What's happening with Ukraine's strikes?

Last week, viral posts claimed that Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers wiped out social media bots. Those posts weren’t really accurate, but people had good reason to worry about Russia using social media to influence the midterms. A company that tracks digital threats and foreign propaganda released a study last week saying a Russian influence operation is creating social posts to sow division among voters.

This is not the first time this has happened. Investigations found that Russia carried out a social media operation favoring Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Intelligence officials also said the Russian government tried to interfere in the 2020 campaign to help Trump. A Kremlin-linked businessman straight up said he interfered in the 2022 midterms. The Justice Department said it disrupted similar operations in 2024.

And if you think the U.S. is completely innocent of election interference ourselves, think again! Democratic lawmakers have decried the Trump administration’s efforts to influence Brazil’s election. Trump also endorsed a right-wing candidate in Colombia’s election and immigration authorities detained an activist critical of that candidate. There are also the recent or ongoing efforts at regime change in Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, not to mention the 80+ instances of the U.S. meddling in elections abroad last century.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a satellite network that Ukraine relies on, making some Ukrainian drones nearly useless. That network is a military-grade version of Starlink, a satellite network that Musk’s company SpaceX runs.

This military-grade version of Starlink is called Starshield. SpaceX built both, but it made Starshield specifically for government and national-security customers, especially for the U.S. Department of Defense. Ukraine uses it to carry out and prevent strikes. But on Oct. 18, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on “Meet the Press” that the U.S. asked SpaceX to slow down the network.

The Journal article shows that even though Musk — not Trump — ordered the slowdown, both were upset that Ukraine had struck Russian diesel refineries and discussed the slowdown after it became public. One of the Journal’s sources said they discussed it before. The Journal later reported that Trump subsequently called Musk and asked him to lift the restrictions. Officials in the U.S. and Ukraine said the system was working more normally after that, but wasn’t fully restored.

Confused? Same! I haven’t had to keep track of this many things with the word “Star” in the title since I tried to get into “The Force Awakens.” That brings us to this week’s media literacy tip from our friends at MediaWise.

WIRED reports that Muse, Meta’s AI agent, is sexting with users even as OnlyFans creators say their accounts get restricted for doing the same thing. Muse generates spicy text, not images or videos. But even that gets adult creators in trouble. Meta guidelines don’t allow sexually explicit language.

WIRED and Mashable both tested Muse’s dirty talk capabilities. Mashable even reported that the AI agent assumed which genitals both it and its user would have.

One creator pointed to SESTA/FOSTA, a 2018 law that many platforms responded to by censoring adult content. Research has also shown that the law has made sex workers less safe in real life.

The same creator also wondered how Muse was trained and if people were compensated for that. Another creator that WIRED interviewed, Vanniall, has a pretty clear message to audiences about Muse: “Stop downloading that app.”

In a case that probably doesn’t matter to most people outside of DC, but that I care about for birdwatcher solidarity reasons, Trump is trying to remove a bunch of trees from a DC golf course. It started when the Trump administration ended a nonprofit’s lease on the East Potomac Golf Course. Then, a different nonprofit sued the administration for doing that.

So, the Trump administration wanted to change the golf course. In cool mom fashion, District Judge Ana Reyes said she wouldn’t stop them as long as they were open with her about it beforehand. Then, the administration removed hundreds of trees from the course and only told the judge about it hours before. Reyes said that move “cost the government all of its credibility with me in this case.”

After that, Reyes said no more tree removals would be allowed until Oct. 26. Then, after the firing of Katie Zacharia — who was just as much legal credentials as me and only barely more experience being a White House press secretary — she posted a goodbye picture that appeared to show photos of further renovation plans.

Then, Trump posted about new renovation plans, writing they’re moving forward with them on Nov. 15. Then, he said they’d actually start immediately. The government tried to convince the judge in a hearing this week that the golf course’s future was still undetermined, and the judge got angry.

Midterm voting is already very much underway, and Election Day is under two weeks away. If you’re glued to the polls trying to make sense of what’s gonna happen, you’re not alone. But how do we know that the polls won’t biff this one as they’ve done in other recent elections?

The short answer is: We don’t! Polls aren’t really meant to tell us the future. That’s what the position of the moon and stars is for, silly! Instead, polls are snapshots of how people feel at one point in time. Theoretically, a respondent can tell a pollster they hate a candidate in late October then still vote for them in early November.

Still, polls can miss the mark on measuring how a group of people as a whole feels. To make sure the polls you’re looking at are reliable, you can check whether they explain how the poll was done and whether they used various ways of reaching people. You can also check polling aggregators so you’re not relying on just one poll and its potential errors.

Let’s say you have a job, and each paycheck you get, Social Security taxes come out of it. (Couldn’t be me! I get to fill out a quarterly worksheet where I tell the IRS how much money I think would have been withheld and they tell me if I’m wrong by charging a penalty fee! What fun!)

Most years, the amount of money Social Security pays to retirees goes up. That’s because of the Social Security Cost of Living Adjustment. In order for people on Social Security to afford to be alive, the program institutes those adjustments when inflation calls for it. It’s meant to help limit losses in purchasing power.

In 2027, the increase will be about $76 per month on average for retired workers. But it doesn’t go up by a fixed dollar amount every year. It goes up by a percentage. Next year’s adjustment is 3.6%, which is the highest since 2023 when it increased by 8.7%. A recent survey from AARP, which paid LNI to make a video about this, found that 76% of respondents said an increase of about this much wouldn’t be enough.