ReportWire

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  • Powerful men in politics and media shown in new Epstein estate images

    WASHINGTON — House Democrats on Friday released 19 photographs from Jeffrey Epstein’s private email server showing a collection of powerful men in politics, media and Hollywood in the convicted sex offender’s orbit.

    The photographs — which were released without information on the timing, location or context of the events portrayed — do not reveal any wrongdoing or show sexual acts but offer more detail about Epstein’s well-known associations with prominent men.

    The 19 images selected and released by Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are a small slice of more than 95,000 photographs the committee received on Thursday from Epstein’s private estate, Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat in the committee, told reporters on Friday.

    Garcia, of Long Beach, added that the release of the images is an exercise in transparency, and said it serves as an example of why Democrats want to keep the pressure on the Trump administration to release its Epstein files ahead of a Dec. 19 deadline mandated by a law passed by Congress in November.

    “I think people should be able to make judgments on their own as to what they see in these photos,” Garcia said. “For us this is about transparency.”

    Most of the images Democrats released on Friday further illustrate Epstein’s already well-known relationships with prominent men, many of whom have over the years faced questions about their ties to Epstein, who died by suicide in federal prison in 2019.

    Some of the photos show Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump advisor, meeting with Epstein at an office; tech billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates standing by what appears to be Epstein’s private jet; former President Clinton with Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell; Epstein with filmmaker Woody Allen on a movie set; and, before he became president, Donald Trump with six unidentified women.

    Other images show stand-alone images of sex toys and, in what appears to be an attempt at racy humor, a bowl filled with what a sign identifies as the “Trump condom” — condom packages emblazoned with a caricature of Trump and the words “I’M HUUUGE!”

    An image released by a House committee shows former president Bill Clinton, center, with Jeffrey Epstein, right, and Ghislaine Maxwell, second from right.

    (House Oversight Committee )

    Trump has denied any involvement or knowledge of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operations, but thousands of emails released last month have suggested the president may have known more about Epstein’s abuse than he had acknowledged.

    Epstein was a convicted sex offender who is believed to have abused more than 200 women and girls. His longtime associate, Maxwell, is serving a 20-year sentence for her role in a sex-trafficking scheme to groom and sexually abuse underage girls with Epstein.

    The 95,000 photographs released this week were turned over to the House committee in response to a set of subpoenas issued for records related to Epstein’s estate.

    Garcia said Democrats on the panel are reviewing the full set of photos and will continue to release them to the public in the days and weeks ahead.

    “These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world,” Garcia said. “We will not rest until the American people get the truth. The Department of Justice must release all of the files, NOW.”

    One of the images released by a House committee shows Stephen K. Bannon with Jeffrey Epstein in an office.

    One of the images released by a House committee shows Stephen K. Bannon, left, with Jeffrey Epstein.

    (House Oversight Committee )

    Trump had tried to thwart the release of what have become commonly known as the “Epstein files” for several months but reversed course in November under growing pressure from his party.

    The president then signed legislation that requires the Department of Justice to release its investigative files related to Epstein by Dec. 19. But his past resistance has led to skepticism among some lawmakers on Capitol Hill who question whether the Justice Department may try to conceal information.

    “The real test will be, will the Department of Justice release the files or will it all remain tied up in investigations?” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said in November. .

    Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told reporters on Friday that if the Justice Department does not release its files by Dec. 19 it would be considered a crime.

    “This is a new law with criminal implications if they don’t follow it,” Massie said.

    Massie said he was “encouraged” by the Justice Department’s requests to unseal court records tied to the grand jury investigations into Epstein and Maxwell. Two judges granted the requests this week.

    The Kentucky Republican said the Justice Department is required to release more than just the grand jury investigations, but also files that were not released to a grand jury.

    “The FBI and DOJ probably have evidence that they chose not to take to the grand jury, because the evidence they are in possession of would implicate other people, not just Epstein or Maxwell,” Massie said. “What we want to see are the facts and evidence that the FBI and DOJ have never given to the grand jury.”

    Ana Ceballos

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  • Commentary: He’s loud. He’s obnoxious. And Kamala Harris can only envy JD Vance

    JD Vance, it seems, is everywhere.

    Berating Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Eulogizing Charlie Kirk. Babysitting the Middle East peace accord. Profanely defending the aquatic obliteration of (possible) drug smugglers.

    He’s loud, he’s obnoxious and, in a very short time, he’s broken unprecedented ground with his smash-face, turn-it-to-11 approach to the vice presidency. Unlike most White House understudies, who effectively disappear like a protected witness, Vance has become the highest-profile, most pugnacious politician in America who is not named Donald J. Trump.

    It’s quite the contrast with his predecessor.

    Kamala Harris made her own kind of history, as the first woman, first Black person and first Asian American to serve as vice president. As such, she entered office bearing great — and vastly unrealistic — expectations about her prominence and the public role she would play in the Biden administration. When Harris acted the way that vice presidents normally do — subservient, self-effacing, careful never to poach the spotlight from the chief executive — it was seen as a failing.

    By the end of her first year in office, “whatever happened to Kamala Harris?” had become a political buzz phrase.

    No one’s asking that about JD Vance.

    Why is that? Because that’s how President Trump wants it.

    “Rule No.1 about the vice presidency is that vice presidents are only as active as their presidents want them to be,” said Jody Baumgartner, an East Carolina University expert on the office. “They themselves are irrelevant.”

    Consider Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, who had the presence and pizzazz of day-old mashed potatoes.

    “He was not a very powerful vice president, but that’s because Donald Trump didn’t want him to be,” said Christopher Devine, a University of Dayton professor who’s published four books on the vice presidency. “He wanted him to have very little influence and to be more of a background figure, to kind of reassure quietly the conservatives of the party that Trump was on the right track. With JD Vance, I think he wants him to be a very active, visible figure.”

    In fact, Trump seems to be grooming Vance as a successor in a way that Joe Biden never did with Harris. The 46th president practically had to be bludgeoned into standing aside after the Democratic freakout over his wretched, career-ending debate performance. (Things might be different with Vance if Trump could override the Constitution and fulfill his fantasy of seeking a third term in the White House.)

    There were other circumstances that kept Harris under wraps, particularly in the early part of Biden’s presidency.

    One was the COVID-19 lockdown. “It meant she wasn’t traveling. She wasn’t doing public events,” said Joel K. Goldstein, another author and expert on the vice presidency. “A lot of stuff was being done virtually and so that tended to be constraining.”

    The Democrats’ narrow control of the Senate also required Harris to stick close to Washington so she could cast a number of tie-breaking votes. (Under the Constitution, the vice president provides the deciding vote when the Senate is equally divided. Harris set a record in the third year of her vice presidency for casting the most tie-breakers in history.)

    The personality of their bosses also explains why Harris and Vance approached the vice presidency in different ways.

    Biden had spent nearly half a century in Washington, as a senator and vice president under Barack Obama. He was, foremost, a creature of the legislative process and saw Harris, who’d served nearly two decades in elected office, as a (junior) partner in governing.

    Trump came to politics through celebrity. He is, foremost, a pitchman and promoter. He saw Vance as a way to turn up the volume.

    Ohio’s senator had served barely 18 months in his one and only political position when Trump chose Vance as his running mate. He’d “really made his mark as a media and cultural figure,” Devine noted, with Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” regarded as a kind of Rosetta Stone for the anger and resentment that fueled the MAGA movement.

    Trump “wanted someone who was going to be aggressive in advancing the MAGA narrative,” Devine said, “being very present in media, including in some newer media spaces, on podcasts, social media. Vance was someone who could hammer home Trump’s message every day.”

    The contrast continued once Harris and Vance took office.

    Biden handed his vice president a portfolio of tough and weighty issues, among them addressing the root causes of illegal migration from Central America. (They were “impossible, s— jobs,” in the blunt assessment that Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, offered in her recent campaign memoir.)

    Trump has treated Vance as a sort of heat-seeking rhetorical missile, turning him loose against his critics and acting as though the presidential campaign never ended.

    Vance seems gladly submissive. Harris, who was her own boss for nearly two decades, had a hard time adjusting as Biden’s No. 2.

    “Vance is very effective at playing the role of backup singer who gets to have a solo from time to time,” said Jamal Simmons, who spent a year as Harris’ vice presidential communications chief. “I don’t think Kamala Harris was ever as comfortable in the role as Vance has proven himself to be.”

    Will Vance’s pugilistic approach pay off in 2028? It’s way too soon to say. Turning the conventions of the vice presidency to a shambles, the way Trump did with the presidency, has delighted many in the Republican base. But polls show Vance, like Trump, is deeply unpopular with a great number of voters.

    As for Harris, all she can do is look on from her exile in Brentwood, pondering what might have been.

    Mark Z. Barabak

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  • Commentary: Bodies are stacking up in Trump’s deportation deluge. It’s going to get worse

    Like a teenager armed with their first smartphone, President Trump’s masked immigration enforcers love nothing more than to mug for friendly cameras.

    They gladly invite pseudo-filmmakers — some federal government workers, others conservative influencers or pro-Trump reporters — to embed during raids so they can capture every tamale lady agents slam onto the sidewalk, every protester they pelt with pepper balls, every tear gas canister used to clear away pesky activists. From that mayhem comes slickly produced videos that buttress the Trump administration’s claim that everyone involved in the push to boot illegal immigrants from the U.S. is a hero worthy of cinematic love.

    But not everything that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol and its sister agencies do shows up in their approved rivers of reels.

    Their propagandists aren’t highlighting the story of Jaime Alanís García, a Mexican farmworker who fell 30 feet to his death in Camarillo this summer while trying to escape one of the largest immigration raids in Southern California in decades.

    They’re not making videos about 39-year-old Ismael Ayala-Uribe, an Orange County resident who moved to this country from Mexico as a 4-year-old and died in a Victorville hospital in September after spending weeks in ICE custody complaining about his health.

    They’re not addressing how ICE raids led to the deaths of Josué Castro Rivera and Carlos Roberto Montoya, Central American nationals run over and killed by highway traffic in Virginia and Monrovia while fleeing in terror. Or what happened to Silverio Villegas González, shot dead in his car as he tried to speed away from two ICE agents in suburban Chicago.

    Those men are just some of the 20-plus people who have died in 2025 while caught up in ICE’s machine — the deadliest year for the agency in two decades, per NPR.

    Publicly, the Department of Homeland Security has described those incidents as “tragic” while assigning blame to everything but itself. For instance, a Homeland Security official told the Associated Press that Castro Rivera’s death was “a direct result of every politician, activist and reporter who continue to spread propaganda and misinformation about ICE’s mission and ways to avoid detention” — whatever the hell that means.

    An ICE spokesperson asked for more time to respond to my request for comment, said “Thank you Sir” when I extended my deadline, then never got back to me. Whatever the response would’ve been, Trump’s deportation Leviathan looks like it’s about to get deadlier.

    As reported by my colleagues Andrea Castillo and Rachel Uranga, his administration plans to get rid of more than half of ICE’s field office directors due to grumblings from the White House that the deportations that have swamped large swaths of the United States all year haven’t happened faster and in larger numbers.

    Asked for comment, Tricia McLaughlin, Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs, described The Times’ questions as “sensationalism” and added “only the media would describe standard agency personnel changes as a ‘massive shakeup.’”

    Agents are becoming more brazen as more of them get hired thanks to billions of dollars in new funds. In Oakland, one fired a chemical round into the face of a Christian pastor from just feet away. In Santa Ana, another pulled a gun from his waistband and pointed it at activists who had been trailing him from a distance in their car. In the Chicago area, a woman claimed a group of them fired pepper balls at her car even though her two young children were inside.

    La migra knows they can act with impunity because they have the full-throated backing of the White House. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller crowed on Fox News recently, “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.”

    That’s not actually true, but when have facts mattered to this presidency if it gets in the way of its apocalyptic goals?

    Greg Bovino, El Centro Border Patrol sector chief, center, walks with federal agents near an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Ill.

    (Erin Hooley / Associated Press)

    Tasked with turning up the terror dial to 11 is Gregory Bovino, a longtime Border Patrol sector chief based out of El Centro, Calif., who started the year with a raid in Kern County so egregious that a federal judge slammed it as agents “walk[ing] up to people with brown skin and say[ing], ‘Give me your papers.’” A federal judge ordered him to check in with her every day for the foreseeable future after the Border Patrol tear-gassed a neighborhood in a Chicago suburb that was about to host its annual Halloween children’s parade (an appeals court has temporarily blocked the move).

    Bovino now reports directly to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and is expected to pick most of the ICE field office directors from Customs and Border Protection, the arm of the federal government that the Border Patrol belongs to. It logged 180 immigrant deaths under its purview for the 2023 fiscal year, the last year for which stats are publicly available and the third straight year that the number had increased.

    To put someone like Bovino in charge of executing Trump’s deportation plans is like gifting a gas refinery to an arsonist.

    He’s constantly trying to channel the conquering ethos of Wild West, complete with a strutting posse of agents — some with cowboy hats — following him everywhere, white horses trailed by American flags for photo ops and constant shout-outs to “Ma and Pa America” when speaking to the media. When asked by a CBS News reporter recently when his self-titled “Mean Green Machine” would end its Chicago campaign — one that has seen armed troops march through downtown and man boats on the Chicago River like they were patrolling Baghdad — Bovino replied, “When all the illegal aliens [self-deport] and/or we arrest ‘em all.”

    Such scorched-earth jibber-jabber underlines a deportation policy under which the possibility of death for those it pursues is baked into its foundation. ICE plans to hire dozens of healthcare workers — doctors, nurses, psychiatrists — in anticipation of Trump’s plans to build more detention camps, many slated for inhospitable locations like the so-called Alligator Alcatraz camp in the Florida Everglades. That was announced to the world on social media with an AI-generated image of grinning alligators wearing MAGA caps — as if the White House was salivating at the prospect of desperate people trying to escape only to find certain carnage.

    In his CBS News interview, Bovino described the force his team has used in Chicago — where someone was shot and killed, a pastors got hit with pepper balls from high above and the sound of windshields broken by immigration agents looking to snatch someone from their cars is now part of the Windy City’s soundtrack — as “exemplary.” The Border Patrol’s peewee Patton added he felt his guys used “the least amount of force necessary to accomplish the mission. If someone strays into a pepper ball, then that’s on them.”

    One shudders to think what Bovino thinks is excessive for la migra. With his powers now radically expanded, we’re about to find out.

    Gustavo Arellano

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  • LAPD spokesperson resigns after U.S. attorney complains about alleged leak, sources say

    The chief spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department has resigned amid accusations from the region’s top federal prosecutor that her office was leaking information, according to three sources familiar with the matter but not cleared to speak publicly.

    Jennifer Forkish, the LAPD’s public information director, said she left the department Thursday at the request of Chief Jim McDonnell but vehemently denied making any unauthorized disclosures.

    “Any suggestion that I have ever shared or leaked information to the media is categorically false,” she said in a statement. “No one in the Department, including the Chief has ever raised or discussed this baseless allegation with me, because it simply never happened. Anyone claiming otherwise is lying.”

    The three law enforcement sources said the chief’s concerns about Forkish’s overall performance had been mounting, and that pressure Tuesday from acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli may have prompted her ouster.

    The drama began Tuesday evening after a Times reporter reached out to an official at the U.S. attorney’s office to inquire about plans to schedule a news conference related to the Palisades fire.

    Flanked by McDonnell and other law enforcement leaders, Essayli announced at a briefing on Wednesday that authorities had arrested and charged a 29-year-old Uber driver with intentionally sparking one of the most destructive fires in California history.

    Before the media event, according to the three sources who had been briefed on the matter, Essayli called LAPD senior staff and demanded to know who in the department had tipped the paper off to the news conference, which had not yet been officially scheduled when The Times asked about it.

    It wasn’t immediately clear why Forkish was suspected of revealing details about the news conference, which federal authorities announced to members of the media via email at 5 a.m. Wednesday.

    Forkish had already left work that afternoon when McDonnell summoned her back to his office at LAPD headquarters for a meeting with him and Assistant Chief Dominic Choi, she told The Times. McDonnell did not reference a call with Essayli during the meeting, telling Forkish only that he did not share her long-term vision for the department’s public relations strategy, she said.

    She said the conversation revolved around the difference of opinion about the department’s overall media strategy, adding that “there has never been any conversation with me regarding the possibility of a leak with anyone from the LAPD.”

    Choi would not address any phone conversation between LAPD leadership and Essayli. He told The Times he could not discuss Forkish’s case due to confidentiality around personnel matters but confirmed she submitted her letter of resignation on Thursday morning.

    “We don’t wish any ill will or anything for her,” he said in a brief telephone interview. “We thank her for her service and everything she’s done and for her time with the department.”

    McDonnell did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment on Thursday. Inquiries to the U.S. attorney’s office and Mayor Karen Bass also went unreturned.

    Forkish expressed gratitude for her time with the LAPD.

    “After much thought, I’ve decided to step down from my role to pursue new opportunities,” she wrote in a statement. “I do so with immense pride in what my team and I accomplished together. We told the hard stories with honesty and balance, supported our officers and our city in moments of crisis, and built a foundation of professionalism that I’ll always be proud of.”

    For months, word has circulated in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles that Essayli — a Trump appointee — is trying to root out leaks to the media. The LAPD has itself routinely opened investigations into employees who speak with journalists without authorization, and faced lawsuits from employees who claimed they were falsely accused of leaks.

    Forkish began her career working for former Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine, who worked as an LAPD cop for more than three decades before going into politics. She later had stints at PR firms around town, including GCG Rose & Kindel. At the lobbying and crisis communication firm EKA, she worked with Celine Cordero, the future mayor’s deputy chief of staff.

    After working as a vice president of corporate communications for casino giant Caesars Entertainment Corp. in Las Vegas, Forkish served as a spokesperson for former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón for several months in 2024.

    Eric Rose, a partner at EKA, where he was once Forkish’s boss, said she has made a positive mark at every stop of her career.

    “Jennifer is an accomplished public affairs professional with deep and diverse expertise, having worked with elected officials at the local, state and federal levels for more than two decades,” he said.

    But Forkish’s appointment to the LAPD job was not without controversy. Multiple department sources not authorized to speak publicly said a dispute over Forkish’s salary demands created tension before she started on the job. Then, the sources said, there was a disagreement over strategy between Forkish and her predecessor, Capt. Kelly Muniz, which ended with Muniz’s transfer to another unit.

    Some press advocates say McDonnell’s tenure has been marked by conflict with the local media. The department faces lawsuits for aggressive behavior by officers toward journalists who covered protests against the Trump administration over the summer, and a federal judge has barred police from targeting reporters with less-lethal projectiles during demonstrations.

    Adam Rose, a deputy director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said the department has in recent months been frustratingly unresponsive when confronted with reports of abuses by officers.

    “While I often vehemently disagreed with past PIOs and past department leadership, at least they were responsive,” Rose said. “The fact that McDonnell and his staff are so recalcitrant — and are so reluctant — to do their jobs is shameful.”

    In her statement, Forkish said she is proud of her time at the LAPD.

    “I’ve always approached this work with transparency, respect, and accountability, and that will never change,” she said.

    Times staff writers James Queally and Brittny Mejia contributed to this report.

    Libor Jany

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  • U.S. envoy’s mention of ‘animalistic’ behavior sparks press corps outrage

    BEIRUT — Lebanon’s often-fractious press corps was united in anger this week over comments by Tom Barrack, the U.S. special envoy to Syria, who warned journalists against “animalistic” behavior and told them to “act civilized.”

    Faced with a media scrum during a news conference held Tuesday in the Lebanese capital Beirut with a congressional delegation, Barrack strode to the podium and peremptorily told reporters they were “going to have a different set of rules.”

    “The moment that this starts becoming chaotic — like animalistic — we’re gone,” he said. “You want to know what’s happening? Act civilized, act kind, act tolerant, because this is the problem with what’s happening in the region.”

    Barrack is a real estate investor of Lebanese descent who, along with his Syria duties, serves as U.S. ambassador to Turkey.

    It exposes a hollow, patronizing mentality that sees the Lebanese not as partners but as ‘rabble’ who must be disciplined

    — Diana Moukalled, Lebanese journalist

    Barrack was accompanied by deputy envoy Morgan Ortagus, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) and is visiting Beirut to pressure the government into making real its plans to disarm Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group.

    The mood in the room wasn’t especially raucous, but apparently it wasn’t quiet enough for a clearly irritated Barrack, who said, “Do you think this is fun for us? Do you think this is economically beneficial for Morgan and I to be here, putting up with this insanity?”

    One aim of the news conference was to announce that Israel had no plans to occupy Lebanon and that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were prepared to invest in an economic zone in south Lebanon to provide jobs to former Hezbollah fighters. But for many Lebanese, Barrack’s comments took center stage.

    Reporters took to social media to excoriate Barrack for acting like a “19th-century colonial commissioner,” as one enraged journalist, Hala Jaber, put it.

    “It exposes a hollow, patronizing mentality that sees the Lebanese not as partners but as ‘rabble’ who must be disciplined,” wrote Diana Moukalled, a Lebanese journalist who is a founding partner in local media outlet Daraj, adding that whoever wants to help Lebanon should first respect the press.

    “Insults are not a negotiating tool,” Moukalled wrote. “We are not props for a diplomatic spectacle, and anyone who demands that Lebanon become a strong state must endure the questions of its press, regardless of their opinion of it.”

    Later Tuesday, the office of Lebanese President Joseph Aoun issued an oblique statement expressing “regret for the statements inadvertently made from its platform by one of its guests today,” while reaffirming its “full appreciation for all journalists.”

    The union of journalists in Lebanon condemned Barrack’s remarks as reflecting “an ingrained colonial arrogance towards the peoples of the region.”

    “We demand that Mr. Barrack issue an official and public apology for his actions toward the journalists, and we demand that the U.S. Embassy in Beirut take a position regarding these unacceptable actions with the media,” the statement said. It called for a boycott of news conferences involving Barrack until he apologized.

    It wouldn’t be the first time 78-year-old Barrack has exhibited a less-than-rosy view of the region — in a July interview with the New York Times, he said the administration had “little patience for the region’s resistance to helping itself” — but the furor now comes at a delicate time for U.S. diplomacy in the region. Washington is pushing the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah, with the hope that Israel and Lebanon would normalize relations.

    Hezbollah, which the U.S. designates a terrorist group, fought Israel after Hamas attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, in a war that escalated into a full-blown Israeli invasion of Lebanon late last year. After a ceasefire in November, Israel withdrew from most of southern Lebanon, save for five points on the Lebanese side of the border. Meanwhile, Israel has continued near-daily attacks, which the Israeli military says are needed to prevent Hezbollah from reconstituting its arsenal.

    This month, the Lebanese cabinet tasked the army with making plans to disarm Hezbollah. The group denounced the cabinet’s decision, saying it won’t give up arms while Israel still occupies land and has not fully implemented November’s ceasefire agreement. Critics accuse the Lebanese government of being submissive to Washington — with Barrack’s tirade adding to their arguments.

    “We strongly condemn the logic of American arrogance and its condescension towards our media professionals,” said Ibrahim Musawi, a Hezbollah-affiliated lawmaker who heads Parliament’s media and communications committee.

    But he also reserved some anger for the Lebanese government, saying that this was another series in its “squandering of national sovereignty.”

    Barrack has yet to comment.

    Nabih Bulos

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  • AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

    AI Slop Is Flooding Medium

    Some Medium writers and editors do applaud the platform’s approach to AI. Eric Pierce, who founded Medium’s largest pop culture publication Fanfare, says he doesn’t have to fend off many AI-generated submissions and that he believes that the human curators of Medium’s boost program help highlight the best of the platform’s human writing. “I can’t think of a single piece I’ve read on Medium in the past few months that even hinted at being AI-created,” he says. “Increasingly, Medium feels like a bastion of sanity amid an internet desperate to eat itself alive.”

    However, other writers and editors believe they currently still see a plethora of AI-generated writing on the platform. Content marketing writer Marcus Musick, who edits several publications, wrote a post lamenting how what he suspects to be an AI-generated article went viral. (Reality Defender ran an analysis on the article in question and estimated it was 99 percent “likely manipulated.”) The story appears widely read, with over 13,500 “claps.”

    In addition to spotting possible AI content as a reader, Musick also believes he encounters it frequently as an editor. He says he rejects around 80 percent of potential contributors a month because he suspects they’re using AI. He does not use AI detectors, which he calls “useless,” instead relying on his own judgment.

    While the volume of likely AI-generated content on Medium is notable, the moderation challenges the platform faces—how to surface good work and keep junk banished—is one that has always plagued the greater web. The AI boom has simply super-charged the problem. While click farms have long been an issue, for example, AI has handed SEO-obsessed entrepreneurs a way to swiftly resurrect zombie media outlets by filling them with AI slop. There’s a whole subgenre of YouTube hustle culture entrepreneurs creating get-rich-quick tutorials encouraging others to create AI slop on platforms like Facebook, Amazon Kindle, and, yes, Medium. (Sample headline: “1-Click AI SEO Medium Empire 🤯.”)

    “Medium is in the same place as the internet as a whole right now. Because AI content is so quick to generate that it is everywhere,” says plagiarism consultant Jonathan Bailey. “Spam filters, the human moderators, et cetera—those are probably the best tools they have.”

    Stubblebine’s argument—that it doesn’t necessarily matter whether a platform contains a large amount of garbage, as long as it successfully amplifies good writing and limits the reach of said garbage—is perhaps more pragmatic than any attempt to wholly banish AI slop. His moderation strategy may very well be the most savvy approach.

    It also suggests a future in which the Dead Internet theory comes to fruition. The theory, once the domain of extremely online conspiratorial thinkers, argues that the vast majority of the internet is devoid of real people and human-created posts, instead clogged with AI-generated slop and bots. As generative AI tools grow more commonplace, platforms that give up on trying to blot out bots will incubate an online world in which work created by humans becomes increasingly harder to find on platforms swamped by AI.

    Kate Knibbs

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  • Louis Farrakhan sued Jewish leaders for $4.8 billion. A judge tossed the case

    Louis Farrakhan sued Jewish leaders for $4.8 billion. A judge tossed the case

    Prominent Jewish leaders are free to continue calling Louis Farrakhan — leader of the Black nationalist organization the Nation of Islam — antisemitic, according to a New York court.

    The Nation of Islam had sued the Anti-Defamation League and Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center for $4.8 billion, claiming the Jewish organizations had violated the Nation of Islam’s 1st Amendment rights by calling Farrakhan’s frequent unflattering comments about Jews “antisemitic.”

    In recent years, Farrakhan has publicly likened Jews to termites, accused the “synagogue of Satan” of wrapping its tentacles around the U.S. government, and argued that the “pedophilia and sexual perversion” in Hollywood could be traced to “Jewish influence.”

    In dismissing the case, Manhattan federal court Judge Denise Cote held that the claims of antisemitism were based on direct quotes by Farrakhan and that there was no evidence that being called antisemitic had harmed the Nation of Islam.

    “We are grateful that the United States judicial system recognized and validated our First Amendment right to confront and speak out against anti-Semitism,” said the Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper in a statement Monday. He called the lawsuit a “not-so-veiled attempt to silence” Jewish voices.

    In a video address posted on the Nation of Islam’s website in the fall, Farrakhan argued that everything he had said about Jews “is absolutely the truth” and that the “vile” claims of antisemitism had cost him and other members of his organization jobs in the media and other business opportunities.

    “And with their influence over the media,” Farrakhan added, “these false charges have been spread throughout the Earth.”

    Jack Dolan

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