Billionaires can't kill our journalism

About a decade ago, Joe Biden sat down with a ghost writer for a memoir. Conversations between Biden and the ghost writer were recorded. Then in 2023, a Republican-led congressional committee investigated whether Biden had mishandled classified materials. Notably, a special counsel was investigating President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents at the same time.

In 2024, a different special counsel report concluded that Biden had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials.” Basically, special counsel Robert Hur found that Biden kept documents about Afghanistan in his house, as well as other classified documents. But the report didn’t recommend charges against Biden in part because of his “limited precision and recall.” Recordings of Biden’s conversations with his ghost writer were used to draw those conclusions. Then, Biden used executive privilege to keep those recordings private. Executive privilege lets the president keep certain documents or information private from Congress and the courts.

Now, Trump’s Department of Justice — an agency with a track record of going after the president’s political enemies — has vowed to make the tapes public by the middle of this month. The DOJ alleges that the tapes show Biden was hiding his cognitive decline as far back as 2016. In response, Biden’s lawyers are suing the Justice Department to stop the tapes from becoming public, saying it would be an “unwarranted invasion of President Biden’s privacy.”

We can’t, because a bunch of artists are dropping out. They’re saying they were misled to believe the concert on the National Mall celebrating America’s 250th birthday was nonpartisan, before they learned President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance were behind the whole thing. Also I don’t wanna go.

Why the confusion? Well, much like how I began planning my August birthday way back in April because I’m a Leo, Congress began planning America’s 250th birthday way back in 2016, when I was an incoming high school senior and Dave was publishing Hillbilly Elegy about to start working at The Washington Post. That’s when they established a nonprofit, nonpartisan group called America250 to plan the celebration. And many of the artists initially believed they were going to perform at a nonpartisan 250th birthday event, like the ones America250 is organizing. But in reality, they had signed up to perform at a concert organized by Freedom250.

What is Freedom250, you might ask? It brands itself as another nonprofit, nonpartisan group planning America’s 250th birthday party. The chair of its task force just happens to be Donald Trump and the vice chair happens to be JD Vance. Trump signed an executive order establishing it in 2025. Its programming has included a “a national jubilee of prayer,” which featured almost exclusively Christian faith leaders. Relatedly, Christianity Today defines Christian nationalism as “the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way.” The ACLU says Christian nationalism “rejects religious freedom and distorts both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy.”

Anyway, remember how Congress established America250 but a Trump executive order established Freedom250? That means Freedom250 operates with far less oversight, and there’s lots we don’t know about who’s paying for its programming. But NOTUS reported that the parent group of Freedom 250 has gotten at least $68 million in taxpayer funds this year.

Dave is currently on his way back from France, where AI generated videos said a coup took place last December. The videos gained 10 million views. Later, creators in the Netherlands used AI and actors in a disinformation campaign that took place in Canada. A media watchdog report found that they used “frequent and obvious lies.” More recently, AI videos promoting tourism to Australia have misled visitors about what to expect there.

Why does this matter? Fake content travels much faster than real content on social platforms. It’s also hard to get it taken down. French President Emmanuel Macron reached out to Facebook, asking them to remove the fake videos about the coup in France. Facebook initially refused. Eventually, they did take the videos down, but other AI-generated fake news videos have long been surging on the platform.

And Meta’s AI woes don’t end there. Hackers took over the White House Instagram account of former president Barack Obama and the official Instagram account of makeup company Sephora. All they had to do was say they forgot the password and ask AI to switch the email address of the account holder. You know what probably would’ve made it harder for this to happen? Having an additional 8,000 employees. But instead, Meta fired 8,000 employees after offloading platform support to AI.

So, how are we supposed to survive in a world where Meta executives decide their profits are more important than the livelihoods of 8,000 people? Some are turning to a lucrative new career option: hacking accounts that can no longer be recovered with human support. Hackers often hold accounts hostage for money. If that doesn’t sound up your alley, don’t worry! There’s also plenty of cash to be made from ad revenue on AI slop that social platforms drag their feet on removing. And if neither of those things sound great to you, we can instead demand that real humans work on platform security. We can also demand that platforms be held responsible when ad dollars flow to bad actors.

This brings us to this week’s media literacy tip from our friends at MediaWise! Here are some ways to tell if something on your feed is AI-generated.

In January, new scanners at the UK’s biggest airport allowed travelers to leave liquids up to two liters (roughly eight cups, for those of us who were taught to refuse the metric system) in their bags while going through security. But the new scanners also come with some drawbacks: their sensitivity has led some airports to do more bag searches by hand, according to a UK consumer group.

More recently, Brussels Airport announced that in the future, travelers won’t have to take out liquids and electronics from hand luggage while going through security. Airport officials said new scanners facilitating this change will begin arriving in 2028, and the airport will have an entirely new screening system by 2029. Here in the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security — which oversees TSA — announced last year that it would review the 3.4 ounce limit on liquids in carry-ons.

Far be it for me to promote new surveillance tech as a unilaterally good thing, so let’s learn more about it together! The new scanners at Heathrow Airport in the UK include systems like Smiths Detection’s HI-SCAN 6040 CTiX. Smiths Detection has also fueled border surveillance and provided tech to prisons, definitionally contributing to the prison industrial complex. The company has also had to pay $100,000 in a disability discrimination lawsuit stemming from its Maryland location.