TL;DR: Tech workers are demanding their companies sever ties with ICE, arguing that the industry has helped accelerate immigration enforcement at scale. The backlash is part of a broader reckoning over how Big Tech’s political alignment, data tools, and content moderation policies increasingly enable government power—from surveillance and encryption access to control over the information we see.

What happened: More than 450 employees from companies including Google, Amazon, Meta, Salesforce, and OpenAI have signed an open letter urging their CEOs to contact the White House and tell ICE to leave US cities. The letter also demands that tech companies end ICE contracts that have enabled large-scale enforcement actions over the past year. Over the weekend, federal immigration agents killed 37-year-old US citizen Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, underscoring the urgency of tech workers’ demands.

This push from rank-and-file workers comes amid a broader pattern of tech companies—and key tech leaders—working closely with the Trump administration. For decades, governments have relied on tech platforms and infrastructure to advance questionable policy goals (see: telecom companies complying with NSA surveillance requests, as exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden). But under the Trump administration, the connection between the tech industry and the administration’s political aims has become more apparent. It’s not just data analytics firms like Palantir working with ICE—reports show that ICE is now looking to buy commercial big data and ad tech tools originally built to target consumers.

How we got here: Big Tech’s alignment with President Donald Trump was on full display at last year’s inauguration, when figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos stood behind the 47th president. The tech sector was also one of the top donor blocs to the Trump campaign in the 2024 election.

Over the past year, we’ve seen how that relationship plays out in practice. ICE has relied on a vast web of tech tools—license plate readers, facial recognition systems, and warrantless phone location tracking—to more quickly identify and detain people, dramatically increasing the agency’s speed and reach.

And it’s not just ICE: Over the weekend, Microsoft confirmed that it handed customer encryption keys to the FBI, allowing law enforcement to access data that was otherwise protected by end-to-end security. While encrypted data is often marketed as inaccessible even to the companies that host it, governments can still gain access through legal orders. Previously, many tech companies refused these orders. But now, it’s clear they're more willing to play ball, with big tech companies like Apple and Google regularly complying with government requests for user data.

The issue also extends beyond law enforcement and surveillance to fears of censorship and algorithmic throttling on social media, now a primary way many people consume news and engage in political discussion. After TikTok’s US spinoff was finalized last week—with several Trump-aligned investors, including Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, now holding significant stakes—users in the US quickly reported widespread outages, trouble logging in, an inability to post videos, and content stuck “under review.” This prompted speculation about whether the disruptions were merely technical or more deliberate suppression during heated political debate. It wouldn’t be without precedent: Platforms including Meta, TikTok, and X have previously acknowledged throttling or removing political content, sometimes unevenly and with little transparency. How these companies act now, and whether they're held to task, could have big implications for how tech continues to enable the government—and what it all means for all of us. —WK

Speed up your typing (by deleting faster)

If you’re anything like me, you spend a significant portion of your day typing—emails, documents, Slack messages, posts on Reddit about your hyperspecific hobby—and a lot of that time is wasted deleting things character by character. Holding down the backspace key like some kind of caveman is inefficient and frankly beneath you. These keyboard shortcuts will help you delete entire words, or even lines, at once, which is especially useful when you change your mind midsentence or realize you need to start over. Here’s how to do it—and keep in mind that your cursor has to be after the word or sentence you want to delete.

Delete entire words:

• On Mac: Press Option + Delete.
• On PC: Press Ctrl + Backspace.

Delete the whole line:

• On Mac: Press Command + Delete.
• On PC: Press Ctrl + Shift + Up Arrow + Delete on Windows (yeah, I realize this isn’t the easiest hack).

Once you get these shortcuts into muscle memory, you'll never go back to pecking away at the delete key one letter at a time. —SM

What was once a somewhat shameful 2am social media scrolling habit (no judgment) is now a bonafide media subindustry: People are obsessed with “microdramas”—vertical, serialized shows optimized for smartphones, with episodes about a minute long. They’re designed to hook you in, so you watch just one more and then another after that. According to a new report, microdrama apps like ReelShort generated roughly $1.2 billion in gross consumer spending in 2025, up about 119% year over year, while DramaBox pulled in hundreds of millions.

These aren’t traditional subscription streaming services a la Netflix. Many operate on freemium or in-app purchase models, which means they hook you with free episodes and then make you pay to find out if the main character’s evil twin survives the yacht explosion. The acting is bad. The production quality is often dismal, and the plots are stuffed with dramatic breakups, cheating, surprise pregnancies, secret identities, and characters rising from the dead. Two actual titles from PineDrama, TikTok’s new microdrama app: Hold Me Tight, Mr. Firefighter and My Boss Thinks I’m A Boy. We wish we were making these up.

It’s another reminder that social media isn’t just featuring more video—it’s specifically optimized for short-form content. The psychological draw is that you can bail at any time—you’re not committing to a three-hour Christopher Nolan epic, just peeking at a low-stakes clip. Just like ’90s infomercials and low-budget true crime reenactments, microdramas fall into the narrow slice of content where something’s so bad that it actually becomes good. It turns out that Quibi, the short-lived app that spent $1.75 billion trying to popularize short-form video, walked so ReelShort could run. —WK

Chaos Brewing Meter: /5