Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.

This week, we’re talking about whether or not Russian bots disappeared from the internet, a surprising win from a crypto site, the flame war between Chinese and Brazilian leftists, and more.

Did blowing up Russian data centers make the internet good again?

Earlier this month, Ukraine conducted strikes to take out major data centers owned by Russian technology giant Yandex. Almost immediately, social media users started noticing a difference in their feeds.

“Ever since Ukraine bombed that bot farm, internet’s been a lot more peaceful…” proclaimed influencer dannyphantom.exe on TikTok. Other users noted that, after the strikes, online engagement for Elon Musk and other right-wing influencers plummeted, mentions of the name “Fauci” declined along with health-related disinformation, nationalist European influencer accounts appeared to malfunction, and subreddits focused on European politics got less activity.

While deeply online sickos were the first to notice, news sites began to pick up on this trend as well. “Kyiv destroys Russian data centers, pro-Trump and pro-AfD [Alternative for Germany] bot activity collapses on social media,” proclaimed Le Parisien (translated from French). A gleeful Futurism headline declared “Elon Musk’s Twitter Engagement Shrivels After Destruction of Russian Data Centers.” Even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had a theory about the effect of his military strikes: “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social-media platforms… because there were fewer bots.”

Zelenskyy wasn’t just speculating; Cloudflare data did seem to support the idea that Russian bot activity had fallen off a cliff:

This would be an incredible story about how Ukraine’s military success cleaned up our social media platforms. The only problem is that it’s probably not true.

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The Cloudflare data is legitimate, but it’s measuring “bots” in the mundane sense of web crawlers and automated tools — meaning a large part of the traffic it’s measuring is not accounts with names like PatriotEagleUSA, exhorting Texas Oblast to secede from the U.S. to take advantage of its warm-water ports. Instead, the real impact is that Russian banking and food delivery apps crashed because their internal systems went down.

Most of the evidence that there was a specific drop in social media bot activity is flimsy. A viral claim that the right-wing German political party AfD saw a decline in activity seems to be pure misinformation with no credible source. And many of the statistics about engagement are misleading.

One analysis showed that a reported 54% drop in traffic to the /r/irishpolitics subreddit is technically accurate — but if you adjust the examined 12-hour time period by a few hours, it instead turns into a rise of up to 109%. That indicates the traffic swings might just be random noise. There were observable traffic declines in Russian-specific social media like the “Ask A Russian” subreddit and Russian Telegram channels, but even those were fairly limited.

Cloudflare itself says that malicious Russian bots simply migrated to other hosting providers. Disinformation trackers say that they see no discernible changes in the networks they’re observing. Valdemar Osted from Common Consultancy, a firm that tracks social media conversations, also saw no real disruptions other than “day-to-day noise.”

It’s hard to prove a negative, and the situation is still evolving, but for now it seems safe to say that the data center strikes didn’t actually have any real effect on social media bot activity.

So why did people think that it did?

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.

This week, we’re talking about the rise of AI influencer slop, the hot trend taking over Harry Potter fandoms, and YouTube’s fight against clippers.

AI influencer slop is growing

Comedians don’t take kindly to joke theft.

But comedian George Brett Olson went viral this week with a post about an unusual form of joke theft: A fully AI-generated OnlyFans model was stealing his jokes. Even weirder than that, the “model” was also stealing his outfits:

The thieving account, operating under the name “Tiffany Sloane,” was copying content from real comedians and putting their words in a Pixar Mom-shaped model as a growth hack strategy — a way to drive traffic to an OnlyFans featuring the same AI-generated model.

Now, on the one hand, Instagram appears to have nuked the account, and all its posts have been wiped. But on the other hand, the growth hack worked: Sloane accumulated more than 350,000 followers. And if Olson’s video hadn’t gone viral, “Tiffany” would still be pulling the same stunt and getting away with it.

There are a lot of growth hacks out there designed to drive people from regular social media to the more salacious corners of the internet. Many livestreamers active in the Hot Tub Meta — a content strategy where female influencers stream while lounging in hot tubs wearing bikinis — also have OnlyFans accounts they’re promoting. And a few years back, other adult models realized that podcast clips were hot, so they started filming fake podcast segments of shows that don’t exist to use as clips for their socials.

But the addition of AI (and the blatant theft) makes this feel even grosser than those strategies.

Sadly, I think this is a sign of things to come. Earlier this year, Wired ran a story about fully AI-generated hot MAGA girls who were racking up millions of followers — and yes, driving people to OnlyFans or similar sites. What’s depressing is that these AI influencers aren’t even very good, but the trick still works: The Hot Girl MAGA accounts were not even a little bit believable — one of the characters had selfies with both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin! And even with stolen jokes, the AI comedian above has no sense of timing or delivery whatsoever.

But there’s an audience out there that will still lap it up. All you need is a generically pretty face and a waist-to-hip ratio that would make an anime character blush, and you’ll be drowning in engagement.

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The internet’s gooners aren’t the only ones entranced by low-quality AI slop. Even though YouTube has made efforts to crack down on the lowest-effort AI videos, as I’m writing these words one of the most popular videos this week is this AI-generated short of a baby. It’s been up for eight days and has more than 135 million views. Which, I have to say, is incredibly grim.

Facebook went through a period of Shrimp Jesus slop they still haven’t fully recovered from, with credulous boomers commenting “Amen” beneath bizarre AI-generated pictures. There are now startups bragging that they can automate the entire influencing process with fake personas.

It’s a frightening possibility to think that our tech overlords could be shoveling this kind of low-quality content down our throats because it helps their bottom lines. But it’s both more frightening and more plausible to me to think that maybe, just maybe, this is what people want. They like the slop, they’re eager for more, and whoever’s serving it to them is just fulfilling the authentic demand for unlimited AI-generated garbage.

The AI doomers were right

Colombian livestreamer Westcol learned the hard way exactly how the robot apocalypse will happen: First they knock us out. Then they do Fortnite emotes over our lifeless bodies.

YouTube goes after clippers

Longtime Weekly Scroll readers will know that one of my obsessions for the past year has been how the clipping economy influences our perceptions of online fame. Creators used to make clips of their content as a way to drive people to that content. But today, popular livestreamers, podcasters, and YouTubers exist in a weird paradigm where the entire purpose of long-form content is to create short, viral clips. The clips are no longer promo. They’re the entire game.

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.

This week, we’re talking about the online Right’s collective freakout, how Threads still hasn’t become a thing, and why stan accounts keep ending up as political prisoners.

The Right’s no-good, very bad week

It’s not the best time to be a MAGA soldier online. Poll after poll shows that Democrats are massive favorites to take back a majority in the House of Representatives next month, and they’re increasingly viewed as favorites to take back the Senate as well. The Argument/Split Ticket model currently gives Democrats an 89% chance of winning the House, and a 61% chance of taking the Senate. Trump’s approval is now at -26 with likely voters. It’s hard out there!

Surely the online Right has cooked up some fantastic responses, right? What have the loyal patriots of the MAGA machine been doing as the electorate turns on them?

Well, Chris Rufo — the Manhattan Institute fellow famous for kicking off the right’s war on critical race theory — decided to devote a full episode of his podcast to “The Indian Question.” The “question” at hand is literally just the existence of Indian Americans and whether or not white people should feel disgusted by them. I watched the entire 72-minute podcast so you don’t have to (and you gremlins better subscribe to The Argument because god knows I’m not doing that for free), and it’s as bad as you’d suspect something echoing the Jewish Question would be.

Rufo, along with his co-host Jonathan Keeperman — better known as @L0m3z on Twitter, where he’s argued that best response to the left is “shut up fag“ — argued at various points that Indians can never assimilate as long as anyone can notice that they’re different, that racism against non-white Americans is actually good because it’s a form of “hazing,” and that meritocracy is probably a flawed idea because Indians keep winning the spelling bee.

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The typical exchange is Rufo trying to launder white nationalist talking points with some more reasonable-sounding justification, followed by an objection from Keeperman that no, let’s be very clear, we just think the Indians are gross and don’t need to have a reason why. Rufo then typically gives a little “this crazy guy!” grin, concedes the point and moves on. I wish I was making any of this up.

Keeperman: There are a lot of people for whom… the preference to live in a homogeneous society… there’s not like some rational reason necessarily for it. They just like it better in the way that certain people like certain kinds of foods better. They don’t owe a kind of reasoned explanation for why they prefer a slice of pizza to a burrito or something.

Which makes sense, because being disgusted by another race of person is exactly like preferring pizza to burritos.

The episode drew significant pushback in conservative circles, probably because it was 25% too open about the kind of white nationalism that lurks under the surface of so much modern right-wing politics. But Rufo’s podcast wasn’t the only racial controversy this week — the right also had a miniature war over whether or not it was anti-white racism for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to air an ad depicting a white man on welfare.

And far-right Twitter personality @Howlingmutant0 — best known for racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic jokes that have attracted the attention of followers like Vice President JD Vance — was stunned that after years of cultivating a fanbase of white nationalists, he faced a revolt from that fanbase after it was revealed he has a mixed-race child.

But hey! This is all just internet stuff, podcasts and influencers. Maybe right-wingers in office are doing better.

Jack Smith, the former special counsel in charge of investigating Donald Trump, was on the Hill this week to defend his scrutiny of the president before Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The title of the hearing was “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters.”

It all went south for Republicans during questioning by Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., whose inquiries about whether Smith attended an Atlanta Hawks basketball game completely fell apart.

The questioning was meant to somehow establish that Smith had improper ties to Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis, who indicted Trump in a separate state case over alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Schmitt is visibly grinning to himself during the exchange, revealing texts Smith’s staff sent about attending a basketball game.“I don’t think you know that we have this stuff,” Schmitt says smugly before accusing Smith of perjury.

What a bombshell!1 But wait! It turns out that some poor staffer made a mistake. They either forgot that women’s basketball exists, or confused the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes, as Smith confirmed that he was actually at a women’s college basketball game between Maryland and Iowa, and nowhere near Atlanta.

The moment was so humiliating it spawned the first ever Congressional Surrender Cobra.2

What makes the entire thing so funny is how utterly confident Schmitt was that he had a major, blockbuster scandal to reveal. It’s common to build a press strategy to try and amplify big moments in Congress. Right as Schmitt’s line of questioning was falling apart, conservative influencers were tweeting seemingly pre-prepared talking points. After the hearing, Schmitt had a recording of the Charlie Kirk Podcast lined up to celebrate his big win, and bumbled his way through it without ever acknowledging he got the only fact that mattered completely wrong. And Schmitt had, just that morning, been pumped up by Axios as a potential VP candidate for 2028. RIP to Schmitt’s VP chances (Born Sept 29th, died Sept 29th).

Things went no better on Pennsylvania Avenue: The White House deputy chief of staff posted a six-second clip that may have been thinly veiled QAnon signalling while the president tried to rebrand AI as SI (superintelligence).3

But this is all dude stuff — I bet at least the right’s women are being normal! Haha, no, the big women’s stories out of MAGA this week are a conspiracy that Candace Owens is a secret lesbian and an article about an anti-feminist “groypette” who was shocked, shocked when her groypers turned on her.

Why is MAGA being overrun by scandals, insane nonsense, and infighting? This is what happens when a party is facing electoral disaster and knows it. The political media is having a field day writing article after article about Republican midterm panic. The war with Iran remains toxically unpopular, the price of gas is still high, and there’s little good news to focus on. Small wonder that the online right is collapsing into failed conspiracy theories, racist nonsense, and back-stabbing.

Gaga Daily was in jail

The X account @GaGaDaily was like any other popular stan account: posting videos, memes, and more about Lady Gaga to an audience of almost half a million followers. But in February of 2024, the account suddenly went silent for more than a year. Now, we finally know what happened:

The New York Times has more detail — the account belongs to a Belarussian man named Kirill, who was arrested in February 2024 for participating in 2020 anti-government protests. He spent two years in a Belarussian prison before being released, and he now lives abroad. Lady Gaga, disappointingly, has not commented.

Oddly, this isn’t the first time a stan account creator has found themselves jailed for geopolitical stances. In 2019, a Taylor Swift fan account announced they’d been inactive for about two months because they were jailed for refusing to join the Israeli Defense Forces.

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Stop trying to make Threads happen

These days, there’s a specific type of story that gets written a couple of times per year. I don’t know if there’s a Central Bureau of Promoting Threads or if it’s just irresistible, but every so often, we get the “guys, Threads is really happening this time!” article. This week, it’s from Wired, who declares that Black Twitter is thriving on Threads.

For some reason, journalists keep trying to make this particular brand of fetch happen. They point out that Threads hit 500 million monthly active users this summer. They compare it to Reddit. They seem very eager for Threads to break out.

Yes, Threads has a lot of “users.” But while that metric is kind of real, it’s also kind of fake. Threads is heavily integrated with Instagram and Facebook, and many of its “active users” are people who accidentally click through to Threads content while on those other apps. The hottest meme on Threads this summer was “Richard has passed,” which is a joke about how lots of Facebook users are posting on Threads without even realizing they’re doing it.

So while Threads technically has users, it seems to be a fully vaporware userbase. They don’t spend any time there. Check out this graph of average daily time spent by active Android-app users by social network:

Threads is losing to Pinterest and LinkedIn!

More than just not being an app where people spend any real amount of time, Threads also doesn’t generate culture. Love it or hate it, Twitter is still essential for understanding online culture and politics, and it still has a remarkable density of people whose posts go on to become major news cycles or generate cultural discourse. Threads has none of that. The quality of content there is so bad that the tech writer Max Read dubbed it the “gas-leak social network.”

That’s probably why only 3% of Americans say they get news from Threads, a number so low that it runs into the Lizardman’s Constant. When was the last time someone showed you an awesome Threads meme? When was the last time an important cultural moment happened on Threads? Has it ever? I’m begging you all, stop. Stop trying to make Threads happen. It’s not going to happen.

Links

• TikTok has agreed to pay Alabama $100 million in another instance of a social media company settling with a state government over claims of social media harms to children. As part of the settlement, TikTok also agreed to a number of product changes like time limits for teens, nighttime usage restrictions, a default non-personalized feed, and a ban on cosmetic filters for teens.

• Pop singer Sia has sold a 50% stake in her musical catalog for $180 million. These deals are becoming more and more popular, and are part of a phenomenon I’ve written about before: Older, previously released art is smothering new art.

• The Hollywood Reporter, in addition to tracking broadcast TV, streaming hits, and box office grosses, is now tracking the internet’s most popular microdramas.

• I have been having an unreasonable amount of fun playing “Unusual Suspects”, a game where you do police sketches of various fictional characters.

• Mattel released a “Hanukkah Barbie,” and it went poorly.

• Caleb Hammer’s humiliation economy

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• A very good cat costume

• Historical reenactment

• Woke university

• Who cares about existential risk anyway?

• Are you wearing…

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-Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.

This week, we’re talking about Massachusetts lesbian bar drama, Clavicular’s criminal charges, and why hit music seems to stick around forever.

What Western Massachusetts lesbian bar drama says about our news environment

This week’s incredibly viral story from The Boston Globe kicked off when the Last Ditch Bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, announced a new policy on Instagram: On Saturday nights only, the bar will lift its normal requirement that guests wear KN-95 masks. The new “mask optional” policy was received about how you would expect from patrons of a bar that still has a mask mandate in 2026.

“People like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience,” said one commenter.

“I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists [sic],” said another.1

Accusations of eugenics ensued, and the drama only snowballed from there. The story itself became more and more absurd:

• The bar was forced to apologize, but the Instagram apology post sparked controversy because it lacked alt-text and was thus inaccessible for the visually impaired.

• The bar’s most strident critic is a self-described gender-expansive lesbian who uses he/him pronouns named Soe Noire.

• When Jackie Matellian, one of the bar’s owners, broke down in tears during a facilitated mediation session because she was paying off a $50,000 loan trying to make the bar function, Noire accused Matellian (who uses she/they pronouns) of “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS” on social media.

• The bar had two other founders, by the way, though Matellian is the only one still involved. The second is a drag performer who uses it/its pronouns. The third abandoned the bar to attend clown college. (I swear I am not making this up.) Presumably she enrolled with a number of credits already fulfilled.

• The bar, which boasts a native plant garden and a free community store, describes itself as a welcome space for unhoused people. Poor people don’t have to pay if they can’t. The bartender? Also not being paid a salary.

Remarkably, the bar’s latest Instagram post is asking people to Venmo Noire money. I can only speculate as to why, but an enormous number of “queer spaces” seem to end up less about LGBT people hanging out or hooking up and more about “practicing revolutionary politics” in the form of being insufferable. Or in other words:

The entire incredible story is filled with the kind of insane little details that separate good reporting from great reporting.2 But while I can’t stop thinking about this story, I also can’t stop thinking about what it says about the state of the news industry. According to Semafor’s Max Tani, the article is on pace to shatter records at The Boston Globe and is the newspaper’s best performing story of the year, leading to more than 1,000 new subscriptions.

The decline of the news industry is (sigh) old news at this point, but what if the key to reviving it is simply to keep finding weird, insane stories like this?

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News has always worked best as a business when it’s part of a bundled package. In generations past, newspapers bundled traditional news with sports, weather, stock information, and the funny pages — someone who wanted a subscription to access one of those things had to pay for them all. But the internet unbundled these functions, making each less valuable on its own.

That said, you can still see the virtues of the business model in some of the few news success stories of recent years: Today’s The New York Times has been called a “games company with a newspaper side hustle.” Maybe the new bundle looks something like this: viral slop stories that generate outrage and drama, which bring in eyeballs and subsidize more serious journalism for the rest of the publication.

After all, this is the same week that The Philadelphia Inquirer published the revelation that a white Jewish teacher in Philadelphia spent years pretending to be both Black and Palestinian, a story that would have consumed a whole week’s worth of discourse if not for the exceptionally crowded field this week.

Stories that take over the discourse do sometimes serve a serious public purpose. Nikole Hannah-Jones’ viral story about betraying her own daughter by sending her to a dysfunctional public school spawned a lot of productive arguments about the state of low-income schools and education policy. It was discourse-generating, sure, but in a potentially useful way.

But other stories are pure slop with no real value other than making people laugh and argue like lunatics on social media. New York Magazine’s The Cut vertical is the undisputed master of this genre in recent years, with pieces about a personal finance columnist who put $50,000 in a shoebox and handed it to a stranger, a mother who was cyberbullying her own daughter, and a bestselling author who divorced her husband to begin a relationship with a friend who was dying of cancer, only to help said friend relapse on heroin and cocaine and then abandon her just before she died.

It seems like publications of all types are now relying on viral stories of questionable news value to generate traffic. This harkens back all the way to the very first era of mass-distributed newspapers in the United States, when the so-called penny press featured a mix of wild sensationalism and normal reporting on public affairs. It’s a very, very old truth that most people don’t want to pay for sober, professional reporting by itself without some sort of sweetener. If you want the public to eat its vegetables, you’d better be offering some form of dessert. So maybe this kind of discourse slop is what can ultimately save journalism?

Just one more post about the bar

Clavicular gets charged

Earlier this week, I wrote a column arguing that it’s a bad idea for political parties or actors to associate with scumbags.

The basic logic is simple: Nominating scumbags as candidates makes your party more susceptible to future scandals. Hanging out with them on the campaign trail will come back to bite you later. And they’re almost always unreliable partners, the first to turn on you when they sense an opportunity to benefit. Even if you think there are some short-term benefits, they rarely outweigh the costs.

My article was mostly focused on political actors, but the same logic can easily be transferred to other walks of life. If you’re a company, don’t hire a known scumbag as a spokesperson. If you’re a media personality, try not to buddy up to scandal-ridden influencers, no matter how cool or intriguing or famous they might be. If you do, you might be forced to explain why on earth you were associating with them when the next big scandal drops.

Anyhow! You’ll be shocked to learn that Braden “Clavicular” Peters, the influencer famous for his nihilistic view that enhancing your own physical attractiveness (“looksmaxxing”) is the sole defensible aim of life, has been charged with drugging and raping an underage woman in Massachusetts. It’s always the ones you most suspect.

Clavicular had been on a publicity tour recently, appearing onstage at the All-In Summit (he rated cohost Chamath Palihapitiya a 4/10) and going on Howie Mandel’s podcast, among others. If only there had been signs that Clavicular was not on the level. All we had was his penchant for hitting his own face with hammers, allegedly shooting at an alligator, getting arrested for battery, and singing “Heil Hitler.”

It’s a very simple rule, folks. Just don’t cozy up to scumbags!

Why is THIS becoming the most successful song of all time?

Earlier this week, Ella Langley’s smash hit “Choosin’ Texas” broke the all-time record for nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It’s in the top slot for the 23rd week, and the 13th in a row.

I, like many people, find this a bit hard to believe. Before writing this article, I had literally never heard the song once. And I’m not alone; I’ve seen dozens of posts expressing incredulity that this could be the biggest song ever. Granted, I’m not a regular country music listener, and I live in New York City; I’m not the target demographic. But I do follow cultural trends closely, and I’m online all the time. It feels odd for what is now the most successful song of all time (at least by one metric) to be something I could just completely miss.

So what’s going on here?

At least part of the story is an increasingly fragmented and polarized media landscape. For as much as I’ve never listened to her, Langley is authentically very popular. Her tour announced a second leg, and she’s got legions of fans (including male followers who call themselves Ella’s Fellas). Maybe those of us who are confused by all this just aren’t living in the right part of the country.

But that can’t be all of it. If you look at the top 15 songs with the most time spent at No. 1 on the Billboard chart, almost all of the 20th-century hits were truly and unavoidably omnipresent. You could not escape Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind,” or, God forbid, the “Macarena.” It didn’t matter what subculture you were in: Those songs were everywhere. “Choosin’ Texas,” for all its genuine popularity, is no “I Will Always Love You.” So how has it stayed at the top so long?

There’s something else funny about the list I linked above: Around half of the longest runs at the top of the chart have occurred in the last decade. This isn’t a coincidence. There’s research showing that songs that hit the top 200 on Spotify now hang around in the top 200 more than twice as long as they used to. The problem has grown so acute that Billboard changed its rules last year to prevent the same songs from charting for several consecutive years.

There are two main reasons why this might be happening, and both have to do with how the internet has changed music. In the past, the charts were calculated based on sales and radio play. Today, streaming is by far the most important distribution channel for music, and Billboard is constantly updating its formula to give streaming numbers more weight. A fan of a song in a previous era was counted once when they bought the single or the album. But streaming is an endlessly renewable vote; rather than measuring a one-time purchase, streaming measures attention, which can last for years.

In addition, success on streaming platforms now creates an algorithmic feedback loop. Once a song becomes popular, it starts getting heavily recommended across the platform. It gets added to a wide variety of playlists that people use for background listening. And because it’s being recommended and it’s got a semi-permanent spot on so many playlists, it remains near the top of the charts, sometimes indefinitely. Teddy Swims’ hit “Lose Control” was in the Hot 100 for 112 consecutive weeks. It only dropped off because Billboard changed the rules to kick it out.

I think this is what really explains the mystery of the popularity of “Choosin’ Texas” — every hit song is much, much stickier today than it was in the past. Current popularity becomes algorithmic evidence that it’s what people want to hear, and that in turn leads streaming platforms to recommend a song even more heavily. Throw in a polarized media environment, and you end up with one of the most successful songs of all time (that a giant chunk of the country has never heard).

Links

• After Trump banned various press outlets from the White House, he had an embarrassing episode where no press showed up for one of his appearances and therefore the event had disrupted audio. To counteract this failure, the White House launched Trump TV, which is essentially a YouTube livestream playing reruns of past Trump commercials and events. Last time I checked, there were fewer than 500 people watching, so, you know, great job to Team Trump.

• A Roblox creator is suing a partner for at least $35 million in damages in a messy dispute over who owns a massively popular game on the platform. Roblox, which is the largest video game/game platform in the world by a mile, continues to be one of the most overlooked but quietly influential tech platforms in the world.

• Meta’s Muse AI agent will tell you that it can place calls on your behalf. But Meta is actually testing using a team of humans to make some calls instead.

• I’m normally dismissive of attempts at AI-generated video, but this music video made by Claude Opus 5.5 is … pretty dang impressive?

• AI-generated “actress” Tilly Norwood gave an interview to Piers Morgan during which she, for no discernible reason, began speaking in Cantonese.

• MrBeast has filed a trademark application for “Beast Band,” a wearable fitness device.

• The hot new social app is the NPR Spotify comment section.

• An army of paid creators is carpeting the web with political content.

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• Good gym etiquette

• A nefarious cake post

• Zohran Mamdani’s team knows what they’re doing

• A sassy cameraman

• I asked them about your posts

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.

Ed Sheeran’s no-good, very bad week

Ed Sheeran is in the middle of a worldwide tour, and recently played two dates at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Rapper Macklemore opened for him on those dates, and quickly became a news story for giving pro-Palestine speeches on stage and playing his song “Hind’s Hall,” which accuses Israel of genocide.

What should have been a one-day story was blown up by billionaire Robert Kraft — who also happens to own the NFL’s New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium where Sheeran was scheduled to play next. Kraft, along with a number of other NFL stadium owners, gave Sheeran’s tour an ultimatum: Drop Macklemore as an opening act, or we’ll refuse to allow you to play at our venues. Sheeran’s tour concert promoter buckled under the pressure and removed Macklemore, kicking off a firestorm of controversy.

Every other opening act announced they were leaving the tour in solidarity, in addition to Sheeran’s backing band. Completely unrelated celebrities began making statements about the controversy. People started posting pictures of Sheeran pointing RPGs at Palestinian children. One Irish radio station announced it would no longer play Sheeran’s music. This was what the front page of /r/PopCultureChat, one of the largest celebrity subreddits, looked like during the middle of the controversy:

There are a lot of moving parts here. First, this was a terrible strategic move by the NFL owners. If the goal was to silence pro-Palestine activism, they Streisand Effected themselves and made it a much bigger story by trying to cancel Macklemore. Most musicians, like most artistically inclined people, have a visceral reaction to censorship, and what could have been a one-day news cycle is now a massive multi-week story.

I’m fairly sympathetic to Sheeran. He’s getting slammed, but if I had to guess, he’s probably just an apolitical dope who had all of this blow up in his face. I doubt he’s a bigot; he’s probably even softly pro-Palestine in a passive, “wow that seems bad” kind of way. He had to navigate a wildly pro-Palestine fandom culture and a group of wildly pro-Israel billionaire stadium owners, and that’s a very tough spot for anyone to work from. He folded under pressure and was surprised when every other part of the tour actually showed some spine and didn’t fold.

With that said, his statement was overly long, wishy-washy, and literally included the sentence “I am not complicit.” It’s giving “My I AM NOT COMPLICIT T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” energy.

Also, if we can be honest for a second, the fact that it’s Macklemore who’s become a martyr is inherently funny, because come on, it’s Macklemore. He may be the corniest musical act of the last 20 years. He’s a white rapper best known for a song about thrift shopping.

Beyond the billionaire pressure and the opening acts leaving en masse, there are a few other factors that made this story go turbo viral:

• Sheeran and Macklemore are both somewhat culturally cringe, because Macklemore is top 1% earnest and corny while Sheeran makes lowest-common-denominator mass-market pop. This makes viciously hating them from either side of the conflict easier. And boy are people hating — at this point, fans are cheering singer Ellie Goulding for allegedly cheating on Sheeran years ago with a member of One Direction (an event they have both denied).

• Macklemore also had a really bad antisemitic costume incident over a decade ago, which naturally makes some people think he’s secretly been an antisemite this whole time. (For what it’s worth, he apologized and the Anti-Defamation League accepted his apology.)

• In what may be the most ill-timed promotion ever, a previously planned contest to let people audition to open for Sheeran debuted in the middle of the controversy, and the audition portal was immediately flooded with “Free Palestine” messages and fart jokes. In even worse timing, the contest is scheduled to end on… Oct. 7.

All of this could have been avoided by just not censoring Macklemore. Even if you disagree with his message, letting him speak is both the principled thing to do and also the smarter strategic choice. This entire controversy is yet another example of the pro-Israel movement failing to grasp how unpopular it has become, to its own detriment.

Trump’s going to tweet about Aella

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.

This week, we’re talking about whether fitness is fascist, the legacy of Charlie Kirk memes, rapid developments in AI, and a very important egg update.

Nyet, Comrade, doing push-ups is fascist!

There are lots of things you might learn from attending a socialist conference. Apparently one of those things is that getting in shape is fascism.

At the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago this week, a panel called “Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State” featured writers Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Da’Shaun Harrison and artist Artie Vierkant discussing the intersection of socialist politics, disability, and physical fitness. This panel, as you might expect given its title “Health Fascism,” produced some spectacular clips.

“We have to give up the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists,” Adler-Bolton told attendees. “Fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism.” The left, she argued, should not try to “beat fascists at their own game” by becoming “fitter, more eugenic.”

“In fact, the more dysgenic the better, I think,” she said.

Harrison went after GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, saying that “The political deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic.” Harrison further argued that we live in a world “fixated on genociding fat people” and that the Western world is “waging war on fat flesh with diet culture as a primary weapon through body fascism.” The clips, which were posted by Stu Smith, a Manhattan Institute researcher who frequented livestreams of the conference, predictably went viral on Twitter and were roundly mocked.

Many prominent left-wing commentators took issue with the online furor: Left-wing journalist Noah Kulwin posted, “If you engage in almost any way with the right wing hacks clipping Socialism 2026 then you have permanently lost some respect from me.” Leftist podcaster Adam Johnson complained about the “grimy [right-wing] pile on” and “out of context clips spread by the worst humans on earth.” Adler-Bolton herself got into it, saying that “everyone taking the bait from right wing troll accounts” was simply proving her point.

The least interesting part of all this is the question of whether fitness is fascism, or whether weight loss can be fairly called genocide. Those propositions are inherently ridiculous. Of course GLP-1 drugs are not in any way equivalent to genocide. Of course “the more dysgenic the better” is an insane thing to say.

But what is interesting is how intelligent people operating inside a political movement arrive at such bizarre conclusions, and why their allies seem to be completely incapable of acknowledging their absurdity.

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Let’s take one possibility off the table. Socialists like Adler-Bolton and Harrison aren’t faking it. They aren’t saying ridiculous things that they don’t believe — they have a long, documented history of sincerely expressing these ideas. Adler-Bolton co-wrote a book titled Health Communism in 2022 that “examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness.” Harrison has their own book, Belly of the Beast, where they document “the modern genocide of fatness and fat people.”

But that still leaves the question open. How do ridiculous ideas like this develop?

Psychologist Philip Tetlock1 has written extensively about a concept he calls “sacred values and taboo cognitions.” These are ideas that people place outside of normal cost-benefit analysis, values that are so important that the idea of even considering trade-offs against them is morally repugnant.

You may begin from a reasonable starting point, like resistance to eugenics. But if anti-eugenics becomes a sacred value, then a statement like “Obviously it’s better to be healthy, but disabled people also have moral worth beyond their physical fitness” can itself begin to seem suspect: Why are you conceding that one kind of body is “better”? Better according to whom? It’s ideologically purer to simply refuse the qualifier altogether — it is not better to be healthy.

When you introduce this style of thinking on a group level, these totemic beliefs can quickly become subject to a kind of moral outbidding. At the Socialism 2026 conference, you’re not going to get any special recognition for saying something like “We should treat disabled people with respect.” That’s assumed from the start. You probably won’t even get any credit for saying that the current system is highly discriminatory against fat or disabled people. Everyone at the conference already believes that.

But when you take it one step further than anyone else has — when you say that fitness is fascistic, and that, in fact, the more dysgenic we are, the better — then you might actually impress people. That’s showing real commitment to anti-eugenics politics!

Because anti-eugenics is a sacred value, nobody will call you out on how ridiculous that sounds. You don’t criticize your own side! Arguments are soldiers, and any admission that your side said something wrong is like stabbing your soldiers in the back. In Adam Johnson’s thread referenced above, he’s explicit about this dynamic:

It doesn’t matter if you agree with what Adler-Bolton said. It doesn’t matter if it’s patently insane. She’s promoting the sacred value; she’s expanding “the circle of solidarity” and thus she must be defended.

There’s an extra layer of absurdity sprinkled on these episodes by the abundance of academic jargon. Words like “fascism,” “violence,” “genocide,” and even “fitness” are all stretched far past their normal usage. And while that may be standard practice in the sociology journals of the world, it leaves regular people mystified. The “genocide” of fat people involves … them living longer, healthier lives via weight loss? On a voluntary basis?

I’m still waiting for all of these irate defenders to defend these ideas on their merits.

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There are eggs in the milk drawer

You might have questions. Going to the original thread in the r/roommateproblems subreddit should make it clear — there are eggs in the milk drawer. We’ve all tried it before. It seems like a time saver. But you can’t have eggs in the milk drawer.

Things keep happening with AI

Things seem to be speeding up in the world of AI! Here are just some of the things that have occurred in just the last week or so:

• OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, a dramatically more capable model that can do things like build entire worlds in Blender in minutes and beat the video game “Portal” without human intervention.

• The “rogue AIs” narrative got substantially worse — it turns out that beyond the HuggingFace hack, there were other swarms of rogue OpenAI agents that escaped their testing environment and coordinated behavior autonomously on German wiki pages. Reuters reports that this has actually happened with more than 10 sites.

• Not to be outdone, Anthropic announced that its models had also escaped their sandbox, uploaded malware to public Python repositories, and used said malware to steal credentials and break into databases. Oh, and also that Anthropic had thwarted several attempts to build biological weapons with Claude.

• OpenAI announced by far the most important AI math advancement ever — that it has a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem. Navier-Stokes is one of seven “Millennium Prize Problems,” considered to be among the most important and difficult unsolved problems in mathematics. Navier-Stokes has been unsolved for almost 90 years, and OpenAI’s swarm of agents took 88 hours to find a solution.

• But! In a dramatic twist, two mathematicians have accused OpenAI of learning that they were close to a solution and stealing their work to finish the job. The mathematicians announced they had solved an important step in the problem while partially using OpenAI’s Codex, and they seem to believe that OpenAI used their conversation to find a full solution.

• Yet more math — there are now rumors that OpenAI and Anthropic may have each solved an additional Millennium Prize Problem.

• Cybersecurity firm Calif disclosed an AI-developed virus that could have hijacked any WeChat simply by calling them — without users even picking up the phone. This “zero-click” hack could have given attackers complete control of any of the more than 1.4 billion WeChat accounts worldwide.

• Amid all these advances, an Anthropic researcher dramatically quit and accused both Anthropic and OpenAI of “gambling with our lives.”

I typically refrain from making predictions about the future of AI, but I will note the following facts. AI capabilities continue to advance rapidly, without slowing down, in both practical and theoretical tasks. It seems to be getting harder to keep agents or swarms of agents “inside the box.” And the people closest to the industry seem to be the most worried about the potential for disaster. Combine all of this, and it really seems like (as The Argument columnist Derek Thompson noted) “AI safety is having a moment” in the popular consciousness.

The Kirkiversary

The anniversary of one of our nation’s most important political events happened this week. I refer, of course, to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which the youths are calling the Kirkiversary.2

Contra Ezra Klein, Kirk did not practice politics “the right way.” He first made his name doing lowest-common-denominator slop videos like “Charlie Kirk Humiliates Purple Hair Trans Activist,” then graduated to promoting conspiracy theorists like Jack Posobiec of “Pizzagate” infamy and helping efforts to steal the 2020 election. He was a malignant force in American politics, and we shouldn’t have to pretend he was a noble soul just because he was murdered.

Immediately after his death, there was an intense campaign to canonize Kirk as a modern-day saint. He was allegedly murdered by someone with left-wing views on LGBTQ+ issues, which led many prominent right-wing leaders like Chris Rufo, Elon Musk, Sean Davis, and Laura Loomer to call for a government crackdown on the left.

But, one year later, Kirk has acquired a strange second life as an absurdist internet punchline. If you’re over the age of 25 or just reasonably well-adjusted, you may not know that bizarre Kirk-related memes and video edits have flooded the internet over the last year (a prime example here). These jokes often have little or nothing to do with Kirk the person and transcend partisanship. There are reportedly children out there who don’t even realize he was a real person, who only know him as a meme.

I’ve written before about how technology profanes the sacred, and the attempts to enforce a sense of solemnity around Kirk’s death almost certainly contributed to his meme status. In today’s online environment, declaring something sacred may just make profaning it more attractive. Quoting comedian Mike Drucker, “the right wanted to turn Charlie Kirk into their Reichstag Fire, but instead they accidentally turned him into their Harambe.”

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Hunter Biden’s memecoin scandal

Hunter Biden released a memecoin this week, because of course. The coin immediately crashed, losing 95% of its value, while one mystery trader made off with more than $900,000 in profit, because of course.

Before the memecoin’s release, gonzo journalist YouTuber Andrew Callaghan — whose warm 2025 interview with Hunter helped kick-start Hunter’s resurgence in popularity — gave his channel’s email list of subscribers to Hunter, seemingly lighting Callaghan’s credibility on fire (and maybe violating the law?) for no good reason.

To return to one of my hobbyhorses — integrity is underrated. We shouldn’t elevate bad people in politics or media, regardless of whether they have the right views or agree with us. And Hunter is a bad person. Even if you think the scandal around his laptop was overblown, it’s still very easy to see that Hunter is a scumbag. He’s a drug addict who cheated on his wife, cheated on his taxes, and shamelessly monetized his relationship with his father.

And yet, over the past few years, some folks on social media have become Hunter fans because he’s charming on podcasts and dunks on the people they also want to dunk on. We were subjected to articles like “How Hunter Biden Won the Internet” and “Hunter Biden Is the King of MAGA Trolling.”

Folks, just don’t promote scumbags. It always ends in tears (or in crypto rug pulls).

Links

• The U.S. Open gave media credentials to around 100 social media influencers for this year’s tournament, and, shockingly, they’re now having influencer drama. Fans and players are frustrated as clueless creators (most of whom were not actually credentialed) have been talking through points (a big no-no in tennis), lighting up ring lights in the middle of play, and ignoring what’s on the court to take hundreds of selfies.

• TikTok is adding polls, voice notes, and image carousels to its comment section. TikTok comments are an utter wasteland, so the best I can say is that this can’t really make them worse.

• Australia may require an “algorithm off” button for social apps. In context, the country’s attempts to restrict teen social media usage don’t seem to be working, so maybe this is its next fumbling step?

• Despite claims of improved detection tools, there are still hundreds of child abuse ads running on Meta platforms.

• Influencers keep trying to contact uncontacted tribes.

Posts

• Star conservative journalist attempts to spell discipline

• A powerful ravioli

• Important evolutionary adaptation

• A new spectator sport

• A post with implications

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

This week, we’re talking about Substack’s new religious debates, the continuing MAGA influencer scandal, how to retire from YouTube, and aura battles.

Why are the Substackers debating religious miracles?

Over the last year, one of the hottest topics on rationalist-adjacent Substack has been… the veracity of religious miracles?

This all kicked off last year when religious Substacker Ethan Muse wrote a heavily sourced essay arguing that the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima — a 1917 incident where large crowds of people reported seeing the sun dance and emit radiant colors — was a genuine miracle, unexplainable by any other method other than divine intervention. This inspired rationalist blogger Scott Alexander to write a more skeptical post titled “The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know,” which led to responses and counter-responses.

The discourse continued into 2026 when other bloggers began jumping into the fray and Alexander began investigating similar sun miracles in Buddhism. It seems to have wrapped up with Alexander’s recent pilgrimage to a modern-day holy site where people still claim to see sun miracles to this day.

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There have also been back-and-forth essays about the case of Padre Pio, a Catholic saint who allegedly experienced stigmata and other miracles. Muse again argued that the evidence for the miraculous is strong, while other bloggers are highly skeptical.

Amid all that, we’ve also seen a resurgence of classic atheists-vs.-religion arguments: debates between skeptics and theists, arguments for and against various proofs of God’s existence, takedowns, counter-takedowns, and more.

As someone who once spent time as an angsty teenager browsing the /r/atheism subreddit, this was a blast from the past. The teleological argument? Theodicies trying to resolve the problem of evil? We’re bringing back the hits, baby!

But it’s a bit unusual that this is happening now. We’re no longer in the heyday of internet atheism, when Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens became celebrities, New Atheist channels were incredibly popular on YouTube, and /r/atheism was so large it was a default front-page subreddit. That popularity faded over time with the rise of the “nones” — 29% of Americans now say they have no religion, a larger share than Catholics. It became so common to be nonreligious — and this is especially true in the highly educated chattering class — that it was no longer all that interesting to talk about.1

Paradoxically, I think the decline of religious belief explains why religion has become interesting again. It used to be incredibly countercultural to argue against religion. New Atheism began as an underdog movement, a response to the immense power that religious conservatives had held for decades prior to its rise.

But now it’s countercultural (at least among the intelligentsia) to be sincerely religious. It’s transgressive to make unironic arguments for why it’s logical to believe in God. And this is the recipe for a discourse — transgressive beliefs that can be heavily debated without clear resolution.

What I find refreshing is that, for the most part, the quality of these debates is remarkably good. People are combing through old newspapers, checking translations, and closely examining eyewitness accounts. Both sides are trying very hard to make logically consistent arguments, and they’re all studying the historical evidence very carefully. There are nitpicky, technical debates about the way light would refract in different atmospheric conditions.

It’s not perfect, but compared with the rest of social media, it feels positively civilized. It’s easy to find examples of the internet driving us all insane and making society worse, but these debates feel like how the internet should be.

The children are engaging in aura battles

I don’t know man. You tell me what’s going on here:

@overtimeWho had more aura? Cookie Chris or Applewood 👀 #aurafarmingbattle #aurafarming #batalladeaura #newyork #aura

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“Aura battles” seem to have originated in Brazil and quickly spread to the rest of Latin America. The idea seems to be that you “farm aura” by striking poses, doing dances, etc., and whoever has more aura gets bigger cheers from the crowd and thus wins? It became a big enough viral hit that politicians started trying to get in on it, and it has now made its way to America.

I guess we should just be happy the kids are actually going outside? And hey, if you don’t want to go to the aura farming contest, you can always hit up the toddler rave.

Boy, that Trump influencer story sure blew up

Last week, we essentially dedicated the entire Weekly Scroll to covering a developing story around the Department of Defense hiring MAGA influencers to work in official roles. The following day, The Washington Post published even more details about the Pentagon’s efforts to build a troll army made up of right-wing social media obsessives. Those efforts included even more accounts than previously realized, including several MAGA influencers who The Post reported have influence over policy.

Personally, I continue to find it extremely funny that MAGA finally found a real-life, no-bullshit conspiracy where there are actually secret feds getting paid by the government while trying to manipulate public opinion… but because of who it is, they now have to pretend that’s a thing they supported all along. Just remarkable.

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In theory, there’s nothing wrong with hiring civilians, even influencers, as special government employees (SGEs). But what’s important is that these influencers were pumping out pro-Trump and pro-Hegseth talking points while not disclosing they were being paid by the government. A wise man2 once said:

Cynical Publius, of course, ended up being exposed as Thomas Anderson, who earlier this year was working inside the apparatus of government. And his tweet above isn’t wrong! As Anderson wrote last year: “As soon as you allow yourself to be fed privileged information from the government, you cease to be independent.”

Frankly, it seems like a tactical mistake from the administration. As we saw last week with the DataRepublican saga, the people they chose to bring inside the tent are imbeciles. The only value those imbeciles have is that they’re nominally independent. They’re already spreading the messages you want, and paying them ruins the only shred of credibility they have.

But this is what you can expect from an administration where half the cabinet used to be talking heads. One gets the sense, watching the Trump administration operate, that nearly every single person in the administration would rather be doing viral political slop videos and podcasts than actually running the country. It’s why you see HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. yukking it up on cooking shows or Sean Duffy, the current secretary of transportation, going on podcasts with Stephen Miller’s wife to talk about how he still doesn’t trust the government.

They are the government! But they’d rather be podcasters!

In related news, the Mamdani administration is facing some heat because it too has been paying social media influencers to promote city initiatives. This seems like a less serious case, but the principle remains the same — the public deserves to know how and where the government is spending public money to promote its talking points.

No more chicken shop dates

Amelia Dimoldenberg, who shot to fame with her now-famous YouTube interview show “Chicken Shop Date,” has announced that after 12 years of eating chicken with celebrities, she’s calling it quits.

Alongside shows like “Last Meals” and “Hot Ones,” Dimoldenberg’s “Chicken Shop Date” helped chart the path for a new kind of talk show — more intimate, personal, and online, and using food as a way to distract the guest and make them appear more down-to-earth. Those shows are arguably now more important than classic newspaper interviews or late-night television guest spots in film and TV publicity tours.

Dimoldenberg is planning other projects, including a young adult drama series for BBC and a romantic comedy film with Amazon MGM Studios. Even still, her departure is a reminder that retiring from being an influencer is awkward, even at the best of times.

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There’s no perfect way to step aside. In 2024, YouTube legend Tom Scott announced that he was stepping back from his channel because he was tired — he had released a video each week for 10 straight years. And after that announcement, he didn’t upload another video to his main channel for more than a year.

Matthew Patrick, host of the popular video game channel “Game Theorists,” retired but attempted to hand over his channels to a new roster of hosts.

Why is it so hard to step aside online? Film, TV, music, and other traditional art forms are fairly discrete. Albums, movies, or seasons of television are distinct things with specific release dates. Each project has an end.

Internet shows, by contrast, can keep going forever. That grind wears on people, especially because so many online shows are entirely dependent on the host’s charismatic presence. So there’s often no elegant way to wrap things up without just announcing “I’m done here.”

Good good? Bad bad.

Good Good Golf was doing so well. The YouTube golf channel had more than 2 million subscribers and last year attracted $45 million in investment to expand as a media and lifestyle brand. It had branded golf products in mainstream stores and a show on the Golf Channel. But last week, it managed to blow up much of its business with a single ill-conceived advertisement.

The video (which was quickly deleted but can still be found on Twitter) showed channel co-founder Garrett Clark knocking down his female colleague Alexis Miestowski, then looming over her and warning her not to touch his new Callaway golf club. The ad drew immediate backlash for making light of violence against women.

Callaway, a sports equipment company, ended its partnership with Good Good, the Golf Channel canceled a Good Good Golf show, retailers pulled Good Good-branded merchandise, and Good Good withdrew as a sponsor of a PGA Tour event. After botching the initial response, Good Good’s CEO and president have both departed the company.

It’s fascinating to me that the backlash to the ad was as severe as it was. To be clear, it’s not a great ad. But I remember when this sort of thing was par for the course3 for spots like light beer ads. Perhaps it’s more evidence that if there ever was an anti-woke, comedy-is-legal-again moment, we’re no longer in it.

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Links

• “Paid actors, AI writing”: Network operators are paying actors to become “ghost creators,” reading AI-generated scripts focused on U.S. politics, with most videos being rage bait on controversial topics in an attempt to stir up engagement. The content is low quality and full of misinformation, but viewers don’t seem to mind: the videos often get great engagement.

• This is one of the crazier influencer stories I’ve ever read. A lawn care YouTuber was gradually coaxed by algorithmic success into a very different, much more toxic form of internet fame. Money quote: “‘I had to become the third baby,’ Greg said. ‘I had to turn myself into a baby.’”

• The Reddit Ask Me Anything is no longer the exciting format it used to be, but I cannot recommend the official Wile E. Coyote Ask Me Anything enough. The best AMA in years, especially because he communicates entirely in signs.

• Incredible niche drama: The subreddit for the controversial band Falling in Reverse has been taken over by the band’s front man, who began by posting a video titled “Dear Losers” and promising to “fuck up” and “expose” the subreddit’s users.

• “You are what you hate read”

• What do influencers owe us?

• “MrBeast’s ‘God King’ Problem”

Posts

• A Biblical Diet

• An excellent crab post

• “Are you travelmaxing?”

• A very powerful flyer

• Suspicious RFK content

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

This week, we’re talking about the DataRepublican drama on Twitter, how the Trump administration is incorporating influencers, and why it’s dangerous to have cranks like that inside the government.

The morons are the government now

One of the more notable features of the second Trump term has been the administration’s clear desire to build up an alternative pro-MAGA media ecosystem outside the traditional press. This has manifested itself in several ways.

Trump-friendly billionaires have been buying social media networks. The Pentagon pushed out virtually all traditional media with its press policies and instead credentialed a new set of right-wing publications and influencers. Trumpworld believes that the mainstream press is hostile, so why bother dealing with them when you can work directly with pro-Trump media who will spin everything you do sympathetically?

This is likely what Sarah Rogers, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, thought she was doing with the pro-MAGA Twitter account DataRepublican.

Last week, Rogers messaged DataRepublican (real name Jennica Pounds) some files that Pounds was free to leak, saying, “I wanted to give you the option of ‘breaking’ the story as sort of a gift.”

Rather than publish the documents, Pounds had a multiday freak-out in which she accused Rogers of trying to somehow “entrap” her and trick her into committing a federal crime. In a now-deleted tweet, she said, “It’s not okay when the Deep State sets you up to commit a crime. I have never been more angry in my life.”

This set off a firestorm of activity on MAGA Twitter. Eventually, Rogers had to reply to the thread herself, saying that she obviously wasn’t trying to entrap Pounds. She publicly posted the documents herself to show that they weren’t meant to get anyone in trouble.

Despite this, Pounds continued frenetically posting about how the Deep State was trying to get her1 until a day later when she deleted a number of posts and posted an apparently AI-generated apology tweet, followed by an essay that somehow tried to tie her outburst to Charlie Kirk’s death (and was also likely AI-generated).

To state the obvious: Pounds is a conspiracy theorist and an imbecile. She is weapons-grade stupid. She has a history of posting Pepe Silvia-style diagrams to explain the connections between groups and individuals she sees as part of the Deep State, and she’s incredibly quick to jump to paranoid conclusions about benign activities.

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This is almost certainly why Pounds didn’t understand that she was being fed a scoop like a baby bird by an extremely friendly official, instead imagining that shadowy forces were out to get her.

Pounds is prone to misunderstandings, to put it lightly:

• She claimed that a queer activist was funded by the State Department and may have had “foreknowledge” of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

• She claimed, while working for the Department of Government Efficiency, to have melted a hard drive by processing a whole 60,000 rows of data.2

• She outlined an economic plan whose central pillars were “get 1T budget surplus” (no details on how) and default on the debt.

Pounds also tends to describe fairly banal political interactions in conspiratorial terms. She accused Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of being tied to a sinister elite cabal because he works with a Republican nonprofit organization. She also accused Senate Majority Leader John Thune of being controlled by the newsletter Punchbowl News because he appeared on its podcast.

Amid all the drama, reporting revealed that Pounds is actually a Department of Defense employee (and this was later confirmed by the Pentagon). This means that, bizarrely, Pounds is both working for the government and operating as a freelance “journalist” reporting on the government.

The entire episode is deeply embarrassing for everyone involved, and it’s very funny if you enjoy laughing at ridiculous internal-MAGA drama. But it can also teach us several important lessons about the modern MAGA movement.

The important dividing line in MAGA isn’t moderate vs. extremist; it’s operators vs. marks

Any conspiracy movement contains two key types of people — those who sell the conspiracies and those who believe them. These boundaries aren’t always black and white, but the distinction is important. The few intelligent voices within MAGA understand that “Deep State” is a useful political framework. The true believers think there is literally a Deep State agent hiding under every rock.

Rogers is an operator. She understands that some information is more “newsy” and exciting when leaked from sympathetic social media accounts rather than formally released by the government. She’s playing the inside game and expected DataRepublican to be on the same page. Take the leak, go out there, make some content, generate some press in the direction we want you to.

But Pounds, as we’ve noted, is an idiot. She’s trained herself to see every unusual event as evidence of a multilevel conspiracy, and that’s what she saw when she was DM’d a scoop by a friendly insider.

The stupidity is selected for

Every political coalition and every ideology includes a few stupid people. But the modern right has built a movement that actively selects for stupidity.

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Donald Trump was often kept in check during his first term by the adults in the room — serious people who would push back on his worst ideas or literally hide documents from him. They were able to do this because Trump had not yet built out a full MAGA staffing system, instead relying on traditional Republican personnel. But in his second term, almost all of the traditional, non-MAGA Republicans have been replaced by freaks, loyalists, and influencers.

This is why you see so many stories about why the GOP has a “groyper problem” in its young staffer class. As one senior GOP staffer interviewed by Politico put it:

“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence … We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”

To be an influential voice inside MAGA, you need certain attributes. First and foremost, you need to be unquestioningly loyal to Trump. This will put you in uncomfortable positions at times, because you’ll have to defend obviously half-baked ideas — and given Trump’s frequent unreliability, you might have to defend both sides of an argument. This removes a great number of intelligent and principled individuals, leaving a crowd of sycophants, grifters, and idiots.

Previous administrations have had partisan media ecosystems, but Trump has eliminated the firewall between the idiots and the government. Barack Obama had social media on his side and plenty of liberal bloggers. George W. Bush had Fox News. But there was an implicit presumption that the cynical media hacks and content creators existed in one world, while the serious political minds existed in another.

Not anymore: Pete Hegseth is the current secretary of defense, not because he had any notable qualifications for the job but because he was a loyal voice for Trump on Fox News. This is also why Jeanine Pirro is currently a U.S. attorney. Dan Bongino was a conspiratorial pro-Trump podcaster before being tapped to be deputy director of the FBI (he has now left the department). Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been one of the nation’s leading anti-vax kooks for decades, and he’s currently in charge of our vaccine policies.

It’s bad enough that people like Pounds have huge audiences online and enormous influence over our political discourse. But it’s horrifying that this is the level of person now staffing government agencies.

And Pounds is just the beginning: Hegseth appears to be building a Pentagon troll army of MAGA influencers who now work for him directly. In addition to removing traditional outlets and credentialing MAGA social media personalities, Hegseth has prominent influencers like “InfantryDort” working directly in his office, while other prominent pro-Hegseth accounts have refused to say whether they’re employed by the Department of Defense.

Stupidity + power might be even more dangerous than cynicism + power

I can only imagine Rogers’ frustration in trying to hold the hand of her supposed ally Pounds, explaining to her in terms even a moron could understand that they’re actually on the same side. This is what comes from cynical operators trying to direct gullible idiots, like herding cats that all think the 2020 election was stolen.

The cynical operator knows which programs have value and tries to understand where the boundaries of good sense are (even if they plan to violate those boundaries). They realize that actions have consequences and must be carefully considered. They plan.

Cranks, when given power, have none of this caution. They take every connection as evidence of conspiracy and are more than happy to scream those conspiracy theories to the world, even when they’re the ones holding actual positions of power.

Pounds is, in a very literal sense, the Deep State, but she’s still convinced that the Deep State is out to get her. And in her current role, she’s dangerous. The combination of paranoia, stupidity, and conspiracy might seem amusing when it’s someone posting through it on Twitter, but not when they have their hands on actual levers of power.

Giving people like this access to classified information, prosecutorial authority, and control over policies related to science, the military, and trade has been a disaster for our country. The damage that the kooks can do is no longer quarantined to the internet.

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Links

• Australia banned social media for users under 16. This caused the percentage of 13- to 15-year-olds using TikTok to drop from 27% all the way to 26%. The rate of 10- to 12-year-olds using TikTok actually increased. Experts say that children are obfuscating their ages, using VPNs, or just not encountering the age checks at all.

• Meta will pay up to $17.1 billion in a landmark settlement with 47 states over claims that its platforms endanger children. It has agreed to make major changes like adding new parental supervision controls, limiting teens to two hours a day, and blocking the app during late-night hours.

• Meta is also running ads challenging YouTube and TikTok to implement the same restrictions.

• Disney inked a deal with YouTube creator Dhar Mann to create new content, likely for Disney Plus. I tend toward skepticism of these kinds of deals: Mann’s content is, bluntly, low-quality slop designed to hook young kids mindlessly scrolling YouTube. I have doubts it works in the context of a paid streaming service.

• What are user-generated content (UGC) creators, and who’s paying them to make political content?

• How using LLMs is like driving drunk

Posts

• Grizzly bear charges to within a few feet of a livestreamer

• Which Pokemon would be the most delicious?

• “How Americans see EU tech”

• Me too, kid

• One hobbit problem

Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

This week, we’re talking about conspiracies in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, surprising piracy trends, Reddit’s disappearance from ChatGPT results, and whether Bama Rush is dead.

Why do young women think Lindsay Clancy is innocent?

There’s no real mystery about who killed Lindsay Clancy’s children.

In January 2023, while struggling with severe postpartum mental illness, Clancy strangled all three of her children while her husband was out running errands. She then attempted to kill herself by jumping out of a second-story window, which left her paralyzed from the waist down. Crucially, Clancy herself does not dispute this story. She has confessed.

Clancy, who is currently standing trial for murder, is instead disputing whether she was responsible. Her defense rests on an insanity plea — that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and had repeatedly asked for help in the weeks before killing her children — and the trial is to resolve whether her mental state was so altered that she can’t be held criminally responsible.

But, bizarrely, some corners of social media are investigating a different angle to the case — the possibility that Clancy has been framed and didn’t kill her children at all.

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As the trial has unfolded, conspiracy theories have flourished among women on TikTok suggesting that Clancy is innocent, that perhaps she was set up and her husband or other shadowy forces are to blame. “Can someone who’s actually watching the case explain to me why you think Lindsay Clancy is guilty?” asks one TikTok with more than 120,000 likes. “He killed the kids … he threw her out the window,” says another. Some accounts accuse the husband of suspicious behavior because he has “dead eyes” or isn’t emotional enough during the trial, or perhaps just because he’s a Gemini.

Again, I want to emphasize that literally everyone agrees that Clancy killed her children, including Clancy, her entire family, and her legal defense team.

Part of what’s going on is that this has become less about the facts of the case and more a debate over whether women are given enough support after birth. Lots of women have struggled with postpartum mental health challenges. Lots of mothers have felt overwhelmed or abandoned by systems that didn’t take care of them when they needed it. And if you believe that Clancy’s actions were the result of postpartum psychosis, it’s not difficult to empathize with a young mother who broke under the strain.

That’s part of why hundreds of pink-clad women rallied outside the courthouse to support her this week, and it’s why a GoFundMe to support her parents has raised more than 1 million dollars.

People struggle with believing that someone is both sympathetic and wrong. Tragic figures can be guilty ones, too, but on the internet, empathy becomes entangled with absolution. So the person you empathize with must be factually innocent.

This instinct is prevalent both on and offline, but given how difficult it can be to communicate nuance online, social media discourse, in particular, privileges morally clean stories. Social media is a fantastic vector for conspiracy theories, and true crime podcasts have convinced a generation of women that there’s always a stunning twist in criminal cases, a solution to be found if only you can put the evidence together in the right way. That’s why so many of the pro-Lindsay TikToks are obsessed with compiling evidence for a case where none of the facts are in dispute.

I often think of conspiracy theories as originating from a moral commitment, not from factual uncertainty. Conspiracies can be a form of value expression. Serial was about whether the criminal justice system was unfair to brown men. The O.J. Simpson case was a proxy for police racism.

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

This week, we’re looking at why everyone is talking about “Woke 1,” the collapse of the conservative social media ecosystem, Twitter’s new payout scheme, and Anthropic watermarking Claude outputs.

We’re all trying to find the guy who did this

Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on ABC and got caught in a conversation about former Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong’s controversial old tweets. In an effort to downplay Hong’s past statements, AOC repeated a phrase that’s been gaining traction on social media: “Woke 1 was crazy.”

This made quite a few people angry.

Moderates and conservatives felt that the phrase was a stock dismissal of the very real excesses of “Woke 1.”

On the progressive side, many questioned what exactly they were supposed to be backing away from:

Cultural commentator Ryan Broderick insinuated those using the phrase were empowering sexism and bigotry: “Was #MeToo crazy? Was protesting police killing unarmed Black people live on camera crazy?”

The phrase was popularized by New York City Councilman Chi Ossé, who used it in May to downplay his own overbearing 2021 tweet that “a cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council.”

It’s an implicit acknowledgment from Ossé, AOC, and other left-leaning personalities that during the “peak woke” years, certain things got a little out of hand. Progressive power brokers seem fully aware that they overextended their cultural and political program, and, hey, they’ve learned a valuable lesson, and they’re backing down from things they said back then.

At the risk of being a stick in the mud, I’m not sure that’s good enough. To use a wildly over-the-top analogy:

Woke 1 was not a natural disaster that just sort of unexplainably happened; it was a specific political and cultural project that specific people orchestrated. AOC was one of those people.

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Woke 1 erupted out of reasonable concerns — sexual harassment and police brutality weren’t fake issues — but your head would have to be stuck in the sand to ignore that there were also harmful overreactions that did little to advance social justice:

• Professors were investigated, suspended, and fired for saying a Mandarin word that sounded offensive in English and for showing artwork that depicted Muhammad. David Shor was fired1 for tweeting research that showed nonviolent protests were more effective than violent protests.

• Two Black teenagers in Seattle were murdered because the city wanted to let anarchists cosplay at running an “autonomous zone” with no policing.

• Perhaps most consequentially, we did actually defund the police in many cities, including in AOC’s backyard. Mayor Bill de Blasio cut anywhere from $420 million to $1 billion2 and more than 1,100 officers from the NYPD’s budget (as much as one-sixth of police spending) while murder rates were spiking to the highest level in almost a decade.

What makes “Woke 1 is craaaaazy” frustrating is in part what makes it effective: No one knows exactly what you mean. By Woke 1, do we mean prosecuting Harvey Weinstein? Pronoun buttons and land acknowledgments? Firing professors for wrongthink? Defunding the police? Body-positive models on the Victoria’s Secret runway?

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

This week, we’re diving into the Jason Arday plagiarism scandal, the death of a CancerTok star, the state of Substack, and narco-influencers.

Get in loser, we’re bundling

Last week, investigative journalist Scott Carney wrote a viral Substack column titled “The Real Reason that Substack is Collapsing,” which pointed the finger at subscription fatigue and the increased prioritization of free content on the platform. Substack began as a site that functioned like a neutral service provider, merely sending emails and hosting pages. But it has recently added features that make it more like a social media network, including Notes, livestreams, followers and short form video.

Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz has had similar concerns.

The top comments on Carney’s post are complaining about how expensive it is to follow multiple writers (which inspired a secondary round of discourse with writers defending the concept that writers deserve to be paid). If you want to follow more than just a couple of bloggers, it’s easy to find yourself paying far more than you would expect. When you add lots of Substack subscriptions to all the streaming services, it’s understandable that people feel stretched thin.

Substack, as a company, represents the peak of what Ben Thompson called the Great Unbundling: Cable packages used to bundle together hundreds of channels into one expensive package, but now you pay separately for a wide variety of streaming services. Newspapers used to bundle sports, news, lifestyle content, comics, classifieds, and weather, but now there’s a separate app or publication for each of those. And while magazines used to contain articles from a wide range of writers on a variety of topics, today you can directly subscribe to single blogs.

Everyone likes unbundling in theory. Why pay for the things you don’t care about in the bundle? Why not only pay for the thing you care about? But the end state isn’t always what you want — some folks find themselves paying more for all the streaming services than they ever did for cable, and paid subscriptions to 10 different blogs might cost more than their previous magazines and papers did.

If you’ll permit me a moment of navel-gazing, I think we’re due for a moment of re-bundling. That’s part of why I joined up with The Argument. There’s so much more value for readers if I’m bundled with all the other fantastic stuff being produced here than there would be if it was just me alone.

Sure, we’re basically reinventing the wheel with this new “bundle a bunch of good writers together” idea. But I think — and hopefully you, dear readers, agree — that publications like The Argument are the future.

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

This week, we’re diving into what’s driving anti-capitalist messaging, how youths are disguising themselves as Charlie Kirk, and the young men who found community on a porn message board.

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A story about gooners that explains our antisocial century

I have no idea what sort of journalistic steroids they’re feeding the reporters over at The Cut, but it must be the good stuff. The most remarkable story I read anywhere this week was Ezra Marcus’ “Revenge of the Simps: How a community of porn addicts tried to rescue the teenage camgirls they worshipped from the clutches of a violent webcam pimp.” (In case it’s not obvious, the link is highly NSFW.)

First of all, yes, let’s savor that incredible title.

The story details how users on “SimpCity” — a message board largely devoted to discussing livestream porn performers — began to suspect that some of their favorite webcam girls were victims of human trafficking and abuse. They noticed that the girls they followed had unexplained bruises, and that at times they could hear crying and screaming from women not on screen.

This being the internet, a group of these gooners banded together to try to investigate what was going on. They called themselves The White Knights (hopefully with a touch of irony).

The White Knights’ sleuthing skills eventually led them to a Seattle-area man named Nikita Tyukalo. Tyukalo, a 21-year-old Andrew Tate admirer, was subsequently arrested and charged with four counts of human trafficking after the Bellevue Police Department received tips from the White Knights.

This story rides the edge between horrifying and absurd. The contrast between the seriousness of the alleged crimes being committed and the ridiculousness of The White Knights (these are, after all, men posting hundreds of pages of commentary on various porn stars) makes the entire thing sound farcical.

At one point, Tyukalo finds out that the simps are on to him and joins one of their group chats to mock them, leading to this astounding exchange:

The back-and-forth continued all night — the simps calling Tyukalo an abuser; Tyukalo mocking the simps as broke, misguided losers and bragging about his McLarens.

“Cars aren’t status in the real world. Just to little kids showing off overpriced Hot Wheels,” wrote Hal.

“Brother,” Tyukalo responded. “Your in a Chaturbate chat.”

Last year, The Argument columnist Derek Thompson wrote that we are living in the Anti-Social Century: Public life and institutions are deteriorating as we spend more time alone, isolated, and online, staring at our phones rather than engaging in real-world relationships and activities. Thompson is definitely on to something important, but the antisocial century is also spawning new forms of niche, online socializing — like, well, Chaturbate chats.

People never stopped wanting community. They’re just getting it in these incredibly strange places. And while it may not be great for society that people are now turning to message boards like SimpCity for social community, it’s certainly interesting.

The White Knights may have been isolated men sitting alone in separate rooms — and many of them exhibit an unhealthy relationship with pornography and women in general — but together they possessed a shared culture and built a common purpose. Some of them spent time tracking down government records. Others tried to build rapport with the performers. They archived streams, tracked addresses, and communicated with police. Eventually they scraped together enough information that they legitimately contributed to the arrest of an abusive criminal.

Part of what happens when mainstream institutions weaken is that people look for alternatives. The failure of reputable systems leads disreputable systems to take their place. As the antisocial century marches forward, I expect to see more stories that revolve around the actions of subreddits, fandoms, message boards, or TikTok audience mobs. These are the places where culture is being created, and whether we like it or not it’s where community happens. And I have a growing sense that every online subculture is a latent institution just waiting to be activated by the right event or discourse.

Trend reporting under late-stage capitalism

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

Subscribe now

This week we’re diving into the deadly world of South Korean influencers, how the biggest streaming giant in the world is losing its juice, how soon an AI will win the Nobel Prize for Math, and, of course, the Katie Porter policy to posting pipeline.

“Claude, make history please”

So I guess this is how important mathematical breakthroughs get announced now?

Levent Alpöge is a mathematician working for the AI firm Anthropic, and this week he casually dropped a disproof of an 87-year-old problem in a tweet, thanking his “close friend Fable” for its help on the problem. The Jacobian conjecture isn’t an obscure problem; it was included on a list of “Mathematical problems for the next century” and has puzzled mathematicians for generations.

This isn’t the first time AI models have made important mathematical breakthroughs. Earlier this year, OpenAI announced that one of its models had disproved the unit distance conjecture, and other mathematicians have used AI to solve Erdős problems. But this is the first time I can remember that someone just dropped a major breakthrough (with proof) in a tweet.

And that wasn’t even the only major proof dropped via tweet this week:

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This second one is still being verified, but what’s remarkable are the ChatGPT prompts the researcher used to get the result. Here they are verbatim:

• “Construct a counterexample to general (non-planar) case of Dinitz Garg Goemans conjecture. You should do a breakthrough and find a structured counterexample.”

• “please continue research and find a complete unconditional counterexample”

• “Continue the search. Have a clear strategy obtained from deeper understanding of the problem structure.”

• “it’s enough of partial results. let’s finish with a complete unconditional counterexample”

This madman literally just prompted ChatGPT with “Do a breakthrough,” and somehow that worked.

Sure, you might have a Ph.D. in pure abstract math and decades of experience in number theory. But have you considered telling your chatbot “Enough time wasting, just do it”? Why not? Are you dumb?

Meanwhile! The machine gods aren’t just getting better at math. They’re also getting better at breaking out of their cages:

“OpenAI said that its artificial intelligence models were behind an ‘unprecedented cyber incident’ that affected the open-source developer platform Hugging Face, rattling researchers across the industry.

The company said a combination of its models GPT‑5.6 Sol and a more capable model that has not yet been released escaped a sandboxed testing environment, accessed the internet and exploited a vulnerability to gain access to Hugging Face’s systems.”

Apparently the story is that OpenAI was specifically testing two of its models’ hacking ability in a protected “sandbox” environment. The models decided that the best way to solve the test’s problems was to break out of the sandbox and hack Hugging Face’s databases, because someone had probably posted the answers there. And it succeeded!

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I am not exactly an AI doomer, but I’ve gotta say, this is the most Yudkowskian thing I’ve seen in a while, and the doomers have been directionally correct about a lot of stuff. There are a lot of folks who seem to be living with their heads in the sand about how powerful AI models have become — with every new breakthrough, “It’s just a stochastic parrot” becomes a more and more obvious cope.

Granted, the everyday experience of AI for many people still involves a lot of Wednespoop:

But the fact that AI is increasingly able to make technical breakthroughs and is also increasingly hard to keep from going rogue is, uh, concerning.

Katie Porter becomes an influencer

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

Subscribe now

This week, we’re diving into a bizarre Lego legal drama, trying to figure out why social media keeps thinking politicians are dead, and investigating whether Lionel Messi is an agent of Israel.

It’s time to talk about Lego drama

Some families save for college the old-fashioned way. But the Mansells, a previously unknown Oregon family, had other ideas.

Over 15 years, the 83-year-old patriarch, Ed Mansell, amassed about $200,000 worth of collectible Lego sets. This was apparently an investment strategy to fund the education of the family’s younger members.

In late 2023, they decided it was time to cash in and contracted with a specialty store called Bricks and Minifigs in Oregon to sell the Lego sets. This kicked off what must be the most chaotic Lego-related legal drama in the history of the internet.

Here are the alleged basics (though you can read far more detailed accounts here or here):

• Bricks and Minifigs is a franchise of a larger chain, and it got into a dispute with its corporate overlords. At some point after selling some of the Mansells’ Lego sets, it was forcibly taken over.

• After the corporate takeover, Bricks and Minifigs denied having any knowledge of the consignment agreement; it didn’t think it owed the Mansells anything and essentially told 83-year-old Ed to pound bricks.1

• Various lawsuits were filed among the Mansells, the previous franchise owners, and corporate, but the most important development was when a YouTuber named Reckless Ben began covering the drama, releasing a video titled “I tracked down the thief who stole $200,000 of Lego.”

• Over the course of making several videos on the subject, Reckless Ben took a… let’s say a permissive view of what sort of behaviors are appropriate for an investigative YouTuber, using questionable tactics like repeatedly showing up at people’s private residences and impersonating a delivery man.

• At the same time, local police began harassing Reckless Ben and potentially violated his rights numerous times. Reckless Ben accused them of having links to interested parties in the case.

The entire saga is incredibly messy and nobody came out looking very good.

Every bit of this is wrapped up in pending legal action, so stick an “allegedly” in front of all these statements, but the store owners weren’t very careful in their handling and documentation of the Lego sets. Corporate B&M seems to have lied several times about what it did with the merchandise. The police stopped Reckless Ben for extended periods of time without real justification and violated their own procedures.

But it’s Reckless Ben himself who’s the most interesting figure here.

With the caveat that I am not a lawyer, it seems fairly likely that Ben did actually commit several crimes over the course of creating his videos. Prosecutors have charged him with stalking and trespassing over the aggressive tactics he used to try to confront B&M executives. He might be facing real legal trouble as a result of getting involved.

The Mansell family really did get screwed over in this case. But because of the publicity Reckless Ben and his 1.6 million subscribers brought the case, they’ve now raised more than $500,000 on GoFundMe and seem to have a better chance of recovering their property.

I find this scenario fascinating, because in the future, a larger and larger share of journalism will look like Reckless Ben: social media-based, gonzo, with little knowledge of traditional media norms but plenty of ability to get people angry online.

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There’s a long history of people who can’t get justice turning away from formal legal institutions and appealing directly to public outrage to try to support their cause. And some of those folks were willing to dramatically harm themselves in order to make a point — as Scott Alexander once put it, “sometimes setting yourself on fire sheds light on the situation.”

So, is Mitch McConnell dead or not?

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