X, formerly known as Twitter, is lagging behind competing platforms TikTok and Instagram when it comes to restricting the reach of so-called “nudify” services that create non-consensual porn by “undressing” individuals using AI, Motherboard has found. 

On December 8, Bloomberg reported that nudify apps are soaring in popularity across the internet in part due to rampant promotion on social media platforms. In response to journalists’ questions, TikTok and Meta both began blocking search terms related to nudify apps. At the time, Bloomberg reported that X did not respond to a request for comment, as is standard for the company since it was purchased by billionaire Elon Musk. 

A week later, X has still not implemented similar controls on its platform. Searching “undress” on TikTok brings up no results either in the “Top” or “Videos” tabs. Instead, the platform warns users that the phrase may be associated with activity that violates the platform’s guidelines. Searching the same term on Instagram similarly brings up no results. Searching “undress” on X, however, readily surfaces a verified account with nearly 20,000 followers promoting nudify app services. X’s results initially say “including results for ‘endress’” and prompt the user to “search instead for ‘undress,’” but this appears to have no effect on the search results. 

Screenshots comparing search results for "undress" on Instagram, TikTok, and X.

Searching “undress AI” on TikTok also brings up no results and a warning that the term is linked to behavior that violates content guidelines, whereas the same term on X brings up numerous tweets in the “latest” tab from accounts promoting nudify services. Notably, Meta’s restrictions appear to be imperfect; while searching “undress” is blocked, searching “undress AI” surfaces accounts seemingly promoting nudify apps. 

Screenshots comparing search results for "undress AI" on Instagram, TikTok, and X.

In addition to the unrestricted search function, numerous users on X complained this week of ads for nudify apps popping up on their timelines, frequently from accounts that feature NFT profile pictures and strings of numbers in their handles, typically indicating a bot rather than a human user. “Love to see X advertisements promoting AI porn generators to help you ‘undress any girl,’” one user wrote on Thursday, attaching a screenshot of an ad. “So fucking creepy.” 

Another user posted a screenshot of an ad that they encountered on the timeline of Kirk Herbstreit, an ESPN sportscaster with 1.6 million followers on X. “Twitter literally allowed a DeepFake AI nude generator to advertise on the profile page of ESPN’s most prominent college football personality,” the user wrote. “A verified account with 1.6 million followers.”

When reached for comment, X sent back a boilerplate auto reply saying, “Busy now, please check back later.” 

The trailer for Civil War, a new film about the crack up of America from Alex Garland and A24, dropped like a bomb on the internet. The film is coming out next year in April, it’ll tell the story of a war journalist, played by Kirsten Dunst, traveling with her family across the U.S. as the country goes to war with itself. Right wing grifters online have already decided that the film is “predictive programming”—an example of shadowy deep state elites using their control of the media to prepare the population for an actual civil war.

This is, of course, bullshit.

Predictive programming is a long-running conspiracy theory that claims powerful Hollywood elites are using the media to program the populace. The idea is that, at the behest of the Illuminati or somesuch, Hollywood makes films like Civil War to normalize the idea of conflict between the states. Philosopher Alan Watts coined the term and it’s been used ever since to explain away the eerie similarities people find between art and the real world.

Another film about an apocalypse, Leave the World Behind, gained similar attention this week. The film, which stars Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke, tells the story of two families trying to survive a vague apocalypse that follows an unexplained blackout. Barack Obama produced the film, which made it an ideal target for conspiracy-minded internet personalities who make money by sharing reactionary takes with their perpetually scared and receptive right-wing audience. Like Civil War, weirdos are pointing to it as an example of elites using art and the media to control us.

The idea is ludicrous on its face and completely misunderstands how art works and the reciprocal nature between a society and the art it creates. The most popular version of the predictive programming conspiracy theory is the idea that The Simpsons predicted something. The only thing The Simpsons ever predicted was our stupidity. But that hasn’t stopped conspiracists from laying the blame for events as wide ranging as 9/11, the pandemic, and the election of Donald Trump at the feet of The Simpsons.

Conspiracy theories flourished in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting. A popular one stated that The Hunger Games and The Dark Knight Rises predicted the event—The Hunger Games because it’s a story about the murder of children and The Dark Knight Rises because it mentioned a place called Sandy Hook.

Art is always in conversation with the society that gave rise to it. It’s a reflection of our anxieties and fears. When it’s at its best it can offer us catharsis through fiction, a way to work through a thought or feeling before it becomes an action. With political polarization increasing in America, what would have once been normal political disputes are becoming violent. It makes sense that an artist like Garland would want to explore that in fiction. That doesn’t mean a real civil war is coming, or that government elites are preparing us for such a conflict.

Movies do not, thank god, predict the future. Not every fiction that is written comes to pass. The idea of a second American Civil War is a staple of fiction in the U.S. In 2006, the TV show Jericho told the story of a nuclear civil war involving powerful business interests. In 2022, HBO Max aired DMZ, an adaptation of a comic book about people living in Manhattan during a second American Civil War. No one cared.

Second civil war stories help Americans make sense of specific moments in political time. Decades later, they often appear strange. In the 1990s, HBO aired a made-for-TV movie directed by Joe Dante of Gremlins fame. This largely forgotten black comedy starred Phil Hartman as an American president facing a populace worried about special interest groups and immigrants changing the electoral college. It’s essentially the Great Replacement Theory as a dark comedy. 

More than a quarter century later, the racist conspiracy theory persists, and so does the country. These stories about America going to war with itself didn’t come to pass. The odds are good that Civil War won’t either.

A New York City group operating community composting drop-offs has been temporarily saved from Mayor Eric Adams’ budget cuts thanks to an anonymous, wealthy donor, one of the nonprofits running the program announced on Wednesday. 

GrowNYC, one of eight organizations the city contracts to provide public food scrap drop-offs at farmers markets and other public events, wrote in an Instagram post that it had “received a temporary lifeline in the form of a one time gift from an anonymous donor helping to avert the elimination of the program due to city budget cuts.” 

The donation will fund GrowNYC’s compost program through at least next June, the group said, though other composting contractors may still have to shut down operations.

“Our seven coalition partners are still at risk and our collective futures are still at stake,” the group wrote. GrowNYC runs 52 food scrap drop-offs across the five boroughs. The city contracts with nonprofits and three community gardens to operate the drop-offs.

GrowNYC said all the contracted organizations together account for 8.3 million pounds of organic waste that is saved from going to landfills, helping to produce hundreds of thousands of pounds of compost that is donated or sold to community groups, including farmers. The group did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The group did not clarify in public statements whether the donor was an individual or an institution.

In a drastic series of mid-year budget cuts, Mayor Eric Adams ordered all city agencies to cut spending by 5 percent, resulting in a $3 million cut from the city’s contracts to community composting organizations like GrowNYC and BigReuse. 

The cuts will also delay rollout of the city’s universal curbside composting program, which began in Queens before expanding to Brooklyn. As a result of the cuts, curbside composting in Staten Island and The Bronx has been delayed until next October, Gothamist reported. It had previously been expected to start in March. The city also told Gothamist that curbside composting will reduce the need for community composting programs.

A group called Save Our Compost that is advocating for restoring funding to the compost programs wrote on Instagram that the remaining organizations that the city contracts would need a cumulative $1.75 million in funding to save their programs. The group said that unless funding is restored to the remaining groups, 60 staff members of these organizations will be laid off and food scrap drop-off and compost processing centers will be forced to close. 

Adams has claimed that his budget cuts are necessary due to an influx of migrants that has led the city to spend money leasing hotels and building out tent cities in far-flung parts of the city, but not everyone agrees with his math. In an Op-Ed, former chief of staff of the city’s Independent Budget Office Doug Turetsky said that, “the numbers don’t look as calamitous as the mayor’s actions portend.” 

The mayor predicted that projected city revenue won’t be enough to keep up with expenses:, anticipating a $7.1 billion budget gap. But Turetsky said the real gap is closer to $3 billion and is “well within the range prior mayoral administrations have handled” as a share of the overall budget.

While it’s unusual for a private donor to anonymously fund a public service, it’s not unprecedented. In 2017, the city’s public defender program for immigrants facing deportation was also anonymously bankrolled by a private donor when then Mayor De Blasio refused to use city funds to defend immigrants convicted of certain crimes. 

Sometimes a movie comes along that’s a controversy before anyone has even seen it. That appears to be the destiny of Alex Garland’s Civil War, a movie about a second civil war in America. Civil War is coming out on April 26, 2024, but the usual crop of right-wing grifters have already decided that the film’s release is some kind of ominous signaling from the woke deep state, foreshadowing events to come.

As with any dystopian media that eerily reflects our current late capitalist reality, online commentators are debating the believability of the film’s premise. In the film’s trailer, a three term president—played by Nick Offerman—goes to war with seceded states, including a Western Alliance of Texas and California. Many did not find this credible.

As a Texan whose family came from California, an alliance between the two states made immediate sense. When people think of Texas or California, they tend to take a narrow view of both places. Californians are hippies, liberal in the extreme, and fond of a nanny state. Texans are cowboys, horse riding libertarians who hate immigrants and love harsh christo-fascist politics. The truth is far more complicated. 

I lived in Texas for more than 30 years. My mother and her family are from the San Joaquin Valley in California, the land of Bakersfield, Fresno, and Stockton. Texas and California are enormous states with diverse and varied populations, climates, and cultures. Outside of the Bay Area and Austin, the politics align more closely than you’d think.

“Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento,” Joan Didion once said. I think about that quote every time I ruminate on holiday seasons spent with my grandmother in the shadow of the mountains. It was a small town of farm workers, trucks from the 1960s, and dust in the air in the middle of December. Huge swaths of California north of LA and San Francisco are like this. And farther north it becomes verdant. Vast forests and different communities with very different kinds of people.

California may have a reputation as a liberal bastion, but it’s the state that gave the 20th century two of the most consequential conservative American politicians—Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Nixon was born in Yorba Linda in Orange County. The OC is famous for its aerospace engineers, fat defense contracts, and conservative politics. It was a stronghold of the John Birch Society, a conspiracy-minded anti-communist group that boiled under the surface of conservative politics for decades. The death of “Nixonland” in Orange County has been predicted many times but it’s never quite come to pass.

Texas, like California, has vast tracts of farmland. Like California, it has enormous urban centers full of cosmopolitans speaking hundreds of languages. Like California, its local politics are largely dominated by one party that constantly fights with the federal government. Like California, it’s an enormous economic powerhouse with a GDP greater than a lot of individual countries. Like California, it has an enormous and historic tech sector that’s interwoven into the fabric of personal computing.

And people move between the two states constantly. Texans love to complain about all the Californians moving in. They were ruining the state, people said. Their politics would warp the place, they said. It’s not just high profile weirdos like Elon Musk and Joe Rogan. There’s tech workers chasing jobs in Silicon Prairie, people who want to purchase suburban homes outside of Dallas for a quarter of what they’d cost in California, and people fleeing wildfires. Throw a stone in Dallas and you’ll hit a recent California immigre. But the highways move both ways and, though a lot has been written about the exodus from California, lots of Texans move the other way. 

If it came down to war, two enormous states with similar economies, similar interests, and a beef with the federal government could easily find themselves aligned.