New research confirms Instagram’s ongoing betrayal of child safety, yet again.
When Danish researchers investigated teen self-harm networks, they found Instagram is actively plugging vulnerable kids into entire networks of self-harm content. Once connected with one member, the algorithm deliberately pushed teens toward all harmful members and far worse risks.
After Vic Langenhoff’s daughter was killed, he wrote the dramatic 1972 headline ‘Stop de Kindermoord’ (Stop the Child Murder) and called for children to be protected from harmful automation.
This harm formula isn’t accidental or an oversight in 2024 — it’s the algorithm working exactly as designed, expanding danger to children while Instagram’s executives rake in profits on hollow promises about “teen safety”.
The Danish study, however, found that rather than attempt to shut down the self-harm network, Instagram’s algorithm was actively helping it to expand. The research suggested that 13-year-olds become friends with all members of the self-harm group after they were connected with one of its members. This, the study said, “suggests that Instagram’s algorithm actively contributes to the formation and spread of self-harm networks”.
I hear the former Chief Security Officer of Facebook, who allegedly facilitated genocide in Asia, has a lovely mansion in the hills near Palo Alto to show for it.
CNN points out that Elon Musk is overtly threatening his own users, declaring all Twitter accounts are now owned by him and him alone.
…the platform is ultimately Musk’s domain, where he can do as he pleases. Musk has shown a willingness to take over accounts in the past, threatening NPR after the public broadcaster stopped posting to its account and seizing the @America handle for his political action committee that supported President-elect Donald Trump during the campaign.
“What conceivable motivation does a company have for destroying the value in their users’ accounts, and implicitly threatening all other users?” Butterfield said. “It becomes an individual person’s playground, rather than a functioning marketplace of ideas.”
The motivation for destroying value in accounts is overthrowing democracy and repealing governance. It’s not that hard to figure out.
Like asking what motivation does the air force have for dropping a bomb, given it destroys the value of the bomb. Destruction is kind of the whole point.
Reframe the question from “why would someone destroy value?” to “what strategic objective might this destruction serve?” This reveals broader patterns we’ve seen historically where controlling information flow and destabilizing existing power structures often involves accepting or even intentionally causing certain kinds of damage.
The Ford Pinto’s 23 total fatalities in the 1970s sparked national outrage and transformed automobile safety regulations forever. Today, Tesla’s safety record makes the Pinto crisis look quaint — “veered” Tesla crashes have reported over 20 fatalities in the past two months alone.
The rate of Tesla vehicles suddenly veering off roads is accelerating far beyond what a growing fleet would predict. Rather than seeing crashes increase proportionally with new car sales, data shows Tesla crashes occurring 5X faster than vehicles are being produced.
Consider Thanksgiving Day alone: A police officer was killed in a head-on collision while other police officers watched helplessly. That same day, three college students died when their Tesla slammed into a tree and burst into flames. Which story made your local news? The frequency of these incidents has become so overwhelming that media coverage has fractured into regional reporting.
Just this week in Australia, another Tesla veered off the road into a pole and caught fire, injuring both the driver and teenage passenger. Each incident becomes just another local story, lost in the growing sea of Tesla crashes worldwide.
The NHTSA and American media have been strikingly slow to recognize this severe public safety problem. When reporting on the recent Cybertruck crash that killed three college students, the Chronicle claimed it was only “the second known fatal crash in which a Cybertruck veered off the road and burst into flames for unknown reasons.“
The recent police officer death stands out particularly because it happened while other officers watched helplessly as one of their own was struck down by an autonomous vehicle. But equally telling is the tragedy of the college students, which reveals a deeper pattern about privileged perceptions of safety and danger. These students came from Piedmont, a neighborhood in Oakland deliberately engineered by the KKK as a white enclave – maintaining 0% Black residents while completely surrounded by neighborhoods that are 30% Black. This wasn’t just historical segregation; it was fear-based marketing of “safety” through privilege and militarized exclusion.
Tesla’s marketing of the Cybertruck follows this same playbook. When Musk says
Sometimes you get these late-civilization vibes… The apocalypse could come along at any moment, and here at Tesla we have the finest in apocalypse technology.
…he’s tapping into a specific strain of white anxiety that has deep historical roots. We’ve seen this before — from Rhodesia’s white minority regime marketing itself as a “civilized” bulwark against Black majority rule, to gated communities promising protection from “urban” threats. The Cybertruck’s aggressive militarized design and marketing about surviving societal collapse appeal to the same fears that drove Piedmont’s formation: privileged white communities seeking technological shields against imagined threats from neighboring Black populations.
The bitter irony is that these carefully cultivated illusions of safety — whether through racial exclusion or supposedly apocalypse-proof vehicles — often create more danger than they prevent. Piedmont families who trusted in Tesla’s artificial promises of technological safety have now experienced firsthand how marketing that plays on fear can have tragic real-world consequences.
This isn’t just about vehicle statistics. It’s about how we evaluate risk through distorted lenses. Just as cigarettes were eventually banned because their dangers extended beyond individual choice to harm others, Teslas present a public safety threat that affects everyone on or near our roads. The question isn’t just what these families were thinking – it’s what we as a society are thinking as we continue to allow these vehicles to operate with minimal oversight.
Source: IIHSKey Observations: Data clearly shows that both serious incidents (orange line) and fatal incidents (pink line) are increasing at a steeper rate than the fleet size growth (blue line). This is particularly evident from 2021 onwards, where: Fleet size (blue) shows a linear growth of about 1x per year. Serious incidents (orange) show an exponential growth curve, reaching nearly 5x by 2024. Fatal incidents (pink) also show a steeper-than-linear growth, though not as dramatic as serious incidents. The divergence between the blue line (fleet growth) and the incident lines (orange and pink) indicates that incidents are indeed accelerating faster than the production/deployment of new vehicles.
In the 1890s, Germany pioneered electric bikes, launching a legacy of sustainable transportation innovation. Yet today, in an ironic twist, Germany’s Nazi party (AfD) has elevated a polluting relic of Soviet engineering into a cultural battleground symbol.
As Germans increasingly embrace efficient, affordable electric two-wheeled transportation, Nazis (AfD) have seized upon an unlikely symbol of resistance: the primitive, polluting two-stroke Simson engines manufactured in East Germany. This embrace of DDR-era technology by a nationalist party reveals a deeper political strategy.
The irony is striking: while electric bikes represent Germany’s authentic heritage of proud innovations, the AfD has chosen Soviet-bloc mopeds as symbols of “traditional” German identity. This dubious appropriation appears deliberately provocative — these engines, which fail modern emissions standards by spectacular margins, serve as perfect vehicles for the AfD’s broader assault on regulations and regulatory authority itself.
Obsolescence makes these mopeds ideal political props for the politically obsolete Nazis. An inability to meet basic standards transforms them from mere vehicles into symbols of false victimhood, grievance and attempted defiance against time itself, not to mention modern governance.
I have firsthand experience with these machines, having spent years modifying an Italian moped from the 1980s. The technology was fundamentally flawed even then. The two-stroke engines release up to 30% of their fuel unburned directly into the air, mixing oil with gasoline to create dramatically higher pollution levels than four-stroke designs. When Simson attempted a more sensible four-stroke update with the SR50/4 in the 1990s, it was snubbed by traditionalists, a perfect metaphor for the AfD’s stance. The more weak and unhealthy a technology, the more ardently they embrace it as a symbol of resistance.
The AfD’s embrace of obsolete technology reveals another layer of historical ignorance. Nazi Germany was crippled by technological backwardness, particularly its heavy reliance on horses. Nearly 80% of the Nazi military depended on horse transport during WWII, lacking reliable access to modern fuel and engines. This technological deficit was a key factor in their defeat by 1942, though Hitler prolonged the war purely to continue his genocidal campaign. The historical irony is sharp: while the AfD claims to champion German technological tradition, they mirror the Nazi regime’s fatal embrace of outdated transportation methods — just replacing horses with Soviet mopeds. Nazis…can Nazi the future.
Freund Pferd or “Our Friend the Horse” by Rolf Roeingh as published in 1941 by Deutschen Archiv-Verlag in Berlin.
Like their Nazi predecessors, the Nazis today (AfD) build power by twisting historical symbols into nonsensical propaganda. They appropriate whatever serves their disruptive agenda, regardless of historical accuracy or internal contradiction. The fact that Germans pioneered electric vehicles in the 1800s makes any “traditional” stance against the modern technology particularly absurd; yet another example of blowing their bets on the wrong horse.
The AfD’s appropriation of the Simson becomes even more cynical when considering the moped’s original design philosophy. The designer’s own grandson reveals the bitter irony[1]:
What does the Simson designer actually think about his moped being exploited by right-wing groups? Clauss Dietel designed the Simson models S50 and S51.
Unfortunately, BuzzFeed News Germany can no longer ask him, as he passed away in 2022. His grandson Bruno Dietel did not want to comment on the topic when we approached him.
In a post on X/Twitter, he writes that the moped’s design was based on the so-called ‘open principle,’ a ‘solidary, ecological, democratic design concept.’ Simson is being ‘wrongfully misused and annexed as a symbol.’ ‘My grandfather experienced the Nazi era in Saxony and in his final years was very concerned about the resurgence of totalitarianism. What’s happening in the Simson context would have deeply outraged him.’
This calculated provocation, using an environmentally conscious designer’s work as a symbol of anti-environmental protest, exemplifies the broader AfD strategy. Nazis deliberately misappropriate symbols to generate outrage, treating German cultural heritage as merely raw material for political theatre.
Their visual branding follows the same cynical logic. Their red ‘swoosh’ logo deliberately contrasts with the German Reichstag’s considered and thoughtful blue, suggesting violent disruption to any democratic process.
The German AfD red logo signals leaving blue to put red Nazis back in power, invoking “just do it” Nike campaigns.
Also, I swear that logo wasn’t designed intentionally to look like a giant red horse penis attached to a swastika man. Pure coincidence.
The Simson story exemplifies how the AfD weaponizes nostalgia against progress. While electric motors offer traditional German solutions to contemporary mobility needs, the AfD transforms them into cultural battlegrounds. Their embrace of anemic polluting Soviet-era mopeds has nothing to do with transportation policy — it’s about manufacturing outrage. The more harmful or obsolete a technology, the more valuable it becomes as a symbol of resistance to modern environmental and social standards.
The path forward may lie in Clauss Dietel’s original vision of modernity, the “open principle” of democratic, ecological design that respects heritage while embracing progress. His Simson vision represented an attempt to bridge East and West, old and new. That his creation has been twisted into a symbol of extreme division would have outraged him, but perhaps not surprised him. After all, he had seen Nazis put on this show before.
A 1980s Soviet export brochure marketed the S51 as a marvel of modern global engineering (click on the image for an English PDF)
