DUBLIN — Bomb threats targeting several of Ireland’s top media organizations are almost certainly linked to next week’s European Political Community summit in Dublin, a government official told POLITICO.

Newsrooms at Irish national broadcaster RTÉ, Virgin Media TV, the Irish Independent newspaper and Newstalk radio received identically worded emails Friday morning claiming bombs had been left inside their offices.

Three of the newsrooms were evacuated, disrupting RTÉ and Newstalk programs, while Virgin staff kept broadcasts running. Police confirmed they found no suspicious devices.

“We have expected a rise in hybrid threats to Ireland because of our hosting of the EU presidency, and the EPC meeting will be by far the biggest set-piece event of that presidency, so one must presume it’s no coincidence that we’re experiencing this spike in hybrid activity now,” the Irish official said.

The Irish government said the threats against media outlets were probably part of a European-wide pattern of threats that have targeted dozens of airlines this week, including Irish carriers Ryanair and Aer Lingus. Hackers also targeted supermarket refrigeration systems in at least seven European countries.

“It is not known yet who is responsible for these threats, whether it is individuals or a centralized or coordinated effort,” the Irish government said in a statement. “However, these threats come on the heels of the ongoing disruption to aviation around Europe caused by similar threats, and it seems likely that this is a coordinated campaign of disruption.”

Bomb threats also targeted at least 18 European flights Friday, after at least 22 the day before, raising concerns that the hoaxes may be part of a coordinated campaign to disrupt air traffic.

Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares told Spanish public broadcaster TVE on Friday that the bomb threats affecting flights could be “an attempt at hybrid aggression and war in some psychological way.” He added that “it cannot be a coincidence that so many identical events occur with the same modus operandi throughout Europe.”

Luis Gallego, CEO of airline group IAG, said: “It is clear that what they [the perpetrators] are looking for is to create chaos and disruption in the different airports.”

Fighter jets were scrambled in Hungary on Friday “in response to bomb threats involving three civilian passenger aircraft,” said Hungary’s Defense Minister Romulusz Ruszin-Szendi.

Prague Airport said nine flights were targeted by bomb threats Friday alone, while France reported another four threats against aircraft flying over its territory that day. The Bulgarian government told AFP that two flights bound for Sofia were targeted by bomb threats on Friday.

Aviation professionals have said no threat should be underestimated. “No matter how remote the real possibility after a call that there is a bomb on board, we will treat it as if there is a bomb on board,” said Paul Reuter, an airline captain and vice president of the European Cockpit Association.

The Irish government official told POLITICO that the sudden increase in anonymous disruptions to airlines, supermarkets and now news outlets appeared to be timed to increase tensions ahead of Dublin’s hosting next Thursday of the EPC summit.

Created in 2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the EPC brings together the leaders of 47 countries and representatives of several bodies, including NATO, to discuss strategic issues. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is also attending.

The Irish official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss Friday’s threats freely, declined to identify Russia as the likely culprit. But he noted that EU partners — including Denmark, which faced a similar wave of so-called hybrid attacks in the run-up to its own 2025 hosting of the EPC — had drawn such links in the past.

Irish police Superintendent Liam Geraghty said the event posed an even tougher security challenge than hosting a U.S. presidential visit. “We have not seen a policing and security operation of this scale ever before in Ireland,” Geraghty told reporters.

The European Commission claims TikTok broke its online platform rules by offering a recommendation algorithm that creates a "rabbit hole effect" on users. In an announcement on Friday, the regulators allege TikTok's algorithm can harm users with "endless and repeated exposure" to content related to sadness, isolation, or body image.

The findings come months after the EU Commission declared that TikTok's design is too "addictive." While TikTok has implemented controls to mitigate the algorithm's "rabbit hole effect," the Commission says its preliminary findings suggest that they're not effective. TikTok must now change the design of its For …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The European Commission has accused TikTok of violating its online platforms rules for having designed algorithms that lead users down so-called rabbit holes.

The preliminary findings announced Friday mark the first time the Commission has focused on a social media platform’s recommender systems as a breach of its powerful Digital Services Act, under which it can issue fines up to 6% of a company’s annual global revenue.

“This is the first time that we are really tackling head-on the engagement-based recommender system model,” said one Commission official, who was granted speaking anonymity to speak freely.

This is the fifth case of the EU executive accusing TikTok of breaching EU rules, even though it has issued no fines against the Chinese-owned platform.

In Friday’s announcement, the Commission says the company didn’t adequately consider the risk of sending users down “rabbit holes” through a “continuous stream of personalised videos, even when those are related to mental health struggles and body image.”

The investigation focused on mental health impacts because “the evidence was strongest,” when asked about how these rabbit holes contribute to radicalization, said another official.

The more users interact with content, even if it’s potentially harmful, the more of that content they are recommended, the Commission said in its press release, which noted that the measures TikTok has put in place to curb the rabbit hole effect have not been effective.

TikTok should take into account “explicit” signals like buttons that say “I’m not interested” more than implicit ones, like engagement, said the first Commission official. Engagement metrics measure how much users interact with content, such as how much time they spend watching a video or the content they like. Talking about mitigation of these risks, the official said that remedies have to be effective and that TikTok’s current measures are not.

“To say ‘I’m not interested’ has to have a meaning, an effective meaning, and not only should not only be an afterthought, and then you go back to the old recommender system,” the official said.

The DSA also foresees a non-personalized feed for all users, but only 0.2% of TikTok users actually select that option, one of the officials said.

A TikTok spokesperson pushed back against the accusation, saying the company “has a strong record” of protecting its users. “The Commission has made a series of statements that are fundamentally inaccurate and distort our platform’s architecture and our commitment to user safety,” the spokesperson said

The company now can examine the evidence, defend its practices and try to come up with a plan to remedy issues that is acceptable to the regulator to avoid fines.

TikTok has managed to close a DSA investigation on advertising transparency by agreeing on fixes with the Commission.

The article has been updated with a statement from a TikTok spokesperson.

It’s hard to tell exactly when AI slop stopped being just a punchline involving Will Smith eating spaghetti and started feeling dangerous. That’s actually part of the problem.

This year, many of the popular AI tools that used to struggle with the number of fingers on a human hand gained the ability to generate photorealistic video — with audio — that costs users virtually nothing to create. Even trained scientists can’t always tell the difference between what’s real and what’s machine-made in digital form. But the most insidious applications of this remarkable technology are playing out on a much more personal level.

A few years ago, we started to hear more about voice cloning tools, which allow scammers to spoof a loved one’s voice in order to extort money from a victim. Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have also made any text-based scams more convincing and much cheaper to deploy. Imposter scams, which include romance scams, tech support fraud, and employment fraud, are on the rise, and thanks to increasingly high-quality AI, it’s harder than ever to know who’s real and who’s an imposter online.

When my daughter’s daycare recently sent us a picture of her entire class smiling in unison, my first thought was, “That’s cute!” My wife told me to look again and said, “That’s not our daughter.” She was right. All of the babies’ faces were AI-generated. 

That was the moment I knew that, despite my years as a tech reporter, constantly warning my boomer parents to take cybersecurity seriously, the scammers could get me. 

As AI gets better and cheaper, we’re all becoming easier targets. Your boomer parents are susceptible to getting scammed in the scary age of AI-powered fraud — but so is your Gen Z sibling, and so are you. 

The amount of money people over 60 have lost in scams skyrocketed from about $600 million in 2020 to about $3 billion in 2025, according to a new Federal Trade Commission report. The overall number of older adults who reported losing money to scammers, however, was actually 14 percent lower than the number of younger people who reported losses. Older adults are historically more likely to report being targeted but less likely to lose money to scammers, the FTC said. When they do lose money, they tend to lose a lot of it.

But younger generations are actually more likely to fall for certain scams, according to numerous surveys from the past five years. 

We should all expect to be bigger targets in the future, too, as scammers inundate us with cheaply produced but very realistic AI slop. “The sophistication of the types of scams that are happening to older adults has definitely moved forward,” Diana Freed, an assistant professor of data science and computer science at Brown, told me. “Having some type of family safety plan around these issues is very helpful.”

The two most important things to do in this stressful AI scam era: reduce the number of scammers that can get to you, and establish ways to verify that people — on the phone, online, in videos — are who they say they are. Assume that anything can be convincingly faked these days, and that your whole family will need help figuring out what’s real. 

Our best chance at getting through this tricky transition unscathed is to do it together.

Why you aren’t wrong to worry about your aging parents

It’s tempting to let generalizations guide your thinking when it comes to internet safety and behavior. Stubborn stereotypes tell us that older people are warm but incompetent, and that makes them more trusting, easy targets for scammers. We’ve all heard stories about someone’s grandma losing her life savings to criminals on the other side of the planet. Now we live in a world where AI can make those criminals sound like a grandchild on the phone, asking their grandparent to send money for an emergency. The same technology can make an aging parent sound like they’re asking their millennial son or daughter for urgent help, too.

“I think the security risks are certainly the same for younger people as well as older people,” said Ed Baig, who covers technology for AARP’s website and magazine.

Still, aging adults do have unique vulnerabilities that you should be aware of. 

As we get older, our brains start to change. Normal cognitive aging leads to declines in processing speed (so you’re a little bit slower), and memory (so you’re a little more forgetful). That doesn’t inherently make an older person more likely to be a scam victim, but some research suggests that low memory function makes people more susceptible to phishing scams. One 2012 study also linked less activity in the anterior insula (the part of the brain that processes disgust, among other things) in older subjects with more trustworthiness. There are other brain changes, like declines in analytical reasoning, that could explain why older adults tend to respond to certain scammer methods, like finding common ground or offering something free.

More than anything, though, older adults tend to have more money — or, at least, they tend to part with larger amounts of it. They are, in this sense, better marks. In 2024, according to the FTC, the median amount reported lost to fraud for people in their 30s was $450, but that number shoots up to $1,000 for people in their 70s and $1,650 for people in their 80s. 

In general, nobody likes to admit they fell for a scam. But the stakes are higher for some older adults, who might fear that they’ll lose their independence if they confess to their families that they’ve been a victim. They may also avoid reaching out to younger relatives to verify a shady-sounding exchange — or to ask questions in general — because they don’t want to bother anyone. 

None of this is taking the very real power of AI into the equation, by the way. Older adults use AI less often than younger generations. About one in four people over 65 have ever used a chatbot, according to Pew, although a separate survey found that over half of older adults have used voice-based assistants, like Alexa. (Thanks to recent upgrades, Alexa is gaining new AI powers, too.) 

So boomers may not be AI experts in large numbers, but they’re getting to know what it’s like to deal with chatbots. That still doesn’t mean they are fully aware of how much more believable scams have gotten thanks to AI. 

What to do with all your AI scam anxiety

Assuming we’re all equally doomed when it comes to AI scams — but also, equally capable of resisting — the best thing to do is prepare yourself and your loved ones. Here are some concrete steps you can take. 

Look at AI-generated content together to better understand the problem

Travis Bible, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and editor in his 40s, told me he felt the need to alert his parents about potential scams after Google’s AI video generator got uncannily good. The third generation of the software, Veo 3, can turn text into photorealistic video with audio in a matter of moments, and Bible realized that the videos the tool can produce could fool even him. 

When simply describing the problem didn’t convince his parents to take it seriously, Bible got creative: He spent three days using AI to make a PSA warning of the dangers of deepfake scams and showed it to them. It worked. “I kind of expected them to be in disbelief, but honestly, they just kind of accepted it,” Bible told me. “Seeing the video made my warning click with them. Like, ‘Oh, it really is that good.’”

There are other PSAs like this floating around, but watching Bible’s made something click for me, too. I can’t really tell if half the clips are real or fake. You can look for tells, like glitches or visual typos, but AI image generators have gotten so good, it can be impossible to spot a fake at a glance. There are also AI tools that will tell you if a piece of media was generated by AI, like the Google-made SynthID Detector. But let’s be honest: When you’re in the heat of a scam, you don’t necessarily have the wherewithal to be testing the authenticity of stuff.

Talk about scams in a stigma-free environment

Older adults don’t want to be scam victims, but they also don’t want to be surveilled by their anxious relatives. To strike a balance, you can take the stigma out of potential victimhood by talking about how scams are creeping into your own life. Feel free to complain about the incessant string of scam texts about unpaid tolls you’ve been getting. If you’re using AI in your daily life, talk about it with your parents or grandparents, and you may learn more about what they’re doing too.

“Older people may turn to technology to ask questions to avoid burdening their children, meaning they may be hesitant to reach out to an adult child to ask for help with AI,” Robin Brewer, an associate professor of information at the University of Michigan, told me. Approaching these topics with generosity instead of judgment might mean your dad reaches out to you the next time he gets a weird text instead of clicking the link in the text to see where it takes him.

Create a family plan for verification

If everyone’s in agreement that we’re living through a scary time, you should create a family plan. This is useful for the older adults in your life, and it can be useful for you or your kids if you’re ever targeted. 

The basic idea is to create a chain of verification, so that if someone receives a call or an email — especially one claiming to be from a relative — they have another family member who can give it a second set of eyes. Scammers can easily spoof phone numbers, so it might look like the call is coming from your sister, when really it’s coming from Singapore. Make sure everyone in the family knows that urgency is a scammer’s best friend, and it’s always a good idea to slow down to try and verify. 

You might also want to agree on codewords to confirm that someone is who they say they are when, say, they call asking for “bail money.”

There’s also a cottage industry dedicated to selling you tech to protect your older loved ones and yourself from scams. You can pay for landline services from companies like Community Phone, Ooma, or teleCalm that protect against unwanted callers, filter, and offer caregivers some basic call monitoring features. Major carriers, like Verizon and AT&T, have filters and scam protection built into their services, and smartphones have features like call screening to help you avoid contact with a criminal. But ultimately nothing is 100 percent when it comes to stopping scammers from calling potential victims, since they’re constantly updating their tactics.

“Technology accelerating concentrates everything in our reality, and fraud will get even more powerful because the technology is getting better,” James Graham, Community Phone’s founder and CEO, told me. “And so you need technology that’s also getting better to prevent it, hopefully at a faster rate.”

So it’s a doom loop. Technology is helping criminals get better at stealing, so we need to invent new technology in order to thwart the thieves — until the next generation of tech comes along, at least. The truth is, we can’t stop scammers from assaulting our phone lines and inboxes any better than we can stop getting older with each passing day. 

We can, however, talk to each other about these constant threats. Warn your family and friends about the evolving threats that you’re seeing reported in the news or on social media. If your grandma sends you AI slop, talk to her about how AI slop gets made and how it can be dangerous. If your kid’s daycare sends you AI slop, make sure your spouse knows it’s AI slop, even if it’s cute.

I’m actually hopeful that things will get better. If you look back a couple of decades, when email was new, the volume of spam you’d get made it almost unusable. Spam filters got better, and we got better at spotting scams. Like the scammers themselves, we’ll have to keep adapting. But if we can teach an AI-generated Will Smith to eat spaghetti properly, as a society, we can do anything.

A week before the midterm elections, Vice President JD Vance hosted a town hall in Texas with Fox News host Jesse Watters. It was a friendly event with a friendly audience in what should have been a friendly state, and maybe that's why Vance couldn't help himself. When a college student earnestly asked how the right expected young people like her to settle down and have kids, given the ever-growing cost of living, Vance replied with a quip about Jon Husted's ass.

The student, Kate White, introduced herself as the vice president of the Texas Christian University chapter of Turning Point USA, the conservative group started by Donald Trump all …

Read the full story at The Verge.

If it goes into effect next year, this California law would restrict social media access for children under 16.

Alexis Ohanian is trying to figure out what’s next for user-generated content now that so much of the internet is “compromised.”

For all the horrible things Donald Trump has wrought upon the world — and there are so, so many — he’s also taught us some important lessons. Trump is proof of several truths: A red-meat-and-stress-addled heart can withstand otherwise unthinkable conditions with the federal government’s medical secrets; reality television ruined the world; and, if we’re not careful, we’re all liable to become parodies of ourselves one day, crying about it online.

That latter bit is certainly true for filmmaker Taika Waititi, whose otherwise tacky-yet-progressive veneer cracked last weekend when he took to Instagram to condemn the poor reviews of his latest film, “Klara and the Sun.” After a torrent of bad press and worse box-office performance, the film’s distributor, Sony, opted to scale back the movie’s wide release, reducing the sci-fi dramedy’s reach from 2,000 theaters nationwide to 800, most of which returned a meager profit. Never one to take his mediocrity on the chin, Waititi deflected the negativity outward, which, as we know, always paints someone in a good light!

Waititi reposted a graphic claiming that “Klara and the Sun” was “rebounding” with a 78% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, a 53-point gap from the film’s 25% critics score. (For what it’s worth, neither number should ever be used to accurately measure a film’s quality.) “I haven’t read a review of anything aimed at me or my peers in 15 years,” Waititi captioned the post. “But I do listen to the people . . . Let’s spare a thought for those sad, lost souls who couldn’t achieve their dreams of becoming artists, and thus settled, and became critics. Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin.”

Reading Waititi’s emoji-peppered caption, I was surprised to find it so carelessly evoked the Trumpian crybaby approach to social media. Whether on X or his own Truth Social, Trump’s favorite way of addressing critics and opponents has long been to toss out adjectives at will. Tack a “SAD!” at the end of Waititi’s caption, and it could easily pass for one of Trump’s poetic musings. (If only Waititi had gone so far as to parrot my personal favorite Trump quip about Barney Frank by saying, “The critics looked disgusting, nipples protruding, in front of my movie. Very very disrespectful.”)

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Ironically, all those admonishments in Waititi’s caption are also fitting descriptors for the state of Donald Trump’s agenda, the one imitated by his legions of Republican cronies spread out across America, hoping to be elected in Tuesday’s midterms. But judging by the results, MAGA’s influence is waning fast. Seven Senate seats flipped, historically red states turned blue and a spate of monumental wins popped up nationwide. The MAGA bubble popped in real time. Americans have seen firsthand what little good fascist ideology does for the average, working-class person. And though the country may not become great again overnight, it appears the last 12 years of freefall have finally been suspended — at least for now.

Not to be all, “Oh, won’t someone think of the celebrities?” about it, but such overwhelmingly positive election results left me wondering what happens to someone like Waititi, whose childish outburst is straight from the MAGA playbook. For over a decade, Trump has used social media to peddle broadly disparaging, dangerous rhetoric that has legitimate impact outside the phone screen. The reckless hatred comprising MAGA ideology is so potent that it’s bled into the ways even otherwise progressive people wield their power, like crude oil painting an ocean black. And while refuting film critics isn’t akin to Trump’s most damning sins, Waititi’s mockery is a symptom of a problem that won’t be washed away by one blue wave, no matter how sizable.

One would think that Waititi would know better. For one, the guy is 51 years old, certainly experienced and well-established enough to let a flop roll off his back. How fitting that his biggest success is the anti-fascist yet aesthetically tasteless political satire, “Jojo Rabbit,” which won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay in 2020, just as the Trump era was revving up for its second leg. That film, about a 10-year-old Hitler Youth who begins to grapple with the realities of life in 1940s Germany, examines propaganda’s influence and the power of hegemony, even if it often lacks the nuance and perspective such a satire warrants. For better, or more often, for worse, Waititi’s writing displays a self-possessed vulgarity that gets in the way of his more salient observations. Case in point: It’s downright ludicrous to stake your name on a film renouncing hate, then take aim at critics — people not exactly matched in influence to someone like Waititi — just six years later.

But this is the rot that social media creates. Whether it’s Instagram, X, TikTok, or YouTube, these sites have incentivized and monetized incendiary opinions. Their algorithms push small people into major power. What was designed to ostensibly be a great equalizer has only divided the world more, making animosity easily accessible to anyone who gets their rocks off on sewing discourse through cruelty. 

For some time now, arts critics have been easy targets on these platforms. Gone are the days of the critic playing dilettante, having intellectual conversations over martinis and cigarettes at the month’s salon for like-minded individuals. To be a critic today — to pursue one’s passion for art and writing and learning, all rolled into one — is to subject oneself to a pretty bleak existence. In most cases, the pay is meager. The hours are long. The job is demanding. And virtually no one has the patience or attention span to read an entire article anymore, let alone engage with its ideas. A legitimate critic doesn’t stumble into the job just to point and laugh; they write because they have real passion for what they cover. Surely someone like Waititi would say the same when he begins a new project after a string of flops.

What Waititi fails to realize is that he’s not punching up or down, but laterally. This is artist versus artist. If the context is right, a good piece of criticism can be as life-altering as a good film. But that’s hard to see when the internet has built such a wide chasm between people, reducing the impact of writing in favor of scrolling. Along with social media’s effect on human behavior, it’s had a heavy hand in blunting the journalism industry. If everyone’s a critic, then no one is, and that’s precisely why monitoring Rotten Tomatoes scores like they’re poll numbers is futile and ridiculous.

But it’s not just Waititi who’s vulnerable to this unique form of MAGA-tinged, social media-brained psychosis; critics can fall prey to it, too. Whether it’s a filmmaker, a film critic, or just your average filmgoer, social media has confined us all to its machine. No one is exempt from consumer tech’s sway. And if a writer or filmmaker wants to make a splash, tossing out an inflammatory opinion aimed at a peer is a surefire shortcut. I’ve seen this affect critics’ prose over time, with certain writers (or their outlets) favoring button-pushing pull quotes and headlines for attention. But in most cases, no critic is happy to spend two hours watching something they find insufferable. No matter how gleeful Siskel and Ebert used to look sparring over movies, their industry was built on intellectual debate in pursuit of cinematic resonance, not schadenfreude.

 

What’s most concerning in Waititi’s response is his foul self-importance, which is the real stain of MAGA politics. While an artist should avoid burdening themselves with hypothetical responses to their work before it’s even out in the world, considering the eventual reaction is worthwhile. Engaging with other people’s perceptions is a practice we could all stand to do with more grace and tact. Contemplating a differing opinion shows maturity and humility, not absolute agreement. Pointing a finger won’t do anything for a person’s growth, artistic or otherwise. America’s politicians are only just beginning to relearn that lesson, understanding the value in trying to address problems, rather than gesture toward them with a shrug.

If America’s blue wave is indeed going to usher in a new era where politicians actually act in favor of the people, and Trumpian artists like Waititi make themselves look foolish on Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram, we owe some props to one of the century’s most prolific liberals. Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” actually got a few things right. In last month’s companion piece to “The Social Network,” Sorkin posited that the average American would soon be mobilized by their fatigue with MAGA politics and social media. But his director’s eye lacked style and discernment. Sorkin responded to criticisms with pleasant diplomacy, even questioning his own merits as a director versus a screenwriter. “I’m worried that the parts of directing that I’m not good at are those parts you can’t learn,” he admitted.

While there may be truth to his concern, Sorkin’s introspection is precisely the kind of pause this country could learn from. If living in MAGA-world for a decade has taught us anything, it’s that things aren’t just good because one person says so. Uniformity is the enemy of art, and blind trust is the scourge of politics. There is no future without recognizing the subtleties existing between the lines. The only thing that is, to quote Waititi, irrelevant, out of touch and obsolete is the arrogance in thinking anyone could know it all.

The post Taika Waititi’s Instagram crash out is a Trumpian sore loss appeared first on Salon.com.

PARIS — Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s campaign has a plan for winning over older French voters: get his young supporters to sign up for Facebook to talk to their parents.

Mélenchon, 75, may be the oldest candidate in next spring’s race to replace Emmanuel Macron. But his progressive platform and call for a civic revolution have made him a hit with younger voters, who are more likely to scroll through TikTok and Snapchat than through the old-school social network.

“We’re strong [on every other social media platform],” said Antoine Léaument, who handles the Mélenchon campaign’s communication operations. “Facebook is one of the places where the digital battle could be decisive.”

More than 40% of voters younger than 35 plan to vote for Mélenchon, according to a recent Cluster17 poll commissioned by POLITICO. That figure drops to 14% or less across the age brackets over 50 — groups that, if they use social media at all, tend to favor Facebook over its newer rivals.

According to Médiamétrie, France’s leading audience measurement company, platforms like Instagram and Snapchat have 35% more daily users than Facebook among 15-to-24-year-olds.

On TikTok, which skews younger, Mélenchon has about twice the following of any other presidential candidate.

“Their digital campaign is paying off very quickly,” said a strategist from a competing campaign, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. The strategist also underlined that the share of comments on social media posts describing Mélenchon in a positive light was rapidly rising despite how he’s been vilified by his opponents.

But on Facebook, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally reigns.

Since June, National Rally posts have drawn more than 2 million reactions, more than those of any other French political party, according to data from social monitoring platform Visibrain shared with POLITICO. The page of the National Rally’s local branch in the small region of Vienne alone generated more reactions than the pages of Macron’s Renaissance party.

“Engagement on Facebook is very concentrated,” around the National Rally, Visibrain said.

Listen to the kids

Recent polls show that Mélenchon’s core base of young voters puts him in a strong position to secure a second-place finish in the first round of the presidential election. That would earn him a spot in a runoff against Le Pen, who has held a double-digit lead for first place in surveys for months. (French presidential elections advance to a two-candidate second round if no one wins 50% of the vote on the first try.)

Beating Le Pen, however, will require winning over larger swaths of the electorate. Though pollsters and political scientists urge caution about polling a runoff so early in a campaign, the second-round surveys pitting Le Pen against Mélenchon show the far-left candidate on track for a crushing defeat.

Many older voters remain undecided about what they would do when faced with that match-up, so the answer could lie in whether they decide to listen to their children.

Léaument has been rallying activists from Mélenchon’s France Unbowed to share content en masse on the platform via an open WhatsApp channel, which currently counts over 170,000 members, posting calls to action or campaign clips to share on their social media accounts.

“WE MUST RE-ENGAGE WITH FACEBOOK AT ALL COSTS! WE MUST NOT LEAVE ANY GROUND TO THE FAR RIGHT,” he urged activists in a message posted to the channel.

That playbook is partly borrowed from André Janones, the Brazilian lawmaker who used the messaging app to mobilize supporters of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of his surprise reelection last month.

It has at least one obvious limitation: Political parties have no control over social media algorithms. In Brazil, Lula’s campaign alleged that Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, was boosting Bolsonaro and suppressing its content — an allegation Meta denied.

Hadrien Clouet, a France Unbowed MP who closely tracks South American politics, said lessons would need to be drawn on how the Mélenchon campaign can “protect [itself] from the influence of U.S. social networks.”

But the underlying idea of having the young convince — if not pressure — their elders has been pushed by the movement’s leadership for several months already.

At a party event over the summer, Mathilde Panot, France Unbowed’s top lawmaker in parliament, invoked the work of French political scientist Vincent Tiberj, who has studied “inverse socialization,” or how children challenge and sometimes change their parents’ views and politics.

She pointed to the 2024 vote to make abortion a constitutional right in France, saying that several lawmakers were pressured into voting in favor of the proposal by their daughters — a point French media also reported at the time.

“The children need to convince their parents,” Panot said. “We need to do some grassroots work, to go out and convince people one by one, and that starts with our inner circle: parents, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts.”

Forty-five minutes before the first polls closed on Tuesday, Greg Gutfeld was still doing what Fox News does best, acknowledging reality just long enough to replace it with a culture-war hallucination. “Gas prices are so high, I’m going to vote for the party that wanted to trans my kids,” he joked on “The Five,” adding that he didn’t see Democratic wins on the horizon. “There is no blue wave materializing,” Clay Travis, the Outkick founder and Fox contributor, posted at 3 p.m. EST, adding that Republicans were surging in Florida and the polls were about to be proven wrong yet again. 

Then the polls closed, and MAGA’s delusions were pulverized. The country that right-wing media had spent two years describing as angry, ascendant and permanently realigned voted in an avalanche that crushed years of manufactured MAGA hype. American voters told the president to take his $5,000 “Trump Dividend” checks and shove them. Elon Musk, who moved to Texas to get away from Democrats and then spent a reported $150 million to deliver the Lone Star State for Republicans, saw his early Tuesday post urging people to vote red disappear from his profile by Wednesday. 

The country woke up to results that few expected — and a long list of historic firsts. Georgia elected Keisha Lance Bottoms, the first Black woman governor in American history. Michigan sent Dr. Abdul El-Sayed to Washington as the first Muslim senator. New Hampshire elected Chris Pappas as the first openly gay man in the Senate. New Mexico made Deb Haaland the first Native American woman governor, and Peggy Flanagan became Minnesota’s first Native American woman senator. Texas elected Gina Hinojosa over three-term Gov. Greg Abbott — the state’s first Latina governor and its first Democratic governor in more than three decades. Ohio got its first woman governor in Dr. Amy Acton. South Carolina tapped Dr. Annie Andrews as its first elected woman senator. Democrats won a Senate seat in Kansas for the first time in 94 years. While votes are still being counted in key races, solid majorities in both the Senate and House are assured, and Democrats are set to make Hakeem Jeffries the country’s first Black speaker. 

Even the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid and a loyal Trump house organ, refused to mince words on its front page: “Trump suffers historic rebuke as Dems romp in midterms,” with “BLUE TSUNAMI” blaring beneath it. On “Fox and Friends” Wednesday morning, Ainsley Earhart warned viewers that “your wallet and your way of life” are now in the crosshairs. 

It is no surprise that Trump 2.0, stripped of its previous establishment Republican guardrails like Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell, has culminated in such total structural collapse. The deeper truth the conservative media apparatus could never say out loud is that MAGA was always a Trump-specific phenomenon. It does not transfer to his imitators, and it only ever worked when the economy let voters treat Trump as entertainment. Right-wing media spent years confusing its ability to dominate a conversation with its ability to represent a country. When Tuesday’s returns exposed the difference, its leading voices reached for almost everything except accountability. They blamed immigration. They blamed insufficient restrictions on voting. They blamed each other. Alex Jones even decided Trump might secretly be a Democrat.

For the network’s election night coverage, Fox News seated former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio between two of Trump’s former press secretaries, Kayleigh McEnany and Karoline Leavitt, and he told them to their faces that they were “missing the plot.” He said, “The American people are looking at a war they do not believe in, and they did not authorize. They’re looking at prices that are making it impossible for middle-class people, let alone working-class people, to live.” 

Trump, watching at the White House, raged on Truth Social — “Why does FoxNews have deBlasio” — and seethed at the panel’s lone liberal: “I can’t stand Jessica Tarlov’s voice — DUMB AS A ROCK, but it’s the voice that gets me.” After Gutfeld read the president’s text on air — which is as good a diagram as exists of what Fox News is now: a suggestion box the president monitors live — Tarlov answered on X, not on Truth Social: “Reality is a tricky thing,” and the president “should get better at dealing with it.” 

On Newsmax, things were somehow worse. Political strategist Dick Morris argued that Trump’s problem was effectively excessive success: He had solved the major problems that would otherwise motivate Republican voters. The influencer ecosystem, meanwhile, went straight for the circular firing squad, and every faction picked a different target. 

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Jones, livestreaming as the returns buried his movement, said Trump himself is the plant: “I think he’s a Democrat. I’m 100% at war with Trump. He’s not that r*tarded. He did this on purpose. I think he’s the ultimate Democrat sleeper cell and he works for them.” Benny Johnson and Libs of TikTok reached for the great replacement theory, and Fox’s Lawrence Jones supplied the broadcast version, surveying Texas and concluding, “Texas, there is a lesson here. Don’t be so welcoming.” 

So much for celebrating people voting with their feet and the U-Hauls leaving California. 

Laura Loomer went straight doomer: “America is over and so is the American Dream.” Others blamed Sen. John Thune for failing to pass the SAVE Act and shrink the electorate further, as though the answer to such a broad repudiation were fewer voters. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro posted the “everything is fine” fire GIF — “Just checking in to see how things are goi—” — and the Federalist’s Sean Davis answered with the hot-dog-suit meme, the one where the man in the costume insists everyone else is the problem.

The recriminations got personal fast. Rep. Nancy Mace told Fox’s Mark Levin to “STFU,” blamed his “beloved” war for the losses and called the night “devastating . . . for the hard-working American who can’t afford to buy a home, or fill their tank with gas or put food on the table.” Levin returned fire: Mace was a “washed up political loser” and “one of the most mentally unhinged POS to ever be in Congress.” She was angry, he said, “because you’ll actually have to now work for a living . . . Good riddance, crackpot.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gloated that with governors’ races lost in Texas and Ohio and Georgia, the Sunshine State would stand alone among the ten most populous states with a Republican governor. And Katie Miller — podcaster, administration wife, professional MAGA explainer — told CBS’s Norah O’Donnell that she had not voted at all. “I did not vote in Virginia because in Virginia when you vote, you dox your own address, and so I prefer my own safety and security over giving that up.” 

In the end, the movement’s loudest voices spent the cycle performing for each other. Some of them couldn’t even be bothered to vote.

The post MAGA media scrambles to form a circular firing squad appeared first on Salon.com.

BRUSSELS — Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will visit the European Parliament next week to discuss online child safety, according to an email sent to lawmakers and seen by POLITICO.

Visiting Brussels for the first time as a couple, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will on Tuesday join Parliament President Roberta Metsola in opening an exhibition honoring “the memory of children whose lives were lost in connection with online harms.”

Prince Harry will then discuss with Commissioner Dubravka Šuica, experts and lawmakers “how we can turn legislative commitments into effective safeguards for children, including through safer design, stronger enforcement, and clear accountability for technology companies,” the email reads.

The event is being hosted by Spanish center-right lawmaker Antonio López-Istúriz White, who is the vice president of the Parliament’s intergroup on children’s rights. In September, the European Commission proposed the EU Kids Act, which includes restrictions on social media use for minors.

“The decisions we take on AI, platform design and the enforcement of online safeguards will shape the digital environments in which children grow up. This responsibility cuts across parliamentary committees and policy areas; the experiences of children and families should inform and guide our work throughout,” Lopéz wrote in his invitation to other lawmakers.

Reddit is testing ads on another area of its platform: search. With this update, ads will appear within your search results "based on a range of factors, including contextual relevance to a search query," according to Reddit.

That means searching for "espresso station" could present you with ads for espresso, machines, beans, or mugs, while a search for a "home office setup" may yield ads for monitors, desks, or office chairs. Reddit currently shows ads across its feeds in a variety of formats, including images, videos, sponsored posts, and AMAs. It also shows ads within threads.

Reddit has announced a number of changes to its platform ove …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Being a MAGA influencer just isn’t what it used to be.

When the Trump administration returned to power nearly two years ago, the influencers swaggered into Washington, D.C. with unrelenting hubris. The inauguration gave us a window into just how decisive they’d been in the previous election. The late Charlie Kirk “got a better seat than every member of Congress,” according to The Daily Beast. Jake Paul and his brother Logan took selfies with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, one of many Big Tech Trump allies who donated to his inaugural fund to secure access to the administration. Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson mingled with government leaders and titans of industry.

In any other election cycle, a viral Fox News gaffe would have registered only as a momentary laugh. Last week, reporter Lucas Tomlinson was covering a South Carolina rally for incumbent Republican Sen. Darline Graham, who is seeking to serve a full term following the death of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham. In reality, the event was more about Donald Trump, who had flown to the Palmetto State to help shore up Graham’s candidacy, which increasingly appears to be at-risk. Spotting a middle-aged white man with a beard, Tomlinson assumed he was about to get some choice footage of a gushing Trump superfan. Instead, Tom Hoyle, with an admirable deadpan, joked that he had turned out for the rally because he was too young to have witnessed the 1978 Jonestown massacre, in which 918 followers of Rev. Jim Jones died after drinking a fruit drink laced with poison. “There’s nothing like seeing a cult right up front, man,” he added.

“All right, maybe this is not a Trump supporter,” Tomlinson said, scurrying away. 

The surreal moment capped what has been a desultory midterm election season for Fox, a network that bills itself as “news” but has long been seen by fans and detractors alike as Republican propaganda. Despite their largely worshipful coverage of the president, Trump has been complaining that the network isn’t doing enough to salvage the campaigns of the GOP. 

“FoxNews is spending far too much time putting on the OPPONENTS of Republican Party Candidates,” he recently posted on Truth Social, echoing his prior complaints that the network focuses too much on the Democrats running this cycle than on their Republican opponents. 

Trump is not wrong about the coverage tilt. According to Media Matters, during this election cycle the network has mentioned the names of Democratic candidates at over three times the rate of Republicans. That disparity, though, doesn’t mean the coverage is sympathetic. To the contrary: Fox producers likely recognize that this year’s GOP field of candidates is deeply uninspiring. Some, such as Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor of Ohio, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is seeking a Senate seat, are so repulsive that even lifelong Republicans can’t pretend to like them.

This season, Democratic candidates are making more compelling TV, particularly the charismatic incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., Michigan’s Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Texas state representative James Talarico, who is running against Paxton. The most Fox News can hope for is to hijack these candidates’ ability to command attention, and then use it to drive negative polarization with endless “who do these people think they are?” outrage. But then again, the network knows its audience. 

As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye recently noted, it’s not like Fox News knows what else to do. The hosts, she writes, have been grabbing wildly at straws, praying they can find any story to spark culture war hysteria that will distract voters from serious issues like inflation, the war with Iran or the metastasizing deportation crisis. The network tried to make hay out of the French riots, but even Fox viewers struggled to see why student protests in Paris matter to America. It attempted to pretend Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., was calling for mass arrests of young Republicans when she was asked during a recent appearance about holding the GOP accountable, but that never really caught on either. A last-minute gambit to feign outrage over Barack Obama’s recent joke comparing Trump’s White House decor to the Cheesecake Factory fizzled out as well, likely because it simply reminded people of how the current resident is defiling the People’s House. 

Part of Fox’s problem is immediate. Many voters’ economic woes are sky-high, making it hard for culture war nonsense to feel relevant. But there’s also a longer-term problem for the network, which is that they don’t make as much sense as they used to.

Fox News has long existed to dress up gutter bigotries and far-right paranoia in the clothes of respectable news coverage, mostly through the use of dog whistles and innuendo. In the past, winks at some of the fouler ideas out there was enough to titillate the audience while keeping up the pretense of respectability. But now, that stuff seems dated and out of touch. 

This is an era when, as Jamelle Bouie of New York Times said on YouTube, the actual president offers “Klansman-level racism” from the campaign stump, calling Black people “low IQ,” flinging a slur for transgender people at Democratic politicians and suggesting that El-Sayed’s Muslim faith makes him a terrorist. Right-wing social media, especially the Elon Musk-owned X, reads like Stormfront message boards from the 1990s, with Musk himself regularly promoting white nationalist ideas and memes. Former Fox hosts Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson offer their former employer stiff competition by being more dishonest and outrageous than the lawsuit-wary network can be, with segments suggesting only supermodel-hot women get raped or that Holocaust deniers have a point. 

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But according to Salon’s Alex Galbraith, one Fox host seems to be getting sick of his network’s culture war strategy. Jesse Watters has complained openly on air about how bad the GOP is doing and how Fox coverage isn’t doing much to excite their audience. In one particularly telling segment, he lashed out about the relentless attention Fox News gives to non-stories from the WNBA, including hysteria over trans players, of which there are zero.

“I don’t want to push this story anymore!” Watters said. “I want to leave this story alone! I am no longer talking about the WNBA. As of now, I boycott this segment.”

Although his reasoning may differ, the host is right that the Fox fixation on the WNBA is stupid. The league has become such an obsession on the right because, plainly put, many male conservatives hate seeing female athletes perform feats they couldn’t even manage in their youth. They want to end professional women’s sports and return to the sexist delusion that all men are stronger and faster than all women. This much is evident in how real-life right-wingers behave toward the WNBA, such as going so far as to buy tickets so they can throw sex toys at the players. 

Fox hosts are careful to never say outright that women shouldn’t play sports; that, as they well know, could alienate millions of Republican voters, especially women and fathers of female athletes who are more moderate on this issue. Instead, the network attempts to hijack the antipathy many conservatives feel toward female basketball players with their traditional wink-and-nudge coverage, pretending they want to “clean up” the sport. This preserves the illusion that the right doesn’t hate female athletes while portraying the players — the white ones at least — as fragile, helping to reassure an insecure male audience. 

In the past, this kind of tap dance has worked. Now, as Watters implied, it’s floundering, feeling much too tepid when compared Fox’s online competitors and actual politicians flinging unprintable slurs. Watters suggested as much during another segment, when he argued that Republicans need more “fear porn” if they want to win.

His use of the word “porn” is telling. Watters was arguing that it doesn’t do to be coy any longer — that only the hard-core stuff will move the base. But for Fox News, that would come at the cost of losing advertising dollars and the eyeballs of less radical viewers. This is a true dilemma — and it’s one that couldn’t happen to a more deserving network. 

The post Fox News loses its grip on the culture wars appeared first on Salon.com.

On Thursday night, the smear at the heart of the mysterious transgender mailers that have rocked the final weeks of the midterm elections in Texas completed its journey. What began as baseless social media whispers quickly ascended the ladder of conservative influence, jumped into mailboxes across the Lone Star State and ultimately into the comforting prime-time embrace of Fox News.

At a town hall in Fort Worth, a Texas mother of six named Rebekah Smith told Vice President JD Vance that her 11-year-old daughter had received a letter explaining how to transition without her parents ever knowing, and asked how Republicans would keep the government out of her family. “I don’t know who sent that letter to your child,” the vice president said, “but I think the person who sends a letter to an 11-year-old about gender transition, what I call that in my family is a pervert, and that person ought to go to prison.” Host Jesse Watters, never one to let a grievance go to waste, promised that Fox would investigate “this perverted letter.” Vance asked Smith to talk to his staff because he would “like the Department of Justice to investigate that” as well.

Watters rushed to promote the spectacle. “WHOA! Texas MOM tells JD Vance her DAUGHTER received a letter telling her TO TRANSITION TO A BOY,” he posted on X, followed by Vance’s promise. Missing from that framing was the question that should have governed the segment: Who actually sent the material?

Nobody on that stage mentioned that the pamphlet was a fake. Nobody mentioned that the real transgender advocacy group named inside it had disavowed the mailer. Nobody mentioned that sworn testimony filed that same week had tied the text messages that accompanied it to a national Republican organization. The vice president was asking federal prosecutors to chase a forgery that may well have originated in his own party’s orbit — and he was doing it on a network whose viewers had been marinating in that forgery for weeks.

The race between Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democratic challenger James Talarico has become a crucible for dark-money maneuvers. As polls show the Republican grip on the Lone Star State slipping, conservative campaigns and their surrogates have resorted to increasingly desperate tactics. In early October, for example, Talarico took a brief hiatus from the campaign trail to recover from a severe case of the flu. Rather than accepting a routine human illness, the right-wing echo chamber treated a temporary absence as evidence of mental illness. Within days, the fabricated scandal has collapsed — yet the machinery of right-wing media simply pivoted to amplifying a more insidious operation designed to trigger visceral outrage.

This second October surprise involved millions of unsolicited text messages and a wave of physical mailers sent to Texas households with materials that directed readers to the website of the Transgender Education Network of

Texas while inserting provocative advice on child emancipation that the real organization says it never authored or authorized. By flooding the electorate with extreme material disguised as progressive advocacy, right-wing operatives appear to have sought to create a fake controversy that could be weaponized in attack ads and campaign speeches. Vance, for instance, told the Fox News audience that Talarico has “a weird fascination with trans kids,” and that “he’ll probably defend the right of the person sending the letter, not the right of the parent who is rightfully creeped out by this.” Vance claimed that Talarico “has actually called it abusive when parents try to prevent their children from transitioning” and that Paxton “has fought hard to prosecute those people, whereas James Talarico has fought hard to protect those people.” Even the distortion had been laundered by then — Talarico called denying a child’s gender identity abusive, a different claim from saying parents must permit medical transition, but at the top of the ladder the difference no longer exists.

That is how a smear works in the closed ecosystem of the American right. It does not need to survive scrutiny. It just needs to circulate upward. An anonymous account posts it; an influencer adopts it; a donor-funded outlet reports the influencer’s outrage as news; an elected official demands an investigation, and the demand becomes proof the story matters; cable news books the controversy; a vice president promises federal action. Each rung launders the one below it. The correction, when it comes, travels in the opposite direction and arrives nowhere.

The paper trail looks like what you would expect from a covert operation. Texas Transgender Student Union LLC was formed in Wyoming on Sept. 2 through a commercial registered agent that helps owners stay anonymous. After CBS News Texas visited the agent’s address in Sheridan, Wyoming, the agent announced it was resigning. The mailers listed a Houston-area post office box. The Texas Observer reported that the barcode on the envelopes traced to a mail-tracking company that has taken federal campaign money from only one group this year, the National Republican Congressional Committee. The committee said it had nothing to do with the mailers, and the company would not say who paid. CBS News Texas reported that the bulk-mail permit belongs to an Illinois printer owned by the Zerrusen family, who have given heavily to Republican PACs and been photographed with Donald Trump.

When the real Transgender Education Network of Texas filed a petition in Travis County court to unmask the perpetrators behind the impersonation campaign, the partisan safety nets of the Texas judiciary eventually snapped into action. A deposition of Infobip, the messaging company that delivered the texts, which a Travis County judge ordered made public, indicated that the texts were sent on behalf of the Republican Women’s Caucus Fund and a man named John Braun. But on Friday, the Texas Supreme Court, composed entirely of judges appointed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott, issued an administrative stay that blocked its release. Chris Hilton, an attorney who previously served under Paxton, defended him during his impeachment trial and was later pushed out of office amid sexual harassment allegations, argued on behalf of the company that the mailers were not political speech because they named no candidate or party.

Dirty tricks are an old tradition of American politics. This cycle, Republican PACs in Nevada mailed a flyer calling a nonpartisan candidate, Danielle Ford, the “AOC of Nevada,” hoping voters would mistake her for the actual Democratic nominee, Aaron Ford. This week also brought word that the group that funded Cornel West’s 2024 ballot drives raised every dollar through a dark-money network bankrolled by Elon Musk.

The president’s party whines about decoy candidates in Alaska while running them at home. Ratf**king is a long and proud Republican tradition, and the Texas operation fits inside perfectly.

The post Right-wing media and the mystery of Texas’ transgender mailers appeared first on Salon.com.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani knows what they’re saying about his grocery plan. 

Conservative media outlets and right-wing commentators have, for more than a year, been practically apoplectic about Mamdani’s push to open five municipal stores to sell discounted food. Local Republicans have responded to the initiative by comparing Mamdani to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. Last year, as Mamdani made the plan a central plank of his campaign, Fox Business published a dramatic piece featuring interviews with “descendants of socialism” from Eastern Europe and Cuba suggesting Mamdani’s agenda was reminiscent of the “vivid memories,” “tales of woe” and “scars” they experienced. 

Now, the plan is underway. The first store is set to open its doors by the end of next year, and Mamdani is thoroughly unmoved by the backlash. In a conversation with TPM last week, the mayor dug into the details of his grocery store plan and brushed off the critics. 

“If I listen to that commentary every day, I would become afraid of my own shadow,” Mamdani said with a laugh. “And I think, for too long, we have allowed the right to dictate the entirety of the discussion. And we have limited ourselves to a response to a landscape that they have created.” 

As he sat in the Governor’s Room of City Hall, Mamdani emphasized his words by tapping his hand against the large conference table. It’s a gesture that would go unnoticed if it were not for his signature silver rings gently rapping against the wood. The sound served as periodic punctuation as he expressed his frustration with the limitations of Democratic politics as usual and his enthusiasm for the city-run stores.

“It is time for us to ask ourselves, what is our party for?” he asked. “And to me, the answer has to be the working class. It’s the only majority in this country. And then what can we do to materially change the lives of those working class New Yorkers or Americans?” 

Those are the people who inspired Mamdani’s groceries initiative. The mayor explained that he settled on the idea during his campaign last year based on conversations with city residents.

“If you ask New Yorkers, .. what are the costs that you’re reckoning with as part of the skyrocketing cost of living crisis in our city? … What is pushing you to reconsider if you should be living in this city? … Again and again, you hear about housing, childcare, groceries,” Mamdani said. “We’d hear about public transit, we’d hear about other things, but groceries would always be up there.”

Data shows it’s gotten far more expensive to eat in New York City. A report released by the state comptroller last year showed food prices in the metropolitan area were up over 25 percent since 2019. And as Mamdani and his advisers looked at ways to confront the issue, they became adamant new approaches were needed. 

“When everyone is telling you that prices are too high, the common refrain is therefore we should subsidize the private market further,” said Mamdani. “And yet, what we’ve seen is that we’ve explored those kinds of strategies here in New York City. They have not had a substantial impact on the cost of groceries.”

The plan is rooted in a very New York “tradition.” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a progressive New Deal Republican who steered the city through the Great Depression, opened public markets that gave street vendors support and space for their businesses. That vision has continued with Essex Market, a warren of shops and restaurants on the Lower East Side that the city has operated since the 1990s. 

Mamdani describes La Guardia as “an inspiration each and every day.” One of New York’s five new grocery stores is being constructed at La Marqueta in East Harlem’s El Barrio, a site that was home to one of the original 1930’s markets. More recently, a similar public grocery store initiative has begun in Atlanta. 

Despite the histrionics — including dire warnings from Fox News and right-wing think tankers that Mamdani’s stores could cause widespread food shortages — the actual plan is fairly limited in its scope. There will just be five stores (one in each of New York City’s boroughs). In addition to La Marqueta, another is planned for a city-owned site at Hunts Point in The Bronx. That store, which has been dubbed The Peninsula, is slated to be the first to open towards the end of next year. The other three locations, which will be in Brooklyn, Queens, and on Staten Island, have not been identified yet. Mamdani has pledged to open all of them by the end of his term in 2029. 

Inside the stores, a slate of items that Mamdani’s team has dubbed a “core basket” will be offered at a 30 percent discount that will be adjusted monthly and pegged to the market rate. This includes produce, meat, seafood, dairy, and a selection of pantry staples. Other items will be on sale at standard prices. The city estimates this will save customers roughly $90 per month.

Those market rate costs for the majority of goods in the grocery stores are hardly in line with the visions of Havana spun by the right. The “government-run” moniker conservatives have slapped on the project is also an exaggeration. Mamdani’s grocery stores are actually a public-private partnership. The New York City Economic Development Corporation currently has proposals out looking to rent privately owned sites for the final three stores. They also have accepted bids from experienced operators to run all of the venues. 

Some of the criticism of the plan has been based on its potential cost to taxpayers. The city initially invested $70 million to cover construction and real estate expenditures associated with the five sites. According to officials, with solicitations for sites and operators ongoing, the final annual cost of the program is not clear. However, they are confident having the spaces paid for will be sufficient incentive to enable the store operators to offer the “core basket.” If necessary, the city may also provide further subsidy beyond covering real estate capital costs to ensure operators can stock the discounted items. Furthermore, they expect the NYCEDC’s competitive bidding process will help identify companies who can keep the stores’ overhead low. 

In the interview with TPM, Mamdani insisted the plan will be “sustainable.” And, thus far, the mayor has a track record of managing the costs of his ambitious programs. This year, Mamdani, who inherited an approximately $12 billion deficit when he took office in January, balanced the city budget. While much has been made of the fact that the feat required some help from the governor’s mansion and a delay in pension payments that will need to be dealt with down the road, Mamdani made up nearly half the difference by finding new revenue through taxes on the wealthy and cost-saving measures like cutting unnecessary overtime. 

Joseph Hernandez, the Republican candidate for state comptroller, has been one of the more vocal critics of Mamdani’s municipal grocery stores. He’s unveiled estimates claiming the plan could cost $200 million. There are some issues with that figure. Along with the initial $70 million in construction costs and an estimated $106 million in projected operating costs, Hernandez’s tab includes a supposed $30 million that he says will be lost by other businesses from competing with the stores. 

“We can absolutely afford it,” Mamdani said with a laugh. “We are a city budget that has significantly north of $100 billion on an annual level — and we already spend about $850 million in programs that seek to address food insecurity, ranging from our school system to funding food pantries.”

“What we’re talking about here is a drop in the bucket of what the city already spends,” he added. “But one that will be felt by every single New Yorker who goes to these stores.”

Mamdani further argued that those who raise questions about the price of social programs “prefer not to see the cost today” of the underlying issues those initiatives seek to address. 

“We are dealing with the costs of food insecurity every single day. We’re sitting down to talk in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world and yet one in four New Yorkers are in poverty,” Mamdani said. “It is not tenable, it is not acceptable.”

For the mayor, the situation calls for a different kind of politics. He described himself as “unwilling” to simply point at the problem “and then hope that somebody comes up with a solution.”

“This is a city of innovation. It’s a city of imagination. It’s time we bring those kinds of ethos to our politics as well,” Mamdani declared. 

The idea that the new stores will hurt other businesses has been one of the more persistent arguments from critics of the plan. A group of minority-owned bodegas and supermarkets has even sued to stop the initiative. Yet Mamdani argues his stores are fundamentally different, particularly from bodegas which typically offer ‘round-the-clock service and core items that won’t be available in the municipal shops. 

“The biggest things that drive revenue for bodegas are tobacco, lottery tickets, and alcohol. We’re not selling those,” Mamdani explained. “Our goal here is not to compete with fundamental parts of New York City.”

Mamdani, who noted there are thriving bodegas in the immediate vicinity of the existing public Essex Market, also framed it as fairly simple math. 

“We’re speaking about a city that has north of 10,000 bodegas, north of a thousand different grocery operators. We’re talking about five city-run grocery stores,” he said emphatically as his ring tapped against the wooden table. 

As they select locations for the stores, city officials are looking for neighborhoods where there isn’t much competition. They are aiming for locations with insufficient grocery store options as well as a high rate of residents accessing public benefits. Though the goal is to ensure the discounted food will be easily accessible for lower income New Yorkers, the stores will be available to anyone who wants to shop at them. 

“These are stores for everyone,” Mamdani said.

In building out his vision for the municipal grocery stores, Mamdani named his chief of staff, Elle Bisgaard-Church, who he calls his “left hand,” as a key force behind the project. He also pointed to Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, the highest ranking City Hall official with the stores in their portfolio, and NYCEDC Executive Vice President Jamie Horton as being among the key officials overseeing the plan. 

Speaking to TPM, Horton said one key aspect of the program for Mamdani is ensuring that the stores will be a “pleasant experience” without “stigma.” The solicitations for operators and sites specify the visual language and design elements that will be part of creating an elevated environment inside the shops. 

“It’s really important that this is an example of public excellence, that the public sector can deliver a high quality experience. It’s also about providing a service … that treats folks with dignity, that this isn’t a handout for folks, it’s that the government is delivering for its people,” Horton said. 

Overall, Mamdani said a core goal of the project is making a real change in the environment for city residents. 

“I am tired of the fact that politics has increasingly become an act of describing working peoples’ struggles as opposed to putting forward what you will do about those struggles,” he said, before asking, “How are you going to deliver them a different reality?”

That ethos and desire to take concrete steps to address cost of living has been the central plank of Mamdani’s platform. As he ran for office last year, the grocery stores were one of the highest profile parts of his campaign along with a partial rent freeze and a plan for fast, free city buses. Mamdani delivered on the rent freeze for certain stabilized units in June. While the plan for free buses has run into legislative opposition, in July, Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul unveiled a road map to speed up service. 

At every turn, Mamdani’s various proposals have faced backlash and questions about costs. The criticism has been amplified by Mamdani’s membership in the Democratic Socialists of America. All of this has, for better or worse, made Mamdani a national figure who has received both positive attention and ire from President Donald Trump. Last June, after Mamdani won the Democratic primary en route to City Hall, Trump took to social media and blasted him as “a 100% Communist Lunatic.” Less than five months later, after Mamdani was victorious in the general election, the two had a warm meeting in the Oval Office where the president heaped praise on the new mayor. 

“I met with a man who’s a very rational person. I met with a man who wants to see — really wants to see — New York be great again,” Trump said, adding, “I’ll be cheering for him.”

Along with the rhetoric, Trump’s allies have also played their part in the opposition to Mamdani’s grocery plan. One of the legal complaints from store owners was filed with the America First Policy Institute, a right wing dark money group chaired by Larry Kudlow, the former director of the National Economic Council in the Trump White House. 

Mamdani smiled broadly as he offered some choice words for Kudlow. 

“Larry must love paying a lot of money for eggs,” Mamdani said, adding, “There will always be opposition wherever there is innovation and wherever there is imagination. And we welcome it. We are fully confident in the legality of this program and even more so than the legality, the urgent necessity of it.”

While the mayor clearly has his critics, Mamdani and the swirl of national buzz around his rise helped turn “affordability” into one of the major talking points of this election cycle. And, in New York, the most recent polling shows his popularity has surged to nearly 70 percent favorability. 

Mamdani believes his fellow Democrats need to be less preoccupied with their detractors. 

“I think you simply have to prepare and expect for this kind of backlash. What it is, is a backlash to any kind of change. And if you want to avoid backlash, then all you will do is just steward the status quo. And that is exactly what has gotten us to this point,” he said. “It is critically important that we stop the act of constructing an ever-lowering ceiling on our ideas.”

For Mamdani, his grocery stores epitomize this ambitious, unafraid vision and approach. 

“That is what is so exciting to me,” he said. “Politics so often is something that has to be translated to someone who lives outside of the political world. There is no translation required about cheaper groceries. You understand it when you’re checking out.”

“For too long, politicians have had things to say and they haven’t had anything to do,” he added. “And it’s time to make this city an example of what we can do for people.” 

Night falls in the European capital. Everything’s quiet, but the nightmares are about to begin.

Viktor Orbán’s ghost haunts the Schuman roundabout; ash from the bonfire of red tape covers the Justus Lipsius building; Ursula von der Leyen’s chief of staff, Björn Seibert, chases after staffers demanding to know what “associate membership” for Canada actually means; and MEPs tremble at the prospect of construction workers uncovering the skeletons of political intrigues past during renovations.

Scared? You should be.

Here’s our guide to who is terrified of whom in the Brussels bubble. 

Everyone is scared of Marine Le Pen

The person haunting EU diplomats, officials and lawmakers is French presidential front-runner Marine Le Pen. Will she really halve Paris’ contribution to the EU budget, as promised? Will she pull Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni away from the Brussels mainstream? And will she demand von der Leyen’s head?

The bubble had warmed (slightly) to the idea of Jordan Bardella in the Élysée Palace, after his years leading the National Rally’s European operation revealed a certain pragmatism toward Brussels — only for those hopes to be shattered when a Paris appeals court cleared Le Pen to be a candidate for the presidency.

The next ECB chief is scared of Jean-Luc Mélenchon

The European Central Bank president is the euro’s last line of defense against unorthodox national economic decisions — but that could be tested by French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is on course to reach the runoff after vowing to set billions of euros of French debt “on fire.” His incendiary plan calls on the Frankfurt-based ECB to waive interest payments on a vast tranche of French bonds — an unorthodox, perhaps impossible, maneuver that critics warn could even see France kicked out of the euro.

Now that we know Christine Lagarde will step down as ECB president in February, what France’s presidential candidates want to do about its monumental debt pile will haunt the race for her successor, with Dutchman Klaas Knot and Spaniard Pablo Hernández de Cos as the two frontrunners.

Lobbyists are scared of ChatGPT

The number of amendments lawmakers have filed has exploded since generative AI arrived, with key EU laws now facing thousands of proposed text changes. Parliament officials don’t think it’s a coincidence, with some pointing to amendments written in suspiciously bot-like language, and others saying sometimes amendments cite legislation that does not even exist.

The growing pile of amendments is haunting lobbyists, parliamentary assistants and officials forced to track and sort through it all — along with the fear that AI could eventually replace them. Spare a thought, too, for the MEPs who may have to vote through the amendments one by one, with hands raised in plenary. 

Commission officials are scared of Austria’s Europe minister

Well-heeled Commission officials (and their families) are spooked by Austria’s Europe Minister Claudia Bauer, who has been leading a push to slash the Commission’s administration expenditure — which pays eurocrats’ salaries and offices — in the next seven-year budget. The campaign, backed by most EU capitals, resulted in an 8% cut to the admin budget in the latest budget proposal.

Bauer is so feared that EU officials joke they reduce their delegations’ size whenever they travel to Austria.

Jessika Roswall is scared of Stéphane Séjourné and Valdis Dombrovskis

Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall and her department have reason to fear industry boss Stéphane Séjourné, who is taking the lead on the upcoming Circular Economy Act, despite Roswall’s official title of Commissioner “for a Competitive Circular Economy.” Making matters spookier, Roswall’s environment department now shares the Breydel building with Séjourné’s internal market and industry department, setting the stage for some chilling corridor encounters as Roswall pushes for greater environmental protection while Séjourné prioritizes industrial growth.

Roswall is also under pressure from EU simplification chief Valdis Dombrovskis to cut red tape on several environmental laws. The Latvian commissioner, who oversees the omnibus packages, wants a deal before year-end. Meanwhile, the center-right European People’s Party continues to press the Commission to reopen laws on birds, habitats, and water — the EU’s oldest nature protection laws — so they can be simplified too.

Alexander Stubb is afraid of Kaja Kallas and António Costa

Kaja Kallas has not publicly addressed the call that Finnish President Alexander Stubb made to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, but the EU’s top diplomat has made clear she dislikes such outreach. Still, if Putin offered serious talks and concessions, Kallas would be the obvious person to answer: as coordinating EU foreign and security policy is her job. “Of course I will talk if such an opportunity presents itself,” she told Estonian media in September when asked about speaking with Putin or his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Also reaching for the phone: António Costa. EU diplomats note that the European Council president represents the bloc at the leaders’ level abroad. That institutional turf war may explain why Stubb stressed that he and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Støre spoke only for their own countries — not for Europe.

Manfred Weber is scared of his own group …

What keeps the leader of the European People’s Party — Europe’s largest political family — up at night? Divisions within his own ranks. So far, Weber has kept a tight ship and wants to reunite his troops ahead of the 2029 EU election, which he is casting as a battle against the far right. But that may prove tricky as the EPP’s national delegations increasingly clash over whether to work with the far right or isolate them.

… and the group is scared of Ouarda Bensouag

Central to Weber’s strategy is Ouarda Bensouag, the group’s secretary-general and his chief of staff. One of his most trusted lieutenants, she has a reputation as a smart but ruthless operator who EPP staffers fear when crossing paths in the Parliament’s labyrinthine hallways.

No one is scared of the Parliament … but they should be

Parliament’s attempts to spook capitals over the next long-term budget have been borderline tragic so far: It keeps threatening to kill the budget, but nobody seems to care or believe it will.

They should care. When it comes time to pass the budget, 361 of 720 votes will be needed, and the margin could be razor-thin in a fragmented chamber that’s hostile to plans to pool farm and regional funds. The louder MEPs protest — and the longer the Council ignores them — the more determined they become to prove the threat is real.

By Max Griera, Gregorio Sorgi, Kathryn Carlson, Nick Vinocur, Jakob Weizman, Fiona McNally and Eliza Gkritsi

LONDON — Britain’s intelligence agency GCHQ cannot account for the whereabouts of thousands of storage devices which could contain sensitive material, according to an official watchdog.

A report by the Investigatory Powers Commissioner (IPCO) — which polices how Britain’s intelligence agencies use their spying powers — on Thursday found that a significant number of devices including USB sticks, hard drives and memory cards are unaccounted for.

Brian Leveson, the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, said that GCHQ “still cannot tell me what has happened to removable media that may hold sensitive data, years after I first raised it with them.”

He noted that the devices “may contain IPA-related data” — which has a high level of sensitivity.

IPA-related data refers to information collected or held under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. That could include intercepted communications such as emails, texts and telephone calls, as well as information extracted from people’s computers or phones.

The report added that GCHQ currently estimates the number of devices “to be in the thousands” and is currently undergoing work so it can report how many of the devices have been confirmed as lost.

“We remain very concerned about this issue and are disappointed with the time it has taken GCHQ to investigate,” the report notes.

Last year IPCO disclosed that GCHQ and fellow intelligence agency MI5 had been unable to locate considerable numbers of storage devices, some of which potentially containing information classified as “TOP SECRET.”

A GCHQ spokesperson said: “As IPCO have reported, our management system for removable media was previously not sufficiently robust to effectively track the items that were registered for use. IPCO are right to note the flaws in the data the system produced, and we have taken action against all their recommendations.

“We recognise the importance of security of removable media in our systems, and have a range of measures to mitigate the risks posed by these items. The findings in the report have been addressed comprehensively and all necessary steps to correct this issue have been taken.”

FRANKFURT — Christine Lagarde’s announcement that she will leave the European Central Bank in February quickly drew attention to more than her departure date: the two bandages on her face visible in a video statement she posted.

They prompted speculation on social media, which Lagarde addressed in a follow-up post. She said they were from a “small surgery” earlier in the week and urged people to follow medical advice and get their skin checked regularly.

In a separate internal video message to all ECB staff, seen by POLITICO, Lagarde offered a little more humor and detail: “I know I look funny. This is not kick-boxing in Thailand,” she said after attending the International Monetary Fund annual meetings in Bangkok earlier this month. “It is just a little skin cancer that had to go.”

The ECB declined to comment and referred to Lagarde’s earlier statement.

Earlier Thursday, Lagarde, who is 70, ended months of speculation about her future role, saying that she will step down on Feb. 7 ahead of her term officially ending in October next year.

The ECB did not reveal what Lagarde’s immediate plans are, however she has previously hinted she may want to weigh in on France’s 2027 presidential race.

An official familiar with Lagarde’s thinking, granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said she made her move almost a full year before the end of her term, to have “greater freedom to express her views and to engage in non-monetary matters, because she cannot remain neutral when she sees the developments taking place in her own country and in the world.”

Die EU-Kommission will nationale Regelungen zu Altersgrenzen für soziale Medien vorerst zurückstellen. Die Mitgliedstaaten sollen entsprechende Gesetzesvorhaben für ein Jahr aussetzen. Statt unterschiedlicher Regeln soll eine gemeinsame europäische Regelung kommen.

Seit dem vergangenen Jahr arbeiten sowohl die Kommission als auch einzelne Mitgliedstaaten an Altersbeschränkungen für soziale Medien. Als Grund gelten Risiken für die psychische Gesundheit junger Menschen. Doch auch nachdem die EU einen einheitlichen Rechtsrahmen vorgeschlagen hatte, verfolgten die Länder weiterhin unterschiedliche Ansätze und Altersgrenzen.

Im September schlug die EU den sogenannten Kids Act vor. Er soll EU-weit einheitliche Standards schaffen und unterschiedliche Beschränkungen für Kinder unter 13 Jahren und Jugendliche unter 15 Jahren vorsehen. Mehrere Mitgliedstaaten arbeiteten dennoch weiter an eigenen Verboten. Länder wie Griechenland und Dänemark erklärten, sie wollten nicht warten, bis die EU-weiten Regeln ausgehandelt und umgesetzt sind.

„Die Kommission hat beschlossen, alle Entwürfe nationaler Gesetze, die sich mit den künftigen harmonisierten Regeln überschneiden, für zwölf Monate aufzuschieben“, sagte Kommissionssprecher Thomas Regnier am Donnerstag vor Journalisten.

Österreich hatte die Kommission bereits im Juli gebeten zu prüfen, ob sein geplantes Gesetz, das den Zugang für unter 14-Jährige verbieten würde, mit EU-Recht vereinbar ist. Die Frist für eine Antwort der Kommission lief am Donnerstag aus. Die EU-Kommission forderte Österreich daraufhin auf, die Verabschiedung des Gesetzes für ein Jahr auszusetzen, sagte Regnier.

„Ein europäisches Problem erfordert eine gemeinsame europäische Antwort“, sagte Regnier. „Wir müssen uns nun auf die Verhandlungen zum EU Kids Act konzentrieren.“

Die Mitgliedstaaten müssen sich nun mit dem Europäischen Parlament und der Kommission auf die Einzelheiten des Kids Act einigen, bevor die Regeln umgesetzt werden können.

Nach dem Vorschlag der Kommission wäre der Zugang zu sozialen Medien für Kinder unter 13 Jahren in den meisten Fällen verboten. Für Jugendliche unter 15 Jahren würde er stark eingeschränkt. Zudem sollen Plattformen zu mehr Sicherheit bereits bei der Gestaltung ihrer Dienste verpflichtet werden. Die Vorgaben sollen auch für Videospiele und KI-Begleiter gelten.

Wie die Mitgliedstaaten auf die Aufforderung reagieren werden, ist zunächst unklar.

Griechenland hat bereits ein eigenes Gesetz für unter 15-Jährige verabschiedet und dürfte es voraussichtlich beibehalten können, weil das Verfahren bereits vor dem EU-Vorschlag durchlaufen wurde. Außer zu Österreich wollte sich Regnier nicht zu einzelnen Ländern äußern. Im Fall Griechenlands gebe es jedoch „Nuancen“, die damit zusammenhingen, wann das Land sein Gesetz der Kommission zur Prüfung auf Vereinbarkeit mit EU-Recht vorgelegt habe.

Dieser Artikel ist zuerst auf Englisch bei POLITICO erschienen.