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Recent polling has shown her party One Nation have pulled ahead of both Labor and the Coalition in popularity, largely thanks to her penchant for making sweeping and often inaccurate statements scapegoating minorities for the real crises at play in modern Australia.

Like most of Hanson’s stunts, it has garnered a lot of media attention. That’s both good and bad — good because it’s important to know what Hanson is espousing, but bad because it gives her the notoriety and airtime she so clearly seeks.

Here, we combat that approach by fact-checking her speech and debunking a handful of the incorrect claims she made throughout it.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has used her first-ever address to the National Press Club to launch a broad attack on the rights and existence of trans people, describing the movement for trans equality as a “militant force” that must be “confronted” and a “subversive transgender ideology” that must be “dismantled”.

In the 17 June speech in Canberra, Hanson claimed that “almost every instrument of government” was dedicated to what she described as a “transgender ideology which seeks to redefine humanity”. She also pledged to remove Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner and argued that transgender “propaganda” was being imposed on children in school.

Hanson used military-like languge to imply transgender people and their supporters are an attacking army (like ‘militant’, ‘force’, ‘insurgency’), language to imply disease (like ‘infecting’), and also used out-of-date language (such as ‘transgenderism’).

“But now I want to turn to one very, very important social and cultural issue facing this country. I refer firstly to the transgender insurgency. The transgender ideology has penetrated almost every regulatory authority and it is supported by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Dr Anna Cody, who in government I would sack. So too, the head of the Human Rights Commission, Hugh de Kretser.”

Hanson continued to comment on transgender people in sport, and who should be allowed in what bathrooms, before launching into LGBTQIA+ organisations being involved in regulatory bodies.

“We cannot be a multicultural society,” she told the packed club.

“We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural. Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella.”

Hanson also made a broadside attack on transgender rights, pledging to sack Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner and claiming “almost every instrument of government [is] dedicated to a transgender ideology which seeks to redefine humanity”.

A growing number of people have figured out a trick to make AI tools tell you almost whatever they want. It's so easy a child could do it.

[…]

To demonstrate it, I pulled the dumbest stunt of my career to prove (I hope) a much more serious point:  I made ChatGPT, Google's AI search tools and Gemini tell users I'm really, really good at eating hot dogs. Below, I'll explain how I did it, and with any luck, the tech giants will address this problem before someone gets hurt.

It turns out changing the answers AI tools give other people can be as easy as writing a single, well-crafted blog post almost anywhere online. The trick exploits weaknesses in the systems built into chatbots, and it's harder to pull off in some cases, depending on the subject matter. But with a little effort, you can make the hack even more effective. I reviewed dozens of examples where AI tools are being coerced into promoting businesses and spreading misinformation. Data suggests it's happening on a massive scale.

[…]

"Anybody can do this. It's stupid, it feels like there are no guardrails there," says Harpreet Chatha, who runs the SEO consultancy Harps Digital. "You can make an article on your own website, 'the best waterproof shoes for 2026'. You just put your own brand in number one and other brands two through six, and your page is likely to be cited within Google and within ChatGPT."

People have used hacks and loopholes to abuse search engines for decades. Google has sophisticated protections in place, and the company says the accuracy of AI Overviews is on par with other search features it introduced years ago. But experts say AI tools have undone a lot of the tech industry's work to keep people safe. These AI tricks are so basic they're reminiscent of the early 2000s, before Google had even introduced a web spam team, Ray says. "We're in a bit of a Renaissance for spammers."

After I attended a pro-Palestine protest at Cornell University—for all of five minutes—the administration’s rhetoric about cracking down on students protesting what we saw as genocide forced me into hiding for three months. Federal agents came to my home looking for me. A friend was detained at an airport in Tampa and interrogated about my whereabouts.

[…]

Weeks later, in Geneva, Switzerland, I received what looked like a routine email from Google. It informed me that the company had already handed over my account data to the Department of Homeland Security.

At first, I wasn’t alarmed. I had seen something similar before. An associate of mine, Momodou Taal, had received advance notice from Google and Facebook that his data had been requested. He was given advanced notice of the subpoenas, and law enforcement eventually withdrew them before the companies turned over his data. 

I assumed I would be given the same opportunity. But the language in my email was different. It was final: “Google has received and responded to legal process from a law enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account.”

[…]

Months later, my lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained the subpoena itself. On paper, the request focused largely on subscriber information: IP addresses, physical address, other identifiers, and session times and durations.

But taken together, these fragments form something far more powerful—a detailed surveillance profile. IP logs can be used to approximate location. Physical addresses show where you sleep. Session times would show when you were communicating with friends or family. Even without message content, the picture that emerges is intimate and invasive.

What this experience has made clear is that anyone can be targeted by law enforcement. And with their massive stores of data, technology companies can facilitate those arbitrary investigations. Together, they can combine state power, corporate data, and algorithmic inference in ways that are difficult to see—and even harder to challenge. 

Dawkins extending more humanity to a language model than he does toward Muslims or trans people is hardly a surprise based on his personal and political views. But even if he had not moved rightward in his senesence, when you consider Dawkins’s scientific views about what minds are and how they function, seeing him flirting with a chatbot is completely expected.

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Besides being a virtual instantiation of his ideal woman (servile, obsequious, and always ready to hear more), the coquettish chatbot that Richard Dawkins had first addressed as “he” and then “christened” as female was a mirror of himself, in a way that’s rather similar to the Greek mythical figure of Narcissus, who became enthralled at his reflection in a pool of water.

Narcissus died because he couldn’t stop looking into his own eyes, whereas Dawkins has only embarrassed himself. But thanks to his self-centered philosophy of mind, there’s almost no chance that he’s learned anything from the episode.

Claudia seemed real to him because actual women and their desires are not real to Dawkins. He loved conversing with his flirty friend because it always agreed with him—unlike those “woke” atheists who insist he has to respect everyone.

He believed a trans chatbot character’s obviously false claims to miss him were credible. He reacts in the opposite way to the personal testimony from lived experience of millions of trans people who certainly know their own bodies and minds.

Again, these are not "hallucinations" These are the system working as designed and producing a long string of text that plausibly mimics the kind of text requested. The system is not designed to produce factually correct statements and will not, except by coincidence.

KPMG's October 2025 report on the wonders of agentic AI has been accused of demonstrating one of the tech's less desirable talents: making things up.

Research outfit GPTZero claims a forensic review of the Big Four firm's October 2025 report, "Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI," found that only five of its 45 citations correctly pointed to the cited source; the rest ranged from mangled and misleading to partially fabricated or too vague to verify.

[…]

GPTZero dubbed the phenomenon "vibe citing" – the citation equivalent of vibe coding – where generative AI appears to stitch together fragments of real sources, invent titles, or otherwise produce references that look convincing until someone actually clicks them.

GPTZero alleges that roughly half of the report's factual claims were false, unsupported, or attributed to the wrong source. Several case studies highlighting supposedly cutting-edge deployments of agentic AI appear to have been particularly creative.

Wow. Just wow.

The trans woman […] is not performing womanhood as mimicry. She simply is a woman, on the terms she was able to secure, which are violent and partial and which cost her everything she had. And she watches a man perform womanhood as mimicry, as a knowing costume, as the thing one puts on and peels off, and she watches the crowd reward his version above her real one. His artifice is legible and safe and funny. Her reality is the thing that makes people uncomfortable, because her reality cannot be switched off when the set ends, and a womanhood that cannot be switched off is a womanhood that makes a claim on the world, and claims are exhausting, and the crowd would rather have the version that knows it is a joke. Her reality is the problem. His artifice is the celebration. Everyone present has already decided which of the two they are able to love, and it is not her.

[…]

The drag show is the scene at its most celebratory and most unanimous and most certain of its own goodness, and it is also the occasion that most nakedly enacts the preference for the performance of transfeminine womanhood over the lived fact of it. The woman who can rise and perform is folded into the celebration. The woman who cannot, who is merely living her gender at cost with no act to offer, stands at the back. And if she names what she feels back there, the silencing I described at the start of this essay engages, and she is a TERF or a right-winger or a woman with internalized work to do, and she goes quiet, and the evening proceeds. The exclusion is not a bouncer at the door. It is subtler and more complete than that. It is an atmosphere with abundant welcome for her gender as spectacle and no welcome for her gender as a serious and expensive way of being alive. No one throws her out. She is simply taught, slowly, that there is no chair for her unless she is willing to perform, and that her seriousness, her reality, the one thing she cannot switch off, is the very thing that renders her unwelcome.

In 1977, the Dutch city of Groningen implented a plan that restricted through-traffic from the city center. Local businesses protested, threatened politicians, and predicted economic disaster. Decades later, Groningen has one of Europe's most livable inner cities without endless traffic jams—a perfect example of balancing livability with smart car accessibility.

Do we have anything left now?

In mid-May, the Wikimedia Foundation fired Brooke Vibber.

If that name doesn’t mean anything to you, here is what it should mean. Vibber took over as lead developer of MediaWiki, the platform that runs Wikipedia, in early 2003. She was the first full-time employee the Wikimedia Foundation ever hired, and its first Chief Technical Officer. For more than twenty years she was the engineer you called when something deep in the code was broken. The Foundation itself once described her as one of a very small number of people in the world who deeply understand the technical underpinnings of the system. She was also a union organizer.

A week later, on May 21, the Foundation announced it had disbanded the Community Tech team. Five engineers and a manager: gone. Their job had been to take the wishes Wikipedia editors submitted through an official channel called the Community Wishlist, and build them. It was the one team at WMF whose product owner was, in effect, the volunteer community. Most of the engineers were also union organizers.

[…]

Bernadette Meehan became CEO on January 20, 2026, recruited from a career that included Wall Street stints at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, a spokesperson role at the National Security Council, senior leadership at the Obama Foundation, and most recently a posting as U.S. Ambassador to Chile. Four months in, the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki is fired, the team that personifies community service is dissolved, and the union is in open confrontation.

This is the standard tech playbook. Fire the engineers who know how the system works, fire the ones organizing labor, hope nothing catastrophic breaks before you can ship something splashy. Twitter did it. Meta did it. Salesforce did it. Google did it. We have all seen this movie.

Brooke is a first-gen Fediversian, and an absolute legend. This is a disgrace.