White House alters arrest photo of ICE protester, says "the memes will continue"
arstechnica.comThere's been a lot of talk on HN about generative AI and how it will be weaponized to scam people and politically for propoganda. That reality got here very quickly.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted a photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minnesota civil rights attorney, being arrested at a political protest. A half hour later, the official White House X account posted an altered version in which Armstrong’s face was manipulated to make it appear that she was crying.
Wild to see this tech get adopted so fast and so unapologetically used.
There are people on this site who will still turn out to vote for this administration and their allies in Congress. It's wild.
The number of tech or tech-adjacent people that have completely torched their reputation in the last few weeks is staggering. I hope they get publicly shamed.
Lol the CEO of Palantir said enthusiastically during an investor conference that it's necessary on occasion to kill his enemies, why would you think tech reputations would get torched? If anything it should be a boon when getting hired for big tech. As the government becomes more fascist and more integrated with industry, these contracts will be more and more important and enthusiastically embracing the anti-domestic-terrorist line will improve reputations even more.
Many tech bros have always been racist and misogynist.
They shamed themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsl_sKYywEI
Unfortunately ... it's all of them.
My suspicion is that, here on HN, the number has dwindled considerably, even as the number has risen among the most famous figures in tech.
HN really should conduct a survey, like StackOverflow does. It would be fascinating.
I see that as wishful thinking. HN has always been very much right leaning. I very much doubt much has changed.
Fair enough. All the more reason for HN to conduct a survey. It would be interesting to find out.
HN is not perfect, but “right-leaning”? What the actual fuck are you smoking
HN has been right leaning? That seems an odd take. Most comments I see on here lean more progressive. Or are you talking about the billionaire tech class who are in their own demographic?
Wonkish, pro free trade, knows who Murray Rothbard is right leaning, not populist modern right wing.
Progressive and right-leaning are not in contradiction with each other, in that corner you will find most libertarians.
I also notice the commentariat here is progressive, but it seems the silent but pervasive downvote campaigns are dominated by, or more charitably, inadvertently aligned with those MAGA oriented views. I’ve come to think of the right wingers mainly contributing to the community with their downvotes. Perhaps they don’t feel they would fair well if they tried to engage in discussion? But it’s an interesting dynamic that a group of silent individuals only make their presence known through the conspicuousness of the censorship they leave in their wake.
> Perhaps they don’t feel they would fare[sic] well if they tried to engage in discussion?
Most of the time when I do see blatant “rightposting” it’s so misinformed and provocative to be indistinguishable from trolling / baiting, so I can’t even tell if it’s downvotes for disagree vs downvotes for suspected trolling.
The less blatant “rightposting” flies quite a bit under the radar, pretty much by definition, which is what the grandparent comment was probably referring to when they said they interpreted HN as leaning right. More like laissez-faire economics.
Those downvote campaigns could easily come from bots and not real users.
In light of that possibility, HN's voting system is probably too rudimentary, private and zero-cost for the modern world. Now I'm not sure if it's naivete, laziness or meant to allow opaque maligned censorship.
Most downvote bots still appear to be observing US office hours though. There's a marked difference in voting patterns between the hours that Australia wakes up and California wakes up versus the rest of the day.
HN like a lot of SV / VC culture was more libertarian leaning than right leaning. Low taxes, minimal oversight, etc. - true largely of workers and capital alike.
The open embrace of the fascist / nativist right in SV has been more recent, and it has empowered this second Trump administration. The calculation is presumably that they can curry favor and consolidate power.
Industrialists have always benefited from aligning with rightwing authoritarian governments. SV has not shown as a whole to be immune to this. The parallels with historical occurrences is blindingly obvious, down to the speech patterns.
> My suspicion is that, here on HN, the number has dwindled considerably
What makes you think that? The number of articles that get flagged and the pattern of the flagging and down voting would suggest that not to be true even if the actual comments might have slowed
This is anecdotal, but two things have impressed me:
1) It is no longer the case when I criticize something Trump has said or done, that I instantly get downvoted into oblivion or flagged.
2) Until recently, when someone posted some moderate comment, someone else often replied with a variant of "HN is a liberal echo chamber" I haven't noticed those replies for a while.
Is it particularly wild? There are many possible interpretations of your statement. Do you expect the people on this site to be particularly different from the voters who almost put Trump into office 2016 and actually voted him into office 2024? Or did you mean to express shock that anyone at all would vote for Trump compared to voting for someone like Biden?
I don't even know what a realistic plan to fix this looks like. How do you cult de-program 40% of the population of the most powerful country on the planet?
Nuremberg-style trials for every single person working under this administration is obviously the base minimum to start to get a handle on this. Anyone who is not pushing for that is not being serious about tackling America's problems. Then what? Extreme anti-trust enforcement and implement wealth caps to prevent the harm from recurring and hope most of the population eventually comes back to planet Earth?
I agree, sadly we do not have any leadership pushing for this yet.
> How do you cult de-program 40% of the population of the most powerful country on the planet?
If history is any guide, that doesn't happen without a substantial - existential, perhaps - exogenous shock.
Oh, that's easy. You see people vote like this if they don't advance economically. So what you need is to create a decade or so of economic advancement for >50% of the US.
If that doesn't happen, odds are that even if a democrat president gets elected, they won't be much better. This is still the fallout of the GFC, of the decision to bail out the banks back then.
I know that sounds incredible, and I would have bitten off the head of anyone claiming this when I was 20 ... but it's how the world works.
As a foreigner, I'm super interested but somewhat lacking in knowledge on this subject. Could you expand on this being the repercussions of the bailout? I felt scammed when I read about it and my country wasn't even very heavily affected by the crisis (I was a wee lad back then though).
Their vulgarity goes beyond tech and are unapologetic about it. They get to do it because mass media fails to call the lies. Over and over.
> mass media fails to call the lies
That can't be all it is: this and other recent, uncontroversially atrocious (when taken out of political context) actions taken by the Trump administration were very widely reported as lies/unconscionable by the vast majority of media outlets large and small.
Hell, we're even only having this discussion because Ars Technica, a publication with ten million readers, did journalism about an event. That's not huge in the grander scheme, but it's not tiny either.
There's certainly many stupid/corrupt things that news media companies should improve. I just don't think "A.P. News isn't calling $thing out" is the problem here.
Uncle Joe and Aunt Lucy aren’t reading Ars Technica. You know where their eyes and ears are glued. Critical reading is reserved for the HN crowd.
It's already got to the point that if I see an interesting video showing a cute animal doing something or a natural disaster my first thought is "Is this AI?"
Makes one wonder what the other, more horrific side of this looks like, and how law enforcement and even begin to separate truth from fiction
In this instance, we've already got law enforcement using fiction to obfuscate fact.
Probably not long before we see sora style videos of a 'new angle' of a controversial event, showing that the protestor / victim did in face have a gun / deserve it
Since many people are primed for this video to confirm their worldview, it doesn't even need to be that good. It will spread like wildfire, and its debunking won't. Technically, there is no reason why this can't be done today.
Only, it's members of the federal government overtly spreading disinformation and laughing about it. It will be a miracle if anything is left of the law enforcement and judiciary that would push back in three years' time.
Remeber my shock, first time reading the following news a couple of years back https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-65757400 where the faces of indian protesters were photoshoped to smile, in order to downplay their protest.
Image GenAi, just triviliazes the work of those in corrupt power.
Not only did they make her cry, they also darkened her skin.
Don't really understand how "AI" ties into this.
This administration has been photoshopping and editing pictures long before AI, here's https://paleofuture.com/nofuture/2019/1/21/president-trump-p... some examples from 2019 where they used shops to make him thin.
Yes of course this could've been done in photoshop. But a convincing Photoshop effort takes someone with years of experience working for likely hours. AI can churn out this kind of image in seconds, operated entirely by someone with zero skill or experience. It lowers the bar significantly, increasing the scope and scale of the output.
For the same reason a fully automatic weapon is substantively different from a bolt action rifle, despite both being guns.
It's also a fundamentally different scenario. Photoshoot-style touchups - likely at the request of the subject himself - for pure vanity, versus doctored images of an unwilling citizen (who presumably hasn't been convicted yet and is therefore considered innocent) as propaganda
This is 100% within my expectations of how long it would take.
If only everyone could have predicted this happen!
Slander and libel laws are complicated, but she should have a pretty good case:
- The defendant knew or should have know that he or she was making an untrue or defamatory statement about you. (Yes, they edited the photo.)
- The false statement must clearly identify you. (It's a clear photo.)
- The defendant must have spread the false information to at least one third party who is not the target. For a libel case, they must do so in print, and for a slander case, they must do so verbally. (They posted it on Social Media.)
- The false statement must have damaged your character in some way. (Probably? This is the hardest one, but it's reasonable that the message that a "Far-Left" agitator would cry when arrested, rather than being stoic and strong could cause damage to her reputation or character.
https://askalawlibrarian.nycourts.gov/legalresearch/faq/3677...
IANAL but she could also have a good case that it will be impossible for her to get a fair trial.
Some potential jurors will have seen these doctored photos. With the prosecution putting out obviously false info then it calls into question their credibility and any other evidence presented at trial.
Federal government can't be sued for defamation. "Federal sovereign immunity" basically says the government can't be sued unless it agrees to waive the immunity, and it doesn't for defamation cases.
The supreme court will declare them immune to the suit, if they haven't already done so.
Hey fellow nerds, never forget that your inventions will be turned into a weapon. We must always consider how dangerous that weapon will be. And there you go, generative AI being used by an authoritarian government to slander and defame political opponents. It's not the first time, I'm sure, and they've been using it for propaganda memes and NFT trash for a while, but this is the most blatant I've seen. It's not obviously altered, it's very believable, and it's for a minor dissident, a protest organizer. I'm really scared.
Memes might continue but WH credibility won't. As if there was any in the first place.
The voter base doesn't care. Federal agents are sent to a state against the governor's will, a man gets shot and killed while carrying a holstered pistol, and all the MAGA 2nd amendment republicans think this was a justified killing because he had a gun on him.
Their voter base - and not the rest of us.
There will be a reckoning - and it may originate from the most unexpected place.
When and where from?
The other side of the voters has happily expanded the power of the executive for decades while demonizing those who would put in some restraint. Both sides do this and here we are. The people voting against Trump still gave him power, just not while he was in office.
> Federal
> against the governor's will
that's kind of the idea
Can you elaborate?
A Federal intervention is generally not called for unless a State pointedly does not get with some Federal mandate or another. See desegregation in the South for another notable historic example.
Of the Little Rock 9 in Arkansas:
>When integration began on September 4, 1957, the Arkansas National Guard was called in to "preserve the peace". Originally at orders of the governor, they were meant to prevent the black students from entering due to claims that there was "imminent danger of tumult, riot and breach of peace" at the integration. However, President Eisenhower issued Executive order 10730,[18] which federalized the Arkansas National Guard and 1,000 soldiers from the US Army and ordered them to support the integration on September 23 of that year, after which they protected the African American students. The Arkansas National Guard would escort these nine black children inside the school as it became the students' daily routine that year.
Ideally though, this type of intervention should be exceedingly rare or reserved for the most egregious cases. Unfortunately, the present administration sees only the mechanism, and is motivated more by pettiness than any real commitment to Statecraft.
their voter base is drenched in lies and agitprop spewing 24/7 from the computer in their pockets
Arguably, that's the point. For post-truth politicians, the objective isn't to present a narrative as objectively factual, but to bring the entire notion of factual objectivity into question.
It's not "This is the truth." Rather, it's "The truth is unknowable." If nobody knows what's true and false anyway, there's no reason to concern yourself with "facts" that disturb your preconceptions.
> White House Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr defended the post after criticism of the image manipulation.
> “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter,” Dorr wrote.
The banner image on Dorr's X account reads: "oMg, diD tHe wHiTE hOuSE reALLy PosT tHiS?"
You're right, and I'd add that the agenda goes well beyond muddying the waters. This administration is deliberately normalizing bad faith, lying, and trolling. Discrediting critics as humorless, pathetic pearl-clutchers. I don't believe that their supporters strictly "believe" in Trump's alternate reality - they know that Trump and his cronies lie non-stop, and they like it. Accepting these lies serves as a shibboleth and lays the groundwork for discrediting fair elections, bogus prosecutions of political opponents, and everything else this administration is doing to corruptly hold on to power and demoralize their opponents.
The corollary is that literally everything that the US government communicates should be assumed to be a lie. Even normal, boring announcements from the USDA and such are communicated in the voice of a terminally-online twitter troll.
Its the Firehose of falsehood. Pioneered in Putin's Russia. It is extremely effective.
Credibility is irrelevant. As you said, they never had it to begin with yet here we are.
Dunking on the administration only serves to pat one another on the back and not make any actual political progress.
It seems you can always without fail count on this administration to do the wrong thing
You really can. Even when they superficially appear to have a good idea, or a middling idea with a potentially good side effect, they consistently find a way to mess up the details and dodge any potential good outcomes.
look at their court briefings, they try do the same thing illegal in as many ways as possible, the goal is to break as much as they can, the constitution being a primary target
#Project2025
Can you imagine what Goebbel could have accomplished with the tools we have today? Unfortunately, now we don't have to.
Link for when MAGA flags it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46755734
Here’s a direct link to the tweet from the White House deputy communications director that said this, after being caught red handed altering photos to spread propaganda and lying to the public:
https://xcancel.com/Kaelan47/status/2014410500096856358
Even crazier is the reply further down on that post from the deputy press secretary, Abigail Jackson, making fun of people who debunked that post like Snopes:
https://xcancel.com/abigailmarone/status/2014411002561863790
It’s horrifying but shows that they’re completely shameless about lying. And shameless about being aggressive and obscene. You see this from the other people too like press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who regularly abuses journalists asking reasonable questions.
And more horrifying are all the accounts replying in support of this. That’s evidence of the hardcore MAGA base that’ll support Trump no matter what he does, I guess.
> And more horrifying are all the accounts replying in support of this. That’s evidence of the hardcore MAGA base that’ll support Trump no matter what he does, I guess.
I'd just like to say that judging public perception based on online comments, in 2026, is probably not a good indicator at all. Sort of ironic having to point this out in a thread about AI faked images, but...
Why? There’s plenty of people disavowing their actions and plenty supporting them. There will be plenty of blue checkmarks with full face shown selfdoxxing while they gleefully call for more to be killed.
There is lots of propaganda being pushed online with fake accounts. Checkmarks and pictures of a face do not make a real account.
That could be true. But the damage is real still. Posts by bots influence real people. If Twitter / X has lots of fake accounts, we need to figure out how to force them to do something about it. I’m sure they can do more about bots if the replies on most big accounts are mostly bots. If they aren’t mostly bots, then that’s a problem of a different kind. But mass spam by bots can still corrupt our political process.
> It influences real people
Sure, but only because people think that that's what the public really thinks.
my point is that there’s enough information that it’s a selfdoxx of it being an actual person that you can find from the information given there alone.
Plenty of people pay for the ‘i think my opinion matters more’ boost button, malicious propagandist or regular person alike
This is very upsetting to see.
I am more and more concerned for my American based friends by the day
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46725268
Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance.
Europe found that out the hard way, and America is in the early stages of realizing it.
If we (Europe) are not careful, we will have to find out this pretty soon again.
It's so tricky. You can do most things right like Denmark/Netherlands, then you mess up just one (housing) and the far-right surges. Now you can't import immigrants to deal with your aging population, which means you're on a timer.
Or your neighbor goes far-right (US, maybe eventually Germany/France) and suddenly they start objecting to your internal policies (eg regulating big tech).
Or Russia+Covid combo suddenly inflating all kinds of prices, and again the far right surges.
I think it's going to be a dramatic few decades.
Yes, extremely tricky. Imo the current ruling class just needs to mess up just on thing, because there is a deep underlaying discontent with the subjectively felt way of living in our modern societies. So housing / migrants are just the spark.
How is this flagged? Deepfakes aren't a tech story now?
HN reveals itself again as the manicured lawn of the fascist tranche of our industry
> [flagged]
Now surely, this won't stay removed from the front page. This is highly relevant to tech current events and therefore HN.
The US has become such a disgusting place. A failed democracy.
As a US citizen, I'm proud of Minnesotans for standing up for American values.
It's nice that they're doing it. And they are certainly the bravest we have to offer; much braver than you or I.
That said, the bravest we have are asking that they please not be murdered. And then peacefully kneeling down to be executed, even when they are armed.
Obviously this only emboldens the murderers. The options moving forward look bleak.
The instant there is armed pushback, Trump will declare martial law. It's entirely plausible that had there not been so many people with cameras around, this would have been used as the excuse.
The best thing to do is to be out there recording everything. You are right that they are emboldened, so you're putting yourself in danger by filming. When people continue to do that despite the danger, and despite the internal or external pressure to escalate, it shows more people what's really happening.
I've witnessed people change their position on ICE's actions based on the video evidence of the last killing. Videos 1 and 2 weren't convincing to them, but the 3rd angle was. That's important, because they now know that the administration is lying in the face of directly contradicting evidence.
will declare martial law
I don't understand how that will be meaningfully different from what is happening already?
Use the actual military with more personnel tanks and air support.
Suspension of 2026 midterm elections
I’m not convinced we’d be in a better place if the ICE officer had been shot in self defense. It’s a really powerful story and cements to ‘normal people’ who are just barely following the news what ICE is like.
FWIW I do think things might be different later but there’s still a lot of room for escalation left
What a bitchy comment
Do yourself a favor and sit this one out while the rest of us fix it.
It cannot be fixed. Red states would have to flip to blue states. I recall general Lee to consider the civil war a stupid mistake but still off he went because he was from Virginia.
I find it very difficult to come to a different conclusion. What is tolerated in the United States is deplorable.
Failing - I didn't hear no bell.
We have a fascist President, yes. We will see if this means we have a fascist government within the next decade.
Not to be too reductive, but while there are some amazing technical achievements there, generative AI seems to be really good for individuals (particularly wealthy ones) and bad for society as a whole. I can create lots of neat new things for my own purposes while social trust dissolves in a sea of slop.
Collective action problems are just the worst.
Damn, HN is turning into Reddit, fast.
The only reason A.I. is being pushed is to control the narrative, because human moderators can still choose to let the counter message slip through.