The Final Boss of AI Slop

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i'm your host joseph and with me are two of the other 404 media co-founders the first being sam cole hello and jason kebler hello hello i nearly said a manual just because i'm reading the script even though he is clearly uh not here today so jason what's going on with merch uh yeah

so we have been we haven't restocked our merch in months and so you know orders have still been coming in but we've been basically out of most things for quite a while so uh we just are doing a big restock right now i just placed the order so we have uh crew necks and hoodies back in stock we have uh hats both black and green back in stock those have been out of stock for a long time and are very popular and we have the return of beanies

And then very excitingly, we have a few new items of merch.

So we have a new crew neck sweatshirt in addition to the one that we had from last year.

We have a long sleeve Doom t-shirt.

So we had the tank top Doom t-shirt over the summer.

Now that it is fall, we have a long sleeve T, same design.

So that's adds some sleeves.

And that's the numbers 404.

But if you look closely, it's a bunch of code.

And that code is for the video game Doom, right?

Yes, it is.

And then we have a logo t-shirt, pretty simple, but people have been asking for that.

So that's all up for pre-order now in our shopify

which you can find on our website if you just look for the merch store

and then also if you place an order I'm really behind on shipping it will be out like this week I'm sending stuff out so basically big merch refresh very excited about it go check check it out have we been impacted touched by tariffs yeah

yes we have um probably we'll do an article about this at some point, but uh, we've mentioned this before.

We work with a local screen printer in LA, they're really, really cool.

It's like a very small shop, um,

and

basically, like, the underlying t-shirts that we're buying, the underlying sweatshirts that we're buying, have gone up in price pretty significantly over the last just like month and a half, something like that.

Um, we're talking like

five to seven dollars per item just for the base t-shirt at wholesale.

So, yeah, I mean, when we're talking about like tariffs impacting things, like this is one of them.

Um,

I'm gonna talk more to our uh, to our supplier just about like what is going on.

But this is, it's interesting because uh, some of our stuff is made in the US.

We try to like make stuff in the U.S.

when possible just to support like local business and things like that.

Um, I've mentioned many times I'm in LA, there's like various clothing companies here that make their stuff in LA,

um,

but

they're getting the actual cotton elsewhere, presumably, or they are

like now playing in a world where all their competitors' prices have gone up, and so they're they can increase price as well.

I'm not exactly sure, like, what it is in this case, but the underlying cost for us has gone up like dramatically in the last month,

So not good.

Yeah, just another way in which

some large economic and geopolitical decisions can impact four journalists trying to sell t-shirts with the Doom code on them, basically.

I mean, it's impacted

an untold number of businesses in all these different ways.

And, you know, it's impacted us in a fairly straight.

forward way, probably.

Like, hey, price went up, you know,

but hopefully people, you know, go check out the merch refresh.

I'm definitely glad that the Doom one

is now on a long-sleeve shirt.

There was no way I was ever going to wear the tank top, although I know Jason rocks it.

Don't think

big fan.

We're breaking

up, yeah, yeah.

Suns up, guns out.

Not for me.

Uh, so yeah, I'm glad the new stuff is in.

And with that, let's talk about this week's stories.

The first section, a lot about Zora 2.

I don't even know if I did that.

That sounds like a Z.

Sora, like

Kingdom Hearts character.

I think that's why my brain refuses to pronounce it because

I'm not entertaining the idea of Kingdom Hearts.

I find it interesting from an IP, like, I'm not, I don't want anything to do with that.

Okay, it's about Sora,

OpenAI's new AI slop machine app video model.

And the first one is

OpenAI's Sora 2 copyright infringement machine features Nazi SpongeBobs and criminal Pikachu's.

First of all, Jason, what is the new app exactly?

Because it's not just a new video model, which we see every six months or whatever, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's OpenAI's attempt to make a TikTok competitor.

So it's a social media platform, or at least it's trying to be.

And that's like kind of the new thing that AI companies have been trying to crack, like the new problem they've been trying to solve is like how to make this stuff social.

We've seen like Meta try to put it into its products, but Mark Zuckerberg has talked about trying to like make its own

AI focused social media app.

And so this is OpenAI's attempt at that.

So basically, you download the Sora app, you scan your face.

Like that's, you can't really use it unless you scan your face.

And that's like the first thing that you do.

So do you literally have to do it?

Or you can just scroll if you don't?

I'm not sure, actually, but it's the first thing that you're prompted to do.

And you can't like do much of anything on it if you don't scan your face.

I should have checked.

I just did it because I was trying to figure out like how this worked.

And so it's shoved in front of you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you open it up and like the camera turns on.

And then you do a selfie and you like take a video and you hold it to your face for a few seconds.

And then it asks you to look left, look right, look up.

This takes like maybe 10 seconds.

And then

it asks you to say three numbers.

So it'll be like 42, 87, 91.

And that's it.

Like that's you give it your voice by just saying that.

And I bring that up because

maybe like four or five years ago on an episode of Cyber, which is the old podcast we did at Vice,

we did a deep fakes audio episode where we cloned the voice of Ben McCoo, who was our host at the time.

And

we had to like find bespoke software engineers to figure out how to do this.

Like they, they had created a model that would like clone his voice.

It was pretty sophisticated.

It was running on their like own server.

And Ben had to read maybe like 20 minutes worth of audio, which is a lot of audio thing.

And at the time, they're like, we've gotten this down from

like, this is state of the art.

Like, you only have to read 20 minutes worth of audio versus like hours and hours and hours worth of audio.

And it didn't sound even that good.

Like, it did sound like Ben, but it was like a days-long process.

He had to do all this stuff.

And now to make pretty convincing video with synced audio that sounds like your voice, it's like a 17 second process.

And Sam, I feel like you have done like quite a lot of reporting on like how that tech has changed.

Like,

I don't know.

I feel like you're, you've like cloned yourself various times.

I mean, when Deepfakes first came out in, I guess, late 2017, I tried to make one of myself.

And at the time, it was like,

I don't know, you needed to, you needed to have like pretty extensive programming knowledge to even just set up the

adversarial networks that you needed to like make a deep fake visually.

And I gave up.

I mean, I was like, I don't have the

patience or even the knowledge to like follow a tutorial at the time.

And now it's like, I, you know, we could do it on an app, and it's literally one photo, or in some cases, not even a photo.

If the person is like well-known or a public figure, you just use text.

But yeah,

that's the case with all of like every format of this technology is so much better than it used to be um to the point where you just need like you said like a couple seconds worth of audio um it's also interesting to me because that's i had to go through this recently with like my bank um with like doing the voice um verification stuff like to make like a voice print and it's basically the same exact thing it's like you read like eight words or something or numbers and you instantly are like, I know your voice now.

It's like, this doesn't seem right.

It seems like it should, you should need more than that.

It seems like you should need more.

Yeah.

Well, and with bank accounts specifically, I used the service 11 Labs a few years ago now.

And to clone my voice with that, I had to read out, I think, a few sentences.

And it was weird.

It was like some

romance novel, if I'm remembering correctly.

And it got like a bit steamy.

I'm like, why the fuck am I reading this?

And then I did that, clone my voice, and then I used that cloned version of my voice to break into my bank account, which was protected with voice ID.

So it's a big mess.

And as you say, Jason, it's crazy easy now to do it.

Yeah, and I bring this up and we dwell on this because like that is the big advancement from Sora, in my opinion, is like there, there have been other like

Nudify apps and AI apps where it's like, oh, you put in a picture and then it makes like a crude version of it.

And those have been very damaging and we've like written about them.

But there hasn't really been a video model to my knowledge where you can deepfake yourself

or, you know, for lack of a better term, you can like clone yourself in like three seconds.

And that is like how the app works is basically like you scan yourself, it's connected to your profile, and then you can use text like in any other AI app to say like, Jason, writing an article in a cyberpunk future, and like it will make a video of that, and it will have my voice, and it will, you can like write the script, like blah, blah, blah.

And to be like very honest, it is pretty damn good like it is

shockingly good um i think that there's still in many of the videos like quite a tell where it's like oh this is ai generated but

with things like animation which we'll get into in a minute like you can tell it to make an episode of spongebob and it will look like the actual animation and the the videos like look pretty realistic the the audios sync pretty well the voice sounds like my voice It's like quite concerning.

And then you can,

it's called Cameo.

You can like

put anyone else who has the app into your videos and by just like tagging them and like generating a video with them.

So basically, like people have been making videos of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, by tagging him and then making him say and do like crazy shit.

And notably, and I think to like OpenAI's credit, this is like an opt-in system.

And so you can be on the app and say, don't let anyone make videos of me.

You can also say, only let my friends make videos of me.

And you can also say,

you have to manually approve any video that has

you in it before it is published publicly.

I wonder if to Sam Altman, is he doing that to all of the ones in Nazi uniforms and shit?

Just changing his notifications.

No, no,

I think you can make it just like an anything goes situation, but like there is a setting where it's like, I have to manually prove each and every video that's made of me.

Although I actually haven't tested it enough to know, because you can generate drafts that live on like the person's phone, and then that person can download the video, which I think is actually one of the...

you know, concerning things about Sora and what we're going to see and already are seeing is people

using Sora to generate video, downloading it, and then posting it elsewhere?

Because, like, if you stay in the Sora app, which again, it's just like a TikTok clone.

So, everything on the app is like vertical videos that you can scroll endlessly, and they're all AI generated.

It's like if you're in that app, you know, it's fake

because it's like an AI app.

So, like, on that front, it's actually

slightly better than like my Instagram feed, where my Instagram feed is full of AI shit.

But like, which isn't disclaiming

stuff.

Yeah.

Whereas like everything on Sora is AI generated, but like Sora is so

good at generating AI video that you can just like generate the video, download it and post it elsewhere.

And like that's probably

advantageous for the people doing this because

the other platforms are monetized as we've like talked about endlessly.

Yeah, and we'll get to more about spreading these videos and sort of misleading people.

But as well as uploading your own face, you mentioned there's SpongeBob, and of course, the headline mentions criminal Pikachu's as well.

When you first open the app and you start scrolling, what are some of these examples of stuff you're seeing?

Because the article starts with basically a very long list to give readers an idea of what people are seeing.

Yeah, so

I got this app the day that it came out and the way that I got it is

I bought an invite code on eBay because I was not invited by OpenAI which we also covered to be clear because that's interesting it's own right yeah yeah

and it was full of just like copyrighted stuff and so like I think the first video I saw was SpongeBob you know saying like I'm on the Sora app oh my god and like talking to Patrick and it sounds like SpongeBob it sounds like Patrick sounds like squidward whatever Then I saw there's so much Pikachu.

There's like tons and tons and tons of Pikachu.

I actually saw a video of Sam Altman grilling a dead Pikachu on a charcoal grill and him going like and like cutting into Pikachu and being like, I'm going to get sued for this,

which I thought was actually pretty funny.

There's like tons and tons and tons, like Mickey Mouse,

you know, Bart Simpson, Peter Griffin from Family Guy, like any copyright character you could possibly imagine was on there

and people were doing all sorts of shit with it like you know there was crossover stuff there was a lot of people putting them into like minecraft uh there was like fortnite but

it has you know peter griffin shooting stewie or whatever um

and that was like the vast majority of the videos that i saw it was like a mix of that a mix of like sam altman videos and then like random people you know posting themselves just trying the app out but like the stuff that was going viral, that was being delivered to me by the algorithm, was primarily copyrighted content.

Yeah.

And you write in the piece, quote, with the release of Sora 2,

it is maddening to remember all of the completely insane copyright lawsuits I've written about over the years, some successful, some thrown out, some settled, in which powerful companies like Nintendo, Disney, and Viacom sued powerless people who were often their own fans for minor infractions or for use of copyrighted characters.

there would almost certainly be fair use.

That was a long quote, sorry.

But what do you mean by that?

Because you're seeing all of this wave, this flood of copyrighted material in this app.

Clearly, OpenAI has scraped these characters and this material from the web in some fashion.

And then you have companies like Nintendo who are usually crushing random ass fans for making stuff about their games.

What do you think about that disconnect?

Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a huge disconnect.

And with the caveat that we'll talk about in a second of what has happened over the last week.

But basically, like Nintendo is extremely litigious.

They go after people who pirate their games, which makes sense.

But then they also go after people who like mod their games or emulate their games.

I wrote about one time Pokemon company and Nintendo suing this fan who threw an unofficial Pokemon party at a game dev conference, like not even affiliated with the game dev conference.

It wasn't like it was at this big event.

It was just like at some satellite bar, and they sued him because they put a Pokemon on the poster of that tiny, tiny event.

And so then to see just like this anything goes extremely blatant copyright infringement by a company that's worth billions and billions of dollars and has all this funding is kind of insane to see like how far we've come.

We've talked about the copyright issues with AI before.

So we won't get into it too much here because a lot of it is like unsettled laws to whether this is fair use.

But

like it was only a year and a half ago or so that most of these big AI companies like wouldn't even say whether they were training on copyrighted content, even though it was obvious that they were.

And now it's like you can have a picture perfect,

you know, episode of The Simpsons with all of the voices synced up.

It's like, obviously, they were training on all of this.

And And so it's kind of insane.

And

to be clear, like, there have been a couple of high-profile lawsuits against AI companies.

Like, Disney is suing Midjourney.

But

you would think, like,

when you have like Mario, like when you have Sam Altman, like, killing Pikachu,

you'd think, like, hey, maybe they would be mad about this.

Yeah.

And there's still time, obviously, for like lawsuits to happen and stuff, but companies can opt out of their ip being used in the app and as far as i know companies have to do that on like a per character basis like disney on nintendo can't go and say take all of our stuff out please they have to go could you take out pikachu please this is what pikachu looks like and i mean i remember way back when pokemon was what 151 Pokemon how

how many is it now I mean I think it's up near a thousand if they're over a thousand yeah so Nintendo is gonna have to send a thousand letters and open a thousand different cases about Pokemon.

I know, I don't know how many people care about the latter series of Pokemon.

That's my bias showing.

But Disney's going to have to do the same for that.

And, you know, maybe

that will,

you know, please these companies.

But yeah, sure, a lawsuit could happen.

And with that said,

because now the app's out and companies have had a minute, a few days to, you know, opt out certain characters.

Have you seen any change on the app like oh actually i can't make spongebob nazi anymore have you noticed anything

yeah yeah so

actually yeah i didn't mention but like there's a there's there are videos of spongebob being a nazi that i saw like right after i opened the app and then like one thing you can do in sora is you can then tweak things that have already been published and so people were like now make it pikachu now make it goku now make it rick and morty now and so there was just like an endless scroll of like Nazi IP, like with swastikas in the background.

Like it was crazy.

It was crazy.

But anyways, over the last week, a lot of the characters have been opted out by the companies that own them.

And that is now one of the like main things that people on Sora are making videos about and talking about, where basically like Sora is no fun anymore because everything I try to do is a content violation and so a lot of the videos are about content violations um and getting like sam altman to be like

say things that are like you can't have fun on my app anymore which is like the app only came out six days ago and so

uh

i mean that that raises questions about whether this app will have like any sort of staying power whatsoever uh we've seen it time and time again like big fancy new social media app uh is released There's like an invite system, so it's hard to get on.

Club house, that sort of thing.

Yeah, it like seems really exclusive.

And then it's like, oh, we got an invite, like got to get on this app.

And then it's popular for a few days or a few weeks.

And then it kind of peters out.

And it's like, I don't know if this will have any sort of staying power.

Like, obviously, Chat GPT has, but not everything that OpenAI has made has been like some massive hit.

And so,

yeah, it's like a lot of the characters have been opted out and people are now like complaining about it.

And let me just say that the opt-out system is like a system that OpenAI devised.

It's like, that's not like a legal framework.

I mean, very, very easily like a company could be like, no, take down everything or we're going to sue you.

And I don't know how that would go, but it's worth saying that this is like an interesting new like paradigm that they're trying where it's like, we're going to put you in the app unless you specifically tell us you're not going to be in there.

That's not how copyright works it's literally the opposite of how it's supposed to work yeah um

and it i mean

i guess maybe to wrap it up before we go to the watermarking thing just with all of that ip now being removed by the copyright holders it almost just brings up the question of what was the point of this app in the like literally what is the point of this app like what do you think

well i mean i i think it's like ai generated video is very popular on the internet just because of the AI slop phenomenon and all that.

And it's like, this is the best, easiest slop maker.

I mean, I think that people will find ways to jailbreak it, for lack of a better term, like to get around the guardrail and things like that.

And then also, it's like most AI slop that we see on the internet doesn't have characters in it and stuff like that.

And so they've made like

the best, easiest AI slop generator that there is.

And I think that to the extent that there will be staying power for this, I think it will probably be from the slop manufacturers who are using the app to make stuff, but then are taking it off the app and putting it elsewhere to go viral in the ways that we've like talked about

before.

Yeah, so yeah, more like generic monster does XYZ or something.

Like it doesn't have to be

some

IP from Stranger Things or something.

It's just going to be more generic creations which don't violate copyright, probably, maybe.

I also, I'm really sorry if this is so dumb and this was like the whole in-joke the entire time, but I'm just sort of realizing that Sora from Kingdom Hearts, which is a video game which has all of this IP crossover from Disney with, you know, Goofy and all of that, and then OpenAI uses that name for its massive copyright infringement app.

I'm sorry, I'm only just putting two and two together.

But I mean, I don't think that's why it's called Sora, but that's a really good thing.

But But that's right, exactly.

Well, there's also Cameo exists too.

Like they're using the word Cameo for literally what Cameo is, which is like a

put a celebrity in something to make them say what you want them to say app.

Does Carameo not own that trademark?

Surely they have a trademark on that.

I'm actually going to look that up while,

Sam, I'm going to ask you about this

next story.

And the headline is, and Matthew, our regular contributor, wrote this, Sora 2 watermark

flood the web.

Basically, you know, every Sora 2 video comes with a watermark.

It's sort of like a little spinning icon that, as Jason says, you can be like, oh, that comes from this app, so it's going to be AI.

But as Matthew has reported, there's now this wave of watermark removers where you just upload the video and it takes it out automatically.

I'm just wondering what

you think of that, because of course, you've covered a ton of, you know, abusive

deep fake and AI videos as well, which don't present themselves as AI-generated.

They don't have a watermark very much deliberately.

What do you make of Sora trying to have a watermark and then it being defeated in 20 minutes or whatever it was?

I mean, it's like very predictable.

Like, you can take watermarks out of pretty much any like TikTok has watermarks where it's like the little TikTok logo bounces around.

Um, it's just not like watermarks in general to be a solution for AI-generated content.

It's like a good start, but it's relying on people to keep it in the video to like not

use something like this, exactly like this to take it out.

It's watermarks are just such a flimsy

indicator of AI content in general.

And it's also, you can put it, you can put a watermark on a real video.

Like you could edit a video to put a sore watermark on it and say, oh, that's not real.

There are types of watermarking that aren't, we're talking about like the little logo, right?

Like the thing that is on the video that you can see with your eyes.

There's types of watermarking that's like, it's more like thumbprinting or hashing where

it's not visible to the naked eye and it's much harder to remove.

You have to like edit the video to actually be able to see it.

Google has something like this for VO.

But

this particular type of watermark is like very predictable that people would try to take it off of Sora videos to make them seem like they're real videos.

And then they repost them to like reels and other platforms where, you know, it's like they're mixed in with real stuff.

Yeah, this whole story was very, it's like, yeah,

that's what people are going to do with this.

It sucks that this is like the

cottage industry that pops up every time.

So it's definitely worth

reporting on and noting that here it is again.

like always.

Yeah, and it was just done so quickly and it can be automated by tools that anybody can then use.

I'm looking at the Cameo trademark, and I'm not a copyright or a trademark lawyer.

I think Jason would probably know more about this, but you know, it says in its goods and services section: downloadable software used to create personalized video messages for entertainment, instructional, inspirational, or greeting purposes featuring athletes, actors, entertainers, influencers, etc., etc.

I know, sounds like you could do that on Sora.

So, I guess we'll see.

I know, but then there's the specific style of the cameo logo, whatever.

Um, yeah, I'm pretty sure there's going to be at least one lawsuit after this app in some sort of um direction.

Um, all right, let's leave that there.

When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about the app Ice Block and Red Dot, which you know are both for reporting sightings for ICE officials, and how Apple and Google have removed those.

Uh, we'll be right back after

this.

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All right, and we are back.

Jason, do you want to take take a look at this story?

So, this is a story that you wrote.

You've actually written a handful of articles about this and this phenomenon.

The title is Ice Block Owner After Apple Removes App.

Quote, we are determined to fight this.

I guess let's just start.

Like, I mean, what is the Ice Block app?

Yeah, so IceBlock is an app that was only available on Apple devices, and you downloaded it, and you could anonymously report sightings of ICE officials in your local proximity.

So it would have access to your location data.

They say they treat this, you know, in a very privacy-centric way.

And a security researcher who, you know, looked into the app largely corroborated that as well.

You know, didn't find anything sketchy going on with the location data.

But the idea is that, oh, I can turn that on.

And then if I see an ICE official in this location or a raid going on, or somebody, you know, not having their due process rights or whatever,

I can report it on the app.

And that will then alert people, say, in that neighborhood, or maybe the next neighborhood over, depending on how close, obviously, the activity is.

And this is one of several apps like this, and we'll talk about another one in a minute.

But it really rose to prominence in June when CNN reported on the ICE Block app,

and

the Trump administration was very, very mad about it to the point where they even floated these ideas that we're going to try to find a way to charge CNN for covering and allegedly promoting this app.

Obviously, that's ridiculous, and I don't think we'd have any legal basis, but you know, sort of who knows

in this day and age.

But that's how it grew and grew and grew to the point where, you know, it became pretty popular.

And when people think of ice spotting apps, they typically think of ice block just because it's sort of the most well-known at this point.

Yeah,

but this app has been pretty widely used by activists, by people in their neighborhoods, et cetera, to essentially tell people where raids are happening.

Like, I,

again, live in LA and during the, I mean, they're still, it's still happening.

It's still happening like everywhere, especially in Chicago, especially in LA, happening in Portland, but it's happening all over the country.

It's like my neighbors were like, download the ice block app.

Like, you'll walk around, you'll see flyers

that a lot of like coffee shops will put on their doors and things like that, which is like what to do in case there's an ice raid, like how to support the people who are being

accosted and detained and things like that, grabbed off the street.

And a lot of them are like, download the ice block app to see, to like report this.

So that's like very notable, I would say.

So anyways, it gets the attention of the Trump administration because CNN reports on it.

And then

Apple takes it down last week.

What is like Apple's reasoning for taking it down?

Yeah.

So

I spoke to the developer.

of Iceblock and they shared the email they got from Apple after the app was removed and they point to a couple of parts of their terms of use of you know their app store policies or whatever.

The first one is 1.1 objectionable content, and then you know, in app should include what they call as offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste, or just plain creepy.

And then they include some examples

and they point to defamatory, discriminatory, mean-spirited, commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, ethnic origin, or other targeted groups.

I emphasize that because that's the only one I could possibly in a million years see this app

kind of at a stretch touching.

But that is what Apple says.

And crucially, this came after

there was a shooting at an ICE facility, I think, a few weeks ago at this point, where a shooter

shot into a van near the facility and authorities claim that the target was ICE officials probably based on messages written allegedly written on the bullet casings unfortunately you know

someone died in that event it was a detainee in the van and others were seriously injured but that sort of brings up ICE block again in front of the Trump administration.

And it seemed, well, I mean, it is clear that pressure from the Trump DOJ and Pam Bondi's DOJ directly led to Apple removing this.

I mean, Pam Bondi went to Fox herself, again, that's the Attorney General, and said, you know, we don't want this.

Basically, I'm paraphrasing slightly, you can see the full quote in the article, but it was direct pressure from the DOJ leading to this.

And I think you found that particularly wild, Jason.

Well, I saw a couple of things.

One, like

during COVID, the Biden administration sent some like relatively innocuous like emails to Facebook and Twitter being like, hey, can you take down this disinformation about vaccines and things like that?

And

they did.

And this became the basis of Elon Musk's the Twitter files, which after he bought the app, like released all of this internal Twitter stuff that was like evidence of a massive government attack on free speech because of pressure from the Biden administration on the social media companies to take down content it didn't like like that and so basically like this

has underpinned

like a gigantic right-wing grievance for years at this point.

Like this these couple of emails have sustained, like, frankly, a years-long outrage cycle.

And careers are built on it, basically.

Grifting careers, yeah.

Yeah, grifting careers are built on it.

Like, lots of people have been fired, like, you know,

like Elon Musk came in and fired everyone at Twitter and like anyone who had anything to do with anything involving that.

I don't know if there's been like threats to prosecute, like, the Biden officials who sent those emails, but like it's a big fucking deal, like in right-wing circles for a very long time.

Now, this is like literally the exact same thing, arguably even worse, because,

like, for a variety of reasons, because not, they're not saying, like, hey, take down a couple posts.

They're saying, hey, delete this app or else, essentially.

I mean,

I think that if the DOJ comes to you and says, like, delete this app, the or else is implied, I would imagine, especially like with this administration, and especially when you have like Tim Cook going to the White House, giving like a glass ornament to the president, like things like this.

Um, and so you have this happening, and it's like,

I don't know how many people use this app, like millions, hundreds of thousands.

I don't know.

It's a pretty popular app.

It was like top of the app store for a little while, um, or near the top.

Um,

like that, that's that's not good.

And it's definitely,

I don't know, it's like First Amendment violation adjacent at

the very least.

And so, you know, the creator of this app says that he's going to push back against it.

I think let's talk about the Google situation and then we can talk about some of the reasoning for this and the

terms of service and things like that.

So

the second story is called Google Calls ICE Agents a Vulnerable Group, Removes ICE Spotting App Red Dot.

So basically, IceBlock was never on Android, right?

It was never on Android because the developer says they couldn't do the privacy protecting things they like to do on Android.

Some people disagree with that, but that's a stated reason.

Yeah.

Okay.

So there's another app called Red Dot,

and it also gets deleted from the Google Play Store.

What happened in this case?

And this happened immediately after the Ice Block situation.

Yeah, as far as I can tell, this wasn't simultaneous to ice block.

I think it happened afterwards.

Of course, if anybody has more information on that, you know, especially from Google's decision, let me know, but that's sort of my understanding at the moment.

Yeah, Red Dot was a very, very similar app.

I mean, at the end of the day, all of these apps are going to be pretty similar, right?

All you're doing is reporting a location saying there are ice people there.

Red Dot did much the same thing.

Both Apple and Google removed this app.

You can't get this app on the Apple App Store.

Apple did tell me it removed multiple apps when it removed IceBlock, but the company stopped responding when I asked, well, was it Red Dot?

Because I found that the day after.

I then ping Google because that's even more interesting because it signals that, oh, there's like a broader crackdown of these ice spotting apps.

And it isn't just limited to Apple, right?

Um, so I reach out to Google, and I'm gonna try and summarize.

I'm gonna read basically what we put in the article because I'm sure for reasons that Jason will bring up, it was a bit of a weird response.

Um,

first of all, Google said it didn't get any outreach from the DOJ, so like I asked that explicitly: like, did the DOJ tell you to take this down?

They said no.

Um, they didn't talk about the ICE facility shooting specifically, but in this very roundabout way, Google said it removed apps that share the location of what Google described as a vulnerable group after a recent violent act against them connected to this sort of app, which is like, wow, that's a lot of words to say that you removed ICE spotting apps after the shooting at an ICE facility.

And most importantly, that you consider ICE officials a vulnerable group.

Jason, when I initially filed it, I don't think we changed the copy.

Well, no, we did later on a little bit, but the headline crucially was not stressing the vulnerable groups part.

You pulled that in.

You pulled that out quite rightly.

Why did that stand out to you?

Calling ICE officials a vulnerable group is an obvious question.

Yeah, so we used to report a lot on terms of service and content moderation on social media platforms, specifically like after the 2016 election, where there was like, and during like Black Lives Matter and like the Me Too movement and things like this, there was like a real effort from social media companies to devise rules that would protect,

you know, quote unquote vulnerable groups.

And vulnerable groups is defined differently by every social media company, but like broadly,

it means

ethnic minorities, gender minorities, religious minorities, people who are traditionally discriminated against or the subject of hate speech.

So, trans people, black people,

you know, in specific countries, it's like religious minorities that are subject to like hate speech and genocide and things like that.

Like, there are so many examples of just like really awful things happening on social media,

you know, like Facebook being credibly accused of facilitating a genocide in Myanmar, things like this.

And so, they write rules in response to these like really awful real world situations.

And the catch-all term that social media companies use is vulnerable groups.

And like

in no world

was like police officers, law enforcement like a vulnerable group.

when these rules were written.

And I think to call them a vulnerable group now is like insane.

And it's also,

but it also mirrors like what the Trump administration has been saying, where they say over and over and over again that these ICE agents are risking their lives, that they're trying to keep America safe, that they're being targeted, that they're being doxxed, that they're being harassed, which has like been the underpinning for why

they're not including ICE agents' names on like indictments in court and things like that, affidavits, which is very rare.

And masking, of course, yeah.

Yeah, masking, like refusing to say their badge number, refusing to identify themselves, which is why you have like sometimes what seem to be like plain clothes officers like abducting people off the streets because they're like, oh, well, we're being targeted, so we can't identify ourselves.

And so this is now Google like parroting, parroting that language and also using

these guard these like

guidelines that they wrote years ago and retrofitting them to like come up with a pretext to ban this app.

And Apple didn't say the exact same thing, but it was somewhat similar where it was like, you know, you already said what the reasoning was.

Targeted groups, yeah.

Yeah, and it's like, okay,

I don't know, like, not good, not good.

I don't know what to say other than it's like, we're now in a world where like trans people are not protected on the internet.

Like,

you know, actually targeted groups are not protected on the internet, but police officers are.

I wonder if Google considers people like the woman who was shot seven times by an ICE official a few days ago in a hotly disputed event in Chicago, right?

I wonder if they consider that person

part of a vulnerable group as well.

Yeah, it is very much co-opting the language and the methodology and the thinking from a content moderation approach from a different time.

Like this, this doesn't, well, they're trying to apply it here in a time that is radically different to, you know, 2016 or even 2020 or anything like that, really.

I did get a statement from Fire App, which is another similar app.

And I should say another one was removed.

I actually can't remember the name of it right now because there's so many of these, weirdly, but another one got removed.

FireApp reached out to me and they're much more, I mean, they're closer to like citizen.

They're sort of broader, but when I checked the FireApp website, and interestingly, it's a website as well.

You can view it.

You can't report on there yet.

But of course, a website's harder to block than an app, right?

I went on there and they sent me an email.

And they said that it's concerning to see platforms similar to ours, a citizen-style app, removed despite their clear compliance with legal standards.

This raises serious questions about fairness and transparency.

This action seems to be based more so on fear of retaliation and retribution from the Trump administration and in line of kissing the metaphorical ring, something we unfortunately have seen many top executives do in order to placate Trump on their side.

I mean, I think that puts it pretty well.

How about we leave that there?

I'm definitely going to keep an eye on all of these ICE spotting apps being removed.

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Soon I'll start reading through the Spotify ones.

I've just been reading the Apple ones out.

I'll go through those as well.

Mrs.

Bean, 404 Media.

We'll see you again next week.

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