Snoop Dogg reveals his ‘love’ for Donald Trump after previous feud
Rapper Snoop Dogg‘s bark is apparently bigger than his bite when it comes to Donald Trump. The hip hop superstar has openly expressed his affection for the former U.S. president after a fiery war of words years ago.
“Donald Trump? He ain’t done nothing wrong to me,” he revealed to The Sunday Times. “He has done only great things for me. He pardoned Michael Harris.”
Death Row Records co-founder Michael “Harry-O” Harris’ grant of clemency was among the twice-impeached president’s 140-plus commutations and pardons issued on one of his last days in The White House.
Harris, who was convicted in 1988 of the attempted murder of a Cook County, Illinois Department of Corrections police officer , served 30 years of a 25-to-life sentence before his sentence was commuted.
“I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump,” Snoop told the U.K. outlet.
One of the biggest acts to come out of the now-defunct record label, the 16-time Grammy nominee chummed it up with the real estate tycoon during his reality TV heyday.
The “Gin & Juice” lyricist appeared on a 2007 episode of the NBC series and later joined other boldfaced names for a Comedy Central Roast special in 2011, where he jokingly encouraged Trump to run for president .
But there was a major change of heart when Trump rose to power in the Republican party. Openly denouncing Trump’s polarizing views, Snoop pointed a gun at a clown character named Ronald Klump (played by actor Michael Rappaport ) in the 2017 music video for the song “Lavender (Nightfall Remix).”
The MAGA leader took to Twitter to respond to the viral clip: “Can you imagine what the outcry would be if (Snoop Dogg), failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama? Jail time!”
Months later, Snoop kept the same energy with the release of “(Make America Crip Again). The album’s titled track featured the lines: “The president says he wants to make America great again. F–k that s–t, we going to make America Crip again… don’t you look strange having all that power but you won’t make change.”
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Elon Musk's social media platform X has blocked some searches for Taylor Swift as pornographic deepfake images of the singer have circulated online.
Attempts to search for her name without quote marks on the site Monday resulted in an error message and a prompt for users to retry their search, which added, “Don’t fret — it’s not your fault.”
However, putting quote marks around her name allowed posts to appear that mentioned her name.
Sexually explicit and abusive fake images of Swift began circulating widely last week on X, making her the most famous victim of a scourge that tech platforms and anti-abuse groups have struggled to fix.
“This is a temporary action and done with an abundance of caution as we prioritize safety on this issue,” Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X, said in a statement.
Unlike more conventional doctored images that have troubled celebrities in the past, the Swift images appear to have been created using an artificial intelligence image-generator that can instantly create new images from a written prompt.
After the images began spreading online, the singer's devoted fanbase of “Swifties” quickly mobilized, launching a counteroffensive on X and a #ProtectTaylorSwift hashtag to flood it with more positive images of the pop star. Some said they were reporting accounts that were sharing the deepfakes.
The deepfake-detecting group Reality Defender said it tracked a deluge of nonconsensual pornographic material depicting Swift, particularly on X, formerly known as Twitter. Some images also made their way to Meta-owned Facebook and other social media platforms.
The researchers found at least a couple dozen unique AI-generated images. The most widely shared were football-related, showing a painted or bloodied Swift that objectified her and in some cases inflicted violent harm on her deepfake persona.
The Swift images first emerged from an ongoing campaign that began last year on fringe platforms to produce sexually explicit AI-generated images of celebrity women, said Ben Decker, founder of the threat intelligence group Memetica. One of the Swift images that went viral last week appeared online as early as Jan. 6, he said.
Most commercial AI image-generators have safeguards to prevent abuse, but commenters on anonymous message boards discussed tactics for how to circumvent the moderation, especially on Microsoft Designer’s text-to-image tool, Decker said.
Microsoft said in a statement Monday that it is "continuing to investigate these images and have strengthened our existing safety systems to further prevent our services from being misused to help generate images like them.”
Decker said “it’s part of a longstanding, adversarial relationship between trolls and platforms."
“As long as platforms exist, trolls are going to try to disrupt them," he said. "And as long as trolls exist, platforms are going to be disrupted. So the question really becomes, how many more times is this going to happen before there is any serious change?”
X’s move to reduce searches of Swift is likely a stopgap measure.
“When you’re not sure where everything is and you can’t guarantee that everything has been taken down, the simplest thing you can do is limit people’s ability to search for it,” he said.
Researchers have said the number of explicit deepfakes have grown in the past few years, as the technology used to produce such images has become more accessible and easier to use.
In 2019, a report released by the AI firm DeepTrace Labs showed these images were overwhelmingly weaponized against women. Most of the victims, it said, were Hollywood actors and South Korean K-pop singers.
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Actor Erin Moriarty announced on Instagram that she’s stepping away from the app — but before she goes, she is using the site to correct an accusation by ex-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly that she had undergone plastic surgery.
Moriarty, who stars in Prime Video’s award-winning series “The Boys,” fired back at Kelly in a lengthy typed-out post shared on Friday.
“There’s no excuse for these horrific allegations, the verbal abuse that I have had to delete, and genuinely false information that is being used to perpetuate a message that is exhibitionist feminism,” she wrote.
The post was in response to Kelly taking aim at Moriarty during a conversation on a Jan. 17 episode of her “Megyn Kelly Show” podcast. Kelly cited Moriarty as an example of a young person choosing plastic surgery as a way to improve their looks.
“More and more young women are doing this,” Kelly said. “It’s not about an objection to plastic surgery. It’s about an obsession with turning yourself into this fake version of yourself.… I find it like a sign of mental illness. I really want to get in the heads of these young girls and say, ‘Please don’t do this.’”
Kelly showed two separate photos of Moriarty in an attempt to highlight the differences in her appearance at different times as evidence of serious surgery.
Moriarty claimed that one picture Kelly used was from approximately a decade ago, before she was of legal drinking age, despite Kelly saying it was from just a year ago.
“How utterly misinformed, inaccurate, and clickbait seeing people who we follow and consider to be informed is appalling,” the actor added.
“You don’t have to believe me when I say that these videos are absolutely false. But the way that this has been spoken about, the way that I have been spoken to, I will not accept,” she said. “This is becoming harassment. This is becoming false news.”
Moriarty said she is now leaving Instagram and social media in general, and that the only reason she hasn’t deactivated her account is because she wants people to see her statement.
“Otherwise, consider it deactivated. I will not have access to it for an extensive, if not permanent, break,” she added.
From combined wire services
