HEADLINES
Enshittification is Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. Rumble is suing California over an upcoming law requiring platforms to block some election deepfakes. Dinesh D’Souza apologized for the election misinformation in his movie “2,000 Mules.” Stanford Professor Jeff Hancock apologized for three AI hallucinations in his testimony supporting a Minnesota law against election deepfakes. FBI director nominee Kash Patel once said “there’s a lot of good” about QAnon. Irish far-right candidates are claiming the election they lost was rigged. TikTok removed three small influence operations targeting the Romanian presidential election.
TOP STORIES
THE MISINFO ANGLE
I did not wake up this morning a South Korea expert, unfortunately, but I did want to cautiously flag that the short-lived martial law decree banned “fake news, public opinion manipulation, and false propaganda” while placing “all media and publications” under control of the government. President Yoon Suk Yeol has a history of calling “fake news” any reporting that is critical or embarrassing for him. His centrist predecessor’s plans to regulate misinformation had also come under fire in 2021 for restricting press freedoms and was ultimately shelved.
MUSK IS MEGAPHONE AND MAGNET
Last week on LinkedIn, just as I was about to post some braggadocious update about a minor career accomplishment, I was served a post by an Italian creative director claiming Elon Musk was about to launch a new phone.
The post cites Musk as saying “the Tesla phone will be the end of iPhone and Samsung.” The device would allegedly cost $299 and be solar powered.
Setting aside that at least two of the four images are patently AI-generated, the claim is completely false. On Joe Rogan’s podcast a month ago, Musk said “No, we’re not doing a phone […] We could do a phone. The operating system of Tesla is Linux-based but we’ve written a massive amount of software on top of that. So like probably Tesla is in a better position to create a new phone that’s not Android or iPhone than maybe any company in the world, but it’s not something we want to do unless we have to or something” (h/t Vera Files).
This didn’t stop the hoax from getting shared widely across LinkedIn. One poster even wrote a follow-up hustle post about going viral with the hoax (she has no regrets).
Of course, it didn’t stop on LinkedIn. Facebook, the zombie social network, has several groups dedicated to the phone and its users (which to be clear, do not exist).
The Tesla Phone is also all over TikTok, which oh-so-helpfully provides AI-generated search highlights summarizing made-up features such as Starlink Connectivity, Earth-Moon-Mars networking and Neuralink Integration.
Heck, the hoax was even mildly popular on BlueSky!
The Tesla Phone also thrives on Google products. Related queries spiked in Google Search over the past week, and a search for [elon musk phone] returns a largely AI-generated highlighted YouTube video that spends 30 minutes reviewing the made up features of the inexistent phone.
