Conservative parents’ advocacy groups are using commercially available artificial intelligence tools to help them flag more books they’ve deemed pornographic to be removed from public schools and libraries (the books aren't actually pornographic) www.404media.co/blockade-the...

Good morning, Baltimore (and beyond)! Proud to roll out our data exploration tool. This interactive visualizer lets you see how—and where—DHS is spending its $190B+ budget.

Btw the PWHL (women's hockey)'s season starts up again on Thursday and if you're in the US at least you can stream their games on Youtube for free www.usatoday.com/story/sports...

NH state house passes "CHARLIE Act," which bans teaching, I kid you not, "critical consciousness" & "prohibited world-views," such as that queer people exist, or that slavery involved race, or, implicitly, that the Nazis murdered Jews based on identity. newhampshirebulletin.com/2026/02/19/h...

“Beyond laundering bigotry as news, digital blackface exposes Black users to a level of personalized abuse and harassment that harkens to a minstrelsy heyday when racists were fully empowered to express their bigotry unbidden.”

Ben Goertzel, popularizer of the term AGI and creator of the Sophia robot, congratulating Jeffrey Epstein the day after Epstein was released from prison. Goertzel is mentioned in the files nearly 800 times, including well after the Miami Herald investigation in 2018.

On Thanksgiving, the immigrant children held at the Dilley detention center gathered in the gym for what they thought was a holiday feast. The kids salivated over a spread of turkey, sandwiches, pastries and pies, a family told me. But the food wasn’t for detainees — it was for the staff.

Looks like The Baltimore Banner is going to fill the gap left by the Post's end of sports coverage.

He Was Laid Off at The Washington Post After Working There 60 Years www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/b...

I've got a "Democracy Dies in Darkness" t-shirt and a Washington Post mug with a "#freepress" hashtag printed on it from my time working there. Both have faded to the point of being basically unreadable over time, just astronomical levels of prescience emanating from them.

Former executive editor @postbaron.bsky.social says the Post is "a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction." www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

The auteur lens of the creator economy too-often makes invisible the infrastructure necessary to do most work well. That is exponentially more true for work like journalism & scholarship that needs institutional memory, costly databases, EDITORS, fact-checking, & when really vital/risky, LAWYERS.

WaPo laid off: -- A journalist covering protest movements and extremism -- A Pulitzer-winning local enterprise reporter -- the race and ethnicity beat reporter -- ... the Amazon beat reporter In addition to so many others

Furious for the friends and journalists I admire still working at WaPo, this is such a sad and extremely avoidable situation

Anyway here's something I wrote a couple years ago on how Huberman plays the role of an illusionist in the MAHA landscape www.vox.com/technology/2...

"Believe your eyes" - great piece from @cwarzel.bsky.social @theatlantic.com on people risking their lives to document ICE. Includes an interview with @startribune.com photographer Richard Tsong-Taatarii. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

I guess one good thing to say about being online this week is that we learned that the war guy also has terrible form on kettlebell swings

Armed ICE agents trapped US citizens in a restaurant and demanded their papers. Federal agents walked into East African restaurants in Cedar-Riverside, MN. They closed and blocked the doors. Then they demanded to see everyone’s papers. Every person present was a US citizen.

“It’s a story about volume, value, and what journalism becomes when “content” grows functionally infinite.” - @davey.bsky.social www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/in-2...

New from me: The internet promised the democratization of information, power, and expression. Now there are vanishingly few ways to be online that don't involve being a billboard. I wrote about the weird — and sometimes devastating — experience of being *influenced* www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

people, you have the chance to put my book ahead of Olivia Nuzzi’s on the bestseller list. put aside all other considerations and think how objectively funny this would be. #1, that Mountain Goats guy. #2, Antivax Man Has My Heart. funniest list of the century. We can do this if we try

SCOOP from me + @makenakelly.bsky.social: despite recent reports, DOGE isn’t dead—it’s actually everywhere. @wired.com www.wired.com/story/what-i...

I really wanna know nuzzi's salary at vanity fair esp given recent layoffs maybe the NYT could have tracked down info like that instead of taking beach pics i dunno

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

Six of the nine Nobel Prize winners this year work in the U.S. Three of the six were born outside the U.S., which is the pattern most years. No country has benefited more from welcoming immigrants from around the world. www.nobelprize.org

if the state of journalism and its capture by the right wing also has you in despair, a real, tangible thing you can do to push back is support/subscribe to worker-owned indie news media!! @coyotemedia.org (bay area) @51st.news (dc) @racketmn.com (mn) @autonomynews.co @505omatic.bsky.social (nm)

“The injections Suza needed had traveled thousands of miles to the Central African nation, USAID and other records show, only to be stranded in a regional distribution warehouse in the same city where she was gasping for air.” wapo.st/489jGvd

New: ICE has bought a tool that tracks the locations of hundreds of millions of phones globally, updates every single day. Usually harvested from apps and advertising www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

Response from @karenattiah.bsky.social counsel, @normeisen.bsky.social et al, at @democracydefendersfund.org: "She did precisely the job you hired her to do as an opinion writer ... She spoke truthfully and forcefully about ... difficult truths at a challenging time"

YouTube removed a channel that was dedicated to posting AI-generated videos of women being shot in the head following 404 Media’s request for comment. The videos were clearly generated with Google’s new AI video generator tool. 🔗 www.404media.co/ai-generated...

If someone goes from a media outlet to a government agency and then implements a policy attempting to prevent the media from reporting on the agency, what does that tell you about their media outlet?

If you use Facebook and are seeing surprising recommendations in your suggested groups when they come up in the News Feed, could you do me a favor and 1) screenshot them 2) click through to see if those groups show up on your full list of suggested groups and 3) DM me? I'm curious about something.

it feels so good to write again, to play games again, after the worst year of my life. i picked a ridiculous game (that i love!) to relearn controller skills with, but taking my time makes it possible aftermath.site/silksong-hol...

Freelance illustration gigs drying up. Ad agencies using Midjourney instead of hiring human artists. Costume design turned over to AI wholesale. Good work vanishing. These are the stories of working visual artists, who describe losing jobs, wages, and hope as their clients and bosses embrace AI.

This is a book everyone should read, ASAP.

internet culture desks aren't just for cute meme trend stories. ever since gamergate, understanding how and why info moves online is critical to seeing how we got *here*

I wrote about Charlie Kirk and the viral content machine that sprang to life in the wake of his shooting — and how this time, even people running the country are partaking in the churn. www.theverge.com/analysis/776...

Most of the people whose thoughts I want to hear about this right now have either left the beat or quit journalism

“Vulnerable people turning to AI chatbots instead of professional therapists for mental health support could be ‘sliding into a dangerous abyss’, psychotherapists have warned.”

Here in Baltimore this morning, where clergy and activists have gathered in support of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is set to check in with ICE this morning. Heavy faith presence in addition to, just, a lot of people for 6:45am. Kilmar himself is about to speak.

Citizen Is Using AI to Generate Crime Alerts With No Human Review. It’s Making a Lot of Mistakes 🔗 www.404media.co/citizen-is-u...

This is the inside story of how Tea's male founder convinced millions of women to share their most intimate secrets on his app, then exposed those secrets in devastating security breaches www.404media.co/how-teas-fou...

Going on vacation tomorrow so spent Saturday night making maps of all the places in Ohio, West Virginia and South Carolina with higher violent crime and murder rates than D.C. Perhaps better places for those governors to focus resources! www.pbump.net/o/more-peopl...

SCOOP from me: FEMA is planning to order states to immediately stop activities intended to combat domestic violent extremism - the latest in a broad federal move to downplay the threat:

This is propaganda that uses the image and voice of someone who is unable to consent, seems like a basic thing journalists shouldn't do, but what do i know man

I guess none of the 4 bylines on the NYT story about Brown's deal with the Trump admin thought that its exclusion of trans women from all women's housing, facilities, programs and activities was worth more than a single reference to requirements to comply on "matters like transgender athletes"

After a five-day halt due to a lack of supplies, our team at WCK’s Deir al-Balah Field Kitchen has resumed limited hot meal service in Gaza. #ChefsForGaza (1/3)

I don't miss the 2015 media environment generally but I do kind of wish I could effortlessly fire up a 1000-word story on the person who filmed themselves placing a labubu on the grave of Karl Marx

Google's AI summaries are - killing traffic to legitimate sites - producing summaries that can be wrong - in the long run probably making you a dumbass www.404media.co/googles-ai-i...