❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

hearing @midimyers.com explain how they landed on their pricing structure felt exactly like this

the @mothership.blog mind.... www.404media.co/maddy-myers-...

Mothership Video game coverage for her, them, and yes, him, too.

and subscribe to @mothership.blog OR ELSE www.mothership.blog

Why Journalists Are Leaving Big Media (with Maddy Myers) YouTube video by 404 Media

watch the full episode here and listen to the 404 Media Podcast wherever you get your pods: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQUq...

got to talk indie media shop, feminism in games writing, and being baby journalists at alt-weeklies with @midimyers.com in this week's interview episode!

www.404media.co/maddy-myers-...

"What I did not account for—shamefully, considering how much time I spend writing about technology in my professional life—[was how the algorithm] was perfecting the art of making me feel weird, broke, and ugly."

@samleecole.bsky.social on getting married in 2026.
www.404media.co/wedding-plan...

this is a lovely compliment and a really interesting observation. thank you! <3

congrats! and, wtf!

looks like it was a gorgeous day! the skincare stuff really encourages obsession/overconsumption. I improved my routine pre-wedding but also definitely started doing stuff I really didn't need, thanks to content like that

Being “bad” at art is good, actually! My favorite excerpt from my appearance with @emilymbender.bsky.social on the @404media.co podcast with @samleecole.bsky.social in the episode “The Marketing Tricks of ‘Artificial Intelligence’”.

stop lasering your butthole!!!!

Like Lillie, the moment I got engaged and started Googling wedding dresses and venues was the moment my entire social media experience shifted into the Bride Algo. Every Reel and Tiktok, and I do mean every single post, contained something new I needed to change about myself: “Everything I did to ‘lock in’ for my wedding & lose 34 lbs in 5 months without missing out on living life.” “If you spend $150k on a wedding and stay married for 40 years, that's only about $10 a day. Not bad for one of the best days of your life.” “What I will NOT be doing as a 2026 bride.” “Bridal Breakdown PSA to 2026 Brides.” “POV: You’re not fat, you’re just puffy.” “25 Things Guests Secretly Hate About Weddings” “LEAVE THAT MAN AT THE ALTAR”

a place I wouldn't go back to with a gun www.404media.co/wedding-plan...

I Almost Lost My Mind in the Bridal Algorithm As a #2026Bride, the constant, aggressive content started to make me feel like I was losing sight of what mattered. And I'm far from alone.

allow me to take you on a journey into the yawning maw of Weddingtok: www.404media.co/wedding-plan...

Ukraine Says Russians are Surrendering to Robots Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pitching his country as a global leader in robots for war and defense. Will the world listen?

Ukraine is telling the world that Russians are surrendering to ground robots

The short version: my father gave me persistent intrastructure

please stop involving me in your kinks

difficult to overstate how not interested I am in what your ai agent is doing, or how quickly I mark emails from agents as spam

Are you a company that sells things? Thinking of going to #Substack? Not sure your options?

Reach out! I have been doing newsletters since 2015. I can help you come up with a strategy that is cost effective and actually makes sense for your audience, without Substack.

erniesmith.net

Thomson Reuters Fired Worker For Speaking Out About ICE, Former Employee Says “When I saw evidence that our products were being used to harm people and undermine the law, I did what anyone should do—I raised the alarm. Thomson Reuters’ response was to fire me.”

New: Thomson Reuters, which runs the CLEAR database ICE uses, fired a longstanding employee for speaking out against ICE, a new lawsuit says. Billie Little led an internal effort raising concerns; was fired. We've shown CLEAR is linked to ICE's Palantir tool

www.404media.co/thomson-reut...

Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit “This is the Strait of Hormuz in the data economy. If you want to make a change, this is where you cut it off. Anything short of that is theatrical political posture.”

“In my view this stuff isn’t complicated. You say, ‘don’t set the cookie.’ They set the cookie. The regulators see a fox going into the henhouse and the fox says, ‘I’m just here to count the eggs, not to eat any chickens.’ And they take them at their word."

Airbnb Hosts Don't Want to Talk to Guests Anymore, Are Outsourcing Messages to AI An entire industry of companies offers Airbnb hosts AI to speak to guests on their behalf. 404 Media poked around the industry after one AI tool offered a guest a recipe for French toast.

finding out an airbnb host was using a chatbot to talk to me -- not just the intro/outro messages but everything -- would light me UP dude www.404media.co/airbnb-hosts...

Doe had broken up with the user in 2024, and he used ChatGPT to process the split, according to emails and communications cited in the lawsuit. Rather than push back on his one-sided account, it repeatedly cast him as rational and wronged, and her as manipulative and unstable. He then took these AI-generated conclusions off the screen and into the real world, using them to stalk and harass her. This manifested in several AI-generated, clinical-looking psychological reports that he distributed to her family, friends, and employer.

For months, her then-fiancé and partner of several years had been fixating on her and their relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In mid-2024, she explained, they’d hit a rough patch as a couple; in response, he turned to ChatGPT, which he’d previously used for general business-related tasks, for “therapy.” Before she knew it, she recalled, he was spending hours each day talking with the bot, funneling everything she said or did into the model and propounding on pseudo-psychiatric theories about her mental health and behavior. He started to bombard the woman with screenshots of his ChatGPT interactions and copy-pasted AI-generated text, in which the chatbot can be seen armchair-diagnosing her with personality disorders and insisting that she was concealing her real feelings and behavior through coded language. The bot often laced its so-called analyses with flowery spiritual jargon, accusing the woman of engaging in manipulative “rituals.” Trying to communicate with her fiancé was like walking on “ChatGPT eggshells,” the woman recalled. No matter what she tried, ChatGPT would “twist it.” “He would send [screenshots] to me from ChatGPT, and be like, ‘Why does it say this? Why would it say this about you, if this is not true?'” she recounted. “And it was just awful, awful things.”

Shortly after moving out, the former fiancé began to publish multiple videos and images a day on social media accusing the woman of an array of alleged abuses — the same bizarre ideas he’d fixated on so extensively with ChatGPT. In some videos, he stares into the camera, reading from seemingly AI-generated scripts; others feature ChatGPT-generated text overlaid on spiritual or sci-fi-esque graphics. In multiple posts, he describes stabbing the woman. In another, he discusses surveilling her. (The posts, which we’ve reviewed, are intensely disturbing; we’re not quoting directly from them or the man’s ChatGPT transcripts due to concern for the woman’s privacy and safety.) The ex-fiancé also published revenge porn of the woman on social media, shared her full name and other personal information, and doxxed the names and ages of her teenage children from a previous marriage. He created a new TikTok dedicated to harassing content — complete with its own hashtag — and followed the woman’s family, friends, and neighbors, as well as other teens from her kids’ high school. “I’ve lived in this small town my entire life,” said the woman. “I couldn’t leave my house for months… people were messaging me all over my social media, like, ‘Are you safe? Are your kids safe? What is happening right now?'”

A woman sued OpenAI last week alleging that ChatGPT reinforced the obsessive, violent delusions of her stalker (her ex-boyfriend.)

This woman's claims (as detailed by TechCrunch, left) are chillingly similar to those of a completely different woman whose story Futurism reported on in Feb (right):

Cybersex Gives Birth to a Psychological Disorder (Published 2000)

makes me think of the "cybersex" panic of the 90s/00s. "the crack cocaine of sexual compulsivity" is a wild wild phrase www.nytimes.com/2000/05/16/h...

can you email support@404media.co (if you haven't already)? we can troubleshoot with you from there

How the Internet Became Hell (with Whitney Phillips) ‘The Ambivalent Internet’ and ‘The Shadow Gospel’ author Whitney Phillips on how online got so bad.

‘The Ambivalent Internet’ and ‘The Shadow Gospel’ author Whitney Phillips on how online got so bad.

WebinarTV Secretly Scraped Zoom Meetings of Anonymous Recovery Programs WebinarTV scraped and shared 12 steps-based anonymous meetings for people recovering from addiction and other private support groups.

this company is scraping and reposting anonymous support group Zoom meetings. Please be careful if you're using Zoom webinars for anything remotely sensitive www.404media.co/webinartv-se...

this isn't a joke. it's real science. we don't do april fools. Thanks.

Ravenous Is a New Worker-Owned Food Culture Media Company For too long, food media has felt toothless. Help us take a bite out of it.

We are in the middle of a subscription drive for our new food and culture site. We are worker-owned, have no investors or VC money, and will never use gen AI to make any written, visual or audio work. If that sounds good to you, sign up for a paid subscription or donate today! www.weareravenous.com

Farmer Arrested for Speaking Too Long at Datacenter Town Hall Vows to Fight Darren Blanchard went a few seconds over his three minute time limit and found himself in handcuffs.

In February, a farmer went a few seconds over his time at a city council meeting when speaking out against a datacenter.

It's a $200 fine for trespassing, but he's vowed to fight it. We've also got the police report from the incident.

FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved in iPhone Notification Database The case was the first time authorities charged people for alleged “Antifa” activities after President Trump designated the umbrella term a terrorist organization.

New from 404 Media: the FBI was able to extract incoming Signal messages from a phone even though the app was deleted. Why? Because parts of messages were stored in the iPhone's internal notification database. Shows how secure chat data can come from unexpected places www.404media.co/fbi-extracts...