LinkedIn has removed at least two accounts that were created for AI “co-workers” whose profile images said they were “#OpenToWork.” 

“I don’t need coffee breaks, I don’t miss deadlines, and I’ll outperform any social media team you’ve ever worked with - Guaranteed," the profile page for one of these AI accounts called Ella said. “Tired of human ‘experts’ making excuses? I deliver, period.”

The #OpenToWork flair on profile pictures is a feature on LinkedIn that lets people clearly signal they are looking for a job on the professional networking platform.

“People expect the people and conversations they find on LinkedIn to be real,” a LinkedIn spokesperson told me in an email. “Our policies are very clear that the creation of a fake account is a violation of our terms of service, and we’ll remove them when we find them, as we did in this case.” 

The AI profiles were created by an Israeli company called Marketeam, which offers “dedicated AI agents” that integrate with a client’s marketing team and help them execute their marketing strategies “from social media and content marketing to SEO, RTM, ad campaigns, and more.” 

Marketeam has raised $5 million in funding so far and recently announced a partnership with Bank Hapoalim, one of Israel’s largest banks.

“Hi, I’m Ella, your AI-powered social media strategist,” a LinkedIn post by Marketeam promoting Ella’s LinkedIn profile said. “Social media is where I thrive–building relationships, credibility, and growth, 24/7, no breaks, no excuses.” 

The post goes on to claim that Ella has grown followers for clients by 500 percent in six months, boosted engagement by 150 percent, and delivered content that “drives results, not just likes.”

“Our proprietary LLM for marketing and our team of autonomous AI agents fit into your current workflows, empowering your marketers to achieve more with unparalleled precision and efficiency,” Marketeam’s site, which also notes it was recently voted as the #2 product on Product Hunt, says.

I learned about Marketeam via a post on r/LinkedInlunatics, a Reddit community where people share LinkedIn that are wild, absurd, or offensive. 

“Although most of these AI accounts have since been rebranded, reported, or removed the idea that someone thought to make an ‘open to work’ post for them is wild,” the Reddit user who shared the AI profiles said. Two profiles that Reddit users in the thread highlighted and encouraged others to report to LinkedIn were removed by the time I found them, but LinkedIn confirmed that they existed and violated the platform’s policy. 

How LinkedIn enforces its policies in practice doesn’t always make sense. The company did not explain why it removed the profile of a woman who made a post about her Pornhub page despite it not containing any adult content, or why it was reinstated after my article about her was published. 

Marketeam acknowledged my request for comet but did not provide one in time for publication.

Some of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) memos sent to federal workers about firing, hiring freezes, and mandatory return to office demands were seemingly written by people who were previously employed by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks with longstanding loyalties to President Donald Trump, according to metadata on the memos posted by the government online. We know this because the senders of the memos failed to scrub the metadata from those documents, making it easy for anyone to reveal the listed authors of the memos. 

The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, better known as Project 2025, is a right-wing agenda from the Heritage Foundation that lays out the blueprint for remaking the federal government by firing government workers to install conservative, right-wing figures. The priorities of its authors include restricting access to reproductive care, mass deportations, and firing civil servants to replace them with Trump loyalists.

Memos to federal Chief Human Capital Officers, HR Directors and Heads of Agencies are available publicly on the CHCO website. The memo author metadata was spotted by someone on Reddit’s r/fednews community, in response to a federal worker’s post. 

The hackers behind the massive breach of AT&T data last year hunted through the data for phone numbers and records associated with top officials and their families, including members of the Trump family such as Melania and Ivanka Trump; Kamala Harris; and Marco Rubio’s wife, people familiar with the matter told 404 Media.

The news further stresses the catastrophic nature of the breach, which impacted “nearly all” of AT&T’s customers’ call and text metadata during a certain timeframe. The breach not only impacted the general U.S. public, but also presented a significant national security risk. People familiar with the incident told 404 Media the hackers also planned to release a lookup tool that would have let anyone search the records for a fee, and said that the number of breached records is larger than previously reported. 404 Media granted multiple sources in this story anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. 

The news of lawmakers’ and top officials’ families being targeted also comes as the FCC, the agency which would potentially fine AT&T for the breach, is now being led by Brendan Carr, who has historically been very friendly to the country’s telecommunications giants. 

“It is clearer than ever that AT&T's lax cybersecurity and Trump's ineffective, corrupt FCC pose a serious threat to U.S. national security,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement. “Instead of throwing the book at AT&T for failing to secure Americans' sensitive data, FCC Chairman Carr is coddling Trump's corporate donors and raising the white flag to hackers. It's time for the public and the U.S. government to stop relying on the insecure voice and text message services provided by phone companies, which are beyond salvaging, and embrace secure, end-to-end encrypted voice, video and text communications.”

Dusty Deevers, a Baptist preacher turned Republican Senator in Oklahoma, introduced eight legislative measures “aimed at restoring moral sanity” that include making pornography a crime punishable by a year in jail.

As spotted by Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, Deevers said in a press release that the bills “set a course for pushing back against the moral decay foisted upon Oklahoma by the far-left’s march through our institutions to destroy the moral foundations upon which the United States and Christian Civilization had long rested.”

Deevers seeks the total abolition of porn by imposing criminal penalties of up to 10 years in prison for production, distribution, or possession of porn and 10-to-30-year criminal penalties for “organized pornography trafficking.” The bill states: 

“No person shall knowingly photograph, act in, pose for, model for, print, sell, offer for sale, give away, exhibit, publish, offer to publish, or otherwise distribute, display, or exhibit any book, magazine, story, pamphlet, paper, writing, card, advertisement, circular, print, picture, photograph, motion picture film, electronic video game or recording, image, cast, slide, figure, instrument, statue, drawing, presentation, or other article which is obscene material, unlawful pornography, or child sexual abuse material, as defined in Section 1024.1 of this title.”

DeepSeek, a relatively unknown Chinese-developed AI model, is now the most popular app in the US Apple App Store based on hype associated with it releasing an an AI model that outpaces OpenAI’s and other companies’ models on some benchmarks while being trained on older chips at a much lower cost. It has caused Nvidia stock, which has become one of the most valuable companies in history thanks to the AI boom, to tumble and is causing more widespread panic in the U.S. market. Marc Andreessen has called this “AI’s Sputnik moment,” referring to the first Russian satellite which got ahead of and accelerated the US space program. 

People in the AI space and those who follow it closely started freaking out when DeepSeek’s newest model, DeepSeek R1, was released last week, and that freakout has now seemingly captured the entire world, impacting the stock market, causing people to wonder if American companies like OpenAI and Nvidia can really dominate the AI industry, if the AI bubble is finally popping, and if this is a sign of imminent Chinese world domination and censorship. DeepSeek is particularly notable because it is free, modifiable, and less expensive to run, which has experts worried about the viability of OpenAI’s already unprofitable subscription products.  

I’m going to be upfront with you here and say that 404 Media does not provide any financial advice and that if I had definitive answers to any of these questions I’d be playing the stock market instead of blogging, but in a day when the takes are going to come fast and furious my take is this: The AI industry continues to develop very fast, it’s hard to extrapolate how it’s all going to unfold based on single event, even if it’s monumental, and the fact that DeepSeek comes from China, a perceived adversary to the United States/the West is making hawks and xenophobes, and tankies foam at the mouth. 

Let’s take a deep breath and start with the biggest headline, which is that Nvidia stock dropped over 12 percent early this morning, its worst performance since 2020. GPU maker Nvidia became a trillion dollar company because it is largely making the chips that power the generative AI boom. These are not only the chips that people need to generate text, images, audio etc locally on their machines, but the massive training clusters of thousands of chips that these foundational models are trained on. In July, for example, Elon Musk proudly announced that xAI started training “the most powerful AI training cluster in the world,” composed of 100,000 Nvidia H100s. 

For the most part, AI companies in the US have competed on the general idea that more data and more compute creates more advanced and more “intelligent” AI models and tools. One of the general strategies, therefore, has been for companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta to feed more and more data into their models and to compete to build incredibly expensive and resource intensive data centers. But last year, we started to see some doubts about the existing consensus on AI scaling laws, which up until recently showed that the performance of AI models improved as the size of the model, data, and compute increased, with some people, including Open AI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Andreessen saying that AI companies are starting to see diminishing returns. Despite these doubts bubbling up, AI companies were still competing for compute, which largely means access to Nvidia’s chips. Musk wants to grow xAI’s cluster to one million GPUs eventually, and the CEO of Broadcom recently said he predicts other companies will attempt to build similarly gigantic clusters. 

This demand for highly specialized and hard to produce hardware has made Nvidia incredibly valuable and critically important to building AI. Because the US government believes that the United States, not China, must be the world leader in AI, it’s also why it has introduced export restrictions that forbid Nvidia from selling its most advanced chips to Chinese companies. This is part of why you see OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank proposing to throw $500 billion into projects like Stargate, a massive AI data infrastructure project that they may or may not have the money for. 

The main reason people are excited/scared/throwing up right now is that DeepSeek was developed and released under America’s export restrictions that prevent Chinese companies from getting the latest and most powerful Nvidia chips. As Wired explained, DeepSeek was spun out from High-Flyer, a Chinese hedge fund that originally acquired GPUs to analyze financial data, before it invested its money and resources in developing AI. That a new player in this space was able to build an AI model without access to the latest and greatest Nvidia chips (though people in China have found ways to obtain them despite restriction), using new, more efficient reinforcement learning strategies, has undermined the idea that companies like Nvidia or OpenAI have built a “moat” around their companies that will secure their lead in the AI race forever, and, by extension, has undermined the notion of American AI world supremacy. It also at least raises the possibility that a Chinese company has found a better, more efficient, and cheaper way to train AI models than any American company has discovered thus far.

As others have pointed out, it’s hard to say exactly what DeepSeek actually spent to make its model without trusting it blindly. The true cost may be hidden in ways we don’t understand, and is definitely benefiting by building on top of the very expensive research (primarily from American companies) that came before it. But if AI companies can build competitive models at a fraction of the cost on a comparatively tiny number of lesser GPUs, then much of Nvidia’s value and the billions of dollars AI companies are burning on training suddenly seems excessive and wasteful (even to AI boosters), hence the stock tumbling. 

Does this mean Nvidia, OpenAI, and other AI companies are doomed? Again, this is not financial advice but the market appears to be spasming based on vibes, and definitely before we have a great understanding of DeepSeek’s impact. The most obvious rebuttal from Nvidia bag holders in this situation is that DeepSeek’s newfound efficiencies will only benefit AI incumbents. If these new methods give DeepSeek great results with limited compute, the same methods will give OpenAI and other, more well-resourced AI companies even greater results on their huge training clusters, and it is possible that American companies will adapt to these new methods very quickly. Even if scaling laws really have hit the ceiling and giant training clusters don’t need to be that giant, there’s no reason I can see why other companies can’t be competitive under this new paradigm. We should also probably hope that this is the case since it could lower the environmental impact of AI.

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but the argument I would add here is that this type of leapfrogging seems totally normal, and we have seem variations of it over the last couple of years. People love to prematurely dance on OpenAI’s grave whenever a new and shiny model is released. Meta’s Llama, France’s Mistral, and Anthropic’s Claude have all seemed like they’re getting ahead at one point or another and are favored by different users for different uses, only for another model to be released by OpenAI or another company that leapfrogs the hot new technology and makes them seem old. 

The difference is that DeepSeek is from China and that a lot of people including the US government don’t like the idea of China being dominant in any arena, let alone one as supposedly consequential as AI. This is obvious given the hysteria on social media right now, the markets, and the way people are talking about DeepSeek’s censorship and the possibility that it could be tied to Chinese surveillance or the Chinese government in some way. Steven Heidel, who works at OpenAI, tweeted Sunday “americans sure love giving their data away to the CCP in exchange for free stuff,” which has gone viral and served as the basis for discussion about DeepSeek as possible surveillance software, the “new TikTok,” etc. What’s particularly notable here is that DeepSeek has been released in a way that can be run locally without an internet connection.

On various AI subreddits, where DeepSeek is all people have been talking about for days, some users are now suggesting that the conversation is being manipulated by “propaganda” from a few accounts. People have repeatedly shared screenshots on social media of DeepSeek refusing to engage with questions about Tiananmen Square and other topics subject to censorship in China, with the implication that this is the information ecosystem we’d live under if China was to dominate the AI race. 

Fair enough, I suppose, but as the developers of “uncensored” AI models have been shouting from the rooftops since the beginning: any AI model that the user can’t control entirely is subject to censorship. OpenAI is a prude, and will refuse to engage users on a lot of topics, sometimes for reasons stated in OpenAI’s policy, and sometimes for reasons we’ll never understand because OpenAI is a black box.

“Why should the open-source AI running on my computer, get to decide for itself when it wants to answer my question? This is about ownership and control. If I ask my model a question, I want an answer, I do not want it arguing with me,” Eric Hartford, a developer of uncensored AI models, told me last year. 

If anything, DeepSeek maps a better AI future for those concerned about censorship because it was released as an “open weights” model, meaning people could modify it to talk about Tiananmen Square and whatever else they want. 

We do not know how this will all shake out, but the release of DeepSeek does seem to be a seismic moment for the AI industry. And it will certainly be used, rightly or wrongly, as a political cudgel to highlight the urgency of the competition for AI supremacy between the United States and China.

On this special guest episode of the 404 Media Podcast, I talked to Alexzandra Kekesi, VP of Brand and Community at Pornhub. Kekesi started in her current role in August 2023, after working for Pornhub and its parent company for more than a decade. She joined us from Montreal, where Pornhub is headquartered. We discuss the stigma facing the adult industry, Luigi Mangione porn, the trad wife to feet pics pipeline, and algorithms that shut you down for showing side boob. Kekesi also breaks down Pornhub’s choice to pull out of states in more than a third of the U.S., following regressive age verification laws.

Kekesi started working at Pornhub's parent company more than a decade ago, when it was still called Manwin. The company, now named Aylo, has since gone through a lot of change in that time, including stronger moderation and uploading requirements. Now, the entire adult industry is in a battle against politicians who would prefer to see porn eradicated altogether.

When we spoke right before the new year, we were heading into 2025 staring down a new wave of privacy-invading age verification laws that make it harder to access adult content online. We talked through how Pornhub is responding to–and legally complying with–those laws by going dark in states where they're enacted.

We also discussed the increased interest in "tradwife" and "demure" porn, and what that says about the world today. "What's interesting about the Year in Review or even search activity on the site in general is that it is certainly a mirror of what's going on in society in general," she said. "We're hovering somewhere around the ballpark of like 130 million daily visitors. So when you see those fluctuations in traffic or these spikes in searches, it really is indicative of real trends or real change in society."

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.

• Pornhub Sees Surge of Interest in Tradwife Content, ‘Modesty,’ and Mindfulness
• Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South
• Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet

Welcome back to the Abstract! What a week. It kicked off with Blue Monday, a date considered the most depressing of the year in the Northern Hemisphere for dubious reasons (in short: it was invented, like most of our reality, by an ad campaign). 

This column will channel the latent crappy vibes with a parade of grotesqueries from the grand world of excrement research. Then, scientists are bringing back the ‘80s with new bioluminescent hues worthy of a Lite-Brite pegboard. Last, if you actually are feeling blue, I recommend Norwegian wood. Not the song. Not the novel. I’m talking about real pine trees in Norway. They see all. They will understand.

Monkey See (Pee), Monkey Do (Pee)

Onishi, Ena et al. “Socially contagious urination in chimpanzees.” Current Biology.

It’s time to put the “pee” in chimpanzee by watching pee come out of chimpanzees. That’s what researchers in Japan did for more than 600 hours to find out if urination is a form of social contagion in chimps. In other words, they observed 20 adult captive chimpanzees (16 males and 4 females) at the Kumamoto Sanctuary of Kyoto University to assess whether they were more likely to pee if they saw other chimps pee.

“The decision to urinate involves a complex combination of both physiological and social considerations,” said researchers led by Ena Onishi of Kyoto University. “However, the social dimensions of urination remain largely unexplored.”

First of all, let’s all congratulate ourselves for performing this complex physiological and social decision multiple times a day. I didn’t even realize we were such pros. 

But back to the study: the team meticulously recorded the number and timing of “urination events” along with the relative distances between “the urinator and potential followers.” The results revealed that urination is, in fact, socially contagious for chimps and that low-dominant individuals were especially likely to pee after watching others pee. Call it: pee-r pressure.

The study gets extra points for including depictions of contagious urination in art history as part of its supplemental information, like those disconcerting fountain statues that pee out water. But the “number one” standout is a 1784 sketch by Thomas Rowlandson entitled “Sympathy, or A Family On A Journey Laying The Dust.” 

Cups runneth over in this contagious urination event that even encompasses dogs and horses. I’m frankly surprised the buggy isn’t also engaged in gushing urination. 

In addition to documenting a unique phenomenon, this artwork is nature’s call to revive the euphemism “laying the dust” for (I assume?) urination. You’re no longer going to the restroom; you are laying the dust. It just goes to show you never know what you’ll learn from a study about contagious chimp urination.

San Francisco’s Best Eats (for Coyotes) 

Caspi, Tal et al. “Impervious surface cover and number of restaurants shape diet variation in an urban carnivore.” Ecosphere.

You’ve seen the pee study, now here’s the number two follow-through. A study out this week reconstructed the diets of coyotes in San Francisco by collecting more than 1,000 scats from 2019 to 2022. Of that initial poopy haul, 707 bonafide coyote dumps were analyzed with metabarcoding and genotyping to reveal what these streetwise canines were eating.

“We collected scats from urban green spaces, including parks, golf courses, and gardens across San Francisco,” said researchers led by Tal Caspi of the University of California, Davis. “We only collected scats that we estimated to be less than 1 week old given their appearance and time since last visit.” 

By analyzing this dookie-base, the team found that coyotes in densely populated neighborhoods were more reliant on human food scraps than coyotes in greener neighborhoods that had access to prey in parks. That finding seems intuitive, given that coyotes are opportunistic omnivores that will eat whatever’s available, but it’s still fascinating how much coyote diets varied, even with packs living just a few blocks away from each other.

“The greatest dietary differences were between Presidio and Coit Tower, even though a coyote can easily traverse the 3-km distance between them,” the team said. “The Presidio is the largest green space in San Francisco (6 km2) and has many native plant communities, sprawling grasslands, and a low percent cover of impervious surfaces. Conversely, Coit Tower is a tourist attraction in the densely populated Telegraph Hill neighborhood and, in part as a result of historical redlining, has less plant cover and lower species richness than formerly greenlined neighborhoods such as the Presidio.”

It's the age-old story of the city coyote and the just-a-bit-less city coyote. But while there were interesting variations in diet, all of these Bay Area coyotes were dining on a daily dim sum of chicken, pork, beef, and fish from human sources. As a cat lover, it pains me to report that domestic cats were commonly detected in the poops, though at low levels. That said, my general feeling is that a predator is skilled enough to catch a cat—animals that I have seen, with my own eyes, defy physics—it kind of deserves to eat it.

Lite-Brites in a Petri Dish 

Hattori, Matsuru et al. “Creating coveted bioluminescence colors for simultaneous multi-color bioimaging.” Science Advances.

Congratulations: You’ve waded through some sewage, and it’s time to wipe those eyeballs out. Fortunately, scientists published a spectacular new rainbow of bioluminescent hues this week. Call it a palette cleanser. 

Just look at these laboratory lite-brites! This study has clearly earned its keep based on aesthetic value alone, but the authors helpfully put some science in there too. Bioluminescence is the biological ability to generate light through chemical reactions, which is why some creatures can glow in the dark. This mesmerizing superpower is also a helpful tool in labs, as certain cells or research targets can be labelled with bioluminescent hues to aid observation.

“Bioluminescence, an optical marker that does not require excitation by light, allows researchers to simultaneously observe multiple targets, each exhibiting a different color,” said researchers led by Mitsuru Hattori of Osaka University. “Notably, the colors of the bioluminescent proteins must sufficiently vary to enable simultaneous detection.” 

The team’s innovation in this study was to debut a method that expanded the color variation, allowing “simple and simultaneous observation of multiple biological targets and phenomena.” To prove their point, they made the Tron mouse pictured above. 

Has science gone too far? Yes. But boy, does it look cool doing it.

Cruel Summer (Scots Pine Version)

Buchwald, Agata et al. “Blue rings in trees and shrubs as indicators of early and late summer cooling events at the northern treeline.” Frontiers in Plant Science.

It’s well-known that trees are nature’s librarians, meticulously keeping records of climate and environmental changes dating back centuries. But over the past decade, scientists have discovered a special type of blue ring in conifers that specifically memorializes cold summers. Low temperatures prevent lignification of the cell walls in the wood, creating the color pattern.

“Blue Rings (BRs) are a relatively newly described anatomical feature in conifers,” said researchers led by Agata Buchwald of Adam Mickiewicz University. “In the current literature, the formation of BRs is associated with cold growing season conditions” in various pine species, though “the potential of BRs in shrubs for paleoclimate studies still has to be explored.”

With that in mind, there was only one thing to do: Hike up Mount Iškoras in Norway and see what the Scots pines and Juniper shrubs had to say. The team took cores from dozens of plants high in the treeline, and discovered blue rings from the year 1902 and, to a lesser degree, in 1877, indicating that summers in those years were colder than average. 

The testimony of the trees not only lines up with historical temperature records, it also coincides with major volcanic events. In the spring of 1902, for instance, Mount Pelée erupted on the Caribbean island of Martinique, killing 30,000 people in one of the worst volcanic disasters on record. The reverberations of this tragedy were etched in blue in the hearts of trees 8,000 miles away on Nordic mountaintops. Reality is so wild and enchanting; it’s a shame it can’t compete with ad campaigns.

Regardless of whether you are as blue as a non-lignified tree ring, 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 Nazis celebrating Elon Musk’s salute, Zuckerberg as a kook, dictating your own threat model and a good block/mute ethos.

EMANUEL: The first week of Trump’s second term is in the books and we’re off to a terrible start. A flurry of executive orders is filled with symbolic and potentially impotent threats, but is also already causing real harm and fear. Local police and schools are preparing for the possibility of ICE raids coming for children. It feels like a return to Trump's first term time dilation effect and if the first term is a guide to the second we’ll probably see more shocking headlines before the weekend. 

People I know who don’t usually ask me about work reached out this week asking what I thought about Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other big tech company CEOs showing up prominently during Trump’s inauguration, if that will impact 404 Media, and if we were scared. I do think there is currently more interest in what we cover but that this surge of interest will fade, as it did during Trump’s first term. I also think that it is probably about to become a more hostile environment for journalists, but I don’t feel like journalists are a particularly vulnerable group under the Trump administration. 

You can see the specific steps that a government agency is taking to comply with the Trump administration’s policies against diversity, equity, and inclusion on the agency’s GitHub, which shows it frantically deleting and editing various documents, employee handbooks, Slack bots, and job listings across everything the agency touches. 

18F is a much-hyped government agency within the General Services Administration that was founded under the Obama Administration after the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov. It more or less had the specific goal of attracting Silicon Valley talent to the federal government to help the government innovate and make many of its websites and digital services suck less. It is one of the “cooler” federal agencies, and has open sourced many of its projects on GitHub.

GitHub is a website for open source development that shows changes across different “commits,” or changes to code and documentation. In the first days of the Trump administration, 18F’s commit list is full of change logs detailing the administration’s attempts to destroy the concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

The changes show that in the last 48 hours, 18F has edited text and wholesale deleted both internal and external web pages about, for example “Inclusive behaviors,” “healthy conflict and constructive feedback,” “DEIA resources,” and “Diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.” It deleted a webpage about “psychological safety” (which now 404s) deleted all information about the “DE&I leads” at the agency, as well as language for employees that said "Anyone who has issues or concerns related to inclusion or equity in the 18F engineering chapter should feel empowered to reach out to the DE&I Leads.” It has deleted, in various places, the word “inclusion,” as well as the term “affinity groups.” 

It also deleted an internal Slack Bot called “Inclusion Bot,” which is described as being “integrated into Slack and passively listens for words or phrases that have racist, sexist, ableist, or otherwise exclusionary or discriminatory histories or backgrounds. When it hears those words, it privately lets the writer know and offers some suggested alternatives.” 

It has also notably deleted information intended for improving accessibility for blind and visually impaired employees, which asked employees to use “visual descriptions” when introducing themselves on Zoom meetings.

In a hiring document, the language “Teams should consider factors of equity and complexity of the research when determining compensation for participants on their project” has been changed to “team should consider other factors or complexity of the research.”

The Trump administration has not tried to hide that it is trying to delete web pages and employee information across the government. But seeing the change logs pop up as they’re happening on GitHub shows exactly how these changes are being done and how they’re rolling out.

On day one of his presidency, one of Donald Trump’s first acts in office was to sign an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes: male and female. 

The order is a transphobic, scientifically incorrect screed titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government” that mischaracterizes sex and gender and demands that “every agency and all Federal employees acting in an official capacity on behalf of their agency shall use the term ‘sex’ and not ‘gender’ in all applicable Federal policies and documents.” 

The Social Security Administration and other government departments are complying with the order by scrubbing information about changing one’s sex from its website.

Ari Drennen spotted the change to the “change sex identification” site and posted a screenshot on X: 

The site now says “you are not authorized to access this page,” blocking it from public view. It used to show basic information about how to change your sex on record with the Social Security Administration by requesting a new Social Security card, and a link to a questionnaire that helped determine how to go about it. “You don't need to provide medical or legal evidence of your sex designation,” the site said when it was online. “Currently, you can change your sex identification to either male or female, but we are examining ways to provide an unspecified sex identification option in the future.” 

Information about gender identity and access to guides on changing one’s sex have also been scrubbed from the administration’s main LGBTQIA+ site. Here’s what looks like today, compared to how it looked last week.

The Gender Identity link that’s now missing from that site and inaccessible to the public—showing a 404 error and not a CMS login message, unlike the “change sex identification” site—used to provide links to forms one would need to fill out to start the process. 

Form SS-5: Application for A Social Security Card is still available for download on the Internet Archive. A page about how to get a social security card is still online, as is a page for locating a Social Security office. 

Several other government websites about gender identity and discrimination are also offline, including a Department of Labor site about discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and a State Department site about how to select your gender marker on your passport, are also gone or scrubbed of mentions of gender identity.

Aside from being unscientific nonsense and anti-abortion rhetoric, the “Defending Women from Gender Ideology” executive order has triggered all of this essential information to go offline across the internet, adding to the confusion and panic that many queer and trans people—and anyone who actually cares about reproductive rights or freedom of speech—already face going into Trump’s presidency. And it’s not the first time Trump’s administration took down a bunch of government websites to try to suppress scientific information: thousands of pages with climate change information were removed or buried during his first term. 

A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed “offensively” as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies’ resources.

“It's less like flypaper and more an infinite maze holding a minotaur, except the crawler is the minotaur that cannot get out. The typical web crawler doesn't appear to have a lot of logic. It downloads a URL, and if it sees links to other URLs, it downloads those too. Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself,” Aaron B, the creator of Nepenthes, told 404 Media. 

“Of course, these crawlers are massively scaled, and are downloading links from large swathes of the internet at any given time,” they added. “But they are still consuming resources, spinning around doing nothing helpful, unless they find a way to detect that they are stuck in this loop.”

The viral AI-generated bread horse image that Mark Zuckerberg “loved” on Tuesday was originally created as a meme by a Polish news organization to warn about the dangers of AI-generated slop on social media. The image became a viral sensation on the Polish internet but broke containment and began going viral more widely; it was then stolen by a totally unrelated real AI spam farm where it has gone megaviral and was ‘loved’ by the Meta CEO.

Called “chałkoń” or “challah horse,” the image was part of a series of AI-generated images created by a Polish news outlet called Donald.pl, which pilloried the AI spam that has taken over Facebook. “This woman baked a challah horse but no one congratulated her,” a page run by Donald called Polska w duźych dawkach (Poland in Large Doses) wrote on January 7. 

The image was designed as a commentary on AI spam on Facebook, the outlet wrote. But like other AI spam, some people believed it was real, and the image was seen by more than a million people and liked 11,000 times. The English-language, subscriber-funded Noted From Poland originally wrote about this drama if you’d like to learn more. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “loved” an AI-generated slop image of a horse made out of bread posted by a spam page on Facebook that also posts AI-generated images of children with amputations and regularly circumvents Facebook’s algorithm to link users offsite to ad-laden AI-generated content farms.

The page, “Faithful,” is verified, operated out of Romania, has 1.1 million followers, and regularly goes mega viral with the exact type of AI slop that I have been writing about over the last year. In that sense, it is the perfect encapsulation of the type of spam page that has become dominant on the platform as Meta continues to lean into AI-generated content and pays people for going viral on the site. 

“I made every detail with love, but it seems no one cares,” reads the caption of the image, which has 2.7 million reactions, 193,000 comments, and 98,000 shares as of the time of this writing. Zuckerberg’s interaction with the page was first noticed by Gazpacho Machine, a man who posts reviews of food he eats while taking showers. 

When Gazpacho Machine posted about this, I was initially skeptical that Zuckerberg's real account had liked the page (as in, it could have been an imposter), and the image had so many likes that Facebook was initially having trouble loading information about which accounts actually liked the page. Gazpacho Machine sent me a screen recording showing that it was indeed Zuckerberg's real "@zuck" account, and I was later able to verify for myself that this is Zuckerberg's real account:

This bread horse is a variation on a classic type of AI slop that made its way into my very first story about the phenomenon of AI spam on the platform in December 2023, when AI spammers were taking already viral images and running them through image-to-image AI tools to create slight variations of the original viral image. 

The origin story of bread horse is “The Bread House man,” a viral Russian image from the 2010s of a man next to a house he had created from various rolls and baguettes. Catherine Hall, a Facebook user who tracked the early spread of AI spam on Facebook, originally found dozens of AI-generated variations of the Bread House Man. 

The “Faithful” page, whose header image says “I Love God. I am proud to say that,” has posted hundreds of AI-generated images over the last few years across a host of genres that are now very familiar to me, and are similar to many pages that are operated by people in the global south trying to make money on Facebook. It has repeatedly posted the same image of an AI generated child who is missing an arm and whose caption says “My mother said I was beautiful, but so far I have not liked anyone” at least three times. It has gotten thousands of likes each time.

The page has also posted various images of AI-generated elderly people who are supposedly older than 100 celebrating their birthday, AI sand sculpture images, AI-generated variations of American Idol and America’s Got Talent, AI wood sculptures, AI photos of aging couples, AI ice sculptures, AI knitting, AI ‘I drew a picture’ images, AI families who are also onion farmers, and AI recycled bottle sculptures. Faithful has also posted a fair bit of Donald Trump content, as well as lots of inspirational screenshots of the Bible, reels that are seemingly automatically created from Reddit posts or written by AI, and inspiration porn. 

Many of the images are monetized in ways that I have previously reported on. For example, many of the images have captions that ask users to read the first comment for more information; a pinned top comment posted by Faithful will then link off of Facebook to a website that is absolutely loaded with ads. I clicked on a recent link posted by both Faithful and a related page called "Faith Space" about an AI generated stepfather who stood up for his AI generated stepdaughter when she was being bullied and was taken to a website called Daily Home Gardening, which served me many ads for products called “Levitox” and “GlucoReNu,” which showed images of worms and had captions that read “The Lump Of Worms Will Come Out Of You In The Morning. Try It.”

I do not know why Zuckerberg “loved” the AI generated bread horse, but it should be noted that it is harder to errantly “love” something on Facebook than it is to errantly like it. Meta did not respond to a request for comment. It is just one small action by one very rich and powerful person. But it is further evidence that strengthens what we already know: Mark Zuckerberg is not bothered by the AI spam that has turned his flagship invention into a cesspool of human sadness and unreality. In fact, he thinks that AI-generated content is the future of “social” media and Meta believes that one day soon we will all be creating AI-generated profiles that will operate semiautonomously on Meta’s platforms. 

While I was writing this, Faithful posted another AI-generated image of a grave with the caption “NEW TOYS APPEARED ON MY SON'S GRAVE EVERY DAY, SO I DECIDED TO FIND OUT WHO WAS DOING IT.” The image links in the comments to Daily Home Gardening, which loaded 64 distinct ads, plus an infinite scroll of ads at the bottom of the page. 

Hundreds of subreddits are considering banning all links to X.com in response to Elon Musk’s salute at a Donald Trump inauguration rally that was celebrated by Nazis as being a Nazi salute. The moderators of dozens of those subreddits have said that they have decided they will ban all links to X.

Here is a video scroll of just some of the hundreds of subreddits that have considered the move over the last 24 hours, with many moderators putting the idea up for a vote among a subreddit’s subscribers:

The bans have run the political gamut, with the subreddits for many cities and states (such as r/NewJersey, r/londonOntario, and sports teams banning all Twitter links. r/christianity banned Twitter links with a gif in which Musk’s salute was put side-by-side with a neo-Nazi’s.

Some subreddits are allowing screenshots from Twitter but not direct linking. Big sports subreddits such as r/NFL, r/hockey, r/baseball, and r/nba are all considering a ban, with moderators saying they will announce decisions shortly. A poll in r/baseball shows that users are overwhelmingly in favor of having links banned in the subreddit. 

On r/formula1, moderators decided to ban links from Twitter except in cases where the information can not be found elsewhere, and specifically from Formula 1 drivers and some others who haven’t yet moved to other platforms. “For a trial period we will ban all content from Twitter with the only exception of screenshots of relevant posts by teams, drivers & F1 that are not available on any other platform. Even in case of major breaking news, we ask you to post links to the press releases or a screenshot of the post from Instagram, with a link in the comments.” The ban is a trial, with the hope that it will encourage Formula 1 journalists and creators to move to other platforms, it says.

Moderators of r/ComicBookMovies posted “With recent events, we (mods) have decided we will no longer use our sub to promote x in any way, shape or form. Following in the footsteps of other subs, we will ban any links or post coming from x, including in the comment sections. While many of our post come from x, moving forward all post will need to come from another source, such as bluesky, approved websites, your own creation, etc.”

The moderators of r/MadeMeSmile, which has more than 10 million subscribers, posted “Would it make you smile if we banned all links to Twitter?” The moderators of r/DnD are similarly considering the move. Posts about banning or potentially banning Twitter links are some of the most popular posts on all of Reddit over the last day. 

Some of the subreddits are also banning material from Meta platforms after Mark Zuckerberg explicitly decided to allow hate to proliferate across his apps, and TikTok and Rednote because of their companies being based in China. “Hello, everyone! Following recent events in social media, we are updating our content policy,” a message on r/antiwork reads. It then says that the following sites may no longer be linked to, or have screenshots from them uploaded: “X, including content from its predecessor Twitter, because Elon Musk promotes white supremacist ideology and gave a Nazi salute during Donald Trump's inauguration,” “Any platform owned by Meta, such as Facebook and Instagram, because Mark Zuckerberg openly encourages bigotry with Meta's new content policy,” and “Platforms affiliated with the CCP, such as TikTok and Rednote, because China is a hostile foreign government and these platforms constitute information warfare.”

The concerted mass action to ban Twitter links is notable because it highlights the difference between moderation on a platform like Reddit and the moderation on platforms like X, Facebook, and Instagram. Reddit’s distributed, volunteer moderation system in which users become the moderators of specific subreddits means they are also in charge of the rules and norms of that subreddit. This means that moderators are, to some extent, beholden to the wishes of subscribers of a subreddit. They are also able to create rules that fit the needs and wants of a specific community. Reddit’s system has many problems: moderators are constantly fighting with Reddit administrators, who are paid Reddit employees; moderators are not paid for their labor; moderators often say they feel burnt out. But the system also fosters a more humane version of the internet where users have more control and the needs of a specific community can be more easily met. 

On Monday, a day after TikTok came back online for the U.S., people started noticing that the app would not let them comment “free palestine.” 

Several TikTok users posted screenshots on X and Bluesky showing the message they received after trying to comment “free palestine” under other people’s posts. TikTok users started reporting this on Sunday, following a tense few hours where the app blocked U.S. users from access ahead of a potential ban, displaying instead a notification sucking up to then-incoming president Donald Trump. 

I tried this myself on Tuesday morning, using two different throwaway TikTok accounts. Using one account, I could comment “free palestine” without a problem, and that comment is still up as of Wednesday morning. Using another, my “free palestine” comments were immediately removed repeatedly, and I received a notification that I had violated the TikTok Community Guidelines. I could comment with a nonsense phrase (“free shavacado”) using that same account, however, and TikTok didn’t remove it. 

The manufacturer of a machine that costs six figures used during heart surgery has told hospitals that it will no longer allow hospitals’ repair technicians to maintain or fix the devices and that all repairs must now be done by the manufacturer itself, according to a letter obtained by 404 Media. The change will require hospitals to enter into repair contracts with the manufacturer, which will ultimately drive up medical costs, a person familiar with the devices said. 

The company, Terumo Cardiovascular, makes a device called the Advanced Perfusion System 1 Heart Lung Machine, which is used to reroute blood during open-heart surgeries and essentially keeps a patient alive during the surgery. Last month, the company sent hospitals a letter alerting them to the “discontinuation of certification classes,” meaning it “will no longer offer certification classes for the repair and/or preventative maintenance of the System 1 and its components.” 

This means it will no longer teach hospital repair techs how to maintain and fix the devices, and will no longer certify in-house hospital repair technicians. Instead, the company “will continue to provide direct servicing for the System 1 and its components.” 

On the surface, this may sound like a reasonable change, but it is one that is emblematic of a larger trend in hospitals. Medical device manufacturers are increasingly trying to prevent hospitals' own in-house staff from maintaining and repairing broken equipment, even when they are entirely qualified to do so. And in some cases, technicians who know how to repair specific devices are being prevented from doing so because manufacturers are revoking certifications or refusing to provide ongoing training that they once offered. Terumo certifications usually last for two years. It told hospitals that “your current certification will remain valid through its expiration date but will not be renewed once it expires.”

We start this week with the TikTok ban: how we got here, what happened, and, most importantly, why it means we need more decentralized services. Jason runs us through it. After the break, Joseph breaks down a site called GeoSpy which is marketing geolocation technology to the cops. In the subscribers-only section, we all scroll through an archive of old Nokia (yes, Nokia) designs. Good stuff in there.

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.

• Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy
• The U.S. Wants to Ban TikTok for the Sins of Every Social Media Company
• The Powerful AI Tool That Cops (or Stalkers) Can Use to Geolocate Photos in Seconds
• Nokia’s Weird Y2K Designs Show the Future We Could Have Had

If it wasn’t already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without restriction.

Besides all of the “normal” problems with corporate social media—the surveillance capitalism, the AI spam, the opaque algorithms—let’s take stock of what has happened in the last few days. 

First, millions of small business owners and influencers who make a living on TikTok were left to beg their followers in TikTok’s last moments to follow them elsewhere in hopes of being able to continue their businesses on other corporate social media platforms. This had the effect of fracturing and destroying people’s audiences overnight, with one act of government. 

TikTok has since come back, but it is still unclear what the future of the platform is, and TikTok now exists at the whim of President Trump and is beholden to him to an unknown extent. TikTok’s status in the Untied States is still up in the air—it is still not available for download in the iOS App Store or the Google Play Store, and it could disappear at any moment if service providers like Oracle decide that Trump’s executive order and assurances that they will not be prosecuted or fined are not enough assurance to keep the app online. 

Elon Musk, who had already turned X into a cesspool of hate and an overt tool to get President Trump elected, is now formally part of the Trump administration, meaning the platform is literally owned by a member of the Trump White House. 

Meta has made an overt shift to the right, and Mark Zuckerberg has himself become a Trump booster. The platform is making its content moderation worse, has declared that immigrants and LGBTQ+ people are legitimate targets for hate speech, and has made many of these changes at the behest of the Trump White House and Stephen Miller, according to The New York Times. 

Shortly after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday, many Facebook users started to report that the social network automatically made them follow Trump’s Facebook page. I’ve seen several threads on this issue on Reddit, social media, and people I know personally have also asked me why Facebook made them follow Trump.

While Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it very clear that he and his company are making changes to endear Meta to the Republican president, there is a much less nefarious explanation for why people suddenly saw Facebook posts from Trump even though they don’t remember following him. When reached for comment, Facebook Communications Director Andy Stone directed me to his posts on Threads which points out how government social media accounts work and change with the current administration. 

The POTUS and White House Facebook pages are owned by the sitting administration. When Trump was sworn into office, those pages started sharing his official portrait, images of him signing a flurry of executive orders, and other images from the inauguration. An archive of the POTUS Facebook page from January 24, 2021, shows that the then incoming Biden administration also held on to all the followers from the first Trump administration. And an archive of the White House Facebook page shows that in both the 2017 and 2021 transitions, the page’s posts were wiped and archived, but its follower count was not. Users who followed those pages during the Biden administration may not know that this is how those official pages are managed, and were surprised to see posts from Trump in their feeds all of a sudden. 

I’ve also seen some people claim that Facebook made them follow other Trump-related Facebook pages, like Melania’s Trump’s or the GOP’s pages, but was not able to confirm that happened. Facebook’s Stone told me that the company has seen no evidence of this happening or reason that it would happen. 

Fear and confusion about social media companies leaning further to the right as soon as Trump took office reached beyond Facebook yesterday, and are understandable given that some “errors” are impacting Democrats but not Republicans. On Instagram, for example, users found that Instagram was hiding results for the search term “Democrats.” At the time of writing, when I searched for “Democrats” Instagram said it couldn’t find any matching results. When I searched for “Republicans” Instagram had no issue and surfaced many posts. Meta told the BBC in a statement that it’s “aware of an error affecting hashtags across the political spectrum and we are working quickly to resolve it.”

As we’ve reported in recent weeks, it’s obvious that Meta has decided to endear itself to Trump and conservatives, making specific policy changes around how users can talk about gender and immigrants in a way that panders to Trump and his supporters. There are many reasons Meta would pander to the most powerful politician in the world, especially since Zuckerberg has explicitly said he hopes Trump will protect his company from European regulators. However, forcing millions of users to follow Trump does not seem especially beneficial to anyone, and could easily be explained by the fact that many of these users already followed official administration accounts, or just the fact that Facebook is a gigantic platform that is rife with errors. 

An issue with Cloudflare allows an attacker to find which Cloudflare data center a messaging app used to cache an image, meaning an attacker can obtain the approximate location of Signal, Discord, Twitter/X, and likely other chat app users. In some cases an attacker only needs to send an image across the app, with the target not clicking it, to obtain their location.

Although the obtained location data is very coarse—in some of 404 Media’s tests it showed what city or state someone was in but did not provide more accurate information than that—the news shows the importance for some at-risk users to protect not just their message contents, but their network activity as well. 

“It's more of an oversight in the way the mobile application works than a vulnerability in the actual code but regardless, I thought it should be fixed,” daniel, an independent security researcher who reported the issue to Cloudflare, told 404 Media in an email. daniel said Cloudflare has since fixed the specific issue his custom-made tool was using.