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Technology
Inside the White House shitposting machine
Last week was a grim reminder that no matter what sort of horror is being perpetrated or how many people end up dead, the Trump administration’s knee-jerk response is to shitpost through it. The White House’s response on X to abducting the head of a sovereign nation? “FAFO”. The response to an ICE agent shooting a woman in broad daylight? A Buzzfeed-style listicle of “57 Times Sick, Unhinged Democrats Declared War on Law Enforcement.” ICE agents arresting protesters? “Welcome to the Find Out stage.”
To the vast majority of people following current events, the Trump administration’s meme-ing is blunt and cruel. But the jaded political insider will also view Trump’s meme fusillade as an element of a media strategy known as “rapid response”: the full-time work of quickly shaping the political narrative of a breaking news event, sometimes within minutes, before the news media and your opponents can shape it for you.
“Every political office, every political campaign, has a dedicated operation that helps them respond strategically to events in the news that are out of their control.” Lis Smith, a high-profile Democratic communications strategist based in New York City, told me. It’s a profession that dates back to the beginning of the 24-hour news cycle, when cable shows could quickly assemble a panel of pundits to discuss current events, and the workload has grown exponentially in the age of social media. “You cannot control all the narratives that are going to be out there, so you need to be able to manage the chaos that’s coming into your world.”
Smith served as the director of rapid response for Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, which was one of the first to fully take advantage of social media, and worked in the comms shop for several New York City mayors and Democratic candidates. She’s widely credited for single-handedly elevating Pete Buttigieg’s profile, turning him from an obscure mayor to a serious presidential candidate as his director of communications. She views social networks through the lens of their messaging utility: X, formerly known as Twitter, is still the best for getting “text-based rapid response communications like written statements” in front of a wide range of “elites and opinion-shapers.” A Bluesky-based messaging strategy might engage a friendly left-leaning audience, but will never “penetrate” the world outside, nor will a Rumble-based campaign ever make it out of the right-wing bubble.
More importantly: memes may be a fast way to convey a political message to a specific audience who gets the inside joke, but the humor is rarely understood by anyone outside of that group — especially people who might have been sympathetic to the concept of stopping illegal immigration, but are horrified by how the Trump administration is going about it. The memes themselves are simply a reflection of that mindset. “The administration’s use of memes really flattens the political debate,” said Smith. “It takes the humanity, the seriousness, and the nuance that’s needed out of it and replaces it just with cruelty.”
Before we get to my conversation with Smith, here’s The Verge’s latest on the political tech dystopia:
- “Snatching Maduro was all about the spectacle”, Elizabeth Lopatto and Sarah Jeong: Real people are dead because Donald Trump wanted a spectacle.
- “America’s new era of energy imperialism is about more than oil”, Justine Calma: Trump wants Venezuela’s oil, Greenland’s minerals, and above all — control.
- “The MAGA-approved video of an ICE killing”, Mia Sato: After a federal agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis, the Trump administration found its preferred angle of the incident.
- “Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards”, Elizabeth Lopatto: X’s deepfake porn feature clearly violates app store guidelines. Why won’t Apple and Google pull it?
- “Trump’s fundraisers asked Microsoft for its White House ballroom donation”, Emma Roth: Amazon also admitted that it was in touch with fundraisers months before the White House released its list of donors in October.
- “New York wants to regulate Roblox”, Lauren Feiner: Gov. Kathy Hochul made new requirements meant to protect kids online a centerpiece of her plan for state policy.
- “Former NYC Mayor Eric Adams accused of $2.5 million crypto ‘rug pull’ as his NYC Token crashes”, Emma Roth: The NYC token’s value peaked at about $580 million, before dropping to $130 million.
- “I can’t find the Trump phone at America’s largest tech show”, Dominic Preston: I’ve looked and looked, but Trump Mobile is nowhere to be found at CES this year
“A meme that is funny or cruel will probably spread faster than anything with nuance”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
You came up during an era where Twitter, before it was X, was really the only internet media environment for politics. How has the practice of rapid response changed in an environment where there is so much narrative to control over so many types of media?
It’s gotten a lot harder. In the ’90s, the big change was the 24-hour news cycle with cable news. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the big development was social media, Twitter, and being able to respond in real time online to news developments. But now, there’s no question that it’s harder to get your message out, with how fractured these different social media channels are. Not everyone is on X today the same way they were 10 years ago. But also, your message is less likely to penetrate as effectively on a platform like X than it was 10 years ago, because of how verification, etc., have changed.
So you really need to have an “all of the above” communication strategy, where you’re hitting traditional media with press releases, calls to reporters and news networks, and you’re also hitting social media in real time. That means not just hitting X, but also hitting Threads, hitting Bluesky, TikTok, Instagram, all those apps, because there has never been a time where people’s media consumption habits have been more fractured than right now.
Do candidates view specific platforms for certain political purposes, or political leanings?
X is still pretty dominant in American politics for getting out rapid response communications, especially text-based rapid response communications like written statements, because it’s still where you’re going to find the most political insiders, political pundits, and reporters. Everything [messaging-wise] trickles out from there. Where you see more fracturing is in terms of where people do short form video: you do see some campaigns using TikTok, others using Instagram more; you do see some favoring of different platforms across partisan lines. But Bluesky on the left is just never going to be as effective of a way of reaching elites and opinion-makers as X is — just as Truth Social or Discord on the right is never going to be the way that you reach elites or opinion-makers.
Let’s go into the content of said messaging. I know that Kamala Harris and Biden tried to lean into memes during their 2024 campaigns, but clearly not as effectively as Trump, and the meme format seems to be really dominant in the Trump administration. Is there a specific way an operative views the meme format as a political messaging tool?
The meme format is more likely to spread quickly. It’s something that a specific audience is going to understand immediately, and it really simplifies a political argument. The problem with that, though, is, one, it’s very audience specific. Not everyone is going to understand a Family Guy meme, not everyone is going to understand a Patriots meme, or whatever the meme du jour is.
Another problem with the meme format is that you lose a lot of context and you lose a lot of humanity in it. So when you see the administration posting sort-of-funny memes about deportations or ICE, you lose a lot of the empathy and compassion that most people have when it comes to the immigration debate. Most people think that illegal immigration is bad and that we should do something about it. But most people also understand that there are real people who are involved in all of these situations and don’t think it’s funny to make light of, say, school pickups getting raided, or families getting separated, or parents crying as they’re being dragged away from their kids.
I was listening to Joe Rogan interviewing Shane Gillis, and they actually touched on this. I would say both Rogan and Shane Gillis are people who were favorable to Trump in the election — Rogan more so than Shane Gillis — but Gillis said, I want our government to take the issue of illegal immigration seriously. I don’t want it to be funny to them. And I think that’s something that really taps into how most people feel about these issues.
If you reduce these very serious issues to cruel, funny memes, you’re going to alienate a lot of people who might be there with you on an issue if you’d approached it with a little bit more maturity and humanity. But the administration is saying, cut out the humanity, cut out the maturity. Those things don’t matter. Because a viral meme — a meme that is funny or cruel — will probably spread faster than anything with nuance. They’re prioritizing speed and virality over nuance and seriousness.
I think you just refined what we’ve been thinking about at The Verge: the way that my coworkers saw Trump’s abduction of Maduro and their response to the ICE shooting was that this government’s policy is a meme mentality — their speed, virality and the need to get their spin out first before anyone feels any sort of way about it.
There’s a short window when people — everyone from reporters to voters to anyone online — are trying to figure out what the hell’s going on and what they think about breaking news. Rapid response is about stepping into that void and shaping it, but there are real problems with how the Trump administration is doing it. Ultimately, yes, they may win some sort of short-term viral meme war. But in the long term, the way that they’re communicating about these issues — whether it’s the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, or deportations in general — they’re gonna lose the political debate. People want action on these issues, but they don’t want wanton cruelty.
Also, if you [the administration[ step in very quickly and put out bad facts, what you do is just compound mistrust in government and mistrust in the administration. And it’s possible that the Trump administration benefits from that because the less people trust official sources, the more it’s good for them. But I think overall, it’s pretty bad that they’re putting out false information that goes mega-viral the way they do it, because ultimately, no one’s going to take anything they say at face value anymore. It’s especially damaging for their relationships with the news media and elites who, in the past, would have clearly taken what any presidential administration said at face value.
Is it too early to think about meme warfare in the midterm election — changing people’s opinions who could be swayed to vote one way or another, getting that messaging to them as quickly as possible, driving them out to the polls?
I don’t think that the meme strategy from this administration is gonna help Republicans in the midterms. And I think if you talk to a lot of Republicans who are up in swing areas or swing states or certain districts, and you presented them with the memes this administration is putting out, I don’t think they would agree with them, and I don’t think that they would say that this is good political strategy. Because to the point I made earlier: the administration’s use of memes really flattens the political debate. It takes the humanity, the seriousness, the nuance that’s needed out of it, and replaces it just with cruelty. The voters who are going to turn out in 2026 — yeah, some of them are going to be part of that MAGA base that it embraces the cruelty, but the people that you need to win over are going to be people who have nuanced views on issues like illegal immigration and people who say, Yeah, we need secure borders; yes, we need more enforcement of our immigration laws; but maybe we don’t need to be putting out memes about, you know, a father being taken off in handcuffs.
That’s where I think the administration’s focus on speed and virality comes at a political cost. Someone’s’s going to have to pay for the tone that they’re taking online, and it’s likely going to be the Republicans who are up in 2026, unless, I don’t know, Democrats somehow overplay their hand on immigration issues.
And a lot of the voters who will determine the midterm elections are older voters. They’re not going to consume the memes firsthand, nor are they going to understand the memes. That’s something being lost in this debate too: even though more people than ever are getting their news through social media, a lot of the people who decide elections, and a lot of the people that Republicans need to win, are not meme consumers. It’s questionable whether it will pay off electorally for them.
Speaking of memes distilling political arguments:
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MacOS 27 Golden Gate will usher in a bunch of changes to the Mac when it’s released later this year, with its biggest new features revolving around Siri AI. But for now, using the first developer beta, Siri AI is only offered through a waitlist. So what’s available to try is mostly about how the upcoming operating system looks and feels.
You’re not welcomed with any fanfare when you boot up the macOS 27 developer beta (that’ll probably come later), but there’s reason to celebrate. Jump to the appearance settings, and you find that Apple now has a Liquid Glass slider, allowing users to set the amount of UI transparency in macOS. On one end of the slider, it’s as seethrough as Liquid Glass gets, and on the other end the transparent accents are heavily frosted. Golden Gate starts you in the middle of the slider by default, for just a touch of frosting — perhaps a gentle admission that the original look went too far. You sadly can’t go fully opaque, but this frosted look does greatly reduce the distracting elements of Liquid Glass.
After spending just a short while with Golden Gate, I already prefer the minimum transparency look. I’d crank that slider in the full version and never turn back. For the strongest Liquid Glass haters out there, the Reduce Transparency option is still available in the Accessibility settings, but using it is like taking a hammer to all that glass — introducing lots of harsh gray and black backgrounds to the dock, Menu Bar, and Control Center.
The absolute wins for macOS 27’s design is the return of edge-to-edge sidebars with colorful icons and the increased corner radii of windows across the OS. The former is basically a backtrack to the way sidebars used to look (which looked better and easier to parse, with less wasted space). And the latter is just logical. How on Earth did Apple get so high on its own design supply that it allowed windowed apps to have mismatched corners?
I do have my nitpicks — the new battery icon taken from iOS is less legible (really, I hate it). Also, after Apple finally added the most basic window snapping feature in Sequoia, it hasn’t refined it one bit. Both Tahoe and now Golden Gate are leaving me wanting better and faster tiling controls like Windows 11, as well as the simple ability to rename virtual desktops. But so far, nothing.
Apple says Golden Gate is supposed to feel snappier, with faster search indexing. It’s too early to tell how much of a difference this makes on the MacBook Neo I’m testing it on — especially since dev betas are notoriously buggy and unstable. Using Spotlight search for local files on Golden Gate performed similar to another Neo I had on-hand running macOS 26 Tahoe. And opening apps on both systems side-by-side led to mixed results: Golden Gate opened Lightroom Classic and Slack faster, but Tahoe was faster to open Photoshop and Steam. I hope Apple’s under the hood improvements to memory and CPU usage will really show on the MacBook Neo, which could use all the efficiency it can get, but the jury’s out for now.
There’s still more to come with further beta releases of macOS 27, where we’ll at some point be able to fully test Siri AI, Visual Intelligence, and the revamped Spotlight Search. Last year’s power user-focused Spotlight with clipboard history was a nice improvement, but I’m skeptical that Siri AI being baked into Spotlight will be quite the gamechanger Apple’s billing it as. I’ll keep an open mind and be looking to find out once I’m off the waitlist.
For now, I’m relieved Apple is slightly backpedaling on Liquid Glass. While the look was never quite as bad on the Mac as it was on iOS, it’s a welcome change to be able to turn down these transparencies and get a little closer to the old looks from Sequoia. That and the other bits of UI polish are a nice upgrade on their own. Now, Apple has to show that it can nail all the new AI features, too — I’m eager to see how it fares.
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Your phone rings. It’s your son’s voice. Panicked. He says he’s been in a car accident. He hurt someone. He’s about to be arrested. He needs $15,000 wired before the end of the day, and please, don’t tell anyone yet. You’d wire the money. Of course you would. Except it isn’t your son.
It’s a scammer who spent about 10 minutes online, pulled three seconds of audio from a Facebook video your son posted last Christmas, and fed it into an AI voice cloning tool that costs less than a Netflix subscription. The voice that broke your heart wasn’t real. The emergency wasn’t real. But the $15,000 transfer? That would have been.
This is already happening to families right now, in every state. And what most people don’t understand is that the voice clone is actually the easy part. What makes these attacks so devastatingly effective is everything that happens before the call.
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AI CYBERSECURITY RISKS AND DEEPFAKE SCAMS ON THE RISE
Data broker profiles can give scammers phone numbers, relatives’ names and addresses that make AI voice scams more convincing. (Matthias Balk/picture alliance via Getty Images)
The technology has crossed a terrifying threshold.
AI can now clone a person’s voice using as little as three seconds of audio, pulled from a social media video, a voicemail greeting, or a voice message. The technology copies tone, speech patterns, and accents closely enough that many people can’t tell the difference between a real voice and a fake one.
Three seconds. That’s shorter than it took you to read that sentence. AI scams surged 1,210% in 2025, and global AI scam losses could reach $40 billion by 2027. This isn’t a slow-building trend. It’s an explosion.
A new study found that 1 in 4 adults have already experienced an AI voice scam. One in four. That’s your neighbor. Your coworker. Someone in your family. But here’s the thing nobody’s telling you.
The voice clone is the last step, not the first
Every article you’ve read about AI voice cloning focuses on the technology. The scarily realistic audio. The three seconds of audio that’s “all they need.” What those articles miss is the setup that happens before the call. A voice clone is useless without answers to two questions: Whose voice do I clone? And who do I call with it?
To answer both of those questions, scammers don’t need to hack anything. They go to the same places anyone can access right now: data broker websites. Armed with your phone number and personal details from a data broker profile, scammers can call you directly and reference your name, address, or recent transactions to appear legitimate. Here’s the step-by-step process, because you need to know exactly how this works.
Step 1: They find you (or your family member) on a people-search site
A scammer types your name into Spokeo, BeenVerified, or Whitepages. Within seconds, they have:
- Your age and current address
- Your phone number
- The names of your relatives, including your adult children and elderly parents
- Where you all used to live
- Estimated household income.
They didn’t hack anything. They paid a few dollars. Or nothing at all.
Step 2: They identify the right target and the right voice to clone
Once they have your family network mapped, they make a decision: Who’s the most vulnerable person to call? And whose voice will make them act?
5 STEPS TO PROTECT YOUR FINANCES FROM FAMILY SCAMS
Often, the target is an elderly parent. The cloned voice is a grandchild or adult child. That combination of a panicked young voice and an older parent who loves them is the most reliably devastating pairing a scammer can manufacture.
Then they go looking for audio. A Facebook video from Thanksgiving. A YouTube clip of a school play. A TikTok your kid posted last summer. Three seconds is enough. The AI tool replicates pitch, cadence, accent, and emotional inflection.
Step 3: They script the emergency
This is where the call starts to feel personal. Data broker profiles can reveal more than your phone number. Scammers may find relatives’ names, rough ages, your city, your property address and other public record details. Then they use those clues to make the fake emergency sound believable.
Scammers introduce physical excuses, like a broken nose or a bad connection, to cover any slight artifacts in the AI voice, then create maximum urgency. The victim is directed to wire money, send cryptocurrency, or hand cash to a “bail bondsman” courier who arrives at the door.
The call sounds real because it was built on real information. Your mother picks up. She hears her grandchild’s voice, the right name, the right emotional register, the right panic. Her rational brain doesn’t stand a chance.
Cybersecurity researchers have noted that the emotional realism of a cloned voice removes the mental barrier to skepticism. When it sounds like your loved one, your rational defenses tend to shut down.
AI voice cloning scams can use short audio clips and public personal data to make fake family emergencies sound real. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
Real families. Real losses
In one documented case in Florida, a woman lost $15,000 after receiving a call from her “crying daughter.” She withdrew cash and placed it in a box, which a driver came to collect from her house. Another call, and a larger money request, soon followed.
The Trapp family in the San Francisco Bay Area received a frantic call from their “son” saying he’d been in a car accident, injured a pregnant woman, and needed urgent help. The scammers posed not only as the son but also as police, instructing the mother to quickly withdraw $15,000 and hand it to a courier already on the way. The family became suspicious just in time and called their son directly. They were the lucky ones.
Hiya’s Q4 2024 Global Call Threat Report found that one-third of survey respondents across the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, and Spain encountered deepfake voice fraud in 2024 and 30% of those who encountered it fell victim.
“But I don’t post videos of myself online”
Neither did some of the victims’ families. You don’t need to be the one posting. Your grandchild’s TikTok account, your daughter’s Facebook, your son’s YouTube channel, or any public audio of them is all the scammer needs.
And even if your entire family has locked down social media? The data broker profile built on you, listing your phone number, your relatives’ names, and your address, is still there, still searchable, and still pointing scammers directly at the most vulnerable people in your network.
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: data brokers update their databases constantly. Your information can be pulled from voter registration records, property filings, court documents, marketing surveys, and loyalty programs, none of which require your permission. You likely have a profile on dozens of sites right now that you’ve never seen. You can run a free scan to see exactly how exposed you are. Results usually arrive within an hour.
SPRING CLEAN YOUR DIGITAL FOOTPRINT: WHY RETIREES ARE SCAM TARGETS
Why removing yourself from data brokers disrupts the entire attack chain
The voice clone is only one part of the scam. The targeting makes it work. When you remove your family’s information from data broker sites, you cut off the scammer’s research. They may lose access to your mother’s phone number, your relatives’ names or clues about who lives alone. Without that personal map, it becomes much harder to choose the right target and the right voice to clone.
Data broker profiles might link your mobile number to your home address and your relatives’ names. That makes family scams, now frequently enhanced by AI voice cloning, much easier for criminals to execute.
This is why I recommend using a data removal service. It can automatically send removal requests to hundreds of data broker and people search websites on your behalf. It can also keep monitoring and resubmitting requests when your data reappears. Because it will reappear. That’s how these sites work.
Check out my top picks for data removal services and get a free scan to find out if your personal information is already out on the web by visiting Cyberguy.com
Get a free scan to find out if your personal information is already out on the web: Cyberguy.com/FreeScan
Scammers may clone a loved one’s voice, claim there is an emergency and pressure relatives to send money immediately. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
Five things to do right now
Beyond removing your data, do these things this week:
THE ONE THING THAT COULD PROTECT YOUR PARENTS FROM SCAMMERS
1) Create a family code word
Pick something random, “purple cactus,” “blue kettle,” anything unconnected to your actual life. Every family member agrees: any emergency call requesting money must include this word before anyone acts. Scammers cannot guess it. No data broker sells it.
2) Establish a callback rule
No matter how real a voice sounds, hang up and call the person back at their known number, not the number that called you. Real emergencies can wait two minutes for a callback. Scammers count on the panic preventing exactly this.
3) Lock down family members’ social media
Set profiles to friends only. Limit public videos. The less audio of your family that’s publicly available, the harder voice cloning becomes. Talk to your kids and grandkids about this specifically.
4) Warn your most vulnerable relatives directly
Don’t assume they’ll figure this out. Have a specific, explicit conversation: “If you get a call that sounds like me asking for money, stop. Ask for our code word. Call me back at my number. It might not be me.”
5) Never wire money, use gift cards, or hand cash to a courier based on a phone call alone
This is how every one of these scams ends. The payment method itself is the red flag. Legitimate emergencies don’t require Venmo, wire transfers, or a courier showing up at your door.
Kurt’s key takeaways
AI voice scams work because they sound personal. A scammer may only need a few seconds of public audio to copy a loved one’s voice and make a fake emergency feel real. However, the voice clone is only part of the attack. Scammers also use data broker and people-search sites to find phone numbers, family connections and personal details that make the call more convincing. That is why a simple family code word can help stop panic before money changes hands. So can a strict callback rule, locked-down social media and direct conversations with older relatives before a scammer calls. The best defense is to slow the moment down. Hang up, call your loved one directly and never send money, crypto, gift cards or cash to a courier based only on a phone call.
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If a phone call sounded exactly like someone you love asking for help, would you stop long enough to question it? Let us know by writing to us at Cyberguy.com
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Nearly a year after it was announced, Instagram says it’s delivering the ability to rearrange the posts in your profile grid. It had been available to some people in test groups, but as of June 8th, it’s rolling out widely via the Android and iPhone mobile apps.
Until now, the posts on your Instagram profile have been locked in chronological order beyond the ability to pin three posts at the top, but once the feature is live on your account, you can long-press and drag posts freely, no matter how old they are. Any posts that are pinned will remain at the top.
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