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  • Inside Two Years of Turmoil at Big Tech’s Anti-Terrorism Group

    Inside Two Years of Turmoil at Big Tech’s Anti-Terrorism Group

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    The four tech giants have presided over the consortium since they announced it in 2016, when Western governments were berating them for allowing Islamic State to post gruesome videos of journalists and humanitarians being beheaded. Now with a staff of eight, GIFCT—which the board organized as a US nonprofit in 2019 after the Christchurch massacre—is one of the groups through which tech competitors are meant to work together to address discrete online harms, including child abuse and the illicit trade of intimate images.

    The efforts have helped bring down some unwelcome content, and pointing to the work can help companies stave off onerous regulations. But the politics involved in managing the consortia generally stay secret.

    Just eight of GIFCT’s 25 member companies answered WIRED’s requests for comment. The respondents, which included Meta, Microsoft, and YouTube, all say they are proud to be part of what they view as a valuable group. The consortium’s executive director, Naureen Chowdhury Fink, didn’t dispute WIRED’s reporting. She says TikTok remains in the process to attain membership.

    GIFCT has relied on voluntary contributions from its members to fund the roughly $4 million it spends annually, which covers salaries, research, and travel. From 2020 through 2022, Microsoft, Google, and Meta each donated a sum of at least $4 million and Twitter $600,000, according to the available public filings. Some other companies contributed tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but most paid nothing.

    By last year, at least two board members were enraged at companies they perceived as freeloaders, and fears spread among the nonprofit’s staff over whether their jobs were in jeopardy. It didn’t help that as Musk turned Twitter into X about a year ago, he kept slashing costs, including suspending the company’s optional checks to GIFCT, according to two people with direct knowledge.

    To diversify funding, the board has signed off on soliciting foundations and even exploring government grants for non-core projects. “We’d really have to carefully consider if it makes sense,” Chowdhury Fink says. “But sometimes working with multiple stakeholders is helpful.”

    Rights activists the group privately consulted questioned whether this would count as subsidies for tech giants, which could siphon resources from potentially more potent anti-extremism projects. But records show staff were considering seeking a grant of more than tens of thousands of dollars from the pro-Israel philanthropy Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust. Chowdhury Fink says GIFCT didn’t end up applying.

    This year, Meta, YouTube, Microsoft, and X amended GIFCT’s bylaws to require minimum annual contributions from every member starting in 2025, though Chowdhury Fink says exemptions are possible.

    Paying members will be able to vote for two board seats, she says. Eligibility for the board is contingent on making a more sizable donation. X had signaled it wouldn’t pay up and would therefore forfeit its seat, two sources say—a development that ended up happening this month. It had been scheduled to hold tiebreaking power among the four-company board in 2025. (Under the bylaws, Meta, YouTube, and Microsoft could have ejected Twitter from the board as soon as Musk acquired the company. But they chose not to exercise the power.)

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  • Chat Podcasts Rule the Market—and Always Will

    Chat Podcasts Rule the Market—and Always Will

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    Nearly every survey of the podcast industry in 2024 agrees on one point: Chat podcasts are king. As video rises in popularity (33 percent of US podcast listeners prefer to consume this way), ad spending increases (estimated to top $4 billion worldwide), and listenership steadily grows (8 percent year-over-year), it is the chat format—in its combative, enlightening, and sometimes quite unserious splendor—that continually draws people in.

    The ecosystem is profuse and unpredictable. There are the mainstays that have become fixtures of culture: The Joe Rogan Experience, Armchair Expert, and The Read. Newer fare like I’ve Had It and ShxtsnGigs (more on that one later) have also found tremendous followings. Other chat-casts, like Club Shay Shay, seem to court controversy with every release. “Katt Williams, please close the portal,” @nuffsaidny recently joked on X, alluding to the comedian’s guest appearance from January when he prophetically proclaimed of 2024: “All lies will be exposed.”

    “That appointment—that relationship—is everything,” Eric Eddings, vice president of audio at Kevin Hart’s media company Hartbeat, says of the bond chat-casts are able to establish with listeners.

    In 2014, along with Brittany Luse, Eddings launched For Colored Nerds, a weekly gabfest about pop culture, race, and current events (full disclosure: I appeared on an episode in 2017). After Nerds, Eddings went to Gimlet Media, where he co-anchored The Nod (also with Luse) and produced for the shows Undone and Habitat, before moving to SiriusXM. Today, Eddings steers podcast development for Hartbeat. What was true of the medium when he started out, he tells me, is still true today. In a recent video call, we discussed the state of the industry and its sometimes complicated evolutions.

    JASON PARHAM: Why have chat-casts gotten so popular?

    ERIC EDDINGS: There are a few reasons. Just to be straight up, a lot of the companies wanted to figure out ways to invest less in programming. Narrative podcasts are very expensive to make. They require a large upfront investment, and then you try to figure out how to make them as successful as possible if they resonate with audiences. And a lot of companies have had difficulty bringing those types of projects to market given the struggles of the entertainment media industry.

    So it’s a money issue?

    Podcasts with chat as a focus are a little bit easier to test out, put in the market, and to create each week. You’ve seen a lot of a turn towards that. Those are the macro influences. But that also short changes a little bit of the conversation.

    How so?

    Even though podcasting has been out for a while, you’ve also seen a lot more groups of people come to podcasts in new ways. There’s more familiarity with the medium. You’ve seen comedians, you’ve seen influencers. There was a trend early in the pandemic where folks were like, “Ah, we’ve got to start a podcast.” Whereas now I think people are having ideas or finding people they want to collaborate with and see podcasting as the place to explore that. It’s a really flexible medium. Collaboration allows for experimentation. And that type of experimentation is so much easier in a chat context because the conversation is the point.

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  • Russia-Backed Media Outlets Are Under Fire in the US—but Still Trusted Worldwide

    Russia-Backed Media Outlets Are Under Fire in the US—but Still Trusted Worldwide

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    In Latin America alone, RT’s channels run 24/7, and reported 18 million viewers in 2018. African Stream, which was also named by the State Department as part of Russian state media’s influence architecture and later removed by YouTube and Meta, garnered 460,000 followers on YouTube in the two years it was up and running. And Woolley notes that in these markets, there is likely less competition for viewership than there is in the saturated US media landscape.

    “[Russian media] made headway in limited media ecosystems, where its attempts to control public opinion are arguably much more effective,” he says. Russian media particularly hones in on anti-colonial, anti-Western narratives that can feel particularly salient in markets that have been deeply impacted by Western imperialism. The US also has state-funded media that operates in foreign countries, like Voice of America, though according to the organization’s website, the 1994 U.S. International Broadcasting Act “prohibits interference by any US government official in the objective, independent reporting of news.”

    Rubi Bledsoe, a research associate at Center for Strategic and International Studies, says that even with Russian state media removed from some social platforms, its messages are still likely to spread in more covert ways, through influencers and smaller publications with which it has cultivated relationships.

    “Not only was Russian media good at hiding that they were a Russian government entity, on the side they would seed some of their stories to local newspapers and local media throughout the region,” she says, noting that the large South American broadcasting corporation TeleSur would sometimes partner with RT. (Other times, Russia will back local outlets like Cameroon’s Afrique Média). “All of these secondary and tertiary news outlets are a lot smaller, but can talk to parts of the local population,” she says.

    Russian media has also helped cultivate local influencers who often align with its messaging. Bledsoe points to Inna Afinogenova, a Russian Spanish-language broadcaster who previously worked for RT but now has her own independent YouTube channel where she has more than 480,000 followers. (Afinogenova left RT after saying she disagreed with the war in Ukraine).

    And Bledsoe says that the ban from the US might actually be a boon for Russian media in the parts of the world where it’s actively trying to cultivate its image as a trusted media brand. “The narratives that were shared through RT and other Russian media and in Iranian media as well, it’s a kind of anti-imperialist dig at the West, and the US,” she says. “Saying the US is the driving force behind this international system and they’re plotting, and they’re out to get you, to impose on other countries’ sovereignty.”

    Though Meta was a key avenue for the spread of Russian state media content, it still has a home on other platforms. RT does not appear to have a verified TikTok account, but accounts that exclusively post RT content, like @russian_news_ and @russiatodayfrance have tens of thousands of followers on the app. African Stream’s TikTok is still live with nearly 1 million followers. TikTok spokesperson Jamie Favazza referred WIRED to the company’s policies on election-related mis- and disinformation.

    A post on X on from RT’s account on September 18, the day after the ban linked to its accounts on platforms like right-wing video sharing platform Rumble, X, and Russian YouTube alternative VK. (RT has 3.2 million followers on X and 125,000 on Rumble). “Meta can ban us all it wants,” the post read. “But you can always find us here.” X did not respond to a request for comment.



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  • Your Dumb Memes Revived One of Butt Rock’s Biggest Bands

    Your Dumb Memes Revived One of Butt Rock’s Biggest Bands

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    Creed is having a moment. Actually, if we’re being precise, it’s having innumerable moments, over and over again, all across the internet.

    On Instagram, the band has been repurposed as a comedic device for dunking on President Joe Biden; on TikTok, shitposters imagined what it would be like to explain the butt rock legends to an alien race; and on X, Creed is an easy punchline for commenting on political theater. All the while, those memes are collectively accumulating millions of likes, views, and shares.

    It’s safe to say that if Charli XCX hadn’t already made 2024 a “brat summer,” then this—as far as memes are concerned—would be Scott Stapp season. And Stapp, for his part, seems to be fully aware of it. “I’ve seen so many [memes],” the Creed frontman says. “Some are hilarious and I find myself just laughing, and some are really heartwarming in terms of how much time and energy the fan has put into creating the video.”

    The wildest part of all isn’t that Creed is being memed to death—it’s that the band is seemingly being memed back to life. In 2024, Creed quietly clawed its way back from internet punchline to real, honest-to-god, record-selling rock band. By June, the band found itself back in the charts—the top 40 no less. Last month, the band’s Greatest Hits was climbing in sales.

    As a result of its unexpected resurgence, Creed is even back touring, playing sold-out shows with fellow postgrunge staples like 3 Doors Down. On top of that, they’re selling tickets for arena gigs for upwards of $100. For the super Creed-core, there’s the band’s second-annual Miami-to-Nassau “Creed cruise” in 2025, which lists top-tier tickets for an eye-watering $4,300. Those tickets, by the way, are sold out.

    Sure, old music finds new audiences all the time, often with a bump from the internet—but Creed isn’t other bands. Creed is a band that hasn’t released a new studio album in 15 years and has spent most of that decade and a half as the butt of internet jokes. By industry standards, Creed was, at least until recently, six feet under.

    “Back in 2020, Creed hadn’t toured since 2012, so we were kind of intrigued, I think would be the word, to see the interest and to see the songs having new life and resurgence and renaissance,” says Creed’s agent, Ken Fermaglich, who has been with the band for decades.

    All of that begs a couple obvious questions: Why here and why now?

    According to YouTuber Pat Finnerty, whose channel “What Makes This Song Stink” ritually roasts bands of Creed’s ilk, the equation for Creed’s comeback is a simple one: time + cringe = popularity.

    Creed, Finnerty says, are now past the 20-year mark after which most old bands can feel new again. “But then there’s the meme thing—you see all these memes of like ‘this band sucks,’ but now, to use the parlance of our time, ‘this band fucks,’” he adds. “They’re switching it from ‘this band sucks’ to ‘this band fucks’ and it’s actually funnier for them to get into it.”



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  • An Avalanche of Generative AI Videos Is Coming to YouTube Shorts

    An Avalanche of Generative AI Videos Is Coming to YouTube Shorts

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    Eli Collins, a vice president of product management at Google DeepMind, first demoed generative AI video tools for the company’s board of directors back in 2022. Despite the model’s slow speed, pricey cost to operate, and sometimes off-kilter outputs, he says it was an eye-opening moment for them to see fresh video clips generated from a random prompt.

    Now, just a few years later, Google has announced plans for a tool inside of the YouTube app that will allow anyone to generate AI video clips, using the company’s Veo model, and directly post them as part of YouTube Shorts. “Looking forward to 2025, we’re going to let users create stand-alone video clips and shorts,” says Sarah Ali, a senior director of product management at YouTube. “They’re going to be able to generate six-second videos from an open text prompt.” Ali says the update could help creators hunting for footage to fill out a video or trying to envision something fantastical. She is adamant that the Veo AI tool is not meant to replace creativity, but augment it.

    This isn’t the first time Google has introduced generative tools for YouTube, though this announcement will be the company’s most extensive AI video integration to date. Over the summer, Google launched an experimental tool, called Dream Screen, to generate AI backgrounds for videos. Ahead of next year’s full rollout of generated clips, Google will update that AI green-screen tool with the Veo model sometime in the next few months.

    The sprawling tech company has shown off multiple AI video models in recent years, like Imagen and Lumiere, but is attempting to coalesce around a more unified vision with the Veo model. “Veo will be our model, by the way, going forward,” says Collins. “You shouldn’t expect five more models from us.” Yes, Google will likely release another video model eventually, but he expects to focus on Veo in the near future.

    Google faces competition from multiple startups developing their own generative text-to-video tools. OpenAI’s Sora is the most well-known competitor, but the AI video model, announced earlier in 2024, is not yet publicly available and is reserved for a small number of testers. As for tools that are widely available, AI startup Runway has released multiple versions of its video software, including a recent tool for adapting original videos into alternate-reality versions of the clip.

    YouTube’s announcement comes as generative AI tools have grown even more contentious for creators, who sometimes view the current wave of AI as stealing from their work and attempting to undermine the creative process. Ali doesn’t see generative AI tools coming between creators and the authenticity of their relationship with viewers. “This really is about the audience and what they’re interested in—not necessarily about the tools,” she says. “But, if your audience is interested in how you made it, that will be open through the description.” Google plans to watermark every AI video generated for YouTube Shorts with SynthID, which embeds an imperceptible tag to help identify the video as synthetic, as well as include a “made with AI” disclaimer in the description.

    Hustle-culture influencers already try to game the algorithm by using multiple third-party tools to automate the creative process and make money with minimal effort. Will next year’s Veo integration lead to a new avalanche of low-quality, spammy YouTube Shorts dominating user feeds? “I think our experience with recommending the right content to the right viewer works in this AI world of scale, because we’ve been doing it at this huge scale,” says Ali. She also points out that YouTube’s standard guidelines still apply no matter what tool is used to craft the video.

    AI art oftentimes has a distinct aesthetic, which could be concerning for video creators who value individuality and want their content to feel unique. Collins hopes Google’s thumbprints aren’t all over the AI video outputs. “I don’t want people to look at this and say, ‘Oh, that’s the DeepMind model,’” he says. Getting the prompt to produce an AI output aligned with what the creator envisioned is a core goal, and eschewing overt aesthetics for Veo is critical to achieving a wide-ranging adaptability.

    “A big part of the journey is actually building something that’s useful to people, scalable, and deployable,” says Collins. “It’s not just a demo. It’s being used in a real product.” He believes putting generative AI tools right inside of the YouTube app will be transformational for creators, as well as DeepMind. “We’ve never really done a creator product,” he says. “And we certainly have never done it at this scale.”

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  • Lo-Fi Weather Channel Videos Are Soothing Climate Fears on YouTube

    Lo-Fi Weather Channel Videos Are Soothing Climate Fears on YouTube

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    The Vaporwave album Conditions at Hickory begins with static, as if you’re tuning in to a 1940s radio broadcast. First and second tracks “Foothills” and “Daily Commute” start out humdrum and benign enough. Then, the mood shifts. Sounds come like warnings, cautions of something sinister to come. Beeping sounds and tornado sirens start to interrupt the music. By the time you get to “Thunderheads” and “Squall,” you’re in the thick of it.

    Kana, aka Dreamweather, released the seven-track album on YouTube, where it soundtracks a frozen image: a bright-red severe weather warning for Hickory, North Carolina. It could be that Conditions is trying to warn you about an impending storm. It could be that the album, with its smooth, jazzy AM-radio tones, is trying to rock you to sleep in the midst of it.

    Kana is one of a number of artists who have taken transmissions from the weather reports of yesteryear and merged them with the lo-fi electronic music genre known as vaporwave. Emerging in the early 2010s, vaporwave has exploded on YouTube recently, soundtracking nostalgic video footage like family trips to Florida in the ’90s or Transformers cartoon clips. The effect is as unsettling as it is comforting—a visual reminder of a different, maybe better era that can’t be lived again.

    As the trend has evolved, many of the more popular vaporwave clips have been those that place ambient sounds over Weather Channel broadcasts from the ’80s and ’90s. Like Twisters, these sometimes eight-hour-long broadcasts evoke a time when TV and radio offered guidance in a storm—and a time before climate change made extreme weather events more frequent.

    Popular vaporwave artists play their music over weather forecasts from fearless stormchaser Jim Cantore. Others—sometimes practitioners of the subgenre known as weatherwave—soothe you with sound as longtime severe weather expert Steve Lyons waves his hands madly about an impending Indiana tornado.

    “As a child, I would often just sit and watch the Weather Channel for hours on end,” Kana says. “I vibed with the local forecasts, its music, and its programs a lot, so discovering that other people were interested in this extreme niche blew my mind.”

    Some of the most popular weatherwave clips use a VHS recording of a Weather Channel broadcast on a random cold ’90s night in the winter. One, a 41-minute video from YouTuber onceinalifetime, has nearly 900,000 views; another is an eight-hour megamood from chyllvester with nearly 650,000 views. Many comments below them speak in nostalgic terms: “I basically lived in hotels growing up (long story). The Weather Channel was the only real constant from place to place. It helped me greatly then. It’s still helping me today.”

    The Weather Channel was founded in Atlanta, Georgia, in May 1982. From the beginning it coupled its stalwart weather broadcasts with a steady stream of smooth jazz, a combo that came to define the 24/7/365 weather network. Whether you were tuning in for the tropical update segment or international weather, the sounds stayed constant and steady, even if the weather did not.

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  • Reddit’s ‘Celebrity Number Six’ Win Was Almost a Catastrophe—Thanks to AI

    Reddit’s ‘Celebrity Number Six’ Win Was Almost a Catastrophe—Thanks to AI

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    Take, for example, the other recently solved internet mystery: The source of the song that became known as “Everyone Knows That.” After nearly three years of online investigative work, a pair of Redditors found the song—titled “Ulterior Motives”—after hearing a similar song in an adult movie clip on YouTube and watching literal hours of porn that had possibly been scored by the songwriters credited on that clip.

    During the hunt there had been speculation that the song was AI-generated or part of some stunt. If the detectives had gotten too distracted by that, or if someone had tried to use AI to “solve” the mystery by just making a similar track, those two never would have gotten to watch all that porn. They probably just would’ve gotten embroiled in scores of online fights.

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

    Celebrity Number Six and “Everyone Knows That” are mysteries that, however slightly, predate the current generative AI boom, and as such seem to have avoided at least some of the fallout. While both investigations definitely exhibited the kind of caution necessary when determining the authenticity of anything online, their narrative arcs show the ways in which the internet is now even more untrustworthy than it used to be. This is far more true in the case of C6 than “Everyone Knows That,” but it’s hard to imagine any new mystery that pops up in their wake having fewer disagreements about what is real and what came from AI.

    When the Times reached out to Sardá, she noted that she’d been trying to enjoy her new fame. (She’s on TikTok now.) She said she was happy that people had gone to such lengths to find her, but also concerned about “how far this could go” and how much it would change her life. There was one thing, though, that seemed to give her comfort: “I can always hide.”

    Loose Threads:

    Cat memes are infiltrating the US election. Bear with me, because pretty much all of these threads are going to be about cats. The first one involves a baseless conspiracy that began floating around this week on social media that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating cats (as well as ducks and geese). Ohio senator J.D. Vance referenced the conspiracy on X, and the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, posted several images of cats (and ducks) with captions like “Save them!” Texas senator Ted Cruz posted a meme-style image macro of a pair of embracing kittens with the text “Please vote for Trump so the Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.” It was accompanied by three cry-laughing emojis. Over on the Republican House Judiciary Committee’s X account, there was a seemingly AI-generated image of Trump holding a duck and kitten in what appears to be a lake.

    Cat memes hit the debate floor. The cat-eating conspiracy got an even bigger platform on Tuesday night when, during Trump’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, he said, “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” The audio quickly migrated to TikTok where it was placed next to images of people’s pets. Memes of Alf, the alien sitcom star who famously always wanted to eat the family feline, also took off.

    Taylor Swift (and her cat) endorse Kamala Harris. Lest you think the cat chat stopped there, it didn’t. Mere moments after the debate ended, Taylor Swift grabbed her phone (presumably) and typed out an Instagram post that both decried AI misinformation and endorsed Kamala Harris. Swift signed it “Childless Cat Lady.” In the photo, she’s holding a cat. As of this writing, the post has more than 10 million likes. Musk seemingly responded to Swift’s endorsement by writing on X, “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.” He followed that up a few hours later with “Toxoplasma gondii is a danger to our democracy,” essentially saying that a parasite that is carried by cats—and can make animals like mice not afraid of cats—could reshape the government in America.

    Kendrick Lamar dropped a new song on Instagram. After causing a major ruckus online by announcing that he’d perform the Super Bowl halftime show next year, Kendrick Lamar dropped a new track. Listen to it here.



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  • Here’s What Right-Wing Influencers Actually Talked About in Tenet Media Videos Allegedly Financed by Russia

    Here’s What Right-Wing Influencers Actually Talked About in Tenet Media Videos Allegedly Financed by Russia

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    In hundreds of videos since taken down by YouTube, right-wing influencers working for Tenet Media—a company the US Department of Justice alleges was financed and guided by a state-backed Russian news network—showed interest in a highly specific set of topics, according to a WIRED analysis.

    Using closed captioning of the videos we downloaded before the videos were removed, we’ve compiled lists of terms frequently mentioned in them, along with a searchable database:

    The content of these videos was described by prosecutors as “consistent” with Russia’s aims to sow political discord in the US. Among the areas covered: free speech, illegal immigrants, diversity in video games, supposed racism toward white people, and Elon Musk.

    While an indictment unsealed earlier this week does not name Tenet, WIRED and other outlets were able to identify it because prosecutors gave its motto as that of a business identified as “U.S. Company-1.” Prosecutors allege that two employees of the state-backed Russian network RT, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, who are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, paid Tenet and its parent company $9.7 million to produce and distribute videos supporting Russian aims. The vast majority of that money allegedly went to Tenet’s network of popular influencers, which included Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern.

    The influencers—who have not responded to requests for comment (Johnson, Pool, Rubin, and fellow talents Tayler Hansen and Matt Christiansen issued statements denying awareness of the alleged Russian influence scheme and portraying themselves as its victims)—are not accused by the government of wrongdoing. Prosecutors say that right-wing personality Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, Canadian nationals who founded Tenet—the two, who have not been charged with any crime, go unnamed in the indictment, but are tied to the business through corporate records—were aware they were working with Russians and failed to register “as an agent of a foreign principal, as required by law.” The indictment alleges that the pair, who were not indicted, did not inform the influencers or other Tenet employees about the source of their funding.

    Nonetheless, Afanasyeva, using fake personae, “edited, posted, and directed the posting by [Tenet] of hundreds of videos,” the indictment says. The indictment does not identify specific videos as allegedly influenced by the RT employees, but prosecutors say they were intimately involved in Tenet’s editorial process: “While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos are often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying US domestic divisions in order to weaken US opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine.”

    To determine what specifically the Russian government is alleged to have funded, WIRED downloaded the closed captioning transcripts from 405 longform videos posted on Tenet’s YouTube channel—you can access the file here—and used natural language processing to identify common themes. These 405 video transcripts represent nearly every longform video available on the channel. We were not able to analyze approximately 1600 YouTube shorts before the channel was removed from the site. We analyzed the data looking for the most frequently occurring two-, three-, and four-word phrases in each video, excluding words like “um” that don’t carry much meaning. (“Um” appears in the dataset 2,340 times.)

    This analysis does not show that in these videos the influencers were particularly fixated on the Ukraine war—the word “Ukraine” appears in the transcripts 67 times, about as often as “misinformation,” “Christianity,” and “Clinton.” It does show the influencers stressing highly divisive culture war topics in the videos, which carried titles like “Trans Widows Are A Thing And It’s Getting OUT OF HAND” and “Race Is Biological But Gender Isn’t???” The word “trans” appears 152 times, and “transgender” 98.

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  • How Israel Is Exploiting Google Ads to Discredit a UN Aid Agency

    How Israel Is Exploiting Google Ads to Discredit a UN Aid Agency

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    What Kronenfeld says truly worries her is that Americans are being exposed to Israel’s propaganda while trying to understand UNRWA’s role in the ongoing crisis. Beside the search ads, Israel has aired video ads in the US through Google that say “UNRWA is inseparable from Hamas” and that it “keeps employing terrorists.” Public misunderstanding could further jeopardize support from the US government, which until the war had been the largest donor to UNRWA.

    “There is an incredibly powerful campaign to dismantle UNRWA,” Kronenfeld says. “I want the public to know what’s happening and the insidious nature of it, especially at a time when civilian lives are under attack in Gaza.”

    Google spokesperson Jacel Booth tells WIRED that governments can run ads that adhere to the company’s policies and that users and employees are welcome to report alleged violations. “We enforce them consistently and without bias,” Booth says of the rules. “If we find ads that violate those policies, we take swift action.”

    The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs in New York acknowledged but did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story over the past four months.

    UNRWA Takes Action

    Using nearly $1.5 billion annually in donor support, UNRWA employs about 30,000 people to educate, feed, and provide care for millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza and neighboring areas. UNRWA supporters say Israel doesn’t like that the agency preserves Palestinians’ refugee status, which arguably gives them a better shot at reclaiming occupied land someday.

    Israel for decades has accused UNRWA of standing in the way of lasting peace by protecting Hamas and enabling the US-designated terrorist organization to indoctrinate generation after generation with hateful ideology.

    The agency has acted in response to Israel’s accusations. UNRWA this year has fired 13 employees, including nine whom an oversight body determined may have been involved in last year’s Hamas attack based on evidence provided by Israel. The US has paused funding to UNRWA since January, while other countries that cut off dollars to the agency this year, including Germany and Switzerland, pledged to reopen the spigot.

    UNRWA’s commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, has said that his organization plays a neutral and vital role in the region and that it engages in screening and training to keep Hamas sympathizers out of its ranks.

    Kronenfeld, who is Jewish, says Lazzarini’s transparency and good-faith efforts have left her feeling comfortable about her role. She joined UNRWA USA in 2020 because her grandfather had escaped Nazi Germany and instilled in her that no one should be brutalized ever again based on where they were born. Among her initiatives was ramping up online advertising, with the aim of bringing in at least $3.90 for every $1 spent.

    Driven by the war, the return on investment has been $25 on every $1 spent this year, but the competition from Israel on Google has meant UNRWA USA is winning fewer advertising auctions and likely getting its message shown to fewer users.

    After Kronenfeld and colleagues complained to Google in January about Israeli ads featuring headlines such as “UNRWA for Human Rights,” they say a company representative told them, without providing a reason, that the ads in question had been removed. Google’s Booth says there was no policy violation.

    By May, per screenshots seen by WIRED, Israel was back to promoting the same content but with tweaked verbiage—“UNRWA Neutrality Compromised,” “Israel Unveils UNRWA Issues,” and “Israel Advocates for Safer, Transparent Humanitarian Practices”—that more clearly previewed what users would get if they clicked.

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  • The Best Field Recorders for Portable Audio

    The Best Field Recorders for Portable Audio

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    Yes, you currently have a device in your pocket capable of capturing audio—your phone. But, the quality of the audio from those tiny microphones leaves a lot to be desired. You’ll easily overwhelm the mics if you try to capture an impromptu jam session with your band. You’ll never get solid stereo imaging of your environment. And echoey lecture halls will reduce any speaker to a muddy mess.

    There are plenty of reasons to pick up a field recorder. They can be used to capture lectures at school, record audio for a video shoot, serve as a mobile podcast studio, collect samples to use in your music, and even create IR (impulse responses) for building custom audio effects.

    There is also the act of field recording itself—going out and capturing the ambient sounds of the world around you. If you’ve never dabbled before, I can’t recommend it enough. It can teach you to listen more closely to the world around you and make you more observant.

    If you work with audio in any way, even as a hobby, a good handheld field recorder is a must-have. Below are our current favorites. Be sure to also check out our guides to the Best Recording Software, the Best Wired Headphones, and the Best USB Microphones. If you’re interested in recording at home as well as outdoors, be sure to check out our guide to leveling up your home recording studio.

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