Jason Koebler

Please, please do our reader survey It'll take just a minute and help 404 Media figure out how to grow sustainably.

We are running our first reader survey, please consider taking it. It will help us out a lot as we plan what we want to do in 2026. I promise for karmic justice I will start doing surveys I'm asked to take

www.404media.co/please-pleas...

some smart thoughts here I think. I’ve personally tried to lean into physical media and local businesses as much as I can

thank you !

Thanks to @bcmerchant.bsky.social for laying it out. Thanks for @jasonkoebler.bsky.social and @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social and their @404media.co colleagues for reporting it. We’ve all seen it. Time to actively oppose it when we can.

One way is a vision of what beings instead. Got some ideas below.

americans are fucking up the world for sure but american tech companies, both AI and social media companies, are highly accelerating this

ok but AI allows people to "apply" zillions of times by spamming stuff until it works. but yes, point taken

A huge and growing amount of the content that we see on the internet is created explicitly because these monetization programs exist. People are making content specifically for Americans. They are not always, or even usually, creating it because they are trying to inflame tensions. They are making it because they can make money from it, and because content viewed by Americans pays the most and performs the best. The guides to making this sort of thing focus entirely on how to make content quickly, easily, and using automated tools. They focus on how to steal content from news outlets, source things from other websites, and generate scripts using AI tools. They do not focus on spreading disinformation or fucking up America, they focus on “making money.” This is a problem that AI has drastically exacerbated, but it is a problem that has wholly been created by social media platforms themselves, and which they seem to have little or no interest in solving.

This broader issue could be and would be drastically diminished if social media companies drastically cut back on these programs, stopped incentivizing keeping people on their own platforms, actually moderated content/deleted this type of content. But they have zero interest in doing this

How to make "monetized USA Accounts" and how to populate them with content is an incredibly popular global YouTube side hustle type of content. Look at this:

America’s Polarization Has Become the World's Side Hustle The 'psyops' revealed by X are entirely the fault of the perverse incentives created by social media monetization programs.

X's location "transparency" feature showing many MAGA accounts are based internationally reveals what we already knew: The world is using American social media and American politics as a slot machine and social media companies are directly incentivizing this:

www.404media.co/americas-pol...

thank you!!

How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World A 404 Media investigation reveals how the man who started Tea, the ‘women dating safety’ app, tried to hire a female ‘face’ for the company and then hijack her grassroots community.

I'm looking to talk to Tea users who were impacted by the hack we covered a few months ago. If you're one of those people please email me at emanuel@404media.co or hit me up on signal at @emanuel.404 www.404media.co/how-teas-fou...

YouTube video by 404 Media How Big Tech Has Convinced Us to Surveil Ourselves and Each Other

Was an honor to have @hypervisible.blacksky.app on our podcast to talk about spying on ourselves, spying on each other, Flock, Ring, food delivery robots, and general surveillance culture:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kBg...

yes more soon! Thank you!

Why Was Nvidia Hosting Blogs About 'Brazilian Facesitting Fart Games'? Domains owned by Nvidia, Stanford, NPR and the U.S. government are being quietly eaten by AI slop.

I think maybe it’s this same phenomenon. Maybe time for an update from us but seems like the same problem: www.404media.co/spam-blogs-a...

Cops Used Flock to Monitor No Kings Protests Around the Country A massive cache of Flock lookups collated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) shows as many as 50 federal, state, and local agencies used Flock during protests over the last year.

Cops all over the country used Flock to surveil No Kings protesters, public records show: www.404media.co/cops-used-fl...

this actually is answered in the article and the answer is yes

AI plagiarism machine

grok's training data includes bumper stickers clearly

Elon Musk Could 'Drink Piss Better Than Any Human in History,' Grok Says Grok has been reprogrammed to say Musk is better than everyone at everything, including blowjobs, piss drinking, playing quarterback, conquering Europe, etc.

it's enjoyable. i'm enjoying it

www.404media.co/elon-musk-co...

ICE Says Critical Evidence In Abuse Case Was Lost In 'System Crash' a Day After It Was Sued The government also said "we don't have resources" to retain all footage and that plaintiffs could supply "endless hard drives that we could save things to."

DHS/ICE, which just got the largest budget increase in its history, claims it doesn't have enough money for hard drives to preserve video evidence in a detainee abuse case at Broadview. Suggests to a judge that maybe the detainees could provide them

www.404media.co/ice-says-cri...

“We tried to engage with the government through our IT specialist, and we hired a video forensic specialist,” Solotorovsky said. He added that the government specialist they spoke to “didn’t really know anything beyond the basic specifications of the system. He wasn’t able to answer any questions about preservation or attempts to recover the data.” He said that the government eventually put him in touch with “a person who ostensibly was involved in those events [attempting to recover the data], and it was kind of a no-name LLC called Five by Five Management that appears to be based out of a house in Carol Stream. We were told they were on site and involved with the system when the October 20 to 30 data was lost, but nobody has told us that Five By Five Management or anyone else has been trying to recover the data, and also very importantly things like system logs, administrator logs, event logs, data in the system that may show changes to settings or configurations or deletion events or people accessing the system at important times.”

The government has apparently retained an essentially unknown IT firm registered to a house in Illinois with virtually no online presence to assist it in trying to recover the footage

Federal lawyers said "we dont have the resources" to retain all surveillance footage, and suggested that perhaps the plaintiffs—who are undocumented immigrants being detained in horrific conditions—could provide "endless hard drives where we could save the information, that might be one solution."

ICE Says Critical Evidence In Abuse Case Was Lost In 'System Crash' a Day After It Was Sued The government also said "we don't have resources" to retain all footage and that plaintiffs could supply "endless hard drives that we could save things to."

Feds now claim a "system crash" that happened immediately after ICE was sued is the reason why 10 days of footage from inside the Broadview Detention Center has been lost.

Unreal hearing on this earlier:

www.404media.co/ice-says-cri...

Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with 'suspicious' travel patterns The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious.

very big story here: apnews.com/article/immi...

Ukraine Is Jamming Russia’s ‘Superweapon’ With a Song A few years ago, Putin hyped the Kinzhal hypersonic missile. Now electronic warfare is knocking it out of the sky with music and some bad directions.

this is sick: www.404media.co/ukraine-is-j...

ready for baseball season

dude lol

New FOIA FORUM about flock rn: bsky.app/profile/jose...

This is of course something that @samleecole.bsky.social has been writing about literally since the dawn of deepfakes. But the scale of this exposure is really crazy. Millions of images leaked by extraordinarily shoddy security, left exposed on the internet for months

It's sort of hard to explain how incredibly fucked up this is. Nudify apps are terrible, and a scourge that is being used against random nonpublic people (and bad no matter who it is). But this app is worse: people are stealing images of women and are putting them in extreme hardcore AI porn