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Congress Is About to Break the Internet
>>> FREE SPEECH FRIDAY <<<
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On Tuesday, members of the House of Representatives gathered for a big hearing called Legislative Solutions to Protect Children and Teens Online. The hearing was the latest attempt by lawmakers to force through a slate of horrifying surveillance laws that would censor the internet, strip the ability to freely access information, and cause great harm to children, especially marginalized youth. The mainstream media has been covering none of this.
Kate Ruane is a director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, and she testified this Tuesday in front of congress about these evil laws. Today, she joins me to break down what's going on in congress, what these proposed laws would do, and why we're at such a crucial moment when it comes to preserving privacy and free expression on the internet.
Read up via the links below and call your representatives today and tell them to stop The SCREEN Act, kill The App Store Accountability Act, and kill the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).
KOSA Won?t Just Silence LGBTQ Voices; It Will Also Be Used To Hide Abortion Info From The Internet
Heritage Foundation Says That Of Course GOP Will Use KOSA To Censor LGBTQ Content
Why The Fuck Are Democrats Helping Build MAGA?s Censorship Machine With KOSA?
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The Radicalization Pipeline Nobody Sees Coming
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Lately, growing swaths of the online left have embraced a messaging strategy known broadly as Dark Woke. While traditional Democrats still try to reach across the aisle and find common ground with conservatives, more on the left are becoming comfortable embracing outright bigotry, slurs, hateful rhetoric, dunking on conservatives, and going full "dark woke."
Twitch streamer SeanDaBlack has been covering the rise of this culture, and he joined me to talk about the rise of "woke" culture in America, how social justice movements have been warped by the internet, what Dark Woke really means and whether it's a winning strategy to counter Trump's online dominance.
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None Of This is About Online Safety
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For decades, the Eelam Tamil ethnic group in Sri Lanka has been persecuted. They are dealing with ongoing occupation by the Sri Lankan government, which has also incited violence against Muslims in the country.
As tensions have escalated, the government has cracked down on speech, leaning hard into online censorship to censor anyone who questions the authority of the Sri Lankan government.
The government has banned social media, passed a restrictive "online safety act" and sought to enact strict controls over what can be said online, all under the guise of "online safety" and curbing "misinformation."
ArunAnnow has been covering the persecution of the Eelam Tamil people and the atrocities of the Sri Lankan government. He's an independent journalist and content creator. Today he's joining me to talk about the situation in Sri Lanka and how their "online safety" crusade is serving as a blueprint for authoritarian U.S. laws.
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Grief-Stricken Winds Documentary Website:
https://grief-stricken-winds.com/
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The MAGA Twitter Apocalypse w/ Charlie Warzel
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Over the weekend, Twitter descended into complete and utter chaos. Elon Musk rolled out a feature called ?About This Account? that allowed people to click on the profile of an X user and see exactly what country the account was created in, where its user is currently based, and how many times the username has been changed.
Dozens of major accounts masquerading as ?America First? or ?MAGA? were identified as originating in places like India, Pakistan, Russia, or Nigeria, engagement farming to earn money through X's creator revenue program, available to those who purchase a blue check.
Charlie Warzel is a longtime technology writer at The Atlantic who has been covering this rollout. Today he's joining me to discuss whether the "about this account" feature is truly 9/11 for pro MAGA accounts, how our internet is being warped by inauthentic activity, whether this truly signifies the end of the social web, and what comes next.
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[PATREON PREVIEW] How Zohran Won The Internet w/ the Creators 4 Zohran Founders
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Since Kamala Harris lost the election, there's been an endless debate among the Democrats on how to best reach young people online. Many centrists have claimed liberals need a "Joe Rogan of the left" and by left they usually mean center right. Others have leaned into memes and shitposting like Gavin Newsom.
Zohran Mamdani didn't do any of that and he won young voters, and especially young men, in a landslide. His digital strategy leaned into creator-style content and leveraged a ton of influencers, but in a way that felt natural, organic and centered his policies, which were the real engine behind his success.
Part of his success was due to Creators For Zohran, an influencer-led coalition aimed at boosting Zohran's messaging online, and Emilia Rowland, Zohran's new media and creator partnerships advisor, who led creator partnerships for Mamdani's campaign.
Emilia, along with Aiden Kohn Murphy and Alexis Williams, co-founders of Creators for Zohran, joined me to pull back the curtain on the work they did with Zohran, talk about what made his creator strategy so effective, and discuss how to build relevance and mobilize people in an increasingly fractured online world.
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The Most Depraved Commentary I've Ever Heard
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Right now, there's a clip going viral from former Obama White House aide and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz that is so appalling and depraved it's hard to believe it's real.
But many people are missing the most dangerous part of her commentary. Her comments reveal exactly what the ruling class in America wants to do to online speech, and why we need to fight back so hard to protect our online freedoms.
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The Epstein Saga Is Sending the Internet Into Chaos w/ Brace Belden
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Jeffrey Epstein is back in the news after a massive new cache of emails and text messages was released last week. Now, Congress is set to send to Trump legislation to compel the Justice Department to release even more records. The whole saga has become a messy political fight that?s causing chaos in the MAGA movement and warping the right wing internet.
No one knows the Epstein saga more than my friend Brace Belden, co-host of the Trueanon podcast and one of the internet's foremost experts on Epstein and MAGA influencers.
He joins me to break down what this latest Epstein cache reveals, the real tea on Donald Trump and Bill Clinton's relationship, and how off this Epstein stuff might impact Trump and the influencers in his movement going forward.
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The Government Is Spying on College Football Games
FREE SPEECH FRIDAY
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The Department of Homeland Security has deployed a powerful surveillance tool at college football games, and that's not the only place where they're using it. If you were one of the thousands of people who attended the Old Miss vs Georgia game a few weeks ago, a DHS system could have been monitoring you.
At that game and others schools have been using a little-known Department of Homeland Security platform called the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN). FOIAball, a newsletter reporting on college football and public records, got a hold of documents related to this surveillance effort.
All of this information and monitoring is now being fed into facial recognition systems, as those systems of surveillance expand. And, HSIN isn't just being used at concerts and game days, it's not being deployed against protesters, activists, and peaceful crowds.
Story on FOIAball: https://www.foiaball.com/p/dhs-college-football-hsin-surveillance-ole-miss-ohio-state
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How Sydney Sweeney Lost The Culture War
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Sydney Sweeney just had one of the worst box office weekends of all time. Her new movie Christy, about a female boxer, made barely over $1 million, making it one of the worst-performing films of all time,
This disastrous flop comes on the heels of yet another culture war controversy that she was at the center of, stemming from a viral GQ interview, and now she's locked in a bitter feud with Zendaya, her co-star on Euphoria, the HBO show that arguably skyrocketed her to stardom.
So all of this begs the question: can Sydney Sweeny survive becoming an avatar for the culture war? Why does every viral moment now become a referendum on politics? Kat Tenbarge joins me to discuss!
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He Was Tortured in an Israeli Prison for Speaking Out
FREE SPEECH FRIDAY
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Tommy Marcus, better known online as Quentin Quarantino online, first became famous during the early days of the pandemic. He posted timely memes and news roundups, but what started as a funny Instagram account quickly turned into a massive fundraising machine. Tommy got more involved in activism and political causes and began using his platform to raise money for humanitarian issues and injustice around the world.
A few months ago, he joined an aid boat headed to Gaza, hoping to deliver supplies to people caught in the ongoing crisis. His ship was intercepted just miles off the coast and the IDF abducted him and fellow activists before holding them in a notorious Israeli super prison. Tommy, one of the few Jewish activists on the boat, was tortured and abused by the IDF.
He finally made it out and is speaking about the experience for the first time. He opens up about how the experience affected him and changed his beliefs about power, justice, and the United States sanction of the slaughter in Palestine.
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Why Every Hit Pop Song Sounds the Same Now
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Did you know that hit songs in the late 1950s were regularly about gruesome death? Or that a US vice president wrote a number one hit? Chris Dalla Riva is one of my favorite music journalists out there. He writes the substack Can't Get Much Higher where he publishes pieces on the intersection of music and data.
A couple years ago he embarked on a quest to listen to every single number 2 hit from the last six decades, and wrote about what he learned in his new book Uncharted Territory. The book is part celebration, part takedown of popular music, and also provides new ways to think about your favorite songs, genres, and artists. This book is genuinely so good and changed the way I think about so many songs and just how different periods in history were reflected in the music from their time.
Chris joined me this week to discuss the past half a century of number 1 hits and what they say about our culture, political system and world at large.
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The New Legal Fight to Destroy Super PACs Forever
FREE SPEECH FRIDAY
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For the first time in fifteen years, there?s a real shot at ending billionaire control of American politics.
A groundbreaking legal effort spearheaded by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, backed by an unlikely coalition of billionaires like Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman, is taking direct aim at the legal foundation that created Super PACs.
I'm going to be covering this legal fight closely. Larry Lessig joined me on this week's Free Speech Friday to break down his legal fight, where things stand, and what needs to happen next in order to win this fight.
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Has Taylor Swift Finally Peaked? Why Billionaires Can't Make Good Art
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Over the past two decades, Taylor Swift has dominated the pop charts and risen to the pinnacle of mainstream fame. She has amassed a $2 billion fortune, won 14 Grammy Awards, sold more than 100 million albums worldwide, headlined the highest-grossing concert tour in history, and built a vast real-estate and music catalog empire.
But lately, the backlash to Swift is growing louder. She has been criticized for her silence on major political issues, for palling around with Trump supporters, her carbon footprint, and many are calling her latest album a flop.
All of this raises the question, has Taylor Swift peaked, not just in popularity, but in cultural authority? Or is this just another cynical reinvention that she'll use to amass even more money and power? Journalist and Swiftie Kat Tenbarge joined me to discuss it all.
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A Woman Streamer Was Assaulted, Is Twitch To Blame?
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FREE SPEECH FRIDAY
Last weekend, popular cosplay Twitch streamer Emiru was assaulted at a meet-and-greet during Twitchcon. A man cut across several meet and greet lines and attempted to grab her for a kiss. The incident was obviously a catastrophic failure when it comes to keeping women creators safe
But, after the Emiru incident, tons of big content creators began piling on on Twitter, pushing out of context clips attempting to show lax security at the event and calling for Dan Clancy's resignation. They began weaponizing the attack on a woman creator to push their own reactionary agendas.
Kat Tenbarge has been covering gender-based violence for nearly a decade and she joined me this week to break down what exactly went down at Twitchcon, why more security doesn't exactly lead to more safety for women, and what the true issue at the heart of all of this is. These attacks on women creators silence women and prevent them from speaking and expressing themselves freely.
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Can Twitch Survive? CEO Dan Clancy at Twitchcon
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As live-streaming becomes an increasingly dominant form of entertainment, Twitch is at a crossroads. Dan Clancy is the CEO of Twitch, and I sat down with him this weekend at Twitchcon to discuss how Twitch is evolving, its broader role in the creator economy over the next 10 years, competition from Hollywood, AI, and how he thinks about balancing streamers' creative freedom with safety concerns. Here's our interview.
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Fighting For LGBTQ Rights is Terrorism Now: NSPM-7 Explained w/ Ken Klippenstein
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Welcome back to Free Speech Friday!
Recently, Trump signed a little-noticed national security directive identifying a slew of views like ?anti-Christian? and ?anti-American? beliefs as indicators of "radical left violence" and terrorism. The directive is called NSPM-7.
NSPM-7carries serious implications for freedom of speech and opens the door to dangerous levels of censorship. In NSPM-7, Trump directs the Justice Department, the FBI, and other national security agencies to fight his version of political violence, retooling a network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to focus on ?leftist? political violence in America.
Ken Klippenstein has been covering all this. He joined me today to break down NSPM-7 and what it means for speech in America. Under the new directive, anyone expressing views that could be construed as any of the following, could be classified by the government as a terrorist:
anti-Americanism,
anti-capitalism,
anti-Christianity,
support for the overthrow of the United States Government,
extremism on migration,
extremism on race,
extremism on gender
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.
Ken's story: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-nspm-7-labels-common-beliefs
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Hasan Piker and the Future No One Is Ready For
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Hasan Piker has never abused his dog, but you'd never know that from the video clips spreading all over the internet. The backlash that Piker is facing shows the consequences of a world where everyone is constantly being recorded and our internet is built to reward outrage and controversy.
In this episode, I dive into the recent viral conspiracy and false claims about Piker and Kaya, unpacking how a single, out-of-context clip spiraled into a full-blown harassment campaign, fueled by bad actors and politically motivated smear tactics.
I unpack how the Hasan Piker dog collar incident is a warning sign of a dystopian future where 24/7 video surveillance merges with online outrage farming. As AI and algorithmic amplification make it easier to manipulate and weaponize video, the problems influencers face today will soon affect us all.
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[PATREON PREVIEW] How Raunchy AI Country Songs Took Over The Internet
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We're facing a tsunami of AI-generated music that is rapidly transforming the digital soundscape and expanding far beyond Spotify. It's already beginning to dominate platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud, and other major streaming services. Generative tools are able to produce entire songs complete with realistic vocals, melodies, and high production quality. AI artists are flooding recommendation algorithms and trending charts.
Kieran Press Reynolds is a writer at Pitchfork, and he's been covering all of this. He joined me to talk about the rise of AI music and what deepfake vocals, manufactured sounds and this flood of AI generated content means for the future of the music industry and the role music plays in our culture.
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You Are Probably Being Tracked By ICE Right Now
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ICE is preparing to deploy a sweeping new surveillance system that would allow it to monitor the real-time movements and online activity of millions of people. Internal documents. The two key tools, Tangles and WebLoc, were originally designed by the Israeli intelligence firm Cobwebs. Together, they enable ICE analysts to fuse billions of mobile location points with data scraped from platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Reddit to build detailed digital dossiers on anyone.
This expansion of ICE?s data surveillance efforts comes amid broader federal initiatives to monitor social media and suppress dissent. Reports indicate ICE will contract private analysts to continuously scan major platforms for ?anti-American? or ?anti-Christian? speech under the Trump administration?s new NSPM-7 directive. This is yet another dangerous escalation of mass surveillance and political targeting, undermining First and Fourth Amendment protections.
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A Crypto Convict's Spectacular Comeback Tour: How Ross Ulbricht Became A Powerful MAGA Influencer
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Nearly a decade ago, Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road dark web marketplace was sentenced to a double life sentence in prison. Now, he's out and has become a powerful influencer and political figure in the MAGA movement.
Ryan Mac at the New York Times has been covering Ulbricht for over a decade. He joined me to dive deep into Ulbrict's' past, how the Silk Road transformed the web, and how this crazy alliance between bitcoin billionaires, libertarians, and MAGA die-hards has skyrocketed Ulbricht to fame and set him up for a major role in politics.
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READ RYAN'S FANTASTIC NYT STORY: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/technology/ross-ulbricht-silk-road-comeback.html
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The Shocking Plan to Kill Online Privacy: A VPN Ban Will Break the Web
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A VPN hides your IP address, making it harder for hackers, corporations and the government to track your activity. Most people know VPNs as a way to get around geogating (like if content is banned in one country you can use a VPN to get around the ban).
But as authoritarian governments in places like America and the UK seek to crack down on online speech, VPNs are under attack. It's getting harder and harder to use them effectively, and recently there's even been talk of an outright ban.
Lia Holland is an activist at Fight for the Future, a civil liberties group fighting to protect VPN access. She joined me to dig into the political campaign against VPNs and talk about how to fight back.
PS: A lot of VPNs are owned by Israel!! Or they trap you into subscription plans. Be careful before downloading one, here's a guide from the EFF on VPNs: https://ssd.eff.org/module/choosing-vpn-thats-right-you
Fight For the Future's Defend VPNs campaign: https://www.defendvpns.com
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The AI Slop-pocalypse: How The Slop Economy Took Over
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AI slop is slowly taking over every platform. "But the flood of financially incentivized sloe has also given way to a strange new internet, where social media feeds overflow with unsettlingly lifelike imagery and even real videos can appear suspect," WaPo reports. "Some viral clips now barely rely on humans at all, with AI tools generating not just the imagery but also the ideas."
There's YouTube Slop, Instagram Reel Slop, Slop all over TikTokk LinkedIn, and X. But who's behind this deluge of deranged and often extremely surreal content?
Drew Harwell is a journalist at the Washington Post and he's been digging into the slop economy. He joins me to talk about the mad rush of creators using AI video tools to flood the internet, how they're making money, and what the future of content looks like as slop eats the world.
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How To Become Invisible Online (Delete Your Digital Footprint and Protect Your Privacy Forever)
Visit https://joindeleteme.com/Taylor20 and use code Taylor20 for 20% off and protect yourself today! SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzAds are following us everywhere, data brokers and hackers are stealing our info, social media companies and AI are hoovering up our data. It can all feel SO overwhelming. In this final installment of my data broker series, I sat down with two of the top security experts on YouTube, John Hammond and Josh from All Things Secured, to break down how vulnerable you might be and what practical things you can do to protect your information online.
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The Truth About Nepal?s Gen Z Uprising
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Welcome back to Free Speech Friday:
Nearly a month ago peaceful student demonstrators protesting corruption in Nepal were shot and killed, sparking nationwide outrage. Government buildings were set in fire, leaders were forced out, and the prime minister resigned, leaving the country?s future uncertain.
But that's not how the mainstream media reported it. They misrepresented Nepal's Gen Z youth movement, portraying young protesters as spoiled children upset about losing social media access, rather than as citizens fighting corruption and authoritarian suppression of free speech. It was a lot of the same framing that the media has used over other authoritarian crackdowns on speech like the TikTok ban here in the U.S.
I brought on Bala Krishna Sha, one of the top journalists in Nepal, who writes for The Himalayan Times, the country's number 1 English language newspaper. He joins me to break down exactly what happened in Nepal, what the real story is that you won't see in traditional western media, and why the free speech fight happening in Nepal has global implications.
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The Secret Role Of Influencers In Global Propaganda
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From Israel to Saudi Arabia to Russia to the UAE and more, influencers are increasingly being used for political propaganda and foreign influence campaigns.
Makenna Kelly is a senior reporter at WIRED and she joined me to talk about how foreign governments are leveraging content creators to quietly push political propaganda and shape foreign policy, how MAGA influencers are embracing these campaigns, and the big money behind it all.
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Trump's Censorship of Jimmy Kimmel Is Just The Beginning
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WELCOME BACK TO FREE SPEECH FRIDAY!
Earlier this week, ABC and Nexstar yanked Jimmy Kimmel's show off the air after he made a joke about Charlie Kirk's death that the Trump admin didn't like. FCC commissioner Brendan Carr called the comments ?offensive and insensitive,? and warned ABC and Disney that there could be regulatory consequences if the network didn?t respond.
All of this is a gross assault on free speech, and to discuss it (and more!) I brought on Ari Cohn, Lead Counsel for Tech Policy at the Foundation For Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). He's one of the leading first amendment lawyers in the country.
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The Truth Behind The Rise of 'Robot Racism'
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People on TikTok, YouTube and X are recreating 1950s style racism towards robots. Using slurs like ?clanker,? ?wireback,? and ?cogsucker,? content creators are framing robots as a marginalized group, parodying old racist stereotypes in a retro aesthetic. The videos have gone viral and amassed millions of views.
But while you might think this is just an excuse for creators to be racist, the trend reflects something a lot deeper. I dive deep into the phenomenon of "robot racism" or "robophobia" and unpack where these terms like clanker are coming from, what they say about our culture and society, automation, exploitation, and how technology is entangled with race and power.
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A New Kind of AI Deepfake is Taking Over TikTok [PATREON PREVIEW]
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We're all familiar with the concept of deepfakes, but now, AI is being harnessed in a new way to deceive. AI generated TikTokers are reciting the actual words of real people, right down to the stumbles, "ums" and "uhs."
This new form of AI-driven identity theft is slipping past moderation filters, misleading millions, and leaving creators feeling powerless. Bobby Allyn is a reporter who's been covering this phenomenon and the rise of TikTok deepfakes, he joined me for this bonus episode of Power User to break it all down and explain why this is happening.
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We Need to Talk About 'Political Violence?
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When a powerful right-wing figure like Charlie Kirk is attacked or killed, political leaders and media rush to mourn them as a martyr and condemn "political violence."
But what does political violence actually mean? While violence against elites is treated as a national tragedy, violence against poor, Black, immigrant, queer, and disabled people is sanctioned. The truth is that political violence has always been part of life in America, but somehow it only becomes a ?national emergency? when that violence threatens power.
In this video, I talk about the history of "political violence" in the U.S., what the term actually means in practice, how it's weaponized, and what we need to do if we actually want to put a stop to it.
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The Death of Casual Posting w/ Kyle Chayka
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In the early days of the internet, social media offered a space where anyone could casually share their daily thoughts, fleeting moments, and observations about the world. Casual posting was the norm, and this extension of everyday life still felt spontaneous and personal.
But lately, that culture has disappeared. It has been replaced by highly curated influencer content, manufactured viral slop, and it feels like everyone is just posting? less.
Kyle Chayka is a writer at The New Yorker and he recently explored this phenomenon in a piece. He joins me to talk about the death of casual posting and what this shift says about the future of the internet.
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ICE can now hack your phone without you knowing
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ICE agents will soon have access to one of the world?s most sophisticated hacking tools thanks to a government contract with Paragon Solutions, an Israeli spyware company that lets people hack into any mobile phone without the person even clicking a link or opening a document.
The new agreement between Paragon and ICE gives ICE access to the Israeli spyware platform, Graphite. Once Graphite infects your phone it can see everything you do on your phone, even stuff on encrypted apps, and you wouldn't even know it's there. I break down what that means for activists, journalists, dissidents, and how Paragon is already rolling out in other countries across the world. I also discuss how to keep yourself as safe as possible from this new tech.
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The Shocking Truth About Dark Money and Influencers
SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! ? https://www.usermag.co Dark money orgs spend millions to shape our political system without having to reveal where their money comes from. Now, they're paying influencers too. Last week, I published an article on WIRED titled "A Dark Money Group Is Secretly Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers." The story describes an initiative aimed at boosting Democrats online that offers influencers up to $8,000 a month in dark money funding. Since the story came out, a bunch of influencers in the program have tried to mislead people about what dark money is and isn't. Anna Massoglia is one of the top journalists in the country covering dark money. She is the director of investigations at the Sunlight Research Center and writes the newsletter Influence Brief. We break down what dark money is, what it isn't, who the biggest dark money power players are, and why even left-leaning undisclosed dark money can harm our political system. We also chat about how dark money is increasingly shaping content on the internet and being used for foreign propaganda campaigns. OPEN SECRETS GUIDE TO DARK MONEY: https://www.opensecrets.org/dark-money READ MY WIRED STORY: https://www.wired.com/story/dark-money-group-secret-funding-democrat-influencers Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz
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The Real Reason Your Insurance Just Went Up
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SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! ? https://www.usermag.co Data brokers vacuum up information about us, what we buy, where we drive, what we watch, when we sleep, where we worship, and, increasingly, information about our faces and bodies and how we move through the world. They stitch these fragments into profiles that are bought, sold, licensed, and shared by advertisers, insurers, political campaigns, hedge funds, and even government agencies. In part two of my series on data brokers I dive into all the crazy ways data brokers harvest your information and how they're doing it in extremely sneaky ways!! I promise this will shock you and you might think twice before doing some daily activities. Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz
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The MrBeast of OnlyFans on Skibidi Toilet Porn and Elon Musk
If you?ve spent enough time online, you have undeniably encountered the work of John Kilo. John is a 28 year old OnlyFans creator in Portland, and he has become a fixture on meme accounts and viral subreddits.
He's part porn star, part performance artist, part cultural critic and shitposter. He has created Skibidi Toilet porn, cosplayed a Trump supporter while having sex with a fleshlight mounted to an AR-15, made corn parodies of Ben Shapiro and Elon Musk, had s*x with every item on the Taco Bell menu, the Pizza Hut menu, and even ranked the most f'able pastas.
He is also a brilliant artist, filmmaker, and kind of an internet and media prophet. He joined me to talk about YouTubifying porn, how virality is reshaping the OnlyFans landscape, leveraging meme culture, and creating art in the age of algorithms.
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Your Landlord Might Be Using Facial Recognition to Spy On You
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All across the country, sweeping surveillance laws are being enacted under the guise of "safety" especially "child safety". Courts are handing over sensitive federal data, housing authorities are deploying broadband surveillance, and tech companies across the board are pushing facial recognition with no oversight.
Amidst of all this, S.T.O.P.?the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project?is fighting back. The organization has released A People?s Handbook of Surveillance to equip the public with information about rampant ?smart city? surveillance. They've been calling out facial recognition tech being enacted in public housing. They're pursuing a federal civil rights lawsuit against the NYPD for civil liberties violations and more.
Albert Fox Cahn is the founder of S.T.O.P. and an icon in the fight against surveillance capitalism. He's joining me today to talk about what's going on right now in America, all the sneaky new ways corporations and the government are trying to surveil us, and how we can build people-first tech that challenges power.
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The True Story Behind Four Loko
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Few beverages have left as unforgettable a mark on American culture as Four Loko. With a dizzying mix of alcohol and caffeine, it skyrocketed to success in the 2000s and became an iconic American brand overnight.
Four Loko was one of the first brands to ever go "viral" and the brand understood internet culture before the internet was even mainstream. But that virality came with a cost. The company suffered government crackdowns, a media moral panic, they changed the formula of their drink and somehow emerged from it all more relevant than ever.
When I met Four Loko CEO and cofounder Jaisen Freeman, I knew I had to talk to him for my podcast. We talk about how his scrappy college drink startup went from being nearly banned to one of the top-selling beverages in the country and how the brand has managed to transform online controversy into a business.
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YouTube's AI Age Verification is a Disaster
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This week, YouTube rolled out automatic age verification in the US. It forces users who the company's AI system guesstimates might be under 18 to submit their government IDs or full biometric scans just to watch certain videos. YouTube is the first major tech platform to preemptively normalize invasive identity checks for everyday online activity, and it's a disaster.
This new identity verification system creates a dangerous precedent. It is building a surveillance infrastructure that normalizes the tracking of legal and previously anonymous content consumption, all under the guise of child safety.
For this week's Free Speech Friday I dig into why what YouTube and other tech companies like Instagram and Roblox are doing with preemptive AI age and identity verification is so harmful, and how it might change YouTube forever.
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What killed The Song Of The Summer w/ Anthony Fantano
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We're halfway through August and summer is rapidly coming to a close. But this year, something about the season was different. It's the first year in over 100 years that there hasn't been a definitive song of the summer.
Is the absence of a ?2025 song of the summer? just a quirk of this year?s charts or a symptom of a music culture permanently fractured by personalization, speed, and saturation. I called up Anthony Fantano to help me answer this question.
We dive deep into what makes a good song of the summer, how the concept emerged in culture, why we don't have one this year, and what a post song of the summer society might look like.
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Everyone?s Lying About Lil Tay OnlyFans w/ Kat Tenbarge
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A few days ago, 18 year old social media star Lil Tay made over $1 million by launching an OnlyFans shortly after her 18th birthday. The launch generated a massive backlash online, people on the left and the right are calling for OnlyFans to be banned and for the criminalization of porn.
On today's free speech Friday Kat Tenbarge and I break down Lil Tay's rise, what actually went down with her OF launch, and how this viral moment is already being weaponized by both influential Democrat and far right accounts to silence speech, dismantle civil liberties and push dangerous censorship laws that would lead to even more exploitation of women and children.
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Is ChatGPT Changing The Way We Talk? w/ Adam Aleksic
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Since its launch in 2022, ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The tool is embedded in more and more areas of daily life and new research shows that it's also transforming how we write and even speak.
A group of researchers analyzed more than 360,000 YouTube videos and 771,000 podcast episodes from before and after ChatGPT?s release to track the use of ChatGPT-affiliated words like "delve" and "examine."
All of this has major implications. Adam Aleksic is an etymologist who studies the way the internet is reshaping language. His new book Algospeak tackles all of this. He joins me to discuss how ChatGPT and AI is transforming the way we talk, what words we use, and how we communicate.
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The UK's Censorship Catastrophe is Just The Beginning
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The UK's Online Safety Act finally went into effect this week and it has been a massive clusterfuck. Entire forums, websites, communities and essential journalism is being censored. People are being forced to scan their faces to use Spotify and YouTube.
Like all of these terrible censorship bills, the Online Safety Act claims it's about protecting children from the evils of pornographic and ?adult? content. But immediately after it went into effect, platforms began classifying nearly all breaking news footage, war coverage, investigative journalism, political protest material and information about reproductive and public health as ?explicit? or ?harmful" content, thus blocking anyone from under 18 from accessing it.
I break down the fallout from the UK's Online Safety Act and what we could be facing here in the U.S. soon if we don't fight back to protect free speech online.
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The Public Health Internet Is Crumbling
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The internet has become the primary way that people get public health information. Especially since the pandemic began in 2020, millions of people have turned to platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and newsletters to keep up to date on things like food recalls, infectious disease reports, and more.
But now, CDC social media channels have gone dark, and the agency's public health communication across the internet is being cut off and dismantled. Chiara Eisner is an investigative reporter at NPR and she's been covering the fiasco at the CDC. We talk about the crucial role that the internet plays in public health and why what's happening right now under Trump and RFK and why it might set us back decades.
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How Companies Learned Everything About Us
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This is the first video in my new series on data brokers and the dark history of digital surveillance. I dig into how surveillance capitalism evolved, the companies profiting from intimate details about your life, and how it all began long before the internet.
I reveal the industry's origins from early government tracking systems to invisible surveillance networks fueling ultra-targeted ads. How corporations are able to build data profiles so detailed that they can predict when you?re going to get sick, where you're likely to live, and even discover you're pregnant before your own family.
Let me know what you think in the comments! I worked so hard on this one ?
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ICE Is Building a Nationwide Tracking System (and Your Data is In It)
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The U.S. government is quietly building the largest surveillance system in modern history. In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I break down how agencies like ICE, DHS are weaponizing your personal data including tax filings, medical records, license plate scans, and more, to hunt innocent people down across the country.
The Department of Homeland Security is also exploring ways to access IRS data on millions of U.S. citizens "associated with criminal activity" or who have shown support for "terrorism." I break down ICE?s growing surveillance empire, the risks of government data abuse, and the terrifying consequences for civil liberties if we don't fight back.
ProPublica article: https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-irs-share-tax-records-ice-dhs-deportations
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Why we can?t stop doxxing people for fun
Last week, a couple featured on the Jumbotron during a Coldplay concert in Boston went viral for being caught cheating. Within minutes of the video spreading on TikTok and X, users rallied together to identify the couple in the video using AI and facial recognition tools.
Crowdsourced social media investigations are becoming more and more common, and the people conducting them are leveraging increasingly dystopian surveillance tech that police and the feds are using against undocumented immigrants and marginalized groups. Meanwhile, all of our privacy is being eroded.
Jason Koebler from 404 Media joined me to dig into the origins of the surveillance-entertainment economy, how and why it evolved, and what we can do to protect ourselves.
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AI Deepfake Panic is Killing Free Speech
There's a bill right now in congress called the NO FAKES act that claims it will protect you from deepfakes. "In this new era of AI, we need real laws to protect real people," Rep. Maria Salazar said when announcing the bill. "The NO FAKES Act is simple and sacred: you own your identity, not Big Tech, not scammers, not algorithms."
As usual, none of this is what the law actually does!!!!!
The NO FAKES act is actually an incredibly sloppy and dangerous piece of legislation that could destroy lives, eradicate privacy, and lead to sweeping censorship of journalistic and constitutionally protected speech. There's a reason that major civil liberties orgs are sounding the alarm about this proposed law.
The NO FAKES act is "something that could change the internet forever, harming speech and innovation from here on out," The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently declared.
This bill would be a disaster for online speech and free expression. The Center for Democracy and Technology published an open letter opposing the proposed law. Kate Ruane is the director for the Center for Democracy and Technology's Free Expression Project. She joined this week's episode of my Free Speech Friday series to break down what the NO FAKES act really says and why we need to fight back against it.
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Diddy And The Death of #MeToo: How Diddy?s Trial Was Weaponized Online
Earlier this month, Sean ?Diddy??Combs was acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering after a high-profile federal trial. The acquittals show how high profile men accused of sexual abuse and wrongdoing still often escape justice.
Already the outcome is being co-opted by the far right and manosphere spaces who are spinning it as proof that movements like #MeToo are overreaching.
Today we're talking about why the Diddy case was a pivotal moment online and why celebrity trials like this do matter in the political sphere now. To break it all down I brought on Caroline Kwan, a prolific Twitch streamer who covers pop culture and political news, and Kat Tenbarge, a phenomenal independent journalist.
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Is a YouTuber Using Copyright Law to Silence Speech?
[FREE SPEECH FRIDAY] For decades, content creators have fought against oppressive copyright law. Copyright claims have been wielded by powerful corporations to take down videos, suppress criticism, and stifle parody through rigid enforcement of online speech.
But now, a troubling shift is unfolding: legal attacks that were once used almost exclusively by powerful media companies, are being weaponized by a big content creator against smaller content creators.
Meredith Rose is a senior policy counsel at Public Knowledge, a non profit promoting freedom of expression and an open internet. She joins me to talk about how copyright law and discussions of fair use are central to the fight over free speech in the digital age!
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MAGA's Epstein Crashout And What's Next w/ Will Sommer
After years of hype and promises to destroy the deep state, the Department of Justice and FBI publicly declared there is no ?client list? linking Jeffrey Epstein to prominent figures, this week. They also confirmed Epstein died by suicide and said told all of MAGA basically to drop the issue.
Now, MAGA influencers are accusing Trump of a cover up, the right wing internet is in disarray, and it remains unclear what will happen next. The Epstein cover up has been the defining conspiracy on the right linking MAGA factions together.
Will Sommer is a reporter at The Bulwark who covers the right wing internet. He joined me to break down what's going on and what's next for the right.
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Silicon Valley Wants Endless War
[VIDEO ESSAY] --- Anti-Muslim hate is becoming extremely profitable in Silicon Valley as the tech industry pivots towards defense tech and embedding itself with the U.S. war machine. From funding Israeli defense startups to spreading racist conspiracy theories about Zohran Mamdani, VCs like Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire are pushing a new breed of tech militarism.
Defense tech, AI surveillance, and far-right pro-Trump ideologies are merging in the tech world as Silicon Valley?s obsession with profit fuels a dangerous new era of "the war on terror 2.0." Shaun Maguire and others like him will play a leading role in this new landscape, where human rights are obstacles and endless war is the ultimate market opportunity.
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