An AI-generated video of President Donald Trump sucking on Elon Musk’s feet, overlaid with the text “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING,” played on TV screens at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) headquarters in Washington, D.C., multiple journalists are reporting on social media.
Journalist Marisa Kabas posted the video on Bluesky, writing, “this video played on loop for ~5 mins on screens throughout the building, per agency source. Building staff couldn’t figure out how to turn it off so sent people to every floor to unplug TVs.”
This morning at Dept of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) HQ in DC as mandatory return to office began, this video played on loop for ~5 mins on screens throughout the building, per agency source.
Building staff couldn’t figure out how to turn it off so sent people to every floor to unplug TVs.
Do you have anything to share related to our coverage? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected].
Last week, Trump called himself a king in a social media post. “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED,” Trump wrote on his platform, Truth Social. “LONG LIVE THE KING!”
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the new Murderbot show, ChatGPT for journalism, and birdwatching from afar.
EMANUEL: Yesterday Apple released the first two images from its upcoming sci-fi show, Murderbot, and announced that it will debut on May 16 this year. I, like many fans of the The Murderbot Diaries books the series is based on, am very excited about the show, but also already disappointed with one major deviation from the source material that’s obvious just from these two still images. The gist is in the show Murderbot is played by Alexander Skarsgård, who in the images looks like a guy, while in the books Murderbot is neither a he or a she, but an “it,” and while it’s not at all the focus of the story, the fact that the main character is androgynous make it much more interesting.
To back up, The Murderbot Diaries are set in the far, far future and follow a “SecUnit,” a super advanced, super lethal cyborg who does private security for scientists and corporations exploring deep space and dangerous planets. Eventually the SecUnit, who we come to know as Murderbot hacks the governing module that keeps it enslaved and has to choose what to do with its independence as it goes off on a series of pulpy space adventures.
This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. To subscribe to Court Watch, click here.
Meta is suing a scammer who allegedly and prolifically extorted people by banning and unbanning their Instagram accounts.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday, is against Idriss Qibaa, who ran the “Unlocked 4 Life” extortion scheme, according to an earlier criminal complaint filed by prosecutors. Qibaa, a self-described “professional when it comes to the banning and unbanning of Instagram accounts,” admitted on Adam 22’s No Jumper podcast in January 2024 that he had over 200 people who pay him monthly to maintain access to their accounts, and claimed he made more than $600,000 a month with this scheme. On the podcast episode, Adam mentioned that celebrities have fallen victim to similar extortion crimes, and Qibaa responded that they’re “getting extorted.”
Part of the “Unlocked 4 Life” extortion scheme included threatening to murder victims if they didn’t cooperate, according to the criminal complaint. A federal grand jury in the District of Nevada indicted Qibaa in August 2024 in a case that’s ongoing, charging him with two counts of violating interstate communications law for sending messages threatening to injure or kill two victims. The indictment goes into detail about the harassment Qibaa allegedly doled out against people who didn’t comply with his scheme, including sending hundreds or thousands of text messages, racial slurs, messages threatening to kill them, and photos of a man with a bloodied face. “Here’s the last guy who came to take photos/came near my home,” that text said. In one case, he threatened to “blast out” a victim’s social security number and demanded she pay him $20,000 to stop harassing her, according to court documents.
“We will consider all enforcement and legal options to protect people on our platforms. These particular abuses target users and violate our policies, and we are committed to countering these malicious activities," a Meta spokesperson told 404 Media in a statement.
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Do you know anything else about social media account extortion? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected].
Meta’s new complaint accuses Qibaa of selling “unauthorized Instagram services including (a) the ability to disable user accounts; (b) user account reinstatement services intended to circumvent enforcement actions taken by Meta in response to users who violated the Instagram Terms of Use (‘Terms’) and other rules that govern access to and use of Instagram, including Instagram’s Community Standards (collectively, ‘Instagram Terms and Policies’); and (c) fake engagement services intended to artificially inflate followers on Instagram user accounts, among other things.” The complaint also claims that Qibaa was running the same grift on X, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and Telegram.
In February 2024, Meta sent Qibaa a cease-and-desist letter, revoked his licenses to access Facebook and Instagram, and disabled his accounts, according to the complaint. But Qibaa made new Instagram accounts to get around the bans, Meta alleges.
Meta’s complaint is a look into how easy it is to manipulate its own reporting and moderation features. The company says Qibaa got people’s Instagram accounts banned by simply submitting fake reports claiming they were violating the platform’s terms. When Qibaa submitted the misleading reports, Meta alleges, Instagram disabled the account on the same day, and in some cases, reinstated it on the same day, too.
Updated 2/19 12:35 p.m. EST with comment from Meta.
A German researcher captured the contents of the White House’s “DEI.gov” during a brief period when it was not password protected.
The capture shows that the site contains a list of vague, alleged government-funded tasks and their costs, without sources or context, like “$1.3 million to Arab and Jewish photographers," “$1.5 million for ‘art for inclusion of people with disabilities,’” and "$3.4 million for Malaysian drug-fueled gay sex app.” DEI.gov redirects to waste.gov and is currently inaccessible without a password; Elon Musk told reporters on Tuesday that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is “trying to be as transparent as possible.”
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Do you know anything else about what's going on inside DOGE? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected].
The researcher is Henrik Schönemann, a historian who started the Safeguarding Research & Culture archivalist project, posted screenshots on Mastodon showing the contents. Schönemann also shared the specific site scrapes that he was able to capture, which showed the contents of the site. He told 404 Media he set up a change detection app using PikaPods, and is monitoring changes across hundreds of government websites. When the dei.gov and waste.gov sites were registered 10 days ago, he started tracking them, too.
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 Apple's iCloud, Wikipedia is a miracle of humankind, and good soup.
JASON: After our relatively unhinged BTBs last week, many of you left extremely nice comments, reached out individually, or otherwise gave us encouragement. You all are the best, and it made us feel very good. Thank you!
This week, I wrote about what the Wikimedia Foundation is doing to prepare itself for attacks from well-funded people who have decided to wage a harassment and legal war on Wikipedia editors. I am not going to rehash why people want to attack Wikipedia because it’s done very well in this article by Molly White, but boils down essentially to: Wikipedia is not that easily manipulated, it does not shy away from the truth, and its distributed, global nature makes it quite resilient.
After a judge called out a law firm for citing fake cases in court documents, the attorneys admitted to AI “hallucinating” the cases.
In a court order filed last week, Wyoming District Judge Kelly Rankin demanded the attorneys explain why they shouldn’t be sanctioned or disciplined for citing made-up information, including referencing eight non-existent cases.
The lawsuit, first filed in 2023, is against Walmart and Jetson Electronic Bikes, Inc., which makes hoverboards for sale at Walmart. The plaintiffs, including a woman, her husband, and four minor children, claim a Jetson hoverboard’s lithium ion battery malfunctioned and caught fire while they were sleeping and burned their house down, severely injuring several members of the family.
In a motion in limine filed by the plaintiff’s attorneys in January, they cited multiple cases (a "motion in limine" is a pretrial motion where attorneys request specific evidence or arguments be excluded from presentation during the trial) that don’t exist. “The cases are not identifiable by their Westlaw cite, and the Court cannot locate the District of Wyoming cases by their case name in its local Electronic Court Filing System,” Rankin wrote. She demanded each of the attorneys “provide a thorough explanation for how the motion and fake cases were generated,” and “explain their role in drafting or supervising the motion.”
Four days later, they responded: “Our internal artificial intelligence platform ‘hallucinated’ the cases in question while assisting our attorney in drafting the motion in limine,” the law firm said in a filed response. “This matter comes with great embarrassment and has prompted discussion and action regarding the training, implementation, and future use of artificial intelligence within our firm. This serves as a cautionary tale for our firm and all firms, as we enter this new age of artificial intelligence.”
Lawyers increasingly use AI tools for research and analyzing documents. But this isn’t the first time using AI to draft legal cases has gotten lawyers in trouble. In 2022, a man filed an action alleging he was injured by an Avianca airlines metal serving cart during an Avianca Airlines flight. His lawyers cited non-existent cases, and instead of admitting it and apologizing immediately, they doubled down and defended the filings. Eventually, they were fined $5,000 for fabricating the case, with the judge writing that they “abandoned their responsibilities when they submitted non-existent judicial opinions with fake quotes and citations created by the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, then continued to stand by the fake opinions after judicial orders called their existence into question.”
And in 2024, disbarred former celebrity attorney Michael Cohen gave his own lawyer, David Schwartz fake case citations generated by Google Bard. Cohen and Schwartz weren’t fined, but the judge who let them off without discipline did call the error “embarrassing” for them.
On Tuesday, a judge ordered the Department of Health and Human Services, Center for Disease Control, and Food and Drug Administration to restore several of the webpages they removed following President Trump’s executive order attacking diversity, equity and inclusion.
The health agencies have until 11:59 p.m. on February 11 to restore the pages to how they were on January 30, and “identify any other resources that [Doctors for America] DFA members rely on to provide medical care and that defendants removed or substantially modified on or after January 29, 2025, without adequate notice or reasoned explanation,” U.S. District Judge John Bates wrote in the order.
The nonprofit Doctors for America is suing the health agencies following their takedown of these resources in compliance with President Trump’s executive order “Defending Women,” which demanded federal agencies scrub their websites. “Our team’s government affairs firm is advising that as of 5pm today, all U.S. government agency websites will be taken down,” an internal email obtained by 404 Media on February 1 said. “According to reports, agencies are unable to comply fast enough with President Trump’s EO ordering all government entities to remove all DEI references from their websites, so these websites will be taken offline. There is no word on when they will be made available again.”
The online resources that were taken down that which Doctors for America cited in court documents include “The Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System,” webpages on “Data and Statistics” for “Adolescent and School Health,” webpages for “The Social Vulnerability Index,” “The Environmental Justice Index,” a report on “PrEP for the Prevention of HIV Infection in the U.S.: 2021 Guideline Summary,” pages about “HIV Monitoring,” A webpage on “Getting Tested for HIV.” 404 Media reported on several of these resources going dark as it happened. According to the Internet Archive, some of these sites, such as the Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System, were down for more than a week after the executive order, then went back up, and are online as of writing. Others, like the Adolescent and School Health page, are still down.
The judge’s decision is in response to Doctors for America’s motion for a temporary restraining order, as part of the organization’s case against federal agencies for removing information from their websites that healthcare workers need for their work. Doctors for America is suing the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), claiming that their removal of datasets and webpages violates the Administrative Procedure Act, and the Paperwork Reduction Act.
“Lack of access to CDC materials on infectious diseases not only harms DFA members’ ability to treat individual patients but also hampers their ability to respond to broader disease outbreaks,” Doctors for America wrote in court documents.
“Like many of my colleagues, I am both a doctor who takes care of patients and a researcher. Removing critical clinical information and datasets from the websites of CDC, FDA, and HHS not only puts the health of our patients at risk, but also endangers research that improves the health and health care of the American public,” Reshma Ramachandran, a member of the Doctors for America board of directors, said in a Doctors for America press release.
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 "staying out of politics" and what it means to be a tech news publication.
EMANUEL: I’m very proud of our output for the last few weeks. When we worked at Motherboard, I really felt like the site was firing on all cylinders when one story was dominating the news and our entire team could pivot, bringing its various areas of expertise to meet the moment and publish unique reporting that was valuable to readers, even if the story that was dominating the news was not something they imagined they’d be covering previously.
I wasn’t sure what that was going to look like with a team of just four people, but I think a look at 404 Media’s site shows that it’s breaking a ton of news on one of the most important stories in the world right now, which is Elon Musk’s aggressive takeover of various government agencies and systems. Covering this story requires us to talk about Musk and Donald Trump, think about them, interview other people about them, and put images of them in our articles so someone who is scrolling their feeds can easily spot what our stories are about.
A New York state senator is trying to introduce the same age verification legislation that has resulted in massive porn sites—including Pornhub and its network of sister sites—going dark across much of the U.S. south and midwest.
The bill, introduced by Republicans Jake Ashby and Assemblywoman Mary Beth Walsh, is almost identical to every other law that has passed across the country in the last two years related to age verification: it would require porn sites to verify that visitors are at least 18 years old through “digital identification,” credit card transaction, government ID, or password-protected login.
Like other laws in Texas, Kansas, North Carolina, Montana, and more than a dozen more states, it defines “material harmful to minors” as a laundry list of sex acts and body parts, including “actual, simulated, or animated display or depiction of: (A) a person's pubic hair, anus, or genitals or the nipple of the female breast; (B) touching, caressing, or fondling of nipples, breasts, buttocks, anuses, or genitals; or (C) sexual intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation, flagellation, excretory functions, exhibitions, or any other sexual act” that “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.”
The authors write in their justification for the bill: “The internet is a dangerous place for children, rife with sexual material that is harmful to minors. The ease of access to this material is downright scary. This legislation seeks to prioritize the protection of children by requiring pornography websites to verify the age of its users. Upon verification that a user is 18 years of age or older, access to the site would be given.”
Sites that operate in the state and don't have age verification set up would face a $50,000 penalty per day.
“In 19 states, Republican and Democratic governors have signed these age verification bills into law. New York should be next,” Ashby wrote in a Facebook post. “In recent years, New York has made positive, bipartisan strides to protect our kids online. We believe this is another important step. Consuming this kind of content is wrong for our kids’ mental health and their emotional development. It can be toxic for their future relationships,” Ashby said in a press release, the New York news outlet Troy Record reported.
When age verification laws are enacted in states, searches for VPNs spike, people go to less-moderated non-compliant websites, and adults’ rights to privacy and speech are infringed upon. Adult industry and first amendment advocates have lobbied for device-based controls for children, instead.
The bill was referred to the committee on Consumer Affairs and Protection on January 30.
NASA personnel were told to “drop everything” to scrub public sites of mentions of DEI, indigenous people, environmental justice, and women in leadership, according to a directive obtained by 404 Media.
The directive, sent on January 22 and obtained by 404 Media, states:
“Per NASA HQ direction, we are required to scrub mentions of the following terms from our public sites by 5pm ET today. This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request. Note that the list below is the list that exists this morning, but it may grow as the day goes on.
DEIA
Diversity (in context of DEIA)
Equity (“ “)
Inclusion (“ “)
Accessibility (“ “)
MSI
Minority Serving Institution
Indigenous People
EEJ
EJ
Environmental Justice
Underrepresented groups/people
Anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.)”
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Do you have anything to share related to this story, NASA or SpaceX? We would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected].
By now, Trump’s war on “DEI” is well documented. But the directive shows the specific words that some agencies were asked to delete, providing a clearer picture of how agencies have been asked to scrub information. A NASA employee told 404 Media “we were absolutely required to scrub all DEI related or DEI adjacent topics and terms from all external websites by 5pm the 22nd, which was a drop everything and get it done task.” 404 Media granted the employee anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Anthropic, the company that made one of the most popular AI writing assistants in the world, requires job applicants to agree that they won’t use an AI assistant to help write their application.
“While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process,” the applications say. “We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree.”
Anthropic released Claude, an AI assistant that’s especially good at conversational writing, in 2023.
This question is in almost all of Anthropic’s nearly 150 currently-listed roles, but is not in some technical roles, like mobile product designer. It’s included in everything from software engineer roles to finance, communications, and sales jobs at the company.
The field was spotted by Simon Willison, an open source developer. The question shows Anthropic trying to get around a problem it’s helping create: people relying so heavily on AI assistants that they struggle to form opinions of their own. It’s also a moot question, as Anthropic and its competitors have created AI models so indistinguishable from human speech as to be nearly undetectable.
These AI models are also replacing the kinds of roles Anthropic is hiring for, leaving people in communications and coding fields searching for employment.
Last month, after Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a model so good it threw U.S. AI companies into a tailspin, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that the race to make more, better, and faster AI models is “existentially important.”
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss AI's boom or bust, trying Github's Copilot, and making time for good ideas.
JASON: When we started 404 Media, I bought a macro lens for my camera and used it to take pictures of leaked documents, things we had FOIAed, things like that. Sometimes I printed out the documents and took pictures of them, other times I took pictures of my computer screen. The thinking was that it was a cooler visual style than just screenshotting them, which obviously takes half a second. It wasn’t a policy or anything, but I took pics for the first few weeks, and they did look cool. I only have one camera, and I mainly use it as a webcam for our podcast. So it was definitely a pain in the ass to take it off a tripod, change the lens, take the photos, put them on my computer, and so on. So after a few weeks, I stopped doing it, and now we use screenshots like everyone else on the entire internet.
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.
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.”
Oklahoma Senator Dusty Deevers has just introduced SB593, a bill that would criminalize p**rnography in the state of Oklahoma, establishing a 10 year prison term for anyone who makes, distributes or even possesses adult content. https://t.co/DvqmM6Aku9pic.twitter.com/I0ZwMzFlvM
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.”
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.
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.
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 Social Security Administration and other government departments are complying with the order by scrubbing information about changing one’s sex from its website.
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Are you a federal employee or contractor with knowledge of the changes described in this piece, or how employees are reacting to these changes? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected].
And just like that, the “how to change sex identification” page has vanished from the Social Security Administration website. pic.twitter.com/cNj7XeeuVH
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.
How the page looks today / How the SSA LGBTQI+ page looked on December 22, via the Internet Archive
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.
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.
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.
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 enjoying things in the AI industry and the TikTok ban.
Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don’t enjoy making music.
“We didn’t just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people,” Shulman said on the 20VC podcast. “And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”
Please go read Emanuel’s whole piece. It’s short and gets straight to the good points of, among other things, that the pursuit of the challenge is one thing that draws people to learn an instrument. Shulman says with his AI tool, they could make the music industry as big as the video game industry, ignoring the fact that some of the most popular video games are specifically about a hard challenge, as Emanuel says.
One of my first cellphones was a Nokia 3310. I still miss it: Launched in 2000, it was a solid worry-stone of a phone with rubbery keys that I could text my friends on during class from under the desk without breaking eye contact with my math professor. I played Snake when I felt awkward at parties and hearing the “kick” ringtone in 2025 is like hearing an ancient folk song. Playing Snake, texting, and scrolling through ringtones was pretty much all I could do with that phone, actually. It was plenty.
The iPhone was still seven years away, and for that reason, mobile phone aesthetics were still finding themselves. On Wednesday, Aalto University in Finland introduced the Nokia Design Archive, an “uncurated repository” containing 20,000 items and 959GB of files showing the designing process, imagining and ideating, and often wacky concepts for how we might use communications devices on the move in the then-future. The content—spanning from the mid-90s to 2017 according to a press release from the university—was licensed from Microsoft Mobile for research and education purposes, but is now open to the public to peruse.
