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  • Most US TikTok Creators Don’t Think a Ban Will Happen

    Most US TikTok Creators Don’t Think a Ban Will Happen

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    A majority of US TikTok creators don’t believe the platform will be banned within a year, and most haven’t seen brands they work for shift their marketing budgets away from the app, according to a new survey of people who earn money from posting content on TikTok shared exclusively with WIRED.

    The findings suggest that TikTok’s influencer economy largely isn’t experiencing existential dread after Congress passed a law last month that put the future of the app’s US operations in jeopardy. The bill demands that TikTok separate from its Chinese parent company within a year or face a nationwide ban; TikTok is challenging the constitutionality of the measure in court.

    Fohr, an influencer marketing platform that connects creators with clients for sponsored content, polled US-based TikTok creators on its platform with at least 10,000 followers. It got 200 responses, half from people who rely on influencing as their sole source of income. Out of the respondents, 62 percent said they didn’t think TikTok would be banned by 2025, while the remaining 38 percent said they believed it would be.

    Some creators may be skeptical that a ban will really happen after they watched the Trump White House and Congress try and fail several times to crack down on TikTok over the past few years. The platform has so far only continued to grow more popular in the US, sparking alarm in Silicon Valley over the threat its competition poses. There’s also the possibility TikTok will be sold to a group of American investors—several interested bidders have emerged—though TikTok has made it clear that such an acquisition would be practically impossible.

    Some creators are simply struggling to believe the bizarre situation their favorite app has landed in. “I’m in denial, because I think the TikTok ban is ridiculous,” one anonymous creator told Fohr through its survey. “I think our government has bigger things to worry about than banning a platform where people are allowed to express their views and opinions.”

    Most creators said they haven’t lost business from brands that pay for marketing content on TikTok since the new law was signed: 83 percent of the influencers who responded said their sponsorships have been unaffected. But the rest had seen signs of brands pulling back from the app or at least diversifying their marketing. Some 7 percent said a brand had paused or canceled a campaign they worked on, and 8 percent said a brand had asked to shift a deliverable to another social media platform or at least inquired about such a change.

    Companies may be reluctant to walk away from TikTok because it’s become one of the most popular avenues for consumers to discover new products, particularly from small businesses. Over the past year, TikTok has tried to leverage that influence into a new revenue stream through an ecommerce feature called TikTok Shop. Over 11 percent of US households have made a purchase through TikTok Shop since September 2023, according to credit card transaction data published in April by the research firm Earnest Analytics.

    It doesn’t look as though the passage of the divestiture bill last month prompted people to spend significantly less time on TikTok or avoid the app altogether. The popularity of the platform in US app stores has remained largely consistent over the past month, according to the market-intelligence firm Sensor Tower. And Fohr found that 60 percent of creators said their video views have remained the same, 28 percent said they had seen them fall, and 10 percent reported their engagement increased. These shifts could simply be caused by routine changes TikTok makes to its algorithm, variability of the content that influencers are sharing, or the whims of users consuming videos.

    TikTok’s rise has spurred US tech giants to mimic many of its features, with Google’s YouTube pushing its Shorts format and Meta’s Instagram launching Reels. Fohr’s survey suggests that if creators start leaving TikTok because of uncertainty about the app’s future or a ban, Instagram stands to benefit the most. A clear majority of creators—67 percent—said they saw it as the best alternative for growing their audience, while 22 percent cited YouTube. Only a small fraction pointed to Snapchat, Pinterest, and other platforms.

    Several of the creators, however, said that it’s harder to gain traction on Instagram compared to TikTok, and one noted that Meta’s platform doesn’t offer anything equivalent to TikTok’s Creativity Program, which pays users based on how many views and other engagement metrics their videos receive.

    Across social platforms, the most common way for creators to get paid is by signing deals with brands to make posts featuring their products. But Fohr’s survey also showed the growth of a novel monetization scheme called the TikTok Creative Challenge, which the app launched last year. It allows companies to post requests for creators to make marketing videos that brands can then use on their own channels. Influencers are compensated based on how well their video performs in terms of views and engagement.

    In Fohr’s survey, that type of content, known as UGC, represented the largest TikTok revenue stream for 18 percent of creators. Whatever happens to TikTok in the US, history suggests that it may not be long before its American competitors begin rolling out their own user-generated content initiatives.

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  • Meta Faces Fresh Probe Over ‘Addictive’ Effect on Kids

    Meta Faces Fresh Probe Over ‘Addictive’ Effect on Kids

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    The European Union has opened an investigation into Facebook and Instagram for the platforms’ potentially addictive effects on children, echoing two similar probes opened into TikTok earlier this year.

    Meta-owned platforms will be investigated for their addictive and “rabbit hole” effects, and whether young users were being fed too much content about depression or unrealistic body images. Investigators will also probe whether underage children—below 13 years old—are being effectively blocked from using the services.

    “We are not convinced that Meta has done enough to comply with the DSA [Digital Services Act] obligations—to mitigate the risks of negative effects to the physical and mental health of young Europeans on its platforms Facebook and Instagram,” Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal markets commissioner who is leading the investigations, said on X.

    “We want young people to have safe, age-appropriate experiences online,” said Meta spokesperson Kirstin MacLeod, adding the company has developed more than 50 tools and policies designed to protect young people. “This is a challenge the whole industry is facing, and we look forward to sharing details of our work with the European Commission.”

    The investigations into Meta and TikTok under the bloc’s new Digital Services Act rules were separate, a Commission spokesperson said, adding that similarities between the cases simply reflected resemblances in how the platforms work. “There are some competitive effects in the markets where some platforms copy other platforms’ features,” they said.

    The effects of social media on children has sparked intense debate in recent months, following the publication of the book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. The NYU social psychologist argues that the prevalence of social media use among young people is rewiring children’s brains and making them more anxious. In October, a coalition of US states sued Meta, alleging the company’s products are harmful to children’s mental health.

    The Digital Services Act is an expansive rulebook that aims to protect Europeans’ human rights online and took effect for the largest platforms in August last year. So far, the EU has investigations open into six platforms for different reasons: AliExpress, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, TikTok Lite, and X. Under the Digital Services Act, platforms can be fined up to 6 percent of their global revenue.

    After the EU launched an investigation into a points-for-views reward system on TikTok Lite—a version of the app which uses less data—the company said it would suspend the incentive following concerns about its impact on children.

    “Our children are not guinea pigs for social media,” Breton said at the time.



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  • Instagram Is My Eden of Delusion. I Never Want to Leave

    Instagram Is My Eden of Delusion. I Never Want to Leave

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    There was a time when the experience of being online didn’t have the feeling of live theater. Today, everyone’s got a part to play—and the main character is Delulu.

    Once again, delusion has gone radioactive. Just look around. Climate denial is trending on YouTube. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee doesn’t think he should be on trial, and even with a court-mandated gag order he refuses to shut up about it on social media. On college campuses across the US, peaceful anti-war student protests are given a nasty PR spin: They’re vilified as antisemitic despite many of the protesters being Jewish.

    On TikTok, delulu has reached peak zeitgeist (the hashtag has over 2 billion views on the app, and more than 130 million posts). Still, I prefer my delusion spoon-fed via Instagram, the metropolis of millennial escape. Scrolling through the app, it’s easy to trick myself into believing things are better than they actually are—that maybe the state of the world, already somewhere far beyond the realm of the absurd, isn’t all that bad. It’s a lie, of course, but lies have their use.

    I went public on Instagram in March because I wanted to promote a documentary I produced. It’s my first TV project, and I’m insanely proud of what we made. Selfishly, I also wanted as many people as possible to see it. But promoting the documentary required that I give up the thrill of anonymity that my finsta provided for a more public-facing persona. I knew I didn’t want to start over entirely, or dissolve the relationships I’d quietly made, and this seemed like a happy medium, even though I had no indication of what fruit it would bear.

    Like many people of my generation, I grew up on the internet. Twenty years in, I’m still here. Only I long for a new kind of connection. As age has a tendency to readjust one’s perspective, my needs changed. I no longer instinctively crave to broadcast my every last thought, or engage with the masses every morning right as I wake up. It’s why my finsta was a perfect compromise. I couldn’t fully unplug, try as I might, but I could find comfort in a smaller audience.

    The world is more connected than it’s ever been. But in opening up, we have lost intimacy. We perform it, but how true is it to our lived experiences? Twitter was especially predictive in that regard: more voices did not equate to more understanding, even as the platform revolutionized how, and how quickly, we connect. The alchemy of unforced connection was what the adolescence of social media embodied best. Keeping my Instagram private let me hang onto a little bit of that feeling.

    I knew it couldn’t last forever. I make a living in a profession that requires endless self-promotion. What the influencer economy made real was the business of personhood. It completely revised the mechanics of engagement. Even if you’re not a “content creator” you are still mostly beholden to their rules of play. Maybe I’m overly sentimental about what we’ve lost, but there used to be a real romance to social media that was discarded for connection built around attention-seeking and brand deals. Social media has upended our relationship with real life: Rather than reality happening to us, we happen to it.



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  • 1994 Was the Last Good Year—and It’s Still Going

    1994 Was the Last Good Year—and It’s Still Going

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    In 1994, everything was cool. Music, movies, TV—the cultural output felt alive. People were also very cool, or they were achieving cool by trying not to be. Anyway, 30 years ago I was not cool and didn’t have much to do on Friday nights. That’s why, on April 8, 1994, I was home, watching as Kurt Loder took over MTV to inform me, and everyone, that Kurt Cobain was gone.

    Reminiscing on the passing of Nirvana’s frontman might be a maudlin way to go about it, but it’s a wild reminder of just how many culture-shifting events took place in 1994. Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction. Nine Inch Nails released The Downward Spiral a month before Cobain committed suicide. Tori Amos dropped Under the Pink a few weeks before that. Above the Rim hit theaters that spring, and lived in car speakers through the summer since Warren G and Nate Dogg’s “Regulate” was on the soundtrack. Aaliyah released “Back & Forth”; Brandy wanted to be down; TLC chased “Waterfalls.” My So-Called Life premiered its one perfect, ill-fated season. Jim Carrey had three films in theaters, of varying quality: Dumb and Dumber, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and The Mask. Brad Pitt had three—two that matter: Legends of the Fall and Interview With the Vampire. Kevin Smith’s debut, Clerks, premiered at Sundance, got picked up by Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax, and was a cult hit before the year was out.

    These things were all anyone could talk about, culturally. That’s all there was to talk about.

    Except they weren’t. Above are just a few of the cultural moments that made nationwide, and worldwide, attention in 1994. It’s the stuff that hit the suburbs. Some of the year’s best art was slow-burn. As C. Brandon Ogbunu and Lupe Fiasco pointed out in their essay last week commemorating the 30th anniversary of Nas’ Illmatic, “the early ’90s had no hip-hop message boards. There was no social media. The legend of Illmatic was built from street corner to street corner, person to person, party to party.” Even still, Nas was on Yo! MTV Raps.

    Every so often some pundit emerges to scratch a chin and pontificate about whether or not monoculture is dead. The New York Times wonders if these are “post-water-cooler TV” times; Vox asks “Can monoculture survive the algorithm?” My colleague Kate Knibbs has already written about how lamenting the demise of the monoculture is all a bit ludicrous, and while it’s arguable there’s just more culture now—more TikToks, more Instagram videos reeling out of Coachella, more streaming shows—there are still common denominators: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, hating Zack Snyder movies. Monoculture, I’d argue, never died; rather, it’s a zombie haunting everything. The ghost in the machine is an unspoken desire to share something collectively, even if only to tear it apart together. (See again: Taylor Swift.)

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.



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  • Ads for Explicit ‘AI Girlfriends’ Are Swarming Facebook and Instagram

    Ads for Explicit ‘AI Girlfriends’ Are Swarming Facebook and Instagram

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    However, 3,000 ads for “AI girlfriends” and 1,100 containing “NSFW” were live on April 23, according to Meta’s ad library.

    WIRED’s initial review found that Hush, an AI girlfriend app downloaded more than 100,000 times from Google’s Play store, had published 1,700 ads across Meta platforms, several of which promise “NSFW” chats and “secret photos” from a range of lifelike female characters, anime women, and cartoon animals.

    One shows an AI woman locked into medieval prison stocks by the neck and wrists, pledging, “Help me, I will do anything for you.” Another ad, targeted using Meta’s technology at men aged 18 to 65, features an anime character and the text “Want to see more of NSFW pics?”

    Several of the 980 Meta ads WIRED found for “personalized AI companion” app Rosytalk promise around-the-clock chats with very-young-looking AI-generated women. They used tags including “#barelylegal,” “#goodgirls,” and “teens.” Rosytalk also ran 990 ads under at least nine brand names on Meta platforms, including Rosygirl, Rosy Role Play Chat, and AI Chat GPT.

    At least 13 other apps for AI “girlfriends” have promoted similar services in Meta ads, including “nudifying” features that allow a user to “undress” their AI girlfriend and download the images. A handful of the girlfriend ads had already been removed for violating Meta’s advertising standards. “Undressing” apps have also been marketed on mainstream social platforms, according to social media research firm Graphika, and on LinkedIn, the Daily Mail recently reported.

    Some users of so-called AI companions say they can help combat loneliness, with others reporting them feeling like a real partner. Not all of the ads found by WIRED promote only titillation, with some also suggesting that an explicit AI chatbot could provide emotional support. “Talk to anyone! You’re not alone!” reads one of Hush’s ads on Meta platforms.

    Carolina Are, an innovation fellow researching social media censorship at the Center for Digital Citizens at Northumbria University in the UK, says human sex workers feed the same needs and desires as racy AI girlfriend apps and also cater to lonely and disabled people. But Meta makes it extremely difficult for them to advertise on its platforms, she says.

    “When people are trying to work through and profit off their own body, they are forbidden,” says Are, who has helped sex workers reactivate lost and unfairly suspended accounts on Meta platforms. “While AI companies mostly powered by bros that exploit images already out there are able to do that.”

    Are says the sexually suggestive AI girlfriends remind her of the unsophisticated and generic early days of internet porn. “Sex workers engage with their customers, subscribers, and followers in a way that is more personalized,” she says. “This is a lot of work and emotional labor beyond the sharing of nude images.”

    Limited information is available about how the AI apps are built or the underlying text or image-generation algorithms trained. One used the name Sora, apparently to suggest a connection to OpenAI’s video generator of that name, which has not been publicly released.

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  • Senate Vote Leaves TikTok’s Creator Economy Staring Into the Abyss

    Senate Vote Leaves TikTok’s Creator Economy Staring Into the Abyss

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    The US Senate passed a bill late Tuesday that allows the government to ban TikTok within a year if it doesn’t make meaningful progress toward separating from its China-based owner, ByteDance. President Joe Biden said in a statement after the vote that he would sign it in law on Wednesday.

    The version of TikTok impacted by the legislation is not the same platform that then-president President Donald Trump first tried to abolish back in 2020, citing national security concerns about its links to China. TikTok, its user base, and the ecosystem of creators making a living from the platform have grown, transformed, and matured since then. And the potential consequences of the app disappearing have become more significant.

    TikTok’s US user base is much older than it was a few years ago, there are more alternative places to post short-form videos, and many long-time influencers say they feel jaded after spending so long trying to fight the app’s critics in Washington. But the number of Americans who are financially dependent on TikTok has also grown, including a new class of creators with smaller followings who make a living from e-commerce-focused videos.

    Speaking hours before the Senate passed the bill targeting TikTok late on Tuesday, creators and others who work in the influencer industry told WIRED its approval would threaten the income of at least tens of thousands of people in the US and leave them feeling outraged.

    “This is my livelihood, this is how I am going to feed my child, this is how many people are feeding their children,” a Pennsylvania-based TikTok creator named Aubrey who posts under the handle Makeupfresh said. Aubrey, who asked to use only her first name for privacy reasons, said she and other creators she knows are planning to vote against lawmakers who backed the TikTok ban in the general election this November.

    James Nord, founder of the influencer marketing platform Fohr, said that TikTok disappearing would be an “extinction level event” for many creators. “Most of them do not have sustainable followings on other platforms,” he said. “And they’re not going to be able to migrate their following to Instagram.”

    Tuesday’s vote was teed up by House lawmakers over the weekend, when they overwhelmingly approved a $95 billion foreign aid package that also includes the measures addressing TikTok. The bill provides funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and was fast-tracked after Iran’s retaliatory attack against Israel last week. It passed the Senate on Tuesday with bipartisan support, 79 to 18, but is likely to face significant legal challenges—including from TikTok, according to reporting from The Information.

    TikTok did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement to Reuters on Saturday, the company accused elected officials of “using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance to once again jam through a ban bill that would trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans.”

    Prasuna Cheruku, founder of the influencer management agency Diversifi Talent, said said that some of the veteran creators she works with didn’t think the ban would actually pass, but that the political drama and TikTok’s evolution have caused some of them to become disillusioned with the app.

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  • Celebrity Deepfake Porn Cases Will Be Investigated by Meta Oversight Board

    Celebrity Deepfake Porn Cases Will Be Investigated by Meta Oversight Board

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    As AI tools become increasingly sophisticated and accessible, so too has one of its worst applications: non-consensual deepfake pornography. While much of this content is hosted on dedicated sites, more and more it’s finding its way onto social platforms. Today, the Meta Oversight Board announced that it was taking on cases that could force the company to reckon with how it deals with deepfake porn.

    The board, which is an independent body that can issue both binding decisions and recommendations to Meta, will focus on two deepfake porn cases, both regarding celebrities who had their images altered to create explicit content. In one case about an unnamed American celebrity, deepfake porn depicting the celebrity was removed from Facebook after it had already been flagged elsewhere on the platform. The post was also added to Meta’s Media Matching Service Bank, an automated system that finds and removes images that have already been flagged as violating Meta’s policies, to keep it off the platform.

    In the other case, a deepfake image of an unnamed Indian celebrity remained up on Instagram, even after users reported it for violating Meta’s policies on pornography. The deepfake of the Indian celebrity was removed once the board took up the case, according to the announcement.

    In both cases, the images were removed for violating Meta’s policies on bullying and harassment, and did not fall under Meta’s policies on porn. Meta, however, prohibits “content that depicts, threatens or promotes sexual violence, sexual assault or sexual exploitation” and does not allow porn or sexually explicit ads on its platforms. In a blog post released in tandem with the announcement of the cases, Meta said it removed the posts for violating the “derogatory sexualized photoshops or drawings” portion of its bullying and harassment policy, and that it also “determined that it violated [Meta’s] adult nudity and sexual activity policy.”

    The board hopes to use these cases to examine Meta’s policies and systems to detect and remove nonconsensual deepfake pornography, according to Julie Owono, an Oversight Board member. “I can tentatively already say that the main problem is probably detection,” she says. “Detection is not as perfect or at least is not as efficient as we would wish.”

    Meta has also long faced criticism for its approach to moderating content outside the US and Western Europe. For this case, the board already voiced concerns that the American celebrity and Indian celebrity received different treatment in response to their deepfakes appearing on the platform.

    “We know that Meta is quicker and more effective at moderating content in some markets and languages than others. By taking one case from the United States and one from India, we want to see if Meta is protecting all women globally in a fair way,” says Oversight Board cochair Helle Thorning-Schmidt. “It’s critical that this matter is addressed, and the board looks forward to exploring whether Meta’s policies and enforcement practices are effective at addressing this problem.”

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  • Pop Music Is Mad. Social Media Loves It

    Pop Music Is Mad. Social Media Loves It

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    Not everyone is buying it. Despite the study’s findings, “I don’t believe hip-hop lyrics are more angry,” says Dame Aubrey, head of A&R for CMG Records and Management, a music label that represents rappers Moneybagg Yo, BlocBoy JB, and GloRilla. If anything, Aubrey says, what changes we do hear are a product of how music has expanded. It’s simple, Aubrey says: more people, more perspectives. The medium is more accessible now because of the technology available. “There’s just a lot more artists with opportunities to be heard because it basically became a trend to make music.”

    One major adjustment in all of this is the mechanics of how a song gets popular, and what its popularity generates.

    In the age of social media, that can often translate into more of the same kinds of sounds, although that is not always the case. So when Lamar throws punches at Drake—dubbing him one of the “goofies with a check” and following that with “Fore all your dogs gettin’ buried / That’s a K with all these nines, he gon’ see the pet cemetery”—the verses gain traction on X because they feed into the theatrics of online socializing, which is defined by joy and camaraderie between users as much as heated confrontation.

    Rap has always gotten, well, a bad rap. Ego, anger, swagger—those emotions are part of the genre’s raucous identity. Since hip-hop’s founding 50 years ago, artists have wielded those sentiments to illustrate their realities. Rap is sport. It’s theater. It is the very kind of music that encourages the style of intense engagement that is increasingly common among fans online.

    Are less positive song lyrics actually on the rise, or is the popularity of a certain kind of song simply a reflection of what we think the algorithm wants to hear?

    Streaming transformed the music industry in every way possible. Crafting hit songs is somehow easier but just as difficult. The winds of virality can still be unpredictable. Although it is not an exact science, what is evident is how streaming playlists help deliver a song to large audiences in ways analog media couldn’t.

    “While there are certainly trends in organic popularity, one unique thing about playlists is the significance and importance of context,” says JJ Italiano, head of global music curation and discovery at Spotify. “Even the most popular songs can vary wildly in how well they perform, depending on the playlist that they’re in and the other songs around them in that playlist.”

    Dasha’s recent viral hit “Austin” had around 10,000 streams when Spotify editors began programming it for their playlists, Italiano says, and it did best when paired with similar on-theme pop songs that straddle country and pop, sequenced among summery, guitar-driven tunes (like Noah Kahan), narrative-rich country songs (like Zach Bryan), or similar heartbreak tracks from a different genre (like Mitski). “Eventually the song became so popular on Spotify that it made its way into our most popular playlist, Today’s Top Hits,” he says. But over time, Italiano notes, sequencing does become less crucial to a song’s lifespan as listeners develop a “deep familiarity” with the song.

    Artists, then, find themselves making music in line with what’s trending, trying to achieve the same level of reach that songs like “Austin” or “Like That” did. In years past, everything from war to heartbreak influenced the music of the moment. That’s still true, but now TikTok, X, and other platforms drive the conversation as much as anything else. “Social media definitely plays a part in song writing just as the community, movies, and television once played a part,” Aubrey says of rap. Depending on the temperature of exchange among users, which swings from lukewarm to indignant depending on the artist, it prompts certain songs to dominate the conversation. Taylor Swift’s most popular online tracks are often the ones detailing scorn.

    Even an artist like Milwaukee rapper Khal!l, who told WIRED in August that he wanted to “create an atmosphere where we can mosh-pit but then also cry and hold hands and shit,” finds himself beholden to the algorithm. He got famous thanks to TikTok and the best way to sustain his presence on the app is to feed it the content that resonates: “We gotta ride this horse ’til the hooves fall off.”

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  • AI-Generated Spoofs of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Are Flooding Instagram and TikTok

    AI-Generated Spoofs of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Are Flooding Instagram and TikTok

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    The blending of the real and unreal could explain why some followers of faux Drag Race get so passionate about what they’re seeing on their feeds. Michael says he “lives for the overreactions of fans” who believe his creations are real people. He says people often ask him for a queen’s actual Instagram handle.

    “I also get the occasional hate comment from someone saying I’m taking away jobs from real drag queens,” he says. As an illustrator himself, Michael says he’s aware “that AI is coming for my job,” but doesn’t believe his Instagram passion project is taking money away from humans. “If someone isn’t going to the club and tipping a real drag queen because they saw AI Drag Race, that’s a problem with the person and not my Drag Race,” he says.

    Fantasy Drag Race’s Más says she has gotten into scrapes with other creators in group chats, too, after questioning how seriously they were taking the whole process. “I’m a queer, nonbinary Mexican in upstate New York,” she explains. “Someone saying that my drag competition isn’t their cup of tea or that some look I made is ugly isn’t going to affect me at all.” Still, she says, it’s understandable that people get emotionally attached to her work.

    Unfortunately, that kind of attachment also comes with a sense of looming dread, since the whole idea of AI-generated Drag Race is a play on a big franchise. While some creators argue that what they’re doing is parody, posting what Grimmelmann says are “almost completely useless” (or perhaps pointless) copyright disclaimers absolving themselves on their main Instagram page, others acknowledge that they’re likely building their followings on shaky ground.

    A number of accounts, including one that featured exclusively Disney characters, have already been pulled off Instagram, giving creators who use only animated or existing characters more than a bit of pause. “I’m very scared of getting taken down,” says Haus of Dreg’s Boopy. “But if I did, then so be it. I mean, what could I even do?”

    “I make sure that I don’t do anything to sexualize the characters, and I don’t do anything to diminish their actual tone,” Horror Drag Race’s Shayne adds. “I’m just merging two mediums—horror and Drag Race—and blending it up into something that both groups of fans can enjoy.”

    It’s not just Drag Race fans that are enjoying the AI experience, either. Mhi’ya Iman Le’Paige, a queen from season 16 of Drag Race, just wore a look down the runway that first originated in a run of AI-generated images. One of her season 16 sisters, Plane Jane, follows at least one of the AI creators.

    The Official AI Drag Race’s Michael says he has had multiple queens reach out asking to use their fictional creations as inspiration, with an unnamed queen from an international franchise asking Michael to design their entire package of runway looks based just on his Carla Montecarlo images. “I feel like it’s only a matter of time,” Michael says, “before I’m watching TV and spot something that I rendered a year ago.”



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  • Antiabortion Disinformation Ads Ran Rampant on Facebook and Instagram

    Antiabortion Disinformation Ads Ran Rampant on Facebook and Instagram

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    Ads containing abortion-related misinformation are allowed to run on Facebook and Instagram in countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, while legitimate health care providers struggle to get theirs approved, new research has found.

    The report, released today from the Center for Countering Digital Hate and MSI Reproductive Choices, an international reproductive health care provider, collected instances from across Vietnam, Nepal, Ghana, Mexico, Kenya, and Nigeria. Between 2019 and 2024 in Ghana and Mexico alone, researchers found 187 antiabortion ads on Meta’s platforms that were viewed up to 8.8 million times.

    Many of these ads were placed by foreign antiabortion groups. Americans United for Life, a US-based nonprofit whose website claims that abortion pills are “unsafe and unjust,” and Tree of Life Ministries, an evangelical church now headquartered in Israel, were both linked to the ads. Researchers also found that ads placed by groups not “originating in the country where the ad was served were viewed up to 4.2 million times.”

    In the report, researchers found that some of the ads linked out to websites like Americans United for Life, whose website describes abortion as a “business” that is “unsafe” for women. The abortion pill is widely considered safe and is less likely to cause death than both penicillin and Viagra. Other ads, like one run by the Mexican group Context.co, linked to a Substack dedicated to the topic that implied there is a secret global strategy to manipulate the Mexican populace and impose abortion on the country.

    One ad identified in Mexico alleged that abortion services were “financed from abroad … to eliminate the Mexican population.” Another warned that women could suffer “severe complications” from using the abortion pill.

    Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels told WIRED that the company allows “posts and ads promoting health care services, as well as discussion and debate around them,” but that content about reproductive health “must follow our rules,” including only allowing reproductive health advertisements to target people above the age of 18.

    “This is money that Meta is taking to spread lies, conspiracy theories, and disinformation,” says Imran Khan, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

    In these countries, where Meta often has partnerships with local telecom companies that allow users to access its platforms for free, Facebook is a key source of information. Some of these ads also ran on Instagram. “Anybody with a cell phone can access information. People use it to find services. When we ask clients, how did you hear about us? a lot of them will cite Facebook, because they live on Facebook. It’s where they know to search for information,” says Whitney Chinogwenya, marketing manager at MSI Reproductive Choices. So when disinformation runs rampant on the platform, the impact can be widespread.

    “Good health information saves lives. By actively aiding the spread of disinformation and suppressing good information,” Khan says, “[Meta is] literally putting lives at risk in those countries and showing that they treat foreign lives as substantially less important to them than American lives.”

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