The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.c0, as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.c0.

I am your host, Joseph. And with me are 404 Media cofounders, Sam Cole

Hello.

And Jason Kebler.

Hello. Hello.

No Emmanuel this week. Hopefully, you'll be here next week. One brief piece of housekeeping. There is an article on the site called 404 media objects to test, Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton's subpoena to access our reporting. I'll read one quote from the article.

This subpoena undermines the free and independent press. It also highlights the fact that the alarm bells that have been raised about legal attacks on journalists in the second Trump administration are not theoretical. Politicians already feel emboldened to use the legal system to target journalists, end quote. That's all we're gonna say about this for now, but go check out the article if you do want to get a little bit more context on that. Jason, merge.

Yeah. So Sam and I and the others, but but mostly Sam and I, have been working on getting a refreshed, like, new merch, new shirts, hoodies, crewneck sweatshirts. We tried really hard to get these, before Christmas so that you could give them as gifts, but we're not gonna have them in time. The reason that I'm talking about this now is because probably later this week, we'll put them up on our Shopify if you're interested. And I wanna highlight that, it's a it's a presale, as in we've ordered them, but we're not gonna get them before Christmas.

But if you wanna buy them, I will ship them out the second that I get them, which will probably be at the very beginning of January. So if you wanna give your loved ones a piece of paper that says you're getting a shirt from 404 Media, now now is your chance. Is that right, Sam?

Yeah. Yeah. The coveted IOU, always a classic for the last minute gift giving. I've done it a 1000 times, unfortunately. But yeah.

And it helps us if you preorder to know how much to get. So and I think they look sick, so watch for that.

I haven't done an IOU, but I might do that this year.

I've done it most years

most years.

Many times. I'm

probably gonna do

it this year. Print out of what I bought you. It's coming later.

It's in the mail. It's like, that's yeah. For sure.

I respect it. I didn't know that was a thing. And I guess soon yeah. Soon, we're gonna begin to I know. We're gonna get into sneaker culture because we're doing all these drops now and presales.

We're gonna have bots on our website. No. I don't wanna give anybody any ideas. But, yeah. Definitely go and order that if you want.

The show is gonna be

a little bit different here

and then we're gonna have a couple of breaks because there is just so much to talk about with the UnitedHealthcare CEO. We've done a few different stories on it, probably different to the ones you've read at other outlets. Obviously, this is the biggest story, at least in the United States. But let's get into it. The first one that we're gonna talk about is one that I wrote called UnitedHealthcare Shooting Person of Interest Had 3 d Printed Glock.

I will give a super brief summary of recent events. I'm sure many people know this. But last week, a man ambushed the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, in Manhattan, on the pavement and and shot him in the back and killed him. There was a massive manhunt with various things along the way. The police found a rucksack full of monopoly money in Central Park.

Lots of photos of the alleged shooter were released or as police got them. And then eventually, reportedly, an employee at a McDonald's in Pennsylvania called authorities after seeing this person of interest later turned suspect. He's arrested and his name is Luigi Mangong. ABC, NBC, CNN, all obtain images of a weapon found on him. This is where my story comes in.

I think it's Mangione.

Sure. We'll go for that. Thank you very much. I even checked. Trying to be respectful.

I'm awful. I apologize.

It's the mispronounced word of the week. We're bringing it back.

Bringing it back. Yeah. We had a good run. I saw in the replies on Twitter immediately, the photo of the weapon. And, you know, to an untrained eye like mine, it just looks like a black Glock.

You know, it just looks like a pistol. But then people were tagging a particular Twitter user and mentioning somebody and saying it was a a particular design of a 3 d printed Glock, frame. I then spoke to 2 people who said the same. One of those sources we granted anonymity. And another one was print, shoot, repeat who, for those who don't know, is a pretty high profile YouTuber and 3 d printed firearm community member.

They do all sorts of things with firearms and 3 d printed, weapons and uploads videos. They have, you know, various issues with YouTube as well, demonetizing content as you might expect, all of that. But both both of these people, they said that the weapon in the photo released was a Chairman Wong version 1. And I think, and I think others would agree, that is hugely significant. And that this might be the first assassination in the United States using a 3 d printed weapon.

Now, again, I'm no expert, but Jason helped me with this because you have a little bit more knowledge than me and through the the two people I spoke to. Just because we say a weapon is 3 d printed, that doesn't mean the entire thing has been made by a printer. You can have different components like the slide, which you'll have to purchase. But this was the clock frame, you know, and that was 3 d printers. Before we touch on that a little bit more, Jason, we haven't covered 3 d printed guns, I think, directly at 4 0 4 Media just because, I don't know, hasn't hasn't super, come up.

But way back at Motherboard, the technology section of ICE where we used to work, and I think actually before my time there, Motherboard made probably, like, the first serious documentary about 3 d printed guns. What was the deal there?

Yeah. So it was called Click Print Gun, and it was made by our ex colleagues at at Motherboard. It was I think it came out maybe in, like, 2012. Like, it was a long time ago, and it followed Cody Wilson who made this 3 d printed gun called the Liberator that he called the Liberator, and, basically, was just showing that it was possible to make a 3 d printed gun. And I will say just, like, for people who are interested, the, producer and director of that documentary, which I think was, like, 25 minutes long, was, Aaron Lee Carr, who has since gone on to make some, like, very high profile documentaries for HBO and and other outlets.

So it's it's extremely well made, and it it's very like, it's worth watching. And this was a really big deal for motherboard as well. Like, I remember it got coverage from CNN and, like, other major media outlets because they had no idea that this was even possible. And it really raised, like, a lot of questions about free speech, like, content moderation, things like that, like, back sort of the the extent of the second amendment, various issues like this, Back when people were not talking about it as much, Cody Wilson went on to found this, I guess it's a company. I I don't even know if it's a company or if it's just like an online platform, like, nonprofit type thing called, Defense Distributed, which has, like, all of these different designs for 3 d printed guns, things like that.

But the the big thing is that the Liberator was, I believe, made entirely out of 3 d print resin, which is, like, printable plastic more or less. And he fired it. Like, he he tested it. It showed that it worked, but, you know, it wasn't super, like, reliable as a gun. I think that

footage of it breaking and stuff.

Yeah. Like, it it breaks. It it's kinda like one of those, like, one time use guns more or less. And I think the very interesting thing is that in the years since then, as most things do in technology, 3 d printed guns have gotten a lot more sophisticated and a lot different. The gun that Joseph wrote about earlier this week that we're talking about, the Chairman Juan gun, is, I guess, you'd call it like a hybrid 3 d printed gun where the case is 3 d printed plastic resin.

But then as Joseph mentioned, many of the parts are, like, are metal, and you buy those metal parts from the Internet. And there was actually a kind of interesting academic study that's referenced in that article, that came out in October about the rise of this type of gun, because they're a lot more reliable than just, like, a plastic gun as you'd expect. But they're, like, a lot more sophisticated, and it's causing, like, some there's speculation in this paper that it's gonna cause some problems for law enforcement because the definition of, like, what a 3 d printed gun is is changing, and sort of, like, tracking this stuff is getting a lot more complicated for that reason. And that paper came out in the United Kingdom that has actual gun laws, whereas, like, the United States, very few. Very, very few.

But I thought it was I thought that was, like, very interesting context was was this paper. But, anyways, Joseph, you wanna talk a little bit more about this specific, gun and then also what what this tells us about what what might happen here?

Yeah. So and I guess just before that, when you when you talk about the Liberator from the early documentary, it it looks very much like his own gun. Right? It's like a particular design. It's not trying to, like, replicate a Glock from what I remember.

It's made in a certain way, presumably because the physics of it has to try to be ineffective even if one shot or a couple of shots weapon. Right? And it's different now in that the the 3 d printed firearms market or community are basically making copies of established weapons that people know work, and they're able to effectively, replicate them. So this weapon, the Chairman 1 v 1, I was told, you know, it was released in around 2020 or 2021, depending on where it was potentially downloaded from. And it quickly became unpopular because the v two came out something like 6 months later.

We don't know enough about, you know, the suspect, whether they did download this, when they downloaded it by 4. That was an interesting data point in that. This isn't like the the version 3 or the version 4 or whatever, a more recent one. It is a years old model of this particular 3 d printed firearm design. So interesting, data point there.

You just mentioned, yeah, that UK paper and how we could have problems for law enforcement. When the reporting initially came out about this 3 d printed weapon, a few outlets relying on the comments of the police, obviously, were framing it as a ghost gun, which is a gun without a serial number. And, of course, that is true in that, you know, you don't 3 d print a serial number onto it if you have any sense. Right? But I do think it's much more significant that it's 3 d printed than it just doesn't have a serial number.

And I think it bears repeating there, as you say, Jason. It could be a real problem in the UK. In the US, Basically, nothing in the way of somebody just buying, a weapon like this. Anyway, that being said, stuff might change now. And I'm I'm glad, like, I didn't we don't wanna make predictions.

I remember when Emmanuel was editing this piece, he changed the work. As I said, it might likely have legal ramifications. He said, we don't wanna predict, which is true. Print, shoot, repeat, the high profile YouTuber, they said, quote, it appears to be the 1st high profile case involving a 3 d printed gun, and it's my guess that this will have a few a huge impact on DIY firearms regulations going forward, end quote. So that's one of the most prominent members of this community acknowledging and seeing that maybe there's gonna be some sort of, legal crackdown.

Now, what that exactly looks like, I'm not I'm not clear on. Some members, I think many members of the 3 d printed firearms community would say that this is information. It is a speech issue. All we're doing is distributing plans, that sort of thing. So we'll we'll see how that pans out legally.

But as well as a weapon of this type being used in a very high profile murder and assassination, I think it really just just show how far freely printed weapons have come. When I was writing my book about a nom, the encryptophone company the FBI secretly ran and back to all them read all the messages. On there, the FBI and other authorities got messages showing that a gang in Finland had basically made a factory for 3 d printed submachine guns. And you look at the photos, and it's crazy. There's, like, 3 or 4 3 d printers all lined up.

And they just have a supply chain of these things. So you have that. You also have some Neo Nazis in Finland who have turned to weapons as well, apparently. And then if you are interested in this, I recommend you go follow the work of popular front from Jake Hamrahan, who's done a bit more reporting on this. And I think he did a recent documentary.

But there's also even rebels in Myanmar who are now using 3 d printed weapons. Like, this is here to stay now. It's we're so far from the Cody Wilsons doing a single shot pistol now.

Yeah. I I've been pretty shocked, at the fact that a lot of the 3 d printed guns appear to me to be, like, submachine guns or, like, automatic weapons in some way. Preface well, or post post face, I don't know anything about guns. Like, I know a little bit about 3 d printed, guns just enough to sort of edit the piece that you did, but I don't know terminology. I don't know exactly, if they're technically automatic weapons or what, but I have been surprised, at how far the it has clearly evolved since that initial Cody Williams, story.

Yeah. Absolutely. Let's have a quick break. And when we come back, we're gonna talk about, a couple more, stories around all of this. We'll be right back after this.

Okay. And we're back. This one. Jason, you just published this today. Luigi Mangione played among us, breathes air.

Obviously, a sarcastic headline. I think before we get to sort of what you're criticizing, when the name of the suspect came out, what did you do?

Yeah. I mean, I think anyone who has done journalism on the Internet has done this at some point. And I think, actually, just like random people who are interested in stories have started doing this as well, which is the name was announced. The name Luigi Mangione was announced yesterday by the NYPD. And then you Google the name, and you try to figure out, like, who was this person, and is this like, you try to look for their accounts more or less.

And in this case, it it wasn't like John Smith. Like, it was easy to find quickly. There were several Luigi Mangionis, but this sort of, like, biographical information seemed to match what was happening on these this person's account. And the most common thing that people do the most common time that this happens is in the result of, like, a a mass shooter where the name of a mass shooter is released, and then the people who cover these things essentially go, like, looking for their online footprint and their manifesto if there is one. Like, there's been several high profile examples where, you know, a mass shooter had, like, a YouTube channel where they had lots of hateful stuff or, in some cases, explained explicitly, like, why they did what they did.

We can talk about why that is a problem, in a minute. But, basically, it's like I, and I believe all of you to some extent, started looking for Luigi Mangione's, online accounts. And there were many, many, many accounts.

Yeah. It's almost it's almost like a reflex, unfortunately, at this point, which I don't really know what that says about us or journalism, and maybe it's not all bad, but it's like a it's like a impulse. Yeah.

Yeah. And the interesting thing in this case a couple interesting things. 1, we've written a lot of articles about, like, he was not a mass shooter. This was like a politic an act of political violence, and there is it has resonated with people in ways that we are probably gonna talk about in the second half of this show. And so, I think that people wanted to see, like, did this person's online politics align with an idealized version of him where he did this killing, allegedly, it was him, to, like, start a class war against a very repressive and anti human health insurance regime.

And I think that people pretty quickly realized that, at least on the surface, there was not a manifesto. There was not, like, a long history of talking about health problems on his social media accounts, things like that. Like, some of that has now since been reported. But I think often about the website heavy.com, which is like a website that I don't even know what it is other than they're very good at SEO ing to the top of any search result for a mass shooter. They do, like, you know, terrible mass shooter, 5 quick facts you need to know.

And it always goes like it's always the first thing that pops up. And I think that every well, many, many, many online media outlets are playing that game with this shooter, with mass shooters, with tragedy, with the big news story. And I think that reflex to do that is understandable because I'm very interested in sort of, like, who this person is and why they did what they did and that sort of thing. There's, like, a big vacuum of information, and then there's, like, one little detail, which is his name, and then you try to fill in all of the gaps of the of the information that you don't have. And sometimes that's very easy, but, like, usually, it's it's very hard because what people were finding was his, like, GitHub page where he had worked on some AI stuff back in 2016, 2017.

You know, we're talking 6 years ago. Like, a Facebook page that had stuff on it but was also very outdated, a WordPress, a Substack, a Twitter feed. And most of this stuff was quite dated.

By years. Yeah. Like, a couple years, several years, something like that.

Yeah. And a lot of it was, like, unrelated, I guess, because people's online presences don't neatly align with an act like this usually. And then there was also the Goodreads account. So I think pretty immediately people found the Goodreads account, which is people don't know, Goodreads is a website where people review books. And, Luigi Mangione has an account there, and there was, like, dozens and dozens and dozens of books that he read.

And so people were trying to, like, form this narrative of what information ecosystem was he surrounding himself with. Is he leftist? Is he a rightist? Is is he a class warrior? Like, people learn very quickly that he went to this fancy private school in Maryland and so on and so forth.

And all of this is, like, very understandable, but every morsel of information was turned into some sort of blog. And the worst of them that I have seen that everyone has been dunking on was an NBC News article that had the headline and lead sort of explaining that he had once played the game among us, which is, in my opinion, it's a game for children. It like, millions and millions and millions of people have played it. Adults play it, etcetera. But it's like

1 year, we played it for my birthday, actually.

Oh, yeah. We did.

So We did. You know? Yeah. I'm not I'm not I'm not mad at anything like a baby game.

But By by that by a game for children, I mean, like, if I had a kid and they were 5 years old, I would feel comfortable allowing them to play this game. It's not really, like, that violent of a game. It's a cartoon game that doesn't have any, like, blood or guts in it as far as I know, and it's a game about social skills, more or less. If you're not familiar, basically, it's like the parlor game mafia where each round or, like, each time you play, you're randomly assigned a role. You're either a crew member or an imposter, and if you're an imposter, you try to kill 1 of the crew members secretly, and then you talk over voice chat if you're on Zoom or you just, like I don't know if you talk in the game in some way, but, basically, you try to, like, trick people into thinking that you didn't do the murder, more or less.

And the NBC news article was like it was more or less like Luigi Mangione, like, role played as an assassin in this game at some point, and that's, like, not useful information.

Well and spoke to a friend who played with them. Right? Or somehow else associated and, like, called it extremely ironic that we were playing this game. They turned out to allegedly murder somebody. And it's just like, you get to this in the piece.

And it's and it's not just your social media posts from years ago are not representative of the very complex person you are. Also, the comments from somebody who you play an online game with years ago mean jack squat, basically. And, yeah, NBC News feels like it should be the headline and the lead.

Yeah. And then so the article then sort of gets into, like, we did this whole search and we talked about whether we were gonna write an article, and then we basically didn't write an article, but then

I wrote article to be clear. Yeah.

Yeah. And then I ended up writing this meta article about it because everyone was talking about this NBC News article and how it's, like, useless. It is a useless exercise. And I said this in the article, and then you and Emmanuel said really mean things to me. But it's like, I'm not gonna do a murder.

Like, I'm not gonna do, like, I'm not gonna do anything like this. I hope to never ever ever be in the news for anything like this. But anytime I do this process of googling for people, I start thinking about what my online profile looks like if someone were to do this to me. And if you Google me, and I have Googled me, it's like all this, like, random shit comes up that has that is either very old or from, like, really old, like, live journal I had as a teenager, you know, photos of things that where I've been places that don't actually mean anything to me. I was actually on Facebook the other day buying a couch on marketplace, and, a post came up from 10 years ago that I don't remember writing.

Like, there's just all this stuff that I don't really remember doing on the Internet because I've been on the Internet for 25 years, just posting and doing stuff. And if you wanna have a narrative about someone, you can kind of, like, pick out any little detail and say, like, oh, this is why he did it or, like, this is relevant or or so on and so forth. And so that's what I tried to write about.

Yeah. It makes sense. The only time you're gonna be able to get a good sort of picture of somebody is when, you know, a magazine comes in, does a real real deep dive. And we we've done those sometimes, early at least a motherboard and stuff. They require a lot of time, a lot of resources.

You're but you're simply not gonna get that in the breaking news situation to the point where you might publish something completely garbage. You know?

Yeah. I guess the last thing I'll say on that, and I I struggled to say it in the article, but, I thought that, Riley MacLeod at Aftermath did a very good job of this in a similar piece on Aftermath. It's like nothing that they that Luigi Mangione has posted online or told anyone or done is as relevant as the fact that they allegedly killed a CEO in, you know, broad daylight and had, you know, a message on the bullet casings. It's like that is a far stronger political statement. It's it's an extreme political statement that is far, like, more, illustrative than a comment they left on a substack or a tweet that they did 6 months ago.

And I think that that is, like, I don't know, worth pointing out.

For sure. Alright. We have a couple more stories. The first one here from Sam. Major health insurance companies take down leadership pages following murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO.

Obviously, we're stepping a little bit in a little bit back in time here. This is basically right at the start, of the of the manhunt. But, Sam, what did other health insurance companies do in the immediate wake, of that murder?

Yeah. So this was 5 days ago, which has been a really long 5 days.

It feels way longer than that.

Let's go back in time to 5 days ago. Yeah. It's been a long week, and it's Tuesday. Yeah. So this is something that I saw someone I think someone tweeted about or posted about on Blue Sky or something, but, someone had actually, I had been texting with my friend, about this back and forth during the day that day.

It was, like, 2 days after the shooting. But, he was like, did you see that UnitedHealthcare took down their leadership page? And I was like, yes. Because I was just looking at I was looking for that page for a different story, and it was down. And I was like, well, that's weird.

And then he texted me that, and then I looked on Twitter, and someone had been posting about, lots of different, insurance companies health insurance companies taking down their leadership and board of director pages or, like, redirecting them to the home page and things like that. So, yeah, I was like, oh, shit. Like, let me look at, like, every major health insurance company and see if I can find if any of them have taken down their pages also. And most of them that I looked up that day had,

I

think What

were some of the first ones? And, of course, this won't mean all that much to non US listeners. You'll you'll still appreciate the the lost media archiving aspect of it, but maybe the names of companies won't mean much to them, but sort of US listeners. What were the sort of those first companies you found?

Yeah. I feel bad for anyone, like, trying to learn about this news cycle, from outside the US, and they feel bad for us for living in this hellhole. But

I feel that's, that's something that people like to say, though. It's like I mean, I they're very depressed for us, but I think it's like, that's crazy that y'all shitty. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy.

Like, sucks.

Sucks. Sucks to suck.

Sorry. So sorry for you and or

Yeah. What's going on over there? Yeah. So, obviously, UnitedHealthcare was down. They were redirecting to the home page, and this is this is all on Friday.

So, again, it's, like, a couple days after. Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield was down or it was redirecting to its about us page, which didn't have anything in it, as far as, like, leadership. The CareSource leadership pages, which were, like, multiple individual pages of every like like, the CFO, the executive vice president, the CEO, the COO. Like, everyone's page was gone. It was returning, like, a URL not found.

Medica, which I had not heard of before this, their executive leadership page returned to its home page, and then its foundation leadership actually also was down and said, oops. Oops. That page does not exist. Elevent's Health was down and said, sorry. That page is no longer here.

And then on Monday, I checked again because a couple more had not taken theirs down yet, and I was like, oh, let me see who else. Kaiser Permanente's page had gone down as of, like, late Friday. Aetna's page said error 4 4. Many people have pointed out the irony of writing about 4 4 errors on 44 Media. It's fun.

Yeah. Humana's board of director page now says you're not authorized to access this page. So it was 9 in total that I checked, and then only one, actually I hit all of them up, obviously, to see if they had comment, but, only one, which is Aetna, which is owned by CVS Health. That was the only one that actually replied to me, and they replied today or yesterday. And they said, it was, like, out of respect they said, out of respect for the Thompson family, we are declining a comment, which in itself is like, yeah.

We're acknowledging that this is about the shooting, which obviously

Obviously what you mean. Right. Right.

Like, I didn't I asked. I said, was this related to the shooting of Brian Thompson? And then they said, out of respect to the family, we're not commenting on that, which, you know, it's not just like, oh, our page is broken, coincidentally.

Right. Sometimes as journalists, we know the answer. The reader knows the answer, but we have to ask these questions because that's our job, and we have to give them a fair chance to respond. As you say, most of them didn't get back to you, but one did. And then they gave that sort of explanation.

I guess just the the last thing is that, you know, a lot of people obviously pointed out the way back machine. And, yes, you know, I'm sure the health insurance companies are aware that you can't remove stuff from the Internet, like that. I'm just I we have to speculate a little bit, but, like, what do you make of that? And do you think that they are also aware of that? Or, I mean, they must be.

Right?

I mean, I think probably like, this is me entirely speculating just as a disclaimer. This is me as an individual person, not not trying to assume things about these companies and their actions. But having seen this happen and having worked at places where consulting firms are brought in to fix a mess on the fly, I am gonna assume that some, like, safety consulting team, either internally or, like, because they all did consulting team, either internally or, like, because they all did it at the same time, I'm assuming, like, they all have the same kinda, like, crisis, comms or crisis safety kind of, protocols that are being passed around. I assume someone paid about a lot of money to tell these companies, hey. You should take down these pages as, like, just something to do.

You know? It's like it doesn't actually do anything. It might make these very, like I don't know, I assume panicked and other people have reported, not happy CEOs and leadership teams feel better. So it's kind of like a Band Aid. It's obviously not anything that's, like, real security or real OPSEC, on any kind of meaningful level, but it's just weird to me to do it at all.

It's I I assume they didn't think anyone would notice, which Right. As we just went over, we're digging around for everything all the time on the Internet these days, so, of course, people noticed. And then it became its own story. You know?

Right. I I guess just last thing I would say is that, like, purely from, like, a cold security perspective, I don't know. You still gotta deal with the low hanging fruit, you know, even though it's like, oh, then someone could get around it, look at Wayback Machine or, you you know, someone motivated enough, obviously, to go cause physical harm is not gonna be deterred by a website, 404ing. Right? But I know from a cold analytical security perspective, you still deal with the low hanging fruit.

So, again, we have to speculate why, but that kind of all makes sense. And it'll be interesting when do they put them back up, or is there a bigger cultural shift around, I mean, to put it bluntly, hatred towards CEOs and leaderships of companies like this, which will bring us to the delegates.

You can't, like, hide this stuff. Like, as in Right. They they're allowed to not have it on their website, but it's like the the disclosure rules around corporate information make it, so I don't know. It's it's kinda interesting. This is a little bit far So I don't know.

It's it's kinda interesting. This is a little bit far. I feel like promise, like, a bit short, but, like, the controversy over the private jet tracking stuff where, like, Elon Musk won't doesn't want his jet tracked, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want his jet tracked, like, the people tracking them have been banned from threads and have been banned from Twitter. It's like immediately after Mark Zuckerberg banned, the tracking of his private jet, on threads, he his private jet was seen at Mar a Lago meeting with, you know, President Trump. It's like there there is a reason that this stuff can be tracked.

And I understand that there is that these companies are worried about protecting their executives, but at the same time, it's like they have these very public roles. And so, I don't know, I think maybe there will be a push by these companies to to either beef up security or keep these things a little bit more private, but they can't really do it that that much.

Yeah. I didn't think of the link to the plane tracking. That makes, complete sense. Alright. Let's take another quick break, and then we'll talk about one more UnitedHealthcare, story before the subscribers only section as well.

We'll be right back after this. Alright. And we are back with one more from Sam. Moderators across social media struggle to contain celebrations of UnitedHealthcare CEO's assassination. Again, we're back in time, sort of around the the time of the other piece that we just covered these cases very quick.

For thank you. Okay. So I'm sure people have seen these. Maybe they've participated in them. It's such a wide sentiment across all social media.

Just what what are some of these posts? I almost feel stupid asking questions. It's so obvious, but we have to lay the groundwork. What are some of these posts, and what is the sentiment that people were exhibiting around this time 4 days ago as you said?

Yeah. So, like, immediately after the shooting, before we even knew, like, who did it or we we were still kind of unclear on any kind of hint of a motivation, people were like I mean, the the reaction generally online was good. You know? It was, like, celebratory that the CEO of, health insurance company was shot. So, yeah, it's this story has a lot of, like, elements to it, and I think that's a result of, like, trying to get the story early and be like, what's hap let's let's just get out there what's happening without doing, like, a everything we know kind of post.

But, you know, redressing just like that this is something that is happening across social media. So, yeah, the posts were generally like, people were people were, like, celebrating. People were saying, you know, I telling their own, like, horror stories about health insurance and dealing with that. One really striking example of this was the nursing subreddit. They are wild in there.

I think Jason was the one that pointed out that, that that was the the mood in there. The memes are memeing in our nursing. And then by contrast, you have lots of other big, front page subreddits, trying or, you know, subreddits that were having posts that were reaching their front page, trying to keep people from breaking the subs rules, which usually like, Reddit's wider terms of use say, no celebrating or glorifying violence, something to that effect. So moderators have to basically moderate to those rules at a minimum to keep their subs going and to keep them from getting completely banned by Reddit administration. So, I mean, it's I understand, like, the mods being, like, let's chill on the celebrations because you're literally breaking the rules when you're doing this.

But, also, a lot of the threads that we saw getting deleted, which are all visible on a separate call, are undelete, were stuff like I mean, I can give some examples. I don't know how far ahead of the story I'm getting here, but, yeah. Give a couple give

a couple.

Some of the big thoughts were, you know, it was just kind of like, can you explain why, why this is a big deal? And that was deleted, and I think that's, like, a reasonable question to ask for, again, like we just said, for people outside of the US who haven't had to deal with

It was like a sincere question, as opposed

to Yeah. I mean, like, who knows, really? But, like, people were replying to it sincerely. And then there was, like, interesting as fuck, which we've written about before, had a thread that was, like, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's final kill death ratio lands him amongst the all time greats.

Which, for those who don't know, is a reference, obviously, to the game Call of Duty where you have a kill death ratio and you kill more players and you get killed. And there's a CEO of a health insurance company, which will reject a lot of claims. Presumably, he would have had a pretty good one. This

Yeah. So that one was deleted, obviously, because their reason was no politics.

I

don't know. It's like I do I feel I feel for the mods. They're trying to to align that is they're unpaid volunteers, first of all. They're trying to to align that's like, we want people to talk freely in the subreddit, but we also don't wanna break Reddit's rules. There was, like, in our facepalm, which is another great subreddit, imagine this is your payback for your own policies.

That is kind of a facepalm. I don't know. Mhmm. Leopards ate my face is a subreddit about, like, the meme that's, you know, the the leopards eating faces party. I didn't think they would eat my face meme, and they took a thread down that was basically, like, saying they won't hurt all the billionaires.

And the reasoning for that was it doesn't it doesn't abide by the the structure of the meme or something. I don't know. So, yeah, maybe Jason wants to talk a little bit about the Maz answers because we've hit all of them up. And we said, you know, hey. What's going on here?

And he got some really interesting answers, I think.

Yeah. So, Sam mentioned this, but the undelete subreddit is very interesting because the way that it works is it archives threads that have been deleted from Reddit if they have reached the top I believe it's top 50 or top 100 of r slash all. So it only archives posts that are incredibly popular. And for, like, the 2 days after the shooting, all of the posts, almost all of them it was, like sorry. Not all of them, but, like, 75% of the posts were about this.

And so that just shows that the overwhelmingly overwhelming sentiment on Reddit was, if not valorizing this guy, then expressing frustration and empathy for what he did. So there's that. And then a lot of the mods were basically, like, some of these posts we are taking down because they violate Reddit's rules. Some of these posts are being taken down by Reddit administrators because they are seeing it and taking it down. And, unfortunately, there's no real way for the public to know which is which.

It's like it's just not clear. A lot of them were just like, we don't wanna get banned by Reddit. Like, we we basically don't we're in a tough spot, and we don't know what to do. I guess my my broader thoughts on this, because Sam did the heavy lifting here, but I I did talk to some of the mods, and I did, like you know, I was kind of I contributed reporting on this story, so I was looking alongside of it. And I understand that this is tricky and that many people are saying, like, you can't valorize a murderer, and that's bad, etcetera, etcetera.

But, comma, but, like, there's there's a big but here, and that that's, like, been the tone of a lot of the conversation online for the last week is that people are fed up with the American health care system, especially insurance company profiteering, etcetera, etcetera. And these are very, very real problems. And we just went through an entire election cycle where Democrats, the left, Liberals, etcetera, said, we need to listen to Donald Trump voters because they are mad, and here's what they're mad about. And we just had years years of discussion about free speech online and censorship and censorship of political speech, blah blah blah. And here's political speech, like, very blatant political speech.

It's getting deleted, like, systematically by companies, publicly traded companies. Reddit is a publicly traded profiteering company. And it's like, they don't wanna have the conversation, and they don't wanna listen to the people who are mad about it. And, I don't know. It's like a it's a tricky thing.

I understand. It's like, it's not something that we wanna, like, face as a society, but I I don't know. I I have a really hard time squaring, we must listen to Trump voters who are mad about trans people in bathrooms, and we're mad about and illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, etcetera, etcetera. And then turn around and say, we can't have a conversation about health insurance in this country that kills millions and millions of people constantly. And it's like a lot of our behind the blogs are about this last week where we've had experiences with the health care system.

A lot of people have had it. And I just think that I don't know. I think that this is, like, a very interesting time, obviously. Like, obviously, it's a very interesting thing. And I think that there are 2 other things that were very eye opening to me, which is Ben Shapiro and the other dipshit on his, like, right

page I think.

Matt Walsh. Both, like, tried to say that these are, like, leftist plots celebrating whatever, and they're getting shred to bits in their comments by people who say, I'm a conservative. This is not a conservative versus liberal issue. This is like a class and economic and, like, health issue for for everyone. And so I do think it's very important.

I think that it I understand that Reddit has rules and these moderators are in a tough place, and you don't wanna condone violence necessarily or, like, promote violence, but at the same time, it's like this conversation is a very important one. And I find it very disheartening to see that a lot of it's just getting deleted. But I don't know. I think that that that's also had the the Streisand effect where it's just leading people to talk about it more. So so who knows?

On that, Sam, is it the same now? Like, is stuff still being deleted? Has the conversation moved from people talking about healthcare now to talking more about the suspects? Or I know that's kinda hard to answer because you don't have you don't have a all seeing eye of social media, but, like, has it moved on? Or yeah.

Thank god. Yeah. I mean, I haven't I haven't, like, checked in on Reddit in particular. And if they're still deleting threads, I think probably people, had, like, that immediate reaction and then moved on. I something that I do think is interesting is people who, I don't know how to word this.

Like, people who don't wanna have the conversation about health care in this country and who who think that they have great health care or that they've never encountered this problem before in their lives. They don't understand where this kind of, like, outrage and this vitriol is coming from. They're doing a lot of, like, hand wringing. They wanna talk about people's reactions to a murder and not the the reason for the reaction. You know?

It's like they they wanna talk about how people are glorifying violence and rooting for shootings in the streets, which is not the conversation that I've seen for the most part. Most part, people wanna talk about how health care is fucked and how they have had almost everyone has had this experience. And we we now know that the person of interest, you know, who's in this story, who we've been talking about this whole time, comes from a wealthy family, and still possibly struggled against the system that's very broken in this country. And maybe wasn't this kind of, like, violent vigilante leftist that a lot of these podcasters and, as Jason said, dipshads want to paint this kind of, like, character as, he's like a he was probably a tech bro. Like, he was into, like, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

And we don't obviously, we don't know all this for sure at this point. This is all kind of with that caveat, but it's not so cut and dry left and right. But instead of addressing that and instead of saying, oh, this is an issue that a lot of people care about and a lot of people are mad about, people with an interest in keeping things very black and white, left and right, like Matt Walsh and his friends, are focusing on that aspect of it and saying, oh, well, people are just, like, bloodthirsty, and they they wanna see violence in the streets against innocent people, which, you know, is not not what we've seen.

Yeah. So I

just hope the conversation can remain on the issue, which is health care. You know? But okay. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I will now play us out. But if you are a paying for a full media subscriber, we're gonna talk about how our reporting on deep fake apps has made Congress, you know, push Apple and Google to basically sort their shit out.

You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.c0. We'll be right back after this. Alright. And we are back in the subscribers only section. So this is what we call, like, an impact tracking article.

You know, maybe I'll get into why we why we do that. But, Emmanuel's not here. But I think you 2 can talk about it. The article is called, congress pushes Apple to remove deep fake apps after 4 zero four media investigation. The original piece is from April.

So, you know, a while ago at this point. And that one was about Apple removing nonconsensual AI nude apps following for a full media investigation. It's like a impact following an impact. Can does anybody remember who

It's an impact human centipede.

Gross. But okay.

Okay. So Emmanuel has been writing a lot of stories about what he calls dual use apps. If for people who are not familiar with the term dual use, it is something used in, like, arms export, like, arms embargo

software issue.

And surveillance software and things like that. It's something that comes up all the time, with regard to China in particular where it's like, we're selling dual use technology to Chinese companies, things like that. And what that means is it's a piece of technology that can be used for one thing that is good and another thing that is bad. That's like a simplified version of it. An example of this is, like, a specific computer chip that can be used for, like, AI processing but can also be used, like, on an ICBM missile or something like that.

And there are this is, like, a really difficult thing to legislate around because you want American companies to be able to sell products to, you know, other companies and and governments and things like that, but you wanna control how they are being used by those clients. That's like a gross oversimplification. And Emmanuel started I don't know if Emmanuel coined this or not, but I'm gonna give it to him since he's been covering it, I think, more than anyone else. The idea of these dual use apps on the App Store where their advertising on the App Store marketplace is like face swap with your friends. And it's like a face swap app, and they say, okay, like, make these silly photos for social media.

But then the ways that they're actually being used is for nonconsensual pornography. And not only are they being used for nonconsensual pornography where they're being used to, you know, face swap someone's face onto a nude body, which is a problem we've discussed a lot. But in many cases, they're being advertised for the these uses, like, on social media or on porn sites. Sam does that gram specifically. Yeah.

Does that sound right, Sam? Like, that that's basically the the explanation. And so Emmanuel has been writing a lot about all these different sorts of apps. He's he's sort of talked to some of the some researchers who have studied the proliferation of these apps, the fact that they're being advertised for one use in one setting on one site and then something totally different on another site. And Apple, in particular, on the App Store has all these, like, anti porn rules, anti adult content rules.

But they're getting through Apple's moderation process by not advertising any of that in the app itself or in, like the, you know, information page on the App Store, but then they are advertising it on third party platforms. And so Emanuel's talked to Apple, like, many, many, many times about this and tried to get them on the record and to discuss, like, how do you review these apps? Like, what is your policy here? Because you're not doing a very good job of tracking them and taking them down and stuff like that. So the initial story back in April was about a handful of apps that Emmanuel had identified and a researcher had identified, that were being advertised in this way.

And Apple did eventually take these apps down. There's still several, probably many, on the App Store. So that was a good bit of impact. The the apps these apps in particular were being advertised on meta platforms on Facebook and Instagram as being deep nude apps, like nonconventional pornography apps. And that was a good bit of impact.

But then the the most recent thing, as you mentioned, is that Congress is now investigating this. And so while Apple has not really talked to us other than saying, hey. We're taking these apps down, they haven't given us sort of the, like, here's the nitty gritty of how we do this research. Let's see. It's 26 Republican and Democratic house representatives sent a letter to Tim Cook saying, like, we would like to know how you try to solve this problem, more or less.

And they sent really similar, letters to Google and a couple other tech companies as well, and it cites Emmanuel's reporting. So that's, like, more or less what what is happening here. And maybe, Joseph, you can talk more about, like, what happens when these companies get a letter because you covered a lot of letters like this, and and usually you do get answers at some point.

Yeah. So people who have read my work for a while have probably identified a pattern, which is that we cover something, we expose something, we investigate something. A senator or a congresswoman or whoever gets angry, writes a letter, and then, you know, that's exactly what's happening here. What sometimes happens, as you sort of allude to, is that while Apple or the company or whoever, they may not give us the answers, but they may potentially give those answers in response to a letter from a a lawmaker. So what might happen here is that although Apple wouldn't talk to Emmanuel, this pretty large group of bipartisan lawmakers, like, just under 2 dozen, that's kinda crazy.

They'll write the letter. Hopefully, presumably, Apple, Google, I think it would have said Microsoft, will respond. And that would include information in those responses. And then, hey, if any of the law makers are listening to this, I doubt it. If anyone from their office is listening to it, usually, they'd be great.

You then provide that letter to the journalists that generated that impact. And then you report on that because that's new information that everybody's trying to get. Right? And that's a very familiar dynamic. I've done that a ton of different times.

And I don't know. It's just an interesting relationship where we're still fiercely independent, but there is an understanding that sometimes companies are just gonna give the details when they get a scary letter from a law mate. It's not even a scary letter, just an inquisitive letter, you know. And so I guess we'll see

An inquisitive scary letter.

Yeah. And I guess the reason, at least for me, why we cover this, I said earlier, there's sort of an impact tracking one. There's a couple of reasons for that. When we're at Muffleboard, I used to keep a spreadsheet of all the impact I generated. Because I mean, to be honest, I was trying to hold on to my job.

Like, that was a, you know, a sinking ship towards the end. It's also good for me because it's just like my primary metric of knowing, oh, okay. My journalism is doing something. So that was always satisfying. We're so busy now that I don't even keep that spreadsheet, and I and I should make another one.

What is good is that if we write an article about our impact, I can just go to the impact section of the website. I can see all of our impact and sort of doing it for me. But there is another, I think, more important thing, which is that it signals to various groups of people that what we're doing actually matters and it is actually making a difference. And I feel like journalists don't do this enough. Like, I see some journalists from very big outlets, Washington Post or wherever.

They'll just tweet about their impact rather than, like, do coverage of it. And, like, there's a story often there, not all the time, but often that, hey, they're doing this in response to the journalism. And that signals to especially for us, the subscribers we're talking to right now that, hey. You are paying to fund this journalism, which is making a difference. And you can know that your money is not actually going to waste.

You know? It is actually doing something. And I and then related to that, I think it also signals to sources or potential sources that, oh, these people actually care about getting stuff done. And, apparently, they do get stuff done, as well. Jason, do you agree with that for why we sort of do them?

Again, we haven't done that many. I feel like we've actually forgotten to write some again because we're so busy, but I don't know who this is.

To to to be totally honest, it's like there's so much going on that I feel like if we don't stop to to sort of do these articles in 6 months, we'll be like, oh, what what, like, what important stories did we do? What sort of impact did we do? And it will be lost to this end of time. And I think that as a small publication, as, you know, journalists, it's important to keep track of when our work matters, in this specific way. And so as you said, it's like a way of tracking that, and I think it's pretty useful to us just because we're then able to say to our readers, like, look.

The stuff that we did, like, led to tangible impact in the world, tangible change in the world. There's been cases where we've, like, applied for awards and and things like that, and it's good to just, like, know, hey. This happened. And then, as you said, often writing this type of story leads to lawmakers releasing the information that they then receive, which itself is what we are seeking in the first place. And so it's just a way to sort of, like, stay on a story, you know, in an important way and sort of track it to its logical conclusion.

It's like, you have the news story, you have the investigation, you have the big feature, then you have sort of the, like, here's what happened as a result of that, and here's, like, what happened in the end. So, I don't know. We don't do these types of stories that often, but I think it's important when we do.

Sure. Alright. This was a long episode. So I will well, we will leave that there, and I will play us out if I can find the right button in our podcast software. Here we go.

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