2025-11-25 02:31:57
A new feature on X is making people suddenly realize that some large portion of the divisive, hateful, and spammy content designed to inflame tensions or, at the very least, is designed to get lots of engagement on social media, is being published by accounts that are pretending to be based in the United States but are actually being run by people in countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Cambodia, Russia, and other countries. An account called “Ivanka News” is based in Nigeria, “RedPilledNurse” is from Europe, “MAGA Nadine” is in Morocco, “Native American Soul” is in Bangladesh, and “Barron Trump News” is based in Macedonia, among many, many of others.
Inauthentic viral accounts on X are just the tip of the iceberg, though, as we have reported. A huge amount of the viral content about American politics and American news on social media is from sock puppet and bot accounts monetized by people in other countries. The rise of easy to use, free AI generative tools have supercharged this effort, and social media monetization programs have incentivized this effort and are almost entirely to blame. The current disinformation and slop phenomenon on the internet today makes the days of ‘Russian bot farms’ and ‘fake news pages from Cyprus’ seem quaint; the problem is now fully decentralized and distributed across the world and is almost entirely funded by social media companies themselves.
This will not be news to people who have been following 404 Media, because I have done multiple investigations about the perverse incentives that social media and AI companies have created to incentivize people to fill their platforms with slop. But what has happened on X is the same thing that has happened on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms (it is also happening to the internet as a whole, with AI slop websites laden with plagiarized content and SEO spam and monetized with Google ads). Each social media platform has either an ad revenue sharing program, a “creator bonus” program, or a monetization program that directly pays creators who go viral on their platforms.
2025-11-24 23:06:36
In the deserted town square of the city of Springfield, three people huddle in an empty courthouse. Two of these people are civilians; one is a “vulnerable,” someone being pursued and targeted by government agents. They talk in hushed tones to one another, playing music to keep fear at bay. Above the door of the courthouse, a plaque reads, “Liberty and Justice for Most.”
At the bottom of the courthouse stairs, two government agents step out of a purple golf cart. They approach the door. They’re carrying guns.
“Hey, is anyone inside?” one of them says. “Any vulnerables in here? We have a warrant. We have a warrant for any vulnerables in the area.”
One civilian opens the door, sees the agents, and immediately slams it shut. After more warrant calls, the civilian says, “Slip it under the door.”
“I would slip it under the door, but there’s no space under the door,” the agent says, stuttering.
The civilian pauses. “Well. Sounds like a personal problem.”
2025-11-22 22:00:14
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that overthrew the regime, survived outer space, smashed planets, and crafted an ancient mystery from clay.
First, a queen gets sprayed with acid—and that’s not even the most horrifying part of the story. Then: a moss garden that is out of this world, the big boom that made the Moon, and a breakthrough in the history of goose-human relations.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Every so often, a study opens with such a forceful hook that it is simply best for me to stand aside and allow it to speak for itself. Thus:
“Matricide—the killing of a mother by her own genetic offspring—is rarely observed in nature, but not unheard-of. Among animal species in which offspring remain with their mothers, the benefits gained from maternal care are so substantial that eliminating the mother almost never pays, making matricide vastly rarer than infanticide.”
“Here, we report matricidal behavior in two ant species, Lasius flavus and Lasius japonicus, where workers kill resident queens (their mothers) after the latter have been sprayed with abdominal fluid by parasitic ant queens of the ants Lasius orientalis and Lasius umbratus.”
Mad props to this team for condensing an entire etymological epic into three sentences. Such murderous acts of dynastic usurpation were first observed by Taku Shimada, an ant enthusiast who runs a blog called Ant Room. Though matricide is sometimes part of a life cycle—like mommy spiders sacrificing their bodies for consumption by their offspring—there is no clear precedent for the newly-reported form of matricide, in which neither the young nor mother benefits from an evolutionary point of view.
In what reads like an unfolding horror, the invading parasitic queens “covertly approach the resident queen and spray multiple jets of abdominal fluid at her”—formic acid, as it turns out—that then “elicits abrupt attacks by host workers, which ultimately kill their own mother,” report Shimada and his colleagues.
“The parasitic queens are then accepted, receive care from the orphaned host workers and produce their own brood to found a new colony,” the team said. “Our findings are the first to document a novel host manipulation that prompts offspring to kill an otherwise indispensable mother.”
My blood is curdling and yet I cannot look away! Though this strategy is uniquely nightmarish, it is not uncommon for invading parasitic ants to execute queens in any number of creative ways. The parasites are just usually a bit more hands-on (or rather, tarsus-on) about the process.
“Queen-killing” has “evolved independently on multiple occasions across [ant species], indicating repeated evolutionary gains,” Shimada’s team said. “Until now, the only mechanistically documented solution was direct assault: the parasite throttles or beheads the host queen, a tactic that has arisen convergently in several lineages.”
When will we get an ant Shakespeare?! Someone needs to step up and claim that title, because these queens blow Lady MacBeth out of the water.
In other news…
Scientists simply love to expose extremophile life to the vacuum of space to, you know, see how well they do out there. In a new addition to this tradition, a study reports that spores from the moss Physcomitrium patens survived a full 283 days chilling on the outside of the International Space Station, which is generally not the side of an orbital habitat you want to be stuck on.
Even wilder, most of the spacefaring spores were reproductively successful upon their return to Earth. “Remarkably, even after 9 months of exposure to space conditions, over 80% of the encased spores germinated upon return to Earth,” said researchers led by Chang-hyun Maeng of Hokkaido University. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report demonstrating the survival of bryophytes”—the family to which mosses belong—”following exposure to space and subsequent return to the ground.”
Congratulations to these mosses for boldly growing where no moss has grown before.
Hopp, Timo et al. “The Moon-forming impactor Theia originated from the inner Solar System.” Science.
Earth had barely been born before a Mars-sized planet, known as Theia, smashed into it some 4.5 billion years ago. The debris from the collision coalesced into what is now our Moon, which has played a key role in Earth’s habitability, so we owe our lives in part to this primordial punch-up.
Scientists have now revealed new details about Theia by measuring the chemical makeup of “lunar samples, terrestrial rocks, and meteorites…from which Theia and proto-Earth might have formed,” according to a new study. They conclude that Theia likely originated in the inner solar system based on the chemical signatures that this shattered world left behind on the Moon and Earth.
“We found that all of Theia and most of Earth’s other constituent materials originated from the inner Solar System,” said researchers led by Timo Hopp of The University of Chicago and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. “Our calculations suggest that Theia might have formed closer to the Sun than Earth did.”
Wherever its actual birthplace, what remains of Theia is buried on the Moon and as giant undigested slabs inside Earth’s mantle. Rest in pieces, sister.
You’ve heard of the albatross around your neck, but what about the goose on your back? A new study reports the discovery of a 12,000-year-old artifact in Israel that is the “earliest known figurine to depict a human–animal interaction” with its vision of a goose mysteriously draped over a woman’s spine and shoulders.
The tiny, inch-high figurine was recovered from a settlement built by the prehistoric Natufian culture and it may represent some kind of sex thing.
“We…suggest that by modeling a goose in this specific posture, the Natufian manufacturer intended to portray the trademark pattern of the gander’s mating behavior,” said researchers led by Laurent Davin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “This kind of imagined mating between humans and animal spirits is typical of an animistic perspective, documented in cross-cultural archaeological and ethnographic records in specific situations” such as an “erotic dream” or “shamanistic vision.”
First, the bizarre Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, and now this? What is it about ancient cultures and weird waterfowl fantasies? In any case, my own interpretation is that the goose was just tired and needed a piggyback (or gaggle-back).
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
2025-11-22 00:54:35
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss how data is accessed, AI in games, and more.
JOSEPH: This was a pretty big week for impact at 404 Media. Sam’s piece on an exposed AI porn platform ended up with the company closing off those exposed images. Our months-long reporting and pressure from lawmakers led to the closure of the Travel Intelligence Program (TIP), in which a company owned by the U.S.’s major airlines sold flyers data to the government for warrantless surveillance.
For the quick bit of context I have typed many, many times this year: that company is Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), and is owned by United, American, Delta, Southwest, JetBlue, Alaska, Lufthansa, Air France, and Air Canada. ARC gets data, including a traveler’s name, credit card used, where they’re flying to and from, whenever someone books a flight with one of more than 10,000 travel agencies. Think Expedia, especially. ARC then sells access to that data to a slew of government agencies, including ICE, the FBI, the SEC, the State Department, ATF, and more.
2025-11-21 08:00:09
Police departments and officials from Border Patrol used Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to monitor protests hundreds of times around the country during the last year, including No Kings protests in June and October, according to data obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
The data provides the clearest picture yet of how cops widely use Flock to monitor protesters. In June, 404 Media reported cops in California used Flock to track what it described as an “immigration protest.” The new data shows more than 50 federal, state, and local law enforcement ran hundreds of searches in connection with protest activity, according to the EFF.
2025-11-21 05:38:30
Elon Musk is a better role model than Jesus, better at conquering Europe than Hitler, the greatest blowjob giver of all time, should have been selected before Peyton Manning in the 1998 NFL draft, is a better pitcher than Randy Johnson, has the “potential to drink piss better than any human in history,” and is a better porn star than Riley Reid, according to Grok, X’s sycophantic AI chatbot that has seemingly been reprogrammed to treat Musk like a god.
Grok has been tweaked sometime in the last several days and will now choose Musk as being superior to the entire rest of humanity at any given task. The change is somewhat reminiscent of Grok’s MechaHitler debacle. It is, for the moment, something that is pretty funny and which people on various social media platforms are dunking on Musk and Grok for, but it’s also an example of how big tech companies, like X, are regularly putting their thumbs on the scales of their AI chatbots to distort reality and to obtain their desired outcome.