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Komunitas mastodon.uno

TikTok: “Se il social danneggia i minori, la colpa è solo dei genitori”. Meloni e Salvini d’accordo, mentre l’Ue accusa le piattaforme.

TikTok: “Se il social danneggia i minori, la colpa è solo dei genitori”. Meloni e Salvini d’accordo, mentre l’Ue accusa le piattaforme. @internet https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2026/04/18/tiktok-se-il-social-danneggia-i-minori-la-colpa-e-solo-dei-genitori-meloni-e-salvini-daccordo-mentre-lue-accusa-le-piattaforme/8355732/ #TikTok #Social #Politica #Meloni #Salvini

Komunitas lemmy.ml

Proton left Mastodon...

I disagree, Proton is a privacy company with more followers on Mastodon than on Threads and TikTok. Should they also drop what Linux support they have to focus only on Windows because it has a large base? This feels alienating to their privacy conscious users if anything.

Komunitas mastodon.uno

Wedium, una via alternativa ai social di marca tedesca.

Wedium, una via alternativa ai social di marca tedesca. A differenza delle piattaforme più note di Meta, la startup berlinese punta su un sistema di verifica obbligatoria dell’identità. Obiettivo, raggiungere almeno mezzo milione di utenti entro la fine dell’anno. @internet https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2026/04/18/wedium-una-via-alternativa-ai-social-di-marca-tedesca-come-dire-addio-a-instagram-tiktokc/8358611/ #Wedium #Meta #Social #Instagram #TikTok

Komunitas hexbear.net

Bulletins and News Discussion from January 13th to January 19th, 2025 - From Mar-A-Lago to Nuuk - COTW: Denmark (including Greenland)

🇺🇸🇨🇳Biden administration looks for ways to keep TikTok available in the U.S President Joe Biden’s administration is considering ways to keep TikTok available in the U.S. if a ban that’s scheduled to go into effect on Sunday proceeds, according to three people familiar with the discussions. “Americans shouldn’t expect to see TikTok suddenly banned on Sunday,” an administration official said, adding that officials are “exploring options” for how to implement the law so that TikTok does not go dark on Sunday. Lol America is so cooked. I can’t wait for the millenium of humiliation for the US https://xcancel.com/Sino_Market/status/1879755727583195436#m

Komunitas hexbear.net

Bulletins and News Discussion from January 13th to January 19th, 2025 - From Mar-A-Lago to Nuuk - COTW: Denmark (including Greenland)

We were banning TikTok because it is a huge national security threat, but also we need to roll the TikTok ban back because it hurts the influencers! Congress panics realizing no one is going to buy TikTok before the ban (a problem they created!), with Sen. Schumer saying: " It’s clear that more time is needed to find an American buyer and not disrupt the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans of so many influencers who have built up a good network of followers." https://x.com/kenklippenstein/status/1880007290830688609

Komunitas news.abolish.capital

There’s no word for this in my language

Nīkau Wi Neera (Photo supplied) A popular trope about Indigenous languages suggests that they’re morally superior for lacking words for modern concepts. This is a problematic myth, writes Nīkau Wi Neera. One of the most persistent and frustrating phrases common among Indigenous peoples of the west is something to the effect of: “There’s no word for ‘profit’ in our language.” Other frequent candidates are words like “sell”, “sovereignty”, or “ownership”. Such sentiments are usually expressed to paint a difference between our Indigenous ways of life and western, typically capitalist, systems. The implication is that these concepts are so totally foreign to Indigenous peoples that we are simply incapable of describing them. This is not so. It’s often second-language speakers I hear making these sorts of comments — typically those with basic conversational fluency in their Indigenous language, which gives them enough confidence to make bold claims about supposed fundamental differences in cultural cognition. Usually, this sort of person speaks only English fluently, was raised and educated in a western setting, and, aside from English, speaks only his or her own Indigenous language with any degree of proficiency. To a certain extent, the resulting attitude is to be expected. I went through this phase myself. Learning another language is, for many, their first introduction to a different way of thinking about the world. It’s natural, then, that the stir of discovery might be extrapolated into somewhat grander anthropological theories. This is especially common among those speakers of a certain political persuasion — often those who are reacting against marginalisation by asserting their Indigenous identity. However, this tendency reflects a broader, recent trend towards the essentialising of Indigenous difference — the belief that we’re fundamentally different from other human beings. This has counterproductive results. There are several issues with framing cultural differences in terms of the absence of words. In the first instance, this misguided linguistic essentialism risks dragging Indigenous peoples back to the old trope of the Noble Savage. A supposed lack of words for “profit”, “greed”, or “lust” implies that these universal human impulses and motivations never existed before European contact. Yet the oral, historical, and archaeological record is full of instances of conflict in Indigenous societies, often brought on by groups and individuals transgressing the social order. It’s unhelpful to think of Indigenous people as idealised, perfect creatures. To do so is to separate us from the flaws, and thus the humanity, that we share with all human beings. Another problem is that, if Indigenous cultures can be considered innocent of western vices*,* it follows that those same cultures may lack certain western virtues. One example is the popular notion that my language, te reo Māori, lacks an original word for the term “kiss”. The term in common use, *“*kihi”, is a Māori borrowing of the English “kiss”. If we entertain this notion of absence, are we then to believe that before the adoption of the term “kihi”, Māori had no way whatsoever to express the meaning of a kiss? Our oral histories speak of kissing. There are written accounts of kissing — or something that looked to Europeans like kissing — in traditional Māori society. To say there is no word for “kiss” in our language suggests that the act of romantic kissing was unthinkable to Māori — and, more dangerously, that Māori society was without romance. In this way, an apparently simple assertion of a lexical absence can in fact serve to reinforce colonial prejudices about Indigenous capacity for love. Saying “there was no Māori word for kiss” suggests to the average person a corresponding absence of all the things that go along with kissing: love, intimacy, tenderness, and so on. This, in turn, reinforces narratives of Māori savagery and insensitivity. Not allowing a people the capacity for love, as an outsider might understand it, is to once again permit only a diminished humanity for that people — to see them as less than human. Such concepts or capacities don’t even need to be particularly ethical or emotional. I wouldn’t like to be told by an English speaker that I am utterly incapable of understanding complex terms like “laparoscopic appendectomy” or “collateralised debt obligation” merely because I speak Māori. Moreover, it would be considered racist, and rightly so, for a westerner to say that the cultural and mythological connotations that go along with the word “finance” are incomprehensible to a person from an Indigenous culture that traditionally practices a gift economy. Assertions of this kind can also lead to absurd and supernatural claims. Benjamin Lee Whorf, who studied the Hopi language under the guidance of Edward Sapir in the 1950s, concluded, largely because of an imperfect understanding of Hopi ways of talking about time, that the Hopi fundamentally did not experience time, or worse, were incapable of experiencing it in the same way as Europeans. This strain of argument, especially as it relates to concepts of time, seems particularly attractive to social media new-age types — think healing crystals, vibrations, dreamcatchers. Not to mention some Indigenous people who, disconnected from the lore and cosmology of their culture, adopt hippie caricatures of other Indigenous cultures and nonsensically map them onto their own. For example, you occasionally see Māori on TikTok talking about how our ancestors “knew about sacred vibration-time”, or other similarly absurd, imported concepts, simply because we “lacked” a term for clocks. The argument, based on such specious linguistic evidence, is that if you can’t talk about it, you don’t experience it. This way of thinking casts Indigenous peoples as something akin to magical, time-travelling elves, like the four-dimensional squid-things in the 2016 film Arrival. It’s not a comparison that does Indigenous people any credit. If there is an iwi (Tūhoe, I reckon) that knows the secret of time travel, we’re yet to hear about it down in Ngāti Toa! Sapir and Whorf’s theories of extreme linguistic relativity were shown to be wrong in the 1980s. Whorf had misunderstood the Hopi language. He had appreciated neither its subtleties nor its strategies for expressing temporal statements that, in English, might require fewer words or be expressed with more straightforward language. The linguist Ekkehart Malotki demonstrated that, far from having no concept or experience of time, the Hopi speak about time in terms of a spatial progression emanating outwards from the speaker, moving from the past to the future. Despite some lingering academic debate about the exact nature of Hopi time, most linguists agree that the Hopi, like all other known human cultures, speak about time using spatial metaphors. The particulars of this metaphor differ somewhat from culture to culture, but the approach is universal. The communication of the same temporal concepts between cultures, it must be said, merely requires a little skilled translation. The necessity and beauty of this translation is the true lesson we should take from the failures of Sapir and Whorf. I know of no evidence that suggests that it is utterly semantically impossible for any one language to express an idea that another can, given the existence of infinite phonemes, speaker identity, inflection, cosmological explication, tone, and so on. The mere fact that we can discuss complex cultural concepts from Indigenous societies using the English language disproves such theories. The danger of fetishising our own Indigenous languages as fundamentally different and semantically firewalled from settler languages is that we may lose access to our deep cultural knowledge and metaphysics. An Indigenous person discovers these things when she learns the strategies within her language for talking about topics that are not intuitive to it. It is in the feeling of a language flexing, bending, and working hard to express something foreign that the speaker truly learns that tongue’s nature. Hence, fluent or native speakers of Indigenous languages are less likely to say their language lacks a term for something. More often, these wise people will say: “It’s hard to explain. It’s kind of like . . . . except with a sense of . . .” The skill, profundity, and mastery of native bilingual speakers are evident in their ability to communicate similarity, rather than difference. This, I believe, is the real treasure of an Indigenous view of language. If there’s any kernel of truth in the claim that “there’s no word for this in my language”, it’s that in some cultures, certain concepts are more proximate — closer, more natural, intuitive — but they are never unthinkable. In some cases, proximity can be merely convenient: New Zealand English frequently uses untranslated Māori words, such as wairua or whānau, to convey complex ideas more quickly. More importantly, this understanding of proximity reveals the sublime depth required for cross-cultural communication and translation. To communicate “collateralised debt obligation” in exclusively Māori terms is a feat just as impressive as explaining “manaakitanga” in exclusively English terms. Moreover, there is an original Māori word for kiss: ūngutu, which means a “firm meeting of lips”. On encountering this translation, an English speaker might feel its depth and tenderness, and perhaps relate it to his own fond memories of a passionate kiss. As with so many things Indigenous, relationality — the principle that people and ideas are defined by their relationships — is the key to communication. Explaining something in someone else’s terms usually involves drawing on the commonalities between you, using shared understandings as a starting point to communicate ideas that might be less culturally proximate to the other person. Who are you to me? Who am I to you? How do we each think about this? Heoi anō, if there is an essential difference in Indigenous thought, it’s the universal belief in relationships and relating, especially in communication. Mihi Kei ngā manu arataki — ōku kaumātua, ōku ahorangi, kei āku hoa mahi anō hoki — e mihi ngaio ana: Luke Wihone, Barnaby Elder, Miriam Bright, John Whitman, S Henhawk, A T Smith, Cameron Hartley, Gahsëni’de’ Hubbell. Nīkau Wi Neera (Ngāti Toarangatira, Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Koata, Ngāti Pāhauwera, Ngāpuhi*)* is an archaeologist working with Indigenous communities in the US. E-Tangata, 2026 The post There’s no word for this in my language appeared first on E-Tangata. From E-Tangata via This RSS Feed.

Komunitas news.abolish.capital

Is AI creating a new ‘Epstein class’?

Welcome to Inequality Watch React, where we don’t just talk about inequality, we go straight to the source. This week, we take you inside the National Press Club, where we spoke with Congressman Ro Khanna about the future of the Democratic Party, economic patriotism, and the growing divide between the powerful and everyone else. From why Democrats struggle to win, to the unanswered questions surrounding the Epstein files, to whether Silicon Valley is creating a new class of untouchable elites, we break it all down. Because this isn’t just about politics. It’s about power, and who it protects. And the big question: can we protect ourselves from its excess and its consequences? Independent journalists Taya Graham and Stephen Janis head down to Capitol Hill to ask these questions. And if you have a question you want us to ask, please leave it in the comments! Credits: Written by: Stephen Janis Produced by: Taya Graham, Stephen Janis Studio / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Taya Graham: Hello, my name is Taya Graham and welcome to our Inequality Watch React, the show where we discuss not just how this country is ruled by billionaires, but how and why. Reporting that seeks to hold the American aristocracy accountable for the destructive effect unimaginable wealth has had on our politics and on our lives. Now, unlike other YouTubers, we go right to the source to report back to you on America’s historic wealth imbalance, namely our nation’s capital, Washington DC. That’s where my reporting partner and I, hello, Steven. Stephen Janis: Hey, how you doing, Taya? Taya Graham: We often find ourselves on the Capitol steps or roaming the halls of Congress, bearing witness and asking tough questions to the people directly responsible for the wealth centric world we live in. So Steven, before I jump into this, how has Capitol Hill been treating you lately? Do you have any beefs about the way the Hill operates? I’m Stephen Janis: Just having to roll finding Republicans in the wild and that’s what I’m trying to do because I really feel like Republicans have a lot of questions to answer, but I can’t find they’re not holding press conferences the way they did even a year and a half ago. So that’s my only beef right now, but we’ll fix that. Taya Graham: I know. I haven’t seen a single free range Republican in months. Stephen Janis: Yeah, it’s weird. But you can get them on Capitol steps, but they’re not holding press conferences where they usually hold press conferences. And that’s been a little frustrating. Taya Graham: And they haven’t been having any town halls for their constituents either. Stephen Janis: Not really. Taya Graham: So they’ve really been quite quiet. Stephen Janis: Yeah. Interesting. Taya Graham: Okay. So let’s get right into this so we can discuss our first video. Now, this is a topic that seems to resurface fairly often on Capitol Hill, and it did again at the National Press Club this week. And it’s basically, why do Democrats keep losing? Now, we know the zeitgeist is slowly turning in the Democrat’s favor. Recent polls show a preference for blue candidates across the board, but a key progressive candidate, Congressman Ro Khanna, has a message for his party. Basically, man up if you want to actually win in the future. Let’s take a listen to what he had to say. Let’s run clip one. Ro Khanna: So where do we go from here? We cannot go back to the days before Trump. That led to a Democratic Party that had an approval rating of 27%. How and why should we go back to a party or a politics that got us two terms of Donald Trump? We cannot simply resort to incrementalism or this fashionable nudges of a broken system. There was a paper written about, let’s just nudge things in the government. It was haralded as some great academic insight. The era of nudges and incrementalism are over. Taya Graham: So Steven, one of the reasons I wanted to lead with this clip is this analysis of the Democrats’ inability to win. Well, we’ve discussed this several times in both articles and a discussion we had almost a year ago. Actually, let’s run the next clip. It is pretty clear Stephen Janis: That they need someone to jump the line to run that the Democratic establishment does not want to run. Taya Graham: Yes. Stephen Janis: Someone with a vision that seems authentic and someone who’s willing to take risks. Taya Graham: Yes. Stephen Janis: You got to take risks. I mean, the risk averse nature of the Democratic Party has turned them into losers. Taya Graham: Yeah. But hopefully the Democrat strategists out there who are spending millions of dollars, maybe they’ll take some time to listen to independent journalists as well as listen to the public and let them know that they have an authenticity issue and they need to find a way to break the inertia. Okay, Steven, I think we called this out several months ago. So do you think Democrats are finally getting the message? Stephen Janis: I’m going to make one argument that you’re probably not going to agree with. And it’s going to seem a little limited, but actually I think it comes down to this. If Democrats run on healthcare and if they make healthcare the center of their campaign, then they’ve learned their lesson. And if they push for Medicare for All, and if they push for the ASA subsidies, and if they don’t back down on this topic and embrace it and run ads about it and talk about how Trump was like, “We can’t afford to give healthcare to the American public. We can only afford to spend money on a war.” If they do that, then I will say yes, they learn their lesson. Otherwise, no. Taya Graham: You know what? Th seems to me like you’re almost recommending a Mondami strategy that obviously had success in New York. Pick something straightforward, simple that actually addresses people’s needs and then stick to it. But honestly, what he did was bold. Even I’m not a New Yorker and I know the five points of his plan and it was a very bold one and it was controversial, but it still worked. But it seems like President Trump is always bold and Democrats are almost always critics or incrementalists, always just trying to nudge things forward with baby steps. And I think Rocano was trying to make the point that incremental steps can’t beat boldness. I mean, you pointed that out in your piece. You can’t continually defend incremental change against a man who is constantly throwing executive orders against the wall to see which one sticks. I mean, I think this idea really becomes relevant. We look at what’s happening with Trump. I mean, he’s saying literally publicly that the federal government can’t help out with childcare. While he explicitly mentioned at the same time, the US is spending an estimated $1 billion a day dropping bombs on a foreign country. I mean, how much of an opening do the Democrats need? And yet I don’t think they’re taking the win here. I mean, if any party can be handed a loaded gun and managed to shoot themselves in the foot with it, it’s the Democrats. Stephen Janis: Yeah. I mean, the thing is that bold ideas, big ideas are just easier to run on, easier to campaign on. They permeate. They get through sort of the digital noise that we ought to deal with. If you’re like, “Well, let’s just increase the ACA tax credits by 2% and we’ll make them applicable to people who have income over 150.” If you get into that in those weeds, it doesn’t work rhetorically. It doesn’t work politically. But if you have big ideas, you can break off a lot of things from it. Just like Mundanis, I’m going to open five free grocery stores. It drove the right wing people crazy. But what it also did is it generated a lot of attention because people were debating ideas. It was bold, a city owned grocery store. But I think it did more than the policy itself was the fact that it made campaigning easier because the idea was bold and it created a lot of traction, a lot of discussion. And if the Democrats come and say, “This is just unacceptable.” We cannot have a country where people do not have healthcare. If they can be bold like that, it’ll generate discussion. And I’m sure you hear a lot of that like, “Well, we have to be kind of in the middle.” No, being in the middle and being incrementalist doesn’t get you attention and you won’t win. So unless Democrats are embracing healthcare all the way from top to bottom, they haven’t learned a thing. Taya Graham: It’s interesting you mentioned attention because I think the war has really been a great distraction. Don’t you think so? Stephen Janis: Yeah, the war has been a huge distraction from almost everything. And it makes it hard for Democrats to make that argument. But a leader will see an opportunity and say, “You know what? Trump is being engaged in this Strait of Hormez business, but we’re going to talk about what Americans really care about, which is being able to go to the doctor and pay for it. ” But I just don’t think there’s a leader with that kind of vision. I would call it a Mamdani kind of vision, being able to see the opportunity for changing the dialogue. And they have got to do that. And Chuck Schumer’s not going to do it. We saw him. Taya Graham: Well, yes, we did see him in person at that protest at the Federal Reserve, and I hate to say it, but his speech was not particularly inspiring to the crowd. But speaking of distractions, that’s going to lead us to our next video. And that’s because the just scant attention paid to the missing Epstein files came up when Rokhana was asked a question about the Epstein class. Now, it was a question about former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s refusal to appear before the House Oversight Committee, despite the fact that she’d been subpoenaed. Now, Bondi says she doesn’t have to appear anymore because she’s no longer the attorney general, but this led to Rokhana of accusing the Department of Justice of basically hiding evidence. Let’s take a listen. What don’t you know yet about the Epstein files? Ro Khanna: I don’t know a lot. I don’t know why the three million files that have been held have been so blacked out. Why the redactions took place in March where a lot of the names that were mentioned of people who were abusers, who raped young girls, why those are all blacked out and even members of Congress can’t see them. They claim, “Oh, this is to protect survivors.” But you don’t need to blank out three million pages of documents just to protect survivors’ names. That would be the first question. Why aren’t they releasing the actual documents where most of the people are named who raped and abused these girls? The second thing I don’t know is why she refused to meet with survivors. Why not meet with survivor’s lawyers? Just from protecting yourself. If I were attorney general, I would say, “Well, let me get the survivor’s groups in. Let’s have a process that the survivor’s lawyers agree to so that if there are any honest mistakes, we could have had the survivors buy-in and I wouldn’t get blamed.” But they refused to meet any of the survivors’ lawyers. They refused to sit down with the survivors. Why? Third, why are they not starting investigations in a criminal matter with people with serious allegations like Les Wexner, like Leon Black? I was asked recently about the very disturbing allegations against Congressman Swalwell, and how do I square that with the Epstein class? And I said, “There needs to be accountability, whether you’re a member of Congress or whether you raped or abused allegedly girls on Epstein’s Island.” But the Manhattan DA is within days opened up an investigation into Congressman Swalwell, and yet for years we don’t have a single investigation into Leon Black and into Les Wexner. Why? Why is there no investigation? How powerful are these people that you’ve not opened up a single investigation for prosecution of the people mentioned in the Epstein falls? Taya Graham: Now, Steven, we’ve both been going through the Epstein emails, and in fact, we’re going to have a large story coming out about what we’ve learned. But what’s the deal with Rokana? I mean, do you think his concerns here add up? Okay. Stephen Janis: I’m going to make a public announcement right now commenting on that. And I’m going to say something that is absolutely patently false and this question and this answer proves it. No one is above the law. That’s just utter BS in the United States of America. True. And the fact that that discussion happened at the National Press Club shows it. I’ve heard it so many times repeated ad nauseum and every day the Epstein continues without investigations, without accountability, with the poor victims coming to the Capitol Hill, just to be recognized who were not recognized. Without an interview with the attorney general, the idea that no one is above the law is absolutely false. And it speaks to the rampant inequality that we’re dealing with that people, there’s a different form of justice system for them and really what you would call like blanket immunity. We talked about on the police accountability report, blanket criminality. We’re a poor community. Everyone is suspect. Well, in the rich community, there is blanket immunity for the 1% and that’s what we’re talking about. No one is above law is absolutely untrue and this proves it. Taya Graham: Well said. And Congressman Rocano does make a point here. He does essentially illustrate that we have a two-tier justice system. And to me personally, as a woman who has covered this story extensively, I have interviewed survivors one-on-one. It’s the acknowledgement part that I have a really big problem with. I mean, the DOJ literally won’t even talk to these women. I mean, how is that even possible? How can that possibly be justified? It’s like you said, a blanket of immunity for the rich and powerful. And while the Trump administration is trying to send people to jail for throwing a sandwich while protesting, rich, powerful men who preyed on young women and children don’t even warrant a review by the DOJ. And I think this goes to the heart of inequality in this country. I’ve covered so many cases on the police accountability report. Like you said, of people driving to work or walking on a sidewalk or doing something completely innocent and they end up in the crosshairs of the police and their lives are upended. Meanwhile, the Epstein class seems untouchable, at least based on what has not happened at the DOJ. And the Epstein class leads to a question that I asked that was directed to Rokana. And namely, how could we prevent a new Epstein class from forming in the wake of the concentrated wealth and power that will be the result of this AI boom? So let’s listen to this answer. Let’s run the next clip. Taya Graham: Follow on AI question from Taya Graham of the Real News Network here in the audience. Do you support breaking up or regulating major tech firms to prevent AI from creating another Epstein class? Ro Khanna: Yes. I mean, we’re going to need to do more than that to prevent an Epstein class. We’re going to need to have attacks on billionaires, but absolutely we need to have AI regulation. I mean, I don’t even understand how this is a question. We have electricity and electricity is regulated. We have nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is regulated. We fly on planes. Great thing. And I’m glad there’s an FAA. Has anyone ever been on a plane when they’re like, “Wow, there are too many regulations.” Oh, you’re like, “Thank you. They’re seat belts. Thank you that you have all the … They say the same thing over and over again every time you board.” So AI, which by the founder’s own belief is a technology with that kind of power. Why wouldn’t you want safety regulations on it? Why wouldn’t you want to make sure there was certification and appropriate checks? And we should have that done in a federal regulatory AI agency. And we shouldn’t have a race to the bottom with China. We should say America will provide the safest, most excellent AI where you know that the AI isn’t going to take your data, where you know that the AI isn’t going to do crazy things. And if China wants to have a race to the bottom, let’s see who the Europeans and Asians and Africans want to buy the AI from. We should say we will have the highest level. And then I think we also need open source so that you don’t concentrate all the power in these companies. Taya Graham: Okay. Steven, what’s your take? Is Silicon Valley basically creating a new Epstein class? Stephen Janis: I love the metaphor that you use in your question because you are actually tiogram just so we know. Epstein class. What does an Epstein class connote? Well, it says that they’re all in kind of classical. They’re learning. They’re watching and learning. Look, the non-tech billionaires who got caught up in, like Leon Black got caught up in this scandal of Epstein are not being prosecuted. What are we going to learn from that? They’re not being investigated. That’s really interesting. Their names are being redacted while victims are being exposed. What are they learning? The Epstein class is getting smarter and they’re saying, “Well, you know what? I mean, maybe we’re not going to be pedophiles, but we can sure break the law and abuse our power because look what happened to these guys. Absolutely nothing.” So the Epstein class is really kind of, to me, it’s not funny, but it’s kind of ironic because it’s like we’re all going to learn together from the past scandals that when we have these AI companies and this massive amount of concentrated power, we certainly don’t have to follow law because they didn’t have to. And we’re actually more Taya Graham: Powerful.What concerns me is that this level of power and therefore this level of immunity will be godlike. I mean, if AI ends up rewiring the economy and throwing millions of Americans out of work, the power will continue to accrue to these people with capital. And that balance is already fraught in this country with, as we mentioned, historic wealth inequality, but it will only increase if AI evolves as predicted. For example, how will our justice system be able to corral an executive or major stakeholder in a technology that could literally replace humanity? Exactly. I mean, their absolute power will dwarf what was afforded to the owners of the social media platforms. I mean, a democracy cannot accommodate gods, and that’s what we will be trying to do. Okay, let me settle down. Stephen Janis: Yeah, but you make a good point. I mean, it really is getting close to godlike power. I mean, these people are actually espousing and saying, “We’re going to kill two million, four million, five million jobs.” They’re saying this without missing a beat. They’re not like, “We have to account for humanity and somehow help people. ” They’re like, “Yeah, it’s just a fact of life. We’re going to do this. ” And in the process, we’re going to become unfathomably rich. Let’s remember AI, OpenAI was started as a nonprofit and look what happened to Taya Graham: That. Compact change. Stephen Janis: These people are feeling it and I think they’re looking at the M.S. Glasses saying, “Yeah, well boy, they got away with this. ” Just imagine what we can get. We have no obligation. I mean, Rokana said in a press conference, we covered them that the second gilded age, which we’re currently in is worse than the first, and that the people at the top are doing less in terms of social largest than they did in the past. There’s no Carnegie Library. There’s no Sam Altman libraries right now. So imagine the power they’re going to have and the past statement I made about no one is above the law. They’re not even going to think of the law. It’s not even going to matter. They’re going to probably be making laws about us. Oh, Taya Graham: Absolutely. Stephen Janis: Identifying us and putting us in jail. Taya Graham: Absolutely. Especially with Citizens United, the amount of political power they’re going to be able to accrue is just going to be nearly impossible for the rest of us to be able to overcome. And then when you keep in mind the fact that none of them have proposed any sort of worker transition programs for people who lose their jobs to AI or any sort of fund for people who lose their jobs AI.com. Yeah, exactly. Nothing like that. Exactly. No. As well as their people who are fighting town by town to just protect their fresh water because the AI data centers are just stealing it from underneath them. I mean, if there is no regulation, I truly fear for the fate of our country. Stephen Janis: Well, you talked about the Epstein class and now we have the AI class Taya Graham: And Stephen Janis: We’ll see what the AI class does because I think they’re going to be quite difficult to deal with. Taya Graham: I think you’re absolutely right. Okay. So now let’s get to our segment called, I told you so, or better yet, our accountability moment that highlights when politicians equivocate and we catch them. Okay. So let me set the scene. Last year when we wandered into a press conference on Doge, now remember back then, the Department of Government Efficiency was led by Elon Musk and he led a group of tech bros that tried to dismantle the federal government basically like three weeks. Well, that didn’t actually work out too well. And Elon was briskly escorted off the premises and the Dosh swag was stuffed into a trash bag left in the former West Wing just prior to its demolition. Also, I did not receive my $5,000 DOS check. Let me know if you did. But the reason this is I told you so is a question that we asked Republicans touting DOJ last year. Okay, let’s see how they answer it. Let’s watch. Stephen Janis: Congressman, a third of the digital service resigned over concerns about access to sensitive information. What guarantees can you give to the American people that their sensitive information won’t be accessed by someone who’s not elected or otherwise appointed or otherwise? Ro Khanna: Let me say this, the IRS failed that test and has failed it for many, many, many years. We need to make sure that we give the tools and the correct tools in technology. And I talked to government technologists just two days ago within the Zoom call where we talked about their needs to make sure that they are brought in and that technology that is efficient and that works properly is a part of the future. Taya Graham: Now, Stephen, just recently there was a development specifically related to your question, which turned out to be so prescient as a whistleblower reported to an Inspector General that a former Doze software engineer told colleagues he had two thumb drives of highly sensitive social security information for over 500 million people, both living in debt. Steven, what on earth is going on here? Stephen Janis: Well, first thing I want to say is it’s been a year and a half since I asked that question like, “Can you guarantee the safety of your data?” And I still really don’t understand Pete’s session’s answer. That’s Congressman Pete’s sessions and he started talking something about the IRS and Taya Graham: How Stephen Janis: They failed or the treasury department. And I still don’t understand what he was saying, but it shows that he couldn’t answer the question because he knew something was afoot. And what was afoot was that these Doge Bros were like downloading social security data, which is the most sensitive data that we have. It includes our social security numbers, address, date of birth, just a way to open up a phantom credit card on everyone in the United States of America. So this also shows, I think, makes a very important point that the policy, like the way you implement and execute policies in the Trump administration is totally freaking off the rails. I mean, they have kids with thumb drives going around in the social security office downloading data. Think about that. Think about all the horrible things that could happen, but also think about the difference between the conceptualization of Doj and the implementation of Doge. Yes. The conceptualization is we’re all going to go in there and kind of literally, like you said, dismantle the government and save $2 trillion. Taya Graham: Yes. Stephen Janis: And what was the execution? Well, almost no money was saved of any material amount. True. Taya Graham: And Stephen Janis: Yet we keep having these repercussions like we all saw the famous TikTok videos of the Doge staffers talking about how they dismantled grants for people, I think from the National Endowment of the Arts on really using AI without even thinking about Taya Graham: It. Stephen Janis: So the point is that this is a perfect example, but it’s also showing how the Republicans are not doing their job in holding the Trump administration accountable. Taya Graham: Steven, I remember thinking when you asked the Congressman that his answer just didn’t make any sense. And now we’ve got a kid walking around with social security data, which of course is about a sensitive and potentially harmful information as it gets. Now, it’s worth noting this press conference happened on what’s known as the House Triangle. It’s a space adjacent to the House Chambers where members can hold press conferences. But oddly enough, or maybe even intentionally, that was the last time we saw a Republican holding court in that spot. Now, Steven, you’ve managed to corral a random Republican on the Capitol steps after the House convenes, but they’ve pretty much been absent from the triangle, at least for us. I mean, why do you think that is? Stephen Janis: Yeah. Well, I think after they passed a big, beautiful bill, they didn’t want to talk to the press In some of the unscripted ways. I mean, I monitor the electronic bulletimore, which tells you every day who’s going to be there. And I rarely … It’s not like I have not seen one, but I rarely see one. And I think after the big, beautiful bill, they just kind of vanish. I mean, they really just cut and run. I haven’t seen them, and I think they just don’t really want to have to answer questions about the particulars of that bill, especially when people are panicking over healthcare costs, the ACA credits, the Obamacare subsidies, which they let lapse. They just don’t want to answer questions about these very important issues. And now that gas is over $4 a gallon, I think they want to be also discreetly out of the spotlight. So that’s why, and it’s pretty frustrating because I really have a lot of questions I want to ask them, but I’m going to keep pushing. Taya Graham: Well, I’m going to keep pushing with you. Oh, good. Okay? Well, that basically wraps up our inequality Watch React Show. We appreciate you watching. And of course, if you have any ideas about how to hold the ultra rich accountable, we’d love to hear them. Just drop them down in the comments below. My name is Taya Graham, along with my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, and we are your inequality watchdogs reporting for you. From The Real News Network via This RSS Feed.

Komunitas lemmygrad.ml

Hackers Expose The Massive Surveillance Stack Hiding Inside Your “Age Verification” Check

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11354233 Archive link: https://archive.ph/MjhpZ (Links omitted) We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached. Every single time. And every single time it happens, the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that built them act shocked—shocked!—that collecting enormous databases of government IDs, facial scans, and biometric data from millions of people turns out to be a security nightmare. Well, here we go again. A couple weeks ago, Discord announced it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience, meaning all users would be shunted into a restricted experience unless they verified their age through biometric scanning. The internet, predictably, was not thrilled. But while many users were busy venting their frustration, a group of security researchers decided to do something more useful: they took a look under the hood at Persona, one of the companies Discord was using for verification (specifically for users in the UK). What they found, according to The Rage, was exactly what we would predict: Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server. In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting – and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies. Let me say that again: 2,456 publicly accessible files sitting on a government-authorized server, exposed to the open internet. Files that revealed a system performing not a simple age check, but a ton of potentially intrusive checks: Once a user verifies their identity with Persona, the software performs 269 distinct verification checks and scours the internet and government sources for potential matches, such as by matching your face to politically exposed persons (PEPs), and generating risk and similarity scores for each individual. IP addresses, browser fingerprints, device fingerprints, government ID numbers, phone numbers, names, faces, and even selfie backgrounds are analyzed and retained for up to three years. The information the software evaluates on the images themselves includes “Selfie Suspicious Entity Detection,” a “Selfie Age Inconsistency Comparison,” similar background detection, which appears to be matched to other users in the database, and a “Selfie Pose Repeated Detection,” which seems to be used to determine whether you are using the same pose as in previous pictures. This was the same company checking whether a teenager should be allowed to use voice chat on a gaming platform. Beyond offering simple services to estimate your age, Persona’s exposed code compares your selfie to watchlist photos using facial recognition, screens you against 14 categories of adverse media from mentions of terrorism to espionage, and tags reports with codenames from active intelligence programs consisting of public-private partnerships to combat online child exploitative material, cannabis trafficking, fentanyl trafficking, romance fraud, money laundering, and illegal wildlife trade. So you wanted to verify you’re old enough to use voice chat, and now there’s a permanent risk score somewhere documenting whether you might be involved in illegal wildlife trafficking. What could go wrong? As the researchers put it to The Rage: “The internet was supposed to be the great equalizer. Information wants to be free, the network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, all that beautiful optimism. And for a minute it was true.” [….] “The state wants to see everything. The corporations want to see everything. And they’ve learned to work together.” Discord, to its credit, has now said it will not be proceeding with Persona for identity verification. And to be fair, Discord and similar internet companies are in an impossible position here—facing mounting regulatory pressure in multiple jurisdictions to verify ages while being handed a market of vendors who keep turning out to be security nightmares. But this is part of a pattern that should be deeply familiar by now. Just last year, Discord’s previous third-party age verification partner suffered a breach that exposed 70,000 government ID photos, which were then held for ransom. Discord said it stopped using that vendor. Then it moved to Persona, which was already raising concerns due to connections to Peter Thiel. Now Persona’s frontend is found wide open on a government-authorized server, and Discord is dropping them too. See the pattern? Discord keeps swapping vendors like someone frantically rotating buckets under a leaking roof, apparently hoping the next bucket won’t have a hole in it. But the problem was never the bucket. The problem is the hole in the roof — the never-ending stream of age-verification government mandates. And this brings us to the bigger, more important point that almost nobody in the “protect the children” policy crowd seems willing to engage with honestly. Every single time you mandate age verification, you are mandating the creation of a centralized database of extraordinarily sensitive personal information. Government IDs. Biometric facial data. The kind of data that, once breached, cannot be “changed” like a password. You get one face. You get one government ID number. When those leak—and they will leak—the damage is permanent. Even the IEEE Spectrum Magazine is now publishing articles that detail how age verification undermines any effort to protect children by putting their privacy at risk. These systems fail in predictable ways. False positives are common. Platforms identify as minors adults with youthful faces, or adults who are sharing family devices, or have otherwise unusual usage. They lock accounts, sometimes for days. False negatives also persist. Teenagers learn quickly how to evade checks by borrowing IDs, cycling accounts, or using VPNs. The appeal process itself creates new privacy risks. Platforms must store biometric data, ID images, and verification logs long enough to defend their decisions to regulators. So if an adult who is tired of submitting selfies to verify their age finally uploads an ID, the system must now secure that stored ID. Each retained record becomes a potential breach target. Scale that experience across millions of users, and you bake the privacy risk into how platforms work. We have been cataloging these breaches for years. In 2024, Australia greenlit an age verification pilot, and hours later a mandated verification database for bars was breached. That same year, another ID verification service was breached, exposing private info collected on behalf of Uber, TikTok, and more. Then came the Discord vendor breach last year. And now Persona. This keeps happening because it has to keep happening. It’s the inevitable result of a system designed to aggregate the exact kind of data that attackers most want to steal. Computer scientists and privacy experts have been sounding this alarm for years. And what makes this even more galling is that these age verification systems don’t even accomplish what they claim to accomplish. Take Australia’s infamous ban on social media for under-16s, the poster child for this approach. It’s been a complete failure on its own terms: plenty of kids have already figured out ways around the ban, while those who can’t—particularly kids with disabilities who relied on social platforms for community—are being actively harmed by their exclusion. As the security researcher who helped discover the Persona leak, Celeste, told The Rage: “Normies won’t be able to bypass these,” while less benevolent people “will always find ways to exploit your system.” So we’ve built a system that fails to keep out the people it’s supposedly targeting, while successfully creating permanent biometric dossiers on millions of law-abiding users. Not great! Meanwhile, what’s happening at the legislative level is perhaps even more cynical. Governments around the world are pushing harder and harder for mandatory age verification online. And as these mandates create a captive market worth billions of dollars, a whole ecosystem of venture-backed “identity-as-a-service” startups has sprung up to serve it. Persona, valued at $2 billion and backed by Peter Thiel’s investment network, is just one of many. These companies make grand promises about privacy-preserving verification, get contracts with major platforms, and then — whoops — leave 2,456 files exposed on a government server. And, of course, these very firms are now lobbying for stricter age verification mandates. They’ve positioned themselves as protectors of children while actively working to expand the legal requirements that guarantee their revenue stream. Lawmakers mandate an impossible task, VC-backed startups pop up to sell a “solution,” those startups then lobby for even stricter mandates to protect their market, and the cycle repeats. “Child safety” has simply become the marketing department for a rent-seeking surveillance industry. As long as the law demands that these biometric gates exist, the “security” of the data they collect will always be a secondary concern to “compliance” with the mandate. Companies will keep rotating through vendors, each one promising that their system is the one that won’t leak, right up until it does. And the age verification industry will keep lobbying for stricter laws, because every new mandate is another guaranteed revenue stream. The researchers who exposed Persona’s frontend hope their findings will serve as a wake-up call. Given the track record, it probably won’t be. Discord dropping Persona changes nothing—the next vendor will collect the same data, make the same promises, and eventually suffer the same breach. Because the problem was never which company holds your biometric data. The problem is that anyone is being forced to hand it over in the first place.

Komunitas lemmygrad.ml

Hackers Expose The Massive Surveillance Stack Hiding Inside Your “Age Verification” Check

Archive link: https://archive.ph/MjhpZ (Links omitted) We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached. Every single time. And every single time it happens, the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that built them act shocked—shocked!—that collecting enormous databases of government IDs, facial scans, and biometric data from millions of people turns out to be a security nightmare. Well, here we go again. A couple weeks ago, Discord announced it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience, meaning all users would be shunted into a restricted experience unless they verified their age through biometric scanning. The internet, predictably, was not thrilled. But while many users were busy venting their frustration, a group of security researchers decided to do something more useful: they took a look under the hood at Persona, one of the companies Discord was using for verification (specifically for users in the UK). What they found, according to The Rage, was exactly what we would predict: Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server. In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting – and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies. Let me say that again: 2,456 publicly accessible files sitting on a government-authorized server, exposed to the open internet. Files that revealed a system performing not a simple age check, but a ton of potentially intrusive checks: Once a user verifies their identity with Persona, the software performs 269 distinct verification checks and scours the internet and government sources for potential matches, such as by matching your face to politically exposed persons (PEPs), and generating risk and similarity scores for each individual. IP addresses, browser fingerprints, device fingerprints, government ID numbers, phone numbers, names, faces, and even selfie backgrounds are analyzed and retained for up to three years. The information the software evaluates on the images themselves includes “Selfie Suspicious Entity Detection,” a “Selfie Age Inconsistency Comparison,” similar background detection, which appears to be matched to other users in the database, and a “Selfie Pose Repeated Detection,” which seems to be used to determine whether you are using the same pose as in previous pictures. This was the same company checking whether a teenager should be allowed to use voice chat on a gaming platform. Beyond offering simple services to estimate your age, Persona’s exposed code compares your selfie to watchlist photos using facial recognition, screens you against 14 categories of adverse media from mentions of terrorism to espionage, and tags reports with codenames from active intelligence programs consisting of public-private partnerships to combat online child exploitative material, cannabis trafficking, fentanyl trafficking, romance fraud, money laundering, and illegal wildlife trade. So you wanted to verify you’re old enough to use voice chat, and now there’s a permanent risk score somewhere documenting whether you might be involved in illegal wildlife trafficking. What could go wrong? As the researchers put it to The Rage: “The internet was supposed to be the great equalizer. Information wants to be free, the network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, all that beautiful optimism. And for a minute it was true.” [….] “The state wants to see everything. The corporations want to see everything. And they’ve learned to work together.” Discord, to its credit, has now said it will not be proceeding with Persona for identity verification. And to be fair, Discord and similar internet companies are in an impossible position here—facing mounting regulatory pressure in multiple jurisdictions to verify ages while being handed a market of vendors who keep turning out to be security nightmares. But this is part of a pattern that should be deeply familiar by now. Just last year, Discord’s previous third-party age verification partner suffered a breach that exposed 70,000 government ID photos, which were then held for ransom. Discord said it stopped using that vendor. Then it moved to Persona, which was already raising concerns due to connections to Peter Thiel. Now Persona’s frontend is found wide open on a government-authorized server, and Discord is dropping them too. See the pattern? Discord keeps swapping vendors like someone frantically rotating buckets under a leaking roof, apparently hoping the next bucket won’t have a hole in it. But the problem was never the bucket. The problem is the hole in the roof — the never-ending stream of age-verification government mandates. And this brings us to the bigger, more important point that almost nobody in the “protect the children” policy crowd seems willing to engage with honestly. Every single time you mandate age verification, you are mandating the creation of a centralized database of extraordinarily sensitive personal information. Government IDs. Biometric facial data. The kind of data that, once breached, cannot be “changed” like a password. You get one face. You get one government ID number. When those leak—and they will leak—the damage is permanent. Even the IEEE Spectrum Magazine is now publishing articles that detail how age verification undermines any effort to protect children by putting their privacy at risk. These systems fail in predictable ways. False positives are common. Platforms identify as minors adults with youthful faces, or adults who are sharing family devices, or have otherwise unusual usage. They lock accounts, sometimes for days. False negatives also persist. Teenagers learn quickly how to evade checks by borrowing IDs, cycling accounts, or using VPNs. The appeal process itself creates new privacy risks. Platforms must store biometric data, ID images, and verification logs long enough to defend their decisions to regulators. So if an adult who is tired of submitting selfies to verify their age finally uploads an ID, the system must now secure that stored ID. Each retained record becomes a potential breach target. Scale that experience across millions of users, and you bake the privacy risk into how platforms work. We have been cataloging these breaches for years. In 2024, Australia greenlit an age verification pilot, and hours later a mandated verification database for bars was breached. That same year, another ID verification service was breached, exposing private info collected on behalf of Uber, TikTok, and more. Then came the Discord vendor breach last year. And now Persona. This keeps happening because it has to keep happening. It’s the inevitable result of a system designed to aggregate the exact kind of data that attackers most want to steal. Computer scientists and privacy experts have been sounding this alarm for years. And what makes this even more galling is that these age verification systems don’t even accomplish what they claim to accomplish. Take Australia’s infamous ban on social media for under-16s, the poster child for this approach. It’s been a complete failure on its own terms: plenty of kids have already figured out ways around the ban, while those who can’t—particularly kids with disabilities who relied on social platforms for community—are being actively harmed by their exclusion. As the security researcher who helped discover the Persona leak, Celeste, told The Rage: “Normies won’t be able to bypass these,” while less benevolent people “will always find ways to exploit your system.” So we’ve built a system that fails to keep out the people it’s supposedly targeting, while successfully creating permanent biometric dossiers on millions of law-abiding users. Not great! Meanwhile, what’s happening at the legislative level is perhaps even more cynical. Governments around the world are pushing harder and harder for mandatory age verification online. And as these mandates create a captive market worth billions of dollars, a whole ecosystem of venture-backed “identity-as-a-service” startups has sprung up to serve it. Persona, valued at $2 billion and backed by Peter Thiel’s investment network, is just one of many. These companies make grand promises about privacy-preserving verification, get contracts with major platforms, and then — whoops — leave 2,456 files exposed on a government server. And, of course, these very firms are now lobbying for stricter age verification mandates. They’ve positioned themselves as protectors of children while actively working to expand the legal requirements that guarantee their revenue stream. Lawmakers mandate an impossible task, VC-backed startups pop up to sell a “solution,” those startups then lobby for even stricter mandates to protect their market, and the cycle repeats. “Child safety” has simply become the marketing department for a rent-seeking surveillance industry. As long as the law demands that these biometric gates exist, the “security” of the data they collect will always be a secondary concern to “compliance” with the mandate. Companies will keep rotating through vendors, each one promising that their system is the one that won’t leak, right up until it does. And the age verification industry will keep lobbying for stricter laws, because every new mandate is another guaranteed revenue stream. The researchers who exposed Persona’s frontend hope their findings will serve as a wake-up call. Given the track record, it probably won’t be. Discord dropping Persona changes nothing—the next vendor will collect the same data, make the same promises, and eventually suffer the same breach. Because the problem was never which company holds your biometric data. The problem is that anyone is being forced to hand it over in the first place.

Komunitas news.abolish.capital

Paramount’s Purchase of CNN Heralds a New Trump-Friendly Media Empire

The Hollywood Reporter (2/27/26) reported Paramount‘s disclosure that funding for its WBD takeover “may include other strategic and financial partners” who go unnamed. The Reporter noted that “previous bids included funding from Middle East sovereign wealth funds, Tencent and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners.” The ultra-wealthy have long leveraged their capital to build sprawling media empires that narrow our public range of debate (FAIR.org, 6/1/87). But Paramount Skydance‘s winning bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) marks a major milestone in media monopolization that, if successful, will further expand Trump-allied tech moguls Larry and David Ellison’s burgeoning power over US news and entertainment media. Even before a winner was announced, the bidding war among Paramount, Netflix and Comcast to take over WBD had attracted intense scrutiny, as the acquisition would not only confer lucrative franchises and a huge advantage in the streaming wars, but also control of major media outlets, including CNN, consolidating a greater swath of the media ecosystem under a single owner. The fallout of the deal was destined to enhance the power of an already-sizable media behemoth, no matter which corporate giant won. On February 27, 2026, after a series of hostile takeover bids by Paramount that disrupted what seemed to be a done deal between Netflix and WBD, Netflix abruptly pulled out of the struggle for ownership, stating that it would not be matching Paramount’s higher offer. The current Paramount offer is valued at $31 per share and, including WBD’s debt load, amounts to a grand total of roughly $111 billion. Father-and-son moguls Alex Shephard (New Republic, 10/27/25): “The administration will use its antitrust power to ensure that it gets the owner of Warner Bros. that it wants: the Ellison family.” Steering this deal, and Paramount’s rapid expansion, are Larry and David Ellison, father-and-son moguls who, in just a single year, have parlayed their tech fortune into a colossal media empire. Larry Ellison, billionaire co-founder of Oracle, has bankrolled Paramount’s ballooning growth, which is overseen by his son David. The pair are notoriously close to Donald Trump, and have already weaponized their newfound media control to shift public discourse to the right (FAIR.org, 9/9/25, 9/19/25, 10/9/25, 11/6/25). In August 2025, the Ellisons’ Skydance Media acquired Paramount, owner of CBS, and spearheaded a blatant ideological overhaul of the news network (FAIR.org, 7/24/25). This MAGA-friendly transformation has been aided by Ellison-appointed editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who had previously made a name for herself as an “anti-woke” crusader and founder of the right-wing media company Free Press. Weiss has been at the forefront of such decisions as canceling the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, pulling a 60 Minutes episode that criticized the Trump administration’s mistreatment of Venezuelan migrants, and promoting Tony Dokoupil to primetime anchor, where he promptly gave War Secretary Pete Hegseth an extended and uncritical platform. Less than six months after the closure of the Paramount deal, in January 2026, Larry Ellison finalized a deal with TikTok, which sold 80% of its US operations to an investor consortium that includes Oracle, and left Ellison with a majority stake in TikTok’s US operations. Since then, a number of changes have been implemented that reek of censorship and surveillance. For one, TikTok immediately altered its privacy policy to permit more extensive data collection, including tracking user location. There have also been accusations of content suppression. This became a prominent conversation after the murder of Alex Pretti, as many users reported that they were unable to upload anti-ICE posts and that, if uploaded, their content was receiving unusually low engagement. Researchers found there was a site-wide outage at the time, but they pointed out that because TikTok isn’t transparent with its data or its algorithm, there’s no way to confirm it’s not shadowbanning content (NPR, 2/4/26) Now, on the precipice of acquiring WBD, with a targeted completion date of September 30, 2026, the Ellisons are slated to have massively expanded their entertainment, media and tech empire in barely over a year. If the deal moves forward, the family would gain control of a vast portfolio spanning legacy media and Big Tech—including film, news, television, sports and social media—granting them substantial influence over how the world is seen and understood. Shuffling the media oligarchy In FAIR’s recent online news ownership study (2/3/26), WBD took the third spot and Paramount/Skydance the 16th. By taking over WBD, the Ellisons would vault into third, just behind Rupert Murdoch’s dynasty. What does this look like in terms of numbers? According to Pew, 37% of adults in the US use TikTok. Pew notes that “just over half of US adults who use TikTok (55%) say they regularly get news there. That works out to 20% of all US adults,” or about 54 million people. Given TikTok’s expanding reach as a news source, the Ellisons’ ownership of the platform is especially significant. When factoring in CBS and the additional audience that would accompany an acquisition of CNN, the scope of Ellison-owned media widens even more. As FAIR noted in a recent study (2/3/26), the digital reach alone of these networks is considerable—from December 2024 to November 2025, CBS and CNN attracted 905 million and 4 billion views, respectively. If we use these numbers to project a future in which the Ellisons control CNN, their annual online news view count would be around 5 billion. The actual broadcast and cable TV viewership of CBS and CNN adds relatively little to the Ellisons’ reach: In a recent week in March, CNN averaged 751,000 total primetime viewers, while the CBS Evening News typically had an audience of 4.3 million in the first quarter of 2026. While the Ellisons’ rapidly consolidating media dynasty is not unprecedented, these developments have reconfigured the media oligarchy, partially displacing established players and amassing holdings that extend beyond traditional cable and print news into digital and technology media. Revisiting FAIR’s ranking of digital media owners by site traffic, an Ellison acquisition of WBD would catapult them to the No. 3 spot, driven by CNN’s more than 4 billion annual visits, placing them just behind the No. 1 Ochs-Sulzberger family of the New York Times and the No. 2 Murdoch family. However, unlike with the Ochs-Sulzbergers, the Ellison media empire would also translate to a strong broadcast and cable news presence, as CNN is regarded as one of the “Big Three” cable news channels, generally trailing only Fox News and Comcast’s MS NOW (formerly MSNBC). And, although the Murdochs wield considerable power in cable, digital and print news, the Ellison portfolio expands into the social media realm as well. This is notable considering the ever-increasing number of Americans that rely on social media for news. According to Pew, 53% of US adults get news from social media “sometimes” or “often.” Facebook and YouTube are the most popular sites for news, while 20% get news “regularly” from Instagram and TikTok. While the Ellisons do not lead in social media news ownership—that distinction belongs to Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google (which owns YouTube)—their media empire, like the Murdochs’, ranks prominently across multiple platforms. Corrupted regulation The Wall Street Journal (12/8/25) reported that “David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN…. Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.” The Paramount/WBD deal has been unanimously approved by the boards of both companies. The next phase is a WBD shareholders vote, which is scheduled to take place on April 23, 2026, and is expected to move forward without complications. Reuters (2/27/26) reports that approval in the EU is not anticipated to pose a significant hurdle, given that a combined Paramount/WBD entity would hold less than a 20% market share across European markets. In the US, the merger would require clearance from both the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which are both controlled by Trump appointees. The anti–public interest antics of FCC chair Brendan Carr are already well-documented by FAIR (2/26/25, 4/2/26; CounterSpin, 4/4/25), and newly appointed Attorney General Todd Blanche appears to have been promoted solely for his unwavering deference to Trump. DoJ official Omeed Assefi, himself a Trump appointee, has insisted that the transaction would “absolutely not” be fast-tracked for political reasons. Yet this claim has been loudly contradicted by statements from Trump’s inner circle. For instance, Hegseth recently said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network [CNN], the better.” A lawsuit filed against Paramount and assorted executives by a former consultant alleges that the elder Ellison was told by Trump, “Larry, it looks like Netflix is gonna get Warner Bros., but if you really really want it, Larry, I’ll make sure you get it” (Hollywood Reporter, 3/17/26). Even if Trump has not explicitly vocalized his preference for an Ellison-owned CNN, it is clear that his personal preference effectively amounts to federal regulatory approval. Put simply, when it comes to antitrust matters, or virtually anything regulatory, pandering to Trump is a prerequisite. And the Ellisons are not shy about pandering: In early December 2025, while the Netflix deal was still in play, David Ellison met with Trump and DoJ officials in Washington, DC, where he publicly pitched that, if Paramount acquired WBD, he would implement “sweeping changes” at CNN. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (12/8/25) observed, shady backdoor dealing and political corruption form the scaffolding of the media oligarchy, a dynamic that reaches new extremes under the Trump regime: Trump has refashioned antitrust oversight to be little more than a personal veto for the Trump family. Friends can do mergers; foes can’t. Indeed, the indifferent and uncommitted can’t either. You need to get right with the Trump family. Hope from the states David Dayen (American Prospect, 2/27/26): “A lifeline exists outside of Trump’s grasp to rethink this looming disaster…. But the state AGs are going to have to act fast.” While it seems unlikely that federal officials with the power to intervene will do so, there is some cause for optimism at the state level. State governments, particularly state attorneys general, have both the authority and a track record of blocking mergers, even those approved by federal agencies. Currently leading the charge is California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who, immediately following the news of a potential Paramount/WBD deal, posted on X (2/26/26) that his office would vigorously investigate the merger. California has taken center stage in this fight, due to the outsized impact that such a deal would have on the state’s television and film workforce. Recent history underscores the validity of these concerns. Just last year, mass layoffs followed the Ellisons’ Skydance/Paramount merger, demonstrating the damage that monopolistic practices wreak on workers. How effective this resistance will be against the sheer capital and political forces driving the Paramount/WBD deal remains uncertain. As David Dayen explains in the American Prospect (2/27/26), states are well aware of the path forward, and there is historical precedence for them to invoke the Clayton Act to challenge the merger. However, he emphasizes the need to act quickly, noting that states “are in a race against Paramount’s savvy consultants, who are trying to speedrun the deal in a matter of weeks.” ACTION ALERT: The progressive media policy group Free Press has a petition encouraging state attorneys general to block Paramount*‘s takeover of* WBD*.* From FAIR via This RSS Feed.

Komunitas aussie.zone

Meta launches 'Vibes,' a new short-video feed of AI-generated content nobody asked for

I almost reflexively downvoted this because the news pisses me off so much, before I stopped myself because it’s unfair to shoot the messenger. If you’re someone who actually believes AI-generated content can be good, why is this even necessary‽ Surely the AI stuff will just naturally rise to the top on YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram Reels. Is that not happening? I wonder why… Gotta hand it to Meta though, that is actually a brilliant name for the product.

Komunitas lemmy.nz

*Permanently Deleted*

Im guessing it’s going to be missing all the features that make tiktok popular like duets and pedophilia.

Komunitas news.abolish.capital

What The Epstein Files Reveal About America’s Elites | More Perfect Union

Epstein secretly invested millions in an Israeli AI company that surveils 911 calls. We investigated Epstein’s emails and his billionaire network. From Peter Thiel to Reid Hoffman to Leon Black, the Epstein class is still here, it’s bipartisan, and it’s extremely powerful. Credits: Writer and Producer: Sean Morrow Videographers: Addison Post, Shirley Chan Editor: Addison Post Video Production Manager: Isabel Atalaya Video Production Coordinator: Jodi Clemens Video Production Fellow: Astrid Dong Video Editing Fellow: Daria Nastasia Check out the.ink by Anand Giridharadas on Substack. More Perfect Union is an Emmy-winning, nonprofit newsroom whose mission is to build power for working people. Here’s what that means: We report on the real struggles and challenges of the working class from a working-class perspective. We attempt to connect those problems to potential solutions. We report on the abuses and wrongdoing of corporate power. And we seek to hold accountable the ultra-rich who have too much power over America’s political and economic systems. To support our independent journalism, subscribe, donate, and follow our other pages through the links below: Help fund our reporting: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/mpu-splash Substack: https://substack.perfectunion.us/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@moreperfectunion Twitter: https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/moreperfectunion.bsky.social Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MorePerfectUS Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/perfectunion/ Threads: https://www.threads.net/@perfectunion Website: https://www.perfectunion.us/ From More Perfect Union via This RSS Feed.