Media

Turkish police arrest four at the satirical magazine LeMan for allegedly depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a cartoon that the pro-government Yeni Şafak newspaper describes as Prophet Muhammad and Prophet Moses with wings and halos shaking hands in the sky while a war scene unfolds below, demonstrators have hurled rocks at LeMan's headquarters in Istanbul and clashed with police, the newspaper denies the allegations and says the drawing was intended to portray a Muslim man named Muhammad and was meant to highlight the suffering of Muslims

Business Insider lays off 21% of its workforce as part of increased AI focus, CEO Barbara Peng comments that over 70% of the employees are using Enterprise ChatGPT regularly and that the goal is 100%

Daily Star stops featuring pin-up women on Page 3 as the last tabloid to keep the tradition, 25-year-old model Isabella says she is heart broken and wants to organize a protest to keep the iconic part of British culture

Reddit shuts down the anti-natalist subreddit r/Efilism with over 10,000 subscribers after a bombing against a fertility clinic in Palm Springs where the 25-year-old suspect Guy Edward Bartkus who died in the blast posted a manifesto where he referenced the subreddit and referred to the idea that death, is the ethical end point for humanity, other anti-natalist subreddits still available

Donald Trump criticizes establishment media for ignoring the genocide and land theft taking place against white farmers in South Africa, says if it were the other way around it would be the only story they would talk about and adds that he doesn't care about race or color but only that what is happening is terrible

EU fines TikTok EUR 530 million for sending European personal data to China and for a lack of transparency, TikTok says it strongly contests the decision and plans to appeal, the company says it is disappointed to have been singled out despite relying on the same legal mechanism employed by thousands of other companies providing services in Europe and that it has among other measures made a EUR 12 billion investment in Project Clover which is rolling out data centers in Europe to store data locally in the EU

Donald Trump launches news aggregator White House Wire, with clear inspiration from the Drudge Report, links primarily to positive reporting about the administration and is published at whitehouse.org/wire

Former British PM Liz Truss announces she will launch an uncensored social media platform, warns that the deep state and mainstream media are stifling freedom of expression like in the Soviet Union and that a grassroots movement that is actually really demanding change is needed

Voice of America which delivers news from an American perspective to foreign countries terminates its contracts with The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse, VOA director Kari Lake says the contracts were expensive and unnecessary, adds that they should produce their own news using their billion-dollar budget and that the American taxpayer should demand to know why if that would turn out not to be possible

The White House comments CNN:s fact check on Donald Trump's quote that the Biden administration spent USD 8 million on making mice transgender, writes that "The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual)", lists the six projects that sum up to USD 8.29 million

The Israeli army launches a Turkish-language X account with a cover photo featuring Israeli soldiers saluting the flags of both Turkey and Israel, the account creation follows Israel lobbying the US to ensure Syria remains weak including allowing Russia to retain its military bases there in an effort to counter Turkey's growing influence in the region

BBC apologizes and admits unacceptable flaws in the documentary Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone about children's life in Gaza after it emerged that the 13-year-old narrator is the son of Hamas's deputy minister of agriculture, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy says it is critical for trust in the BBC that a comprehensive and rigorous review happens quickly and that appropriate action is taken

Jeff Bezos says Washington Post's opinion section will focus on personal liberties and free markets, adds that they will of course also cover other topics but that but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others, Opinion Editor David Shipley steps away from the newspaper

Brazil orders ban of right-leaning video platform Rumble, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes says the platform has repeatedly and willingly not complied and for instance refused to take down Brazilian conservative Florida-based journalist Allan dos Santos' channel, Rumble which earlier this week along with Trump Media & Technology Group sued Moraes for infringing on the free speech protections of the First Amendment of the US constitution comments that the Brazilian censorship is unprecedented

AP sues three Trump administration citing freedom of speech regarding losing access to presidential events for not using the term Gulf of America, AP comments that the press and all people in the US have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says they will see them in court

The White House posts video on X showing illegal immigrants being deported and jingling handcuffs titling it "ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight", mixed reception for the post that got six million interaction and 6,000 retweets within two hours, Elon Musk retweets the post writing "Haha Wow"

TikTok shuts down in the US after the Supreme Court upheld a law passed in April preventing American companies from hosting or serving TikTok content unless it sells itself to a buyer from the US or one of its allies, the company says that Donald Trump has indicated working on a solution and Trump has also said he will most likely delay the ban for 90 days, the TikTok app has been used by 170 million Americans

The EU Commission asks X to hand over internal documents about its algorithms, the company has been accused of giving far-right posts and politicians greater visibility over other political groups, EU digital commissioner Henna Virkkunen says they will not hesitate to ban or fine X if it was found to be in breach of the Digital Services Act

Meta terminates its DEI programs effective immediately and instead focuses on apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all regardless of background, also changes focus from diverse-owned suppliers to supporting small and medium-sized businesses, HR VP Janelle Gale says the legal and policy landscape surrounding DEI efforts is changing

Meta dismantles censorship and fact-checking, will instead copy community notes feature from X, announced by Mark Zuckerberg who says Trump's election victory is tipping point toward prioritizing free speech

Meta deletes AI-generated accounts after criticism, Liv the "Proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller" whose profile included pictures of her children among deleted accounts, says bug fixes were needed but has earlier communicated that they see a future where AI users generate and share content just like human accounts do on the platform

AP criticized for writing that a car drives into a crowd regarding Saudi Taleb al-Abdulmohsen's terror attack against a Christmas market in Magdeburg – JD Vance asks who drove the car, Ron DeSantis' communications director Bryan Griffin comments ironically that a car did it all by itself and the X community notes add that it is factually incorrect that the car drove itself

Albania blocks social network TikTok for at least a year starting 2025, Prime Minister Edi Rama says TikTok is the thug of the neighborhood and will be chased out

The prisoner CNN helped free from Syrian prison was the notorious torturer Salama Mohammad Salama with a long history of alleged war crimes, CNN comments that they have subsequently been investigating his background and are aware that he may have given a false identity, fact-checkers Verify-Sy notes that the man's grooming and general physical health constitute an incongruous portrayal of someone allegedly held in solitary confinement in the dark for 90 days and that there is no record of anyone in the region with the name he provided

European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) finds that the EU Commission's ad campaign on X breached the EU data protection laws as political views were processed to target the ads, the ad campaign was intended to sway opinion regarding Chat Control where EU wants to scan all electronic communications – keywords avoided by the campaign were for example #Qatargate, brexit, Christian and Vox

Rupert Murdoch loses bid to change his family trust to consolidate control of his media empire to his son Lachlan instead of dividing it equally among his four eldest children, reportedly wants his companies to continue acting as a conservative media force which Fox Corp CEO Lachlan is understood to be more aligned with, Murdoch's lawyer says they intend to appeal

X goes to court to avoid having to transfer Alex Jones' and Infowars' accounts which were said to be part of the Infowars bankruptcy sale that The Onion won, says its terms of service make it clear that accounts are ultimately owned by X and cannot be sold, Jones calls Musk a hero

US political commentator Candace Owens refused a visa to enter New Zealand because Australia banned her due to comments regarding the Holocaust and Muslims, has for instance expressed doubts regarding medical experimentation on Jews in concentration camps during World War II, planned doing a speaking tour discussing free speech and Christian faith

Australia bans social media ban for children under 16, X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Reddit but not YouTube included, the platforms bear sole responsibility for enforcement and risk fines of up to USD 33 million, 77% of Australians support the ban according to a recent YouGov poll

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy start podcast to keep the public updated on their work to reduce the US federal state, Dogecast will provide unique transparency into their process and also highlight examples of waste, fraud and misuse of tax funds

Milo Yiannopoulos makes comeback as a manager of disreputable celebrities, new company Tarantula has had Azealia Banks, Ariel Pink, Martin Shkreli and Ye as clients, Yiannopoulos also works undercover for the Trump family and helped them get rid of Laura Loomer

Alex Jones' media companies including Infowars are taken over by The Onion after bankruptcy auction, new owner intends to turn site into a parody of the kind of material it previously produced, Jones says he'll stay in studio and continue broadcasting until physically removed

FBI raid on Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan after platform gained attention for predicting Donald Trump's election victory, suspected political retaliation for challenging traditional polling and media processes

The Guardian stops posting on X, referring to how the platform has developed under Elon Musk with allegedly toxic far-right content and influence on the US presidential election, Musk responds that the newspaper is irrelevant and a vile propaganda machine

Joe Rogan's three-hour interview with Donald Trump difficult to find on Youtube who cites technical problems, Kamala Harris's campaign requires a different recording location and a one-hour time limit for the vice president to appear on the podcast, and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance's visit scheduled for Wednesday

Mel Gibson is working on a television series about the Great Siege of Malta in 1565 and was recently on a visit to the island where he met the country's Prime Minister Robert Abela, says the story of the 700 knights who won when they defended Malta against the attacks of the Ottomans is incredible

Alex Jones' media company Infowars will be sold in parts at an auction after an order by federal judge due to pay the USD 1 billion Jones was sentenced to pay for claiming the Sandy Hook school shooting never took place and was a false flag operation

The company Tortoise Media, with Karl-Johan Persson and Christina Stenbeck as two of the owners and James Harding as the largest, plans to acquire The Observer publication now owned by The Guardian

Former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo says he called Donald Trump because he was embarrassed by the reactions and lack of reactions regarding the threats against him, says he does not understand how Trump continues his campaign, how he manages to raise his fist second after being shot and barely talk about it, though clarifies that the idea of ​​him being a Trump supporter is laughable

British magazine The Spectator is bought by businessman Paul Marshall, owner of right-wing media GB News and online publication Unherd, for GBP 100 million, is profitable and has grown turnover every year since 2013

Youtube stops recommending certain types of health and fitness videos to teenagers as it can be harmful to their self-confidence and body image, the same measures were taken for the US last year

Court upholds previous ruling that the Internet Archive's activity of scanning and lending library books violates copyright laws, assesses that all four requisites for fair use speak in favor of the publisher, but judges that the site's activity is not commercial in nature, unlike the assessment of the previous instance

SpaceX's Starlink will block X in Brazil after the Supreme Court's decision to ban the platform in the country and to freeze of Starlink's assets to ensure that X pays its fines, both companies' owner Elon Musk writes that if Brazil does not return the illegally seized property they will seek reciprocal seizure of government assets too

Russian opposition journalist Sergei Mikhailov, editor of the publication Listok, is sentenced to eight years in prison for reporting on the number of dead civilians in the Kiev suburb of Butja and Mariupol in Donetsk, something that the court judge was knowlingly spreading of fake information

X, formerly Twitter, is being shut down in Brazil after order from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre De Moraes citing refusal to comply with local laws, using VPNs to get around the shutdown faces fines of USD 8,900 daily, and according to X's owner Elon Musk, the social media platform is the country's most used news app and what the people want

French President Emmanuel Macron, who himself uses Telegram, met with the platform's CEO and founder Pavel Durov several times before the Russian was granted French citizenship in 2018 but reportedly failed to convince him to move the headquarters to Paris from Dubai

Germanys federal police, BKA, asks social media platform Gab for the identity of user who wrote that overweight German politician Ricarda Lang is fat, founder and CEO Andrew Torba does not comply with request

Mark Zuckerberg writes in a letter to Congress that Meta in 2021 received repeated pressure from the Biden administration to censor certain content related to covid-19 and that the FBI in the lead up to the 2020 election warned of an upcoming Russian disinformation campaign against the Biden family, which led Meta to censor the New York Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop that Zuckerberg now claims in hindsight was not Russian disinformation

Shareholders of X, formerly Twitter, disclosed and include Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Sean Combs, Bill Ackman, Larry Ellison and Jack Dorsey among many others

The founder and CEO of the messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, arrested on Saturday night by French police at an airport outside Paris for not doing enough to prevent criminals from using his platform due to lack of content moderation, for a long time he has had an arrest warrant against him in France

Pakistani Farhan Asif is arrested in the country's capital Lahore on suspicion of cyber terrorism as he is linked to the news aggregator Channel3now which published a false name of the perpetrator of the attack in Southport in the UK that started the recent riots, the British High Commissioner in Islamabad declines to comment on whether the arrest was made at the request of UK

American TV personality Phil Donahue passes away at the age of 88, known for his own show that aired between 1967 and 1996 and for being an early male feminist, hosted guests who were allowed to speak unedited such as Donald Trump, Milton Friedman, Louis Farrakhan, David Duke and Khalid Muhammad as well as Jared Taylor on a show at MSNBC 2002

Elon Musk shuts down the X office in Brazil, citing legal threats against their employees in the country from Alexandre de Moraes of the Supreme Court if censorship orders are not enforced, the platform is still be available to consumers in the country

Brazilian-Jewish media mogul and one of Brazil's richest men, Silvio Santos, dead aged 93, built SBT, one of the country's three major TV channels, Forbes has compared him to Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva writes on X that he was the country's greatest television personality ever

The 2024 Paris Olympic gold medalist in women's boxing, the Algerian Imane Khelif who, despite his denial, has been accused of being a man, files a lawsuit against the social media platform X to the French authorities regarding cyberbullying, citing J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk

The Falun Gong movement with the media house Epoch Times is taking over the town of Middletown with 30,000 inhabitants in the state of New York in the US, has bought up real estate for 18 million dollars as well as the local shopping center and seems to be wanting to broadening the news business so that now even the local trade brings in income to the movement

Elon Musk interviews Donald Trump on X in connection with the former president's relaunch on the platform, Thierry Breton from the EU threatens Musk in an open letter with legal reprisals before the broadcast if it turns out to be in violation of the EU's regulations, to which Musk replies that Breton should go fuck his own face

YouTube CEO between 2014 and 2023 and one of Google's first employees, Susan Wojcicki, dies of cancer at age 56, earlier this year her 19-year-old died of an overdose in a dorm room at the University of California

The latest issue of the German newspaper Compact, which was recently banned by the decision of the Minister of Justice Nancy Faeser, is published under the name Näncy by the newspaper Demokratischer Widerstand, Compact's editor-in-chief and founder Jürgen Elsässer says he did not participate in the move but welcomes it

US federal judge Amit Mehta rules that Google has a monopoly on certain internet searches and certain internet advertisements and violates the country's antitrust law, in the next step of the process the decision will be made on what that means

Canadian news outlets have lost 43 percent of their engagement on social media overall after Meta's ban on news articles in Canada, in response to Bill C-18, came into force a year ago, three-quarters of the population is unaware of the ban and Canadians are consuming less news

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump does not appear as a suggestion in google searches for assassination attempts on presidents and a search for "president donald" suggests Donald Duck and Donald Reagan but not Trump, the search engine giant itself claims protection in place against political violence but that they are working on improvements

Disney's attempt to dismiss actress Gina Carano's lawsuit has been denied, Carano was fired from the series The Mandalorian on the grounds that she did not align with the company's values after she made social media posts in support of conservative view

Tucker Carlson's podcast overtakes The Joe Rogan Experience as the most popular podcast in the US on Spotify

Media mogul and Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch is in a legal battle to give hos son Lachlan full control of the family's investments even though their trust says control should be split equally between the four oldest children, according to sealed court documents seen by The New York Times

Online publication VDare, focusing on demographic change, identity and immigration, shuts down after 25 years citing investigation by New York District Attorney Leticia James, executive editor Peter Brimelow says she didn't charge them with anything but that she battered them to death with an enormous, ongoing, and intrusive investigation

Italian journalist Giulia Cortese is acquitted of posts in which she compared the country's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to Benito Mussolini, but is sentenced to pay 5,000 euros in damages for making fun of Meloni's height by writing, among other things, "you don’t scare me, Giorgia Meloni, after all, you’re only 1.2 metres tall" and "I can’t even see you"

In the latest expansion of The Sims 4, Lovestruck, the characters can date several characters at the same time, the game takes place in the city of Ciudad Enamorada where, among other things, there are singles bars and gyms and players can search for love themselves via the in-game dating app

Children up to 16 years old who take part in 30 percent or more of their parents' commercially published material must receive financial compensation according to a new law in Illinois in the USA, the money set aside will be accessed by the children when they turn 18

Wikipedia's editors consider the Anti-Defamation League generally unreliable regarding the conflict between Israel and Palestine as well as regarding anti-Semitism and the Jewish lobby organization is added on the list of banned and partially banned sources

Israel's Ministry of Communications along with police raid the news broadcaster Al Jazeera's office in Nazareth and confiscate equipment following the government's decision to end its operations and Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi writes on X that Israel does not intend to allow Hamas to broadcast from within the country

Georgia's parliament votes through a law requiring NGO:s and media operating in the country that have more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad to register with the state and provide detailed reports on their funding and work, sparking major protests and both the EU and The US condemns police violence against the protesters

Russian-language Wikipedia is shut down in connection with the outbreak of war, and its head Vladimir Medeyko leads the work to create the new version, Ruwiki, by copying all Russian-language articles from Wikipedia and then editing these, for example renaming the article "Russian Invasion of Ukraine" to "Military Actions in Ukraine (in 2022)”

X is ordered by the Federal Court of Australia to remove videos of last week's stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanueli in a Sydney church by Muslim teenager and is now being criticized by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for its refusal and the announcement that they will take it to court

Wikipedia spends more money on left-wing causes than running an encyclopedia, asks its readers for donations but has assets of USD 250 million, donates USD 24 million mostly to the left-wing organization Tides Foundation, which collects anonymous donations to pass on and, among other things, to Knowledge Equity Fund working to work against Eurocentrism and white male imperialist and patriarchal supremacy

Alexandre de Moraes, judge of the Superior Electoral Court of Brazil, starts investigation against Elon Musk who announced that he does not intend to comply with the Brazilian court order to censor accounts on X with a daily fee of almost 20,000 USD per account for failure of censorchip, Musk calls for impeachment or resignation of de Moraes

Sweden deports Chinese journalist Chen Xuefei Axelsson, resident in Sweden for 20 years and has as an editor at Green Post collaborated with Chinese intelligence and worked closely with the Chinese embassy

The Scottish legislation, the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, comes into force on 1st of April, which states, among other things, that it is a crime if a person communicates material to another that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening, offensive or insulting and that it is likely to lead to hatred against a specific group

Austrian nationalist activist Martin Sellner gets his account back on X and Elon Musk asks if it's legal in response to his post about him being arrested by police in Switzerland during a speech, last month it was reported that Germany was considering banning the Austrian from entry

The children's channel Nickelodeon employed four now-convicted sex offenders, including Brian Peck who corresponded with serial killer John Wayne Gacy, and several of the child actors now talk about their experiences in the new documentary Quiet on Set, the writer and producer Dan Schneider denies any wrongdoing

Elon Musk cancels planned collaboration with former CNN profile Don Lemon about a new showon the platform after Musk was interviewed in a first episode and that during the negotiation Lemon reportedly demanded a free Tesla Cybertruck, 5 million USD in advance, 8 million USD in salary, shares in X, private flight to Las Vegas and hotel for him and his fiance

Tucker Carlson publishes interview with Mike Benz, CEO of the Foundation For Freedom Online (FFO), which provides a detailed account of the censorship industrial complex, how it was created, why it was created, which agencies and organizations operate it and its key people, and how it was used and is being used for mass censorship and political influence on social media within the US and in the rest of the world, as well as to invert the meaning of democracy

19-year-old Marco Troper, son of YouTube's former CEO Susan Wojcicki and nephew of 23andMe's founder and Sergey Brin's ex-wife Anne Wojcicki, is found dead in a dormitory on the UC Berkeley campus and according to grandmother Esther Wojcicki, he must have inhaled drugs and that they don't know what kind pending toxicology report

X censors accounts related to Indian farmer protests citing legal demands after hashtag #FarmersProtest2024 trends and security in New Delhi is stepped up to stop farmers from entering the capital

Actress Gina Carano, with the financial support of Elon Musk, is suing Disney after she was fired from the Star Wars films citing her social media posts, Carano says she was not considered to be in line with the acceptable narrative of the time and that she was consistently accused of being an alt-right extremist

Tucker Carlson is in Moscow and there are rumors of an upcoming interview with Vladimir Putin, has been seen at the Bolshoi Theater and when asked if he is in the city to interview the president, he replies that we will see

Austrian nationalist activist Martin Sellner's not yet published book Remigration number one on Amazons best sellers list, the e-commerce company will examine the contents as soon as the book is published (German)

Joe Rogan signs new multi-year deal with Spotify but the podcast will be available on more platforms, says he believes podcasts are popular because you get to be a fly on the wall and that it inspires listeners to have similar conversations themselves

Poland's Constitutional Court rules that the new left-wing government's use of commercial laws when it sacked executives of public service companies and then shut them down is unconstitutional, Law and Justice MP Patryk Jaki says all of Tusk's usurpers should leave the buildings immediately, as the minister's actions were illegal

Tucker Carlson visits Julian Assange, who reportedly said the key reason he is in prison is due to WikiLeaks' publication of CIA surveillance, ahead of final appeal against extradition to the US, afterwards Carlson mentions fabricated, media-fueled sexual abuse allegation in Sweden and that it is a total scandal that they are detaining him

The video platform Rumble disables access in Brazil after disagreements with the country following the Supreme Court's demand to deplatform some content creators, CEO Chris Pavlovsky says he will not be bullied by foreign goverment demands for censorship and that users with unpopular views are welcome on the platform on the same terms as other users

Alex Jones gets his account back on X, formerly Twitter, after five years after gaining 70 percent support in poll organized by Elon Musk

Ireland, where many tech companies are headquartered in Europe, is preparing internet regulation called the Online Safety Code, which is said to protect social media users from harmful content, will act as a larger framework that also includes the EU's Digital Services Act and the Terrorist Content Online Regulation

X's CEO Linda Yaccarino writes in a memo that the company's principles do not have a price tag and will not be compromised ever after Elon Musk asked the advertisers who are blackmailing him to go fuck themselves, the platform has expressed that small and medium-sized companies are a significant motor which they believe they have definitely overlooked for a long time

Elon Musk is suing the Washington-based lobbying group Media Matters, which he accuses of misrepresenting the likelihood of ads appearing next to Nazi content on X that was used to pressure advertisers, X CEO Yaccarino says the truth is that not a single authentic user have seen IBM's, Oracle's or Comcast's commercials next to what Media Matters claims

Apple, IBM, Disney and the EU and others stop their ads on X in response to Elon Musk's critical posts against Jewish groups, even Tiktok has been criticized for content sympathetic to Osama bin Laden but unclear if and to what extent they have been boycotted by advertisers

Alex Jones launches the video game New World Order Wars where you play as Jones and meet enemies like Bill Clinton, Mark Zuckerberg and gay frogs

Charlie Warzel: News media has become too cumbersome and a low-margin product that the big social media companies distance itselfs from and traditional news consumption is becoming less important to consumers as trust is down during the last two decades and young people are turning to influencers, creators and podcasts to follow news

The Beatles release the song Now and Then based on the demo John Lennon recorded in 1970 with now improved sound quality thanks to AI, guitars recorded by George Harrison in 1995, as well as newly recorded drums by Ringo Starr and bass, guitar and piano by Paul McCartney that matches Lennon's original recording

Hashtag #StandwithPalestine has been posted 210,000 times on Tiktok since October 16 and gets four times more views compared to #StandwithIsrael which has been posted 17,000 times, the pro-Palestine hashtag is most common in Malaysia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates