In now unsealed court documents reviewed by Forbes, Google was ordered to hand over the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and user activity of Youtube accounts and IP addresses that watched select YouTube videos, part of a larger criminal investigation by federal investigators.

The videos were sent by undercover police to a suspected cryptocurrency launderer under the username "elonmuskwhm." In conversations with the bitcoin trader, investigators sent links to public YouTube tutorials on mapping via drones and augmented reality software, Forbes details. The videos were watched more than 30,000 times, presumably by thousands of users unrelated to the case.

YouTube's parent company Google was ordered by federal investigators to quietly hand over all such viewer data for the period of Jan. 1 to Jan. 8, 2023, but Forbes couldn't confirm if Google had complied.

The mandated data retrieval is worrisome in itself, according to privacy experts. Federal investigators argued the request was legally justified as the data "would be relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, including by providing identification information about the perpetrators," citing justification used by other police forces around the country. In a case out of New Hampshire, police requested similar data during the investigation of bomb threats that were being streamed live to YouTube — the order specifically requested viewership information at select time stamps during the live streams.

"Photography has long served to trivialize the atrocities of war," writes anthropologist Sophia Goodfriend, and not just in Israel and Gaza but everywhere now that smartphones are commonplace on the battlefield. (Be advised: There are images of violence in this article.)

Tracing 75 years of Israeli war photography, an anthropologist explains how images that reframe disproportionate violence as proof of victory have intensified in the war on Gaza that erupted in 2023.

Throughout the genocide, IDF soldiers have looted the homes and belongings of Palestinians. There are videos online of soldiers rummaging through boxes of clothing and jewelry in destroyed homes. In a Facebook group, an Israeli woman posted a photo of a plastic bag full of makeup, with a caption asking what she should do with the “gifts from Gaza” that her husband, an IDF soldier, brought back for her.

Eyeshadow palettes and underwear: these objects have intimate relationships with their wearers, and that’s what makes it insidiously violative to loot as a “gift” or “trophy.” This perverse practice of stealing Palestinian women’s personal objects—objects that touch a skin, a body—and treating them as “souvenirs” of conquest to gift to their wives is a form of sexual violence. The production and circulation of these images among the Israeli military is a tactic to perpetuate violence against Palestinian bodies, beyond and without physical contact.

Russia has replaced Wikipedia with a state-sponsored encyclopedia that is a clone of the original Russian Wikipedia but which conveniently has been edited to omit things that could cast the Russian government in poor light. Real Russian Wikipedia editors used to refer to the real Wikipedia as Ruwiki; the new one is called Ruviki, has “ruwiki” in its url, and has copied all Russian-language Wikipedia articles and strictly edited them to comply with Russian laws.

The new articles exclude mentions of “foreign agents,” the Russian government’s designation for any person or entity which expresses opinions about the government and is supported, financially or otherwise, by an outside nation. Prominent “foreign agents” have included a foundation created by Alexei Navalny, a famed Russian opposition leader who died in prison in February, and Memorial, an organization dedicated to preserving the memory of Soviet terror victims, which was liquidated in 2022. The news was first reported by Novaya Gazeta, an independent Russian news outlet that relocated to Latvia after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. It was also picked up by Signpost, a publication that follows Wikimedia goings-on.

Both Ruviki articles about these agents include disclaimers about their status as foreign agents. Navalny’s article states he is a “video blogger” known for “involvement in extremist activity or terrorism.” It is worth mentioning that his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, firmly believes he was killed.

Across the world, mass protests used to offer a degree of safety in numbers. But in the last decade, the spread of facial recognition technology has meant a lone face in a crowd is no longer anonymous — it allows law enforcement to capture people’s identities en masse. Authorities in several countries have generally pitched facial recognition as a tool to capture terrorists or criminals, but the technology has emerged as a critical instrument in a new context: punishing protesters.

This week, we published a new feature by journalist Darren Loucaides on the proliferation of facial recognition as a tool to control and curtail protests. We take a look at three case studies — in Russia, India, and Iran — to show how this technology, combined with the rise of authoritarianism in many countries, is upending civil demonstrations as we know it.

The industry is primarily driven by around 24,000 talent agencies, which help influencers gain followers and income by providing them with training and equipment. These agencies take commissions from the earnings of individual livestreamers, as they sing, dance, sell products, flirt with the audience, or stage life-threatening gimmicks to make a living.

But once they sign contracts with the talent agencies, influencers are forced to make a choice: Livestream for several hours a day, for years, for little money, or pay hefty penalties to break their contract. Ultimately, it is a trap. Rest of World reporter Viola Zhou spoke to livestreamers who said they would owe tens of thousands of dollars if they breached their contract and failed to complete their work.

the platforms these men have shaped and shepherded are tuned to reward outrageous behavior. Having colonized our attention spans through their products, they now seek attention for themselves.

Whatever the precise reason for these developments, the new Silicon Valley machismo is predictably terrible for women. Under the old geek mode of masculinity, women in tech reported an exhausting litany of workplace microaggressions. But this top-down machismo arguably invites aggression of a more macro sort: sexual harassment and abuse, the rollback of DEI programs and inclusive benefits, and — ultimately, inevitably — even fewer women in leadership or technical positions. “It makes [the workplace culture] misogynistic and sexist — in some cases, not everywhere,” Swisher said. But in places where the bros in charge have adopted more masculine posturing or explicitly moved against DEI, she added, “they set it up as if it’s a giant video game in which they’re the main player, and then they populate it with people like them.”

For consumers, meanwhile, the trend yields worse products with fewer safeguards. Even male executives have admitted as much: Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, once said harassment would be less prevalent on the platform if the company hired more women early on. At Reddit, it took Ellen Pao, the site’s first female leader, to finally cleanse the platform of its most toxic communities.

“I do think people who are in touch with the harm caused by the platform not doing anything are going to be more empathetic to the users who experience it,” Pao told Links.