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  • Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Dies at 56

    Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Dies at 56

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    The unassuming house on Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park, California, had been empty for only a couple of years when I visited in 2008, but the ghosts were still there. This was where Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google a decade previous. Here was the garage once packed with newly delivered servers and routers; there were the carpeted rooms at the back of the house where Page, Brin, and their first employee Craig Silverstein churned out code; out the window was the backyard with the hot tub.

    In Google’s infancy the house belonged to a young couple, Dennis Troper and Susan Wojcicki, who had recently purchased it for $615,000. To help with the mortgage, the Google duo paid them $1,700 a month to rent unused space. “They entered through the garage,” Wojcicki later told me. “They weren’t allowed to enter the front door.”

    Wojcicki found herself hanging out with the young founders and became fascinated by the rise of the search startup. She soon joined it herself, about the time the 15-person company moved out of her house and into an actual office, over a bicycle shop in Palo Alto. In 2002, she took over the Google advertising arm, eventually heading a multibillion dollar business that transformed the entire industry. In 2014, she became CEO of the company’s video product YouTube, running one of the world’s biggest media properties and navigating it through competitions with other social networks and crises of content moderation. Though she was one of the most powerful women in all of business, she played it low-key, even to her departure in February 2023, “to start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about,” as she wrote in the company blog.

    That same low-key ethic persisted in her difficult final years, where she privately battled non-small cell lung cancer. On Friday, Troper said that Susan Wojcicki died at 56.

    In a company known for head-scratching quirks, absurd ambitions, and splashy profiles, Wojcicki somehow ducked the biggest spotlights while taking on gargantuan responsibilities. Even before Eric Schmidt became Google’s CEO and became known as the adult in the room, Wojcicki was a calm, analytical presence whose wise counsel and steady work ethic qualified her for the company’s most critical roles, even as Google, later named Alphabet, grew to one of the world’s most powerful companies. In the earliest days, her educational pedigree–including a degree at Harvard and an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA—as well as her Intel experience, made her a relative veteran compared to the peach-fuzzers in charge. She was also literally a member of the family, after cofounder Brin married her sister Ann (they divorced in 2015).

    Well before Schmidt’s arrival, Wojcicki was active in steering Google towards profitability. “There was a transition where we realized that we could make a lot more money from the advertising, as opposed to syndicating search on the web,” she told me in 2008, in an interview for my history of the company.

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  • Twitch’s New DJ Program Has Flaws, But It’s the Best There Is

    Twitch’s New DJ Program Has Flaws, But It’s the Best There Is

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    Other restrictions such as the lack of VODs (videos-on-demand/replays) or other promotional tools like clips are factors DJs need to consider. Many performers already don’t use the VOD service, to avoid potential strikes, but for some it’s another way to engage fans who can’t watch live. Twitch has confirmed that VODs are not covered by the existing licensing agreement, but the company claims it’s exploring other promotional tools. DJs who also host nonmusic streams are simply being told to run dual accounts with only one enrolled in the program.

    Despite these drawbacks, every DJ whom WIRED spoke with agreed that operating in a copyright gray area wasn’t good for anyone. Most also understood that Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, has obligations to rights holders. Clancy suggested as much in a blog post announcing the program. “It’s crucial that DJs understand the status quo on Twitch was not sustainable,” he wrote, “and any viable future for the community required we find a solution.”

    Solutions are what Twitch seems to be needing most these days. The company, you may have heard, is not making money. User growth seems to have stagnated, while revenue growth has slowed, according to documents recently reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. In January, it announced it was laying off 500 employees (approximately a third of total staff), a move that followed a purge of more than 400 people in March last year.

    According to Twitch, there are currently “tens of thousands” of DJs on the platform. This means, at best, DJs currently account for approximately 1 percent of active streamers—so attracting more to the platform is unlikely to be a panacea. But it is a growth area, fueled in large part by a wave of performers who joined during the pandemic, that the company clearly deems worth investing in.

    In terms of competition, Twitch doesn’t face much. Harris says he tried Mixcloud, but felt there was a lot of “bot” activity in the streams and the revenue split wasn’t favorable. TikTok and most other mainstream social media platforms suffer at least some combination of takedowns and demonetization for playing unlicensed songs. Kick, a direct Twitch rival, offers a far more favorable earnings split—95 percent going to the performer—but if Twitch can’t make money with its bigger cut, it raises questions over whether that ratio is sustainable.

    DJs, for their part, appear to welcome Twitch’s commitment to them, with most concerns directly proportional to their investment in the platform so far.

    “I haven’t got a lot to lose, to be honest, so I’m just seeing where it takes me,” Harris says.

    “Twitch is my main source of income,” says Colaway, a DJ who streams about 35 hours per week. “The supply of DJs on Twitch has grown extremely, so the likelihood of new DJs streaming full-time is very unlikely.” She added that she believed the program was still a step in the right direction and that she would be signing up.

    As for East, he says: “I plan on hopping onboard as soon as it goes live, just so that I’m in the game, and getting the feel of what’s happening.”

    “If I’m the guinea pig at that point, I’m the guinea pig,” East adds. “And I’ll take my lumps and bumps and hopefully keep on moving. The journey for me on Twitch has been amazing. It’s really the community that cements that.”

    Ultimately, Twitch has the best shot at making this work, if DJs can tolerate the inconveniences that going legitimate requires. As the embattled music industry pats down the pockets of the people who promote its artists, Twitch seems as well positioned as any platform to offer a resolution.

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  • How to Clear Your Watch History on Netflix, Apple TV+, YouTube, and More

    How to Clear Your Watch History on Netflix, Apple TV+, YouTube, and More

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    Almost every movie and TV show streaming app you use keeps track of what you’re watching. This is for convenience’s sake; by logging your activity, the app can let you pick up where you left off at another time or on another device, you can be notified of new content you might like, and the app can serve up more relevant recommendations.

    You just wouldn’t get the same quality of experience if this tracking wasn’t happening. But there are also a couple of good reasons why you might want to dive into your viewing history and edit it, or wipe it completely.

    First, there’s the privacy issue. If you share your account with someone else at home, or with the entire family, maybe you don’t want them knowing you skipped ahead in a show, or that you enjoy terrible action flicks quite as much as you do.

    And second, there’s the recommendations served up by your apps. Everything you watch contributes to these recommendations, so removing movies and shows you didn’t like—or that your kids binge watched—will keep those recommendations relevant.

    Netflix

    On the Netflix website, hover the cursor over your profile picture (top right), then choose Account and Manage Profiles, and click on your profile. Select Viewing Activity to see everything you’ve watched lately.

    Each item in the list has a Hide button on the right. When you tap Hide, that title will no longer affect your recommendations and won’t show up on Netflix as having been watched. If you hide one episode of a show, you’ll be asked if you want to hide the entire series. There’s also a Hide All button at the foot of the list.

    You can’t access this list in full from inside the Netflix mobile apps, though you can hide titles you’ve watched recently. Tap My Netflix, then scroll down to the recently watched section. Tap the three dots on any thumbnail to find the Hide From Watch History option.

    Apple TV+

    In the TV app on macOS, open the TV menu and choose Settings: Under the Advanced tab, there’s a Clear Play History button. This resets the list of everything you’ve ever watched, and you can’t select individual titles.

    What you can do with individual titles is remove them from the Up Next bar on the main screen. Click the three dots next to any thumbnail and you can choose Remove From Up Next and Remove From Recently Watched to hide the evidence that you’ve seen it. (The show will still be marked as watched if you search for it.)

    The same options are shown if you tap the three dots next to a show or movie thumbnail in the TV app for iOS and iPadOS. To clear your viewing history on a mobile device, tap your profile picture (top right), then Clear Play History.

    YouTube

    When you’re signed into YouTube on the web, you can click History in the left-hand navigation panel to see what you’ve been watching recently, and click the X next to any video to remove it from your watch history.

    From the same screen, you’ve got options to Clear all watch history and Pause watch history. You can also select Manage all history, which takes you to a full list of everything you’ve ever seen on YouTube. From here you can search for videos, browse by date, and delete some or all of the videos from your history.

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  • ISIS Created Fake CNN and Al Jazeera Broadcasts

    ISIS Created Fake CNN and Al Jazeera Broadcasts

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    The Islamic State has created fake videos mimicking the look and feel of mainstream news outlets CNN and Al Jazeera, according to a new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue shared exclusively with WIRED.

    Launched in early March, the campaign was orchestrated by War and Media, a pro–Islamic State media outlet that typically creates long-form videos pushing the group’s ideology and history. The Islamic State, or ISIS, is a UN-designated terror group that perpetrated a genocide of the Yezidi population in Iraq and conducted multiple terrorist attacks, including the 2015 attacks in Paris that left 131 people dead; it has also promoted videos of its members beheading journalists and soldiers.

    Central to the campaign were two YouTube channels. One was falsely branded as CNN and pushed English-language videos, and the other was branded with the Al Jazeera logo and pushed Arabic-language videos. The videos featured the logos of the real news outlets, and in the case of CNN, the videos also featured a real-time ticker along the bottom of the screen which changed to match the content being shown. The campaign also deployed a network of social media accounts branded to look like they were affiliated with news outlets, in what appears to be an effort to push ideology to new audiences.

    In total, the campaign created eight original videos, four in each language, that discussed topics like the Islamic State’s expansion in Africa and the war in Syria.

    One video also focused on the deadly attack on the Crocus City Hall in Moscow in March. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, and the video attempted to combat a disinformation narrative promoted by the Kremlin that Ukraine, not the Islamic State, was accountable.

    “It was essentially fake news to debunk fake news,” Moustafa Ayad, the executive director for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, tells WIRED.

    Ayad also believes the campaign was a test run to ascertain how successful it would be in circumventing censorship efforts on mainstream Western platforms.

    “It’s the first time we’ve really seen a concerted effort by an Islamic State outlet to create this fake ecosystem of news that isn’t branded as something that’s affiliated with the Islamic State,” says Ayad. “It was very much a test of the system and now they know where there are weaknesses in their strategy.”

    The videos remained on YouTube for a month and a half before they were removed by the company, but during that time, the videos were also downloaded and republished by Islamic State supporters on their own accounts. Some of those videos are still circulating online today, because they have not been added to the hash-sharing database that platforms use to coordinate the takedown of terrorist content.

    “What they did was essentially build this entire little fake ecosystem of social media channels that are doppelgängers of news outlets,” Ayad says.

    Each of the videos on YouTube racked up thousands of views, and while none of them went viral, it was “enough for the group to get some traction in circles outside where they would normally get [traction] and saw real people commenting under the videos,” says Ayad.

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  • Roaring Kitty Is Playing With Fire

    Roaring Kitty Is Playing With Fire

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    Gill did not face charges then, but this time could be different. The securities regulator for the state of Massachusetts has already confirmed it is looking into Gill’s recent conduct, without providing specifics. It would appearthat Gill is aware of the risk of provoking an SEC investigation, too. On May 16, he posted a clip of a CNBC interview in which Jay Clayton, former SEC chair, expressed the view that his conduct should not be tolerated. The SEC declined to comment on the existence of an investigation.

    At the start of Gill’s YouTube livestream, a long disclaimer scrolled up the screen like the Star Wars opening crawl. “You should not treat any opinion expressed on this Youtube [sic] channel as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy,” it read. As Gill bantered with his YouTube viewers—all 600,000 of them—the price of GameStop stock briefly rose. “Shit, look at this. It’s going up,” he said. “Do I have to be careful what I say here? I don’t really know.”

    It might seem self-evident that Gill’s posts, cryptic as they may be, have caused a rise in the price of GameStop stock from which he stands to profit, as a stockholder. But absent a full history of his trading, it is difficult to assess whether he has actually violated securities laws, says Richard Schulman, partner at law firm Adler & Stachenfeld. “It’s never entirely clear until the facts are fully formed,” he says.

    But Gill has given regulators plenty to dig into. “Was his purpose to influence the movement of stock price? Did he, in fact, affect demand for the stock? Will he profit from these activities? These are the kinds of issues a regulator will want to investigate,” says Schulman. The answers could determine whether Gill faces a formal investigation.

    Specifically, Gill could find himself in trouble when his call options expire on June 21, leaving him with a decision: should he sell his options at a profit, if the stock price remains high, or take delivery of the GameStop shares they represent? Having made his position public, says Bragança, Gill is required under a little-understood facet of securities law to provide his audience with advance warning of any sales, even if doing so would jeopardize profits. “The problem is when you change your position,” says Bragança. “Before you sell, you’d better tell the marketplace. Most people on social media don’t think that way. The initial [social] posts are not the thing that is going to get him in trouble—it’s the stuff we can’t see.”

    Gill may question how his conduct differs from any other pundit that offers stock tips, or chief executive who talks up their company. And he could have a point. There is an extent to which Gill is flirting with gray areas in the securities rulebook, devised long before someone imagined an influencer in a position to swing the market with a single tweet.

    But the SEC has typically contended that the rules are sufficiently malleable to allow for mutations of age-old violations to be dealt with. “Market manipulation is not necessarily a rigid concept,” says Schulman. “The SEC is not unused to trying to apply concepts to new situations in the world that has developed.”

    The SEC has not made public its thinking, but former chair Clayton, in the interview with CNBC, implied the agency will be eager to prevent further volatility in the price of GameStop, which risks imposing large scale losses on investors. One way to do that would be to bring cases against an individual that it considers has wielded social influence in an illegal way, with the aim of deterring others from doing the same. “It’s like Aesop’s fables,” says Bragança. “We’re telling a story. You should take a moral from it.”

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  • Why the EU’s Vice President Isn’t Worried About Moon-Landing Conspiracies on YouTube

    Why the EU’s Vice President Isn’t Worried About Moon-Landing Conspiracies on YouTube

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    When European Union vice president Věra Jourová met with YouTube CEO Neal Mohan in California last week, they fell to talking about the long-running conspiracy theory that the moon landings were fake. YouTube has faced calls from some users and advocacy groups to remove videos that question the historic missions. Like other videos denying accepted science, they have been booted from recommendations and have a Wikipedia link added to direct viewers to debunking context.

    But as Mohan spoke about those measures, Jourová made something clear: Fighting lunar lunatics or flat-earthers shouldn’t be a priority. “If the people want to believe it, let them do,” she said. As the official charged with protecting Europe’s democratic values, she thinks it’s more important to make sure YouTube and other big platforms don’t spare a euro that could be invested in fact-checking or product changes to curb false or misleading content that threatens the EU’s security.

    “We are focusing on the narratives which have the potential to mislead voters, which could create big harm to society,” Jourová tells WIRED in an interview. Unless conspiracy theories could lead to deaths, violence, or pogroms, she says, don’t expect the EU to be demanding action against them. Content like the recent fake news report announcing that Poland is mobilizing its troops in the middle of an election? That better not catch on as truth online.

    In Jourová’s view, her conversation with Mohan and similar discussions she held last week with the CEOs of TikTok, X, and Meta show how the EU is helping companies understand what it takes to counter disinformation, as is now required under the bloc’s tough new Digital Services Act. Its requirements include that starting this year the internet’s biggest platforms, including YouTube, have to take steps to combat disinformation or risk fines up to 6 percent of their global sales.

    Civil liberties activists have been concerned that the DSA ultimately could enable censorship by the bloc’s more authoritarian regimes. A strong showing by far-right candidates in the EU’s parliamentary elections taking place later this week also could lead to its uneven enforcement.

    YouTube spokesperson Nicole Bell says the company is aligned with Jourová on preventing egregious real-world harm and also removing content that misleads voters on how to vote or encourages interference in the democratic processes. “Our teams will continue to work around the clock,” Bell says of monitoring problematic videos about this week’s EU elections.

    Jourová, who expects her five year term to end later this year, in part because her Czech political party, ANO, is no longer in power at home in Czechia to renominate her, contends that the DSA is not meant to enable anything more than appropriate moderation of the most egregious content. She doesn’t expect Mohan or any other tech executive to go a centimeter beyond what the law prescribes. “Overusage, overshooting on the basis of the EU legislation would be a big failure and a big danger,” she says.

    On the other hand, she acknowledges that if the companies aren’t seen to be stepping up to mitigate disinformation, then some influential politicians have threatened to seek stiffer rules that could border on outright censorship. “I hate this idea,” she says. “We don’t want this to happen.”

    But with the DSA offering guidelines more than bright lines, how are platforms to know when to act? Jourova’s “democracy tour” in Silicon Valley, as she calls it, is part of facilitating a dialog on policy. And she expects social media researchers, experts, and the press to all contribute to figuring out the fuzzy borders between free expression and destructive disinformation. She jokes that she doesn’t want to be seen as the “European Minister of the Truth,” as tempting as that title may be. Leaving it to politicians alone to define what’s acceptable online “would pave the way to hell,” she says.

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  • Russians Love YouTube. That’s a Problem for the Kremlin

    Russians Love YouTube. That’s a Problem for the Kremlin

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    Milov stresses that YouTube isn’t just a one-way service: Because it allows users to comment and chat anonymously, it provides an extraordinary chance for regular Russians to express themselves without fear of censorship.

    “The amount of our feedback is enormous,” he says. “Just myself, alone, I literally get messages, every day, from at least hundreds of people from across the country. When something serious happens? Thousands.” Sometimes, Milov says, his first indication that something terrible has happened in Russia is seeing just how many unread messages he has in his YouTube inbox.

    Milov says this feedback reinforces the idea, supported even by Kremlin-approved pollsters, that opposition to the war in Ukraine is growing. But it also provides some important details and nuance. “So this is like, I would say, an enormous focus group, with which you can also communicate. You can ask them questions back.” He chuckles, thinking of the notorious Russian security and intelligence agency: “You know, the FSB would kill for this kind of information.”

    “Obviously, the question is, why didn’t Putin shut down YouTube?” Milov says. “It’s easier said than done.”

    In recent years, Moscow has deployed an array of strategies to cow and kill independent media and the open internet in Russia. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok have been blocked altogether. Independent media like Meduza, TV Rain, and The Insider have been declared “undesirable” or labeled “foreign agents.”

    Through it all, YouTube has survived.

    Milov says the Kremlin was too slow to move on YouTube. By the time Moscow was banning other popular Western platforms, the Google-owned video platform had become indispensable to everyday Russians. “They kind of let the genie out of the bottle,” Milov says.

    “YouTube is mommies showing cartoons to kids, teenagers are watching music videos, people are watching comedians, elderly folks watching old Soviet movies, which are widely available there, and so on,” he says. “And you shut it all down? So you have these empty evenings now, from this point on.”

    Unable to disrupt YouTube, the Kremlin tried desperately to compete with it.

    Moscow had high hopes for Rutube, a long-suffering YouTube clone which was relaunched in 2020 after a merger with the media arm of state-controlled energy giant Gazprom. If the site’s “top videos” section is to be believed, it hasn’t worked—some had racked up view counts in the mid-thousands.

    VK, Russia’s answer to Facebook, has fared slightly better with its video-sharing platform, and it is rife with pro-Kremlin broadcasters. But even its most popular channels have just a tiny fraction of the biggest Russian-language YouTube accounts.

    “It’s like a big room, but it’s empty,” Milov says of these Kremlin-backed alternatives.

    Having failed to compete with his online critics, Milov believes Putin opted for a more direct strategy. Just days before I arrived in Vilnius, thugs appeared outside the home of Leonid Volkov, former chair of the Anti-Corruption Foundation and Nalvany chief of staff. Armed with hammers, they savagely beat him. Lithuanian intelligence believe the men arrested were operating on orders from Russia. A week after the attack, Volkov was back on YouTube, his arm in a sling, “I am not going to stop—although I will gesticulate less in the coming weeks,” he said.

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  • Musi Won Over Millions. Is the Free Music Streaming App Too Good to Be True?

    Musi Won Over Millions. Is the Free Music Streaming App Too Good to Be True?

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    Musi has faced objections to its business practices before. In October 2019, the company filed suit against an online ad network, alleging that it had withheld payments owed for ads that ran within the Musi app. In November that year, the ad network filed a counter-complaint alleging that it stopped payments after discovering Musi’s business was fraudulent. “Musi was knowingly and illegally ripping music off from YouTube,” the counter-complaint said, alleging that when advertisers found out, it lost over $7 million. A judge granted a request from Musi to dismiss the case without prejudice in 2020.

    Cherie Hu, the founder of the music-business research network Water & Music, described Musi’s interface as utilitarian. It’s a place to listen to music and make playlists, and that’s it. Users don’t see song lyrics, information about upcoming concerts, or any features hinting at collaborations or partnerships with artists. “It’s a very generic way of curating and presenting music,” she says. Even after more than a decade in operation, it still feels more like a bright CS student’s senior project rather than a professional product.

    Musi claims not to host the music videos its users stream, instead emphasizing that these videos come from YouTube. Those videos appear within Musi’s own barebones interface, but some flaunt their origins with watermarks from YouTube or Vevo. Users have to sit through video ads right when they open Musi and can then stream uninterrupted audio, but video ads play silently every few songs while the music continues. The app also displays banner ads, but users can remove all ads from the app for a one-time fee of $5.99.

    Unlike its leading competitors, Musi doesn’t offer a download function, so the music stops without access to the internet. “Candidly, this won’t be a feature ever, due to restrictions set in place by YouTube,” a Musi support account told a fan last year who asked on Reddit if an offline mode was coming.

    James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and internet law at Cornell University, says the way Musi operates raises a number of questions. “Is this copyright infringement? A license for YouTube might not be a license to Musi,” he says. “Does this violate YouTube’s terms of service in a way that YouTube could cut it off?” As of now, the answers are unclear.

    One unknown is whether playing a song on Musi will result in the same amount of income for an artist as it would if played directly on YouTube, especially as streaming payouts calculations rely on a variety of factors. The Musi support account on Reddit has told listeners that it does, without providing any further details or evidence. It is also unclear whether a rights holder who wishes to remove their music from Musi would have a clear mechanism to do so without also pulling it from YouTube.

    By tapping into YouTube in this way, Musi appears to have pulled off something remarkable: Building a booming business in streaming music without taking on any of the legwork of striking deals with labels and distributors. That causes David Herlihy, a copyright lawyer and music industry professor at Northeastern University, to describe Musi as a “bottom feeder.” He believes the app has skated by thus far because it’s not technically breaking any laws. “It’s legal,” he says. “They’re linking to YouTube, and YouTube has licenses.”

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  • These Dangerous Scammers Don’t Even Bother to Hide Their Crimes

    These Dangerous Scammers Don’t Even Bother to Hide Their Crimes

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    In a series of posts in one Telegram channel, highlighted by Warner, who is also involved in Intelligence for Good, one cybercriminal can be seen walking others through how to run a sextortion scam. They say they tricked people into sharing nude images—posting screenshots of the conversation—and explained ways other people can replicate it. “Hey I am posting your naked pictures on social media and Facebook,” says a sample message cybercriminals could use. “Am not just posting it am sending copies of it to your area,” the message says, before demanding $700.

    While the scripts like these are shared on all social media channels, WIRED found at least 80 on the document-sharing service Scribd. The company removed them after WIRED got in touch, with a spokesperson saying there are limits on what people can upload and that the company has automated and manual reviews to remove content. “We’re actively building out new capabilities to broaden the scope of content moderation coverage to include a wider range of concerning text and image violations,” the spokesperson says. Some of the scripts had been online since 2020, and on pages where they were removed a “reading suggestions” section recommended other scam scripts.

    Raffile says the Yahoo Boys have been able to “thrive” online “due to lack of moderation around all the illicit material” that they’re sharing. “They’re acting with impunity because they feel they will never get caught,” Raffile says.

    Beyond the messaging platforms, the Yahoo Boys have a presence on TikTok and YouTube. “We design our app to be inhospitable to those who seek to exploit our community and we’ve removed this content for violating our policies,” a TikTok spokesperson says.

    “Our policies prohibit spam, scams, or other deceptive practices that take advantage of the YouTube community,” a YouTube spokesperson says. “We also prohibit videos that encourage illegal or dangerous activities. As such, we have terminated the flagged channels for violating our policies and our terms of service.” They add that the company removed accounts for breaching policies about harmful content, spam, and generally violating its terms of service.

    The accounts posted tutorials about how to scam people, link to groups on messaging apps, and promote technology for fake video calls. On TikTok, multiple accounts include carousels of images that the scammers can use in their efforts to create believable personas. Some of these include posts of elderly women for scammers who are in “need of grandma pictures for proof” of their fake identities and others for scammers who “need kids pics” for their victims.

    As well as being a threat to thousands of people around the world, the Yahoo Boys can be quick to adopt new technologies. David Maimon, a professor at Georgia State University and the head of fraud insights at the identity-verification firm SentiLink, has monitored Yahoo Boys for years and says their techniques have evolved alongside new technologies.

    “To build rapport with victims, the fraudsters first used text messages, then started sending recorded audio messages, to now using deepfake tools to communicate with victims live,” Maimon says. “On some of the markets we now also see the use of cloned voices. It is now accompanied with sending physical items to victims such as presents, food deliveries, and flowers.” Within some groups, they use “nudification” tools to turn photos of people clothed into nude photos, and deepfake video calls.

    While the Yahoo Boys have been active for years, all the experts spoken to for this piece say they should be treated more seriously by social media companies and law enforcement. “It’s time that we start looking at Yahoo Boys as a dangerous organization, transnational organized crime, and start giving it some of those labels,” Raffile says.

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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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