Facebook's algorithm is recommending the bizarre, AI-generated images (like "Shrimp Jesus") that are repeatedly going viral. Pages doing this are linking out to AI-generated and otherwise low-effort spam pages that are stacked with ads:

404media.co/facebooks-algo… There is a new preprint paper out on this phenomenon by @noUpside from the Stanford Internet Observatory that adds more context to this article and the thread I'm about to do: cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/ai-spa…

I went deep into the world of TikTok spammers who claim to makes 5 figures a month posting stolen and AI-generated clips through its partner program. This community is absolutely nuts

404media.co/inside-the-wor… There are 80,000 people sitting in a Discord talking about how to turn Reddit posts, fun facts, redpill clips, Would You Rather, Minecraft gameplay into $$$. Entire industry has popped up around it. People selling clips, tools, US-based TikTok accounts, GPT prompts, ideas

Google News is indexing and promoting websites that immediately rip off others with AI clones of their articles. These websites are absolutely littered with Google ads. Our website, in which real humans do journalism, is not indexed by Google News

404media.co/google-news-is… Google's stated position on this is that it doesn't mind AI-gen content: “Our focus when ranking content is on the quality of the content, rather than how it was produced. Automatically-generated content produced primarily for ranking purposes is considered spam..."

Last week, Garth Brooks released a new album exclusively as part of a 7-CD set at Bass Pro Shops. It has still not been pirated, the lyrics are not on lyrics websites, there is exactly one professional review of the album

404media.co/has-anyone-on-…
The CD currently has six ratings on Bass Pro Shops' website. I found four tweets from people who said they have the album. No posts on popular Garth FB page. The hosts of "Garthology" podcast reveal halfway through their episode about it that they had not been able to listen

white supremacists are hijacking city council meetings all over the US

404media.co/white-supremac…
Local news has been picking this up when it happens and has been doing a good job. But they rarely talk about what these hijackings mean for other citizens, who want to talk about real problems, or are at least doing so in good faith.

Note: This is a tough listen--

Flew to Vegas Saturday to gamble in MGM's hacked casinos / America's interactive ransomware museum.

Evidence of the hack is everywhere. Roughly a third of all slot machines seem to be broken, sports book kiosks are down ...

404media.co/inside-mgms-ha… workers are still writing records of every transaction down with pen and paper.

Food court employees are physically walking to the single working register to take orders for eight different restaurants.

People are waiting 45 minutes to cash out from slot machines

NEW: Instagram is full of ads for drugs, guns, stolen credit cards, counterfeit cash etc

A window into a blatantly illegal economy of drug dealers, hackers, and scammers that Meta is not only failing to moderate, but actively profiting from:

404media.co/instagram-ads-… The ads link to Telegram, which is where a lot of internet drug trade/crime trade has moved. So, tapping through friends' stories about vacation and you suddenly see an ad for a bunch of stolen credit cards. One tap and you're in the place to buy it

Underappreciated aspect of Twitter exodus is this:

Elon just bought every employee's equity at inflated price of $54/share. He then asked if they want to work "extremely hardcore" or take their large pile of cash + 3 months of pay and leave the shitshow

vice.com/en/article/v7v… Like most tech companies, huge part of comp package is equity ... Elon just bought that equity. Most employees are probably sitting on more cash right now than they've ever had in their entire lives and are being asked to choose between disaster ego boss and enjoying their money

Here is ticket allocation chart for a 2009 Taylor Swift show in Nashville. This information is made public extremely rarely. In this case, 11,720 of the 13,330 tickets were sold during presales or otherwise held. Only 15% made available during public sale

vice.com/en/article/88q… Presales are *supposed* to help fans, in theory. They give fans more chances to buy tickets if they're busy during the public sale. They also give scalpers more chances to buy tickets. Scalpers buy tickets during *every* presale.

We've obtained the chats Facebook gave to police in Nebraska to help them prosecute a 17-year-old and her mother for the crime of "abortion," as well as the search warrants and court records used to obtain her chats

vice.com/en/article/n7z… ancillary, but obtaining "public" court documents went like this:
- Pay $100 to the government of Nebraska for an "annual subscription" to "Nebraska.gov"
- Fill out a printed form agreeing to terms and conditions
- You sign and send in form
- Wait 2 days for approval

WHERE ARE THE SPACE PICTURES it's unfathomable to me how you fuck up "we're going to show you one (1) picture of space"

SCOOP: Uvalde and Uvalde Police have hired a private law firm to fight against being required to release body camera footage and other records related to school shooting

Files could be 'highly embarrassing,' involve 'emotional/mental distress,' it argues

vice.com/en/article/88q… Uvalde says it has received 148 public records requests from the shooting. Letter to Texas Attorney General seems to seek to suppress records relating to all/most/many of them

NEW: Internal docs show Amazon's system for tracking every minute of workers' shifts for "unproductive time." In an example a worker is docked for "talking," walking to another floor of the warehouse, interrogated by their manager about bathroom use

vice.com/en/article/5dg… Hard to express how dystopian this is. Product scanners detect inactivity, which is added to a piece of software. 30 minutes of "time off task" = written warning. Managers are then required to interrogate the "top offender" on their team per shift ...

NEW: Investigation documents we obtained about the police killing of Portland Antifa shooter Michael Reinoehl show an extremely chaotic scene; indiscriminate firing, a narrative full of holes, and an operation where police were primed to expect violence

vice.com/en/article/xgd… Also shows: A possible evidence tampering investigation, no real evidence Reinoehl ever shot his gun or even got it out of his pants, a kid hit by debris or shrapnel

It would mean a lot to me and everyone @motherboard if you signed up for our email newsletter, which we recently revamped to be a behind-the-scenes look at how we report our stories. We're really trying very hard to grow this so please subscribe and share

link1.vice.com/join/6qz/signu… feel free to print out our flyer and plaster it everywhere:

The CDC spent $420k to track millions of phones to/from churches, restaurants, K-12 schools to see if Americans were complying with lockdown orders. Wanted to track phones for other purposes

vice.com/en/article/m7v… March-May 2020 was a scary time, there have been scary times since, but the widespread use of cell phone location data under COVID-19 emergency authority was never a good idea. We've repeatedly seen COVID used to buy drones and other surveillance tech

Conservatives going to be disappointed to learn that Twitter's rules don't exist to punish them, they exist because of the invisible hand of the free market they love so much. Brands don't want to be next to hate speech, violence, threats, etc

vice.com/en/article/g5q… Unless Musk wants to run Twitter exclusively as a charity for society's worst people (which he has no intention of doing), Twitter is not going to be able to get rid of its (already lax) rules or significantly roll back its (already terrible) enforcement without advertiser exodus

NEW: Autonomous drones are flying above farmers markets, street fairs, monitoring unhoused people and mental health episodes all over the country. This started more or less as a pilot project in Chula Vista, California. We have thousands of docs that show

vice.com/en/article/93b… That a couple small police departments have become superfans of Skydio, an autonomous "made in the USA" drone manufacturer that works with law enforcement, the Pentagon, and private industry. Here's how Skydio went from a couple police departments to hundreds:

NEW: Google is going to sell Pixel repair parts to consumers through iFixit. Crucially, the program includes OEM batteries: vice.com/en/article/93b… So in the last ~4 months we have

- Microsoft
- Apple
- Samsung
- Google

all changing their stances on right-to-repair, all announcing they will sell specific parts direct to consumers. This is after years of saying doing this would be "dangerous" and lead to widespread hacking

NEW: NLRB wants to ban captive audience meetings, Amazon's (and other companies') favorite union busting technique, in which workers are forced to listen to anti-union propaganda during work hours

vice.com/en/article/7kb… Here are examples of the types of things said at captive audience meetings: You will lose your job if you unionize

The contractor “could say we’re not going to do Google Fiber anymore”

vice.com/en/article/pkp…

Cool arc: Much-hyped crypto game Axie Infinity creates a bunch of wealth from thin air for early adopters

Early adopters "loan" their Axies to people in the Global South, paying them a tiny pittance to grind for them and funnel the money up

vice.com/en/article/88g… - These "Managers" basically recreate traditional workplace structures. People in developing world work for rich westerners under specific rules, regulations, and work contracts. They are creating virtual monsters, nothing of actual value