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USFacts: “Congress hasn’t passed a full budget on time since 1997. How is the government getting funded? Government budgeting is a massive project. Each year, the federal government takes in trillions of dollars and redistributes them (and, in most years, more) to fund government programs and address the current administration’s priorities. At USAFacts, we talk …
Wired: “Documents show that ICE plans to hire dozens of contractors to scan X, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms to target people for deportation. United States immigration authorities are moving to dramatically expand their social media surveillance, with plans to hire nearly 30 contractors to sift through posts, photos, and messages—raw material to be transformed …
NewsGuard: The United States has “unilaterally disarmed in the information wars,” dismantling key defenses against Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation efforts, NewsGuard Co-CEO Gordon warns in an op-ed published in the Washington Post on Oct. 6. Crovitz argues that recent actions by the Trump administration — including the effective shutdown of the Foreign Malign Influence …
404 Media: “The Trump administration’s tariff regime and the elimination of fee exemptions for items under $800 is limiting resource sharing between university libraries, trapping some books in foreign countries, and reversing long-held standards in academic cooperation. “There are libraries that have our books that we’ve lent to them before all of this happened, and …
“Social media companies fuel and profit off of hate and disinformation. Could they also be subsidizing it? Monetization.wtf is WHAT TO FIX’s go-to resource to investigate how social media platforms redistribute revenue to their users. With billions of dollars flowing through social media, understanding who gets paid by platforms, how much, and for what, is …
MIT Technology Review: “People over Papers, a crowd-sourcing project that maps sightings of immigration agents, was taken offline yesterday by Padlet, the collaborative bulletin board platform on which it was built. It’s just the latest ICE-tracking initiative to be pulled by tech platforms in the past few days. A Padlet customer service representative told Celeste, …
Nature Scientific Reports [full text] – People are poorly equipped to detect AI-powered voice clones. Sarah Barrington, Emily A. Cooper & Hany Farid. “As generative artificial intelligence (AI) continues its ballistic trajectory, everything from text to audio, image, and video generation continues to improve at mimicking human-generated content. Through a series of perceptual studies, we report on …
Follow up to Government Workers Say Their Out-of-Office Replies Were Forcibly Changed to Blame Democrats for Shutdown – See Also: Mashable: “The U.S. federal government shut down at midnight on Wednesday, bringing a halt to numerous government services after Congress could not agree on a crucial funding bill. Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration was quick to …
Axios: “Hate crimes have hit record levels in the past few years. Analysts say antisemitic crimes rose again in 2024. MAGA activists are going after two of the nation’s most storied civil rights watchdogs, accusing them of smearing conservatives as extremists. MAGA leaders, backed by the Trump administration and Elon Musk, are trying to undermine the …
Urban Institute – Regulatory Changes Could Significantly Reduce Eligibility for Benefits, Particularly among Older Workers. September 18, 2025. The Social Security Administration (SSA) is preparing a proposed rule that could significantly reshape how disability eligibility is determined for two major programs: Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). This brief examines the …
The Verge: “The Trump administration declared war on the “terrorist organization” of “antifa” and the supposed “networks” associated with it last week. Antifa is not so much a vast national conspiracy as it is simply an abbreviation for anti-fascism — but don’t point out that anti-anti-fascism looks a lot like fascism. That would make you …
NextGov/FCW – “At least 15 government oversight websites were down — and with them, access to watchdog reports and required hotline and whistleblower links — as of Wednesday evening. That’s not due to the federal shutdown that began at midnight; it’s a deliberate move by the White House, whose Office of Management and Budget is …
