When I was cast on the TV show "Survivor" in 2023 (yes, that show is still on), I thought I knew what anxiety felt like. I had spent years helping clients understand it, name it, and care for it. I had been in active therapy for around a decade. But living through it in front of millions of people is something no training could have prepared me for.
Offline, there has been a surge of reported hate crimes and book bans, alongside a wave of government and legislative actions targeting LGBTQ+ rights (with a focus on trans people). Online, LGBTQ+ individuals face coordinated harassment campaigns, a rollback of digital protections, and systematic erasure from AI training data and moderation.
Violence against LGBTQ+ people has risen dramatically in every country across nearly all walks of life, according to the report. In the US, nearly 20 per cent of all hate crimes were motivated by anti-LGBTQ+ bias, according to details released by the FBI in August. In 2024, GLAAD tracked at least 918 incidents, including seven fatalities and 140 bomb threats.
Giuffre wrote of the 2022 confidential settlement of her sexual abuse civil claim against the royal, widely rumoured to be $12m, that her lawyers were going to ask for the moon, and her team had agreed it had to be more than mere money. After casting doubt on my credibility for so long Prince Andrew's team had even gone so far as to try to hire internet trolls to hassle me the Duke of York owed me a meaningful apology as well, she wrote.
Dr Andrew McFarlane, 61, was arrested and charged with communications offences in August after he called Ellie Wilson a "manipulative liar", a "slut" and a "hippo" in a series of posts on X. In 2022 his son Daniel McFarlane was convicted of raping Ms Wilson, who has since become a campaigner for survivors of male sexual violence. Rape Crisis Scotland has complained to the General Medical Council (GMC) twice about Dr McFarlane's conduct,
This covers an interaction that happened after responding truthfully to "Dear Rubyists: Shopify Isn't Your Enemy". I have covered multiple times the mean discriminatory ways Ruby/Rails subreddit members treat some Rubyists, which started happening only in the last 10 years.
But this was just wild, you know? Von said. And people are sending messages and hateful stuff, and, you know, You think all these illegals should and all this type of shit. I could talk to you ad nauseam about that, but this wasn't the time for it. It just was something they used and put out there and everybody saw, right?
However, the show caught the attention of Musk after far-right social media accounts began recirculating clips of the series this week. The show's creator, Hamish Steele, shared to his BlueSky account that "It's probably going to be a very odd day" after Musk retweeted a post from Libs of TikTok calling out Dead End: Paranormal Park for "pushing pro-transgender of CHILDREN." The post claimed the series was "advertised for 7-YEAR-OLDS" and "promoted on Netflix Kids now," to which Musk added: "This is not ok."
Last September, Naima Troutt was one of 25 liberal college students chosen to debate Charlie Kirk. One interaction in the 90-minute video was particularly memorable: After Kirk attempts to argue that abortion is murder, Troutt mutters to herself, "Ugh, his smile is very creepy." "Oh, so smiling is creepy?" he asks, to which she replies, "No, your smile specifically." The room erupts into laughter. The clip went viral. Fan edits were made in her honor. In the world of debates designed for maximum social-media engagement,
I'm fine now, but I won't pretend I wasn't shaken, she said. For a week I second-guessed every bump, every look, even crossed the road to avoid people. I shared the incident online and since the TikTok went viral, with that came an influx of more racist comments. Ms Choudry said the experience had left her heartbroken and triggered painful memories of growing up in Sunderland, where she was the only brown girl and suffered racism.
What was Deborah's supposed crime? The policeman didn't tell her. Was it her passionate support of President Trump and the MAGA movement on her Facebook and X pages? To make it worse, Deborah is in the midst of cancer treatment, including chemotherapy. She ought to be have been convalescing. Instead, she was harassed for her tweets. Thames Valley Police are responsible for guarding President Trump this week. What would he make of the fact that those same officers are visiting the homes of his supporters - including US citizens - and threatening them with arrest?
In the mid-2010s, loosely organized online movements began spilling into the real world, catching popular culture off guard and leaving many journalists flat-footed in unfamiliar internet territory. You know their names. Pizzagate. QAnon. And the most consequential of all, MAGA: a mainstream political movement fueled in part by a fervent online contingent. But before all that came Gamergate, the proving ground where the tactics were tested.
Tánaiste Simon Harris has said the "sustained, relentless nature" of threats targeting his children and family must be called out and not "glossed over".
Images of Meloni's sister, Arianna, and the opposition leader, Elly Schlein, were also discovered on the Italian platform Phica, which had more than 700,000 subscribers before its managers closed the site on Thursday, blaming users for using the platform incorrectly. The photos, accompanied by vulgar and sexist captions, were taken from either personal social media accounts or public sources without consent and altered to zoom in on body parts or depict the women in sexual poses.
When she finally got back on to the dating scene, she was wary. She decided to sign up for a new app where women could do background checks and share experiences of men they were dating. Users of the US-based Tea Dating Advice app, which is only available in America, could flag if potential partners were married or registered sex offenders. They could run reverse image searches to check against people using fake identities.
Brendan Abernathy is a singer-songwriter who went viral earlier this year for an earnest performance of his song "married in a year." The backlash was immediate, and one word popped up over and over again in the comments: "cringe." Brittany and Ramtin Arablouei, co-host of NPR's Throughline, get into the rise of cringe culture: where it comes from, how it's hurting us, and how leaning into cringe is good for art.
Ming's boyfriend had secretly taken sexually exploitative photos of her and other women, using AI to generate pornographic images, revealing a disturbing pattern of abuse.
