Politics

Dozens of neo-Nazis are fleeing Telegram and moving to a relatively unknown secret chat app that has received funding from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

In a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue published on Friday morning, researchers found that in the wake of the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov and charges against leaders of the so-called Terrorgram Collective, dozens of extremist groups have moved to the app SimpleX Chat in recent weeks over fears that Telegram’s privacy policies expose them to being arrested. The Terrorgram Collective is a neo-Nazi propaganda network that calls for acolytes to target government officials, attack power stations, and murder people of color.

Last month Katlyn, a Massachusetts mother of a 2-year-old daughter, posted a worrying message in a private Facebook group that promotes and sells a dietary supplement that its members believe is a cure for a wide range of ailments, with group members claiming it can help everything from cancer to autism.

“I started my 2 yo daughter on both the drops and the spray on Sunday,” Katlyn wrote. “Monday morning she had a pretty painful looking white head above her top lip which I didn’t think much of until the next day she had another one on the side of her middle finger. She’s never had anything like this before. Could this be a detox symptom? They are painful too she [flinched] when I touched them.”

A short video clip of a Finnish ethical hacker using a USB stick to hack an election voting machine is being hyped by right-wing figures as proof that the US presidential election could be stolen.

But the machine in question has been discontinued, and has not been used in US elections for a decade.

The video clip, which has been shared by key figures who have pushed former president Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, was taken from an episode of the PBD Podcast first broadcast on YouTube last week. The show is hosted by Patrick Bet-David, a conservative commentator known for sharing conspiracy theories to his millions of followers.

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Less than an hour before JD Vance and Tim Walz took the debate stage on Tuesday, Elon Musk hit pause on his usual shitposting of pro-Trump memes to send a more serious message to his nearly 200 million X followers.

“If you live in Pennsylvania and haven’t registered to vote, you only have 20 days left to do so!” he posted.

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Vice Presidential candidates governor Tim Walz and US senator JD Vance faced off last night in their first and only debate. Will Vance’s repackaging of Trump’s record on issues like abortion and January 6 land with independents and swing state voters? Where was the fiery Walz who won social media by calling Republicans “weird?” And will any of this really matter on election day? WIRED’s Tim Marchman and Makena Kelly join Leah to discuss.

During the vice presidential debate on Tuesday night, Tim Walz misspoke and said he had “become friends with school shooters.”

A quick search would have revealed that Walz likely meant to say that he had become friends with the families of school shooting victims. He has repeatedly credited these families—including onstage Tuesday night—with changing his mind on gun control laws, helping him usher in some of America’s most progressive gun safety laws during his time as governor of Minnesota.

On Tuesday night, vice presidential nominees JD Vance and Tim Walz will debate each other for the first and only time ahead of the November presidential election.

Before becoming a Republican senator from Ohio, Vance built his profile as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir detailing his life as a young adult from Middletown, Ohio. In California, Vance connected with tech investors like the conservative Peter Thiel, who donated millions to his 2022 Senate campaign. Walz, a former US congressperson and current governor of Minnesota, was not as high-profile of a pick as Vance, but the Kamala Harris campaign has leveraged his background as a former teacher, football coach, and veteran to appeal to rural America. Walz has inspired much of the Democrats’ election messaging, like calling the GOP “weird.”

For months, speculation has raged in Washington over the future of Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission chair and face of the Biden administration’s crusade against monopoly power. Overturning decades of antitrust norms, charged by Khan with failing to curb extreme concentrations of corporate power, the administration has routinely scrutinized major acquisitions traditionally ignored by Khan’s predecessors, forcing companies like Lockheed Martin and Nvidia to abandon multibillion-dollar deals in court.

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Bradley Tusk really wants people to be able to vote on their phones. For the past few years, Tusk, a venture capitalist, political strategist, and philanthropist, has been building new software to revolutionize the way people vote in the United States. In his new book, Vote With Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting Is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy, Tusk argues that mobile voting could completely change elections.

Trae Stephens’ origin story begins like the first volume of a spy thriller series. Galvanized by 9/11, he vowed as a high schooler to find a career that would let him defend his country. He applied to colleges with programs that could prep him for that heroic role. None were interested in a kid from a hardscrabble Ohio town, so he traveled uninvited to Washington, DC, barged into the applications office at Georgetown University, and talked his way into the School of Foreign Service, where among other things he learned Arabic. After graduating, he joined a US intelligence agency (he can’t say which one), where he used his education as a “computational linguist” to do a kind of desktop counterterrorism. But it wasn’t long before he became frustrated by the red tape—and the lousy IT setup.