There Are No Girls on the Internet

This week on the Patreon: Bridget remembers the time she met Sheryl Sandberg. https://TANGOTI.com/patreon

Google promised to delete sensitive location data about abortion clinic visits. A new study finds that it still isn’t living up to that promise: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/16/google-keeps-location-history-data-abortion-clinics-despite-delete-pledge

Teen deepfake victim pushes for federal law targeting non-consensual, AI-generated explicit content - the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/deepfake-law-ai-new-jersey-high-school-teen-image-porn-rcna133706

OpenAI quietly removes ban on military use of its AI tools: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/16/openai-quietly-removes-ban-on-military-use-of-its-ai-tools.htm

AI already being used to select bombing targets in Gaza: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how-israel-uses-ai-to-select-bombing-targets

Formula E Team Fires Its AI-Generated Influencer after Fans Balk: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a46353319/formula-e-team-fires-ai-generated-influencer/

It's not just you, Google Search really has gotten worse: https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-research

The Self-Checkout Nightmare(?) May Finally Be Ending: https://gizmodo.com/the-self-checkout-nightmare-may-finally-be-ending-1851169879

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It’s a new year, which is a great opportunity to take stock of what we’re leaving behind in tech in the new year.

Bridget joined Sam and Anney over at Stuff Mom Never Told You to get into what’s not coming with us in 2024.

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Happy 2024 - the internet is all scams, lies, baits, Nazis and spiders!

Substack has a Nazi problem: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/11/substack-platformer-nazis/

Dating apps are in their flop era: https://www.bustle.com/wellness/dating-apps-have-gotten-worse-hinge-tinder-bumble-gen-z-millennials

On Threads, users say they're flooded with pro-life and transphobic posts: https://mashable.com/article/threads-transphobia-anti-abortion-posts-hate-speech

EBay to pay $3 million after employees sent live spiders, funeral wreath and fetal pig to critics: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ebay-pay-3-million-employees-234151533.html

The SEC’s Official X Account Was ‘Compromised’ and Used to Post Fake Bitcoin News: https://www.wired.com/story/sec-x-account-compromise/

What!? Did Elon Musk Just Endorse Tweet Saying Students at HBCUs Have Low IQs? https://www.theroot.com/wtf-elon-musk-seems-to-endorse-tweet-saying-students-a-1851159488?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=dlvrit&utm_content=theroot

Video Game Voice Actors Criticize SAG-AFTRA Over Agreement With AI Company: https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2024/01/10/video-game-voice-actors-criticize-sag-aftra-over-agreement-with-ai-company/?sh=267ac9e0374e

The George Carlin AI Standup Is Worse Than You Can Imagine: https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d94xx/the-george-carlin-ai-standup-is-worse-than-you-can-imagine

Bridget’s favorite Carlin bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

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Harvard donor Bill Ackman pushed for the resignation of Harvard's first Black woman president, Dr. Claudine Gay, for what he says is a history of academic plagiarism. An independent review panel cleared her of misconduct, but the allegations continued and led to her resignation. Now Ackman’s wife, Dr. Neri Oxman, is also being accused of plagiarism in her academic work.

In the aftermath of Dr. Gay’s resignation from Harvard, here’s how Ackman has responded to the allegations against his wife. Meanwhile, their troubling connection to Jefferey Epstein resurfaces.

Full video of this episode is available on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/tangoti

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Happy New Year! We’d intended to air the first newscast of 2024, but instead we have to talk about what happened to Dr. Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard. She resigned last week after an intense campaign to get her fired led by right wing activist Christopher Rufo. Yup, the same right wing activist who created the moral panic over Critical Race Theory. He’s been completely transparent, through public tweets and interviews in big outlets like Politico, that his goal in creating the campaign against her was a broader desire to destroy the concept of “DEI” (Diversity Equity & Inclusion).

And yet, legacy media outlets like the New York Times uncritically legitimized his bad-faith framing with multiple featured articles. People like tech podcaster Jason Calacanis have celebrated her resignation as evidence of a return to meritocracy, a ridiculous idea that only makes sense if one believes that prestigious leadership positions are just being handed out willy-nilly to unqualified Black women, which is obviously not true! Black women have to work twice as hard to get half as much, and even then one misstep is all it takes for bad faith allegations to take down a powerful Black woman in the eyes of a public that is all too willing to believe that DEI initiatives are the only way a Black woman could possibly achieve a leadership position.

We Sat Down With the Conservative Mastermind Behind Claudine Gay’s Ouster: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/03/christopher-rufo-claudine-gay-harvard-resignation-00133618

Why White Women Won DEI: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-white-women-won-dei-aparna-rae/

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Have you been seeing a lot of content on social media romanticizing women not working outside of the home?

Jo Piazza, host of the hilarious and insightful podcast Under the Influence, breaks down why we're seeing so much trad wife content right now.

#TradWives: sexism as gateway to white supremacy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/tradwives-sexism-gateway-white-supremacy/

Listen to Under the Influence: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/under-the-influence-with-jo-piazza/id1544171101

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Netflix’s Inventing Anna presents a flashy version of fake German heiress Anna Delvey’s scams.

Rachel Deloache Williams was scammed out of $62,000 by Anna on a disastrous trip to Morocco.

Rachel discusses true crime shows like Inventing Anna and Hulu’s The Dropout and what it means for all of us when liars and scammers are elevated and amplified.

Anna ‘Delvey’ Sorokin Almost Ruined My Life. Now She’s Being Rewarded for Her Crimes: https://time.com/6146419/inventing-anna-rachel-williams-anna-delvey/

Check out Rachel’s book My Friend Anna: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/My-Friend-Anna/Rachel-DeLoache-Williams/9781982114107

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Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to pay Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss, two election workers he baselessly maligned in Georgia, almost 50 million dollars. And they might even sue him again! Here’s how we got here.

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We're taking a break from our usual content to share a new podcast from iHeart's Outspoken network, Afterlives: The Layleen Polanco Story.

You can check out the rest of the show here: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-afterlives-the-layleen-po-127683074/

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Cait Corrain is an author who had a highly anticipated book called Crown of Starlight coming out in May of 2024. But now her book has been shelved after she admitted to using Good Reads to review bomb a bunch of other writers’ forthcoming books. Most of her targets were Black or queer, while Corrain is white. This story has a LOT of twists and turns, including her inventing an obviously fake conversation with an obviously fake person.

Canadian author Xiran Jay Zhao was the first person I saw to bring it to wider attention online. They first noticed that Cait’s book Crown of Starlight was getting good reviews from the same accounts who were trashing other books, some of which were not even out yet.

Xiran Jay Zhao also created a 31-page Google document of screenshots showing a bunch of the alleged-but-now-admitted fake GoodReads accounts, screenshots of conversations, and other damning receipts.https://docs.google.com/document/d/1__mO1uqIqcmupBAPKwXDzlUbZIwtY6fKf0S1Y0SNz0E/edit

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