2026-04-14 00:11:30
A hacker has compromised a backend system for Doublespeed, an a16z-funded startup that uses a phone farm to flood social media with AI-generated TikTok accounts, and attempted to have those accounts post memes calling a16z the “antichrist,” according to screenshots seen by 404 Media.
The hack is at least the second time Doublespeed has been compromised. The startup uses AI to create fake influencers, generate videos, and post comments.
“a16z is the antichrist. sponsored by doublespeed.ai,” the meme says. It includes images of a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen; a woman pole dancing; and occult symbol Baphomet.
The screenshots show the meme queued up for publication in Doublespeed customers’ dashboard, seemingly to post to their associated social media accounts. A caption indicates the hacker stole some other data and may tried to post content from hundreds of accounts.
“47MB exfiltrated. 573 accounts postable. 413 phones dumped. A16z portfolio security built different,” the caption reads.
It appears the meme was ultimately not posted on Doublespeed customers’ social media accounts. One screenshot included the social media handle of an impacted Doublespeed account; as of Monday, the meme was not available on that account.
Zuhair Lakhani, a co-founder of Doublespeed, told 404 Media in an email “We’re aware of the unauthorized access attempt and addressed it quickly. This involved an older system for queuing posts that had remained in place for compatibility with existing customer workflows, and we have since secured it.”
“Importantly, no unauthorized posts were successfully published, and we have not seen evidence that this attempt resulted in broader impact to customers,” he added.
404 Media first reported about Doublespeed last year, after the startup raised $1 million from a16z as part of its “Speedrun” accelerator program, “a fast‐paced, 12-week startup program that guides founders through every critical stage of their growth.” Doublespeed markets its use of phone farms as a way to evade social media platforms’ policies against removing inauthentic behavior. Doublespeed customers get access to a dashboard that allows them to operate multiple AI-generated influencers. At the moment Doublespeed focuses on operating TikTok accounts, but also plans to give customers the ability to operate accounts on X and Instagram.
Doublespeed was previously hacked in December of 2025. The data from that hack revealed at least 400 TikTok accounts Doublespeed operates and that at least 200 of those were actively promoting products on TikTok, mostly without disclosing that they are ads or not real people. Some of the products promoted by these AI-generated accounts included supplements, massagers, and dating apps.
As we’ve noted last year, Marc Andreessen, after whom half of Andreessen Horowitz is named, also sits on Meta’s board of directors. Meta did not respond to our question about one of its board members backing a company that blatantly aims to violate its policy on “authentic identity representation.”
2026-04-13 22:48:19
Why does the internet feel like it’s getting worse every single day, and why does it feel like the political landscape is getting worse in response? The answer might seem obvious, especially if you read 404 Media on a regular basis, where we’ve been documenting this decline, but it’s important to occasionally zoom out and ask the big questions.
That’s why this week on the podcast I’m joined by Whitney Phillips. Phillips is the author of several books about internet culture and ethics, including This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things and The Ambivalent Internet. She’s a professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon, and also one of my favorite people to talk to and listen to because she’s a genius when it comes to the kind of internet culture and platform dynamics we report on every day at 404 Media.
I wanted to talk to Whitney today because it’s been a few years since we talked in depth about the state of the internet and so much has changed in that time, sadly for the worst, and I really wanted some help in understanding the current state of things, as bad as they are. We also spent quite a bit of time talking about her upcoming book, The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-liberal Demonology Possessed U.S. Religion, Media, and Politics.
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2026-04-13 21:15:01
WebinarTV, a site that scrapes Zoom webinars without permission, has downloaded and posted Zoom Webinars for anonymous addiction recovery meetings, support groups for caregivers and people who suffer from chronic illness, and a meeting of nudists.
WebinarTV’s Michael Robertson told me that the company asks every single person for permission to “promote” their webinars, but these specific examples show that WebinarTV scrapes and shares the videos on its site before asking for permission and that some people are not aware that this is happening to them.
“As with all of our support group meetings, this meeting was not intended to be recorded, but rather to be a private discussion among participants,” Kimberly Dorris, executive director at the Graves’ Disease & Thyroid Foundation (GDATF), which hosted a Zoom session which vetted participants, and which still ended up on WebinarTV, wrote in a post about the meeting being uploaded to WebinarTV. That post was titled “A Warning For Patient Communities Connecting on Zoom.”
I first reported about WebinarTV in March, after a teacher told me that a sensitive meeting he held on Zoom for educators who wanted to protect their students from ICE raids ended up on the site. The teacher found out about the video when a someone calling themselvesSarah Blair, which appears to be an AI-generated persona, sent him an email letting him know that the meeting was posted to WebinarTV and also turned into an AI-generated podcast. The teacher asked WebinarTV to take down the meeting because it could put some of the participants in danger, and WebinarTV removed it shortly after.
WebinarTV claims it hosts more than 200,000 Zoom webinars it scraped this way.
After I published the story, several people who use Zoom regularly for meetings or webinars they consider private checked to see if their Zoom videos were posted to WebinarTV and got in touch with me.
Gillian Brockwell, a journalist and 404 Media reader who goes to addiction recovery meetings on Zoom searched WebinarTV for her own meeting after seeing my story. She didn’t find her own meetings, but flagged several other meetings that were clearly meant to be for people who want to preserve their anonymity.
One meeting posted to WebinarTV for “panic anonymous,” or people who suffer from panic and high anxiety, was described as a “a confidential group that bridges decades of clinical biofeedback practice with modern wearable technology.” The recording of the webinar posted to WebinarTV included participants’ full names and shows their faces.
A 12 steps and faith-based recovery meeting for people with substance abuse issues also shows participants full names and faces.
"If I found out I was in one of these meetings captured by WebinarTV, I would feel terrified and betrayed, especially if I were in early recovery," Brockwell told me. "These meetings are clearly meant to be confidential and anonymous, and anonymity is a key component of mutual-support and 12-step recovery models. It allows people a pathway through the stigma that so often prevents them from seeking help, and members sharing openly about some of the most humiliating moments in their lives – things they might never say in public – is a key part of 'identifying in.'"
“I hosted a meeting last night that was intended to be for family members of patients with Graves' disease, thyroid eye disease, and Hashimoto's thyroiditis,” Dorris from the GDATF told me in an email in March. “The link to *register* was public, but in order to receive the joining link, you had to fill out a questionnaire.”
The description for the Zoom meeting was: “Has a loved one been diagnosed with Graves’ disease, thyroid eye disease, or Hashimoto’s thyroiditis? Join us for a short presentation followed by an interactive discussion with people who understand what your family is going through! This meeting is intended for family members and caregivers only. If you are a researcher, industry representative, etc. please contact GDATF at [email protected] to discuss how we can better assist you.”
The registration form specifically asked potential participants whether they were attending in support of or on behalf of someone impacted by these conditions, and were admitted to the meeting one at a time from a Zoom waiting room. Dorris said that no visible AI and transcription tools were running.
One meeting of nudists, or “naturists,” also featured every participant’s face and name, and some appeared shirtless on camera. It’s not clear if this meeting was designed to be private nor if the participants know the meeting was recorded and posted on WebinarTV.
Robertson told me that WebinarTV is not violating these people’s privacy because the site only scrapes Zoom webinars as opposed to Zoom meetings. Zoom webinars work similarly to a regular Zoom meeting, but are intended for larger audiences with features like polling, breakout rooms, and EventBrite integrations.
“Webinars are no different than Facebook Live, X broadcast, or Youtube Live. They are broadcast to the public. This is why we have 200,000 webinars and zero issues to date,” Robertson told me. “We contact every host, twice to make sure they want the promotion. We're the only search engine that does this. Also we make it one click easy to remove. Go try and get something removed from any other search engine.” Robertson is of course ignoring the fact that many people organizing or joining these sessions, even if they are technically webinars, expect them to be private or limited to just the participants.
When I reached out to Zoom in March it said that based on its review WebinarTV accesses meetings using links that have been shared publicly, then records the sessions using browser extension or “other tools.”
“Because these recordings occur on the participant’s device and outside of Zoom’s environment, no platform—including Zoom—has the technical ability to fully prevent third-party screen recording,” the spokesperson said.
“While it is true that our meeting wasn’t infiltrated due to a technical flaw from Zoom, as a customer, I would still like to see Zoom speak out against companies like WebinarTV that send bots with fake identities to infiltrate meetings and covertly record participants who had a reasonable expectation of privacy,” Dorris told me.
2026-04-11 21:00:06
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that were ritually sacrificed, kicked out of the galaxy, taxonomically revised, and wore many hats.
First, scientists shed light on human sacrifice and cousin sex using ancient DNA from the bones of people who lived in fifth-century Korea. Then: the yeeting of a star, an octopus imposter, and the indignities of a bare head.
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.
Ready or not, it’s time to visit an ancient burial ground packed with the bones of sacrificed families. Welcome to the Imdang-Joyeong site in Korea, which contains a cluster of 1,500-year-old tombs from the tumultuous Three Kingdoms period.
As the name suggests, this era was dominated by a trio of warring dynastic factions called the Goguryeo, Baekjae, and Silla. Historical and archaeological evidence suggests that the Silla kingdom followed unique customs, including the practice of “Sunjang,” a coburial of sacrificed people with an elite grave owner, as well as consanguineous marriages—marriages between close blood relatives.
Now, researchers have now sequenced ancient DNA from 78 deceased individuals to corroborate the findings with confirmed lineages. The results revealed that consanguineous marriages were indeed common, and that adult women were often buried together with their own kin, which is a rarity in ancient graveyards around the world.
“Silla is thought to have practiced different marital customs from that of its neighbors, such as Goguryeo,” said researchers co-led by Hyoungmin Moon of Seoul National University and Daewook Kim of Yeungnam University. “Most notably, Silla royal elites are documented to have practiced consanguineous marriage, which is rarely observed in Goguryeo and Baekjae records. Historical accounts of consanguineous marriage are thought to be related to the consolidation of the rank and social status within Silla royals and local elites.”
“However, because of limited ancient genome studies in Korea, no corroborating genomic evidence so far has been reported regarding the marriage customs of the Three-Kingdoms period Koreans,” the team added. “Our research is the first to analyze the genome-wide composition of closely related individuals from an ancient Three-Kingdoms period of Korea.”
Many tombs at this site include separate chambers for elite grave owners, and for sacrificed people, which often included entire families that may have been ritually sacrificed and buried alongside their masters. Both elites and sacrificed individuals were often born from unions between first or second cousins, suggesting that consanguineous marriages were common across class lines.
“We found decisive evidence of three cases of families in which parents and their offspring were sacrificed together in the same grave,” the team said. “Our genetic findings are the first to confirm the acts of Sunjang of an entire household and suggest that these practices might be common for sacrificial burials of the Three-Kingdoms period.”
In addition, some adult women were buried alongside their parents and grandparents, a pattern that is rare in most other ancient burial grounds in which women tend to be buried alongside their husbands and in-laws. The study offers a rare glimpse of a society with idiosyncratic customs that is ready-made to be the setting of a new HBO prestige series.
In other news…
Some space explosions go so hard that they can kick a star right out of a galaxy. Scientists report the serendipitous discovery of one of these so-called “runaway stars” that was likely ejected from the galaxy approximately 2.8 million years ago “with an ejection velocity exceeding 600 kilometers per second”—or about 1.3 million miles per hour—according to a new study.
This cosmic sprinter is a white dwarf, the collapsed remains of a star, that was accelerated to ludicrous speed by a “Type Iax” supernovae, a type of stellar kablooey that occurs in some binary star systems.
This runaway star “is notably hotter than previously studied members of this class,” said researchers led by Aakash Bhat of the University of Potsdam. “Kinematic analysis indicates that the star has a high probability of being unbound from the Galaxy.”
So long, runaway star, and safe travels through intergalactic space.
Prepare to be ink-pilled, because it turns out that the oldest known octopus fossil ever found—a 300-million-year old species called Pohlsepia mazonensis—is not an octopus at all. It is a member of the nautilus family that just ended up looking sort of like an octopus in part because its shell fell off during the decomposition process.
“We present the first comprehensive reassessment of this enigmatic fossil, alongside multiple new specimens, using a suite of advanced analytical techniques,” said researchers led by Thomas Clements of the University of Reading. During this process, the team discovered a special “radula”—a feeding organ lined with rows of teeth—that matched the nautilus family.
As a result, P. mazonensis “represents the oldest known fossil soft tissue nautiloid (albeit without its shell),” the team concluded. The finding is a boon to octopus scientists (a.k.a. Doc Ocks) who have been perplexed for years by this specimen, given that the fossil record otherwise suggests that octopuses emerged much later in time, during the age of dinosaurs.
It just proves the old adage: Don’t believe everything you hear about the evolutionary origins of octopuses.
We’ll cap off with a hat tip to a study that chronicles hat etiquette across early modern England, roughly spanning the 1400s to 1700s.
Authored by the aptly-named Bernard Capp of the University of Warwick, the work is packed with madcap anecdotes about hats as signifiers of identity, instruments of shame, tools for salutations, and even makeshift toilets in the most ribald tales.
“The ‘Pleasant History’ of Hodge tells of a simpleton humiliated by a maidservant who claps on his head the hat in which she had just defecated,” Capp noted in the study. “Such behaviour, moreover, was not confined to fiction; in 1747 a Wiltshire man admitted snatching a rival’s hat, pissing in it, and clapping it back on the victim’s head.”
Other highlights include the Cap Act of 1571, which allowed offenders “to be prosecuted for wearing hats to church;” jokes about fine ladies wearing towering ribboned hats that spooked local livestock; and a man named Thomas Ellwood who was rendered unable to leave his house for months in 1659 because his father confiscated all his hats, because who would dare, in his words, to “run about the Country bare-headed, like a Mad-Man”?
Hats off to this heady historical work, and beware the bareheaded Mad-Men.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
2026-04-11 00:07:51
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 gun violence and chatbots and acceptance of depravity.
EMANUEL: It takes a lot for a post to shock me these days, especially if it’s from a known shitposter like the president of the United States, but I’ll confess that I was shocked by Trump posting a video of a woman getting beaten to death with a hammer last night.
I’m not a big believer in the “Trump is doing X because he doesn’t want you to think about Y” theory, but it’s hard not to read as at least an intuitive desire to change the subject away from the conclusion (?) to his disastrous adventure in Iran. It’s not going to work either way, and that’s not going to be the legacy of his posting style either. What’s sticking with me at the moment is not the graphic nature of the post itself or the attempt to demonize certain minorities—unfortunately none of that is surprising at this point—but that I don’t know if it’s possible to roll back this level of acceptance of even embrace of depravity in our culture.
2026-04-10 02:00:46
Scientists have observed an extremely rare chimpanzee “civil war,” a conflict that has killed at least seven adults and 17 infants, and which sheds new light on the nature of warfare in humans, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.
Male chimpanzees are often aggressive to outsiders, but it is unusual for chimps to kill former members of their own social groups. Though Jane Goodall and her colleagues observed one famous example—the Gombe Chimpanzee War of the 1970s, which resulted in seven adult deaths—it’s estimated that these violent episodes occur only once every 500 years, based on genetic analyses of chimpanzee lineages.
Now, a team led by Aaron Sandel, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, has reported a far more deadly “group fissure” among the Ngogo chimpanzees of Uganda. This population exceeded 200 individuals at one point, making it the largest group of chimpanzees ever observed in the wild. But over the past decade, the chimps have fractured into two factions, one of which has staged multiple lethal raids on the other.
“Certainly, these are not strangers,” said Sandel in a call with 404 Media. “These are chimps that once knew each other, and we know that for certain.”
The Ngogo group has been studied since the 1970s by primatologists like Thomas Struhsaker, and have been intensively observed since 1995 as part of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project set up by David Watts and John Mitani. For more than three decades, researchers from around the world have convened to watch the group during summer field expeditions, while Ugandan research assistants have maintained a continuous presence at the site.
Because of this longstanding observation, Sandel said, researchers were able to be on the ground “witnessing every moment” as the deadly chimp war unfolded.
Chimpanzees from different clusters socialized together before the group fissure in 2015. Image: Aaron Sandel
This group has always had distinct subpopulations that spent more time together, including the Western and Central clusters. Even so, before the fissure, the clusters regularly overlapped for shared activities like grooming, patrolling, and interbreeding.
Sandel vividly remembers the exact day that this dynamic had noticeably shifted: June 24, 2015. He was following the Western cluster, which was at the center of its “neighborhood” territory, he said.
Video credit: Aaron Sandel
“They hear chimps from the Central neighborhood nearby, and they go quiet,” he recalled. “They seem nervous. They're touching each other with this reassurance that they typically do when they hear the outsider chimps, but I was just alone with them. I remember, just in that moment, being really puzzled and focused, like ‘what’s going on?’”
“They could have reunited and done what's typical—screaming and charging around, maybe some slapping, and then come together, sit together, groom, maybe go their separate ways after, because they'd already started to be a bit more disconnected,” Sandel continued. “But instead of reuniting in typical chimpanzee fusion fashion, the Western chimpanzees ran and the Central chimps chased them.”
Video credit: Aaron Sandel
What started as a weird vibe transformed into a weeks-long chill between the groups, followed by a temporary thaw. Ultimately, the tension spiraled into bloody conflicts.
“You act like a stranger, you become a stranger,” Sandel said. “It seemed like that planted the seed of polarization.”
Over the course of the next few years, the males in each cluster began to treat each other like outsiders. The last offspring that had parents from different clusters was conceived in March 2015. The Western and Central chimps were fully separated by 2018.
The Western chimps, despite being smaller in number, have since amped up hostilities by staging 24 violent attacks against their former kin, killing at least seven mature males and 17 infants from the Central cluster. The death toll may well be higher, but some deaths and disappearances cannot be conclusively attributed to the conflict.
Sandel and his colleagues proposed a few possible causes of this “civil war,” a term that specifically refers to human conflicts, but that may have parallels in other species. First, the unusually large size of the group may have amplified feeding competition among individuals, even in their lush forest habitat. Social networks within the group may have also been disrupted by a wave of six deaths in 2014—five adult males and one adult female—some of whom likely died from disease.
The beginning of the fissure also coincides with the rise of a new alpha male, Jackson, who replaced the previous alpha, Miles. Sandel recalled Miles grunting in submission to Jackson on the same day that the Western cluster ran away from the Central cluster. Such transitions between alphas can introduce social instabilities as the dominance hierarchy is upended, a process that can take several months.
Indeed, Miles reacted violently toward other members of the group in the wake of his displacement. Jackson, who led the Central cluster, ended up as one the casualties of the conflict; he died from injuries inflicted by the Western cluster in 2022.
Whatever the cause of the rupture, this group of former kin have now become hostile enemies. It’s always dicey to draw broad comparisons between the behavior of humans and other animals, but the team speculates in the study that one possible takeaway is that "it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace.”
“If we study chimpanzees in detail and start to understand the mechanisms driving their cooperation, their conflict, and something as complex as one group becoming polarized, splitting, and engaging in ongoing lethal conflict, then we might gain insights into similar dynamics that are happening in humans,” Sandel said.
“If chimps are able to do this complex process in the absence of ethnicity, language, and religion—the things we often attribute to human warfare—chimps don't have those narratives and those excuses,” he concluded. “They're stripped away of those cultural dimensions. It must be their interpersonal social bonds and daily conflicts, reconciliations, and avoidances—all those dynamics. If that's the case with chimps, to what extent is it the case in humans? It’s a hypothesis to be tested.”
