Creators

Beyond part one’s exposure of affiliate revenue hijacking, MegaLag digs into Honey’s “extortion” by adding limited-use “friends and family” type discounts and lying to the store owners about never removing codes for unaffiliated businesses while trying to sign them up as partners.

On Thursday night, the White House Live News section featured YouTuber @RealMattMoney, for reasons that remain unclear. According to Bloomberg, “The White House is aware of the incident and looking into the matter, a White House official said on the condition of anonymity.”

During Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said TikTok is “very much applying lessons they’ve learned in China to the rest of the world:”

The Screen Culture and KH Studio YouTube pages have suddenly disappeared, taking their fake clips with them, reports Deadline. An earlier Deadline investigation showed how they operated, mixing official movie footage with AI-generated images, which some movie studios were profiting from by claiming the ad revenue they brought in.

Emanuel Maiberg at 404 Media reports that a hacker has gained access to a server farm stuffed with phones churning out AI influencer ads. It’s owned by a startup called Doublespeed, which advertises “bulk content creation” and just got a million bucks from Andreessen Horowitz. Neat.

A report by Gudea, which tracks online conversations, describes how accusations of white supremacy and Nazism spread following Swift’s album release this fall. According to the report, just 3.77 percent of users accounted for more than a quarter of the conversation; it also found overlap between the users driving the Swift discourse and users active in an “astroturf campaign attacking Blake Lively.” Naturally, the inauthentic discourse then prompted real backlash and responses, making it an even bigger discussion.

After the Trump administration used Carpenter’s song “Juno” in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) propaganda video, the pop star responded, calling it “evil and disgusting.” The White House account has since deleted the post — but they’ve picked this fight with musicians before.

His latest work, “Regular Animals,” features Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Beeple himself (aka Mike Winkelmann) as robot dogs that walk around taking photos and poop out stylized images, 256 of which are NFTs. Beeple told Page Six that the piece represents how we now “see the world through their eyes.” Eurgh.

Fans of Adobe’s experimental camera app can finally use it with the front camera on the latest iPhones. Project Indigo was slow to support the iPhone Air and 17 series, at least partly due to problems with the new selfie camera those devices employ. Adobe finally rolled out support for those phones in late October with the selfie camera disabled. Now, selfies are back on the menu with an update that arrived yesterday.

Boing Boing plunged the depths of Etsy to find this 3D-printed replica of the Chernobyl power plant, complete with a ruined reactor that lights up and spews “smoke” when you use it as a diffuser or humidifier.

Nearly a year ago, I wrote that impending tariff policies seemed poised to turn American consumerism upside down. In the months since, many people have said that Donald Trump’s tariffs — and the higher costs passed on to shoppers — could force people to buy less stuff they didn’t need in the first place. But as the Wall Street Journal reports, even sky high tariffs might not be enough to break the habit for good.

Now, creators can use an upgraded AI-powered website-building tool to construct their Beehiiv site, sell digital products without commission, embed podcasts into their site, as well as access website analytics. You can view all the updates to the platform in the video below.