Former president Donald Trump has shared AI-generated images that falsely claim Taylor Swift fans are supporting his campaign. In a post on Truth Social, Trump shared screenshots of four posts on X that purport to show a number of young women all wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts in a variety …
Read More »Kamala Harris’ Brat Summer Is Almost Over. What’s Next?
Team Trump was winning the internet until the Harris–Walz campaign took over. But Democrats can’t just keep calling Republicans “weird” and celebrating Brat Summer until Election Day. Today on the show, writer and critic Hunter Harris on how Kamala Harris is harnessing social media, and what comes next in the …
Read More »The Who's Who of Political Influencers
This is a very exciting day! In addition to a fresh makeover for this newsletter, I just published a new project today outlining some of the biggest names in online political influencing from both the right and the left. Over the past week, I crowdsourced the names of some of …
Read More »A Single Iranian Hacker Group Targeted Both Presidential Campaigns, Google Says
When Donald Trump's presidential campaign publicly stated last week that it had been successfully targeted by Iranian hackers, the news may have initially seemed like a sign that the Middle Eastern country was particularly focused on the candidate whom it perceived to take the most hawkish approach to its regime. …
Read More »Instagram Isn’t Protecting Women Politicians From Hate Speech
Pinned on vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ official Instagram page is a post featuring her alongside her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz. In the comments, along with praise, criticism, and more than one “Trump 2024,” are several comments asking if Harris had offered Walz oral sex, …
Read More »Trump's Shooting Rattled QAnon Believers. Then They Doubled Down
It’s been one month since former president Donald Trump was shot during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. At first, it seemed to those close to them as if QAnon adherents might finally be shaken from their long-held conspiratorial belief systems. In their universe, Trump was waging a secret war against …
Read More »Gamergate’s Aggrieved Men Still Haunt the Internet
Ten years ago, a flood of gamers attacked developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu and media critic Anita Sarkeesian. The three were part of a growing chorus of people calling for a more inclusive culture within video games. The attackers doxxed and harassed their targets, doing all they could to …
Read More »Elon Musk said Donald Trump interview suffered a 'DDoS attack' — X / Twitter employees say he's lying
Over 54 minutes of elevator music and then – complete silence. That’s what X users who tried to tune into Elon Musk’s interview of Donald Trump were treated to on Monday night as X’s live audio platform, Spaces, glitched out when hundreds of thousands of user accounts tried to listen …
Read More »Donald Trump Doesn’t Need X—but Elon Musk Desperately Needs Him Back
Former president Donald Trump is back on X, and Elon Musk appears to be ecstatic. In the hours after Musk and Trump’s meandering, disinformation-filled chat on X Spaces—which was, Musk claimed without evidence, delayed because of a cyberattack—the X owner stayed online well into early Tuesday morning, sharing dozens of …
Read More »Kamala Harris' Rally Crowds Aren't AI-Generated. Here's How You Can Tell
Donald Trump may have coined a new term in his latest false attack on Kamala Harris' presidential campaign. In a pair of posts on Truth Social over the weekend, the former president said that Vice President Kamala Harris "A.I.'d" photos of a huge crowd that showed up to see her …
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