AkiraBot is a program that fills website comments sections and customer service chat bots with AI-generated spam messages. Its goal is simple: it wants you to sign up for an SEO scheme that costs about $30 a month. For that low price it swears it can enchant Google’s algorithms to get you on the frontpage. But it’s a scam.

A new report from researchers at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne documented how scammers deployed AkiraBot, the tool’s use of OpenAI generated messages, and how it avoided multiple CAPTCHA systems and network detection techniques. According to the report, the bot targeted 420,000 unique domains and successfully spammed 80,000.

Whoever runs AkirBot operates their SEO company under a bunch of different names, but they all tend to use the words “Akira” or “ServiceWrap.” SentinelOne says the tool finds websites crafted by third party software like Wix or Squarespace and spams comments sections and automated chatbots with a promise to get the site on the frontpage of various search engines. If you have a small business that exists on the web or have run a WordPress-based website in the last 15 years, you’ve likely seen messages like those AkiraBot crafts. 

“My name is Megan, from The Akira Team—I just noticed your website through your Entireweb Website Listing, and wanted to get in touch with you right away,” a typical message reads, left in the comments of a candle company shop. “We have a special offer for your website today, and that is 1st Page Rankings in all major search engines (That’s Google, Yahoo and Bing) + social media and video commercial advertising starting at just $29.99 which I am ABSOLUTELY certain will benefit your website and business, by bringing you LOTS of new customers, very very quickly.”

The oldest domain associated with the bot was registered in 2022 and SentinelOne says it was able to track its progression as it moved from attacking Shopify sites and evolved to take on those created with GoDaddy, Wix, and Squarespace.

According to the researchers, AkiraBot used an OpenAI chat API to craft custom messages using gpt-4o-mini. It prompted GPT to give it messages after prompting it to be a “helpful assistant that generates marketing messages.” All the messages were similar, but just different enough to fool traditional spam filters.

OpenAI did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment, but SentinelOne thanked it in the conclusion of its report and printed a statement from the company. “We’re grateful to SentinelOne for sharing their research,” OpenAI told SentinelOne. “Distributing output from our services for spam is against our policies. The API key involved is disabled, and we’re continuing to investigate and will disable any associated assets. We take misuse seriously and are continually improving our systems to detect abuse.”

The bot also evaded CAPTCHA, according to the researchers “We identified an archive with files for CAPTCHA-related servers and browser fingerprints, which allow the bot’s web traffic to mimic a legitimate end user. The archives contain a fingerprint server that runs on the same system as the other AkiraBot tools and intercepts the website loading processes using Selenium WebDriver, an automation framework that simulates user browsing activity,” the report said.

SentinelOne also detailed how the bot used proxy hosts to avoid network detection. “In each archive SentinelOne analyzed, AkiraBot used the SmartProxy service. SmartProxy’s website claims that its proxies are ethically sourced and that they provide data center, mobile, and residential proxies,” the report said. “Each version of the bot uses the same proxy credentials, suggesting the same actor is behind each iteration.”

One recent variant of the bot—Useakira—is still up and has customer reviews on Trustpilot. They’re all either five stars or one star. “Just got spammed on my wix chat too! Thanks for the reviews on here for saving me some time in confirming it’s spam!” One user said.

“No idea who this company are until today when I suddenly start getting emails. They've scraped my data from my website and are using it to try to sell me website advertising,” said another included in the report.

“Received 5 emails Useakira in one day though our websites contact us form, Trying to push their service, Spam company will not be engaging with them,” said a third.

There are also a lot of five star reviews for the service, but SentineLABS noted they follow a pattern. Five star reviewers tend to have one previous review made a few days before the Akira or ServiceWrap review and the messages often sound the same. “We believe the actor may be generating some fake reviews, though it is difficult to say with certainty,” the report said.

Although OpenAI did shut down the bad actor’s API key, that the bot exists at all and was successful tens of thousands of times points to a grim future. AI slop is a brute force attack on algorithms that’s filling all our feeds with machine-generated poison. Now crooks have used a similar method to run an SEO scam. It worked, for a while.

Whoever built it will probably come back with something else. “We expect this campaign to continue to evolve as website hosting providers adapt defenses to deter spam,” SentinelOne said in its report.

On Wednesday President Trump signed an executive order which told respective agencies to revoke any security clearance held by Chris Krebs, SentinelOne’s Chief Intelligence and Public Policy Officer, and others at the company. While he was the head of a part of DHS focused on cybersecurity, Krebs said that Biden won the 2020 election, going against Trump’s false claims the election was stolen.

“We are a cybersecurity company – our mission is to defend customers, enterprises, and governments against cyber threats by leveraging the most advanced Artificial Intelligence. We view the White House as a crucial collaborator on that mission, and we will continue to support a strong America at a time of heightened geopolitical threats,” SentinelOne said in a statement. “We will actively cooperate in any review of security clearances held by any of our personnel – currently less than 10 employees overall and only where required by existing government processes and procedures to secure government systems. Accordingly, we do not expect this to materially impact our business in any way.”

Bias in artificial intelligence systems, or the fact that large language models, facial recognition, and AI image generators can only remix and regurgitate the information in data those technologies are trained on, is a well established fact that researchers and academics have been warning about since their inception. 

In a blog post about the release of Llama 4, Meta’s open weights AI model, the company clearly states that bias is a problem it’s trying to address, but unlike mountains of research which established AI systems are more likely to discriminate against minorities based on race, gender, and nationality, Meta is specifically concerned with Llama 4 having a left-leaning political bias. 

“It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics,” Meta said in its blog. “This is due to the types of training data available on the internet.”

A powerful Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database, parts of which have been seen by 404 Media, allows the federal government to search for and filter people by hundreds of different, highly specific categories. Surveillance experts say the database is a tool that could possibly be helping ICE identify, detain, and deport people who are suspected of relatively minor infractions or who fit certain characteristics, but said the fact that we don’t necessarily know the exact mechanisms by which people are being identified and detained is a major problem. 

The database, called “Investigative Case Management” (ICM), “serves as the core law enforcement case management tool for ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI),” according to a 2021 privacy impact assessment for the tool. 

404 Media saw a recent version of the database, which allows filtering according to hundreds of different categories, which include things like resident status and entry status (“refugee,” “border crossing card,” “nonimmigrant alien refused admission,” “temporary protective status alien,” “nonimmigrant alien transiting without visa,” “undocumented alien,”); “unique physical characteristics (e.g. scars, marks, tattoos)”; “criminal affiliation”; location data; license plate reader data; country of origin; hair and eye color; race; social security number; birthplace; place of employment; driver’s license status; bankruptcy filings, and hundreds more. A source familiar with the database told 404 Media that it is made up of “tables upon tables” of data and that it can build reports that show, for example, people who are on a specific type of visa who came into the country at a specific port of entry, who came from a specific country, and who have a specific hair color (or any number of hundreds of data points). 

ICM was created by Palantir, the powerful and controversial surveillance and data management company. In 2022, Palantir signed a $95.9 million, five-year contract to work on ICM.  

ICE agents can set up a “Person Lookout Query” that sends email notifications if a person suddenly triggers the parameters of a search query. 404 Media has seen parts of the infrastructure of this database, which shows the characteristics that can be searched for, as well as several example reports that can be generated by it. 

A 2016 privacy impact assessment filed by DHS about the database says that ICM connects to other DHS and federal databases, including SEVIS, which are records about all people who are admitted to the United States on a student visa; another search tool called FALCON; “real-time maps” associated with ICE’s location tracking tools; “limited location data from license plate reader cameras operated by ICE,” as well as information from “other federal agencies.” The Intercept previously reported those agencies include the DEA, the FBI, the ATF, and the CIA.

We start this week with Joseph's story revealing how the FBI secretly ran a massive money laundering ring to catch drug traffickers and hackers. After the break, we run through a bunch of tariff stories and how it's going to impact everything from the Nintendo Switch to the iPhone. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains why he found the new book on Facebook particularly illuminating.

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.

• ‘Elon Musk’ Was a Prolific Money Launderer for Hackers and Drug Traffickers. It Was Secretly the FBI
• Big Tech Backed Trump for Acceleration. They Got a Decel President Instead
• 'Sea of Idiocy:' Economists Say Trump Tariffs Will Raise Price of Switch 2 and Everything Else
• A 'US-Made iPhone' Is Pure Fantasy
• Framework Stops Selling Some of Its Laptops in the U.S. Due to Tariffs
• 'Careless People' Is the Book About Facebook I've Wanted for a Decade

This weekend, U.S. secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick went on CBS’s Face the Nation and pitched a fantasy world where iPhones are manufactured in the United States:  “The army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America, it’s going to be automated, and the tradecraft of America is going to fix them, is going to work on them, there’s going to be mechanics, HVAC specialists, electricians,” Lutnick said. “The tradecraft of America, the high school educated Americans, the core to our workforce is going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America to work on these high tech factories which are all coming to America.” 

The idea of a Made-in-the-USA iPhone has been an obsession for politicians for years, a kind of shorthand goalpost that would signal “American manufacturing is back” that is nonetheless nowhere close to being a reality and would require a nearly impossible-to-fathom restructuring of the global supply chains that make the iPhone possible in the first place. Over the years, economists and manufacturing experts have attempted to calculate how much an American-made iPhone would cost. In recent days a Quora answer from 2018 that suggests an American iPhone would cost $30,000 has gone repeatedly viral. A Reuters story that claims a tariffed iPhone would cost $2,300 has also gone viral.

These articles are good exercises but they are also total fantasy. There is no universe in which Apple snaps its fingers and begins making the iPhone in the United States overnight. It could theoretically begin assembling them here, but even that is a years-long process made infinitely harder by the fact that, in Trump’s ideal world, every company would be reshoring American manufacturing at the same time, leading to supply chain issues, factory building issues, and exacerbating the already lacking American talent pool for high-tech manufacturing. In the long term, we could and probably will see more tech manufacturing get reshored to the United States for strategic and national security reasons, but in the interim with massive tariffs, there will likely be unfathomable pain that is likely to last years, not weeks or months. 

The truth is that, assembled in the U.S. or not, the iPhone is a truly international device that is full of components manufactured all over the world and materials mined from dozens of different countries. Apple has what is among the most complex supply chains that has ever been designed in human history, and it is not going to be able to completely change that supply chain anytime soon.

We can see how the iPhone is made today by looking at numerous reports that Apple puts out every year, which outlines its current supply chain and workforce requirements. So let’s start there. The home page of Apple’s supply chain website states “Designed by Apple in California. Made by people everywhere.”

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Monday that the General Services Administration converted 14,000 magnetic to digital records, and claimed the process saved a million dollars a year.

The problem is, magnetic tapes are regarded by storage and archivist professionals as being a stable, reliable, and safe medium for long-term data storage. Just because it’s a 70 year old medium doesn’t mean those records needed a massive overhaul to digital, that it will save any money in the long term, or that the new storage method is better.

The shed-sized post office opposite a Baptist Church 40 miles outside of Louisville, Kentucky, was an unlikely starting point for one of the most significant undercover FBI operations in recent years. Inside that post office on September 17, 2021, sat a package that had arrived a few days earlier. On the face of it that package and others like it shipped over the coming months were not suspicious. They often contained children’s books. Nestled in those, though, was an envelope. Then another envelope inside that. And inside that, thousands of dollars of cash.

This money came from “ElonmuskWHM,” one of the biggest online money launderers and who advertised on the dark web site White House Market (WHM). For nearly a year by that point, ElonmuskWHM had been a crucial cog in the underground economy. Criminals came to ElonmuskWHM when they needed to cash out their ill-gotten cryptocurrency, bypassing the legitimate banking system that ordinarily kept tabs on their customers and gave information to law enforcement. So the FBI wanted to shut ElonmuskWHM down.

The FBI eventually identified ElonmuskWHM as Anurag Pramod Murarka, a 30 year-old Indian national who authorities arrested after luring him to the country by approving his travel visa application. More extraordinarily, the FBI then took over ElonmuskWHM’s money laundering operation and ran it themselves for nearly a year, Gabrielle Dudgeon, public affairs specialist at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Kentucky, which prosecuted the case, told 404 Media. With criminals believing they were interacting with the real ElonmuskWHM, the FBI then investigated the launderer’s customers, including drug traffickers and hackers. 

As part of the investigation into ElonmuskWHM, both before and after the account takeover, investigators linked the money launderer to drug traffickers in Miami; a robbery at knife point in San Francisco, and numerous multi-million dollar hacking cases. During this window of time, the FBI investigated an alleged member of the notorious Scattered Spider hacking collective, which was responsible for the MGM Resorts hack and has caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage. In this operation, rather than following the money, the FBI would become the money, potentially giving criminals tens of thousands of dollars in an effort to learn their real identities.

Framework—a company that makes upgradeable and repairable laptops—has said it will pause sales on several versions of one of its models in America thanks to Trump’s tariffs.

“Due to the new tariffs that came into effect on April 5th, we’re temporarily pausing US sales on a few base Framework Laptop 13 systems (Ultra 5 125H and Ryzen 5 7640U). For now, these models will be removed from our US site. We will continue to provide updates as we have them,” Framework said in a post on X.

On Monday stocks plummeted again following President Trump’s tariff announcements last week. For a brief moment, they dramatically shot back up following reports that Trump was considering a 90-day pause in tariffs. But, that turned out to be false, and people have been trying to find out where the idea that there would be a 90-day pause actually came from.

A company called Benzinga carried the headline “Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett Says Trump Is Considering A 90-Day Pause in Tariffs For All Countries Except China,” according to what appears to be a screenshot of the headline posted to Bluesky. 

Benzinga itself is now blaming posts on X for the market-moving mistake.

On Saturday Elon Musk sat in his personal jet and tested out Starlink’s in-air WiFI by streaming some Path of Exile 2. Less than five minutes into the stream, someone in game chat asked him to “jerk off mr trump so he dies of a heart attack!” For the next hour and 40 minutes, the world’s richest man frowned his way through a livestream while people yelled at him. 

Path of Exile 2 is an action role-playing game and Musk loves it, but he’s terrible at it. He has claimed he’s one of the top players in the world and later admitted he’s paid people to help keep his account leveled up and full of the high-end gear it needs to play the game at the highest level.

Over the weekend, in his jet, he was playing the game in hard core mode. When a player dies in this mode they cannot progress any further. Essentially, players have one life. Musk died a lot. The stream’s entire vibe was fucked. This is the richest man in the world sitting in a private jet playing a game by himself for an audience of strangers while techno music blasted through the speakers. Streaming on a platform he owns using technology he owns in a jet he owns, he sat stone-faced and grinded his way through the early portions of Path of Exile 2 while other players yelled at him.

It’s the first Monday after Donald Trump started implementing his so-called “reciprocal tariffs” and the markets are seeing red. At the time of writing the S&P 500, Dow, and Nasdaq are all down around four percent with the latter taking the hardest hit. And that’s on top of the S&P 500’s 10 percent fall last week. Things can still change quickly, and it’s up to historians to decide what to call Trump’s decision to push the economy off a cliff when they write their history books, but Wikipedia editors, who are arguably writing one of the first drafts of history, have already called it the “2025 stock market crash.”

“At the beginning of Donald Trump's second term, he was inaugurated inheriting a particularly strong domestic stock market,” the top section of the Wikipedia article titled “2025 stock market crash” reads. “Whilst this was maintained for a period of a few weeks after his inauguration, the Trump administration began making and announcing increasingly aggressive trade policies in an attempt to practice protectionism and economic pressure, including heightening previous trade wars, starting new trade wars, heavy tariffs, and increasing tensions with allies; most prominently, Canada. As the administration continued to practice these policies, markets began to experience continued turbulence, volatility, and general uncertainty.”

While the current title of the article definitely calls it a stock market crash, it is, like every Wikipedia article, subject to change depending on how editors continue interpreting events. The article currently includes two disclaimers. The first notes that it “may be affected by a current event,” and the “article may change rapidly as the event progresses.” The second notes that there is a pending request from some editors to change the article title to “2025 stock market decline.”

“The suggested renaming is just a placeholder,” one editor who wants to call it a “decline” said in the “talk” page where Wikipedia editors debate the decision. “I cannot find many reliable sources describing this as a "crash", at least not yet. A crash is generally considered to be a fall of >20%.[1] Most indices are bubbling around 9–10%; it is certainly contentious to label it a crash.”

The talk page for the Wikipedia article shows that previously there were two Wikipedia pages for the current economic turmoil caused by Trump’s tariffs, one titled “stock market crash” and the other titled “stock market decline.” Editors agreed to merge the articles, and at least for now keep the “crash” title. 

Although there is no definition of a stock market crash it's generally accepted an “‘abrupt double-digit percentage drop in a stock index over the course of a few days’” is a crash (which both have happened),” the editor said, citing Investopedia. “Also this is a really big crash, the last time the smp was at 5000 points was in April of 2024, meaning a year of progress has been wiped out in 48 hours. My personal stock portfolio dropped by 25%. But with that being said it might be better to change the title of the article to something like April 2025 stock market crash as there might be a bigger crash later.”

Just because Wikipedia says something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fact. It’s a crowdsourced repository that ultimately reflects what Wikipedia editors decide. But it’s also one of the most useful and reliable repositories of information humanity has created, which feeds Google and countless other tools on the internet, and at the very least it reflects a prevailing point of view on what Trump did to the global economy. 

In 2018, I spent two days at Facebook’s Menlo Park campus doing back-to-back on-the-record interviews with executives who worked on the company’s content policy teams. This was after we had published article after article exposing the many shortcomings of Facebook’s rules, based on internal guidebooks that were leaked to Joseph. We learned, for example, that Facebook would sometimes bend its rules to comply with takedown requests from governments that were threatening to block the service in their country, that Facebook had drawn an impossible-to-define difference between “white supremacy,” “white nationalism,” and “white separatism” that didn’t stand up to any sort of scrutiny, and that it had incredibly detailed rules about when it was allowable to show a Photoshopped anus on the platform. 

After months of asking for interviews with its top executives, Facebook’s public relations team said that, instead, I should fly to Menlo Park and sit in on a series of meetings about how the rules are made, how the team dealt with difficult decisions, how third party stakeholders like civil liberties groups are engaged, and how particularly difficult content decisions were escalated to Sheryl Sandberg.

One of the people I interviewed while at Facebook headquarters was Guy Rosen, who was then Facebook’s head of product and is now its chief information security officer. I interviewed Rosen about how it could be possible that Facebook had failed so terribly at content moderation in Myanmar that it was being credibly accused of helping to facilitate the genocide of the Rohingya people. What Rosen told me shocked me at the time, and is something that I think about often when I write about Facebook. Rosen said that Facebook’s content moderation AI wasn’t able to parse the Burmese language because it wasn’t a part of Unicode, the international standard for text encoding. Besides having very few content moderators who knew Burmese (and no one in Myanmar), Facebook had no idea what people were posting in Burmese, and no way to understand it: “We still don’t know if it’s really going to work out, due to the language challenges,” Rosen told me. This was in 2018; Facebook had been operating in Myanmar for seven years and had at that time already been accused of helping to facilitate this human rights catastrophe.

My time at Facebook was full of little moments like this. I had a hard time squaring the incredibly often thoughtful ways that Facebook employees were trying to solve incredibly difficult problems with the horrendous outcomes we were seeing all over the world. Posters around HQ read “REDUCE CLICKBAIT,” “DEPOLARIZE,” “REDUCE MISINFO,” and “UNSHIP HATE.” Yet much of what I saw on Facebook at the time and to this day are, well, all of those things. Other posters talked about having respect for employees, as I wrote about a workforce that was largely made up of low-wage contractors around the world whose job was to look at terrorism videos, hate speech, graphic sexual content, etc. When I asked a Facebook executive about what it was doing to support the mental health needs of its content moderators and to help them deal with PTSD, the Facebook executive in charge of content moderator training at the time told me that they had designed “actual physical environments” in its offices where traumatized employees could “just kind of chillax or, if you want to go play a game, or if you want to just walk away, you know, be by yourself.” 

The biggest question I had for years after this experience was: Does Facebook know what it’s actually doing to the world? Do they care?

In the years since, I have written dozens of articles about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, have talked to dozens of employees, and have been leaked internal documents and meetings and screenshots. Through all of this, I have thought about the ethics of working at Facebook, namely the idea that you can change a place that does harm like this “from the inside,” and how people who work there make that moral determination for themselves. And I have thought about what Facebook cares about, what Mark Zuckerberg cares about, and how it got this way. 

Mostly, I have thought about whether there is any underlying tension or concern about what Facebook is doing and has done to the world; whether its “values,” to the extent a massive corporation has values, extend beyond “making money,” “amassing power,” “growing,” “crushing competition,” “avoiding accountability,” and “stopping regulation.” Basically, I have spent an inordinate amount of time wondering to myself if these people care about anything at all.

Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams, is the book about Facebook that I didn’t know I had been waiting a decade to read. It’s also, notably, a book that Facebook does not want you to read; Wynn-Williams is currently under a gag order from a third-party arbitrator that prevents her from promoting or talking about the book because Facebook argued that it violates a non-disparagement clause in her employment contract.

Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook between 2011 and 2017, rising to become the director of public policy, a role she originally pitched as being Facebook’s “diplomat,” and ultimately became a role where she did a mix of setting up meetings between world leaders and Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, determined the policy and strategy for these meetings, and flew around the world meeting with governments trying to prevent them from blocking Facebook. 

The reason the book feels so important and cathartic is because, as a memoir, it does something that reported books about Facebook can’t quite do. It follows Wynn-Williams’ interior life as she recounts what drew her to Facebook (the opportunity to influence politics at a global scale beyond what she was able to do at the United Nations), the strategies and acts she made for the company (flying to Myanmar by herself to meet with the junta to get it unblocked there, for example), and her discoveries and ultimate disillusionment with the company as she goes on what often feels like repeated Veep-like quests to get Mark Zuckerberg to take interactions with world leaders seriously, to engineer a “spontaneous” interaction with Xi Jinping, to get him or Sandberg to care about the role Facebook played in getting Trump and other autocrats elected.

She was in many of the rooms where big decisions were made, or at least where the fallout of many of Facebook’s largest scandals were discussed. If you care about how Facebook has impacted the world at all, the book is worth reading for the simple reason that it shows, repeatedly, that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook as a whole Knew. About everything. And when they didn’t know but found out, they sought to minimize or slow play solutions.

Yes, Facebook lied to the press often, about a lot of things; yes, Internet.org (Facebook’s strategy to give “free internet to people in the developing world) was a cynical ploy at getting new Facebook users; yes, Facebook knew that it couldn’t read posts in Burmese and didn’t care; yes, it slow-walked solutions to its moderation problems in Myanmar even after it knew about them; yes, Facebook bent its own rules all the time to stay unblocked in specific countries; yes, Facebook took down content at the behest of China then pretended it was an accident and lied about it; yes, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg intervened on major content moderation decisions then implied that they did not. Basically, it confirmed my priors about Facebook, which is not a criticism because reporting on this company and getting anything beyond a canned statement or carefully rehearsed answer from them over and over for years and years and years has made me feel like I was going crazy. Careless People confirmed that I am not.

It has been years since Wynn-Williams left Facebook, but it is clear these are the same careless people running the company. When I wonder if the company knows that its platforms are being taken over by the worst AI slop you could possibly imagine, if it knows that it is directly paying people to flood these platforms with spam, if it knows it is full of deepfakes and AI generated content of celebrities and cartoon characters doing awful things, if it knows it is showing terrible things to kids. Of course it does. It just doesn’t care.

Throughout the book, Wynn-Williams grapples with the morality of what she’s being asked to do, and whether it feels ethical for her to be doing it at all. This is her book, of course, and she generally comes off as someone fighting to do the right thing at a company that often did not do the right thing. But even this retrospective introspection hit hard for me; Wynn-Williams is a funny, colorful, and sometimes heartbreaking writer. She writes about staying at Facebook even as she’s treated terribly and asked to do horrible things following a near-death health emergency she suffered during childbirth because she needs the health insurance, she talks about sexual harassment she says she endured from her boss and Sheryl Sandberg, and about being fired after reporting it. 

It is obvious why Facebook doesn’t want people to read this book. No one comes out looking good, but they come out looking exactly like we thought they were. 

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

This week has been a lot. This year has been a lot. THIS MILLENIUM HAS BEEN A LOT. That’s why there’s only good news in the column this week. We deserve it.

Normally, I’m not a big fan of putting artificial stuff in our brains (see: plastic spoons). But I’ll make an exception for a new neural implant that has allowed a woman to regain the ability to speak nearly 20 years after suffering a debilitating stroke. It’s an encouraging story about the profound human triumphs that scientists can deliver, assuming you don’t fire them all for no discernible reason.

Then, bats! We’re back on the bat beat, baby. It’s not my fault, they just keep doing interesting things. Then, these sunflowers don’t need sperm to reproduce. Will this create a male sunflower loneliness epidemic? Last, time to retire to the fjords. See you there.

After 18 Years of Silence, a Woman Speaks 

Littlejohn, Kaylo and Cho, Cheol Jun et al. “A streaming brain-to-voice neuroprosthesis to restore naturalistic communication.” Nature Neuroscience.

In 2005, a 30-year-old woman who was otherwise in good health suddenly reeled from dizziness and found herself unable to speak. She had suffered a pontine stroke, which obstructs blood flow to the pons region of the brainstem, leaving her unable to verbally communicate beyond a few sounds. 

But over the past several years, this woman, now in her late 40s, has been able to speak again with the help of a neuroprosthesis device that can translate thoughts into speech in real time, similar to transcription software. 

An implant in the woman’s brain records neural activity and streams it into a synthesized audio unit that is based on a recording of her voice before her stroke. This brain-computer interface is an improvement over past iterations because there is no appreciable delay between thoughts and speech for the woman, who is identified by her first name Ann.

“Natural spoken communication happens instantaneously,” said researchers led by Kaylo Littlejohn and Cheol Jun Cho of the University of California, Berkeley. “Speech delays longer than a few seconds can disrupt the natural flow of conversation. This makes it difficult for individuals with paralysis to participate in meaningful dialogue, potentially leading to feelings of isolation and frustration.” 

“We developed a ‘streaming’ speech neuroprosthesis that seamlessly converts short windows of neural activity to audible sound without waiting for an entire sentence to be attempted,” the team continued. “Speaking seamlessly with real-time, low-latency communication at will is integral to our sense of identity and belonging, which is severely decreased in individuals with anarthria.”

The study includes a few videos of Ann reading sentences on a screen, which are then converted into speech through the neuroprosthesis. The speech is still slow and halting, and the authors outline future improvements in the study, but the device is nonetheless a “major step” toward technologies that can restore speech. 

In addition to the ingenious work from the team, Ann deserves mad props for devoting so much of her time and mental energy to refining the device. 

Welcome to the Cocktail Party Nightmare 

Goldshtein, Aya and Mazar, Omer et al. “Onboard recordings reveal how bats maneuver under severe acoustic interference.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Speaking of speech, time to check in with the ultimate chatterers: Bats. This week, we’re all invited to the “Cocktail Party Nightmare,” which is the actual term for the “tremendous nightly challenge” bats face as they careen from their cave roosts while “maneuvering under severe acoustic interference” and “trying to avoid collisions,” according to a new study.

Basically, as thousands of bats fly together into the night, they produce a cacophony of echolocating chatter that should, in theory, overload their sensory acoustic band. Yet bats seem to be able to seamlessly navigate through this acoustic maelstrom with very few collisions. How to solve this riddle? Mic the bats, of course! 

“We…fitted some of the bats with onboard microphones, enabling us to record the auditory scene from the individual bat’s point of view,” said scientists co-led by Aya Goldshtein of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Omer Mazar of Tel Aviv University. “These unique data…enabled us to examine how bats move collectively at such high densities while relying on echolocation.”

The experiment, which was conducted on greater mouse-tailed bats in Israel’s Hula Valley, revealed that bats adjust their echolocation frequencies as they leave the cave, when they are most closely clustered, so that they can focus on avoiding crashes with their near-neighbors. Once they are out in the open, they quickly disperse to more peaceful sonic environments.

“We found that the bats gradually increased their spread as they flew farther from their cave while still maintaining a group structure over several kilometers,” the team said. “This movement strategy allowed the bats to rapidly reduce group density and, consequently, to decrease conspecific sensory masking and almost nullify collision risk.”

In other words, the next time you’re at a Cocktail Party Nightmare, mind your echo etiquette.

Sisters are Doing it for Themselves (Sunflower Edition)

Lv, Jian and Liang, Dawei et al. “Haploid facultative parthenogenesis in sunflower sexual reproduction.” Nature.

Step aside, Jesus Christ: There’s a new virgin birth in town. Scientists this week reported the surprise discovery that sunflower seeds can be developed without fertilization, a process known as parthenogenesis. 

Many animals and plants—and perhaps, Mothers of God—reproduce through this ladies-only form of reproduction, in which females asexually produce viable embryos from only their eggs. 

But scientists who were tinkering with “emasculated sunflowers”—which is, yes, a great band name, but also a common form of pollination control—have now reported that they just kind of accidentally did an immaculate conception.

“We serendipitously discovered that emasculated sunflowers spontaneously form parthenogenic haploid seed,” said researchers co-led by Jian Lv and Dawei Liang of the State Key Laboratory of Crop Germplasm Innovation and Molecular Breeding in China. “To our knowledge, this is the first report of a crop species exhibiting facultative parthenogenesis as a rare and likely unselected back-up pathway to failed fertilization.” 

The discovery could have big implications for this important crop. Sexual reproduction is pretty time intensive (relatable!) so the unexpected discovery that sunflowers can pop out seeds without pollination could optimize the growing multi-billion dollar industry for sunflowers. 

You Can Afjord to Miss This

Gehman, Alyssa-Lois Madden et al. “Fjord oceanographic dynamics provide refuge for critically endangered Pycnopodia helianthoides.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Time to end on a moment of zen. And what better place to find serenity than the fjords of coastal British Columbia? 

You don’t have to take my word for it; just ask the sunflower sea star (Pycnopodia helianthoides), a species that has been so stressed in recent years that it has literally been tearing itself to pieces. This grotesque affliction, known as sea star wasting disease, has devastated many sea star populations around the world, but P. helianthoides is among the hardest hit, losing more than 90 percent of its Pacific Coast population. 

I know, I know, I promised some zen! There may be some light at the end of the tunnel for this species, as scientists have observed populations recovering in fjord refuges along the BC coast. Sea stars in these havens are not necessarily less exposed to the disease, but the conditions in fjords, which are regularly fed with freshwater flows, may give the animals a better chance to recover from infection.

“P. helianthoides in fjord habitats appear to be responding differently to SSWD than those in other habitats and regions,” said researchers led by Alyssa-Lois Madden Gehman of the Hakai Institute. “The contrast between the interaction between salinity and temperature on biomass density within the fjords and outer islands suggests that these habitats could be a refuge from disease.” 

“We suggest that the unique oceanographic conditions within the fjords, specifically through the increase in freshwater input during snowmelt, known as the freshet, could be keeping P. helianthoides in conditions that optimize host health and/or limit disease progression and transmission,” the team said.

Honestly, the compulsion to tear one’s own body limb-from-limb due to environmental stress seems dangerously relatable. But if sea stars can find some sanctuary from their hellish plight, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us. 

Thanks for reading! See you next week. 

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 learning from civilizations past and learning to drive.

JASON: I mentioned this on a podcast a few weeks ago, but I have been falling asleep lately to the Ancient Americas YouTube channel. Made by a guy in the midwest named Pete, Ancient Americas makes 30-minute to hour-long videos about indigenous American civilizations: The Mayans, the Incans, the Aztecs, the Nazca, sure. But also the Calusa, the Toltecs, the Tarascans, the Marajoara, the Cahokia, and lots of other civilizations / peoples / cities / ruins that I had never heard of and never learned about in school. 

I didn’t have any specific interest in this—Ancient Americas started autoplaying one night at 3 AM when I couldn’t sleep, and Pete’s monotone voice put me back to sleep very quickly. I started listening more often, and it has quickly become my go-to thing to fall asleep to. Pete says he is not an archaeologist or an anthropologist, but each of his videos is insanely well researched, and he includes a Google Doc bibliography with each one. His recent video about the “Mayan Collapse” sources 10 books and academic papers, and includes 16 pages of single-spaced image credits and licenses. I have seen Pete go on the channels of historians and archaeologists with PhDs and more than hold his own. In short, he is the real deal. 

In October of 2023, Marc Andreessen, founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), published the “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” arguing that human ingenuity has been stagnated and demoralized by regulation, and that the only viable path forward for society is the accelerated development and adoption of new technologies, and specifically artificial intelligence. 

Andreessen was only formalizing and articulating a position that had already gained traction among tech company executives and Twitter shitposters like @BasedBeffJezos (Andreessen crowned him a “patron saint” of techno-optimism), who adopted the label of effective accelerationists, or e/acc. 

Almost two dozen repositories of research and public health data supported by the National Institutes of Health are marked for “review” under the Trump administration’s direction, and researchers and archivists say the data is at risk of being lost forever if the repositories go down. 

“The problem with archiving this data is that we can’t,” Lisa Chinn, Head of Research Data Services at the University of Chicago, told 404 Media. Unlike other government datasets or web pages, downloading or otherwise archiving NIH data often requires a Data Use Agreement between a researcher institution and the agency, and those agreements are carefully administered through a disclosure risk review process. 

Jason, Sam, and Emanuel talk about Miyazaki being turned into a meme, the guys suing OnlyFans after being surprised to learn they were not actually talking to models, and the depravity of "brainrot" AI.

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.

Articles discussed:
Hayao Miyazaki, Who Said AI Is ‘Insult to Life Itself,” Reduced to AI-Generated Meme by OpenAI
OnlyFans Sued After Two Guys Realized They Might Not Actually Be Talking to Models
'Brainrot' AI on Instagram Is Monetizing the Most Fucked Up Things You Can Imagine (and Lots You Can't)

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Last week, the Financial Times reported that Nintendo shifted half of its production capabilities for the upcoming Switch 2 to Cambodia and Vietnam, in part to avoid Donald Trump’s trade war on China. Wednesday morning, Nintendo formally announced the Switch 2, and its $449 price, which is $150 more than the Switch. A few hours later, Trump announced tariffs on the entire world, with particularly large fees on China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. 

There are going to be far more important and damaging impacts of Trump’s unilateral trade war on everyone than the price of an already expensive game console likely going up. The U.S. stock market has already plunged. But the timing and narrative around the Switch 2—the successor to one of the most popular games consoles of all time—highlights how destabilizing this is likely to be, the interconnectedness of the global economy, and the fact that Trump cannot just snap his fingers and onshore manufacturing to the United States without massive pain. Gamers, understandably, are pissed, and award-winning economists say they are right to be. I thought it'd be useful to discuss the broader impact of the tariffs with leading economics by focusing on the Switch 2, because it's such a high-profile item.

“The policy announcement is astonishing for its stupidity,” Gene Grossman, a global trade expert and Princeton professor who won the Onassis Prize in International Trade, told 404 Media. “It seems like a joke!” He added that it is hard to know exactly what will happen given the overall “sea of idiocy” brought on by the tariffs. 

Since Trump’s announcement, it has become clear that the administration calculated the tariffs for each country based on a crude formula that takes each country’s trade deficit with the United States, divides it by two, and sticks a percent sign at the end. This means new tariffs on Vietnamese-made goods will be 46 percent and new tariffs on Cambodian-made goods will be 49 percent.

“If [the Switch 2] is something that consumers are dying to have ‘at any price,’ then the price will go up. If consumers can readily switch to something else, then if Nintendo wants to sell these things, it will have to lower the price,” Grossman said. “Yes, I think it is quite possible that the price will go even higher than $449.99. Some expectations of a tariff may have been built into this price, as you suggest, but I don’t think anyone expected a 46% tariff on Vietnam, not even close.”

Kimberly Clausing, a professor of tax law and policy at UCLA School of Law, told 404 Media that “the tariffs announced will definitely increase prices further over what is baked into price levels currently,” and that Nintendo will “have other markets they can sell to tariff-free, so they have no reason to sell at a special low price in the United States, certainly not enough to offset the full tariff.” 

Felix Tintelnot, an associate professor of economics at Duke University, told 404 Media it can be costly for companies to change their publicly announced prices. 

"I think two things are true at the same time: 1. It is likely that Nintendo did not expect the tariff on Vietnam to be 46%," Tintelnot told 404 Media. "2. It is costly for firms to change prices, particularly after publicly announcing one. So I would think it is somewhat uncertain what they will do. One possibility would be for the price to remain unchanged, but the price of complementary goods to increase, such as games." 

Jason Cherubini, an executive in residence of finance at Loyola University Maryland, said it’s possible Nintendo had already priced in some unknown level of tariffs prior to the announcement, and that he thinks the price for the Switch 2 is unlikely to change because video game companies have historically sold consoles at a loss and then made money back on the sale of games. 

“Nintendo started to diversify their manufacturing away from China with the impending threat of tariffs but also to move away from geopolitical concentration in China. But these tariffs were not wholly unexpected,” he said. “I think the price they announced is the price that’s going to stick, because with consoles a lot of pricing is strategic pricing as opposed to being based on the true cost of manufacturing it … especially Nintendo, who really keeps all of their IP, their games, so much of that is in-house, it’s probably even more important for Nintendo to get people to have the console, so that way they're buying Zelda, they're buying Mario, they're buying all of these IP that Nintendo then profits off of. Getting people to purchase it is more important than them making money on the console itself.”

We don’t know what is actually going to happen with the Switch 2 yet, but prices are almost definitely going to go up for almost everything across the entire economy, Grossman said. 

“While I can’t say confidently about this item, I can say that prices will go up for a whole range of goods, starting with cars and right on down to clothing,” he said. 

Trump has announced these tariffs with the nominal goal of moving manufacturing to the United States. Reshoring manufacturing—especially of high tech goods—has been a goal of various administrations over the years, and was a goal of Joe Biden’s CHIPS Act, which the Trump administration has sought to gut. 

There are numerous practical problems with trying to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. They include the fact that lots of factory work is so underpaid and grueling that people in China don’t even want to do it anymore; the average age of factory workers in China is rising and companies there have begun shifting jobs to more developing nations like Vietnam and Cambodia. 

Many of the raw materials and components needed for tech manufacturing are not mined or made in the United States, meaning those components and rare earth metals are going to be subject to tariffs. American companies do not have the expertise or ability to build lots of products in the United States, and setting up factories and supply chains to do so is not going to be an overnight process, it will be one that takes years or decades depending on the product. 

“Nintendo would need to spend billions to open a factory in the US,” Daniel Ahmad, director of research and insights at Niko Partners and a video game market analyst, tweeted. “It'd probably take 4-5 years to complete this. Not to mention the time and cost to rebuild supply chain infrastructure and source components (which would be subject to tariffs because they're made outside the US). Nintendo would have to pay each worker about 10x to 15x more than they would for a worker in Vietnam. Then after you add up the initial capital expenditure, labor cost, supply chain cost, operational costs etc... you'd be able to buy a US manufactured Nintendo Switch 2 in 5 years for a significantly higher price than $450. And the kicker is that by the time they've done all that, the US will have a new president who most likely removes all the reciprocal tariffs anyway.”

Cherubini said that reshoring electronics manufacturing is “not something you can just flip a switch on. Optimistically you’re looking at a year for simpler manufacturing, but a lot of it is a multi-year process.” 

I have covered attempts by the electronics industry to create high tech factories and mining operations in the United States; many of them are not going particularly well. The United States has only one rare earth minerals mine (in California), which has been mining for less than 10 years. Foxconn and TSMC factories in the United States have had a mixed record and do not have anywhere near the sophistication or capacity as their factories in Taiwan and China.

This is all to say that, based on where things stand this morning, we are in for a world of economic pain. 

On Tuesday, some parents lost the ability to track the locations of their children using a T-Mobile tracking device and app and instead were shown the exact locations of random other children around the country, 404 Media has learned.

T-Mobile sells a small GPS tracker for parents called SyncUP, which they can use to track the locations of young children who don’t  have cell phones yet. Jenna, a parent who uses SyncUP to keep track of her three-year-old and six-year-old children, logged in Tuesday and instead of seeing if her kids had left school yet, was shown the exact, real-time locations of eight random children around the country, but not the locations of her own kids. 404 Media agreed to use a pseudonym for Jenna to protect the privacy of her kids.

“I’m not comfortable giving my six-year-old a phone, but he takes a school bus and I just want to be able to see where he is in real time,” Jenna said. “I had put a 500 meter boundary around his school, so I get an alert when he’s leaving.”