The Indian government has a monopoly on radio news, allowing it to dictate what hundreds of millions of people hear. With an election approaching, that gives prime minister Narendra Modi a huge advantage.

Radio has been part of Zareef Ahmad Zareef’s life since childhood. Today, he listens every morning and says it’s “a mandatory indulgence” in the evenings. A Kashmiri poet, Zareef has worked on radio as a cultural and literary commentator—he’s even written programs for children—and he says that the medium is woven into the fabric of society. “In Kashmir, it has preserved our heritage, literature, culture,” he says. “We are indebted to it in the way that it has recorded our history.”

When, starting in August 2019, the Indian government all but shut off telecommunications in Kashmir during a political crisis, Zareef relied on radio to stay on top of events.

This year marked a century since the first radio broadcast was made in India. In the age of social media, radio has endured, with hundreds of millions of people still tuning in across the country. The state broadcaster All India Radio has 262 radio stations that reach almost every part of India, broadcasting in 23 languages and 146 dialects. There are over 388 private FM stations spread across the biggest and smaller cities. But that enormous reach has one major limitation. People like Zareef who are looking for diverse news sources can’t turn to their local radio stations because the Indian government maintains a complete monopoly on radio news. Instead, they must on foreign broadcasters.

“I listened to BBC, Voice of America, and others on my radio when I wanted an alternate source of information about what’s happening to us and around the world,” Zareef says. Even though he questions the motives of international channels, he is adamant about the need to hear alternative perspectives. “Until there is criticism of an idea, it doesn’t become respectable,” he says. “Perpetuating a singular point of view is not democracy.”

With a national election approaching—and a government that has been widely accused of censoring unfavorable coverage, arresting or harassing journalists, and shutting off the internet during moments of crisis—free speech activists, journalists, and opposition politicians worry that control over radio will hand the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party a huge advantage, limiting negative coverage of its candidates and giving it a platform for its talking points.

“In the context in which we are living, which is a unipolar government, the concern is amplification,” says political journalist Anuradha Raman. “Because you’re not giving any news on private radio at all, it just amplifies the government’s voice.”

The roots of government control over India’s airways stretch back to colonial rule. In the early 1930s, the British colonial administration bought up the bankrupt Indian Broadcast Corporation, relaunching it in 1936 as All India Radio. After independence, the Indian and Pakistani governments inherited the notion that “news on radio can be very dangerous and can easily lead to the spread of rumor, more than newspapers and others, and that it needs to be absolutely controlled,” says Isabel Alonso Huacuja, a historian at Columbia University and author of _Radio for Millions_, a book about radio’s development in the Indian subcontinent.

Post-independence, the government even tried to control the music that went onto the airwaves. For a time, popular music from the Bollywood industry was banned in favor of more classical music. People found a way around the blockade by tuning in to Radio Ceylon, based in Sri Lanka, which found a dedicated audience in both India and Pakistan.

Private radio stations only emerged in the early 2000s, after a court challenge. The industry expanded in phases as legacy media companies got into the business one by one. But their output remains limited to music, entertainment, infotainment, weather, and traffic. Even sports coverage is restricted. In 2019, the year of the last general election, the government allowed private FM channels to carry news bulletins, but only those produced by All India Radio, which have to be aired in unaltered form.

This isn’t just a question of freedom of speech, but of economics. Listeners want news and sports, meaning that private companies struggle to compete with the state broadcasters.

“Freedom on news, current affairs, and sports—even sports is very restricted, so that government radio gets unfair advantages—will allow multiple content options, give multiple perspectives to citizens, as well as open free and authentic news broadcast in backyards of India, its emerging small-town, semi-urban population,” says Uday Chawla, general secretary of the Association of Radio Operators of India, an industry body.

Without news and current affairs commentary, private radio loses out on listeners and advertisers. In the US, where there are few restrictions on radio broadcasting, the share of radio in all advertising is 12 percent, Chawla says. In India, it’s just 3 percent. The association has been trying to convince the Indian government to relax its monopoly for years, with little success.

Some broadcasters who got into the business hoping that the rules would change have given up waiting. “For 16 years I was doing the same kind of stuff: same Valentine’s Day, same Diwali, as if nothing else is happening in the world,” says former radio jockey Simran Kohli. “It’s like we were not growing up … we were being treated as children,” she says. She joined radio in the hope that news would be allowed, but the governments kept pushing it “till a new minister came, a new government came, but eventually nothing really happened.”

In 2013, campaign group Common Cause petitioned the Supreme Court to end the ban. In 2017, the home ministry, which controls the security apparatus in India, submitted an affidavit in the court and said news on private radio could pose a “security risk” since there was no mechanism to “monitor the contents of the news bulletins.”

In an era of social media misinformation and hate speech, it may feel strange to worry so much about radio. But the medium is powerful, reaching 99.1 percent of the population and stretching deep into areas where the internet hasn’t fully come to dominate. It’s also a trusted medium, the place people have historically turned to during disasters, emergencies, and moments of national importance. If Indira Gandhi comes on the radio saying a state of emergency is being declared, you’d better believe it. If a radio announcer say it’s going to flood, it is going to flood; if they say India lost a cricket match, it did. During the Covid pandemic, Chawla says, private radio stations broadcast 30,000 hours of health advice to the public.

A 2023 Reuters Institute report found that All India Radio remains India’s most trusted news brand. In a media environment increasingly characterized by a cacophony of voices, the homogeneity of the single, clear voice on the radio imbues huge power—even if that power comes without any guarantee of objectivity.

“It is an absurdity that you want a particular kind of news to be heard by everybody,” says Vipul Mudgal, director and chief executive of Common Cause. “FM radio stations are hyperlocal, they serve hyperlocal communities, allow them to do hyperlocal news.”

The current media landscape in India is sharply polarized, and the mainstream media is largely seen by independent journalists and the opposition as favoring the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The government has been widely accused of trying to censor unfavorable media coverage and limit alternative voices on social media.

Modi himself has embraced radio. Since October 2014, the prime minister has hosted his own monthly show, _Mann Ki Baat_ (“_Words from the Heart_”). On his show, Modi talks about the policies and schemes of his government and sometimes announces new ones. His focus is usually on issues affecting rural populations, where the majority of the population still live.

Kohli, the former radio jockey, is among the show’s admirers. “I have heard it, and I know people have strong opinions about it, but the show talks about that 70 percent of the population which no one is able to reach. At least through _Mann Ki Baat_ they know what is happening for them.”

Modi himself has said that when the show began, “I had decided it would not carry anything political or any praise for the government, or for Modi for that matter.”

But opponents and civil society have accused Modi of using the airwaves to push his political agenda. In 2015, during state elections, the opposition tried unsuccessfully to get the election commission to ban Modi’s radio show, alleging that it violated electoral codes.

When the show’s landmark 100th episode was aired earlier this year, community radio stations were “advised” by the government to carry the program in full. Reportedly, the government even asked for “a photo of the community listening to the broadcast as a memoir.” Students at a leading medical institute were barred from leaving their **hostels** for a week for skipping the program. When the June 2023 episode of _Mann Ki Baat_ aired, protesters in the north-eastern state of Manipur smashed radio sets because Modi made no mention of the violent conflict raging there.

Mudgal says that while the prime minister has “every right to use the medium of his choice,” the broadcast often ignores critical context or omits controversial stories that might paint the government in a less than flattering light.

In September, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India published recommendations to the Modi government on issues related to FM broadcasting. One of its recommendations was that “private FM operators should be allowed to broadcast news and current affairs programs, limited only to 10 minutes in each clock hour.”

But for any political leader entering an election season, this kind of outreach would be enormously valuable. The national poll is less than six months away, and if history is any guide there is little chance that the government will relinquish its grip on the airwaves.

Raman, the political journalist, says that the government’s monopoly leaves voters less informed. “I would have benefited from a private radio station telling me about my constituency,” she says. “I would have benefited from information on the candidates who are going to fight the elections. In 2024, I would benefit immensely from knowing whether they have any criminal cases against them so that I can exercise my vote more confidently. This is the kind of information that an informed citizenry must have.”

The Hundred-Year Battle for India’s Radio Airwaves

A WIRED analysis of more than 100 restricted channels shows these communities remain active, and content shared within them often spreads to channels accessible to the public.

In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, people concerned about online extremism turned their attention to the encrypted messaging app Telegram, where a Hamas-aligned group posted graphic images of the group’s attacks to a channel that now has 1.9 million followers. That content was then shared widely across social media. Following public pressure on Apple and Google several weeks into the Israel-Hamas war, Telegram “restricted” two of the major channels used by Hamas. But it did not, as it may appear to some users, ban them.

A WIRED investigation reveals that rather than ban or delete Hamas channels or those run by right-wing extremist groups, Telegram is hiding them from the users of the two major app stores, but they are still there. Some of the content from restricted channels is being shared broadly in unrestricted ones—despite Telegram’s mechanisms for stopping the sharing of such content. The findings show that while Telegram makes some of its most violative communities difficult to find, the people in restricted channels are still able to spread their messages, experts say, and the channels continue to function as spaces of radicalization.

WIRED and Jeff Allen, cofounder of the tech policy think tank the Integrity Institute, analyzed over 100 restricted channels and thousands of posts over more than two months. Most of these channels include content related to right-wing extremism and other forms of radicalized hate. WIRED’s analysis found that most of these channels remained active even when restricted.

“What they’re doing is making \[channels\] not show up in your search and discoverability, but they’re keeping them on the back end,” says Nicole Stewart, assistant professor of digital media at Texas State University.

Founded by Pavel Durov in 2013, Telegram has long been a favorite platform for extremists. Its channels have no limit on the number of subscribers who can join (groups have a 200,000-person limit), and its approach to content moderation has meant that groups and content that might violate the terms of service on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) remain accessible.

WIRED examined 108 restricted channels, including the Hamas-aligned channels Telegram restricted in late October, and 365 unrestricted channels over more than two months. Fifty-four of the public, unrestricted channels included content forwarded from the restricted channels, suggesting that they share overlapping membership. While some restricted channels have only a handful of messages per week, others, like the right-wing channel rlwolf\_9999, have upwards of 1,000.

Most of the channels were restricted during the months WIRED monitored them. However, in examining the Hamas channels that were restricted after the October 7 attacks, WIRED found that while content views dropped significantly—by about 70 percent—they still remained active, with the Hamas military-affiliated channel @qassambrigades continuing to share more than 20 pieces of content per day. Although views on the restricted channel often dipped, WIRED found that content from @qassambrigades was copied and pasted into the unrestricted channel @hpress, a popular news-focused channel that has over half a million subscribers.

“It’s not surprising that in a restricted environment that you’ll start to see that same network-sharing pattern,” says Stewart. “It’s what they do to share their own ideological beliefs and spread the message.”

Experts who study extremist groups on Telegram tell WIRED that the platform typically moderates these groups’ content in response to pressure from governments, law enforcement, or entities like Google and Apple that have the ability to restrict the app’s availability.

“What we seem to know from experience is that when Google and Apple say, ‘Hey, remove this,’ that’s when Telegram comes in and starts removing things,” claims Aleksandra Urman, a researcher at the University of Zurich who has studied Telegram and the far right in Europe. That also speaks about the “power of Google and Apple,” Urman says, because both companies are able to exert influence over Telegram’s moderation decisions.

While Telegram is available for download on Google Play and the Apple App Store, both Google and Apple disallow apps that promote hate speech, terrorism, and violent content. For example, Google’s terms of service say it doesn’t “allow apps with content related to planning, preparing, or glorifying violence against civilians” or “apps that promote violence, or incite hatred against individuals.” Apps that violate these standards can be removed from Google Play or the App Store, significantly limiting their availability. That both app stores offer Telegram for download suggests the app is complying with the companies’ terms of service.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment. Google spokesperson Danielle Cohen tells WIRED, “Play apps that contain or feature UGC \[user-generated content\], including apps which are specialized browsers or clients to direct users to a UGC platform, must implement robust, effective, and ongoing UGC moderation. This includes providing an in-app system for reporting objectionable UGC and users and taking action against that UGC and/or user where appropriate.”

Telegram did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

In 2021, Telegram released a version of the app that could be downloaded directly onto Android, which the company billed as having “fewer restrictions.” Downloading the app directly puts it outside the scope of Google Play’s terms of service. Users who have this “sideloaded” version of Telegram can continue to see and post in restricted channels that regular users can’t access.

Cohen, the Google spokesperson, tells WIRED that “Google does not control app distribution on Android,” noting that Android’s open operating system means apps can be downloaded from other Android app stores or directly to users via an app’s website.

Telegram’s terms of service state that users may not “promote violence on publicly viewable Telegram channels, bots, etc.,” but it says nothing about how the platform responds to users who violate these rules. Telegram did not respond to questions about how it assesses whether a channel should be restricted or banned entirely, as it has done to Islamic State-affiliated channels in the past.

In a post on his public Telegram channel on October 13, Durov addressed the pressure to remove Hamas channels and content, saying, “Every day, Telegram’s moderators and AI tools remove millions of obviously harmful content from our public platform.” He also asserted that because Telegram doesn’t algorithmically amplify content, “it’s unlikely that Telegram channels can be used to significantly amplify propaganda.”

While Telegram may not be algorithmically promoting content, it is used to spread hateful ideologies, experts say. “Hate groups and designated terrorist groups who are using the platform as a way to mobilize the troops, basically, they’re functioning as influencers,” says Stewart of Texas State University. Part of that work is sharing and promoting the posts and ideas of other aligned groups and influencers, pushing users deeper into the extremist ecosystem.

When a Telegram user from a restricted channel forwards content to a nonrestricted channel, that content won’t be visible to anyone in the channel who has downloaded the app from Apple’s App Store or Google Play. But a simple copy and paste easily circumvents this feature for text-based messages. WIRED and Allen found over 400 instances where text-based content was copied word for word into both restricted and nonrestricted channels, with users often tagging the restricted channels in the unrestricted ones. The analysis did not include images and videos, which also comprise a considerable amount of the content.

For instance, messages sent to an unrestricted channel called OfficialTheCollective, with more than 4,000 members, included tags to restricted channels like SpecialQForces, a QAnon conspiracy channel, and often encouraged users to join.

One message posted to OfficialTheCollective even instructs users how to get around Google and Apple’s restrictions, saying, “Google and Apple \[are\] censoring the Telegram app downloaded via Google Play and Apple App Store. Use the web browser.” The message includes instructions about how to sideload Telegram, including a link to an instructional video on the video platform Rumble, which is popular with right-wing influencers.

In the unrestricted ExpatsPortugalEngChannel, WIRED found a message referencing a riot by Eritrean migrants in Germany. “Where are all the liberals who wanted these invaders in their country with open arms?” the post reads. “WE need you to go talk to them nicely, go first before the NAZIS take charge since YOU going to need them now.” The text is identical to a post shared in the restricted channel @InTheEndGodAlwaysWins.

In some cases, Telegram will restrict channels based on local laws. This includes Germany, which has strict rules against hate speech and neo-Nazism. Heidi Schulze, a researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, says that she was able to access channels restricted in Germany by using VPNs and Dutch SIM cards, which tricked Telegram into treating her as though she weren’t in Germany at all. Channel restrictions “from Telegram’s perspective might be a smart thing because they’re adhering to the local laws, but they’re not deleting channels,” she claims, as it would allow the platform to retain its claim of protecting freedom of speech.

But Urman, of the University of Zurich, says that restricting the channels can also create a space for more radicalization. “People who are likely to follow these groups even after they are restricted, who really want to see that content and are going to seek out the technical possibilities to do that, are more likely to be more radical,” she says.

Having already been “deplatformed” in some capacity can also mean that content is likely to be more extreme because channel operators are no longer factoring in a fear of content moderation, according to Urman. “These groups, even when they are restricted, are probably conducive to radicalization,” she says. “You’re not going to plan, in most cases, a certain attack out in the open. But now you’re not in the open. You are among your club.”

Rita Katz, executive director and founder of SITE Intelligence Group, a consultancy that monitors terrorist groups online, believes the company’s decision whether to ban a channel likely hinges on laws and enforcement. “The European Union has strong-armed Telegram to take action against ISIS and al Qaeda since 2015, and the company acted even more surgically against the groups’ networks in 2019,” claims Katz. “Telegram began deleting whole channels and accounts, not only of administrators or ISIS- and al Qaeda-connected accounts but also of everyone in those chat groups and channels.”

When a user forwards a message from a restricted channel to a nonrestricted one, a notice will appear to anyone who doesn’t have the “sideloaded” version of the app saying that the message can’t be displayed on that user’s device. WIRED’s analysis of thousands of restricted pieces of content found that only 36 of them appeared with the notice that they were restricted for violating Telegram’s terms of service. This means that a majority of restricted channels and content appear to be an effort to comply with the policies of Google and Apple, which can drop the app from their stores.

“Unless Telegram’s operations are going to be threatened somehow,” claims Stewart, “it’s probably not a priority for them.”

Telegram’s Bans on Extremist Channels Aren't Really Bans

Congressional leaders are discussing ways to reauthorize Section 702 surveillance, including by attaching it to the National Defense Authorization Act, Capitol Hill sources tell WIRED.

Rumors are rampant on Capitol Hill about an effort said to be underway by US congressional leaders to salvage a controversial surveillance program—a plan that sources say may include slipping a last-minute provision into a “must-pass” defense authorization bill.

Republican and Democratic senior aides tell WIRED that word of private talks between the party leaders began to leak late last week, sparking concerns that House speaker Mike Johnson and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer were mounting a last-ditch effort to rescue the program, known as Section 702, without the support of their rank-and-file members.

Neither Schumer nor Johnson have responded to requests for comment.

The 702 program—so named for its statutory source, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—allows the government to warrantlessly surveil the communications of foreign citizens “reasonably believed” to be overseas. While intelligence analysts cannot target legal US residents, they can and often do acquire the communications of Americans in contact with foreign surveillance targets. Section 702 targets are not limited to terrorists and criminals, and may include, for example, foreign officials, diplomats, and journalists—anyone whose calls, texts, or emails are believed to have intelligence value.

The 702 statute is set to expire at the end of the year, though surveillance under the program, obtained through the compelled cooperation of US telecoms, could technically continue until April.

By week’s end, top congressional leaders are expected to present the final text of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a massive bill that directs the Pentagon’s annual funding and one of only a few bills that lawmakers cannot afford to let die. Amending the bill to extend the Section 702 program would force members into an up-or-down vote with limited debate and no opportunity to omit any unwanted, last-minute changes.

The House and Senate passed their own versions of the NDAA this summer, and a conference of top lawmakers had been tasked with consolidating the two bills. Currently, however, only a few top lawmakers know what the bill’s final text will say. The remaining conferees expect to receive a copy of the NDAA as early as Wednesday, but may have less than a day to parse what is typically over 1,000 pages of text. Party leaders will expect at least half of the conference to sign off on the bill quickly and send it to the House and Senate floor for a vote.

House majority leader Steve Scalise and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment, nor did any senior members of the House and Senate armed services committees.

Republican staffers tell WIRED that extending the 702 program in this manner will almost certainly ignite another major quarrel in the House, where Republicans with considerable sway—including Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Matt Gaetz, who successfully ousted former House speaker Kevin McCarthy in October—are fiercely opposed to reauthorizing the program without a slew of new privacy safeguards.

An unlikely coalition of Republican and Democratic lawmakers was formed this year to oppose the intelligence community’s effort to obtain a clean reauthorization of the 702 program, which has been plagued by years of internal abuse at the National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation. The program’s critics have put up a laundry list of potential reforms, many of which are vehemently opposed by the White House and intelligence community at large. A chief demand of the Republicans, for example, has been to automatically strip the security clearance of any federal employee caught abusing 702 data.

A source familiar with the White House’s goals for the program tells WIRED it has encouraged Congress throughout the year to discuss potential privacy-enhancing reforms, while drawing a “red line” at demanding that the FBI obtain warrants before accessing raw 702 data for national security investigations. The source adds that the White House would be open, though, to discussing a warrant requirement for domestic criminal investigations, a recommendation made earlier this year by the president’s own intelligence advisory board.

Oversight officials on the congressional intelligence committees did not respond on Monday to inquiries from WIRED. A Democratic spokesperson for the House Intelligence Committee said its ranking member, Jim Himes, was unable to comment, but says a failure to reauthorize Section 702 by year’s end would prove to be a “disaster for national security” and a lost opportunity for meaningful reform.

Section 702 Surveillance Reauthorization May Get Slipped Into ‘Must-Pass’ NDAA

Yes, your iPhone automatically turns on NameDrop with the latest software update. But you shouldn’t really be worried about it—regardless of what the police are saying.

Apple’s NameDrop feature in iOS 17 is having a bit of a viral moment. Across the United States, police departments are warning adults to turn off the contact-sharing feature on their iPhones and their children’s devices. In addition, a widely shared TikTok video, with over 2 million views, describes how the feature lets strangers at the gym or on the bus steal all your information. The catch? It’s not true. You shouldn’t worry about NameDrop being some huge security risk.

First announced at the company’s developer conference in June, NameDrop is an extension of Apple’s AirDrop functionality. When NameDrop is turned on, two iPhone users can activate the feature by holding the top ends of their smartphones together. Then a contact card with your email and phone number may pop up on your own device. After that, you can tap **Share** or **Receive Only**. If you choose to share your contact information, it will be sent to the other device. End the transaction by tapping **Done** in the top left corner of your screen.

Contact sharing will be canceled if the two smartphones are moved apart anytime during the process or if you decide to lock your iPhone using the power button. Even though NameDrop is auto-enabled when you update to iOS 17, it’s crucial to note that consent is required throughout the process. Some random person on the street can’t just bump into you for a few seconds, and then walk away with your phone number.

Still want to turn off the NameDrop feature for your iPhone? Start by opening your **Settings**, then tap **General** and **AirDrop**. Go to the section labeled **Start Sharing By** and toggle **Bringing Devices Together** to the left. On this page, you can also change the settings for who can AirDrop information to your phone.

The iPhone isn’t the only Apple product that can use NameDrop. If you own a newer Apple Watch, you can receive the contact info from iPhones as well as other Apple Watches. To instigate a watch-to-watch transfer, you’ll need to open **Contacts** and tap on your image. Choose **Share** and hold your watches close together. (Holding hands is not required to complete the NameDrop.) Voluntarily follow the same steps listed above to share your info.

Apple calls the image that pops up during a NameDrop your Contact Poster. It’s not just for NameDrops; the Contact Poster lets you control what appears when a text or call lands on a friend’s or family member’s phone. It’s highly customizable, with a range of color choices, and the option to display a selfie, memoji, or just your name. Check out this guide for in-depth tips to personalize it.

Even though you shouldn’t worry very much about the NameDrop feature on your iPhone, it’s important to be aware of how your smartphone can leak personal data. A good place to start is by checking to see whether you’re sharing location data in a way you don’t actually intend to. Another basic step to keep your iPhone secure is to update the software as soon as the new option becomes available, so Apple can patch potential exploits.

You Don’t Need to Turn Off Apple’s NameDrop Feature in iOS 17

What you look for online is up to you—just make sure no one else is taking a peek.

When it comes to looking something up on the web, most of us default to “googling” it—Google's search engine has become so dominant that it's now a verb, in the same way that Photoshop is. But using Google for your searches comes with a privacy trade-off.

Google's business is, of course, based on advertising, and every search you make feeds into the profile of you that it uses to target the ads you see around the web. While Google isn't telling marketing firms what searches you're running, it is using those queries to build up a picture of you that ads can be sold against. As such, Google can be a real snoop about collecting all your data and using it to personalize your ads and the search results you get.

There are ways to increase your privacy on Google’s platforms, like using privacy-focused browsers, using privacy-focused alternatives to Google Maps, auto-deleting your web history after a certain time period, or simply limiting the amount of data the company collects in the first place, by opting out of features like web-based email and location awareness. (And you should know that using your browser's incognito mode isn’t as sneaky as you think it is.) If you're serious about getting off the data collection grid, there’s a bevy of other privacy-focused search options at your disposal. So if you want to use a search engine that doesn't keep track of your queries, serve your data to advertisers, or change your search results based on what it thinks you’ll like, you’ve got some options.

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is simple, secure, and private.

DuckDuckGo via David Nield

The granddaddy of Google alternatives, DuckDuckGo has made private search its raison d'être for more than 15 years. The service is a little harder to recommend these days, after a kerfuffle in 2022 where the company was caught in an apparent partnership with Microsoft that allowed the tech behemoth’s tracking scripts to run unimpeded on the DuckDuckGo browser. After outcry from privacy advocates, DuckDuckGo walked back that stance a few months later, and it now says it does indeed block Microsoft’s trackers.

If you can move past that particular ugly duckling, the service is still far more private than Google. DuckDuckGo says it collates information in search results from over 400 sources. It doesn’t draw from Google, but it does pull from places like Bing and Wikipedia. What it doesn’t do is personalize search results based on data it collects from users. Like Google, DuckDuckGo displays ads, but they’re not tailored to what it thinks you’ll like based on your search history.

DuckDuckGo can be installed into just about any browser via a browser extension. It also has a full browser available on desktop for Mac and Windows. There are also mobile apps on both iOS and Android that work as browsers while incorporating DuckDuckGo’s search engine.

On the browser and app alike, the service automatically tracks and blocks all the data-scraping efforts from the websites you visit. Press the shield button in the browser bar to see what sites have tried to collect your data or track your travels across the web. Another feature blocks trackers and data requests in other apps on your phone. DuckDuckGo says it can’t block certain scripts and trackers on the websites that run them (like Facebook, for example), but tapping that little button quickly lets you know what’s being blocked and what’s not.

Brave Search

Brave isn't going to keep track of what you're looking for.

Brave via David Nield

The privacy-focused browser extension provider Brave has its own dedicated search engine. The company launched the service in 2021. Like the other services on this list, Brave says its Search product doesn’t track your searches or log your data. It's impressively comprehensive—as much for its security and privacy as for the results you get.

Simply put, no logs of your queries are kept by the search engine. While that might make for a slightly less convenient user experience—Google might automatically know you're more interested in the Miami Dolphins than actual dolphins, for instance—it does mean that you can search without worrying that you're going to see any related advertising.

"It's impossible for us to share, sell, or lose your data, because we don’t collect it in the first place," says Brave. While the service might eventually become ad-supported, those adverts won't know anything about you or what you've been looking for on the web, making it distinctly different from Google's offering.

Brave also has a service in beta called Goggles that lets users customize their own page rankings to make search results more relevant to each person. It can have some issues, such as being a bit complicated and also could lead to people creating their own little filter bubbles—inadvertently or otherwise.

You can download the Brave Browser for desktop, or get its mobile apps on Android and iOS. You can also access the Brave search engine from any web browser and any device. You don't have to use the Brave browser to use it.

Kagi

The prospect of paying for a search engine might seem odd if you’re used to unlimited Googling on a whim. But that’s exactly the service Kagi is offering.

If you’re willing to pay for yet another subscription, Kagi is a premium search experience worth trying. You can customize how search results are displayed and how links are organized and accessed. There’s also a robust array of search operators and keyboard shortcuts to use. Kagi’s privacy policy is similar to the other services on this list, in that it doesn’t track your online movements or collect your data. It also doesn’t show ads, which feels like such a relief in the era of endless pop ups and sponsored posts.

The pricing plan is simple. There is a free tier, which allots you 100 searches per month before cutting you off. From there you can pay $5 per month for 500 searches, or get unlimited searches $10 a month. All plans, even the free ones, require you to make an account.

Kagi is available as a browser extension for Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari. Kagi’s Orion browser is available on the Mac, and it also has an iOS app.

Startpage

Want Google’s search results but without Google? Startpage may be the answer. The company serves up Google’s search results without you being tracked. “Startpage submits your query to Google anonymously, then returns Google results to you privately,” the company says on its website. It adds that Google “never sees you and does not know who made the request”.

Startpage, which was founded in the Netherlands in 2006, says that it doesn’t store people’s personal data or search history, and your IP address is removed by its servers. The company also says it blocks price trackers and prevents advertisers from showing you ads based on your online history. (It does show ads from Google’s search results). Its search results also let you click to open an anonymous view of them, which it claims works like a VPN.

The experience isn’t exactly the same as Google search, but the results are. For instance, if you search for something in the news—maybe Elon Musk, if you must—Google will show you a carousel of the latest news stories before its search results. Google also includes Musk’s latest tweets, videos of him, and photos. When you’re using Startpage, the clutter is removed and you just get URLs.

Mojeek

Mojeek doesn’t use search results from other search engines. Instead, the British search engine, which launched in 2006, is building its own index of the web. It’s doing this in the same way as Google and Bing. The company’s crawlers, which trawl the web and collect information about pages, have indexed more than six billion web pages.

This crawling isn’t as extensive as Google’s—back in 2013 Google said it was indexing 30 trillion web pages, 100 billion times a month—but Mojeek says its approach means it is fully in control of the search results it shows. The company argues there should be alternative indexes to those controlled by Big Tech. “Making and altering our own algorithm from scratch to display high quality and unbiased results is essential,” the company said in 2018.

But that’s not the only difference to Google. Mojeek also says it doesn’t track people. The search results you see are based entirely on the words that you type in, the company says, and it doesn’t collect IP addresses, search history or the clicks that you make.

Limiting Google

You can break the connection between Google Chrome and your Google account.

Google via David Nield

It's worth bearing in mind that if you're using Google Chrome and you're signed into Google, you may well be syncing your DuckDuckGo or Brave searches back to your Google account. Your Google web history and your Chrome browsing history (if you're signed into Google) will match up most of the time, because Google keeps them in sync by default, partly to make it easier to use Google across multiple devices.

To stop this from happening in Chrome, click the three dots in the top right-hand corner, then choose **Settings**. If you see that you're signed into your Google account at the very top, click **Turn off**—this will break the connection between Google and your browser, and you'll be given the option to delete all the data that's stored locally on your device (including your browsing history, bookmarks, and stored passwords).

Perhaps an easier option is to simply switch to another browser altogether—as we've already mentioned, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and Kagi all have them. Other good cross-platform alternatives to Chrome are Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari from Apple—but whichever one you switch to, be sure to check out the settings for deleting your browsing history as you go. (All of these browsers have simple-to-use options for this.)

Whichever browser you decide to use, opening up a private or incognito window while you're searching will prevent those searches from being logged inside the browser—as soon as you close the window, the search is gone forever. Bear in mind that these modes don't necessarily stop online companies from tracking your queries though. (If you sign into your Google account while in private mode, Google will still be able to track you.)

If you can't bring yourself to be parted from the search results that Google serves up, you can at least make sure that they're not remembered for too long. Open up your Google account settings page on the web, then click **Data & Privacy** and scroll down to **Web & App Activity.** You can choose either **Manage activity** to remove history and searches manually, or select the **Auto-delete** option to have this data wiped automatically once it's been stored for a certain amount of time.

Private and Secure Web Search Engines: DuckDuckGo, Brave, Kagi, Startpage

Plus: North Korean supply chain attacks, a Russian USB worm spreads internationally, and more.

Trillions of domestic phone records in the United States are tracked every year under a secretive surveillance operation, WIRED revealed this week. The Data Analytical Services program, which was previously known as Hemisphere, allows cops to request and analyze the phone records of people and others who they communicate with, including those not suspected of crimes. The surveillance system is run by the White House, with telecom firm AT&T providing phone records in response to law enforcement requests.

The crypto world kept tumbling this week. After Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty at the start of this month, it was the turn of crypto exchange Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao to face scrutiny from US officials. The US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against the company, which accuses it of violating US anti-money-laundering laws and of enabling Iran, Cuba, and Russia to launder dirty money.

If you’re in the US and have some extra time over the long holiday weekend, it’s also worth catching up on Andy Greenberg’s epic tale of the three young hackers twho brought down the internet with the Mirai botnet—and their story of redemption. Then it’s definitely time to log off.

That’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy stories we didn’t report on in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.

Google makes most of its money from advertising—and it doesn’t like ad blockers, which prevent millions of ads being shown on websites every day. In recent months, the company has been cracking down on ad blockers on YouTube in a big way. But that’s just the start of it.

This week YouTube confirmed it has, in some instances, introduced a five-second delay before videos load if people are using an ad blocker in their browser. “In the past week, users using ad blockers may have experienced suboptimal viewing, which included delays in loading, regardless of the browser they are using,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Verge. The company admitted the delays had been happening after some people on Reddit and Hacker News spotted slow loading times and initially thought it was because of the browser they were using.

The move follows Google announcing last week that it is going ahead with plans to change how Chrome browser extensions operate, which may limit how some popular ad blockers work. Last year the company paused its plans to roll out Manifest V3, the platform that browser extensions work on, after complaints about how it would impact some extensions. As Ars Technica reported, Google is planning on rolling out a revised version of Manifest V3 in June next year. Google says Manifest V3 is designed to make Chrome run smoothly by reducing the resources that extensions can use and improve security. However ad blockers and privacy experts have criticized how the system works and, in particular, changes to the Declarative Net Request API.

Google proposed putting restrictions on this API but has relaxed these somewhat in the new version of Manifest V3. It originally planned to allow browser extensions to make 5,000 content-filtering “rules,” but it has now increased this to 30,000 rules. AdGuard, an ad blocker, has tentatively welcomed some of the revised changes. Elsewhere, uBlock Origin, which uses around 300,000 filtering rules, has created a “lite” version of its extension in response to Manifest V3. The developer behind uBlock Origin says the lite version is not as “capable” as the full version. Meanwhile, browser makers Brave and Firefox say they are introducing work-arounds to stop ad blockers from being impacted by the changes.

Supply chain attacks, where malware is implanted in a company's legitimate software and spread to the firm's customers, can be incredibly hard to detect and can cause billions of dollars in damage if they’re successful. Hackers for North Korea are increasingly adopting the sophisticated attack method.

This week Microsoft revealed it has discovered the hermit kingdom’s hackers implanting malicious code inside an installer file for photo and video editing software CyberLink. The installer file used legitimate code from CyberLink and was hosted on the company's servers, obscuring the malicious file it contained. Once installed, Microsoft said, the malicious file would deploy a second payload. More than 100 devices have been impacted by the attack, Microsoft says, and it has attributed the attack to the North Korea-based Diamond Sleet hacking group.

After details of the attack were revealed, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre and the Republic of Korea’s National Intelligence Service issued a warning saying that North Korea’s supply chain attacks are “growing in sophistication and volume.” The two bodies say the tactics support North Korea’s wider priorities, such as stealing money to help fund its ailing economy and nuclear programs, espionage, and stealing tech secrets.

Some flights have had to change course or lost satellite signals in midair due to electronic warfare, _The New York Times_ reported this week. The ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza have seen GPS jamming and spoofing technologies interfere with the daily operation of flights in and around the areas. The incidents, so far, have not been dangerous. But they highlight the increase in electronic warfare capabilities—which seek to interrupt or disrupt the technologies used for communications and infrastructure—and how the technology needed to launch them is getting cheaper. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, electronic warfare tactics have become increasingly common on both sides, as drones being used for surveillance and reconnaissance have had their signals interrupted and rockets have been sent off course.

Gamaredon is one of Russia’s most brazen hacking groups—the hackers have consistently attacked Ukrainian systems. Now one piece of its malware, a worm that spreads via USB stick and is dubbed LitterDrifter, has spread internationally. The worm has been spotted in the US, Hong Kong, Germany, Poland, and Vietnam, according to researchers at security firm Check Point. The company’s researchers say the worm includes two elements: a spreading module and a second module that also communicates with Gamaredon’s servers. “It’s clear that LitterDrifter was designed to support a large-scale collection operation,” the Check Point researchers write, adding that it’s likely the worm has “spread beyond its intended targets.”

Google’s Ad Blocker Crackdown Is Growing

Security researcher Barrett Lyon, who makes visualizations of the internet's network infrastructure, is back with a new piece chronicling the rise of the IPv6 protocol.

When you're browsing online, you probably don't pay close attention to the URLs in the address bar of your browser, much less the IP addresses of the sites you're visiting or your own internet connection. But behind the scenes, the Internet Protocol is the key network communication and routing mechanism that's underlying everything you see and do. The mainstream internet was based on IP version 4, or IPv4, but this network had technical limitations including too few IP addresses to support the global explosion of internet use. So in the 2010s, the web community embarked on a massive migration effort to begin supporting the next-generation network known as IPv6.

As you read WIRED.com, though, the technical side of the internet still probably all feels pretty abstract and far away. Wanting to essentially “see” IPv6 for himself, security researcher Barrett Lyon set out to chart the topography and growth of the newer network alongside the classic IPv4. Lyon has been making kaleidoscopic visualizations of the internet since 2003, and he collectively calls this work Opte. But this is the first time the project has contrasted the IPv4 and IPv6 networks over time.

“I wanted to map IPv6, which begins as a little tiny scrap of a thing, and juxtapose it with IPv4, or what some might call ‘the real internet’" Lyon tells WIRED. “The most surprising thing is toward the end of the video, you see that IPv6 has accelerated in growth and adoption, and you can see that eventually it's going to be more robust and more prevalent and eclipse IPv4. Eventually, we’ll have this network we’ve been using for 35 years that will no longer be important.”

The IPv6 internet at the end of September.

Courtesy of Barrett Lyon

Lyon uses what are known as Border Gateway Protocol routing tables—basically maps of the best and most efficient routes for data to travel across the internet—to generate the Opte visualizations. The data comes from University of Oregon's RouteViews Archive Project.

As the images came back for IPv6, Lyon says, he was surprised to see the regions of the world that had adopted IPv6 more enthusiastically or more slowly. The tech community in the United States, for example, was slower to incorporate IPv6 than that in the European Union.

Opte also visualizes a leapfrog effect when newer, highly networked technologies like artificial intelligence platforms come online using IPv6 without the legacy infrastructure of digital systems that have been around for decades and slowly revised and improved.

“IPv4 has been around for so long, and it's fascinating to see technological advances on that network, but IPv6 supports bigger networks by default like AI networks, that are growing at exponential rates where these computers all need to talk to each other,” Lyon says.

The IPv4 internet at the beginning of October.

Courtesy of Barrett Lyon

Lyon points out that watching IPv4 and the rise and transition to IPv6 through Opte not only illustrates the current moment of the internet, but also begins to shed light on where things may go next.

“What this comparison hints at is that there will be new protocols after IPv6 that need to exist in order to enable new technologies that we haven’t thought of yet,” he says. “Even more intricate protocols to support features like space communications or big AI farms. There will be some point in time where even IPv6 won’t be sufficient to support what society needs from the internet.”

Go on a Psychedelic Journey of the Internet's Growth and Evolution

There’s a devastating amount of heavy news these days. Psychology experts say you need to know your limits—and when to put down the phone.

Scrolling through social media can feel like a nightmare these days. You’re reading about the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war, and then you’re reading about the horrors of the war between Ukraine and Russia. You’re learning about the latest devastating climate news. Democracy is under threat in America. It can feel like everything is falling apart.

This, of course, can have a significant effect on your mental health. You start to feel overwhelmed. Not only are you dealing with the regular stresses of daily life—your job, your finances, your personal relationships—but now you’re thinking about the most serious problems the world is facing. Social media algorithms tend to elevate the most contentious content, so these feeds are showing you things that will elicit a visceral response—they’re putting the doom in doomscrolling.

According to psychology experts, this has become a serious problem. People are ingesting too much negative news, and it’s not only affecting them personally but impacting society at large. People can handle some bad news, but what if it’s a lot of bad news? And what if a lot of people are doing this while trying to function in the world together?

Matthew Price, a professor of psychological science at the University of Vermont, says that stress is cumulative. One thing starts stressing you out, and then it’s another thing, and then one more thing. Suddenly, you’re spiraling. He says the stress can continue throughout your day even when you’ve stopped bingeing on bad news on social media.

“Some of the work that we have done has shown it definitely increases your stress in the moment. It could increase your stress throughout the rest of your day,” Price says. “When you doomscroll, it gets much easier to reach your limit than I think you would if you weren’t doing that.”

Price says ingesting a lot of negative news can cause anxiety and depression, at least for some period of time, but it’s especially likely to “exacerbate” anxiety, depression, and PTSD in people who have a history of experiencing those conditions. He says that people often doomscroll because there’s something bad going on and they want to find a way to fix the problem they’re reading about.

“When we’re doomscrolling, we’re kind of looking for the resolution to the issue. Read some more posts. Read some more articles. If I get more information, then maybe I’ll understand the problem,” Price says, describing the doomscrolling cycle.

This doesn’t just affect individuals. When a lot of people are experiencing the stress of the news of the world at once, it can make them more likely to “snap at each other,” Price says. We may not realize it, but the reason that guy was rude to you at Starbucks might be that he has read too many damn scary news articles.

“When you have multiple people who are struggling, they’re going to have a harder time communicating together,” says Bethany Teachman, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. “We have to think of these things from a systemic perspective or we’re not going to be very effective at making change.”

Teachman says doomscrolling can “skew our sense of what’s going on.” You start to think everything and everyone is the worst, but it’s quite possible little of it is actually affecting you personally. Perhaps terrible news from around the world would not be changing your daily life unless you were reading about it, and it’s important to recognize when it’s time to log off.

“We do need to stay informed, but when we move past informed to feeling overwhelmed and often paralyzed and feeling like we’re under constant threat, it’s clearly crossed over into a negative place,” Teachman says. “I think part of what’s happening is most of the news stories tend to be negative, so it gives us this sense that we’re in a constant state of danger and that we are vulnerable and the world is a very dangerous place.”

In terms of solutions, Teachman says people need to limit their exposure to social media and the news to keep their lives balanced. It’s OK to read some news to stay informed and check out what people are saying online, but it can get unhealthy if you overdo it. Once you’ve read enough to know what’s going on, think of other things that you enjoy doing and that help you maintain your mental health, she says.

“It’s not about ‘this is a bad thing and this is a good thing.’ It’s about how you engage with it and how it fits in with the rest of what’s going on in your life,” Teachman says. “How are you living the rest of your life, and what are the impacts on that?”

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the news, Teachman says it’s important to consider what your values are and how you can act on those values in your daily life. Think about who you want to be and what you want to accomplish. This can focus your mind when you’re feeling overwhelmed.

If you’re not feeling like you’re who you want to be right now, she says, think of small things you can do to get closer to becoming that person. Think about the things you can do to get closer to that goal so you’re more capable of handling stress and feeling mentally well, and about the things you can do to help solve the problems you’re worried about.

“Take a step back from your social media. Take a step back from your phone. Take a step back from the stressors unless the thing that’s stressful is imminently going to harm you,” Price says. “And get more local.”

Price says that acting locally on issues you’re concerned about can help you maintain your mental health because otherwise things can feel too far away and too difficult to solve. Maybe you can’t end a war, but perhaps you can help some people in your community or get your community to do something that helps a bigger problem.

People are overwhelmed. They’re tired. Sometimes you want to just curl up in a ball and pull your comforter over your head. Teachman says that’s the worst thing you can do for your mental health. It’s important to connect with people to maintain your mental health, she says, and sometimes you can connect with people and be part of the solution to a problem at the same time.

It's Time to Log Off

From Russia to Iran, the feds have charged Binance with allegedly conducting well over $1 billion in transactions with sanctioned countries and criminal actors.

For years, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, has been dogged by rumors of malfeasance and federal investigations. Today, in a set of accusations that will rock the already tumultuous world of crypto, the US Department of Justice revealed criminal charges against the company and its chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, claiming they enabled the laundering of vast flows of dirty money across the globe, from Cuba to Iran to Russia.

The indictment against Binance, unsealed ahead of a press conference by US attorney general Merrick Garland, accuses the company of billions of dollars of transactions that violated US anti-money-laundering laws, including well over a billion dollars of actual criminal transactions and sanctions evasions. Separate indictments specifically charge Zhao and former chief compliance officer Samuel Lim with allowing those illicit transactions to take place.

Garland announced Tuesday that Zhao had pleaded guilty to a felony money-laundering violations charge and that the company had agreed to pay a $4.3 billion fine as part of a settlement with the DOJ. Zhao has also stepped down from his role running the company and agreed to pay a $150 million fine. Lim must pay $1.5 million as part of the settlement.

“Binance prioritized its profits over the safety of the American people,” Garland said during the press conference. “Binance became the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange in part because of the crimes it committed. Now it is paying one of the largest corporate penalties in US history."

The charging documents describe a company that allegedly turned a blind eye, sometimes willfully and knowingly, prosecutors claim, to the trading of funds from sanctioned countries and regions like Iran, Cuba, Syria, and Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine such as Crimea and Donbas, as well as the now defunct criminal dark-web market Hydra.

“Their illicit financing problems were overwhelming to an unsolvable degree,” a former Binance executive tells WIRED, echoing the charges. The former executive was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about internal company matters. “It was a nightmare trying to get a handle on all the sanctions evasions taking place. The execs were more and more hostile to compliance teams trying to mitigate a lot of issues that they were seeing.”

The indictment alleges, for instance, that Binance allowed more than 1.1 million transactions between US persons and Iranians—each one an alleged sanctions violation—totaling to a value of nearly $900 million. It also alleges $106 million in direct flows of money from the Russian dark-web market Hydra, which offered narcotics, stolen data, and money-laundering services, to Binance accounts.

US prosecutors claim Binance processed around $275 million in both deposits and withdrawals to BestMixer, a cryptocurrency “mixing” service designed to make cryptocurrency transactions harder to trace, before Dutch law enforcement shut down that service in May 2019 as part of a money-laundering investigation. The charging document goes on to allege that Binance users included ransomware gangs, hackers who had plundered crypto from other exchanges, and scammers. In comments at Tuesday's press conference, US treasury secretary Janet Yellen added that Binance had facilitated transactions with terrorist groups “including Hamas,” which the US designates as a terrorist organization, as well as purveyors of child sexual abuse material.

For years after its founding in 2017, the prosecutors say, Binance had virtually no know-your-customer requirements, in violation of US money-laundering laws, despite offering its services to US users. In the indictment against Zhao, he’s accused of encouraging the company to operate in a “grey zone,” telling employees that it was “better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

Even once Binance appeared to enact more stringent know-your-customer rules for users in 2021, the indictment alleges, the company often ignored sanctions violations or knowingly allowed users to circumvent its money-laundering checks. More than 12,500 users, the indictment claims, listed Iranian phone numbers on their accounts but were allowed to continue trading on the exchange.

“Iran is very tricky,” a Binance staffer wrote in an internal communication at one point, according to the indictment. “We definitely do not want to acknowledge we have them onboard … our official stance is we gotten rid of all of them \[sanctions\] and blocked.”

Binance's investigations and compliance team, according to the charging document, was instructed to check on a user's “VIP level" before banning their account for violations—or to even give VIP users new accounts despite known violations. In one internal conversation, a Binance staffer allegedly told another to warn a VIP user to “be careful with his flow of funds, especially from darknet markets like hydra,” according to prosecutors. The staffer allegedly added that the user “can come back with a new account \[but\] this current one has to go, it's tainted.”

In one particularly damning message read by Garland, a compliance executive allegedly joked, “Is washing drug money too hard these days? Come to Binance. We got cake for you.”

Rumors and reports of Binance's use by criminals have circulated for years. Reuters reported in June 2022 that Binance had enabled more than $2.35 billion in money laundering by hackers and drug traffickers, which Binance denied. In December of last year, Reuters wrote that the Department of Justice was considering criminal charges against the company.

The charges and settlement come on the heels of the fraud conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX, which once rivaled Binance as one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. “In just the past month, the Justice Department has successfully prosecuted the CEOs of two of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges in two separate criminal cases," Garland said in Tuesday's press conference. "The message here should be clear: Using new technology to break the law does not make you a disruptor, it makes you a criminal.”

DOJ Charges Binance With Vast Money-Laundering Scheme and Sanctions Violations

The North Atlantic Fellas Organization is trying to shut down Trump’s flailing social media platform before the 2024 election—by shitposting.

As former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social social media platform teeters on the brink of financial collapse, a group of shitposting cartoon dogs known for mocking Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine has infiltrated the platform. They’re trying to bring it down from the inside before the 2024 US election.

The North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO) is an online activist group founded last year to combat pro-Russia propaganda related to the invasion of Ukraine. Last month, the group turned its attention to Trump’s social network and launched a campaign to take over the trending topics section on the website. The group says that the operation, which included 50 “NAFO commandos,” as members targeting Truth Social call themselves, was so successful that those running the campaign now have a long-term goal: Take down Truth Social completely.

“The goal we have in mind, which is lofty, is to help bring the platform down ahead of the 2024 election,” Rock Kenwell, the pseudonymous leader of the NAFO commandos, tells WIRED. “We know it's going to be an aggregator for extremism and probably violence the way things are looking at this point.”

Describing the Truth Social platform’s current environment, Kenwell compared the challenge of combating the spread of pro-Trump messaging on the platform with “dealing with your racist uncle that nobody wants at the Thanksgiving dinner table because he’s just obnoxious and looking to fight with everybody.”

Truth Social was launched in early 2022 by Trump, who had been kicked off of mainstream platforms for inciting violence. Trump claimed that the network would challenge “Big Tech platforms” like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as a free speech platform open to everyone, but in the 18 months since it started, the site has failed to attract anyone outside of Trump sycophants and QAnon conspiracy groups, and has instead become the butt of late night comedy. Last week, a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed that the platform had lost $31 million since it launched.

“It's a very easy platform to manipulate. It's a very primitive, social media environment,” adds Kenwell.

Kenwell, along with other members of NAFO, posts anonymously to avoid blowback from the individuals and groups they are targeting. They also represent themselves online by using various cartoons of the Shiba Inu, a Japanese breed of dog that became a popular internet meme in 2013.

While most of NAFO’s activity takes place on X, the website formerly as Twitter, Kenwell had considered targeting Truth Social after he was inspired in part by a campaign earlier this year run by three friends—including the founder of the Birds Aren’t Real satirical conspiracy movement—who managed to get the #DeSantis2024 hashtag trending on Truth Social before it suddenly shut down.

But Kenwell was finally convinced to take action when he saw the Biden campaign join Truth Social. Biden’s campaign team joined Truth Social in October and briefly surged past the Trump campaign account in terms of followers, though the Trump account, with almost 65,000 followers, has since surpassed the Biden account, which currently has almost 56,000 followers.

On October 31, Kenwell launched his campaign to try and take over the trending topics section on Truth Social by using anti-MAGA hashtags. Just 50 members were involved in the initial wave, but they successfully got hashtags that could be misinterpreted as pro-MAGA onto the trending list, including misspelt phrases like #StollenElection or #ErectionFraud. This goal was achieved in a matter of hours, according to screenshots shared with WIRED of the platform’s trending topics.

In the space of 10 days, the Commandos posted over 8,200 “Truths” containing their anti-Trump hashtags. “These guys are way easier to trigger than the Russian spambots over on Twitter,” wrote NAFO member Pinkeye McGrew in a private Truth Social group hours after the operation began.

The campaign was orchestrated in this private group, and everyone in the group shared (or “reTruthed”) each other’s posts to make it look like there were a lot more people involved.

The hashtags were eventually removed from the trending list, but Kenwell claims the campaign had an even greater impact on the platform: “We actually made Truth Social take down new app downloads from the app store,” Kenwell says. “We made them shut off new account registration just after our campaign began.”

Truth Social was in fact unavailable to download from the app store, and new registrations were closed around the time the campaign took place. However, this has periodically happened at other times on Truth Social and WIRED could not independently verify that the NAFO campaign was responsible for closing new registrations.

Truth Social did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment about NAFO’s campaign to impact Truth Social’s trending list, why it closed registrations around this time, and whether the decision was linked to NAFO’s campaign.

The success of the campaign did, however, entice around 200 NAFO members to sign up for future anti-Truth Social campaigns, Kenwell tells WIRED.

NAFO is planning to spread pro-Ukraine content on the platform later this month. “The thing is to get the word out in that environment about the realities of what's happening in Ukraine because, it being a MAGA environment, they are pro-Russia, they're very anti-Ukraine,” Kenwell says.

Next, the group will take aim at the few advertisers who have decided to pay Trump to sell gold, alternative medicine, and Trump merchandise on his platform.

Kenwell says he has a database of around 50 Truth Social ads queued up and ready to be faked and deployed at once. “So, all of a sudden, it's just a glut of fake ads,” Kenwell says. “It's really easy to fake ads on Truth Social … If we can take any ad and get a couple of thousand false versions of that ad running, nobody can really identify what is the original ad anymore and what's fake.”

While the operation was being conducted by anonymous accounts, the campaign was far from top secret. On X, Kenwell detailed exactly what the group was doing and how new members could join in a thread he called the NAFO Commandos Quick Start Guide.

Though a few of the NAFO accounts have been taken down—including a spoof Russian Embassy account, which was taken down for pretending to be an official government agency—Kenwell says he’s not worried about being kicked off Truth Social.

"We don't care, because we'd just try again, we'd make new accounts and get back on there again,” Kenwell says. “Anyway, I don't believe that they have the capability or the personnel to deal with something like this on an ongoing basis.”

Source

Wired