All posts tagged "Internet"

Long before “crunchy” moms championed the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Erica Roach found a Facebook group of women who homeschooled their kids and embraced wellness.

As some moms today who seek more natural lifestyles for their families are also anti-vaccine, so were some of Roach’s Facebook friends.

By the time her fourth child was born, Roach said, she was “pretty anti-vax,” declining vaccines in her baby’s first year after initial shots at the hospital. ...

False reports of active shooters that put Villanova University in Philadelphia and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga on lockdown and saw law enforcement swarming over campuses last week were likely perpetrated by an online swatting group called “Purgatory,” extremism researchers say.

Five Purgatory members hosted a voice call on Discord, a platform popular with gamers, on Aug. 21 to an audience of 41 people, livestreaming the bogus calls to authorities at Villanova and Tennessee, according to a report by Marc-André Argentino, a Canadian researcher.

Using a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service that masks caller identity and location, a Purgatory leader with the screenname “Gores” made calls reporting active shooters, per a report by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, or GPAHE, which also monitored the chat. ...

When Natalie Rupnow and Solomon Henderson, two teenagers separated by more than 500 miles, carried out school shootings in late 2024 and early 2025, they were linked by a global online network that encouraged obsession with mass murder.

In a violent subculture in which the vast majority of mass shooters are white males, the two were unlikely candidates for infamy. Rupnow was a teenage girl. Henderson was Black.

But the communities that nurtured them on their paths to violence offered ironic memes and terrorist manuals promoting white supremacy, violent misogyny and homophobia. ...

A 19-year-old Ohio man who set up an online group chat and wrote scripts for Purgatory, a nihilistic swatting gang that targeted a casino, airport, trailer park and schools, has pleaded guilty in federal court.

Brayden Grace of Columbus, Ohio, appeared before Judge Julie Rebecca Rubin in Baltimore on Wednesday and pleaded guilty to conspiracy, cyberstalking, threat to damage and destroy by means of fire and other charges.

Grace was responsible for developing swatting scripts for a two-month coordinated campaign that sought to sow fear and tie up law enforcement resources across the U.S. in December 2023 and January 2024, according to prosecutors....

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer seems to have overcome a major roadblock in his own party who’s holding up legislation designed to protect children from online harm.

“The majority leader and I have exchanged new text that looks like an improvement to me,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) exclusively told Raw Story at the U.S. Capitol. “I need to make sure that it protects LGBTQ teens, and, at this point, it looks like we're moving in the right direction.”

ALSO READ: ‘They could have killed me’: Spycraft, ballots and a Trumped-up plot gone haywire...

San Francisco (AFP) - Ayman Chaudhary turned her love for reading into a living on TikTok, posting video snippets about books like those banned in schools in ultra-conservative parts of the United States. Now the online platform she relies on to support her family is poised to be banned in what entrepreneurs using TikTok condemn as an attack on their livelihoods. "It's so essential to small businesses and creators; it's my full-time job," the 23-year-old Chicago resident told AFP. "It makes me really worried that I live in a country that would pass bans like these instead of focusing on what's......