Sam Cole
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samleecole.bsky.social
Sam Cole
@samleecole.bsky.social
22K followers 400 following 720 posts
journalist / co-founder @404media.co
signal: sam.404 (sensitive comms)
[email protected] (everything else)
complain about the paywall catch a block
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samleecole.bsky.social
I love our audience
January 16, 2026 at 9:20 PM
samleecole.bsky.social
temu ass
from the daily beast: Workers dressed as dogs in 18th-century finery dancing at Mar-a-Lago on January 8, captured on Instagram.
January 15, 2026 at 3:33 PM
Reposted by Sam Cole
josephcox.bsky.social
This piece is based on leaked ICE material, sworn testimony from an ICE official we obtained, and public procurement records. ELITE's full name is "Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement". Specifically for finding communities and people to target www.404media.co/elite-the-pa...
“Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) is a targeting tool designed to improve capabilities for identifying and prioritizing high-value targets through advanced analytics,” a user guide for ELITE obtained by 404 Media says. The tool aims to be nearly all encompassing when it comes to finding ICE targets, from identifying subjects in the first place, to building a list of people, to supervisors approving selections for officers to ultimately go into the field and apprehend.
January 15, 2026 at 2:11 PM
samleecole.bsky.social
99% of the headlines about grok being "turned off following backlash" are shameful but thank god @theverge.com took the time to check what is actually going on www.theverge.com/news/859309/...
No, Grok hasn’t paywalled its deepfake image feature
X’s sexual deepfake machine is still running, despite Grok saying otherwise.
www.theverge.com
January 9, 2026 at 3:32 PM
samleecole.bsky.social
this is a strategy every other "nudify" app on the market uses, by the way. someone's been studying! www.404media.co/a16z-backed-...
a16z-Backed AI Site Civitai Is Mostly Porn, Despite Claiming Otherwise
Data shows that the vast majority of images on Civitai were pornographic, and that the site hosted more than 50,000 AI models designed to recreate the likeness of real people.
www.404media.co
January 9, 2026 at 3:25 PM
samleecole.bsky.social
it’s too early to speculate, but making the people who are tagging grok under the posts of women they don’t know and writing prompts like “make her bend over on all fours doggy style” multiple times a second pay for the privilege COULD be a play to become profitable www.404media.co/x-premium-gr...
Masterful Gambit: Musk Attempts to Monetize Grok's Wave of Sexual Abuse Imagery
In an attempt to push more people toward a paying subscription, Grok now refuses to generate images in replies. The paywall is pretty leaky, though.
www.404media.co
January 9, 2026 at 3:24 PM
samleecole.bsky.social
I can also still fully use the app to generate videos and photos without a subscription. including undressing images. hello
January 9, 2026 at 1:35 PM
samleecole.bsky.social
the butterfly meme but he's saying "is this accountability?" to a subscription revenue funnel
January 9, 2026 at 1:31 PM
samleecole.bsky.social
something else I don't think we talk about enough is the word "grok" and why he chose it, but that might just be my personal vendetta against the hack named robert heinlein
January 8, 2026 at 5:36 PM
samleecole.bsky.social
combining this with a platform like twitter/x is gasoline on a fire. it's always been where the worst people online emerge into the mainstream, ready to fuck someone's life up. Elon has his "everything app" now, where everything a troll needs is at their fingertips www.404media.co/grok-ai-sexu...
The only reason any of this is being discussed now, and the only reason it’s ever discussed in general—going back to Gamergate and beyond—is because many normies, casuals, “the mainstream,” and cable news viewers have just this week learned about the problem and can’t believe how it came out of nowhere. In reality, deepfakes came from a longstanding hobby community dedicated to putting women’s faces on porn in Photoshop, and before that with literal paste and scissors in pinup magazines. And as Emanuel wrote this week, not even Grok’s AI CSAM problem popped up out of nowhere; it’s the result of weeks of quiet, obsessive work by a group of people operating just under the radar. And this is where we are now: Today, several days into Grok’s latest scandal, people are using an AI image generator made by a man who regularly boosts white supremacist thought to create images of a woman slaughtered by an ICE agent in front of the whole world less than 24 hours ago to “put her in a bikini.
January 8, 2026 at 3:52 PM
samleecole.bsky.social
we have to, at some point, address the fact that there are thousands and thousands of people are behind these prompts. there are no guardrails against misogyny. it's a feature, not a bug, as they say bit.ly/452c8bj
In 2018, less than a year after reporting that first story on deepfakes, I wrote about how it’s a serious mistake to ignore the fact that nonconsensual imagery, synthetic or not, is a societal sickness and not something companies can guardrail against into infinity. “Users feed off one another to create a sense that they are the kings of the universe, that they answer to no one. This logic is how you get incels and pickup artists, and it’s how you get deepfakes: a group of men who see no harm in treating women as mere images, and view making and spreading algorithmically weaponized revenge porn as a hobby as innocent and timeless as trading baseball cards,” I wrote at the time. “That is what’s at the root of deepfakes. And the consequences of forgetting that are more dire than we can predict.”
January 8, 2026 at 3:50 PM