rather than treating every insult as a crime.
Limits of intervention: Criminal or potentially criminal conduct—such as weapons, assault, theft, or vandalism—should be reported, while noncriminal peer disputes should generally be handled as life problems rather than prosecuted through anti-bullying systems.
Courtesy Road Ahead/Unsplash
In the years after the 1999 Columbine massacre, anti-bullying policy swept the country. By 2015, all 50 states had adopted anti-bullying laws. Schools added reporting systems, investigations, staff training, prevention curricula, and specialized personnel. An industry of programs, consultants, researchers, and lawyers has flourished alongside those mandates.
The movement’s most ambitious promise—that bullying can be eradicated—remains unproved. Some studies find modest benefits from anti-bullying programs. Others find no benefit or harmful effects. Federal data and reports concede that trends in bullying rates are unclear, but that they have not declined meaningfully in the last 25 years. In the 2021–22 school year, 100 percent of students reported experiencing, witnessing, or being aware of bullying.
Israel “Izzy” Kalman, a longtime school psychologist and psychotherapist, argues that “anti-bullyism” is an ideology that teaches children to assign responsibility for their distress to other people and report their grievances to authorities. It then forces schools to act as investigators, judges, and enforcers of ordinary peer conflict as if they are criminal offenses.
Kalman is the head of the Kalman Bullying Institute, creator of Bullies2Buddies.com, and lead author of the Be Strong Resilience Program. He has spent a quarter century arguing that the anti-bullying movement has intensified hostilities rather than reduced them, and he has made that case extensively at Psychology Today through his blog, Resilience to Bullying.
I spoke with Izzy about what counts as bullying, what anti-bullying laws require schools to do, why reporting can intensify conflict, and what he would teach instead. The transcript below has been edited for clarity and length. The full video conversation contains much more for readers interested in the subject.
Carolyn D. Gorman: You spent decades as a school psychologist. What made you skeptical of the anti-bullying approach before it was fashionable to be skeptical?
Izzy Kalman: I had been successfully teaching kids and schools how to deal with bullying using basic psychological and therapeutic principles, when this bullying psychology comes out claiming they had the solution. It’s the opposite of everything I learned in psychology and psychotherapy, in philosophy and religion. It’s the opposite of what I discovered actually works. They were prescribing things that make the problem worse. Do the same things at home with your own children and you get endless sibling rivalry.
CG: You coined the term “anti-bullyism” to describe the ideology behind the modern anti-bullying movement. Why did you need a new word?
IK: The term “anti-bullying movement” doesn’t really tell you what it does. In reality, it’s an ideology, with a set of definitions and assumptions treated as fundamental truths. And no matter what evidence emerges to counter them, these truths are never rejected. So, since it is a complete belief system, it deserves to be called an “-ism.”
One of the basics of good psychotherapy is developing an internal locus of control—the belief that what happens to me in life is in my control. Anti-bullyism promotes the opposite: “The problem has nothing to do with you; it is totally the fault of the bully. You can’t solve the problem by yourself. The bully is too powerful. Everybody has to help you.”
CG: Many children are both bully and victim, and it isn’t always easy to tell who is what. What does that dichotomy create?
IK: According to the bullying philosophy, there is a victim and there’s a bully. The victim has nothing to do with the problem and only the bully is guilty. In real life, the alleged bully almost always insists that he’s the victim. “What are you talking about? I didn’t do that. He’s lying,” or, “He started with me.” Nobody thinks they’re a bully. Hitler didn’t think he was a bully. Very few parents say, “Oh yes, my child is a bully.”
I have this saying, which I actually love: The reason the anti-bullying movement is so phenomenally popular is the same reason that it’s failing so dismally–everybody thinks the bully is the other person. People love the teaching because it tells us the problem is not our fault, it’s their fault. Everybody loves to hear that.
CG: Dan Olweus, who created the field of bullying psychology, defined bullying as intentional, repeated harm involving a power imbalance. What’s wrong with that definition?
IK: There are three pillars: imbalance of power, intentionality, and repetition. In practice, each one is invalid and useless.
CG: Each one of those are subjective and can be perceived by the “victim,” and it’s the victim’s perspective that matters. So, what is the practical definition of bullying that schools work with?
IK: Anything that you don’t like people doing to you. It can be eye rolling—and many state laws actually list eye rolling as a form of bullying. If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t have to experience it, and it’s the school’s job to make sure you don’t.
CG: And what does that require schools to do?
IK: I describe it as a law-enforcement model. There’s a perpetrator—a criminal—and there’s a victim. The victim is innocent, the perpetrator is guilty, and the job of the system is to protect victims from bullies. You have to take the side of the victim, and you have to judge—who’s right, who’s wrong, who the bully is—and then punish or rehabilitate him.
The most fundamental instruction of anti-bullyism is that you have to tell the school authorities. And it makes sense—if you don’t tell them, how could the school do anything about it? The problem is that the school can only make it better if it has a reliable way of solving the problem. If it doesn’t, it will probably make it worse. And most schools don’t.
CG: Olweus believed his program, the most common model implemented across the world, could eradicate bullying entirely. Did it?
IK: In his book he says, and I’m paraphrasing, there’s no reason we can’t get rid of bullying 100 percent. In his own research, schools that implemented his program properly for two years saw about a 50 percent reduction. It has never been replicated, especially not in the United States. Other research might find a 10 percent reduction, or a 15 percent reduction, but not 50 percent.
CG: Rates of bullying have not changed over time.A meta-analysis in School Psychology Review found not just no effects but actively harmful outcomes in 86 percent of programs. Why hasn’t the field treated that as disqualifying?
IK: Because anti-bullyism is an ideology, and what needs to be done is decided in advance. It’s been decided that schools have to actively intervene to stop bullying. So, when the research shows it’s not working, they don’t reject the program. They say, for some reason we didn’t find the right results—maybe it needs a better study. Even in that article you mention, the researchers did not conclude we should stop using these programs because they’re not working. The conclusion was that schools have to do more to stop bullying.
CG: A study in the Journal of Child and Family Studies found that students who reported bullying to school staff had higher odds of continued victimization. Why does the recommended response make things worse?
IK: Have you heard the saying that’s common in jail and also among kids, “snitches get stitches and end up in ditches?” Even if they’ve never heard it, kids discover very quickly that nobody likes them after they inform on their peers.
There’s a well-known concept in psychology called triangulation, or the drama triangle, where somebody plays a rescuer between a victim and an abuser. I’m not talking about criminal abuse—of course you have to get involved to stop people from being murdered or injured. But when you get in the middle of their fights, trying to take the side of the victim against the perpetrator, you make the two sides hate each other even more. At least one of them ends up hating you as well. And you prevent the two people from figuring out how to solve the problem with each other.
This is what happens in sibling rivalry. Parents’ intervention immediately escalates the hostility. They fight much harder over getting their parents on their side than what they originally were fighting about.
Now this is what the schools have to do: take the side of the one who looks like the victim against the one who looks like the bully. It immediately gets the two kids fighting even harder because each one—and their parents—want the school on their side.
CG: What should schools teach instead?
IK: Many bullying experts say the golden rule is the solution, but they’re doing it in a way that doesn’t work because they’re not understanding it. They think it means: don’t be a bully. The problem is nobody thinks they’re a bully. So, when we tell kids don’t be a bully, nobody thinks, “Oh, I have to stop?” They think, “that’s right, they have to stop bullying me!”
We don’t need the golden rule to teach people to be nice. It’s obvious that it’s good to be nice. The hard part is knowing what to do when people are mean to us. The answer of the golden rule is that you have to be nice back. That’s hard, because we’re programmed for reciprocity—to treat others the way they treat us. But if you’re mean to me and I’m mean back, we’ll be fighting all the time and become enemies. So I figure, what do I need enemies for? I know you are also programmed for reciprocity. So, even if you’re mean to me, I’m going to be nice back, and before long you’re going to start being nice to me. The golden rule puts me in control, and it creates a win-win outcome.
CG: You’ve called free speech the constitutional version of “sticks and stones.” Explain why free speech is a solution for bullying.
IK: The sticks and stones slogan is the age-old solution to becoming a victim of relentless teasing and taunting. It expresses the fundamental difference between verbal aggression and physical aggression. If you hit me with sticks and stones and I get hurt, who hurt me?
CG: I did.
IK: Yeah. If you call me an idiot and I feel hurt, what percentage does it depend on me?
CG: One hundred percent.
IK: That’s right.It’s totally up to me if I get upset by words. It’s not up to you. When kids understand the slogan, they can decide, it’s not sticks and stones, I don’t have to get upset. Then they don’t become a victim of verbal bullying.
But the modern version is, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can scar me forever or kill me.” They’re teaching kids that being called an idiot should hurt more than having their bones broken.
When I try to stop you from insulting me, it doesn’t make you stop. It makes you continue. But if I let you insult me, it’s no fun and you leave me alone. So, freedom of speech—letting people say what they want—is the solution to verbal bullying.
CG: How should schools tell what to act on from what to leave alone?
IK: There are two general kinds of aggression. You won’t find this in psychology, but you will find it in law. One kind causes objective harm: if you do it to me and I get hurt, you are the one who hurt me. It’s not my choice whether I get hurt. Rape, vandalism, theft, extortion—these are treated like crimes in all cultures, and you have a right to be protected from them.
The other kind causes subjective harm: if you do it to me and I get hurt, I really hurt myself. The classic example is an insult. Is it moral to punish you for something I did to myself? In a country with freedom of speech, you’re allowed to insult me. But with anti-bullying laws, now you’re not. It’s treated like a crime.
CG: Where does your method fail? Are there children it won’t work for?
IK: There are some kids I failed with no matter how long I worked with them. If kids have serious neurological problems, intellectual deficits, or psychiatric conditions that prevent them from understanding what I teach, they won’t be able to do it. Or they understand it but have no impulse control—they’re so reactive it won’t work.
CG: And where do schools fail?
IK: Because anti-bullyism takes a law-enforcement approach, it turns schools into law-enforcement agencies and courts of law. They have to investigate. They have to interrogate. They have to judge. They have to punish. Would you go to a court where the judge is any Joe Shmoe off the street? School personnel are not qualified for that job. And judging makes people hate you. The winner is happy, the loser hates you, and the two sides still hate each other.
Today is the worst time in history to be a school administrator, because you are being held legally responsible for accomplishing the impossible. Schools are required by law to treat a problem in a way that’s been proven not to work, and then they get sued when it doesn’t.
CG: So, what should be reported?
IK: Criminal behavior, or potentially criminal behavior, has to be reported. If I know you’re bringing weapons to school, I should tell the school. That’s objective harm. People ask me, what if there’s a psychopath who smashes your face in? That’s a crime. You report it. It’s better to call things what they are.
CG: If a state legislature called you tomorrow and asked what to repeal, what would you say?
IK: Get rid of anti-bullying laws. All of the actions that deserve to be treated like crimes already are. Anti-bullying laws have only come to add things that were never considered crimes. The great majority of bullying is insults. We live in a country that has freedom of speech, and freedom of speech allows us to insult each other, but anti-bullying laws have repealed it. Social exclusion—I don’t want to be your friend. These are things that as individuals we should have the freedom to do.
CG: Is there anything the movement got right that you would keep?
IK: Yes. Insults and social exclusion and rumors are very serious problems. You can start out with the highest self-esteem, and if you’re put down by your peers every day and you’re getting upset by it, it will destroy you. So, kids deserve to be taught what to do about it—not treating these things like crimes, but as problems in life that we have to learn how to deal with.
The bullying problem can be solved. Not completely; there’ll never be no bullying. But you can make a dramatic impact, not by spending more money, but by spending less.
Google Program: google introduced a program allowing political candidates and committees to bypass gmail spam filters for fundraising appeals
Political Complaints: the change follows years of complaints from republicans alleging that spam algorithms unfairly blocked their emails compared to democrats
Launch Details: google announced the policy quietly via a help center update and began contacting political committees from both parties
User Impact: strategists note the policy will likely flood users with unwanted political spam during the midterm elections
Requirements: bulk senders must register their domains and maintain a spam rate below zero point three percent to qualify
Past Pilot: a similar pilot program launched four years ago was discontinued after a few months
Legal Actions: previous lawsuits and federal election commission complaints alleging algorithmic bias against republicans were dismissed
Strategic Reactions: some republicans welcomed the chance to reach voters, while some democrats expressed concern over scam pacs and inbox clutter
Google quietly rolled out a new program on Monday that will allow candidates, political parties and political action committees to more easily bypass Gmail’s spam filter and send fund-raising appeals to the inboxes of the company’s many millions of email users.
The change comes after years of complaints from Republicans that Gmail’s spam algorithm unfairly blocked their committees’ emails more than those of their Democratic counterparts, although those complaints were dismissed in court. For campaigns and PACs that meet the terms of the program, it is expected to route an influx of cash solicitations into Gmail inboxes, helping campaigns raise millions of dollars more in the final sprint to the midterm elections.
Google chose not to debut the new program with any fanfare, instead posting an update to its Help Center on Monday. The company began to reach out to some political committees in both parties on Monday after publishing the change, according to two people briefed on the outreach who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Political strategists in both parties said the new policy could be deeply consequential for candidates — even if frustrating for users in the United States, who are likely to be bombarded with pleas for donations.
“Heading into the 2026 elections, Gmail users are going to be flooded with unwanted political spam because Google decided to create a V.I.P. lane for campaigns,” said Kenneth Pennington, a Democratic digital strategist and veteran online fund-raiser. “This is a bad deal for Gmail users and a gift to bad actors in the political fund-raising space.”
José Castañeda, a spokesman for Google, said the new program resulted from an effort to provide long-term clarity for both campaigns and users.
“This program is designed to connect people with the emails they want to receive while keeping them fully in control of their inboxes,” he said in a statement. “To participate, bulk senders must meet strict security and compliance requirements, ensuring that messages people receive are relevant, useful and verified.”
The new program is set to begin on Sept. 8, the day after Labor Day — and the day before Republicans are set to hold a rare midterm convention in Dallas.
The change comes four years after Google rolled out a similar program on a pilot basis that was discontinued months later.
At the time, the Republican National Committee sued the technology giant, accusing it of “throttling its email messages,” though Google said the party had not signed up for the program. A federal court later dismissed the case, with Judge Daniel J. Calabretta writing of the R.N.C.’s claims, “This is pure speculation, lacking facts from which the Court could infer animus or an absence of good faith.”
The Federal Election Commission also dismissed a formal complaint from Republicans that Gmail’s spam filter was biased against the party.
Whether a fund-raising email winds up in users’ spam folders or inboxes can be worth millions of dollars to campaigns over time.
It is not immediately clear whether the changes would affect one party more than the other, but some Republicans appeared optimistic.
“For years Google’s algorithm silenced Republican voices, burying our emails in spam while Democrats’ landed in the inbox,” said Will Kiley, the communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “This program is a real chance to fix it and let voters hear from the candidates they choose to follow. We’ll be watching closely to make sure Google follows through.”
Some Democrats feared the change could open the door for so-called scam PACs, which spend little of their money on actual campaigns, to more easily reach inboxes. Other Democrats hoped the change might help deliver the party an advantage because Democrats generally have been better at online fund-raising than Republicans.
The R.N.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Google’s new program will require that candidates, PACs and party committees register the domain they send emails from and that their spam rates, the percentage of emails that users mark as spam, remain below 0.3 percent, according to the policy.
Mr. Pennington, the Democratic strategist, feared that Google made the change because of pressure from Republicans.
“While there could theoretically be another reason for this policy shift, it appears that Google is sacrificing the inbox sanity of its customers simply to placate a false, bad faith narrative from Republicans claiming partisan spam bias,” he said.
Amanda Elliott, a Republican digital strategist, said the mistrust on the right with the tech industry runs deep, especially around the issue of whether fund-raising emails wind up in inboxes or the spam folder.
“For everyone who’s been talking about censorship and bias, this could be a put-up or shut-up moment,” she wrote in a text message. “Are your emails landing in spam filters because you’re a Republican or because you’re just running a subpar email program and not following best practices? Perhaps we’re about to find out!”
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Pornhub says the UK government should recognise the law has ‘failed’ in protecting children © Leon Neal/Getty Images
Earl Warren in 1948 (Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Bettmann via Getty Images)
