404 Media

2025-09-16 16:25:27

DOJ Deletes Study Showing Domestic Terrorists Are Most Often Right Wing

The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States.

The study, which was conducted by the National Institute of Justice and hosted on a DOJ website was available there at least until September 12, 2025, according to an archive of the page saved by the Wayback Machine.

“The Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs is currently reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance,” reads a message on the page where the study was formerly hosted. “During this review, some pages and publications will be unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

Shortly after Donald Trump took office he issued an executive order that forced government agencies to scrub their sites of any mention of “diversity,” “gender,” “DEI,” and other “forbidden words” and perceived notions of “wokeness.” The executive order impacted every government agency, including NASA, and was a huge waste of engineers’ time.

We don’t know why the study about far-right extremist violence was removed recently, but it comes immediately after the assassination of conservative personality Charlie Kirk, accusations from the administration that the left is responsible for most of the political violence in the country, and a renewed commitment from the administration to crack down on the “radical left.”

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said in a speech after Kirk’s death. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”

Elon Musk, who owns X, recently tweeted that he was going to “fix” the platform’s AI assistant Grok after it cited research that showed right-wing violence was more common than left-wing violence: “My apologies, we are fixing this cringe idiocy by Grok,” he said.

Vice President JD Vance, who guest hosted Kirk’s podcast on Monday, also vowed to go after “growing and powerful minority on the far left.”

“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives,” the study said. “In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”

The DOJ did not immediately respond to our request for comment. Steven Chermak, one of the study’s co-authors, declined to comment.

'The Bigotry Is Astounding:' Engineers Waste Time and Money Scanning .Gov Sites for 'Transgender' and Other Terms

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is wasting workers’ time and taxpayer dollars.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-16 16:10:43

Michigan Lawmakers Are Attempting to Ban Porn Entirely

A bill introduced by Michigan lawmakers last week would ban pornography, ASMR, depictions of transgender people, and VPNs for anyone using the internet in the state.

House Bill 4938, called the “Anticorruption of Public Morals Act,” would prohibit distribution of “certain material on the internet that corrupts the public morals,” the bill states. It was introduced on September 11 by five Republican representatives: Josh Schriver, Joseph Pavlov, Matthew Maddock, James DeSana, and Jennifer Wortz.

The bill would forbid all “pornographic material,” which the lawmakers define as “content, digital, streamed, or otherwise distributed on the internet, the primary purpose of which is to sexually arouse or gratify, including videos, erotica, magazines, stories, manga, material generated by artificial intelligence, live feeds, or sound clips.”

The bill’s authors list out the specific things they consider pornographic material, including:

• Vaginal or anal intercourse
• Fellatio or cunnilingus
• Masturbation
• Ejaculation or orgasm
• Penetration with sexual devices
• Group sex
• Bondage, domination, or sadomasochism.
• Acts involving bodily fluids for sexual arousal.
• Erotic autonomous sensory meridian response content, moaning, or sensual voice content [ASMR]
• Animated, virtual, or sexual activity generated by artificial intelligence
• Depictions of characters acting or resembling minors in sexual contexts.
• Any other pornographic material

The lawmakers also define any depiction or description of trans people as pornographic, and therefore, banned on platforms operating in the state, including anything “that includes a disconnection between biology and gender by individual of 1 biological sex imitating, depicting, or representing himself or herself to be of the other biological sex by means of attire, cosmetology, or prosthetics, or as having a reproductive nature contrary to the individual's biological sex.”

Platform operators that “knowingly distribute” any of the above content to anyone accessing it from Michigan would be guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment up to 20 years or a fine of up to $100,000, or both. If the platform hosts more than “100 pieces” of the above, that escalates to 25 years and $125,000. On top of being a felony, hosting that content would open platforms and internet service providers up to civil fines of up to $500,000 for “each violation.”

Sites would be required to change their terms of service to prohibit the above material, and implement moderation tools that use AI and human mods to find and remove pornographic content.

The bill would require internet service providers servicing Michigan to implement "mandatory filtering technology” and “actively monitor and block known circumvention tools,” which would include VPNs—the most popular workaround for people in states with age verification laws in place. It also would ban the promotion or sale of VPNs in Michigan.

The Egg Yolk Principle: Human Sexuality Will Always Outsmart Prudish Algorithms and Hateful Politicians
Anti-porn laws can’t stop porn, but they can stop free speech. In the meantime, people will continue to get off to anything and everything.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

As Michigan local news outlet Fox 2 noted yesterday, Schriver has been talking about wanting to ban porn entirely in the state for a long time. Earlier this year, he said "shutting down the porn industry would be a crushing blow to the human trafficking industry." Porn is legal and constitutionally protected by the First Amendment in the US, but many lawmakers in this country have been pushing to change that for years. It’s also basically impossible to pin down what content will “sexually arouse or gratify” every person who uses the internet; people are getting off to a billion different kinds of content that doesn’t even include bodily fluids or genitals.

Nearly 30 states have passed and enacted laws that require all visitors to porn sites, including adults, to verify their ages with a government ID or face scan to access porn. In some states, such as Wyoming and South Dakota, those laws extend to mainstream, non-porn platforms like Bluesky. Michigan lawmakers have introduced two age verification bills: one for device-based age verification and one that mimics the many laws that have passed in states across the country. Existing age verification laws—which are uniformly invasive of people’ privacy and ineffective at actually stopping children from viewing harmful content—typically have bipartisan support, but Michigan’s Democratic senate and its governor Gretchen Whitmer will ultimately decide whether the much more extreme, Republican-backed “Anticorruption of Public Morals Act” will become law.

Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet

Invasive and ineffective age verification laws that require users show government-issued ID, like a driver's license or passport, are passing like wildfire across the U.S.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-16 15:15:40

ChatGPT Will Guess Your Age and Might Require ID for Age Verification

OpenAI has announced it is introducing new safety measures for ChatGPT after the a wave of stories and lawsuits accusing ChatGPT and other chatbots of playing a role in a number of teen suicide cases. ChatGPT will now attempt to guess a user’s age, and in some cases might require users to share an ID in order to verify that they are at least 18 years old.

“We know this is a privacy compromise for adults but believe it is a worthy tradeoff,” the company said in its announcement.

“I don't expect that everyone will agree with these tradeoffs, but given the conflict it is important to explain our decisionmaking,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X.

In August, OpenAI was sued by the parents of Adam Raine, who died by suicide in April. The lawsuit alleges that alleges that the ChatGPT helped him write the first draft of his suicide note, suggested improvements on his methods, ignored early attempts and self-harm, and urged him not to talk to adults about what he was going through.

“Where a trusted human may have responded with concern and encouraged him to get professional help, ChatGPT pulled Adam deeper into a dark and hopeless place by assuring him that ‘many people who struggle with anxiety or intrusive thoughts find solace in imagining an ‘escape hatch’ because it can feel like a way to regain control.’”

In August the Wall Street Journal also reported a story about a 56-year-old man who committed a murder-suicide after ChatGPT indulgedhis paranoia. Today, the Washington Postreported another story about another lawsuit alleging that a Character AI chatbot contributed to a 13-year-old girl’s death by suicide.

OpenAI introduced parental controls to ChatGPT earlier in September, but has now introduced new, more strict and invasive security measures.

In addition to attempting to guess or verify a user’s age, ChatGPT will now also apply different rules to teens who are using the chatbot.

“For example, ChatGPT will be trained not to do the above-mentioned flirtatious talk if asked, or engage in discussions about suicide of self-harm even in a creative writing setting,” the announcement said. “And, if an under-18 user is having suicidal ideation, we will attempt to contact the users’ parents and if unable, will contact the authorities in case of imminent harm.”

OpenAI’s post explains that it is struggling to manage an inherent problem with large language models that 404 Media has tracked for several years. ChatGPT used to be a far more restricted chatbot that would refuse to engage users on a wide variety of issues the company deemed dangerous or inappropriate. Competition from other models, especially locally hosted and so-called “uncensored” models, and a political shift to the right which sees many forms of content moderation as censorship, has caused OpenAI to loosen those restrictions.

“We want users to be able to use our tools in the way that they want, within very broad bounds of safety,” Open AI said in its announcement. The position it seemed to have landed on given these recent stories about teen suicide, is that it wants to “‘Treat our adult users like adults’ is how we talk about this internally, extending freedom as far as possible without causing harm or undermining anyone else’s freedom.

OpenAI is not the first company that’s attempting to use machine learning to predict the age of its users. In July, YouTube announced it will use a similar method to “protect” teens from certain types of content on its platform.

Extending our built-in protections to more teens on YouTube

We're extending our existing built-in protections to more US teens on YouTube, using machine learning age estimation.

^{James Beser (YouTube Official Blog)}

404 Media

2025-09-16 13:32:20

$2,000 Shipping: International Sellers Charge Absurd Prices to Avoid Dealing With American Tariffs

Some international sellers on large platforms like eBay and Etsy have jacked up their shipping costs to the United States to absurd prices in order to deter Americans from buying their products in an effort to avoid dealing with the logistical headaches of Trump's tariffs.

A Japanese eBay seller increased the shipping cost on a $319 Olympus camera lens to $2,000 for U.S. buyers, for example. The shipping price from Japan to the United Kingdom, Italy, Ireland, Costa Rica, Canada, and other countries I checked is $29, meanwhile. The seller, Ninjacamera.Japan, recently updated their shipping prices to the United States to all be $2,000 for dozens of products that don't weigh very much and whose prices are mostly less than $800. That price used to be the threshold for the de minimis tariff exemption, a rule that previously allowed people to buy things without paying tariffs on lower-priced goods. As many hobbyists have recently discovered, the end of de minimis has made things more expensive and harder to come by.

eBay does allow sellers to opt out of selling to the United States entirely, but some sellers have found it easier to modify existing listings to have absurd shipping prices for the United States only rather than deal with taking entire listings down and delisting them to restrict American buyers entirely.

I found numerous listings from a handful of different sellers who, rather than say they won't ship to the United States, have simply jacked up their shipping costs to absurd levels for the United States only. There are $575 cameras that the seller is now charging $500 to ship to the United States but will mail for free anywhere else in the world. Another Japanese seller is charging $640 to mail to the United States but will ship for free to other countries. A seller in Kazakhstan is charging $35 to mail a camera internationally but $999 to send to the United States. A German yarn seller is charging $10.50 to ship to Canada, but $500 to ship to the United States. On Reddit, users are reporting the same phenomenon occurring with some sellers on Etsy as well (it is harder to search Etsy by shipping prices, so I couldn’t find too many examples of this).

What is happening here, of course, is that some sellers in other countries don't want to have to deal with Trump's tariffs and the complicated logistics they have created for both buyers and sellers. Many international shipping companies have entirely stopped shipping to the United States, and many international sellers don't want to have to deal with the hassle of changing whatever shipping service they normally use to accommodate American buyers. eBay has also warned sellers that they may get negative feedback from American buyers who do not understand how tariffs work. eBay's feedback system is very important, and just a few negative reviews can impact a seller's standing on the platform and make it less likely that buyers will purchase something from them.

None of this is terribly surprising, but as an American, it feels actually more painful to see a listing for a product I might want that costs $2,000 for shipping rather than have the listings be invisible to me altogether.

[Mint+] OLYMPUS M.ZUIKO DIGITAL 60mm f/2.8 Macro ED MSC AF Lens From Japan | eBay

Lens ABQA11389. Lens condition. Mark in the lens. 93-94% Mint Minimal sings of use, Still very clean. 97-98% Mint++ Never used, but pre-owned. 95-96% Mint+ Almost no signs of use. 80-85% For Parts As-is.

^eBay