There Are No Girls on the Internet

In this week's News Roundup, Bridget and Producer Mike cover the tech news stories you might have missed. TRIGGER WARNING - one story discusses disturbing sexual assaults.
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Reese Witherspoon thinks women should embrace AI more. The comments were not kind. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXKphAtkbgW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
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Gisèle Pelicot's story of being drugged and raped by her husband and other men for a decade captured headlines. A new CNN investigation reveals a large ecosystem of men helping each other commit similar crimes around the world with something like an "online rape academy." https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2026/03/world/expose-rape-assault-online-vis-intl/index.html
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Lauren Sanchez Besos is a cultural force, revolutionizing the way Americans live, and inspiring everyone with her embrace of joy and her perfect marriage to Jeff Bezos. Right? RIGHT?! (wrong) https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/business/lauren-sanchez-bezos-jeff-bezos.html?unlocked_article_code=1.blA.i7qg.dQZ7G1_RUIcF&smid=url-share [gift link]
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Workers at surveillance company Flock inexplicably accessed cameras in a gymnasium and pool, prompting the city of Dunwoody, Georgia, to delay their contract renewal after a citizen's open records request revealed anomolies in the logs. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/06/flock-cameras-privacy-concerns
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Why Are Flock Employees Watching Our Children? https://jasonhunyar.substack.com/p/why-are-flock-employees-watching-720
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Women in northern Nigeria have been writing steamy romance books for decades. They are fighting morality censorship by innovating new models of distribution and monetization on WhatsApp. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/article/love-is-universal-but-nigerias-romance-lit-market-is-one-of-a-kind and https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/world/africa/nigeria-erotica-writers-censors.html
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Let us know what you think by emailing [email protected] or leaving a comment on Spotify.
Anti-Occupy Wall Street Champagne Toast Later Today? https://gothamist.com/news/anti-occupy-wall-street-champagne-toast-later-today
Rich people watching Occupy protestor: https://www.threads.com/@yungbooks/post/DEEOKfUOXkA
Pre-order Bridget's forthcoming audiobook about AI and intimate relationships at LoveAtFirstPrompt.com !
Follow Bridget and TANGOTI on social media! || instagram.com/bridgetmarieindc/ || tiktok.com/@bridgetmarieindc || youtube.com/@ThereAreNoGirlsOnTheInternet || bsky.app/profile/tangoti.bsky.social
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Fake AI-generated Black women are flooding your social media feeds, performing self-hatred, pushing porn sites and drop shipping scams, and raking in cash for anonymous creators who'll never be held accountable.
Jeremy Carrasco, the internet's go-to AI debunker, breaks down who's behind it, why platforms keep looking the other way, and why one Black student researcher's testimony made him want to do something about it.
AI Blackface: Profiting on racist depictions at scale: https://www.riddance.ai/p/ai-blackface-profiting-on-racist
AI videos of sexualised black women removed from TikTok after BBC investigation: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c070e283k8vo
Bridget explains the evolution of digital Blackface from its antebellum roots in this Youtube video: https://youtu.be/yh-2il78AEA
Digital rapper FN Meka and the new era of digital Blackface: https://omny.fm/shows/there-are-no-girls-on-the-internet/digital-rapper-fn-meka-and-the-new-era-of-digital
Let us know what you think by emailing [email protected] or leaving a comment on Spotify.
Pre-order Bridget's forthcoming audiobook about AI and intimate relationships at LoveAtFirstPrompt.com !
Follow Bridget and TANGOTI on social media! || instagram.com/bridgetmarieindc/ || tiktok.com/@bridgetmarieindc || youtube.com/@ThereAreNoGirlsOnTheInternet || bsky.app/profile/tangoti.bsky.social
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this week's News Roundup, Bridget and Producer Mike cover the tech news stories you might have missed.
Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In is fighting the gender gap in AI adoption, but raising questions about its own leadership. https://www.fastcompany.com/91521751/sheryl-sandbergs-lean-in-is-fighting-the-gender-gap-in-ai-adoption
Gen Z Goes to the Movies! The new Zendaya film 'The Drama' is a smash hit. Younger Audiences Are Driving Box Office Sales, Study Shows
https://variety.com/2026/film/box-office/gen-z-driving-box-office-1236703551/
The FBI was able to recover deleted Signal messages from a user's phone because they were stored in his notification history. Check your Signal settings now to stay safe "Settings > Notification > Store" https://www.404media.co/fbi-extracts-suspects-deleted-signal-messages-saved-in-iphone-notification-database-2/
She Was in Labor at a Florida Hospital. Then She Was in Zoom Court for Refusing a C-Section. https://www.propublica.org/article/florida-court-hearing-c-section
BBC breached editorial standards over BAFTAs racial slur but no big deal, BBC investigation finds. https://news.sky.com/story/bbc-breached-editorial-standards-over-baftas-racial-slur-investigation-finds-13529270
Ohio creep becomes first to be convicted under new Take-It-Down law for sexually explicit images:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/08/ohio-man-convicted-ai-sexually-explicit-images
Instagram reportedly deletes Bellesa sex toy shop account for using the word 'clitoris': https://mashable.com/article/instagram-deletes-bellesa-shop-account-with-700000-followers

‘This Is Not Me’: Inside the AI Scams Driving Musicians Crazy: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/ai-scams-musicians-streaming-services-spotify-1235535753/
Let us know what you think about these stories by emailing [email protected] or leaving a comment on Spotify.
Pre-order Bridget's forthcoming audiobook about AI and intimate relationships at LoveAtFirstPrompt.com !
Follow Bridget and TANGOTI on social media! || instagram.com/bridgetmarieindc/ || tiktok.com/@bridgetmarieindc || youtube.com/@ThereAreNoGirlsOnTheInternet || bsky.app/profile/tangoti.bsky.social
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You've probably heard about author Mia Ballard. Her debut novel "Shy Girl" has been at the center of a controversy about whether she used AI to help write it. After a New York Times article, her publisher dropped her book. She's since deleted most of her social accounts and gone dark.
This story is much bigger than whether one writer did or didn't use AI. It's about the question of who gets to set the standard in AI and creative work? And more importantly who gets protected, and who gets sacrificed to it?
Subscribe to Drey's excellent substack for sharp reporting and open source investigative journalism into tech and power: https://thedreydossier.substack.com
Read / Watch Drey’s reporting on Shy Girl: https://thedreydossier.substack.com/p/the-shy-girl-ai-scandal-is-way-worse
Follow Drey on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok: @thedreydossier
Read more about the limitations of AI-detection software, and why many of the country's most respected universities have banned it. https://timrequarth.substack.com/p/why-you-shouldnt-trust-ai-detector
Read Thad’s blog post called Shy Girl: The Background to the New York Times Story: https://thefutureofpublishing.com/2026/03/shy-girl-the-background-to-the-new-york-times-story/
Bridget’s SMNTY ep about ShyGirl: What the Shy Girl Conversation Says About AI and Art: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-mom-never-told-you-21123631/episode/what-the-shy-girl-conversation-says-about-ai-and-art-328745937

Let us know what you think by emailing [email protected] or leaving a comment on Spotify.
Follow Bridget and TANGOTI on social media! || instagram.com/bridgetmarieindc/ || tiktok.com/@bridgetmarieindc || youtube.com/@ThereAreNoGirlsOnTheInternet || bsky.app/profile/tangoti.bsky.social

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Publishing is having a trust crisis. With AI accusations swirling around authors like Mia Ballard, whose novel Shy Girl was dropped by her publisher despite her denying any AI use, questions about authenticity in publishing have never felt more urgent. But this kind of chaos isn't new. We saw it coming.
We're revisiting one of our wildest deep dives: the Cait Corrain Goodreads scandal. Corrain had a highly anticipated debut novel, Crown of Starlight, coming out in 2024 — until she admitted to using fake Goodreads accounts to review bomb other writers' forthcoming books. Most of her targets were Black or queer authors. Corrain is white.
The story has a lot of twists and turns, including a fabricated conversation with a completely made-up person that Corrain invented to take the fall.
Canadian author Xiran Jay Zhao was the first to bring it to wider attention, noticing that Crown of Starlight was getting glowing reviews from the same accounts trashing other books — some of which weren't even out yet. Zhao also compiled a 31-page Google document of screenshots and receipts: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1__mO1uqIqcmupBAPKwXDzlUbZIwtY6fKf0S1Y0SNz0E/edit?tab=t.0
Let us know what you think by emailing [email protected] or leaving a comment on Spotify.
Pre-order our forthcoming audiobook about AI and intimate relationships at LoveAtFirstPrompt.com !
Follow Bridget and TANGOTI on social media! || instagram.com/bridgetmarieindc/ || tiktok.com/@bridgetmarieindc || youtube.com/@ThereAreNoGirlsOnTheInternet || bsky.app/profile/tangoti.bsky.social
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.