LONDON — The year is 2016. Somehow it feels carefree, driven by internet culture. Everyone is wearing over-the-top makeup.
At least, that’s how Maren Nævdal, 27, remembers it — and has seen it on her social feeds in recent days.
For Njeri Allen, also 27, the year was defined by the artists topping the charts that year, from Beyonce to Drake to Rihanna’s last music releases. She also remembers the Snapchat stories and an unforgettable summer with her loved ones. “Everything felt new, different, interesting and fun,” Allen says.
Many people, particularly those in their 20s and 30s, are thinking about 2016 these days. Over the past few weeks, millions have been sharing throwback photos to that time on social media, kicking off one of the first viral trends of the year — the year 2026, that is.
With it have come the memes about how various factors — the sepia hues over Instagram photos, the dog filters on Snapchat and the music — made even 2016’s worst day feel like the best of times.
Part of the look-back trend’s popularity has come from the realization that 2016 was already a decade ago – a time when Nævdal says she felt like people were doing “fun, unserious things” before having to grow up.
But experts point to 2016 as a year when the world was on the edge of the social, political and technological developments that make up our lives today. Those same advances — such as developments under U.S. President Donald Trump and the rise of AI — have increased a yearning for even the recent past, and made it easier to get there.
Nostalgia is often driven by a generation coming of age — and its members realizing they miss what childhood and adolescence felt like. That’s certainly true here. But some of those indulging in the online journeys through time say something more is at play as well.
It has to do with the state of the world — then and now.
By the end of 2016, people would be looking ahead to moments like Trump’s first presidential term and repercussions of the United Kingdom leaving the EU after the Brexit referendum. A few years after that, the COVID-19 pandemic would send most of the world into lockdown and upend life for nearly two years.
Janelle Wilson, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, says the world was “on the cusp of things, but not fully thrown into the dark days that were to come.”
“The nostalgia being expressed now, for 2016, is due in large part to what has transpired since then,” she says, also referencing the rise of populism and increased polarization. “For there to be nostalgia for 2016 in the present,” she added, “I still think those kinds of transitions are significant.”
For Nævdal, 2016 “was before a lot of the things we’re dealing with now.” She loved seeing “how embarrassing everyone was, not just me,” in the photos people have shared.
“It felt more authentic in some ways,” she says. Today, Nævdal says, “the world is going downhill.”
Nina van Volkinburg, a professor of strategic fashion marketing at University of the Arts, London, says 2016 marked the beginning of “a new world order” and of “fractured trust in institutions and the establishment.” She says it also represented a time of possibility — and, on social media, “the maximalism of it all.”
This was represented in the bohemian fashion popularized in Coachella that year, the “cut crease” makeup Nævdal loved and the dance music Allen remembers.
“People were new to platforms and online trends, so were having fun with their identity,” van Volkinburg says. “There was authenticity around that.”
And 2016 was also the year of the “boss babe” and the popularity of millennial pink, van Volkinburg says, indications of young people coming into adulthood in a year that felt hopeful.
Allen remembers that as the summer she and her friends came of age as high school graduates. She says they all knew then that they would remember 2016 forever.
Ten years on, having moved again to Taiwan, she said “unprecedented things are happening” in the world. “Both of my homes are not safe,” she said of the U.S. and Taiwan, “it’s easier to go back to a time that’s more comfortable and that you felt safe in.”
In the last few days, Nævdal decided to hide the social media apps on her phone. AI was a big part of that decision. “It freaks me out that you can’t tell what’s real anymore,” she said.
“When I’ve come off of social media, I feel that at least now I know the things I’m seeing are real,” she added, “which is quite terrifying.”
“We can so readily access the past or, at least, versions of it,” she said. “We’re to the point where we can say, ’Remember last week when we were doing XYZ? That was such a good time!’”
Both Nævdal and Allen described themselves as nostalgic people. Nævdal said she enjoys looking back to old photos – especially when they show up as “On This Day” updates on her phone, She sends them to friends and family when their photos come up.
Allen wished that she documented more of her 2016 and younger years overall, to reflect on how much she has evolved and experienced since.
“I didn’t know what life could be,” she said of that time. “I would love to be able to capture my thought process and my feelings, just to know how much I have grown.”
As the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday, experts warned that a flood of “AI slop” is threatening efforts to preserve the memory of Nazi crimes and the millions of Jewish people killed during World War II.
Images seen by the AFP news agency include an emaciated and apparently blind man standing in the snow at the Nazi concentration camp Flossenbuerg, and a viral image of a little girl with curly hair on a tricycle falsely presented as a 13-year-old Berliner who died at the Auschwitz extermination camp.
Such content — whether produced as clickbait for commercial gain or for political motives — has proliferated over the past year, distorting the history of Nazi Germany’s murder of six million European Jews during World War II.
A person walks through the field of stelae at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe on the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, Jan. 27, 2026.
Christoph Soeder/picture alliance/Getty
Early examples emerged in the spring of 2025, but by the end of the year, “AI slop” on the subject “was being shown very frequently,” historian Iris Groschek told AFP.
On some sites, examples of such content were being posted once per minute, said Groschek, who works at Holocaust memorial sites in Hamburg, including the Neuengamme concentration camp.
With the exponential advances in AI, “the phenomenon is growing,” Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the foundation that manages the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora memorials, told AFP.
Several Holocaust memorials and commemorative associations this month issued an open letter warning about the rising quantity of this “entirely fabricated” content.
Some of them are churned out by content farms that exploit “the emotional impact of the Holocaust to achieve maximum reach with minimal effort,” it said.
The picture supposedly from Flossenbuerg camp falls into this category, as it was shown on a page claiming to share, “true, human stories from the darkest chapters of the past.”
But the memorials warned that fake content was also being created, “specifically to dilute historical facts, shift victim and perpetrator roles, or spread revisionist narratives.”
A man watches during a commemoration of the Official Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity in the Spanish Senate, Jan. 27, 2026, in Madrid.
Europa Press News
Wagner points, for example, to images of seemingly “well-fed prisoners, meant to suggest that conditions in concentration camps weren’t really that bad.”
The Frankfurt-based Anne Frank Educational Center has warned of a “flood” of AI-generated content and propaganda “in which the Holocaust is denied or trivialized, with its victims ridiculed.”
By distorting history, AI-generated images have “very concrete consequences for how people perceive the Nazi era,” said Groschek.
The results of trivializing or denying the Holocaust have been seen in the attitudes of some younger visitors to the camps, particularly from “rural parts of eastern Germany … in which far-right thinking has become dominant,” said Wagner.
In their open letter, the memorials called on social media platforms to “proactively combat AI content that distorts history” and to “exclude accounts that disseminate such content from all monetisation programs.”
“The challenge for society as a whole is to develop ethical and historically responsible standards for this technology,” they said, adding: “Platform operators have a particular responsibility in this regard.”
German Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer said in a statement to AFP: “I support the memorials’ call to clearly label AI-generated images and remove them when necessary.”
He said that making money from such imagery should be prevented.
“This is a matter of respect for the millions of people who were killed and persecuted under the Nazis’ reign of terror,” he said, reminding the platforms that they have obligations under the EU’s Digital Services Act.
Groschek said none of the American social media companies had responded to the memorials’ letter, including Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram.
TikTok responded by saying it wanted to exclude the accounts in question from monetization and implement, “automated verification,” according to Groschek.
WASHINGTON — The United States on Friday imposed sanctions on a fleet of nine ships and their owners accused of transporting hundreds of millions of dollars in forbidden Iranian oil to foreign markets.
The sanctions are being imposed because of Iran’s “shutdown of internet access to conceal its abuses” against its citizens during its crackdown on nationwide protests, the U.S. Treasury Department said. They “target a critical component of how Iran generates the funds used to repress its own people,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.
The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said the nine targeted vessels — flagged from Palau, Panama and other jurisdictions — are part of a shadow fleet, a network of older tankers used to transport goods that are subject to international sanctions, notably from Russia and Iran. The U.S. sanctions aim to prevent the targeted Iranians from doing business with Americans or accessing U.S. accounts.
Friday’s action is part of an ongoing buildup of tensions between the U.S. and the theocratic nation as an American aircraft carrier group inches closer to the Middle East. President Donald Trump called the group an “armada” in comments to journalists aboard Air Force One late Thursday.
Trump added that the U.S. was moving the ships toward Iran “just in case” he wants to take action against Iran’s government. The Republican president has repeatedly boasted that his threats on Iran have prevented the execution of more than 800 dissidents.
Iran’s top prosecutor on Friday called Trump’s repeated claims “completely false.”
Meanwhile, the death toll in Iran from the bloody crackdown on nationwide demonstrations rose to at least 5,032, activists said.
The U.S. issued sanctions this month against Iranian officials and firms accused of helping to repress the nationwide protests, which challenged Iran’s theocratic government, including the secretary of the Supreme Council for National Security, whom the Treasury accuses of being one of the first officials to call for violence against protesters.
Trump on Thursday declined to say whether the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei should be removed from office.
Online marketplaces and high-street health retailers are being flooded with weight-loss supplements making misleading claims.
That’s according to a major investigation by the consumer association Which? which has warned that these products are flouting strict advertising rules.
Which?’s researchers found bogus claims on popular platforms, including Amazon, eBay, and Temu. Well-known high street retailers including Holland & Barrett and Superdrug were also identified in the report.
Current UK laws state that companies cannot make health claims about a product without evidence. Any specific claim must be listed on an approved official health register.
However, Which? found that many brands are making outlandish promises with very little enforcement.
One supplement on eBay claimed that raspberry fruit extract helps the body burn fat at a higher rate. In reality, such claims have been repeatedly rejected due to a lack of evidence.
The investigation discovered that some major retailers use website categories like “fat burners” to sell basic vitamins. Holland & Barrett listed Acai Berry tablets in its fat burner section despite no weight-loss ingredients being present.
Superdrug included a cinnamon supplement under appetite suppressants even though the product made no such claim. This practice can mislead shoppers into buying items they believe will help them lose weight.
Even more concerning were products claiming to target specific body parts or mimic medical jabs. One supplement on Temu promised to shred stomach fat fast. Another on Amazon claimed users would lose centimetres from their waistlines in just four weeks.
Rules set by the Advertising Standards Authority prohibit brands from predicting how much weight someone will lose or where they will lose it from.
Products are also forbidden from claiming they are as effective as prescription weight-loss medication. Which? found a listing on eBay for a pill that suggested it was just as effective as prescription options.
This creates a dangerous confusion for consumers seeking medical results from unregulated supplements. Following the report, more than 50 misleading listings were taken down by the retailers involved.
Says Sue Davies, Which? Head of Consumer Policy:
“It’s really worrying that online marketplaces and popular health retailers are promoting misleading health supplements.
“Not only does this make it impossible for shoppers to trust the claims they see online, but it also means people could be wasting their hard-earned cash on products that just don’t live up to the claims.
“Better oversight of the industry is desperately needed so the government and regulators can crack down on these misleading listings and ensure that any sellers who break the rules are properly held to account.”
Right of replies
A government spokesperson said:
“Food labels must be easy to understand, accurate and honest.
“Any claims about the health benefits or nutritional value of supplements need to be backed by science and officially approved by authorities.
“Companies that break these rules may be subject to enforcement action by local authorities.”
An Amazon spokesperson said:
“We require all products offered in our store to comply with applicable laws, regulations and Amazon policies.
“We develop innovative tools to prevent unsafe products from being listed. We continuously monitor our store, and we take action to maintain a safe selection for our customers, including removing noncompliant products and outreach to sellers, manufacturers, and government agencies for additional information, when appropriate.
“We have removed the highlighted products in question.”
An ASA spokesperson said:
“Our rules are clear that ads mustn’t make unauthorised health, medical or weight-loss claims. In particular, ads can’t claim or imply that a food supplement can provide effects associated with prescription-only weight loss medicines.
“We recognise that these kinds of ads can target potentially vulnerable people who may be concerned about their weight or health. We’ve been using our AI-powered Active Ad Monitoring system to proactively monitor supplement ads.
“This has enabled us to identify and ban a number of ads that have broken our rules, including several ads for ‘faux-zempic’ supplements that misleadingly claimed to produce effects similar to prescription-only weight-loss medicines.”
A spokesperson for Coolkin said:
“Our products are certified before they are put on the shelves. There is no problem.”
An eBay spokesperson said:
“Consumer safety is a top priority for eBay. We have reviewed the listings identified by Which? and have removed all items that are against eBay policy.
“We use enforcement measures to help prevent unsafe items from being listed on eBay. These include seller compliance audits, block-filter algorithms, AI-supported monitoring by in-house specialists, and close partnerships with regulators. These measures help prevent millions of potentially unsafe items from being listed each year.”
Holland and Barrett said:
“We are committed to providing high-quality, science-backed products that reflect the latest guidance. Product categorisation is intended to support customers to navigate our website, and we regularly carry out detailed reviews led by our science and regulatory teams to ensure this is consistent and helpful.
“Following our latest review, the H&B Acai Berry tablets now sit within our Superfood category.”
An Internal Youth spokesperson said:
“We have passed on your points to our marketing department who will be addressing each concern and actioning anything deemed inappropriate on our product listing immediately.”
Lynda Scammell, head of borderline products at the Medicines Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said:
“If a product offered as a food supplement contains medicinal ingredients or makes medicinal claims to treat or prevent disease, it will be considered a medicine and regulated under medicines law.’
“Any weight loss product which is presented in a way that is typical of authorised medicines, or which has a product name which is similar to the name of a prescription medicine to the extent that it may cause confusion in the mind of the average UK citizen is not permitted.”
A Pharmaslim spokesperson said:
“The product is manufactured in the UK in a licensed facility and is a food supplement, not a medicinal product. We do not make medical or therapeutic claims for it. For completeness, the listing you are referring to is not currently active, as the product is out of stock. We are reviewing the points you raise regarding product naming and marketing presentation.”
A spokesperson for Superdrug said:
“Our customers’ health and wellbeing is always a priority. Superdrug Marketplace is a curated platform where third-party sellers must adhere to strict listing guidelines, including alignment with UK health authority recommendations. We do not intend to make unjustified health claims, and any categorisation on our website is designed to help customers navigate products rather than imply specific health outcomes.
“Upon being made aware of Which?’s findings, we have paused all retailing of the highlighted product. We have also reviewed the category in question, and will take further action where necessary to ensure our content remains compliant and clear for customers.”
A Temu spokesperson said:
“After receiving the inquiry, we immediately removed the products listed in the report pending further review and are working with the sellers involved to rectify their descriptions.
“Temu maintains strict requirements for dietary supplements, requiring documentation such as HACCP certification and composition reports.
“Following ASA’s advice on food supplements, Temu has been enforcing and will further enhance its review process. We are also providing additional compliance training to remind sellers of their obligations to meet the required regulatory standards.”
Formula Max and Pslalae did not respond to Which?’s requests for comment.
VSCO filters, Kylie lip kits and the summer of Pokemon Go.
The year 2016 is making a comeback in 2026 as people flood Instagram with throwback posts reminiscing about what they viewed as an iconic year for popular culture and the internet.
In the past two weeks, many people online — from celebrities to regular Instagram users — dug through their camera rolls and Snapchat memories to unearth hyper-filtered photos of themselves a decade ago.
Many of the photos share common themes now emblematic of the era: a matte lip and winged eyeliner, bold eyebrows and glamorous eye shadow. Acai bowls and boxed water. Chokers, aviator glasses and boho outfits made trendy by Coachella.
“When I’m seeing people’s 2016 posts, even if they were in different states or slightly different ages, there’s all these similarities, like that dog filter or those chokers or The Chainsmokers,” said Katrina Yip, one of many people online who posted 2016 throwback photos. “It makes it so funny to realize that we were all part of this big movement that we didn’t really even know at the time was, like, just following the trend of that time.”
The trend has become the latest example of people online romanticizing a different time as a form of escapism. Last year, Gen Zers, typically defined as those ages 14-29, posted videos expressing love for the charm and “cringe” of millennials. There has also been a recent surge in millennial-focused pop culture, which has been celebrated online.
To many millennials and older Gen Z, 2016 was a year when community flourished on social media. People dumped their entire camera rolls into messy Facebook photo albums, sent each other silly Snapchat selfies and eagerly posted what they ate for brunch.
“If you’re older, like maybe you were 50 in 2016 and you weren’t on Instagram or a heavy internet user, you might be like, ‘Why does everyone care about this random year?’” said Steffy Degreff, who shared her own throwback photos last week.
Degreff, 38, said that for those who’ve been on social media for more than a decade, there’s nostalgia for the way social media used to function — with chronological feeds that focused only on the users people followed. There used to be an end to scrolling (specifically, when you ran out of updates from your friends). Platforms back then felt “a little bit less malicious” in their design, she said.
“I do think that 2016 was the beginning of the end of a golden era of when people felt really good about the internet and social media and politics,” she added. “And then, obviously, the pandemic happened.”
Many online who voiced their nostalgia described the overall energy of 2016 as “colorful” and “carefree.”
People often went out in crop tops and jeans with a flannel tied around their waist. They’d snap pictures of an outfit laid out carefully on their bed or of a giant acai bowl. Then, they’d pore over VSCO (a popular photo editing app) filters with their friends, debating which preset to choose.
“Now, we’ve gone very neutral-toned, like quiet luxury aesthetic, very minimal,” said Paige Lorentzen, who shared throwback photos featuring some of the trendiest brands of the time, such as Boxed Water Is Better and Triangl Swimwear. “Whereas back then, it was the brighter the saturation on your photos, the better. Everything felt like summer.”
The new year marked exactly 10 years since 2016; therefore, many online began posting the phrase “2026 is the new 2016,” according to the database Know Your Meme.
But “as the trend carried on, some social media users began posting videos denouncing the idea of making 2026 the new 2016, citing problems with living in the past and pointing out bad things that happened in 2016,” Know Your Meme added.
“Why is everyone trying to bring back 2016? Please don’t actually,” wrote an X user.
Still, some who look back fondly on the era, especially those who were in their teens in 2016, said life felt more carefree then.
“I know people’s perceptions of 2016 are based on their own experiences, but for me it was senior year of college. I lived by the beach; I didn’t have many college classes left,” said Lorentzen, 31. “It was before adulthood. So it kind of just embodied that carefree young California girl era.”
It was also before the concept of content creation began to dominate. While YouTubers and Instagram influencers existed, they seemed fewer and further away. And TikTok wasn’t around yet, although people would achieve stratospheric Vine stardom from time to time.
Some, like Yip, said that nowadays, her non-content creator friends and acquaintances rarely post online anymore unless it’s for a major life milestone.
“It was OK to be cringey, you know?” Yip said. “People were just posting for their friends. The people you followed on social media were just people you knew in real life. They weren’t celebrities or educational accounts, and so everything just felt like you were more in a little personal bubble.”
Content creator Teala Dunn, who grew a massive YouTube following sharing morning routines and vlogs in the mid-2010s, was one of the era’s trendiest influencers, particularly for teenage girls. She said that when she thinks of 2016, she recalls “fun and freedom and lightheartedness.”
“The internet was so popular, like a lot of things were starting to become really viral and fun,” Dunn said. “And I feel like a lot of people, especially influencers and YouTubers and all of my friends, we didn’t take things too seriously.”
Dunn said that the dynamic online has shifted to become drastically more parasocial and that harassment from strangers comes much more easily now than it did before. While Dunn still creates content now, she said she has scaled back how much she’s willing to reveal about her personal life.
And she, like many others, noted that 2016 seemed like one of the last years when life felt “normal.”
“I didn’t realize how much we took for granted normal life pre-Covid. Like, pre-Covid was a completely different time,” Dunn said. “I feel like the news was still crazy, but it was definitely not as crazy as the news is now. I feel like we can all agree to that. Things were just a lot more fun.”
Since its launch, TikTok has become one of the world’s most popular social media platforms, using recommendation algorithms to connect content creators and influencers with new audiences.
LONDON — With one puff of a cigarette, a woman in Canada became a global symbol of defiance against Iran’s bloody crackdown on dissent — and the world saw the flame.
A video that has gone viral in recent days shows the woman — who described herself as an Iranian refugee — snapping open a lighter and setting the flame to a photo she holds. It ignites, illuminating the visage of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s highest cleric. Then the woman dips a cigarette into the glow, takes a quick drag — and lets what remains of the image fall to the pavement.
Whether staged or a spontaneous act of defiance — and there’s plenty of debate — the video has become one of the defining images of the protests in Iran against the Islamic Republic’s ailing economy, as U.S. President Donald Trump considers military action in the country again.
The gesture has jumped from the virtual world to the real one, with opponents of the regime lighting cigarettes on photos of the ayatollah from Israel to Germany and Switzerland to the United States.
In the 34 seconds of footage, many across platforms like X, Instagram and Reddit saw one person defy a series of the theocracy’s laws and norms in a riveting act of autonomy. She wears no hijab, three years after the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests against the regime’s required headscarves.
She burns an image of Iran’s supreme leader, a crime in the Islamic republic punishable by death. Her curly hair cascades — yet another transgression in the Iranian government’s eyes. She lights a cigarette from the flame — a gesture considered immodest in Iran.
And in those few seconds, circulated and amplified a million times over, she steps into history.
In 2026, social media is a central battleground for narrative control over conflicts. Protesters in Iran say the unrest is a demonstration against the regime’s strictures and competence. Iran has long cast it as a plot by outsiders like United States and Israel to destabilize the Islamic Republic.
And both sides are racing to tell the story of it that will endure.
Iranian state media announces wave after wave of arrests by authorities, targeting those it calls “terrorists” and also apparently looking for Starlink satellite internet dishes, the only way to get videos and images out to the internet. There was evidence on Thursday that the regime’s bloody crackdown had somewhat smothered the dissent after activists said it had killed at least 2,615 people. That figure dwarfs the death toll from any other round of protest or unrest in Iran in decades and recalls the mayhem of the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Social media has bloomed with photos of people lighting cigarettes from photos of Iran’s leader. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em. #Iran,” posted Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana.
In the age of AI, misinformation and disinformation, there’s abundant reason to question emotionally and politically charged images. So when “the cigarette girl” appeared online this month, plenty of users did just that.
It wasn’t immediately clear, for example, whether she was lighting up inside Iran or somewhere with free-speech protections as a sign of solidarity. Some spotted a background that seemed to be in Canada. She confirmed that in interviews. But did her collar line up correctly? Was the flame realistic? Would a real woman let her hair get so close to the fire?
Many wondered: Is the “cigarette girl” an example of “psyops?” That, too, is unclear. That’s a feature of warfare and statecraft as old as human conflict, in which an image or sound is deliberately disseminated by someone with a stake in the outcome. From the allies’ fake radio broadcasts during World War II to the Cold War’s nuclear missile parades, history is rich with examples.
The U.S. Army doesn’t even hide it. The 4th Psychological Operations Group out of Ft. Bragg in North Carolina last year released a recruitment video called, “Ghost in the Machine 2 that’s peppered with references to “PSYWAR.” And the Gaza war featured a ferocious battle of optics: Hamas forced Israeli hostages to publicly smile and pose before being released, and Israel broadcast their jubilant reunions with family and friends.
Whatever the answer, the symbolism of the Iranian woman’s act was powerful enough to rocket around the world on social media — and inspire people at real-life protests to copy it.
The woman did not respond to multiple efforts by The Associated Press to confirm her identity. But she has spoken to other outlets, and AP confirmed the authenticity of those interviews.
On X, she calls herself a “radical feminist” and uses the screen name Morticia Addams —- after the exuberantly creepy matriarch of “The Addams Family” — sheerly out of her interest in “spooky things,” the woman said in an interview with the nonprofit outlet The Objective.
She doesn’t allow her real name to be published for safety reasons after what she describes as a harrowing journey from being a dissident in Iran — where she says she was arrested and abused — to safety in Turkey. There, she told The Objective, she obtained a student visa for Canada. Now, in her mid-20s, she said she has refugee status in and lives in Toronto.
It was there, on Jan. 7, that she filmed what’s become known as “the cigarette girl” video a day before the Iranian regime imposed a near-total internet blackout.
“I just wanted to tell my friends that my heart, my soul was with them,” she said in an interview on CNN-News18, a network affiliate in India.
In the interviews, the woman said she was arrested for the first time at 17 during the “bloody November” protests of 2019, demonstrations that erupted after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear deal that Iran had struck with world powers that imposed crushing sanctions.
“I was strongly opposed to the Islamic regime,” she told The Objective. Security forces “arrested me with tasers and batons. I spent a night in a detention center without my family knowing where I was or what had happened to me.” Her family eventually secured her release by offering a pay slip for bail. “I was under surveillance from that moment on.”
In 2022 during the protests after the death of Mahsa Amini in custody, she said she participated in a YouTube program opposing the mandatory hijab and began receiving calls from blocked numbers threatening her. In 2024, after Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash, she shared her story about it — and was arrested in her home in Isfahan.
The woman said she was questioned and “subjected to severe humiliation and physical abuse.” Then without explanation, she was released on a high bail. She fled to Turkey and began her journey to Canada and, eventually, global notoriety.
“All my family members are still in Iran, and I haven’t heard from them in a few days,” she said in the interview, published Tuesday. “I’m truly worried that the Islamic regime might attack them.”
LONDON — Wikipedia unveiled new business deals with a slew of artificial intelligence companies on Thursday as it marked its 25th anniversary.
The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed licensing deals with AI companies including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft and France’s Mistral AI.
Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the early internet, but that original vision of a free online space has been clouded by the dominance of Big Tech platforms and the rise of generative AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web.
Aggressive data collection methods by AI developers, including from Wikipedia’s vast repository of free knowledge, has raised questions about who ultimately pays for the artificial intelligence boom.
The nonprofit that runs the site signed Google as one of its first customers in 2022 and announced other agreements last year with smaller AI players like search engine Ecosia.
The new deals will help one of the world’s most popular websites monetize heavy traffic from AI companies. They’re paying to access Wikipedia content “at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs,” the Wikimedia Foundation said. It did not provide financial or other details.
While AI training has sparked legal battles elsewhere over copyright and other issues, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes it.
“I’m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it’s human curated,” Wales told The Associated Press in an interview. “I wouldn’t really want to use an AI that’s trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI,” Wales said, referring to billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform.
Wales said the site wants to work with AI companies, not block them. But “you should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you’re putting on us.”
The Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit group that runs Wikipedia, last year urged AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform and said human traffic had fallen 8%. Meanwhile, visits from bots, sometimes disguised to evade detection, were heavily taxing its servers as they scrape masses of content to feed AI large language models.
The findings highlighted shifting online trends as search engine AI overviews and chatbots summarize information instead of sending users to sites by showing them links.
Wikipedia is the ninth most visited site on the internet. It has more than 65 million articles in 300 languages that are edited by some 250,000 volunteers.
The site has become so popular in part because its free for anyone to use.
“But our infrastructure is not free, right?” Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander said in a separate interview in Johannesburg, South Africa.
It costs money to maintain servers and other infrastructure that allows both individuals and tech companies to “draw data from Wikipedia,” said Iskander, who’s stepping down on Jan. 20, and will be replaced by Bernadette Meehan.
The bulk of Wikipedia’s funding comes from 8 million donors, most of them individuals.
“They’re not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies,” Wales said. They’re saying, “You know what, actually you can’t just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way.”
Editors and users could benefit from AI in other ways. The Wikimedia Foundation has outlined an AI strategy that Wales said could result in tools that reduce tedious work for editors.
While AI isn’t good enough to write Wikipedia entries from scratch, it could, for example, be used to update dead links by scanning the surrounding text and then searching online to find other sources.
“We don’t have that yet but that’s the kind of thing that I think we will see in the future.”
Artificial intelligence could also improve the Wikipedia search experience, by evolving from the traditional keyword method to more of a chatbot style, Wales said.
“You can imagine a world where you can ask the Wikipedia search box a question and it will quote to you from Wikipedia,” he said. It could respond by saying “here’s the answer to your question from this article and here’s the actual paragraph. That sounds really useful to me and so I think we’ll move in that direction as well. ”
Reflecting on the early days, Wales said it was a thrilling time because many people were motivated to help build Wikipedia after he and co-founder Larry Sanger, who departed long ago, set it up as an experiment.
However, while some might look back wistfully on what seems now to be a more innocent time, Wales said those early days of the internet also had a dark side.
“People were pretty toxic back then as well. We didn’t need algorithms to be mean to each other,” he said. “But, you know, it was a time of great excitement and a real spirit of possibility.”
Wikipedia has lately found itself under fire from figures on the political right, who have dubbed the site “Wokepedia” and accused it of being biased in favor of the left.
Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are investigating alleged “manipulation efforts” in Wikipedia’s editing process that they said could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it.
A notable source of criticism is Musk, who last year launched his own AI-powered rival, Grokipedia. He has criticized Wikipedia for being filled with “propaganda” and urged people to stop donating to the site.
Wales said he doesn’t consider Grokipedia a “real threat” to Wikipedia because it’s based on large language models, which are the troves of online text that AI systems are trained on.
“Large language models aren’t good enough to write really quality reference material. So a lot of it is just regurgitated Wikipedia,” he said. “It often is quite rambling and sort of talks nonsense. And I think the more obscure topic you look into, the worse it is.”
He stressed that he wasn’t singling out criticism of Grokipedia.
“It’s just the way large language models work.”
Wales say he’s known Musk for years but they haven’t been in touch since Grokipedia launched.
“I should probably ping him,” Wales said.
What would he say?
“’How’s your family?’ I’m a nice person, I don’t really want to pick a fight with anybody.”
____
AP writer Mogomotsi Magome in Johannesburg contributed to this report
BANGKOK — Iranian demonstrators’ ability to get details of bloody nationwide protests out to the world has been given a strong boost, with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service dropping its fees to allow more people to circumvent the Tehran government’s strongest attempt ever to prevent information from spilling outside its borders, activists said Wednesday.
The move by the American aerospace company run by Elon Musk follows the complete shutdown of telecommunications and internet access to Iran’s 85 million people on Jan. 8, as protests expanded over the Islamic Republic’s faltering economy and the collapse of its currency.
SpaceX has not officially announced the decision and did not respond to request for comment, but activists told The Associated Press that Starlink has been available for free to anyone in Iran with the receivers since Tuesday.
“Starlink has been crucial,” said Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian whose nonprofit Net Freedom Pioneers has helped smuggle units into Iran, pointing to video that emerged Sunday showing rows of bodies at a forensic medical center near Tehran.
“That showed a few hundred bodies on the ground, that came out because of Starlink,” he said in an interview from Los Angeles. “I think that those videos from the center pretty much changed everyone’s understanding of what’s happening because they saw it with their own eyes.”
Since the outbreak of demonstrations Dec. 28, the death toll has risen to more than 2,500 people, primarily protesters but also security personnel, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.
Starlink is banned in Iran by telecommunication regulations, as the country never authorized the importation, sale or use of the devices. Activists fear they could be accused of helping the U.S. or Israel by using Starlink and charged with espionage, which can carry the death penalty.
Since then, more than 50,000 units are estimated to have been sneaked in, with people going through great lengths to conceal them, using virtual private networks while on the system to hide IP addresses and taking other precautions, said Ahmad Ahmadian, the executive director of Holistic Resilience, a Los Angeles-based organization that was responsible for getting some of the first Starlink units into Iran.
Starlink is a global internet network that relies on some 10,000 satellites orbiting Earth. Subscribers need to have equipment, including an antenna requires a line of site to the satellite, so must be deployed in the open, where it could be spotted by authorities. Many Iranians disguise them as solar panels, Ahmadian said.
After efforts to shut down communications during the 12-day war with Israel in June proved to be not terribly effective, Iranian security services have taken more “extreme tactics” now to both jam Starlink’s radio signals and GPS systems, Ahmadian said in a phone interview. After Holistic Resilience passed on reports to SpaceX, Ahmadian said, the company pushed a firmware update that helped circumvent the new countermeasures.
Security services also rely on informers to tell them who might be using Starlink, search internet and social media traffic for signs it has been used, and there have been reports they have raided apartments with satellite dishes.
“There has always been a cat-and-mouse game,” said Ahmadian, who fled Iran himself in 2012, after serving time in prison for student activism. “The government is using every tool in its toolbox.”
Still, Ahmadian noted that the government jamming attempts had only been effective in certain urban areas, suggesting that security services lack the resources to block Starlink more broadly.
Iran did begin to allow people to call out internationally on Tuesday via their mobile phones, but calls from outside the country into Iran remain blocked.
Compared to protests in 2019, when lesser measures by the government were able to effectively stifle information reaching the rest of the world for more than a week, Ahmadian said the proliferation of Starlink has made it impossible to prevent communications He said the flow could increase now that the service has been made free.
“This time around they really shut it down, even fixed landlines were not working,” he said. “But despite this, the information was coming out and it also shows how distributed this community of Starlink users is in the country.”
Musk has made Starlink free for use during several natural disasters, and Ukraine has relied heavily on the service since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. It was initially funded by SpaceX and later through an American government contract.
As a proponent of Starlink for Iran, Ahmadian said the Crimea decision was a wake-up call for him, but that he couldn’t see any reason why Musk might be inclined to act similarly in Iran.
“Looking at the political Elon, I think he would have more interest … in a free Iran as a new market,” he said.
Julia Voo, who heads the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Cyber Power and Future Conflict Program in Singapore, said there is a risk in becoming reliant on one company as a lifeline, as it “creates a single point of failure,” though currently there are no comparable alternatives.
China has already been exploring ways to hunt and destroy Starlink satellites, and Voo said the more effective Starlink proves itself at penetrating “government-mandated terrestrial blackouts, the more states will be observing.”
“It’s just going to result in more efforts to broaden controls over various ways of communication, for those in Iran and everywhere else watching,” she said.
___
Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv, Israel contributed to this report.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The death toll from nationwide protests in Iran surpassed 2,000 people on Tuesday, activists said, as Iranians made phone calls abroad for the first time in days after authorities severed communications during a crackdown on demonstrators.
The number of dead climbed to at least 2,003, as reported by the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. That figure dwarfs the death toll from any other round of protest or unrest in Iran in decades and recalls the chaos surrounding the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
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Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iranians could call abroad on mobile phones Tuesday for the first time since communications were halted during a crackdown on nationwide protests in which activists said at least 646 people have been killed.
Several people in Tehran were able to call The Associated Press and speak to a journalist there. The AP bureau in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, was unable to call those numbers back. The witnesses said SMS text messaging still was down and that internet users in Iran could connect to government-approved websites locally but nothing abroad.
The witnesses gave a brief glimpse into life on the streets of the Iranian capital over the four and a half days of being cut off from the world. They described seeing a heavy security presence in central Tehran.
Anti-riot police officers, wearing helmets and body armor, carried batons, shields, shotguns and tear gas launchers. They stood watch at major intersections. Nearby, the witnesses saw members of the Revolutionary Guard’s all-volunteer Basij force, who similarly carried firearms and batons. Security officials in plainclothes were visible in public spaces as well.
Several banks and government offices were burned during the unrest, they said. ATMs had been smashed and banks struggled to complete transactions without the internet, the witnesses added.
However, shops were open, though there was little foot traffic in the capital. Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, where the demonstrations began Dec. 28, was to open Tuesday. However, a witness described speaking to multiple shopkeepers who said the security forces ordered them to reopen no matter what. Iranian state media had not acknowledged that order.
The witnesses spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
U.S. President Donald Trump has said Iran wants to negotiate with Washington after his threat to strike the Islamic Republic over its crackdown.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, speaking to the Qatar-funded satellite news network Al Jazeera in an interview aired Monday night, said he continued to communicate with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff.
The communication “continued before and after the protests and are still ongoing,” Araghchi said. However, “Washington’s proposed ideas and threats against our country are incompatible.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Iran’s public rhetoric diverges from the private messaging the administration has received from Tehran in recent days.
“I think the president has an interest in exploring those messages,” Leavitt said. “However, with that said, the president has shown he’s unafraid to use military options if and when he deems necessary, and nobody knows that better than Iran.”
Meanwhile, pro-government demonstrators flooded the streets Monday in support of the theocracy, a show of force after days of protests directly challenging the rule of 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iranian state television aired chants from the crowd, which appeared to number in the tens of thousands, who shouted “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”
Others cried out, “Death to the enemies of God!” Iran’s attorney general has warned that anyone taking part in protests will be considered an “enemy of God,” a death-penalty charge.
Trump announced Monday that countries doing business with Iran will face 25% tariffs from the United States. Trump announced the tariffs in a social media posting, saying they would be “effective immediately.”
It was action against Iran for the protest crackdown from Trump, who believes exacting tariffs can be a useful tool in prodding friends and foes on the global stage to bend to his will.
Brazil, China, Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates are among economies that do business with Tehran.
Trump said Sunday that his administration was in talks to set up a meeting with Tehran, but cautioned that he may have to act first as reports of the death toll in Iran mount and the government continues to arrest protesters.
“I think they’re tired of being beat up by the United States,” Trump said. “Iran wants to negotiate.”
Iran, through the country’s parliamentary speaker, warned Sunday that the U.S. military and Israel would be “legitimate targets” if Washington uses force to protect demonstrators.
More than 10,700 people also have been detained over the two weeks of protests, said the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which has been accurate in previous unrest in recent years and gave the latest death toll early Tuesday. It relies on supporters in Iran crosschecking information. It said 512 of the dead were protesters and 134 were security force members.
With the internet down in Iran, gauging the demonstrations from abroad has grown more difficult. The Associated Press has been unable to independently assess the toll. Iran’s government hasn’t offered overall casualty figures.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Mobile phones in Iran were able to call abroad Tuesday after a crackdown on nationwide protests in which the internet and international calls were cut.
Several people in Tehran were able to call The Associated Press and speak to a journalist there. The AP bureau in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, was unable to call those numbers back.
Iranians said text messaging appeared to remain down, and witnesses said the internet remained cut off from the outside world.
Iran cut off the internet and calls on Thursday as protests intensified.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, speaking to the Qatar-funded satellite news network Al Jazeera in an interview aired Monday night, said he continued to communicate with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff.
The communication “continued before and after the protests and are still ongoing,” Araghchi said. However, “Washington’s proposed ideas and threats against our country are incompatible.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Iran’s public rhetoric diverges from the private messaging the administration has received from Tehran in recent days.
“I think the president has an interest in exploring those messages,” Leavitt said. “However, with that said, the president has shown he’s unafraid to use military options if and when he deems necessary, and nobody knows that better than Iran.”
Meanwhile, pro-government demonstrators flooded the streets Monday in support of the theocracy, a show of force after days of protests directly challenging the rule of 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iranian state television aired chants from the crowd, which appeared to number in the tens of thousands, who shouted “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”
Others cried out, “Death to the enemies of God!” Iran’s attorney general has warned that anyone taking part in protests will be considered an “enemy of God,” a death-penalty charge.
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Just after 8 p.m. Thursday, Iran’s theocracy pulled the plug and disconnected the Islamic Republic’s 85 million people from the rest of the world.
Following a playbook used both in demonstrations and in war, Iran severed the internet connections and telephone lines that connect its people to the vast diaspora in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Until now, even while facing strict sanctions over the country’s nuclear program, Iranians still could access mobile phone apps and even websites blocked by the theocracy, using virtual private networks to circumvent restrictions.
Thursday’s decision sharply limits people from sharing images and witness accounts of the nationwide protests over Iran’s ailing economy that have grown to pose the biggest challenge to the government in years. It also could provide cover for a violent crackdown after the Trump administration warned Iran’s government about consequences for further deaths among demonstrators.
As the country effectively goes dark, loved ones abroad are frantic for any scrap of news, especially as Iran’s attorney general warned on Saturday that anyone taking part in protests will be considered an “enemy of God,” a death-penalty charge
“You can’t understand our feelings. My brothers, my cousins, they will go on the street. You can’t imagine the anxiety of the Iranian diaspora,” said Azam Jangravi, a cybersecurity expert in Toronto who opposes Iran’s government. “I couldn’t work yesterday. I had meetings but I postponed them because I couldn’t focus. I was thinking of my family and friends.”
Her voice cracked as she added: “A lot of people are being killing and injured by the Islamic Republic of Iran, and we don’t know who.”
Even Starlink is likely being jammed
This is the third time Iran has shut down the internet from the outside world. The first was in 2019, when demonstrators angry about a spike in government-subsidized gasoline prices took to the streets. Over 300 people reportedly were killed.
Then came the protests over the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini following her arrest by the country’s morality police over allegedly not wearing her hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities. A monthslong crackdown killed more than 500 people.
While the connectivity offered by Starlink played a role in the Amini demonstrations, the deployment of its receivers is now far greater in Iran. That’s despite the government never authorizing Starlink to function, making the service illegal to possess and use.
A year ago, an Iranian official estimated tens of thousands of Starlink receivers in the Islamic Republic, a figure that Los Angeles-based internet freedom activist Mehdi Yahyanejad said sounded right.
While many receivers likely are in the hands of business people and others wanting to stay in touch with the outside world for their livelihoods, Yahyanejad said some are now being used to share videos, photos and other reporting on the protests.
“In this case, because all those things have been disrupted, Starlink is playing the key for getting all these videos out,” Yahyanejad said.
However, Starlink receivers are facing challenges. Since its 12-day war with Israel last June, Iran has been disrupting GPS signals, likely in a bid to make drones less effective. Starlink receivers use GPS signals to position themselves to connect to a constellation of low-orbit satellites.
Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights and security at the Miaan Group and an expert on Iran, said that since Thursday he had seen about a 30% loss in packets being sent by Starlink devices — basically units of data that transmit across the internet. In some areas of Iran, Rashidi said there had been an 80% loss in packets.
“I believe the Iranian government is doing something beyond GPS jamming, like in Ukraine where Russia tried to jam Starlink,” Rashidi said. He suggested Iran may be using a mobile jammer, like it did in previous decades to disrupt satellite television receivers.
The International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, has called on Iran to stop jamming in the past.
Meanwhile, Iran has been advocating at the ITU for Starlink service to the country to be stopped.
Help ‘needs to come soon’
It appears that the majority of information coming out of Iran since Thursday night is being transmitted via Starlink, which is now illegal. That carries dangers for those possessing the devices.
“It’s really hard to use it because if they arrest a person, they can execute the person and say this person is working for Israel or the United States,” Jangravi said.
Not using it, however, means the world knows even less about what’s happening inside Iran at a pivotal moment.
“This sort of nonviolent protest is not sustainable when the violence (by security forces) is so extreme,” Yahyanejad said. “Unless something changes in the next two or three days, these protests can die down, too. If there’s any help, it needs to come soon.”
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Protests sweeping across Iran neared the two-week mark Saturday, with the country’s government acknowledging the ongoing demonstrations despite an intensifying crackdown and as the Islamic Republic remains cut off from the rest of the world.
With the internet down in Iran and phone lines cut off, gauging the demonstrations from abroad has grown more difficult. But the death toll in the protests has grown to at least 65 people killed and over 2,300 others detained, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. Iranian state TV is reporting on security force casualties while portraying control over the nation.
“The United States supports the brave people of Iran,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote Saturday on the social platform X. The State Department separately warned: “Do not play games with President Trump. When he says he’ll do something, he means it.”
State TV split-screen highlights Iran’s challenge
Saturday marks the start of the work week in Iran, but many schools and universities reportedly held online classes, Iranian state TV reported.
State TV repeatedly played a driving, martial orchestral arrangement from the “Epic of Khorramshahr” by Iranian composer Majid Entezami, while showing pro-government demonstrations. The song, aired repeatedly during the 12-day war launched by Israel, honors Iran’s 1982 liberation of the city of Khorramshahr during the Iran-Iraq war. It has been used in videos of protesting women cutting away their hair to protest the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini as well.
“Field reports indicate that peace prevailed in most cities of the country at night,” a state TV anchor reported. “After a number of armed terrorists attacked public places and set fire to people’s private property last night, there was no news of any gathering or chaos in Tehran and most provinces last night.”
That was directly contradicted by an online video verified by The Associated Press that showed demonstrations in northern Tehran’s Saadat Abad area, with what appeared to be thousands on the street.
“Death to Khamenei!” a man chanted.
The semiofficial Fars news agency, believed to be close to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard and one of the few media outlets able to publish to the outside world, released surveillance camera footage of what it said came from demonstrations in Isfahan. In it, a protester appeared to fire a long gun, while others set fires and threw gasoline bombs at what appeared to be a government compound.
The Young Journalists’ Club, associated with state TV, reported that protesters killed three members of the Guard’s all-volunteer Basij force in the city of Gachsaran. It also reported a security official was stabbed to death in Hamadan province, a police officer killed in the port city of Bandar Abbas and another in Gilan, as well as one person slain in Mashhad.
State television also aired footage of a funeral service attended by hundreds in Qom, a Shiite seminary city just south of Tehran.
More weekend demonstrations planned
Iran’s theocracy cut off the nation from the internet and international telephone calls on Thursday, though it allowed some state-owned and semiofficial media to publish. Qatar’s state-funded Al Jazeera news network reported live from Iran, but they appeared to be the only major foreign outlet able to work.
Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who called for protests Thursday and Friday, asked demonstrators to take to the streets Saturday and Sunday with Iran’s old lion-and-sun flag, used during the time of the shah.
Pahlavi’s support of and from Israel has drawn criticism in the past — particularly after the 12-day war. Demonstrators have shouted in support of the shah in some protests, but it isn’t clear whether that’s support for Pahlavi himself or a desire to return to a time before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The demonstrations began Dec. 28 over the collapse of the Iranian rial currency, which trades at over 1.4 million to $1, as the country’s economy is squeezed by international sanctions in part levied over its nuclear program. The protests intensified and grew into calls directly challenging Iran’s theocracy.
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Iranian authorities cut off phone service and internet access Thursday in the capital and in several parts of the country as mass protests and chanting against the government continue, with dozens of people killed in the demonstrations and thousands arrested. Multiple sources in Tehran told CBS News the internet was down in the capital.
The NetBlocks monitoring organization said Thursday evening local time in Iran that its live data showed Iran was “now in the midst of a nationwide internet blackout; the incident follows a series of escalating digital censorship measures targeting protests across the country and hinders the public’s right to communicate at a critical moment.”
Attempts to dial landlines and mobile phones from Dubai to Iran could not be connected, the Associated Press reported.
Security forces confronted protesters in several cities and towns, firing tear gas. One CBS News source in the capital said there were “huge crowds out across Tehran. Unprecedented,” and confirmed that the internet was down for most people in the city. He said some people, with more robust, more reliable business accounts could still get online. Not long after, that source became unreachable, suggesting the blackout had widened even further.
There were reports on social media, largely by anti-regime activists, that web service was also down or severely restricted in the cities of Esfahan, Lodegan, Abdanan, and parts of Shiraz.
The web outages came as Iranians began chanting out of their windows against the regime, following a call by exiled Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former U.S.-backed shah, to make their voices heard at 8 p.m. local time (noon Eastern). Analysts and insiders told CBS News the scale of the response to Pahalvi’s call could determine whether the deadly, 12-day-old protests fizzle out as previous rounds of unrest have, or grow into a major challenge to the government, and provoke a possible wider crackdown.
“All of the huge crowds in my neighborhood are pro-Pahlavi and from several areas my sources report the same — pro-Pahlavi crowds are prevailing, undeniably,” the source in Tehran told CBS News, calling it “monarchists responding to Reza.”
Protesters are seen tearing up a large Iranian flag after it was taken down in the city of Mashhad, in Iran’s Razavi Khorasan province, in an image taken from video posted on social media amid nationwide protests. The location of the video was verified by Reuters but the date could not be, though it corresponded with reports of a protest in Mashhad on Jan. 7, 2026, a day before the video was posted online.
Reuters/Social media
So far, the unrest has left at least 42 people dead, including at least four members of the security services, and seen more than 2,260 others detained, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.
President Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt Thursday that his administration is monitoring the protests in Iran. He threatened to take severe action if authorities kill protesters.
“I have let them know that if they start killing people, which they tend to do during their riots — they have lots of riots — if they do it, we are going to hit them very hard,” Mr. Trump said.
Speaking to reporters Thursday at the White House, Vice President JD Vance said the U.S. stands by anybody in Iran engaged in peaceful protest. Asked if the U.S. would take part in any Israeli strikes on Iran, Vance called on Iran to have real negotiations with the U.S. over their nuclear program.
“I’ll let the president speak to what we’re going to do in the future,” Vance said.
NetBlocks said earlier that its “data show the loss of connectivity on #Iran internet backbone provider TCI in the restive city of Kermanshah as protests spread across the nation in their 12th day; the incident comes amid rising casualties with indications of disruptions in multiple regions.”
Iranian authorities regularly restrict or disable internet access when they expect significant protests or other potentially destabilizing events.
President Mahsoud Pezeshkian, seen as a reformer but subordinate to Iran’s longtime Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, intimated ahead of his election in 2024 that he would free up the internet and make more websites accessible. It remains tightly restricted, however. Social media sites such as TikTok, Facebook and X are officially banned, as is access to U.S. and European news sites, including CBS News.
Many young, tech-savvy Iranians have become adept at getting around the restrictions, but it’s a cumbersome process, and when the regime slows down internet speeds at politically sensitive times, the whole system can become unusable.
GENEVA — GENEVA (AP) — TikTok was picked by FIFA as the first “preferred platform” for video content on social media at a men’s World Cup, the soccer body said Thursday.
The World Cup tie-in will see creators get special access at the 48-nation tournament being co-hosted in 16 cities — 11 in the United States, three in Mexico and two in Canada — from June 11 to July 19.
FIFA said World Cup broadcast rights holders can livestream parts of the 104 games at a dedicated hub on the TikTok app, which has more than 170 million users in the U.S.
“Additionally, a wide group of creators will receive the opportunity to use and co-create FIFA archival footage,” it said.
FIFA did not state the value of the deal, or details of any tender process and rival bidders. YouTube had a low-level sponsor deal that included access for creators at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
What kind of live content can be streamed this year, at a tournament where commercial partners’ exclusive rights are fiercely protected, also was not specified by FIFA.
TikTok’s partnership with MLS and Apple TV led to the platform carrying footage from cameras dedicated just to following soccer great Lionel Messi playing in games for Inter Miami.
FIFA promised fans would be taken “behind the curtain and closer to the action than ever before,” its secretary general Mattias Grafström said.
TikTok’s in-app World Cup hub also will give fans “participation incentives” like custom stickers, filters and gamification features.
“ TikTok GamePlan turns fandom into measurable business results for our sports partners, with fans being 42% more likely to tune in to live matches after watching sports content on TikTok,” said its global head of content, James Stafford.
TikTok became the world’s most downloaded phone app while also under threat of being shut down in the United States as a national security threat.
In December, TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance agreed to form a U.S. joint venture with investors Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX. That deal is scheduled to be sealed later this month.
Sometimes you can tell a bill will be really bad just from its title. So it goes with The Republic Unifying Meritocratic Performance Advancing Machine Intelligence by Eliminating Regulatory Interstate Chaos Across American Industry Act, from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.). And, boy, does it deliver on that disaster of a name, managing to combine nearly every bad tech policy idea of the past half-decade—including gutting Section 230 and creating new requirements around the suppression of sexuality online—into one massive piece of Trump-branded legislation.
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The bill’s title alone is asinine, even if we put the North Korea-ness meets word-salad nature of it aside. Following the normal rules of making acronyms, it would be the TRUMP AMIERICA (or perhaps AMIBERICA) AI act, though Blackburn is throwing rules to the wind and referring to it as the TRUMP AMERICA AI act.
If only the problems stopped there!
Alas, Blackburn is serving up a cornucopia of proposals that could throttle free speech and free markets online. An anti-tech omnibus, if you will, sold as a simple AI regulatory scheme.
Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick calls it a “massively destructive internet policy overhaul masquerading as AI legislation.” It “would change nearly every US government policy regarding how the internet works, tackling AI, Section 230, copyright, and a bunch of other nonsense all in one bill.”
Masnick has a nice rundown of the bill’s myriad flaws, which include instituting a “duty of care” for AI developers to “prevent and mitigate foreseeable harm to users” (per Blackburn’s summary of the bill). This duty would be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
“This is one of those things that I’m sure sounds good to folks, but as we’ve explained over and over again this kind of ‘duty of care’ is basically an anti-230 that would do real damage,” writes Masnick.
It’s basically just an invitation for lawyers to sue any time anything bad happens and someone involved in the bad thing that happened somehow used an AI tool at some point.
And then you have to go through a big expensive legal process to explain “no, this thing was not because of AI” or whatever. It’s just a massive invitation to sue everyone, meaning that in the end you have just a few giant companies providing AI because they’ll be the only ones who can afford the lawsuits.
And just in case that didn’t allow for enough ways to attack AI companies, another section of the bill would enable “the U.S. Attorney General, state attorneys general, and private actors to file suit to hold AI system developers liable for harms caused by the AI system for defective design, failure to warn, express warranty, and unreasonably dangerous or defective product claims.”
Blackburn—who was once a proponent of light-touch regulation when it came to the internet—has also worked elements of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) into the TRUMP AMERICA AI Act.
It will require certain social media platforms, video games, stream services, and messaging applications “to implement tools and safeguards to protect users and visitors under the age of 17 to protect children from sex trafficking, suicide, and other abuses,” per Blackburn’s summary. As with KOSA, this requirement is promoted in a way that sounds unobjectionable—admirable, even—but would, in effect, require companies to suppress massive amounts of content, weaken privacy protections, and more.
“This section generally requires covered platforms to exercise reasonable care in the design and use of features that increase minors’ online activity to prevent and mitigate harm to minors (e.g., mental health disorders and severe harassment),” the summary says.
Enterprising lawyers can easily argue that all sorts of things contribute to mental health issues in their young clients, enabling lawsuits over generally unobjectionable (or, at the very least, totally legal) speech and neutral platform features. The biggest tech companies may be able to fight these, but all but the behemoths would be forced to preemptively ban a bunch of speech in order to avoid potential lawsuits.
Section 11 of Blackburn’s bill is promoted as combating “the consistent pattern of bias against conservative figures demonstrated by Big Tech and AI systems.” But, in practice, it could require AI systems to have a pro-conservative slant—at least as long as President Donald Trump or other Republicans are in power.
The bill would set up “audits of high-risk AI systems to undergo regular bias evaluations to prevent discrimination based on protected characteristics, including political affiliation.”
Presumably, federal agencies would be tasked with conducting these audits, which could leave it up to political appointees—not exactly a notoriously unbiased bunch—to judge what does and doesn’t count as bias against a particular political group. How long before AI developers have to tailor their systems to spitting out politically favorable results?
The effect of this section could be somewhat blunted by the fact that it only applies to “high-risk” systems, which Blackburn’s summary describes as “those that could pose significant risks to health, safety, rights, or economic security, including those in education, employment, law enforcement, or critical infrastructure.” But without a more precise definition, it’s hard to say how this would shake out or what it would mean for the sorts of general AI systems used by consumers.
During the heyday of federal antitrust hearings about Big Tech, the idea of ending “self-preferencing” got a lot of play. Self-preferencing refers to tech companies using their services to promote or favor their other services, and for some reason, lawmakers are convinced that it’s a scourge.
But self-preferencing comes with a lot of perks for tech users, not just for the companies involved. It means that when you Google a particular place or business, Google will automatically place a map of this location near the top of the search results. It means that Amazon will perhaps show you more products eligible for free shipping with a Prime membership—something Prime members want!—than products where shipping costs extra. And so on.
The TRUMP AMERICA AI act would stop “systemically important platforms”—defined as including, but perhaps not limited to, “platforms with subscribers or monthly active users in the United States not less than 34% of the population of the United States”—from engaging in “self-preferencing or steering users to products or services offered by the platform operator,” per Blackburn’s summary.
In effect, it would make Big Tech less user-friendly in the name of protecting us from Big Tech.
A line tucked near the bottom of Blackburn’s summary says that the bill would prevent “systemically important platforms from disseminating sexual material harmful to minors.”
It’s cloaked in euphemistic language: “sexual material harmful to minors” sure sounds like something very bad, like it might be referring to child pornography or other forms of illegal imagery.
But we’ve seen, in myriad state laws targeting material harmful to minors, that this term can be used very broadly, encompassing not just any and all pornographic photos and videos but also written erotica, literature that describes sexual relationships, stories centered on gay and transgender characters, and so on.
A requirement that big tech platforms ban “sexual material harmful to minors” would almost certainly mean that they must filter out anything that could be considered porn and perhaps much more.
One of the most worrying bits of the bill concerns Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Blackburn’s bill would “establish a ‘Bad Samaritan’ carve-out that would deny immunity from civil liability to platforms that purposefully facilitate or solicit third-party content that violates federal criminal law.”
Of course, Section 230 is already inapplicable to violations of federal criminal law. A company can’t break federal law and claim that Section 230 lets them do it.
So what’s the true aim here? I think Masnick frames the issue pretty well:
Right now, 230 lets platforms get frivolous lawsuits dismissed quickly at the motion to dismiss stage. This change would force every platform to go through lengthy, expensive litigation to prove they weren’t “facilitating” (an incredibly vague term) or “soliciting” third-party content that violates federal criminal law.
That’s gutting the main reason Section 230 exists. Instead of quick dismissals, you get discovery, depositions, and trials, all while someone argues that because your algorithm showed someone a post, you were “facilitating” whatever criminal content they claim to find.
Slippery words like “facilitate” and “solicit” give authorities a lot of leeway to punish tech companies for activities we generally think of as non-criminal, free-market, or speech-facilitating activities.
The bill would put into policy Trump’s desire to ban states from passing their own AI regulation. Earlier this month, the president issued an executive order seeking to stop states from passing certain sorts of AI regulation so the country could have, instead, a “national framework”—though the order can’t actually create said framework or outright ban states from passing their own laws. Congress can, however. And Blackburn’s bill would preempt state AI laws in several arenas.
Blackburn’s summary also lists a huge array of other changes the TRUMP AMERICA AI Act would enact. Some of these summaries are relatively vague—for instance, Section 8 is merely described as “establish[ing] requirements for companies providing AI chatbot and companion services to protect kids.”
One section would require “interoperability for systemically important platforms, which include platforms with subscribers or monthly active users in the United States not less than 34% of the population of the United States.” Interoperability is one of those ideas that may sound nice in theory but presents huge technical challenges and security risks.
Several sections seem designed to upend copyright laws, by ignoring concepts like fair use, satire, and parody. There’s a bit that would create “a federal right for individuals to sue companies for using their data (personal, copyrighted) for AI training without explicit consent” and another that would “hold individuals or companies liable if they produce an unauthorized digital replica of an individual in a performance.” Yet another section would deem “derivative works generated, synthesized, or produced by an AI system without authorization as infringing works, which would be ineligible for copyright protection.”
The bill hasn’t even been formally introduced yet, let alone attracted official cosponsors, so it’s hard to say how Blackburn’s colleagues will treat the bill. But it seems clear that the measure’s title has been calculated to attract Trump’s endorsement, which could translate to a lot of Republican lawmakers falling in line, too.
“I look forward to introducing the TRUMP AMERICA AI Act in the new year to create one federal rulebook for AI to protect children, creators, conservatives, and communities across the country and ensure America triumphs over foreign adversaries in the global race for AI dominance,” said Blackburn.
New post!
There was a lot of innovation in medicine and biomedical research this year, and I’ve tried to summarize the biggest ones in this blogpost.
Patient “states he has a foreign body in his rectum that is vibrating. He states he was with a girl last night and doesn’t remember much.” Using data from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s emergency room visits database, Defectorhas compiled a list of things people got stuck in their rectums and genitals in 2025.
New York passes an immunity bill. The bill “provides immunity from prosecution for certain individuals engaged in prostitution who are victims of or witnesses to a crime and who report such crime or assist in the investigation or prosecution,” per the legislative summary. “This law recognizes that safety must be prioritized over punishment,” said Decriminalize Sex Work Legal Director Melissa Broudo. “It is a vital and common sense public safety measure that strengthens law enforcement’s ability to identify, investigate, and convict perpetrators of violence and trafficking.”
Did China just ban sexting? “The Chinese government has banned the sharing of ‘obscene’ content in private online messages and increased the penalties for spreading pornographic material,” reportsThe Washington Post. “While the revision will target the dissemination of pornography and exploitative images,” the new regulation “may also mean that consensual sexting could also be dragged into China’s legal system.”
Lol: The URLs trumpkennedycenter.org and trumpkennedycenter.com are owned by comedy writer Toby Morton, who predicted the renaming of the D.C. performing arts institution (it will become the “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts”) and snapped up the web domains in advance.
As technology distracts, polarizes and automates, people are still finding refuge on analog islands in the digital sea.
The holdouts span the generation gaps, uniting elderly and middle-aged enclaves born in the pre-internet times with the digital natives raised in the era of online ubiquity.
They are setting down their devices to paint, color, knit and play board games. Others carve out time to mail birthday cards and salutations written in their own hand. Some drive cars with manual transmissions while surrounded by automobiles increasingly able to drive themselves. And a widening audience is turning to vinyl albums, resuscitating an analog format that was on its deathbed 20 years ago.
The analog havens provide a nostalgic escape from tumultuous times for generations born from 1946 through 1980, says Martin Bispels, 57, a former QVC executive who recently started Retroactv, a company that sells rock music merchandise dating to the 1960s and 1970s.
“The past gives comfort. The past is knowable,” Bispels says. “And you can define it because you can remember it the way you want.”
But analog escapes also beckon to the members of the millennials and Generation Z, those born from 1981 through 2012 — younger people immersed in a digital culture that has put instant information and entertainment at their fingertips.
Despite that convenience and instant gratification, even younger people growing up on technology’s cutting edge are yearning for more tactile, deliberate and personal activities that don’t evaporate in the digital ephemera, says Pamela Paul, author of “100 Things We’ve Lost To The Internet.”
“Younger generations have an almost longing wistfulness because because so little of their life feels tangible,” Paul says. “They are starting to recognize how the internet has changed their lives, and they are trying to revive these in-person, low-tech environments that older generations took for granted.”
Here are some glimpses into how the old ways are new again.
Keeping those cards coming
People have been exchanging cards for centuries. It’s a ritual in danger of being obliterated by the tsunami of texting and social media posts. Besides being quicker and more convenient, digital communication has become more economical as the cost of a first-class U.S. postage stamp has soared from 33 to 78 cents during the past 25 years.
But tradition is hanging on thanks to people like Megan Evans, who started the Facebook group called “Random Acts of Cardness” a decade ago when she was just 21 in hopes of fostering and maintaining more human connections in an increasingly impersonal world.
“Anybody can send a text message that says ‘Happy Birthday!’ But sending a card is a much more intentional way of telling somebody that you care,” says Evans, who lives in Wickliff, Ohio. “It’s something that the sender has touched with their own hand, and that you are going to hold in your own hand.”
More than 15,000 people are now part of Evans’ Facebook group, including Billy-Jo Dieter, who sends at least 100 cards per month commemorating birthdays, holidays and other milestones. “A dying art,” she calls it.
“My goal has been to try to make at least one person smile each day,” says Dieter, 48, who lives in Ellsworth, Maine. “When you sit down and you put the pen to the paper, it becomes something that’s even more just for that person.”
The singularity of a stick shift
Before technology futurist Ray Kurzweil came up with a concept that he dubbed the “Singularity” to describe his vision of computers melding with humanity, the roads were crammed with stick-shift cars working in concert with people.
But automobiles with manual transmission appear to be on a road to oblivion as technology transforms cars into computers on wheels. Fewer than 1% of the new vehicles sold in the U.S. have manual transmission, down from 35% in 1980, according to an analysis by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
But there remain stick-shift diehards like Prabh and Divjeev Sohi, brothers who drive cars with manual transmissions to their classes at San Jose State University along Silicon Valley roads clogged with Teslas. They became enamored with stick shifts while virtually driving cars in video games as kids and riding in manual transmission vehicles operated by their father and grandfather.
So when they were old enough to drive, Prabh, 22, and Divjeev, 19, were determined to learn a skill few people their age even bother to attempt: mastering the nuances of a clutch that controls a manual transmission, a process that resulted in their 1994 Jeep Wrangler coming to a complete stop while frustrated drivers got stuck behind them.
“He stalled like five times his first time on the road,” Prabh recalls.
Even though the experience still causes Divjeev to shudder, he feels it led him to a better place.
“You are more in the moment when you are driving a car with a stick. Basically you are just there to drive and you aren’t doing anything else,” Divjeev says. “You understand the car, and if you don’t handle it correctly, that car isn’t going to move.”
Rediscovering vinyl’s virtues
Vinyl’s obsolescence seemed inevitable in the 1980s when compact discs emerged. That introduction triggered an evisceration of analog recordings that hit bottom in 2006 when 900,000 vinyl albums were sold, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. That was a death rattle for a format that peaked in 1977, when 344 million vinyl albums were sold.
But the slump unexpectedly reversed, and vinyl albums are now a growth niche. In each of the past two years, about 43 million vinyl albums have been sold, despite the widespread popularity of music streaming services that make it possible to play virtually any song by any artist at any time.
Baby boomers expanding upon their decades-old album collections aren’t the only catalyst. Younger generations are embracing the lusher sound of vinyl, too.
“I really love listening to an album on vinyl from start to finish. It feels like I am sitting with the artist,” says 24-year-old Carson Bispels. “Vinyl just adds this permanence that makes the music feel more genuine. It’s just you and the music, the way it should be.”
Carson is the son of Martin Bispels, the former QVC executive. A few years ago, Martin gave a few of his vinyl records to Carson, including Bob Marley’s “Taklin’ Blues,” an album already played so much that it sometimes cracks and pops with the scratches in it.
“I still listen to it because every time I do, I think of my dad,” says Carson, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
After starting off with about 10 vinyl albums from his dad, Carson now has about 100 and plans to keep expanding.
“The current digital age of music is fantastic, too, but there’s nothing like the personal aspect of going into the record store and thumbing through a bunch of albums while making small talk with some of the other patrons to find out what they’re listening to,” Carson says.
Paul, the author of the book about analog activities that have been devoured by the internet, says the vinyl music’s comeback story has her mulling a potential sequel. “A return to humanity,” she says, “could turn out to be another book.”
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
LA PAZ, Bolivia — LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — Bolivia’s new government on Tuesday issued a decree that will allow global satellite internet companies such as Starlink or Kuiper to provide internet access across the Andean nation as it tries to upgrade its technology and speed up its notoriously slow connectivity rates.
Bolivia’s centrist President Rodrigo Paz signed the decree, which waives the restrictions placed on international satellite companies by the socialist administration of his predecessor, Luis Arce.
Last year, Arce’s government refused to grant a license to SpaceX, which owns Starlink, to operate in Bolivia, citing data protection and national sovereignty concerns.
For years, Bolivia has tried to improve internet access in remote areas with a satellite purchased from China during the government of left-wing leader Evo Morales. When the satellite was acquired in 2013, Morales promised it would “enlighten the people, after years of living in obscurity.”
However, the Chinese satellite, known as the Tupac Katari, failed to significantly speed up internet connections on mobile phones or in homes, because it relies on geostationary technology and orbits Earth at a distance of about 35,000 kilometers (about 21,800 miles) from the surface.
In contrast, satellites used by Starlink orbit the planet at a distance of 550 kilometers (some 340 miles). Modern satellites used by Starlink and its competitors stay closer to Earth, which enables them to transmit data at faster rates.
A report published in November by Ookla, a connectivity intelligence company, found that Bolivia had the slowest internet speed for mobile phones and fixed broadband in South America. Brazil is the regional leader in internet speed.
On Tuesday, the Bolivian president said that by granting licenses to international satellite companies, he is hoping to “reduce the digital divide” and guarantee access to high quality connectivity for Bolivians.
The slow connectivity rates in Bolivia stymie simple tasks such as conference calls, and also make it harder to conduct more complex operations online, including cloud computing.
“We became spectators while the rest of the world advanced,” said Paz, who was elected in October. “But that is over. With new technologies we will be able to make up for lost time.”
Paz also said international companies — including Tesla, Amazon, Tether and Orcacle — plan to invest in data centers that Bolivia will set up near the cities of El Alto and Cochambamba.
Earlier this week, Paz signed a decree to eliminate fuel subsidies that had hobbled public finances and worsened the dollar shortages. Labor unions across the Andean nation took to the streets on Monday to protest the elimination of the fuel subsidies.
LOS ANGELES — Often when a potential convert walks through the doors of his church, one of the first things the Very Rev. Andreas Blom encourages them to do is give up the thing that brought them there.
“You discovered Orthodoxy online. You learned about it online. Now you’re here, the internet is done,” he tells inquirers at Holy Theophany Orthodox Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “Now you have a priest. Now you have people. Now you need to wean yourself off that stuff and enter into this real community of faith.”
Blom is not a Luddite advising congregants to go off the grid, but is instead responding to the explosion of Eastern Orthodox content online that is, at least in part, driving a surge of converts across the United States. Christian Orthodoxy is an embodied tradition that requires in-person participation, but the internet has given their message a reach not seen in centuries.
Sometimes called America’s “best kept secret,” Orthodoxy is embraced by about 1% of U.S. adults, according to Pew Research Center. But a heightened online profile has led to two waves of converts since the pandemic, said Matthew Namee, executive director of the Orthodox Studies Institute.
Young, single men are often cited as the driving force behind this trend. But Namee said preliminary data suggest the most recent influx of converts is more diverse, with many Black and Hispanic people, women and young families joining. Clergy report people coming from a host of religious backgrounds, from Islam to witchcraft, as well as different Christian traditions.
Blom’s Holy Theophany launched a second church this year because their 250-capacity building was consistently overflowing, with dozens standing outside each week.
“It’s almost full already,” he said of the new location. “And back at our church, again we have a bunch of people standing outside every Sunday. We just can’t keep up.”
They’re already in talks to launch a third church.
While some Orthodox content creators are priests, others have no formal ties to the church. They span ideological and political affiliations, with some leaning far right and others who are conventional religious conservatives on issues like marriage and abortion.
“By and large, Orthodox Christians are not far right. It’s a minority group within a minority religious tradition,” said Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, who studies religion and politics at Northeastern University.
Jonathan Pageau, a Canadian icon carver who teaches symbolism courses online, is among the most popular content creators with about 275,000 YouTube subscribers.
“We have to see it as a kind of irony and something of a paradox. In some ways, you could say we’re using tools that aren’t completely appropriate,” he said of how the internet contrasts with Orthodoxy’s emphasis on in-person liturgy. “At the same time, one of the things that the internet offers is reach. And one of the things Orthodoxy hasn’t had in forever is reach.”
Pageau, who converted in 2003, says he and other influencers stress the importance of in-person community to their followers.
“We tell them to go to church,” he said. “You can’t live this in your mind online because it is distorting. When you go to church, you meet all kinds of people, people that are on all sides of the political aisle.”
Abia Ailleen researched Orthodoxy online for six months before stepping inside Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Los Angeles. The 28-year-old Latina, who was chrismated — or received into the faith — in April 2024, also sees a disconnect between Orthodoxy online and in the flesh.
“People who come to Saint Sophia who are very rigid, who want to be perfect and holy based on what they’ve learned on the internet, a lot of the time Saint Sophia isn’t a place that they want to stay,” she said. “We really have cultivated a structure of humility, of making mistakes and of vulnerability.”
To be sure, devout Orthodox do follow a robust program of prayer, fasting and other disciplines. Justin Braxton, a firefighter who converted a year and a half ago, likens some of Orthodoxy’s “strenuous” demands to exercise.
“I dreaded leg day, but I would feel amazing afterwards. I feel like that’s the difference between happiness and joy. Happiness is when you’re basically fulfilling carnal needs,” he said. “Joy is that feeling after that tough workout and saying, ‘Yeah, I did it.’”
At the same time, priests often try to temper the yearnings of some converts for rules and structure.
“They come to Orthodoxy and they find that yes, we have rules and we have structure. But within those rules and structure there’s a lot of fluidity,” said the Very Rev. Thomas Zain, dean of St. Nicholas Cathedral in Brooklyn, New York, and vicar general of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.
His church has seen an exponential increase in attendance, which began about two years ago. “I’ll get like 50 people at a Bible study or adult education class, where I used to get three or four or five,” he said.
Zain, a descendant of Syrian immigrants who was born into the faith, is navigating the ideological diversity from which people are joining. “It’s breathed new life into the church, but it’s also challenging because you’re trying to mold them into one community with the old and the new,” he said.
Part of what’s fueling the perception that only men are converting is that many influencers overlap with the so-called manosphere — content online that caters toward men grappling with their understanding of masculinity. Orthodoxy is often billed as an alternative or supplement to self-help advice for young men.
“As a theologian, the idea that somehow masculinity — this particular way of thinking about masculinity — is inherent to Orthodox theology and teaching is I think just completely wrong,” said Aristotle Papanikolaou, cofounding director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University. “There’s actually no logic to the idea that somehow I need to be masculine in this particular way in order to unite myself with God.”
Though appealing to some, others believe these influencers distort their idea of Christianity. “It’s just not my cup of tea,” said Aaron Velasco, a 26-year-old filmmaker chrismated last year.
And while Velasco did take an interest in some content creators, and appreciates Pageau’s demeanor and perspective, he thinks many of them preach an inflammatory version of the faith that doesn’t fit his current understanding of it.
Many adherents say the broader church is more ideologically diverse than the rigid conservatism often found online.
“Look at the institutional church. There is this huge hierarchy where women are not present. It’s hard to say that’s not a masculine image,” said Dina Zingaro, who is studying Orthodoxy at Harvard Divinity School and who was raised in the faith. “At the same time, there are so many counter-narratives in Orthodoxy that uproot this idea.”
Church leaders have made few public responses, however some clergy are beginning to speak more about the magnitude of this influx and its accompanying challenges.
“There are cases of extremism and fundamentalism,” said Metropolitan Saba, leader of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, during an address last month in Denver. “Many who are coming to the church today are psychologically, emotionally or socially wounded, which requires experienced and mature spiritual fathers and mothers.”
Zingaro, who preaches regularly and teaches courses for Orthodox women on preaching, hopes church leadership will be more vocal.
“Our response in my mind has not been strong enough,” Zingaro said. “There’s something that we’re doing that is making people think it’s OK to make these claims about Orthodoxy. We need to lift up the real spirit and the core of Orthodoxy, which is really the opposite of this rule-based male domination version.”
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Efforts to expand high-speed internet across rural northern Michigan will get a $920 million boost from a federal grant, which over the next four years is expected to make broadband available to an additional 200,000 homes and businesses.
Combined with $550 million in matching funds from providers, the almost $1.5 billion investment is a potential game-changer for rural counties, said Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
The federal grant was announced in 2023, but it’s taken two years to get projects in local communities lined up for disbursement of those funds. In four years, the investment is expected to add 31,000 miles of fiber-optic lines across the state.
“When we expand access to affordable, high-speed internet, we open doors to jobs, healthcare, education, opportunity and so much more,” Whitmer said in a statement. “We’re making historic investments across the state to ensure that no matter where someone lives or works, they have the connectivity they need to thrive and reach their full potential.”
“We know that access to reliable, high-speed internet is no longer a luxury,” said Eric Frederick, chief connectivity officer for the Michigan High-Speed Internet Office. “This funding … helps Michiganders get access to education, visit doctors, apply for jobs and so much more.”
Currently, about 9 of 10 Michigan homes have access to internet service of at least 100 megabits per second, the minimum rate the Federal Communications Commission sets for high-speed internet, also called broadband. That puts Michigan in the middle of the pack among states.
Yet there are 23 counties — mostly in northern Michigan or the Upper Peninsula — where under 60% of homes have broadband access, according to data from Connect Nation, a nonprofit working to close the digital divide.
In Lake County, just 22% of homes have high-speed internet available; In Osceola County, it’s 28%.
By comparison, Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties all have broadband access surpassing 99%.
Katy Xenakis-Makowski, superintendent of Johannesburg-Lewiston Area Schools in Otsego County, told Bridge Michigan that many of her students and half her teachers don’t have high-speed internet at home.
“They just started to put broadband in my neighborhood this summer,” Xenakis-Makowski. “We had an ice storm and were out (of school) for eight days. “People say, ‘Oh, you should just make them up by going online,’ and we can’t.”
Government support is needed to expand high-speed internet infrastructure to rural regions where there aren’t enough potential consumers to make the expansion financially viable. The UP’s Luce County, for example, has a population of about six people per square mile.
Michigan has made notable progress in increasing access, as well as the speed of the internet available. In 2018, just 4.3% of households had access to 1 gigabit-per-second service, compared to 45.2% in 2025.
After the announced expansions are complete, “Michigan will be closer to universal availability than ever before,” said Frederick. “There will still likely be extremely remote and rural locations that may still need to be connected, but nearly all Michigan households and businesses will be able to access high-speed internet after these investments are made.”
Even when internet lines are laid, there’s the problem of service cost in areas that have a high poverty rate. Nationally, between 3% and 8% of households where broadband is available do not have internet in their homes, either because of cost or choice.
As of 2023, more than 492,000 Michigan households had either no internet access or no availability of broadband, according to the Michigan Digital Equity Plan, published by the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity. Another 730,000 households faced barriers related to affordability, device access or digital literacy.
This story was originally published by Bridge Michigan and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
