The Most Dangerous Lie on the Internet: The 62 Million Men Hoax Explained

62 million men, 62 million men worldwide attended an online RAP Academy in the month of February alone. 62 million. 62 million men had an academy on how to drug and grape their wives. 62 million men. 62 million. In March, CNN published a massive investigation into what they called a global online rape academy that had allegedly attracted 62 million men. This story broke the internet. You might have seen it across your TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram feeds. Content creators and pages like At Feminist promoted this story relentlessly. But what if nothing about this story is what it seems? After digging into it, this story is one of the worst, most dangerous examples of bad journalism being used to justify incredibly harmful laws. And today I have Kat Tenbarge here, a journalist for Spitfire News who covers gender based violence, to talk about how this story is so incredibly dangerous and harmful and why this big investigation doesn't reveal what CNN claims it does. Not only are we going to debunk a bunch of claims made in this story, but we're also going to talk about why stories like this are proliferating and how the mainstream media further specific narratives to manufacture consent for really dangerous and harmful laws. Kat, welcome to Power User. Thanks so much for having me. Okay, where were you when this story hit the timeline? Because, you know, I was on, I think it was like TikTok or Instagram, and I feel like it was like this thing where suddenly I saw probably 50 videos in a row about this. Yes, it was definitely one of those things where like someone made a post and then tons of people were making posts because it was also like within the past two weeks. But the article actually came out like several weeks before it really popped off and went viral online. So it was definitely from like influencer accounts and not even actually journalists. It was like just random people. Yeah, I mean, I saw the tweet go viral initially and I feel like it propagated across platforms because it went super viral on Twitter. mostly because they had an extremely misleading headline. Like the original post actually has a community note on it because the original post had the 62 million number in it, which is what we're going to sort of debunk here. But I feel like it spread on Twitter. And then, as you said, it like ricocheted around the internet. Every influencer has talked about this. Newsletters like issues should care about, at feminists, like all of these like women's news websites, which is so insidious and horrible. So first, let's just describe what this article says. It centers on this website called Motherless. Motherless is an adult content website. It is pretty similar looking format-wise to any of your mainstream adult content websites. And it has a variety of genres. It has a variety of content on there. Yeah, this website is just one of many massive, massive what they're called tube websites. websites they're effectively like you know corn hub sorry i'm gonna have to speak a lot in like coded language this doesn't get taken off youtube unfortunately but they're all of these websites where effectively users can upload user generated content it does have some guidelines obviously you can't upload illegal content but you know motherless describes itself as a moral free file hosting site where anything legal is hosted it's basically a big website where you can get adult content now Now, there are a lot of different types of content on these big tube sites. A lot of them kind of like drill down into different fetishes. So you'll have, you know, balloon fetish, foot fetish, whatever. And one specific type of fetish content is called sleep content. And there's about 20,000 videos on Motherless of sleep content. But this kind of content is pretty pervasive across the adult website ecosystem. and it consists of essentially one person engaging in activities with the other person while they're theoretically asleep. Now, much of this content is very clearly staged. Like it is, they are so clearly on a set. The women or men are like very obviously like performers, but you know, there are also a lot of videos that it's maybe unclear if it's staged or how much. So there's 20,000 of these videos on Motherless. Yeah. They're not advertising that it's criminal conduct taking place. They're actually advertising the opposite. They are branding it as like consensual staged activity. And so this CNN article did not find that any of these specific videos on this platform were non-consensual, but they link it to real crimes. Yeah, they basically imply that like all of these 20,000 videos are criminal content. And this would like, this would like sort of the equivalent would be taking a look at another adult website, looking at every video where, you know, there's maybe a grape fantasy or something like where a person seems coerced and saying, okay, that fictional depiction in adult content is real. And that's very silly because as we know, people come up with all sorts of different scenarios in adult content. And it's like saying something that you witnessed in a movie is real. It's like, no, this is intentionally staged as entertainment, as content to be consumed. These are actors. These are performers, et cetera. Some of them are different sort of levels of professional performers. You've got the sort of independent content creators. You have people that work for studios, et cetera, et cetera. But as you know, the CNN article sort of tries to conflate the two. So it starts off by saying there's this horrible website, Motherless. It's a massive site. And on that site, you know, there are all these women that are allegedly being victimized in their sleep. Now, that website, Motherless, has 62 million visits a month. Not men, okay, and not even unique visitors. visitors visits and also not even views on these videos like the videos that they're talking about oftentimes have like 50,000 views like I think they literally say in the article and that would be high most of this content actually is not viewed very much because it's not a super popular fetish there are way more pervasive and popular fetishes and this content is just not that much of a thing online there are like deepfake websites that I've looked at for like deepfake adult content that is like expressly non-consensual. And the view counts were way higher on those websites. And they're not even as old as websites as Motherless is. So it's kind of striking. Like the videos aren't even that highly viewed. It's like they're taking the entire site's traffic to get that big number. Okay, so there's all this sort of sleep fetish content. Now, at some point in the comment section of one of these seemingly consensually produced sleep fetish videos, A user posted a link to a Telegram group that had several hundred men discussing how to assault women while they were asleep. Is this bad? Yes, it's bad. But I just want to be clear. Motherless was not hosting this content. Motherless was not promoting this content. This website that had 62 million visits a month or whatever, it was not promoting this Telegram group to 62 million people a month. That's ridiculous. this website was not affiliated in any formal way with this telegram group. Just somebody posted in the comments, hey, here's this telegram group. A CNN reporter joins the telegram group and discovers that it's full of hundreds of men talking about, you know, unconsensually attacking women. These men are all over the world. There's no evidence that these men produced any of the content that's on Motherless at all. It's not even really confirmed that any of them acted on any of their behaviors. One of them was arrested after CNN flagged their identity to the police in Poland, but they don't even know it's him. So, you know, it's just so ridiculous. But I think what's so insidious is that none of this is really made clear in the article. It's all just sort of conflated. So if you just skim this article, you'd be like, oh, there's 62 million men on this website and now there's this whole community that's being fostered like no this link to this telegram community could have been shared anywhere the facts of the article and the way that people then turned them into viral social media content it became so distorted because the number one thing that i've heard people say about this article including just like in casual conversations with like friends and colleagues and acquaintances people believe that there were 62 million men in this group chat. And people keep saying like, there's 62 men in an online group chat and like that's how many men are engaging in these specific behaviors in this one group chat. And that is not true. And like to your point, Taylor, like the distortion becomes even worse because then people think that also like the website with 62 million hits is directly like a part of this content or that it's all some sort of like networked economy when there's no evidence of that. Like I've investigated sort of networked economies of non-consensual content online, and this is not the same thing. It is like kind of a bunch of like disjointed groups that are being associated with each other so that they can get that really, really big number in the headline. And let's talk about where this content came from. So there has been an anti-adult content activist, a hardcore far-right activist that wants to censor, you know, the whole internet, hates adult content, who has been posting for months about this website. She's become obsessed about this website. And it seems like CNN just got this article from her because she has been the one that is digging in on all of this stuff. We're talking about this woman named Layla Micklewaite. Do you want to explain who this woman is, Kat? Yeah. So like these anti-adult content activists are religious extremists. They operate under the guise of wanting to protect women, much in the same way that like anti-trans extremists operate under the guise of like wanting to protect women and girls. But really like their motivation is rooted in like oftentimes far right Christian movements. And so there's a lot of manipulation going on with figures like Layla. And the group that she's a part of is called Exodus Cry, which should be all you need to know like that's an obvious sign that this is rooted in like extreme forms of Christianity. But basically she conflates all adult content with sexual violence. So she operates under the assumption and perpetuates this belief that anything you see on an adult content website is some form of illegal activity. And not only is that not true and like really just like kind of a a panic designed to psychologically terrorize women. But also, this is really harmful for adult content creators because it makes it harder for them to live. It makes it harder for them to work. And it even makes it harder for them to report when violence occurs to them. Because if there's no distinction between consensually produced content and non-consensually produced content, then it makes it much harder for people to be able to get these crimes taken seriously. Yeah, it's so dangerous. I mean, Layla McElwain is just the worst. This woman is just completely intertwined in far-right Christian nationalism. You've probably seen her on a bunch of far-right podcasts. She's very involved in that sphere. She went on Jordan Peterson's podcast back when Jordan Peterson was still around, claiming why adult content is addictive, how harmful it is. As you mentioned, Kat, she's really against sort of like sexuality. Like, I don't know how else to put it, she's against women expressing their sexuality. She's against, you know, gender non-conforming people. This is far right Christian nationalism. And these people have been waging a war on adult content since the beginning of the internet, right? These are the people that got FOSTA, SESTA passed. These are the people that have been trying to chip away at our free expression online, especially women's free expression, LGBTQ people's free expression, et cetera, for years. So she becomes obsessed with Motherless. Like she's posting about Motherless. She's talking about Motherless. She's trying to get all this attention on it. CNN takes the bite, I guess. And they do this investigation. One of the worst investigations I've ever seen because they didn't ultimately find anything except like a group chat with a couple hundred men that are like all over the world. And it's sort of unclear if what they're saying, you know, happened even happened. But anyway, CNN runs the story. So they open with this description of Motherless. As you say, they conflate the 62 million people with the Telegram group, and then they proceed to tell some really horrifying, disturbing stories. So they talk about this one woman who for 16 years, her husband would make her tea. She would fall asleep and then he would assault her while she was asleep. This is horrible. Now, this woman's abuse started over 20 years ago. And actually, her husband was prosecuted and is currently serving an 11-year sentence after a four-year court battle. But none of this was facilitated because of a website. And they also compare it up at the very top to the Giselle Pellicott case, which also does not have anything to do with this specific Telegram group or this adult content website. There were elements of a forum where Giselle's abuser found other men. But it was really interesting to me that like the human experiences highlighted in this article don't have anything to do with the technological aspects of this article. And in fact like these women stories really exposed some other systemic issues that I think would be really really helpful to focus on here Like for example that woman whose husband did ultimately get convicted and is currently in prison She talked about how horrific the legal process was and how it was a four year legal process and how her children were ostracized and bullied at school and she lost all of her friends because people believe that like husbands cannot harm their wives in this way and that it wasn't a big deal because she was like unconscious at the time. So like there are other systemic issues that are just kind of being completely overlooked because all of the focus is on the idea, the false idea that there were 62 million men in a group chat, when the real story here is that this is a phenomenon that well precedes the internet. Men have been doing this to their wives and to other women for probably centuries, but certainly at least decades. And while the internet plays a role in some of these cases, to act like that is the main driver of the behavior is to actually obfuscate like the patriarchal misogynistic elements of this culture, the police failure and inaction, like the systemic barriers. And of course, the societal stigma, like all of that is sort of pushed aside. Well, also, you know, there's no evidence that the internet is making this phenomenon worse. And in fact, there's evidence that the digital trails these people create through buying these drugs online, through bragging about, you know, their escapades to communicating about Gruchats actually helps them get prosecuted. And so, you know, yeah, we had the Gisele Pellicott story. We had the woman who suffered for 16 years. And then we had this woman, Amanda Stanhope, who also, you know, basically had a partner who assaulted her when she was asleep. when she went to the police about it and they were gonna arrest him, et cetera. He took his own life before the case went to court. Very tragic, very horrible, but none of that has anything to do with adult content. And none of these men were creating adult content that ended up on any of these websites. And none of these men cited in the stories took part in this Telegram group either. And Amanda Stanhope, the reason I believe CNM was able to find her is because she now uses social media to talk about this crime and to raise awareness for her story. And then in response to that, you have people basically saying we should be censoring her off the internet. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.co. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues and for challenging power. As you can imagine, advertisers are not exactly eager to work with somebody who covers a lot of the topics that I cover and talks about the things that I talk about. These videos I make are entirely funded by you and I can't continue to make them without your support. 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And only, you know, half of them could be men. So we have no idea actually how many men even visited this website. But the article, I think it's so insidious. The reason I want to talk about it, especially it's like, I feel like you and I were like venting about it so much on chat is that it takes this like really dangerous turn. So it immediately starts talking about how we need to censor the internet. And it says, Motherless has avoided being targeted for the type of content posted on its site due to US safe harbor protections that largely shield platform owners from direct liability for their users uploads. Now, what they're talking about there is section 230. And that's not what section 230 does. Section 230 does not shield you from liability for illegal content, not even remotely. Also, once again, there's no evidence that any of the content that was found on Motherless was illegal or showed actual illegal content. And even in the Telegram group, when they identify things that are very sketchy, that should likely be investigated by authorities, like men saying that they're selling these liquids that you can use to drug your wife, none of those men are in the United States. They are all around the world. All of the men in this story who are in this Telegram group chat, None of them are in the United States. One of them is in this like unincorporated Spanish autonomous city off the coast of like West Africa. One of them is somewhere else in Africa. One of them, I believe, is in Sweden. Like they're in various countries around the world. So United States tech policy has no relationship to any of what is happening in this group chat or even on this website. And Motherless, which is not an American company, has been fined in its actual home country of Luxembourg. And so like, I just, this is not, this argument is nonsensical. It's nonsensical, but it's so insidious because, you know, Lucy from, as she should care about wrote this whole terrible thing. And I wrote her this like long email, like, what the hell are you doing? Being like, this is why we need to repeal section 230, you know, at feminist, at feminist, this deranged Instagram account that's, that was saying like, we need to repeal section 230, as you mentioned, this is a website based in Luxembourg providing legal content where somebody in the comments of one of these hundreds of thousands, if not millions of videos posted a link to a telegram group where people in Africa and Sweden were discussing doing illegal activity. Like none of this has anything to do with America. None of this has anything to do with Section 230. There's not any evidence that this is happening in America, although it probably is just based on the horrible things that happen to women. Telegram itself is also famously not an American company. Like Telegram is, I believe, headquartered in the UAE right now and like jumps around the world, like to try to, in part, to try to avoid legal liability. Yeah. So it's just like taking all of this sort of stuff that's frankly not even illegal, but a lot of it, the stuff that is illegal, like even some of the stuff that these men are saying, like, is it bad that a random man on an island off the coast of Africa, is chatting with several hundred other men about potentially assaulting a woman? Yes. But that's all that you found. You didn't find that that man even assaulted a woman. You didn't find who he is. You didn't find anything. And you're using all of that. You're telling these sob stories of these women to then manufacture consent for the most dangerous authoritarian censorship and surveillance laws that will be used to harm women here in America. And that's what's so disgusting to me. Yeah. The idea that this is a reason to abolish abolish or reform or take away Section 230 is exploiting victims' trauma and creating like conflating statistics to create spectacle in the service of horrific tech policy that would disadvantage victims across the board. And just like anti-trans playbooks, just like, you know, the Christian conservative right, it's all done under the guise of protecting women and girls so that they can further harm women and girls. Yeah, it's so I mean, not only are these people completely intertwined with the anti trans anti LGBTQ movement, because Christian fundamentalists don't like the LGBTQ people. Right. And they also don't like women's rights. But like, I just think it's so insidious because it's being put forward as this like accountability. Right. This like the same way as you mentioned. Right. Like these, you know, a cis woman being assaulted in the UK or something is used as pretext to strip LGBTQ people of rights. It's like, well, that's not keeping women safe either. The headline, I think, is part of why the story spread so far. It reads at the top of this article, exposing a global rape academy. In shocking group chats, men encourage one another to drug and assault their wives and swap tips on getting away with it. Again, horrible that that happened, you know, that a couple hundred men are doing this on a group chat in wherever the hell they are. I think that the framing of a rape academy makes it sound like it's this industrialized thing. And I think that that language paired with the number 62 million men, which again is nonsense, really is meant to terrify people and make it seem like it's this like industrialized systemic thing that we need to, you know, abolish Section 230 in order to stop. It was really shocking, like actually reading the article and seeing what the article was actually about after seeing a lot of these social media posts, because the way that they actually got the term, you know, rape academy is they interviewed an Italian politician who is a woman who has horrifically like suffered a, I believe, a similar crime at the hands of a fellow politician, which is horrible. Again, has nothing to do with motherless, nothing to do with this telegram chat. And they interviewed this woman. and what it sounds like from the article is that they told her about this chat for the very first time. Like literally it's the, you're telling me for the first time meme. And she responded like, it sounds like a rape academy. And then that framing became, experts are referring to this as a rape academy. And I'm like, no, they're not. Like this woman is an expert in many things, but this Telegram group chat and this website, she is not. She was literally just like hearing about it. She's just a random Italian politician who was assaulted by another Italian politician. Once again, none of this has anything to do with motherless. It has nothing to do with the Internet. It's horrible what happened to her. But CNN going to her, being like, here's what's happening, and who knows what they told her about this group and the inflammatory way they presented it. She says, it sounds like this. They don't even say, actually, that's not how it happened. Actually, there's no lesson plans. Actually, there's no, this is not some systemized thing. This is just a group chat of random men in random places around the world, sort of like living out these fantasies. And that's the headline. Then they put that in the headline. And it makes it sound like, again, there are 62 million men that have enrolled in some sort of formal program to assault women, which is a horrifying prospect. But it's just simply not what's happening. It feels to me like psychological warfare against women to make us really frightened and scared and more in favor of reactionary politics that are ultimately against our best interests. Like it is it feels very insidious because I spoke to women in the weeks after this article came out who were genuinely very frightened at what they like believed to be true. And like, it just is so unfortunate because it distracts us and deflects from a lot of real systemic issues and points us in the direction of fake solutions that are actually going to hurt us. Yeah. I mean, I just, I typed the word 62 into TikTok and what do you get? 62 million men rape Academy. And there's just endless videos of people saying 62 million men, 62 million men. This is something we need to do. This woman says 62 million men had an academy on how to drug and assault their wives. Nope, that didn't happen. That straight up did not happen. When people use the phrase rape academy, it reminds me of Andrew Tate's Hustlers University, which where he was instructing like his followers on sort of how to like sexually exploit women online. And even Andrew Tate, who has obviously one of the most prolific, you know, academies for doing this, it's nowhere near 62 million men. Like the idea that this is a real thing is, is so obviously like almost like propagandistic in nature. And yeah, it's really, it's really disturbing. It's really disturbing that this went so far. But CNN knows what it's doing, right? And I mean, I think like, it's really important to note that these major massive media organizations are lobbying for Section 230 repeal. Like they are, they are part of these lobbying groups that directly want to repeal Section 230. It is in their business interest to dismantle free speech on the internet so that we all go back to 1995 and we can only get our information from traditional media. And, you know, I'm not arguing that necessarily the reporters involved in this story know that, you know, it's not like some top-down thing, but that is how these stories are uplifted in these mainstream media organizations. This story was not just a regular story. It has this interactive graphic. They put so much money behind it. They did endless social promotion for it. They were doing media outreach for it. They made this, this huge thing. And it's spread to this just degree that it's so hard to even combat. Like by the time, what is that saying? Like a lie spreads around the world before the truth puts on its shoes. That's how it feels where like, it feels so fruitless. And I keep waiting for somebody to come in and say like, oh, that's all false. But here it's been what, almost two months. And this stat has just been incorporated into the internet and is being used by people that are claiming to be progressive to dismantle Section 230, something that far right Christian fundamentalists are behind. Like that is not a progressive stance to have. And yet you literally have at feminists pushing it. And also like CNN is soon going to be run by the horrible Paramount merger, where you now have like Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News. And it's like increasingly just becoming a mouthpiece for Trump's administration. And it like so at the exact same time that these media organizations are pushing to restrict the amount of sources of information we have access to which is of course in their best interest these news organizations are also being essentially like overtaken and weaponized by like fascist governments. And the reason why they use this type of like emotional sort of propaganda aimed at making women really fearful about like adult websites is because it is so effective. And going back to Layla Mickleway and Exodus Cry, the woman in the group that like pushed this anti-motherless campaign, Layla is an expert at this because she is previously one of the most instrumental people in pushing the campaigns against Corn Hub. And she used the exact same type of viral tweet material. I've come across so many viral tweets from her over the years, basically like conflating all adult content with sexual violence. And because of that, like Corn Hub now has to have this really restrictive like age verification software. And that has become the model for the entire internet where like these are the movements that start to break down the barriers that will eventually lead to like federal oversight of everything we do online. Which is what they want. Yes. And the other playbook that these people are also simultaneously running and have done very successfully is also the anti-abortion playbook. Because this is exactly how they have made it so that not only have we lost the federal right to an abortion, but increasingly, like, pregnancy and women's bodily autonomy is being surveilled by, again, fascist governments. So if you think that this is going to help women, ask yourself, does Donald Trump's administration have women's best interests at heart? Are these the people who are going to protect women's free speech and right to bodily autonomy? No, of course not. But if people fail to step back for one second and look at the bigger picture here and look at who these movements truly benefit at the end of the day. I also think that the number and the scale and the way that they make it seem so mechanized is meant to kind of disenfranchise people and like make it so that they don't need to take action. Like a couple hundred men in a group chat is actually something that people could meaningfully take action on. But 62 million men feels overwhelming. It feels like, well, then we need a law, right? We need something. We need somebody in power to step in. And it's like, no, actually, it's just that you found like actually a pretty small group of men. Now they're scattered around the world. It would be hard for you to do something about in America, but you could call the local precincts in these different countries and probably get a lot of these men arrested if they were actually doing something wrong. Yes. And to your point that you made earlier on, Taylor, like when people see these types of behaviors documented online, they feel like the problem is that these online platforms exist. But really, if you like look at this from the direction of like, what can you do that's productive? This now creates like actual evidence for people to investigate, for people to even know that these crimes are occurring. And I completely agree with you. I think that like 62 million men is a number that you cannot do anything about. It is like a thought terminating cliche in that regard, because it's just like all men are evil and sentence period right there, which is a very reactionary mindset that a lot of people are like kind of being herded into. But yeah, in addition to that, you could absolutely like work to find each of these men to track them down, to like reach their partners, to investigate, to hold them accountable. But actually, that's a lot of a lot of work. And people would just rather make a viral TikTok being like, all men are evil, like and subscribe. Well, also, it's like, as you said, it's about villainizing the platform instead of the behavior. The problem here, right, like the examples they use of women that were assaulted in this way in the article, none of that has anything to do with this platform. None of it has anything to do with a telegram group. None of it has anything to do with anything that they're conflating it with. And by the way, these men were held accountable in each case. But it's worth noting that the majority of victims, because of the nature of this specific crime, the victimization happens from somebody that the woman is intimate with, usually, you know, a partner, a husband, et cetera. It's somebody that they know IRL. it's not like random men are you know going and like i mean roofing people is a thing but like it's not like this specific sort of like sleep content stuff is like that pervasive i would say as a form of assault towards women there are other forms of assault that are more pervasive this is really something that's like between a husband and a wife right or between a partner and instead of focusing on prosecuting that or saying like hey we need an education hey we need to educate people that like, actually, just because a man is your husband, that doesn't give him the right to assault you. You know, here's an education campaign. Here's what we can do. Instead, they're focusing on villainizing the platforms, not the men. And that's really disturbing too, because it's like, oh, all these men are evil. What can we do? Hold the platforms accountable. It's like, but the platforms didn't do any of this. I don't doubt that they're not doing, you know, that they're the most responsible platforms on earth. But like, again, this is like, call the Luxembourg government, you know what i mean and and get some accountability if you want some content taken down but otherwise like this is not a problem and it all does feed back into that sort of like christian mentality around sexual violence which is to actually cover it up so that you can protect it because at the end of the day what all of these groups want to happen is they want this information to be scrubbed from the internet they don't want us to be able to identify the problem or document the problem They want it to essentially get covered up. Like the idea around content moderation is that it's often presented as like the ultimate form of accountability. But in reality, what's happening is that they're taking down the evidence and not even doing anything about the perpetrator. So these solutions are actually cover ups. Right, exactly. First of all, again, there is no evidence that any of this content on Motherless is criminal. But if it was, what CNN is advocating for is for that content to be taken down, not for the men assaulting their wife to be prosecuted. Like that's the systemic fix that they want is to repeal Section 230. It just makes me so mad. And I don't know how to change the conversation. Like, hopefully people are still listening to this podcast episode and can go out and be like, hey, did you see that viral claim? Guess what? It's total bullshit. But like, I don't know. I mean, when I look through on TikTok, like these videos have millions of views. These are like leftist and progressive and like feminist content creators that are spreading this slop. Like, I don't know how we can like change the narrative or how to get people on the left to like wake up and see that like aligning yourself with far right Christian nationalists because it seems, quote unquote, like tough on tech in some way is such a losing, stupid battle. And like you're about to take away all of our rights. People like Layla McElwey and like these ultimately like these conservative groups, they can always rely on two things, which is like anti-women sentiment and also anti-adult content sentiment. And so, so many of their like culture wars are driven by that because they don't even have to do that much work because the population is already there, like already wanting to support these viewpoints. And unfortunately, people also don't listen to adult content creators because if they did And if they listen to like just anyone who knows anything about like technology, they would know that FOSTA-SESTA actually like made it much harder for the police to go after traffickers. And SESTA-FOSTA actually made the internet less safe for these adult content creators. And it also led to massive waves of censorship and deplatforming of even feminist creators. So it's like you have these big feminist accounts literally like advocating for their own demise. and a lot of them, unfortunately, don't even know it and aren't willing to like hear that. Well, yeah, for people that don't know and didn't watch my whole series on Section 230, I have a whole episode on FOSTA-SESTA. FOSTA-SESTA is the first major carve out to Section 230. So everything that these people have been saying in this CNN article, like, oh, we just need to repeal Section 230. We need to chip away at Section 230 protections. Guess what, guys? We did that a decade ago, literally, in 2018, and we created this massive carve out to Section 230. It was framed as holding big tech accountable. All of these conversations, I feel like I'm in a time warp or something. We literally had all this. That's what they did. They made this huge carve out to Section 230. What did it do? Not only did it not hold big tech accountable, the big tech companies are more powerful today than ever, but it resulted in the mass deplatforming of progressive content on the internet. And I would argue emboldened Trump's movement to an insane degree. And when people talk now, too, about how young people are more conservative or there's so much puritanical kind of belief online and young people are becoming more modest, etc. Abstinence is on the rise. I think you cannot separate that from FOSTA-SESTA and the fallout and the deplatforming of adult content, of sexuality, feminism, of abortion, of all of this stuff. Because our internet is getting sanitized. The Christian nationalists are winning. They are winning. And like this anti-adult content sentiment is so bizarre to see like flourish so much in these like feminist progressive spaces because it literally does sound like Mike Johnson, like the Speaker of the House who tracks his corn consumption alongside his son while at the exact same time like defending and protecting Donald Trump. We all know what Donald Trump has been accused of. Like, it's very obvious that this anti-adult content ideology is to obfuscate from actually holding people who commit acts of sexual violence accountable. And so it's so frustrating to see it just like flourished on the left instead of holding perpetrators accountable. Like people will always take the easy way out of just like finding something to demonize instead of like the actual abusers. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, that's where I just have to go back to this just appalling coverage. In the shit you should care about newsletter, which really bothers me because this is like a huge progressive allegedly newsletter. After explaining, you know, the 62 million men and conflating all of this stuff and kind of doing a poor job of communicating the story. There's this giant subhead and it says, why is any of this legal? If you're anything like me, reading this might make you want to put your fist through something. Well, Motherless is operating completely within the law. It's shielded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. And it just goes on and on and on. And it's, I can't, I'm infuriated. I wrote her this like long email. She of course did not respond to me. But like, first of all, again, Motherless is based in Luxembourg. There's nothing illegal that's been found to be on Motherless. This is not a US law problem. And if there were videos on Motherless depicting these types of crimes, it would already be illegal. These crimes are not legal. That's why they're called crimes. They're already illegal. They don't get prosecuted. That's the problem. People think we need more laws. We need to actually enforce the laws that already exist. All of this stuff has been illegal for decades. And Section 230 does not protect illegal content. So it's just like, again, I just, it's this complete misunderstanding and this kind of like these people that just hear buzzwords, I guess, and they just like vomit them out and to so much harm. But it's infuriating. And I think we're seeing it kind of come for the rest of the internet, you know, like there's blood in the water. And now that this story has gone incredibly viral, it's like people want follow-ups, people are posting about this. And it kind of reminds me of actually conversations around 4chan and some of these incel forums where people will be like, young men are getting radicalized online. And that's why we need to hold social media companies accountable. Then you dig into a lot of the coverage of this stuff and you see that it's a lot of the extreme content is actually not hosted on YouTube. It's not hosted on Instagram. These platforms have been so effectively sanitized. It's on these like forums, right? It's on like incel forums. It's on these small places that don't have algorithms, don't have social media addiction, don't have any of the problems. Like, you know, in the social media addiction case that they hold up as examples of like, you know, how it's harming children and all this stuff. So they hold up all those examples of features on social media. But then you're like, OK, so where's the harmful content? Oh, well, actually, the harmful content's on this other website that actually doesn't have any of those features. That's just a small niche forum that's actually hosted in like South Africa or Russia and only gets, you know, 2000 visits a month. Yes. And also, like, if these people get their way and they already are, because like you said, like one of the reasons why these weird niche forums are taking off is because people are now being pushed off the mainstream social media platforms. Because as all of the, you know, Section 230 advocates, as all of the people who are against bad internet bills will tell you, if you pass these laws and if you force the major platforms to be challenged under like these lawsuits around liability, what's going to happen is all of the bad actors are going to migrate to places that are not in the jurisdiction, that do not fall under the laws. You're just going to have like worse websites than ever before because now people can't get content that is actually moderated content on platforms like Reddit, for example, like all of the adult content on Reddit is being scrubbed at like an alarming rate for a lot of like adult content creators And instead of having these options that are more like heavily moderated now people are going to the Telegram group chats and they getting more illicit content and they being driven into more like extreme places that the laws in the united states cannot touch so that is the result yeah it's like i mean these same people like leila micklewaite and these other you know christian nationalist types they want to ban only fans right they don't they're against only fans they're against like adult content creators etc and when you do that When you take away that consensual content of content that, frankly, the content creator themselves can profit off of, right? The woman can profit directly off of. Then, yeah, people are, listen, they're not going to stop consuming adult content. They are going to go to these darker corners of the internet that aren't regulated, that are potentially include, you know, harmful content, content that is made unconsensually, content that depicts criminal activity, et cetera, and content that the women involved in it are not compensated for, right? If men are getting the content from these like harmful telegram groups, they're not they could just be paying an OnlyFans creator. They could just be watching adult content on a normal Web site, except now they can't because they have to input their biometric data and it's tied to their government ID forever. So it's like I just I think we're actually creating, you know, these systems of harm. But as you mentioned, it's not about addressing any of the harm. It's not about tracking down any of these men. It's not about prosecuting the men or leading education campaigns to, you know, to sort of educate people about this stuff and about these crimes. It's about let's censor the whole Internet. Let's remove adult content from the Internet. And we have these dumb, dumb, dumb leftist and liberal influencers going along with it, leading the charge along with anti-LGBTQ, anti-woman, anti-abortion hate groups. There's also this like pseudoscientific strain that has really emerged. And the CNN article features this as well. This idea that sexual violence is a direct result of adult content and that the behavior is actually linked to the viewership of adult content, which is not true. And if that were true, then sexual violence would have only existed after the invention of the Internet. Like, I just am like, how do people fall for this argument? Do you think that men thousands of years ago were learning about sexual violence from adult websites? Of course not. Of course not. But like, and in fact, like the idea that they're only doing it because they watch adult content completely ignores the men's agency or the perpetrator, whatever, regardless of gender. It ignores the perpetrator's agency and the fact that they are going to do this because it's a means of like power and abuse. and it has it oftentimes most times has like nothing to do with them watching adult content but this this idea that like it's the fault of adult content that sexual violence is because of adult content is like so harmful but becoming such a prolific strain of thought in these like leftist spaces and i'm just like you guys are losing it you guys are like becoming right-wing conservative fundamentalists like christian fundamentalists i think there's just a lot of Christian fundamentalism that has made its way into the online left specifically in a really dangerous way where they really start to just sort of take these things at face value, as you said, I think because it's corporations. And so they're like, okay, big corporations, bad, big tech, bad. Therefore, Christian fundamentalists who are against big tech for really dangerous, you know, reasons are like on my side and I'm going to sort of adopt this framework and they're Puritans. It's really scary. And I think that these people should be very careful about who they're getting in bed with. Like, you know, especially with the rise of like AI content, I'm thinking of non-consensual AI content and all this stuff. Like we want to create solutions to these problems that protect people's autonomy and liberty and free expression and open access to information. And I mean, you and I have talked about this before, too. But like there's a lot of money right now in the anti-AI movement. As I just texted you recently to like, there's a lot of money. There's billions of dollars in the anti-AI movement right now. And a lot of it is from Christian fundamentalists or far right groups or groups that will happily partner with anti-LGBTQ hate groups. And they're shaping these conversations. And they're like, look, we all hate AI. Great. I'd love to regulate AI. You know, I use some AI tools, but like overwhelmingly AI is not being used to like liberate us. It's being used for profit. And I say that even as somebody that like, again, occasionally does use these tools. So it's like, we want to regulate AI, but we have to be so careful because we shouldn't be listening to Exodus cry about AI policy. And yet that's who's driving tech regulation. That's who's driving the conversation around tech policy right now. Yes. I think you shared this, Taylor. And I've talked about this before, and I wrote about this for my newsletter. But there's an anti-AI group that was started, or one of the founding members is a correspondent on Steve Bannon's War Room. and Steve Bannon has like pushed this group really, really hard. And they are in support of Ron DeSantis' AI Bill of Rights in Florida. And Ron DeSantis has like his whole like that, the people championing that bill have referred to opponents as digital Epsteins. Steve Bannon was a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein. Steve Bannon was one of the last people Jeffrey Epstein ever texted to cancel a lunch meeting that they had planned the day that Epstein was arrested in 2019. Steve Bannon was literally trying to rehabilitate Jeffrey Epstein's reputation and like met with him frequently and talked to him all the time. And you're telling me that like this guy is opposed to like digital Epsteins. Like you're literally working with an Epstein associate. Right. They're calling people that oppose this specific AI regulation, pedophiles, groomers, digital Epsteins, all of this stuff that we saw them try to leverage against trans people. Right. Like against women. It's just this like sort of constant effort to stigmatize anybody that speaks out against their far right Christian nationalist policies is like, well, you want to endanger the children. You want children to be, you know, trafficked. You want women to be trafficked and abused. And it's like, no, actually, I don't. I want those people held accountable. But you guys are far right Christian nationalists. I don't think you want those things. I think you just want to censor and mass surveil the Internet and build a structure of control. because ultimately what you want is to control women and control children, control LGBTQ people. And yet these leftists, I mean, that group especially, right? Like they had this whole thing in Brooklyn, like they have gotten all of these leftists. Bernie Sanders is doing event, you know, Bernie Sanders is promoting the rhetoric of these people and doing events with people that are adjacent to this movement. That's so fucking crazy. In 2020, during an interview with the New York Times editorial board, Bernie Sanders said he did not believe he had any apps on his phone. He does not know what an app is. Like this man, poor Bernie Sanders, it's being misled. I love Bernie Sanders. Like I vote, you know, like I wanted him to win in 2016. Okay. Like I trust him on like labor policy, whatever. The man is like in his eighties, he has not led the way on tech policy. Like he has no idea what's going on. And like, he's like directionally, like, that's the thing. It's like, he's directionally right that there are issues with AI, but he's got, he has no technological literacy to like navigate this stuff. And I think that's true of a lot of the left. I think a lot of the left, like they fundamentally, because they sort of conflate, well, I mean, technology is run by corporations, right? But they don't engage with these tools. They don't understand these platforms. They don't understand how it works. They've been completely checked out of the tech policy debate for the past decade. Most of them don't even know what FOSTA-SESTA is. And they're out here opining about section 230. Yes. No, if you don't know what FOSTA SESTA is, if you don't know who sponsored the Kids Online Safety Act and what she said about it, if you don't know this stuff, you have no business talking about section 230. Like, literally shut up. It reminds me, like, when people spread, like, the rhetoric of victim blaming, when leftists spread this rhetoric in, like, the Amber Heard case, for example. I'm just like, if you can't tell me, like, what Darbo means, like shut the hell up. You are better off quiet than you are like trying to weigh in on these issues that you do not comprehend. Well, they're also like rewarded for it because it makes you seem like you're tough. Like, I mean, I think of like this CNN article and I think back to an article that I did years ago, a few articles I've done over the years where it's like, in some cases I'm just like sort of repackaging something that some special interest group gave you and your editors like, hey, can you write this up for the New York Times or whatever? It's a report from the Center for countering digital hate. And you're like writing up like, oh, teens are getting bullied online or whatever, you know, like, or there's hate speech or whatever, which is bad, but that gets like weaponized, but you're rewarded. You're rewarded. Like, oh my God, you're tough reporting on that. And it's like, did I do tough reporting? It seems like this story was kind of handed to me or like in this case, right? The CNN story, it's like, well, Layla McElwade did all of this for you. Basically you like, sounds like chase down some men, didn't ultimately find them, didn't ultimately do anything. Aggregated a bunch of stories that were already like public that, you know, that these women's like, it's terrible that that Italian lawmaker was assaulted by her colleague. What does that have to do with any of this? And then you package it. And then what? You win an award. And then you're a good journalist. And it's like, because you've manufactured consent for censorship and surveillance. And then what is really getting on my nerves lately is then people are like, anyone who opposes COSA is probably getting paid by Meta. or like you guys, how much of the big tech companies paying you guys is like a comment that I see all the time. And I'm like, not only are we not getting paid, not only are we probably losing like paid opportunities because we're willing to talk about this stuff, but also the people pushing like COSA are being paid so much money to do these campaigns. Like these are such highly funded campaigns. Can we just talk about the fact that yet another AI safety group was revealed to be funded by Elon Musk today? The other biggest online safety coalition for AI was revealed to be funded by OpenAI. The Digital Childhood Alliance, one of the main child safety groups that's been involved in all the state legislation, is funded by Meta. Meta is using the fact that they lost in California the social media addiction trial to push the App Store Accountability Act, which would completely remove anonymous Internet use for everyone. But then these people online, I think they just like they can't. I don't know. It's like this level of nuance that they can't grasp where it's like, no, the reason that you have this reactionary belief, the reason that you think COSA is good is because you have fallen for all of the propaganda. That money, the money is being spent to make you have these beliefs and you have them and it worked. Yeah, well, it's just like the Blake Lively and Amber Heard cases where it's like it's nearly impossible to convince someone that they have been manipulated once they have already like bought into it. And I feel like there's a quote about that where it's like a famous quote where it's like it's very difficult to convince a conned person that they've been conned because you've already bought in. And particularly with stories like this, again, this is why they use propaganda like 62 million men are in a rape academy, because it is so emotionally like intense that once you believe that you can't unbelieve it. Once you have experienced like an emotional reaction to something like that, you're actually going to be furious a lot of the time if someone tells you that you're wrong. And like these groups know that they play off of it. It's very emotionally manipulative. But perfect example of this, there were all of these, I mean, there were viral TikToks about these like fake misinformation. And then there were people trying to combat it and they were the ones getting canceled. Yeah. Because again, when you try to combat it, like now it seems like what? You don't believe, you know, rape victims. You don't believe like abuse. You're trying to minimize abuse. You know, you're trying to defend a big tech platform. You're trying to defend like corporations not having responsibility. It's like, no, none of that. One of those TikTokers who was getting like so much backlash for being like, there aren't 62 million men in a rape academy. He literally did a TikTok where he read the entire CNN article out loud from start to finish. And he was still getting attacked. Like that just kind of tells you the whole thing. Like people don't want to hear it. Well, they don't want to know the truth of it, right? Like this is the same thing of like, when you try to explain FOSTAs, you try to explain it. Like they just don't want to engage in the truth. They have this emotional kind of reaction to things. They have an emotional connection with things and it's just, it's really hard to break people out, but I'm so glad for people like you and others, you know, that are doing the work and that are like fighting the good fight because it is so scary. We are going to lose our rights. I'm like horrified by it. And so I just like really appreciate you coming on and chatting about all this. Oh, I'm glad that there's a platform to talk about it. I'm like, wow, when we're all in the Trump camps because we posted about like abortion rights in a positive way, like I'm like, we're gonna have such amazing conversations in the anti-women labor camps. I can't wait. I think that they're gonna surveil us. I don't even think we're gonna have free speech in the camps, Kat. There's gonna be like a Palantir choke collar on us. All right, Kat, well, thank you so much again for joining. Thank you for having me. 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