Editors Note: This piece is the practical, step-by-step follow-up to my last article, Your Face Is No Longer Yours (And Meta Doesn’t Care). While that article explained why and how tech platforms fail us, this playbook is all about action. Below, you will find concrete tools, survivor-led tactics, and alternative security steps to protect human rights defenders, journalists, and everyday citizens when big tech monopolies choose to look away.

The most dangerous thing about a deepfake is not always that people believe it. Sometimes the damage is already done before anyone figures out it is fake.

A manipulated video can travel across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, X, TikTok and private group chats in hours. It can be downloaded and copied instantly, reuploaded across accounts, burner profiles, stripped of its original context, and weaponized into targeted harassment, impersonation, sexual violence, political disinformation or reputational assault. It hijacks a target’s likeness to inflict severe psychological and real-world harm before they even know it exists. And once the weaponized content enters algorithmic circulation, the target is often left alone to clean up the wreckage.

That is one of the clearest lessons from recent Meta Oversight Board cases: platform safety architectures are still fundamentally reactive, highly fragmented, and structurally designed to shift the burden of proof and policing onto the victim. Last week, I provided a full diagnostic autopsy of this structural failure, mapping its fallout across two women from entirely different worlds.

We saw Dorothy McHugh, a 77-year-old Scottish local councillor, whose likeness was hijacked by a deepfake video ahead of an election. Meta hid behind a legacy “public figure” loophole, allowing the video to circulate for ten months while automated systems blocked her from reaching a human reviewer.

Alongside her stood a young Muslim health advocate in Europe whose television interview was altered by generative AI into a series of humiliating videos. Meta’s algorithms summarily rejected her reports because of a hyper-narrow policy gap: since the video fabricated her conduct rather than altering her physical anatomy, the platform ruled it did not count as a violation.

When tech giants apply these rigid, checklist-driven policies to complex human realities, they create dangerous gray areas that bad actors systematically exploit. And the human toll is immediate: severe character defamation, targeted xenophobic and misogynistic harassment, and prolonged psychological re-traumatization.

In this playbook, we pivot from diagnosis to design: what should you actually do if this happens to you, a colleague, or a community you are defending?

1. Preserve First. Report Second.

Before reporting a harmful deepfake, document and preserve evidence first, then report. This may feel counterintuitive. When confronted with a digital attack, our immediate visceral instinct is to “get this down immediately” and hit that report button. This is a trap. In the rush to erase the harm, users often delete the very proof required to stop it. Posts disappear, accounts get suspended, captions change, and copies move elsewhere. Once content is scrubbed by the platform, the evidence you need for an appeal, legal recourse, journalism, or advocacy vanishes with it.

Before you touch a platform’s reporting forms, you must document the pattern. Capture transient information that is at risk of being moved, altered, or lost completely.

• Record raw video screen recordings and capture screenshots of the deepfake playing in real time, capturing how it renders on screen.

• Log the exact account names and handles, and copy the full URLs of the source profiles.

• Document the temporal context: record the precise date, time, and timezone of your capture.

• Capture the surrounding engagement and context: document captions, comment sections, reposts, trackbacks, and visible engagement metrics.

If the content is spreading across multiple accounts or platforms, track them in a central place too. Document the pattern (coordinated ecosystem) rather than treating each upload as an isolated incident.

Tools & Resources

• Hunchly (Desktop Software): A professional-grade digital investigation tool that runs silently in your browser background. It automatically records, logs, and timestamps every URL, webpage, and image you visit, creating an unalterable history built to serve as valid legal evidence.

• Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine or Archive.today (Web Tool): A free, instant way to take a permanent text and graphic snapshot of a specific URL. Even if the perpetrator deletes the post or gets suspended, the archived snapshot remains public and unchangeable.

• Starling Lab for Data Integrity: A highly innovative project by Stanford and USC utilizing decentralized web protocols and cryptographic hashing to create immutable, tamper-proof ledgers of visual evidence, ensuring digital chains of custody that withstand corporate deletion.

• OSINT Framework: The primary web-based directory that organizes open-source intelligence tools into a structured, browsable tree. It is maintained by the OSINT community to pivot through data categories (usernames, emails, maps, etc.) without relying on commercial software dashboards.

2. Report the Underlying Violation (the Harm), Not the Technology

This is where people lose critical time. A deepfake is a mechanism; the specific abuse it produces it executes is the actual policy infraction and violation.

One of the biggest structural mistakes of tech platforms’ trust and safety teams is their obsession with authenticity over intent—treating synthetic media as a technical box to check. But the critical question is never, “Is this file fake?” It is “What is this fake being weaponized to achieve?”

If someone uses a manipulated video to humiliate a woman, impersonate a public figure, spread hate, distribute non-consensual sexual content, or incite harassment, report the underlying policy violation rather than generic AI labels. Report it as:

• Harassment, stalking, or bullying

• Wholesale impersonation

• Hate speech or incitement to violence

• Non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) or sextortion

• Deception, fraud, or identity theft

Tools & Resources

• Take It Down (by NCMEC) (Under 18): A free, anonymous tool operated by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children explicitly designed to stop the online spread of non-consensual explicit images or deepfakes of individuals under 18.

• StopNCII.org (for adults, global coverage): The gold standard for intimate deepfake removal worldwide. Operated by the Revenge Porn Helpline in partnership with a global council of international NGOs, this platform uses secure, on-device hashing technology. The multi-language interface allows global victims to generate security hashes to stop sharing across networks (including Meta) without their media files ever leaving their devices.

• Chayn: A phenomenal, independent survivor-led global majority movement that builds open-source, multilingual digital safety resources and trauma-informed reporting pathways for gender-based violence, completely outside corporate templates.

• Platform Direct Reporting: Skip generic “AI” forms and automated generic feedback loops. Use Meta’s direct dedicated reporting channels for Harassment/Bullying, Impersonation (Facebook Form or Instagram and Threads), or Hate Speech, or sextortion, to trigger stricter policy enforcement and a more stringent review.

3. Record and Appeal Every Automated Rejection

Never assume that a rejected report means the content complies with platform and community guidelines. Automated moderation systems handle the vast majority of first-line platform triage, and they routinely mistake and misread context, subtext, and localized language.

If the platform gives you an option to appeal, use it immediately. Keep a meticulous log of the corporate response: screenshot your original report submission, the automated rejection notification, and the subsequent appeal confirmation.

This matters because while your single failed report is a frustrating administrative hurdle, it can also become evidence of a broader systemic enforcement failure, especially if multiple people report the same content and Meta repeatedly declines to act (part of a logged trail). And this can be be escalated to regulatory authorities.

Tools & Resources

• Oversight Board Appeals Portal: If you exhaust Meta’s internal appeal options and severe, high-stakes content remains online, check your eligibility to submit your case directly to the independent Oversight Board for binding evaluation.

• Digital Rights Foundation (DRF) Cyber Harassment Helpline: A pioneering grassroots initiative in South Asia that offers specialized support tracking, documenting, and contesting automated platform rejections for regional language users facing weaponized online harassment.

• Moderation Evidentiary Tracker (Template): Create and maintain a simple spreadsheet logging: Platform Reference ID #, Source URL, Date Reported, Initial Automated Decision, Date Appealed, and Final Enforcement Outcome. Attach timestamped screenshots to keep your paper trail intact.’

4. Don’t Accidentally Make the Deepfake More Viral.

Say it with me: debunking should not become amplification.

This is a common trap and one of the hardest psychological parts of responding to manipulated media. When targeted by a malicious campaign, people understandably want to publicly expose the lie. However, quoting, embedding, or reposting the full original deepfake video—even to condemn it—feeds the platform’s algorithms recommendation engines, distributes the media to new audiences, and scales the original harm.

The objective is to provide enough baseline context to to explain the abuse (neutralize the deception) without becoming another free distribution channel for the perpetrator. Implement defensive communication tactics. Consider using:

• Utilize static, flat screenshots rather than moving video files.

• Apply heavy pixelation, crops, or blurs to sensitive visual elements.

• Isolate short, specific audio/visual fragments rather than whole files.

• Superimpose aggressive text watermarks directly over the graphic.

• Rely on precise, purely text-based descriptions of the manipulation.

Tools & Resources

• Redacted App (or Signal Media Editor): Free tools to quickly blur faces, crop out identifying details, or place heavy text watermarks (e.g., “MUTILATED/ DECEPTIVE MEDIA”) across a screenshot before sharing it for awareness.

• Canva (Text Overlay): If you must share a frame to debunk it, use Canva or similar editing tool, to slap a bright, unmissable banner over the image so it can never be screenshotted and reused maliciously out of context.

• WITNESS "Prepare, Don't Amplify" Guide: An invaluable methodology developed by my team at the global human rights organization WITNESS, showing grassroots advocates how to expose synthetic deception safely without inadvertently triggering algorithm-driven viral loops.

5. Play Whack-a-Mole Strategically

Deepfake harm rarely stays confined to a single upload. Once a video begins circulating, people can download it, crop and re-edit it, add new captions, change the audio or cross-post it to entirely different platforms and accounts. Removing the initial post often does very little to stop the momentum. To track copies, you must search laterally:

• Monitor highly distinctive phrasing, syntax patterns, or specific typos from the original caption.

• Track the accounts and network profiles driving high engagement volumes in the original comment sections.

• Audit variants of the subject’s name across secondary platforms and alternative networks.

• Maintain a centralized tracking log of new instances, duplicates, noting when they appeared and which accounts are posting them and driving the engagement.

This is an area where platforms must do far more. Once a piece of manipulated media is determined to violate platform rules, the target should not have to spend weeks chasing down identical variations, playing whack-a-mole with hundreds of copies.

Tools & Resources

• Google Reverse Image Search & TinEye: Upload a clean screenshot or still frame from the deepfake to run a reverse-image lookup, tracing where else the file or its direct visual variations have been hosted across the web.

• Google Alerts & Talkwalker: Set up real-time keyword alerts for the specific phrase, hashtag, or target victim’s name used in the deepfake caption to catch new uploads instantly.

• Bellingcat Digital Toolkit: A community-driven, public-interest collection of open-source methodology tools designed by independent researchers to trace media footprints, cross-reference metadata, and map coordinated distribution networks without corporate assistance.

6. Escalate Outside the Corporate Ecosystem

Meta and Silicon Valley executives cannot be the ultimate arbiters of human safety. Depending on the situation and jurisdiction, a weaponized deepfake routinely crosses the threshold into explicit criminal or civil violations, including stalking, extortion, character defamation, identity theft, fraud, civil rights violations, and coordinated election interference.

When an attack escalates and the harm becomes more serious, look past corporate chat bots and broken platform reporting forms. Connect early with journalists legal counsel, independent digital rights organizations and coalitions, civil society groups, investigative journalists, and relevant regional regulatory watchdogs. A glitchy or unresponsive platform reporting form or chatbot is never your only avenue of recourse.

Tools & Resources

• Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI): Offers a 24/7 crisis helpline (1-866-411-5237) providing legal resources, safety planning, and emotional support for victims of non-consensual intimate imagery.

• Local Cybercrime Reporting: File a formal report with federal cybercrime divisions (like the FBI’s IC3 in the US, or your regional equivalent) to build a legal paper trail. Here is a list of cybercrime agencies by country.

• European Digital Rights (EDRi) & Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF): Powerful, independent civil-society networks in Europe and the US that bypass corporate channels to monitor structural policy failures, leverage regulatory frameworks (like the EU’s Digital Services Act), and advocate for systemic, non-corporate platform accountability.

• Access Now Digital Security Helpline: A global non-profit rapid-response emergency helpline offering 24/7 digital security and legal support in 9 languages (including Arabic, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Tagalog, Ukrainian, and Chinese) to help secure accounts, mitigate active digital attacks, and bypass broken algorithmic forms.

• Digital Rights Networks: Best for region-specific legal and localized civil society escalations. In regions where English-centric reporting forms fail, look to localized digital defense groups (like Luminate and Global Voices , Hiperderecho and TEDIC in Latin America, SMEX (Social Media Exchange) in the Arabic-speaking region, 7amleh the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement (focus on Palestine and Israel), or Digital Rights Foundation in South Asia) that maintain direct, high-priority escalation channels with Meta.

7. Journalists: Verify the Process, Don’t Just Declare the Result

Newsrooms carry an acute ethical and public responsibility. A manipulated asset does not become responsible reporting simply because a headline asserts that it is fake. Before embedding, linking to, or broadcasting deceptive media, journalists must evaluate whether exposing the material is fundamentally required to serve the public interest.

Rigorous journalistic verification demands identifying the earliest known upload node, auditing whether the audio track and visual layers originated together, forensically reverse-searching individual keyframes, testing for physical or lighting anomalies, and directly contacting the person depicted.

When digital manipulation itself becomes the news event, expose the forensic workflow—how you know it is false. Institutional trust is built and strengthened by showing your verification methodology and process, not simply by stating your conclusion.

Tools & Resources

• InVID / WeVerify Verification Plugin: The global standard tool used by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) . This essential browser extension allows journalists to perform reverse image searches on video frames, analyze metadata, and parse localized contexts or regional video formats across cross-platform chats like WhatsApp and Telegram.

• Amnesty International YouTube Data Viewer: Paste any YouTube URL to extract hidden upload times and track down the original, earliest version of a piece of video evidence.

• Meedan (Check Platform): An innovative tech non-profit building open-source, multilingual, and highly collaborative workflows for global newsrooms and fact-checking collectives to verify media and track narrative warfare outside Western markets.

8. Pressure Platforms to Stop Making Victims Police the Network

Ultimately, none of these tips and survival strategies should obscure the structural reality: individuals and organizations targeted by synthetic abuse should not be responsible for discovering every copy, deciphering opaque corporate policy frameworks, filing repetitive forms, and persuading a trillion-dollar technology company to protect human life, and that the harm being experienced deserves human review. Platforms can, and must, intervene earlier.

True intervention must occur upstream. Platforms possess the technical capacity, and must be pressured, to identify violating content at the point of ingest, preventing near-identical copies from spreading. They must prioritize reports involving synthetic impersonation, non-consensual manipulation, and coordinated harassment. They must route high-risk cases to qualified human reviewers instead of closing support tickets automatically. Crucially, reporting systems must be designed around the operational reality that deepfake abuse is often a coordinated campaign, not an isolated post. That distinction matters.

And it must impose stronger penalties on repeat distributors.

Tools & Resources

• The Sovereign Tech Fund & Prototype Fund: Independent, public-interest funding bodies that finance decentralized, community-driven alternative technologies, open-source protocols, and privacy infrastructure to reduce global civil society’s reliance on corporate monopolies.

• AlgorithmWatch & European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL): Independent watchdog institutions leveraging public accountability mechanisms—like the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) and the AI Act—to legally pressure tech companies to audit their algorithmic recommendation engines and halt the monetization of coordinated harm.

• Civil Society Coalitions: Join and support campaigns led by digital transparency organizations like the Global Tech Justice Coalition or Mozilla Foundation that coordinate open letters, policy advocacy, and shareholder pressure targeting safety accountability at Meta.

We have spent years discussing deepfakes as though the central danger were that people might mistake something fake for something real. Unfortunately, that is only part of the problem. It is the wrong way to look at it, and definitely the wrong way to address it. It is a framing we were fed, and it is a deeply misleading one.

A deepfake causes enormous harm even when everyone eventually learns it is fake. The humiliation happened. The harassment happened. The lies circulated. The screenshots and search results remain indexed for the world to access today, tomorrow, and decades from now. Long after a public retraction is issued, the target is still forced to defend their human dignity against actions they never took, words they never uttered, and content to which they never consented.

Which is why our response cannot stop at labeling manipulated media. A digital sticker is a corporate smoke screen. The real policy question is not simply whether Meta can tell us that something is fake; it is whether platforms can intervene before deception becomes distribution, distribution becomes harassment, and harassment becomes irreversible real-world harm.

This narrow, technical obsession with authenticity rather than systemic harm isn’t new. We have seen this exact structural failure before in other catastrophic platform crises. And this isn’t a theoretical critique; it is an operational reality I have spent nearly two decades navigating on the front lines around the world.

Throughout my career leading global crisis response, documentation, and verification initiatives, I have worked directly alongside multilateral institutions, informal networks, and an incredible ecosystem of global majority and global north practitioners, advocates, and innovators. Together, we have built the workflows, toolkits, policies, and defensive strategies needed when tech platforms and regulatory actors choose to look away. Many of the operational methodologies and tactical resources I have detailed here—and continue to analyze—are shared directly on this Unembedded Substack platform to build our collective security.

What this global network has proven is that digital violence is defined by a dangerous convergence phenomenon. Modern media manipulation does not exist in a silo. We are witnessing the fusion of identity theft, gender-based violence, localized information warfare, and algorithmic amplification. This convergence creates unprecedented risk regulation challenges; it moves too fast for traditional, localized legal systems, and slips directly through the fragmented corporate policy departments of Silicon Valley.

Yet, within this convergence lies an opportunity for true safety and security. By shifting away from isolated, siloed reactions—where platforms only address a crisis when it impacts Western markets while ignoring what happens elsewhere—we can build cross-border, systemic advocacy. The technical mechanism of automated apathy that allows a deepfake to target a local councillor in the UK is the exact same architecture that leaves human rights defenders in active conflict zones completely exposed, and killed in masses by tech supported and driven systems like Israel’s Lavender system. The infrastructure is identical; the only difference is the extension and severity of the real-world consequences.

Those who suffer first, and the most, are always the most marginalized communities—women, religious minorities, migrants, and independent journalists operating under hostile regimes and even in our very own so-called “democratic” states. But this lawlessness is catching up with us all. A system that automates indifference in one region will inevitably deploy that same indifference against you. And it already is.

Until tech platforms design their systems around preventing rapid distribution and protecting human safety rather than merely labeling data, we are all left to fend for ourselves. This is why we must master how to preserve evidence, report strategically, limit amplification, and escalate when corporate channels collapse.

But let us be clear: those are survival tools. They are tactical stopgaps. They are not a substitute for true platform accountability, policy, and structural change.

Let’s Build Your Defense Strategy

Operating in modern media systems means facing rapidly shifting technological risks, information warfare, and institutional vulnerabilities.

If your organization, media team, board, or leadership circle needs specialized guidance to adapt to emerging online harms, navigate digital evidence, mitigate deepfake threats, or implement rigorous international information integrity strategies, let’s talk. Learn more about my practice, training programs, and bespoke advisory services or schedule a direct consultation at Raja Althaibani Strategic Advisory or email me directly at inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com

MASTER RESOURCE DIRECTORY

• If you need to remove intimate images/deepfakes: StopNCII.org (Global Adults) | Take It Down (Under 18) | Chayn (Multilingual Survivor Support).

• If you need 24/7 localized crisis escalation or security support: Access Now Helpline (24/7 in 9 languages) | SMEX (MENA Region) | 7amleh the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement (focus on Palestine and Israel) | Digital Rights Foundation (South Asia) | Hiperderecho (Latin America).

• If you need independent metadata verification & investigative archives: InVID / WeVerify Plugin | Meedan Check | Bellingcat Toolkit | Starling Lab.

• If you need legal advocacy, rights defense, & policy intervention: Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) | EDRi (European Digital Rights) | EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) | AlgorithmWatch.

This is a non-exhaustive list.

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of my ongoing tech advocacy, systems-change analysis, and reporting for Unembedded, informed by more than 15 years working at the intersection of technology, media, and human rights. I examine complex technical and policy developments through an intersectional, public-interest lens—asking how systems of power translate into real-world consequences, who they protect, who they fail, and what those failures demand of companies, policymakers, and institutions.

“Refugees are welcome here, even if they rape our women, because white people do that too.”

Imagine opening your phone to discover a video of you delivering that exact, venomous statement. Within hours, you are the centerpiece of a viral internet storm, framed by a hyper-realistic, AI-generated clone of your own face giving a vicious speech you never uttered. This was the horrifying reality for Dorothy McHugh, a 77-year-old Scottish Labour councillor in Dundee. The malicious video, posted in November 2025, weaponized her likeness during a highly sensitive local protest over asylum-seeker housing, altering public trust and severely damaging her personal integrity.

Before the shock of that political hit could even settle, a second deepfake launched a parallel attack on a young Muslim woman just across the English Channel. A dedicated health advocate working to de-stigmatize menstrual hygiene for minority girls awoke to find her face stolen. A malicious actor had taken a real television news interview she gave, stolen her likeness, and used generative AI to clone her face and manufacture this viral circus.

Through a series of deepfakes, the young Muslim woman was depicted engaging in bizarre, physically absurd gym exercises, while shouting contradictory health advise to supposedly demonstrate how to "stay in shape”. The impact was swift and devastating. The deeply humiliating videos quietly racked up tens of millions of views across Meta’s social media ecosystem, unleashing a weaponized flood of abusive, xenophobic, and misogynistic harassment that targeted her weight and her hijab.

Both women did what any of us would do in this situation: they immediately reported the content to Meta. Yet, Meta missed both opportunities to recognize and prevent harm, and failed to remove either video.

When the young Muslim advocate tried to report the video for bullying and harassment, Meta’s automated system completely closed her initial reports and subsequent appeals without ever escalating them to a human being for review. The platform maintained the content stayed up because its internal definition of “unwanted manipulated imagery” was too narrow. Because the bad actors fabricated her conduct and actions rather than explicitly altering her physical body, the algorithms let it slide. It ruled in the perpetrator’s favor.

Dorothy McHugh faced the exact same digital brick wall. The automated systems repeatedly refused to prioritize her reports, or reach a human reviewer. As a result, her deepfake remained online for ten agonizing months, undermining her ability to fulfill her public duties as an elected official ahead of her upcoming council election. The constant, looming presence of the video—coupled with vile, violent user comments discovered later during the investigation, including one explicitly stating she "wants [to be] raped"—deeply re-traumatized the 77-year-old councillor. Exhausted by the platform’s automated apathy, Dorothy had to step back entirely while a colleague fought Meta on her behalf.

Imagine reporting that someone has stolen your face, invented your words, and circulated the result to provoke hostility and real-world harm, only to discover that a multi-billion-dollar platform does not consider your safety urgent enough for a real human being to examine.

Worse yet, you quickly realize that the avenues to fight back are not merely unhelpful, they are entirely non-functional.

When you navigate Meta’s safety interface, you enter an administrative void. There is no emergency hotline, no direct support email, and no path to reach a living person during a crisis. Instead, you are forced to deal with an adversarial maze of dead ends. You click a generic “Report” button, only to have a context-blind algorithm send you cold, automated rejection script, before closing your support ticket within seconds.

If you attempt to appeal, you’re met with automated chat tools with broken loops of unhelpful text, support dashboards that freeze, and ticketing systems that quietly close your case without explanation trapping you and any other victim in a labyrinth of automated rejections while the defamatory media continues to accumulate thousands of views and generate active engagement unchecked. It is a hollow facade of corporate compliance designed to absorb your complaints, burn you out, and leave you completely abandoned while the toxic machine continues to profit off your deepfake.

These are not isolated glitches in an otherwise functional matrix; they are part of an industrialized crisis of protracted systemic platform neglect. For over a decade, platforms’ automated systems have systematically prioritized rigid policy blocks over human nuance—a pattern that became glaringly visible following the Arab Spring and the Syrian conflict. As platforms became vital repositories for human rights monitoring, automated tools operating under blanket policy triggers routinely censored and erased critical evidence, civilian testimony, and war-crimes documentation. Yet, while the algorithms scrubbed history, they simultaneously failed to catch actual weaponized hate speech, targeted disinformation, and coordinated mass-reporting campaigns.

It is the same systemic disfunction that led to the suppression of vital documentation during Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S., where automated algorithms repeatedly flagged street journalism and anti-racism activism as graphic violence, erasing the record of real-world events, allowing harmful narratives about the movement to flourish. It mirrors the digital censorship faced by the LGBTQ+ community, whose essential mental health resources, community organizing, and educational spaces are routinely mislabeled, shadowbanned, and blocked as “adult content” by context-blind filters.

This crisis has escalated with synthetic media, and its collidision with virtually non-existent defense mechanisms. Global monitoring shows the total volume of deepfakes circulating online has exploded to over 8 million unique files—a staggering 16-fold increase in just two years. Yet, when these fakes hit the internet, Meta and its peers collapse under the weight of their own automated apathy.

According to a Reporters Without Borders (RSF) analysis of targeted deepfakes, a vast majority of malicious creators operate with absolute impunity. This lawlessness is directly fueled by a total lack of cooperation from social media platforms, which routinely leave the offending content active long after it has been flagged. The fallout from these unaddressed deepfakes is devastating, inflicting severe harms that range from financial fraud and character defamation to direct, terrifying threats to victims’ physical safety.

Crucially, this is not a gender-neutral crisis; this is an engine of gender-based violence. Women accounted for a disproportionate 74 percent of the cases studied by RSF, proving that bad actors have successfully turned generative AI into a specialized tool for silencing and terrorizing women online.

It is the exact same dynamic that played out across the two deepfake cases with the Chancellor and Health Advocate in the UK and Europe.

Eventually, on September 17, Meta’s Oversight Board stepped in, forcing Meta to take down the videos of the women. But the significance of their investigation and rulings extends beyond these two bad moderation decisions and failures. It confirmed that the platform’s reporting channels are structurally broken, relying on automated triage scripts that shift the burden (including the burden of proof) onto the victim. It is a system built not to resolve harm, but to automate corporate indifference.

Furthermore, it reveals that Meta and other platforms remain trapped in outdated, checklist-driven frameworks that treat synthetic media merely as an issue of transparency: whether a piece of content fake. But they are missing the bigger picture.

By reducing complex human threats to simple binary equations—asking only “is this AI-generated?” rather than “how is this being weaponized?”—they remain fundamentally blind to localized intent. And they act like putting a label on an AI-generated video solves the problem. But it’s not just about labeling, this is about power.

The real problem isn’t just asking “is this AI-generated?” The real questions are: Who is being targeted? What is the deeper intent? How does the content spread, and how does it tap into real-world inequalities to yield real world consequences?

These videos were never merely lies. They hijacked and appropriated women’s identities and weaponized them as delivery systems to pump out political hate, humiliation, and threats and intimidation. In both cases, the synthetic media was not the harm’s endpoint. Deepfakes like these don’t just invent new problems—they supercharge existing ones, making the attacks more real, easily distributable, and harder to stop. And it leaves the target with nowhere to escape.

Yet, the tech industry’s current defense strategy completely ignores this human toll, opting instead for superficial fixes.

Meta’s fix: Adding warning labels and AI disclosure tags for transparency.

The Reality: A label merely provides technical metadata—it tells the viewer if and how a piece of content was created or altered. It does absolutely nothing to disrupt the behavioral violence of the attack itself.

Much of the tech industry’s emerging response to synthetic media relies on provenance, detection, and disclosure. Think of provenance as a digital watermark baked into a file when it is made, tracking its birth certificate and history to prove how it was created. Detection acts like a security scanner, using automated software to hunt for hidden AI pattern glitches in uploaded content. Finally, disclosure is the warning label slapped on the post, shifting the burden onto everyday viewers to figure out what is real and what is fake.

Sure, it is useful to let people know when a photograph, recording or video has been altered. But provenance and disclosure alone, as an approach, is based on a dangerously narrow theory of harm.

Their thinking goes: If you tell the viewer, “Hey, this is fake,” then you’ve solved the problem; This framework assumes the main threat is simply a confused viewer mistaking a fabrication for reality. It implies that once a warning label pops up to fix the misunderstanding, the system has supposedly done its job, and the platform’s responsibility ends. The viewer can now make a better judgment. But in reality, it leaves the victim completely unprotected from the ongoing attack.

It might address a fleeting moment of deception, but it completely fails to stop networked abuse. A labeled deepfake can still reach millions of people. It can provoke racist and misogynistic harassment, contaminate search results, jump between platforms and circulate in private groups where the original warning label and tag disappears entirely. Copies can survive long after the target has issued a denial, and short clips can be stripped of context and repackaged as viral memes, reaction videos or alleged “evidence.”

Virality does not wait for verification.

Furthermore, a passive label cannot restore a victim’s control over their own face or voice, undo the emotional humiliation, expose the perpetrators coordinating the campaign, or stop algorithmic recommendation systems from extending its reach. Crucially, it fails to neutralize the implicit threat delivered to everyone watching: speak publicly, and this will happen to you too.

This creates a devastating chilling effect, forcing women and marginalized communities to think twice before appearing online simply because their identities are being weaponized against them. Frequent targets of online abuse already carry a disproportionate cost for participating in public debate, and synthetic media dramatically raises that cost by allowing harassers to manufacture incriminating material faster than any target or fact-checker can possibly rebut it.

Therefore, the baseline technical question cannot simply be: Is this AI-generated? Platforms must force their systems to address structural product questions:

• Was this identity used without consent?

• Is the manipulation exploiting and inciting hatred against a vulnerable community?

• Is the content being amplified by coordinated networks?

• Has the content created a credible, irreversible safety risk for the target—and others?

• Did the platform’s own recommendation algorithm, and lack of intervention, accelerate its spread?

• Can the victim immediately reach a qualified human reviewer before the damage spreads, in a timely and effective way?

These are not media-literacy questions about whether users know how to spot a deepfake. They are fundamental questions about product design, corporate responsibility, and platform power.

Meta’s Fix: Meta claims to safeguard political expression and legitimate criticism of powerful officials through their public figure moderation exemption.

The Reality: Meta weaponizes the public figure rule to sidestep corporate responsibility, transforming a legacy free-speech protection into an active, dangerous vector for identity theft and AI abuse.

Meta initially concluded that the deepfake video of a Scottish local councillor didn't violate its bullying and harassment rules simply because she is a politician, and therefore categorized her as a public figure under the exemption. This policy distinction originally made sense when platforms wanted to separate legitimate criticism of powerful officials from personal bullying. But in the age of generative AI, it functions as a glaring loophole, effectively creating a permission structure for wholesale impersonation and AI abuse.

Politicians, journalists, and human rights defenders are still human beings. They do not forfeit the right to control their own bodies, faces, and voices the moment they enter the public eye. Completely fabricating someone's words out of thin air isn't criticism—it is an assault.

This loophole becomes downright lethal in conflict zones and crisis environments, where the consequences of synthetic media collapse instantly from reputational harm into physical danger. Imagine a synthetic video depicting a journalist praising an armed group, an human-rights defender confessing to foreign espionage, or a humanitarian worker making a fabricated sectarian statement. This content is routinely weaponized to undermine independent reporting, mobilize digital lynch mobs, justify arbitrary state detention, or poison the credibility of authentic documentation. In many environments, it can also result in direct physical harm and even death.

A weaponized deepfake does not need to convince a global audience or survive a month-long fact-check or investigation. It only needs to deceive a single armed checkpoint or reach a hostile actor before the correction catches up. By the time a tech company in Silicon Valley figures out what happened, debates whether to slap a passive label on it, the real-world physical damage is already done.

For targets operating outside the Western hemisphere, the danger is multiplied exponentially. If you work in a language or culture Meta doesn’t prioritize, reports are routinely missed, misclassified, or ignored. For those in Arabic-language environments, this risk is deeply compounded by platforms’ systemic failures in dialect recognition, context-aware moderation, and access to rapid human escalation channels. A global policy written in English offers zero protection when an Arabic-language report is processed by automated filters that completely lack the political and cultural literacy required to recognize a threat to someone’s life. The corporate policy may exist on paper, but the actual protection does not.

Meta’s Fix: Meta evaluates content through isolated checklists—treating hate speech, bullying, and privacy issues as independent technical violations—to process millions of posts objectively and at a massive scale.

The Reality: Platforms treat interconnected harms as separate violations of their policies, which abusers easily exploit by combining multiple tactics into a single assault that slips through the platform’s structural blind spots.

Social media networks love corporate organization. If a piece of content is uploaded, their systems evaluate it through isolated lenses: hate speech lives in one department, bullying in another, privacy violations down the hall, and misinformation across the street.

But real-world abusers do not respect corporate organizational charts or policy thresholds.

A malicious deepfake is a multi-pronged weapon of convergence. It doesn’t just do one thing; it simultaneously combines identity theft, gendered harassment, political disinformation, and coordinated bot amplification. It permeates different ideologies, weaponizes historical social fractures, and crosses digital borders to hit a target from every angle at once.

Yet, because Meta assesses each rule in absolute isolation, its automated systems frequently conclude that no single rule has been breached severely enough to justify a takedown. Nothing ever seems bad enough on its own to trigger action. Abusers understand this structural blind spot perfectly, exploiting it to orchestrate attacks that fly entirely under the safety radar.

The Oversight Board, at least, recognized this systemic failure. By evaluating the content within its real-world context, they saw that the deepfake targeting the politician was not merely inaccurate political commentary—it was a coordinated strike that hijacked her likeness to incite hatred against refugees. Similarly, the video targeting the Muslim activist was not just an unwanted digital manipulation; it was a compounded attack drawing power from the toxic intersection of sexism and Islamophobia.

Perhaps the most disturbing fact in these cases is not that Meta’s automated systems missed the videos. Automated systems will always make mistakes. It is that the reporting and review infrastructure did not reliably correct those mistakes. This is where platform accountability becomes measurable.

To counter this, platforms must adopt a cumulative-harm standard for synthetic media. When digital manipulation intersects with identity-based abuse, structural intimidation, or coordinated harassment, safety responses must immediately escalate rather than vanish between corporate policy silos. The burden of proof cannot remain on the victims whose identities have been stolen.

A meaningful remedy system would give people whose likenesses have been manipulated a dedicated reporting route, rapid human review, preservation of relevant data and a way to identify duplicates and coordinated reposts. It would address reach as well as removal: limiting recommendations, preventing monetization and reducing recirculation while a credible impersonation report is investigated.

It would also preserve evidence of the campaign. Removal is necessary, but deletion without documentation can erase information needed by researchers, courts, journalists or the target herself to establish patterns of abuse.

For human-rights defenders and organizations documenting conflict, the preservation question is critical. Platforms must be capable of restricting harmful circulation while retaining authenticated records, associated metadata and enforcement histories through rights-respecting processes. Safety and accountability should not be forced into a false choice between leaving abusive material online and making the evidence disappear.

In summary

The Oversight Board’s recommendations point in the right direction: stronger labeling, warning screens, and distribution limits for high-risk AI content, alongside broader protection against unwanted manipulated imagery. But Meta must go further.

It should immediately implement a six-point upgrade to its architecture:

1. Expedite impersonation channels. Create an expedited reporting route and impersonation channel accessible to public figures, journalists, activists and ordinary users alike whose likeness has been stolen.

2. Institute cumulative evaluation. Evaluate synthetic content cumulatively across the intersections of harassment, hate, privacy, authenticity and coordinated-harm policies.

3. Automate networked takedowns. Proactively detect and act on duplicate and near-duplicate versions across Facebook, Instagram and Threads simultaneously.

4. Audit global performance disparities. Audit safety response quality by language, dialect, gender and region—and publicly publish the disparities.

5. Establish secure data archives. Preserve removed synthetic media and relevant metadata when it may document coordinated abuse or other rights violations. The deepfake can be used as evidence itself, so treat it as such when collecting and archiving the content and its data.

6. Provide target transparency reports. Provide victims with a clear record of what action was taken, what viral or targeted reach the content obtained and whether copies remain active on the network.

Most importantly, Meta must stop treating virality as something that happens around harmful content rather than something its own systems actively produce and incentivize.

Deepfakes are governance tests. The next generation of synthetic-media policy will fail if it focuses only on whether a piece of content carries an “AI-generated” label.

Deepfakes are becoming highly efficient instruments for redistributing power: taking control of a person’s face, voice, and credibility and handing that control over to anonymous strangers, political actors, or hostile networks. The people most exposed will always be those already forced to fight for equal visibility, safety and credibility online—women, Muslims, migrants, racialized communities, journalists, and human rights defenders.

The ultimate measure of a platform’s response is therefore not whether its software can identify an artificial file. It is whether it can recognize, intercept, and dismantle the real system of harm built around it.

Meta did not initially do that in either of these cases. The Oversight Board corrected the individual decisions. Now the question is whether Meta will correct the broken architecture that produced them. A digital label may tell us that a video is fake. It cannot, by itself, stop the power power behind the lie.

If you want to make sense of what you’re seeing online , or understand why your feeds are flooded with misleading footage, you need to look at where this material actually originates.

Because of severe media restrictions and internet blackouts on the ground, breaking content from Yemen— whether it is authentic citizen video, official media, or staged propaganda—almost always drops on private and hyper localized chat loops on Telegram and WhatsApp.

To make sense of the content you’re seeing on different platforms, here is a top line explanation of what the common visual distribution pipeline looks like. It follows a specific rapid chain :

1 . Ground zero - Telegram: officialmilitary media offices, local militias, low level combatants, political activists, and hyper-local neighborhood groups use encrypted Telegram channels to dump first-look videos, combat footage, official claims and updates, and other types of documentation and content. These channels are often dedicated to specific districts, networks, localized military units, or city wide emergency updates and coordination .

2.The domestic echo - WhatsApp: Inside Yemen, low-bandwidth WhatsApp groups act as a massive incubator where unverified voice notes and grainy video forwards spread like wildfire between families, community and activist networks, and tribes.

3. The global launchpad- X (Twitter) , most unreliable : Within minutes of appearing on Telegram (and WhatsApp) , this media is pulled by international commentators, state-backed bot networks, as well as clout-chasing accounts and dropped onto X for wider distribution.

By the time a video reaches your timeline on X, TikTok, or Facebook, Instagram it has been stripped of its original context, repackaged for maximum engagement, and weaponized to drive a narrative.

If you are tracing breaking events, remember: the speed of a post on X and these other platforms does not equal its accuracy. In fact, speed usually means it’s unreliable and recycled.

Rule of thumb: the rawest content rarely appears on platforms with public URLs . It originates in closed-loop, invite-only chat groups.

Tips on How to Detect Inauthentic or Unreliable Content

When evaluating visual media coming out of this pipeline, watch for these specific red flags to spot manipulation:

• The clear sky archive rehash: be suspicious of crisp, high-def daytime footage claiming to show sudden active strike from citizen networks. Disinfo networks frequently repurpose old military parade footage, past airstrikes from early years of the conflict, or completely unrelated explosions from other conflicts and industrial accidents, particularly from similar looking Middle East contexts, and claim they are happening right now.

• Mismatched audio tracks : Watch closely for dubbed or detached audio. This is common practice used by many propagandists who routinely take genuine, quiet phone footage filmed by civilians and layer loud, artificial explosions, frantic shouting , or military chants and sounds over the top to inflate the scale of an incident and manipule context .

• Low-Resolution proof: If a breaking video is heavily pixelated, compressed, or cropped into an awkward and unusual vertical format , it is likely a video of a video. This lowering of quality is deliberately used to defeat automated reverse-image search tools and obscure visual signs that would prove the clip is old or from a different country or source .

• Unnatural weather and topology: Verify the geography. Check if the terrain, vegetation, architecture, or weather in the video aligns with the specific region of Yemen it claims to represent. It is incredibly common for footage from Iraq, Syria, or Ukraine to be mislabeled as Yemen.

• Aggressive watermarking: Look closely at logos in the corner of the frame. Media pulled from Telegram is often hastily cropped to hide the digital watermark of the original creator, or slapped with a new, authoritative-looking faction logo to claim false ownership.

NEW YORK — When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani dropped a two-minute video address calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal and the architect of a genocide, he didn’t just create a viral moment. He signaled a significant shift in the U.S. political landscape, and in how American officials can publicly approach Palestinian rights and accountability.

With more than 30 million views, the address reflected something larger: the erosion of what many have called the Palestinian exception in American politics, the longstanding assumption that criticizing Israel was politically fatal. Increasingly, elected officials are demonstrating that speaking plainly about Palestinian rights can be politically survivable, and potentially advantageous.

Foreign policy is increasingly being understood as a domestic reality inextricably linked to our own communities. Leaders are proving that you can treat Palestinian life as a matter of universal right, say it plainly, and win.

The debate has moved beyond whether Palestinians deserve equal humanity. The challenge now is confronting the political, financial, and institutional systems that have enabled decades of impunity.

As those systems come under greater scrutiny, statements and policies once treated as politically disqualifying have increasingly moved into the open, including explicit calls for displacement and collective punishment.

At the same time, decades of U.S. political, financial and lobbying infrastructure continue to impose substantial costs on officials who challenge longstanding U.S. policy toward Israel.

That is why Mamdani’s clarity matters. He is helping shift the political baseline, but in this video address, he stopped short of maximizing the opportunity.

Mamdani’s intervention exposes two different problems. The first is jurisdictional: the institution he invokes offers New York almost no practical leverage. The second is narrative: concentrating accountability on Netanyahu risks mistaking the most visible actor for the system that produced him.

In his address, Mamdani stated the legal truth: Netanyahu belongs in a courtroom, not a motorcade. He acknowledged that New York has no independent authority to execute International Criminal Court (ICC) warrants, and argued that the federal government should step in, join the Rome Statute, and enforce the arrest.

He named the limits of his office, but treating those limits as a mere technicality misses the entire architecture of U.S. foreign policy . The United States is not a neutral bystander waiting to join the court. It has spent decades actively engineering a legal fortress to ensure it never has to answer it.

In 2002, Congress passed the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act, contemptuously nicknamed the Hague Invasion Act, which explicitly authorizes the U.S. president to use “all means necessary,” including military force, to liberate any U.S. or allied official detained by the court. The law reflects how aggressively Washington has sought to insulate U.S. personnel and certain allies from the court, making the prospect of the federal government voluntarily executing an ICC warrant politically remote.

That reality was reinforced just twenty-four hours before Mamdani’s video address, when the President declared that Netanyahu “will not be arrested” on U.S. soil.

Demanding that Washington suddenly enforce an ICC warrant is therefore appealing to the one government whose domestic laws were deliberately designed to resist the court’s authority. Nor is doing so necessarily in the United States’ long-term interest, given that successive U.S. administrations have themselves been accused of conduct that could face international legal scrutiny if the same standards were consistently applied.

Even if the United States ratified the Rome Statute tomorrow, history suggests that treaty membership alone is no guarantee of enforcement. The past two years have exposed an uncomfortable reality: many ICC member states have treated their legal obligations as optional rather than binding.

While countries including Ireland and the Netherlands initially pledged to enforce the warrants “100 percent,” events quickly exposed the gap between legal commitments and political will.

In April 2025, Netanyahu landed in Budapest to a literal red carpet. France pledged to “vigorously apply” the warrant on a Tuesday, only to pivot by Wednesday to claim Netanyahu enjoyed head-of-state immunity. This is the same France that publicly lectured Mongolia months earlier for extending that exact same courtesy to Vladimir Putin, who strolled through an ICC member state in 2024 completely unbothered. Germany “examined the legalities”. Italy declared an arrest “unfeasible.” And the United Kingdom chose its words like an operative defusing a bomb.

This fracture deserves a precise name: the court for thee, immunity for me and mine.

The reality is the ICC has no police force and it cannot prosecute defendants in absentia. Its authority depends almost entirely on member states choosing to execute its warrants. When those governments refuse, accountability shifts away from The Hague and toward jurisdictions that possess both legal authority and the political willingness to act.

But none of this should be read as diminishing Mamdani’s broader record. His proposed Not on Our Dime Act recognized a central strategic reality: meaningful accountability often begins by targeting the financial and institutional infrastructure that enables unlawful conduct.

By seeking to prohibit New York–registered charities from funding Israeli settlements, the legislation focused on a lever that actually falls within New York’s jurisdiction. That makes the omission in this particular speech all the more notable, not because the strategy is absent from his politics, but because it was absent from one of his most widely watched public interventions.

Which raises the obvious question: if not The Hague, then where?

This brings us to the opening Mamdani missed, and what many experts, advocates, and activists, like Mohammed El-Kurd, pointed out immediately after the video went viral. The real lever isn’t sitting in a courtroom in the Netherlands. It is bolted directly to the floor of New York City.

New York is not only the world’s financial capital. It is also home to dozens of tax-exempt organizations that raise and transfer tens of millions of U.S. dollars to support Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Those organizations are incorporated under New York law, regulated by New York authorities, and fall within the jurisdiction of the New York State Attorney General.

The distinction is jurisdiction. Washington has spent decades resisting the ICC; New York already has authority over organizations incorporated and operating under its laws. That is where rhetoric encounters an actual lever.

The second opportunity Mamdani left on the table is more subtle, but ultimately more consequential.

Mamdani’s argument was rooted in universality, not exception. He framed his remarks around the principle that international law should apply equally to everyone, repeatedly arguing that any individual subject to an ICC arrest warrant should be held accountable regardless of nationality or political office. That consistency has been a defining feature of his public advocacy and is one of the speech’s greatest strengths. Yet, in practice, Netanyahu remained its unmistakable focal point.

That is understandable. Netanyahu is the country’s longest-serving prime minister and the most recognizable face of the war.

But centering the critique on Benjamin Netanyahu risks reinforcing one of the most effective enduring narratives in modern political communication: reducing systems to a single villain.

There is comfort in believing that history turns on one person. It suggests that if the individual is removed, the crisis ends with them. But states do not function that way. Policies are conceived, refined, funded, defended, and carried forward by institutions that survive elections and outlast the politicians who temporarily lead them.

That is precisely why so much of Israel’s political and public relations machinery benefits from making Netanyahu the face of everything. If the world’s attention remains fixed on one man, it becomes easier to overlook the broader architecture that produced, legitimized, and sustained these policies across successive governments.

But historical record makes that difficult to defend. The displacement of Palestinians, settlement expansion, territorial fragmentation, and the systematic denial of Palestinian self-determination did not begin with Netanyahu, nor are they likely to end with his departure. These are the product of decades of legislation, military policy, court decisions, bureaucratic practice, and political consensus. And we have decades of evidence proving this.

None of this absolves Netanyahu. He bears responsibility for decisions made under his leadership and for the coalition he assembled, in which figures such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have exercised extraordinary influence. But that coalition is better understood as the latest expression of a much longer trajectory than as a sharp break from it.

That is the distinction worth preserving. Holding individuals accountable is essential but mistaking the individual for the system is not.

The coalition itself illustrates the point.

Israel operates without a single written constitution, relying instead on Basic Laws that have become increasingly vulnerable to political manipulation. Netanyahu governs through a coalition in which far-right partners exercise enormous leverage over both government policy and the state’s future direction.

Smotrich, as Finance Minister, controls both the national purse strings and the settlement portfolio. He has openly advocated annexing the West Bank under a doctrine of “maximum land, minimum Arab population,” while his ministry has prepared plans for future settlements in Gaza. Ben-Gvir, as National Security Minister, oversees the national police, has championed expanding arms to radical settlers, and repeatedly promotes what he calls the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians. Both have made clear that they are willing to collapse the government if military operations are significantly curtailed and their military aggression is challenged.

The clearest evidence, however, lies not only in campaign speeches but in legislation.

Recent laws and legislative proposals demonstrate how political rhetoric becomes state policy. Consider the proposed Death Penalty for Terrorists Law. The bill establishes an expedited system of capital punishment for offenses defined through broad nationalist language. The significance extends beyond the death penalty itself. The proposal would further embed unequal treatment of Palestinians into the machinery of criminal law, creating an exceptional punishment regime widely expected to fall disproportionately on Palestinians.

What might otherwise be dismissed as extremist rhetoric is being codified into legislation, giving discriminatory state power the legitimacy and permanence of law. The danger is not only what the law permits, but what its passage would reveal: policies once associated with Israel’s far right can migrate into the legal architecture of the state itself.

And that shift is not confined to political elites. It is increasingly reflected in public opinion.

A March 2025 poll of Israeli Jews published in Haaretz revealed that 82 percent favored the total expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, and 47 percent agreed that the military should treat captured cities by killing everyone in them. A separate survey showed a clear majority opposed to allowing any food or medicine to enter the strip at all.

These attitudes matter because Ben-Gvir and Smotrich did not emerge in a vacuum. Their political power rests within a broader rightward shift in Israeli politics and a constituency increasingly receptive to policies once associated with its far right.

Nor does the machinery stop there.

International attention understandably remains centered on Gaza. Yet that focus often obscures the simultaneous acceleration of systematic abuses and atrocities across the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Widen the frame further and another reality comes into focus: the machinery extends well beyond Israel’s borders.

It relies on U.S. military assistance, diplomatic protection, repeated U.N. Security Council vetoes, and a domestic lobbying infrastructure built to raise the political cost of dissent.

During the 2024 election cycle, AIPAC and affiliated super PACs spent more than $100 million backing candidates while targeting members of Congress, including Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, who dared to challenge the longstanding bipartisan consensus on Israel, and to say what Mamdani just said.

It also depends on a media ecosystem that has spent decades softening the language of occupation and violence, reporting that Palestinians simply “die” rather than are killed, and presenting a profound asymmetry of power as though it were a conflict between equals.

Put Netanyahu in a jail cell tomorrow and the infrastructure that made his government possible does not disappear with him. Neither does the political constituency that empowered his coalition. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir remain. So do the settlement movement, the weapons contracts, the lobbying apparatus, the diplomatic cover and the political incentives sustaining them.

That wider reality also changes the communications challenge. Years of Palestinian documentation, organizing, journalism and public pressure have pushed criticism of Israeli state violence further into mainstream political discourse. The harder task is preventing a newly acceptable critique of Netanyahu from becoming the boundary of acceptable criticism itself. If he becomes the safe target—the man everyone can condemn without interrogating the system and larger cast of actors around him—an apparent breakthrough can instead narrow scrutiny of those who enabled, sustained and benefited from that system, limiting where accountability can reach.

The test, then, is whether the frame actually widens. Accountability has to follow responsibility outward: from Netanyahu to the policies governing Palestinian life; to the institutions that implement them; and to the money and political relationships that enable them in our very own jurisdictions.

That broader frame also reveals where accountability can become material. Some of the available pressure points sit inside tax law, municipal government, financial regulation, litigation and corporate governance—the systems through which distant abuses acquire local infrastructure.

Campaigns such as Not on Our Dime, which seeks to prevent New York tax-exempt dollars from supporting illegal settlements, point toward that next phase. So do efforts focused on financial transparency, municipal oversight, strategic litigation, universal jurisdiction, shareholder activism, and regulatory accountability.

Persuasion created the political opening. The question now is what can be done with it: which laws can be changed, which financial flows exposed, which institutions challenged, and which local authorities already possess powers they have chosen not to use.

If you found this analysis useful, you can read the rest of our ongoing field notes and investigative dispatches at rajaalthaibani.com.

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin

The political temperature in the United States is at an all-time high.

Within the past 24 hours, President Trump used a primetime White House address to argue that America’s election system “falls catastrophically short” of acceptable standards while releasing newly declassified intelligence about foreign election interference, and going so far as to declare our voting system “worse than any third world country.”

Whether readers agree with his conclusions or not, the speech reflected something undeniable: confidence in democratic institutions has become one of the defining political battles of our time.

Open almost any news app today and you’ll encounter variations of the same story. Headlines warn of foreign influence campaigns, AI-generated disinformation, election security threats, declining institutional trust, and deepening political polarization. After years of relentless crisis coverage, it’s understandable if many Americans feel anxious, exhausted, or increasingly powerless.

Yet there’s a paradox at the center of modern political life. The more attention we devote to national outrage, the less agency we often feel over the things we can actually influence. Refreshing election forecasts won’t alter a single ballot. Doom-scrolling through political commentary won’t make your community safer, your vote more secure, or your neighbors more trusting.

Democratic resilience isn’t built exclusively in Washington. It is built in quieter, less visible places: neighborhoods, polling places, local institutions, and the everyday interactions that shape civic life.

Research on democratic resilience points to a consistent conclusion: societies become more resistant to manipulation when citizens cultivate strong civic habits—verifying information before sharing it, understanding how elections work, knowing their rights, participating in local civic life, supporting trustworthy journalism, and building relationships across political differences.

None of these actions will dominate tomorrow’s headlines. Taken together, however, they are far more consequential than another afternoon spent arguing with strangers online.

Here are six practical ways to strengthen your community—and your own peace of mind—before Election Day.

In this Guide

1. Defuse Online Disinformation: Build better habits for navigating AI-generated content, deepfakes, and misinformation.

2. Secure Your Vote: Reduce uncertainty before Election Day by preparing ahead.

3. Protect the Process: See how poll workers and local election officials keep elections running—and how you can help.

4. Know Your Rights: Understand the legal protections that help you participate in civic life with confidence.

5. Defuse Polarization: Strengthen trust through local relationships and community engagement.

6. Invest in Local Journalism: Support the information ecosystem that keeps communities informed and accountable.

1. Defuse Online Disinformation: Build Your Media Moat

Modern election interference doesn’t begin at the ballot box. It begins on your phone.

Foreign influence operations, domestic political actors, and opportunistic online networks increasingly compete for one scarce resource: your attention. Their objective isn’t always to persuade you to support one candidate over another. Often, it’s simply to erode trust, heighten emotional reactions, and deepen social division.

Artificial intelligence has accelerated this challenge. Convincing deepfake videos, cloned voices, fabricated images, emotionally charged misinformation and hyper-partisan rage bait can now spread faster than professional fact-checkers can respond. As these technologies become more accessible, every voter must develop basic habits for evaluating information before reacting to it.

We just saw this playbook in action in the United States, where a highly sophisticated cyber campaign was exposed for creating deepfake video clones of legitimate anchors from Reuters and Fox News to distribute fabricated election news.

Recent elections around the world illustrate how quickly synthetic media has become part of modern political campaigns:

Israel: Fabricating institutional authority

Deepfake videos falsely portrayed Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg—who chaired the Central Elections Committee—announcing a fabricated state of emergency that would supposedly close polling stations. At the same time, misleading AI-generated images circulated through encrypted messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, exploiting private networks where independent fact-checking is more difficult.

Slovakia: Exploiting the information vacuum

Just two days before parliamentary elections, an AI-generated audio recording appeared to capture a leading candidate discussing election fraud. Because Slovak law imposed a pre-election media silence period, the candidate had little opportunity to publicly rebut the recording before voters went to the polls.

United Kingdom: Targeting public trust

Ahead of national elections, concerns over AI-generated audio prompted the UK Electoral Commission to test new deepfake detection tools. Synthetic recordings capable of imitating public figures highlighted how quickly fabricated media could damage reputations before its authenticity could be verified.

India: AI at unprecedented scale

India’s 2024 general election demonstrated the sheer scale of AI-assisted political communication. Campaigns generated millions of automated voice messages in regional dialects and, in some cases, used generative AI to recreate deceased political leaders delivering messages that appeared to endorse contemporary candidates—further blurring the distinction between historical record and synthetic content.

Different countries. Different political systems. The underlying tactic is remarkably similar: exploit emotion before facts have time to catch up.

What You Can Do

Verify before you amplify. Never share or react to an inflammatory political headline based on a single post or feed. Deploy the 3-Source rule (lateral reading). Leave the original platform entirely, open three separate browser tabs, and verify the claim across three distinct, independent news organizations with separate ownership and editorial boards. If only one outlet is reporting the story, or if the claim exists only on social media, treat it with caution until additional reporting emerges.

Reverse-search suspicious images. Images often circulate without context or are recycled from unrelated events. Free tools such as Google Lens or TinEye Reverse Image Search can help identify when and where an image first appeared online, making it easier to detect manipulated or misleading visual content.

Listen critically. AI-generated audio has become increasingly convincing, but synthetic recordings can still contain subtle clues, including unnatural pacing, unusual vocal cadence, inconsistent background sound, sudden drops in background ambient noise, or a complete lack of emotional inflection. When controversial recordings surface, wait for verification before accepting them as authentic. You can also test suspicious files using free detection platforms like ElevenLabs AI Speech Classifier.

Interrupt the outrage cycle. Disinformation succeeds by provoking immediate emotional reactions, to force viral sharing. If a post makes you instantly angry, frightened, or triumphant, pause before responding. Force a mandatory 20-minute cooling-off period before you reply, share, or quote-post it. Even a brief delay gives time for additional reporting and reduces the likelihood of unintentionally amplifying false information.

Curate your information environment. Social media platforms allow users to mute or block keywords, topics, and accounts in your account settings. Consider reducing exposure to speculative polling terms, inflammatory commentary, highly polarized phrases, and repetitive partisan content during the days or weeks surrounding an election. Limiting algorithmically amplified outrage can improve both the quality of your information and your own mental well-being.

Protect your digital privacy. When sharing links received through messaging apps or social media, consider removing unnecessary tracking parameters. Delete everything in the URL starting with ?utm_ or ?src= before forwarding them. These tracking codes are used by algorithmic data firms to map your social circles and build targeted profiles to feed you more polarized content.

Why this Matters

The strongest defense against disinformation isn’t better technology. It’s better habits. No platform, government agency, or AI detection system can verify every piece of content before it reaches your screen. But each of us can slow the spread of misinformation by refusing to become its next distributor. In an era when synthetic media is becoming cheaper, faster, and more convincing, skepticism is no longer cynicism. It’s civic responsibility.

2. Secure Your Vote: Reduce Uncertainty Before Election Day

For many Americans, anxiety about elections has less to do with politics than with uncertainty. Am I still registered? Has my polling location changed? Will my mail ballot arrive on time? What happens if my name isn’t on the voter rolls?

These aren’t hypothetical concerns. In recent election cycles, administrative issues—including polling-place consolidations, malfunctioning electronic pollbooks, long lines, and routine voter-roll maintenance—have disrupted voting in communities across the country, leading to voter suppression or citizen alienation. While most problems are resolved through established election procedures, many voters don’t discover an issue until they arrive at the polls.

The easiest way to reduce election-day stress is to eliminate as many unknowns as possible before voting begins.

What You Can Do

Verify your registration now. Don’t assume your registration is current simply because you’ve voted before. States regularly update voter rolls, and polling locations can change between elections. Visit Vote.gov or your state’s official election website to confirm your registration status, identify your assigned polling place, and review a sample ballot before Election Day.

Knowing what to expect removes unnecessary uncertainty, and helps you spend more time evaluating candidates instead of navigating logistics.

Save proof of your registration. After confirming your registration, save a screenshot showing your active status and polling location or print a copy for your records. If questions arise at your polling place, having that information immediately available can help election officials resolve administrative issues more efficiently.

Track your ballot in real-time. If you’re voting by mail, use your state’s official ballot-tracking system whenever one is available. Many states participate in services such as BallotTrax, allowing voters to receive text or email notifications when ballots are mailed, received, and accepted for counting. Tracking your ballot replaces uncertainty with confirmation.

Vote during quieter hours if possible. Long lines tend to occur before work, during lunch breaks, and immediately after offices close. When schedules allow, mid-morning or mid-afternoon voting often results in shorter wait times, fewer administrative bottlenecks, and mitigate risk of encountering malfunctioning machines during peak pressure hours. While every community differs, flexibility can make voting faster and less stressful.

If you’re an American living abroad, plan early. More than four million Americans are eligible to vote from overseas, yet many ballots are rejected each election because they arrive late or contain technical errors. Submit a Federal Post Card Application (FPCA) every year through the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) to request your ballot. Whenever your state permits it, choose electronic ballot delivery to reduce international mail delays. If your official ballot doesn’t arrive in time, many voters can use the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot (FWAB) as an emergency backup, to ensure your vote is counted.

Use your nearest U.S. embassy or consulate. In many countries, U.S. embassies and consulates allow citizens to submit completed absentee ballots for diplomatic mail forwarding to the United States. Check your embassy’s website well before election deadlines to confirm local procedures and mailing cut-off dates.

Follow ballot instructions carefully. Many absentee ballots are rejected for avoidable mistakes: missing signatures, incorrect envelope procedures, or incomplete forms. Take a few extra minutes to read every instruction before sealing your ballot. Sometimes the smallest administrative details determine whether a vote is ultimately counted.

Confidence in elections doesn’t come from assuming everything will work perfectly. It comes from understanding how the system works, and preparing for the few things that occasionally don’t. Most election administration happens quietly, professionally, and without incident. But when problems do arise, informed voters are far better equipped to navigate them than surprised ones. Protecting your vote begins long before Election Day.

3. Protect the Process: Serve Your Community as a Poll Worker

America’s elections are remarkably decentralized. Unlike many democracies, elections in the United States are administered primarily at the county and municipal level by thousands of local election officials and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens serving as poll workers, election judges, and volunteers. That decentralization is one of the system’s greatest strengths. It distributes responsibility rather than concentrating it in one institution. But it also depends on people showing up.

Across the country, election offices have struggled in recent years to recruit enough poll workers, particularly since the pandemic. Staffing shortages can contribute to longer lines, delayed openings, administrative bottlenecks, and increased pressure on already stretched election officials. While these challenges vary widely by jurisdiction, they underscore a simple reality: elections rely on civic participation long before anyone casts a ballot.

Most Americans experience elections only as voters. Few ever see how much preparation, training, and bipartisan cooperation happens behind the scenes to make Election Day work.

Serving as a poll worker offers a rare opportunity to see that process firsthand—and to help strengthen it.

What You Can Do

Apply through your local election office. If you’ve ever wondered how elections actually operate, consider serving as a poll worker. Begin with your county or state election office, which can explain eligibility requirements, training, compensation, and responsibilities. Most positions are paid, include mandatory training, and require no previous experience. Organizations such as the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and WorkElections.org can also help connect volunteers with local opportunities.

Bring someone with you. Double your impact by convincing a friend, colleague, or family member to sign up with you. Election officials consistently report needing younger workers with strong technical skills to help operate modern electronic check-in pollbooks. Serving together not only helps your community, it also makes what can be a long Election Day more enjoyable.

Learn how elections actually work. Even if you never become a poll worker, take time to understand your state’s election procedures. Read your local election office’s voter guides. Watch demonstrations of ballot-counting procedures. Learn how provisional ballots work. Understand the safeguards that already exist. The more familiar citizens become with election administration, the less room there is for speculation, misinformation, and unnecessary distrust.

Thank the people who make elections possible. Poll workers, election clerks, and local election administrators rarely receive public recognition. Their work is demanding, highly scrutinized, and increasingly conducted under intense public pressure. A simple expression of appreciation helps reinforce that election administration is public service, not partisan activism.

Democracy doesn’t function automatically. Every election depends on thousands of ordinary citizens who quietly keep the process running—from election administrators and poll workers to volunteers and observers. Most of their work happens out of public view, and that’s precisely the point: when elections function well, they rarely make headlines.

Strengthening democracy isn’t only about casting a ballot. Sometimes it’s about helping make sure everyone else can cast theirs, too.

4. Know Your Rights Before You Need Them

Democracy depends on more than the right to vote. It also depends on citizens understanding the rights that allow them to participate in public life with confidence.

Whether you’re attending a town hall, observing a polling place, participating in a peaceful demonstration, or documenting events in a public space, uncertainty about your legal rights can discourage civic participation just as effectively as misinformation.

In recent years, concerns about surveillance, aggressive monitoring, and the increasingly blurred boundaries between lawful political expression and security enforcement have left many Americans uncertain about where those rights begin and end. That uncertainty can be just as chilling as overt intimidation, causing people to withdraw from civic life altogether.

The goal isn’t to become a legal expert. It’s simply to understand your rights well enough to participate confidently, respond calmly, and know where to turn if questions or problems arise.

What You Can Do

Carry a trusted legal resource. Keep an instant legal reference on your phone. Download a reputable “Know Your Rights” guide or bookmark resources from organizations such as the ACLU or your state’s civil liberties organization (e.g. ACLU “Know Your Rights” App). Bookmark legal portals regarding your explicit rights when filming law enforcement, participating in peaceful protests, or encountering aggressive behavior at public demonstrations.

Document incidents carefully and systematically . If you witness voter intimidation, unlawful interference, or another concerning incident, resist the urge to post immediately on social media. Instead, open a secure note app and record the precise time, GPS location, people involved (when appropriate), and a factual description of what occurred (individual descriptions, including officer badge numbers, and specific actions). Detailed contemporaneous notes are often more valuable to investigators than fragmented online posts.

Secure your phone. If you expect to attend a demonstration or another event where your phone may contain sensitive information, review your device’s security settings in advance and change your phone settings to require a passcode instead of FaceID/Biometrics. Under U.S. law, law enforcement can legally force you to unlock a phone with your face or fingerprint, but they cannot legally force you to give up a memorized passcode without a warrant. Using a strong passcode, enabling encryption, and understanding your legal rights regarding access to your device can better protect your personal information. Because legal standards surrounding digital privacy continue to evolve, consult current guidance from trusted legal organizations for the latest information.

Report problems through official channels. If you experience or witness voter intimidation, unlawful interference, or significant election irregularities, notify local election officials immediately. You can also contact the nonpartisan Election Protection Hotline (866-OUR-VOTE), which connects voters with trained volunteers who can explain available options and, when appropriate, escalate concerns to election authorities.

Understand the rules at your polling place. Election laws differ from state to state, including rules governing campaign activity near polling locations. Before Election Day, familiarize yourself with your state’s electioneering restrictions so you know what conduct is, and is not, permitted around polling places. Knowing the rules helps protect both your own rights and the integrity of the voting process.

Memorize the buffer zone rule. Every state has a legally mandated "no-electioneering" boundary (typically 50 to 100 feet) around the entrance of a polling place. Inside this perimeter, no one is allowed to hand out political literature, wear candidate merchandise, or solicit votes. If a partisan actor approaches you inside this zone, say clearly: "This is a designated buffer zone, and electioneering is restricted here," and report them to the chief poll worker immediately.

If your eligibility is questioned, ask about your options. If there is a problem locating your registration at the polls, remain calm and ask election officials to explain the available procedures. Under federal law, and Help America Vote Act (HAVA), eligible voters may have the right to cast a provisional ballot in certain circumstances while their eligibility is verified. Understanding that option before Election Day can help reduce confusion if an administrative issue arises.

Democratic participation is strongest when citizens understand both their rights and their responsibilities. Knowing the law isn’t about preparing for conflict. It’s about replacing uncertainty with confidence. Most civic interactions proceed without incident. But when unexpected situations do arise, preparation allows you to respond thoughtfully rather than react emotionally. Confidence, like resilience, is built long before it’s tested.

5. Defuse Polarization: Rebuild Trust Close to Home

Political polarization often feels like an unavoidable feature of modern life. National debates spill into family gatherings, friendships fracture over social media, and every election can feel like an existential struggle between irreconcilable sides.

Yet research consistently points to an important distinction: while Americans remain deeply divided over national politics, they tend to view their own neighbors far more positively. Face-to-face interactions reduce the stereotypes and assumptions that flourish online, reminding us that most people are more complex than the political labels attached to them.

Democratic resilience begins not in Washington, but in the communities where people still have the opportunity to know one another as neighbors rather than adversaries.

What You Can Do

Create spaces where politics isn’t the agenda. Invite neighbors over for coffee, organize a block gathering, or spend time together at a local park—with one simple expectation: leave national politics at the door. Shared experiences build trust far more effectively than political debates ever will. Focus entirely on shared local needs—neighborhood safety, fixing local potholes, or planning a block party—to build a network of mutual support that lasts long past November.

Acknowledge emotions, then change the conversation. When someone raises a divisive political topic, resist the instinct to argue or fact-check immediately. Instead, acknowledge the emotion behind what they’re saying before gently redirecting the conversation toward something you both share. For example: “I can understand why that story is worrying. The news has been exhausting lately. I’ve been trying to focus more on what’s happening here in our neighborhood. Have you seen they’re finally repairing the intersection on Maple Street?” Validation isn’t agreement. It’s often the quickest path back to a productive conversation.

Choose curiosity over persuasion. If a political disagreement does emerge, don’t focus on winning the argument. Ask thoughtful, open-ended questions instead. “I’m curious, what experiences shaped your view on that?” Questions encourage reflection. Arguments often encourage people to defend positions they may not have examined deeply. This disrupts defensive, algorithmic thinking.

Show up locally. Attend a town council meeting, community board session, school board meeting, or neighborhood association gathering. Local government is where many decisions affecting daily life are actually made, yet it often receives only a fraction of the attention devoted to national politics. Participation also reminds us that civic life is far broader than elections alone.

Join a nonpartisan civic organization. Organizations such as the League of Women Voters, neighborhood associations, volunteer groups, and community improvement organizations provide opportunities to work alongside people with different political perspectives toward shared local goals. Collaboration builds trust in ways online debate rarely can.

Trust is rarely rebuilt through national political victories. It grows gradually through repeated local interactions: helping a neighbor shovel snow, volunteering together, attending community meetings, or simply learning one another’s names.

Politics may shape our differences. Community reminds us of what we still share.

6. Invest in Local Journalism: Strengthen Your Information Ecosystem

Democracy depends on more than free elections. It depends on reliable information.

Yet today’s media environment increasingly rewards attention over accuracy. National cable networks, social media platforms, and algorithm-driven news feeds compete for clicks, engagement, and advertising revenue—often elevating the stories most likely to provoke outrage rather than understanding.

Local journalism operates under a different set of incentives. Reporters covering city councils, school boards, county courts, and neighborhood issues are often accountable to the very communities they serve. Their work is less focused on amplifying national political conflict and more concerned with answering practical questions that directly affect people’s lives.

As local newsrooms disappear across the United States, communities lose more than newspapers. They lose institutional memory, public accountability, and trusted sources of shared information. Supporting local journalism is one of the most direct investments citizens can make in democratic resilience.

What You Can Do

Subscribe to a local substack or independent newspaper. If you’re able, support an independent local newspaper, nonprofit newsroom, or community journalist covering your city or region. Even one paid subscription helps sustain reporting that keeps residents informed about the decisions shaping their daily lives. Organizations such as the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) or the Local News Initiative can help readers discover nonprofit newsrooms serving their communities.

Diversify your news diet. Avoid relying on a single publication, television network, or social media feed. Reading across multiple credible news organizations with different editorial approaches provides a broader understanding of events and makes it easier to recognize bias, omissions, or incomplete reporting. Healthy information ecosystems depend on diversity, not uniformity.

Reduce algorithmic noise. Consider muting highly repetitive political commentary, prediction markets, and outrage-driven content during election season. This isn’t about avoiding the news. It’s about creating space for reporting that informs rather than inflames.

Read beyond the headline. Headlines are designed to capture attention. Whenever possible, read the full article before sharing it. Examine the reporting, the evidence presented, and the sources quoted—not just the headline or accompanying social media caption. Thoughtful readers are far more difficult to manipulate than impulsive ones.

Support journalism that values accuracy over speed. Reliable reporting often takes time. Investigative journalism, local accountability reporting, and deeply sourced analysis rarely compete with breaking news for speed—but they frequently provide the context that breaking news cannot. Supporting that work helps strengthen the public’s ability to make informed decisions.

A healthy democracy depends on citizens who are well informed, not simply well connected. The information we choose to support shapes the conversations we have, the institutions we trust, and ultimately the decisions we make together.

In an era of information abundance, one of the most meaningful civic choices we can make is deciding what kind of journalism deserves our attention, our trust, and our support.

Democracy Is Built Closer to Home Than We Think

It is easy to believe that democracy is shaped only by presidents, political parties, and institutions in Washington. The headlines encourage that perception. Every day brings another crisis, another prediction, another argument over the future of the country. The result is a growing sense that the most important decisions are happening somewhere else, and that ordinary citizens have little influence over them.

History suggests otherwise. Democracies are sustained not only by constitutions and courts, but by the everyday habits of ordinary people: verifying information before sharing it, showing up to vote, serving their communities, understanding their rights, engaging respectfully with their neighbors, and supporting journalism that holds local institutions accountable.

These actions rarely dominate the news cycle. They won’t trend on social media. They won’t eliminate political disagreement or resolve every institutional challenge facing the country.

But they do something quieter, and ultimately more durable. They strengthen the civic foundations on which democracy depends. If there is one lesson from recent elections around the world, it is this: resilience cannot be downloaded, legislated, or outsourced. It must be practiced. Not all at once.

One conversation. One verified story. One ballot. One community. At a time.

So rather than asking what Washington will do next, ask a different question:

What is one thing I can do this week to make my own community a little more informed, a little more connected, and a little more resilient?

Start there. Because democracy is built closer to home than we often imagine.

Your Turn: Take One Action Today

Pick just one action from this playbook today, and take your power back from the algorithms.

Share this guide with three friends who are feeling overwhelmed by the news cycle, and let’s build resilience together.

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About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin

Previous coverage: Beyond the Headlines: Protecting Youth from Algorithmic Extremism · The Viral Confrontation San Diego’s Mayor Didn’t Want You to See

When political violence strikes a marginalized community, the institutional response follows a well-worn script.

High-visibility police cruisers temporarily flank the perimeters of local houses of worship. Press conferences dominate the news cycle. Public officials deploy localized, sanitizing language: “isolated incident,” “troubled individuals,” “suspected hate crime.”

Authorities waste invaluable time compensating for catastrophic systems failures and patching outdated bureaucratic protocols. And then, if enough pressure builds, the truth emerges, and the fractures within the structures and systems we depend on are exposed.

Three weeks after three worshippers were murdered at the Islamic Center of San Diego, that is exactly what happened. Under sustained community pressure and the weight of a 75-page manifesto explicitly designed to trigger a race war, authorities scrambled to react. Finally, the FBI stepped in with a reclassification: domestic terrorism. Not just a hate crime.

But by the time the paperwork cleared, the attention economy had already exacted its tax. Naturally, the collective focus has migrated to the next crisis, the next viral conflict, or the next cycle of outrage. The state’s updated vocabulary arrives as a quiet postscript to a story the public has already stopped reading, leaving the bureaucratic machine to hollowly declare a victory of definition long after the world has moved on.

Then the news trucks packed up. The patrol cars disappeared. And the underlying pipelines that radicalize, arm, and mobilize violent actors remain entirely functional. Not metaphorically, but literally, utilizing the exact same fractured legal, security, and digital infrastructures—and the hosting providers and lobbying networks that insulate hate from accountability.

This structural delay creates a dangerous psychological trap. Because the institutional upgrade happens so late, the only words that truly stick in the public consciousness are the initial, sanitized headlines — circulated before the machinery of Big Tech and mainstream media has already pulled our attention elsewhere. This warps how we understand and process political violence in three specific ways:

• Cementing the Wrong Frame. The public internalizes the early, flawed narrative, “isolated incident”, as definitive truth. The structural reality “domestic terrorism,” “transnational accelerationist network”, is lost entirely.

• The Manufactured Attention Deficit. We are never allowed enough time to sit with a tragedy, sit with the grief, or critically analyze the failure. The attention economy demands constant novelty to maintain profitability.

• A Cycle of Strategic Amnesia. Media and tech infrastructures work in tandem to keep us perpetually moving forward. By starvation of time, they ensure structural failures never stay relevant long enough to generate sustained public interest or spark real systemic accountability.

  

Call It What It Is, And Then Go Further

Classifying this attack as domestic terrorism matters. Words carry weight. The designation formally elevates what happened to what it actually was: an ideological, coordinated assault on our collective security, incubated on domestic soil, inspired by an international accelerationist movement with a shared canon and a shared playbook.1

But symbolism does not stop bullets.

The FBI’s reclassification exposes a terrifying structural reality: our national security architecture and legal frameworks are fundamentally unequipped not just for a decentralized digital era, but for the era of ideological convergence.

Our counter-terrorism tools were built to detect rigid, uniform doctrines. They look for card-carrying members of specific, legacy hate groups. But modern online radicalization no longer requires ideological purity. Instead, the pipeline operates like an algorithmic “salad bar,” where broken individuals mix and match seemingly contradictory grievances.

In digital spaces, we now see a fluid convergence where militant accelerationism weaves seamlessly together with incel subcultures, radical anti-government conspiracism, hyper-nihilism, and eco-fascism. They are bound together not by a shared utopia, but by a shared desire for total systemic collapse.2

Our legal framework is structurally blind to this synthesis. It wastes critical time trying to pigeonhole an attacker into a singular, bureaucratic box—debating whether an event was a “hate crime” or “political terrorism”—while the pipeline itself has already moved past ideology entirely, unifying disparate factions under a singular, gamified playbook of mass violence.3

This profound mismatch between 20th-century static law and 21st-century fluid terror manifests in three devastating operational blind spots:

• The Teeth Gap: When an attacker is captured alive, federal prosecutors can leverage hate crime statutes to give the system legal teeth. But because there is no comprehensive domestic terrorism statute with preventative criminal charges for decentralized actors, the FBI’s reclassification carries zero immediate legal utility. It cannot preemptively punish, it cannot deter cell networks, and it cannot dynamically unseal preventative warrants against borderless entities.

• The Retroactive Trap: When perpetrators commit suicide at the scene—as Clark and Vazquez did, and as Christchurch's Tarrant explicitly instructed followers to do—the "domestic terrorism" label degrades entirely into an exercise in clerical data tracking. The real systemic failure is that our statutory frameworks are designed to react with labels only after the legal ledger is closed, rather than affording the state the proactive legal utility to dismantle the infrastructure before the first shot is fired.

• The Post-Mortem Reality: The entire national security apparatus functions as an autopsian machine, formally acknowledging a synthesis of threats only after the bodies are counted and the manifestos are downloaded, while thousands of other hyper-individualized actors currently sitting in online radicalization pipelines remain entirely untouched.

This is not a failure of law enforcement effort. It is a structural paralysis born from outdated legal architecture, and it was fully visible in San Diego sixteen months before the attack.

The Machinery Nobody Wants to Name. But We Will.

Here is what I have been arguing throughout my Safari Is Over series: the danger of performing autopsies on isolated events, rather than examining the systemic and structural conditions that produced them. We have become highly skilled at reacting to symptoms. We are far less practiced at dissecting causes.

San Diego is not a local tragedy. It is not an American anomaly. It is a data point in a global systems failure, and whether you are reading this from New York, Amsterdam, Nairobi, or Istanbul, you have a direct stake in what happens next.

To understand why San Diego happened, we must stop staring at the surface of the water. The pipeline is not built on extremist ideology alone. It is built on four foundational conditions — structural rot that runs far deeper than any manifesto:

I. Sociological Atomization: The systematic breakdown of local community infrastructure, civic spaces, and social cohesion in Western societies has created a massive demographic of lonely, untethered individuals experiencing acute existential drift. Legitimate personal isolation, economic anxiety, and alienation are not met with community care and human connection; instead, they are outsourced to profit-driven digital interfaces, and left to putrefy in online echo chambers that systematically converted personal grievance into collective, violent anti-system rage. Convincing vulnerable individuals that civilizational conflict is their only path to significance.

II. Asymmetric Jurisdictional Warfare & Legal and Governance Atrophy:

The state operates on an obsolete, 20th-century model of geographical borders and physical command chains (think structured cells and top-down organizations). Conversely, modern extremism operates through fluid, borderless hybrid decentralized extremist networks that defy fixed labels and render national legal architectures fundamentally toothless. International frameworks cannot stop cross-border ideological acceleration when the network has no fixed address and no central leadership to surveil.

III. The Financialization of Attention: Under digital capitalism, human attention is the ultimate commodity. Because outrage, fear, and polarization generate the highest engagement metrics, the economic foundations of tech and media are structurally aligned with the mechanics of radicalization. This is compounded by a fundamental fracture within journalism itself: hyper-accelerated timelines force breaking desks to treat attacks as context-free anomalies, while resource limitations strip investigative units of the capital and capacity required to map complex pipelines.

IV. The Complicity of the Self: We must ultimately confront our own role as media consumers, citizens, and communities. We actively feed the attention economy that makes outrage profitable. Sheltered by comforting narratives of exceptionalism, it is easy to point fingers at external villains or passively wait for “the authorities” to fix a broken world. By participating in fractured, hyper-individualistic cultures, we starve the collective accountability and social tissue required to stop the bleeding before it begins.

The New Holy Trinity: The Infrastructure of Radicalization

When these four root conditions converge, they give birth to three operational engines: the obvious threats we point fingers at. They are not the roots. They are the highly functional superstructure built directly on top of the structural decay.

I. The Revenue Locomotive (The Optimization Engine):

Operating within a governance vacuum, Big Tech and Corporate Media serve as the front-end funnel. Mainstream algorithms optimize recommendation loops to push isolated people toward extremism, while corporate parents spend millions lobbying to kill transparency bills that would force them to reveal how those loops work. Simultaneously, mainstream outlets package mass casualties into sensationalized, polarizing content because fear drives ad revenue, and fear provides the exact global megaphone the attackers designed their massacres to achieve.

II. The Infrastructure of Permission (The Technical Sub-Layer)

When mainstream platforms issue bans, extremism simply migrates fluidly into a decentralized, unmoderated tech layer that exploits the governance void. It utilizes decentralized, federated networks like Matrix/Element and private Mastodon instances, metadata-free encrypted messaging apps like Session and private Signal forks, anonymous imageboards like 4chan, 8kun, and EndChan, and offshore bulletproof hosting providers. This plumbing ensures their digital infrastructure remains immune to state censorship or legal subpoenas, and keeps the recruitment archive accessible to the next shooter in a bedroom somewhere.

III. The Ideal Archetype (The Cultural Gamification Network)

Decentralized cells and imageboards weaponize hyper-individualism by taking the isolated individuals processed by the Revenue Locomotive and offering them a tribal identity. They explicitly gamify mass murder, turning digital manifestos like The New Crusade into viral marketing collateral with leaderboards and digital trophies, ranking body counts like a video game leaderboard. This closes the loop: transforming the consumer of radical content into the next active producer of violence.

What’s Coming

This is part of Unembedded’s ongoing reporting and analysis on the systems, infrastructures, and power structures that produce political violence, and the people working to dismantle them.

San Diego is the entry point. The machinery it exposed is not local, and the reporting will not stay local.

In the coming weeks and months, we are going deeper into every layer of this infrastructure, through this and other past and current events. That means:

• The legal and security architecture: the counter-terrorism protocols, behavioral intervention frameworks, and intelligence-sharing systems that were all active in the Vazquez case, and the documented points at which each one failed. What the law can and cannot do. What it is designed to ignore. What a 20th-century security model looks like when it meets a 21st-century decentralized network.

• The tech and platform layer: Cloudflare’s four-year infrastructure relationship with WatchPeopleDie. Meta’s January 2025 content moderation rollback and what the data shows happened after it. The lobbying architecture that killed transparency legislation across ten countries. What the EU’s Digital Services Act is actually doing, and what it can’t touch.

• The transnational network: how Christchurch, Buffalo, Bratislava, Nashville, and San Diego are nodes on the same line. The shared canon, the shared playbook, the shared recruitment pipeline. Why this is not an American story, and what that means for practitioners, policymakers, and communities in Europe and beyond.

• The policy and accountability gap: the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act and why it has died in the Senate every session since 2017. What ERPO law can and cannot do about peer networks. What a network-aware intervention framework would actually require. Who is blocking it and what they are protecting.

• The cross-community dimension: the San Diego manifesto named Muslim, Jewish, Black, and LGBTQ communities as targets. The movement does not discriminate. Neither should the coalition fighting it. What a joint cross-community advocacy strategy looks like in practice, and who is already building it.

• The media and attention economy: how breaking news desks structurally produce the amnesia cycle this piece describes. What responsible coverage of ideological violence actually requires. The outlets and journalists doing it right, and what we can learn from them.

• The practitioner, activist, and engaged public tools. Public records request templates (CPRA for California, FOIA for federal). Digital safety guides for parents, educators, and community moderators. Model ERPO reform language for state-level advocates. Christchurch Call resources for civil society organizations engaging international frameworks. City council comment scripts. Shareholder action guides for institutional investors with human rights mandates. Scripts for talking to your kids, your neighbors, your elected officials, and your school board. Guides for recognizing radicalization early: in your home, your classroom, your community center, your mosque, your church, your synagogue. How to report, who to call, what actually happens when you do. And the full cross-community action playbooks/ tip sheets: concrete, specific, and written for everyone from the policy veteran to the parent who just found something disturbing on their teenager’s phone. Not awareness. Actionable.

We will not move on. That is the commitment.

The system flagged Caleb Vazquez sixteen months before the attack. It removed 26 guns from his home. It marked the file resolved. And it never saw Cain Clark coming, because the two of them built toward the same endpoint in digital spaces the architecture was never designed to watch.

That is where we go next.

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin

On Monday, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria took to a press conference podium intending to deliver standard, bureaucratic platitudes following a gruesome mass shooting. Hours earlier, two teenage gunmen entered the Islamic Center of San Diego, murdering three Muslim worshippers in cold blood before turning the weapons on themselves.

But the standard political script was abruptly shattered. A voice from the crowd shouted directly at the Mayor:

“This is a fucking direct result of your leadership! Our Muslim brothers and sisters have been talking to you... you emboldened Zionist propaganda, and you'll keep doing it!”

The footage is raw, uncomfortable, and rapidly going viral. It exposes a profound, simmering fury toward a political establishment that treats Islamophobic violence as an isolated anomaly while actively cultivating the soil where it grows.

The Architecture of Complicity

Local activists and community members are not just angry at a single press conference; they are indicting an entire career of selective empathy and institutional hostility. When we look past the Mayor’s public relations shield, a clear, three-part framework of systemic enabling emerges:

• Manufacturing Dehumanization: Mayor Gloria has consistently aligned himself with aggressive Zionist advocacy, uncritically repeating foreign policy narratives that paint Arab and Palestinian populations as inherently suspect. This rhetoric domesticates violence, signaling to extremist actors that these communities do not deserve protection.

• Weaponizing Identity to Silence Dissent: In a cynical display of identity politics, Gloria previously boycotted a major local Pride event because the headlining artist, Kehlani, expressed solidarity with Palestine. By weaponizing his platform to penalize basic human empathy, he signaled that solidarity with Muslim and Arab lives is a fireable public offense.

• Institutionalizing Xenophobia: Beyond the rhetoric lies policy. Under Gloria’s administration, local municipal systems have quietly cooperated with federal immigration crackdowns and ICE raids. This has effectively normalized the idea that the immigrant "other" is a structural threat to public safety.

The "Hate Crime" Shield: A Direct Institutional Deception

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The most dangerous weapon in the municipal toolkit is the deliberate manipulation of legal definitions. The distinction comes down to specific U.S. federal laws, which treat international terrorism differently from domestic terrorism, frequently creating a structural double standard in how the word "terrorism" is legally applied.

We are seeing this exact bureaucratic evasion play out right now in San Diego:

• The Administrative Classification: San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl stated that the mass shooting is being treated strictly as a hate crime. This classification was maintained even after federal and local investigators uncovered anti-Islamic, anti-Semitic, and white supremacist writings in the vehicle, alongside a 75-page manifesto left behind by the two deceased teenage shooters, Cain Clark and Caleb Vazquez.

The manifesto was titled “The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant” and made reference to Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people and injured 89 more in an attack on a mosque and an Islamic center in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, according to the sources. The FBI confirmed Tuesday that it is examining a manifesto, but did not verify the one circulating online that purports to be the attackers’ writings.

• The Prohibited Prosecution: Because both perpetrators died of self-inflicted wounds immediately following the attack, no formal criminal charges, such as state hate crime enhancements or federal domestic terrorism-related charges, will ever be prosecuted in an open court of law. The legal book has been effectively closed.

• The Expert Counter-Narrative: While local police and the FBI handle the formal criminal probe under restrictive hate crime frameworks, independent experts refuse to play along. Researchers from organizations like George Washington University’s Program on Extremism have publicly characterized the event as a clear instance of "do-it-yourself domestic terrorism," citing the suspects' deep online radicalization and adherence to neo-Nazi, far-right accelerationist ideologies. Simultaneously, civil rights and advocacy groups, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), have fiercely condemned the mass shooting as a textbook terrorist attack against the Muslim community.

This is why the linguistic shift matters: a hate crime designation frames mass violence as the tragic, isolated work of pathologically bigoted lone wolves.

Conversely, labeling an attack terrorism forces the state to admit that an organized, ideological insurgency is operating successfully under its watch. It would require local law enforcement and the Mayor’s office to launch aggressive, proactive counterterrorism operations against domestic, right-wing networks, the very networks fueled by mainstream political scapegoating.

By downgrading a targeted terrorist onslaught to a localized hate crime, local officials decouple the violence from the hostile political climate they helped create. They treat the symptom while actively protecting the disease.

These recent gruesome murders are not an aberration. They are the predictable, scalable consequence of a systemically fostered environment.

But understanding the machinery of this institutional deception is only the first step. Outrage without a tactical target is exactly what complicit officials rely on—they expect our fury to fade by the next news cycle.

To shatter this cycle, we must convert our systemic critique into direct, localized pressure. If the state refuses to classify this violence accurately, the community must force accountability through every legislative, legal, and financial mechanism available.

Dismantling the Machinery: How to Force Accountability

Acknowledge the grief, but channel the rage into concrete structural leverage. To force real accountability from Mayor Gloria and compromised municipal institutions, the public must execute targeted civic disruptions:

1. Weaponize the City Council Record: Do not just protest outside. Under San Diego municipal rules, community organizations can bundle individual speaking limits into a single, comprehensive 15-minute formal presentation. Use this mechanism to embed evidence of institutional complicity directly into the permanent city archive.

2. Audit the Police Data Pipeline: File targeted California Public Records Act (CPRA) requests demanding the internal communications between the Mayor’s office and local law enforcement regarding threat classifications. If local agencies are downplaying right-wing accelerationism to shield political donors, track the data and litigate.

3. Threaten Political Viability: Build independent, multi-faith voting coalitions that refuse to endorse, fund, or validate any local official who remains silent on domestic terror frameworks or participates in political boycotts of pro-Palestinian voices.

The political class expects our outrage to fade into the next news cycle. Do not let them change the subject. Share this post, drop your thoughts in the comments, and let's organize.

San Diego Grassroots Action Dashboard

• Organize Below the Radar: Follow and support the boots-on-the-ground work being led by faith and justice groups like Pillars of the Community San Diego (@potcsd) and American Muslims for Palestine.

• Demand Transparency: Use the San Diego City Council Comment Portal to demand a full audit of how the SDPD logs right-wing extremism versus civil rights violations.

The National Playbook: Moving Beyond San Diego

What happened in San Diego is happening in your city, too. Encroaching white supremacist violence is being minimized by a political class that refuses to name the threat. Here is how we fight back nationally:

• Flood Congress: Call your federal representatives and demand they co-sponsor the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act to force the FBI and DHS to legally treat white supremacy as a national security threat.

• Support the Frontlines: Amplify and fund national watchdogs like @CAIRNational and @AJP_Actionwho are legally challenging the institutional double standards that protect violent extremists.

• Primary Complicit Democrats: Work with groups like the Working Families Party to recruit, fund, and elect bold, grassroots leaders who refuse to sacrifice Muslim, Arab, and immigrant safety for establishment political donations.

(Author's Note: You can find the direct contact portal for your U.S. Representative at House.gov and your U.S. Senators at Senate.gov. It takes 90 seconds, and it breaks their office's status quo.)

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Copy-and-Paste Federal Action Script

Subject Line: Urgently Co-Sponsor the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act / Address Far-Right Extremism

Dear Senator / Representative [Insert Name Here],

My name is [Your Name], and I am a constituent writing from [Your City, State, Zip Code].

I am contacting your office to demand immediate legislative action following the horrific mass violence at the Islamic Center of San Diego. For decades, our federal national security apparatus has disproportionately targeted minority and activist communities while minimizing the organized, ideological threat of white supremacist and far-right accelerationist networks.

The habitual institutional practice of downgrading organized ideological slaughter to local "hate crimes" instead of classifying it as domestic terrorism shields violent political movements from necessary accountability.

As my representative, I urge you to immediately take the following federal actions:

1. Co-Sponsor and Pass the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act: Mandate that the FBI, DOJ, and DHS establish dedicated offices solely tasked with monitoring, analyzing, and prosecuting domestic terrorism networks.

2. Demand a Congressional Investigation into DHS Fusion Centers: Order a full budgetary and operational audit of state-and-local intelligence hubs to expose why federal security resources consistently ignore active right-wing extremist infrastructure.

3. Enforce the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act: Mandate strict data compliance for local police departments, ensuring they cannot legally misclassify or bury white supremacist violence under low-level reporting standards.

The political class can no longer hide behind generic press statements while ignoring the systemic infrastructure feeding domestic terror. Our communities deserve structural safety, not empty platitudes. I will be tracking your voting record on these specific measures closely.

Sincerely,
[Your Name]
[Your Contact Information]

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Are you worried about what your children, students, friends, or community are being exposed to online right now?

The teenage gunmen who carried out Monday’s deadly attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego did not radicalize in a vacuum.

They were shaped by systems, and manufactured by design.

While communities mourn the lives of Amin Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha, and Nadir Awad, commentators keep asking:

How does this keep happening?

The urgent question is:

How do we expect to protect young people from online radicalization while ignoring the algorithmic systems, dehumanizing political language, grievance economies, and engagement-driven infrastructures that normalize extremism in the first place?

The infrastructure of modern violence has fundamentally changed.

What once lived in fragmented corners of the internet is now embedded into everyday digital life, reaching children earlier, faster, and more intimately than ever before.

It connects seemingly disparate horrors: ISIS propaganda networks, the Christchurch mosque livestream, antisemitic synagogue attacks, and the rising global surge of femicide and targeted misogyny.

For years, Western institutions treated these threats as distant, fringe, or external. Domestic extremism was minimized, selectively labeled, or politically compartmentalized while the underlying systems continued expanding in plain sight.

Today, state actors, influencers, extremist networks, and platform economies increasingly exploit the same vulnerabilities: fear, isolation, humiliation, identity crises, discrimination, and social alienation.

The pipeline is digital, and its consequences are physical.

So I created this tip sheet not as a panic document, but as a practical starting point for parents, educators, journalists, organizers, and communities trying to understand what is actually happening around them, and what warning signs we can no longer afford to ignore.

This is only the beginning.

In the coming weeks, Unembedded will continue publishing:

• practical prevention guidance

• platform accountability analysis

• newsroom reporting frameworks

• policy pressure points

• school and community intervention strategies

• investigations into the systems shaping modern online radicalization

Prevention starts long before violence. It starts with understanding the systems shaping attention, identity, belonging, and belief.

Subscribe to Unembedded, and restock and share this with your networks.

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Please note: the guidance and frameworks shared through Unembedded will continue evolving as technologies, platforms, policies, and online behaviors rapidly change. Stay subscribed for updated analysis, corrections, resources, and future action frameworks.

— Raja Althaibani, Editor, Unembedded

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin

This essay is part II of The Safari Is Over, a series that uses the manosphere as a lens to examine the media systems, economic conditions, and institutional failures that produced it, the broader harms those failures generate well beyond this one ecosystem, and what practitioners, journalists, and anyone paying attention can actually do about it. The manosphere is the entry point. It is not the destination. Read Part I here. Follow and subscribe on Substack.

Louis Theroux went inside the manosphere the way institutions always go inside things they don’t understand: with a camera, a broadcast license, and the quiet confidence that naming something is the same as knowing it. It wasn’t. What Inside the Manosphere produced was ninety minutes of compelling television that reproduced the exact logic it arrived to examine, and in doing so, caught something it didn’t mean to: a more structurally honest document hiding inside the spectacle, about media, power, and the system most institutions covering this space have a considered interest in never quite naming. A 24-year-old fitness influencer named it anyway, with a box of donuts.

The Intergenerational Reckoning

In the film’s more subdued scenes, the alpha facade evaporates. We see Harrison Sullivan, née HS TikkyTokky, not as a digital titan but as a 24-year-old tentatively assessing his safety with an outsider. He is visibly disarmed by Theroux: a man who carries quiet authority without a supercar or a livestream, whose power rests on something Sullivan’s world doesn’t trade in: accumulated institutional credibility.

To Sullivan, Theroux is something between a ghost and an indictment. Not a moral superior, but a living artifact of a world that no longer exists. He represents the stable father figures, the stable career ladders, the functional social contracts, the era in which an expensive degree, a reputable institution, and thirty years of accumulated experience built something durable, something that compounded, that you could pass on. The era of greater opportunity that Sullivan’s generation was told to expect and has never been offered. That world produced the likes of Theroux. And the people who built it are now the ones holding the microphone, asking Sullivan to explain himself.

What Sullivan’s generation inherited was not the system. It was the wreckage of the system, and the insistence, from the people who benefited from it, that the wreckage is their fault— and everyone else’s fault but them: immigrants, queers, women, black people, Latinos, the ‘uncivilized’Middle East, Jews, Muslims.

The data behind this is not abstract. Federal Reserve research shows Baby Boomers owned over 20 percent of the nation’s wealth by the time their median age reached 35; Millennials, at the same point, owned less than 5 percent. A housing market turned shelter into a financialized asset class. Tuition debt for credentials that no longer open the doors they were sold to open. A mental health epidemic unfolding alongside the productivity gospel. And real wages stagnated while the institutions best positioned to respond—legacy media, political parties, universities, humanitarian complex—each became more invested in their own survival than in the constituencies they were built to serve. The explanatory frameworks for this collapse are everywhere now; their proliferation is itself evidence that when institutions stop providing coherent accounts of the conditions they produced, the explanation market opens up, and it fills with whatever arrives first.

Into that vacuum, two responses have emerged. The manosphere correctly identifies the betrayal and routes it into misogyny, racial resentment, and the politics of domination. A different generation of journalists, organizers, and independent media makers is also refusing the old framework, but fighting to build something more honest in its place.

What unites both, the grifters and the truth-tellers, is that they are holding up a mirror. The manosphere’s reflection is distorted, engineered to flatter the grievance and monetize the rage. But the first thing it shows you, before the distortion sets in, is real: the establishment’s hypocrisy, its moral self-congratulation, its total inability to see what is directly in front of it or hear what is being said to its face.

That is what this essay examines. Theroux is not the villain of this story. He is its most useful illustration, a good-faith representative of an institutional class that arrived at this encounter with all the right credentials and the wrong frame, and left having been shown, clearly and without apology, what the world looks like from the other side of the glass.

The donut shop is where that showing begins.

The Donut Shop: Mercenary Transparency vs. the Theater of Virtue

In one of the documentary’s pivotal scenes, Theroux attempts to pin Sullivan on his central contradiction. Sullivan built his platform on a specific promise to young men: that OnlyFans degrades the women who use it and the men who consume it, that real alpha discipline means refusing the easy hit, that their weakness is a choice. He built his following on that moral framework and simultaneously ran an OnlyFans referral operation, profiting directly from every subscriber he sent there. The men who trusted his guidance were, in effect, paying him twice: once for the identity and once for the behavior he told them proved they lacked it.

The Bonnie Blue scene makes this visible in real time. Sullivan invites adult content creator Bonnie Blue onto his livestream, calls her “disgusting” and “absolutely repulsive” on camera, and then admits to Theroux, without embarrassment, that he invited her specifically to exploit her notoriety for his own viewership numbers. She knew it. She came anyway. Both extracted what they needed and called it content. The audience got the spectacle. Sullivan got the clicks. And the young men watching got another lesson in which women are repulsive, from the man simultaneously monetizing their attention toward her. The donut shop has more than one counter.

@thesunThis is the shocking moment HStikkytokky and Bonnie Blue clash on Louis Theroux’s new Netflix doc as he calls her ‘repulsive.' Read the full story above. #bonnieblue #HStikkytokky #louistheroux

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What Theroux then attempts is a precise unfolding of exactly this: to make Sullivan account for what he has built on, telling the young men who follow him that certain things are beneath them while quietly profiting from every one of them who does what he condemns. Sullivan isn’t merely a hypocrite. He is selling his audience a moral framework he doesn’t believe in, to an audience that trusts him, while extracting money from the behavior he’s told them makes them weak.

Theroux: “It’s like saying... ‘Here’s a box of donuts that I’m holding up to your face. If you eat that, you’re a loser, but I’m gonna work out.’ I’m getting a very mixed message.”

Sullivan: “You do what you choose. If you wanna go and eat the donuts, eat the donuts, but I own the donut shop. So whether you come in the gym and pay for my PT or eat the donuts, I make dough either way.”

Sullivan’s response doesn’t answer the question. It dismantles the frame the question assumed.

This is the death of the gotcha interview, and it is worth understanding precisely why. For decades, investigative journalism has relied on the moral contradiction as its primary lever: pin the subject down, expose the hypocrisy, force the reckoning. Theroux deploys that lever here with considerable skill. It doesn’t work, not because Sullivan is more clever, but because the lever depends on a shared assumption that Sullivan’s world has already discarded: that shame functions as a regulatory mechanism. In a hyper-financialized attention economy, moral shame has been replaced by the currency of reach and revenue. Sullivan doesn’t deny the contradiction. He reframes it as a business model. And to his audience, that reframing reads not as deflection but as honesty.

Sullivan’s logic is internally consistent: in a fully commodified system, the moral weight of a transaction shifts from seller to buyer the moment the buyer makes an informed choice. He is not pretending to be a good person. He is refusing to perform the pretense. And paradoxically, that refusal makes him appear, to the audience watching, more trustworthy than the institutional gatekeeper trying to hold him to account.

Sullivan is an outlier in his own ecosystem, not a representative of it— a distinction the documentary consistently fails to make.

What Sullivan doesn’t realize, and what the documentary doesn’t examine, is that his donut shop logic accidentally raises a question Theroux never quite asks. If the consumer knows the product is harmful and buys it anyway, who holds the moral weight? Sullivan isn’t making a principled argument about informed consent. He’s practicing a distorted, transactional version of it—one in which disclosure substitutes for responsibility, and naming the harm is treated as the same thing as absolution from it.

But the deflection lands on something real. His ethics are transparent in the narrowest possible sense: he hides nothing about what he is selling or why. And that accidental, twisted clarity exposes something the documentary never turns to face: that the institutions now asking him to defend himself operate on the same extraction logic, just with cleaner branding. They routinely mask predatory practice behind a veneer of advocacy, moral authority, or public service. The difference is they never name it. Sullivan, however grotesquely, did.

But look at the room. Theroux is not just a journalist asking a question. He is a representative of a media system—BBC-trained, Netflix-distributed—that also needed this encounter to happen. The documentary exists because Sullivan’s world generates compelling, profitable, algorithmic content. Netflix benefits from the access. Sullivan benefits from the legitimacy and reach that a Theroux documentary confers. Both are in the donut shop. The critical difference is that Sullivan named it.

This is what researchers who study media and power call media-as-node: the recognition that journalism and media production don’t sit outside the systems they cover, observing from neutral ground. They are participants in the same information economy, shaped by the same structural incentives—access, visibility, revenue—that shape their subjects. The newsroom is not the referee. It is another player. And the moment it covers an influencer, a movement, or an ecosystem for outrage clicks or high viewership, it stops challenging that ecosystem and starts fueling the economic engine that sustains it.

This isn’t a critique of Theroux as an individual. He is simply more visible than most. The logic that produced his encounter with Sullivan is the same logic that produced Sullivan in the first place. Recognizing this doesn’t make Sullivan’s behavior more acceptable. It makes the critique more honest and harder to dodge.

Sullivan already understands this.

“If I’d just done good things, I would never have really blown up in the first place,” he tells Theroux.

He is describing, with unusual precision, the structure of the attention economy he inhabits. Not justifying it, but mapping it.

“And I’m not living for other people. I’m living for myself,” he says. “My kids are going to be very, very happy, very fulfilled.”

Theroux names what he’s watching: “You sound a bit like Bonnie Blue.” He means it as an indictment. Sullivan hears it as a category error. The documentary never quite resolves why both of them are right.

The Reciprocal Radicalization Cycle

What Sullivan represents, and what the documentary fails to systematically address, is not a personal moral failure but the output of a specific structural mechanism.

Call it the Reciprocal Radicalization Cycle: a closed loop in which economic precarity and social isolation produce grievance, grievance gets packaged as identity, identity gets monetized through escalating provocation, and the resulting outrage cycles back through media coverage that amplifies exactly what it claims to be investigating. The cycle is self-reinforcing: each amplification creates conditions for the next escalation; each escalation creates conditions for the next amplification.

The evidence for its effects is specific. UK research published by Ofcom shows that manosphere content now forms part of the regular online environment many young users encounter directly — not sought-out extremism but ambient noise, algorithm-served and normalized. Counter-terrorism data from the same period shows 19 percent of those arrested for terrorism-related offenses in the UK in 2023 were aged 17 and under.

These numbers don’t establish a direct pipeline from any specific content to any specific act. What they describe is an ecology, a set of conditions in which radicalization becomes more available, more legible, and more appealing to people who have already been stripped of other sources of identity, purpose, and belonging.

No single actor in this ecology bears the crime alone. Accountability is distributed. The platforms that amplify, the media that spectacularizes, the institutions that fail to respond, the audiences that click, all participate. Whitney Phillips’ landmark 2018 Data & Society report, The Oxygen of Amplification, documented this precisely: even responsible, critical reporting on extremists can increase their reach, drive recruitment, and inspire imitators. The act of coverage is not neutral. Attention is a resource, and the cycle has learned to harvest it from every direction, including from the journalism meant to interrupt it.

The research on radicalization is consistent across cases: the common thread is not coherent ideology but a recognizable cluster of conditions: narcissistic grievance, social isolation, a prior history of personal failure, personal humiliation, and an information environment that handed each a ready-made identity, enemy, and path to significance. The ideology was the costume. The attention economy was the fuel.

This pattern extends to the manosphere’s own hierarchy. It is not coincidental that its most prominent figures share a recognizable profile: men whose personal circumstances—failed relationships, stalled ambitions, real or perceived humiliations—found rescue in a system that reframed failure as persecution and persecution as identity. The manosphere didn’t radicalize them by exposing them to correct information about a hostile world. It gave lonely, volatile individuals a hero narrative and a cast of villains. The media, by repeatedly centering those figures as fascinating, dangerous, and worthy of prime-time investigation, has done its own work in that same direction.

Here is where the media-as-node argument becomes most consequential: the reciprocal radicalization cycle doesn’t run only through platforms and influencers. It also runs through the coverage. Every time a documentary, a news segment, or a morning show treats the manosphere as a spectacle of outrageous personalities rather than a networked ecosystem with a structural function, it performs exactly the same displacement: making the behavior visible and the machinery invisible, generating attention without generating understanding, amplifying without explaining. Feeding the cycle it claims to be exposing.

The manosphere didn’t create those conditions; it is harvesting them. And the media, in its current form, is assisting the harvest.

The manosphere is not the only mirror the system holds up. Its femisphere counterpart runs the same extraction in reverse: monetizing female grievance through the same algorithmic infrastructure, routing the same legitimate structural conditions toward the same illegitimate conclusions. That ecosystem will get its own full examination in a separate installment. What both prove together is the central argument of this essay: this is not a story about bad men or bad women or bad influencers. It is a story about a system that converts structural failure into identity, identity into provocation, and provocation into revenue; and that runs this cycle regardless of which gender is holding the microphone, which platform is hosting it, or which institution claims to be covering it from neutral ground.

The establishment’s response has been consistent and consistently inadequate: label the creators grifters, platform them for engagement, then perform dismay at the reach. What it has not done is examine its own role in producing the conditions that made both ecosystems legible, or acknowledge that the same institutional failures Sullivan named in the donut shop are the substrate both sides are feeding on. That absence of self-examination is not an oversight. It is the same selective accountability. The establishment is also in the shop. It has simply never had to say so out loud.

Next in the series:

Inside the Manosphere III: Affective Combat and the Paper Tiger—on Piers Morgan’s walk off, what it revealed about the structural fragility of legacy media power, the establishment, and how all roads lead back to Gaza. Subscribe so you don't miss it.

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Key Concepts — Part II

Media-as-node: Journalism and media production don’t stand outside the systems they cover. They are participants in the same information economy, shaped by the same structural incentives—access, visibility, revenue—that shape their subjects. The newsroom is not the referee. It is another player. And its silence is not neutrality. It is a decision about whose reality gets to be real.

Reciprocal Radicalization Cycle: A closed loop in which economic precarity produces grievance, grievance is monetized through escalating provocation, and media coverage amplifies what it claims to investigate, creating conditions for the next cycle. Accountability in this cycle is distributed across platforms, institutions, audiences, and the journalism meant to interrupt it. No single actor bears the crime alone. All participate.

Mercenary Transparency vs. Theater of Virtue: Sullivan names his mercenary motive plainly. The institutions surrounding him— the media, NGOs, the counter-terrorism industrial complex, the humanitarian sector— perform virtue while extracting the same value through cleaner branding. The question is not which is worse. It is why one gets a Netflix budget and the other gets a subpoena.

The Safari Is Over is a diagnostic series — an autopsy of the media systems, economic conditions, and institutional failures that produce and sustain exploitative ecosystems like the manosphere, and the broader harms those failures generate well beyond it. It names what is broken, how it got that way, and who pays the invoice.

Killing Spectacle, published in The Field Dispatch, is the companion: a practitioner’s guide to covering online harm and extremism without reproducing its logic. Where The Safari Is Over diagnoses, Killing Spectacle prescribes fifteen shifts across framing, verification, sourcing, and sustained practice for journalists, editors, researchers, and anyone trying to report the system rather than the spectacle.

Both live under Unembedded, structural and media analysis, human rights documentation, and practitioner intelligence for people working the documentation-to-narrative-to-accountability pipeline.

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin

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Part 1 covered the first three shifts media practitioners should make before reporting— pitch the system, report the consequence, center the burden-bearers. Here are two more bonus shifts to carry with you. Because I care, and because I want us to win.

From Killing Spectacle: 15 Shifts for Reporting on Online Harm and Extremism, a guide for journalists, editors, producers, researchers, and media practitioners. Published here in parts. Each installment stands alone. The full picture builds across the series.

Start here: Part 1: Frame the Story Right .

Here are two more shifts to make in our daily practice to help us kill the ‘spectacle’ in ‘spectacle journalism’.

My first piece published here covered first three mindset and technical shifts, before reporting: pitch the system not the spectacle, report consequence not conflict, center the burden-bearers not the perpetrators. Those shifts are about what story you’re telling and whose experience is at the center of it.

These two are about something that happens before any of that, reading the information environment you’re working inside before you let it assign the story for you.

On beats covering online harm, extremism, and AI abuse, the platform is not a neutral surface. It is an active editorial force. It decides what looks significant. It manufactures the appearance of consensus. It makes fringe content look mainstream and widespread harm look marginal. Journalists who don’t account for that are not reporting reality. They are reporting the platform’s version of reality, which is designed, in specific and documented ways, to serve interests other than public understanding.

These two shifts are about closing that gap before the first word is written, or first raw video is collected, edited, or clipped.

Shift 4: Virality is evidence of distribution, not importance

Unlearn: Treat trending content as proof that something matters.

Relearn: Virality tells you something was distributed at scale. It tells you almost nothing about whether it reflects reality.

One of the most corrosive habits in covering online harm and extremism is treating visibility as proof. A piece of content goes viral. It appears in your feed, your editor’s feed, your source’s feed. It feels significant because it is everywhere.

But everywhere on a platform is an editorial decision made by an algorithm, not a measure of cultural reality, social consensus, or genuine threat. Platforms are built to surface conflict and blur the line between significance and visibility. Journalism walks straight into that trap when it treats the trending tab as an assignment editor.

Urgency and importance are not the same thing. A piece of content can reach ten million people and reflect almost nothing about how those people actually think, behave, or live. A pattern that affects millions can be entirely invisible on a platform because it doesn’t produce the engagement mechanics that make content travel.

The shift is learning to ask:

is this visible because it is significant, or does it seem significant because it is visible?

What this looks like in practice

The 2024 tradwife surge looked, from inside the feed, like a mass cultural shift: a generation of women returning to domestic roles. Mainstream coverage treated it that way. Research from Monash University and the International Journal of Communication found no evidence of that in behavioral data. What the data showed was that recommendation algorithms were artificially funneling users toward increasingly extreme gender content. The trend didn’t reflect what women wanted. It reflected what the platform rewarded and amplified. Reporting it as a cultural shift normalized extremist content through perceived popularity, exactly the outcome the amplification was designed to produce.

The same failure appears constantly on extremism beats. Coordinated seeding makes fringe content look mainstream. Manufactured outrage cycles make marginal figures look culturally significant. The platform’s engagement mechanics are not neutral. They are specifically designed to surface the most inflammatory version of any story. Treating that surface as reality is a reporting failure, not just an editorial one.

Editorial test:

If this were not trending, would you still assign it?

If the answer is no, you are covering distribution, not reality.

If this incident had never been filmed, clipped, or algorithmically amplified, would it still matter?

If the answer is yes, that is where the story begins.

Field note on extremism and online harm beats specifically:

On these beats the virality problem is often deliberate, not incidental. Bad actors engineer viral moments specifically to manufacture the appearance of consensus, to make a fringe position look mainstream, a marginal figure look culturally dominant, an isolated incident look like a pattern. The tradwife surge was organic platform mechanics producing a distorted picture. Coordinated extremist content seeding is the same distortion produced intentionally.

The verification question is the same in both cases:

is this visible because it is significant, or significant because it is visible?

Before escalating any trending story on these beats, ask whether the spike is organic or cluster-driven. The answer changes what you’re actually covering.

Toolkit 4: Auditing virality before you escalate

Before escalating any trending story, run this test:

Does this affect policy, safety, public resources, or a meaningful number of people beyond the feed?

If not, you are covering distribution.

For checking whether a spike is organic or coordinated: Junkipedia tracks coordinated inauthentic behavior and platform manipulation; the Stanford Internet Observatory publishes platform-specific research on amplification mechanics; CrowdTangle (now Meta Content Library) and Brandwatch track cross-platform spread patterns.

For situating platform trends in behavioral reality: look for data that exists outside the platform such as surveys, behavioral research, policy data, academic studies that either corroborates or contradicts what the platform surface suggests. Monash University’s platform research and the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report are both useful starting points for cross-referencing platform visibility against real-world data. Also check out Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit.

Newsworthiness test before escalating any trend:

does this have policy effects, safety implications, measurable behavioral uptake, or institutional consequences outside the platform?

If it scores zero on all four, it is a distribution story, not a significance story.

See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

Shift 5: Situate the incident in the pattern

Unlearn: Let one vivid case carry the argument about scale.

Relearn: Every incident needs a baseline, a trend line, and proportionality ( in both directions).

One vivid case can distort an entire public conversation. This happens constantly in coverage of online harm, extremism, and AI abuse: a single incident is treated as a trend, a trend is treated as a crisis, a crisis is reported without baseline data. Audiences end up with inflated fear, or false reassurance, and no way to judge what is actually escalating versus what is simply newly visible.

The proportionality failure runs in both directions, and both directions cause harm.

Inflating rare incidents produces moral panic, bad policy, and the kind of fear that bad actors deliberately manufacture. Minimizing widespread patterns produces public blindness to structural harm that is hiding in plain sight. Both failures serve bad actors: the first by manufacturing urgency around marginal threats, the second by providing cover for systemic ones.

Reporting the pattern means reporting both directions with equal rigor. How common is this, really? Is it rising, falling, or newly visible? Is this incident exceptional or representative? What would a reader need to know to make an accurate judgment about the scale and nature of the harm?

What this looks like in practice

Coverage of incel-linked violence regularly treats isolated attacks as evidence of a mass movement, inflating a rare incident into a pattern that the data doesn’t support. Coverage of Andrew Tate’s reach did the inverse: the Hope Not Hate finding that 8 in 10 boys aged 16 to 17 had seen his material, and the YouGov finding that 1 in 6 boys aged 6 to 15 held a positive view of him, were treated as fringe statistics in coverage that hadn’t done the work of situating the numbers. That is not a fringe statistic. Reporting it as one was a failure of proportionality in the opposite direction, minimizing a documented, widespread pattern because the number was uncomfortable to report at its actual scale.

The Marshall Project’s context-first reporting on crime data is the model for how to do this right: every incident is situated in the baseline, every trend is measured against historical data, and the story names clearly what the data shows and what it doesn’t. One dramatic incident never distorts the national picture because the national picture is always present in the reporting.

Editorial test:

Are you showing readers where this event sits in the real pattern — or are you allowing vividness to substitute for scale? Can you state, specifically: is this incident typical, exceptional, rising, falling, or simply newly visible?

If you can’t answer that question before you file, the context is missing.

Field note on these beats specifically:

The proportionality question is weaponized on both sides of these beats. Extremist actors inflate their own significance to appear more powerful and culturally dominant than they are. Treat their visibility claims with the same skepticism you’d apply to any source with an incentive to exaggerate. Platform harm is simultaneously minimized by the institutions that produce it. Treat their framing of harm as marginal or exceptional with the same skepticism. Your job is to find the actual baseline, which usually requires going outside the platform, outside the institution, and outside the most visible sources on both sides.

Use the context box. Add this to every spike story and every incident report on these beats:

• Baseline: what is the normal rate or scale of this type of incident or behavior?

• Trend line: is this rising, falling, stable, or newly visible?

• Rarity: is this exceptional or representative?

• Responsible inference: what can we actually conclude from this data, and what would we need to establish what we can’t yet conclude?

That box, applied consistently, prevents a single dramatic case from doing the work that evidence should do.

Toolkit 5: Context tools for situating incidents in pattern

For baseline and trend line data on online harm and extremism: the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) publishes research specifically designed to provide contextual data for journalists; the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) tracks platform harm at scale; Hope Not Hate’s annual State of Hate report provides UK and European baseline data on extremism reach and penetration.

For AI harm and platform data: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the Alan Turing Institute all publish research that provides the baseline data most platform coverage lacks. Use them before you file, not after.

For proportionality in both directions: the Context Box above. Apply it to every spike story. If you can’t fill in all four fields, you don’t have enough information to report the incident as evidence of a pattern.

Pro tip: add the context box to every spike story: baseline, trend line, rarity, and what we can responsibly infer. It takes ten minutes and prevents the single most common framing failure on these beats.

See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

What these two shifts have in common, and how they complete Phase 1 (shifts and tips before reporting)

Both shifts are about the same underlying discipline: not letting the platform assign your story.

Shift 4 asks whether what is visible is actually significant. Shift 5 asks whether what is significant is being accurately sized. Together they close the two most common framing failures on these beats: treating virality as cultural evidence, and treating a single incident as proof of a pattern.

Combined with the first three shifts, Phase 1 is now complete. You know what story you’re telling (the system, not the spectacle), whose experience is at the center (the burden-bearers, not the perpetrators), what you’re following (consequence, not conflict), whether the platform signal is real (Shift 4), and whether the scale is accurate (Shift 5).

Phase 2 begins where Phase 1 ends. Once you know what you’re covering, how you gather and weigh evidence determines everything.

Please share your favorite tips and any additional shifts you think we should be making as media and human rights practitioners reporting on online harm. The shifts, tips and toolkits in this series are non-exhaustive, and are serve as a launching pad for this community, which includes YOU, to extract from as well as contribute to.

Because we care. And because we want to win. Collectively.

The Field

The practices above are easier to sustain inside a community of people working on the same problems than alone. That’s what The Field is: a cross-sector community of practice for journalists, researchers, advocates, lawyers, and technologists working at this intersection, built on the principle that the people with the most situational knowledge are often those with the least institutional power, and that better practice requires closing that gap deliberately. If this is your beat, wherever you are, it’s yours to join.

Join The Field: Fill out the intake form or reach out to me directly at inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com

The Frontier

Phase 1’s specific frontier question is the platform transparency problem: you can’t accurately situate incidents in pattern or audit virality if the platforms controlling the data don’t share it. Shifts 4 and 5 both require external data sources precisely because platform data is inaccessible, unreliable, or strategically curated. The EU Digital Services Act and US platform accountability efforts are the most significant structural responses to this problem, and both are currently contested, partially implemented, and under pressure. Naming that gap is part of what this guide does. Closing it requires more than better journalism. It requires platform accountability infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist at the scale these beats require.

Up next — Killing Spectacle, Part 2: Rigor Without Cruelty

Phase 1 is complete. Phase 2 is where the frame you built either holds or falls apart.

How to verify claims in spaces designed to mislead — including how to slow down when emotion spikes and bad actors are deliberately manufacturing urgency. How to build an evidence hierarchy rather than a transcript of competing claims. And how to use AI to see what only becomes visible at scale, rather than to produce faster noise.

Part 2 is where the craft gets specific. The frame is only as good as what you can prove.

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If this is your beat — or someone you edit, teach, or commission —send it directly and invite them to join The Field. The journalists and media practitioners who need this most are rarely the ones looking for it.

These aren’t universal rules. They’re practices drawn from years in this space. What works in a long-form investigation won’t always survive a breaking news brief. Context matters. This guide is a conversation, leave a comment or reach me directly with what’s missing and what works. What’s useful goes into the guide, with credit.

About the author. Raja Althaibani is an advisor, strategist, and trainer working at the intersection of human rights, media systems, digital evidence, and emerging technology. With over 15 years of experience across the Middle East, North Africa, and the United States, she has worked with journalists, civil society organizations, and international institutions to document harm, build accountability processes, and adapt human rights practice to shifting technological and political realities. She previously worked at WITNESS, the human rights organization specializing in video and digital documentation. She is the founder of Arab Hyphenated.

She writes Unembedded, which includes the ongoing series The Safari Is Over, and founded The Field, a cross-sector community of practice for journalists, researchers, advocates, and technical practitioners working on these beats.

inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Join The Field

killing spectacle | media guide | virality | platform accountability | online harm | extremism | framing | Raja Althaibani

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability—advising, training, investigating, and building infrastructure for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow. Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law, and open-source digital documentation.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over, on how media covers harm and what better practice looks like, and The Field Dispatch, the intelligence arm of The Field—a community of practice she founded.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · contact form · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Linkedin

The problems at the intersection of media, online harm, technology, and accountability don't respect disciplinary boundaries. Neither should the people working on them.

A journalist investigating an extremist network needs to understand platform infrastructure. A human rights lawyer building a case around digital evidence needs to understand how that evidence was collected and verified. A technologist building tools for open-source investigation needs to understand what practitioners in conflict zones can actually access and use. A researcher documenting online abuse needs to understand how newsrooms make editorial decisions, and what gets lost in translation between the field and the published piece. And a community documentarian on the ground needs to understand how her work will travel once it leaves her hands: who will interpret it, in what context, and toward what end.

These people rarely work together in any sustained way. The communities of practice1 that exist are largely siloed: by discipline, by geography and language, by institution, and by the structural imbalances that have long shaped who gets to lead, contribute, and be heard in this space.

The Field exists to change that.

What The Field is

The Field is a cross-sector community of practice (CoP)2, global from the start, for journalists, researchers, advocates, lawyers, and technical practitioners working at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability.

It was founded on a simple argument: that the existing community of practice in this space is fractured, skewed toward Global North institutions, and structurally extractive toward the practitioners with the most situational knowledge and the least institutional power. That better outcomes— better journalism, stronger accountability, more effective tools, more durable practice require deliberate, unblocked collaboration across the full spectrum of the field.3

This is not a network. It’s a working community co-created, contribution-led, and designed to be less monopolized, more inclusive, and genuinely global.

What The Field does

The Field brings together practitioners to:

• Build shared knowledge across disciplines, geographies, and languages so that the journalist, the lawyer, the researcher, and the technologist are working from the same foundation rather than talking past each other.

• Develop practical frameworks and field guidance including methodologies, tools, and resources that are actually usable by the full range of people doing this work, not just those with institutional backing and Global North infrastructure.

• Strengthen the work that holds systems accountable by centering practitioners with situational knowledge, reducing extractive dynamics, and creating conditions for collaboration that is fair, equitable, and genuinely useful.

• Build a community of practice that lasts by connecting practitioners across sectors and geographies who are doing this work, sharing what they know, and building something more durable than any single investigation, report, or news cycle.

Who it’s for

If you work in any of the following, wherever you are in the world, The Field is for you:

Journalism and editorial practice · Open-source investigation and digital evidence · Human rights documentation and advocacy · International law and accountability · Disinformation and information disorder research · Platform policy and tech accountability · AI, emerging technology, and public interest practice · Media training and capacity building

This includes, and deliberately centers, practitioners from the so-called Global South (Global Majority), diaspora communities, and those working in and on conflict-affected and underrepresented contexts. The people closest to the harm are the ones this field most needs to hear from.

You don’t need an institutional affiliation. You don’t need to be based in a Global North city. You need to be doing the work, or building toward it.

Further Reading

The Field builds on arguments first made here: The Case To (Re)new Community of Practice for the Open Source Investigative Field — Symposium on Fairness, Equality, and Diversity in Open Source Investigations, OpinioJuris.

How to join

The Field is in its founding phase. This is the moment to get in early, shape what it becomes, and connect with the first cohort of practitioners building it together.

To join or express interest:

Fill in the intake form here

Reach out directly: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com ; Or leave a comment below.

Tell us who you are, what you work on, where you’re based, and what you think The Field needs to do. That information will directly shape how the community is built.

There is no membership fee. No institutional gatekeeping. No prerequisite except the work.

Subscribe now

The Field was founded by Raja Althaibani. Read her work at Unembedded.

About the Author

Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability— advising, training, writing, investigating, and building the infrastructure that helps practitioners and institutions respond to an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow.

Her background spans human rights, journalism, international law and accountability, and open-source digital documentation. She works with journalists, editors, researchers, lawyers, advocates, technologists, and institutions across sectors and geographies, advising on online harm, information disorder, and emerging technology; training practitioners to work with greater rigor and judgment; and building cross-sector communities and tools designed to make the field stronger, more inclusive, and less extractive.

Her work is defined by one consistent thread: closing the gap between complex systems and the people who need to understand, navigate, and hold them accountable.

She writes Unembedded—long-form analysis, reported essays, practical guides, and field frameworks on media, power, harm, and who controls the story. It publishes original reporting, case studies, curated resources, tools and templates for practitioners, and research and reading lists across the beats it covers.

Unembedded includes two ongoing series: The Safari Is Over—on how media covers harm, extremism, and algorithmic culture, and what better practice looks like— and The Field Dispatch, the working intelligence arm of The Field community of practice. She is the founder of The Field.

Work with Raja: inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com or via contact form; and website www.rajaalthaibani.com

From Killing Spectacle: 15 Shifts for Reporting on Online Harm and Extremism, a guide for journalists, editors, producers, researchers, and media practitioners. Published here in parts. Each installment stands alone. The full picture builds across the series.

Killing Spectacle is part of ‘The Safari Is Over’, an ongoing series on media, harm, and the information landscape.

There’s a moment most journalists on this beat recognize, even if they don’t name it.

You’re pitching a story about a harmful online community, an AI abuse case, a radicalization pipeline. And somewhere in the process, the story migrates toward its most watchable part. The clip. The personality. The confrontation. The thing that makes an editor say: that.

It feels like journalism. It has texture and tension and a hook. But something has gone missing: the part that would actually change how the public understands what’s happening. The part that helps them identify where to direct action.

This guide is about that gap, and how to close it, deliberately.

What this guide is and isn’t

These are practices, not rules, drawn from years in this space, watching what holds and what collapses under scrutiny. They’re also shifts: things we have to actively unlearn before you can replace them with something more useful. Most of the bad instincts on this beat aren’t careless. They’re trained. They got rewarded. They got pieces commissioned and clips shared and panels booked. Unlearning them requires naming them first.

This is also a living document and a conversation. If you work on these beats— as a journalist, researcher, advocate, lawyer, technologist— what’s missing and what works belongs in here. Leave a comment or reach out directly. Everything useful goes into the guide, with credit.

How the full guide is structured

The 15 shifts are arranged across four phases: Framing (how you conceptualize and pitch the story before reporting begins), Rigor (how you verify and source in environments designed to mislead), Structure (how you shape and distribute the story without reproducing the harm), and Sustained Practice (how you protect and maintain this work inside institutions that don’t always reward it). The three shifts below are Phase 1. You don’t need to follow them sequentially, but the logic is cumulative, and each phase assumes the one before it.

The question that runs through all 15 shifts

Does this story increase public understanding, or does it redistribute attention?

Redistributing attention is easy. It generates clicks, and it can feel like exposure. But it rarely changes anything. Public understanding is harder to produce and harder to sell. It’s also the only thing journalism in this space can offer that the algorithm can’t.

What prompted this guide

This guide didn’t come from one story. It came from a pattern.

There is a structural problem in how online harm, extremism, and algorithmic culture get covered, and it shows up across formats, platforms, and beats. It’s not about bad journalists and storytellers. It’s about the gravitational pull of certain types of stories: ones that arrive pre-loaded with conflict, personality, and outrage, and make spectacle feel like investigation.

You know these stories.

The influencer radicalizing teenage boys, covered through his most inflammatory clips. The deepfake abuse case that leads with the viral moment and buries the policy vacuum. The AI system causing harm, reported as a curiosity rather than a systemic failure. The harassment campaign reconstructed around the abuser’s language rather than its cost to the target. The extremist community profiled through its most watchable members, never its recruitment infrastructure.

The Jihadi Johns and Andrew Tates—manufactured characters who understood exactly what the media would do with them, and built the spectacle, legitimacy, and reach they so desperately wanted accordingly. The alt-right figures who gamed outrage cycles to launder fringe ideology into mainstream debate. The misogynist podcasters whose revenue model runs on the very coverage claiming to expose them. The election disruptors who flood the zone knowing the correction will carry the lie further. The war crimes filmed and uploaded by perpetrators— state and non-state actors—because they knew journalists would distribute them.

In every case, the harmful actor understood the media environment better than the coverage did. And they know the media environment and its participants better than it knows itself.

These stories all have legitimate public interest at their core. The coverage often doesn’t find it because the spectacle is closer, faster, and easier to sell. That’s not a personal failure. It’s an editorial one.

And editorial choices can be made differently. This is a guide to making them differently: 15 shifts from spectacle-driven coverage to high-impact public interest reporting across online harm, extremism, AI, and algorithmic culture.

Shift 1: Pitch the system, not the spectacle

Unlearn: Anchor the pitch to a personality or incident.

Relearn: Pitch the system the incident reveals.

The most damaging instinct on this beat is reaching for a compelling figure or moment to sell a story. This is understandable, it’s how pitches get bought. But on beats involving harassment, extremism, or AI harm, incident-led coverage carries real costs: it re-traumatizes victims, amplifies the people causing harm, and normalizes what should remain structurally shocking. More practically: it produces stories that don’t survive the next news cycle. Incident-led coverage has a shelf life. System-led coverage has a subject.

What this looks like in practice

When AI-generated non-consensual images of a female student at a Louisiana middle school circulated last year, early coverage treated it as a conflict: a fight, an expulsion, a drama between teenagers. Readable. Thin.

Stronger reporting reframed the same facts around a policy vacuum: schools were applying outdated cyberbullying frameworks to a new type of harm and deepfake technology those laws never contemplated. No mechanism existed to respond, discipline, or protect. The incident was the entry point. The institution was the story.

One version ages out when the next incident lands. The other stays useful to every educator, parent, and policymaker who encounters the same gap. By focusing on the public-interest frame over spectacle, 8 more students were identified as victims of the same abuse, revealing a critical lack of oversight and accountability.

Editorial test:

Can you name the failing institution, platform, or policy in your first two paragraphs? If the story falls apart without the viral moment, you’re chasing spectacle.

Pitch frame to keep nearby:

The public needs to understand how [system] is responding to [harm] because it affects their ability to [protect themselves / hold someone accountable / make an informed decision].

Field note on AI and algorithmic beats specifically:

When a model or platform is implicated in harm, resist the pull toward anthropomorphizing the technology as the protagonist. The model isn’t the story. The decision to deploy it without safeguards, the gap between the terms of service and what the product actually does, the accountability structure that allowed the harm to scale, those are the story. Name the company. Name the design choice. Name the person who signed off.

Toolkit 1: Pitching the system when editors want the story

Before pitching, build a one-page map of the system you're investigating: the institution, the policy gap, the harm pathway, the people absorbing the cost. Kumu or a shared Miro board forces you to articulate the system before a word is written, and gives editors something concrete to look at beyond a clip or outrageous hook. AI-assisted document analysis (DocumentCloud Analyst, OCCRP Aleph) surfaces patterns across large document sets faster than manual reading. And maintain a running accountability file on the institutions on your beat (policy changes, enforcement actions, known gaps) so when an incident occurs, the system story is already half-reported.

*See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

Shift 2: Conflict is the delivery system. Consequence is the story.

Unlearn: Let the most dramatic moment become the unit of analysis.

Relearn: Treat conflict as the delivery system. Report the consequence.

Conflict generates heat, and heat generates clicks. But heat dissipates, and if you’ve only reported the confrontation, nothing survives the news cycle.

Covering consequence is different. Consequence is what changed. Who gained power, money, reach, or legitimacy. What the people most affected did next. How institutions responded or didn’t, or built in deniability so they wouldn’t have to.

What this looks like in practice

Podcast formats built around confrontation and humiliation, Fresh & Fit being a well-documented case, tend to get covered through their worst and most outrageous clips. That coverage is reliable and easy to produce. It also explains nothing.

But it doesn’t explain anything. It doesn’t tell you how the format generates revenue, how engagement mechanics reward escalation, how humiliation becomes entertainment, or what that does to the young men watching. Consequence-led reporting asks: what changed as a result of this? Who built a platform, a business, a political foothold? Who lost their safety, their sense of what’s normal? Who absorbed the cost?

That’s where the story lives.

Editorial test:

What happened after the conflict? Who gained, measurably (in reach, revenue, or legitimacy) and who absorbed the damage?

If you can’t answer both, the reporting isn’t finished.

Field note

Consequence is harder to report because it's often disaggregated and delayed. The influencer's revenue doesn't appear in the clip. The behavioral shift in the audience doesn't show up in the incident report. This is partly by design, platforms and bad actors alike benefit from keeping consequence invisible. Closing the gap requires a different sourcing strategy: researchers, platform transparency data, former employees, and the people most affected tracked over time, not quoted once. Phase 4 of this guide addresses the longitudinal obligation in full.

Toolkit 2: Following consequence when platforms obscure it

For platform and influencer revenue: Social Blade tracks estimated YouTube and Twitch earnings; SimilarWeb tracks audience growth and traffic sources; OpenCorporates surfaces corporate structures. For political influence: InfluenceMap. For moving from "here's the personality" to "here's the infrastructure": Gephi visualizes how content, accounts, and communities connect. For high-volume content beats, AI transcription (Whisper) and synthesis tools (NotebookLM) let you track rhetoric and escalation patterns across thousands of hours of material, the slow radicalization pipeline, not just the viral moment. And set calendar reminders at 3, 6, and 12 months after publication. The follow-up is itself a reporting method.

*See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

Shift 3: Center the burden-bearers, not the perpetrators

Unlearn: Let perpetrators set the terms of the story.

Relearn: Center the people who carry the long-term burden.

This is the structural failure that runs deepest, and the one most resistant to change because it’s baked into how stories get told.

On extremism, harassment, and abuse beats, perpetrators routinely set the frame. They’re quotable, accessible, often actively seeking coverage and eager for attention. Victims and survivors appear later : as context, as reaction, as proof that something bad happened. That structure isn’t neutral. It reproduces the hierarchy of the harm itself.

Centering burden-bearers isn’t a fairness question. It’s a reporting accuracy question. The people who live with the long-tail consequences of these systems understand them differently, and often more completely, than the people producing them. Their testimony is evidence. Not color.

What this looks like in practice

Amnesty International's Toxic Twitter research didn’t focus on what abusers said, it focused on what the abuse cost. Women changed how they used platforms. Many withdrew from public life online. Some feared for their physical safety offline. The damage was measurable, documented, and largely absent from coverage that kept returning to perpetrators and their rhetoric. That research made harm legible in terms institutions could act on. It named the hidden tax. It showed the invisible majority.

Editorial test:

Who has the most to lose in this story? Are they present with name, context, and consequence in the first third of your piece?

If not, you’re reporting the fire. Not the building that keeps catching.

Field note on source relationships

Burden-bearers are often sources who've been burned by coverage before: used as a single quote, stripped of context, left exposed after publication with no follow-up. The relationship requires more than a consent form. It requires transparency about how the material will be used, what decisions you'll make about their identification, and what your obligations are after the piece goes live. Phase 2 of this guide addresses this in depth, specifically, how to handle sources who are also subjects, and what rigor looks like without cruelty.

Toolkit 3: Reaching burden-bearers and protecting them

Secure communications are baseline: SecureDrop for newsrooms; Signal with disappearing messages for individual reporters. The Freedom of the Press Foundation's operational security guides are shareable with sources, not just practitioners. For community-based sourcing, the antidote to the parachute model, build relationships with survivor advocacy groups, mutual aid networks, and community organizations before you need them for a story. Meedan's Check enables collaborative verification with input from affected communities, valuable for content in languages or contexts outside a reporter's fluency. And the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma carries peer-reviewed, practitioner-tested guidance on trauma-informed practice. It belongs in your working reference, not just your reading list.

*See my full guide and series for the deeper breakdown of this case and related tools.

What these three shifts have in common

They all require resisting the pull toward what is easiest to see, film, quote, and sell.

That pull is real. Editors want the hook. Platforms reward the clip. Audiences click on conflict. None of that is going away. And none of it is an excuse, either.

These shifts aren’t about producing slower journalism or quieter journalism. They’re about producing journalism with a longer half-life: stories that build public understanding instead of borrowing its attention.

Phase 1 of this guide is conceptual. It changes how you frame the story before you report it. The shifts in Phases 2, 3, and 4 build on this foundation: rigor without cruelty, structure that makes systems visible rather than personalities legible, and the sustained practice of doing this work inside institutions that don’t always reward it. A story with the right frame but weak verification is still a weak story. These phases are cumulative. Each one assumes the work of the one before.

Because I care—and because I want us to win—here are two bonus shifts to carry with you from Part I before you start reporting: treating virality as distribution evidence, and placing the incident within the larger pattern. Both are about closing the gap before the first word is written.

Killing Spectacle (Part I-Continued): Framing the Story — Two Bonus Shifts Before You Report on Online Harm and Extremism

Read it here.

The Field

The practices above are easier to sustain inside a community of people working on the same problems than alone. That’s what The Field is: a cross-sector community of practice for journalists, researchers, advocates, lawyers, and technologists working at this intersection, built on the principle that the people with the most situational knowledge are often those with the least institutional power, and that better practice requires closing that gap deliberately. If this is your beat, wherever you are, it’s yours to join.

Join The Field: Fill out the intake form or reach out to me directly at inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com

The Frontier

These three shifts will make individual stories better. They won’t fix the structural conditions that make better journalism hard to sustain: the revenue models that reward speed over depth, the synthetic media environment that is actively contaminating the evidentiary record, and the reach gap that means the reporting most needed by communities closest to the harm is the reporting least likely to reach them. Each of those problems gets its full treatment in the phase where it becomes most acute, synthetic media and verification in Part 2, the reach gap in Part 3, the revenue question in Part 4. Naming them here is a promise, not a deferral. The frontier is the reason the guide exists. Craft alone doesn’t close it.

Up next— Killing Spectacle, Part 2: Rigor without cruelty.

How to verify claims in spaces designed to mislead, including a synthetic media environment where the detection tools are always one cycle behind the fakes. How to handle sources who are also subjects, and what informed consent actually looks like as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time form. And the specific problem no one talks about clearly enough: what you do with evidence you can verify but cannot safely publish, and how that shapes what you can responsibly claim.

Part 2 of this guide is where the frame you built in Part 1 either holds or falls apart. The craft is in making it hold.

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Two additional shifts to consider before you start reporting: treating virality as distribution evidence, and placing the incident within the larger pattern. Both are about closing the gap before the first word is written.

Killing Spectacle (Part I-Continued): Frame the Story Right with Two More Shifts (read here)

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If this is your beat, or someone you edit, teach, or commission, send it to them directly and invite them to join The Field, our new community of practice. The journalists and media practitioners who need this most are rarely the ones looking for it.

These aren’t universal rules. They’re practices drawn from years in this space. What works in a long-form investigation won’t always survive a breaking news brief. Context matters. This guide is a conversation, leave a comment or reach me directly with what’s missing and what works. What’s useful goes into the guide, with credit.

About the author. Raja Althaibani works at the intersection of media, harm, technology, and accountability— advising, training, investigating, and building tools for practitioners navigating an information landscape that moves faster than most frameworks can follow.

She writes Unembedded, which includes the ongoing series The Safari Is Over ; and founded The Field, a cross-sector community of practice for journalists, researchers, advocates, and technical practitioners working on these beats.

inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com · www.rajaalthaibani.com · Join The Field

New here? This essay is part of The Safari Is Over: Why Louis Theroux Never Made It Inside the Manosphere, a series on the systems and incentives that have made the manosphere more visible, more influential, and more misunderstood. Read the series introduction and announcement here.

When Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere1 landed on Netflix last month, it seemed to promise a public service. At last, here was a mainstream documentary promising to enter an ecosystem that has spent years radicalizing grievance, laundering misogyny as self-help, and turning humiliation into a business model.

But the film mistakes so-called access for understanding.

Theroux is the undisputed master of the faux-naïve encounter: the blinking, bumbling Englishman whose disarming politeness usually coaxes the truth out of fanatics. For years, that method worked because exposure still carried moral weight. To be seen clearly—saying vile things aloud, revealing dehumanizing beliefs, and performing your own moral squalor for the camera—was, in itself, compromising.

But in the neon-lit gyms and high-rise apartments of the so-called “manosphere”2, his act feels less like a method than a valuable asset inside a content machine run by a motley crew of savvy hustlers and manfluencers3. Rather than a rigorous inquiry into the system that makes the manosphere profitable, reproducible, politically useful, and dangerous, the documentary plays out as a digital safari.

Across its 91-minute runtime, Theroux gawks at hyper-masculine grifters and flamboyant villains, offering viewers a guided tour through the spectacle while obscuring the machinery, incentives, and deeper actors sustaining it.

But who can really blame him?

In one scene, we watch as 24-year-old British TikTok influencer HS TikkyTokky, née Harrison Sullivan, casually presents his phone to show Louis a video of himself receiving oral sex in a club toilet just hours earlier.

Sullivan, right, appears amused and almost triumphant after showing Theroux the graphic video, bragging that he had been “out late getting content.” Source: Netflix

Theroux appears visibly disgusted. Source: Netflix

We see the Fresh & Fit podcast studio functioning like a digital-age Roman coliseum, where Myron Gaines and his co-host invite young, unprepared women onto the podcast only to badger and degrade them before a live audience of thousands.

Even Theroux, long practiced in meeting extremists and fanatics, appears visibly astonished by the sheer spectacle of it all.

And that is precisely the problem. The manosphere is not just a collection of obnoxious men with ring lights and microphones, nor merely a niche internet pathology. It is a networked commercial ecosystem built on grievance, gender panic, extremist ideology, and algorithmic escalation. It monetizes male insecurity, packages domination as clarity, and converts resentment into recurring revenue.

That is where the documentary goes wrong. By treating the manosphere mainly as personality, or as “toxic masculinity” embodied by a young, amoral generation, it mistakes spectacle for explanation. More broadly, it reflects a recurring failure in mainstream media: when coverage locks onto the face, the clip, and the performance, structure recedes behind character. Systemic critique collapses into character study.

Theroux leans into that logic. He centers the individual as both narrative engine and easy-to-digest villain, while sparing Netflix and other platforms a more unpleasant analysis of the algorithmic incentives and systemic forces that built these men in the first place.

More importantly, he misses a crucial point: these men are not simply being themselves. They are performing profitable characters for a global audience. If Theroux had set up the conditions to break the façade, or brought in someone with deeper knowledge of the space, a more revealing truth about both these figures and the ecosystem they inhabit might have emerged.

Instead, he falls into a profound irony. In trying to expose the spectacle, he reproduces its logic, prioritizing performance over systemic accountability. He gives a global stage to the movement’s preferred symbols of success— supercars, crypto wealth, and the livestreamed objectification of women— while looking past the wreckage and the invisible majority left in their wake.

The deeper question is not simply what these men do, but what kind of system rewards this behavior in the first place.

The manosphere does not run on conviction alone. To stay solvent in the attention economy, red-pill influencers have learned to commodify misogyny and spectacle, paying a kind of mandatory tax of the macabre to remain visible.

@hsullivan#hstikkytokky #fyp #edmatthewstokky #viral #videoviral

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They engage in clip-farming and context stripping, distilling hate into its most viral form for algorithms that reward the most jagged edges of the human psyche. Under incentives that reward outrage, humiliation, and extremity, they monetize the demolition of their own dignity4, knowing that only the most visceral provocations reliably break through the noise5.

Research points to precisely this logic: repeated exposure, recommendation loops, normalization, and monetized escalation. Seen through that lens, many of the documentary’s most infamous moments look different. They are not just signs of moral rot. They are also signs of market discipline.

What looks like shamelessness is often evidence that private life has been fully absorbed into production. Sex, shame, cruelty, confrontation, humiliation—nothing remains outside the feed if it can be monetized within it. Yet the documentary returns to these scenes as if their extremity were the deepest thing about them. It is not.

The deeper fact is that this ecosystem now requires escalation. In a saturated market of outrage, neutrality is death, moderation is invisibility, and dignity does not scale. The men in this space are not only rewarded for transgression; many are trapped by the need to intensify it. That would have been the documentary’s real subject, had it trusted the harder story.

And once you see that escalation is not incidental but structural, the ecosystem begins to look less like chaos than hierarchy and ideological convergence.

At the top sit the better-insulated operators: figures like the Andrew Tates, with diversified revenue, political adjacency, private channels, event circuits, loyal fan economies, and off-platform leverage.

Beneath them is a much larger class of clippers, podcasters, streamers, outrage merchants, and masculinity entrepreneurs who depend almost entirely on algorithmic visibility. They posture as sovereign men while living in profound dependence on Big Tech and the upper tiers of manosphere hierarchy.

This hidden hierarchy matters because it makes the ecosystem legible. It shows who is protected and who is disposable. It explains why “community” so often turns out to be a marketing fiction rather than brotherhood or connection.

It also reveals that many of the loudest figures, like those featured in the documentary, are not architects so much as products: profitable, vicious, disposable, replaceable.

The hierarchy also reproduces itself through recruitment. More established operators do not simply build audiences; they court younger influencers, pull them into their orbit, and turn them into feeder figures for the brand. The point is not just ideological alignment. It is audience capture.

Sneako illustrates the pattern. He first built an audience as a teenage YouTube creator long before entering the manosphere, then was drawn into Andrew Tate’s orbit and recast as a younger, more platform-native extension of that world, quickly earning a reputation as Tate’s protégé.6

His more recent fallout with Tate reveals the fragility of loyalty in the red-pill economy. What looks like mentorship is often a form of capture: the absorption of new faces, new markets, and new streams of grievance into the machine. In a hierarchy built on clout, access, and followers, conflict is never merely personal. It is also a struggle over succession—over who gets to inherit the brand, the audience, and the authority of the “Top G.”

In that sense, the manosphere can begin to resemble a minor geopolitics of influence: alliances are tactical, loyalty is conditional, and succession battles are fought through audiences as much as ideology.

In a recent video, Sneako put it this way:

“The Matrix sees slop and clout, and they love you. They give you everything […] But once you speak to people that are different than you—that is when the vultures come out of nowhere and swarm.”

That hierarchy, and the recruitment funnel it depends on, also help explain who benefits from keeping the system volatile. The manosphere does not exist in isolation. It is embedded in a wider ecosystem of actors who derive value from that volatility: ideologues, extremists, and power brokers whose reach extends far beyond fitness tips and lurid scenes.

Researchers increasingly describe the manosphere as a networked ecosystem in which misogynistic narratives circulate across overlapping subcultures, often intersecting with other forms of extremism and moving beyond the niche digital margins they once appeared to occupy.

Experts have also repeatedly pointed to overlaps with far-right ecosystems, including white supremacist and anti-democratic currents. Some recent counter-extremism research suggests that today’s radicalization landscape no longer fits neatly into clean ideological boxes. What investigators increasingly encounter instead are blurred, unstable, and overlapping formations.

That ambiguity is part of the danger. It makes these ecosystems harder to track and harder to counter precisely because grievance, entertainment, influencer culture, and ideological radicalization now bleed into one another.

Those overlaps are no longer peripheral. Figures like Sneako and Nick Fuentes help show how misogynistic branding, far-right politics, antisemitism, and celebrity spectacle increasingly merge and spill into one another.

A recent viral clip of Andrew and Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, Sneako, and others partying in a Miami nightclub while Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” played in the background is a crude but telling example of that convergence: misogynist influencer culture, far-right provocation, celebrity antisemitism, and platformed spectacle collapsing into the same scene.

By chasing visible manosphere figures without following these ideological mergers to their outer edges, Theroux misses the deeper and more dangerous intersections with actors like Nick Fuentes, who use alpha rhetoric and gender grievance as Trojan horses for broader radicalization and incitement.

That is why the documentary, for all its so-called access, never really gets “inside” the manosphere.

Instead, it raises a critical ethical question: does the film function as a critique, or merely as a larger stage for the reciprocal grift?

By prioritizing shocking, performative moments over structural analysis, the documentary leans into spectacle journalism, where the line between interrogation and amplification becomes dangerously thin, creating a parasitic symbiosis in which legacy media and the renegade manosphere perform for one another, each using the other’s platform to reinforce its own relevance, visibility, and clout. It exposes the banality of the scam behind the curated personas, yet remains entangled in the same attention economy that sustains them.

For all its bile and spectacle, the most striking thing about the documentary is how “meh” it feels. Packaged as awareness, its rhetoric is often barely distinguishable from the sensationalist content and extremist provocations already circulating through news cycles, political discourse, official rhetoric, and algorithm feeds.

If anything, the film feels tame because we are already trapped in a feedback loop where the bar for outrage keeps rising and the machinery of radicalization has become ordinary.

This is not a fringe problem, and it is not far from home. Research suggests that manosphere content now forms part of the online environment many people, including young users, can encounter directly. Related UK data also show that 19 percent of those arrested for terrorism-related offenses in 2023 were aged 17 and under.

That does not mean every misogynistic influencer space is a terrorism pipeline. It does mean the wider ecology of radicalization, grievance, and digitally mediated harm can no longer be treated as niche.

Not when so many young users encounter fragments of it directly and daily.

Not when its styles and logics have already leaked so thoroughly into public discourse.

Not when the bar for outrage has been pushed so high that degradation now reads as ordinary content.

And the effects of spectacle journalism and media storytelling are not incidental. They are corrosive.

On audiences, it heightens attention and emotional arousal while often eroding credibility, especially in hard news7. Over time, it breeds fatigue, cynicism, avoidance, and a public that is overstimulated but underinformed.

For journalism, it shifts incentives from verification and depth to visibility, personalization, and performance.

For public discourse, it favors scandal, conflict, and personality over policy, process, and structure.

For democracy, the problem is not simply vulgarity. It is that spectacle weakens the conditions democratic judgment requires: trust, shared factuality, deliberative attention, and sustained engagement with public life.

And for the invisible majority8, it turns casualties into background. The people who profit from attention stay at the center of the frame; the people who bear the costs are pushed to its edges.

We are already saturated by an attention economy that trains us to treat humiliation, conflict, and dehumanization as normal. To keep platforming spectacle at the expense of a better-informed public is professional malpractice.

It is time to move beyond spectacle and cynical grift and start examining this as a crisis of connection, accountability, power, and political formation.

The safari is over.

Key takeaways

The manosphere is not a roster of outrageous men. It is a networked commercial ecosystem, and reporting and storytelling should treat it as such.

When coverage centers the performer, it risks mistaking access for understanding and spectacle for explanation.

Extremity is not always revelation. Often it is market discipline: content shaped by platforms, monetization, and the demand for visibility.

The real story is usually off-camera: hierarchy, incentives, audience funnels, ideological overlap, and who profits from amplification.

Spectacle-centered coverage can unintentionally strengthen the system it claims to expose by routing attention, legitimacy, and curiosity back to its most marketable figures.

Good reporting and storytelling should ask not only what was said, but what is being optimized, who is being recruited, what is being normalized, and what has been pushed out of frame.

The people most visible in these ecosystems are not always the most powerful. Many are replaceable performers inside a larger machine.

When coverage keeps the loudest performer at the center, the people harmed by the system become background.

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Companion resources

Because this problem extends beyond one documentary or one subculture, this essay is accompanied by additional practical resources, publishing in the upcoming days and weeks:

• A guide for journalists and editors on avoiding spectacle, reducing amplification, and reporting the system rather than the performance.

• A separate audience tip sheet for readers, parents, educators, and viewers on how to recognize spectacle, pause escalation, and ask better questions about what platforms are rewarding.

• Practitioner’s note: We Are Not Your Spectacle A critique for Western Media Practitioners, from Your Arab American Peer.

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Note to Readers

This essay is the first in a series, The Safari Is Over: Why Louis Theroux Never Made It Inside the Manosphere. Using the documentary as a starting point, the series examines the wider systems, cultures, and conditions that have made the manosphere more visible and more misunderstood. Read more here.

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Media, Research, and Professional Inquiries

For media requests, speaking invitations, consultations, collaboration inquiries, or professional contact, please reach out at inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com or connect via Substack or LinkedIn messenger or via my website contact form.

Read the first essay in the series here: Inside the Manosphere I: The Media Spectacle Is a Distraction

There is now an entire media economy devoted to making extremism impossible to ignore while doing far less to make it intelligible.

That problem sits at the center of this new series, The Safari Is Over: Why Louis Theroux Never Made It Inside the Manosphere, which examines the manosphere not as an internet curiosity or passing media spectacle, but as part of a wider ecosystem of misogyny, hate, extremism, and violence evolving in plain sight.

Using the Louis Theroux documentary as a starting point, and placing it alongside other pop-cultural texts, news stories, case studies, and emerging social trends, the series explores both the shared dynamics and the important differences across these formations.

It asks two central questions: what does it mean to live in a media environment that makes extremism easier to consume, circulate, and act on than to understand, and what can be done to interrupt and mitigate that harm more effectively, ethically, and responsibly?

This is no longer a fringe issue, if it ever truly was. The overlap between manosphere culture, broader far-right ecosystems, and more mainstream reactionary politics has become too consequential to dismiss as online spectacle or subcultural noise. What is at stake here is not only cultural analysis, but the public interest, public safety, and national security.

Across the series, I examine the structures that shape and sustain these worlds: media and journalism, platform design, Big Tech and its incentives, emerging technologies and AI, regulatory and legislative bottlenecks, policy failures, and the public habits that can either intensify harm or help contain it. The aim is not simply to interpret the spectacle, but to make it legible.

The series is written for both practitioners and general readers, with particular relevance for journalists, researchers, educators, policy specialists, legal analysts, trust and safety teams, and security practitioners. It combines analysis with practical literacy: how to recognize these dynamics early, how to respond more effectively, and how to avoid making them worse through weak analysis, careless language, poor ethics, or ineffective tools.

Series Rollout

The series will be published here on Substack over the coming months, generally on a fortnightly cadence. Alongside the main essays, I’ll also be publishing companion pieces, practice notes, source breakdowns, practical explainers, and media-literacy resources.

The first essay, “Inside the Manosphere I: The Media Spectacle Is a Distraction,” is now live. Upcoming companion materials will include a practice note on the relationship between spectacle journalism and amplification, along with tip sheets for practitioners and audiences on how to recognize, resist, and avoid reinforcing spectacle-driven narratives.

The next installment turns to the emotional economy beneath the spectacle, and to the thing most people still mistake for its primary product.

The Full Map — What’s Published and What’s Coming

THE SAFARI IS OVER Analysis Series on the manosphere, media, power, and the systems that produced both

Published:

• Inside the Manosphere I: The Media Spectacle Is a Distraction

• Inside the Manosphere II: The Donut Shop and the Ruins

Forthcoming:

• Companion practice notes and tip sheets tied to the manosphere and THE FIELD.

THE FIELD DISPATCH Working intelligence and practice resources for practitioners

Published:

• Killing Spectacle Part 1: Three Shifts for Journalists Who Cover Online Harm

• Killing Spectacle Part 1 Continued: Two Bonus Shifts Before You Report

• The Field: A Community of Practice (announcement and call to action)

Where to Follow

Substack (@rajaalthaibani): full essays, companion pieces, and extended analysis

Instagram (@raja_althaibani): shorter posts, bite-sized educational slides, visual explainers, live commentary, links, and frequent updates.

LinkedIn (@rajaalthaibani): practitioner-focused reflections, applied takeaways, and professional context

Website: rajaalthaibani.com

To follow the full series and receive new installments directly, subscribe on Substack here:

Subscribe now

Media, Research, and Professional Inquiries

For media requests, speaking invitations, consultations, collaboration inquiries, or professional contact, please reach out at inquiries@rajaalthaibani.com or connect via Substack or LinkedIn messenger or via my website contact form.