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Category: Social media

DHS sending hundreds of administrative subpoenas to social media companies to suppress political dissent

DHS sending hundreds of administrative subpoenas to social media companies to suppress political dissent

The New York Times reports: The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency. In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials…

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DHS hires social media propagandist who promotes white supremacism

DHS hires social media propagandist who promotes white supremacism

The New York Times reports: The Department of Homeland Security has hired a social media manager from the Department of Labor for a key communications job, despite posts he made on Labor Department media accounts that raised internal alarms over possible white-nationalist messaging. Peyton Rollins, 21, was hired this month to help run Homeland Security’s social media accounts, which have become public bullhorns for President Trump’s mass-deportation efforts and come under scrutiny of their own for appealing to right-wing extremists….

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Musk calls Spanish PM ‘fascist’ as X hits out over French office raid

Musk calls Spanish PM ‘fascist’ as X hits out over French office raid

The Independent reports: Elon Musk has slammed Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez as a “true fascist totalitarian” after he proposed a ban on social media use by teenagers, as Europe toughens its stance against tech giants. In a furious response on his social media site X, the tech billionaire described the Spanish prime minister – who had earlier promised to protect children from the “digital Wild West” – as a “tyrant and traitor to the people of Spain”. Sanchez had…

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Right-wing influencers who brought mayhem to Minnesota are now targeting California

Right-wing influencers who brought mayhem to Minnesota are now targeting California

Wired reports: A month after the Trump administration began its immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis, right-wing creators are turning their attention to a new target in search of fraud: California. Over the last few weeks, right-wing creators who were instrumental in boosting the Minnesota fraud allegations that predated the administration’s surge of federal immigration agents have been going after a number of California’s social welfare programs, making unsubstantiated accusations of fraud—and potentially laying the groundwork for a similar federal crackdown…

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DHS is trying to force tech companies to hand over data about Trump critics

DHS is trying to force tech companies to hand over data about Trump critics

TechCrunch reports: The Department of Homeland Security has been quietly demanding tech companies turn over user information about critics of the Trump administration, according to reports. In several cases over recent months, Homeland Security has relied on the use of administrative subpoenas to seek identifiable information about individuals who run anonymous Instagram accounts, which share posts about ICE immigration raids in their local neighborhoods. These subpoenas have also been used to demand information about people who have criticized Trump officials…

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How to be a citizen in the information war (and stay sane)

How to be a citizen in the information war (and stay sane)

  On this week’s “Galaxy Brain,” Charlie Warzel opens with what it means to live in 2026, when our phones can drop us into graphic, real-time violence without warning—and when documenting that violence can be both traumatizing and politically consequential. Using recent footage out of Minneapolis as a lens, he explores the uneasy collision of algorithmic feeds, misinformation, and the moral weight of witnessing. Charlie also traces how viral documentation can puncture official narratives, pushing stories beyond political circles and…

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Instagram ‘is a drug’: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial

Instagram ‘is a drug’: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial

Ars Technica reports: Anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and death. These can be the consequences for vulnerable kids who get addicted to social media, according to more than 1,000 personal injury lawsuits that seek to punish Meta and other platforms for allegedly prioritizing profits while downplaying child safety risks for years. Social media companies have faced scrutiny before, with congressional hearings forcing CEOs to apologize, but until now, they’ve never had to convince a jury that they aren’t liable for harming…

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Meta is blocking links to ICE list on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads

Meta is blocking links to ICE list on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads

Wired reports: Meta has started blocking its users from sharing links to ICE List, a website that has compiled the names of what it claims are Department of Homeland Security employees, a project the creators say is designed to hold those employees accountable. Dominick Skinner, the creator of ICE List, tells WIRED that links to the website have been shared without issue on Meta’s platforms for more than six months. “I think it’s no surprise that a company run by…

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AI-powered disinformation swarms are coming for democracy

AI-powered disinformation swarms are coming for democracy

Wired reports: In 2016, hundreds of Russians filed into a modern office building on 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg every day; they were part of the now-infamous troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency. Day and night, seven days a week, these employees would manually comment on news articles, post on Facebook and Twitter, and generally seek to rile up Americans about the then-upcoming presidential election. When the scheme was finally uncovered, there was widespread media coverage and…

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Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media

Experts warn of threat to democracy from ‘AI bot swarms’ infesting social media

The Guardian reports: Political leaders could soon launch swarms of human-imitating AI agents to reshape public opinion in a way that threatens to undermine democracy, a high profile group of experts in AI and online misinformation has warned. The Nobel peace prize-winning free-speech activist Maria Ressa, and leading AI and social science researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Yale are among a global consortium flagging the new “disruptive threat” posed by hard-to-detect, malicious “AI swarms” infesting social media and…

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Trump regime social-media managers have turned official feeds into streams of neo-Nazi xenophobia

Trump regime social-media managers have turned official feeds into streams of neo-Nazi xenophobia

Ali Breland writes: The U.S. Labor Department is embracing Nazi slogans and tropes, the Pentagon’s research office is deploying neo-Nazi graphic elements in its social-media feeds, and the Department of Homeland Security recently posted lyrics mimicking a popular song by a band with ties to an ethno-nationalist social club. The official social-media channels of the Trump administration have become unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery. The leaders of these departments so far refuse to answer questions about…

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Corruption: Tech companies’ access to UK ministers dwarfs that of child safety groups

Corruption: Tech companies’ access to UK ministers dwarfs that of child safety groups

The Guardian reports: Tech companies have been meeting government ministers at a rate of more than once per working day, enjoying high-level political access that dwarfs that of child safety and copyright campaigners, who called the pattern “shocking” and “disturbing”. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Elon Musk’s X, whose Grok AI image generator has sparked outrage with its sexualised images of women and children, were among the US tech companies holding hundreds of meetings with people at the heart of government,…

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State Department threatens UK over probe into Elon Musk’s X

State Department threatens UK over probe into Elon Musk’s X

Politico reports: The U.S. Department of State’s Sarah B. Rogers says “nothing is off the table” if the U.K. government makes good on its threat to ban Elon Musk’s X over concerns about a deluge of AI-generated sexualized deepfakes on the platform. “I would say from America’s perspective … nothing is off the table when it comes to free speech,” Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, told GB News in an interview which aired in the U.K….

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Four days on the ground in Minneapolis: We’re all just content for ICE

Four days on the ground in Minneapolis: We’re all just content for ICE

Ryan Broderick writes: The frontline of America’s slow-moving civil war has come to Minnesota. The Department of Homeland Security doubled down on their occupation of the state following last week’s murder of Renee Nicole Good. Now residents armed with whistles, snowballs, and group chats race through the streets, trying to protect one another from the more than 2,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers swarming the city. During my four days in the Twin Cities, I watched the fabric of American…

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Inside ICE’s media machine

Inside ICE’s media machine

The Washington Post reports: For the Immigration and Customs Enforcement public affairs team, the nighttime operation across metro Houston in October was a gold mine. An ICE video producer shadowed agents as they pulled over and handcuffed more than 120 suspected undocumented immigrants, then sent the footage to a private team chatroom. Across thousands of internal ICE messages reviewed by The Washington Post, this kind of celebration has become commonplace. The messages show how the team has worked closely with…

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Right-wing influencers have flooded Minneapolis

Right-wing influencers have flooded Minneapolis

Wired reports: In the days since a masked federal agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, right-wing creators and influencers like Nick Sortor and Cam Higby have descended on Minneapolis, filming protesters and interviewing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. So far, they’ve produced a steady stream of content that appears designed to paint Minneapolis as a lawless city, and the actions of ICE agents like Jonathan Ross, who reportedly shot and killed Good, as self-defense. “HELL YES! ICE just…

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