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Surgery Without A Scalpel: How Meta’s Photo Filters Fuel Transgender Delusions

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Even as social media addiction accelerated under Covid lockdowns, Meta jettisoned internal alarms about mental health dangers. Following Frances Haugen’s 2021 whistleblower testimony, attorneys general from 42 states filed consumer protection lawsuits against Meta.

The “Facebook Files,” a Wall Street Journal investigation based on Meta’s internal documents, showed that the social media company “ignored their own studies revealing Instagram’s photo-sharing and editing app harms girls.” Capitalizing on the need to connect during lockdown, Meta helped propel young women into gender facilities. 

When you set up a social media profile, you begin a process of virtualized identity that makes you a target for ad campaigns. Bots track people exploring “gender issues.” As Michelle Santiago Cortés’ observed, “Our algorithmically orchestrated encounters with people … on social media start to feel preordained, as if the fact that the algorithm put something on our path Means Something™.” Meta hid the many adverse effects — including anxiety and body-image dysmorphia — tied to compulsive online behavior such as infinite scrolling.

The “Facebook Files” disclosed built-in Instagram features that made it more harmful than similar youth-targeting apps. In particular, according to internal documents, “Social comparison is worse on Instagram.” Social comparisons on visual platforms, such as Instagram, resemble past research on body image. That research showed that young girls’ body image worsened when they compared themselves to images of cover girls.

The Self as an Object to Edit

What’s worse now is that, according to JAMA Plastic Facial Surgery, selfies and photo editing detach users from their

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Report: 647K Noncitizens Convicted Or Suspected Of Homicide, Other Crimes Are Not In ICE Custody

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More than 647,000 illegal immigrants convicted or suspected of sexual assault, homicide, and other heinous crimes are roaming free in the United States, federal immigration authorities confirmed on Wednesday.

The revelation came in a letter sent to Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Deputy Director and Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director Patrick Lechleitner. The data disclosed by the agency showed that as of July 2024, there are 425,431 noncitizens convicted of criminal offenses, many of them serious, and 222,141 noncitizens with pending criminal charges who are currently not in ICE custody.

According to Fox News, “Those include 62,231 convicted of assault, 14,301 convicted of burglary, 56,533 with drug convictions and 13,099 convicted of homicide,” as well as “[a]n additional 2,521 [with] kidnapping convictions and 15,811 [with] sexual assault convictions.”

Those with pending charges are facing allegations of similar offenses.

In his communique to Gonzales, Lechleitner contended that the Department of Homeland Security “removed or returned more than 893,600 individuals” from the United States from “mid-May 2023 through the end of July 2024” and that the “majority of all individuals encountered at the Southwest Border over the past three years have been removed, returned, or expelled.”

The acting agency head also took an apparent swipe at Democrat-run “sanctuary cities,” writing that “‘sanctuary’ policies can end up shielding dangerous criminals, who often victimize those same communities.”

As noted by Fox News, the Biden-Harris administration has released many illegal aliens “who came to the

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NY Judges Scrutinize ‘Troubling’ $450 Million Penalty In Trump Fraud Case: ‘No One Lost Any Money’

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Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron ordered in February former President Donald Trump to pay an approximate $450 million penalty in a civil fraud case in which there were no victims. Now, a New York appellate court is raising questions regarding the “troubling” penalty and Attorney General Letitia James’ justification for bringing the case in the first place.

James accused Trump of inflating his personal wealth to get better loan terms. Trump, for example, valued his Mar-a-Lago estate at between $427 million and $612 million, Forbes reported. Engoron, however, cited a one-off local Palm Beach County appraiser who valued the property as low as $18 million. Some experts have reportedly valued the sprawling property in the hundreds of millions.

As my colleague Mark Hemingway explained earlier this year, “Trump took out loans over several years, as real estate moguls are wont to do. For him to get approved for those loans, the banks did their own due diligence about Trump’s finances and ability to pay back the loans and decided to give them to him. Trump paid back the loans, and everyone made money.”

Enogoron ultimately ordered Trump to pay $354 million plus an additional $100 million in interest. Trump posted a $175 million bond in April and appealed the ruling.

[READ NEXT: Judge Engoron’s Inflation Of Trump’s ‘Ill-Gotten Gains’ Is The Real Financial Fraud]

Trump’s team argued on Thursday before the New York Appellate Division, First Judicial Department that the case was a “clear-cut violation of the statute

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Washington Post’s Incurious Philip Bump Says The Media Should Just Give Kamala The ‘Benefit Of The Doubt’

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Because the national news media can’t be bothered to actually scrutinize Kamala Harris’ campaign — they’re trying to help her win, after all — they instead choose to scrutinize anyone else who tries.

That’s why rather than sincerely look into Kamala’s relatively new biographical claim that she once slung Happy Meals working at a McDonald’s, The Washington Post’s most willfully obtuse writer, Philip Bump, decided that this week his energy was best spent belittling anyone who questions it — most notably, Kamala’s opponent, Donald Trump.

“Since Trump has been saying that the McDonald’s story isn’t true,” Bump wrote Thursday, “a lot of his supporters are saying it too, rushing to prove that Harris was being dishonest about her McDonald’s employment with the same intellectual rigor that they applied to uncovering voter fraud and pet eating.”

To the extent that Bump had any interest at all in the unsubstantiated “french fries and ice cream” tale Kamala relays to make herself seem humble and relatable, it was to prove that he couldn’t prove whether it’s true even if he wanted to. “Over the course of this week,” he wrote, “I spent some time looking into the story myself — not because I doubted Harris’s claim (since there’s no real reason to doubt it) but because I was curious if it was provable.”

This is what the national media do anytime a Republican or right-leaning news publication raises a legitimate issue that might be politically harmful to voters of the Democrat Party. They dismiss the controversy

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