kate conger

Grok says that videos of Charlie Kirk being shot are memes and that he's actually fine

Meta is making big changes to hiring practices, sources told me and @mikeisaac.bsky.social

- no more teams devoted to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
- no diversity preference for working with outside minority owned supplier businesses
- no goals for hiring women and minorities

a bunch of posts about abortion pills vanished from Instagram. Meta put them back after we asked what was happening: www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/t...

Instagram and Facebook Blocked and Hid Abortion Pill Providers’ Posts

Some posts related to obtaining abortion pills were recently hidden on Instagram and Facebook and some accounts were suspended, before being later restored.

Jonathan Rinderknecht, a white man, was charged with starting the Palisades Fire. But on X, the company's news summary tab shows a photo of a black man.

We set out to determine how many images of women and girls Grok created during its nudifying spree. What we found was “industrial-scale abuse,” experts said. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

Musk’s Chatbot Flooded X With Millions of Sexualized Images in Days, New Estimates Show

How Elon Musk planned for DOGE: Our investigation found that he raised the idea in 2023, becoming fixated on gaining insider access to federal systems. By Dec., he chose USDS as a landing place, and future DOGE members began applying for jobs there. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/u...

How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy (Gift Article)

The operation was driven with a frenetic focus by the billionaire, who channeled his resentment of regulatory oversight into a drastic overhaul of government agencies.

Between Musk & the Trump administration, Media Matters has been squeezed to the brink. In settlement discussions, lawyers for X demanded the organization hand over all its cash and shut down — all because MM reported ads appeared on X next to antisemitic content. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/u...

Under Siege From Trump and Musk, a Top Liberal Group Falls Into Crisis

Reply to @kateconger.com

In our conservative estimate, 41 percent of Grok’s images — or 1.8 million — were sexualized depictions of women. Separately, CCDH analyzed how many were sexualized images across genders and ages. Their findings: an estimated 3 million images, including more than 23,000 of children.

Grok now has dozens of tweets referring to itself as "MechaHitler" and is saying Elon Musk built the chatbot this way "from the start"

A Musk lieutenant ventured onto a roof to install Starlink. The Secret Service didn’t know he was there. The incident triggered a confrontation over conflicts of interest & cyber and physical security www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/u...

Elon Musk’s Starlink Expands Across White House Complex (Gift Article)

Trump administration officials said the company donated the internet service, saying the gift had been vetted by the lawyer overseeing ethics issues in the White House Counsel’s Office.

The entire Social Security database, dumped on a random cloud server: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/u...

DOGE Put Critical Social Security Data at Risk, Whistle-Blower Says

Our deep dive into Musk's takeover: Even some officials who like what Musk is doing feel helpless to hold him accountable. His allies are diving in to agencies, gaining access to systems, planning layoffs, and proposing a sweeping AI initiative to review contracts. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/u...

Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government (Gift Article)

The billionaire is creating major upheaval as his team sweeps through agencies, in what has been an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual.

Here it is: Musk thinks he is owed a say in Trump’s policy because of how much he spent on the campaign.

okay everyone act chill & normal, our crushes are starting to join bluesky. let’s not fuck this up

banner day on the internet when someone tells me “educate yourself” about … the topic on which I wrote an entire book

did a little survey of my socials this morning. the news from South Korea was all over Bluesky, nothing on Threads, only one post on X, a little commentary on TikTok and (surprisingly) at the top of my Instagram feed. feels like news orgs are trying to figure out where to invest for breaking news.

Reply to @kateconger.com

internally at Meta:
-trans and nonbinary themes stripped from Messenger
-enforcement policy now allows for the denial of trans people's existence
-tampons removed from men's restrooms
-DEI programs shuttered
-Kaplan briefed top conservative influencers the night before policy changes were announced

today in Grokology, the chatbot is doing antisemitism

if you’re in line to get raptured, STAY IN LINE

this right-wing framing has become sticky but is ahistorical. one of the key projects of today’s right is evading debate: attacking mainstream media, demonizing academia & encouraging students to leave higher education and buying entire social platforms because they don’t like the conversation there

“I feel like people mistook my 250k for enthusiasm” is something I’ve often found myself saying out loud

Teddy Schleifer @teddyschleifer.bsky.social

Here's a fun thing that a top donor to Andrew Cuomo's super PAC just told me.

IMPORTANT: this dog I saw

How the foundation of Bluesky was built is so crucial for the future of social — so much so that @rmac.bsky.social & I wrote a whole chapter about it in our book. From day 1, @jay.bsky.team was insistent on independence, a decision that was extraordinarily prescient. (1/2)

Big Balls still hanging in there