#immigration + #politics

An average of 9,000 refugees were admitted monthly between January 2024 to January 2025. From February to December 2025, there were 1,226 total admissions, 1,059 of whom were from South Africa.

It's quite disappointing that these policies - especially the H1B tax, which brings the best and brightest in the world to the US - all target legal immigrants.

Video from bystanders showed that Pretti had not attacked officers, as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said immediately after the shooting. Critics raised further complaints after Noem and Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller both called Pretti a domestic terrorist before an investigation had concluded.

Although this is just an anecdote, I think it happens very widely. Maybe not always as sinister, but certainly far from innocent. Basically we see that these online companies are now paid by engagements (i.e. views, clicks, comments, shares). So they create algorithms that show content to people who are estimated to have higher engagement with content. Why not? People engage with content they like right? And we didn't tell the algorithm to prioritize anything bad - in fact we may even bias the algorithm away from obviously bad content.

Even simple statistical algorithms are very good at predicting what someone is likely to engage with given a modest set of examples from their past online engagements. The more advanced machine learning and AI-based algorithms we have today are unbelievably good at it. The reality is that us humans cannot actually understand how or why these algorithms are prioritizing content, we just know that it generates more engagement. We also don't know what content it will see and how it will react to new types of content.

The companies also tell "creators" that create posts/videos that generate engagement they can make money. People have realized what types of posts and videos get more engagement and they've found that things that make people angry or envious generates more engagement and more money. They figure, it it was against the rules, content moderation or the algorithm won't show it (exactly what the person in this article said). Yet, none of that happens and hate spreads.

Politicians are using the same tactics. They've realized that content that makes people angry or envious will generate engagement with them - and that leads to them being "popular" and ultimately winning elections.

So what can we do? Most of all we should make sure that we're aware that the content online and spoken by politicians is at least in part if not mostly to "engage" us. Remember that what we read and what they say is often meant to provoke us into some response. The wise old saying from my grandmother of Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see, seems more appropriate than ever.

Why not boycott social media? I think it's harder than it seems. Public companies that we are all invested in share key information on twitter. News sites that are the foundation of an "informed electorate", link to twitter in most articles. Governmental leaders around the world share policy updates on twitter - and twitter requires you to sign-in and share information about yourself in order to see it - so even remaining anonymous isn't an option. Are you going to stop going to YouTube - is there any other video site left? What about Linkedin - who also has a content algorithm that the most popular people work hard to understand and get noticed. So while it sounds nice to just obstain, I think it's less realistic than it seems.

Last summer, the man says, he found himself sitting in his car, analysing trends on TikTok. His day job was conducting viewings for an estate agency but he was trying to come up with an idea for a viral video account that could be run as a money-making side-hustle.

“I was thinking of unique videos I can do for people,” he says on the tape.

That’s when he had a brainwave: “Hate brings views.”

At that time protests outside asylum hotels were spreading across the country. The man says he noticed “far-right people” were among the most engaged on TikTok. They were easy to rile up: “They hate such videos of illegal migrants. I was like, why not?”

He added an AI-generated voiceover about asylum seekers, rapists, and illegal immigrants then pressed upload. The audience response was instant and enormous, and TikTok’s algorithm responded by pushing it into the feeds of hundreds of thousands of people. Irate Londoners drove up engagement by complaining they couldn’t afford such properties while illegal immigrants were supposedly getting them for free.

“It wasn’t racist,” the man says of his account. He argues that if the videos had really been racist, TikTok’s algorithm would have downgraded the content. Instead, he was rewarded with millions of views. He was just an entrepreneur following a simple content strategy: “Every single video I would basically copy paste the same thing. I wrote down ‘illegal migrants’.”

Despite fostering online hatred, the man recorded by Wasserstrum insists he doesn’t personally share the views expressed on his TikTok account. Instead, he suggests his fake anti-migrant house tour videos were just a way to game the algorithm, build an audience, and hopefully make money.

”I didn’t do anything because of hate,” he says on the tape. “I didn’t care. It’s just I wanted the clicks.”

Privacy in general matters because you never know how your data might be used even if you’re a good guy.

On Thursday, a Skagit County Superior Court judge ruled that pictures taken by Flock cameras in the cities of Sedro-Woolley and Stanwood qualify as public records, and therefore must be released as required by the state's Public Records Act, court records show.

Flock's cameras, also called automated license plate readers, continuously and indiscriminately capture time- and location-stamped photos of any passing vehicles. Those images are then stored, and information about the vehicles, including their condition, make, model and license plate number, is added to a searchable database controlled by the customer.

Last week's Skagit County ruling could oblige the dozens of Washington police agencies which use Flock cameras, ostensibly to help them find stolen vehicles, crime suspects and missing people, to release the photos and data they collect — an outcome privacy advocates warned was possible.

The ruling also exacerbated concerns about potential misuse of Flock data, which swelled after University of Washington researchers released a report Oct. 21 showing federal immigration agencies like ICE and Border Patrol had accessed the data of at least 18 Washington cities, often without their police departments' knowing. The report raised concerns that the agencies might be using the data to target and arrest immigrants as part of Trump's immigration crackdown.