Mia Sato | The Verge

MAHA wants to make cotton the new beef tallow

2026-06-05T10:26:21-04:00

In between beef tallow fries, raw milk, and vaccine denialism, Make America Healthy Again figureheads have set their sights on another slice of life: our clothing.

“The MAHA movement doesn’t stop with what we EAT — It’s also about what we WEAR,” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said in a post on X in late May. “For decades, America offshored textile jobs and allowed foreign synthetic, plastic-based materials to take over the clothing market.” Rollins went on Fox News to promote a new Department of Agriculture campaign dubbed “the Great American Cotton Plan,” an initiative that promises subsidies for American cotton farmers, revitalization of domestic manufacturing, more favorable trade policies with other countries, and a marketing campaign aimed at consumers that urges them to buy “plant, not plastic.” The campaign is at least partially a problem of the Trump administration’s own making: Cotton farmers themselves have said tariffs and increasing costs are making the job harder and more expensive.

The focus on cotton clothing and textiles as part of MAHA ideology is coming at an opportune time for the movement. There’s been a wave of interest in clothing made from natural fibers like cotton, wool, and linen, as opposed to synthetics like polyester that are common in fast fashion especially, but also in clothing more generally. Some brands are cashing in on growing consumer interest in natural-fiber clothing, marketing their products using imprecise and unregulated buzzwords like “non-toxic” and “clean.” And at every turn, influencers document their efforts to swap out plastics and other synthetics in their homes for “natural” alternatives. Now, led by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., MAHA is subsuming cotton as part of the official platform.

The government’s appeal to consumers to buy, wear, and use cotton products over others seems, on its face, fairly harmless — cotton clothing does feel nice. It is a versatile fabric that comes in an endless array of textures, knits, colors, weights, and prints. It’s breezy in hot weather, especially with a looser weave that isn’t skin-tight. There are some products that I will only purchase if they’re 100 percent cotton, like pajamas, graphic T-shirts, or denim. Cotton, like every fiber, has its place in our wardrobes; the MAHA evangelists and profiteers, though, rarely untangle the nuances.

The Great American Cotton Plan is about one thing: Putting American cotton first again.

Real “_____” wear cotton. 👖🌱

Americans. Cowboys. Farmers. Families. MAHA. Because cotton is real, natural, American-grown, and made by U.S. farmers.

Here’s the plan 👇

✅ Promote… pic.twitter.com/PkzvY9nHBb
— Secretary Brooke Rollins (@SecRollins) May 28, 2026

One garment category that’s gotten a lot of attention in recent years is activewear, which tends to be made of synthetics for performance and comfort purposes, and is often worn close to the skin. On social media, influencers dramatically stuff their leggings, sports bras, and underwear into garbage bags, vowing to toss their clothing and replace it with cotton products. The influencer content often goes for maximum panic. (“If you want to have babies one day, throw away all your activewear,” one video begins. It’s promoting a so-called “low-tox” athletic brand.)

But some average consumers also worry about working out in petroleum-based materials, citing polyester garments shedding microplastics and the potential of their skin absorbing chemicals from their clothes. A piece from Wirecutter dealing specifically with the plastic activewear question lays out some of the complicating factors: When it comes to chemical exposures, it’s not clear what risk clothing poses compared to, say, eating or drinking. Scientists are still trying to understand what effects microplastics have on the human body, or how to best measure microplastics to begin with. Synthetic fabric and materials also do play an important role in having comfortable, durable clothing: You need elastic in the waistbands and legs of underwear, for example, or they wouldn’t stay in place. Socks made of 100 percent wool or cotton would wear out faster. Even the “low-tox” activewear brands promoted by influencers have some amount of synthetic fibers with unidentified origins in the fabrics they use — 100 percent cotton leggings won’t have the same stretch.

There’s another reality that much of the “non-toxic” and administration’s MAHA branding is glossing over: Being made from natural fibers like cotton doesn’t necessarily mean a garment is safer or chemical-free. Manufacturers will sometimes treat fabrics (including cotton) to make them more resistant to staining or wrinkling, which can lead to chemicals like formaldehyde being present in clothes. Some early research has also called into question claims that natural fibers do in fact biodegrade, as often claimed by manufacturers and brands.

The USDA’s Great American Cotton Plan has also angered some MAHA influencers, who say it’s a scheme backed by the agriculture industry to sell more pesticides — cotton is water-intensive to grow, process, and dye, and uses massive amounts of chemical pesticides and fertilizer. Their preferred course of action is to focus on organic farming, but even that comes with a caveat: Generalized organic labels are squishy, and reporting by The New York Times found evidence of fraud along the supply chain for certified organic products. In other words, it’s a mess.

One thing that’s for sure, though, is that consumer fears around what clothing is made of is great for business. There are “low tox,” “natural,” and “clean” clothing brands popping up every day, with nice-sounding but unregulated claims around safety and health with sparse details — but with plenty of products for consumers to purchase. MAHA Action, a group that says it is “committed to supporting president Donald Trump’s MAHA Agenda,” celebrated the Great American Cotton Plan on social media. True believers can fill their shopping carts in the MAHA Action online store, which is stocked with a handful of organic cotton T-shirts — and plenty of polyester, too.

Hundreds of prolific Wikipedia editors are threatening to go on strike

2026-05-28T23:19:10-04:00

Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of trust on the internet. But last week, volunteer editors and contributors were alarmed to hear that a small but important team of engineers at the nonprofit that supports it had been laid off. The layoffs didn’t just threaten to sever an important link between the Wikimedia Foundation and its community — they also raised concerns that the WMF was engaging in union-busting. After days of heated discussion, some Wikipedians are ready to support a strike. What that even looks like on a platform where creators mostly aren’t being paid is a different question.

On May 20th, the WMF said it was disbanding the Community Tech team, a group of five engineers and one manager who are among WMF’s paid staff. The team was a bridge between the foundation and Wikipedia’s army of volunteers. The team developed tools and features that contributors use every day: things like plagiarism detectors, dark mode, or chart and graph tools. Editors and former foundation employees describe it as an approachable group — somewhere volunteers could turn if they needed help, or to have their voice heard.

Even so, this system could get backlogged. The WMF acknowledged that the process of responding to community requests for features and tools was not working perfectly, and said that having a centralized team was “leading to frequent bottlenecks and delays.” So going forward, that work would be distributed among multiple teams instead of through a centralized Community Tech team.

“Why aren’t you backtracking like hell right now?”

The reaction from the community was immediate and negative. Longtime contributors demanded the reinstatement of team and changes to the way the wishlist, a log of new features and tools the community requests, was run. Others suspected an ulterior motive. In recent months, Wikimedia staff had announced their intent to unionize, and some suggested the foundation was specifically laying off staff involved in the union drive. The breakup of the Community Tech team was also not the first instance of shocking, sudden departures. The union Wiki Workers United, which has not yet been recognized, declined a request for an interview.

Jimmy Wales, a cofounder of Wikipedia, argued with contributors on the site’s discussion pages, saying it was “time to get serious about meeting community needs,” and assuring volunteers that there would still be dedicated staff working on the wishlist. Volunteers did not find it comforting.

“If it’s not about the money, it’s not about the union, why aren’t you backtracking like hell right now?” says Hannah Clover, an editor and former Wikimedian of the Year. “Even Jimmy is trying to pass this off as somehow listening to the community, and that’s infuriating.”

In an email to The Verge, Nadee Gunasena, chief of staff at the Wikimedia Foundation, said that the restructuring was based on internal assessments dating back to September 2025. Gunasena said the restructuring will ensure that volunteer requests will be fulfilled by a variety of teams with expertise in different areas, and that it will seek to place the six Community Tech employees in other roles; if none are found, they’ll be laid off next month. Gunasena also denied that WMF has terminated any staff for union activities. If union supporters recruit enough staff to call for a vote — which hasn’t yet been requested — “we respect the rights of all eligible staff to vote, and if the majority of eligible staff vote in favor of representation, we will proceed to negotiate in good faith,” Gunasena said.

The relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the volunteers that maintain Wikipedia had been improving consistently, says Femke Nijsse, a volunteer contributor — until the layoffs. Now, Nijsse says, it feels like the relationship is moving in the opposite direction.

“The wishlist has been broken for two, three years, and the response has not been to fix that, but to fire the people that are still making it sort of work,” she says. Nijsse has suggested a way to overhaul the process that has unsurprisingly prompted extensive discussion among volunteers. At the top of the list is to reinstate the Community Tech team.

Both editors and former employees worry that the work done by the Community Tech team will fall by the wayside without dedicated staff. One former foundation employee, who asked not to be named in order to speak freely, told The Verge that several of the employees on the disbanded team were “one-of-a-kind developers who know segments of the tech stack that no one knew.”

“This follows a pattern of breaking up community-facing teams with the idea that now everyone’s going to be responsible for it,” they say. “And what happens every time is no one’s responsible for it, and then it gets neglected.”

Tamzin Hadasa Kelly, another volunteer editor, said in a message to The Verge that it was clear immediately that the community was angry. Kelly created a petition in solidarity with the union in which volunteers are saying they are willing to engage in collective action — potentially even an editors strike — if WWU asked them to. It’s since been signed by more than 700 editors, most from Wikipedia’s English-language site, who are collectively responsible for writing tens of thousands of articles and making nearly 10 million edits. “The goal was not to do some performative stunt or just turn this into a community vs. WMF power struggle, but to put the power in the hands of the people who need it, which is WWU,” Kelly said.

A strike would likely not happen unless WWU called for one, and there’s no clear timeline for this. For now, the volunteer community is rapidly signing on to the petition, and will need to hammer out what a strike would look like via Wikipedia’s consensus-based guiding decision-making process. Some proposed actions don’t necessarily impact Wikipedia’s content. Contributors have discussed measures like blocking banners calling for donations to the WMF, which could cut into the foundation’s funds.

Routine vandalism, spam, errant sentences, and other less urgent rule-breaking would go unmoderated

The version of a strike proposed by Kelly, however, would call on editors to cease any activity on Wikipedia other than to remove the most egregious examples of abuse, like the posting of personal information, harassment, or adding fabricated and unsourced information about living people. Routine vandalism, spam, errant sentences, and other less urgent rule-breaking would go unmoderated. Pages might go blank, or quickly become outdated, says Nijsse.

The effects of any kind of work stoppage could be profound, given how much weight the site carries on an internet filled with sludge. “Wikipedia can very quickly become dated if there’s not hundreds and hundreds of people updating it every day,” Nijsse says. “Breaking news is probably where you’ll see a bigger problem, where articles just don’t get created.” Wikipedia is also a major source for AI tools like Google’s AI Overviews or ChatGPT. If Wikipedia breaks, the internet breaks — and Wikipedia needs the unpaid editors, whose anger is quickly mounting.

“There will be no Wikipedia. It will quickly deteriorate” if even a critical mass of volunteers stop working, says another former Wikimedia Foundation employee. “That would be a disaster, not for Wikipedia, but for humanity.”

The AI fight brewing inside The New York Times

2026-05-27T08:06:35-04:00

Yellow taxis pass in front of The New York Times newspaper building. | Alexandra Schuler/dpa (Photo by Alexandra Schuler/picture alliance via Getty Images)

How newsrooms should use AI — or if they should at all — has been a recurrent debate within the media industry over the last several years. Increasingly, these rules are being hammered out at the bargaining table between unions and publishers. Right now, employees at The New York Times are gearing up for a fight.

Unionized staff with the Tech Guild say Times management has refused to provide the union with information related to how the company has used AI, its plans for AI use in the future, and how it will affect employees’ jobs and workflow. (The union filed an unfair labor practice charge earlier this month.) The Tech Guild, a NewsGuild of New York unit of around 700 software engineers, designers, product and project managers, and data analysts, also filed grievances saying Times management violated their collective bargaining agreement when it started using two internal AI tools that track and evaluate employee performance and activity.

One of the AI tools, called DX, advertises itself as an engineering productivity tool that lets companies track employees’ output, generative AI use, and efficiency, among other metrics. DX was originally announced internally as a way to improve the developer experience, says Ben Harnett, a software engineer at the Times and chair of the unit’s generative AI committee. The goal, at least according to Times management, was to measure the company as a whole. Over the last few months, though, the DX data has become more personalized, with benchmarks being applied to individuals, Harnett says.

“Now people in disciplinary situations are suddenly having read back to them, ‘You only did one [pull request] per week, per whatever, and that’s 25 percent below industry standard,’” Harnett says. He is concerned that the blanket metrics flatten all work the unit members do and erase the nuance of engineering into an opaque set of metrics that can be used against staff in disciplinary or performance review settings. The metrics don’t correlate to quality of work or the actual number of features an employee delivers, Harnett says.

“All this [data] reasonably could be expected to … help us understand how we’re doing, but not the way that they’re using it and implementing it, which we think is amounting to a de facto quota,” Harnett told The Verge. DX statistics have been cited in recent disciplinary conversations, the Tech Guild says.

“We feel really [this] amounts to deploying surveillance and monitoring tech against the workers.”

Another software called Glean takes internal knowledge bases like wikis, GitHub documents, Google Docs, and emails, and allows employees to query the system to find what they’re looking for more easily. But there are concerns among employees that Glean can also be used to monitor workers because it pulls in vast amounts of internal documentation: Harnett says that if he’s working on a draft document to describe a feature he’s building or leaves a comment in a file that’s available in Glean, for example, a manager could query the tool about his individual performance or contributions. The Tech Guild told The Verge that the style and format of recent disciplinary notices sent to staff suggest they were generated using Glean. Harnett says that Glean has issues — namely that it generates falsehoods and can lead a user on “wild goose chases.”

“The way that they’re using [DX and Glean] we feel really amounts to deploying surveillance and monitoring tech against the workers,” Harnett says. The union believes that the use of these tools violates multiple parts of their contract, including protections around privacy and monitoring, job descriptions, and requirements for notifying employees and bargaining with them.

Both the Tech Guild and the Times Guild (which represents 1,500 editorial, ad sales, and support staff at the Times) filed unfair labor practice charges against the Times, saying that company violated labor law by refusing to respond to their requests for information around AI use at the outlet.

The Times did not respond to specific questions about how it uses DX and Glean, but spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in an email that the company disagrees with the characterizations made in grievances and that it would respond as part of its “normal contractual process.”

“Likewise, we will respond to this Request for Information (RFI) in due course as we’ve done with 80+ other RFIs from the Guild in recent years,” Rhoades Ha said.

The Times Guild is currently bargaining a new contract, pushing for robust protections against AI, like requirements that a human is behind any AI tool being used, that any journalism utilizing AI is transparently labeled, and that staff are compensated for AI model training deals the company might make. The Times deploys artificial intelligence tools for some reporting, like using it to parse millions of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein or scan satellite images of Gaza to try to find where Israel had dropped a specific kind of bomb.

Journalists across the industry are in the process of negotiating union contracts, and AI is one of the most urgent issues at stake. In April, 150 unionized employees at ProPublica walked off the job for 24 hours; one of the key sticking points with management was how AI would be used and disclosed to audiences. After McClatchy, the company that publishes newspapers like the Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee, started rolling out a generative AI tool that spits out different versions of stories, some staff withheld their bylines in protest.

Harnett emphasizes that the unit’s position is not that AI shouldn’t ever be used, but that workers should have a say in how it’s deployed. Metrics like how many tokens an employee uses or how often they’re using AI to do their jobs create pressure to do more and incentives that don’t align with doing quality work.

“It’s going to distract [you] from actually doing a good job, which is what we think the company should want,” he says.

Pope Leo calls for being ‘profoundly human’ in the age of AI

2026-05-26T14:19:06-04:00

Pope Leo XIV attends the presentation of his first encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, on May 25th, 2026 in Vatican City, Vatican. | Photo: Getty Images

Pope Leo XIV warned of the risks of AI and unconstrained technological power in his first major papal document released on Monday. Magnifica Humanitas is the pope’s manifesto on “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” in which he discusses the dangers of AI-powered warfare, the effects of AI on labor, and the need for new legal and ethical frameworks to govern technology.

In his papal encyclical — a kind of open letter from the Catholic Church — Pope Leo stressed the economic and social upheaval that rapid AI adoption is creating, with inadequate protections for individuals that threaten human dignity. He compared the current era of AI to the Tower of Babel, saying society must “avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’” which he defines as “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”

Pope Leo’s letter touches on major areas of modern life that AI has become deeply embedded in: job loss and labor generally, AI-powered warfare, and children being exposed to AI tools and content, among other topics. Above all, the encyclical calls for the dignity of humans to be a central part of decision-making and governance. The letter is an appeal for “moral and social discernment that safeguards the primacy of the human person, in order to ensure that it will always be human intelligence, with its conscience and freedom, that guides technical innovations and responsibly determines their use and limits,” Leo writes.

The letter, which runs more than 42,000 words, frames the call for “prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI” as “an exercise of responsible care for the human family.” Among some of the proposals:

A social criteria for introducing automation and AI, along with protections and retraining programs for workers
Humans, not opaque technological systems, should make decisions about when to use lethal force
Help for teachers and students to engage with new technology in responsible, critical, and creative ways
Transparency and accountability when algorithms are used to make decisions around hiring or access to services and opportunities
Develop more environmentally sustainable AI technology

The effects of AI on humanity have been a defining issue for Pope Leo: He chose his papal name in reference to the Industrial Revolution, during which his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, issued his own encyclical on protecting workers amid technological advancements. Pope Leo has also been engaging with the AI industry — Anthropic cofounder Christopher Olah was present when the pope presented his encyclical on Monday. Politico reported that representatives from Amazon, Meta, and Google have met with Vatican officials ahead of the publication of Monday’s encyclical as the tech industry tries to influence the Church’s positions. (There’s also a subset trying to “AGI-pill” the pope; Magnifica Humanitas doesn’t explicitly mention artificial general intelligence.)

The encyclical isn’t a blanket objection to AI. Rather, Pope Leo calls for the “disarming” of the technology — both in a military sense and also economic and societal sense. AI shouldn’t be used for a race to amass power or monopolize society, he says.

“To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.”

Who gets to own the Luigi Mangione story?

2026-05-21T15:51:22-04:00

Luigi Mangione, accused of the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, attends a court hearing on May 18, 2026. | POOL/AFP via Getty Images

On Monday morning, a judge overseeing the New York state case on the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO ruled that some evidence collected by police could not be shown to a jury.

It wasn’t the only news coming out of the hearing. Outside the courthouse, Molly Crane-Newman, a New York Daily News reporter, captured on video several attendees giving incendiary remarks to the press. One of the attendees, Lena Weissbrot, said the children of Brian Thompson, who was shot and killed in December 2024, were “better off without him” and that they “needed to learn to not be like their dad.” Another attendee who identified themselves only as Ashley chimed in, “I’m standing on business. Fuck Brian Thompson. I don’t give a flying fuck he died.” They went on to discuss the US for-profit healthcare industry and people who have died without necessary medical care.

Ordinarily this would be a minor tabloid news item, along the lines of previous coverage of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering Thompson. I had seen — and interviewed — the attendees in question at previous hearings while covering the case. They, like other supporters of Mangione, have become regulars at the courthouse in lower Manhattan. But this time the comments spawned a different kind of news cycle: This handful of attendees had press credentials hanging from their necks.

Local reporters criticized the fact that the city had apparently doled out press passes to the three supporters, who run social media accounts under the moniker “The Mangionistas.” Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams described them as “reporters” and accused the current administration of being “reckless” in how they credential journalists.

The city-issued press passes require applicants to submit six examples of on-the-ground reporting, which can include traditional formats like a written story or a broadcast — but the application leaves room for more nontraditional formats as well. The city defines a member of the press as someone who “gathers and reports the news, by publishing, broadcasting, or cablecasting articles, commentaries, books, photographs, video, film, or audio by electronic, print, or digital media, such as radio, television, newspapers, magazines, wires, books, and the Internet.” What separates a reporter from a person who witnessed something and posted about it? Is a Substack essay on equal footing with a reported story? How do you demand that a reporter disentangle their personal opinions or feelings from the story they’re covering? (I’d argue this is nearly impossible.) It’s a definitional quagmire that could affect newsgathering beyond the Mangione case and shut out smaller outlets or independent journalists.

At the same time, there are practical reasons the city might want to be more rigid in its credentialing. A press pass is required to cross police and fire lines and attend city-sponsored press events. Even before the Mangionistas, some local reporters have raised concerns about the city’s credentialing practices: A right-wing anti-vax local political candidate known as the “Sperminator” managed to get a press pass at some point during the Adams administration. The New York Post reported that the city blocked him from renewing his credentials in 2025 after he was accused of impersonating a reporter. If everyone can theoretically become “media,” credentialing becomes useless.

Who gets to decide what is and isn’t reporting?

By the end of the day, The New York Times reported that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration was reviewing the press credentialing process, and on Tuesday Mamdani said that the three Mangionistas should not have been issued press passes to begin with. (Reached via email, the Mangionistas declined to comment.) City Hall pointed The Verge to Mamdani’s comments earlier in the week, in which he said the three fans “don’t fall within [the] debate” of who should be able to get a press pass. Weissbrot appears to have started publishing dispatches from Mangione’s court hearings in September on a blog called The Bicoastal Beat, though there is no disclosure that she is directly involved in organizing for Mangione; a message to the author’s Bicoastal Beat email address was not returned.

“These individuals do not represent the views of Luigi, nor the tens of thousands who have shown their support from around the world,” Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a lawyer for Mangione, said in an email. “The only people who speak for Luigi are his attorneys. We condemn these vile and irresponsible statements that have no place in the discourse around these cases.”

The incident is weird on several levels. For one, it has become increasingly difficult to draw clean distinctions between a journalist, an influencer, a gadfly, a fan, and an activist. Who gets to decide what is and isn’t reporting, and who might be blocked from access if stricter rules are put in place? The situation also reveals the fault lines within the larger Luigi Mangione universe, and the messiness inherent in making a celebrity out of someone on trial for murder.

This situation might be an edge case, but the questions it raises cut across wider changes in our information ecosystem and evolving media consumption habits. Some of this comes from the way people are consuming the news: through vertical video, through clips, or through “news influencers” who are not doing their own reporting but instead summarizing or responding to the news. Institutions and those in power have also cozied up to personalities who do deliver news and information to their audiences, albeit lacking journalistic standards or rigor: Donald Trump and his administration have used content from MAGA-aligned influencers as justification for carrying out immigration raids. Influencers are getting exclusive White House briefings. Mamdani has also hosted influencer-only events and press conferences where creators can interact with him and make content. It’s probably reasonable to expect a baseline level of decorum from everyone, press pass holders or not — but if the Mangionistas had not made the statements this week, would it still be a problem that they, as a kind of Mangione influencer group, had gotten credentialed? All of a sudden the mayor’s office finds itself having to referee what opinions or views are acceptable for members of this loosely defined press to have. Revoking a press pass is also not so simple — it requires a hearing with the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings.

It’s fitting we are arguing about whether Mangione fans should get press credentials — his case is all about narrative control. From the beginning, the killing of Thompson was less about the individuals involved than it was about what they represented: the US health insurance industry versus everyone else. Mangione supporters have long expressed frustration with how “the media” writes about them (they typically are referring to the more sensationalist coverage labeling them as ghoulish and loony). Many supporters of Mangione are adamant that they do not condone this specific violence, and instead use the case to advocate for healthcare reform and for a fair trial for the accused.

But there are also tensions within the wider community of people following the case closely. When I spoke with supporters in December outside the courthouse, some complained about other attendees — the ones who show up dressed “like they’re going to Comic-Con,” or those who seem more interested in the spotlight. The annoyance stems from a belief that it both makes all supporters look bad and also takes the focus away from the man who is actually on trial. (I also spoke with Weissbrot that day; she has attended many of the pretrial hearings in the New York case against Mangione.)

Indeed, some of the loudest condemnations of the Mangionistas’ statements have come from within the Mangione support network. People Over Profit NYC, a healthcare reform group that has become a mainstay outside the courthouse, issued a statement denouncing the comments. Some Mangione supporters wondered whether his legal team could bar the Mangionistas from court, or whether Mangione could get restraining orders against them. Others accused the three women of purposely sabotaging Mangione by saying maximally controversial things to elicit negative public opinion. It speaks to the wider challenge of how to talk about the case: If you ask supporters, Mangione is some combination of a folk hero, a symbol of the failures of the US healthcare system, an innocent man, and someone who is guilty in a literal sense but shouldn’t be by legal standards.

Threading that needle is impossible in a case where public participation has been a hallmark of its notoriety. Supporters have sent in more than $1.5 million to Mangione’s legal defense fund; he is reportedly inundated with letters in jail. The upcoming jury selection process will similarly be a spectacle, and prospective jurors will surely be asked if they’ve shared some Luigi meme in the last year and a half. This is the problem with being the internet’s favorite defendant, of having support so fervent it becomes a recurring Fox News or Daily Mail cliche. Eventually someone will put their foot in their mouth and you will have to answer for it.

Would you let robots spend your money? Google is betting on it

2026-05-19T13:07:06-04:00

Google is going all in on AI-driven shopping even as some competitors back off.

At Google I/O, the company unveiled the latest iteration of its AI commerce tools: a “Universal Cart” that works across different retailers and Google products like Gemini — and eventually YouTube and Gmail, too. Users can add products to Google’s universal cart as they browse Search and chat with Gemini and then check out through Google. The cart will also track prices, provide in-stock notifications, suggest potential discounts, and alert shoppers to potential issues with their selections.

Despite the transformative changes AI has brought to the workplace, business, and culture, tech companies are still trying to make the case to the average person that AI can improve their lives or make tedious, unpleasant tasks easier. One place Google thinks that could be is shopping. In November, the company introduced a way for shoppers to dispatch an AI voice to call brick-and-mortar stores to ask about inventory; it also began rolling out a semi-automatic way for shoppers to have AI agents purchase items online on their behalf.

The Universal Cart attempts to corral people’s shopping habits into one place. People shop over the course of days, across different devices and accounts, says Vidhya Srinivasan, vice president and general manager of ads and commerce at Google.

“A lot of the ways I capture this is by having many, many, many tabs open and by syncing profiles and things like that. And it kind of works,” Srinivasan said in an exclusive briefing. “What the shopping cart does from a current problem perspective is it brings all of this together … It is a cart that’s going to be available wherever I am across Google properties.” A cart icon will be displayed next to a user’s profile picture.

Srinivasan envisions the cart almost like a personal shopper working in the background. The Universal Cart works across different retailers, including Sephora, Target, Wayfair, and Walmart, and eventually users will be able to add items to their cart from YouTube or when they see products in Gmail. Once a product is in the cart, users can get price-drop alerts, view price history, and be notified when an out-of-stock item is available again. Srinivasan says the cart — which runs on Gemini — can also alert a user to potential issues with their planned purchases. She gives the example of someone building their first PC choosing a motherboard and processor with incompatible sockets without realizing it; the cart would flag the discrepancy and warn the shopper of potential problems. Shoppers can also connect retailer loyalty programs and credit cards through Google Pay, and the Universal Cart will suggest payment methods and potential ways to save money. If a shopper wants to build a cart but doesn’t want to check out through Google, they can also transfer the contents of their cart to a retailer’s website and finish checkout there.

“The retailer might have other things they want to show the person when they land over there, and they can go deeper in other ways potentially,” Srinivasan says.

Agentic shopping is only possible — and helpful — with the buy-in from a variety of actors: search engines, retailers, payment processors, and so on. Participation from retailers is especially important, considering widespread adoption of agentic shopping could mean customers have little reason to actually visit a store’s website at all (we’ve been calling this “the Doordash problem” at The Verge). Amazon sued AI company Perplexity in November for allowing users to buy products through its Comet AI browser. OpenAI’s efforts at checkout features within ChatGPT were disappointing. As more shoppers use AI chatbots to research products to buy or get recommendations, getting surfaced in AI search platforms is becoming more and more urgent for retailers and brands, which are already tweaking their online presence to try to get chatbots to mention them.

Google seems to know it is getting between merchants and their customers; Srinivasan says the company is “very focused” on the value exchange between all parties. “[Consumers] benefit, but also merchants benefit, because [in the] long run, that’s the only way it works,” she says.

Srinivasan describes Google’s place in the interaction as a “matchmaker”

Having billions of products available for purchase within Gemini is great for Google, but retailers need something in return. Srinivasan says Google does not currently take a cut of sales or a commission for products purchased. I asked Srinivasan whether she’s heard concerns from retailers about the idea that Google could become the portal through which shoppers buy things online. She describes Google’s place in the interaction as a “matchmaker.”

“We really want to facilitate lots of consumers talking to lots of merchants,” Srinivasan says. “We don’t want to be the merchant of record.”

On the infrastructure level, there are signs that the retail industry is coalescing around Google. In January, the company announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a new open standard it developed with major retailers like Walmart, Shopify, and Target that makes the entire AI shopping journey possible: researching items, putting them in a cart, buying them, paying for them, and getting post-purchase customer service. (OpenAI has its own competing version.) In April, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe joined the committee that governs UCP.

Google previously introduced a way for shoppers to purchase products directly within AI Mode in Search and in the Gemini app, and it’s now expanding into hotel and local food delivery categories. Using Gemini Spark, a new “24/7 personal AI agent” announced by Google, users will also be able to give AI agents more specific guidelines for purchases, like the brands they like, items they’re looking for, and budget. The shopping agent can then make purchases on the shopper’s behalf, provided all criteria are met. A shopper could specify the exact model of a pair of boots they want, for example, set a price limit, and have the AI agent purchase the item when it finds it. The purchases use a technology called Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), essentially a digital paper trail and approval process for having an AI agent carry out a task like buying something.

Shopping is complicated — what happens, for example, when the robot buys something under the price a user specifies, but with tax and shipping it ends up being much more expensive than another option? Would most shoppers trust AI enough to spend their money on their behalf? (Srinivasan tells me Google is currently working through all of this, but that in general, a shopper would go to the actual retailer, not Google, to resolve problems after purchase. Which raises another question: Will retailers introduce policies around purchases made with AI?) Buying things is also emotional: If a rare item on my wishlist pops up for $4 more than I told the chatbot was my limit, I might pull the trigger even if the robot couldn’t. It is hard to imagine a world where shoppers immediately outsource their shopping to a machine: It would be a radical reshaping of what it means to buy things. Most of all, adoption would require an enormous amount of consumer trust — and that is still an uphill battle.

YouTube is expanding its AI deepfake detection tool to all adult users

2026-05-15T18:21:33-04:00

YouTube is expanding its AI likeness detection program to all users over the age of 18 — meaning just about anyone can have the platform hunt for potential deepfakes of themselves.

The likeness detection feature uses a selfie-style scan of a person’s face to monitor YouTube for lookalikes. If there is a match, YouTube alerts the user; the person then has the option to request that YouTube remove the content. YouTube has said in the past that it has found the number of removal requests to be “very small.”

YouTube began testing the feature with content creators, and then expanded it to government officials, politicians, journalists, and finally the entertainment industry. The expansion to any user 18 years or older is a significant shift — it essentially gives the average person the ability to constantly monitor content on YouTube that could use their likeness. Takedown requests are evaluated using YouTube’s privacy policy, and the company says it considers removals based on criteria like whether the content is realistic, is labeled as AI-generated, and if a person can be uniquely identified. There are carveouts for things like parody or satire, and the tool only covers facial likeness, not other identifying features like a person’s voice. Users can withdraw from the program and have YouTube delete their data.

The news was announced on YouTube’s creator forum, but spokesperson Jack Malon says there are no requirements on what constitutes a “creator” who is eligible.

“With this expansion, we’re making clear that whether creators have been uploading to YouTube for a decade or are just starting, they’ll have access to the same level of protection,” Malon said in an email.

Deepfake content often centers on celebrities, politicians, or other public figures, but the ability to create a convincing digital replica is a concern for private citizens, too. There have been instances of teenagers being deepfaked by classmates, and three teenagers sued xAI alleging that the company’s Grok chatbot generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) of them.

YouTube is courting creators — and sponsors — with streaming shows

2026-05-13T15:49:37-04:00

In the ongoing fight for content and talent, YouTube is pitching itself as the connector between the creators and advertisers — and marketing its creators not just as the future of social media, but also of advertising, TV, streaming, and entertainment more broadly.

At the company’s annual advertiser event in New York on Wednesday, YouTube introduced a new slate of exclusive shows coming to the platform, hosted by some big names: a travel show with Trevor Noah, a Met Gala documentary series from podcaster Alex Cooper, a new series from Kareem Rahma, the host of the popular show Subway Takes, and more. The pitch to advertisers: Invest in these YouTube-only series.

On the content creator side, YouTube’s appeal has long been its relatively generous ad revenue split that creators earn through views. But the company has steadily added more and more ways for content creators to make money, like shopping features and a hub for brands to find creators that might be a fit for them. Advertisers are also increasingly dumping money into sponsored videos, where creators can swap out brand sponsors when a campaign is over, essentially creating a billboard that constantly updates.

YouTube accounts for a huge chunk of what people watch: 12.7 percent of all TV viewing, according to Nielsen. It also offers advertisers more than 3 million eligible content creators whose content can serve as an ad space, along with built-in AI tools to help advertisers find those channels. Rahma told The New York Times this week that when he started posting his series on YouTube, the company offered to help him secure sponsors for his new show (and spin up his Emmy campaign). YouTube has tried to make its own original content with celebrities and internet stars in the past, but it has largely flopped (YouTube CEO Neal Mohan has said executives “weren’t good at picking content”). The company seems to have realized that it makes more sense for it to be a platform for video content that creators are already making — and a place to find brands that will bankroll that work.

YouTube has to offer creators something unique to keep them on the platform. Even though YouTube played a major role in the podcast world’s pivot to video and is also the top podcast platform, some creators have jumped ship — especially to Netflix, which is building up its own slate of video podcasts. In December, iHeartRadio brought 15 shows to Netflix, including The Breakfast Club and My Favorite Murder. Netflix also launched its first original podcasts in January: one hosted by comedian Pete Davidson and another with sports commentator and former NFL player Michael Irvin.

Palantir’s true believers are wearing this jacket

2026-05-12T08:27:13-04:00

In late April, Palantir — the software company that, in recent years, has perhaps become best known for its defense industry contracts and work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — announced that it would be adding new products to its merch store. The latest offering was a cotton chore coat.

At $239 and in bright blue and black options, the jacket looks like a standard offering that has, by way of photographer Bill Cunningham, trickled down into mainstream menswear for years. This jacket is a pastiche of 19th century French workwear that was worn by people actually doing physical labor; the only noticeable difference is that a dainty Palantir logo appears on the breast pocket.

The jacket ruffled feathers, to put it lightly. One TikTok described it as “Evil boring French workwear for evil boring guys.” The more sartorially inclined questioned why Palantir, as a cheerleader of US military might, wouldn’t make something inspired by American workwear. Still, by the end of its on-sale day, the 420 units Palantir produced had sold out. (Palantir declined to comment for this story.)

For over a year, along with its merch, Palantir has been trying to sell the idea that it is, actually, a lifestyle brand. In a credulous interview with GQ leading up to the release of the jackets, a Palantir employee told the magazine that the company “exists to ensure that the institutions that power the United States and its allies have the best software capabilities on Earth,” and that wearing Palantir-branded clothing was a way for other people to hitch their wagon to this ideology. As for what wearing Palantir merchandise would represent, there are mentions of “supporting our warfighters,” “strengthening Western institutions,” and being apolitical. Most of the garments do not obviously signal these things — there’s no stars and stripes iconography or STAND FOR THE FLAG, KNEEL FOR THE FALLEN-type slogans. Instead, it is Palantir talking to itself and its supporters; chore coat wearers might earnestly believe in these values, but their clothing, at least, is a marketing exercise for the company itself.

“It makes sense to me. I think it’s actually really smart of Palantir to want this, to want to be on T-shirts and to want to be something that people wear, even ironically,” says Avery Trufelman, a fashion journalist and host of Articles of Interest, a podcast that last year detailed the outdoor industry and its long-running ties to the military. “It’s kind of a bad move to say you want to be cool — that’s not cool. But the initial aspiration is really, really smart.”

As Articles of Interest documented, fashion and the military have a deeply entangled history — from bomber jackets and combat boots to field jackets and khakis, our contemporary wardrobes are littered with clothing that has origins in military use. Some household name brands like Patagonia have also contracted with the military in addition to selling fleece jackets to crunchy outdoor types.

Palantir’s merch is a new way for the laptop class to signal brand alignment

It’s also not so unusual that a defense contractor would wind up making products for the consumer market, Trufelman says: synthetic insulation by PrimaLoft was initially developed for the US military but now lines jackets sold at REI and bedding at L.L. Bean. Camouflage prints intended for elite soldiers are now also part of the uniform of fashionable civilians. The difference, of course, is that Palantir doesn’t really make clothes: It makes powerful (and sometimes poorly understood) software that even some of its own employees are increasingly concerned about. Palantir’s merch serves no tactical purpose for “warfighters,” but is a new way for the laptop class to signal brand alignment.

“Palantir doing their version of it is sensible, because who are the people that are buying their clothes? They’re often urban knowledge workers, people that send email all day,” says Derek Guy, a menswear writer. (You may know him as “The Menswear Guy” on social media.) “It’s just a very fashionable garment at the moment for that kind of class.”

Palantir has something of a cult following already, in part because it has made some investors very rich. It has an engaged, committed base of retail investors and fans who debate what to do about Palantir’s “PR problems” and track company goings-on obsessively. Palantir itself also communicates directly with individual investors or fan communities. (Palantir appears to have previously even hired a moderator from the company’s Subreddit into a communications role.) A line of merchandise beyond the usual tote bag is a way for Palantir to turn these fans and investors into walking billboards.

Connor, a Palantir fan and merch customer who describes himself as “quite bullish” on the company, also owns tech merch from Tesla, Google, OpenAI, and Apple. “It’s fun to wear these items, and they’re a nod towards technology and brands I like or am associated with because that’s a part of my personality,” Connor said in a message to The Verge.

Alex, another Palantir fan, has collected several merch items from the company dating back to the early 2000s that he acquired secondhand like a zip-up sweatshirt issued to employees, as well as more recent releases. (Despite their support for Palantir, both Connor and Alex asked that The Verge not use their full names: Connor, because he limits his online presence, and Alex, due to the “uptick in attention” that the company has gotten over their merch. Alex acknowledged that Palantir is part of his investment portfolio.) Alex says he sees Palantir as a foil to other parts of the tech industry that have “parasitically” extracted users’ data, information, and personal thoughts.

“I see Palantir as being the antithesis of that, where they’re trying to get the brightest minds together to create technology that will better serve us as opposed to just use us for ad revenue,” Alex says. (Palantir’s technology is also used in advertising, including a platform announced in 2025 touted by a partner as “the holy grail of marketing brought to life.”)

Alex says he wears Palantir merchandise as a “conversation piece” hoping to discuss misconceptions about the company — but there have been few takers. Mostly, he says people might say something under their breath about the merch; he has also found posts on X by strangers referencing a “dude in a Palantir shirt” that he believes are about him. A barista once asked him his thoughts on Palantir technology being used to kill Palestinians, he says (Palantir has said Israel uses its technology for “war-related missions”).

“Every other time I’ve worn [Palantir] stuff … people will tweet about it, but they’ll never actually confront me about it, which is bizarre,” Alex says.

Palantir is clearly putting in more effort to its merchandise than simply drop-shipping cheap T-shirts featuring its logo — the company told GQ it will introduce a tennis collection in June. But even with slightly elevated products, the output shows the limits of a technology company trying to signal taste or refinement when it comes to art and culture. An item previously for sale in the Palantir shop is a white crewneck sweatshirt with bold red lettering reading “SILICON VALLEY DROPOUTS.” Many people immediately noted the similarities between the Palantir crewneck and Off-White, the brand founded by the late fashion designer Virgil Abloh. The crewneck seemed to be referencing Abloh’s designs, like T-shirts with scattered, minimal typography in a style that was particularly trendy a decade ago.

“I don’t know what [Palantir is] trying to achieve, but you can’t design your way into coolness like that. It takes a much larger effort. It takes a different kind of cultural positioning,” says Guy, the menswear writer. “It requires a lot more than just designing merch. I mean, if it was that easy to rebrand yourself, then everybody would do it.”

Alex, who has a creative background, skipped the Off-White-style sweatshirt. “That piece in particular totally screamed, like, a rich dude that shops at Bloomingdale’s that wants to dress like a dude in his mid-20s,” he says. “I saw the piece for what it was and it was distasteful.”

The tech guys the products cater to live in a bubble, where taste — a recent buzzword — and style are fed to them, Alex says.

“The stuff they’re buying … is already so downstream from the people that it originated from that by the time they get to it, or it’s fed to them by their algorithm or their stylist, it’s already out of vogue,” Alex says.

Anything with a Palantir logo or name on it is inseparable from the company’s business: Supporters will rep it as a way to signal their alignment (or their financial ties), and anyone morally, ethically, or intellectually opposed to the company will see the logo as a marker of something truly rotten. The Palantir merchandising effort is a way for the company to get attention on social media and hype up a base of people already on board with its mission (or to expand its base to sympathetic audiences). But it’s another, harder task to create cultural cache around a brand marred in criticism — no amount of company merch a decade behind the cutting edge will change that.

The sold-out Palantir chore coat reminded me of another tech firm’s adventures in merchandising: OpenAI’s employees-only (but publicly viewable) archive of company swag, which includes a Dreamsicle-colored basketball and a T-shirt with a handwritten script that looks like it could be from a neighborhood natural wine bar. Buried among the listings was OpenAI’s own version of a chore coat, apparently from 2024, in the same bright blue, faux vintage wash, with a little logo dotting the breast pocket. Despite coming only a couple years before Palantir’s, there is no GQ article about it.

Palantir’s efforts to speak directly to its base of fans also brought to mind a more quaint branding stunt: an Anthropic pop-up last October, hosted in the West Village in New York City. Marketed as an anti-AI slop gathering, attendees lined up down the block for a cup of coffee and a free baseball cap embroidered with the word “thinking.”

Fans described it as “culturally coherent” and that “the aesthetic screams craft/authenticity,” clearly drawing a line between Anthropic’s tools and those of its competitors more concerned with scale. If Palantir is the lifestyle brand for a group unapologetically hyped on Western military power, Claude is the chatbot for the creatives, the dreamers, and the thinkers — at least, that’s what the merch is trying to say.

I kept scrolling through the many cloying products in the OpenAI shop until I hit the first item listed at the bottom of the page: a baseball cap from September 2024, a full year before Anthropic’s “thinking” coffee shop pop-up. “Thinking deeply” is embroidered on it.

Correction May 12th: An earlier version of this story said an OpenAI hat read, “Still thinking.” It actually said “Thinking Deeply.”

The clippening

2026-05-28T11:00:33-04:00

Earlier this year, after a tumultuous period serving as the former second-in-command at the FBI, Dan Bongino went back to what he is perhaps known best for: video podcasting. After Bongino exited the role in January, he began promotion for the return of his podcast, The Dan Bongino Show. He bought out a billboard in Times Square in New York; he dropped teaser videos for his first new episode in months. Bongino also deployed a more experimental promotional tactic, aimed at getting portions of his show in front of a wider audience. For this, he used clippers.

Clippers are largely anonymous social media accounts whose sole purpose is to rack up views. The accounts take a piece of long-form content — an hourslong livestream, for example, or a podcast — and pull out the most exciting, controversial, or shocking moments. Sometimes the accounts are dedicated to clipping, but companies will also recruit accounts with existing followers. Clippers can be based anywhere in the world (one tech founder who uses clippers has described some of them as “hungry Slovakian teenagers”) while targeting English-speaking audiences.

After clippers get the source material that a brand wants to promote, they cut it down and blast their version into the open web. Hundreds or even thousands of clipping accounts might be sharing similar videos, all in competition with one another. You have perhaps learned about a TV show moment, a celebrity podcast appearance, or a new band via clippers without even realizing it; it just looks like someone sharing something. Clippers do not need to be affiliated in any real way with the subjects they are clipping, and the clipped content does not need to be creative, transformative, or even interesting. It is the cartilage of the internet, the placeholders for the algorithm to suck in and spit out.

According to a campaign listing on the service Clipping.net, The Dan Bongino Show started a 31-day campaign beginning the day after his podcast returned in February. There were few requirements or guidelines, only that clippers should pull moments from his new podcast episode and include #danbongino in the video caption. The campaign ran across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and clippers would be paid $150 for every 100,000 views (with funds dispersed via PayPal). A Discord message about The Dan Bongino Show pegged the budget at $2,000. Bongino’s team did not respond to a request for comment.

“It’s just a necessary marketing play that if you’re not doing you’re behind,” Clipping founder Anthony Fujiwara told The Verge in a message. “Clipping lets you abuse the algorithms of other platforms to grow your product exponentially.” Fujiwara says 62,000 clippers use his platform, earning $3,000 a month on average. Most are based in the US.

“We verify using their audiences as a metric for who we want to be a clipper,” he says. “Indian views don’t help anyone.”

If you are someone who wants attention, social media is just another form of gambling in the age of algorithmic recommendation feeds. Creators and influencers can optimize their content or tweak titles and thumbnails, but ultimately they are all just pulling a virtual slot machine arm, hoping it will dispense views, engagement, and resultant revenue. For well over a decade, content creators have worked to reverse engineer “the algorithm.” Deploying clippers allows companies to gamble on content at scale, without paying a network of contractors upfront: Why bet once, when you could bet 50 times? Clipping is nothing new, despite the recent discourse around who uses it and why, and whether paying random accounts to share content promoting something is deceptive or manufacturing fake fandom. The reality is that more and more, the social internet is filled with clips, paid and unpaid, that stand in for the full-length podcast, video, film, album, or piece of writing. As online content increasingly becomes abstracted from the original work, what purpose does making the full version even serve?

If clips really are the standard for marketing, why the secrecy?

It’s not just podcasters who hire what is essentially a personal army of microtask workers. Clipping.net also lists campaigns for TV shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race ($175 per 100,000 views) and Michael Carbonara, a candidate running for congress in Florida. (The instructions for the campaign note dictate “Your clips must NOT have Michael saying anything Anti-Trump / Anti-White House,” and note that AI-generated clips are acceptable, though.) The brief doesn’t include any instructions for disclosing it is paid content; the Federal Election Commission requires that digital content include disclaimers. Carbonara’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment. World of Wonder, the production company for RuPaul’s Drag Race, declined to comment.

On Vyro, another clipping service launched by MrBeast, a clipping campaign for Perplexity launched in early April centered on Joe Rogan’s use of AI. (Perplexity is a sponsor of Rogan’s show.) Clippers were instructed to make content based on Rogan discussing AI with guests like Bradley Cooper and Johnny Knoxville, with the AI company specifically mentioned. The campaign ran across Instagram and TikTok, paying $1.20 per 1,000 views on a video — and came with more requirements. Accounts were required to have more than 10,000 followers to submit clips, and all posts were to include #PoweredByPerplexity and #sponsored (many clipping campaigns have no disclosures that the content is paid).

Despite the hundreds of thousands of views the Rogan clips generated, nobody involved would take responsibility for actually funding and running the campaign. Reached via email, Perplexity distanced itself from Vyro, with spokesperson Jesse Dwyer saying Perplexity “has no knowledge” of the company and “takes any unauthorized use of the Perplexity name or logo very seriously.” When asked to confirm Perplexity had not run or authorized clipping campaigns, Dwyer initially stopped responding to The Verge. After publication, Dwyer told The Verge it was “not accurate” to say Perplexity launched the clipping campaign. Vyro directed me to Evangelist, a platform that connects brands with clip farms; Evangelist CEO Dusan Kovacic told The Verge in a statement that his company was not hired directly by Perplexity, had never claimed it was, and that the clipping campaign “came through an agency-side channel.” Kovacic said he was not able to comment further on specific client or agency relationships.

If clips really are the standard for marketing — a tool that everyone uses, that is at this point old news — why the secrecy?

One of the biggest beneficiaries of the clip economy is Clavicular (real name: Braden Peters), a 20-year-old streamer who has enjoyed an unprecedented come-up thanks to short videos of him going viral. He has received mainstream news coverage of his maniacal focus on his appearance, in a fringe subculture known as “looksmaxxing.” He has thrown around racist slurs; hit his face with a hammer, saying he was literally chiseling his bones; and sang along to Ye’s song “Heil Hitler” with other right-wing and manosphere influencers. You probably have never watched one of Peters’ hours-long streams — but I bet you’ve seen clips of them.

According to figures posted by Peters, more than 1,600 clippers farmed out content of him between March and April, posting nearly 70,000 videos that accumulated more than 2 billion views. They clipped him on a fake date with another influencer, in nightclubs with a rotating cast of women, and apparently being consensually choked until he convulsed.

“Everyone hating but as predicted the clip went giga viral,” Peters wrote on X of the choking stunt.

The clip ecosystem has a way of elevating even unknown personalities, reaching millions of people who will potentially never see where the original material clips come from. Peters, for example, has around 337,000 followers on Kick, a fraction of the following others command on the platform. Relatively few people watch his streams live, which are, frankly, uneventful — except for the moments he’s manufactured to be clipped later.

You do not even need to hire people to clip your content: Many will do it for free, or you can just recycle everything you produce as clips. TBPN, the three-hour podcast popular among a subset of the Silicon Valley tech industry, gets only a few thousand views on YouTube, but most people watch the show via disembodied segments — clips of each guest — on X. OpenAI recently acquired the show, which generated millions of dollars via flashy, maximalist ads on the livestreams. As part of the OpenAI deal, TBPN will “wind down” the advertising, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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Clippers by and large add nothing of substance to the original work — no analysis, no response, not even filters and music and cuts that fan edits often have. It is the most boring kind of content, spliced purely for the algorithm. And when it comes to paid clippers, it is hard to separate the aesthetics from the often very young editors who churn out content. Often, the only edit made to videos is a solid border around a clip with a clickbait-y few lines of text: “Joe Rogan talking about AI sounding too real 😨” one video on Instagram reads. The video is a clip from Rogan’s interview with Knoxville and includes the tag #PoweredByPerplexity and #sponsored, as per the clipping campaign rules. Another Instagram account that last posted in 2017 when it was sharing calligraphy videos appears now to be part of a clip farm, sharing Call of Duty clips tagged as sponsored with captions like “This might be the smoothest sniping has ever been in a battle royale 👀.” The original clip that made Clavicular into a viral personality was nothing special, simply a short video with the Kick logo in it. The caption, filled with words that to the average person meant nothing, was the actual growth hack: “Clavicular ran into a frat leader at ASU and got brutally frame mogged by him👀😂”

Now that the existence of clipping has hit mainstream consciousness, the strategy is being touted as the future of building platforms and growing a business online. Clipping is undeniably effective at generating views, which in the era of short-form video largely means the number of times a post comes up on a user’s feed (as opposed to requiring a certain watch time, for example). But whether clipping actually builds a meaningful and resilient audience is, to me, still unproven. The Rogan and Knoxville clip on Instagram, for example, generated 272,000 views, but almost no engagement: just over 700 likes, 14 comments, and 10 reposts. Did Perplexity’s clipping campaign meaningfully affect its business, or Rogan’s viewership? Did it change anyone’s mind about AI? Or was it simply the connective tissue between one scroll and the next, a piece of media that popped up and was forgotten just as quickly?

Eventually, the full-length content becomes a means to an end

TikTok’s ascendance during the pandemic made short-form video everyone’s problem (or solution, depending on how you look at it). In less than a decade’s time, we are in a second pivot to video phase that now stretches beyond news organizations. Podcasts have turned into video talk shows hosted by journalists, influencers, comedians, and nuns. Political strategy firms flood Instagram, TikTok, and X with clips of politicians at events saying something shocking or stupid, knowing the clip itself is the news. Even I, a features writer, participate in the clip-ification of our digital lives: I make short-form videos explaining my stories to TikTok audiences who will mostly not end up reading the original piece. Some of it is out of necessity — if you make something for public consumption, the devil’s bargain is you have to promote it. But overindexing on the clipped version means eventually, the full-length content is a means to an end. If clips really are the present and future of media and reach online, one begins to wonder what justifies making the unclipped, complete content in the first place.

Now that the clipping cat is fully out of the bag, companies offering the service will likely be busy; maybe some firm really will hire a “Chief Clipping Officer” (though I’d advise against it). It might be effective in pumping views for a while — but if we are to believe the platforms where this kind of recycled content lives, reused clips may have a short shelf life online. Meta has said it’s cracking down on “unoriginal” content that includes many of the hallmarks of clippers: “adding borders, inserting captions, and changing the reel’s speed” are specifically called out. Clipping companies are pulling in millions of dollars by condensing politicians, podcasters, indie rock bands, and Silicon Valley technocrats into bite-sized content — but even the clippers need something to clip from. If all that matters is going viral, the value of producing anything more complete begins to diminish, and so does the viewers’ incentive to engage with anything beyond the clips.

In April, a clip of Tucker Carlson’s podcast circulated online, in which the right wing media personality said he would be “tormented” for playing a role in Donald Trump getting elected. The excerpt was shared by TMZ, discussed on The View, and clipped by Headquarters, the social media account run by former Kamala Harris staffers. What was part of the episode but that didn’t hit the clip farms was Carlson saying Barack Obama “hated” white people, or brushing off criticism that Trump is racist because he was known to be romantically involved with “everyone.” Carlson’s repentance for supporting Trump is a perfectly executed soundbite, just the right size to satiate a viewer who can then scroll to the next thing. The clip becomes more urgent than the thing it existed to promote.

Update, May 7th: Added additional details about who launched the Perplexity clipping campaign.