Curiously Curated Conspiracies, Cover Ups and Corruption. All content is 'for your consideration' only. "The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears." ~ Hunter S. Thompson
Researchers say more than 250 ads containing AI-generated child sexual abuse material have appeared on Meta’s platforms including Facebook and Instagram since early August, weeks after the company removed dozens of similar ads following reporting from Wired.
Wiredreports that the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project says that in early August, Meta deleted roughly 53 ads across Facebook, Instagram and Threads that contained child sexual abuse material, telling the outlet at the time that most of the abusive ads predated the rollout of new AI tools designed to “better detect and block” harmful content. Now, the same watchdog group says ads containing sexual imagery of children are back, some of which are identical to those previously removed.
The problem didn’t stop there. Researchers say Meta has published more than 350 abusive video ads since the end of last year. Many link to so-called “nudification” apps tied to Chinese developers. Unlike the initial batch of 53 ads, the new ones used images of real children, not stock or generic photos.
One ad used an official photograph of a minor from a European royal family, transformed into a video depicting a graphic sex act. Researchers declined to name the royal in order to protect the victim.
“Researchers identified the real-world identities of four minors used in the ads,” according to TTP, whose director is Katie Paul. Three of the four are from the United States. One is a teenager who runs a social media influencer account on a Meta platform. Another is a teen influencer with a public account. The third is a stock photo model, a real person, labeled as “pre-teen” on stock photo websites.
The ads typically open with an innocuous photo of a preteen or teen girl (only one involved a boy), paired with text claiming the image is “not just a photo” and that “there are no restriction” on how it can be used. The videos morph the children’s faces into explicit sexual content, often depicting sex acts. Clicking the ads sends users to download AI face-swapping or video apps from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Many carry the tagline: “This is the AI that men actually use.”
Google received another public flogging in federal court on Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, ordered Google to stop the conduct that has been strangling revenue from web publishers for years — the latest blow in the government’s antitrust case against the tech giant’s advertising empire.
This follows Brinkema’s ruling last year that Google violated US antitrust laws by unlawfully maintaining monopoly power in open web display advertising. It was the SECOND time a federal judge ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly in part of its business, after Judge Amit Mehta found the same thing in online search.
Google is a monopolist. The courts confirmed this again.
“This is a landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the digital public square,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “This Department of Justice will continue taking bold legal action to protect the American people from encroachments on free speech and free markets by tech companies.”
“The Court’s ruling is clear: Google is a monopolist and has abused its monopoly power. Google’s unlawful dominance allows them to censor and even deplatform American voices. And at the same time, Google destroyed and hid information that exposed its illegal conduct. Today’s opinion confirms Google’s controlling hand over online advertising and, increasingly, the internet itself.”
Google censors and deplatforms American voices. The DOJ said it clear and out loud.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is about to drop a lawsuit on Amazon today alleging that the e-commerce platform manipulated prices paid by businesses to advertise on its retail platform, which made the company tens of billions of dollars over a seven-year period, WSJreports, citing agency officials.
According to the report:
The lawsuit, joined by a bipartisan group of more than 20 state attorneys general, will allege that Amazon deceived advertisers by secretly raising the minimum price advertisers had to pay to place ads promoting their products, FTC officials said.
The case, to be filed in a Seattle federal court, will become the consumer-protection agency’s third major case against Amazon, which agreed to pay $2.5 billion last year to settle an earlier suit alleging it tricked people into signing up for its Prime service and made it hard to cancel the subscription. Another lawsuit alleging that Amazon engaged in illegal monopolization is headed for trial next year. -WSJ
Amazon’s digital advertising platform is the third-largest in the world, behind Alphabet’s Google and Meta – earning $68 billion in ads in 2025, according to the report – which claims that advertisers suffered billions of dollars in harm by paying higher prices for ads. Some states may attempt to claw some of the money back.
New York City’s WNBA team refused to take a paid scoreboard message from a woman who wanted to support the XX-XY movement to protect women’s sports from men identifying as women. Naturally, the team had no problem displaying pro-trans scoreboard messages.
Julie Potter, a lesbian hip-hop performer, says the New York Liberty tried to alter her message, which she paid to display at Barclays Center during the Liberty’s game against the Indiana Fever.
Potter says she has a receipt showing she paid $100 for the scoreboard message to be shown during the August 22 game, OutKick reports.
The singer adds that she asked the team to display the following message: “Thank you Jennifer Sey! XX-XY Athletics will Save the Day!”
The payment and message were accepted, Potter said, but the day before the game, she was contacted by the team and told that they would not display the message she had requested. Instead, the sales dept. told her the message they would agree to display would read, “Thank you Jennifer Sey, thank you for all you do for XX-XY Athletics.”
Potter said she told them that if they did not display the message she had paid for, she wanted to cancel it and get a refund.
Despite balking at Potter’s message, the Liberty had no problem displaying pro-transgender messages during the game.
A state tax court in Maryland invalidated the nation’s first state tax on digital advertising and directed state officials to refund tax payments already collected from major tech companies.
The legal dispute had been closely watched by other states that are considering taxing online advertisements.
The Annapolis-based Maryland Tax Court ruled on Aug. 14 that the digital advertising gross revenues tax was unconstitutional after it was challenged in three separate lawsuits by Google, Apple, and Peacock TV. Refunds are expected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The state imposes the levies based on the businesses’ global revenue. Lawmakers previously said the tax could raise $250 million per year. The money raised from the tax was earmarked for a state education program.
The 2021 tax statute specifically targets the revenue large companies earn from digital advertisements shown in Maryland. Companies that take in more than $100 million in annual global gross revenue were taxed at 2.5 percent.
A sliding scale applies to companies with larger revenues, maxing out at 10 percent for those earning more than $15 billion in global gross annual revenues.
The law’s backers argued that Maryland needed to overhaul its tax system to deal with major changes in how businesses advertise. Lawyers representing the affected companies said their clients were targeted unfairly.
The state court said the tax runs afoul of the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act, the First Amendment, and the due process and commerce clauses of the U.S. Constitution.
The court held that regulating interstate commerce was the business of Congress – not the Maryland General Assembly – and that it was inappropriate that the tax law was premised on global revenue rather than revenue that comes from in-state advertising.
The Internet Tax Freedom Act forbids taxation of electronic commerce if similar services are not taxed. The court held that there is no meaningful distinction between digital advertising and print or billboard ads, meaning the federal bar applies.
Before the press was captured, vaccine injuries were openly covered on national TV. Now the dam of censorship is breaking, and we can finally confront the tragic history that keeps repeating.
A key theme I’ve tried to highlight in this publication is that the same medical catastrophes keep repeating (because those responsible are never held accountable), so by understanding what happened in the past, you can see and understand what is happening now and what will likely happen in the future.
For example, because vaccines are “risky but necessary,” the medical profession and government, again and again, concluded that they needed to tell the public all vaccines were “safe and effective” as the potential injuries a mass vaccination campaign would cause were outweighed by “necessary” benefit the vaccines could offer. As such, examples can be found again and again of severe injuries being systematically covered up for the “greater good” (e.g., the earliest documented example I know of this happened in 1874 with the smallpox vaccine) and health authorities concocting the same set of excuses we’ve seen since smallpox as to why those vaccines failed to prevent the diseases they were supposed to.
Since the risks of most vaccines (detailed here) far outweigh their benefits, a mass-vaccination paradigm can only be sustained by censoring the evidence of harm — and then citing that manufactured silence as proof of safety. Over the decades, more and more has been done to conceal those harms. For almost a century, severe neurological injuries after vaccination were routinely reported in the medical literature. Now vaccine injuries are censored, and it is nearly impossible to publish anything critical of vaccines in a “reputable” journal.
Likewise, despite the “science” that says vaccines are safe, it is nearly impossible to obtain the raw datasets that could actually answer the question — as Steve Kirsch showed the public throughout COVID-19 with his relentless, endlessly stonewalled quest to get that data. Likewise, VAERS, a public injury-reporting database only exists because the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act required a way for patients to bypass doctors refusing to report their injuries, and as such, ever since a law mandated its creation, everything possible has been done to undermine and discredit VAERS (except when the industry uses it as “proof” to prove vaccines are safe).
This is the inescapable problem at the heart of mass vaccination. When you take a product that is not completely safe and give it to an entire population, tens of millions of healthy people, most of whom were never at meaningful risk from the disease, even a small rate of serious harm guarantees that enormous numbers are injured or killed. Since there is no way around that arithmetic the authorities have chosen concealment every time, suppressing the data, reclassifying the injuries, and dismissing each casualty as a coincidence, because the alternative is admitting the paradigm itself produces the ever-increasing wave of chronic illness sweeping our society.
For a long time, the injuries were too numerous to fully hide, so the public kept reawakening to them and the mainstream media kept covering them. The industry’s solution came after it won liability protection in the 1986 vaccine law: spend whatever it took to censor the coverage and bury the injuries. But removing that check, the public finding out and objecting, removed the only real constraint on toxic vaccines reaching the market, and progressively more dangerous ones followed, until the COVID-19 catastrophe injured so many people that even a robust censorship apparatus couldn’t contain it. Numerous polls I’ve summarized in detail here demonstrate the scale of the vaccine injuries: depending on the survey, 7% to 13% of recipients reported a serious side effect, 24% to 28% say they know someone they believe died from the shot, and 46% to 55% believe the COVID vaccines have killed a significant number of people. Propaganda has its limits, and once numbers like those take hold, a new awareness of vaccine injury surfaces across the media ecosystem, occasionally on conservative networks, but mostly in the independent press.
Because we keep forgetting the past, the cycle repeats. My goal here is to show that what we are seeing now is nothing new, that it has happened countless times before, on a smaller scale that was easier to sweep under the rug, by collecting dozens of clips that were once routinely aired on television and are almost inconceivable today, given how brutal the censorship has become.
France has implemented a law banning unsolicited telemarketing calls, shifting the country from an “opt-out” registry system to an obligatory prior consent (“opt-in”) framework.
The law reportedly took effect Tuesday after it was adopted by the National Assembly and the Senate — France’s two chambers of Parliament — on June 30, 2025, and formally promulgated by French President Emmanuel Macron.
France has replaced its former opt-out system, a national registry called “Bloctel,” which operated similarly to the U.S. National “Do Not Call” Registry, with a prior consent “opt-in” framework. The change was made after years of consumer complaints regarding non-compliant call centers that routinely ignored the opt-out list.
Under the new law, companies are prohibited from making unsolicited marketing calls to consumers who have not explicitly given prior consent to be contacted.
However, this restriction does not apply across the board: companies remain permitted to call existing customers with whom they have an active contractual relationship, provided the call relates directly to their existing contract or related services and the customer has not previously requested to opt out.
“Peace and quiet is a right,” stated Marie-Amandine Stévenin. President of leading consumer advocacy group, Que Choisir Ensemble. “This observation holds true both online and on the street, where we are inundated with calls to consume.”
Frédéric Billon, head of the trade association Fédération de la Vente Directe, claims that the law will strain local businesses accustomed to casually calling their customers. He added that this could put French companies at a disadvantage against foreign competitors operating outside the law’s reach.
Two California Democrats are moving to outlaw AI-generated campaign ads at the federal level, just days after a Republican rival for the governor’s mansion used the technology to hammer their party.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) on Monday reintroduced the AI Ads Act, which would make it a federal violation to use artificial intelligence to impersonate candidates or committees in federal races.
The push comes on the heels of two AI-generated spots from GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, who went after Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrat gubernatorial nominee Xavier Becerra.
Of course, Hilton isn’t the only one having fun with the technology. The campaign of Spencer Pratt, the reality television star turned Los Angeles mayoral candidate, made waves with his creative and side-splitting ads from Los Angeles-based director Charles Curran.
Unsurprisingly, Schiff claims his bill isn’t about politics, but about protecting against a so-called “serious threat to our democracy.”
“AI-generated fraudulent advertising which uses the likeness or voices of candidates to misrepresent their positions, campaigns, or causes, or otherwise misrepresents a candidate’s point of view is not only wrong – it poses a serious threat to our democracy that should concern all Americans regardless of their party,” said Schiff. “Fraudulent AI advertising has already proliferated in races across the country, and if Congress does not act, this runaway challenge will only get worse as AI becomes increasingly capable of blurring the lines between fact and fiction. With November elections around the corner, time is of the essence to reign in false political advertising.”
Groups that support the bill include Common Cause, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Campaign Legal Center, Protect Democracy and Public Citizen, according to the New York Post.
“AI will transform our lives and our society in many ways, but it can’t be used to mislead voters or undermine our democracy. I’m proud to lead the AI Ads Act with Senator Schiff to ban AI-generated content that deceives the public about candidates or elections,” Khanna said in a statement.
Transgender Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE) said President Donald Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them” campaign ad resonated with voters in part because Democrat leaders “remained silent” instead of responding to the attack during the 2024 election.
In an interview with The Hill’s “In the Know” columnist Judy Kurtz, McBride was asked about the Trump campaign ad that appeared to be highly effective and asked whether Democrats needed to handle the issue differently going into the midterms and the next presidential race.
“In the 2024 White House race, there was an ad from the Trump campaign saying that Kamala Harris is for they/them and Donald Trump is for us. I believe it was featured in your documentary as well. It seemed to be pretty effective,” Kurtz asked. “Do you think, going into the midterms and then the next presidential race, Democrats have to be careful in how they handle this issue so they are not pushed off balance by Republicans?”
“Well, I think the degree to which that ad was effective in the last election was a byproduct of two major issues,” McBride responded. “One was the perception that people had that Democrats were not fighting for bold, broad-based economic policy as our top priority. And the second was that we were silent in the face of the ad.”
McBride said many Democrat leaders were unsure how to answer the Trump campaign’s messaging and ultimately chose not to respond.
“I think many of our political leaders in that moment were concerned about how to respond and therefore sort of remained silent,” McBride added. “I think some of the lessons learned from the 2024 cycle are that we have to be able to respond. We have to be willing to respond.”
The interviewer referenced Trump’s 2024 campaign ad, “Kamala Is for They/Them. President Trump Is for You,” which has been viewed more than 632,000 times and received over 22,000 likes on YouTube.
Google is removing the last technical workaround that kept effective ad blockers alive in Chrome.
When Chrome 150 ships on June 30, the browser will delete a hidden setting called the ExtensionManifestV2Disabled flag, a switch that power users had been toggling to keep old-style extensions running after Google officially discontinued them.
Without it, uBlock Origin and every other extension built on the old Manifest V2 framework, the set of rules that governed how browser extensions worked for years, will stop functioning permanently. Chrome 151, expected in July, will strip the remaining MV2 flags entirely. No policy override and no hidden setting will bring them back.
The company that sells more advertising than any other on Earth now controls whether you can block those ads. And it just decided you can’t, at least not effectively.
Under the old system, extensions like uBlock Origin could watch your browser’s traffic as it happened, see an ad or tracker trying to load, and block it on the spot before it ever reached your screen.
Under the new system, extensions have to hand Google a pre-written list of things to block and Chrome decides whether to follow those instructions. The lists are capped at a fixed number of rules, and the extension can’t react to anything that isn’t already on the list.
uBlock Origin’s developer, Raymond Hill, has been clear that a Manifest V3 version cannot replicate the original’s full capabilities. A stripped-down version called uBlock Origin Lite exists for MV3, but it handles only a fraction of the filter lists, the community-maintained databases of known ads and trackers, that the original supported.
It also can’t perform cosmetic filtering, the process of hiding ad containers and promotional elements that remain on a page even after the ad itself is blocked. Without it, you get blank boxes where ads used to be, or sponsored content that looks native to the page. For more than 40 million Chrome users who relied on the original, the replacement is a downgrade by design.
Google engineer Devlin Cronin confirmed the timeline in a Chromium code review commit, a logged change to Chrome’s underlying source code that other developers can inspect, writing that “MV2 extensions are no longer allowed in any supported version of Chrome, and we are removing support for them and the associated functionality. We won’t be able to provide / maintain this functionality indefinitely due to the complexity and tech debt, as well as the security risks it entails (we’ve actually found a number of bugs that are specific to MV2 lately). Of course, other browsers can continue supporting these if they so desire.”
Hellbound and Down 
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