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We're halfway through August and summer is rapidly coming to a close. But this year, something about the season was different. It's the first year in over 100 years that there hasn't been a definitive song of the summer.

Is the absence of a “2025 song of the summer” just a quirk of this year’s charts or a symptom of a music culture permanently fractured by personalization, speed, and saturation. I called up Anthony Fantano to help me answer this question.

We dive deep into what makes a good song of the summer, how the concept emerged in culture, why we don't have one this year, and what a post song of the summer society might look like.

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A few days ago, 18 year old social media star Lil Tay made over $1 million by launching an OnlyFans shortly after her 18th birthday. The launch generated a massive backlash online, people on the left and the right are calling for OnlyFans to be banned and for the criminalization of porn.

On today's free speech Friday Kat Tenbarge and I break down Lil Tay's rise, what actually went down with her OF launch, and how this viral moment is already being weaponized by both influential Democrat and far right accounts to silence speech, dismantle civil liberties and push dangerous censorship laws that would lead to even more exploitation of women and children.

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Since its launch in 2022, ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The tool is embedded in more and more areas of daily life and new research shows that it's also transforming how we write and even speak.

A group of researchers analyzed more than 360,000 YouTube videos and 771,000 podcast episodes from before and after ChatGPT’s release to track the use of ChatGPT-affiliated words like "delve" and "examine."

All of this has major implications. Adam Aleksic is an etymologist who studies the way the internet is reshaping language. His new book Algospeak tackles all of this. He joins me to discuss how ChatGPT and AI is transforming the way we talk, what words we use, and how we communicate.

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The UK's Online Safety Act finally went into effect this week and it has been a massive clusterfuck. Entire forums, websites, communities and essential journalism is being censored. People are being forced to scan their faces to use Spotify and YouTube.

Like all of these terrible censorship bills, the Online Safety Act claims it's about protecting children from the evils of pornographic and “adult” content. But immediately after it went into effect, platforms began classifying nearly all breaking news footage, war coverage, investigative journalism, political protest material and information about reproductive and public health as “explicit” or “harmful" content, thus blocking anyone from under 18 from accessing it.

I break down the fallout from the UK's Online Safety Act and what we could be facing here in the U.S. soon if we don't fight back to protect free speech online.

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The internet has become the primary way that people get public health information. Especially since the pandemic began in 2020, millions of people have turned to platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and newsletters to keep up to date on things like food recalls, infectious disease reports, and more.

But now, CDC social media channels have gone dark, and the agency's public health communication across the internet is being cut off and dismantled. Chiara Eisner is an investigative reporter at NPR and she's been covering the fiasco at the CDC. We talk about the crucial role that the internet plays in public health and why what's happening right now under Trump and RFK and why it might set us back decades.

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This is the first video in my new series on data brokers and the dark history of digital surveillance. I dig into how surveillance capitalism evolved, the companies profiting from intimate details about your life, and how it all began long before the internet.

I reveal the industry's origins from early government tracking systems to invisible surveillance networks fueling ultra-targeted ads. How corporations are able to build data profiles so detailed that they can predict when you’re going to get sick, where you're likely to live, and even discover you're pregnant before your own family.

Let me know what you think in the comments! I worked so hard on this one 🙏

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The U.S. government is quietly building the largest surveillance system in modern history. In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I break down how agencies like ICE, DHS are weaponizing your personal data including tax filings, medical records, license plate scans, and more, to hunt innocent people down across the country.

The Department of Homeland Security is also exploring ways to access IRS data on millions of U.S. citizens "associated with criminal activity" or who have shown support for "terrorism." I break down ICE’s growing surveillance empire, the risks of government data abuse, and the terrifying consequences for civil liberties if we don't fight back.

ProPublica article: https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-irs-share-tax-records-ice-dhs-deportations

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Last week, a couple featured on the Jumbotron during a Coldplay concert in Boston went viral for being caught cheating. Within minutes of the video spreading on TikTok and X, users rallied together to identify the couple in the video using AI and facial recognition tools.

Crowdsourced social media investigations are becoming more and more common, and the people conducting them are leveraging increasingly dystopian surveillance tech that police and the feds are using against undocumented immigrants and marginalized groups. Meanwhile, all of our privacy is being eroded.

Jason Koebler from 404 Media joined me to dig into the origins of the surveillance-entertainment economy, how and why it evolved, and what we can do to protect ourselves.
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