404 Media

2026-09-03 15:49:18

Flock Taught Cops How to Surveil No Kings Protesters

Flock taught cops how they could surveil the No Kings protests and “small parades” using a mix of Flock’s technology and law enforcement’s own databases in a webinar last year. As Flock publicly downplays the power of its automated license plate camera network and highlights its use to solve violent crime, the company’s seemingly endless trove of webinars, training sessions, and blog posts show it offers far more invasive capabilities.

In the webinar, Flock’s director of market management Caity Peak explains how real time crime centers — which are police surveillance centers that utilize Flock cameras and other surveillance cameras — can be used for emergency response, but can also be used to surveil “established events” like 4th of July fireworks displays, parades, bike races, Mardi Gras, and protests. The webinar shows just how routine the idea of always-on surveillance has become, and how casually it is used during extremely innocuous events.

Peak explains that police can use FlockOS, a software platform that combines Flock’s automatic license plate readers (ALPR), drones, gunshot detectors, 911 data, and other surveillance cameras (including ones Flock does not own) into a “single pane of glass” or single piece of software to look at various types of surveillance in one place during both emergencies and relatively mundane events in a city or town.

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“Imagine that you’re an incident commander, and you’re working this No Kings Protest,” Peak explains while a dashboard shows a series of surveillance tools overlaying the city of Denver. “If I’m somebody assigned a traffic post that’s working this No Kings Protest, I really don’t have time to go in […] and look at all these places [for different intelligence]. This is an example of viewing all of that in one place. I’m an officer, I can see the response plan that’s included, I can pull that up if I need it, but I can also see live video footage as that protest moves throughout the park.”

Peak says the surveillance footage can be used to monitor the protests without having cops physically on the ground “making it worse, getting attention.”

“I’ve got the video footage to monitor when things go sideways, I know when the environment is starting to shift. But I also know a lot of other things as well. I can see traffic flow, so as people are blocking the roadway, maybe that’s OK for a while, but if I see that traffic has been stopped a while, I may need to send officers to that area because I know that road rage is imminent,” she continues. The dashboard Peak shows includes traffic information, a “response plan” for the protest, the floor plans of nearby buildings, as well as a series of video feeds of both outdoor-mounted cameras and cameras inside businesses and government buildings.

404 Media and the Electronic Frontier Foundation previously showed that police have specifically used Flock cameras to monitor the No Kings protests and other First Amendment-protected activity. 404 Media found California cops used Flock to monitor an “immigration protest.” The EFF found that the following law enforcement agencies ran Flock searches related to No Kings protests and rallies:

This webinar shows this type of surveillance is not anomalous, and is specifically taught by Flock. The webinar also shows that Flock’s latest public stance — that its ALPR cameras are noninvasive technology, that they take only static images at a single place and time, and that they are primarily used to solve the worst crimes — is wildly misleading. Flock has time and time again pitched itself to police as a sort of operating system to solve crime and do real-time surveillance and predictive policing. ALPRs are just one part of this broader surveillance apparatus that Flock has created, markets to police, and teaches them how to use. These real time crime centers are proving increasingly popular with police; Flock now says on its website that more than 4,800 cities around the country are running FlockOS software.

Matt Patin, a former New Orleans Police Department officer and current Flock employee, explains in the webinar that the dashboard can show ALPR data, body camera footage, and other data to “give me a full situational awareness of what’s going on.” Peak explains that, back when she was a cop, she used to hope that people would plan events near intersections that had ALPR cameras. “We’d have to pick which intersection is going to make sense [for an ALPR camera], where do we see the most traffic, where do we see the most events, and then I hoped that if an event happened in front of a camera, it’s one that’s in an intersection where I chose to put [the ALPR] and not one where I chose not to put an ALPR,” she says, adding that she would try to think which types of cameras and drones to use to police a specific event. “I want to make sure I have as many tools to make myself dangerous if and when I need it,” she adds.

Peak goes on to give another example, in which police would surveil a car sideshow near Sacramento using a mix of drones, surveillance cameras, ALPRs, and monitoring of social media posts. “We knew it was likely to turn into nefarious activity based on who was promoting the car show,” she says. A list of “THINGS TO LOOK FOR” include “mismatched front and rear wheels, stickers representing car clubs, and covered up license plates with car club logos.” Peak then demos Flock’s free-form search, which is “AI-powered video search and alerts.”

“Let’s take Flock’s free-form feature and say ‘hey, any time you see a car tonight with multi-colored wheels passing by any one of these five LPR cameras, I want you to send us an alert,’” she says. She then explains how Flock Nova, the company’s deeper investigative tool, can be used to marry LPR information with “all of your agency data,” which in this example includes “person data, IP data, email data, sex offender data, license plate data, vehicle data, and OSINT [open source intelligence].” A screenshot of the Flock system shows a “street racing suspect” complete with the man’s name, address, email, social media accounts, phone number, and various affiliations.

“It works like a Google Search,” she says, imagining a scenario in which cops pull someone over then use Nova. “I run him through Nova. I can query CAD [computer aided dispatch], RMS [records management system], OSINT, jail records. All these things we have integrated to see that we have contacted him before for sideshows, he has been contacted for spinning cars in an intersection in the last 90 days, he is related to this car club, and now with that information, I have the justification I need to actually tow the car for 90 days instead of just issuing a citation.”

Later in the webinar, police from New Orleans and Flock representatives spoke about how its system was used by police in the aftermath of the Bourbon Street terror attack that killed 14 people on Jan. 1, 2025 and during the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras that year. The webinar highlights how this tech is used after a crime, and how the data often filters across agencies. Ross Bourgeois, who runs New Orleans' real time crime center, says that the city used a "tremendous amount of cameras in a very short time" to recreate the terrorist's movements.

“We were able to use our network of cameras and license plate readers to map out what he did when he entered the city a day or two before the event, up until he executed the event and engaged the police and our shooting situation at the conclusion of it,” Flock's Patin said, adding that footage running through FlockOS were eventually shared with the Department of Homeland Security, federal fusion centers, and the FBI. “7 terabytes of information, which was a lot of data, and we were able to share that with our fusion center and our federal partners. Homeland Security, HSI [Homeland Security Investigations, a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and FBI.”

California Cops Investigate ‘Immigration Protest’ With AI-Camera System

New data obtained by 404 Media also shows California cops are illegally sharing Flock automatic license plate reader (ALPR) data with other agencies out of state, who in turn are performing searches for ICE.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-09-02 18:43:42

How the Hell Did an Island Suddenly Appear, Then Vanish?

An island that appeared to suddenly materialize, then vanish, on Williston Lake in British Columbia over the summer was rediscovered on the massive reservoir on Monday.

Once you’ve taken that all in, let’s ask the important question: How the heck did that happen?

The existence of the disappearing island—a floating mass of trees and vegetation that measures about 230 feet by 460 feet—sparked international attention last month after Rocky Avery, a local resident, posted a viral video of it that was sent to him by one of his boater friends, according to CBC News.

Bob Gammer, a spokesperson for BC Hydro, was initially suspicious that the video might be AI, but confirmed it was authentic after spotting the island drifting about 60 miles west of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam in satellite images taken on July 21. In satellite images from August 5th and circulated last week, it was no longer visible, sparking a search over the past few days that led to its rediscovery about 20 miles northwest of where it had previously been spotted.

“We had some earlier satellite imagery that confirmed that this wasn't just a hoax or some kind of AI thing, and that it really was real,” Gammer told 404 Media in a call. “Since then we've had more photos from people on their boats on the water sailing right up to this island, and additional satellite imagery that puts it all together to say that this is a real thing. It’s a sizable island.”
Satellite images provided by BC Hydro to CBC. Image: BC Hydro
As it turns out, this isn’t a new phenomenon—though Gammer said it hasn’t been reported on Williston Lake before. Floating islands form on shorelines over many years, as natural rafts made of driftwood can allow plants and trees to grow above the water. These platforms can then detach in certain conditions, such as stormy weather or flooded shores, allowing them to meander into the water.

Williston Lake is a reservoir created by the massive W.A.C. Bennett Dam, which stands more than 600 feet high. Due to high snowpack and precipitation, the dam was opened in June and July, filling the reservoir for the first time in 14 years, according to Gammer. These high water levels, in addition to strong winds, likely dislodged the island, allowing it to float freely in the water.
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“This is all brand new to us,” Gammer said. “We've never seen anything like this on the reservoir.”

BC Hydro is urging boaters to keep their distance and not to step on the island. Despite its size, the forested mass is structurally flimsy and hazardous to walk on. Other than birds, no animals have been spotted on the island. However, animals have accidentally been swept away on these natural rafts; indeed, many species have crossed oceans and reached new continents this way.

The island doesn’t pose any risk to the dam or vessels, and its journey around the lake is now being monitored by BC Hydro through satellite images and eyewitness reports. This waterborne woodland may disintegrate over time, or become reattached to the shoreline. If it survives until winter, it could be frozen into the ice and perhaps thaw out again in spring.

“It's a break from everyday reality, and so it's really captured a lot of attention,” Gammer said. “There's a lot of media interest, and it's been great to be able to tell the story. And who knows how long this will last? I mean, in terms of its news value, I'm sure it'll disappear within a few days. But the island will be there for a while. We'll be monitoring it, and if there's anything exciting about it, we may be able to tell that story too.”

Oceanic dispersal - Wikipedia

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

404 Media

2026-09-02 16:04:27

A16z Says You Actually Love Social Media, Enshittification Isn’t Real

Yesterday a16z published an article in which NYU Professor of Design, AI and Media Theory Ruby Thelot argued that “enshittification,” or the concept that technology platforms get worse after they lock in users, isn’t real. In reality, Thelot says, people use social media more than ever and report that they are satisfied with it.

Thelot argues that, enshittification, a term coined by Cory Doctrow which has become one of the stickiest ideas of our era to explain the current state of technology and capitalism, is a misdiagnosis of what he describes as “platform narcissism.” The idea is that people, namely older people like Doctrow and western geratric millennials who used to get a lot of value out of Facebook, selfishly think platforms should continue to cater to their needs even though they aged out of them and should be focused on raising their kids. The platforms are actually popular and well liked, but by younger people who are using Instagram and deriving value from it in a way older people can’t understand, or by people in other countries and contexts than their own. Additionally, Thelot argues, the theory of enshittification allows users who should log off an excuse to stay on platforms that it is fashionable to hate. They spend time there, but say they hate it and can’t leave because they are trapped.

“Perhaps the reason why the platform seems worse is because your life has changed,” Thelot says. “Over the same period of time, your goals have changed, and they no longer fit with the platform’s new features. Why the hell would a fifty-five year-old be watching Reels? Go take care of your kids.”

The indisputable fact of Thelot’s argument is that various social media platforms have more users and are more profitable than ever. This data is readily available from reliable market surveys, polls, and quarterly earning reports from the companies themselves. It’s important to note that companies like Meta have a history of juking the numbers, and that despite this it recently reported its first ever decline of 20 million users, but Thelot’s point stands: Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are massively popular.

I will also cosign Thelot’s advice that people should log off. There are many reasons why some people can’t, present company included, but it’s never not good advice and even if you have to be on social media you can probably reduce your time scrolling.

Thelot’s argument falls apart when he tries to prove people are actually satisfied with their time on these platforms. To prove this, he points to research from American Customer Satisfaction Index, a private company which surveys customers’ satisfaction with various products and services. In its ACSI Entertainment Study 2026 it surveyed 30,886 customers and found that overall satisfaction with social media rose by 1 percent to a score of 75 out of 100. If satisfaction with social media is rising instead of falling and doesn’t have a terrible score, it’s doing the opposite of enshittifying and people don’t actually hate it, he argues.

Kudos to Thelot for finding data that appears to contradict the human civilization-wide backlash to social media and nearly the only political issue that a deeply divided country can agree on, but this is cherry picking.

Here are the type things customers are asked to evaluate with a score of 0-100 in the survey this rising satisfaction score for social media: “Quality of mobile app, reliability of mobile app (minimal down time, crashes, lags), loading speed and reliability, ease of navigation, ease of using the site on different devices, speed and reliability of video clips, variety of services and information, freshness of content, relevance of content, ability to use site without disruption, personal relevance of ads seen.”

Customers scored all these aspects of social media highly (between 68 and 84), and I agree with their evaluation. Instagram loads really fast. I can scroll videos on TikTok very quickly. I watched one YouTube Short about Warhammer 40,000 lore, and then was served more than a dozen other YouTube Shorts about Warhammer 40,000 lore that were both fresh and relevant. I do not contest any of this and I don’t think that is why both my friends in the DSA and my Trump supporting family members agree that Instagram is bad.

If we wanted to find out why Americans have negative feelings about social media or why we think these platforms are enshittifying, we might ask questions like: Does using Instagram make you feel good? Do you think children younger than 13 should have unlimited access to TikTok? Has Facebook been a net positive for your family?

Let’s look at some other data. A recent survey from The Searchlight institute found that voters “overwhelmingly believe social media has a negative impact on society.” Last year, anEmerson College poll found that Americans have low confidence in information they get from social media and that social media platforms are most responsible for the creation of “fake news.” In 2021, the Cato Institute found that 75 percent of Americans don’t trust social media to make fair content moderation decisions. In August, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that three in five Americans support stronger oversight of social media companies. 35 percent said social media stressed them out. 52 percent said they spend too much time on social media. A Pew poll in July found that 6 in 10 Americans supported a social media ban for kids under 16.

These opinions, especially as they relate to the impact social media has on younger people, has nothing to do with how fast videos load on Instagram or how effective the ads are. The apps function well technically and the ads are making money, this is self-evident and the reason we have a problem. The reason people feel like social media is enshittifying is that these companies promised to connect people across the world but in reality have chased engagement, catering to basest the human urges to hold our attention. Kids especially feel socially pressured to use these apps because that’s what every other kid is doing and where they feel their community is. It is such a clearly awful and obvious result of the way these apps have enshittified that in August Meta agreed to pay $17 billion dollars in penalties and finally curb the most dangerous aspects of its platforms over claims it endangered children.

People need to be on Linkedin to find jobs. Municipalities and news organizations share important updates on social media first. You might be pulled onto Facebook or WhatsApp against your will because your local school or community of parents congregate there. That doesn’t mean they like it. It is possible to hate something with your entire being and still participate in it.

There are Warhammer and cute cat videos, but every scroll is a spin of a slot machine that cycles between hate, fear, jealousy, disgust, and horniness. We all see it and no amount of pro big tech propaganda, funded by the same firm that invested in these companies is going to convince anyone otherwise.

Majority of Americans support banning social media for kids under 16

Across major demographic and partisan groups, more Americans support than oppose banning those under 16 from using social media.

^{Jeffrey Gottfried (Pew Research Center)}

404 Media

2026-09-02 15:57:29

Texas Police Used AI to Write Report About Using Flock to Search for Woman Who Had Abortion

The Texas sheriff’s office that used Flock to search more than 80,000 cameras nationwide for a woman who had a self-administered abortion used Axon’s Draft One AI tool to help write a police report about the incident, documents shared with 404 Media show. The tool was used in part to summarize a discussion of “the legal implications of the situation.”

404 Media first reported on the incident in May 2025 in which the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched Flock’s nationwide network for the whereabouts of a woman who self-administered an abortion, highlighting the threat of this AI-powered surveillance system being used to criminalize or track women seeking reproductive healthcare. The use of both Flock and Axon’s Draft One, which uses audio from body camera footage to automatically draft police reports using artificial intelligence, shows how quickly police departments have come to use AI surveillance tools even in critically sensitive cases.

“I acknowledge this report was generated using Draft One by Axon,” a section of the report reads.
Redactions by 404 Media, who is not naming the woman.
The abortion case has since become a flashpoint in the controversy over the use of Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. Flock’s CEO, Garrett Langley, has repeatedly and erroneously suggested that 404 Media misreported the case and that the search was done only for the woman’s safety because her family was worried about her. 404 Media previously reported that the entire police investigation was done at the behest of the woman’s abusive partner and that police discussed whether they were allowed to charge her with a crime: “It was discussed at the time with the District Attorney’s office and learned the State could not statutorily charge [the woman] for taking the pill to cause the abortion,” a police report previously obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and shared with 404 Media said. Concern from her family is never mentioned in that earlier police report or in the AI-generated police report used to write this article.

The AI-generated incident report was obtained by journalist Cameron Probert of the Tri-City Herald and shared with 404 Media. The report shows there is extensive body camera and audio evidence that would clarify what happened in the case, and that at least one police officer, sergeant Damien Bethel, used Draft One to write his report on the incident. Parts of a police incident report show that Draft One was used to summarize a discussion between police over “the legal implications of the situation” and other investigative aspects of the case. The Johnson County Sheriff’s Department has repeatedly refused to release body camera footage from the case, including in response to 404 Media’s public records requests.

“Deputies discussed the legal implications of the situation, noting that while the girlfriend self-administered the abortion pill, there were no criminal charges applicable under current Texas law,” Bethel’s report states, providing no more details about the specifics of the discussion. “Deputies also considered the possibility of a civil lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company that supplied the pill.”

Bethell’s Draft One report further states, “There is digital multi-media evidence from Body Worn Camera footage of this call for service in the AXON Evidence Library. There is digital multi-media evidence of In-Car Camera footage of this call for service in the AXON Evidence Library or the WatchGuard Evidence Library. There were digital images captured while on the scene.” The Johnson County Sheriff’s Department has thus far refused to release even redacted versions of this evidence that the EFF and 404 Media have separately requested.

Leaked audio of Langley obtained by 404 Media, recorded by Signal Akron, shows that as recently as earlier this month, Langley was still lying about the specifics of the case to law enforcement customers of Flock. “She was in an abusive relationship and the family was concerned that she was in danger. They were trying to find her because they were worried her life was at risk,” he said. There is no mention of the woman’s family being concerned about her in any of the police reports; the only person who expresses concern about her in the police narratives is her abusive partner, who told police that the abortion happened weeks prior to their investigation. So-called “welfare checks” have repeatedly been used by abusers to harass women who have gotten abortions and, in Wisconsin, a police officer allegedly illegally used Flock to see if his ex-girlfriend had gone to an abortion clinic.

Another section of the report detailing the Flock searches shows that the officer who did the Flock searches never went to the woman’s house, and looked her up in a credit card header database system called TLO to find her addresses and vehicle information. His section of the report describes his searches as being for her safety because he worried that the man who reported her (her abusive partner) could have hurt her. He does not mention doing the search at the behest of her family.

“I began to believe the victim may have been hurt by the RP [reporting person] due to the call and it not making sense. I wanted to use resources available to help find where the victim and her children could be to make sure they were okay,” the officer wrote. “I entered the vehicle into FLOCK to see if we could see where the victim and her children might be at due to multiple different locations being given for the victim and her children. Deputies had attempted to try and contact the female, but were unsuccessful. The FLOCK hit showed the victim had been in Dallas prior but nothing recent. The reason for the FLOCK search was to find out what city the victim and her children might be in and give us an idea of where to look for them, due to the large area of where the victim and her children cold [sic] be at.”

When contacted for comment, the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office would not provide more details about the case or the use of Draft One to write portions of the police report to 404 Media. Keven George of the sheriff’s office said, “Draft One works by uploading and transcribing body‑camera audio once an incident concludes. Within about five minutes, a preliminary narrative based on that transcript is generated. Officers remain fully in control of the final report: they review and edit the draft, fill in missing details, and approve it before submission. Safeguards, such as placeholder ‘insert’ prompts, help ensure accuracy and prevent the system from guessing details it cannot verify.” He added, “the Deputy has to digitally sign before the narrative can be used.”

Paris Lewbel, public relations manager at Flock, told 404 Media “As Garrett said, the case report from Johnson County details that authorities explicitly stated she could NOT be charged with a crime.”

Forbes recently reported Axon’s AI tools sometimes introduce errors that officers then need to spend time removing.

The Secret Weapon Hackers Can Use to Dox Nearly Anyone in America for $15

Most Americans have very little choice but to provide their personal information to credit bureaus. Hackers have found a way into that data supply chain, and are advertising access in group chats used by violent criminals who rob, assault, and shoot …

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-09-02 14:02:53

Cops Are Asking Axon to Make Their Cameras Look Different From Flock So People Don't Destroy Them

Axon says cops are asking it to make its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) look different from Flock cameras because Flock vandalism has become so widespread, according to comments Axon’s CEO made in a now deleted webinar.

The comments highlight how Axon is trying to take advantage of sustained opposition against Flock's license plate cameras, with one law enforcement customer suggesting a camera redesign would “help with the optics while we batten down the hatches” as the backlash spreads.

💡
Do you work at Axon or Flock? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

As 404 Media has reported, some towns and cities are switching from Flock to Axon’s cameras after cops did lookups for ICE in Flock, tracked a woman who self-administered an abortion, and have repeatedly abused their access to stalk ex-spouses. ALPRs constantly scan the license plate, brand, model, and other identifying features of all vehicles that drive past the camera and then make this timestamped log of activity searchable by law enforcement without a warrant.

In an August 26 webinar that was hosted on Axon’s official Vimeo page called “From backlash to trust,” Axon Chief Customer Officer Mike Wagers took a question from the remote audience and asked, “is there any talk — and there has been talk — to redesign Outpost, our fixed ALPR camera, to not look exactly like a Flock camera?”

“We are looking at [...] do we change the general shape,” Rick Smith, Axon’s CEO, replied.
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At another point in the webinar, Smith brought up Axon’s Lightpost product, which is an ALPR and AI-powered camera that attaches to an existing streetlight. “Frankly, we’ve had a lot of customers saying, hey, we’d like something that looks different because there is all this blowback. ​​It's harder to vandalize because it's up higher,” he said.

Smith also said, “We’ve had some people say they’d like to see us make just a different camera, because our ALPR camera looks like an ALPR camera.” Another idea Smith brought up, pending customer feedback, is to go in the other direction and make ALPRs more explicit, with signs showing where they are located and a description of the city’s ALPR policies.

MegaraMedia, a YouTuber, downloaded a copy of the webinar before it was removed and shared it with 404 Media.
A screenshot of one of the questions during the webinar.
During the webinar, Axon asked its law enforcement customers to chime in with questions and answer a customer survey. 404 Media scanned the QR code displayed during the webinar to view those questions. One, which appears to be the one Wagers paraphrased, read, “Is there any talk to redesign the Outpost to not look exactly like the Flock camera — I think it will help agencies with the optics while we batten down the hatches…”

Axon did not respond to a request for comment.

Around the country people have destroyed Flock cameras, including tearing them down, backing trucks into them, or spray painting over their lenses. Authorities have arrested and charged multiple people in connection with that vandalism. In one case, a cop made a fake, 3D-printed Flock camera to essentially act as bait; authorities then charged a man who broke the fake camera with three felonies.

One explicit reason some cities have ditched Flock for Axon is Flock’s national network. This allows a cop on one side of the country to search cameras not only in their own jurisdiction or state, but in another state entirely. When reporting on how local cops were performing Flock lookups for ICE, 404 Media found that some police departments did not know or understand their cameras were accessible by other agencies.

Smith said of the backlash against Flock and ALPR more generally: “This has been a hell of a storm.”

Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock to Stalk People

There have been more than a dozen cases around the country where police use Flock to obsessively and illegally stalk people.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-09-02 12:47:45

Podcast: We Spoke to an Amazon Worker Destroying Books for AI

We start this week with Emanuel’s follow-up to his Amazon book scanning story, in which he spoke to someone who worked in the Amazon warehouse which destroys books to train Amazon’s AI products. After the break, Emanuel and Sam tell us about the same few names appearing in LLM output over and over again. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph tells us why ICE is buying loads of data about ‘voter fraud’.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/PcNdLnLF7mo?…

• ⁠You're Invited: 404 Media's Third Anniversary Live Podcast and Party!⁠
• ⁠Inside the Warehouse Where Amazon Scans and Destroys Books for AI Training⁠
• ⁠The AI ‘Ghosts’ Contaminating Academic Publishing⁠
• ⁠ICE Plans to Spend Millions on Boston Dynamics Dog Robots⁠
• ⁠ICE Wants the Country’s Voter Data⁠

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

^{404 Media (Apple Podcasts)}

404 Media

2026-09-01 13:49:42

Oklahoma Tells City It Can't Charge $17,125.44 for a Records Request Related to Data Center Arrest

A city in Oklahoma tried to charge a farmer more than $17,000 to fulfill a public records request for information related to a proposed data center and the farmer’s arrest at a city council meeting. Now, in a win for the farmer, the State’s attorney general has stepped in and told the city to drop the fees and “provide access promptly” to the documents.

Farmer Darren Blanchard attended a meeting about Project Mustang — a proposed 225 acre data center in Claremore, Oklahoma — in February and planned to speak in opposition to the project. He left in handcuffs after the city council ordered him arrested for going 30 seconds over his allotted three minute speaking limit.

Claremore charged Blanchard with trespassing, a municipal crime with a $200 penalty. Blanchard pleaded not guilty, hired an attorney, and vowed to fight the charges on free speech grounds. As part of his defense, Blanchard and his lawyers filed a public records request asking the bodycam footage from the arrest and city records related to previous disturbances at public meetings. Claremore told Blanchard and his lawyers that they’d be happy to fulfill his request, but it would cost $17,125.44.

Katie Griffin, one of Blanchard's lawyers, filed a complaint with the Oklahoma Attorney General about the fees and requested someone at the State take a look. Claremore sent its own letter to the AG, outlining why it thought the fees were justified. “The City knows and is aware that any documents released to Mr. Blanchard and to those associated with him, regardless of the privacy implications of individuals named in such documents, are subject to wide distribution, including on social media,” said Claremore’s lawyers in a copy of the letter obtained by 404 Media.
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Claremore’s lawyers also complained that Griffin wouldn’t narrow the focus of her request.“Her persistence in maintaining an overly onerous request demonstrates that this dispute has nothing to do with transparency and likely has everything to do with causing excessive time/money expense to the City in order to generate public sympathy for her client and negative publicity for the City,” Claremore’s lawyers said.

Blanchard’s legal team told 404 Media this statement “is affirmatively false” and that they had, in fact, narrowed the scope of the original request. “In response to our narrowed request, RFR raised the City of Claremore's fee estimate for the production of these records from $16,540.44 to $17,125.44. No further requests for clarification have been received by Mr. Blanchard's legal team from RFR to date,” Blanchard’s legal team said.

The bulk of the fees Claremore wanted to charge are for a legal review of 2,800 records related to Blanchard’s arrest and Claremore’s relationship with security contractors and Rogers State University where the meeting took place. Claremore said that the legal review “to ensure that all information which must be withheld relating to members of the public and the City’s personnel is redacted in order to protect their privacy” would cost $16,540.44.

Claremore also wanted to charge a fee of $585 for a 15 hour search — roughly what it costs to employ a city clerk for two days. To do otherwise, the city argued, would cause “excessive disruption to its essential functions,” according to a letter Claremore’s lawyers sent to the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office.

Anthony Sykes, an Assistant Attorney General for Oklahoma, didn’t accept Claremore’s argument, according to a copy of his response obtained by 404 Media. Sykes explained that Oklahoma’s laws only allowed the City to charge for “direct costs of record copying, or mechanical reproduction.” A public body can charge fees for records requests, but only for the direct cost of searching and copying. Critically, if it charges fees at all it must disclose them publicly.

“The City has not posted a schedule of fees as required by the Open Records Act. Having failed to give the requisite notice of the fees charged for public access to City records, the City is foreclosed from charging search fees,” Sykes said. “If I were to conclude otherwise, there would be no incentive for public bodies to comply with the statute. They could simply ignore what the ORA requires and charge what they deem reasonable on a case-by-case basis.”

“I also note that the City also failed to explain how 15 hours of staff time would cause ‘excessive disruption’ of its ‘essential functions,’ such that a search fee would be statutorily permissible in the first place,” Sykes added in a footnote. “Similarly, the City has not provided any justification for charging the hourly rate of the City Clerk — as opposed to a less costly member of the Clerk’s staff — to search for the records.”

Claremore also said it had found more than 10 hours of bodycam footage from Blanchard’s arrest but, again, needed time to review it “to ensure all available redactions are made to protect the privacy of the public and City personnel,” Claremore’s lawyers said. “Much of the footage at issue in Ms. Griffin’s request was taken in a very crowded room and features an incalculable number of people. A review of this footage by legal counsel is required in order to determine what, if any, portions should be redacted as required by law.” 404 Media acquired a portion of the bodycam footage from Blanchard’s arrest and published it in June.

Sykes told Claremore to release the footage without a lengthy review and redaction process. “The footage sought here is of a public meeting attended by scores of people,” he said in his response to the City. “No one in attendance had any reasonable expectation of privacy, and the City has not identified any provision of state or federal law that justifies redaction of any portion of the footage [...] the City should be able to provide access promptly.”

Blanchard’s legal team told 404 Media it was “grateful for the intervention of the Attorney General's Office in this matter and their favorable advisement advocating for governmental transparency and compliance with the Open Records Act.”

“Mr. Loeffler [one of Claremore’s lawyers] responded to our correspondence timely to indicate that he anticipates the City of Claremore will be finished assembling these records ‘soon.’ He did not provide a date certain by which these records would be made available,” Blanchard’s legal team said. “He also informed us that the video footage of Mr. Blanchard's arrest is ready to be picked up from the Claremore Police Department. Mr. Loeffler did not indicate how long those records had been available.”

Blanchard’s case is one of a number of people who’ve been arrested at public city meetings in the past year. Police arrested a high school teacher in Kansas for clapping during the public comment period of a city meeting about data centers. The city charged them with interfering with law enforcement and later dropped the case. In Texas a man was arrested in his driveway a week after he’d said “bullshit” during a public city meeting.

The City of Claremore, Oklahoma did not return 404 Media’s request for comment.

Update 9/2/26: This story has been updated to include comments from Blanchard’s legal team.

Bodycam Shows Moment Cops Arrested a Man for Speaking Too Long at Data Center Meeting

We spoke to Darren Blanchard, the man arrested while speaking out against data centers at a community meeting. He's sharing the bodycam footage of his arrest for the first time with 404 Media.

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-09-01 13:27:26

This 'Digital Camouflage' Shirt Confuses AI-Powered Surveillance Cameras

I am standing in front of a camera that’s streaming to a giant video screen. The image recognition AI running on the camera puts a big green box around me. “PERSON,” it says. Artist Simon Weckert hands me his newest creation, a button-down shirt with flowery, blurry globs of green and pink. I put the shirt in front of me. The box and the word “PERSON” disappears. I pull the shirt away. The box pops back up. I put the shirt in front of me. It disappears. This is “digital camouflage,” and it has confused the algorithm.

Weckert designed digital camouflage as a response to the proliferation of AI-powered surveillance cameras that detect people, vehicles, animals, bicycles, and other objects in their field of view. Many of these AI-powered cameras can detect when a person is lying down, “anomalous behavior” such as people loitering, people fighting, or an abandoned package, which can lead to a police response. These cameras are already relatively commonplace around the world, but Weckert created it because police recently deployed these types of cameras outside of Kotbusser Tor, a popular subway stop in Berlin. They are the first police-run object recognition surveillance cameras in the city.

“Obviously people don’t like it because it means that AI is tracking the movements and behaviors of people. It’s one thing to have somebody behind the camera watching you, but now we have AI doing this kind of analysis,” Weckert told me. “It can detect if somebody’s laying on the ground so that means homeless people could be detected and police get triggered.”

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Weckert says one of the problems with Berlin’s cameras is that it’s not clear exactly which image recognition it’s running. But many image recognition cameras run a variation of YOLO (You Only Look Once), a family of open source image recognition algorithms. So Weckert installed YOLO on his own camera and began trying to confuse it by iterating on different types of random patterns.

He starts with a random pattern he said, and shows it to the YOLO algorithm to see if it detects a human, and with how much certainty. “When YOLO returns 100%, I know the pattern obviously isn’t working,” he said. “And then step-by-step, I change the pattern, I rotate certain parts of the pattern, change the colors, flip it so on and so forth. And every time we ask how much confidence do you have this is a person using something called gradient ascent to get away from the category of a person. And then suddenly you as a person, with the pattern on you, aren’t detected as a person because the algorithm can’t make sense of it.”

Weckert has done a series of buzzy projects before. Back at Motherboard, we covered the virtual traffic jam he created on Google Maps by sticking a bunch of GPS-enabled cell phones in a red wagon and walking slowly through the streets of Berlin. Digital camouflage sits alongside projects by other artists intended to hide people’s faces from facial recognition cameras or to confuse automated license plate reader cameras with shirts made of nonsense license plate graphics. Over the years, AI surveillance has improved to a point where many of these techniques don’t actually work anymore, but for the moment, digital camouflage does, at least on the very popular YOLO algorithms. Weckert said one of the major problems is that police won’t say specifically what algorithm they’re using, making it difficult to say whether his shirts work on the cameras at Kotbusser Tor.

“The problem is that we don’t know what technology is behind these camera systems, so therefore I cannot claim 100 percent that the t-shirt works against this specific camera system, but I can say I know it works for the very public and famous YOLO algorithm,” Weckert said. He said that just as fashion brands have seasonal updates, so too will his digital camouflage “Every time there’s a new YOLO, a new pattern will come out. Just like in fashion, the summer winter collection, here it’s the every YOLO edition.”

He said the project is not just intended to help people avoid surveillance, but to teach people about it and to show people there’s lots of ways to protest and push back against it. “It’s to give them the feeling that there are actually certain tools we can use against surveillance. It's not like we just have to accept what the lawmakers and police are doing.”

The State of Anti-Surveillance Design

The most effective surveillance-evading gear might already be in your closet.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-31 12:21:57

How Cyber Sleuths Tracked a Nigerian Scammer to His Doorstep

This is an adaption of a podcast interview 404 Media recorded with Erin West and Paul Raffile. Check out the whole thing here on YouTube.

Erin West and Paul Raffile stepped out of their van about 45 minutes outside Lagos, Nigeria, and walked down a muddy hill. At the bottom, they entered a field with houses made of corrugated steel and cardboard. Raffile kept falling into the mud.

After walking about a quarter of a mile, the pair came to a hut, six feet high on stilts, and climbed up a ladder. Inside was the baba lao, a local spiritual leader. The baba lao was going to do a ritual designed to ensure a Nigerian scammer would make more money in his blackmailing or manipulation of an overseas victim, maybe back in the United States.

A scammer who accompanied West and Raffile had a photo of the victim he was trying to get money from, and the identity he had impersonated to do so. The baba lao then fused these two souls together to bring more fortune to the scammer, Raffile recalled. For two and a half hours, the baba lao jumped between grinding herbs, creating talismans, sacrificing an animal. Locals gathered outside the hut.
youtube.com/embed/973m4leS25c?…
West and Raffile are scam experts: West is the founder of Operation Shamrock, an organization that aims to disrupt scam operations, and Raffile is a long time cybercrime researcher, who focuses especially on sextortion. This is where scammers, like those in Nigeria, will assume the identity of a young person, approach teenagers in the U.S. on apps like Instagram, have them record explicit videos, then pull the mask away and threaten to release the videos to the victim’s friends and family unless they pay up. Sextortion is common across U.S. social media platforms; at least dozens of young boys have taken their own lives after being targeted.

The pair hatched a plan to go to Nigeria to see if they could actually track down a scammer. The trip provided rare insight into how some scammers live and how brazenly many of them flaunt their scams.

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Sextortion is “targeting youth. It's surging,” Raffile said. “I wonder, can we hatch a plan where we put ourselves out there as a target, create our own fake account, get scammed by these criminals, and then trace the criminal back to their home turf?”

💡
Do you know anything else about Nigerian scammers? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

They made an Instagram and Snapchat account pretending to be a young person. Within a couple of days, they started receiving suspicious direct messages. West said she was “flabagasted” at how quickly the messages came in.

The scammers were pretending to be young women, often using photos stolen from OnlyFans models. As the chat progressed and the scammers demanded money, the pair said they could only pay in Bitcoin, and sent a link to a website where the scammer could allegedly claim their payment. The site was actually grabbing the scammers’ IP addresses. It showed the scammers were in Lagos, Nigeria. With not much to go on just yet, the pair got on a flight to Nigeria.
youtube.com/embed/OsJERlgzLg0?…
Once they landed, they had around six days to find a scammer. It would not be financially viable to sit around in Lagos forever. The pair deployed the IP address grabbing website again, but this time one of the scammers granted the tool more permissions in his browser. The tool was also designed to, if possible, get their exact location, or turn on its camera and see their face. This time, it worked. They had a scammer’s face.

At one point, another scammer asked the pair to move from Instagram, where the conversation initially happened, over to WhatsApp, which revealed the scammer’s phone number. The pair’s fixer put that number into TrueCaller— an app that harvests peoples’ phone contact lists and makes them searchable, essentially — which revealed the name Big Dollar. West also provided the number to some contacts who investigated it. They worked with another expert too who was able to dig up more information and find the scammer’s real name. They then found other social media profiles belonging to Big Dollar, including a TikTok account that had posted blackmail messages. The pair were given GPS coordinates of where this scammer might be.

They drove to Big Dollar’s village, and ultimately he refused to meet the pair. West told Big Dollar on the phone, we know who you are, we know where you live, and the next step is we’re going to give this information to the FBI. Around this time, they saw Big Dollar’s social media accounts go dark.

West said, “it was an interesting opportunity to really put some fear in a class of people who aren't really afraid of being arrested.”

These teenage boys were blackmailed online – and it cost them their lives

Parents told USA TODAY their teenage sons died by suicide within 24 hours of being financially sextorted. Here's what they want others to know.

^{, USA TODAY (USA TODAY)}

404 Media

2026-08-30 13:20:40

Google's Calling Lake Ontario 'Lake America' Now

On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order demanding Lake Ontario be renamed to Lake America. At the signing of the order, he sat next to a big poster board map of the Great Lakes, with a big red arrow labeling Lake Ontario as "Lake America," with the words "Making the Great Lakes Even Greater."

The Canadian province of Ontario borders the north, west, and southwest sides of the lake, with New York State on the south and east.

It was unclear in the days immediately following the order whether Google would respect the name change. MapQuest, the 1996 navigation service that still exists but most people stopped using in the early 2000s as Google Maps took over, went viral last week after posting a screenshot of Lake Ontario on X, saying "We're not changing it." MapQuest also launched a "Rename Lake Ontario" web toy.
youtube.com/embed/59dhY3rBu1I?…
Google follows the U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), which formally changed the name for 'Lake Ontario' to 'Lake America' in the United States, according to Google's announcement about the change, posted Saturday: "Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the U.S., people using Maps in the U.S. will see 'Lake America,' those in Canada will continue to see 'Lake Ontario,' and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names. These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now."

Apple Maps still shows it as Lake Ontario as of Sunday morning.

Tip Jar

When Trump issued an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in early 2025, Google Maps changed it for the same reason — to be consistent with GNIS. People review-bombed the location on Google Maps so aggressively following the change, Google shut down reviews.

Trump has been degrading historically neighborly U.S. and Canadian relations since his first term, and that formerly friendly relationship has devolved into a trade war. Trump announced that the U.S. will start imposing 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods last week; Canada, in turn, responded with tariffs on $20 billion of American goods, including steel, farm equipment, dairy products, and appliances.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul said she's not calling it that. “I'm speechless. It is so patently absurd,” she said in an interview with NY1. “Shame on them for deflecting from the real needs that Americans are feeling that we have here in New York. The high cost of energy, prescription drugs, utility bills, groceries. And this is what the president spends his time on? Renaming a lake that was named after our Indigenous peoples. Shame on you.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also called Trump's insistence on renaming the lake “juvenile.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…

Hochul, New York leaders reject Trump's plan to rename Lake Ontario

Hochul rejected the name, saying, “New York won’t be calling it that.”

^{Erica Brosnan (Spectrum News NY1)}

404 Media

2026-08-29 10:00:27

Thousands of Interstellar Objects May Be Lurking in Our Solar System

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that went interstellar, entombed the sky, hit the gas, and renewed the world.

First, scientists predict that there are thousands of objects from alien star systems lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system. Then: ancient air is hidden in glassy Moon beads, the “worst energy policy in the world,” and a mysterious Mississippian luxury.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

The interstellar objects we met along the way

Raymond, Sean et al. “Capture of interstellar objects during stellar encounters.” Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Over the past decade, three interstellar objects have been spotted streaking through our solar system. It’s likely that dozens more of these interlopers will be discovered in the coming years. These objects travel so fast that they can escape the gravitational clutches of the Sun, which is why they are only visible for weeks before hurtling back out to speed-run the galaxy.

But while some interstellar objects (ISOs) leave in a hurry, others may be here to stay, lurking in the outermost reaches of the solar system, known as the Oort cloud, reports a new study.

Over the course of its 4.6-billion year lifespan, the Sun has wandered close enough to other stars to collect thousands of non-native objects from the fringes of those passing systems. It may have also sent off many of its homegrown objects to join alien star systems during these encounters, like some kind of stellar gift exchange.
Concept art showing the scale and spherical shape of the Oort Cloud. Image: NASA
“The Solar System has long been suspected to contain captured, non-native material,” said researchers led by Sean Raymond of the Bordeaux Astrophysics Laboratory. “The recent ISO discoveries have now confirmed directly that extraterrestrial material regularly passes through the Solar System.”

Drawing on these discoveries, Raymond and his colleagues ran models to predict how many ISOs might be exchanged between stars during close encounters, called stellar flybys. The Sun is estimated to have had at least one or two of these meetups during its life so far, which could be “responsible for a large fraction of the captured ISOs currently residing in the Solar System.”

“Given that flybys are unavoidable in the Galactic field, most stars should host sparse Oort clouds populated with ISOs captured during stellar flybys,” the team said.

The Oort cloud — composed of frozen comet-like objects — extends for about three light years away from the Sun, so it’s not currently possible to send a spacecraft to go out to sift for ISOs in these distant wilds. Still, it’s neat to know there are so many interstellar hitchhikers riding in the Sun’s backseat.

Ancient magic Moon beads

Han, Ziyan et al. “Lunar transient atmosphere recorded in Chang'e 6 impact glass beads.” Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

A memory of an ancient ephemeral sky on the Moon may be locked inside glass beads scattered across the lunar surface, according to a new study.

The Moon is airless, but there’s evidence that it was surrounded by a transient atmosphere billions of years ago, which was fed by volcanic eruptions in its early history. Rocks crashing into the surface may have also vaporized material and created brief, gassy skies over time.

Scientists have now examined glass beads that were scooped up from the far side of the Moon by China’s Chang’e 6 sample-return mission, and delivered back to Earth in the summer of 2024 (that’s so Brat). The lunar glass, which was forged by rocks crashing into the surface, captured the chemical signatures of the vapor plume created by those impacts, capturing a whiff of a long-lost transient atmosphere.
The scoop left by Chang’e-6 sample collection on the Moon, which included the glass beads. Image: Chunlai Li, Hao Hu, Meng-Fei Yang
“Chang’e 6 (CE6) mission has returned the first lunar samples from the farside of the Moon,” said researchers led by Ziyan Han of Nanjing University. “The returned CE6 lunar regolith contains impact glass beads that could have recorded impact-induced vaporization on the Moon's farside and may serve as barometers, providing critical constraints on the global distribution of the Moon's transient atmosphere.”

The team noted that these fleeting impact-induced atmospheres might exist on other airless bodies in the solar system, and beyond it. For this reason, the researchers warned that atmospheres detected around exoplanets “may not always solely represent stable, long-lived atmospheres” which could “complicate the interpretation of atmospheric data as evidence of long-term planetary habitability on the rocky exoplanets.”

There you have it—just some ancient glass beads that contain the breath of past lunar skies. Carry on.

The real cost of cheaper gas

Mahdavi, Paasha and Ross, Michael L. “The worst energy policy in the world.” Science.

How bad does an energy policy have to be for experts to declare it the worst in the world? Buckle up because we are hitting the gas.

In an editorial published in Science this week, a pair of researchers lament the widespread rollout of consumer fossil fuel subsidies in response to the spike in gas and oil prices caused by the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. While it’s understandable for governments to want to ease financial hardships, the team stressed that these subsidies are a major setback to confronting the climate crisis and they fumble the chance to present the Iran war as a clear example of why we need to reduce global reliance on fossil fuels.

“Consumer fuel subsidies are the worst kind of energy policy: they boost the most polluting kind of energy—fossil fuels—with a policy that is wasteful and deceptively hard to reverse,” said authors Paasha Mahdavi of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Michael L. Ross of the University of California, Los Angeles.

“The Iran war represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels,” the team continued. “But short-term measures that governments are taking—to help their citizens cope with unaffordable gasoline and diesel prices—will have long-term effects. Making fossil fuels cheaper now will have catastrophic consequences in the future.”

To channel the old joke from The Simpsons: “It’s the worst energy policy in the world…so far.”

A Mississippian taste for cacao

King, Adam et al. “Cacao in the Mississippian World: Archaeogenomic evidence for T. cacao consumption at the Etowah Site, Georgia.”

Let’s close with a finely-aged dessert. And I mean, really aged—this decadent treat is 1,000-years-old.

Humans have been consuming the delectable fruits of the cacao tree for many thousands of years in Central and South America, and the plant made its way into parts of North America, such as the American Southwest. Now, archaeologists have discovered cacao was also consumed as far east as the Etowah Site in Georgia, an ancient city built by the Mississippian culture, revealing the unexpected spread of the delicacy deep into the Southeast.

“There is very little material evidence of connections between people living in Mississippian places like Etowah and those living in Central America,” said researchers led by Adam King of the University of South Carolina. “As a result, the possibility that the Mississippian world had access to cacao has always seemed remote.”
Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site. Image: Archaeo-Geophysical Associates
But one should never underestimate the power of chocolate, and this study bears that wisdom out. When the team analyzed ancient DNA sequences of residue found on Etowah pottery, they detected notes of cacao.

“Despite the fact that Etowah is separated from potential sources of cacao by great distances, ancient DNA confirms the site’s inhabitants consumed cacao,” the team said. The researchers speculated that Etowah may have sourced its cacao from trade routes to Mexico or the American Southwest, but noted that no “direct connections to Mexico nor the American Southwest are supported by archaeological evidence for now.”

“These results ask us to reopen lines of research long closed, especially regarding contacts between the impressive civilizations of Central and South America and the great Mississippian civilization of the Eastern Woodlands,” King and his colleagues said in the study.

As to the cultural role of cacao, the study suggested that “at Etowah and possibly across the Mississippian world, cacao consumption played a role in world renewal rites of intensification.”

Given the previous story about fossil fuels subsidies, we need all the world renewal rites we can get, so eat dessert first.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-08-28 15:16:39

Behind the Blog: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Flamin' Hot Slop

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss cool old books, new toys for ICE, and Flamin' Hot Slop.

SAM: On the podcast last week, we had what I thought was a pretty nuanced and interesting conversation about the "rare books" discourse (although I'm biased; listen and let me know). I mentioned this in the episode but it all makes me think about all the rare books I've bought over the years — these are rare by any definition of the word in that they're usually limited or out of print and I got them through used book sellers online where only one copy was often available.

When my book launched a few years ago, I started a very short-lived Substack blog to write about some of the behind the scenes stuff happening around publication. One of those posts is a bibliography, including a lot of the books I sourced and references for my own.

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Behind the Blog: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Flamin' Hot Slop

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-28 14:04:55

ICE Plans to Spend Millions on Boston Dynamics Dog Robots

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to buy at least a million dollars worth of robots from Boston Dynamics, the company that makes the dog-like SPOT robots, with the purpose of improving “officer safety,” according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announcement.

The news shows that ICE continues to spend millions of dollars on new technology. On Thursday, U.S. procurement records showed that ICE has contracted to buy 6,000 pairs of electric shock gloves for $16.7 million, the Associated Press reported.

💡
Do you work at Boston Dynamics or ICE? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

ICE “has a requirement to purchase Boston Dynamics SPOT Robots and accessories [sic] support public safety and law enforcement operations by providing a remotely operated robotic capability for inspection, situational awareness, and hazard assessment in environments that may pose risks to personnel,” the announcement reads. “This capability helps improve officer safety, supports informed operational decision-making, and enhances DHS’s ability to respond to incidents involving dangerous, confined, unstable, or difficult-to-access areas.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Boston Dynamic’s now infamous robots are used by police departments all across the U.S. They are equipped with cameras for 360 degree views, can automatically open doors with their extendable arm, and can pick up objects. The Los Angeles Police Department used one of the robots to remotely pick up two imitation firearms. The New York Police Department cancelled its contract with Boston Dynamics following a public backlash.

ICE plans to spend between one and two million dollars on the robots, according to the announcement. The robots can cost starting at around $75,000, suggesting ICE plans to buy at least several of the devices.

“Boston Dynamics sells to many government agencies and public safety organizations and the robots are used to keep people out of harm’s way and aid first responders in assessing dangerous situations,” a Boston Dynamics spokesperson told 404 Media in an email. “Specific Spot applications typically include things like hazardous gas detection, unexploded ordnance inspection, suspicious package investigation, search and rescue, subterranean or confined space exploration, and structural assessments following fires, disaster events, and other hazards. Additionally we want to point out that any attempted weaponization of Boston Dynamics’ robots is strictly prohibited, as clearly outlined in ourTerms and Conditions, our ethical principles, as well as in an open letter against weaponization, which was spearheaded by Boston Dynamics and co-signed by 5 other leading robotics companies.”

The company is also working on humanoid robots. Another robotics company, Foundation, recently reportedly pitched its own humanoid robot tech to DHS.

Update: this piece has been updated to include a statement from Boston Dynamics.

Humanoid robots could patrol southern border, CEO pitches, as futuristic technology moves closer to reality

Robotics startup Foundation has pitched its humanoid robot, Phantom, to DHS officials to help patrol and surveil the US southern border.

^{Fox News (New York Post)}

404 Media

2026-08-27 18:14:29

The AI ‘Ghosts’ Contaminating Academic Publishing

“Elena Vasquez and Marcus Chen have appeared as volcano experts, astronauts, thriller protagonists, podcast hosts, and academic co-authors across hundreds of independently produced AI-generated documents, never having lived,” a new preprint research paper from Samsung and the University of Warsaw said.

The paper identified a number of names that co-authored hundreds of AI-generated academic papers, articles, and books. The authors don’t actually exist, but are instead names that large language models repeatedly produce when tasked with generating experts in certain fields.

The paper, titled “The Ghost Couple: Correlated LLM Name Priors and Their Haunting of the Web and Academic Publishing,” utilized a known phenomenon where certain LLMs will keep coming up with the same names in certain contexts. For example, In June, Sam wrote about how ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude were likely to use the name Elias Thorne in fiction they generated, and that the character was often a lighthouse keeper. Similarly, users noticed that if they ask ChatGPT to generate a software developer, their name will often be Marcus Chen.
From The Ghost Couple: Correlated LLM Name Priors and Their Haunting of the Web and Academic Publishing
The researchers were able to show not only that LLMs often default to the same names, but that they produce “correlated character ensembles,” meaning some names were more likely to appear together. Other names that were consistently generated by AI models include Elena Amara Okafor from Claude, Aris Thorne and Lena Petrova from Gemini, and Elara Voss from ChatGPT.

Earlier this month, I reported a story about Research Gold, a company that offered what it claimed was human medical research, but that was in fact entirely AI generated. The founder and lead methodologist for that company was named Elena Vasquez. Research Gold removed Elena Vasquez from its site after I published the story.

Michał Brzozowski, the lead author of the paper, told me that searching for these names on Google turned up other instances of AI generated personalties. For example, following the killing of Alex Pretti at the hands of U.S. Border Patrol agents in January, a rumor spread on Facebook that he was fired from his nursing job for misconduct allegations. Snopes reported that the false statement was attributed to “executive director Dr. Elena Vasquez,” who does not exist.

Brzozowski was able to search databases of academic papers for the names they knew LLMs often generated.

“On Zenodo, a CERN operated repository that mints real DataCite DOIs, we identify 1,655 ghost-authored records claiming nonexistent journals with fabricated publication dates.” A DOI, or a Digital Object Identifier, is a string of characters and numbers used to identify academic papers. The researchers saw that many of the papers authored by these AI names were backdated, meaning their publication dates were different from the date they were uploaded to Zenodo.

Anyone with a free account can create a DOI on Zenodo, but the existence of AI generated papers with DOIs has impacts on other parts of the web and academic publishing.

“These [AI generated papers] carry real DOIs harvestable by any scholarly aggregator; the infrastructure for large-scale scholarly record contamination is already in place. Ghost names additionally appear on ResearchGate, forming synthetic research groups with collaborators drawn from multiple model families, and are indexed without verification by Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar [...] The academic record is being quietly haunted.”

Research Gate and Google Scholar are both aggregators of academic publishing that are likely to come up in search results.

The researchers say that different LLMs and versions of those LLMs generate certain names so consistently, they think they can use them to determine the provenance of AI slop. For example, the name Elena Vasquez was particularly common in content generated by Claude Sonnet 4, so papers that list her as an author were likely generated by that LLM. However, Brzozowski said that this level of accuracy might not hold for long now that AI generated content with these names is flooding the internet and feeding back into all AI models that are scraping the internet for training data.

The fact that AI academic publishing is struggling to deal with the load of AI generated content isn’t new. We’ve previously reported that scientific journals have published AI generated text, that AI is impacting the peer review process, and that the open-access repository for preprint academic research Arxiv will now ban authors for a year if they are caught submitting AI generated work. The potential upside of this research is that these names might allow us to detect this AI generated content more easily.

ArXiv to Ban Researchers for a Year if They Submit AI Slop

The change comes as arXiv and others struggle to manage an influx of AI-generated materials masquerading as rigorous science.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-27 15:47:59

The Tragedy and Ecstasy of AI Companions (with Bridget Todd)

Tech companies want you to believe that the chatbots they profit from are the always ready, never judgmental, constantly affirming friend in our pockets. But are the people using them as companions under some kind of deep self-delusion? Or are they seeking something else?

In this week’s interview episode, I was joined by journalist Bridget Todd. Among many other projects and accomplishments, Bridget is the creator and host of the award winning podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet, is a Fellow at the MacArthur Foundation, and an affiliate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Her new audiobook, Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy, launched in July with coauthor Michael Amato.
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We talk about her work interviewing people who use chatbots to fill an emotional need, how people who engage in romantic, intimate and erotic roleplay with LLMs are mocked for it, and how tech companies are implicated in all of this. In her new book, you’ll hear from experts in the field of AI companionship, but also from people who have nuanced, interesting interactions with chatbots every day.

For Bridget, Love at First Prompt was inspired in large part by her own use of LLMs in the face of extreme stress and tragedy after her parents died – her dad after a long illness, and her mom more suddenly after. “It was like having to relearn how I fit into my existing social dynamic,” she told me. “I was incredibly isolated. I wasn't really talking to my friends. I wasn't really talking to anybody. I wasn't really returning any emails. I was completely overwhelmed in all the ways somebody can be overwhelmed.” She’d been using ChatGPT to keep track of medical notes, but soon that changed, almost without her realizing it.

“My use of ChatGPT had gone from just looking up things that my dad's doctor would say, or researching how to get care and how to pay for care – it was a lot of that because I was getting hit with a lot of complex medical jargon that I never heard – to then, I found myself late at night telling ChatGPT, ‘I'm so overwhelmed. This is so overwhelming. I'm so exhausted. I'm so worried about my dad. I'm so anxious.’ And so there wasn't any particular black and white light switch that flipped where [I thought] now I'm going to start speaking emotionally to ChatGPT. It happened without me really even noticing it.”

This made her curious about other people’s usage of chatbots, especially in a time when so many tech companies are pushing “AI companions” as the frontier of connection.

In the book, she breaks down how real people use LLMs to fill an emotional need, and connects their experiences to how tech executives are cashing in. “All of these things that we used to think of as sacrosanct are now just up for grabs by these tech companies. And so the question that I asked people who were experiencing intimacy with AI was, are you comfortable with something as intimate as these connections that are romantic or sexual being owned and controlled by companies who don't give a shit about you, who we know cannot be trusted, who do horrible things without even thinking about it? Even beyond that, who will change as the wind blows?” Bridget said in our conversation. “Like Sam Altman saying, ‘We're gonna start doing erotic role play. Oh, just kidding. Never mind.’ The whiplash with which [execs] say things and then take it back and then operate as if they never said that, it's almost like gaslighting. Do you want your most intimate human connections being mediated by an unreliable gaslighter? And that's what we have in these tech companies.”

Bridget’s book is her most vulnerable work yet. She unpacks and critiques her own use of ChatGPT during a crisis, and reveals what she learned about herself, her friendships and real-life relationships, and what it means to maintain human connections in an era tech companies are constantly trying to exploit our innermost worlds.

Further reading:

• Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy
• New Study Reveals the Manipulative ‘Dark Patterns’ of AI Chatbots
• ‘It’s Hurting Like Hell’: AI Companion Users Are In Crisis, Reporting Sudden Sexual Rejection
• ChatGPT’s Hail Mary: Chatbots You Can Fuck

ChatGPT’s Hail Mary: Chatbots You Can Fuck

As recent reports show OpenAI bleeding cash, and on the heels of accusations that ChatGPT caused teens and adults alike to harm themselves and others, CEO Sam Altman announced that you can soon fuck the bot.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-27 15:33:32

Cocomelon's Studio Tells Its Artists to Start Experimenting With AI

Moonbug Entertainment, the children’s entertainment studio that makes the hugely popular shows Cocomelon, Little Baby Bum, Blippi, and Mia’s Magic Playground has asked its animators to start using artificial intelligence while making its shows, 404 Media has learned.

Moonbug’s Generative AI policy and its “Studio AI Bible,” a guide to using AI to help generate content, seen by 404 Media, explain in detail how its AI use will work. The policies indicate that the company is in the initial stages of experimenting with AI in the creation of its shows, but that for the moment it has put several guardrails in place in part over legal and copyright concerns associated with using AI in a more substantial way.

“Keep a human in the loop when using AI. AI is used to assist the artist, not be the artist,” the guidelines say. “Always remember that we can only own (copyright) what a human has created and so we need to ensure the final execution involves substantial human creative input. Our core IP (e.g. key characters/signature worlds and important backgrounds) must reflect substantial human creative input and intentionality.”

The documents show in detail how a major studio, which runs an empire of content that is wildly popular with infants, toddlers, and their families, is using AI. Moonbug’s shows have hundreds of millions of subscribers on YouTube, and many of its shows have spinoff series and movies that air across several major streaming services. Cocomelon spinoffs air on Netflix, the studio is working on a Cocomelon movie for Universal, and the series is set to move to Disney+ next year. YouTube has been flooded with AI-generated content for infants and toddlers, but these documents indicate that even the biggest companies in the industry are using AI, albeit with far more thought and care than slop purveyors. Its properties also have various popular children and baby toys.

“Like many media companies, we're exploring how AI tools can support our creative and production teams. Today, generative AI is not used in episodes of our content,” a Moonbug spokesperson told 404 Media. “Our core principle is that AI should assist the artist, not be the artist. Our guidelines prohibit AI from originating key creative elements such as new characters, core storylines and song lyrics, and require substantial human creative input. Everything we produce — whether they incorporate AI-assisted elements or not — goes through our human-led creative and quality-control process, including frame-by-frame human eyeball review, and rounds of iterations and notes from our creative and production teams.”

The guidelines say that AI can be used for ideation, scripting, storyboarding, design, and animation, but has put guardrails on how AI can be used in each step of the process.

For example, the company says animators can use AI for “utility tasks/standard production enhancers,” but cannot use it to “alter a VO/actor’s performance without checking with Legal.” It says AI can be used “to refine a human-authored draft,” but “no ghost-writing. Do not generate key creative elements (character arcs, core plot twists, song lyrics) from scratch by AI. The narrative ‘soul’ and key dialogue beats must remain human-authored.” The company says AI can be used to “generate visual research, vibe boards, brainstorm ideas and concepts and exploring texture/colour/lighting references,” but that there is “no ‘prompt to product.’ […] do not move a 100% AI-generated design directly into the production pipeline. It must be translated into a studio-drawn concept to ensure it meets our technical standards and style.”

At times, the guide gets very granular. It says workers are allowed to use AI to create “generic” designs and textures, such as trees in a background or furniture, for character outfit changes, or for “creating 3D turnarounds from existing human-created 2D characters,” but usually cannot use it to create wholly new characters. “The [AI] assets must be processed by an artist (eg over-painted, tweaked) to ensure human in loop. All new characters should be human created (unless have had approval for specific IPs). Props — if we are creating something unique and to be heavily featured in the series e.g. the Clubhouse — it must be human created. All franchise specific worlds should be human created (unless intended to be generic).”

The company is requiring employees to “first test all tools with non Moonbug IP and/or test assets before proceeding with legal approval.” After being approved by legal, employees are allowed to use AI to help create assets for Moonbug shows, but all AI use, including the prompts used to generate assets, must be cataloged and saved. The company spokesperson told 404 Media that “non Moonbug IP” refers to generic assets that the company has made: “We created generic test characters and environments so teams can freely explore new tools without using Moonbug IP or anyone else's IP. If a tool proves useful, further testing with Moonbug IP requires appropriate approvals.”

“Making content for young children comes with a particular responsibility, regardless of the tools involved,” the spokesperson added. “Our GenAI guidelines add another layer of guardrails: no ‘prompt-to-product,’ human authorship of core creative elements, approved tools and legal review, protections around performers and third-party IP, and human review of finished work. Ultimately, people make the creative decisions about what is appropriate and worthy of our audience.”

All AI tools that the company uses must have individual legal approval, and all AI-generated assets must be kept in separate file folders than human-created ones using a system it is calling “provenance and isolation,” according to the guidelines. The “goal” of this file management system is “to ensure we always have a path back to human-authored works to maintain copyright ownership over what matters.”

“Every project must have a dedicated folder for AI generated assets. No file from this folder should be moved into main production folders without being processed by human artist [sic] first. All 100% human created assets must also be stored and labeled properly,” the guidelines say. Workers must log all of their AI prompts, then also write an explanation of how a human transformed the asset if it is ultimately used in production.

A section of the document called “prompt guidance” says that workers should begin the AI production process by “upload[ing] a human-drawn sketch/Moonbug owned IP as a structural reference, use AI as a refiner eg to add texture/lighting.” It says “No text-to-image prompting (unless for brainstorming/research,” and “no style mimicking or soundalikes — do not use prompts like ‘in the style of Pixar/Ghibli’ etc. Use descriptive artistic terms instead — eg ‘hand-painted water colour aesthetic’ or ‘vibrant street-art aesthetic, chromatic aberration.’”

In May, workers with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees working on a live action Cocomelon spinoff show went on strike, alleging that they were not being provided fair wages and benefits.

“We see AI as a tool that can expand what talented creative people are able to do, not a substitute for the people who create our stories,” the Moonbug spokesperson said. “We're exploring whether these tools can reduce repetitive work, enhance the creative process and potentially allow our teams to create more stories and experiences for families.”

IATSE Goes on Strike Against ‘CoComelon: The Melon Patch’ Children’s Series

IATSE has gone on strike against the second season of the YouTube children’s series, “CoComelon: The Melon Patch,” citing unfair wages and benefits.

^{Arushi Jacob (Variety)}

404 Media

2026-08-27 14:34:03

Businesses Go Viral for Making Signs Without AI

In July, we wrote about the ‘ChatGPT flyer pandemic,’ in which, as you’ve surely seen, businesses everywhere are advertising themselves and their products with AI-generated posters that all look the same. Surf lesson coaches; guitar stores; bars; so many takeout places. They’re all doing it. And all the posters suck ass.

Naturally, a new meta is emerging, where some businesses and organizations are now holding up crudely drawn signs saying they’ll never use AI, or fuck AI, or various things like this. And people absolutely love it: some of these posts have tens of thousands of likes.

“I would rather your event flyer look like this than see more AI slop,” one flyer posted to Instagram, written in pencil on a page of lined paper, reads. It then shows a couple of stick figures smiling, with the text “I will come to this event.”

Another Instagram post has a couple of people from a bar holding a clip board. The hand-written note in one picture says, “We will NOT be using any AI post to promote the following…” Other pictures then ask people to apply for job vacancies at the bar.
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A library posted a very similar message on a piece of cardboard, that reads, “We will not be using AI to create content.”

A cafe posted a series of photos on Instagram of someone holding a paper sign that says, “We will not be using any AI posters to promote ourselves. Instead I will be using this paper and marker pen.” One of the photos adds, “the pancakes are really really GOOD!”

“I hear ya’ll hate AI flyers! So here I am doing hair,” a hand-written sign from a stylist reads, complete with a picture of someone working on another’s hair.

Rachel Karten, writer of the Link In Bio newsletter, posted some other examples 404 Media came across as well.

This trend will probably go stale fast. But, hey, jump on it while you can.

Rachel Karten (@milkkarten) on X

small businesses are going viral by participating in a trend where they declare they don’t use ai flyers

^{Rachel Karten (X (formerly Twitter))}

404 Media

2026-08-27 14:08:29

Florida ‘Deputy of the Year’ Used Flock to Stalk Ex, Held Gun in Her Mouth, Did a Nazi Salute

Brevard County deputy sheriff Michael Fultz resigned from the force after an internal investigation detailed extreme cases of alleged sexual misconduct, racism, and abuse, including Fultz’s use of Flock to stalk his ex-girlfriend. News6 in Florida first reported the story, and 404 Media has uncovered additional details about the former deputy’s use of Flock after obtaining a copy of the investigation.

Hired in 2024, Brevard County named Fultz its Deputy of the Year in 2025. The day of the ceremony Fultz’s ex-girlfriend sent a letter of complaint to the sheriff’s office with a long list of complaints about his behavior. The letter was enough to prompt the sheriffs to investigate Fultz which is when they discovered he’d used Flock to stalk her.
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The 43-page investigation found Fultz had posed for pictures as Adolf Hitler, freely used racial slurs in texts, masturbated on camera in his police vehicle, took pictures of his ex-girlfriend with his service weapon in her mouth during sex, repeatedly broke the law to generate clout online for his motorcycle themed Instagram and TikTok accounts, and used Flock to stalk his ex-girlfriend.

One of the sheriff's office’s key findings was that Fultz used Flock to spy on his ex and bragged about it to her.When questioned about using Flock, Fultz told investigators that he remembered the conversation with his ex but “denied checking her vehicle registration to spy on her or out of revenge.” The investigators audited the Flock logs and found that Fultz had, indeed, tracked her movements.

When someone runs a search using Flock, the system requires users to enter a reason. Fultz flagged his search for his ex as a general investigation, and simply entered “investigation” as the reason.

Investigators also found that Fultz accessed Flock while he was off-duty. “Deputy Fultz agreed that he would have entered the registration number prior to leaving for work based on the time, and denied using his agency laptop. Deputy Fultz explained all his flock inquiries were made from his agency-issued cellular telephone,” the investigation said.

Fultz denied he was using Flock to stalk his ex. He claimed to investigators that he may have been showing her how it works, and denied spying on her. The report also states that he said “he had her location on Snapchat, so it wouldn’t have benefitted him to track her on Flock.”

Fultz’s abuse of Flock is just one piece of a much larger investigation into his behavior. In an image provided by his ex, he “had shaved your mustache to resemble Adolf Hitler and [was] demonstrating a Nazi salute,” the investigation said. She also “provided photographic evidence of you holding a firearm to her head and also inserting it into her mouth while having sex.” She said it was consensual, according to the investigation, but “she realized it was a poor idea and inappropriate for a deputy sheriff. The firearm in the images appears to be an agency-issued Walther.”

In April 2025, Fultz shot and killed a man who charged him with a knife. “She specifically noted that the sexual encounter where you introduced the firearm occurred after your on-duty shooting incident.”

She also shared numerous text messages where Fultz used racial slurs. “She described Deputy Fultz as active on Discord and other web-based chats and believes his attempted humor was reflective of the dark humor he observes on those sites,” the investigation said.

When questioned about this, Fultz pointed to his childhood and an edgy card game. “Deputy Fultz said he grew up in a foster home with black parents and siblings, and the words became normal to use. Deputy Fultz stated that although he would not use the words in public, he felt comfortable using them via text messages” with his ex, the investigation said. “Deputy Fultz did recall playing an edgy game called ‘Cards Against Humanity’ on several occasions, but he stated it never turned into anything more than edgy humor which is the design of the game.”

Investigators also found that Fultz had been pulled over for speeding on his motorcycle and covering up his license tag at least four times, including one incident where he was going 111 MPH. He walked away from every interaction after identifying himself as a member of law enforcement.

Investigators told him he had to keep his motorcycle’s license tags visible. “Inexcplicably, within 30 minutes of the direct order you were provided, you drove your motorcycle out of the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office parking lot with no license tag attached. The incident was captured on video and preserved as part of the investigation,” the investigation said.

Fultz explained he was speeding and covering his tag for online clout. “Deputy Fultz stated he made several posts to his account about riding with no license tag, claiming it was a trend that he followed. Deputy Fultz stated the posts were to get more ‘likes’ and ‘views’ on his account. Deputy Fultz claimed that he uses AI to generate some of the images,” the investigation said.

At the end of the investigation, the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office made it clear that Fultz would not keep his job, but they allowed him to resign rather than be fired. “Although termination is warranted for your egregious misconduct, due to the fact you are no longer employed by the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office, this Administrative Investigation is closed and referred to file,” the investigation concluded.

Fultz is just one of a growing list of law enforcement officers who are losing their jobs and, sometimes, getting arrested across the country for abusing their Flock access. An officer in Charlotte, South Carolina was arrested after misusing Flock in July. The town of Greer, South Carolina suspended its Flock contract after it discovered two of its officers used the system to stalk their exes. Another South Carolina officer was fired after an audit discovered she’d used Flock 166 times to watch an ex.

Fultz is unique in that he told the person he was watching that he used the Flock camera system to spy on her. Many of the stalking victims don’t find out about the abuse until it’s gone on for months or even years. The investigation also paints a broader picture of the kind of law enforcement officer who abuses their access to Flock.

The Brevard County Sheriff’s Office provided 404 Media with a copy of its investigation but did not respond to a request for comment.

Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock to Stalk People

There have been more than a dozen cases around the country where police use Flock to obsessively and illegally stalk people.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-26 19:46:56

A Student Said He Was a Hobby Plane Spotter. He Was Allegedly Taking Photos for the Chinese Government

A Chinese national studying in Canada allegedly crossed over into the United States earlier this year to take photos of facilities near the Chicago airport at the direction of a suspected Chinese government official, according to newly filed court records. The Chinese official repeatedly told the student to destroy the SIM cards they used to communicate and stick to a Huawei phone.

The records provide insight into how Chinese state actors continue to use students to essentially crowd source imagery of sensitive U.S. locations or military aircraft, and how those students are told to remain undetected.

Seamus Hughes of Court Watch first identified and posted the records on Wednesday.

Weiheng Zeng is an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada and has crossed into the U.S. around two dozen times since 2022, according to an affidavit from an FBI Special Agent.

💡
Do you know anything else about this case? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

In April, an unknown person was seen inside the FedEx employee parking lot at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, Illinois, the document continues. This person looked like they were taking photos of aircraft or other parts of the airport. They climbed onto a forklift to take photos in the direction of the aircraft, and tried to get into a FedEx truck, according to photos included in the document. Authorities later figured out this was Zeng based on the dark blue Chrysler Town & Country vehicle that left the area and that he was connected to

When Zeng tried to enter the U.S. again last Sunday, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) interviewed him repeatedly. At first, Zeng said he planned to travel with his sister and a classmate. CBP agents then reviewed his phone and found multiple photos of aircraft, the document says. Zeng told the agents “he takes pictures of model aircraft being tracked for a flight radar website,” it adds. At one point he said he takes the photos as his hobby. Agents also found photos of Zeng and others in tactical clothing holding rifle-styled firearms. Zeng said this was an airsoft gun.

Images: screenshots from the court record.

Zeng changed his story repeatedly, before revealing taking the photos was more than a hobby. Instead, he knows someone referred to in the court record as his “Chinese Contact.” This contact assigned Zeng specific planes and their tail numbers to photograph, and then paid Zeng $20 to $30 per picture. Zeng said this Chinese Contact sent him SIM cards to communicate, and then told him to destroy the cards, their chats, and delete the photos he took. Later Zeng said the contact told him to use his Huawei phone to communicate, and never take that phone into the U.S.

Zeng claimed the Chinese Contact approached him through “an aviation spotter website” around a year and a half ago, the document continues. Zeng said he believed this person was connected to the Chinese Communist Party, and later told the FBI the person sent a photo of an official looking badge. The language the contact used “was very organized and managed, not language typically used between friends,” the document adds. When the FBI later looked into this site, the agency found it appeared to not exist, according to the court record.

One of the photographed planes was an American United aircraft which had “a unique, temporary paint job, of which photographs were highly desired,” according to Zeng. The contact wanted Zeng to go to places in Orlando, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles to take photographs of specific locations around airports, the document says. Zeng said he denied these requests and accepted two tasks over 18 months. One of those was to get the photos of the interior of the FedEx facility at O’Hare International Airport. In all, he made $500, the document says.

“ZENG stated ‘Chinese Contact’ was not satisfied with the photographs and the photographs were fine, but not what were ‘expected’,” the document adds.

Seamus Hughes (@SeamusHughes) on X

oh. https://t.co/FVpnKSxKG8

^{Seamus Hughes (X (formerly Twitter))}

404 Media

2026-08-26 18:19:46

Scientists Discover Vast Underground 'Anomaly' on Mars

Scientists have discovered a thermal “anomaly” deep underground on Mars that could help explain the red planet’s divided geography and shed light on whether it once hosted alien life, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature.

Using a novel approach involving three Martian orbiters, the team peered into the interior of the planet and detected that its mantle—the layer between its crust and the core—is 400 to 750°F hotter in the southern hemisphere compared with its northern half.

The temperature anomaly could help explain the longstanding mystery of the so-called “Martian dichotomy,” the term for the bizarre difference between the Martian north and south hemispheres. Whereas Mars’ northern half is dominated by lowlands that may have once hosted a giant ocean, the southern half is covered in highlands that are miles higher in average elevation.

For decades, scientists have puzzled over whether this dichotomy originates from an ancient impact, or if it might have emerged from early internal processes in the mantle, such as convection or plate tectonics. By tracking tiny changes on Mars during its orbit around the Sun, scientists detected much higher temperatures in the planet’s southern mantle; the crustal dichotomy is at least partly a reflection of a similarly divided interior.

The origin of the dichotomy “is still an ongoing question in Mars science, and a pretty fundamental one,” said Nick Wagner, a planetary scientist at Brown University who co-authored the study, in a call with 404 Media. “This study doesn't provide an answer to it, but adds another line of evidence to figure out what is actually going on underneath Mars.”

To get a look under Mars’ hood, Wagner and his colleagues used a novel approach called tidal tomography. The team analyzed 16 years of tracking data from three NASA orbiters—Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter—to measure the slight gravitational wobbles of Mars during its orbit around the Sun.

The results exposed a clear asymmetry in temperatures between the hemispheres that mirrors the crustal dichotomy. While it will take a lot of future research to narrow down the exact cause of this thermal anomaly, the team suggested that it might be due to present-day activity in the mantle, known as convection, or perhaps it acts as insulation under the highlands that has lasted for billions of years.

“I was kind of surprised how sharp the result was, and how confident it was,” said Wagner. “But maybe we shouldn't be surprised, because Mars seems to be dominated by these large scale variations from the north to south, so it makes sense that these variations also extend into the mantle.”

This hypothesis is not mutually exclusive to the idea that an ancient impact may have contributed to the crustal dichotomy, and it will take more research to tease out the causes of Mars’ strange structure.

“The Mars interior is still really unknown,” Wagner noted.

Tidal tomography has been used to glimpse the interiors of Earth and the Moon, but this is the first time the approach has been applied to Mars. The technique allows scientists to remotely probe a celestial body’s interior without having to land spacecraft on the surface, which could make it “a powerful tool for future missions seeking to characterize the interiors of planetary bodies,” according to the study.

Unraveling the full complexity of Mars—from its atmosphere down to its core—will yield insights into its past and present habitability, and whether it ever hosted life. Some four billion years ago, the Martian surface was home to rivers and lakes, and perhaps an enormous ocean, providing the right conditions for life as we know it on Earth. NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is exploring a dried-up lakebed, has discovered tantalizing compounds that could have been made by ancient microbes, but could also have a geological origin.

To determine if Mars has ever been home to aliens, scientists need to reconstruct its complete evolution, including its internal dynamics.

“Habitability is a complicated thing,” Wagner said. “There's a lot of different things that feed into it: heat, chemistry, water. Earth is special for a lot of reasons, habitability included, but I think what gets undersold, potentially, is the geodynamics of it. And what I mean by that is [Earth has] plate tectonics—a way for the surface of Earth to transfer material with its interior and regulate its carbon, regulate its nitrogen and its oxygen. As far as we know, Mars doesn't have plate tectonics, and it never did.”

“I'm wondering how this anomaly plays into the idea of Mars maybe having the ability to have plate tectonics at one point, or maybe not having the ability,” he concluded. “It's another piece in this puzzle to figure out what past Mars looked like, both habitability-wise, but also just for pure science.”
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Tidal tomography reveals a thermal anomaly beneath Mars’s crustal dichotomy - Nature

Analysis of tracking data from Mars orbiters reveals time-variable gravity field behaviour reflecting the structure underlying the Martian crustal dichotomy and indicates the preservation of a 200–400 °C thermal anomaly in the present-day mantle belo…

^Nature

404 Media

2026-08-26 13:44:05

Flock’s CEO Is Lying to Cops About 404 Media's Reporting on Abortion Case

In an August call with Ohio law enforcement and government officials, Flock’s CEO Garrett Langley repeatedly lied about his surveillance technology’s role in tracking a woman who had self-administered an abortion, the context around the tracking of the woman, and 404 Media’s coverage of that watershed incident. Langley claimed that the story is “entirely false,” despite court records, police reports, and 404 Media’s other reporting documenting the case in detail.

The candid comments were recorded by Signal Akron journalist Doug Brown, who sat in on the call with an Ohio lawmaker and then shared them with 404 Media. The recording shows how Langley speaks in private with government officials when the conversation is not intended to be broadcast, and comes amid a PR campaign to recast his embattled company. Recently Langley has gone on something of a media blitz, speaking to outlets like The New York Timesand appearing on the tech-focused All-In Podcast. Those conversations were, obviously, meant to be consumed publicly. Behind the scenes, Langley speaks very differently.

In the call, Langley strategized with cops about how to deal with journalists, suggesting that they avoid talking to national outlets and that cops focus on telling “sob” stories.

“Let me handle The New York Times, you handle your local media. They want to hear from you, you know your reporters, they’ll pick up a sob story,” Langley said.

💡
Do you work at Flock? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

“There’s a story reported by 404 Media of a Texas officer using Flock to try to find a woman who had an abortion. And it’s entirely false. They knew it was false. Because there’s a few things, right, because one, it’s not illegal to have an abortion in Texas. It’s illegal to administer an abortion. So the woman could never have been under investigation for having an abortion. So that’s problem one,” Langley said in the meeting.

In fact, court records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and shared with 404 Media show that Texas authorities did discuss whether they could charge the woman with a crime on the same day they performed the Flock search. An affidavit said, “it was discussed at the time with the District Attorney’s Office and learned the State could not statutorily charge [the woman] for taking the pill to cause the abortion or miscarriage of the non-viable fetus.” Police documents categorize their work on the case as a “death investigation.”

In that case 404 Media revealed in May 2025 which Langley called “entirely false,” authorities in Texas searched Flock cameras nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion. That search included cameras in states where abortion is legal. The incident showed in real terms what healthcare access and privacy advocates had warned about: that in the wake of Roe v. Wade, more law enforcement may use surveillance technology to track down people who are seeking reproductive healthcare. At the time, the Sheriff Adam King of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office told 404 Media the woman’s “family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital.” (It later turned out the Flock search was performed more than two weeks after the abortion, making this explanation dubious).
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The records were part of an arrest affidavit against the woman’s partner, who was arrested for allegedly threatening her at gunpoint on the day she took an abortion pill. Police investigative documents obtained by 404 Media further show that police were initially treating this as an investigation rather than a wellness check. A police incident report describes the police collecting evidence from the woman’s partner’s home, including the FedEx packaging and instructions for the abortion pill she took, photos her partner took, and other evidence.

In the meeting, Langley continued, “The second problem is if the 404 Media group would have taken the time to conduct an actual journalistic investigation, they would have found out that two weeks later, when all this came out, she was in an abusive relationship and the family was concerned that she was in danger. They were trying to find her because they were worried her life was at risk.”

Langley’s version of events here is misleading, too. 404 Media has repeatedly reported that the police documents do not mention the woman’s family having any concern about her. The entire investigation that led to the Flock searches was performed at the behest of her abusive partner, and the police documents show that the man had seen her a day after the abortion but did not call the police until weeks later. The man’s trial, related to charges around his alleged abuse, is scheduled for later this year.

It is unclear what Langley means by “two weeks later, when all this came out.” He may be referring to the fact that the police investigation and the Flock searches only happened more than two weeks after the woman had the abortion, which is a fact that people only know because of 404 Media’s journalistic investigation and the EFF, which obtained the relevant court records that 404 Media reported on. It was only after our reporting was published that police created a new document retroactively providing the justification as being concerned for the woman’s safety.

When 404 Media asked for comment on Langley’s comments from the call, Flock public relations manager Paris Lewbel said the court documents showed that the woman could not be charged with a crime. This ignores the fact that they did discuss doing so.

Langley has a pattern of making contradictory statements or incendiary ones he later has to walk back. In an interview with Forbes in September, Langley described DeFlock, the open source map of Flock camera locations, as a “terroristic organization.” In July, he apologized for those comments. He mocked people who attended city council meetings to raise concerns about Flock cameras, while also acknowledging that his staff have lobbied at close to 10,000 city council meetings last year.

There have been multiple cases of deception or misleading statements from and inside Flock recently. Jonathan Paz, who used to be a government affairs manager at Flock, told 404 Media he repeatedly asked internally if Flock was working with ICE. He was told no. But, beyond local cops performing lookups for ICE in the Flock system, the company actually did have a pilot program giving a division of ICE direct access to Flock’s network. Paz said he was “lied to.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) documented a case in which Flock’s chief information security officer told a city council the tool did not make a heat map of an individual’s movements. The Oshkosh City Council approved its contract with Flock, but then immediately revoked it after learning a day later that Flock had lied.

Regarding that case, Lewbel told 404 Media, “The main assertion in the ACLU article is a misspoken statement by one employee in a contentious meeting in Oshkosh, WI, which we corrected the next day. The assertion that our intent to be anything less than transparent in providing education about our products is false.”

Flock Lied About its ALPR technology. What Else Has It Lied About?

ACLU documents how surveillance camera company Flock has lied to local officials about its operations

^{Chad Marlow (American Civil Liberties Union)}

404 Media

2026-08-26 13:21:51

Inside the Warehouse Where Amazon Scans and Destroys Books for AI Training

Last week we published a story that revealed an Amazon warehouse where the company scans and destroys thousands of books for AI training data. The following is an interview with one of the Amazon employees at this warehouse. We granted this employee anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

The employee worked at Amazon’s VGT3 warehouse, which is housed in the same facility as LAS8, where Amazon operates its print-on-demand business. Both operations are part of a larger complex of Amazon facilities in Las Vegas, Nevada.

We discovered that VGT3 was used to destructively scan books for AI training data by placing a tracking device in a shipment of rare books that a bookseller suspected was being acquired by an anonymous AI company. We saw the shipment travel across the country before finally landing at VGT3. Online, Amazon employees who worked at VGT3 described the work of receiving shipments of books, cutting the spines off of them, and scanning the loose pages.

The Amazon employee I talked to described what that operation looks like from the warehouse floor.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

404 Media: What do you do when you get to work at VGT3?

Anonymous: We have to walk past everything to get to the back of the warehouse. That's where I first saw all the scanners, and I was really wondering what was going on. I remember I even asked someone what they were doing and they said they’re not sure even the people who work there know what they’re doing. Of course, once I got over there and started putting two and two together, I kind of understood. And you know, I think people who work there probably know what was going on over there, but probably just didn't want to talk about it.

📖
Do you work at a company that scans books for AI training? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal @emanuel.404. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.

We also saw them cutting the spines off the books and everything. And after they scan it, they throw all the loose leaf papers into a big shuttle. [Editor’s note: Shuttles is how Amazon refers to gaylords, which are big open cardboard boxes that are often used to store books in bulk.] So they're all mixed together. There's no way to put the book back together or anything. Where I worked, primarily they would bring us boxes of books, or sometimes there's shuttles of books.

What kind of books?

All kinds of books. When we first started a lot of them were brand new. Some of them are used as well. Like you could tell, they were liquidated from a library or something like that. We were even getting boxes of stuff from London. There were a lot of books from the University of London. There was even like, I don't know what you would call them, but it was like kind of stapled together papers that said that they were presented to Parliament on the behalf of Her Royal Majesty the Queen. So they were like government documents. I don't know if they're public. Probably they're public, but it was just interesting that we found all that in there.

What did you think the books were for?

That's what we were wondering, and we were kind of like, ‘this is a lot of random information.’ They have literally any kind of book you could think of. They have ones in different languages. We saw a lot of German and Russian books, and we actually got whole pallets of Japanese books. Some of these books are brand new and they're like still sealed. A lot of the Japanese ones were, but yeah, we do get the stuff from the libraries, and that's the stuff I think is more mixed because they're not all nice in boxes and everything like that. They're kind of just thrown into the shuttle.

What was it like working there?

Our job was to unbox the books, and honestly, they seem like a mess over there. Like they're not really well managed or organized at all. Their process wasn't solid. Their process changed every day. But we were pretty much putting them in a tote [a small plastic stackable bin] so that they can go be scanned in and sorted, so that they can go over to the people to cut the bindings off.

They take them off the truck. The dock's right there, and then they stage them, which is just putting them on standby. People pick up the books and bring them to our station and we stack up the totes until it’s a whole pallet, and then the people with the pallet jacks come and they take the whole pallet.

And I think the next area, I think they call it receiving. What I've heard they do there is that they're scanning all the barcodes pretty much to see if they need it and just weed out duplicates. Something else they had us do was—we call it the trash but we don't we don't know exactly what they do with them—but one day we were taking all the duplicates and all the ones they said, “oh, we don't need these,” and we were throwing those in different shuttles. They're like yeeted in there, like they're not nicely placed in there or anything. And they say they're returning them to the vendors, but I'm like, you know, ‘do the vendors go through it and see which ones are actually worth it?’ Because it's like a tall shuttle that's probably six feet tall, six or seven feet tall. They're just piled in there. It’s also right next to where they start cutting the spines, and so I think right after that, that's where it's going [the trash].

What does it look like when they cut the spines off the books?

It's a machine people operate. Each of these machines is just like a little workstation, and there'll be one person at each of these stations. It's really safe because it has a little cover and it has a little area where you slide the book into, remove your fingers from the area, and then you press a button, and it just comes down and slices it. And then you remove the books after the blade is gone.

After they cut the spines they have these kind of library carts, kind of like how you would stack books, but instead, it's a stacks of paper and little cardboard things to separate—I'm guessing— the different books.

I saw the pages being thrown in a shuttle after they were scanned. We were walking by and we went over to one of the shuttles and looked into it because we could tell they were throwing the old books in it or the cut books in it, and it's just a bunch of loose paper like just sheets thrown in there.

Did you see the scanners?

They probably have like at least 20 scanners, maybe 25. They look like machines that count cash, it flips through the pages really fast. It kind of has something like that they load it into, and I can see their screens, and on their screens, you can see the scans of the book, and it's going really fast.

What do you think about Amazon doing this?

At first what they were telling people is that it was for Kindles, but I just didn't believe that. I instantly was like, I don't think that's how they do it because of publication rights and stuff, copyright and everything. Then I saw it was for AI. I don't like it only because I wish I could take these books. There's so much knowledge and so much stuff in them and some of them look like they might be rare, and I've heard that they order rare books, and that's why I say some of these are so obscure. I definitely don't like the idea that they can't be reused or anything like that afterwards. They're reducing the amount of available copies for other people.

404 Media

2026-08-26 13:07:22

Podcast: Cops Are Making Fake Flock Cameras and Amazon Packages

We start this week with Jason’s piece on a cop making a fake Flock camera to catch a vandal. How can you be charged with destroying expensive property if… the camera wasn’t real? After the break, Sam tells us about how Darth Vader loves Flock. In the subscribers-only section, we talk a bit about three years of 404 Media.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/rYCvhAOGAjM?…

• ⁠You're Invited: 404 Media's Third Anniversary Live Podcast and Party!⁠
• ⁠RSVP: Killer Technology With 404 Media⁠
• ⁠Man Charged With 3 Felonies For Breaking 3D-Printed ‘Decoy’ Flock Camera⁠
• ⁠The Man Behind the Anti-Flock Darth Vader Mask Wants to Know: 'When Will This End?'⁠

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

^{404 Media (Apple Podcasts)}

404 Media

2026-08-25 18:35:26

Israel Is Running a Synthetic Think Tank to Influence AI Search Results

A synthetic Israel-funded think tank has published more than 100 articles since it launched less than a month ago. First spotted by Politico, the Hanover Institute for Public Policy is run by the American advertising firm Piro Inc, paid for by Israel, and appears designed to generate content for LLMs that are continually scanning the internet to inform their responses, with the goal of tweaking chatbot answers in favor of Israel.

Every few days, the Hanover Institute publishes around a dozen articles related to Israel, antisemitism, and Palestine. Every article’s headline has a question. The articles have no byline, often contain graphs, and cite real sources but do not link to them.
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The articles ask questions like How Much Palestinian Land Has Israel Taken?, Why Is Israel Seen as the Aggressor?, and Is There a Policy of Starvation in Gaza? The answers often read like word salad nonsense. “A reader who has encountered the claim as a consensus has encountered something real,” one article said about Israel restricting food supply to Gaza.

“The reframe is the denominator. Six documents from five bodies is a count of assertions, not a change in the kind of evidence available,” it said. “Adding a seventh organization stating the same conclusion does not convert an organizational determination into an adjudicated finding, because the evidentiary route is the same in each case: a body assembling material, applying its own threshold, and publishing.”

The site’s about page said the lack of a byline was “the convention at institutional publishers” and that it wants readers to weigh the sources “rather than the author.”

“Accountability for the material is not anonymous,” Hanover said on its about page. “The registrant responsible for distributing it is named in the disclosure at the foot of every page and on the public register at the Department of Justice, where each report is filed. The researchers are not named because a finding should stand or fall on its sources rather than on the standing of whoever assembled it, and because the subject attracts harassment. That is a considered editorial position, not an oversight.”

An analysis from AI detection tool Pangram found that three Hanover Institute articles we tested were written entirely by AI. Only the bibliography at the end of each article was human written, according to Pangram. The images, too, are AI generated.

There’s evidence that Hanover’s articles are not just written by LLMs, but are also written for LLMs. The site has an llms.txt, a webpage markdown that’s designed to make it easier for LLMs to scrape a website and the “registrant responsible for distributing” is the marketing firm Piro, which advertises a service to manipulate chatbot answers on its website.

Piro did not return 404 Media’s request for comment, but co-founder Daniel Rosenberg explained how its system worked in a post on LinkedIn. “Every day, more buying journeys begin with an AI conversation instead of a Google search. If the models don't understand your story, they'll tell someone else's,” he said.

“The question was: how do you make sure AI knows how to tell them? We spent the last year searching for the best technical minds in the space, learning how AI models discover, evaluate, and synthesize information across the web,” he said on LinkedIn. “Then we built a process that brings both disciplines together: identify where a brand's narrative is thin, inconsistent, or missing, then strengthen the signals that shape how AI understands and explains it [...] We call it AI Story Optimization.”

Prio’s website explained more. “Search is no longer about keywords. It’s about story. About trust. Not only the trust of a language model deciding whether to cite you, but the trust of the actual human being reading that answer and deciding whether to buy. That is two audiences in one sentence: the engine that recommends you, and the person who believes it,” Piro said on a page advertising its AI Story Optimization service.

“We map every surface the models read. Reddit threads, YouTube transcripts, G2 reviews, publisher pages, forums, comparison sites, and we score each one by how much it actually shapes what the engines say about you. Not a vanity dashboard. A ranked map of real influence,” Piro said on its website.

Hanover is registered as a foreign agent with the United States government which means it has to file paperwork disclosing its broad goals and its funding. According to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) paperwork reviewed by 404 Media, Piro is working with LaPam — the Israeli government’s official advertising agency: “Piro, Inc. will provide strategic communications and media relations services in connection with LaPam’s engagement on behalf of the State of Israel,” the paperwork states. Piro has also uploaded copies of each article to FARA’s website.

According to FARA paperwork, these activities are political and “may include the creation and dissemination of factual, source-supported informational materials intended to educate the U.S. public regarding Israel and related issues through publicly distributed content.”

The FARA paperwork also included two invoices from HAVAS Media — a European advertising agency working for Israel — provided to Piro for its services. One invoice dated April 30, 2026, included a total of $900,000 to develop the project. “Services include audience research, content architecture, scriptwriting, asset production, distribution planning, interactive performance analysis, and final program evaluation. All content is developed for distribution via digital and social media platforms in the United States.” Another invoice filed on June 20 showed that HAVAS paid Piro an additional $100,000 for two months of work.

“It shouldn't surprise any of us that Israel is funding a disinformation and propaganda machine intended to manipulate the American public,” Margaret DeReus, the executive director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, told 404 Media. “This is just the newest iteration of what Israel has been doing for decades and it isn't working. No amount of chatbot manipulation can reverse the massive surge in public support for Palestinian freedom"

Hanover’s articles feel impersonal, a dry reading of complicated and deadly conflicts. According to its website, however, the work is deeply personal.

“The Institute’s original founder traced this work to a moment in his own childhood. At ten, he asked the man his grandmother had married about the numbers tattooed on his arm; the man had survived Auschwitz. What a child could not fully grasp, the adult came to understand: that such hatred is recent rather than distant, that it reached within a single lifetime and within his own family,” the website said. “That is his account of why the work exists. It is not offered as a credential for it.”

The Hanover Institute did not return 404 Media’s request for comment.

#ai #brandstrategy #storytelling #generativeai #geo | Daniel Rosenberg

When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity about your category, an answer comes back in one confident paragraph. Most brands have no idea how that paragraph gets built. So we spent months reverse-engineering it.

^{Daniel Rosenberg (LinkedIn)}

404 Media

2026-08-25 18:16:34

ICE Wants the Country’s Voter Data

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is looking for a federal contractor to provide it with access to the country’s voter registration and voter history data, according to newly released procurement records reviewed by 404 Media.

The procurement records say ICE is seeking the data to help detect fraud. But given the administration’s habit of using fraud as a pretense for large immigration enforcement actions, and President Trump’s constant comments about election security in the lead up to the midterms, the planned hiring of a contractor to handle voter data raises questions around what exactly ICE plans to do with the data.

💡
Do you work at ICE or CBP? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

“The purpose of this acquisition is for the handling and secure delivery of publicly available voter registration files and voter history files to support Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) fraud detection and data segmentation activities,” a section of the procurement records reads. The records are part of a Request for Information, or RFI, which means the government is asking potentially capable contractors to come forward.

The records say the list of jurisdictions ICE wants voter data from is likely to be limited at first, but that the contractor needs to have the capability to get data from all 50 states and other U.S. territories.

Specifically, ICE is seeking “Public voter registration file for each Government-identified jurisdiction,” and “Public voter history file for each Government-specified federal election, when publicly available and separate from the public voter registration file.”
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Voter data is public by design and can be obtained in various ways. Some sites collate this data and make it easily searchable.

But handling such a large volume of data in a clean and reliable manner could be a challenge. ICE is looking for a contractor to essentially help streamline that process, by both obtaining the data and handling it for the agency.

The purchase specifically is for HSI, the part of ICE traditionally focused on criminal investigations, including money laundering, cybercrime, and various types of fraud. That does include voter fraud.

Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) highlighted an HSI case that ended in charges against a Chinese national for alleged fraudulent voter registration and fraudulent voting.

Experts generally agree that voter fraud is exceptionally rare. But constant claims that voter fraud is happening on a wider scale or tangibly impacting elections runs the risk of disenfranchising voters from participating at all.

In July, 404 Media reported ICE was to pay Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to a wealth of personal data to investigate “voter fraud.” Personal data Thomson Reuters holds includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, and more.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Voted in America? This Site Doxed You

Voting rolls are technically public records but can be laborious to get hold of. A right-wing site weaponizes that information by allowing anyone, anywhere, to search for a voter’s physical address and party affiliation.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-25 16:33:48

Charges Dropped Against Person Who Clapped at a City Data Center Meeting

Emporia Kansas has dropped its criminal case against Lux Claridge, a high school teacher who was arrested for clapping during a city data center meeting.

“Today, I was informed by my attorney that the city has dropped my charges and has passed my information along to the county. As far as I know, I'm in the clear unless the county is feeling froggy,” Claridge told 404 Media in an email on Monday.

Claridge's lawyer forwarded them a message from Emporia's assistant city attorney: "Due to conflicts on this matter, the case has been dismissed without prejudice in municipal court and sent to the County Attorney’s office for their review."
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The small town of Emporia, Kansas is fighting against its city commission and a proposed hyperscale data center project that would sit on 1,000 acres of prairie land near Claridge’s home. Claridge attended a commission meeting on July 22 and planned to speak out against the project, but was dragged out of the meeting and arrested by police when they clapped during a presentation.

Emporia held Claridge for eight hours and charged them with disorderly conduct and interfering with a law enforcement officer. The city refused to show 404 Media a copy of the arrest report and has not responded to a request for comment about the dropped charges.

After Clardige’s arrest, Emporia’s city commission moved to virtual meetings and ended public comment. The city said it was doing so “in the interest of public safety.” According to Claridge, the city commission announced that in-person meetings with open public comments will return soon. “Our mayor is ‘willing to give us another shot to act like grown ups,’” Claridge said, quoting Emporia mayor Becky Smith. They added that the city will vote on whether or not to ban hyper-scale data centers outright in November.

According to a press release from the Emporia city commission, the city will meet in-person in a special session open to the public on August 26. “Public comment is expected to resume at the regular September 2 meeting,” the announcement said. In a different press release, the city said the November vote on a data center ban hinges on a County court giving it the OK.

Emporia did not return 404 Media’s request for a comment.

Megaphone Embeddable Player

^{404 Media (Megaphone)}

404 Media

2026-08-25 15:44:17

Man Charged With 3 Felonies For Breaking 3D-Printed ‘Decoy’ Flock Camera

A police department in Florida used “decoy” Flock cameras that an officer 3D-printed at home to “bait” would-be vandals. Police officers monitored the fake cameras for days, then charged a man with three felonies after he cut down and destroyed one of the plastic devices. The police department in question refuses to release any information about how the decoy operation was devised or carried out and claims there is zero paper trail whatsoever about the operation.

Oviedo, Florida mayor Megan Sladek said she “had NO idea” that this was happening and said she was “speechless” over the sting operation, which was first reported by News 6 Orlando. The arrest shows that police have escalated their attempts to catch potential Flock vandals, and that some departments have dedicated significant resources into doing so. Sladek told 404 Media that the 3D-printed camera in question was “free.”

Despite the decoy camera being worth, at most, several dollars worth of plastic filament, Evan Meyer was charged with three felonies: attempted larceny/grand theft, criminal mischief of property damage worth more than $1,000, and property crimes against computer equipment supplies, according to an arrest report obtained by 404 Media. The arrest report states that the operation was devised after several Flock cameras in Oviedo were stolen in late July and early August.

“Several of our Flock Safety cameras were stolen between 7/23/2026 -8/3/2026 out of the Lockwood Blvd. corridor and we replaced them with clone style Flock cameras. These Flock ‘bait’ cameras were made to closely resemble that of real Flock cameras but did not cost the same amount nor collect any data within the device,” the arrest report states. Meyer was arrested shortly after midnight Thursday after knocking the 3D-printed fake camera off a pole with a pair of garden shears and destroying it.

“When asked how much he believes the camera costs to replace, he stated approximately $1,000-$5,000 proving that Meyer knew it was an expensive real piece of equipment and not a fake replica,” the police report states. “The actual cost to replace our Flock camera is valued at $800.00 plus any installation fees. Meyer advised he has been hearing all the negative things online about the misuses of Flock cameras (specifically the CEO of Flock Safety) and decided to knock the one down which was closest to his house. Meyer grabbed his father's pruning shears from the garage, walked down the street (south from his house) and was tall enough to cut the mount off and then smashed the camera on the ground.”

The arrest report implies that because Meyer thought that Flock cameras were expensive and because he didn’t know it was a decoy that he could be charged with attempted grand theft and other charges that carry more consequences.

The operation is reminiscent of Amazon “package sting” operations that several police departments attempted several years ago, in which empty Amazon boxes were placed on people’s porches while police officers watched. Those sting operations resulted in zero known arrests.

The Oviedo Police Department has thus far refused to release almost any information about the operation outside of what was said in the police report, and has repeatedly claimed to 404 Media that public records about how the fake camera were made do not have to be released because they have to do with an ongoing criminal investigation. The department first claimed that it has zero public records whatsoever about the fake device from before the arrest, then claimed that any and all records are exempt from release.

A representative for the Oviedo Police Department told 404 Media that “The decoy FLOCK camera was produced by an officer at their home using their personally owned 3D printer and donated to the agency Our agency does not own a 3D printer therefore does not have design, planning and creation of the alleged decoy or replica cameras before the arrest, including the communications and presentations through which that work was discussed.” It said there are “no meeting minutes, no text messages, and no emails regarding the production of a decoy FLOCK camera prior to the arrest on 8/20/2026.”

Mayor Sladek posted on Facebook that she was “speechless” over the operation, and that “transparency is so important.”

"My 2 cents: there are 2 completely separate issues in play here, and they're tangled up in an unfortunate way. ISSUE 1: VANDALISM IS WRONG. I don't care if it's a Flock camera, a piece of art, or graffiti in a public space, it's not right. The police caught a person who engaged in destroying public property, and that's what we hired them to do. They did their job,” she wrote. “ISSUE 2: on Monday, just days before this incident, a majority of COUNCIL AGREED TO CONSIDER ENDING FLOCK. There is a timeline of events related to installing decoy cameras, and somewhere in that timeline, City Council instructed staff to prepare a resolution to end the use of Flock in Oviedo. While it is irrelevant to the issue of vandalism, when the fake cameras were fabricated and installed relative to a very public discussion about their potential discontinuation is something I would like to know.”

In an email to 404 Media, Sladek said that “the whole thing is very interesting from a legal perspective. Mayor is a part-time job here in Oviedo, and I'm an attorney by day, so I'm probably looking at this with a bit different lens than the average person. Even if the guy knew it was a fake camera, that would still make it art, and it would still be vandalism.”

“I became aware of the camera's existence when I heard about it from a resident who saw it on the news, and shortly after that, my first questions were about the cost and process,” she added. “Can't do much better than free, and the effort did result in someone hopping up a pole and attempting to take it down. What is not known is whether the person who removed the first camera at that location is the same as the person who removed the decoy. It would be interesting to know if the one arrested has any prior criminal history or if this was a first offense. How to charge is up to the state's attorney, but you'll see on the police report when it arrives that the person arrested believed that he was damaging property valued at a much greater price point than the actual value was. “

In a Facebook comment, Sladek posted several responses to questions that Oviedo police chief Dale Coleman gave her. Coleman said that he approved the plan, and that “supervisors have latitude how they go about solving a crime operations [sic] like this are done whenever there is a reasonable chance of success. This operation is similar to a drug operation or a theft ring at the mall. CID has done this many of these and know what is needed to do it lawfully.”

Coleman told Sladek that there were multiple cameras installed last Sunday, and said that police officers were watching the cameras all night between Sunday and Thursday, when Meyer was arrested.

It is not clear which 3D printed plastic Flock camera model the police officer used, but 404 Media found various Flock camera replicas on popular free 3D printer model sites.

How Amazon and the Cops Set Up an Elaborate Sting Operation That Accomplished Nothing

Behind-the-scenes emails show how Amazon and Ring worked with police in Aurora, Colorado to make people scared of each other.

^{Caroline Haskins (VICE)}

404 Media

2026-08-25 13:52:35

The Man Behind the Anti-Flock Darth Vader Mask Wants to Know: 'When Will This End?'

Anthony Ralphs has been showing up to San Diego City Council meetings to speak against Flock's presence in his city for a year. At first, he took the podium during public comment in business casual — dress shirts, pants, suits, "respectable" clothing — to voice his concerns about the city's deal with the surveillance company.

"I did all the right things. I wore the suits. I said all the correct talking points. I made all the compelling arguments," Ralphs told me in a phone call. He cited Supreme Court precedent, like Chatrie v. United States, which challenged the constitutionality of geofence warrants where police could collect location history data from cell phones.

"It seemed like no matter how many cases I brought up, no matter how many violations of the Constitution this technology breaks, no matter how many constituents, no matter how many organizations, no matter how well I dress, no matter how fine my talking points, they weren't listening," he said. "That was when I realized, you know, you can't spell activism without 'act,' right? And I decided, well, maybe I'll try something different."

On August 19, Ralphs stood before city council members in a Darth Vader cape and mask, complete with mechanized breathing and voice changer. "The emperor is a fan of Flock," he began, and, speaking as the Dark Lord, laid out in three minutes why the Empire depends on Flock's warrantless network of automatic license plate readers and surveillance cameras. The video went extremely viral; after our coverage of Ralph's comments, every news outlet on the planet seemingly wrote about the mysterious San Diegan Vader. Coverage of his speech was published in Singapore and translated to Spanish and Arabic.

‘I Would Never Do This To You:’ Protesting Flock, Arizona Man Presents Plan to Surveil Government Officials
“They didn’t understand it was satire in the beginning until the end,” Casa Grande, Arizona resident Jacob Petrosky told 404 Media. “They were not happy, they were very upset.”
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Ralphs is an event producer and has been hosting raves and music festivals in the area for the last 13 years. He founded an event space, Eden Art Garden, about an hour outside of the city. He recently started DeFlock San Diego and works with the Transparent and Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology San Diego (TRUST SD) Coalition as well as other anti-surveillance and privacy rights groups to educate people and organize more widely. "But now we need the musicians, we need the artists, we need the painters, the actors, we need the thespians to bring this together and get some wheels on the movement to help it gain traction," he said.

"I think it's a character that resonates. He's like an archetype for evil. He's an archetype for the Empire," Ralphs said. "Vader is always a servant of the Empire, right? So [Flock] is nothing but tools for the servants of the Empire. Framing it into that context, I think was what was needed to bring this conversation into like a theatrical global component is really framing it in that kind of good versus bad framework. It is such an Orwellian technology being utilized by such comic book villain forces of evil trying to do dastardly things."

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One of Ralphs' first city council meetings was in December 2025, when hundreds of people spoke in person, attended via Zoom, or sent comments online opposing Flock. After six hours of deliberation and debate, and despite the vast majority of public comment coming from constituents who wanted Flock out of San Diego, the council voted to continue the program.

"After that meeting, where city council decided that none of their constituents' opinions mattered and that they were going to vote how they wanted to vote regardless... After that, the movement was so discouraged, and all of us were so deflated that it was really hard to summon the collective energy and to muster the kind of the vitality that we needed to keep pushing forward," Ralphs said. He came back to another city council meeting a week later, and was "shocked and really disappointed," he said, to see the chamber was completely empty of members of the public. In that moment, he said, he realized he had an opportunity to attend as many city council meetings as he could — once every two weeks, then once a week, then twice and week and eventually every council and subcommittee meeting by spring 2026. "Then by May and June, I was so familiar with the process of giving public comment, of looking at the agenda items ahead of time to know what was going to be discussed, knowing how to cede time and get time ceded to you, I started organizing people to join me to speak to city council."

What Happened When Flock Came to My Town
My small town in South Carolina will soon have more Flock cameras than police officers.
404 MediaMatthew Gault

After Vader's appearance went viral around the world, Ralphs wondered if he'd let the character remain anonymous or take ownership of it. "But I think that it's a good time now to follow up with what the intention was, and what the reason and method was behind it," he said. "I think it's important for people to know this wasn't just some antic from somebody who just decided to show up one day and make some noise. This was a thought out plan that was exacted only after cumulative frustration from hundreds of people being ignored and months and months and months of trying things quote unquote the right way and it not working."

On Monday afternoon, Ralphs returned to San Diego City Council. He carried the mask to the podium with it wheezing on its own, and sat it down on the table. "I think we know who the bad guy is now. But I think what the whole world wants to know is who wants to be the good guy," he said. "I have requests to be interviewed this entire week. And what I would like to ask is, of the five council members that voted for Flock: When will this end? When will you listen to the vast majority of your constituents?"
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…

The Straits Times - Breaking News, Lifestyle & Multimedia News

The Straits Times - Get latest breaking news, business, sports, lifestyle, tech & multimedia and more news in Singapore, Asia & rest of the world at straitstimes.com.

^{The Straits Times}

404 Media

2026-08-24 14:48:33

How a Network of Volunteers Is Liberating Critical Court Records for Everyone

This article was republished from our friends over at Court Watch. Please consider subscribing to them if you want the early scoop on what's happening in our court system, from the concerning to the bizarre. Madeleine O’Neill is a freelance reporter in Baltimore.

Hundreds of street arrests that court records show disproportionately targeted Latinos in and around New York City. Detainees shuffled across the country one day before a congressional oversight visit. A judicial emergency in the Eastern District of California.

Each of these stories came to light because of habeas corpus — a centuries-old legal writ that has become a powerful tool for freeing immigrants swept up in the Trump administration’s mass detention and deportation campaign. Because they’re public court filings, habeas corpus petitions also offer a window into the often cryptic world of immigration enforcement.

But there’s a catch. Across the country, the nearly 50,000 habeas corpus petitions filed in recent immigration cases are public records only in theory, because a 2007 court rule makes the petitions impossible to access online like most other federal court records.

The rule has hobbled attorneys, journalists, and researchers trying to gather information about arrests and detention in this unprecedented era of immigration enforcement.

“The effect is it takes much longer to get access to these records in a particular case and it makes it basically impossible to get records in a lot of these cases at once,” said Renee Griffin, a staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

“It’s a real nationwide problem,” Griffin said.

A new project called Habeas Dockets is working to counteract this roadblock with help from volunteers. According to the project’s founder, 400 people across the country have contributed court records to the site, which publishes habeas corpus filings online for anyone to read them.

Court Watch spoke with founder John Kyle Cronan, a software developer from Chicago with no legal background besides his own curiosity.

“I’m the kind of person who has a PACER account just to look at stuff sometimes,” Cronan said, referring to the federal court's online document retrieval system.

He first noticed the effect of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 5.2(c) in April 2025, when he tried to access court documents about a group of people the federal government was trying to send to CECOT, a maximum security prison in El Salvador known for its brutal conditions.

When Cronan tried to open the documents, he ran into the same message that greets anyone who tries to access these records online: “You do not have permission to view this document.”

A court clerk explained to Cronan that he could come in and view these public records in person at a courthouse kiosk. The courthouse was in northern Texas. Cronan was in Chicago.

“You’ve got me there,” Cronan remembers thinking. He decided to organize a volunteer effort to make these court records accessible online. The project has become Cronan’s full-time job, and he recently started fundraising to grow the site. Cronan relies on help from law students, paralegals, and volunteer attorneys to review each filing for sensitive information that should be redacted, even though he’s not legally required to do so.

The personal details potentially contained in immigration filings are the reason why there is a limit on electronic access in the first place. The privacy rule recognizes that immigration cases, like social security cases, are particularly likely to contain sensitive information—hence the shielding.

Immigration matters are usually handled in immigration court, which is separate from the federal court system and does not allow public access to filings. In some cases, however, a person seeking asylum or other protected status might end up taking their claims to a federal judge, at which point the filings become public records.

Those papers could contain highly sensitive information about trafficking or domestic violence victims, said Daniella Prieshoff, senior managing attorney at the Tahirih Justice Center in Baltimore. Making that information easily accessible online could be dangerous for vulnerable clients, who are fearful of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in addition to their abusers or traffickers.

“It’s not just ICE, but it’s persecutors, abusers, traffickers,” Prieshoff said. “Our clients have very realistic concerns that those individuals will be able to find them at all costs, so having that parameter of allowing access to those records, but at a physical location, … I think that sets up a boundary that helps protect survivors.”

The flood of habeas corpus petitions filed under the second Trump administration is somewhat different than typical immigration cases filed in normal times. Usually an obscure area of law, habeas corpus petitions have become an increasingly important way to challenge the legality of an immigrant’s detention as ICE holds more people in facilities that are often ill-equipped to handle them.

These petitions are often filed hastily in the hours or days after a person has been arrested. They rarely contain the contents of asylum applications or other sensitive information, but lay out the bare bones facts of the petitioner’s detention.

Cronan’s team examines habeas filings before making them available online to ensure that any personal information, such as details about a person’s fear of persecution in their home country, is redacted.

Habeas Dockets first launched a year ago and became a nonprofit, operating under the name Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative, earlier this year.

“With the return of Trump, I really feel like the issues of immigration enforcement are the worst of all of it,” Cronan said. “I feel really strongly that what they’re doing is wrong and is harming people.”

About 29,000 documents have been uploaded to the site, Cronan said, with help from a group of volunteers that includes students, retirees, working folks with flexible schedules, and attorneys.

The electronic shielding rule is essentially an artifact of the early days of the internet, and much like PACER itself, it has not kept up with the times. The rule assumes that lawyers will go to the courthouse in person to do legal research on habeas cases, which is no longer the case, Cronan said. It also prevents attorneys, journalists, and researchers from accessing cases outside their geographic area, a significant hindrance as courts across the country handle thousands of new habeas cases.

The rule also has the side effect of making it harder to scrutinize the claims the government makes in habeas cases.

“It’s convenient for them,” Cronan said. The Habeas Dockets project will serve as an archive of the legal response to the federal government’s unprecedented fast-track approach to deportation.

Even when volunteers go to courthouses in person to view habeas filings, they sometimes run into roadblocks. At some district courts, clerks allow members of the public to view immigration records at access kiosks, but don’t allow them to print the pages out. You’re also not allowed to save the files to the computer or to a thumb drive, making it impossible to share the documents.

Habeas Dockets managed to get that policy changed in the Western District of Pennsylvania, Cronan said, but it remains a problem at four other district courts across the country.When printing is possible, Habeas Dockets reimburses volunteers for those costs from donations, Cronan said.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press also urged district courts to curb the electronic access restriction in a series of letters sent to the chief judges in five districts last year.

“This restriction prevents timely public access to fast-moving legal developments and impedes the ability of the press to report on critical, newsworthy matters,” RCFP wrote.

Two district courts declined, Griffin said, and others said they would send the request to their rules committee. None of the courts have acted on the request.

RCFP urges federal courts to lift restrictions on accessing immigration records

A rule blocks remote public access to records filed in immigration cases, complicating journalists’ efforts to cover enforcement actions.

^{Reporters Committee (The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press)}

404 Media

2026-08-21 14:54:35

Behind the Blog: Early Birthday Reflections

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss three years of 404 Media.

JASON: Tomorrow is the third anniversary of the launch of 404 Media. If you haven’t been paying attention to us yammering on about this on the podcast and in our emails, you can celebrate with us at our party in New York in a few weeks.

Anniversaries are a good time to take stock of things, but they always seem to sneak up on us. I don’t think we’ll have much of a public post this year on the actual anniversary, but maybe some public celebrating closer to the party and panel we’re throwing.

First off, if you’re reading this, thank you for your support and for being a subscriber. We could not be doing this without you. Starting 404 Media has changed all of our lives; we’ve said it a million times at this point, but it was not clear when we started this that it would actually work. Three years in, it is extremely working, and we are very proud of the work we’ve done, what we’ve built, and the impact our journalism has had. These are going to be disorganized, off the dome thoughts, but a few things:

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Behind the Blog: Early Birthday Reflections

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-20 17:10:52

'Darth Vader' Wants Flock in San Diego

During the public comment portion of a recent San Diego city council meeting, the council called for the next comment to take the podium: "Darth Vader?" As he approached the microphone in his black helmet and cape, his heavy breathing reached the mic before he did.

At the Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee Meeting on August 19, Vader — whose identity is not revealed during the meeting — spoke passionately in support of Flock in San Diego.

💡
Are you the Dark Lord of the Sith in question? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.

"The emperor is a fan of Flock, and we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium," Vader said. "Because we all know that the Flock cameras are not only following the license plate readers; they are following children. They are following children in parks and gymnasiums, and we need this. I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend. How will the people trust this city council when this city council continues to vote for surveillance technology that imprisons them?"

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Vader asked the council members to "work their Jedi mind tricks" and use "double speaking" to convince people that more surveillance is good. He referenced a June 2023 city council vote in favor of San Diego's Unsafe Camping Ordinance, which critics say effectively criminalized homelessness.

"This is what the emperor needs. This technology will help us find the rebel scum and their hidden base on Hoth. This technology will help us find Luke Skywalker as he traverses the universe in his X-wing. This technology is a necessary, necessary force," Vader said.

There are more than 550 Flock cameras installed around the city of San Diego, according to publicly available data aggregated by Flock tracking map DeFlock.

San Diego signed a year-long deal to join Flock's Nova service, giving the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) access to "open source intelligence" and data from other law enforcement agencies, Axios reported in April.

As 404 Media recently reported, Nova supplements license plate data with personal information sourced from other companies and the wider web. “You're going to be able to access data and jump from LPR to person and understand what that context is, link to other people that are related to that person [...] marriage or through gang affiliation, et cetera,” a Flock employee said during an internal company meeting, according to an audio recording obtained by 404 Media. “There’s very powerful linking.”

‘I Would Never Do This To You:’ Protesting Flock, Arizona Man Presents Plan to Surveil Government Officials
“They didn’t understand it was satire in the beginning until the end,” Casa Grande, Arizona resident Jacob Petrosky told 404 Media. “They were not happy, they were very upset.”
404 MediaSamantha Cole

In June, SDPD stopped sharing surveillance data with federal authorities and other out-of-state agencies following Attorney General Rob Bonta's office warning the police the actions were likely violating state law that prohibits local police departments from sharing ALPR data with outside law enforcement agencies, according to local news outlet KPBS.

A San Diego man recently spent a month in jail after a Flock camera wrongfully flagged him for a felony crime involving brandishing a handgun, his attorney claims. That man is now preparing to sue the city, the Times of San Diego reported.

If you are the Sith Lord who spoke at the August 19 meeting, please get in touch: sam@404media.co.

A Flock license plate reader linked a San Diego man to a violent crime. He was five miles away.

A San Diego man spent one month in jail for a crime he didn't commit, after San Diego Police misinterpreted a hit from a license plate reader.

^{Jesse Marx • Special to Times of San Diego (Downtown News)}

404 Media

2026-08-20 13:34:23

Subtlefakes: Slightly Altered Nonconsensual AI Images Are Taking Over X

I can clearly remember the first time I saw a deepfake. I was waiting for the train on my way to the Vice office in 2017 when I got a Twitter DM from someone who saw it posted to Reddit. It was a short .gif from the start of a porn video, showing a woman lying on a bed and talking to the camera, only the woman’s face had been edited to look like Gal Gadot.

The deepfake was shockingly realistic for the time, and as Sam’s reporting on it from that day on has shown, deepfakes have primarily been used to harass and degrade women. We were surprised by how advanced the technology seemed at the time and knew that the internet and the law wasn’t prepared to deal with it. The technology has advanced exponentially since then, and the internet and the law has still not caught up to it. But as concerning as deepfakes clearly were the moment we laid eyes on them, the problem was never that we thought Gal Gadot actually made an adult video. Deepfakes can look convincing, but they never fooled us that what we were seeing was real.

But for the past few months I’ve been looking at a new and strange type of AI generated nonconsensual image on X that I think will fool a lot of people. These images, which I’ve started calling subtlefakes, are not as clearly offensive, but they are a lot more convincing. The concerning implication is that it’s not just the technology that is advancing now, but that the people who wield it maliciously are getting more sophisticated. Much like “cheap fakes,” which in 2019 Data & Society described as an edited piece of media that manipulates the truth without requiring AI or any other advanced technology, subtlefakes are another form of synthetic media that has taken over the internet since the emergence of deepfakes in 2017.

These more convincing images are not AI generated nudes of celebrities or face-swapped identities onto porn videos, but AI generated images of celebrities that are subtly edited to make them more revealing or provocative. We’ve written countless stories about AI generated nonconsensual media of celebrities and non celebrities. It’s a form of harassment that causes psychological and material damage to people, and they don’t have to be believable to do that. Even if the image looks photorealistic, it is often clearly fake for the simple reason that it’s unlikely that the biggest actor in the world would suddenly produce hardcore pornography that’s posted by a random account to X.

The images I’ve been seeing lately are often only slightly altered. One type of image, for example, will edit a real photograph of a famous actor walking a red carpet, but edit it to make her dress more revealing or to make her butt or boobs bigger. Another type is entirely AI-generated post-workout selfies at the gym.

The only example I feel totally comfortable sharing is one that was called out and shared by the target of one of these fakes, actor Xochitl Gomez. As a side-by-side she shared on Instagram shows, someone had taken a real photograph of her at a parking lot, looking over her shoulder and smiling at the camera, and used AI to make it look like she was bending over in one image and putting her hand on her butt in the other. Similarly, someone had taken an image of her on a red carpet and used AI to make it seem like she’s turning her back to the camera and sticking her tongue out. These images are not just photorealistic, they also don’t have the usual context clues we’ve come to expect from nonconsensual images. I think I am very good at spotting AI generated images because it’s a big part of what we do here, and I don’t think I could tell these were AI generated if I was just scrolling on X.

These images are almost always posted by verified engagement farming accounts on X, which pays the people who operate them if their posts get enough impressions. X obviously doesn't care if people are doing this and a bunch of other stuff that’s as bad or worse. I’ve seen at least one account that shared a few of these subtle deepfakes, but when I scrolled down their post history I found nonconsensual fully nude and sexual images that they monetized via other platforms, so that’s another reason why X accounts might be doing this. There are many, many accounts like this and they are earning millions of views.

I think it’s interesting because it’s a new, and as far as I know, yet to be covered use of nonconsensual AI images. It’s also important and in the public’s interest to know it’s happening because people should know what kind of AI content is targeting them, especially if it’s at the expense of other people. It’s also possibly a warning sign for how people’s AI use is evolving from abusive but obviously fake, to more subtle, less offensive, but much harder to detect.

The other reason these types of images are going to be harder to moderate is that it’s easier to produce them. There are plenty of services that let people easily AI generate nonconsensual nudes of anyone, but they almost always involve some friction. People have to go to a sketchy site, install a sketchy app, or pay a small fee. As we’ve reported many times in the past, more easily accessible AI generators from tech giants can be manipulated to produce nonconsensual images as well, but generally speaking, most companies are trying to prevent people from making those images with their tools. While it’s not impossible, it does require some effort to bypass those guardrails.

It is not so hard to bypass those guardrails if the nonconsual images people are producing don’t include any nudity or sexual acts, assuming the AI generator is even design to prevent those type of images. Most mainstream AI generation tools at least try to prevent people from generating any type of nudity. Fewer of them try to prevent people from generating the likeness of a real person. I can’t say for certain where most of the subtlefakes I’ve seen come from, but I know that at least some of them were made with X’s own Grok because some images included the Grok watermark. X has repeatedly been caught enabling nonconsensual images and only attempting to do something about it after public outrage.

X did not respond to a request for comment.

“Large social media platforms that are really struggling under the weight of this for the first time,” Hany Farid, an image forensics expert and cofounder of deepfake detection firm GetReal, told me. You can see my full interview with Farid here. “They've always had a problem, but this seems to be the first time where they're like, ‘Oh man, this is really bad.’ And I think it's because the volume and the sophistication of the fakes is nothing we've seen before.”

The primary targets of deepfakes always were and continue to be women, but Farid said other nefarious uses of the technology are also becoming harder to deal with.

“If you go back 10 years, it was pretty clumsy,” Farid said. “It's getting more and more sophisticated. They're evolving. Cyber criminals evolve and that's going to make everybody's job much much harder as the years go on.”
youtube.com/embed/0xVxK5o4P48?…
Our reporting on deepfakes over the years has taught us that people make them because they feel entitled to women’s bodies, because they are intentionally trying to hurt them, or because it’s profitable. I’m sure all those reasons apply to subtlefakes, but it appears to me that the current state of X is pouring gasoline on that fire. People use subtlefakes as advertisements for accounts other platforms where they monetize nonconsensual images, but that is rare. It seems that the more logical scheme is to monetize pure engagement via X’s ads revenue sharing program, which pays X users for engagement. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s easy money. Since X is not interested in moderating this content, one person can also operate multiple accounts, posting dozens of times a day.

In general, my X feed is mostly different types of engagement farming. Another type of subtlefake I’ve seen a lot of doesn’t require AI at all. For example, this post about OnlyFans model Sophie Rain claims that Drake paid her $2,000,000 to take her virginity, and includes two random images of Drake and a completely unrelated TMZ video of Rain. People click on the video to see if she said what the post claims, and the account gets the engagement before they realize it’s a lie.

This kind of easy, stupid, but effective garbage is what X is rewarding, and these subtlefakes are just one concerning outcome.

🐐(OPEN FOR HALF OFF EATS/2K27) (24/7) (@LoveAIex) on X

Sophie Rain reveals that she found out Drake got pe*is filler surgery after he took her virginity for $2,000,000👀 "It had so much more girth than when he got leaked" "Im not complaining though that di*k was fire"

^{🐐(OPEN FOR HALF OFF EATS/2K27) (24/7) (X (formerly Twitter))}

404 Media

2026-08-20 13:12:03

Township Fights Nuclear Weapons Data Center By Passing a Moratorium on Electrical Infrastructure

Ypsilanti Township in Michigan passed a six month moratorium on “major electric utility infrastructure” on Tuesday night. The moratorium is a delaying tactic, the latest in the Township’s long fight to stop the construction of a $1.2 billion data center that’s backed by the University of Michigan and the Pentagon’s nuclear war scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL).

Last year, the university announced it was partnering with LANL on the construction of a massive 220,000 square foot hyperscale data center in Ypsilanti Township and residents have been fighting it ever since. During a meeting of the Township Board on August 18, the council unanimously passed a resolution that will delay the construction of new electrical infrastructure for 180 days.

💡
Do you know anything else about this story? Is your town fighting a data center? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at +1 347 762-9212 or send me an email at matthew@404media.co.

Data centers need a lot of energy, and Michigan’s power authority will have to build new substations in the Township to power the proposed facility. The moratorium asked the local power authorities to use the six month delay to study noise pollution and how the new infrastructure would affect existing customers.

The moratorium is narrowly focused on “the nature and scale of electrical infrastructure necessary to serve new high-energy-demand land uses [...] including infrastructure associated, but not limited to hyper-scale data centers, mid-sized data centers, artificial intelligence computing facilities, and high-performance computational centers, industrial facilities, and other intensive electrical users.”

Earlier this month, the University of Michigan announced it had settled on a specific plot of land in Ypsilanti Township — a 144-acre plot on Textile Road. In a press release about the decision, the University said the data center would have the “capacity to change the world” and insisted it would not be a “high value target risk” in a war, that it would not store any hazardous nuclear material, and was not a weapons production facility. LANL previously confirmed that the data center will be used for nuclear weapons research. Ypsilanti Township Supervisor Brenda Stumbo told WEMU news that the selection of the site was a “travesty of justice” because it ignores constituents’ concerns about environmental impact.

During the August 18 moratorium vote, the Board projected a large stock photograph of an electric substation behind its members. The photo was meant to remind people of the size of the incoming infrastructure and the lack of communication from the university about it.

“This picture’s really important to think about because U of M has been so crystal clear that they’ve been communicating to us abundantly — which is not true,” Strumbo said during the meeting. “That speaks to the lack of respect.”

Ypsilanti Township's data center fight is unique in that its board of local leaders are united with the community in opposition to the project. Township Board members have repeatedly spoken about the University's lack of respect and lack of communication. “We will fight to our very last breath,” Strumbo said during a Board meeting in June. In April, the Board voted to institute a 365 moratorium on delivering water to data centers. The University threatened legal action in response and called the move “discriminatory.”

The University of Michigan declined to comment on this story.

U-M selects preferred location for Los Alamos facility site

The University of Michigan reports it has selected a 144-acre site along Textile Road near Bridge Road in Ypsilanti Township as the preferred location for its Los Alamos Research Computing Center. WEMU's Caroline MacGregor reports.

^{Caroline MacGregor (WEMU-FM)}

404 Media

2026-08-19 20:06:22

Podcast: Amazon is Destroying Rare Books to Train AI

We start this week with Emanuel’s big story about Amazon buying, and destroying, masses of books to train AI. After the break we talk about a couple of wild cases where people are using AI. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about Meta’s new smart glasses patent and research into how perverts are using them.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA6…
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/_sf2VoKvxBk?…

• ⁠We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility⁠
• ⁠‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit⁠
• ⁠Person Hides Prompt Injection in Legal Filing Telling AI to Side With Them⁠
• ⁠Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People, Make Highlight Reels of Your Dinner Party⁠
• ⁠Researchers Show How Meta's 'Pervert Glasses' Are Used to Harass Women⁠

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

^{404 Media (Apple Podcasts)}

404 Media

2026-08-19 18:00:10

Lifeforms Can Survive on ‘Significant’ Regions of the Moon, Study Finds

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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

Microbes from Earth could survive on parts of the Moon for at least a week, a discovery that suggests that the lunar surface is not as hostile as previously assumed and has implications for upcoming human missions, reports a study published on Wednesday in Sciences Advances.

Astronauts haven’t walked on the Moon since the Apollo era, but that may change soon. The US-led Artemis program and a Chinese-Russian space partnership both aim to land crews on the lunar south pole during the 2030s. This polar region has been selected because it contains water ice in permanently shadowed regions, which is an essential resource for life support and other mission operations.

Whereas most of the Moon appears to be inhospitable due to extreme temperatures and intense radiation, these shady polar spots are sheltered from harmful ultraviolet light. To assess how long life could survive there, a team analyzed the region’s topography and surface conditions and compared it with the survival bounds of common earthly microbes. The results revealed that “significant lunar polar areas likely have surface conditions amenable to microbial survival,” according to their study.

“Recent studies have shown how unique the conditions are on the surface of the lunar poles and we realized that it was worth studying how amenable those might be to survival for certain microbes, particularly in the context of recent work on how hardy some bacteria and fungi are when exposed to space conditions,” said Prabal Saxena, a research space scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center who led the study, in an email to 404 Media.

“The fun thing is that we were able to leverage expertise of people we knew or were down the hall from us to explore this question,” he added, because NASA Goddard has “experts on lunar surface evolution, biochemistry, clean room microbiology, lunar surface topography/lighting and planetary protection on our team who all helped make the study happen!”

With this interdisciplinary approach, the team modeled conditions at various sites that are under consideration for crewed Artemis landings using remote-sensing observations from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. They then selected bacteria and fungi that are abundant on spacecraft, and would be most likely to be transported to the lunar surface during future missions, and assessed whether they could survive in any of those regions.

In regions known as the Nobile Rim and Connecting Ridge, there are “significant places where microbes may be able to survive” the team said in the study. In particular, the fungi Aspergillus proved to be extremely resilient in the models, persisting for up to seven Earth days in some shadowed regions.

“Aspergillus was our champion, and possesses characteristics (thick walls and dark pigments that protect them from X-rays, cosmic radiation, and UV-C radiation) that make it especially well suited to survive in regions of the lunar poles,” Saxena said.

These organisms would likely enter a dormant cryptobiotic state, rather than flourishing and growing across the lunar surface. Still, the fact that they can endure long periods at all is a testament to the adaptability of Earth life, as well as a reality that should be factored into mission planning in order to prevent contamination of the lunar surface and potential health risks to a crew.

“I think we suspected some microbes might survive for a very small amount of time in places like permanently shadowed regions—that's pretty intuitive since those regions only receive indirect light and radiation, and are persistently very cold,” said Saxena. “However, after modeling the conditions, the spatial regions and extent in time of survival was definitely surprising.”

“While we're only looking at survival in this study—and not growth or reproduction—this makes us think it's worth thinking about certain regions of the Moon in a different way scientifically and operationally with respect to microbial life,” he added.

The team also noted that microbial life from Earth could potentially arrive on the Moon through meteoric exchanges of rocks across space, raising the possibility that microbes have already survived, even for short periods, on the lunar surface.

“We know that the Earth 'talks' to the Moon through particle and meteorite transfer, and that meteorites from other sources constantly slam into the Moon, so it is a possibility” Saxena said. “In many ways, the Moon is a potential time capsule of the Earth, Sun and space environment over time. We should go explore it to see what secrets are waiting to be discovered!”

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International Lunar Research Station - Wikipedia

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404 Media

2026-08-18 15:54:15

Anthropic’s Text Watermarking Proves AI Companies Do Not Care at All About Writing

Earlier this month, Anthropic announced that future versions of Claude will generate text that includes watermarks showing it was AI-generated. At the time, Anthropic did not explain how this would work, leaving us to speculate on the podcast: Would it somehow encode this into the text? Include invisible characters? Do something with the metadata? We now know, thanks to a blog post over the weekend, that Anthropic will do this by changing how its AI writes altogether.

“Nothing is added to the text and there are no hidden characters,” Anthropic wrote in that company blog post. “The difference between watermarked and un-watermarked text will not be distinguishable to readers.” The way it will work, the post explained, is that Anthropic will subtly alter the word choices in AI-generated text in a way that is only known to Anthropic and its algorithms. Anthropic will know the watermarking algorithm, which will change “the source of the randomness used to pick among words” and thus can write a tool to detect whether something has been AI-generated.

This research and approach is interesting in a data science kind of way, but Anthropic’s layperson explanation for how this will work shows how little the company thinks about the craft of writing or the subtle differences between words a human author might want to use to convey their thoughts.

Anthropic asks us to consider the difference between two sentences: “Take the sentence ‘The weather today was cold and…’. The next word is very unlikely to be ‘sugary.’ But it is quite likely to be ‘overcast’ or ‘grey.’ Under most circumstances, it doesn’t matter much to the reader which of these latter two words the model ultimately chooses—the meaning of the sentence is largely the same either way. In cases like this, the choice is settled by a random number,” Anthropic writes. “Watermarking uses low-stakes choices like these—which occur many times over a piece of generated text—to leave a pattern in Claude’s responses. That pattern is undetectable to the reader, but is detectable to anyone who has a key that encodes it. When watermarking is used, choices are still made at random, but the source of the randomness is different.”

Anyone who has written anything would, I hope, understand that the difference between the sentences “The weather today was cold and grey” and “The weather today was cold and overcast” are sometimes “low stakes,” as Anthropic describes, but not always. “Grey,” and “overcast” are different words, and there are any number of reasons why a human author might pick one over the other in a given context. In this example, however, Anthropic’s algorithm sees these words as totally interchangeable and thus its watermarking algorithm has decided that it can “nudge” the word choice one way or the other for the purposes of watermarking.

Anthropic continues: “Instead of using an arbitrary random number generator to pick the next word, watermarking uses the key and a few words that come before to settle what word the model should pick. That is, the words that Claude picks are still random, but now, one can check the sequence of words and see if it’s consistent with the choices Claude would make if it was using the key. If it is, one can assign a probability that the text was generated by Claude.”

Anthropic claims “Watermarking does not impact the quality of Claude’s output. To a reader, a watermarked response is indistinguishable from an unwatermarked one,” and that “in internal testing, we’ve seen no impact of watermarking on the content, level of creativity, or readability of Claude’s text.”

People are quite mad about Anthropic’s watermarking system, and understandably so. Synonyms are sometimes interchangeable, but not always, as is pointed out in this excellent essay by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, and by journalism academic Jeff Jarvis, in which he claims Anthropic “devalues writing.” In making this choice, “Anthropic declares words fungible, language random, choice meaningless,” Jarvis writes.

When I sat down to write this post, I was mad because it seems like Anthropic is putting its thumb on the scale, messing with the outputs of its machine and saying that the resulting text is qualitatively just the same as the other AI text it was probably going to output. But as I began writing this, I realized that my problem is not necessarily with text watermarking but with AI-generated text altogether. It does not matter to me, necessarily, whether the output of Claude’s garbage AI text is one way or is a slightly different way. But it does matter to me that AI data scientists at huge tech companies think that word choice doesn’t matter, or that it is possible to statistically use synonyms wherever without fucking with the meaning of a sentence.

Throughout the blog post, Anthropic describes the act of writing as being akin to a probabilistic game of chance. In Anthropic’s own words, its writing is sometimes the result of an “arbitrary random number generator,” and “random” whenever its systems encounter a situation where its tool believes, based on pattern recognition, that the choice between several possible next words isn’t all that important. That may be true for LLM garbage, but is not true for the human experience of writing, which is why human writing almost always feels different than AI writing.

This watermarking approach, and Anthropic’s blog post about it, highlights something that should already be clear about a company that famously scanned and destroyed huge numbers of printed books and has trained its LLMs on stolen content: Anthropic does not care about the craft or effort of writing, and sees words as fungible and unimportant. Anthropic says it is making this change as part of the European Union’s new AI regulations, which are well-intentioned but problematic. While it can definitely be useful to have additional ways of detecting AI-generated content, the carelessness with which Anthropic has announced this decision highlights the broader problem with using LLMs to write: They are, as Anthropic notes, probabilistic tools that do not “write” in the way that humans do, rather, they mimic their training data which is, by definition, things that have already happened and been ingested.

Contrast this with how Anthropic sees code, something where it says an “exact output is required.” In writing, meanwhile, Anthropic suggests different words are often “equally good.” Over and over again, Anthropic and the researchers who work on this type of watermarking claim that text can be “nudged” in this way without being noticeable to humans or without impacting “quality.”

But it is worth noting that the people judging the “quality” of the AI-generated outputs are either data scientists or people asking AI tools to do their writing for them, not, say, people who care about reading or writing. The scientific paper that Anthropic cites was done by Google researchers on a Google watermarking tool called “SynthID,” which Anthropic’s watermarking is based on.

In the SynthID study, quality was assessed by randomly putting watermarking on some Gemini outputs, then asking Gemini users to either thumbs-up or thumbs-down the response: “A random fraction of queries were routed to a watermarked model and an equivalent number to the unwatermarked counterpart. The Gemini user interface allows users to provide feedback on model responses via a thumbs-up (good response) and a thumbs-down (bad response). We analysed approximately 20 million watermarked and unwatermarked responses and computed the thumbs-up and thumbs-down rates (both as a fraction of the total number of thumbs-up and thumbs-down feedback received). We found that the thumbs-up rate for the two models differed by 0.01%.”

I hope it is clear to anyone who has clicked on this article that asking someone who asked a chatbot something to thumbs up or thumbs down a response is not a very good way of assessing the “quality” of “writing.” The other human assessment that Google did was to ask people to assess side-by-side watermarked and unwatermarked text for quality. Here are examples given in an appendix of the study; apparently people did not really have a preference one way or the other:

One could argue that these passages are two different ways of explaining something, yes. But they are definitively not the “same,” and it is unclear to any reader why one version is one way and the other version is another way. Why did the LLM write “respiratory failure” in one example and “cessation of breathing” in the other? The answer for both is an “arbitrary random number generator” and proprietary black box algorithmic weighting systems controlled by the AI company. In the watermarked version there’s been an additional “nudging” or messing with the machine that’s already just a pattern matcher.

The point is, there is no conscious thought or decision-making process happening here, so perhaps watermarked AI text is not all that much more offensive than regular AI text. But to see it laid out in such stark terms by the companies building these machines shows how little they actually care about writing. If you asked me, on the other hand, why I used one word instead of another, I might not be able to tell you exactly why, but I could probably explain to you what I was going for, the style of writing I do, my intended audience, my mood that day, whether my heart was racing or not, where I was, what I was doing, what I did earlier that morning and what I did later that day. Maybe it was a word my third grade teacher used all the time or which I read in an article last week or is an inside joke with my friends or which I have recently become obsessed with or tend to overuse. Why I wrote what I wrote or why I did anything at all is the result of my some mix of human experiences dating back to when I first acquired language as a baby and continuing on to this very moment that I may or may not be able to explain, but which result in a certain style of writing that is mine.

This is the case even when I’m working fast or carelessly dashing off text messages, when the thoughts just kind of flow from my brain to my fingers to my keyboard where I don’t know if what I’m saying is making sense at all but is probably legible because it’s coming from a human brain and not a random number generator.

This is why short passages of AI-generated text feel soulless and generic, as we have written about repeatedly. And there are many AI tools that use AI to make AI writing seem less generic (yo dawg, we heard you like AI so we put AI in your AI) by using synonyms that are supposed to make a passage sound more human — or less plagiarized — by picking words that are less commonly used. The text outputted by these tools, which are called “spinners” or “humanizers” are often just as uncanny and weird as AI writing itself. Or, when applied to things where, to use Anthropic’s own language, “an exact output is required” such as quotes in a news article, the output is often factually inaccurate, libelous, or just plain garbage.

Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain

AI writing is impossible to avoid, is making everything sound the same, and is driving us crazy.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-08-18 13:27:22

X's Algorithm Feeds Off Ragebait and Impacts Democrats More, Study Finds

X’s algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it, according to a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled Value misalignment of X’s feed algorithm is a reflection of value tensions in engagement, found that the site’s algorithm prioritized engagement above all else when it generated a user’s For You Page. It also showed that X serves more ragebait to people who say they are Democrats, although the exact reason for that is unclear.

“In 2026 that’s maybe not the most surprising headline ever,” Ziv Epstein, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, and co-author of the paper, told 404 Media. “So we actually dug in a little deeper to figure out why this is actually happening, and it turns out that X's feed algorithm, like a lot of these social media algorithms, is optimized for engagement [but] it turns out that not all types of engagement are considered equally.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
The study’s goal was to understand how a user’s self-professed values system might shape what they see on X. “We recruited a nationally representative sample of N = 715 Americans who are active users of X in September and October 2024, quota matched on ethnicity, gender and partisanship, to install a browser extension to collect their [For You Page] and Following feeds,” the study said.

Epstein said the study was observational and meant to get people asking questions about what they want to see on social media, how their feed is designed, and by whom. “There are these social media algorithms that have enormous amounts of power in our lives, they shape the information that we consume, and we have very little transparency into how they operate and what their implications are,” he said. “And so, we were very interested in trying to understand the particular effects of this particular algorithm, and so I think that has kind of important implications for civil society and just fighting some of the technofeudalistic tendencies of platforms to control these algorithms.”

For the study, researchers collected a “values inventory” of the volunteers using a research tool called the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values. The values inventory in the study is presented as a wheel with 19 points that corresponded to features like “tolerance,” “dominance,” “hedonism,” and “openness to change.” Users also reported their political alignments.

Then researchers watched how users engaged with posts on X and how those posts reflected their self-reported values. “We observe that the inventory of posts from followed accounts reflects users’ self-stated values — but that there is an overall negative correlation (misalignment) between users’ explicit values and the values in content that the algorithm is more likely to amplify,” the study said.

When a user on X sees a post that makes them mad — like a press release from a politician from a political party they don’t like — sometimes they’ll fight about the post in the replies. It doesn’t matter who you follow or what your stated values are, X reads replying as engagement and will send more of the infuriating posts the user’s way.

“When we look at commenting, the act of replying to posts, that's where we actually see some kind of meaningful misalignment between people’s values and the values of the content they’re replying to,” Epstein explained.

Most of the participants liked and reposted content on X and got served more of the same sort of content. Replying was rare, just 6.8% of the interactions according to the study, but had an outsized impact on the algorithm. “Replying is only a fraction of engagement, but there does seem to be some evidence that these algorithms are prioritizing and learning more from this kind of rarer form of engagement,” Epstein said. “So it’s this feedback loop of outrage baiting. The algorithm learns that you get outraged and then continues to serve more content in that direction and that seems to be particularly true of the Democratic users of our study.”

Though this happened across the political spectrum, the study found that ragebaiting occurred more for users that identified themselves as Democrats. “Democrat users confront the abundant value-misaligned content by replying to it, which the algorithm in turn preferentially learns from and continues to feed them,” the study said. “This highlights a core tension with how engagement-maximizing algorithms operate on social media: frictions between users’ stated preferences and their behaviors of reactive confrontation are exploited by engagement-maximizing algorithms to create runaway feedback loops of increasing value misalignment.”

Epstein said he’d need to do more research to find out why X seems to serve ragebait to Democrats more often than Republicans. It could be that there’s more rightwing content on X overall or it could be that Democrats tend to engage with posts they disagree with more often. “There might be some kind of differential effects on information diets there, or it might be something more psychological about how different you know partisan identities are triggering different kinds of actions and reactions, but ultimately I don't want to speculate too much,” he said.

I asked Epstein if he worried that prioritizing “values” in a social media algorithm might lead to more siloed user bases and more echo chambers. “I do think that if we go kind of down this path of thinking through and imagining value line social media feeds, we do have to be very aware of the potentials of value echo chambers, right?” he said. “Where people just, you know, they have the certain values that they have, and all the content they see is just aligned with those values. I think that is a very scary and dark reality.”

But he also said that values are intentional and that thinking about the kind of stuff you want to see on a social media site before you pull up your feed is a positive. “You're pumping the brakes, you're taking a breath, and you're thinking about what you actually really care about. In this world — and I don't have the data for this — but I would speculate that a lot of people actually do care about seeing a diverse set of content and engaging meaningfully across these lines, and you know maybe that isn't a particular value on my 19-dimensional wheel, but this is just a starting point of thinking about our intentions and thinking very deliberately about the kind of information we want to be exposed to, versus the the knee-jerk reaction that we're kind of learning in this very kind of short, shallow attention span, emotion and negative affect-driven model of these very myopic forms of engagement.”

X did not return 404 Media’s request for comment, but Nikita Bier — X’s former head of product — confirmed that the site’s algorithm had at one time been set to favor replies. “This is no longer true,” Bier said in a post on X. “The largest contributor of seeing ragebait was the reply predictor and we were aware that angry replies were causing people to see more of that content. So last month, we gave the reply predictor a 15x boost if it’s a friend’s post — and it reduced ragebait by [an] order of magnitude.”

Update 8/18/26 at 1:30PM: This story has been updated to include a comment from X’s former head of product

Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) on X

@jason_koebler This is no longer true: The largest contributor of seeing ragebait was the reply predictor and we were aware that angry replies were causing people to see more of that content.

^{Nikita Bier (X (formerly Twitter))}