Earlier this month, St Clair filed a lawsuit against Musk's AI company in response to a flood of deepfakes made by xAI's chatbot Grok and shared on X, the social media platform Musk owns. She told Fortune earlier in January that X users were turning pictures on her X profile into sexualized AI-generated images of her, including some she said depicted her as a minor.
Within days, hundreds of thousands of requests were being made to the Grok chatbot, asking it to strip the clothes from photographs of women. The fake, sexualised images were posted publicly on X, freely available for millions of people to inspect. Relatively tame requests by X users to alter photographs to show women in bikinis, rapidly evolved during the first week of the year, hour by hour, into increasingly explicit demands for women to be dressed in transparent bikinis, then in bikinis made of dental floss,
Meta has removed a Facebook page dedicated to tracking Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) action in Chicago after the Justice Department got involved. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X Tuesday that Facebook had taken down an unnamed "large group page that was being used to dox and target" ICE agents after outreach from the DOJ. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed the group, which he did not identify, "was removed for violating our policies against coordinated harm." Its removal follows Apple and Google blocking ICE-tracking apps, also following government demands.
Shadowbanning is the often silent suppression of certain types of content or creators in your social media feeds. It's not something that a U.S-based creator is notified about, but rather something they simply find out when their posts stop getting the same level of engagement that they're used to, or when people are unable to easily find their account using the platform's search function.
Kirk's killing during a speaking event in Utah last week unleashed a wave of negative commentary about the activist online, ranging from criticism of his conservative views to morbid celebrations of his death. Graphic footage of Kirk's murder also ricocheted across platforms, exposing millions of people to gory images of his final moments. In the hours after the killing, Republican House Representative Anna Paulina Luna urged Meta, X and TikTok to take down videos of Kirk's death, warning that at some point, social media begins to desensitise humanity.
On Thursday, a video popped up on my X feed, displaying the very moment that political activist Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck as he sat on a stool onstage at a college campus, talking with students and observers. There was no warning, no prompt before the video started playing-only an instant replay of the exact moment of gory violence that would immediately make waves around the country and the world.
Joanna Massey, PhD, is one of those business leaders, and she is not afraid to challenge the status quo. She is a corporate board director, Fortune 500 executive, and expert in corporate governance and crisis communications. With advanced degrees in business, law, and psychology, she brings a unique, interdisciplinary perspective to one of the most pressing issues of our time: how to protect free speech in the digital age without sacrificing public safety and democracy.
