CBS News chief Bari Weiss pulls 60 Minutes story Weiss said investigation had to include comments from Trump administration 60M's ⁦‪Sharyn Alfonsi‬⁩ said multiple US agencies refused to comment - and this lets WH veto coverage My NPR story www.npr.org/2025/12/22/g...

Thanks to @zackwhittaker.com for flagging this story from @kevincollier.bsky.social that I missed last week. Darcula has been a pain for phishing and SMS campaigns, also one of first phishing kits to go all in on adding AI features.

It remains insane that self-serious outlets that thoroughly vet and fact check their reported stories also publish egregious falsehoods as long as it's filed under opinion. Have never heard a good argument for this practice.

Pour one out tonight for the probably hundreds of reporters poring over this batch of Epstein files that of course dropped late Friday afternoon the week before Christmas. I am not on that duty, but jeez what a way to spend your weekend and holidays.

We're in a brief golden era where journalists can do straight-faced, deadpan reporting on AI and get hilarious results.

Pour one out for Dan Bongino

Fun fact: This is not actually a scoop at all, and was a minor detail in the story we did last week.

New from me! After we reached out to the owner of these deepfake porn sites, they were removed offline and he deleted his socials. Each time a site goes down, it's a win for me. Hopefully this guy never tries to get them up and running again. Check out our investigation!

I can't tell you how mortified I would be as a reporter if I did something like this and got publicly roasted for it.

Kentucky's really is good though. And I am an impartial judge, no partisan to that Commonwealth.

In late 2020 a Chinese man called Guan Heng travelled to Xinjiang with our BuzzFeed map of detention facilities to provide ground truth for our work - he provided the first corroborating evidence for many sites. He escaped to the US - then ICE detained him. www.wsj.com/world/china/...

404 Media zine has apparently outsold American Canto. Help continue that trend here: 404media.myshopify.com/products/pre... www.404media.co/behind-the-b...

Hey @nbcnews.com can you start calling me CyberGuy when I'm on? Makes the journalism hit harder I think. www.foxbusiness.com/video/638641...

I’M LOSING MY SHIT THIS IS SO FUNNY

New! We worked with the Public Interest Research Group to test a bunch of LLM-driven toys ahead of the Christmas. That sexual talking teddy bear wasn't a one-off; it turns out disturbing behavior is deeply built into these toys across the board.

US government announce a new website that doesn't crash from the traffic of said announcement challenge.

This was just sent to me by an LAUSD parent. A 4th grader was assigned to design a book cover for Pippi Longstocking using Adobe for Education. Here is what the AI tool generated:

The band American Minor only had one album but it was good.

I talked to VP JD Vance about those wedding ring stories ... www.nbcnews.com/politics/jd-...

I took a trip to Russia in the early aughts and in Moscow this dude was selling Matryoshka dolls of a ton of sports teams and he had the 1999 Thundering Herd, the unrecognized national champion of that year. They even got star players' numbers right. How?? I do not know. Big one's Chad Pennington.

I have some bad news about your most recent Black Friday purchase, the AI Pervert Toilet.

Question for people who aren't reporters: When you see this in a news story, do you assume that the senior aide is somebody at Johnson's office and the reporter is winking at you to indicate that? www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/u...

This is stunningly good reporting by two bylined reporters and six credited researchers, and it's undermined throughout by links to an "Ask the Post AI" that delivers insipid answers to its own contrived prompts under the guise of "More context on this article"

You could write a (very uninformative, unfun) book about the many things tech leaders say that would get them Ds in any college philosophy class if extrapolated into a paper.

Cool story I happened to write a month ago @politico.com! But also it isn't just liberals.

I would add to this that many people have routine, deeply unpleasant interactions with LLMs (bad job aides, annoying LLM call centers seem to have replaced human or more basic robot ones overnight), but it really is a thing that other types of AI is massively helpful for some scientific research.

FYI: Nathan Rabin needs your love and appreciation right now. He was in a very significant car crash earlier this week and is in the hospital recovering. (His family was also in the car, they’re fine, but he got the brunt of the injuries.) Now’s a good time to support him: www.nathanrabin.com

Sarah Beckstrom's ex-boyfriend told NBC News she dreamed of becoming an FBI special agent. She didn't want to deploy to D.C. "She hated it. She cried about it." But she started visiting monuments and museums and started enjoying it. May she rest in peace. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

you know, what if they aren't actually a commentary on journalism or the state of media. what if these people are just extremely weird

I’m surprised how upset I am about the two WV guardsmen. It’s a job you take to serve your neighbors and country while living a normal life, far more likely to do disaster relief work (WV has plenty) than see combat. WV's gov, Patrick Morrisey, was the first to volunteer to send them to patrol DC.

This is fantastically done, laying it out like this.

West Virginia governor Patrick Morrissey, who was eager to deploy state guardsmen to DC, says the two who were shot were from the WV guard. First he said one died, now potentially walking that back.

OpenAI is arguing in court that it wasn't responsible for ChatGPT repeatedly encouraging a teen to die by suicide because he was violating our TOS. I'm not a legal expert but am very curious who courts will think is responsible for an AI's actions.

📢 Announcing hacklore.org 📢 It’s time to retire outdated cyber advice! More than 80 cybersecurity veterans have signed an open letter urging a shift from folklore to guidance that actually helps people avoid the most common attacks. 🔐 Blog: medium.com/@boblord/let... Site: www.hacklore.org

Not to do the easy dunk on the NYT and Friedman, but this is truly one of the least clickable teasers I have ever read.

Important story: The very wealthiest people in America are playing an ever more important role in financing America’s elections — and potentially determining their outcome.

Hand-counting ballots is time-consuming, expensive, and error prone. But some Republicans are going for it anyway: www.nbcnews.com/politics/ele...

NEW: For months, my colleagues and I dug into YouTube's conservative airwaves and found a flourishing network of host-read ads on right-leaning podcasts. This phenomenon has enriched hosts, YouTube, and businesses that use ideology to sell. bloom.bg/3Kaio9w

For a handful of reasons it can be really hard to report well on advancing domestic US government surveillance. This by @byrontau.bsky.social is so well done.

Here's the law, if anyone wants to read it. It's pretty short, and provides a list of what has to be released and when (heads up that agencies routinely blow past statutory deadlines), lists exceptions (e.g., no publishing of CSAM) and requires reporting to Congress. www.congress.gov/bill/119th-c...

I grow frustrated with local news-- by focusing so much on stories of violence, they inadvertently promote the idea that the world is more violent than it is (leading voters to candidates who promise security at all costs). But holding up a mic to a cow is incredible www.10tv.com/article/news...

The FBI just put out an alert about a wanted guy named Ryan Wedding but it reads like they're announcing that our mutual bud Ry is getting hitched.

I am in perpetual awe of scope of crappy tech startups and the numerous boutique PR spam outlets that promote them. I block them daily. And still I get emails with subjects more cursed than I could imagine, i.e

Trump suggests Khashoggi had it coming: "You're mentioning someone that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen. But he knew nothing about it. You don't have to embarrass our guest."

I'm sure the IRS will be super forgiving if you file your tax return with a bunch of lies on it because the LLM hallucinated you having a ton of writeoffs and dependents and are actually owed a $3 million refund.

As I told the Columbia Journalism Review, this swatting incident occurred just before I published an investigative report that unmasked the operators of four major neo-Nazi accounts on X. I don't think the timing was coincidental. www.cjr.org/analysis/loc...

Our love grew quickly, like bamboo. But distrust quickly spread underneath it, like the roots of bamboo. Looking back, I was naive. Green. The color of, you guessed it, more bamboo.

Scoop: CISA plans to embark on a hiring spree and change some workforce policies in an effort to rebuild its depleted ranks ahead of a possible conflict with China, according to a memo from its acting director that I obtained. www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/cisa-hi...

Border Patrol can operate anywhere in the country. The 100 mile zone is where they have heightened vehicle stop authority.

This is funny because if you click through, Carr's "How about no" line is on X, a QT of the official NBC News tweet of my story about former FCC commissioners calling to kill the agency's News Distortion policy. I wrote it last week and emailed Carr/the FCC for a response and never got one.