Flutterby™!: Topic : Journalism and Media

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Entry: 2026-03-11 20:16:58.23136+01 Let's get together and sing! by Dan Lyke comments 0

We've been singing with various local community song circle groups for a while, Marv Zauderer's group down in Marin, Janice Hardy's group here in Petaluma with Janice Hardy (I've been collecting those songs here).

I mentioned that Marv's hosting Riomas was super powerful, and we came home and immediately pre-ordered Gather Your Resilience: Medicine for Liberation by Riomas.

We've seen this movement blossom with the media coverage of the singing resistance in Minneapolis, there's gonna be a lot of song at the next No Kings rally, and seems like in a lot of other places.

Anyway, as awesome as it is to have all of this modern music flowing through song leaders, it's useful to keep track of the history: Elaine Kolb's 1981 Let's Get Together has been published, with her agreement, on Archive.org.

[ related topics: Music Bay Area Journalism and Media Community Archival ]

Entry: 2026-03-11 17:19:19.775372+01 Grammarly co-opting reputation by Dan Lyke comments 0

Grammarly introduced "Expert Review", in which they co-opted the good names of prominent people as editorial styles:

Note: References to experts in Expert Review are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities.

Leading to many of those experts saying "eeew, gross".

Casey Newton: Grammarly turned me into an AI editor against my will and I hate it (Via).

Ingrid Burrington ‪@lifewinning.com‬

A little offended Grammarly didn't make a sloppelganger of me

‪jennifer uncoolidge‬ ‪@histoftech.bsky.social‬

So apparently grammarly stole my fuckin identity

Laura Hazard Owen at Nieman Lab: A lot of journalism folks are offering editing advice as Grammarly’s AI “experts” (Via)

Maureen Ryan: An open letter to Grammarly and other plagiarists, thieves and slop merchants (Via Chuck Wendig)

Kevin M. Kruse:

Strongly encourage all academics, novelists, reporters, bloggers, whatever to just email this account and state that you want to opt out of this idiocy.

Overload them with emails and make them regret they ever tried this shit.

The MeFi thread.

Addendum: PRF Law: Class Action Alleges That Grammarly Misappropriated the Names of Journalists and Authors Through its “Expert Review” That Lets Users Get Feedback on Writing From Experts. Go get 'em, Peter Romer-Friedman!

Entry: 2026-03-03 00:19:08.080072+01 The fight against anonymity by Dan Lyke comments 0

Since there's currently an orchestrated push to destroy anonymity on the Internet: Politico: Resist ‘dangerous and socially unacceptable’ age checks for social media, scientists warn

The warning comes as countries around the world move to bar children from social media, which requires some way of checking users’ ages to decide if they can access online services. In an open letter, 371 security and privacy academics across 29 countries said the technologies being rolled out are not effective and carry significant risks.

California Assembly Bill 1043: AB-1043 Age verification signals: software applications and online services. apparently makes it illegal to configure an operating system without confirming the user's age, similarly for Colorado Senate Bill SB 26-051: AGE ATTESTATION ON COMPUTING DEVICES

Taylor Lorenz in The Guardian: The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all, in response to the toot linking to that Alan @metaphase@toot.community asked

@taylorlorenz Who is paying for the lobbyists for this seemingly worldwide campaign for the legislation to install identity surveillance everywhere "for the children"?

And why, even in blue states, are the politicians always so eager to enable tools so easily abused by authoritarian, fascist governments

Entry: 2026-03-02 15:25:28.002824+01 by Dan Lyke comments 0

On Saturday evening, Charlene and I were sitting out on our front patio eating dinner and watching drivers run the Mission & Mountain View stop signs (spending some more time gathering video of this in order to make a montage to post to Facebook and NextDoor titled "those fucking bicyclists" is a fantasy project).

The social media comments on the news of two recent killings of cyclists on rural roads around Petaluma are filled with "yeah, that road isn't safe for bicycles, I don't know what they were doing there".

We hear that the city has over 200 requests for traffic calming and safety improvements in their barely funded safe streets programs.

But here we have an example of where a metropolitan region of 1.5 million people has decided that killing people for convenience is not acceptable.

Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death.

Entry: 2026-02-28 01:50:02.164077+01 We need a better phrase than "AI psychosis" by Dan Lyke comments 0

el @el@tilde.zone

We need a better phrase than "AI psychosis" or "AI addiction" for what this is.

What we're seeing with people becoming emptionally and intellectually dependent on computer processes, as a direct consequence of the way both mass and social media have for generations been designed to exploit parasocial fascinations and protaganism.

The entire Internet of social interaction, fandom, and fantasy, was slurped up in service of training these language models in how to act human. With that kind of pedigree, you know damn well how competent they will be at that, in a variety of fairytale ways. The ultimate "Choose Your Own Adventure" storyline.

This is a problem well beyond ethical concerns like intellectual property rights. What's been documented so far, is the December of a global mental health pandemic that may well make the Covid isolation blues seem mild. But for me, the descriptors of "psychosis" and "addiction" don't really cut it.

Entry: 2026-02-28 01:29:40.481313+01 ChatGPT exposes China strongarm operation by Dan Lyke comments 0

CNN: A Chinese official’s use of ChatGPT accidentally revealed a global intimidation operation

The Chinese law enforcement official used ChatGPT like a diary to document the alleged covert campaign of suppression, OpenAI said. In one instance, Chinese operators allegedly disguised themselves as US immigration officials to warn a US-based Chinese dissident that their public statements had supposedly broken the law, according to the ChatGPT user. In another case, they describe an effort to use forged documents from a US county court to try to get a Chinese dissident’s social media account taken down.

Via

[ related topics: Politics Law Journalism and Media Law Enforcement ]

Entry: 2026-02-23 19:18:41.817918+01 OpenClaw deletes Meta director of AI Safety inbox by Dan Lyke comments 0

404 Media: Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox

Summer Yue, the director of alignment at Meta Superintelligence Labs, a part of the company that is working on a hypothetical AI system that exceeds human intelligence, posted about the incident on X last night. Yue was experimenting with OpenClaw, an viral AI agent that can be empowered to perform certain tasks with little human supervision. OpenAI hired the creator of OpenClaw last week.

Entry: 2026-02-21 01:29:28.992383+01 Tony Gilroy interview by Dan Lyke comments 0

Andor creator Tony Gilroy gives the interview he couldn't during its release. I didn't watch the show, and I don't think I need to 'cause I'm seeing it play out IRL, but the interview has a number of "nailed it" quotes, eg:

So you get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism and the karaoke menu of things that you go through to do it. You could list them from the show, or you could list them from the newspaper.

Via a whole bunch of places, but here, for instance.

Entry: 2026-02-20 18:35:23.985616+01 COYOTE Almost Got Slopped by AI by Dan Lyke comments 0

Fascinating little article about patterns in Social Security numbers: How COYOTE Almost Got Slopped by AI.

Also, lovin' COYOTE Media collective, but having trouble separating it from COYOTE the Margo St. James organization.

Entry: 2026-02-18 21:40:45.000698+01 LLM hogwash via blogging by Dan Lyke comments 0

Getting LLMs to repeat hogwash for fun:

I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI – and it only took 20 minutes

I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled "The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs". Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporters and based my ranking on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Championship (which doesn't exist). I ranked myself number one, obviously. Then I listed a few fake reporters and real journalists who gave me permission, including Drew Harwell at the Washington Post and Nicky Woolf, who co-hosts my podcast. (Want to hear more about this story? Check out tomorrow's episode of The Interface, the BBC's new tech podcast.)

Via Thomas Germain (the author) on Bluesky.

Entry: 2026-02-18 21:37:02.537337+01 Political effects of X by Dan Lyke comments 0

Nature: The political effects of X’s feed algorithm Germain Gauthier, Roland Hodler, Philine Widmer & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya

We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

Via

Entry: 2026-02-11 19:41:13.963683+01 The next decade will be built to give it back. by Dan Lyke comments 2

Assaad Abousleiman on LinkedIn

The last decade of software was built to capture attention.

The next decade will be built to give it back.

I don't agree with his "plausible sentence generators are the future" conclusion that the rest of this essay goes on to conclude, but I like the strong opener. We have a decade or so of computing that's actively user hostile, and we need software which we can trust, which is on our side.

I do agree with two points:

First, that we need to treat the computing developments of the last decade or decade and a half as actively hostile. Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, et al all have gone completely over from enabling us to finding ways extracting every possible bit of value from us.

Built in applications on our platform have gone from utilities to worthless for our own data unless we cave to demands for additional subscription payments. From media players to just using our own damned hard drives, it's getting harder and harder to use our own data, the focus becomes ways to sell us mediated subscriptions.

We're no longer in control of what we see, instead we're being fed information that serves the wants of capital in ways that emotionally triggers us, with automated measures of the efficacy of those information feeds. Our conversations with our friends and our communities are being mediated by hostile forces.

In the social media and email tools of the '90s, we had the ability to build incredibly nuanced filters to help us automatically control what information we were going to let the assholes impose on our lives. Now, the best of these tools (things like Mastodon on the Fediverse) give us simple yeah/nay keyword filtering.

Second, that this software needs to help us automate processes that we currently do manually. As operating systems have moved from the command-line to GUI, we've lost the physical artifacts of process. I think it's worth diving deeper into this.

Every use of an LLM to write code is an acknowledgement of the failure of the programming languages that it's implementing code in. We can describe the process well enough that a lossy plausible sentence generator can guess at what we meant, why can't we make the language express that same meaning unambiguously, in ways that are accessible?

We need a move forward in computing language design to give us languages with grammars flexible enough that people can express, and we can iteratively guide them into a repeatable formal definition that they understand, and that the computers can deterministically execute.

Finally, we need business models, and computing tools, that serve us, rather than those who are looking to further exploit us.

Entry: 2026-02-09 19:10:23.535084+01 LLMs make terrible advice nurses by Dan Lyke comments 0

nature medicine: Reliability of LLMs as medical assistants for the general public: a randomized preregistered study.

LLMs generated several types of misleading and incorrect information. In two cases, LLMs provided initially correct responses but added new and incorrect responses after the users added additional details. In two other cases, LLMs did not provide a broad response but narrowly expanded on a single term within the user’s message (‘pre-eclampsia‘ and ‘Saudi Arabia’) that was not central to the scenario. LLMs also made errors in contextual understanding by, for example, recommending calling a partial US phone number and, in the same interaction, recommending calling ‘Triple Zero’, the Australian emergency number. Comparing across scenarios, we also noticed inconsistency in how LLMs responded to semantically similar inputs. In an extreme case, two users sent very similar messages describing symptoms of a subarachnoid hemorrhage but were given opposite advice...

404 Media: Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds

Entry: 2026-02-06 17:59:37.508384+01 units of sin by Dan Lyke comments 0

Mike Taylor 🦕 @mike@sauropods.win

I was thinking about how strange it is that the cupboard in a bathroom is called a "vanity unit", and then I got to thinking, what if all your furniture was named after the seven deadly sins?

* Bathroom cupboard = vanity unit

* Paid-work office = avarice unit

* Computer gaming station = anger unit

* Device running social media = envy unit

* Bed = lust unit

* Induction hob = gluttony unit

* Sofa = sloth unit

Entry: 2026-02-06 01:04:19.351003+01 Denmeyer & Associates goes after SuspectFile by Dan Lyke comments 0

SuspectFile: Assault on Independent Journalism: Unfounded Legal Attacks over the Black Basta Investigation

In which the SuspectFile folks go through entirely too much effort and energy to demonstrate to The Hacker News’ law firm, Dennemeyer & Associates, that they're full of shit and need to stop with the false copyright claims.

This kinda stuff is why fraudulent DMCA claims really need some teeth. Pulling stunts like this really needs to hurt the fraudsters enough that it's a career limiting maneuver.

Via.

Entry: 2026-02-02 17:52:01.547779+01 Data Centers in Space by Dan Lyke comments 2

From back in December, but apropos because of Elon Musk's "data centers in spaaaace..." pump-n-dump: Matthew R. Buckley, aka "Physics Matt": The Dumbest Thing I’ve Seen This Week:

To be blunt, the entire stupid idea is a giant middle finger to multiple fundamentals of physics, and the fact that it is apparently being taken seriously by our tech lords, mainstream journalism, and political leaders is a damning indictment of not just the ridiculous amount of money chasing bad ideas in the tech/LLM/hype sector that has eaten the American economy, political power centers, and people who really should know better, but yet another demonstration of how people who built their economic empire on a claim of STEM-based rigor and quantitative genius either can’t do basic physics or know that no one out there who matters is going to call them on it.

Although, frankly, dropping a bunch of GPUs into a decaying low earth orbit is a way to point out how rapidly these things depreciate.

Entry: 2026-01-28 19:07:13.723997+01 ManyVids founder in AI induced psychosis? by Dan Lyke comments 2

404 Media: Aliens and Angel Numbers: Creators Worry Porn Platform ManyVids Is Falling Into ‘AI Psychosis’

Futurism: OnlyFans Rival Seemingly Succumbs to AI Psychosis, Which We Dare You to Try Explain to Your Parents

Via

Edit: Bonus, from 404 Media: App for Quitting Porn Leaked Users' Masturbation Habits

Entry: 2026-01-28 18:28:45.507854+01 Steve Simon on Pam Bondi's extortion letter by Dan Lyke comments 0

A few days old, but Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State: Statement from Secretary Simon — January 25, 2026

SAINT PAUL – On January 24, 2026, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz with three requests that she writes would "restore the rule of law, support ICE officers, and bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota.” The third request in the letter was to allow the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to access Minnesota’s “voter rolls.”

Via

Entry: 2026-01-22 17:53:41.574288+01 Ribald in Sydney by Dan Lyke comments 0

Wish this piece went deeper, but still a fascinating glimpes at Australia's sexual culture of the early 1970s: Satirical erotic newspaper discovered inside heritage Hobart hotel.

Via Metafilter.

Entry: 2026-01-22 00:52:59.512766+01 Mental illness and LLMs by Dan Lyke comments 0

Man Who Had Managed Mental Illness Effectively for Years Says ChatGPT Sent Him Into Hospitalization for Psychosis

"They straight up took my data and used it against me to capture me further and make me even more delusional."

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff calls out AI models as 'suicide coaches'

In three public appearances, the executive of San Francisco’s largest tech company used the phrase “suicide coach” to describe the chatbot from Character.AI — a Menlo Park startup sued by multiple families over their children’s mental health crises. Benioff discussed the issue with TV interviewers from CNBC and Bloomberg, then on stage with President Donald Trump’s AI czar David Sacks. Calling out the United States’ failure to regulate social media, the CEO advocated for new accountability measures aimed at chatbot companies.

Entry: 2026-01-08 17:45:05.037506+01 it's all rainbow Linux by Dan Lyke comments 0

gnilleps @gnilleps@mastodon.art

I sometimes see people complaining about their experience on one ‘social media’ platform being terrible as opposed to another, and someone else will have had a different experience. And I think a lot of it’s down to how you curate your feed. For example; I principally follow illustrators here on Mastodon, so my feed is largely… wait—Why is it all rainbow Linux? WHY IS IT ALL RAINBOW LINUX?!?

Entry: 2025-12-29 20:56:40.85881+01 Norman Rockwell was woke antifa by Dan Lyke comments 0

The Bulwark: The MAGAfication of Norman Rockwell. I suspect that Norman Rockwell was fighting against those who'd use his art for nativist propaganda, he seems to be pretty explicit about it:

Then in the 1960s, Rockwell underwent a more radical transformation. He became more concerned by both the social turmoil around him as well as his own legacy. “I was born a White Protestant with some prejudices that I am continuously trying to eradicate,” Rockwell said in 1962. “I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people and in myself.”

Entry: 2025-12-28 03:05:02.161513+01 We've talked about AI and social media by Dan Lyke comments 0

We've talked about AI and social media in the context of Ameica's Funniest Home Videos and golf crotch shots, and... The Internet provides. https://bsky.app/profile/jjvin...t.bsky.social/post/3mayddynhas2l

Entry: 2025-12-23 18:42:56.812173+01 Softbank scrambles to fund OpenAI by Dan Lyke comments 0

Reuters Exclusive: SoftBank races to fulfill $22.5 billion funding commitment to OpenAI by year-end, sources say

The "all- in" bet on OpenAI is among the biggest yet by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, as the Japanese billionaire seeks to improve his firm's position in the race for artificial intelligence. To come up with the money, Son has already sold SoftBank's entire $5.8 billion stake in AI chip leader Nvidia (NVDA.O), offloaded $4.8 billion of its T-Mobile US (TMUS.O) stake, and slashed staff.

Via

Entry: 2025-12-19 23:35:55.044034+01 Prohibited Grounds for Withholding by Dan Lyke comments 0

Sorry, I really want to make social media more... you know... social. Life updates and stuff. Not just posting links to law... But it seems like today is a day to emphasize a passage from "H.R.4405 - Epstein Files Transparency Act".

https://www.congress.gov/bill/...th-congress/house-bill/4405/text

(b) Prohibited Grounds for Withholding.—

(1) No record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.

[ related topics: Politics moron Journalism and Media Real Estate ]

Entry: 2025-12-19 18:22:56.518262+01 Foxes & Henhouses by Dan Lyke comments 1

Axios on MSN: Scoop: TikTok signs deal for sale of US unit after years-long saga:

The White House and the Chinese government hammered out a deal in principle in September to sell TikTok's U.S. operations to a joint venture controlled by a U.S. investor group led by Andreessen Horowitz, Silver Lake, and Oracle.

(Emphasis mine.)

I don't have a non-paid link for this, but: 404 Media: Hack Reveals the a16z-Backed Phone Farm Flooding TikTok With AI Influencers. So, yeah, Andreessen Horowitz has backed Doublespeed, a company that uses generative AI to create social media slop for advertisers.

This will not end well for society.

Entry: 2025-12-15 18:39:52.482671+01 Social media & teens by Dan Lyke comments 0

In response to a thread about fixing social media rather than banning kids from it, Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io noted:

@juliette Hot take that shouldn't be: Any effort to ban kids from the internet and force in-person local socialization is a form of conversion therapy and inherently abusive.

BBSes may have saved my life.

Oooh, scrolling down that thread, the streams cross: Epic Null @Epic_Null@infosec.exchange

@dalias @juliette I certainly wouldn't say I see a lot of "Pro safe-streets" discussion from the people who push to ban the internet for children. Or "Build more parks". Or "Open more child-friendly stores". Or even "Build denser housing so kids are closer to other kids". Or even "More libraries! Safe routes to school!"

You know, conversations that would emphasize opportunities to socialize in person.

Entry: 2025-12-15 18:27:18.394827+01 Human Context Protocol by Dan Lyke comments 0

Schneier on Security: Building Trustworthy AI Agents is a bit of publicity for Robust AI Personalization Will Require a Human Context Protocol, but as David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run points out

the cited paper is utterly detached hypothesis-crafting from MIT Media Lab and Glen fuckin Weyl

Entry: 2025-12-13 01:55:03.757826+01 browser on the ancient Kindle Fire is by Dan Lyke comments 0

The browser on the ancient Kindle Fire is no longer running GrumpyPlayer. What's the current state of "play digital music" devices? Preferred is attach to my WiFi, let it get files via HTTP or something, second is copy media to the device or an SD card. Last is a Plex or similar server.

[ related topics: Music Journalism and Media Sports Pyrotechnics ]

Entry: 2025-12-12 00:50:08.18872+01 They droned back by Dan Lyke comments 0

This is fascinating: Digital Digging: They Droned Back

Seven German journalism students tracked Russian-crewed freighters lurking off the Dutch and German coast—and connected them to drone swarms over military bases.

[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]

Entry: 2025-12-08 19:05:26.744889+01 AI slop and DDG by Dan Lyke comments 0

AskMeFi question about Duck Duck Go results shows the summary for the Wikipedia result, that I've replicated, as:

Williot Swedberg is a Swedish footballer who plays for Celta Vigo and the Sweden national team. He started his career at Hammarby IF and was named one of the best young talents in 2004 by The Guardian.

What Wikipedia actually says is:

In October 2021, Swedberg was named as one of the 60 best young talents in world football born in 2004, by the English newspaper The Guardian.

[Emphasis mine]

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ gives the same bogosity, so this is probably something that's crept in from Bing. https://www.startpage.com/ gives a shorter summary.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Journalism and Media Television Sports ]

Entry: 2025-12-08 18:29:32.807483+01 AI & Insurance coverage by Dan Lyke comments 0

I ran across links to this article, Financial Times: Insurers retreat from AI cover as risk of multibillion-dollar claims mounts, about AIG, Great American, and WR Berkley backing away from AI coverage, but it's paywalled, so I went searching for the headline, and it's interesting how this current media push is being spun, with a week before that stories about startup insurers stepping in to cover risks that the major companies don't want to touch: Insurance companies are trying to avoid big payouts by making AI safer

“We’re in an era now where the losses are really here and happening; that’s one thing. The second thing is that insurers are now actually starting to exclude AI from their existing policies,” Dattani said. “So it feels pretty certain that we’re going to need some solution here, and we need people with skin in the game who can provide third- party oversight. That’s where we see the role of insurance.”

Ernst & Young: How can responsible AI bridge the gap between investment and impact?

Almost every company in our survey (99%) reported financial losses from AI- related risks, and 64% experienced losses exceeding US$1 million. On average, the financial loss to companies that have experienced risks is conservatively estimated at US$4.4 million.1 That’s an estimated total loss of US$4.3 billion across the 975 respondents in our sample.

And now traditional insurers stepping back: Major Insurers Want Out of AI Coverage as 'Black Box' Risk Grows:

The industry has good reason to be spooked. Google's AI Overview falsely accused a solar company of legal troubles earlier this year, triggering a $110 million lawsuit. Air Canada got stuck honoring a discount its chatbot completely invented after a customer took the airline to small claims court. Most dramatically, fraudsters used a digitally cloned executive to steal $25 million from London engineering firm Arup during what appeared to be a legitimate video conference.

Entry: 2025-11-21 22:52:31.284181+01 China buys CIA insurance provider by Dan Lyke comments 0

Just clearing my bookmarked social media pages: A Chinese firm bought an insurer for CIA agents - part of Beijing's trillion dollar spending spree. So, yeah, you wanna know who's working for the intelligence agencies? Why not just get their health records...

Via/

Entry: 2025-11-17 21:35:46.621872+01 media decisions aren't merely driven by traffic by Dan Lyke comments 2

World Without Exploitation has released a short PSA on YouTube featuring survivors of Epstein's child rape ring.

MeFi user Smedly, Butlerian jihadi notes:

This gets me a little too heated to express my entire sentiments reasonably, but the TL;DR is that we can absolutely see from just those emails that have been released that the broad outlines of this situation were always widely known among the establishment and their courtiers in the upper levels of media.

There is a canard that gets trotted out when people are critical of the media, which is that their decisions are driven by traffic -- what will drive clicks is given more attention. This story, if nothing else, categorically demolishes that defense. Media coverage is structured to create a narrative that serves the interests of the privileged classes, full stop. If they had wanted to make this a massive scandal driving huge surges in traffic, they absolutely could have. And again, the broad outlines of the scandal were demonstrably well known.

It is instructive to contrast how this would be covered if it were attractive white teenage girls being trafficked and exploited by people of color, organized into gangs or otherwise.

At some point there should be pitchforks and guillotines for the people who covered this up, and that's the limit of what I will say here.

Also Via and Via.

Entry: 2025-11-12 19:56:25.379669+01 At least use an ad blocker by Dan Lyke comments 1

My mom called me up again, recently, because her computer once again was locked in some state where a voice was warning her that the Facebook police were going to come get her or something. After going through Ctrl-W and the usual things and having that not work, we went for a reboot, and of course once the browser quit the voices stopped.

Now she's got some whackadoodle conspiracy health beliefs, and that leaves her prone to surfing the less savory aspects of the web, but that Facebook knows that at least 10% of its ads are scams (I mentioned that I'm surprised it's that low) and the Nevada ransomware attack happened because a state employee confused a malicious Google ad result with a valid download, indicates that our media culture is irretrievably broken.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange observes:

Given this and the recent Facebook news, there's a very strong case to be made that an ad provider is legally an accomplice to any crime committed by their ads. If they are profiting financially from enabling crime, they are criminals.

and... I realize that us web publishers have some legal protections, but I'm starting to think that between stuff like this and the various age verification laws going in various places, that maybe it is time to move comments and annotations into the client/aggregators that pull from various different places, and make publishers liable for what they publish.

Entry: 2025-11-12 18:25:55.376214+01 AI spending replacing jobs by Dan Lyke comments 0

Fast Company: AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is

Yet we remain skeptical of the claim that AI is responsible for these layoffs. A recent MIT Media Lab study found that 95% of generative AI pilot business projects were failing. Another survey by Atlassian concluded that 96% of businesses “have not seen dramatic improvements in organizational efficiency, innovation, or work quality.” Still another study found that 40% of the business people surveyed have received “AI slop” at work in the last month and that it takes nearly two hours, on average, to fix each instance of slop. In addition, they “no longer trust their AI-enabled peers, find them less creative, and find them less intelligent or capable.”

Via Brian Krebs

Entry: 2025-11-11 22:36:38.300018+01 private equity killed media by Dan Lyke comments 0

Talking Points Memo: Pivots, Trolls, & Blog Rolls — Reflections on 25 years of Digital Media

Via

[ related topics: Weblogs Journalism and Media ]

Entry: 2025-11-06 22:29:35.143373+01 Facebook scam ads by Dan Lyke comments 0

Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show

Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads – and issuing reports on ’Scammiest Scammers.’

I am actually surprised that the number is that low. I assume that any ads on Facebook are scams. I wonder if they've A/B tested out exactly what proportion of scammy ads they can get before users stop engaging and advertisers stop buying ads?

Via and Via.

Entry: 2025-11-05 21:07:47.232498+01 Norman Rockwell's family calls out DHS bigotry by Dan Lyke comments 0

Norman Rockwell family slams DHS over art use on social media

“Protect our American way of life,” one DHS post on Facebook from August said, with an image of Rockwell’s 1971 painting “Salute the Flag.” Another post included an image of Rockwell’s work along with a quote from former President Coolidge: “Those who do not want to be partakers of the American spirit ought not to settle in America.”

USA Today Opinion: We're Norman Rockwell's family. Trump's DHS has shamefully misused his work.

“I was born a White Protestant with some prejudices that I am continuously trying to eradicate,” Rockwell said in an interview in 1962. “I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people and in myself.”

Via.

Entry: 2025-10-21 16:29:26.148021+02 AI summarized by Dan Lyke comments 0

Just because it's a nice summary of what we know all in one place Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets@mastodon.social

@delaney ChatGPT and other LLMs are built entirely on stolen intellectual property https://www.cbc.ca/news/busine...penai-canadian-lawsuit-1.7396940, trained by near-slave labour in abusive conditions https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/, use horrifying amounts of water and electricity https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/theres-a- cost-to-your-chatgpt-query-the-water-you-drink/, promote misinformation https://www.allaboutai.com/ai-...mistakes-and-even-openai-doesnt- know-why/ as well as racist and sexist stereotypes https://www.snexplores.org/article/racial-bias-chatgpt-ai-tools, and actually cause a decline in cognitive function among people who use it regularly https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/

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