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Direct Message News

Direct Message News is the byline under which DMNews publishes its editorial output. Our team produces content across psychology, politics, culture, digital, analysis, and news, applying the Direct Message methodology of moving beyond surface takes to deliver real clarity. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, sourcing, drafting, fact-checking, editing, and review, rather than a single writer's work. DMNews takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial standards.

Texas’s app-store age-verification law remains in effect after the Supreme Court declined to block it, making it the first of four state app-store age-verification laws to actually take effect while the other three remain stalled into 2027

Google’s AI Overviews now answer forty eight percent of all search queries, and more than half of all searches end without a single click, yet marketing teams are still building quarterly reports around a number that stopped meaning what it used to

Brands have spent two years handing vendors more customer data to power AI personalization, and only now is anyone asking who actually keeps the value once that data leaves the building

Indiana outbid every other state for data centers with what is now the largest single subsidy package in the country, and lawmakers have not said yet what happens when the bill for it comes due

Virginia is still the largest data center market on the planet, with roughly two hundred facilities packed into a single county, and its legislature is now fighting over whether to keep a sales tax exemption worth an estimated one point nine billion dollars a year

Meta is replacing up to ninety percent of its content review staff with AI, and the marketers most exposed are the ones who have never had to argue with a machine about why their account got flagged

Monterey Park, California just became the first city in the country to permanently ban data centers by popular vote, with eighty six percent of residents in favor

Arizona lawmakers passed a three year moratorium on data center tax breaks to slow the industry down, and in the two weeks before it took effect developers filed nearly as many applications as they had in the previous thirteen years combined

Texas passed a law banning targeted ads to minors, and a federal judge has now struck it down in a second ruling that went further than his first, ruling it violated advertisers’ free speech rights

Connecticut, Arkansas, and Utah made their comprehensive privacy laws enforceable on July 1, adding a new wave of state-specific consent and opt-out rules for marketers to track this year

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