QAnon

Parler is back, baby. After a year-long hiatus from the web, the conservative social media site has returned to the internet, and this time its new owners are promising it won’t become the radical rightwing hellscape it was when it left. Tesla Investors Not Happy With Mr. Tweet's TweetsParler has been offline since last April when it was bought by a media conglomerate and was subsequently shut down in the hopes of revamping and resurrecting it. Prior to its procurement, the site had been struggling. This week, as part…

Donald Trump called into CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday where he talked about crypto, tried to defend his complete 180 on a TikTok ban, and promoted his new sneakers. The former president also railed against Facebook, calling it the “enemy of the people.” But there’s one thing Trump didn’t mention about Facebook: He’s still buying ads on the social media platform.Meta's Apparent Firing Goof“I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media,” Trump said on the show MondayTrump is still spending…

Facebook plans to “deprecate” its News tab for users in the United States and Australia by April, according to a confusingly worded announcement published Thursday night. What does that mean? As best we can tell, it means Facebook doesn’t want anyone to use the platform for news anymore and will be killing its dedicated News tab. Russian Court Says Meta Is "Extremist Organization"“In early April 2024, we will deprecate Facebook News—a dedicated tab in the bookmarks section on Facebook that spotlights news—in the US and…

Wireless customers with AT&T, Cricket Wireless, T-Mobile, and Verizon all reported outages across the country this morning. And just like clockwork, some folks online pounced on the disruption as evidence of a global conspiracy. What Drew Noomi Rapace to Constellation?Alex Jones, arguably America’s most popular conspiracy theorist, believes the telecom outage is a direct result of Chinese hackers.“Is it a cyber attack? AT&T is being very tight-lipped,” Jones insisted in a web broadcast on Thursday in his typical…

President Joe Biden has a message for the right-wing conspiracy theorists who were convinced he was rigging the Super Bowl in favor of Taylor Swift’s boyfriend: The plan went off without a hitch.Is Threads a Threat to Twitter? | Future TechShortly after the Super Bowl ended on Sunday, Biden gleefully trolled those who accused him and the Democrats of running a “Taylor Swift election interference psyop.” According to the theory, Biden orchestrated the victory of the Kansas City Chiefs, where Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kelce…

Every website on the internet is currently trying to stick an AI-powered chatbot on its homepage, a trend that extends even to 8kun—the far-right image board website that is known for being a toxic cess pool of depraved and immoral content.NPR Is Going Dark on Twitter | Future TechJim Watkins, who created the website from the ashes of 8chan (which was summarily kicked off the internet by web hosting providers in 2019), posted about the site’s new AI chatbot on X on Tuesday. According to Watkins, the new chatbot, which is…

Half a decade after he was kicked off Twitter by the platform’s safety team, professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been welcomed back to the site, which is now called X. Zillow Says You’ll Buy Your Next House With… AI? | AI UnlockedYou can thank Elon Musk for that. This weekend, Musk passed around a poll on X to see if users wanted Jones to return to the platform. Nearly two million votes were cast—out of which some 70 percent voted for Jones to return to the site. Musk had previously stated that he would never…

Reddit followed through on its threat to take over subreddits if they did not reopen to the public with its takeover of r/malefashionadvice on Thursday. Prior to closing down in protest of Reddit’s API price changes. The subreddit was one of the biggest on the platform that was still engaged in the protest, boasting more than five million subscribers.Reddit Knowingly Downvoting Self | Future TechReddit reached out to moderators telling them if they didn’t reopen their subreddits they would be in violation of the company’s…

Most people made aware of a plot to kidnap and murder children on an industrial scale would want to do something about it. It is hardly surprising that Edgar Maddison Welch, learning of such a wicked scheme, and outraged that law enforcement agencies were doing nothing, took matters into his own hands.On 4 December 2016, Welch brought an assault rifle and handgun down to Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington DC, to liberate the children held captive there in the basement. But he found no children and no basement.That…

The GOP infighting continues to rage on as the race for the 2024 presidential bid picks up steam. A super PAC supporting Florida hopeful Ron DeSantis has unleashed a campaign ad that features an AI-generated version of Trump’s voice.The PAC, called Never Back Down, released the ad in support of Iowa governor Kim Reynolds in a bid to sow division amongst Republican voters in the first caucus state, Politico reports. The ad accuses Trump of “attacking” Reynolds, claiming he endorsed and stood by her,even when she “fell…