This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss data dumps, high stakes, and lizard brain screen time. JOSEPH: Flight Manifests Reveal Dozens of Previously Unknown People on Three Deportation Flights to El Salvador is the…

Hello 404 Media readers! We’re excited to announce that we’re having our first ever party in Los Angeles. We have partnered with the amazing DIY hackerspace RIP.SPACE in the Arts District. We’ll start the night with a live podcast about the surveillance technologies powering ICE, with a specific focus on tools that are being used…

Conservative content mill PragerU is partnering with the White House to make AI-generated videos of founding fathers and Revolutionary War-era randos. PragerU is a nonprofit organization with a mission “to promote American values through the creative use of digital media, technology and edu-tainment,” according to its website. It’s been criticized for advancing climate denial and…

The CEO seemingly having an affair with the head of HR at his company at the Coldplay concert is a viral video for the ages, but it is also, unfortunately, emblematic of our current private surveillance and social media hellscape. The video, which is now viral on every platform that we can possibly think of,…

ICE officers are able to point their smartphone’s camera at a person and near instantaneously run their face against a bank of 200 million images, then pull up their name, date of birth, nationality, unique identifiers such as their “alien” number, and whether an immigration judge has determined they should be deported from the country,…

The flight manifests for three legally contested deportation flights from Texas to El Salvador contain dozens of additional, unaccounted for passengers than a previously published Department of Homeland Security (DHS) list of people deported from the United States on those flights, 404 Media has learned. The additional people on the flight manifest have not been…

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. A major mystery about a long-lost legend that was all the rage in Medieval England but survives in only one known fragment has been solved, according to a study published on…

Steam, the dominant digital storefront for PC games operated by Valve, updated its guidelines to forbid “certain kinds of adult content” and blamed restrictions from payment processors and financial institutions. The update was initially spotted by Steam.DB, a platform that tracks and publishes data about Steam, and reported by the Japanese gaming site Gamespark. The…

We start this week with a series of articles from Emanuel about a crackdown in the AI industry. After the break, Sam tells us about the ‘Save Our Signs’ campaign which hopes to preserve the history of national parks. In the subscribers-only section, Jason rants about how AI will not save the media industry.  Listen…