Image: Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for WIRED25

A Silicon Valley billionaire who co-founded LinkedIn is apologizing for accidentally funding a recently uncovered fake news operation.

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman on Wednesday addressing a that uncovered a “secret experiment” that utilized fake news in the Alabama Senate race that pit Democrat Doug Jones against Republican Roy Moore in December 2017. 

The Times report claims that Democratic tech operatives engaged in Russian manipulation tactics, funded by Hoffman, in an effort to help Jones defeat Moore in last year’s special election.

“I categorically disavow the use of misinformation to sway an election,” Hoffman says in his statement, claiming he was unaware of the project. “I would not have knowingly funded a project planning to use such tactics, and would have refused to invest in any organization that I knew might conduct such a project. Nevertheless, I do have an apology to make and have learned a lesson here.”

Hoffman, who is currently a board member for a number of tech companies such as Microsoft, has invested millions of dollars in Democratic Party-leaning groups following the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. 

One such investment was made to American Engagement Technologies (AET) according to the . Hoffman invested $750,000 in the group headed by the first director of the United States Digital Service (USDS) Mikey Dickerson. 

Dickerson, who is also a former Google engineer, helped found the USDS during the Obama administration in an effort to upgrade governmental use of technology.

According to Hoffman, AET provided Texas-based cybersecurity research firm New Knowledge with funding for research. That backing, partially from Hoffman, helped fund the special project that carried out a disinformation campaign in the Alabama race. 

New Knowledge’s chief executive Jonathan Morgan personally confirmed the agency weaponized fake news in the election between Jones and Moore. However, he claims his use of such tactics were on a small scale and denies involvement in the larger scheme described by the New York Times.

The special project involved the creation of a fake news story that linked Republican candidate Roy Moore to thousands of false Russia accounts. The bots began following Moore on Twitter en masse and drew media attention. A Facebook page posing as Alabama conservatives was also created in an attempt to divide Republican voters in the state. The efforts cost $100,000 according to the Times.

Morgan has claimed that his involvement was strictly for research purposes and was not based on affecting the outcome of an election. Regardless, Facebook Morgan’s account for “engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

It should be noted that New Knowledge is one of the cybersecurity firms that put together two new reports on Russian interference in U.S. politics for the Senate Intelligence Committee. The reports were published .

Sen. Doug Jones, who was victorious over Moore in the election, for the federal government to investigate. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is looking into whether the disinformation campaign violated the state’s .

Hoffman has joined Jones in calling for a federal investigation into the tactics. He has also committed to maintaining better oversight of organization he funds as well as improving on how he vets future investments.

Image: illustration: rachel kraus/mashable; screenshot: dyson; photo: Layne Murdoch Jr./Getty Images for goop

It’s a match made in late-stage capitalism heaven.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience-filled lifestyle brand Goop is now shilling a Dyson product that truly embodies the best of the word “excess.”

Please meet the Dyson Supersonic hair dryer in 23.75 karat gold. 

Dyson released this very special edition of its Supersonic hair dryer in August. It’s an ultra-luxe version of its (actually great, if pricey) hair dryer. Just, ya know, adorned with gold. 

But not just any gold! It’s gold leaf, sourced from Italy, and hand painted on every device. The wand of the dryer also comes in a nice royal blue. The case comes in a red that matches the “gesso” of the dryer. Over time, the gesso will mix with the gold to form a signature “patina.” (I learned a lot of new words reading the description of this golden blow dryer). 

It can be yours for $499.99 — just $100 off the base price of the original!

Ads for this unholy marriage of vanity and brand affinity appeared in the Goop newsletter on Thursday. Here is the ad. Goop and Dyson are apparently “friends.”

Image: screenshot: rachel kraus/mashable

It makes perfect sense for Goop to include this product — which costs approximately 25 times more than a typical blow dryer — in the newsletter, even as an ad. 

Goop is what the biz calls an “aspirational” brand. That is, it is intended for both rich people (Gwyneth), and people who wish they were rich (me). The first item in the Goop “what’s new” shop is a $1,260 coat. It is famous for selling items like Moon Dusts and Jade Eggs to promote health and wellness. And though Goop has been thoroughly ridiculed for its excesses and out-of-touch editorial, it still commands a devoted following of aesthetes, VIPs, and their minions. Goop is worth $250 million.

Goop is my guilty pleasure, though I can’t afford anything it sells. However, I dearly hope Gwyneth uses this gold blow dryer. The flaxen titan of wellness, tending to her locks with a golden rod in hand, a steely look in her eye, is sheer perfection. She deserves it. And so do you.

 

Buckle up everyone, we have another Yanny/Laurel on our hands. 

While watching Sesame Street with his daughter, Redditor u/schrodert had to do a double take because Grover seems to be saying, “Yes, yes that’s a fucking excellent idea!” 

Listen for yourself:

Grover is actually saying, “Yes, yes, that sounds like an excellent idea!” 

As u/NeverFresh points out, listeners can hear both depending on what they want to hear. If you think “that sounds like” over and over again in your head, you’ll hear the clean version. But if you’re more inclined to dirty thoughts, you might hear Grover cussing.

It’s similar to the Yanny/Laurel video that tore apart social media, or the “brainstorm”/”green needle” meme that had Redditors scratching their heads. 

It doesn’t work for everyone, though. 

What do you hear? 

Image: John Raoux/AP/REX/Shutterstock

In a fitting end to a year of questionable tweets, Elon Musk is asking the courts to drop a defamation suit filed against him after insulting a British cave diver on Twitter this summer.

A motion to dismiss the case was filed Wednesday to the U.S. District Court in California’s Central District where Vernon Unsworth, a UK citizen, filed a complaint in September alleging Musk used defamatory language when Musk tweeted Unsworth was a “pedo guy,” then later sent an email to a BuzzFeed reporter accusing the diver of being involved in child sex trafficking. The tweets have since been deleted and Musk publicly apologized — on, you guessed it, Twitter.

Unsworth was part of a mission to rescue a Thai soccer team trapped in flooded caves in June and into July. Musk offered his companies’ engineering and systems expertise to build a rescue submarine, which Unsworth criticized.

Now Musk would like to put this all behind him, or as the motion says “end the war of words,” but in a statement to CNBC, Unsworth’s lawyer plans to pursue the case. Musk’s main defense is that his words were “non-actionable opinions” protected by the First Amendment even if they were offensive “imaginative attacks.”

In the motion, Musk calls Unsworth’s comments “indefensible and baseless” and that they prompted Musk to defend himself and his companies, SpaceX, Tesla, and the Boring Company.

Musk then “took to Twitter — a social networking website infamous for invective and hyperbole — to respond.” Later in the motion, Musk characterizes the social media site as the “rough-and-tumble Twitter platform.”

Since this was Twitter and not “a Boston Globe Spotlight exposé, a university press conference, or criminal complaint” the case against Musk and his “gratuitous barb” should be dismissed, his legal team argues.

Unsworth is seeking $75,000 in damages and a court order to stop Musk from making more allegations. Sounds familiar.

With 2018 winding down, it’s safe to say that this year was just as chaotic at the White House as 2017, if not more so. From absurd behavior to jail time for former staff members to the battle with the press, it’s been a year that’s left us trying to catch our breath.

So much of what’s happened in 2018 has been centered around the White House, be it staff turnover or events that actually took place there. So instead of trying to take on the worldwide whirlwind that is Trump himself, we’ve limited our scope to some of the worst White House-oriented events of the year.

Even then it’s pretty hard to capture everything that happened. But here are our picks for the 14 worst White House moments of 2018.

1. Trump’s Jailhouse Rock

For all of Trump’s belly-aching about the Mueller investigation being a “witch hunt,” an awful lot of people from the president’s orbit are going to jail over it. The biggest Trump figure to fall is his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in prison for a variety of crimes, including violation of campaign finance laws — which Trump is also implicated in — due to making hush payments to two women with whom Trump allegedly had affairs. 

Other figures awaiting jail time include Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn and his former campaign chair Paul Manafort. And the Mueller investigation still isn’t even over. The cases are piling up so quick, it’s starting to look like the participants already found guilty will total more days in jail than days in Trump’s first (and possibly only) presidential term. 

2. Chuck & Nancy & Chaos

Talk about going out with a bang. Even with a few days left in the year, it’ll be hard to top what happened on Tuesday, December 11, in front of a gaggle of press in the Oval Office. Incoming House Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the leading Democrats in Congress, were sitting with Trump and VP Mike Pence for what Trump clearly hoped was a nice, bipartisan photo op.

What unfolded, though, was a spectacular partisan verbal brawl. Pelosi and Schumer needled Trump over immigration and government funding, resulting in Trump saying he’d take full responsibility for any government shutdown. 

It was an astounding meltdown from a president who’s made us almost numb to tantrums. It also sets the stage for an explosive 2019, as Democrats take back control of the House while the 2020 presidential campaign revs up and the Mueller investigation rolls on.

3. Acosta-gate

Trump’s battle with the media came to a head in the final quarter of 2018. CNN’s Jim Acosta has raised the ire of multiple White House officials, including Trump, throughout the current administration’s tenure. The feud exploded in early November when a heated exchange between Acosta and Trump eventually led to the White House revoking Acosta’s press pass. 

While it was the clearest punch thrown by the administration in their ongoing fight against the press, things got even weirder when White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders shared a doctored video of the incident sourced to an Info Wars editor to defend the revoked pass, claiming Acosta physically attacked the young White House intern trying to take a microphone from Acosta. Kellyanne Conway made it even weirder with an alternative facts defense. 

In the end, the White House backtracked from the physical nature of their original claim (the video was doctored, after all) and said it was because, basically, they thought Acosta was rude. Eventually, Acosta got his pass back, the White House made up (bad) new rules for journalists, and the battle between the free press and the president continues on. 

4. A horrifying holiday

In 2018, just as it happened in 2017, First Lady Melania Trump’s Christmas decorations in the White House were met with ridicule. In particular, the giant blood-red Christmas trees that haunted the hallways of the White House were target of jokes and memes this time around.

Maybe next year, she’ll stick with some garland and an inflatable Santa on the lawn. 

5. That painful Game of Thrones tweet

We can’t pinpoint any single tweet Trump sends, because really, he sends so many bad ones that we’d never keep up. But this one in particular, this really bad attempt to cash in on the popularity of Game of Thrones, gets its due because it’s very clear someone’s nephew or some lowly underpaid intern stayed up way too late in the White House basement to come up with this bad art. 

It’s a perfect example of an inept, out-of-touch administration bringing the thirst. It went viral, alright, but for all the wrong reasons. To mash together two HBO references, if you come at the Night King, you best not miss. 

6. The corniest White House painting

Trump has famously tried to spruce up a White House that he isn’t exactly thrilled to live in by hanging things like his victorious electoral map. In 2018, we learned he’d gone one step further by hanging a terrible fan art painting portraying him sharing some drinks and laughs alongside other Republican presidents.

While Trump may have gotten along swimmingly with Nixon, it’s hard to envision either Abe Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt having too many chuckles hanging out with the president.

7. The child separation policy

Perhaps the biggest black eye the Trump administration took in 2018 was over separating migrant children from their families at the border. The administration insisted, despite evidence uncovered by journalists, that this was not their policy, inciting a wave of backlash (and a debate over First Lady Melania Trump’s controversial jacket choice).

The administration said they put a stop to the unconscionable practice after much protest, but trouble lingered as hundreds of children remained separated from their parents into the fall, just as Trump began revving up his midterm election racist rhetoric over a caravan of migrants streaming through Mexico. 

8. Donald and Kanye hold court

Trump relishes a spectacle, but this was something else altogether, a meeting of minds that went supernova in seconds. It was such an incredible display of jaw-dropping absurdity, we almost missed the fact Kanye that shared his iPhone passcode with the world. 

9. An awkward phone call

Trump’s presidency has, thus far, been a long, strange fever dream, a feeling punctuated by the ridiculously awkward August phone call he had with Mexico president Enrique Peña Nieto. As his speakerphone continued to malfunction, what should have been a dry, pointless diplomatic photo op turned into a comedy of errors. When it got the VEEP treatment, it only served to remind us all that distinction between the HBO satire and the real world was getting blurrier every day.

10. Voting with your groceries

For a president whose administration is hell-bent on destroying voting rights, Trump doesn’t seem to understand how voter ID works. At least, that’s the feeling we got in August when, trying to explain his desire for stricter voter ID laws, the president of the United States said, “You know if you go out and buy groceries, you need a picture or a card — you need ID.” Which is … not true at all, unless you’re buying some sort of alcohol. 

Things got weirder when White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee tried to explain Trump’s quote and that, yes, the president knows how grocery shopping works. 

Three months later, in November, Trump returned to this line of thought in an interview with conservative website The Daily Caller, saying, “If you buy a box of cereal — you have a voter ID.” This is, again, untrue, as was Trump’s assertion that people voted multiple times using disguises. It’d be ridiculous if the threat of stripping voter rights wasn’t so real.

11. The revolving door

If there’s a word that’s best represents Trump’s time in the White House, it’s “chaos.” And much of that is attributable to the revolving door of the the president’s administration. Among the highest profile 2018 departures were Chief of Staff John Kelly, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and embattled EPA chief Scott Pruitt, who was forced out by a hilariously long series of scandals.

Besides that, though, were the resignations of communications director Hope Hicks, reportedly a stabilizing force of the Trump White House, UN ambassador Nikki Haley, and aide Omarosa Manigault, who seemed to be a catalyst for chaos, right down to the wacky promotional tour for her White House memoir. 

Turnover is to be expected with any presidency, but the unprecedented rate at which Trump’s administration has seen change is a sign that the White House is in deep disarray. 

12. Trump’s notes to self

One thing aides around the White House have to do, apparently, is to remind President Trump to act, well, presidential. That fact isn’t all that disturbing; presidents are busy people and little notes to keep them on track or to remind them of certain things are a necessity. 

Except these notes were so simplistic, so seemingly unnecessary that you can’t help but wonder what goes through Trump’s head. Such as the notes that were given to Trump before he met with victims of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting that read like a list of “how to sound like a human being.”

Other times, his notes were either misspelled (“colusion”) or he just straight-up ignored them, such as the time he was told “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” Vladimir Putin and he turned right around and offered those congrats. 

13. Lowering the flag

Trump holds grudges. We know this. But it was still shocking to see that twice — TWICE — Trump let those grudges spill out into a time of mourning by dragging his feet on lowering the White House flag. 

Following the June 28 shooting deaths of five journalists in the Annapolis, Maryland newsroom of the Capital Gazette, President Trump, no lover of the media, reportedly denied a request to lower the White House flags to half-staff to honor the victims though he had done so several times before to honor victims of mass shootings. Several days of criticism later, the White House relented. 

Then, when Senator John McCain, a Trump nemesis who had been the target of Trump verbal attacks, died in August, the White House faced criticism for raising the flag after a day at half-staff and for Trump’s prolonged silence about McCain’s passing. Both of these were remedied, but not before Trump’s pettiness showed through. 

14. The “shithole” heard ’round the world

We should have known 2018 was going to be a wild year when, in January, Trump kicked off the year by referring to countries like Haiti, El Salvador, and some African nations as “shithole countries” while discussing immigration with lawmakers in the Oval Office. 

The racist comments got a worldwide reprimand; they also kicked up a hornets nest of anger at debate here at home. But perhaps nothing was as powerful as the testimonials that came from people who had immigrated to the U.S. from the countries Trump slandered. 

The responses were as inspiring as Trump’s comments were awful. That didn’t take away the stench from the White House, though, another example of the lurking racism of the current administration breaking through the surface to remind us all what dark days these are. 

Image: Thomas Trutschel / getty

Take a deep breathe, Instagram users. Your timeline will now revert back to normal.

Outrage on Thursday as Instagram users were greeted by a major interface change that completely transformed the way their timeline worked. However, the design overhaul that was widely rolled out is now being rolled back. 

According to Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, the big Instagram change was a test accidentally launched to a much wider audience than intended.

The horizontal scrolling timeline change was meant to be shown to only a small test audience.

Instagram users that had received the UI update opened the app and found they were now forced to tap left and right to see a new post instead of scrolling up and down through their feed. The new horizontal scrolling timeline also allowed for only a single piece of content to show at a time.

The Facebook-owned social network usually announces major updates with a blog post. This wasn’t the case this time around. Users were also not given a choice to avoid the new interface as an app update wasn’t required to see the timeline change.

If you’re still seeing the new timeline, Mosseri recommends restarting the app.

2018 was a year — and some of this year’s memes reflect that. 

Although plenty of the memes that came out this year were the perfect platform for top-tier shitposting, a lot of the memes that cropped up were not. Some were distasteful in the least cute way, and some were just mediocre. Some just lacked the staying power of a quality meme.

Here are 9 of 2018’s memes that were … just kind of bad. 

1. Logan Paul’s suicide forest memes

Yeah, Logan Paul’s suicide forest debacle was this year. Amidst the controversy over filming the body of a dean man, Paul’s shocked expression in the thumbnail became a crappy meme. Like a terrible precursor to the surprised Pikachu meme, internet users tossed his face onto death-related images. The context of the meme is in bad taste, and honestly, it’s pretty lazy. 

2. Krusty Krab vs. Chum Bucket

Look, everyone loves a good Spongebob meme — after all, the cartoon is so freaking memeable. But this one is just another version of Drake’s Hotline Bling meme, except in a different format. It’s essentially rejecting one thing for another, and it’s been done before. 

3. Gru’s plan

Gru’s Plan wasn’t necessarily a bad meme, but it did die pretty quickly. It was fun while it lasted but it just lacked the staying power of a good meme. 

 

4. We live in a society

OK, Banksy. The “We live in a society” meme poked fun at art trying to be too deep and highlighted underrated media, but at the end of the day it’s just people categorizing themselves in meme format again. 

5. Stairwell Kermit

The Youth love a good nihilistic meme, but like Gru’s Plan, Stairwell Kermit inexplicably didn’t stick around for long. Maybe it went meta too quickly, or maybe r/MemeEconomy invested too heavily, but the meme hardly made a dent on the general internet beyond Reddit. 

6. Yanny/Laurel

This auditory version of The Dress tore apart the internet, which was fun until the White House tried to jump on the bandwagon. Yanny/Laurel is dead. It’s gone. Let it go. 

7. The “In My Feelings” challenge

Drake’s absolute banger “In My Feelings” swept the internet after Shiggy created a dance challenge for it, but teens took it way too far and started getting hit by cars. The National Transportation Safety Board even released a statement against the challenge. Is it worth the clout? Is it? 

8. Singing Bibble

This meme is fun but Bibble is … just another Meryl Streep meme. It conveys the same purpose: a call and response about something you’re enthusiastic about. 

9. Drake & Millie Bobby Brown

Drake, a 31-year-old grown man, and Millie Bobby Brown, a 14-year-old child, raised eyebrows when she gushed about their close friendship that involved sending messages like “I miss you so much.” The whole situation is gross enough without people making memes about it. 

2019 will (hopefully) bless us with many, many more beautiful memes, but we can settle for some mediocre ones too. 

Black Mirror is diving into the trend of ’80s nostalgia, but these aren’t the childhood pixel games you remember. This isn’t your mamma’s (or teen boys’) retro trip. It’s more like a journey into madness than the warm comfort of returning to simpler times. 

“Bandersnatch,” the first Black Mirror feature film, will tell the story of a programmer creating a video game based on the fantasy novel of an unhinged genius. There are also some drugs involved — but unlike the cocaine popular in the 1984 of the real world, these pills have mind-melting effects.

It also might deliver on the rumors of a create-your-own-adventure style Black Mirror episode that circulated earlier in the year. After all, it’s the perfect setting and story for it.

“Bandersnatch” drops on Dec. 28th.