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Maggie Harrison Dupré

@mharrisondupre.bsky.social
9.4K followers 1.6K following 1.2K posts

Award-winning journalist at Futurism covering AI and its impacts on industries, media/information, and people. Send tips by email to: maggie@futurism.com or Signal: mhd.39

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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
NEW: Brown Brothers Media is the most successful media company you've never heard of. For years, its success was fueled by AI, fake writers, and fake reporting. When we started asking questions, BBM started mass-deleting content. Somehow, what came next was even worse. futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
Brown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.
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jon christian @jonchristian.net · 03/10/2026
NEW: After we investigated a company that buys struggling news sites and turns them into AI-powered content mills that churn out garbage using fake journalists and subject matter experts, Google has officially cracked down on the scheme: futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
Google Updates Guidelines to Punish Sites That Use Fake Bylines and AI-Generated Headshots
Google has updated its guidelines to forbid the use of fake bylines, AI-generated headshots, and other acts of "deception."
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Muse has escaped containment
The giant marshmallow man from Ghostbusters
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S.J. Pearce @homophonous.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Good advice.
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
If you're looking for a college program to support this fall that isn't football, might I suggest UMass Field Hockey........ we're currently ranked 3rd in the nation, our highest ranking years, and absolutely crushing it
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jon christian @jonchristian.net · 30/09/2026
UPDATE: After our investigation into that company that buys struggling news sites and turns them into AI-powered content mills, it has halted publication -- at least for now futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
That Company That Buys Struggling News Sites and Turns Them Into AI-Powered Content Mills Has Halted Publishing After a Futurism Investigation
Brown Brothers Media has halted publication at its wide-ranging AI-powered content farm empire -- for now, at least.
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
NEW: Brown Brothers Media — the vast content network scaled through the heavy use of AI + fake writers w/ fabricated credentials — has halted publishing amid what appears to be a Google crackdown on many of its sites. BBM may have been earning 64m+ readers per month. futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
That Company That Buys Struggling News Sites and Turns Them Into AI-Powered Content Mills Has Halted Publishing After a Futurism Investigation
Brown Brothers Media has halted publication at its wide-ranging AI-powered content farm empire -- for now, at least.
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Meanwhile, Cambridge Analytica's former website is now an AI slop/plagiarism farm futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
Someone Has Brought Cambridge Analytica Back as a Zombie Slop Farm
Cambridge Analytica has returned, in a very 2026 way: CambridgeAnalytica.org is now an AI-powered content farm.
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jon christian @jonchristian.net · 28/09/2026
Somehow "the guy who buys struggling publications and fills them with fake journalists that publish thousands of articles of AI slop to overwhelm google? turns out he goes way back with Ghislaine Maxwell, the collaborator of Jeffrey Epstein" feels like the ultimate and most exhausting 2026 sentence
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
NEW: Justin Brown, a cofounder of the AI slop empire Brown Brothers Media, has deep ties to convicted sex criminal and Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell promoted Brown's failed social media platform Ideapod -- which is still a publisher in BBM's portfolio: futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
You Know Those Three Brothers Who Buy Struggling News Sites and Turn Them Into AI-Powered Content Farms? It Turns Out One of Them Has Extensive Connections to Ghislaine Maxwell
Ideapod, a cornerstone brand of Brown Brothers Media's AI empire, has deep ties to convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
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Happy National Hamburger Day @birdrespecter.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
How does this story keep getting more insane
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jon christian @jonchristian.net · 28/09/2026
The Brown brothers remind me of those "see no evil, hear no evil" monkeys you see in tchotchke shops -- of course the sort of people who will carefully not notice that they're hanging out with a bunch of sketchy "Epstein class" power players will go on to embrace AI in an incredibly cynical way
It’s hard not to see a parallel to Justin heaping praise on Maxwell and milking her connections for publicity or funding, promising that Ideapod would “improve our world in unfathomable ways” while pointedly failing to notice that the entire milieu had a rotten stench. The closer you look, the more the Brown brothers start to feel like those “see no evil, hear no evil,” monkeys in tchotchke shops: talking a big game while staying willfully ignorant of exactly what’s made them relevant — whether it’s schmoozing with reprehensible people or pumping the web full of fake characters lamenting their loss of identity in old age or grieving the death of an imaginary loved one.
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Another super weird shoe has dropped futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
You Know Those Three Brothers Who Buy Struggling News Sites and Turn Them Into AI-Powered Content Farms? It Turns Out One of Them Has Extensive Connections to Ghislaine Maxwell
Ideapod, a cornerstone brand of Brown Brothers Media's AI empire, has deep ties to convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
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Victor Tangermann @vtanger.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
absolutely bonkers followup to @mharrisondupre.bsky.social 's incredible reporting on the Brown Brothers Media AI slop empire futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
You Know Those Three Brothers Who Buy Struggling News Sites and Turn Them Into AI-Powered Content Farms? It Turns Out One of Them Has Extensive Connections to Ghislaine Maxwell
Ideapod, a cornerstone brand of Brown Brothers Media's AI empire, has deep ties to convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
“If the ocean dies, I’m not sure what that outcome will be. But definitely not good.” Groundbreaking stuff
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jon christian @jonchristian.net · 28/09/2026
NEW: After we published an investigation into Brown Brothers Media, a company that buys struggling news sites and turns them into AI-powered content mills, we got a tip that completely gobsmacked me: one of the brothers has extensive connections to Ghislaine Maxwell futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
You Know Those Three Brothers Who Buy Struggling News Sites and Turn Them Into AI-Powered Content Farms? It Turns Out One of Them Has Extensive Connections to Ghislaine Maxwell
Ideapod, a cornerstone brand of Brown Brothers Media's AI empire, has deep ties to convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
NEW: Justin Brown, a cofounder of the AI slop empire Brown Brothers Media, has deep ties to convicted sex criminal and Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell promoted Brown's failed social media platform Ideapod -- which is still a publisher in BBM's portfolio: futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
You Know Those Three Brothers Who Buy Struggling News Sites and Turn Them Into AI-Powered Content Farms? It Turns Out One of Them Has Extensive Connections to Ghislaine Maxwell
Ideapod, a cornerstone brand of Brown Brothers Media's AI empire, has deep ties to convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
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onion person @junlper.beer · 27/09/2026
new episode where we talk to @mharrisondupre.bsky.social and @jonchristian.net about a growing media slop empire populated by ai written articles and characters podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/k...
podcasts.apple.com
Fake Empire
Podcast Episode · Kill The Computer · September 24 · 1h 3m
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
me n my agents gonna go hack some shit
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jon christian @jonchristian.net · 22/09/2026
been thinking about the rush of technologies -- explosive drones, remote gun turrets, killer robots -- that reduce the space between action and consequence so far that you can fire a deadly weapon from your browser window futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
Wild New Website Lets You Shoot "Less Lethal" Ammunition From Gun Turrets in a Firing Range
A new website called Shov allows users to "shoot guns on the internet" by remotely-controlling a weapon right inside their web browser.
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
A fake ESA scientist bylined this essay about how his marriage fell apart because of a lack of communication despite his alleged "years" of studying "how astronauts communicate under pressure." Again, this scientist was never real web.archive.org/web/20260403...
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Sohan Dsouza @sohandsouza.info · 19/09/2026
Brilliant investigation in "pursuit hunt" mode. The fake personal stories, meat proxies, scrubbing, recycling, anon bylines, developing-world creators replaced with AI slop engines, repurposing of established assets—all indictments of today's information environment. #PotemkinNews #AI #slop #media
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Dan Nguyen @dancow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
but how can this be…? The Scandinavia Standard has always been my go to source for authentic original human generated Scandinavian content
Scandinavia Standard homepage: 
The Soviet Union invaded Finland in the winter of 1939 expecting the job done inside two weeks, and the Finns held the line for 105 days at...
On 30 November 1939, the Soviet Union sent roughly a million men across the Finnish border, and Moscow was working on a short clock.
BY THE STANDARD BRIEF • SEP 10, 2026


The loneliness no one warns you about in retirement
LIFESTYLE
We are reliably wrong about our own happiness, which suggests we have been chasing the...
LIFESTYLE
If you want to live with fewer regrets, the fears to let go of are the ones that stop you...
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Here's a list of every media company we've linked to Brown Brothers Media: futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
Here's Every Known Publication Owned by Brown Brothers Media, Which Buys News Sites and Turns Them Into AI-Powered Content Mills
The little-known company Brown Brothers Media operates a vast media empire. Here are the many sites we've linked to the network.
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jon christian @jonchristian.net · 18/09/2026
Google could keep manipulative and dishonest companies like Brown Brothers Media at bay by deindexing their sites, but instead Google shows their crap extremely prominently on its various platforms
a bunch of screenshots of Brown Brothers sites on google news
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Kristina Killgrove @killgrove.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
This is a good deep-dive into AI slop invading what used to be legit media sites. One thing I’m seeing more and more: slop outlets churning archaeology stories from 1-5 years ago and presenting them as news. 🏺🧪
futurism.com
How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
Brown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.
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Vincent uses they/them pronouns 🐸 @v-e-tirado.com · 17/09/2026
theres Dead Internet Theory and theres "Three Specific Men That Are Actively Making The Internet A Worse Place" theory
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Bryan Toporek @btoporek.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I truly, truly hate it here. (Incredible reporting, though!)
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jon christian @jonchristian.net · 17/09/2026
NEW: We spent months investigating a little-known media startup called Brown Brothers Media, which buys legit news sites and turns them into AI-powered zombie content farms What blew my mind was its traffic -- it appears to be getting more readers than NPR or CBS News futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
Brown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 17/09/2026
Fascinating story with plenty of deep research. But the kicker at the end, is these dipshits recently started promoting a site that promises all human content... which appears to be fully AI generated. I went and looked and... yup. But also...
In any case, BBM's zombie content mill flounders onward. It recently started promoting a new site called Sentient Blogs, which positions itself as a publication dedicated to human authorship in an era of shoddy Al content.
"A platform dedicated to supporting and promoting the work of human bloggers that create human generated content, not Al," reads its about page, with its FAQ further promising that "we are confident that between our amazing authors who are writing on this platform because they share the same initiative and our [quality assurance] measures, the likelihood of Al content is very very low."
To kick it off, Lachlan bylined a piece about his touchingly human experiences with fatherhood, writing that a "thousand dinners become a family culture. Repeated school runs become the background of a child's childhood. Years of quiet effort become a marriage, a friendship, a body of work or a sense of being useful to other people."
A disclaimer at the bottom, dissonantly, says it was "produced with Al assistance." According to Pangram, it was 100 percent Al-generated.Logo showing "by humans, for humans""As we journey through the rise and development of AI, I believe people will begin to crave real, authentic human-made content"

Sentient Blogs FounderProduced with AI assistance. Reviewed by the Sentient Blogs editorial team before publication. See our about page.
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Gisele Navarro @ichbingisele.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Picture this: Google’s algorithm updates have been slowly killing your long-standing food blog year after year.  No matter what you do, traffic from search keeps dropping so you decide to sell the domain to the highest bidder. Welcome to the content farm ↓
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Cyrus Farivar @cfarivar.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Why bother even doing real journalism when AI slop is so lucrative. (Another banger from @mharrisondupre.bsky.social and @jonchristian.net!) futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
Brown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.
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Gisele Navarro @ichbingisele.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
A story of what could happen after Google’s algorithm updates have slowly killed your long-standing blog so you decide to sell the domain to the highest bidder: futurism.com/artificial-i... by @mharrisondupre.bsky.social + @jonchristian.net
futurism.com
How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
Brown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.
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Sam Blum @samblum.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
@jonchristian.net and @mharrisondupre.bsky.social are doing important work @futurism.com. This story is nuts and flew under the radar of the biggest media desks in the country! futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
Brown Brothers Media is a media empire raking in millions of clicks with AI, fake writers, and plagiarism.
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Tony Elkins @tonyelkins.com · 17/09/2026
Incredible story by @mharrisondupre.bsky.social & @jonchristian.net I know it seems like a never-ending slog, but this is just one example of amazing tech journalism being written in the ai-moment. Also, I'm so fucking angry this is happening, along with the giant side of colonialism thrown in.
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jon christian @jonchristian.net · 17/09/2026
The three white/australian brothers behind BBM all live in Southeast Asia, where they've shown about the amount of respect to the region that you would probably expect
The Brown brothers are Australian originally, but all three now live and work in Southeast Asia.

In a 2024 YouTube video, two of the brothers — Justin and Lachlan — enthuse about the region in a way that sounds strikingly extractive.

Vietnam was so “cheap” that it had been “essential while I was rebuilding the businesses,” Justin explained, adding that “there are a lot of economic opportunities in an emerging economy like Vietnam.”

“Saigon is an awesome place to come and reinvent yourself,” Lachlan cuts in, saying he had married a local woman after moving to Vietnam in the 2010s.

“There’s lots of opportunity here, especially if you want to make money, because of the developing economy,” Lachlan continues, encouraging others to set up shop in the area and “reap the rewards.” He adds that he’s been purchasing investment properties there that have “already risen in value.”
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James Alistair Henry @jamesbluecat.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Jeez, this is grim. "At a moment when legitimate news organizations are struggling to survive, it has raked in untold hundreds of millions of eyeballs... polluting the media ecosystem with noxious AI clickbait designed to do little else but trick Google’s algorithms."
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Ruth Watson @ruthwatson.eurosky.social · 17/09/2026
A long but important read for anyone who cares about journalism, journalists, and honesty. 'BBM buys “old, established websites with real audiences only to replace most (or all) of their content with AI slop before plastering the sites with ads.”'
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
need a men in black flash stick for shailene woodley's emmy's outfit
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Ginny seeks to entice me with a glazed ham
A scammer text reading: "Hi Evelyn, it’s Ginny. I’m planning to make glazed ham tomorrow evening. Do you have time to come over?"
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Ej Dickson @ejdickson.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
There is a corner of the internet I had never heard of before I started reporting this story. It’s called the “burnerverse”: a network of anon burner accounts ostensibly discussing college sports. But they have another goal: destroying young girls’ lives.🧵: www.wired.com/story/burner...
wired.com
A College Girl Was Exploited on Camera. A Network of Anonymous Men Got to Work
Maddie Kowalski is one of countless young women who’ve had their lives destroyed by the burnerverse, a loosely connected online community of sports fans. Now she’s fighting back.
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
<3
A tuxedo cat next to a bouquet of pink roses
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
NEW: A Utah mother posted what she felt was an innocuous family video to IG/FB. Later, she noticed a Meta AI prompt encouraging her to investigate her own family -- and watched as the AI drew on years of social media posts to compile intelligence about her and her kids. futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
Mother Horrified When Meta's AI Scours Instagram and Facebook for Invasive Information About Her Young Daughters
Kalie Robins shared a video of her and her daughter singing. Meta AI started prompting her to investigate information about her family.
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
New dad and career reveal
Me asking Meta AI “who is Maggie Harrison Dupré” (that’s me) and Meta AI offering a lot of information that is not even sort of accurate
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jon christian @jonchristian.net · 09/09/2026
NEW: In one of the most horrifying stories I've ever reported, I found that Facebook is hosting huge quantities of AI-generated videos of violent child abuse -- kids being beaten, burned, and far more But the genuinely shocking thing was how little Meta seems to care futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism headline:

> Facebook Is Hosting Huge Numbers of Horrifying AI-Generated Videos of Violent Child Abuse, and Meta Is Barely Even Pretending to Care About Taking Them Down

> Facebook is filled with AI-generated videos of children being beaten, burned, and bludgeoned with heavy objects. Meta doesn't seem to care.
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Curious about how Meta polices such vile content in practice, we conducted a test by reporting eight accounts that had been sharing AI-generated child abuse videos.

Out of the eight accounts we reported, Meta eventually removed only two — and in one of those cases, it initially rejected the report before overriding the decision and taking it down. The timelines for action were lengthy, exceeding a week.

“We’ve taken a look and found that the page doesn’t go against our Community Standards,” the company wrote.Image: Facebook declining to remove a page posting AI-generated child abuse

The six accounts that the company’s moderators left up had shared many heinous videos, including a toddler being struck in the face with a frying pan, a girl being beaten with a baseball bat, and a baby being kicked. (After a thoughtful internal discussion, we are opting not to share any of the videos at this time; if you are a member of the media considering follow-up coverage, please feel free to email us and we can provide examples to corroborate our reporting.)

If Meta were serious about proactively taking down the child abuse content, or detecting it at the time of upload, it would almost certainly be able to do so.
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Lisa Schmeiser @lschmeiser.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
"Who owns a reporter's byline?" is about to become a real interesting question.
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
NEW: Journalist Kaitlin Durbin accused Cleveland.com of publishing an AI "Express Desk" article under her byline — without her knowledge or approval — while she was away on her honeymoon. The Express Desk "uses AI tools to assist in producing content." futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
Journalist Accuses Ohio's Main Newspaper of Slapping Her Name on an AI "Express Desk" Article Without Her Knowledge, While She Was on Honeymoon
A journalist accused Cleveland.com of publishing an AI "Express Desk" article under her byline without her consent, knowledge, or approval.
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Maggie Harrison Dupré @mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
NEW: Journalist Kaitlin Durbin accused Cleveland.com of publishing an AI "Express Desk" article under her byline — without her knowledge or approval — while she was away on her honeymoon. The Express Desk "uses AI tools to assist in producing content." futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
Journalist Accuses Ohio's Main Newspaper of Slapping Her Name on an AI "Express Desk" Article Without Her Knowledge, While She Was on Honeymoon
A journalist accused Cleveland.com of publishing an AI "Express Desk" article under her byline without her consent, knowledge, or approval.
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