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For decades, the Eelam Tamil ethnic group in Sri Lanka has been persecuted. They are dealing with ongoing occupation by the Sri Lankan government, which has also incited violence against Muslims in the country.

As tensions have escalated, the government has cracked down on speech, leaning hard into online censorship to censor anyone who questions the authority of the Sri Lankan government.

The government has banned social media, passed a restrictive "online safety act" and sought to enact strict controls over what can be said online, all under the guise of "online safety" and curbing "misinformation."

ArunAnnow has been covering the persecution of the Eelam Tamil people and the atrocities of the Sri Lankan government. He's an independent journalist and content creator. Today he's joining me to talk about the situation in Sri Lanka and how their "online safety" crusade is serving as a blueprint for authoritarian U.S. laws.

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Grief-Stricken Winds Documentary Website:

https://grief-stricken-winds.com/

News Sources/Orgs:

https://x.com/TamilGuardian

https://x.com/JDSLanka

https://x.com/lankafiles

https://x.com/PEARL_Action

People to Follow:

https://x.com/kumanan93

https://x.com/ambikasat

https://x.com/JeraThampi

Other Resources:

https://ptsrilanka.org

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Over the weekend, Twitter descended into complete and utter chaos. Elon Musk rolled out a feature called “About This Account” that allowed people to click on the profile of an X user and see exactly what country the account was created in, where its user is currently based, and how many times the username has been changed.

Dozens of major accounts masquerading as “America First” or “MAGA” were identified as originating in places like India, Pakistan, Russia, or Nigeria, engagement farming to earn money through X's creator revenue program, available to those who purchase a blue check.

Charlie Warzel is a longtime technology writer at The Atlantic who has been covering this rollout. Today he's joining me to discuss whether the "about this account" feature is truly 9/11 for pro MAGA accounts, how our internet is being warped by inauthentic activity, whether this truly signifies the end of the social web, and what comes next.

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Since Kamala Harris lost the election, there's been an endless debate among the Democrats on how to best reach young people online. Many centrists have claimed liberals need a "Joe Rogan of the left" and by left they usually mean center right. Others have leaned into memes and shitposting like Gavin Newsom.

Zohran Mamdani didn't do any of that and he won young voters, and especially young men, in a landslide. His digital strategy leaned into creator-style content and leveraged a ton of influencers, but in a way that felt natural, organic and centered his policies, which were the real engine behind his success.

Part of his success was due to Creators For Zohran, an influencer-led coalition aimed at boosting Zohran's messaging online, and Emilia Rowland, Zohran's new media and creator partnerships advisor, who led creator partnerships for Mamdani's campaign.

Emilia, along with Aiden Kohn Murphy and Alexis Williams, co-founders of Creators for Zohran, joined me to pull back the curtain on the work they did with Zohran, talk about what made his creator strategy so effective, and discuss how to build relevance and mobilize people in an increasingly fractured online world.

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Right now, there's a clip going viral from former Obama White House aide and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz that is so appalling and depraved it's hard to believe it's real.

But many people are missing the most dangerous part of her commentary. Her comments reveal exactly what the ruling class in America wants to do to online speech, and why we need to fight back so hard to protect our online freedoms.

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Jeffrey Epstein is back in the news after a massive new cache of emails and text messages was released last week. Now, Congress is set to send to Trump legislation to compel the Justice Department to release even more records. The whole saga has become a messy political fight that’s causing chaos in the MAGA movement and warping the right wing internet.

No one knows the Epstein saga more than my friend Brace Belden, co-host of the Trueanon podcast and one of the internet's foremost experts on Epstein and MAGA influencers.

He joins me to break down what this latest Epstein cache reveals, the real tea on Donald Trump and Bill Clinton's relationship, and how off this Epstein stuff might impact Trump and the influencers in his movement going forward.

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FREE SPEECH FRIDAY

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The Department of Homeland Security has deployed a powerful surveillance tool at college football games, and that's not the only place where they're using it. If you were one of the thousands of people who attended the Old Miss vs Georgia game a few weeks ago, a DHS system could have been monitoring you.

At that game and others schools have been using a little-known Department of Homeland Security platform called the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN). FOIAball, a newsletter reporting on college football and public records, got a hold of documents related to this surveillance effort.

All of this information and monitoring is now being fed into facial recognition systems, as those systems of surveillance expand. And, HSIN isn't just being used at concerts and game days, it's not being deployed against protesters, activists, and peaceful crowds.

Story on FOIAball: https://www.foiaball.com/p/dhs-college-football-hsin-surveillance-ole-miss-ohio-state

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Sydney Sweeney just had one of the worst box office weekends of all time. Her new movie Christy, about a female boxer, made barely over $1 million, making it one of the worst-performing films of all time,

This disastrous flop comes on the heels of yet another culture war controversy that she was at the center of, stemming from a viral GQ interview, and now she's locked in a bitter feud with Zendaya, her co-star on Euphoria, the HBO show that arguably skyrocketed her to stardom.

So all of this begs the question: can Sydney Sweeny survive becoming an avatar for the culture war? Why does every viral moment now become a referendum on politics? Kat Tenbarge joins me to discuss!

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Tommy Marcus, better known online as Quentin Quarantino online, first became famous during the early days of the pandemic. He posted timely memes and news roundups, but what started as a funny Instagram account quickly turned into a massive fundraising machine. Tommy got more involved in activism and political causes and began using his platform to raise money for humanitarian issues and injustice around the world.

A few months ago, he joined an aid boat headed to Gaza, hoping to deliver supplies to people caught in the ongoing crisis. His ship was intercepted just miles off the coast and the IDF abducted him and fellow activists before holding them in a notorious Israeli super prison. Tommy, one of the few Jewish activists on the boat, was tortured and abused by the IDF.

He finally made it out and is speaking about the experience for the first time. He opens up about how the experience affected him and changed his beliefs about power, justice, and the United States sanction of the slaughter in Palestine.

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