Last month, age verification laws went into effect in Wyoming and South Dakota, requiring sites hosting “material that is harmful to minors” to verify visitors are over 18 years old. These would normally just be two more states joining the nearly 30 that have so far ceded ground to a years-long campaign for enforcing invasive, ineffective methods of keeping kids away from porn online. 

But these two states’ laws leave out an important condition: Unlike the laws passed in other states, they don’t state that this applies only to sites with “33.3 percent” or one-third “harmful” material. That could mean Wyoming and South Dakota would require a huge number of sites to use age verification because they host any material they deem harmful to minors, not just porn sites.

Louisiana became the first state to pass an age verification law in the US in January 2023, and since then, most states have either copied or modeled their laws on Louisiana’s—including in Arizona, Missouri, and Ohio, where these laws will be enacted within the coming weeks. And most have included the “one-third” clause, which would theoretically limit the age verification burden to adult sites. But dropping that provision, as Wyoming and South Dakota have done, opens a huge swath of sites to the burden of verifying the ages of visitors in those states.

Louisiana’s law states: 

“Any commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall be held liable if the entity fails to perform reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material.” 

A “substantial portion” is 33.3 percent or more material on a site that’s “harmful to minors,” the law says.

The same organizations that have lobbied for age verification laws that apply to porn sites have also spent years targeting social media platforms like Reddit and X, as well as streaming services like Netflix, for hosting adult content they deem “sexploitation.” While these sites and platforms do host adult content, age-gating the entire internet only pushes adult consumers and children alike into less-regulated, more exploitative spaces and situations, while everyone just uses VPNs to get around gates.

Florida Sues Huge Porn Sites Including XVideos and Bang Bros Over Age Verification Law

The lawsuit alleges XVideos, Bang Bros, XNXX, Girls Gone Wild and TrafficFactory are in violation of Florida’s law that requires adult platforms to verify visitors are over 18.

404 MediaSamantha Cole

Adult industry advocacy group the Free Speech Coalition issued an alert about Wyoming and South Dakota’s dropping of the one-third or “substantial” requirement on Tuesday, writing that this could “create civil and criminal liability for social media platforms such as X, Reddit and Discord, retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble, streaming platforms such as Netflix and Rumble,” and any other platform that simply allowed material these states consider “harmful to minors” but doesn’t age-verify. “Under these new laws, a platform with any amount of material ‘harmful to minors,’ is required to verify the age of all visitors using the site. Operators of platforms that fail to do so may be subject to civil suits or even arrest,” they wrote.

I asked Wyoming Representative Martha Lawley, the lead sponsor of the state's bill, if the omission was on purpose and why. "I did not include the '33% or 1/3 rule' in my Age Verification Bill because it creates an almost impossible burden on a victim pursuing a lawsuit for violations of the law. It is more difficult than many might understand to prove percentage of an internet site that qualifies as “pornographic or material harmful to minor'" Lawley wrote in an email. "This was a provision that the porn industry lobbied heavily to be included. In Wyoming, we resisted those efforts. The second issue I had with these types of provisions is that they created some potential U.S. Constitutional concerns. These Constitutional concerns were actually brought up by several U.S. Supreme Court justices during the oral argument in the Texas Age Verification case. So, in short the 1/3 limitation places an undue burden on victims and creates potential U.S. Constitutional concerns."

I asked South Dakota Representative and sponsor of that state's bill Bethany Soye the same question. "We intentionally used the standard of 'regular course of trade or business' instead of 1/3. The 1/3 standard leaves many questions open. How is the amount measured? Is it number of images, minutes of video, number of separate webpages, pixels, etc. During oral argument, a Justice (Alito if I remember correctly) asked the attorney what percentage of porn was on his client’s websites. The attorney couldn’t give him an answer, instead he mentioned the other things on the websites like articles on sexual health and how to be an activist against these laws," Soye told me in an email. "The 1/3 standard also calls into question the government’s compelling interest in protecting kids from porn. Are we saying that 33% is harmful to minors but a website with 30% is not? We chose regular course of business because it is focused on the purpose of the business/website, not an arbitrary number. If you look into the history of the bill, 33% was a totally random number put in the first bill passed in Louisiana. Other states have just been copying it since then. We hope that our standard becomes the norm for state laws moving forward."

Kansas Is About to Pass the Most Extreme Age Verification Law Yet

The bill would make sites with more than 25 percent adult content liable to fines, and lumps homosexuality into “sexual conduct.”

404 MediaSamantha Cole

A version of what could be the future of the internet in the US is already playing out in the UK. Last month, the UK enacted the Online Safety Act, which forces platforms to verify the ages of everyone who tries to access certain kinds of content deemed harmful to children. So far, this has included (but isn’t limited to) Discord, popular communities on Reddit, social media sites like Bluesky, and certain content on Spotify. 

On Monday, a judge dismissed a case brought by the Wikimedia Foundation that argued the over-broadness of the new UK rules would “undermine the privacy and safety of Wikipedia’s volunteer contributors, expose the encyclopedia to manipulation and vandalism, and divert essential resources from protecting people and improving Wikipedia, one of the world’s most trusted and widely used digital public goods,” Wikimedia Foundation wrote. “For example, the Foundation would be required to verify the identity of many Wikipedia contributors, undermining the privacy that is central to keeping Wikipedia volunteers safe.” 

"As we're seeing in the UK with the Online Safety Act, laws designed to protect the children from ‘harmful material’ online quickly metastasize and begin capturing nearly all users and all sites in surveillance and censorship schemes,” Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, told me in an email following the alert. “These laws give the government legal power to threaten platform owners into censoring or removing fairly innocuous content — healthcare information, mainstream films, memes, political speech — while decimating privacy protections for adults. Porn was only ever a Trojan horse for advancing these laws. Now, unfortunately, we're starting to see what we warned was inside all along."

Updated 8/13 2:35 p.m. EST with comment from Rep. Lawley.

Updated 8/13 3:35 p.m. EST with comment from Rep. Soye.

​We've survived and thrived for two years and are ready to celebrate with you, the ones who made it possible!

Come have a cocktail or locally-brewed beer on us at vertical farm and brew lab farm.one. We'll also record a live podcast with the whole 404 crew, for the first time in person together since... well, two years ago!

Doors open at 6, programming begins at 6:45, good hangs to continue after. Open bar (tip your bartenders), and pizza will be available for purchase on-site if you're hungry.

​​Free admission for 404 Media subscribers at the supporter level. Sign up or check your subscription here. Once you're a supporter, scroll to the bottom of this post for the code to enter at checkout on the Luma page. Or buy tix for yourself or a friend to make sure you have a spot on the list.

​We'll also have some merch on hand that'll be discounted for IRL purchases.

If getting into the coolest party of the summer isn't enticing enough, you'll be supporting the impact of our journalism, which so far this year has included:

• Nvidia was sued after we revealed the company scraped YouTube and other sites en masse to build its own AI systems.
• GeoSpy, an AI tool that let anyone geolocate photos in seconds and whose users could include stalkers, dramatically restricted access after 404 Media published an investigation into it.
• Congress repeatedly grilled Apple and Meta over their association with nonconsensual nudify and deepfake apps after we exposed the connections. 
• A public library ebook service said it was going to cull AI slop after we found low quality books were flooding libraries.
• Congress just launched an investigation into automatic license plate reader company Flock; After 404 Media’s investigations this year, Flock removed a number of states from its national lookup tool. In July, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon announced an agreement by Flock to block any out-of-state police searches related to abortion or immigration.

Our earlier work has shut down surveillance companies and triggered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines too. Our paying subscribers are the engine that powers this impactful journalism. Every subscription, monthly or annual, makes a real difference and makes it possible to do our work. 

Fine print: Tickets are required for entry, including for subscribers. 21+ only. Seating for the podcast is open but limited and includes standing room; a ticket doesn't guarantee a seat but let staff onsite know if you require one. Photos will be taken at the event. Venue reserves the right to refuse entry. Good vibes only, see you soon!

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This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Wikipedia's ethos and zooming in on a lot of pictures of cops' glasses.

EMANUEL: I’m going to keep it very short this week because I’m crunching on a feature, but I wanted to quickly discuss Wikipedia. 

This week I wrote a story about a pretty in-the-weeds policy change Wikipedia’s community of volunteer editors adopted which will allow them to more quickly and easily delete articles that are obviously AI generated. One thought I’ve had in mind that didn’t make it into the last few stories I’ve written about Wikipedia, and one that several people shared on social media in response to this one, is that it’s funny how many of us remember teachers in school telling us that Wikipedia was not a good source of information. 

Congress’ website for the U.S. Constitution was changed to delete the last two sections of Article I, which include provisions such as habeas corpus, forbidding the naming of titles of nobility, and forbidding foreign emoluments for U.S. officials.

The last full version of the webpage, archived by the Internet Archive on July 17, still included the now-deleted sections. Parts of Section 8 of Article I, as well as all of Sections 9 and 10 of Article I are now gone from the live site. The deletions, as of August 6, are also archived here. The change was spotted by users on Lemmy, an open-source aggregation platform and forum. 

This webpage, maintained by the U.S. government, hasn’t changed significantly in the entire time it’s been saved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine—since 2019. The page for the Constitution on the National Archives website remains unchanged, and shows the entire document.   

"Due to a technical error, some sections of Article 1 were temporarily missing on the Constitution Annotated website," a spokesperson for the Library of Congress told 404 Media in an email on Wednesday afternoon. "This problem has been corrected, and the missing sections have been restored."

Sitting in my office in NYC, I sent a CNC machine in a guy’s workshop in Wisconsin a 40 by 25 pixel drawing and watched it flip hand painted wooden blocks across a grid, one by one, until the glorious smiling 404 Media logo appeared—then watched it slowly erase, like a giant Etch A Sketch, moving on to the next drawing. 

Designer Ben Holmen created the Kilopixel, a giant grid made of 1,000 wooden blocks that a robot arm slowly turns to form user-submitted designs. “Compared to our modern displays with millions of pixels changing 60 times a second, a wooden display that changes a single pixel 10 times a minute is an incredibly inefficient way to create an image,” Holmen wrote on his blog detailing the project.

Choosing what to make the pixels from was its own hurdle: Holmen wrote that he tried ping pong balls, Styrofoam balls, bouncy balls, wooden balls, 3D printed balls, golf balls, foam balls, “anything approximately spherical and about 1-1.5in in diameter.” Some of these were too expensive; others didn’t hold up well to paint or drilling. Holmen settled on painted wooden blocks, each serving as one 40mm pixel. To be sure each block was exactly the right size, he built 25 shelves and drilled 40 holes into each, threading the blocks onto the shelves using metal wires. “This was painstaking and time consuming - I broke it down into multiple sessions over several weeks,” he wrote. “But it did create a very predictable grid of pixels and guaranteed that each pixel moved completely independently of the surrounding pixels.

From there, he used a CNC machine, which moves on the X, Y, and Z axes: across the grid, up and down, and the flipping finger that pokes inward to turn the pixel-blocks. Holmen wrote that he connected a Raspberry Pi to the CNC controller, which queries an API to get the next pixel in the design, activates the “pixel poker,” and reads a light sensor to determine whether the pixel face is painted black or raw wood.  

Two webcams stream the Kilopixel to Youtube, with a view of the whole grid and a view of the poker turning the blocks one by one. “The camera, USB hub, and light are hung from the ceilingwith a respectful amount of jank for the streaming phase of this project,” Holmen wrote. Anyone with a Bluesky account can connect their account and submit a pixel drawing for the machine to create, and people can upvote submissions they want to see next. Once it’s finished, the system uploads a timelapse of the painting to the site and posts it to Bluesky, tagging the submitter.

This entire process took him six years. I asked Holmen in an email what it cost him: “Probably around $1000 and hundreds of hours of my time,” he told me.

And the project isn’t over: It still requires some babysitting. Sometime early Tuesday morning, the rig got misaligned while working on an elaborate pixellated American Gothic, with the flipper-finger grasping at the air between blocks instead of turning them. Holmen had to manually reset it in the morning, entering the feed to tinker with the grid. 

He said he plans to run it 24/7, but that it might not go flawlessly at first. “I've had to restart the controller script twice in 10 hours, and restart the YouTube stream once,” he said on Monday, before the overnight error. “I am planning to run it for a few days or weeks depending on interest, then I'll move on to a different control concept. I don't want to babysit a finicky device all the time.”

When I checked Kilopixel’s submissions on Monday, someone had drawn the Hacker News logo—a sure sign that a hug of death was coming. I asked Holmen if he’s had issues with overload. “Just one—I undersized my web server for the attention it got,” he told me on Monday evening. “It's been #1 on Hacker News for about 10 hours, which is a lot of traffic. kilopx.com has received about 13,000 unique visitors today, which I'm very pleased with. The article has received about 70,000 unique visitors so far.”

The Kilopixel experiment might also be setting a time-to-penis record: In the six hours it’s been online as of writing this, I haven’t seen anyone try to make the robot draw a dick, yet. Holmen mentioned “defensive features” built into the web app in his blog for mitigating abuse, but so far people have behaved themselves. “I expect the best and worst out of people on the internet. I built an easy way for admins to delete gross or low effort submissions and enlisted a couple of trusted friends to keep an eye on the queue with me,” Holmen told me. “I'm certain there are ways to work around things, or submit enough to make cleanup a chore, but I decided to not lock things down prematurely and just respond as things evolve.” 

The state of Florida is suing some of the biggest porn platforms on the internet, accusing them of not complying with the state’s law that requires adult sites to verify that visitors are over the age of 18.

The lawsuit, brought by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, is against the companies that own popular porn platforms including XVideos, XNXX, Bang Bros and Girls Gone Wild, and the adult advertising network TrafficFactory.com. Several of these platforms are owned by companies that are based outside of the U.S.

Collective Shout, an organization “for anyone concerned about the increasing pornification of culture,” based its claim that Steam and Itch.io host “hundreds of rape and incest games” on user-generated tags, and the organizations that co-signed Collective Shout's open letter to payment processors did not respond to 404 Media’s questions about whether they tried to verify its accusations against the game platforms before signing on their support.

Collective Shout's July 11 letter urged Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, Japan Credit Bureau, Paysafe, and Discover to "cease processing payments on gaming platforms which host rape, incest and child sexual abuse-themed games."

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss messy Tea and our first livestreamed event.

SAM: We had an awesome time hanging out with a couple hundred of our Angeleno friends at Rip.Space on Wednesday! The full live podcast is here (start around 1:45) and it’ll be in your feeds soon, too. The first portion of the livestream is partially us testing that it worked, but then an impromptu panel happened with the Rip.Space folks that’s extremely worth a watch.

Spotify is requiring users in the UK to verify they’re over 18 to view "certain age restricted content," and users are reporting seeing a popup on Spotify to verify their ages following the enactment of the UK's Online Safety Act last week, which forced platforms to verify the ages of everyone who tries to access certain kinds of content deemed harmful to children.

“You may be presented with an age check when you try to access certain age restricted content, like music videos tagged 18+,” Spotify says on an informational page about the checks. If you fail the checks, or if the age verification system can’t accurately determine your age—which involves getting your face scanned through your device’s camera to determine your age, or uploading your license or passport if that doesn’t work—your Spotify account will be deleted.

This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.

A former content moderator for Chaturbate is suing the live-streaming porn platform for psychological trauma he claims he suffered after being exposed to “extreme, violent, graphic, and sexually explicit content” every day without industry-standard safeguards, according to a new lawsuit.

Neal Barber, who was hired by Bayside Support Services and Multi Media LLC—the parent company of Chaturbate—in 2020, filed a lawsuit on July 22 claiming that those companies “knowingly and intentionally failed to provide their content moderators with industry-standard mental health protections, such as content filters, wellness breaks, trauma-informed counseling, or peer support systems.” The lawsuit is a proposed class action for moderators hired in the last four years to moderate Chaturbate streams. 

“The company has not been served nor has it reviewed the complaint and therefore cannot comment on the matter at this time,” a spokesperson for Multi Media LLC told 404 Media. “With that said, it takes content moderation very seriously, deeply values the work of its moderators, and remains committed to supporting the team responsible for this critical work.” 

Grindr won’t allow users to add “no Zionists” to their profiles, but allows any number of other phrases that state political, religious, and ethnic preferences, according to 404 Media’s tests of the platform and user reports. 

Several users received an error message that says “The following are not allowed: no zionist, no zionists,” when they tried to add the phrases to their bios on Thursday. I tested this myself on a new Grindr account, and received the same error message. I was able to add “Zionist” to my profile (without “no”), however, and could also add any phrase I could think of: “no Arabs,” “no Blacks,” “no Palestinians,” “no Muslims,” “no Christians,” “no Jews,” “no trans,” “no Republicans,” “no Democrats,” and so on. “No Zionist[s]” was the only phrase that was blocked in my testing.

Following 404 Media's request for comment, Grindr removed the restriction. “The policy was implemented following user escalations around its potentially inflammatory nature," a spokesperson for Grindr told me on July 29. "We regularly examine our moderation policies and recently decided to reverse this one upon review.”

Others have seen this message as early as May 2024. It’s not clear when Grindr started implementing this rule; “no Zionists” doesn’t appear anywhere in its terms of service.

Its terms of service does state, however: “You will NOT post, store, send, transmit, or disseminate any information or material which a reasonable person could deem to be objectionable, defamatory, libelous, offensive, obscene, indecent, pornographic, harassing, threatening, embarrassing, distressing, vulgar, hateful, racially or ethnically or otherwise offensive to any group or individual, intentionally misleading, false, or otherwise inappropriate, regardless of whether this material or its dissemination is unlawful.” 

In 2020, Grindr removed its ethnicity filter, writing in its announcement: “We will continue to fight racism on Grindr, both through dialogue with our community and a zero-tolerance policy for racism and hate speech on our platform. As part of this commitment, and based on your feedback, we have decided to remove the ethnicity filter from our next release.⁣” But the BBC and other outlets noticed that the app didn’t actually remove it for weeks and several updates after the announcement. 

Grindr founder Joel Simkhai is Israeli and left the company in 2018 after it was sold to a Chinese gaming company. In September 2024, The Forward reported that “pro-Israel Jews” complained that they felt like they faced hostility on dating apps for displaying Israeli flag emojis or identifying as Zionist. In March 2025, the Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel, known as the Aguda, reported “a significant uptick in attempted lynchings and stabbings that used the popular dating app Grindr to target LGBT people in the North,” the Jerusalem Post reported, where attackers allegedly created fake Grindr profiles to lure victims to them.

“It seems pretty explicitly pro-colonization and protecting of the ideology that genocide and ethnic cleansing are okay for certain groups to perform as long as it upholds your own personal or capitalistic interests,” Green, a Grindr user I spoke to who also saw this error message, told me. “It’s gross. And to put energy towards protecting a blatantly bigoted ideology and not put the same energy towards protecting minority groups is pathetic. So fuck Grindr and its inability to intersect queer oppression with the oppression of other groups.” 

Updated 7/29/2025, 5:40 p.m. EST to include Grindr's statement.

The National Institutes of Health claims it’s being strained by an onslaught of AI-generated research applications and is capping the number of proposals researchers can submit in a year.

In a new policy announcement on July 17, titled “Supporting Fairness and Originality in NIH Research Applications,” the NIH wrote that it has recently “observed instances of Principal Investigators submitting large numbers of applications, some of which may have been generated with AI tools,” and that this influx of submissions “may unfairly strain NIH’s application review process.” 

“The percentage of applications from Principal Investigators submitting an average of more than six applications per year is relatively low; however, there is evidence that the use of AI tools has enabled Principal Investigators to submit more than 40 distinct applications in a single application submission round,” the NIH policy announcement says. “NIH will not consider applications that are either substantially developed by AI, or contain sections substantially developed by AI, to be original ideas of applicants. If the detection of AI is identified post award, NIH may refer the matter to the Office of Research Integrity to determine whether there is research misconduct while simultaneously taking enforcement actions including but not limited to disallowing costs, withholding future awards, wholly or in part suspending the grant, and possible termination.” 

Conservative content mill PragerU is partnering with the White House to make AI-generated videos of founding fathers and Revolutionary War-era randos.

PragerU is a nonprofit organization with a mission “to promote American values through the creative use of digital media, technology and edu-tainment,” according to its website. It’s been criticized for advancing climate denial and slavery apologism, frequently publishes videos critical of “wokeness” and “DEI,” and is very concerned about “the death of the West.” It has also been increasingly integrated into school curricula around the country.

PragerU held a launch event for the series, “Road to Liberty,” on June 25. Secretary Linda McMahon took some time away from dismantling the Department of Education to speak at the event. In person at the White House, visitors can tour a display of notable Revolutionary War people and places, and scan a QR code on displays that take them to PragerU’s AI-generated videos of people from that time period speaking. 

Each of the videos highlights a different person who was alive during the signing of the Declaration of Independence, from former presidents to relatively minor players in the fight for independence. The videos are clearly AI-generated, with the sepia-toned peoples’ mouths moving almost independently from the rest of their faces in some of them. In one, an AI-generated John Adams says “facts do not care about our feelings,” a phrase commonly attributed to conservative commentator and PragerU contributor Ben Shapiro. 

At the end of the videos, there's a logo for the White House with the text "brought to you by PragerU," and a disclaimer: "The White House is grateful for the partnership with PragerU and the U.S. Department of Education in the production of this museum. This partnership does not constitute or imply U.S. Government or U.S. Department of Education endorsement of PragerU."

Professor of history Seth Cotlar spotted the videos in a thread on Bluesky: 

I asked Cotlar, as someone who specializes in American history and the rise of the far-right, what stood out to him about these videos. I thought it was odd, I said, that they chose to include people like politician and disgraced minister Lyman Hall and obscure poet Francis Hopkinson alongside more well-known figures like John Adams or Thomas Jefferson. 

“You're right to note that it's a pretty odd collection of figures they've chosen,” Cotlar said. “My guess is that this is part of the broader right wing populist push to frame themselves as the grassroots ‘true Americans,’ and they're including all of these lesser known figures with the hopes that their viewers will be like ‘oh wow, look at all of these revolutionary freedom fighters like me who were just kinda ordinary guys like me but who still changed history.’” 

He also said it’s noteworthy that the “Road to Liberty” lineup so far is almost entirely white men, including the random dudes like Hall and Hopkinson. “The lack of any pretense to inclusion is pretty notable. Even conservative glosses on the Revolution from the pre-Trump era would have included things like the Rhode Island Regiment or Lemuel Haynes or Phyllis Wheatley. Needless to say, they absolutely do not include Deborah Sampson,” Cotlar said. All of the people in the “coming soon” section on PragerU’s website are also white men. 

AI slop has become the aesthetic of the right, with authoritarians around the world embracing ugly, lazy, mass-produced content like PragerU’s founding father puppets. Here in the U.S., we have President Donald Trump hawking it on his social media accounts, including AI-generated images of himself as the Pope and “Trump Gaza,” an AI video and song depicting the West Bank as a vacation paradise where Trump parties alongside his former bestie Elon Musk. As Republicans used the response to Hurricane Helene to blame migrants, Amy Kremer, founder of Women for Trump, posted an AI image of a child caught in a flood hugging a puppy and then said she didn’t care that it wasn’t real: “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” she wrote on X. Mike Lee shared the same image. AI slop makes for quick and easy engagement farming, and now it’s being produced in direct partnership with the White House.

I’m not sure what app or program PragerU is using to make these videos. I thought, at first, that they might be using one of the many basic lipsyncing or “make this old photo come alive” mobile apps on the market now. But the videos look better, or at least more heavily produced, than most of those apps are capable of. Just to make sure they haven’t somehow advanced wildly in the last few months since I checked one out, I tried one of them, Revive, and uploaded an image of John Adams to see if it would return anything close to what PragerU’s putting out. It did not. 

The PragerU videos aren't this bad, but they also aren’t as good as what would come out of Veo 3, the newest AI video generator, which generates highly realistic videos complete with sound and speech, from text prompts. I gave Veo a painting of John Adams and told it what to say; PragerU probably isn’t using this generator, because the result is much more realistic than what’s in the “Road to Liberty” series, even when I use a screenshot from one of their videos.

On the off chance the culprit is Midjourney—although the series’ style and the way the subjects’ mouths move almost independently of the rest of their faces don’t match what I’ve seen of Midjourney’s videos—I tried that one, too. I just gave Midjourney the same Adams portrait and a prompt for it to animate him praising the United States and it returned a raving lunatic, silently screaming. 

Striking out so far, I emailed Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and Chief Science Officer of synthetic media detection company GetReal, and asked if he had any leads. He said it looked similar to what comes out of AI video creation platform HeyGen, which creates AI talking heads and generates speech for them using ElevenLabs. I tried this on screenshots of the avatars in PragerU’s Martha Washington and John Adams videos to see if the puppet-mouth-style matched up, and they were pretty close.

PragerU’s videos are still more heavily produced than what I could make using the free version of HeyGen; it’s possible they used a combination of these to make the videos, plus some old-fashioned video editing and animation to create the final products. PragerU reported almost $70 million in income last year, they can afford the effort. 

“While the PragerU stuff is distinctly terrible, it's not like our culture has commemorated the Revolution with high-minded sophistication,” Cotlar told me. “I was 8 during the bicentennial and while I definitely learned some stuff about the founding era, most of what I absorbed was pretty schlocky.” He mentioned the "Bicentennial minutes" that were broadcast in 1975 and 76, sponsored by Shell, and which TV critic John J. O’Connor called “so insubstantial as to be almost meaningless.” The series won an Emmy.

In the last two years, several states, beginning with Florida, have approved PragerU content to be taught in public school classrooms. In Oklahoma, teachers relocating from states with "progressive education policies” will have to undergo an assessment in partnership with PragerU to determine if they’re allowed to teach. "If you want to teach here, you'd better know the Constitution, respect what makes America great, and understand basic biology,” State Superintendent Ryan Walters said in a press release. “We're raising a generation of patriots, not activists, and I'll fight tooth and nail to keep leftist propaganda out of our classrooms."

Data preservationists and archivists have been working tirelessly since the election of President Donald Trump to save websites, data, and public information that’s being removed by the administration for promoting or even mentioning diversity. The administration is now targeting National Parks signs that educate visitors about anything other than “beauty” and “grandeur,” and demanding they remove signs that mention “negative” aspects of American history. 

In March, Trump issued an executive order, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity To American History,” demanding public officials ensure that public monuments and markers under the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction never address anything negative about American history, past or present. Instead, Trump wrote, they should only ever acknowledge how pretty the landscape looks.

Last month, National Park Service directors across the country were informed that they must post surveys at informational sites that encourage visitors to report "any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features," as dictated in a May follow-up order from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. QR codes started popping up on placards in national parks that take visitors to a survey that asks them to snitch on "any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features."