404 Media

2026-06-05 15:51:06

Behind the Blog: Dangerous Memes

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 controversial memes, good times at Meta, and more.

EMANUEL: My recent story about Google employees internally sharing memes about how they hate the company’s AI product took a bit more time than it should because I had to recreate all the memes you see in that article. Rather than screenshot and repost the images Google employees shared with me, I went to imgflip.com/memegenerator and recreated the meme from scratch, making it look as close to the original as possible.

I did this in order to protect my sources at Google. It might be unlikely, but it is possible that resharing the actual memes I was sent could help management identify who was sharing them. How dangerous doing something like that depends on the nature of the images, the company, the position the source is in, how the image was accessed and shared, and many other factors. At the end of the day, I felt that it’s better to take this extra step than not. The “original” images didn’t add that much to the story, and the risk to sources is not zero. Memegen, the internal Google meme generator in question here, has also been a source of controversy at the company before. I’ve heard but can’t confirm that has led to firings in the past, so better safe than sorry.

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Behind the Blog: Dangerous Memes

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404 Media

2026-05-29 16:06:59

Behind the Blog: Being New and Some Numbers

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 going deeper, Google's search changes, and a rogue zine.

SAM: Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the way a line of reporting or even an entire beat or set of beats can be in conversation with itself over time. I’m thinking of this more in the last week because I published this story about a high school that’s dealing with synthetic imagery harassment—AI generated child sexual abuse material to be specific—and a lot of the people involved in that story are learning about deepfakes for the first time through this very traumatizing, difficult situation.

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Behind the Blog: Being New and Some Numbers

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404 Media

2026-05-22 15:45:16

Behind the Blog: The Attention Wars

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 Spencer Pratt, bricking phones, and the FTC.

JASON: I have watched mostly in horror as Spencer Pratt has taken over the internet and, it feels, the physical space around me as he attempts to run for mayor of Los Angeles on what is basically a MAGA platform. For those unaware, Pratt is a former reality show star from The Hills who I was vaguely aware of at the time and then never thought about again until a few months ago. Pratt’s political origin story is that his Pacific Palisades mansion burnt down during last year’s fire; he has since railed against the government response to the fire and announced he is running for mayor as a Republican in a city that is extremely democratic.

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Behind the Blog: The Attention Wars

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-15 15:19:07

Behind the Blog: New Music and a Crash Out

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 developers' AI woes, how the magic happens, and the Beach Boys.

JOSEPH: Earlier in the week we published ICE Agents Have List of 20 Million People on Their iPhones Thanks to Palantir. This took a little while because I spoke to four people who attended the conference. I spoke to one, I asked if they knew anyone else there. Got another name and phone number, and so on.

I included this line in the copy: “The officials’ comments may need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but still reflect ICE’s position that Palantir is allowing the agency to identify people to arrest and locations to raid faster.”

I think that was important to include because these are comments and figures coming from senior ICE officials, and one in particular, Matthew Elliston, assistant director of Law Enforcement Systems & Analysis at ICE. As we all know, DHS lies.

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Behind the Blog: New Music and a Crash Out

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-08 16:03:52

Behind the Blog: Storage Woes and RSS

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 storage, RSS, and a big reporting project.

JOSEPH: In an earlier BTB I mentioned the pain of obtaining cryptocurrency in 2026. Well, that was in service for the article we published this week called ‘HELLO BOSS’: Inside the Chinese Realtime Deepfake Software Powering Scams Around the World. This has been a long time coming. As you can read in the piece, it took weeks, eventually more than a month really, to get the people to sell me the software and for us to test it.

I wanted to talk about my opinion on the ethics around a story like this. This is not a science. Many journalists have a different view on all sorts of different techniques or conduct. But these are my thoughts.

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Behind the Blog: Storage Woes and RSS

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-05-01 16:50:32

Behind the Blog: Big Questions of Consciousness

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 a wild message, big questions about consciousness, and a visit to a museum.

JASON: I got an extremely funny Signal message yesterday after I published my most recent article about Flock. Like, very confused Signal message from someone who ostensibly thought maybe they were a source? We do sometimes get article tips that are like “Off the record, not to be quoted, confidential source:” and then the entirety of the message is like “did you see this article in The New York Times?”

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Behind the Blog: Big Questions of Consciousness

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404 Media

2026-04-17 13:00:29

Behind the Blog: Jazz and Journalism

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 the Madonna-whore algorithm, reader tips, and jazz.

SAM: Yesterday morning I published a story I started working on weeks ago and only in the last week or so felt enough distance from the topic to be able to articulate it clearly: My year in the wedding planning social media abyss. The piece is a long, more sourced BTB, and I don’t have a ton to add to what’s said in it, but I do want to highlight some of the comments I’ve gotten so far that touch on things the story doesn’t elaborate on.

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Behind the Blog: Jazz and Journalism

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404 Media

2026-04-10 16:07:51

Behind the Blog: Smoking the Whole Carton

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 gun violence and chatbots and acceptance of depravity.

EMANUEL: It takes a lot for a post to shock me these days, especially if it’s from a known shitposter like the president of the United States, but I’ll confess that I was shocked by Trump posting a video of a woman getting beaten to death with a hammer last night.

I’m not a big believer in the “Trump is doing X because he doesn’t want you to think about Y” theory, but it’s hard not to read as at least an intuitive desire to change the subject away from the conclusion (?) to his disastrous adventure in Iran. It’s not going to work either way, and that’s not going to be the legacy of his posting style either. What’s sticking with me at the moment is not the graphic nature of the post itself or the attempt to demonize certain minorities—unfortunately none of that is surprising at this point—but that I don’t know if it’s possible to roll back this level of acceptance of even embrace of depravity in our culture.

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Behind the Blog: Smoking the Whole Carton

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-04-03 16:55:57

Behind the Blog: Systems As Designed

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 crypto, journalists using AI, and a cool photo of Earth.

JOSEPH: I can’t talk about the story just yet, but recently I had to acquire some cryptocurrency quickly for research purposes. I was not anticipating quite how dramatically the world of cryptocurrency and getting it has changed.

I first became aware of cryptocurrency, or more specifically Bitcoin, when I was an intern at VICE. Someone on my table (they put all the unpaid interns on a medium sized table in the London office) was talking about it. They were pretty deep into it as I recall, and covered it a fair bit. I then was asked to work on a collaborative documentary between VICE, Raw, and the BBC about the Silk Road drug marketplace because I already knew more than most about message encryption. I then had to learn more about Bitcoin.

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Behind the Blog: Systems As Designed

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-03-20 15:00:00

Behind the Blog: Marathon and the Metaverse

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 getting stories from Twitter, the metaverse, and the new game Marathon.

EMANUEL: I think I’m addicted to Twitter again.

We haven’t written a ton about the war with Iran but I’ve been following the news closely because I’m checking if there are important stories for us to do there, and because I can’t help but watch the disaster unfold even if it’s making me incredibly anxious.

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Behind the Blog: Marathon and the Metaverse

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-03-13 16:56:57

Behind the Blog: DOGE Bros and Data Labelers

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 traveling for reporting and watching way too much DOGE bros.

JOSEPH: I just wanted to write some brief notes about the DOGE depositions and the piece I Watched 6 Hours of DOGE Bro Testimony. Here's What They Had to Say For Themselves. Much of the reason I managed to watch all of this testimony was because I was on a couple of long flights this week. On the first flight, I saw the Justin Fox deposition on YouTube. I started watching it and recording the timestamps of interesting parts, and passed those over to our social manager Evy who then cut them into videos which have since been shared pretty widely.

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Behind the Blog: DOGE Bros and Data Labelers

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-03-06 16:26:59

Behind the Blog: An AI Army Foot Fetish

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 a PC repair battle, a revealing comment from an FBI official, and a dangerously dumb narrative.

EMANUEL: I want to update those who have been following the 404 Media sidequest “Emanuel’s CPU is dying.” The update is that I basically got a new PC. I kept my GPU (4080 Super), my CPU cooler, and storage, and upgraded everything else, including the case, because I bought the old one in the era before GPUs were more than a foot long.

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Behind the Blog: An AI Army Foot Fetish

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-27 16:27:13

Behind the Blog: Using Your Brain

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 wishes made, god complexes, and the point of it all.

SAM: This week I wrote about Amazon’s changing policy for wishlists. It’s allowing gifters to choose third-party sellers for items, which could expose recipients’ delivery addresses to the gifter. The notice Amazon sent wishlist holders is a basic example of CYA messaging: Amazon can’t guarantee what a third party seller will do with your address once they have it, including giving it to a gifter for tracking purposes.

Sex workers first flagged this change on social media because many use wishlists as an easy way to accept gifts, tributes, tips, etc instead of or in addition to actual funds. This is important because payment processors are wildly hostile and actively discriminatory toward the adult industry, and having alternative ways to get paid is crucial if you’re debanked or banned from the usual payment processors. I think most use it in a supplementary fashion, though.

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Behind the Blog: Using Your Brain

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-20 16:54:17

Behind the Blog: Nothing to Hide Here

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 parenting blogs, Pinterest sawing its own legs off, and legal guardrails.

EMANUEL: I felt a great relief this week getting out this story about Alpha School, an AI-powered private school where—shockingly—the AI is not working as promised. I’ve been working on it intensely for a few weeks and it always feels good getting a big investigation off your plate, especially when people seem to appreciate it, which I’m glad they did in this case.

When my wife was pregnant, Sam, Jason, Joe and I joked about how we were about to get a lot of baby and parenting related content on the site. Historically, a lot of our reporting was influenced by subjects we were interested in in our personal lives. Being a parent is an all-consuming life change, so we all assumed I’d be writing about baby monitor hacking or something like this. I’ve definitely done a little bit of that (please check out this podcast I did with Patrick Klepek about screen time and kids), but not as much as I expected.

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Behind the Blog: Nothing to Hide Here

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-13 15:27:28

Behind the Blog: Unglamorous Work

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 support and saying RIP to FPDS.

JOSEPH: I think I might make this into a more full article in a couple weeks when it actually happens, but yesterday I realized that FPDS.gov is shutting down. That is the Federal Procurement Data System, a website that includes decades of records showing what the U.S. government bought, from what company, and when. I check it essentially every day, and it has been the basis of countless of my articles at this point. Whether it’s finding an initial lead, or a story in itself, FPDS is behind so many of them.

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Behind the Blog: Unglamorous Work

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-02-06 17:54:33

Behind the Blog: The Neverending Cybersecurity Story

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 AI bubble hysteria, "just go independent," and more.

JOSEPH: This week we reported how the FBI has been unable to get into a Washington Post reporter’s iPhone because it was in Lockdown Mode. Side note, I wonder how the insane cuts at The Post are going to impact its digital or physical protection of journalists, if at all. This court record was very, very interesting in that it’s a quite rare admission of why exactly authorities were unable to access a device.

I don’t think there’s an area of cybersecurity, which we have a lot of reporting on, that is constantly in flux as mobile forensics. Nothing stays still, even for what feels like five minutes. There are constant tech developments, both on the side of Apple and Google, then on companies trying to break into those phones, like Cellebrite and Grayshift, the creator of Graykey.

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Behind the Blog: The Neverending Cybersecurity Story

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-30 17:03:10

Behind the Blog: Own Goals and Lying Devs

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 a trip to Kenya, reconstructing images, and lying developers.

JASON: Last week, I was in Kenya, a trip that turned out so overwhelmingly positive and left me in such a good mood that I am still somehow a week still carrying with me. I was invited to give a presentation at a conference about how AI is changing journalism, and how journalists can navigate an age of disinformation, slop, and general chaos.

It was a very small conference, with about 30 people, and everyone was incredibly interesting and cool; it was a mix of people who run independent newsrooms across Africa, Europe, and Asia, as well as human rights and nonprofit researcher types. At the conference itself, I met a lot of people who I hope we’ll be able to partner with in some way in the future.

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Behind the Blog: Own Goals and Lying Devs

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-23 17:53:28

Behind the Blog: Signs of the Times

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 stances on AI, a conference about money laundering, and signs about slavery coming down.

EMANUEL: Last week we published my interview with the Wikimedia Foundation CTO Selena Deckelmann. I was happy to talk to her because she’s uniquely positioned to talk about generative AI’s impact on the internet both as the CTO of the website that creates some of the most valuable training data, and one of the sites that’s threatened by generative AI output the most.

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Behind the Blog: Signs of the Times

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-16 17:17:14

Behind the Blog: Putting the Puzzle Together

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 the staying power of surveillance coverage, the jigsaw of reporting, and eyestrain.

JASON: I’ve started this year in the same way I spent a lot of last year: Writing about the automated license plate reader company Flock. In my career it’s been sort of weird for me to focus on one company or one thing so much for so long. I tend to get a little restless about the topics I cover, and there can sometimes be a very real fatigue with specific types of stories. After a while, people “get it,” and so the bar for a new story on a topic keeps going up. I wish this weren’t the case, and we try to cover things we feel are important, but if you’re writing about a topic and no one is reading it, then the audience might be telling you they don’t find that thing interesting anymore.

This has not yet been the case with Flock, somewhat to my surprise. I’ve been writing about surveillance technologies for a long time, and it’s rare for a specific company or specific type of technology to hold people’s interest and attention for too long.

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Behind the Blog: Putting the Puzzle Together

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-01-09 18:09:17

Behind the Blog: The 'View From Nowhere'

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 viewing terrible images online and giving out zines at a benefit show.

EMANUEL: I’ve seen a lot of terrible videos in my years online but by far the most upsetting type of video shows police using excessive force and especially videos of police killing people. There are more graphic videos from battlefields and other dark corners of the internet but what happened to Renee Nicole Good this week could happen to anyone living in America, and when I imagine the tragedy that has been visited on her loved ones I can’t help but imagine how easily I or anyone I care about can find ourselves in the same situation.

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Behind the Blog: The 'View From Nowhere'

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-12-26 14:00:43

Behind the Blog: We Have Recommendations For You

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 our recommendations for the year.

SAM: Whenever we shout out a podcast, book, TV show, or other media or consumable product on our own podcast or in a Behind the Blog, you guys seem to enjoy it and want more. To be totally real with you, I get a ton of great recommendations from you, the readers and listeners, all year long and am always learning a lot from the things you throw in the comments around the site and on social media. The 404 Media community has good taste.

We talked through some of our top recommendations of the year in this week’s podcast episode, but here’s a more complete list of what each of us has enjoyed this year, and thinks you might also find worth digging into.

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Behind the Blog: We Have Recommendations For You

This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Meta's relationship with links and more.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-12-19 16:10:49

Behind the Blog: Resisting Demoralization

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 history repeating itself and Meta's relationship with links.

JOSEPH: I wanted to add a little bit from behind the scenes of this piece: Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It. As I said on the podcast this week, there are and continue to be many questions around the case. Especially why CBP stopped Samuel Tunick in the first place.

In the piece I did not focus on Tunick’s activism because frankly we don’t know yet how big a role it played in CBP stopping him. I mentioned it but didn’t focus on it. I think regardless, someone being charged for allegedly wiping a phone is interesting essentially no matter who they are.

Yes, it absolutely may turn out that he was stopped specifically because of his activism. Maybe lots of people think it’s very likely that’s the reason. But I can’t frame a story because it feels like that’s maybe the case. I have to go on what actual evidence I have at the moment.

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Behind the Blog: Resisting Demoralization

This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Meta's relationship with links and more.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-12-12 17:06:05

Behind the Blog: Is This Headline 'Clickbait'?

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 conversational AI, a behind the scenes of the zine, and more.

EMANUEL: I made the terrible mistake of looking at some Hacker News comments this week for my story about a developer whose Google accounts were banned after he uploaded training data to Google Drive. Unbeknownst to him, the training data contained CSAM.

As we’ve explained in previous stories, CSAM is a subject we dread covering not only because it’s one of the most awful things one could think about, but because it’s extremely difficult and legally risky. For understandable reasons, the laws around viewing, let alone possessing CSAM, are strict and punishing, which makes verification for reporting reasons challenging. For similar reasons, it’s something we need to write about very carefully, making sure we don’t wrongfully associate or whitewash someone when it comes to such horrible behavior.

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Behind the Blog: Is This Headline 'Clickbait'?

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-26 15:25:00

Behind the Blog: Behind 404 Media's ICE Lawsuit

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 being journalism dorks, our new lawsuit against ICE, and working on bullshit.

JASON: I’m writing this from sunny Athens, Greece, where I’ve been invited to talk about 404 Media at the IMEDD International Journalism Forum, an annual conference. Over the years, I haven’t been to too many conferences, because honestly it was always too disruptive to the day-to-day journalism and work of managing a team to be able to get away. We’re more than two years into this, but one of the nice things about having this company is that I can mostly get my work done whenever makes sense for me, whether that’s late at night in Los Angeles or early in the morning in Greece.

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Behind the Blog: Behind 404 Media's ICE Lawsuit

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-08-22 15:55:53

Behind the Blog: Our Second Anniversary Party!

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 have a slightly shorter than usual entry from the gang, with some party pics and musical selections from the night.

SAM: We’re all still recovering, processing, and floating on the overwhelming support and encouragement we felt from everyone who came to the second anniversary party last night. Thank you again to our sponsor for the evening, DeleteMe (get 20% off with them here as a thank-you to our community with code 404media) and farm.one for being awesome hosts, and especially thank you to everyone who came, cheered us on from afar, and made the last two years possible.

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Behind the Blog: Our Second Anniversary Party!

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}