Trump Take LEGO

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Hello, welcome to the 404 Media podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL.

404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support.

To subscribe, go to 404media.co.

As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments gain access to that content at 404media.co i'm your host joseph and with me are 404 media co-founders sam cole hey emmanuel mayberg hello and jason kebler hello hello

so later this week we will be uploading a recording we did in los angeles we've sort of been a bit stacked up with bonus recordings.

I feel like every week we've published something.

We had the New York one, then we had a comment show for paying subscribers as well.

Now we have this

LA podcast.

Jason, just briefly, do you just want to remind people sort of what that event was and what we spoke about and maybe what they can hear in that bonus pod coming later in the week?

Yeah, it was about the technology that ICE uses for its raids and mass deportation campaign.

It pulled together a lot of our reporting over the last few months.

And we did this, it's now been a month somehow, but it just took us a minute to get it edited and out.

And as Joseph said, we've been stacked.

But I remember what we talked about, and it's still totally relevant today.

So please check it out.

Yeah.

And one thing I'll add just on ICE technology.

So today I went to go check the ICE procurement records, which I very regularly do.

And I saw that ICE

can carry on with its purchase of $2 million worth of spyware.

They bought this in 2014.

It was blocked by the Biden administration.

I think after reporting from Wired, and there were concerns about it being used, I checked that, and it says that the work order, the

stop work order, has been lifted.

So ICE now or soon will have access to very, very powerful cell phone spyware technology.

Paragon, the company, is also being implicated in a scandal in Italy, I believe.

Jack Paulson, the independent journalist, was first to report this yesterday.

The stop work order was actually lifted, I think, on Friday.

And they say, the one weekend I don't check the procurement records.

It gets lifted.

But that makes, I think, our conversation in LA even more timely.

So definitely go check it out.

And we'll be keeping an eye on that.

And then just final bit of housekeeping.

For the podcast next week, it's probably just going to be Jason and the manual because I'm away for something.

Sam's away on a reporting trip as well.

So

look forward to that, listeners, and look forward to Jason the manual doing all of the work.

Thank you for that.

I'm going to

find other people to put on.

We're going to grab people off the street.

Do it.

Sure, why not?

All right.

For this week, we're still here.

So let's do this first story.

It's a couple of stories written by Jason and our regular contributor, Matthew Golt, as well.

The first one is Trump Take Lego.

And I'm just going to read out the second headline as well, even though we'll talk about it in a bit, because the context is the tariffs.

Trump tariffs cause chaos on eBay as every hobby becomes logistical minefield.

Well, let's go back to Lego first of all.

Jason, what's your first Lego memory?

I'm not a Lego guy, to be honest.

My brother and my sister are super into Lego.

And they're both younger than me.

I find Lego to be Lego brand bricks to be pretty difficult to put together.

It doesn't work very well with my brain.

And so I never got into it other than I just remember like my brother and my sister always asked for Lego stuff for Christmas and for their birthdays and things like that.

Whereas I asked for, I don't know, cool sports stuff,

video games, things of this nature.

I will say another like core memory for me though is at my very first journalism job where I was an intern fact-checker.

I fact-checked an article about

Legos

and

specifically about AFOLs, which are adult fans of Lego.

And

I believe the article was published and called them Legos as opposed to Lego brand bricks.

And we got many, many, many letters to the editor.

It was at a magazine, so it was printed in a magazine.

And you're not supposed to to call them Legos.

Like the company gets mad about it.

The fandom gets mad about it.

They are Lego is the brand.

So they're Lego brand bricks, Lego brand blocks.

Don't call them Legos.

People will be mad.

And you were also mad because not to throw him under the bus, but completely to throw him under the bus.

When Matthew Gold filed this, didn't he refer to it as Legos plural?

And then you were like, oh my God, you can't do do that we're gonna die well i so i i was like matt like you know about lego right like you know about legos you're an adult fan of legos because it seems like something that he would know about uh and he was like yeah deaf definitely and then the second word of the article was legos

uh and i was like he's trying to get us killed out here yeah

uh my first was the star wars episode one kits you could get subulbus pod racer in a in a in a lego kit that was awesome anyway we should probably talk about the story wait hang on.

Before we get super defamation, before we get super defamation, Matthew Galt says he is not an adult fan of Legos.

Thank you very much.

Did you just message him?

Well, that much is clear.

That much is clear because he didn't know this.

The last thing I'll say is that Lego, the brand, which is Danish,

has a page about how to properly refer to their brand of blocks.

And it's very serious.

It's like Nintendo level of like, do not, do not mess this up or we'll be very mad.

We must protect our intellectual property, et cetera.

So kind of interesting.

And Jason, what does Lego mean?

Dude, I have no idea.

It means play well.

Okay, on to actually talking about the story.

I did a lot of Lego when I was a kid.

So headline, Trump take Lego.

What is happening?

with Lego here.

What are they stopping exactly?

And then we'll get into the reasons why.

So what's actually changing here?

So Lego has this

program called Pick a Brick.

And it is basically a website where you can buy Lego bricks, but you can buy them individually.

So you can buy like the different heads of the minifigs, which are the little characters.

You can buy like different connectors.

You can buy regular blocks.

You can buy different feet and things like this.

And as I understand, it's a relatively new

feature, as in like from the last several years, because for many, many years, there were like third-party companies that were assembling little sets of like 10, 10 square blocks, like 10, you know,

arms for minifigs and things, and sending it because there was no like really good way to buy individual Lego bricks.

And then eventually, Lego launched this program called Pick a Brick, where you can buy them individually.

And last week, they announced that if you're you're in the United States or Canada, you won't be able to buy a huge number of the bricks from this program.

Let's see,

more than 2,500 different types of bricks are no longer available in the United States.

And that is because of this thing that we're going to talk a lot about called Duminimis.

which is

this tariff waiver program that has been around for a long time in the United States, where if something costs less than $800, you don't need to pay tariffs on it.

And so, this like this made things really easy for people who had different hobbies or who were into fashion or who just like to buy things from overseas.

You could buy a shirt from like a British like clothes company and you wouldn't have to worry about tariffs.

And

that is now over.

That ended on August

28th.

It ended on Friday.

Friday was the last day.

And so

announced a long time ago, of course, and we all knew this was coming.

And I feel like some people were like, oh, the tariffs already happened and things aren't that bad.

It's like, well, no, now it's happening for these sorts of purchases.

So people are going to actually notice it.

Now it's happening for like individual people because it was happening for companies for a while where it's like, oh, I'm importing tons of raw material to sell at my store or to like do something in the US.

And I'm going to like maybe pass that cost on to to consumers.

But now it's like, if you're buying an individual item from a store overseas, this is something that you will encounter.

And crucially,

Trump ended this for China back in, I think, March, like a few, a few months ago, he ended it for China, but it was still a thing for other countries where you didn't have to pay this.

And there's a few...

There's a few reasons sort of like why De Minimis has ended.

I think one, it's just like part of Trump's like vindictiveness and sort of like anger about international trade.

But companies like Timu and Shein in China were abusing this system.

So like they were selling huge amounts of products to the United States and rather than shipping them over on big container ships, they were sending like lots of small shipments of less than $800.

And so they weren't paying tariffs.

And that was like,

that was a problem, sort of.

Like, you know, I guess

some people had a problem with it, basically.

Yeah, some people had a problem with it.

I mean, it led to like lower priced goods in the United States, but basically, like, they were,

they were

abusing a loophole in the system to do this.

And so that's why it ended in China first.

Also, there's like a lot of people in the Trump administration and just like very, people who are very hawkish about this sort of thing, saying that these small packages packages have been abused to like import fentanyl into the United States.

And it's like,

don't think that is the main mechanism, but like that, that was some of the political narrative that was used to close this loophole.

So, anyways, it's like you can go on Lego and buy a brick for a dollar, like buy just like a single piece, but like now, because of the end of De Minimus,

importing that to the U.S.

to an individual customer is like a gigantic pain in the ass.

And so Lego is like, we're just not going to do it.

And people

even

had bricks in their shopping carts.

And then I think, according to posts on social media, they saw them removed from those shopping carts as well.

So they were planning to buy their Lego bricks.

And, oh, no, sorry.

You can't do that anymore.

As you said,

it's not just the US, but Canada as well.

Any idea why the Canadians were implicated as well?

Like, because some of the tariff stuff doesn't apply there, did Lego camera?

Yeah, I mean, because they were shipping to a warehouse, like a logistics center in the United States is sort of like my understanding of why Canada was cut off as well, because there was not like a direct from Denmark shipping situation to Canada.

They were going, they were like running it through a logistics center in the U.S.

And so those were impacted as well.

I will say that Lego has been talking a lot about how they're trying to build more like manufacturing centers in the United States, which is sort of the stated purpose of a lot of these tariffs.

And who knows how long that takes, but

building Lego bricks is not as complicated as building an iPhone.

And so I would imagine that eventually maybe they'll relaunch this program.

Well, you can still buy some of the bricks from this program.

The most popular bricks, they said, you can still buy because they're like already based in the US.

Like they're so they're shipping them to the US at such a large quantity that they're coming in through like more normal means versus like being shipped directly from Denmark to individual people in the US.

Yeah.

And as you say,

making Lego bricks probably less complicated than making an iPhone.

So why doesn't Tim Cook just produce

the iPhone out of Lego?

In the US with Lego.

And then that would solve all the the problems.

And then he doesn't really have to go give Trump like a gold carrot

trophy or statue or whatever it was.

But I think that would solve everyone's problems.

So if we zoom out slightly, that's kind of all of the

big mess that's happening with one hobby, a big hobby, Lego's popular, but one singular hobby.

But this other piece that I mentioned, Trump tariffs cause chaos on eBay as every hobby becomes a logistical minefield, obviously implicates everything.

And deck, sort of the sub-headline of the article, says, quote, buying cameras, retro games, board games, skincare, flashlights, sex toys, watches, and anything else from overseas just became far more complicated, slow, and expensive.

I think we understand the more expensive.

Can you just explain the complicated and slow?

Yeah, it's because it's not just, hey, you have to pay this tariff.

There's like a logistical aspect to paying the tariff.

And so,

you know, it's hard to say how this will play out in the long run.

And a few readers have said, well, this has basically been the system in Europe for a long time because Europe doesn't have de minimis in most countries.

I believe in probably none, but I'm not sure.

Don't check me on that.

But basically, it's like if you, when I send shirts from my apartment in LA to our readers in Germany, for example, they have to go pick it up from the post office often and pay a tariff there.

And it's like that is a process.

And so,

what is happening is: one, a lot of the national mail carriers have stopped shipping to the United States for a minute because they don't have the logistical infrastructure set up to deal with the U.S.

customs system.

And so, like, Japan Post has said they're not going to send packages to the United States.

Like

DHL said they're going to restrict some things.

There's just like a bunch of individual international like post offices that are like, we're not going to ship to the US until further notice.

So you now have to ship through FedEx and UPS.

Those are the ones that still are doing it, which are both American companies.

And

one, like in my experience, FedEx is good.

Like they're pretty fast, but they're really expensive.

They're like, they're quite expensive.

And so there's that price.

But now, when you get a package internationally,

the package is not just going to come directly to your house, it's going to clear customs at the border.

And, like, who knows how long that will take?

Like, it could be quick, it could take days, according to some eBay sellers I talked to, and some people who are posting about this, and small companies that like packages are getting held up for days at the border.

But then, when it goes through, it's like you have to log on to FedEx's like website to go pay the tariff before it will get delivered to your house.

And it's just like adding all this friction and it's annoying.

Yeah.

It's like crazy additional steps that lots of people aren't used to, basically.

Lots of people aren't used to.

And like this article, it's affecting like eBay sellers, Etsy sellers, like really small businesses, people who do this like on the side.

And I've heard from a lot of people saying,

I have a metal band in Norway, and some of our customers are in the United States.

And it's like, I don't have the time or energy to jump through these hoops to send like two vinyl records to the United States occasionally.

So I'm just not going to do it.

And so it's cutting off a lot of

people who want to buy things from overseas.

And it's like, maybe it's, you know,

American exceptionalism or just like how I was raised, but I'm like, I'm not used to that.

Like, this is not the capitalism and commerce that I was promised growing up.

It's like, I'm very used to, oh, you can buy anything from anywhere and they'll send it to you.

And like, now that is simply not the case.

And there's like all these small businesses that won't do it.

You know,

I first became aware of this because I'm into film photography and almost all, not almost all, but many, many, I would say like 50% or more of the vintage film cameras that are on eBay are shipped shipped from Japan.

And that's because Canon and Nikon and Pentax and like all of these big camera companies are Japanese companies.

And so there's just like more stock there.

And also,

film photography remained popular in Japan longer than it remained popular in the United States.

And so there's like a lot more businesses that

have the cameras, that refurbish them, that

have stayed in this business.

And so

I bought several of my cameras from eBay from Japanese sellers, and it used to be really simple.

I just like bought it and then I paid like usually $20 shipping and it came and I didn't have to think about it.

And

I messaged a bunch of Japanese eBay sellers, and I was like, what is the process going to be?

Am I going to have to pay tariffs?

Like, am I not?

And it's all over the place because some of the sellers are doing what's known as like duty-paid shipping.

So they are paying the shipping, they're paying the tariffs beforehand and they're including that in the overall price.

So the overall price is going up.

Others are saying, well, we're going to sell it for cheaper, but you're going to have to do the importing side of things.

And so it becomes like

if you're a price conscious person, which I am for a lot of these hobbies, I'm like, I want to get a good deal.

If you're buying stuff on eBay, you probably want to get a good deal.

You're having to calculate like

which one of these cameras is going to be easy to get?

Like, am I going to have to go to FedEx to pick it up?

Am I going to have to pay the tariff there?

What is the tariff going to be?

And eBay has like a page to help you with this.

And

the advice they give is like, look up all this information that you don't have and aren't used to looking up.

It's called harmonization tax code, like numbers.

These are the tools that they're offering, right?

Or they point people people to what they pointed to a us government tool and that's just a list of like millions of different types of products and they all have a code a tariff code and you have to like put it in there to figure out like what rate this product is tariffed at and that website sucks and it's broken half the time um like it it's just very difficult to use because it's like a u.s government website um

and then it's like then ebay says literally quote apply some math and it's like i love to apply some math.

Like, what math am I applying?

And it's like, buy it.

And then the advice they're giving to sellers is like, expect negative feedback from buyers who can't figure this out and blame you.

Wow.

And if you've ever sold anything on eBay, bought anything on eBay, it's like feedback is how that entire website runs.

Like if you start getting negative feedback, you get dinged in the algorithm.

people stop buying from you.

Like it's a real nightmare.

And so this is like, it's just a shit show.

And it's for every hobby.

Like after I wrote this, like people who are into anime figurines were like, I cannot get my white, my wifeus anymore.

Like I can't buy yarn.

I can't buy like all this stuff that's just made elsewhere.

Like all of these hobbies, if you're into vintage anything, it's not like we're making new vintage film cameras in the United States.

And so it's just a mess.

Yeah, I guess just the last thing I'll say is if the intent, if the intention of the tariffs is to move manufacturing from overseas to the U.S., what so do they do they want Norwegian heavy metal bands to become American heavy metal bands and then produce their vinyls in the States or something?

I mean, it's just ridiculous on the face of it.

And it is obviously stupid for globalization and free trade.

I guess, just super last thing, what are you keeping an eye on?

Just like people contacting you with those stories and that sort of thing, like you mentioned?

Or?

Yeah, I mean, it feels like thus far American businesses have like jumped through many, many hoops to

make the tariffs look to consumers like they're not impacting prices, like they're not impacting people in any way.

Like Amazon was going to add a line item for tariffs back when they were first announced, and then Trump got mad and they're like, never mind, we're not going to do it.

Like we're going to try, we're going to make this all invisible to the consumer.

A lot of companies have, some have raised prices, but a lot of them have like held their prices down as long as they possibly can because I think they are scared of invoking the wrath of the Trump administration.

And I think that

this is something that can't really be hidden because

the people who are impacted are

like small businesses in other countries.

that are then passing that information on to American consumers.

And so I'm very curious as to whether this is going to be like,

I don't think it's going to be the thing that finally turns people against Trump, but I think it is going to be something that will be like hard to hide.

And, you know, if you have like a hobby of any sort, like this is probably going to be annoying for you.

And so, yeah, if it's affected you, if it's affected your business, I would love to hear from you.

My email is jason at 404media.co

and my signal is jason.404 because I'm collecting stories from small businesses and people who are into hobbies and stuff who are like, I can't get my stuff anymore.

So, whatever that thing is, let me know.

Yeah, the more obscure, the better.

The more obscure and expensive, the better.

All right, we'll leave that there.

When we come back, we're going to talk about one of Emmanuel's stories.

And for a moment, we were kind of part of the story as well in a weird way.

We'll be right back after this.

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All right, and we are back.

This is one that Emmanuel wrote: How OnlyFans Piracy is Ruining the Internet for Everyone.

Emmanuel, obviously, we'll get into the specifics here and the broader points, but maybe let's just go right to the beginning: how did you first come across this?

And it somehow involves us

and our website in a weird way.

How did you first come across this?

So I was editing a piece by Matthew Gault, who we just talked about, about the Swedish prime minister launching an AI bot to speak for him and it kind of going haywire, as you might expect.

And

I did what we often do, which towards the end of the story, we kind of link to other relevant stories that we published recently.

And I thought about a story that Sam did about Facebook's AI therapists

also going haywire and lying to users and things like this.

So

sadly, sometimes the fastest way to find a story is to just go to Google and type in some keywords plus

four or four media.

I do it literally every day for all of my own coverage, even for when we work at motherboards.

It's subject, Joseph Cox, motherboard vice.

Okay, I found my article.

Right.

So I was doing that again.

Yeah, I also do the same thing every day, and it just wouldn't come up.

And I was pretty surprised because I knew I was using the right search terms and I was sure that we published it because it's a story that did well.

And

I was confused.

But then I scrolled down to the bottom of the Google search results and I saw what

the notice that Google puts on pages when it removes search results because of copyright takedown requests and you can click that to follow the link to something called the Lumen database which keeps a record of takedown requests meaning there is the copyright holder they file a claim against a website that they think has violated their copyrights.

They say what the original content is, what the offending content is, who filed the claim, and when.

And when I clicked that, I saw that a

company called Takedowns AI

filed a claim on behalf of an influencer

whose name is, sorry, I had it in front of me and I lost it I think yeah Tamara

and she has an OnlyFans

and the claim

said

that

something in Sam's story violated her copyright and you can log in and see the specifics of the complaint And when I did that, I saw that an image that Sam had created for the top of the story, which is just a collage of three

different

profile pictures for these AI avatars, which are AI generated.

She claimed, or Takedown's AI, the company that filed it for her, claimed

violated her copyright, which is obviously not true because

it doesn't look like her and it's AI generated.

And

it just obviously has nothing to do with her original content.

Yeah, Sam, just briefly, to so you make this, yeah, you often make the sort of artwork, especially for the behind the blog stuff and for your own articles or some of our others as well.

You make this piece of artwork to go to the top of the article just to make it very crystal clear.

That did not include this adult performer's likeness in any way, correct?

It wasn't a photo of her.

No, the image that

the notice was specifically referencing was an AI-generated

like

picture of an AI therapist that was already on Instagram so I didn't make

I didn't generate an image of anything I took a screenshot of something that was on Instagram that was AI generated that I guess the system picked up as like looking enough like this other woman which they don't really look like, right?

But it wasn't her.

It wasn't her.

No, no.

It looks nothing.

And just to emphasize how nonsense the claim is, it looks nothing like her.

It obviously wasn't taken from any of her pages.

And it's AI-generated, meaning that it's not lifted from any particular website.

And also, I believe the legal state of AI-generated content is you can't file copyright claims on it.

A judge has ruled, and I believe this has been upheld in court, that

you can't claim copyright on AI-generated content anyway.

So it's just a completely nonsense claim.

So

you go to look for this article, you can't find it.

You find this bizarre

DMCA complaint against our site, but there were other ones in there as well, right?

Do you see these other websites in the same complaint?

And I think it was something like 60 had received something similar.

Yeah, there were a little

over 60 links in the same complaint to totally different websites.

And I went through every single one of those and I could not find a single image or any type of content that could conceivably

be seen as something that this influencer Tamara has posted elsewhere.

And just to make clear, all of these

sites, as far as I could see, were de-indexed from Google search.

If you were trying to find one of these things, you could not because of this claim.

Right.

So

all of these sites have been de-indexed for this creator.

What is Takedowns AI then?

Exactly.

Are they something of an agent or a middleman?

Or

how are they involved here exactly?

And what do they do?

Takedowns AI is a copyright takedown service, which is a type of service that has existed for, I would say, more than a decade now.

And

it's something that traditionally

big corporations had, like Universal or Disney, they hire companies to kind of scan the internet for pirated content and file takedowns.

As

the influencer economy grew, and specifically as

the adult

entertainment industry became

less about big studios and more about individual creators who are

on OnlyFans,

they needed a solution as well because their content is pirated all the time.

It's extremely common for a creator's OnlyFans page.

Somebody buys access, they download everything, they upload it to some message board, and that is devastating for their business.

And these people are usually,

you know, a one-person business.

It's an OnlyFans model.

They're creating all of their own content.

They don't really have the time to scan the entire internet and remove all this pirated content.

That's when all these

smaller takedown service companies popped up in order order to serve them.

So you pay them a monthly fee.

They offer a variety of services, but the main thing they do is scan the internet, find your content, and then file the many, many, many takedown requests that you would need in order to police piracy of your content.

It's not a perfect solution.

Content is still pirated, but it is something,

I think, extremely basic at this point for any

adult content creator that has any level of fame.

It's something that they have to do.

Yeah.

And

it's also obviously impacting sites that don't have, that aren't violating these people's copyrights.

And, you know, it says they do it through facial recognition, keyword searches, and human reviewers to do this.

So it's a pretty active process, it seems, right?

So there's a lot of companies in this space.

Like I said, some companies have been in this space for more than a decade.

I talked to one of them for this

article, and

everybody uses the same tools, more or less.

There's facial recognition, there's reverse image search, there's searching for keywords, which usually means just like searching for the creator's name or username, their OnlyFans handle.

And then there's a lot of automation in how the takedown request is created and filed to various services.

We're talking about Google here because one of the most effective things they can do is just have Google delist the sites that contain the pirated material.

But they also do this on YouTube.

They do this on Instagram for people who are using their images in order to catfish other users.

And there's just a lot of takedown notices to generate.

So there's some automation on that end as well.

I think the difference as I am finding out or as I have found out when I was looking into this article is how much automation or human review exists before the request is sent out to a platform.

And

I would say that

as you might expect,

the less human review

exists,

the more errors you see.

To be clear, and I tried to be clear about this in the article as well: Takedowns AI is the company that I saw had a lot of errors.

So, you know, the claim that we were in, we were one mistake out of 68.

I found other really bad, embarrassing mistakes.

For example,

there's this creator that goes by the username Honeybee, and there was a Takedowns AI complaint filed to Google on her behalf, and it included links to things like an academic article about actual honeybees, right?

Like the University of Missouri had an article about honeybees that was delisted because Takedowns AI was like, honeybee equals honeybee, get rid of that.

All that being said, I would say even with Takedowns AI, which

has a lot more automation in the process, the vast majority of their claims are legitimate, right?

They're filing hundreds of claims a day.

I believe they filed several million claims since they were founded in 2022.

And it seems to me that the vast majority of those claims are legit, but it only takes one error.

to really damage the discoverability of our website, of other websites.

It's not a trivial, it's not trivial damage that they're doing to the internet and to specific websites.

Yeah, it's much more about the sort of secondary effects or impact that it's having on other parts of the World Wide Web, not even their own clients or those creators.

It's like, hey, you've just removed a 404 media article or a study or whatever from Google, which, yes, it's gone downhill massively for a while now, but it's still a massive source of traffic and discoverability for so many people, for academics, for

media outlets, or whatever.

And I guess just the last question is, this was one way in

to talk about DMCA,

this thing that we've spoken about a bunch and back and offerboard as well.

And then outlets like TechDirt, for example, will cover, or Torrent Freak, I think as well, will cover DMCA a ton.

What's the more fundamental or the deeper issue here, if there is one?

Is it just that DMCA sucks or like, what is a deeper issue here?

I'm really glad you asked because it was very interesting to see the response to the article.

I say in the story that what I think makes this problem interesting and really tricky is that it's not just one thing, it is the intersection of several things that are very shitty about the internet.

And one of them, clearly, as you said, is this DMCA takedown process legally and on specific platforms is very flawed.

And we've known this for many years, right?

Like the way I think this comes up most often is on YouTube, there's Content ID.

They use automated tools to kind of match audio and take down what they think are infringing videos.

And a lot of silly stuff happens where

like the artist that created the music that appears in their video is taken down because Content ID is so aggressive.

So there's that aspect of it for sure.

The one that people don't think about very often, and it's the reason that I mentioned it in the headline and kind of the reason I led with it is like this OnlyFans piracy problem.

It's like this is a really big

problem.

And these individual creators don't have the same power and resources that a Disney Disney has, that all these giant record companies have.

And they're just trying to make a living.

They have

legal pressure, censorship from platforms.

And this is just like another burden that they deal with that people

don't think about.

And

I guess

finally

is the thing we keep coming back to, which is our over-reliance on Google, right?

It's just like, this is the dominant search engine.

This is how you find stuff on the internet.

Their DMCA takedown process is also flawed.

I don't think they don't care about it.

I don't think that they're not trying to make it better, but they get millions and millions of these requests.

Some of them go bad.

And you might even know that it's dead.

Like, we didn't even know that this was impacting us.

until I searched for this.

And you can imagine how often that happens.

So all three of these things are colliding.

And after I published the story, you know, I heard from people on SEO, I heard from other OnlyFans creators, I heard from other takedown services,

I heard from people who are like mad about Google.

So it's interesting how all these problems are coming to a head in like this one way.

For sure.

And just like the tariff story, again, if you're impacted by this as well, of course, uh reach out we'll leave that there if you're listening to the free version of the podcast i'll now play us out.

But if you are a paying 404 media subscriber, we're going to

talk about a bunch of the recent chat GPT reporting from ourselves and from other outlets and how it's related to, you know, some really, really dark stuff, unfortunately.

I'm sure you probably know what I'm talking about.

You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co

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