A secretive surveillance company is building "AI persona" bots for cops intended to gather evidence on people. Personas include "college protesters," "radicalized" divorced moms, children. We have docs that shows how it works and what cops can do with it:

404media.co/this-college-p… Example AI honeypot accounts include "Heidi," who the company, called Massive Blue, describes as a "radicalized" "protest persona" who is a divorced woman from Texas who likes baking, body positivity, protesting, and is active on 4chan and Telegram

An Elon Musk-funded PAC is microtargeting Muslim people in Michigan and Jewish people in Pennsylvania with opposite messaging about Kamala Harris using ZIP code targeting, according to data I pulled from Snapchat. Few things from this investigation:

404media.co/this-is-exactl… They are targeting areas of Michigan that have many Muslim voters with ads saying Kamala stands with Israel. I mapped the targeting and it is very specific. They are targeting an area outside of Flint that has a major mosque (but no other parts of Flint)

After months of digging and reporting, I have learned where Facebook's bizarre AI spam (like "Shrimp Jesus") comes from, who is making it, how it works, and how it is monetized.

Turns out Meta is directly paying people to spam FB with this stuff

404media.co/where-facebook… Here's what I learned:

- Facebook is paying for virality directly via its "Creator Program Bonus"
- Influencers in India, Philippines, Vietnam have picked up on this and are making YouTube courses / Telegram classes
- Images made with Bing AI Image Creator

SCOOP from @samleecole: Leaked Slacks and documents show the incredible scale of NVidia's AI scraping: 80 years — "a human lifetime" of videos every day. Had approval from highest levels of company despite staff legal/ethical concerns:

404media.co/nvidia-ai-scra… “We need a volunteer to download all the movies,” one senior NVidia employee said. “We have to be very careful about Hollywood hypersensitivities against AI.”

Approval to download at scale framed as "an executive decision. We have an umbrella approval for all of the data."

A blistering Goldman Sachs research report wonders if the massive investment in Generative AI will ever pay off, says stock gains are already baked in "outside of the most bullish AI scenario," and posits that Gen AI is likely a bubble:

404media.co/goldman-sachs-… This one of Goldman Sachs' top analysts: "This is not a matter of just some tweaks being required here and there; despite its expensive price tag, the technology is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to be useful for even such basic tasks."

Ticket scalpers have reverse-engineered how Ticketmaster generates the revolving barcodes for its tickets. They are now able to generate authentic tickets on their own infrastructure, which removes resale restrictions and lets them sell

404media.co/scalpers-are-w… This solves a mystery lots of fans who bought on secondary market had, for why they were being asked to open their tickets on "" or "" or some other non-Ticketmaster website. secure-tickets.com
amosa.app

New: I've been reading the Gateway Pundit's bankruptcy documents. The election workers suing the company for defamation say the company is not actually bankrupt and is using bankruptcy as a 'delay tactic'

404media.co/gateway-pundit… Gateway Pundit's own filings show that it has $2.3 million of assets against $102k of debt. GP has only one employee (Jim Hoft). One of its largest debts is owed to Hoft's husband. Company just loaned Hoft $800k

Scoop: I obtained the contract Samsung requires independent shops to sign to buy phone repair parts from them.

It requires:

- "Daily" dumps of customer data
- The "immediate destruction" of any phones a shop comes across that has third-party parts

404media.co/samsung-requir… The contract shows that "independent" repair through this program isn't independent at all. And if you're a customer, you think you're going to an independent shop but that shop is required to share your information directly with Samsung

Students at Emory University built an AI study tool. They pitched it to the university at an entrepreneurship competition. They won "grand prize" and $10,000 to build the tool. They built the tool. The school's Honor Council suspends them for cheating

404media.co/university-sus…
- The students built *exactly* what they said they were going to build
- Professors congratulated the students, recommended the tool into their classes, introduced them to VCs
- The business school wrote an article about them & promoted on LinkedIn

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