Taylor Lorenz’s Power User

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON. Buy a subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 From Israel to Saudi Arabia to Russia to the UAE and more, influencers are increasingly being used for political propaganda and foreign influence campaigns.  Makenna Kelly is a senior reporter at WIRED and she joined me to talk about how foreign governments are leveraging con...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON !!! Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 WELCOME BACK TO FREE SPEECH FRIDAY!  Earlier this week, ABC and Nexstar yanked Jimmy Kimmel's show off the air after he made a joke about Charlie Kirk's death that the Trump admin didn't like. FCC commissioner Brendan Carr called the comments “offensive and ins...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 People on TikTok, YouTube and X are recreating 1950s style racism towards robots. Using slurs like “clanker,” “wireback,” and “cogsucker,” content creators are framing robots as a marginalized group, parodying old racist stereotypes in a retro aesthetic. The videos have gone v...

[Patreon Preview] To listen to/watch this full episode, ⁠sign up for my Patreon⁠ ! Signing up for the Patreon will get you access to one bonus episode per month, the ability to listen/watch without ads, and you're helping to support the show. Join today !! We're all familiar with the concept of deepfakes, but now, AI is being harnessed in a new way to deceive. AI generated TikTokers are reciting t...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON : https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co  When a powerful right-wing figure like Charlie Kirk is attacked or killed, political leaders and media rush to mourn them as a martyr and condemn "political violence." But what does political violence a...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co  In the early days of the internet, social media offered a space where anyone could casually share their daily thoughts, fleeting moments, and observations about the world. Casual posting was the norm, and this ext...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co  ICE agents will soon have access to one of the world’s most sophisticated hacking tools thanks to a government contract with Paragon Solutions, an Israeli spyware company that lets people hack into any mobile phon...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co Dark money orgs spend millions to shape our political system without having to reveal where their money comes from. Now, they're paying influencers too. Last week, I published an article on WIRED titled "A...

Go to https://joindeleteme.com/TAYLOR20 and use my code TAYLOR20 at checkout for 20% off! SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co Data brokers vacuum up information about us, what we buy, where we drive, what we watch, when we sleep, where we worship, and...

If you’ve spent enough time online, you have undeniably encountered the work of John Kilo. John is a 28 year old OnlyFans creator in Portland, and he has become a fixture on meme accounts and viral subreddits.  He's part porn star, part performance artist, part cultural critic and shitposter. He has created Skibidi Toilet porn, cosplayed a Trump supporter while having sex with a fleshlight mou...

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co All across the country, sweeping surveillance laws are being enacted under the guise of "safety" especially "child safety". Courts are handing over sensitive federal data, housing authorities are...

Go to joindeleteme.com/Taylor20 and use my code TAYLOR20 at checkout for 20% off! SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co Few beverages have left as unforgettable a mark on American culture as Four Loko. With a dizzying mix of alcohol and caffeine, it sk...

SUPPORT MY PODCAST ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co This week, YouTube rolled out automatic age verification in the US. It forces users who the company's AI system guesstimates might be under 18 to submit their government IDs or full biometric scans just...

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co  We're halfway through August and summer is rapidly coming to a close. But this year, something about the season was different. It's the first year in over 100 years that there hasn't been a definitive song of the summer.  Is the absence of a “2025 song of the summer” just a...

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co  A few days ago, 18 year old social media star Lil Tay made over $1 million by launching an OnlyFans shortly after her 18th birthday. The launch generated a massive backlash online, people on the left and the right are calling for OnlyFans to be banned and for the criminaliza...

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co  Since its launch in 2022, ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The tool is embedded in more and more areas of daily life and new research shows that it's also transforming how we write and even speak.  A group of researchers analyzed more t...

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co  The UK's Online Safety Act finally went into effect this week and it has been a massive clusterfuck. Entire forums, websites, communities and essential journalism is being censored. People are being forced to scan their faces to use Spotify and YouTube. Like all of these...

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co  The internet has become the primary way that people get public health information. Especially since the pandemic began in 2020, millions of people have turned to platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and newsletters to keep up to date on things like food recalls, infe...

I'm proud to partner with DeleteMe. Get 20% off their plans: joindeleteme.com/taylor20 This is the first video in my new series on data brokers and the dark history of digital surveillance. I dig into how surveillance capitalism evolved, the companies profiting from intimate details about your life, and how it all began long before the internet. I reveal the industry's origins from early g...

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co  The U.S. government is quietly building the largest surveillance system in modern history. In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I break down how agencies like ICE, DHS are weaponizing your personal data including tax filings, medical records, license plate scans, and more,...

Last week, a couple featured on the Jumbotron during a Coldplay concert in Boston went viral for being caught cheating. Within minutes of the video spreading on TikTok and X, users rallied together to identify the couple in the video using AI and facial recognition tools. Crowdsourced social media investigations are becoming more and more common, and the people conducting them are leveraging incre...

There's a bill right now in congress  called the NO FAKES act that claims it will protect you from deepfakes. "In this new era of AI, we need real laws to protect real people,"  Rep. Maria Salazar said when announcing the bill. "The NO FAKES Act is simple and sacred: you own your identity, not Big Tech, not scammers, not algorithms."  As usual, none of this is what the law...

Earlier this month, Sean “Diddy” Combs was acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering after a high-profile federal trial. The acquittals show how high profile men accused of sexual abuse and wrongdoing still often escape justice.  Already the outcome is being co-opted by the far right and manosphere spaces who are spinning it as proof that movements like #MeToo are overreaching.  Today we'r...

[FREE SPEECH FRIDAY] For decades, content creators have fought against oppressive copyright law. Copyright claims have been wielded by powerful corporations to take down videos, suppress criticism, and stifle parody through rigid enforcement of online speech. But now, a troubling shift is unfolding: legal attacks that were once used almost exclusively by powerful media companies, are being weaponi...

After years of hype and promises to destroy the deep state, the Department of Justice and FBI publicly declared there is no “client list” linking Jeffrey Epstein to prominent figures , this week. They also confirmed Epstein died by suicide and said told all of MAGA basically to drop the issue.  Now, MAGA influencers are accusing Trump of a cover up, the right wing internet is in disarray, and it r...