Last week, OpenAI released Sora 2, the latest version of its AI video creator, along with a new Sora app for making and sharing those videos. The new tool has led to an explosion in realistic AI videos on social media, including plenty of fresh discussion about intellectual property rights. But one of the oddest things to emerge with Sora 2 is a new crop of videos showing AI protesters.
These aren’t just any protest videos. Specifically, supporters of President Donald Trump appear to be making videos of protesters being brutalized by the federal agents and troops who have been sent to U.S. cities. Trump has most recently tried to deploy National Guard troops to Portland and Chicago, and while those deployments have been delayed by the courts, those cities are still crawling with ICE agents terrorizing immigrant communities.
One of the new fake protester videos, which has over 40 million views on Instagram, shows someone clad in black shouting in the face of a soldier dressed in fatigues.
“What’s your name, soldier?” the AI protester yells repeatedly. The text on the screen reads “wait for it” before the AI soldier sprays the protester with orange pepper spray, yelling back “Sergeant Pepper.”
The video has been shared on several platforms, including TikTok and X, where many people don’t seem to understand it’s AI. The actor James Woods, a Trump supporter who frequently shares right-wing memes on X, wrote on Tuesday about the video, “Couldn’t get better than this. Haiku-level brilliant.” Many of the comments seem to be just as oblivious to the fact that it’s AI.
Another video that’s become popular on Facebook, Instagram, and X shows AI protesters shouting “no queso, no cheese,” apparently a racist riff on the common protest chant “no justice, no peace.” The AI protesters in the video are also sprayed with a chemical agent.
The video has gotten over 1.5 million views on X alone, with the caption, “Lmfao, that was beautiful and before you ask I voted 100 for this!!”
The phrase “I voted for this” has become a common thing for far-right supporters of Trump to say when something particularly brutal has happened to their political opponents.
Lmfao, that was beautiful and before you ask I voted 💯 for this!! pic.twitter.com/O6VLFZnw3i
— 🇺🇸Steve2A🇺🇸God🇺🇸Family🇺🇸Country🇺🇸 (@lakemonstercl1) October 7, 2025
The Instagram version of the video includes the caption “Liberals acting like clowns – got treated like clowns by federal agents – goodbye – FAFO,” an acronym for “fuck around and find out.” Some users on Instagram have pointed out that it’s AI, but the account insists in the comments that it’s real.
It’s not real, obviously. And the big Sora watermark should be the clue to anyone who’s familiar with OpenAI. But unfortunately, that kind of watermark isn’t enough for most people these days to differentiate between fake and real content.
The shorter Sora videos are also being compiled into larger compilations of AI-generated fakes, like in this one on X that includes jokes about the protesters being paid. It’s a common right-wing accusation that all the people protesting Donald Trump are actually paid to be there, often by liberal activists like George Soros.
The most curious thing about all of these fake protester videos is that there are plenty of real videos to share. For example, a pastor in Chicago was shot in the head with pepper balls by agents last month. Rev. David Black was protesting outside an ICE facility near Chicago, Illinois, and was simply speaking peacefully when he was attacked.
Another one of several videos showing protesters getting brutalized while doing nothing wrong was recently captured in Portland. A woman is seen simply talking with police before she’s sprayed for absolutely no discernible reason.
Unbelievable. Outside the Portland ICE facility, a man and a woman were standing and talking to a pair of cops with shields when one of them draws his pepper spray and unloads it into her face. She was still crying out in pain several minutes later and had to be taken away to get… pic.twitter.com/2j2CVdO5rC
— Dispatches and drama from Seattle protest scene (@bennetthaselton) October 3, 2025
But real videos of a pastor or a woman getting treated with unnecessary violence don’t really fit the narrative that President Trump and his fascist goons are trying to sell. Trump has claimed the reason he’s sending agents and troops to U.S. cities is that they’re overrun with crime. And he just wants to restore law and order.
In reality, violent crime is near a 50-year low, and Trump is simply trying to strike fear into the hearts of ordinary Americans as his thugs disrupt countless lives. That disruption is having an economic impact, as restaurants in Chicago are comparing the loss of business to the start of the covid-19 pandemic.
Perhaps that’s why we’re seeing so many fake videos of protests on social media right now. They need a pretext to justify their brutal crackdown on working people. Trump himself seems to have been convinced to deploy the National Guard to Oregon because he saw too many old videos of Portland from the summer of 2020 on TV. And when it comes to Trump, he’s pretty easy to fool.
Trump has even shared an AI video of himself promoting a magical “med bed” that can cure all diseases. The president’s Truth Social account deleted the video, but it’s still not clear why he shared the conspiracy theory in the first place. It’s entirely possible he thought it was real. We simply don’t know.
Remember when the president saw a photoshopped image of the letters “MS-13” on someone’s hand back in April and insisted it was real?
Trump is not a smart man. And his followers are even dumber, as they spread AI slop far and wide, creating an alternative reality where sadistic troops dole out punishment to the left on American streets. Unfortunately, you don’t need AI to see so much brutality right now. And if Trump has his way, you’re going to see a lot more of it very soon.
Source link
#Fake #Protest #Videos #Latest #Slop #Viral #MAGA #World
![EON wants to move the data superhighway from ocean fiber to space lasers | TechCrunch
As hyperscalers build out data centers around the world, they need to move the bits back and forth, and that often relies on a somewhat brittle network of undersea fiberoptic cables crisscrossing the oceans.
Those cables are tricky to access and repair, much less install. But alternatives aren’t easy to find: Radio transmissions don’t have the bandwidth, which rules out most wireless approaches on the ground or in orbit. But now, maybe lasers could do the job.
Endeavor Optical Networks, a start-up founded in May and emerging from stealth today with .75 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, is betting on that plan. The co-founders, CEO Charlie Horowitz and CTO Tyler Presser, aim to launch a network of laser-equipped spacecraft to link data centers from orbit.
Most satellite communications networks, even those that provide broadband internet service, aren’t robust enough to carry data at 200 terabits a second or more, the speed of undersea fiber.
However, more powerful satellites and advances in optical technology are making space-to-ground communications with lasers more feasible. NASA used laser comms to beam back data from its most recent Moon mission, while a handful of private space companies, including York, Kepler, and Cailabs, have demonstrated links between Earth orbit and the ground.
Those connections, however, aimed for a throughput of 2.5 Gbps, and EON has a bigger starting goal, Horowitz says: Throughput of 2.4 terabits a second. That will require some secret sauce to deal with one of the biggest problems with laser comms—how the signal is distorted by the atmosphere as it passes through it, particularly when clouds are blocking the way.
EON intends to build a network of about 20 satellites, each able to provide a dedicated link between two continents, with the initial fleet providing 24 hour coverage for early customers. The company will carefully choose ground stations in different regions to serve local data centers and CDNs, using redundant sites and leveraging weather data to ensure a reliable link.
The startup is talking to hyperscalers and AI labs as customers, since they move more data than anyone else, with the focus on underserved or expensive routes: Lengthy ones, like France to Australia, or those without extensive existing infrastructure, like crossing between Africa and South America. They plan to sell dedicated capacity to entice customers interested in full control of their data transit.
First, though, EON will use its seed round to build out an optics lab, hire more engineers, and perform ground tests ahead of a demo satellite they hope to launch around the end of 2027. Horowitz expects that spacecraft to offer the highest optical downlink throughput yet seen—at least 800 gigs and perhaps a terabit.
Doing that will require careful engineering. EON will focus on producing the optical communications terminal, carefully allocating spending to the components that must be exquisite, like the gimbals that will point the laser. The company plans to buy powerful off-the-shelf satellite busses, like those made by Apex Space, Horowitz’s previous employer.
Horowitz served as Apex CEO Ian Cinnamon’s chief of staff and then as the company’s director of special projects. “Charlie is a force of nature—he can move seamlessly from strategy to the details required to make something real,” Cinnamon told TechCrunch. “Charlie is the ideal founder, and I invested personally because I believe deeply in Charlie and what he’s building at EON with Tyler.”
In addition to Pressler, a PhD astronautical engineer who has planned frontier missions for NASA, the company’s technical bench includes Michael David Francois, a long-time Google executive focused on global network infrastructure, and Wesley Baxter, an optics engineer who most recently worked on Amazon’s LEO satellite network.
Jeannette zu Fürstenburg, the General Catalyst partner who led the investment, said she sees it uniting the fund’s two key themes—AI and resilience.
“I don’t worry about demand,” she told TechCrunch. “I think all of that will solve for itself. It’s really all about can you actually get this thing into space in the time that we discussed? We really think about founder-product fit, [Horowitz] is just the right caliber of guy to go after a problem like this.”
They aren’t the only one chasing this problem—Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, has announced plans for TeraWave, a 5,048 satellite network that aims to provide speeds of up to 6 Tbps to large-scale users. Blue’s plan is more ambitious, but will also require more time to launch and deploy. EON’s smaller fleet of satellites should be easier to get into space quickly, but they will need to solve many of the same technical challenges.
“Data centers have high standards for quality and redundancy,” points out Caleb Henry, the director of research at Quilty Space. “Satellite internet is just now progressing from a technology of last resort to dependable, high-bandwidth infrastructure. That’s not to say it will be impossible to make satellites optimized for data center connectivity, just that it will be harder and take longer than most entrepreneurs suggest.”Still, a project like may be more practical compared to the popular idea of building the data centers themselves in space.
“We have one rule at the company: no physics problems,” Horowitz says. “There’s a market that exists today that we can go serve. Down the road, we’ll go and take on more as it comes, but we know that this is a problem that exists today, that’s only getting worse. That’s our bet—more data is moving terrestrially than ever.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#EON #move #data #superhighway #ocean #fiber #space #lasers #TechCrunchExclusive](https://i3.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/EON-Co-Founders_Horizontal_Philip-Cheung.jpg?resize=1200%2C898&ssl=1 "EON wants to move the data superhighway from ocean fiber to space lasers | TechCrunch
As hyperscalers build out data centers around the world, they need to move the bits back and forth, and that often relies on a somewhat brittle network of undersea fiberoptic cables crisscrossing the oceans.
Those cables are tricky to access and repair, much less install. But alternatives aren’t easy to find: Radio transmissions don’t have the bandwidth, which rules out most wireless approaches on the ground or in orbit. But now, maybe lasers could do the job.
Endeavor Optical Networks, a start-up founded in May and emerging from stealth today with .75 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, is betting on that plan. The co-founders, CEO Charlie Horowitz and CTO Tyler Presser, aim to launch a network of laser-equipped spacecraft to link data centers from orbit.
Most satellite communications networks, even those that provide broadband internet service, aren’t robust enough to carry data at 200 terabits a second or more, the speed of undersea fiber.
However, more powerful satellites and advances in optical technology are making space-to-ground communications with lasers more feasible. NASA used laser comms to beam back data from its most recent Moon mission, while a handful of private space companies, including York, Kepler, and Cailabs, have demonstrated links between Earth orbit and the ground.
Those connections, however, aimed for a throughput of 2.5 Gbps, and EON has a bigger starting goal, Horowitz says: Throughput of 2.4 terabits a second. That will require some secret sauce to deal with one of the biggest problems with laser comms—how the signal is distorted by the atmosphere as it passes through it, particularly when clouds are blocking the way.
EON intends to build a network of about 20 satellites, each able to provide a dedicated link between two continents, with the initial fleet providing 24 hour coverage for early customers. The company will carefully choose ground stations in different regions to serve local data centers and CDNs, using redundant sites and leveraging weather data to ensure a reliable link.
The startup is talking to hyperscalers and AI labs as customers, since they move more data than anyone else, with the focus on underserved or expensive routes: Lengthy ones, like France to Australia, or those without extensive existing infrastructure, like crossing between Africa and South America. They plan to sell dedicated capacity to entice customers interested in full control of their data transit.
First, though, EON will use its seed round to build out an optics lab, hire more engineers, and perform ground tests ahead of a demo satellite they hope to launch around the end of 2027. Horowitz expects that spacecraft to offer the highest optical downlink throughput yet seen—at least 800 gigs and perhaps a terabit.
Doing that will require careful engineering. EON will focus on producing the optical communications terminal, carefully allocating spending to the components that must be exquisite, like the gimbals that will point the laser. The company plans to buy powerful off-the-shelf satellite busses, like those made by Apex Space, Horowitz’s previous employer.
Horowitz served as Apex CEO Ian Cinnamon’s chief of staff and then as the company’s director of special projects. “Charlie is a force of nature—he can move seamlessly from strategy to the details required to make something real,” Cinnamon told TechCrunch. “Charlie is the ideal founder, and I invested personally because I believe deeply in Charlie and what he’s building at EON with Tyler.”
In addition to Pressler, a PhD astronautical engineer who has planned frontier missions for NASA, the company’s technical bench includes Michael David Francois, a long-time Google executive focused on global network infrastructure, and Wesley Baxter, an optics engineer who most recently worked on Amazon’s LEO satellite network.
Jeannette zu Fürstenburg, the General Catalyst partner who led the investment, said she sees it uniting the fund’s two key themes—AI and resilience.
“I don’t worry about demand,” she told TechCrunch. “I think all of that will solve for itself. It’s really all about can you actually get this thing into space in the time that we discussed? We really think about founder-product fit, [Horowitz] is just the right caliber of guy to go after a problem like this.”
They aren’t the only one chasing this problem—Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, has announced plans for TeraWave, a 5,048 satellite network that aims to provide speeds of up to 6 Tbps to large-scale users. Blue’s plan is more ambitious, but will also require more time to launch and deploy. EON’s smaller fleet of satellites should be easier to get into space quickly, but they will need to solve many of the same technical challenges.
“Data centers have high standards for quality and redundancy,” points out Caleb Henry, the director of research at Quilty Space. “Satellite internet is just now progressing from a technology of last resort to dependable, high-bandwidth infrastructure. That’s not to say it will be impossible to make satellites optimized for data center connectivity, just that it will be harder and take longer than most entrepreneurs suggest.”Still, a project like may be more practical compared to the popular idea of building the data centers themselves in space.
“We have one rule at the company: no physics problems,” Horowitz says. “There’s a market that exists today that we can go serve. Down the road, we’ll go and take on more as it comes, but we know that this is a problem that exists today, that’s only getting worse. That’s our bet—more data is moving terrestrially than ever.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#EON #move #data #superhighway #ocean #fiber #space #lasers #TechCrunchExclusive")
Post Comment