If you value my reporting on federal politics, right-wing alternative media and far-right extremism in Canada, then keep your eye on @thewatchdog.ca We're going to break stories that protect the public and defend democracy www.thewatchdog.ca/p/sign-up

Sign Up For The Watchdog

The Watchdog protects the public and defends democracy through original public interest watchdog journalism.

thewatchdog.ca

I think Canada’s legal community does not adequately grasp the extent to which the legal system is being misused by performative dorks on the Internet

NEW: Meta has run dozens of paid ads that include explicit, AI-generated child sexual abuse material in recent months. Some as recently as this week. "These are ads that were reviewed, approved, and allowed to run by Meta, never encountering interference while the company collected the ad dollars."

Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

More than 50 offending image and video ads were published across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or Threads, according to Meta’s ad library data. Some ran as recently as this week.

wired.com

AI is a very useful tool

A former neo-Nazi activist with convictions including for harassing a Jewish MP has been selected as a Conservative candidate for a local election in Somerset. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Former neo-Nazi activist selected as Tory candidate for Somerset council election

Joshua Bonehill-Paine, creator of satirical Crewkerne Gazette, has convictions including for harassing a Jewish MP

theguardian.com

Looks like the white nationalist CHUDs at Dominion Society threw Greg Wycliffe under the bus. True colours, shining through.

Tony the Antifascist Swan is sick of Twitter@tonyyvce.bsky.social · 7d ago

New from me: Greg Wycliffe: Modern Day Ernst Röhm canadaantifa.blogspot.com/2026/07/greg...

I can't believe this is real (it is.). I tried it. I picked a coastal area and generated an image of a house collapsing into the ocean. It even labeled it "collapsed house." This is "digital asbestos" that is polluting our information environment - and could get people killed.

Faine Greenwood@faineg.bsky.social · 6d ago

I used to do some work on the ethical use of satellite and drone imagery for aid and disaster response, and it is genuinely hard to express in words what a dangerous, stupid thing Google is doing by making it easy to use GenAI to create faked satellite imagery:

NEW: The State Department finalized a rule implementing a "visa bond" program for tourist/business visitor visas, to be imposed on a list of countries to be announced. Applicants for B1/B2 visas from those countries will have to pay a $10k, $15k, or $20k bond, to be paid back once the visa expires.

Received this bizarre email out of the blue yesterday from National Post columnist Adam Zivo gloating over my former colleague's layoff notice I'd like to thank Postmedia for looking into it and issuing this statement clarifying Zivo is expected to uphold professional standards for employee conduct

You don't have a human right to water, that water is for the data center that runs the revenge porn generator which is the real human right

ICE shared Medicaid data it wasn't supposed to have in the first place with Palantir. First Medicaid officials shared data about millions of people with ICE. ICE then shared that data with Palantir, according to a new court filing reported on by @NPR. /1

ICE shared Medicaid data it wasn't supposed to have with Palantir

The revelations came out in a federal court case brought by Democratic states challenging ICE's access to Medicaid data to aid in deportation efforts.

npr.org

Squished in the middle of this story was this heartbreaking paragraph. Unconscionable.

Brian Lyman@brianlyman.bsky.social · last wk.

A lot of what-the-hell moments in this story, but building a data center in a floodplain in Louisiana is inviting the wrath of Poseidon.

This is my last working week as the labour reporter at PressProgress. I received notice a little over a week ago that the labour reporter position is being terminated and I’m being laid off.

Jimothy Takes www.patreon.com/merrittk/pos...

If you use AI for your advertisement flyers, I'm going to make assumptions about you. I'm going to assume you cut corners on everything. If you're a bakery, I'm going to assume you use poor quality ingredients. If you're a handyman, same thing, I'll assume you cut corners on your work.

The SPLC has documented hate groups, antigovernment figures, conspiracy propagandists and various hard-right extremists in the United States. The #IntelligenceProject's latest guide aims to help researchers, journalists and other writers navigate this complex subject: https://bit.ly/3RhcqqT

Pete Hegseth: "We need our warriors to embrace the Spartan mindset" U.S. Military: *suffers crushing defeat to the Persians*

Maybe it's me pining for another era, but I am so surprised that every time Hegseth fires or demotes someone very transparently due to their identity, political opponents talk about it in the frame of the "culture war" that enables that.

Rep. Scott Peters@repscottpeters.bsky.social · 2w ago

Rear Adm. Amy Bauernschmidt and others earned these promotions through years of service and achievement. Secretary Hegseth cancelled them because of his nonsense culture wars. This hurts our military readiness and national security at the same time President Trump continues to start new wars.

Kind of funny how none of the people panning the "could AI one day be consciousness" article have no background or even engagement with neuroscience. And by funny I mean wholly predictable.

like 1/3 of the country can't breathe and we've had a parasite outbreak, we're in a perma-war with Iran, but resenting what other people get and policing kids sports teams seems like a top strategy to deal with that

Alejandra Caraballo@esqueer.net · 3w ago

Matt Yglesias is simply a horrible person.

Fox News' website is currently treating tonight's Trump election denial speech as less important than Caitlin Clark swearing at a ref.

How's it's playing.

Mike Roger's, a senator from Michigan posted this on his social media. Perhaps he has forgotten that Canadian firefighters have come to his country to help fight their forest fires. Or that a Canadian firefighter pilot died in Colorado this week helping put out their forest fires.

my absolute favorite bit going on the internet right now is that Washington Post Opinion continues to make these extremely rage bait podcasts and vertical videos and absolutely no one watches them and they are universally reviled. Like even with the quotetweet dunking these have like seven views

Hey @theonion.com I love you guys but please don't support a festival that's spotlighting the absolutely fould, rancid piece of human trash that is the egregiously unfunny Ben Bankas This is the guy who said, of Renee Good, "“Her last name was Good. That’s what I said after they shot her"

Bankas is a proud bigot who only stopped being a darling in alt-right comedy because they had a problem with him being Jewish. He promoted white nationalist and antisemitic comedians until at least the Palestinian genocide when Nazis likewise took issue with him being pro Israel.

Rachel Gilmore@rachelgilmore.bsky.social · 3w ago

Hey @theonion.com I love you guys but please don't support a festival that's spotlighting the absolutely fould, rancid piece of human trash that is the egregiously unfunny Ben Bankas This is the guy who said, of Renee Good, "“Her last name was Good. That’s what I said after they shot her"

The Las Vegas skyline from Blade Runner 2049 vs the Toronto skyline from right now.

These images of First Nations community members evacuating Collins, Ontario on motorboats are absolutely surreal www.facebook.com/reel/1548244...

Luke LeBrun@lukelebrun.ca · 3w ago

These photos of FNs community members fleeing their homes by boat are genuinely apocalyptic (Photo via Wayne Wastaken of Collins, Ontario, who says his “hometown is gone”) www.facebook.com/share/r/1ArN...

Pave paradise, put up a data centre...

In America today, the wealthiest 1% is now worth more than the entire American middle class. That never happened before.