Why did the Metropolitan Police attend a UCL bar to kick out our group of conservative-minded students over our views on transgenderism, asks Samiksha Bhattacharjee.

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Starmer wants to ban children from social media. Jack Watson, 17, argues the Government is making a serious mistake – in his experience, the benefits of social media outweigh the costs.

The post As a 17 Year-Old Who Has Spent my Entire Life on Social Media, I Think the Benefits Outweigh the Costs appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

The Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM), a state-controlled pollster, has reportedly stopped publishing President Vladimir Putin's "open" trust rating after it fell to its lowest level since the start of the full-scale war, the Moscow Times reported on June 8.

A University of Oxford professor has cancelled a series of lectures discussing gender law after pro-trans activists interrupted the first two talks and hurled abuse at him.

The post Oxford University Professor Forced to Cancel Lectures After Pro-Trans Activists Call Him a “Bigot” and “Transphobic” appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

In 2016, when Peter Thiel killed Gawker, he insisted that he wasn’t attacking journalism writ large. 

On the contrary, he told the New York Times, he’d spent $10 million secretly backing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the news outlet because: “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest… if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.” 

10 years later with the aid of an “AI tribunal,” a team of intelligence and law enforcement veterans, and a political climate vastly more hostile to press freedom, he is trying to do exactly that, bypassing the courts, short-circuiting the first amendment, and making it much, much cheaper to indulge in the quasi legal harassment of journalists.

Objection.ai is a new startup funded by Thiel, and cofounded by Aron D’Souza, who worked closely with him on the Gawker case. It promises “a fast affordable way to challenge statements in the media.” Anyone can file an objection, which will trigger an investigation by a team hired, the company says, from the CIA, FBI, and British intelligence agencies. Targeted outlets and reporters will have an opportunity to respond, and the results will be fed to an AI model, which will render a verdict. The complainant, and the target, are asked to agree to binding arbitration, with an unspecified range of potential consequences. Financial details are vague, but the company has said the process will cost around $2,000 — far less than the retainer of a crisis communications expert.

An initial slate of cases includes objections against the New York Times, for reporting on how Thiel’s fellow traveller David Sacks, former PayPal chief operating officer and Donald Trump’s former “AI and Crypto Czar,” uses his White House position to benefit Silicon Valley connections; The Wall Street Journal for its revelations about the doodle contributed by Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book (a case recently dismissed by a federal judge); and British reporter Hannah Broughton for an aggregated story in the UK tabloid the Mirror about allegations that Amazon workers were told to continue working while a colleague lay dead on the warehouse floor. A smattering of social media provocateurs (Candace Owens) and politicians (Bernie Sanders) round out the roster, but the aggregate effect is indisputable: Thiel’s animus was about journalism all along. Indeed, the Objection.ai team couldn't be clearer about that.

“Gawker was not unique,” writes D’Souza on the company’s website. “It was simply the first large media company to be tested against reality in the age of clicks, outrage, and algorithmic amplification. Since then, the same structural failure has spread everywhere.”

“Peter Thiel and I … did not just fight Gawker,” he goes on. “ — We demonstrated that facts still mattered if someone was willing to enforce them.”

This is worse than revisionism. D’Souza is banking on everyone having forgotten that the Hulk Hogan case had nothing to do with “reality.” It was undisputed that the sex tape published by Gawker was real. The original suit, which failed, was for copyright infringement and the ultimate $140 million award that bankrupted the company was for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional harm. 

This foundational lie is important, because it is a warning against the temptation to engage Objection.ai on the merits. It would be easy enough to conduct a good faith debate to take at face value D’Souza’s argument that tech platforms and algorithms amplify false claims to millions, that courts are expensive and slow, media ombuds toothless, and fact-checkers partisan. And it would not be hard to demonstrate that he is harnessing widely shared concerns about a disordered information environment to mobilize support for an AI powered justice system controlled by a hyperpartisan private company with a track record of attacking the very institutions that are holding the line on consensus reality.

It would also be a mistake. There is nothing good faith about this effort. Rather, it is classic Thiel: an attempt to hack the principles of accountability, and turn them against journalism. Leave it to his less sophisticated Silicon Valley peers to rail against the media, create in house news outlets or buy them. The PayPal co-founder is going for the heart of the system, and financing infrastructure that will enable anyone who can afford a used Honda Civic to launch a harassment campaign, cloaked in the language of legitimate investigation. James O’Keefe, but with the judicial rather than journalistic process as its governing metaphor.

It will be tempting, too, to question the likely financial sustainability of Objection. That will be the least of its founders' concerns. The for-profit structure supports a story about the company’s purpose. It may work, or not, but its goals are nonfinancial. We reached out to Thiel for comment on Objection.ai before publication and will update this article as soon as he responds.

Providing funding, alongside Thiel, is Balaji Srinivasan, the investor and author of “The Network State,” a book about social networks with “a sense of national consciousness” replacing the nation state. He once outlined an early version of the Objection.ai model in an email to the far right theorist Curtis Yarvin about dealing with critical coverage. "If things get hot,” he suggested “it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to *their* advertisers/friends/contacts."

These men understand the limits of the Gawker verdict’s impact. It bankrupted the company, a personal victory for Thiel, but perhaps the least important outcome of the case. At a more systemic level, it struck fear into the hearts of media insurers and newsroom counsel, focusing attention on third party litigation finance as potential threat. 

If people with limitless resources could sponsor litigation against news organizations they disliked, constitutional protections would be no match for the sheer cost and complexity of defense.

Now, they’ve found an AI-assisted way to supercharge those effects. 

The Gawker case routed around the First Amendment by relying on a privacy claim. Objection.ai does so by building a hallucination of the legal process. Any journalist foolish enough to agree to binding arbitration by the company probably deserves what they get, but that will be a vanishingly small minority. For those who don’t, a phone call, or a knock on the door from a former FBI agent, or defense intelligence operative, will be chilling, and an ex-parte verdict rendered by Thiel’s custom-tuned AI will act as a cudgel on social media and via traditional PR. Journalists will be assigned a “trust score” to act as an additional goad.

In an environment of less peril for press freedom, it might be easy to laugh off Objection.ai as the confection of a thin-skinned millenarian. Right now, with the crony capture of broadcast news far advanced, swathes of the tech community openly hostile to journalism, and the White House onside, it would be wise to take it seriously. That starts with seeing it for what it is, and refusing to engage with a process which, unlike the real courts, Peter Thiel has no legal power to compel. 

The post Peter Thiel is building a parallel justice system — Powered by AI appeared first on Coda Story.

On the night of January 16, 2024, Egana Djabbarova was awoken by her wife and told that she needed to leave the country immediately. Djabbarova, her wife said, had been denounced by pro-war activists and framed as an enemy of the country. She had recently published her novel, “My Dreadful Body,” with a small, indie press that had been praised by mainstream critics, unexpectedly propelling her into the public eye. One of the book's central themes is surveillance: growing up in a community with strict behavioural codes, the protagonist's every move is under scrutiny.

In a dark echo of her work, Djabbarova was now under online surveillance herself. “I was just the perfect enemy,” she tells me, “because I’m queer, I’m not Slavic, I worked on decolonial and feminist projects… So boom, it happened.”

She is speaking to me from Hamburg, where she now lives. Djabbarova is part of the so-called fifth wave of writers exiled from Russia, alongside Maria Stepanova, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Maxim Osipov to name a few. Her upbeat tone during our call gives little indication of the arduous journey she has endured since fleeing Russia. Upon receiving a humanitarian visa from Germany, she spent months in a refugee camp. She lived, she says, “in a container house, literally a shipping container. You feel like you're not a subject, not a human being.” 

More permanent accommodation has provided a degree of safety and stability, but a sense of precariousness lingers. She describes her position as an exile as “strange” — on the one hand she has been welcomed into Germany’s cultural elite in winning the Hamburger Literaturpreis; on the other, she feels like a “ghost,” unable to express herself in German and often bewildered by the unfamiliarity of everyday tasks in a new country, and in a new city which, she tells me jokingly, is quaint and polite like the well-behaved boy next door. 

But there’s a deeper, historical layer to Djabbarova’s story of exile. Her father was a refugee from the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, while her mother was forced out of her family home. “Homelessness and exile — this is my heritage,” she says. Being othered became a common theme of Djabbarova’s childhood, as a child of Azeri parents living in Yekaterinburg. “In Russia you are constantly reminded that you're not Russian,” she says. “Then during the summer you visit your relatives in Azerbaijan and they laugh because you cannot speak Azerbaijani properly.”

This sense of double estrangement is mirrored in “My Dreadful Body” (published in Russian in 2023 and recently translated into English by Lisa Hayden). At only a touch over 100 pages, it is a slim but powerful account of the pressures on one woman growing up among the strict codes of an Azerbaijani family living in Russia. A sense of surveillance and conditional belonging defines the narrator’s upbringing: “In the world where I grew up,” she writes, “gazes penetrated every little corner. The evil eye, the neighbors’ eyes, the relatives’ eyes, the random pedestrian’s eyes, the unscrupulous men’s eyes, the women’s unhappy eyes. Life in the community was reminiscent of a reality show with constant video surveillance: no action, word, or undertaking went unnoticed.”

The story is based on Djabbarova’s own life. “Maybe 70-80% of this story is absolutely true”, she confirms. The narrator is named Egana, she grows up in an Azerbaijani family in Russia, too Russian for the family, not Russian enough for her friends at school. She also, like Djabbarova, suffers from a debilitating autoimmune disorder that is eventually diagnosed as dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions. During one episode, she describes her body as resembling “willow branches gone mad from a strong wind” — a potent image of struggle against external forces. Djabbarova describes the book as a way to reclaim her body through language. “I was trying to tell this story in a poetic way. I wanted to change my body into poetry.” 

Each chapter of “My Dreadful Body” begins with a different body part (“Eyebrows,” “Eyes,” “Hair” and so on), like the poetic blazons spun by Renaissance poets. Where those poems encouraged an idealized, sensationalized reading of each body part, Djabbarova’s chapters are more sober explorations of the physical limits — and personal and cultural stories — these body parts contain. 

In one of many poignant scenes, the narrator’s head is shaved in preparation for a procedure. She cries on seeing her “shorn scalp,” but the sadness is not aesthetic, it’s ancestral; the act marks a symbolic rupture with her lineage. “My past,” she writes, “the past of all the women in my family, the memory of my ancestors, the history of a single body — all that now lay on the cold floor.” After this scene, her grandmother’s dictum that only long hair was considered beautiful, rings even more sharply. 

Illness then emerges as another form of exile, from one’s sense of self, from what’s perceived as “normal” in society, from the culture and community one belongs to. “They do not see you as a subject, as a human being, and they do not recognize your existence… I realized if I wanted to be seen as a subject, I needed to do it myself.” Djabbarova is talking about the plight to be believed about her symptoms here, but she could easily be talking about the often dehumanizing experience of exile. In both instances there is something fundamental under question, or as Djabbarova puts it, “You’re trying to prove that you have the right of being. You’re trying not to be erased.” 

We often talk about exile in the context of loss, but how might exile liberate? Paradoxically, Djabbarova tells me, her diagnosis became a form of liberation. “I always felt I had so many expectations on me as a girl, as a woman, so when I was finally diagnosed it was a liberation because my parents realized I would never be this type of girl.” Exile breeds a particular creative liberation, too, evidenced by the fact Djabbrova wrote the novel from Taiwan where she was briefly teaching Russian. “Here I had enough distance from my own life and my own experience,” she says. “Maybe it’s easier to write about your story being on an island in the Pacific Ocean.”

Writing is arguably the real heroine of Djabbarova's novel. For the narrator Egana, it is a place free from surveillance and a source of protection, “like an invisible amulet.” Poetry, she told me “was the only safe space for me because nobody was asking anything of me. It's the only place where I don't feel judged. I don’t feel ashamed. I don’t feel questioned.”

The chapter “Hands” opens: “The most important parts of a woman’s body were her hands: they prepared food, rocked children, did laundry, ironed men’s shirts, sewed clothes, swept, washed the floor, and dusted.… Any woman in our family knew that her hands were not given to her for writing.” To use her hands, then, to write becomes both a symbolic and quite literal form of resistance against such gendered codes.

Notably, Djabbarova is not alone in invoking the body as a space to explore the upheavals of exile. In Maria Stepanova’s autofictional work “The Disappearing Act” — recently translated into English by Sasha Dugdale — the narrator attempts to purge herself by volunteering to be cut in half as part of a circus trick. Djabbarova’s approach to reclaim identity and agency through the body is less literal, and more personal, but through this specificity she has landed somewhere indisputably universal. 

“I realized the only way I can write this novel is through my body,” she says. “Because the only way I can rehabilitate my being, my agency, my subjectivity is through my body. And that's why I wanted every reader to feel my body… It's really important for all of us not to forget that this right of being is basic. It's not given. It's something you have from birth." 

At the end of our conversation, Djabbarova (who has been speaking in English) struggles to recall a word and jokes that learning German is slowly pushing her English out. “Certain words I only remember in German!” she laughs. Is this the beginnings of a kind of homemaking for Djabbarova, a sign that the seeds she has scattered in her new country are taking root? Like her protagonist, who finds solace and safety in words, it seems that Djabbarova’s most trusted tool for survival, for managing the condition of exile, is language. 

The post Exiled at Midnight appeared first on Coda Story.

Julia E, an 18-year-old influencer from Germany, was hanging out with her family on the Palm Jumeirah beach when she heard a blast and saw a fireball erupt into the sky. She knew tension was mounting following the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran the previous day, but she didn’t imagine Dubai would be on the frontline. “I was a little scared,” she says. “Usually you just read about it in the newspapers, you see it online, but when you see it in front of you, it’s a different feeling — like your heart just drops.”

The fear was not an emotion she expressed on Instagram. Julia’s family moved to Dubai from Germany in 2024, tempted by the business potential of an emirate that aggressively marketed itself as the influencer capital of the world — a digital utopia carved out of the desert, with its gleaming skyscrapers and Insta-ready waterfronts. Dubai’s state-backed Creator HQ offers content creators long-term residencies, legal support, networking opportunities, training and an environment geared towards digital entrepreneurship. Influencers need a permit to legally operate in Dubai but taxes are negligible — 5% VAT on taxable income from clients in the UAE over AED 375,000 (about $102,000), and a flat 9% corporate tax on income exceeding AED 1,000,000 (about $272,000). It has attracted over 50,000 content creators to Dubai, which has a population of about 4 million.

With 60,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram, Julia is looking to build her own marketing company in Dubai. In an effort, she says, to comfort her younger brother, she recorded a video shortly after witnessing the explosion. It showed Julia, a palm tree and the glittering night skyline behind her, with the caption: “You live in Dubai, aren’t you scared?” The video cuts to a montage of Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and other Emirati sheikhs: “No, because I know who protects us.” The short video is set to an AI-generated rendition of the Belgian singer Stromae’s ‘Papaoutai’, a song that laments the loss of a father.

According to Julia, she was the first content creator to post an ‘Are you safe?’-style video, a now viral trend across the Gulf as influencers counter the narrative of a region in turmoil. 

“I decided to make that video,” she says, “because I did feel safe. And I wanted to spread some positivity and my perspective that we are still being protected and we still have someone behind us here.” As Iranian drones hit the Gulf, including luxury tourist hotels destinations like Fairmont, The Palm hotel and the Burj Al Arab hotel, there was a wave of schadenfreude online. Some users outside Dubai could not contain their glee that the city’s glossy surface, its influencer-curated image of sunkissed luxury, had been ripped apart. The distress of those who spend their working hours flaunting luxury and throwing shade at the cities they come from, were, it has to be admitted, amusing to many.

But Dubai’s influencers doubled down, as the war spiralled and airports shut down, stressing the city’s safety, walking around in crowded public spaces, praising “the best air defense systems” and the men behind it: a reaction so seemingly choreographed that people questioned whether it was part of a government PR campaign. 

On March 3, the UAE’s president and crown prince were conspicuously filmed on a stroll through a Dubai mall, reassuring bewildered shoppers. It was eerily reminiscent of Volodymyr Zelensky’s “The President is here” video from four years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Vogue Arabia, headquartered in the UAE, praised Gulf leaders and wrote about the influencer campaigns and the people’s “unwavering faith in their nation’s leadership and its steadfast commitment to protecting those who call it home.” 

As inviting as Dubai is to influencers, they must acquire advertiser permits that can cost up to $4,000 and are told to respect the state and avoid circulating rumors and unverified information or any content that can harm the UAE’s foreign relations or “offend or compromise national unity or social cohesion.” In the wake of Iran’s strikes, the UAE’s Public Prosecution announced that "anyone who shares or republishes content from unknown sources may face legal accountability under the country’s applicable laws, even if they are not the original creator of the content.”

There is a sense of vulnerability among Dubai’s influencers, says Zoe Hurley, associate professor of media at the American University of Sharjah and author of the 2023 book ‘Social Media Influencing in the City of Likes: Dubai and the Postdigital Condition’. “They haven't necessarily been trained professionally. They don't have institutional guardrails protecting them, or any formal buffer zones that might have protected people who are putting themselves out there.” she said. Hurley made a distinction between “influencers who are here on holiday who don't live here and who are followed by, say, people in the UK” and homegrown ones, representing diasporas in Dubai — from South Asia, the Levant and Europe — “who people are turning to because they're the thought leaders in their communities.”

None of the influencers we contacted in Dubai or across the Gulf confirmed ever being prompted or paid to post positive content. The German NTV network, however, reported concerns voiced by German influencers: "I don't know what I'm allowed to say and what I'm not allowed to say," one posted, "We're not allowed to post anything!” said another. These stories and reels have since been deleted.

Julia made another video, responding to the accusations that influencers were essentially providing a PR service for Dubai. “I will tell you exactly how much I got paid,” she says. “Dubai pays me in business… in safety… in connections… with weather.” She adds that, unlike in Dubai, she would never venture outside alone in her native Germany after 8 at night.

This point about Dubai’s safety — leaving things in the car without being scared to be robbed, or walking alone at night — is echoed widely among European expatriates in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia who compare it to the relative anxiety they feel in Europe. Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov recently made the same point: “Unfortunately, I had to leave Dubai for Europe a week ago — so I’m not only missing the free fireworks from Iran, but also exposing myself to greater risk. Given Europe’s crime rates, Dubai is statistically safer even with missiles flying.” Elon Musk shared the sentiment, writing that “No country is perfect, but Dubai and UAE broadly are objectively safer and better run than many areas of Europe.” Notorius influencer and ‘manosphere’ icon, Andrew Tate, still facing human trafficking and rape charges in Romania, posted a video of himself dancing on a yacht “as bombs fall.” His brother Tristan Tate chimed in, comparing air attacks in Dubai to stabbings in London. 

What these influencers don’t discuss is Dubai’s underbelly, an invisible city occupied by an underpaid migrant workforce, their treatment explained away on the grounds that they make more money in Dubai than they would in the poor countries in South Asia and Africa that they come from. While the influencers enjoy government-sponsored benefits and status, these other migrant workers remain bound under the kafala (sponsorship) system that binds their residency status to their employer. Despite reforms, under the system their status remains uncertain, their earnings precarious, and imprisonment or fines for relatively minor offences is common. There are no golden visas for laborers and maids, never mind darker reports about human trafficking and sexual and physical abuse. 

London-based barrister Caoilfhionn Gallagher described the UAE’s exploitation of migrant workers as a “grubby reality, with rampant human rights abuses.” She said she had “acted for people prosecuted and jailed in the UAE for daring to work with human rights organisations or criticise the authorities,” referring to the mass trial in 2024, when 43 people, among them human rights activists, had been “subjected to enforced disappearance, solitary confinement and incommunicado detention.” 

The contrast between the city that influencers show their followers and the city built on the abuse of migrant labor is one that governments across the Gulf want to bury. The UAE’s 2031 vision sees creative industries contributing up to 5% of the country’s GDP. 

For decades now, the UAE has been trying to diversify its economy, to pivot away from its reliance on hydrocarbons. It is betting on the digital economy and tourism to be the cornerstones of economic growth. 

But for all the bravado on display, rich people and Western influencers are fleeing the Gulf, as war with Iran continues. Influencers unable or unwilling to leave, must keep grinding. Narcissus could not stop staring at his reflection even as he was dying. Will Dubai’s influencers be allowed to look away from their reflections in the city’s famous mirrored skyscrapers?

The post The influencer bubble: Can content creators continue to airbrush the Gulf? appeared first on Coda Story.

Google held at least 34 meetings with top German government officials – including the Chancellor – to discuss suppressing "hate speech" and "disinformation" online, reveals John Rosenthal.

The post Google Met Top German Government Officials Dozens of Times to Discuss Online “Hate Speech” and “Disinformation” appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

by Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net At the United Nations Committee on Information’s 47th session, now in progress through May 9, delegates delivered impassioned speeches condemning the spread of false information online. But while much of the discussion focused on the dangers of disinformation, a growing undercurrent of concern emerged over the potential use of these efforts as a pretext for censorship and control over speech. The Israeli delegation described the spread of online falsehoods and incitement as not merely a technical hurdle but a “moral obligation” to confront, stating that “the fight against disinformation is not only a […]

by Kit Knightly | Off-Guardian Last week, alternative video-sharing platform BitChute announced they would no longer allow UK-based users to view content on their site. The opening of their official statement makes the reason quite clear [you can read the whole thing here]: After careful review and ongoing evaluation of the regulatory landscape in the United Kingdom, we regret to inform you that BitChute will be discontinuing its video sharing service for UK residents. The introduction of the UK Online Safety Act of 2023 has brought about significant changes in the regulatory framework governing online content and community interactions. Notably, […]

by James Bovard | Mises Wire On March 25, six masked federal agents seized a Turkish graduate student on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk—who was wearing a hajib—is a Fulbright scholar working on a doctorate at Tufts University. She was abducted and vanished into the maw of the federal prison system. The Trump administration ignored a federal court order and took Ozturk from Massachusetts to Louisiana federal detention facilities. But the Trump administration knew Ozturk had criticized the government of Israel a year earlier, enough to seal her doom according to the latest iron-fisted political correctness dictates. She […]