404 Media

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AN 4 26

It’s not enough that the right-wing is still working overtime to ban books, say critics. It’s that they’re letting someone else do their homework.

“Conservative parents’ advocacy groups have been experimenting with using commercially available artificial intelligence tools to help them flag more books they’ve deemed pornographic to be removed from public schools and libraries,” reports 404 Media. “Even though LLMs are notoriously error-prone, and the books in question aren’t pornographic, these groups continue to explore use cases for AI anyway.”

Conservative book-rating sites like BLOCKADE (Blocking Lustful Overzealous Content, Keeping Away Depravity and Extremism), for example, rely on xAI or OpenAI API keys to generate book reports from PDF/ePUB files, says 404 Media. It essentially bases an analysis on a set of parameters that are publicly available through the creator’s Github page.

But AI is no Roger Ebert. It’s not even a critic. It’s just a list haunted by a chatbot, reports 404 Media.

“The program’s script includes a list of roughly 300 words, each assigned a severity score that contributes to an overall appropriateness score based on their own metrics,” said 404 Media. “The script explicitly defines ‘educational inappropriateness’ as ‘content offensive to conservative values,’ while also asking the AI ‘not to include any additional text or explanation’ for its decisions.’”

Jeremy Blackburn, associate professor of computer science and director of the Institute for AI and Society at Binghamton University, tells 404 Media that it is the kind of cheating that would get you drummed out of college.

“If you want to classify content in this kind of context, maybe toxicity with offensive content, troublesome content — whoever it is it finds troublesome — asking for an explanation is super useful,” said Blackburn, who did not hide his disdain for the right’s decision to leave analysis to a chatbot. “There’s just a lot of responsibility being abdicated if you’re abdicating the responsibility with this kind of not sophisticated prompting strategy with no real thought into how to evaluate what comes out of these models.”

It is the dumbest of dumb things used by cheaters to censor others, say intellectual freedom advocates. BLOCKADE interprets conservative values to mean whatever xAI or OpenAI’s LLMs say they mean and then builds a “risk profile” for the book that the right-winger then saves as a PDF to ape legitimate book reviews from organizations like Moms for Liberty. These bot reviews are designed to be submitted as attachments to formal book challenges to school and library districts.

404 Media says other conservative organizations then mass produce the bans “using heat maps to monitor books they don’t like that remain available in school libraries by aggregating data by state, district, school building and the number of books in circulation.”

“Committees are basing their decisions off of that biased information, and so they’re going to be more predisposed to remove books because the only thing they’re seeing is a red flag saying, ‘Hey, this book is p----, you should remove this book,” said Jessica Horton, who oversees Let Davis Read — a watchdog group monitoring local book challenges submitted to her children’s school district.

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4,642 views Jan 7, 2026 The 404 Media Podcast

We start this week with Matthew’s story about an organization tracking the location of AI data centers around the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. After the break, Jason tells us all about what Grok got up to over the holiday break, and we ruminate on what the breakdown in the information ecosystem means. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about how we bought 404media.com! Timestamps - Intr - Researchers Are Hunting America for Hidden Datacenters: [https://www.404media.co/researchers-a...](https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbGxtRWw1bXRGeHBta3JLWnk3dWtJZnlaNDhXZ3xBQ3Jtc0tuR2lWb0U4cFhieVUwTXc2QXk2ems1UGpfOXZIN1A4RktQMDJXUW9kaHlwMWpkRElwdVhGRDFDYTZzaWlZc0VaM2pfSkN6VXZVZUxjYjltaGt4UFFXcjhGRU5UNkdzbGhkMlhyYWt6T2s0Q1dGMDhGZw&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.404media.co%2Fresearchers-are-hunting-america-for-hidden-datacenters%2F&v=zT9lEyHnZIk - Grok's AI CSAM Shitshow: https://www.404media.co/groks-ai-csam...Subscriber's story - We Bought 404media.com: https://www.404media.co/we-bought-404...

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AN 9 25

404 Media reports the Department of Justice has taken down a study showing white supremacist and far-right violence outpaces “all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States.

The DOJ website hosted the study, conducted by the National Institute of Justice, until September 12, 2025.

In its place is the message: “The Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs is currently reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance. During this review, some pages and publications will be unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

The report What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism revealed “Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

IFrame Content

The document reports “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists,” since 1990, “including 227 events that took more than 520 lives.”

In this same period, the report claimed, “far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”

“We don’t know why the study about far-right extremist violence was removed recently,” writes 404 Media reporter Emanuel Maiberg, “but it comes immediately after the assassination of conservative personality Charlie Kirk, accusations from the administration that the left is responsible for most of the political violence in the country, and a renewed commitment from the administration to crack down on the ‘radical left.’”

The DOJ did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

Read the 404 Media report at this link.

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an 2 25

Employees of Elon Musk have made their way inside the highest echelons of several influential government agencies. And in new audio allegedly obtained from a recent meeting, one Musk associate is heard calling on colleagues to forge ahead with a plan one employee described as "illegal."

404 Media reported Tuesday that Musk's employees — who have seized control of operations within the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management (which houses the federal government's human resources functions) and the General Services Administration (GSA), which is the agency responsible for the construction, oversight and maintenance of all federal buildings — are now planning to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) throughout federal agencies.

Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd, who now leads the GSA's Technology Transformation Services (TTS), said during a recent meeting that he hoped to transform the login.gov website federal employees use for work to more easily incorporate with the Social Security Administration "to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud." He specifically mentioned wanting to train AI on government contracts.

“We want to start implementing more AI at the agency level and be an example for how other agencies can start leveraging AI ... that’s one example of something that we’re looking for people to work on,” Shedd said during the meeting, according to 404. “Things like making AI coding agents available for all agencies. One that we've been looking at and trying to work on immediately within GSA, but also more broadly, is a centralized place to put contracts so we can run analysis on those contracts.”

Musk employees training AI on analyzing contracts would be a significant conflict of interest for Musk, as his companies currently make billions of dollars from contracts with the federal government. The Los Angeles Times reported in November that since SpaceX was founded in 2002, it has received approximately $21 billion in federal contracts.

According to audio of the meeting obtained by 404 Media, one employee during that meeting said that aggregating data with login.gov would be an "illegal task," as the Privacy Act "forbids agencies [from] sharing personal information without consent." But Shedd reportedly shrugged off those concerns and said workers with 18F (a TTS team that writes software for federal agencies) should carry on with the original plan unless they hit a "roadblock."

"The idea would be that folks would give consent to help with the login flow,” Shedd said. “But again, that's an example of something that we have a vision, that needs worked on, and needs clarified. And if we hit a roadblock, then we hit a roadblock. But we still should push forward and see what we can do.”

One of 404's sources told the outlet that "the reaction of the team, the whole group of 18F and TTS is pretty unanimously negative" in response to Shedd's remarks. They also expressed fear that 18F would be gutted and replaced by a team of software engineers who would report to Musk, rather than the GSA.

"The administration views TTS and 18F as a pool of talent that it will draw from, that it will poach from," the source said. "And it will take the people from TTS that it wants, and then most of the organization will wither away."

An FAQ posted to login.gov suggests that attempts to aggregate Social Security data is fluid. The site warns users to "not send Login.gov sensitive data about yourself or identifying numbers."

Click here to read 404's full report.

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AN 1 25

During the 2024 U.S. presidential race, now-President Donald Trump made a concerted effort to distance himself from Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation's 922-page blueprint for a second Trump presidency. Trump reportedly viewed Project 2025 as a major political liability, claiming he had nothing to do with it even though its architects were major allies.

Democratic nominee Kamala Harris hammered Trump aggressively on Project 2025, and her website even had an entire section devoted to the Heritage document and its proposals. Harris, in an October 14, 2024 post on X, formerly Twitter, wrote, "Donald Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda would give him unchecked power to act on his worst instincts — and there will be no one to stop him."

Regardless, Trump narrowly won the election, returning to the White House on January 20, 2025. And according to reporting from 404 Media, some memos from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) "were seemingly written by people" with Project 2025 connections. But the OPM, Mediaite's David Gilmour reports, "scrambled to scrub" those memos.

404 Media's Samanta Cole, in an article published on January 27, reported, "Some of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) memos sent to federal workers about firing, hiring freezes, and mandatory return to office demands were seemingly written by people who were previously employed by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks with longstanding loyalties to President Donald Trump, according to metadata on the memos posted by the government online. We know this because the senders of the memos failed to scrub the metadata from those documents, making it easy for anyone to reveal the listed authors of the memos."

But Gilmour, in an article published on January 28, reports that the OPM "scrambled to scrub" the memos "after initial publication of the documents contained metadata revealing they were authored by individuals tied to Project 2025."

"The metadata revealed the authors' identities as individuals affiliated with the Heritage Foundation think tank's Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for reshaping federal governance, according to 404 Media," Gilmour explains. "One memo, titled 'Guidance on Presidential Memorandum Return to In-Person Work' and dated January 24, listed its author as Noah Peters, a senior advisor at OPM and former Trump appointee who served as solicitor for the Federal Labor Relations Authority during Trump's first term."

Gilmour adds, "Another memo, 'Federal Civilian Hiring Freeze Guidance,' was authored by James Sherk, who 404 Media highlights as an architect of the Trump Administration's Schedule F classification, which stripped employment protections from federal workers."

Sherk, according to Gilmour, was "formerly" active in the Heritage Foundation.

"Despite Trump's public denials of involvement with Project 2025 and distancing from the blueprint," Gilmour reports, "the metadata leak is the latest evidence of how he has tapped its contributors for high-ranking roles. Although the OPM deleted the initial documents before uploading amended ones, tech industry researcher Molly White has hosted the original memos on her website in full."

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