For a while, businesses were flexing their social responsibility muscles, weighing in on public policy matters that affected them or their stakeholders. These days, not so much, with leaders fearing reprisal for speaking out. But silence can have its own consequences. Also in this episode: The gap between AI expectations and reality; rent-a-mob services damage the fragile reputation of the public relations profession; too many people think AI is conscious, so we have to devise ways to reinforce among users that it’s not; Denmark is dealing with deepfakes by assigning citizens the copyright to their own likenesses; crediting photographers for the work you copied from the web won’t protect you from lawsuits for unauthorized use. In Dan York’s Tech Report, Dan shares updates on Mastodon’ (at last) introducing quote posts, and Bluesky’s response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding Mississippi’s law making full access to Bluesky (and other services) contingent upon an age check.

Links from this episode:

• So far, AI Isn’t Taking Jobs or Generating Profit


• Companies Are Pouring Billions Into A.I. It Has Yet to Pay Off.


• Seizing the agentic AI advantage


• Not today, AI: Despite corporate hype, few signs that the tech is taking jobs — yet


• 1 in 6 workers pretend to use AI amid workplace pressures, survey finds


• We must build AI for people; not to be a person


• FIR Interview: Monsignor Paul Tighe on AI and Humanity


• The Wisdom of the Heart (Neville’s post on Monsignor Tighe’s remarks)


• As Rent-A-Mob “Protests” Rage, PRSA’s “Ethics” Board is AWOL


• Boom times for rent-a-mobs


• Fox News’ Lawrence Jones Presses Rent-A-Mob Company CEO Over Protests


• Denmark Aims to Use Copyright Law to Protect People From Deepfakes


• Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features


• When Does Corporate Silence Backfire?


• Home Depot keeps quiet on immigration raids outside its doors


• Facebook post on crediting photographers when you don’t have permission to use their content


• Unmasking the Copyright Traip: The Dark Side of AI Bots

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

• Quote Posts Coming to Mastodon


• Our Response to Mississippi’s Age Assurance Law – Bluesky

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, September 29.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

@nevillehobson (00:02 )

Hello everyone and welcome to Four Immediate Release. This is episode 478, the monthly long-form edition for August 2025. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz (00:14 )

And I’m Shel Holtz, and we have six reports for you today. Hope you find them illuminating. And if you find any of them worthy of comment, I would hope that you would comment on them. There are a number of ways to comment on the content that you hear on for immediate release. You can send us an email to fircomments at gmail.com and attach an audio file if you like. You can record that audio file.

On the FIR website, there’s a tab on the right-hand corner. It says record voicemail and you can record up to 90 seconds. You can record more than one. We know how to edit those things together. So send us your audio comments, but you can also leave comments on the show notes at FIRpodcastnetwork.com.

on the posts we make at LinkedIn and Facebook and threads and blue sky and mastodon. You can comment on the FIR community on Facebook. There are lots of ways that you can share your opinion with us so that we can bake those into the show. And we also appreciate your ratings and reviews. So with those comment mechanisms out of the way Neville, let’s.

hear about the episodes that we have recorded since our last monthly episode.

@nevillehobson (01:33 )

We did five since then. Actually, it was four plus the last monthly. So we’ll start with that one. It’s episode four, 74 for July, the long-form episode. That one ran one hour, 33 minutes. So a bit shorter than we usually do for the month, which is about hefty, hefty but good, as Donna would say. Yeah, exactly.

Shel Holtz (01:52 )

We were terse.

@nevillehobson (01:55 )

So we covered a number of topics related to AI, was how we titled the episode Show Notes. AI is redefining public relations, driving a change in the way we craft press releases, PR is at the heart of AI optimization and more. Good discussion. had lots of topics. The links are brilliant. Lots of content we linked to in that episode.

Then we followed that. That was on the 28th of July that was published. On the 29th, the day after that, we published an FIR interview with Monsignor Paul Tai of the Vatican. That was on AI ethics and the role of humanity. It’s actually an intriguing topic. We dove into a document called Antiqua et Nova that was really the anchor point for the conversation that talked about

the comparison of human intelligence with artificial intelligence and that drove that discussion. He was a great guest on the show, Shell, and it’s intriguing. There’s more coming about that in the coming weeks, the way, because I’ve been posting follow-ups to that in little video clips from that interview and there’s more of that kind of thing coming soon. So we have a comment, right?

Shel Holtz (03:06 )

Every do.

We do, from Mary Hills out of Chicago. She’s an IABC fellow who says, insightful and stimulating discussion. Thank you for the extraordinary host team for making this happen and Monsignor Tai for sharing his insights. To the question, my view as a ComPro is to build bridges to discover options to move forward and choose the best way. Think discursive techniques, sociopositive climates, and our ability to synthesize data and information.

It taps into those intangible assets we bring to our work and are inherently in us.

@nevillehobson (03:45 )

Good comment. Reminds me, the way, related to what you talking about, how to comment before we started this, is most of the comments we seem to get, certainly in the last six months, if not more, have been on LinkedIn. It’s a great place for discussion, but that’s a business network. You need to be a member to see them. So if you’re not a member and you want to comment, join LinkedIn, otherwise you won’t be able to.

Shel Holtz (03:56 )

Mm-hmm.

It’s free.

@nevillehobson (04:07 )

Yeah, it is. So then next, well, you’ve got a paid option, but generally it’s free unless you take out the paid option. I’ve got the paid option too, just as a little aside there. So we followed that on the 4th of August, episode 475, title of the post, algorithms got you down, get retro with RSS. The rise of social media news feeds had rendered RSS useful for many people, said, and declining usage led Google to sunset it.

Shel Holtz (04:09 )

Not for me, I pay for mine, but.

Yeah, that’s right. Exactly.

@nevillehobson (04:34 )

But RSS feeds never went away. And we explored that a bit. Most people don’t know that all the newsletters they subscribe to, the sub-stacks or whatever publication it is, RSS is driving a lot of how they get the