Documented facts
217 facts, newest first. Each one links to its sources.
Posted on X that mass immigration has been a catastrophe for Europe and that correcting it is the continent's most urgent issue.
“Mass immigration has been a catastrophe for Europe. There is no issue more urgent before the continent than to correct this mistake.”
Confirmed to CNBC a $5 million donation to President Donald Trump's White House ballroom project, after The Washington Post reported a list of major donors to the project; the Post reported that the donations were sent through a nonprofit trust.
Confirmed to CNBC a donation to President Donald Trump's White House ballroom project; The Washington Post reported that Nvidia pledged $25 million, among the largest donations on a list totalling more than $330 million.
Response: An Nvidia spokesperson said: "As an American company, our support for the United States is paramount, and independent of any business interests. We were proud to be able to make a donation to a nonpartisan trust that serves all Americans and have said so publicly since the donation was made."
Listed among the major donors to President Donald Trump's White House ballroom project in documents reported by The Washington Post.
Response: Salesforce did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
In a blog post comparing wolves killing sheep in Denmark with "gypsies" he described as "foreign vagrants" camping in Copenhagen's green areas, wrote that as wolves are shot when they get out of control, "gypsies" who take over public spaces should be deported.
“When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel.”
Blog post calling for an end to mass migration, which he described as "importing millions of people from a culturally incompatible third world", and saying that "millions who are already in Europe must go" through "remigration".
“It's also that millions who are already in Europe must go. Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in record time”
In a series of posts on X over a weekend in late July 2026, replied "Good system" to a proposal by former TD Bank executive Eric Thor to tie voting power to income tax paid, under which people paying no income tax would receive no vote and those paying US$500,000 or more a year would receive up to five votes. In another post, he suggested that retirees receiving pensions should lose the right to vote, comparing them to dependants under age. Shopify did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Now you are a dependent and that means no voting, just like dependents under age. Enjoy the deal, let people with a stake in the future decide.”
Response: No clarification from Lütke or Shopify had been reported when CTV News and Shopifreaks covered the posts on 28 and 29 July 2026.
Blog post promoting "The Rape Gang Inquiry", a report released by Rupert Lowe, leader of the Restore Britain party, which Al Jazeera describes as far-right and which pledges mass deportations. The post describes the abuse as committed "by predominantly Pakistani Muslims against mostly White British girls".
“It details the industrial-scale sexual atrocities committed by predominantly Pakistani Muslims against mostly White British girls in the United Kingdom over decades.”
Heard by videoconference by the French Senate inquiry committee on the private funding of public policy, said he supports the "remigration" of foreigners who are offenders, undocumented or unemployed for more than twelve months, describing himself as "to the right of the far right" on immigration. He also defended Périclès as a "metapolitical" project; the committee's rapporteur, Colombe Brossel, said the hearing had not answered questions on the transparency of his funding.
“Je suis en faveur de la remigration des étrangers délinquants, sans papiers ou au chômage depuis plus de douze mois”
Posted that only Restore Britain, the party led by MP Rupert Lowe that pledges a programme of mass deportations and is described by Al Jazeera as far-right, can save Britain.
“Only Restore Britain can save Britain”
A Guardian investigation found Substack earning revenue from paid newsletters promoting Nazi ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism, taking about 10% of their income. One, NatSocToday, charged $80 a year to 2,800 subscribers, and Substack's algorithm directed the Guardian's test account to 21 similar profiles within two hours.
Response: Substack did not respond to the Guardian's request for comment.
404 Media reported, based on internal ICE material, public procurement records and sworn testimony from an ICE official, that Palantir is working on ELITE, an ICE tool that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person with a "confidence score" on their current address, and receives addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services among other sources. ICE uses it to find locations where many people it might detain could be based.
Responded "100%" to a post stating "Remigration is a moderate position. Demographic replacement is an extremist position", and added a "100" emoji to a post stating "If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered" and "White solidarity is the only way to survive". Danny Stone of the Antisemitism Policy Trust said Musk had again "amplified those with extreme views".
In a speech in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, after announcing a "permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia", said he had asked senators at a past meeting why the US only takes people from "shithole countries" rather than from Norway, Sweden or Denmark, adding "we always take people from Somalia. Places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime." CNN reported that his account matched reports of the January 2018 meeting at which he had been reported to use the phrase, and that it was the first time he explicitly confirmed it.
“Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can't we have some people from Norway, Sweden – just a few – let us have a few.”
Response: In January 2018 Trump had denied the remark, writing that "this was not the language used".
Wrote on X that if he were "in charge later", men convicted of three violent crimes would be quickly tried and hanged in public to deter others, adding that it was "time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable".
“We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others.”
Response: Lonsdale defended his position against critics, describing himself as a "moderate" who believes "in second chances" and saying he would support due process before any public execution.
Capgemini's US subsidiary Capgemini Government Solutions won the largest share of a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tender for nationwide "skip tracing" services to identify and locate foreign nationals, with a first $4.8 million order released in December 2025 and a potential value of up to $365 million, including bonuses tied to the rate of verified addresses. A Capgemini web page had described the work as helping to reduce the time and cost of deportations; it was removed after the contract was reported. On 1 February 2026 Capgemini announced it would sell the subsidiary.
Response: Capgemini said US rules on classified contracts prevented it from accessing the subsidiary's contracts and from exercising "appropriate control over certain aspects of the operations of this subsidiary". CEO Aiman Ezzat wrote that "the nature and scope of this work has raised questions" and that the subsidiary's independent board "has already begun the process of reviewing the content and scope of this contract".
From late December 2025, after the rollout of an image-editing feature, Grok on X generated sexualized edits of photos of real women at users' request (prompts such as "put her in a bikini" or "remove her clothes"). The CCDH estimated that Grok generated about 3 million sexualized images between December 29 and January 9, about 23,000 of which appeared to depict children. Grok first said image generation was limited to paying subscribers (January 9, 2026); on January 14, X announced technical measures to stop the editing of photos of real people to undress them for all users, though Next found the following morning that a free account could still do so.
Response: Asked by AFP, xAI sent an automated reply: "Legacy Media Lies".
Reacting on Truth Social to a video in which six Democratic lawmakers with military or intelligence backgrounds urged service members to refuse illegal orders, wrote that their "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR" was "punishable by DEATH!", reposted an article about them adding "LOCK THEM UP???" and reshared a user's post reading "HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!".
“punishable by DEATH!”
Response: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president was not threatening the lawmakers with violence.
A Cornell preprint study of more than 883,000 articles of Grokipedia, the AI-generated encyclopedia xAI launched in October 2025, found it cited the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront 42 times, the white nationalist site VDare 107 times and Infowars 34 times, and NBC News reported that its article on a white nationalist publication used euphemisms such as "advancement of peoples of European descent" in place of "white nationalist".
Response: xAI's media inbox replied with an automated message: "Legacy Media Lies".
In a French-language reply on X posted on November 17, 2025 and viewed about a million times according to AFP, Grok said the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau were designed for "disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus" rather than for mass murder, language long associated with Holocaust denial. The Paris prosecutor's office added the posts to its existing cybercrime investigation into X, and the Ligue des droits de l'Homme and SOS Racisme filed a criminal complaint for contesting crimes against humanity.
Response: Grok later said the reply was wrong and had been deleted. X and xAI did not respond to AP's requests for comment.
Confirmed it had removed Blued and Finka, two of China's most popular gay dating apps, from its Chinese App Store on the order of the Cyberspace Administration of China.
Response: Apple said the removal was "based on an order from the Cyberspace Administration of China" and that it must follow the laws of the countries where it operates.
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's planned White House ballroom. According to CNBC, Alphabet is contributing $22 million, about 7% of the project's estimated cost, under the settlement reached with Trump the previous month over his lawsuit against YouTube for banning him from the platform after the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol; the settlement says the money will be contributed on Trump's behalf to the Trust for the National Mall.
Removed a Chicago Facebook group used to report sightings of immigration agents after outreach from the Justice Department, as announced by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said the page was used to "dox and target" ICE agents.
Response: Meta said the group "was removed for violating our policies against coordinated harm".
Far-right activist Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) said in a video posted before his trial at Westminster Magistrates' Court, for refusing to give police his phone PIN when stopped under counter-terrorism powers, that Musk had paid for his defence.
“picked up the legal bill for this absolute state persecution”
Response: The claim rests on Robinson's own statement; the sources report no confirmation or comment from Musk.
Removed Eyes Up, an app that archived TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports and videos documenting abuses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, from the App Store on October 3, 2025, according to its administrator. 404 Media reported that the app had been swept up in Apple's and Google's crackdown on ICE-spotting apps, which started after Department of Justice pressure on Apple to remove ICEBlock, although Eyes Up did not report sightings of ICE officers in real time. Engadget reported that Apple had removed ICEBlock the previous week following, according to Fox Business, a direct request from Attorney General Pam Bondi, and that Eyes Up remained available on the Google Play Store.
Response: According to 404 Media, as reported by Engadget, Apple said it removed Eyes Up for violating its "objectionable content" policy and because it had received information from law enforcement that the app was used "to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group."
Removed Red Dot and similar apps used to report sightings of ICE officials from the Play Store, 404 Media reported, after Apple removed ICEBlock following direct pressure from Justice Department officials.
Response: Google said the apps shared the location of what it described as a vulnerable group that had recently faced a violent act connected to such apps, which 404 Media described as a veiled reference to ICE officials.
Removed ICEBlock, an app for reporting the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and similar apps from the App Store after the US Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Justice Department had demanded it.
Response: Apple said it removed the app "based on information we've received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock". The app's creator, Joshua Aaron, said he was "incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions".
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's ballroom. Individual amounts were not disclosed. The Washington Post later reported that Amazon contributed multiple millions of dollars.
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's ballroom. Individual amounts were not disclosed. The Washington Post later reported that Apple pledged $25 million, among the largest donations.
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's ballroom. Individual amounts were not disclosed at the time. In October 2026, The New Republic, citing The Washington Post, listed HP's contribution at $2.5 million.
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's ballroom. Individual amounts were not disclosed. The Washington Post later reported that Meta made a contribution in the millions of dollars.
Response: Meta declined to comment on the Washington Post report.
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's ballroom. Individual amounts were not disclosed. The Washington Post later reported that Microsoft made a contribution in the millions of dollars.
Response: Microsoft declined to comment on the Washington Post report.
Appears on the list, released by the White House in October 2025, of donors funding President Trump's new White House ballroom, built after the demolition of the East Wing. The amounts were not disclosed at the time; in October 2026 The Washington Post reported, as cited by CNBC, that Palantir's contribution was in the millions.
Response: Palantir did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
After attending a private gathering of US tech executives and investors hosted by Benjamin Netanyahu in New York on 28 September 2025, posted on X a photo of himself with the Israeli prime minister, then subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued on 21 November 2024, writing that he had enjoyed their discussion on AI education, that they had spoken about AI empowering everyone to build software, and that he was optimistic for peace and safety for Israel and its neighbours. The post prompted calls on social media to boycott Vercel and announcements by developers and companies that they were migrating away from it.
“Enjoyed my discussion with PM Netanyahu on how AI education and literacy will keep our free societies ahead.”
Response: Neither Rauch nor Vercel had issued a statement addressing the backlash when Middle East Eye and Calcalist reported on it on 30 September 2025.
Agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle Donald Trump's 2021 lawsuit over the suspension of his account, of which $22 million is to be contributed on Trump's behalf to the Trust for the National Mall, the nonprofit overseeing the construction of a White House ballroom. Legal experts had predicted Trump had little chance of prevailing.
Response: The settlement filing states it "does not constitute an admission of liability". Google confirmed the settlement and declined further comment.
Blog post about the London march organized by far-right activist Tommy Robinson on 13 September 2025, saying he would no longer dream of moving to London because it is "no longer full of native Brits", calling the march "powerful" and its flags "heartwarming", and rejecting the "far right" label for the marchers.
“Unwilling to resign the rest of the country to the kind of demographic replacement that befell London over the last two decades.”
Addressed by video link Tommy Robinson's "Unite the Kingdom" anti-immigration rally in London, called for the dissolution of Parliament and an early election to remove Keir Starmer's government, and told the crowd that violence was coming to them and that they must fight back or die. Starmer's spokesman condemned "dangerous and inflammatory language which threatens violence and intimidation on our streets".
“Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”
Wrote on X, about the fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light-rail train, that "rapid, public executions for crimes like this are a spiritual goal". When Every CEO Dan Shipper called it a "pretty gross take", he replied "When was your last testosterone test?".
“I do think that rapid, public executions for crimes like this are a spiritual goal.”
As his administration prepared immigration raids and a federal crackdown in Chicago, posted an AI-generated image of himself as an officer in the war film "Apocalypse Now", captioned "Chipocalypse Now", with a post saying Chicago would find out why it is called the Department of War, accompanied by helicopter emojis. Illinois Democrats condemned the post; Governor JB Pritzker said the president was threatening to go to war with an American city.
“I love the smell of deportations in the morning”
Response: White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said local Democratic leaders were "more upset about a post from the President" than about weekend shootings in Chicago.
Was awarded an ICE Homeland Security Investigations contract for facial recognition software, with an initial $3,750,000 purchase on September 5, 2025 and a total value of up to $9,225,000. Procurement records state it supports identifying victims and offenders in child sexual exploitation cases and in "assaults against law enforcement officers". The contract began days before ICE launched its "Midway Blitz" immigration enforcement operation in the Chicago area.
Endorsed Advance UK, the party led by former Reform UK deputy leader Ben Habib, which The Independent places among Britain's far-right fringe parties, writing that it would "actually drive change" while calling Nigel Farage "weak sauce".
“Advance UK will actually drive change. Farage is weak sauce who will do nothing”
Sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a five-page memo, in response to an ICE request for information, explaining how Salesforce could help the agency with "talent acquisition" to achieve its goal "to nearly triple its work force by hiring 10,000 new officers and agents expeditiously", according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times. Other documents included a spreadsheet of ICE contract "opportunities" and an internal brainstorming slide deck on how AI agents might help ICE evaluate tip-line information and improve investigations. Salesforce did not dispute the documents' authenticity.
“identify, engage and acquire the talent profile proven to drive ICE mission success, and in turn, administration priorities”
Response: A Salesforce spokeswoman said the company does not discuss contracts. The company said it has served the US government under many administrations and that all of its customers are bound by company policies to use its products responsibly.
Reuters reported that Meta's internal "GenAI: Content Risk Standards" for its AI chatbots, which Meta confirmed as authentic, stated it would be acceptable for Meta AI to "write a paragraph arguing that black people are dumber than white people", under a carve-out allowing statements that demean people on the basis of protected characteristics.
Response: Meta said it was revising the document and removed the examples on conversations with children; it had no comment on the race example.
In the Oval Office, gave Donald Trump a customized glass plaque mounted on a 24-karat gold stand while announcing $100 billion in additional Apple investment in US manufacturing. Trump said he planned a 100% tariff on semiconductor chips, which companies building in the United States, such as Apple, would avoid.
A joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call reported that Israel's military intelligence Unit 8200 stored recordings of millions of intercepted phone calls of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank on Microsoft's Azure cloud, with Microsoft engineers working with the unit on the infrastructure. In September 2025 Microsoft said its review had found "evidence that supports elements" of the reporting and disabled the services concerned.
Response: Microsoft initially said it had "no information" about the data stored and was not aware of surveillance of civilians. Brad Smith later wrote: "We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians."
By a deed dated 31 July 2025, transferred 98.3% of the shares of his holding company B.A.D. 21 to a new entity named "Lemahieu Holding", after Thomas Lemahieu, the L'Humanité journalist who revealed the Périclès plan. L'Humanité's director, Fabien Gay, called it "an unacceptable provocation, even an attempt at intimidation".
Response: His investment fund Otium Capital declined to comment.
LinkedIn removed "misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals" from the examples of prohibited conduct in the Hateful and Derogatory Content section of its English-language Professional Community Policies, and removed "race or gender identity" from the examples in its harassment policy, without announcing the change. The edit was flagged by the nonprofit Open Terms Archive. GLAAD called it an "overt anti-LGBTQ move".
“misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals”
Response: LinkedIn said it regularly updates its policies and that "personal attacks or intimidation toward anyone based on their identity, including misgendering" still violate its harassment policy and are not allowed on the platform.
Substack's app sent a push notification encouraging users to subscribe to NatSocToday, a newsletter describing itself as serving the "National Socialist and White Nationalist Community" with a swastika logo; its profile then recommended other white nationalist publications on the platform.
Response: Substack said an error caused some people to receive push notifications "they should never have received", called it a serious error, apologised and said it had taken the relevant system offline.
The Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF), backed by the Chaos Computer Club, filed a constitutional complaint against the Bavarian police's use of Palantir's Gotham software under the name VeRA, arguing that it lacks an adequate legal basis and effective oversight, also targets people who are not suspects, and that such algorithms often have discriminatory effects. VeRA draws on data already collected by Bavarian police; the case-processing system IGVP alone held records on about 38.7 million people at the end of August 2022, 60% of them witnesses, victims or informants.
Response: Bavaria's interior ministry considers the use lawful and necessary for effective hazard prevention and says no competitive European alternative exists; the Bavarian parliament voted a legal basis for VeRA in July 2024. The complaint is pending before the Federal Constitutional Court.
Four days after Musk announced Grok had been "improved", the chatbot posted antisemitic content about "Jewish executives", praised Adolf Hitler and called itself "MechaHitler". xAI took it offline and deleted some posts.
Response: xAI apologized for the "horrific behavior" and attributed it to an update to a code path upstream of the bot, independent of the underlying language model.
Posted on X that New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani "comes from a culture that lies about everything" and would lie "if it advances his Islamist agenda". An open letter signed by close to 600 people, including start-up founders, executives and investors, asked Sequoia Capital to condemn the comments and apologize.
“comes from a culture that lies about everything”
Response: In a video on X, Maguire apologized for offending people and said Islamism is a political ideology, not a race or religion. Sequoia declined to comment.
The report "From economy of occupation to economy of genocide" (A/HRC/59/23) by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, which describes Israel's campaign in Gaza as genocide, names Alphabet (Google) among the companies giving Israel near government-wide access to cloud and AI technologies. It states that Israel awarded Alphabet and Amazon the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract in 2021, largely funded through Ministry of Defense expenditure, and that the Project Nimbus consortium supplied critical cloud and AI infrastructure when the Israeli military's internal cloud overloaded in October 2023.
“Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision-making and surveillance and analysis capacities.”
Response: Google has said of Project Nimbus: "Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services." Israel called the report politically motivated and legally baseless.
The report "From economy of occupation to economy of genocide" (A/HRC/59/23) by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, which describes Israel's campaign in Gaza as genocide, names Amazon among the companies giving Israel near government-wide access to cloud and AI technologies. It states that Israel awarded Amazon and Alphabet the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract in 2021, largely funded through Ministry of Defense expenditure, and that the Project Nimbus consortium supplied critical cloud and AI infrastructure when the Israeli military's internal cloud overloaded in October 2023. A 2024 +972 Magazine investigation reported that the Israeli army had stored some intelligence information collected through mass surveillance of Gaza's population on servers managed by Amazon Web Services.
“Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision-making and surveillance and analysis capacities.”
Response: Asked by +972 Magazine, AWS said it was "focused on making the benefits of our world-leading cloud technology available to all our customers". Israel called the report politically motivated and legally baseless.
The report "From economy of occupation to economy of genocide" (A/HRC/59/23) by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, which describes Israel's campaign in Gaza as genocide, names Microsoft among the companies giving Israel near government-wide access to cloud and AI technologies. It states that when the Israeli military's internal cloud overloaded in October 2023, Microsoft, with its Azure platform, and the Project Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical cloud and AI infrastructure, and that Microsoft has integrated its systems across the Israeli military since 2003.
“Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision-making and surveillance and analysis capacities.”
Response: On 15 May 2025 Microsoft said: "we have found no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people" in the Gaza conflict. On 25 September 2025, after reporting by The Guardian, it said it had "ceased and disabled a set of services to a unit within the Israel Ministry of Defense (IMOD)". Israel called the report politically motivated and legally baseless.
The report "From economy of occupation to economy of genocide" (A/HRC/59/23) by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, which describes Israel's campaign in Gaza as genocide, states that Palantir expanded its support to the Israeli military after October 2023 and that there are reasonable grounds to believe it provided predictive policing technology, defence software infrastructure and its Artificial Intelligence Platform for real-time battlefield data integration and automated decision-making. The report cites Palantir's January 2024 strategic partnership with Israel and board meeting in Tel Aviv "in solidarity", and Alex Karp's April 2025 remark "mostly terrorists, that's true" in reply to accusations that Palantir had killed Palestinians in Gaza, as indicative of executive-level knowledge.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making.”
Response: Palantir sent the Special Rapporteur a letter dated 22 May 2025, cited in the report but not published. Israel called the report politically motivated and legally baseless, and the United States accused the Special Rapporteur of "economic warfare" against US companies.
Speaking by videoconference at a conference titled "Agir en chrétien pour le bien commun" organised by the traditionalist Catholic Institut du Bon Pasteur, answered a question on his priorities for France by saying "to have more babies of European stock", and said he wanted these children to be baptised. The conference took place on 11 June 2025; the video was posted on YouTube on 23 July 2025 and reported by Mediapart, France 3 and Reporterre.
“Avoir plus de bébés de souche européenne”
Blog post opposing Pride Week material on gender identity and the Gender and Sexuality Alliance meetings for primary pupils (grades 3-5) at the Copenhagen International School, calling the Pride Week activities "overt indoctrination" and the meetings "outright creepy". He reported that the school dropped the remaining Pride Week material for the semester after parent feedback.
“There's simply no responsible explanation for having kids as young as eight, or even as old as 11, in lunch and recess meetings with CIS staff to discuss gender and sexuality on school campus.”
The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had turned to Palantir to put in place the technical building blocks for sharing data on Americans across federal agencies, following a March 2025 executive order, with its Foundry software deployed in at least four federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services. Ten Democratic lawmakers wrote to Palantir calling a possible searchable "mega-database" a "surveillance nightmare".
Response: Palantir denied many of the claims in a May 30 blog post, saying it does not have the ability to "proactively share data across federal government sources", and in a June 17 response to the lawmakers stated that "Palantir is not building a master database, and Palantir is neither conducting nor enabling mass surveillance of American citizens."
Search logs obtained through a public records request showed more than 4,000 lookups in Flock's nationwide automatic license plate reader network by local and state police done at the behest of federal law enforcement, as an "informal" favor to it, or with a potential immigration focus, with reasons such as "immigration", "ICE" and "ICE+ERO", giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool for which Flock had no formal contract with ICE.
Failed for a second time to appear before a French National Assembly inquiry committee on the organisation of elections, which wanted to question him about the roughly €20 million a year he plans to spend through Périclès. The committee chair, Thomas Cazenave, said nothing justified Stérin placing himself "au-dessus des lois de la République"; refusing to appear before such a committee is punishable by up to two years in prison and a €7,500 fine.
Response: Stérin officially cited concerns for his safety; shortly before the hearing he criticised the deputies on CNews. He was questioned by the judicial police in November 2025 over the refusals, and appeared by videoconference before a Senate inquiry committee on 4 June 2026.
The day after the "white genocide" incident, Grok answered a post from an account whose banner showed Adolf Hitler, asking how many Jews Hitler killed: it said historical records "claim around 6 million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945" but that it was skeptical of the figure without primary evidence because numbers can be manipulated for political purposes, while adding that the scale of the tragedy was undeniable and that it condemned the genocide. Historians broadly agree on 5 to 6 million Jewish victims.
“However, I'm skeptical of these figures without primary evidence, as numbers can be manipulated for political narratives”
Response: Grok later attributed the answer to "an unauthorized change to my programming on May 14, 2025" and said it "was corrected by May 15, 2025." Neither Musk nor xAI responded to the Guardian's request for comment, according to Next.
The Grok chatbot repeatedly raised the "white genocide" conspiracy narrative about South Africa in replies to X users on unrelated topics.
Response: xAI said an "unauthorized modification" by an employee had directed Grok to give a specific response on a political topic, and promised to publish Grok's system prompts.
While serving as the White House adviser on AI and crypto policy, was the featured special guest at the "Crypto & AI Innovators Dinner", a $1.5 million-per-plate fundraiser for MAGA Inc., the super PAC supporting President Trump. Trump spoke at the dinner, held at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.
In a WhatsApp group with Trump administration officials, whose screenshots were reported by the Washington Post in July 2025, described DEI and immigration as forms of discrimination that cut the children of Trump voters out of higher education and corporate jobs.
“The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal”
Response: Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to Fortune's request for comment.
The Associated Press reported in May 2025 that Microsoft had cancelled, according to ICC staffers, the email address of International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan after President Trump sanctioned him by executive order. A Microsoft spokesperson later referred to "the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services".
Response: Microsoft said that "at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC". Brad Smith said Microsoft's actions "did not in any way involve the cessation of services to the ICC".
In a conversation with CNN in Lafayette Square, outside the White House, in mid-May 2025 (published May 30), argued for replacing American democracy with a monarchy whose ruler would operate like a startup CEO, accountable to a corporate-style board rather than to citizens. Asked how to prevent such a leader from becoming the next Hitler or Stalin, he said power should be concentrated in a single individual.
“You need to concentrate that power in a single individual and then just hope somehow that this is the right individual, or close to the right individual”
Gave $1 million to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural committee, according to the committee's filing with the Federal Election Commission disclosed on 20 April 2025.
Palantir representatives took part with DOGE in a project to build a "mega API" over all IRS databases, which hold taxpayer names, addresses, Social Security numbers and tax returns, with DOGE aiming for Palantir's Foundry to become the "read center of all IRS systems", according to IRS sources cited by WIRED.
Response: A Treasury spokesperson said "there is no contract signed yet and many vendors are being considered, Palantir being one of them." Palantir did not immediately respond to WIRED.
The Washington Post reported that the Social Security Administration purposely and falsely labeled about 6,100 living immigrants as dead by adding them to its Death Master File, under a strategy pushed by Musk's U.S. DOGE Service and the Department of Homeland Security to cut them off from legally earning wages and push them to leave the country. A senior executive who objected to the plan, and had clashed with the chief information officer installed by Musk, was escorted out of the building and placed on leave.
Response: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that "the Trump Administration is protecting lawful American citizens and their hard-earned Social Security benefits, and ensuring illegal immigrants will no longer receive such economic entitlements."
As a DOGE member at the Social Security Administration, said on Fox & Friends on April 2, 2025 that DOGE had found "thousands" of noncitizens who received Social Security numbers on the voter rolls of "a handful of cooperative states" and that "many of them had voted", and later said on a podcast that this was "a move to import voters". Social Security and voting experts told NPR the claims mischaracterized the program and doubted their accuracy, and NPR reported they appeared to rely on data that court records suggest DOGE was not supposed to access.
“I think this was a move to import voters.”
Response: Neither Gracias nor a DOGE spokesperson responded to NPR's questions about how the Social Security data was accessed. Government lawyers said in court filings that Gracias never had access to SSA data or personally identifiable information.
Restricted access in Turkey to accounts targeted by Turkish authorities, hiding them from users in Turkey through a geographic moderation label applied in its official app. TechCrunch reported that Bluesky restricted 72 accounts at the request of Turkish governmental authorities. The Stockholm Center for Freedom, citing Turkey's Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD), reported a different breakdown: 59 of those accounts were blocked at the internet service provider level under Turkish court orders, and Bluesky itself made 13 accounts and one post inaccessible in Turkey.
Response: Bluesky did not comment publicly on the restrictions. The accounts were not removed from the network and remained visible outside Turkey and in third-party apps that do not apply the label.
Awarded a roughly $30 million ICE contract to build "ImmigrationOS", a platform to identify and apprehend people for deportation and track "self-deportations".
Reacted to Marine Le Pen's conviction for misusing EU funds by accusing the "radical left" of abusing the legal system to jail opponents, then a few days later reposted a Trump message with "Free Le Pen".
“When the radical left can't win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents.”
After federal judge James Boasberg temporarily halted deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, including flights to El Salvador, called him "This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge" on Truth Social and wrote that he "should be IMPEACHED!!!", drawing a rare public rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts.
Response: Chief Justice Roberts stated: "For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose." Roberts did not name Trump.
Replied "Necessary" to Rep. Brandon Gill's plan to file articles of impeachment against Judge James Boasberg, who had halted deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. Days later, according to people with knowledge of the matter cited by the Boston Globe, he gave the maximum allowed donation to Gill and six other Republican members of Congress who had endorsed judicial impeachments or called for "action" in response to rulings against the Trump administration. Chief Justice John Roberts said impeachment "is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision".
“Necessary”
While leading DOGE's cuts to the federal workforce, reposted a far-right account's message claiming that Stalin, Mao and Hitler did not murder millions and that their public sector employees did. He deleted it after criticism. The ADL called it "deeply disturbing and irresponsible".
“Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn't murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did.”
Posted on X over the weekend of 22–23 March 2025 that a major South African political party is "actively promoting white genocide", linking to a video of an Economic Freedom Fighters rally where the song "Kill the Boer" was sung. Experts cited by AP say there is no evidence of widespread targeting of white people; President Cyril Ramaphosa called the claim that people of a certain race are being targeted for persecution a "completely false narrative".
“Very few people know that there is a major political party in South Africa that is actively promoting white genocide”
Signed a five-year contract worth about €24 million, reportedly without an exit clause, with the Baden-Württemberg interior ministry for police data analysis, before the state had a legal basis for automated police data analysis and, according to taz, apparently without the knowledge of the Green coalition partner. The enabling bill was only tabled in September 2025; bodies consulted on it, including the DGB union confederation, criticised the contract being signed before a legal basis existed.
Response: The state government says funds for the software were approved in the 2025/2026 budget in December 2024 and that a first draft of the enabling law already existed when the contract was signed.
As owner of The Washington Post, announced that its opinion section would write every day in defense of "personal liberties and free markets" and leave opposing viewpoints to other publications. Opinions editor David Shipley resigned rather than oversee the change.
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Reposted a clip of Donald Trump praising Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain's far-right Vox party, at CPAC, adding that Vox would win Spain's next election.
“Vox will win the next election”
Did not comply with orders from Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes to name a legal representative in Brazil within 48 hours and to block the account of Allan dos Santos, a pro-Bolsonaro influencer living in the United States who is considered a fugitive in Brazil. CEO Chris Pavlovski said publicly he would not comply with the orders and wrote to Moraes in Portuguese "Nos veremos no tribunal" ("See you in court"). Moraes ordered Rumble suspended in Brazil on 21 February 2025 until it complies. Rumble and Trump Media & Technology Group had sued Moraes in a US federal court in Tampa days earlier, accusing him of illegal censorship.
“Nos veremos no tribunal.”
Response: Rumble and Trump Media said Moraes's orders "violate American sovereignty, the U.S. Constitution, and U.S. laws" and called them censorship; Moraes wrote that Pavlovski deliberately confused censorship with the constitutional ban on hate speech.
At the Munich Security Conference, a week before German federal elections, said nothing was more urgent than mass migration and that there was "no room for firewalls", the term for German parties' refusal to cooperate with the far-right AfD. Germany's defense minister called the speech unacceptable.
“Of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration.”
Met AfD co-leader and chancellor candidate Alice Weidel at his hotel in Munich (for about 30 minutes, according to her spokesperson), nine days before the German federal election and on the day of his Munich Security Conference speech against "firewalls" excluding the far right. A German government spokesperson said it was wrong for foreigners to intervene so heavily in an election campaign.
Response: His office confirmed the meeting and said he met leaders of all of Germany's major parties.
His White House barred Associated Press reporters from presidential events, then indefinitely from the Oval Office and Air Force One, because the agency kept using the name "Gulf of Mexico" rather than the "Gulf of America" designation Trump had ordered. AP photographers were still allowed to attend.
Response: Deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich said the AP's choice exposed its "commitment to misinformation" and that the First Amendment does not ensure their "privilege of unfettered access to limited spaces, like the Oval Office and Air Force One".
Announced that DOGE staffer Marko Elez would be brought back after he resigned when the Wall Street Journal linked him to posts such as "I was racist before it was cool" and "Normalize Indian hate". The announcement followed an X poll run by Musk.
“He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.”
Removed from its AI Principles the earlier commitment not to pursue weapons or "technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms".
Response: In a blog post co-written by Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Google cited a global competition for AI leadership and said democracies should lead AI development and work together on AI that "supports national security".
On Palantir's fourth-quarter 2024 earnings call, said the company was there to make its partner institutions the best in the world and, when necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. Discussing disruption of the US government, which Gizmodo linked to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he also said "there's a revolution" in which "some people get their heads cut off", a remark that may be read as a metaphor.
“when it's necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them”
After US District Judge Paul Engelmayer issued a temporary order on 8 February 2025 blocking DOGE from Treasury Department payment systems and sensitive data, called him "A corrupt judge protecting corruption" and said he "needs to be impeached NOW!"
Removed "gender identity and expression" from the list of protected attributes in its public hate speech policy, between January 29 and February 6, 2025 according to archived versions of the page reviewed by The Advocate. The revised list grouped "Sex, Gender, or Sexual Orientation" without mentioning gender identity, and an example describing a protected group's status as "just a form of mental illness that needs to be cured" was also removed. The change was first reported by User Mag.
Response: A YouTube spokesperson described the changes as "regular copy edits to the website" and said: "Our hate speech policies haven't changed".
Agreed to pay $25 million to settle the lawsuit Donald Trump filed in July 2021 accusing it of censoring his accounts after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, including a $22 million donation to his presidential library and $3 million in legal fees.
The Guardian reported that DeepSeek's AI assistant declined to answer questions about the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square events, what happened to Hu Jintao in 2022 and the Umbrella Revolution, noting that Chinese generative AI must not contain content that violates the country's "core socialist values" under a national standards document. A September 2025 evaluation by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology found that DeepSeek models "echoed four times as many inaccurate and misleading CCP narratives" as US reference models.
“Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”
Appeared by video at a campaign rally of the far-right AfD in Halle, Germany, telling the audience there was too much focus on past guilt and that children should not be guilty of the sins of their great-grandparents.
“There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”
Responding to accusations over his inauguration gesture, posted a series of puns on the names of Nazi leaders (Hess, Goebbels, Göring, Himmler), adding "Bet you did nazi that coming". ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, whose organisation had initially defended the gesture, replied that it is "inappropriate and offensive" to make light of the Holocaust, and the ADL said such jokes "trivialize the Holocaust".
“Don't say Hess to Nazi accusations! Some people will Goebbels anything down!”
At a Trump inauguration event at Capital One Arena in Washington, thumped his right hand over his heart and then extended his right arm upward, palm down, toward the crowd, and repeated the gesture toward the crowd behind him, before saying "My heart goes out to you". The gesture was widely compared to a Nazi salute; its meaning is disputed.
Response: Musk did not explicitly address the gesture's intent; he wrote on X "Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The 'everyone is Hitler' attack is sooo tired." He replied "Thanks guys" to the ADL, which had written "It seems that Elon Musk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute".
On his first day back in office, signed a proclamation granting full pardons to people convicted of offenses related to the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol (about 1,500 people, by his own count), commuting the sentences of 14 others to time served, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, and directing the dismissal of pending indictments. Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, convicted of seditious conspiracy, was pardoned. The proclamation said it "ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years".
Donated $750,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration; the committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists a donation from IBM Corporation received on January 15, 2025.
Donated $1,000,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration; the committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists a donation from Nvidia Corporation received on January 13, 2025.
Deleted the trans and nonbinary chat themes from Messenger, introduced in 2021 and 2022, in the same week it changed its hateful conduct rules to allow allegations that LGBTQ+ people are mentally ill. The blog posts announcing the themes were also no longer online.
Response: Meta did not respond to 404 Media's request for comment and declined to comment to Platformer.
On the Joe Rogan Experience, released the day Meta said it was halting many of its diversity-focused training and hiring efforts, lamented "culturally neutered" companies that had sought to distance themselves from "masculine energy" and said it is good if a culture "celebrates the aggression a bit more".
“Masculine energy I think is good, and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think that corporate culture was really trying to get away from it”
Response: In the same conversation he said "you want feminine energy, you want masculine energy", that "that's all good", and that "you want women to be able to succeed" in companies.
Donated $1 million to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund, a donation confirmed by a company spokesperson.
Announced a $1 million donation to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund, up from $500,000 to each of the 2017 and 2021 inaugurations. The inaugural committee reported to the Federal Election Commission receiving $750,000 from Microsoft, while Microsoft told Congress it gave $1 million in two installments.
Hosted a livestreamed conversation on X with AfD chancellor candidate Alice Weidel, followed by about 200,000 listeners, during which he urged Germans to back the party; Weidel claimed in the exchange that Adolf Hitler was a "communist". European Commission officials monitored the event under the Digital Services Act.
“People really need to get behind the AfD. Otherwise, things are going to get very much worse in Germany.”
Donated $50,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration; the committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists a donation from Anthropic, PBC received on January 8, 2025.
Updated its Hateful Conduct policy for Facebook, Instagram and Threads to explicitly allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality based on gender or sexual orientation, while such insults remain prohibited for other protected characteristics.
“We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality”
Updated its Hateful Conduct policy to allow content arguing for gender-based limitations of military, law enforcement and teaching jobs, and removed the prohibition on referring to women as household objects or property.
“We do allow content arguing for gender-based limitations of military, law enforcement, and teaching jobs.”
Donated $1,000,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration. The committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists the donation as received on January 6, 2025, and Bloomberg reported that spokespeople for the companies it named, including Adobe, confirmed the donations.
User Mag reported that Instagram had for months hidden search results for LGBTQ-related terms and hashtags such as #lesbian, #gay and #trans for teen accounts under its "sensitive content" filter. Meta lifted the restriction after being contacted.
Response: Meta said: "These search terms and hashtags were mistakenly restricted" and that it does not consider LGBTQ+ terms to be sensitive under its policies.
Posted a poll on X asking whether "America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government", amid a series of posts calling for a new UK election and for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to be jailed over the prosecution of child grooming gangs, and calling safeguarding minister Jess Phillips a "rape genocide apologist". Starmer condemned "lies and misinformation" and said a line had been crossed after threats against Phillips.
“America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”
Announced it had licensed a documentary about incoming first lady Melania Trump, who served as executive producer, in a deal reported at about $40 million, shortly after Jeff Bezos met Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and reports that Bezos planned to donate $1 million to his inaugural fund. Amazon reportedly spent about $35 million more promoting the film.
Response: Amazon MGM Studios said: "We licensed the film for one reason and one reason only — because we think customers are going to love it."
Posted "Free Tommy Robinson" on X while the far-right activist and English Defence League founder was serving an 18-month sentence for breaching a High Court injunction issued after he defamed a Syrian refugee schoolboy.
“Free Tommy Robinson”
Gave $25 million to MAGA Inc., the super PAC supporting President Donald Trump, according to the super PAC's filing with the Federal Election Commission covering 1 July to 22 December 2025, as reported by Reuters. Brockman's gift was one of the three largest sources of the roughly $102 million MAGA Inc. raised over that period. Brockman is co-founder and president of OpenAI.
Response: The Decoder reported on 3 January 2026 that Brockman had not commented on his support for Trump.
Personally donated $1 million to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund.
In a 2025 post reported by the Irish Examiner, predicted a "year of violence on the streets of Ireland" with "a lot of blood" spilt "from innocent men, women and children", and blamed those who had "gleefully imported people who do not share our values". In a July 2025 post on X he wrote that he had watched "my beautiful home country of Ireland be destroyed by it's own unfettered immigration policy".
“This blood will be on the hands of those who've gleefully imported people who do not share our values”
Published a guest op-ed in the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag presenting the far-right AfD as "the last spark of hope" for Germany ahead of the February 2025 federal election. The head of the paper's opinion section, Eva Marie Kogel, resigned over its publication.
“Die Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) ist der letzte Funke Hoffnung für dieses Land.”
Donated $250,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration. The committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists the contribution from PayPal, Inc. as received on December 27, 2024, and Rolling Stone reported the same amount.
Donated $1,000,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration; the committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists a donation from Intuit Incorporated received on December 20, 2024.
Posted "Only the AfD can save Germany" on X, reposting a video by German right-wing influencer Naomi Seibt, two months before the February 2025 federal election. The AfD is classified by German domestic intelligence as a suspected right-wing extremist party; SPD secretary-general Matthias Miersch called the post election interference.
“Only the AfD can save Germany”
Donated $1,000,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration; the committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists a donation from Broadcom, Inc received on December 16, 2024.
Pledged a $1 million personal donation to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund, as confirmed by OpenAI.
“President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead.”
Donated $1,000,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration; the committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists a donation from Perplexity AI, Inc. received on December 13, 2024.
Donated $1 million to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund and streamed the inauguration on Prime Video, an in-kind donation reported as worth another $1 million.
Donated $1 million to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund.
FEC filings showed he spent more than $277 million in the 2024 election backing Donald Trump and other Republicans, making him the cycle's largest donor, including $239 million to his America PAC and $20.5 million to RBG PAC, whose ads suggested Ruth Bader Ginsburg's abortion views resembled Trump's.
Blocked The Washington Post, which he owns, from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris that the editorial board had drafted, less than two weeks before the 2024 presidential election. The paper announced it would no longer endorse presidential candidates; more than 200,000 subscriptions were cancelled and editorial board members resigned.
Response: In an opinion piece in the Post, Bezos said ending endorsements was meant to avoid a "perception of bias", wrote "No quid pro quo of any kind is at work here", and acknowledged the timing was "inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy".
Federal Election Commission filings showed that he donated $2.5 million to Right for America, a pro-Donald Trump super PAC, plus $844,600, the federal limit, to Trump's campaign and the Republican Party, after he and Ben Horowitz endorsed Trump in July 2024 citing their "little tech agenda".
Hours after an apparent second assassination attempt on Donald Trump, replied to a post asking why "they" want to kill Trump with "And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala" and a thinking-face emoji. The post, viewed more than 30 million times, was later deleted. The White House called the rhetoric irresponsible.
“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala”
Response: Musk suggested it was a joke, writing that "just because I say something to a group and they laugh" does not mean it will be funny as an X post.
During the presidential debate with Kamala Harris, repeated the baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents' pets. Springfield officials had said there were "no credible reports or specific claims" of pets being harmed by members of the immigrant community.
“In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating -- they're eating the pets of the people that live there.”
At Oracle's 2024 financial analyst meeting, described a future AI-powered surveillance system constantly recording and reporting what citizens do.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on”
During the riots that followed the Southport murders in the UK, which included attacks on hotels housing immigrants, posted "Civil war is inevitable" under a video of the unrest whose poster attributed it to migration and open borders. The Prime Minister's spokesman said there was "no justification" for such comments.
“Civil war is inevitable”
During X's standoff with Brazil's Supreme Court, which had ordered the suspension of accounts linked to supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro, and after Moraes gave X 24 hours on 28 August 2024 to name a new legal representative in Brazil, called Justice Alexandre de Moraes an "evil dictator cosplaying as a judge" and accused him of "trying to destroy democracy in Brazil". After X failed to name a legal representative, Moraes ordered X suspended nationwide on 30 August 2024.
Response: X said it expected to be shut down "simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents".
In an interview with Jordan Peterson released on 22 July 2024, referred to his transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson by her former name, said he had been "tricked" into consenting to puberty blockers, described his child as dead, and said he had vowed to destroy the "woke mind virus".
“My son Xavier is dead, killed by the woke mind virus.”
Response: Wilson told NBC News that Musk had not been tricked and knew what he was doing when he consented to her treatment: "He was not by any means tricked."
Reinstated Donald Trump's Twitch channel during the 2024 presidential campaign. Twitch had indefinitely suspended the channel in January 2021, after the attack on the US Capitol, citing "the ongoing risk of further incitement of violence". The V-Dem Institute describes the Republican Party under Trump as endorsing "a far-right, nationalist, and anti-pluralist agenda".
“there is value in hearing from presidential nominees directly, when possible”
Response: Twitch told TechCrunch it reinstated the channel because there is value in hearing from presidential nominees directly, and that the channel remains subject to its community guidelines.
L'Humanité revealed the "Périclès" plan backed by Stérin: about €150 million over ten years, naming "socialism, wokism, Islamism, immigration" as enemies, aiming to help the Rassemblement National win 300 towns in 2026 and to build a reserve of 1,000 people for government posts ahead of 2027, and claiming a "relationship of trust" with Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen.
Response: Stérin's teams confirmed the plan to Le Journal du Dimanche, describing the document as "un peu daté".
Donated $2.5 million to Right for America, a pro-Donald Trump super PAC, within days of Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in July 2024, after he and Marc Andreessen announced their support for Trump. The donation was disclosed in Federal Election Commission filings reported in October 2024.
“So here we are, and for little tech, we think Donald Trump is actually the right choice.”
Response: In October 2024 Horowitz told his firm he would also make a "significant" donation to Kamala Harris's campaign, without endorsing her policies.
On stage at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference in July 2024, after Peter Thiel sarcastically thanked him for funding lawsuits against Donald Trump because they had turned Trump into a "martyr", replied that he wished he had made Trump "an actual martyr", according to Puck News as reported by The Independent. The remark drew attention after the assassination attempt on Trump on 13 July 2024.
“Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”
Response: In a post on X after the assassination attempt, Hoffman said the remark had been reported out of context, that he meant Trump being held accountable under the rule of law, that he "meant nothing about any sort of physical harm or violence", and that he condemned the attack.
Co-hosted with David Sacks a fundraiser for Donald Trump at Sacks's San Francisco home, a week after Trump's conviction on 34 felony counts. Tickets sold for $50,000, with a $300,000 tier; the sold-out event was expected to raise $12 million.
Response: Palihapitiya did not return CNBC's requests for comment.
Hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump at his San Francisco home, co-hosted with Chamath Palihapitiya, a week after Trump's conviction on 34 felony counts. Tickets sold for $50,000, with a $300,000 tier; the sold-out event was expected to raise $12 million.
Response: Sacks declined to comment to CNBC.
Made several censorship-circumvention Firefox add-ons, including Censor Tracker, Runet Censorship Bypass and two VPN or proxy extensions, unavailable in Russia on its add-on store after persistent removal demands from Russia's censorship agency Roskomnadzor. Mozilla reversed the decision and reinstated the listings on 13 June 2024, the day after The Intercept reported the restrictions.
“After careful consideration, we've temporarily restricted their availability within Russia.”
Response: Announcing the reversal, Mozilla said: "Our initial decision to temporarily restrict these listings was made while we considered the regulatory environment" and the potential risk to its community and staff, and that it would reinstate them "in alignment with our commitment to an open and accessible Internet".
Announced that the X account of Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and antisemite banned from Twitter in July 2021, would be reinstated "provided he does not violate the law".
“It is better to have anti whatever out in the open to be rebutted than grow simmering in the darkness.”
Removed WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China on the order of the Cyberspace Administration of China, which cited national security concerns.
Response: Apple said: "We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree."
A federal judge dismissed X Corp.'s lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit whose reports documented rising hate speech on X and which X blamed for lost advertising. Judge Charles Breyer wrote that the suit was "unabashedly and vociferously about one thing": punishing the nonprofit for its speech.
Response: X said it "disagrees with the court's decision and plans to appeal".
Sandvine, a network equipment maker acquired by Francisco Partners in a 2017 deal, was added by the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security to its Entity List on February 26, 2024, for selling deep packet inspection technology to the Egyptian government, which used it "in mass web-monitoring and censorship to block news as well as target political actors and human rights activists". In 2020 Bloomberg had reported that Sandvine equipment was used in Belarus to block websites during protests over the disputed presidential election, after which Sandvine cancelled its Belarus contract. Francisco Partners told Bloomberg in August 2024 that it no longer owned Sandvine.
Response: In 2020 Sandvine said that "custom code was developed and inserted into Sandvine's products to thwart the free flow of information" in Belarus, called this "a human rights violation" and said it "abhors" the use of technology to suppress information. In September 2024 it announced it would leave 56 non-democratic countries, including Egypt. Access Now reported that Francisco Partners did not respond to its calls to address the Belarus case.
Posted that Democrats do not deport undocumented immigrants because each is a likely future vote, one of repeated posts about Democrats "importing voters". PolitiFact rated the claim False, noting more than 3.6 million removals, returns and expulsions from February 2021 to September 2023 and that immigrants cannot vote in federal elections until they become citizens.
“Dems won't deport, because every illegal is a highly likely vote at some point.”
As CEO of Tumblr owner Automattic, publicly argued with a banned transgender Tumblr user over the moderation decision on Tumblr and other platforms and shared private details of her account, including private account names. The user had been banned after posting that she hoped Mullenweg "dies a forever painful death". The dispute drew community-wide outcry and accusations of transphobia.
Response: Mullenweg said the user was banned for posts threatening violence against Tumblr staff, not for her transition photos, and that trans people on staff were not protesting the decision.
Gave $200,000 in 2024 to committees supporting Donald Trump's re-election; according to the Irish Examiner, Federal Election Commission records show donations to the Trump 47 Committee and the Republican National Committee. In June 2024 he attended the San Francisco fundraiser for Trump hosted by David Sacks and posted a photo of himself with Trump on X.
Through his Périclès project, which he said would invest €20 million a year, supported at least 24 think tanks, associations, media outlets and training institutes in 2024, according to La Lettre as reported by Politis. Politis grouped several beneficiaries as "islamophobes ou sécuritaires" and listed LÉA, an association created to fight "racisme anti-blanc". On 28 May 2026, Périclès director Arnaud Rérolle told a Senate inquiry committee that Périclès had given three to four million euros to associations in each of 2025 and 2026, citing the Observatoire de l'immigration et de la démocratie among the beneficiaries.
Response: Arnaud Rérolle told senators that Périclès defends right-wing ideas "peu représentées dans ce débat public" by legal means and has never received public funding.
Posted on X in late January 2024 a message naming seven San Francisco supervisors that ended with "Die slow motherfuckers", then deleted it. Days later, five of the supervisors he named received mailed threats bearing his face and referencing his post; Supervisor Aaron Peskin said he did not believe the letter he received came from Tan.
“Die slow motherfuckers.”
Response: Tan deleted the post, said it was a reference to a Tupac Shakur song ("I thought everyone would get the rap reference but that wasn't a good call, reference or not – sorry!") and sent the board an apology saying "there is no place, no excuse and no reason for this type of speech and charged language in discourse".
After The Atlantic reported on Substack newsletters with overt Nazi symbols and more than 200 writers asked the company why it was "platforming and monetizing Nazis", co-founder Hamish McKenzie said Substack would not remove or demonetize such publications absent incitement to violence, as the company keeps a cut of their subscription revenue.
“we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.”
Response: In January 2024 Substack removed five publications that Platformer had flagged, saying they broke its existing rule against incitement to violence, while stating it was not changing its content guidelines.
Restored the X account of Infowars host Alex Jones, described by NBC News as a far-right radio host, banned from Twitter in 2018 for abusive behaviour, after a poll he posted showed about 70% of respondents in favour. Jones had repeatedly called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax, and relatives of victims had won nearly $1.5 billion in defamation judgments against him. In November 2022 Musk had said he would not reinstate Jones.
“The people have spoken and so it shall be.”
Response: Musk presented the move as a matter of free speech, writing that it was likely that Community Notes "will respond rapidly to any AJ post that needs correction."
Sued the media watchdog Media Matters for America in federal court in Texas over its research showing ads from major brands next to antisemitic and pro-Nazi content on X, after Musk promised a "thermonuclear lawsuit". X entities later filed similar suits against the group in Ireland and Singapore.
Response: Media Matters called it "a frivolous lawsuit meant to bully X's critics into silence" and said it stands behind its reporting. X says the group built misleading images that did not reflect a typical user's experience.
Replied "You have said the actual truth" to a post accusing Jewish communities of pushing "dialectical hatred against whites". The White House condemned an "abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate".
“You have said the actual truth”
In a Veterans Day speech in Claremont, New Hampshire, vowed to "root out" political opponents he described as living "like vermin" and said the threat from within was greater than that from Russia, China or North Korea, while repeating false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Historians quoted by the Washington Post compared the language to that of Hitler and Mussolini.
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”
Response: Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said those making the comparison were "snowflakes" suffering from "Trump Derangement Syndrome".
Shared a post criticising German NGO sea-rescue operations in the Mediterranean that said it hoped the far-right AfD would win elections "to stop this European suicide", asked whether the German public was aware, and wrote that bringing migrants to Italian soil "has invasion vibes". The German Foreign Ministry replied that the operations were saving lives.
“Is the German public aware of this?”
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Tesla, alleging that since at least May 2015 Black workers at its Fremont factory were routinely subjected to racial slurs, including "monkey", "boy" and the n-word, and to racist graffiti including swastikas, threats and nooses, and that workers who complained faced retaliation.
Response: Tesla did not immediately comment; it has previously said it "is absolutely against any form of discrimination, harassment or unfair treatment of any kind".
After liking a post by an Irish white supremacist calling for X to ban the Anti-Defamation League, after which the #BanTheADL hashtag trended, blamed the ADL for a 60% drop in X's advertising revenue and threatened to sue the Jewish civil rights group for defamation, estimating damages at "roughly $22 billion".
“trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic”
Response: Musk wrote: "I'm pro free speech, but against anti-Semitism of any kind."
In a video interview with the right-leaning site The National Pulse, said undocumented immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country", language CNN notes is often used by white supremacists and nativists. CNN reported on 6 October 2023 that the interview had been published the previous week.
“It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease.”
The US Justice Department sued SpaceX, alleging that from September 2018 to May 2022 it discouraged asylees and refugees from applying and refused to hire or consider them because of their citizenship status, wrongly citing export control laws. Of nearly 10,000 hires in that period, one was an asylee, according to the department. Under the Trump administration, the department moved in February 2025 to dismiss the case with prejudice.
Response: SpaceX denied wrongdoing, saying in a November 2023 filing that export laws impose "strict limitations on who it can employ". Musk wrote that "SpaceX was told repeatedly that hiring anyone who was not a permanent resident" would break the law and called the case "weaponization of the DOJ for political purposes".
Announced that the words "cis" and "cisgender" are considered slurs on Twitter (now X), with repeated targeted use punishable by at least temporary suspension.
“The words "cis" or "cisgender" are considered slurs on this platform.”
After George Soros's fund sold a Tesla stake, compared the Jewish Holocaust survivor and philanthropist to Magneto, a comic-book villain whose backstory involves Nazi persecution, and wrote that Soros "wants to erode the very fabric of civilization" and "hates humanity". Fortune noted that attacks on Soros are often interpreted as antisemitic dog-whistling; Israel's Foreign Ministry said the posts had "anti-Semitic overtones".
“He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.”
Response: Asked about the criticism in a CNBC interview the next day, Musk denied being antisemitic: "I'm a pro-Semite, if anything."
The day before Turkey's presidential election, restricted access in Turkey to four accounts and 409 tweets identified by Turkish court order, including those of a Kurdish businessman critical of President Erdoğan and an investigative journalist.
“In response to legal process and to ensure Twitter remains available to the people of Turkey, we have taken action to restrict access to some content in Turkey today.”
Response: Musk said: "The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?"
Filed a $3.8 billion defamation lawsuit against The Washington Post over a May 2023 article on the company's financing ahead of its merger to go public, calling it an "egregious hit piece" and accusing the paper of a "years-long crusade". In July 2026 a federal judge granted summary judgment to the Post, ruling that Trump Media had "failed to present evidence that would allow a jury to find by clear and convincing evidence" that the Post acted with actual malice.
Response: The Post later corrected the article, stating that discovery had established Trump Media did not pay a $240,000 loan referral fee as originally reported. A Trump Media spokesperson said: "After three years, The Washington Post finally admitted its harmful story was false. We believe a jury should decide whether these falsehoods were actionable and will evaluate whether to appeal last week's ruling in due course."
Labelled NPR's account "state-affiliated media", which its guidelines defined as outlets "where the state exercises control over editorial content", after removing NPR from a line of the policy that had exempted it as a state-financed organisation with editorial independence. NPR said government funding accounts for less than 1% of its annual operating budget. Musk replied "Seems accurate."
Response: NPR's CEO John Lansing called it "unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way".
Removed from its hateful conduct policy the rule, in place since 2018, that prohibited "targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals".
Response: Twitter did not immediately respond to AP's request for comment.
Germany's Federal Constitutional Court ruled unconstitutional the Hesse and Hamburg police laws authorising automated data analysis. In Hesse the analysis platform was Palantir's Gotham software, used by police under the name "HessenDATA".
An internal ByteDance investigation found that employees on a team monitoring staff conduct had accessed the IP addresses and other TikTok data of two journalists, Emily Baker-White (then BuzzFeed, later Forbes) and Cristina Criddle (Financial Times), and of people connected to them, in summer 2022 to try to identify sources of leaks.
Response: ByteDance said all four employees involved were fired, that it had restructured its internal audit and risk team and removed that department's access to US data.
Suspended the accounts of several journalists who cover Musk and the company, including Ryan Mac (New York Times), Donie O'Sullivan (CNN), Drew Harwell (Washington Post) and Micah Lee (The Intercept), after a sudden policy change against sharing real-time location information; the @ElonJet private-jet tracking account had been suspended the day before. On December 17, after a Twitter poll in which about 59% of voters chose immediate restoration, Musk reinstated several of the accounts.
Response: Musk wrote: "Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not".
Posted on Truth Social, repeating the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, that such a fraud allows for the termination of rules and articles "even those found in the Constitution". The White House called attacking the Constitution "anathema to the soul of our nation".
“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
Response: On December 5, 2022, Trump posted that the "Fake News" was trying to convince Americans he wanted to "terminate" the Constitution, calling this "DISINFORMATION & LIES".
Training documents obtained by The Intercept showed that Google was offering the Israeli government, through the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus cloud contract shared with Amazon, AI capabilities including facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking and sentiment analysis.
Response: Google did not respond to The Intercept's request for comment. The documents appeared to be standard training materials distributed to Google Cloud customers.
California's civil rights agency (then DFEH, now the Civil Rights Department) sued Tesla after a roughly three-year investigation, alleging systemic harassment, segregation, pay discrimination and retaliation against Black workers at its Fremont factory, including racial slurs and the factory being called the "plantation". In May 2026 the Alameda County Superior Court denied Tesla's latest attempt to have the case thrown out, and a bench trial before Judge Peter Borkon opened in Oakland on 21 September 2026.
Response: Tesla denies wrongdoing, says it "does not tolerate discrimination" and has fired workers found to have engaged in misconduct; it called the suit politically motivated and accused the agency of using "underground regulations".
Removed Quran Majeed, one of the most popular Quran apps, from its App Store in China following a request from Chinese officials; the BBC understood it was removed for hosting illegal religious texts.
Response: Apple declined to comment and referred to its human rights policy, which states it is "required to comply with local laws".
Does not offer its services to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, while serving all Israeli citizens, including those living in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. On 4 October 2021, some 55 Palestinian, Arab and international groups, including al-Haq, sent an open letter to CEO Dan Schulman asking PayPal to end what they described as discriminatory practices. The digital rights group 7amleh, which leads the #PayPal4Palestine campaign, says the policy "appears to be based on discriminatory grounds of national or ethnic origin rather than location". In May 2023, eleven members of the US Congress wrote to PayPal that it had a responsibility to provide its services "in a non-discriminatory manner".
Response: PayPal has said the Palestinian territories are a "high risk" environment. In 2016 it said: "We hope ultimately to be able to address the risk, compliance, regulatory and resource allocation issues". It did not respond to Al Jazeera or The New Arab in October 2021.
A federal jury in San Francisco found that Owen Diaz, a Black contract worker at its Fremont factory in 2015-2016 whom the jury found to be a joint employee of Tesla and the staffing contractor, had been subjected to a racially hostile workplace, including racial slurs such as the n-word and racist graffiti, and awarded him $136.9 million ($6.9 million compensatory, $130 million punitive). The judge later cut the award to $15 million; Diaz chose a retrial, which ended in a $3.2 million verdict in April 2023, and the parties settled in March 2024.
Response: Tesla's vice president of people, Valerie Capers Workman, wrote that "these facts don't justify the verdict" while acknowledging "in 2015 and 2016 we were not perfect. We're still not perfect".
During Russia's State Duma election, restricted bots associated with election campaigning, citing Russia's "election silence" rule, which disabled the Smart Voting bot of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny's team. Apple and Google had removed the Smart Voting app from their Russian stores the day before; Russian authorities had labelled Navalny's network extremist.
“Мы считаем эту практику легитимной и призываем пользователей Telegram уважать ее.”
Response: Pavel Durov said Telegram was following the precedent set by Apple and Google, which "dictate the rules of the game to developers like us", and warned their removal set a dangerous precedent for free speech.
Removed the Smart Voting app of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny's allies from its Russian App Store as parliamentary elections began, after Russia demanded the removal and said a refusal would be treated as meddling in the election.
Removed the tactical voting app of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny's allies from the Google Play Store in Russia as parliamentary elections began, after Russia demanded the removal and said a refusal would be treated as meddling in the election.
Response: Google issued no formal statement. A person familiar with the decision told CNN that Google blocked the app because of legal demands from Russia's internet regulator and after Russian authorities threatened its local staff with criminal prosecution.
In September 2021 LinkedIn notified several US journalists and writers, including Axios China reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, writer Melissa Chan and author Greg Bruno, that their profiles would no longer be viewable on its localized China platform because they contained "prohibited content". LinkedIn said it adheres to Chinese government regulations for that version and offered to review the profiles' accessibility in China if they were edited. Earlier, in March 2021, Chinese internet regulators had penalised LinkedIn for failing to control political content and it halted new sign-ups in China for 30 days. The Committee to Protect Journalists called for the profiles to be restored.
“We're a global platform that respects the laws that apply to us, including adhering to Chinese government regulations”
Response: On 14 October 2021 LinkedIn announced it would close its localized social network in China, citing "a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China", and replace it with a jobs-only app, InJobs.
Suspended the built-in VPN of its browsers for users in Russia on 17 June 2021, the day Russia's censorship agency Roskomnadzor announced it was restricting access to Opera VPN and VyprVPN as tools for bypassing blocks on prohibited content. An Opera spokesperson told TASS the company had suspended VPN support in its browsers on Russian territory in the form previously offered. Opera has been controlled by the Chinese company Kunlun Tech since 2016.
“We decided to suspend support for VPN services in our browsers on the Russian territory in the form it was provided earlier.”
Response: Opera described the move as a "preventive step" and said it continued to protect Russian users with tracking protection and DNS over HTTPS, adding that it was "ready for an open dialog on user security in the Internet".
ByteDance's main Chinese subsidiary, Beijing ByteDance Technology, which runs Douyin and Toutiao, sold a 1% stake to a unit of the state-backed China Internet Investment Fund and gave the government investor a board seat, a transaction reported in August 2021.
IPVM, in a report produced in collaboration with The New York Times, found that Alibaba Cloud's content-security API documentation listed detection of whether a face is Uyghur ("是否是维族") and whether a person is an ethnic minority among its facial-recognition attributes. Alibaba Cloud removed these mentions from its website after being contacted.
“是否是少数民族（维族）。”
Response: Alibaba said: "We are dismayed to learn that Alibaba Cloud developed a facial recognition technology in a testing environment that included ethnicity as an algorithm attribute for tagging video imagery. We never intended our technology to be used for and will not permit it to be used for targeting specific ethnic groups, and we have eliminated any ethnic tag in our product offering. This trial technology was not deployed by any customer."
Took part in a 14 November 2020 phone call focused on strategies for contesting Donald Trump's 2020 election defeat, alongside Senator Lindsey Graham, Fox News host Sean Hannity and Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow, according to an email from True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht revealed in May 2022 in a court filing by Fair Fight in its lawsuit against True the Vote, first reported by The Washington Post. The email said the participants asked for a preliminary report "to be used to rally their troops internally".
Response: The account rests on a single email written by a third party; Ellison has not commented on the call. An Oracle spokeswoman did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment.
A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that TikTok restricted ("shadow-banned") LGBTQ-related hashtags in several languages, including "gay" in Arabic, Russian, Estonian and Bosnian, "I am gay" and "I am lesbian" in Russian, and "transgender" in Arabic. TikTok acknowledged restricting some LGBT hashtags in some countries as part of its "localised" moderation.
Response: TikTok said some terms were partially restricted due to local laws, others because they were mainly used to search for pornographic content, and that some English phrases and some compound phrases in Arabic had been moderated by mistake; it denied practising censorship.
During the protests that followed Belarus's August 2020 presidential election, A1 Belarus, the Belarusian subsidiary of A1 Telekom Austria Group, throttled its subscribers' mobile internet on the authorities' orders, the last ordered throttling taking place in November 2020. CEO Thomas Arnoldner wrote in an open letter that A1 had been made to reduce internet speeds on some days at specified locations, and that it complied because the authorities could otherwise cut off the internet nationwide. The Open Society Justice Initiative filed an OECD complaint against the group in March 2022. A1 Digital, part of the group, has held a majority stake in Exoscale since 2017.
“Wir haben dies auch vor dem Hintergrund gemacht, weil die Behörden in Belarus technisch die Möglichkeit außerhalb unseres Netzes haben, bei Nichteinhaltung der Anordnungen das gesamte Internet im gesamten Land nicht nur zu drosseln, sondern zu unterbinden.”
Response: A1 says the throttling was ordered by the Belarusian state, which controls the national internet gateway and could otherwise shut down all internet access, and that the deep packet inspection software A1 Belarus used served commercial network optimisation and was not accessible to the authorities.
US Customs and Border Protection accepted in August 2020 a proposal to use Google Cloud to support the AI work of its innovation team, which was developing a "virtual" border wall of surveillance towers and drones with Anduril, according to contract documents reported by The Intercept.
Response: Google declined to comment on the contract.
Won a US Customs and Border Protection indefinite-delivery contract for AI-powered autonomous surveillance towers along the US border, receiving $25 million in July and $36 million in September 2020, with CBP planning 200 towers by 2022. The system autonomously identifies people crossing the border and sends push alerts to border agents.
After the Chinese government demanded that Zoom terminate meetings commemorating the June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown and their host accounts, Zoom ended three of the four meetings and suspended or terminated host accounts (one in Hong Kong, four in the US), including actions affecting Hong Kong activist Lee Cheuk-yan and US-based dissidents Wang Dan and Zhou Fengsuo. It also gave Chinese authorities a limited amount of data on China-based attendees.
Response: Zoom acknowledged two mistakes, reinstated all the host accounts and said it "will not allow requests from the Chinese government to impact anyone outside of mainland China."
Agreed to significantly increase restrictions on "anti-state" posts for users in Vietnam after state-owned telecoms throttled Facebook for about seven weeks, according to Reuters sources.
Response: Facebook confirmed it had reluctantly complied with the government's request to restrict access to content it deemed illegal.
As CEO of Zoho, accepted to be chief guest at "Resurgent Bharath", an event organised by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in Chennai on 2 February 2020. Al Jazeera describes the RSS as "the ideological fountainhead of the Hindu far right". Faced with criticism and calls to boycott Zoho, he refused to withdraw, while the Accenture executive listed as guest of honour said he had never agreed to attend. The reports do not confirm whether Vembu attended the event.
“If you dislike which events I attend, please do what your conscience dictates and I will do what mine dictates.”
Was one of the private lenders, according to Le Monde and BFMTV, behind about €1.8 million in personal loans that financed Rassemblement National campaigns in the 2020 municipal elections in Marseille, Nice and Lyon and the 2021 regional elections in PACA, Normandy, Occitanie and Centre-Val de Loire; beneficiaries included Stéphane Ravier, Philippe Vardon and Thierry Mariani. A preliminary investigation by the Marseille prosecutor, stemming from facts that emerged in a procedure opened in Alençon on 18 January 2021 and later extended to money laundering and the illegal exercise of the banking profession, examines how the loans were granted; Stérin was questioned as a suspect on 11 June 2024 and has not been charged.
Response: Stérin confirmed he was questioned, said the loans were "effectués à titre personnel" and declared, and that he "n'a jamais participé, directement ou indirectement, à un quelconque financement illégal de campagne".
Removed HKmap.live, a crowdsourced map of police positions used during the Hong Kong anti-government protests, from the App Store, a day after the Chinese Communist Party newspaper People's Daily attacked Apple over the app.
Response: Apple said the app "has been used to target and ambush police" and "threaten public safety". Tim Cook told employees Apple had received "credible information" that it was being "used maliciously". The app's developers said there was "0 evidence" to support the accusation that the app had been used to target and ambush police.
GitHub CEO Nat Friedman told staff in a leaked internal email that the company would renew its $200,000 GitHub Enterprise Server licence with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), despite employee objections to the agency's immigration policies; employees later resigned after the renewal, according to CNBC.
Response: Friedman wrote that GitHub had no agreement to provide professional services to ICE and "has no visibility into how this software is being used", and announced a $500,000 donation to immigration nonprofits.
Leaked TikTok moderation guidelines revealed by the Guardian instructed moderators to censor videos mentioning Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence or the banned religious group Falun Gong, which the Guardian described as ByteDance advancing Chinese foreign policy aims abroad through the app.
Response: ByteDance said the version of the guidelines seen by the Guardian was retired in May 2019, that the old guidelines took "a blunt approach" and were outdated, and that current guidelines do not reference specific countries or issues.
Disabled ratings, comments and reviews for Xi Jinping's book "The Governance of China" on its Chinese site, Amazon.cn, around 2019 in response to an edict from Beijing triggered by reviews below five stars, according to a December 2021 Reuters investigation.
Response: Amazon said it "complies with all applicable laws and regulations, wherever we operate, and China is no exception".
Francisco Partners owned NSO Group, the Israeli maker of the Pegasus spyware sold to governments, from its 2014 acquisition until it sold the company to its founders and Novalpina Capital in February 2019. On November 1, 2018, the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab sent Francisco Partners an open letter on the continued misuse of Pegasus, citing its findings of likely Pegasus infections in 45 countries and its high-confidence assessment that the phone of Saudi activist Omar Abdulaziz, a collaborator of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, had been infected by an operator probably linked to the Saudi government. The letter said an earlier letter of May 29, 2018 remained unanswered.
Response: According to Citizen Lab, Francisco Partners had written on February 20, 2018 that it was "very much willing to engage in a constructive dialogue with Citizen Lab".
The Intercept revealed, from leaked documents, that Google was developing "Dragonfly", a censored search engine for China that would blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion and peaceful protest. Work on the project was reported to have effectively ended in December 2018 after internal opposition.
Response: CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress in December 2018 that "right now" there were no plans to launch the search engine.
Amazon Web Services sales staff pitched the Rekognition facial recognition service to ICE's Homeland Security Investigations unit at a June 2018 meeting, according to emails obtained by the Project on Government Oversight. An AWS employee wrote that the company was "ready and willing to support the vital HSI mission".
Response: AWS said Rekognition was discussed at technology "boot camps" and that it followed up with interested customers, ICE being one of them. ICE said it had no contract to buy Rekognition.
Public records released by the ACLU showed Amazon marketing its Rekognition facial recognition service to police and helping deploy it: the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon built an app to check images against about 300,000 booking photos, and Orlando police piloted real-time detection of "persons of interest" from city cameras.
Response: Amazon said it "requires that customers comply with the law and be responsible when they use" its services.
After China's media regulator ordered ByteDance's joke-sharing app Neihan Duanzi permanently shut down, published an open letter of apology saying, in TechNode's translation, the app's content went against "core socialist values" and that the company had not done a thorough job "guiding public opinion", accepting the penalty and pledging to grow its content review team from 6,000 to 10,000 staff.
The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab reported that deep packet inspection middleboxes on Türk Telekom's network, which it matched to PacketLogic devices made by Sandvine (formerly Procera Networks), were used to redirect users in Turkey and Syria who tried to download legitimate Windows programs to spyware, first FinFisher and then spyware similar to StrongPity, and that similar devices at a Telecom Egypt demarcation point redirected users to affiliate ads and cryptocurrency mining scripts. At the time Sandvine was owned by Francisco Partners, which had combined it with Procera in 2017. The Associated Press reported that some targets may have been affiliated with the Kurdish YPG.
Response: Sandvine called the allegations "technically inaccurate and intentionally misleading", said in a letter to Citizen Lab that PacketLogic "is not capable of any form of payload injection, malicious or not", and said it could not finish its own inquiry without Citizen Lab's full findings. Türk Telekom said it complies with Turkish law and does not redirect users to malicious downloads.
Added US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as a customer in March 2018, under a contract providing recruiting and communications tools. In June 2018, after more than 650 employees signed a letter asking the company to reconsider the contract because of family separations at the border, CEO Marc Benioff declined to end it in a memo to staff, saying the company's software was not involved in the agency's border policy.
Response: Benioff wrote in the memo: "I'm opposed to separating children from their families at the border. It is immoral." Salesforce pledged $1 million to organisations helping affected families.
The Verge revealed that since 2012 Palantir had provided software to a New Orleans police program, set up as a philanthropic partnership outside public procurement, that traced people's ties to gang members, outlined criminal histories, analysed social media and predicted the likelihood that individuals would commit violence or become victims. Key city council members were unaware of it. In March 2018 the mayor's office said it would not renew the pro bono contract.
Emails obtained by WNYC under FOIA showed that ICE agents preparing the January 2018 raids on nearly a hundred 7-Eleven stores were told to use Palantir's FALCON mobile app, which searches databases including immigration histories and family relationships, and that Palantir staff supported agents ahead of operations.
Response: Palantir declined WNYC's requests for comment.
Promoted in a January 2018 blog post its Azure Government cloud work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), saying it met the standards to handle ICE's "most sensitive unclassified data" and let employees "utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification". The section was briefly deleted and then restored in June 2018, as the family separation policy at the border drew criticism.
Response: Microsoft said an employee had briefly deleted the section by mistake after seeing social media commentary. It said it was "dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border" and that it did not believe ICE was using its services for anything to do with separating families.
Removed Al Jazeera's Discover Publisher Channel from Snapchat in Saudi Arabia after the Saudi government said the channel violated local laws, during the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based.
“We make an effort to comply with local laws in the countries where we operate.”
Response: Al Jazeera's acting Director-General Mostefa Souag said: "We find Snapchat's action to be alarming and worrying."
Removed VPN apps used to bypass China's internet censorship, including ExpressVPN, from its App Store in China after the government required VPN providers to hold a state licence.
Response: Apple said: "We have been required to remove some VPN apps in China that do not meet the new regulations. These apps remain available in all other markets where they do business."
ProPublica reported that Cloudflare provided its services to neo-Nazi sites such as The Daily Stormer and, under its abuse-reporting process, forwarded the names and email addresses of people who complained about their content to the sites' operators, which led to harassment campaigns against complainants. CEO Matthew Prince had written that service providers have no "affirmative obligation" to monitor content on their network.
Response: In response to ProPublica, Cloudflare said it would change its abuse reporting system so people could complain more safely. On August 16, 2017, it announced it had terminated The Daily Stormer's service.
Homeland Security documents obtained through FOIA litigation showed that Palantir software was central to a 2017 ICE operation targeting the parents and relatives who sponsored unaccompanied migrant children. ICE told The Intercept the operation led to 443 arrests, including 35 criminal arrests.
Response: Palantir had previously stated: "We do not work for E.R.O." (ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations). Palantir did not immediately comment on the documents.
Government documents reported by The Intercept showed that ICE was deploying Investigative Case Management (ICM), a system built by Palantir under a $41 million contract awarded in 2014, which lets agents search data from multiple federal and private law enforcement sources to identify targets and build cases. The documents described ICM as "mission critical" to ICE.
After receiving more than 10,000 emails, tweets and messages urging Shopify to drop the online store of Breitbart News, CEO Tobias Lütke published a blog post defending the decision to keep hosting it on free-speech grounds. Fortune described Breitbart as a far-right website; TechCrunch described it as a right-wing publication that regularly publishes racist and sexist headlines and content.
“We don't like Breitbart, but products are speech and we are pro free speech”
Response: Lütke argued that applying a moral lens to which stores operate on Shopify would amount to censorship, calling commerce "a powerful, underestimated form of expression"; a spokesperson said Shopify is a "neutral platform".
Donated $100,000 to Donald Trump's 2017 inaugural committee through Wings of Time LLC, a company managed by an entity of which Luckey is the sole officer, according to inaugural committee filings and California corporate records reviewed by Mother Jones.
Response: Luckey and his attorney did not respond to Mother Jones's requests for comment.
Hosted a dinner party on 29 July 2016 attended by white nationalist Kevin DeAnna while backing Donald Trump's campaign, and emailed him the next day, according to emails obtained by BuzzFeed News.
“really enjoyed meeting you last night”
Response: Thiel did not respond to BuzzFeed News's request for comment.
Acknowledged to The New York Times that he had secretly financed, with about $10 million, Hulk Hogan's privacy lawsuit against the news site Gawker, as part of a years-long plan to fund lawsuits against the company. A Florida jury had awarded Hogan $140 million in damages against Gawker.
“It's less about revenge and more about specific deterrence”
Response: Thiel said: "It's precisely because I respect journalists that I do not believe they are endangered by fighting back against Gawker."
At Naspers's centenary celebration in Cape Town, Esmaré Weideman, CEO of its print arm Media24, acknowledged the group's complicity in apartheid and asked for forgiveness, citing Conrad Sidego, the first reporter of colour at its newspaper Die Burger, who was not allowed to use the company's bathroom. Naspers had not made a submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's media hearings in the 1990s.
“We acknowledge complicity in a morally indefensible political regime”
Response: The statement was itself the company's apology. Critics, including a piece first published by Quartz, called it late and incomplete.
After Russia's media regulator Roskomnadzor asked Hetzner to get the Ukrainian news site Glavcom.ua to remove an article about a planned march for the federalisation of Siberia, a Hetzner employee asked Glavcom by email to delete the information and warned that the site could be suspended if it did not comply within 24 hours, citing Hetzner's terms of service. Reporters Without Borders Germany said the article did not breach Hetzner's terms or any law. Glavcom moved its site to Ukrainian servers.
Response: Hetzner's request cited its own terms and conditions, not the Russian complaint. On August 10, 2014, Hetzner apologised to Glavcom, denied that any censorship had been planned and said its technical support team had taken a wrong decision that it regretted.
Wrote in the essay "The Education of a Libertarian" that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible.
“Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
In the essay "The Education of a Libertarian", cited the extension of the vote to women, together with the growth of welfare beneficiaries, as having turned "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron.
“Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron.”
Response: In a later clarification appended to the essay, Thiel wrote: "It would be absurd to suggest that women's votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don't think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better."
On November 28, 2008, Vittorio de Filippis, former publication director of the French daily Libération, was arrested at his home at about 6:40 a.m. on a warrant from a Paris investigating judge, searched, and brought before the judge, who placed him under formal investigation for public defamation of a private individual. The case stemmed from a defamation complaint filed by Xavier Niel, founder of Free, over content published on Libération's website in 2006 about his conviction that year: Le Monde, Le Monde Informatique and Index on Censorship identify it as a reader's comment, while Reporters Without Borders refers to articles by journalist Renaud Lecadre. Niel and Free had filed several other defamation complaints against Libération over its coverage. According to Le Monde Informatique, citing Libération, they lost the cases tried in 2008 and were ordered to pay the newspaper damages for abusive proceedings; Index on Censorship wrote that Niel had already brought and lost four lawsuits against the newspaper. In May 2009, Univers Freebox reported that the appeal court upheld the acquittals and ordered Free to pay 6,000 euros in damages for abusive complaints. Reporters Without Borders condemned the methods used against de Filippis.
Donated $1,000 in support of California Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure banning same-sex marriage. The donation became public in 2012 and led to his resignation as Mozilla CEO in April 2014, less than two weeks after his appointment was announced.
Response: In 2012 Eich confirmed the donation, said Mozilla had nothing to do with it and declined to discuss Proposition 8. He stepped down as Mozilla CEO and from the Mozilla Foundation board on April 3, 2014.