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Category: Social media

‘I’m not a foreign agent,’ says Laura Loomer. But is she just a hired gun?

‘I’m not a foreign agent,’ says Laura Loomer. But is she just a hired gun?

Antonia Hitchens writes: One night at Ned’s Club, a members-only lounge with views of the White House, Nigel Farage, the British politician who heads the populist Reform Party, was hosting a bash for the right-wing television channel GB News, which was opening a bureau in D.C. Several members of Trump’s Cabinet were there; Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, gave a toast. Loomer was at home in Florida, but longtime lobbyists and consultants were discussing her activities on two…

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How Gen Z toppled Nepal’s leader and chose a new one on Discord

How Gen Z toppled Nepal’s leader and chose a new one on Discord

Wired reports: At 11:30 pm on Tuesday, September 9, Rakshya Bam stepped down from an army jeep outside military headquarters in a pitch-dark, locked-down Kathmandu. The 26-year-old hadn’t slept in more than a day. Her eyes were red-rimmed and glassy, the whites threaded with thin lines of fatigue. A wave of youth-led protests had rocked Nepal, born on Discord servers, TikTok feeds, and encrypted messaging apps. In just a few days, Bam had seen friends gunned down, watched parliament buildings…

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How Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change

How Joe Rogan misleads listeners about climate change

By Dana Nuccitelli, Yale Climate Connections November 7, 2025 Joe Rogan has one of the most popular podcasts on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and a combined 50 million followers on YouTube, Spotify, and Instagram. And like nearly all of today’s most popular online shows, Rogan’s spreads climate misinformation. In an October episode of his podcast, Rogan interviewed two octogenarian fringe climate contrarians, Richard Lindzen and William Happer, who together have been spreading climate misinformation since at least 2012. For over…

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How Meta has become pillar of the global fraud economy by delivering 15 billion scam ads a day

How Meta has become pillar of the global fraud economy by delivering 15 billion scam ads a day

Reuters reports: Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show. A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes,…

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The psychology of trolling may start with a specific type of envy

The psychology of trolling may start with a specific type of envy

PsyPost reports: A new study reveals a psychological pathway that connects narcissistic personality traits with the tendency to engage in social media trolling. The research suggests this link is partially explained by a person’s feelings of malicious envy and their exposure to antisocial media content. The findings were published in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology. To understand the study, it helps to first understand the concepts involved. Narcissism is a personality trait characterized by a grandiose sense of self-importance,…

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ICE has powerful Clearview AI facial recognition app that Illinois cops are barred from using

ICE has powerful Clearview AI facial recognition app that Illinois cops are barred from using

Chicago Sun-Times reports: The Trump administration has wiped a facial recognition policy from its website while further embracing the controversial technology and securing a $9 million contract with a company barred from selling to Illinois law enforcement agencies. The ban was the result of a lawsuit filed in Cook County that alleged Clearview AI’s massive database of photographs pulled from across the internet violated a landmark state law protecting people’s personal information. But a settlement of the case didn’t apply…

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Problematic social media use linked to loneliness and death anxiety

Problematic social media use linked to loneliness and death anxiety

PsyPost reports: A study of adult social media users in Italy suggested that loneliness and death anxiety might mediate the relationship between attachment anxiety and problematic social media use. The paper was published in Death Studies. Attachment anxiety is a form of insecure attachment characterized by fear of rejection and excessive need for closeness in relationships. People with attachment anxiety constantly worry that their partner does not love them enough or will eventually leave them. This persistent fear can lead…

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Retired law enforcement officer jailed five weeks for reposting a Facebook meme is freed in Tennessee

Retired law enforcement officer jailed five weeks for reposting a Facebook meme is freed in Tennessee

The Intercept reports: More than a month after he was arrested for sharing a meme on Facebook, 61-year-old Larry Bushart Jr. walked out of the Perry County jail in Linden, Tennessee, on Wednesday, where his wife was waiting to take him home. He wore a weary smile and the same white T-shirt he had on the night he was jailed. A reporter from a local news station, which had previously splashed his mugshot on its website, approached for an interview….

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Chatbots are pushing sanctioned Russian propaganda about Ukraine

Chatbots are pushing sanctioned Russian propaganda about Ukraine

Wired reports: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek, and xAI’s Grok are pushing Russian state propaganda from sanctioned entities—including citations from Russian state media, sites tied to Russian intelligence or pro-Kremlin narratives—when asked about the war against Ukraine, according to a new report. Researchers from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) claim that Russian propaganda has targeted and exploited data voids—where searches for real-time data provide few results from legitimate sources—to promote false and misleading information. Almost one-fifth of responses to…

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Stunning success of No Kings protests gives Trump a bout of AI diarrhea

Stunning success of No Kings protests gives Trump a bout of AI diarrhea

Julianne McShane writes: Saturday’s “No Kings” protests were, as my colleagues chronicled, about as wholesome as you could imagine. There were inflatable animals. There were American flags galore. Even the New York Police Department admitted that the 100,000 protesters were peaceful and that cops made no arrests; police in Washington, DC and Austin, Texas said the same. But that hasn’t stopped top Republicans from thoroughly melting down over its success. Case in point: On his Truth Social platform on Saturday…

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Wokeness is alive and well — on the right

Wokeness is alive and well — on the right

  Language policing. Cancel culture. Victimhood contests and cultural grievances. Despite attacking the left for partaking in such practices, there’s an emerging set of individuals on the right who have became exactly what they’ve criticized. Meet the woke right.

Facebook collaborates with Trump regime by taking down ICE-sightings group in Chicago

Facebook collaborates with Trump regime by taking down ICE-sightings group in Chicago

Chicago Sun-Times reports: At the request of the U.S. Department of Justice, a Facebook group used by nearly 80,000 people to report sightings of federal immigration agents in the Chicago area has been taken down by the social media giant Meta, Facebook’s parent company. The group, called ICE Sighting-Chicagoland, has been increasingly used over the last five weeks of “Operation Midway Blitz,” President Donald Trump’s intense deportation campaign, to warn neighbors that federal agents are near schools, grocery stores and…

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White House officials are increasingly concerned about Laura Loomer’s influence

White House officials are increasingly concerned about Laura Loomer’s influence

The Wall Street Journal reports: President Trump confidante Laura Loomer has successfully campaigned for the ouster of more than a dozen national security officials and others she has accused of secretly working against the president’s “Make America Great Again” agenda. Now she is training her considerable firepower inside the MAGA tent. In recent weeks, the right-wing conspiracy theorist has: Gone after former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, dubbing him “Tucker Qatarlson” who is being “bought off by the Muslim Brotherhood,”…

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Can the Trump regime ban apps that track ICE agents?

Can the Trump regime ban apps that track ICE agents?

BBC News reports: The US government and law enforcement agencies have hit out at developers and users of apps which track Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), arguing they threaten the lives of agents. The FBI says the man who targeted an ICE facility in Dallas – killing two detainees – had used these types of apps to track the movements of agents and their vehicles. A tracking app downloaded more than a million times that shows the movements of immigration…

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AI-generated social media has arrived ‘where seeing is not believing’

AI-generated social media has arrived ‘where seeing is not believing’

NPR reports: A fascist SpongeBob SquarePants, a dog driving a car and Jesus playing Minecraft – these are just a few of the things you can see as you flip through OpenAI’s new app populated exclusively with short-form videos generated using artificial intelligence. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for, don’t worry: you can make it with ease using a small text-based prompt window in the app. The result is a highly addictive stream of sometimes funny and…

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Israel is paying influencers $7,000 per social media post

Israel is paying influencers $7,000 per social media post

Responsible Statecraft reports: In a meeting dedicated to harnessing pro-Israel media energy on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alluded to a cohort of Israel’s influencers. “We have to fight back. How do we fight back? Our influencers. I think you should also talk to them if you have a chance, to that community, they are very important.” Being paid by Israel to post on social media is also very lucrative. According to previously unreported recent documents, these influencers are…

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