A more buttoned-up version of Garbage Day

I recently gave a talk to pro-democracy group, who wanted to know why the left is still struggling to embrace the internet the same way the right has. And I told them what Garbage Day readers already know. I talked about Zohran Mamdani's video-based campaign in New York, the Gen Z Discord revolution in Nepal, how political debate now happens through diffuse networks run by influencers, fueled by attention and dark money. And it was apparent that even those who do understand that we're in a new world still don’t understand how to navigate that new world.

So today Garbage Day is officially launching a new service, Garbage Day Media Intelligence, or GDMI, to help campaigns, advocacy organizations, and companies fully understand the corners of the internet that matter most to their mission. GDMI comes out of the work Garbage Day’s head of research, Adam Bumas, has been doing since 2023. When Adam first joined, I had the crazy idea of “mapping out the whole internet.” I wasn’t sure if it was possible or if anyone would want to read it, but I was fielding a lot of emails at the time from readers saying some variation of, “Garbage Day is good, but I want to show it to my boss and it’s way too online.” So I figured a more buttoned-up, more analytical version of Garbage Day might work and Adam was willing to take the risk and come on board.

To run this project, I've brought on my long-time friend and colleague J. Lester Feder. Lester is an award-winning investigative reporter and communications strategist who has worked at outlets such as Politico and BuzzFeed News, covered health policy in the White House, and has experience with congressional campaigns and advocacy campaigns on the national and international levels. And we already have some projects in the works.

We’ll be helping a progressive group map the social media landscape of a state with a major Senate race next year. And we’ve added the excellent newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist to our client list, where we’re guiding them through the thorny world of Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, Instagram and TikTok every month.

If you want to work with us you can email GDMI Director J. Lester Feder at [email protected].

We’ve been publishing Garbage Intelligence since May 2023 and while we might never truly measure the entire internet, we’re getting pretty close. We have almost three years worth of data on the top posts across almost every platform that exists — Reddit, Bluesky, YouTube, Patreon, and even Facebook, courtesy of our very gracious partner Newswhip. And Adam’s research has become the backbone of all the takes you read in the newsletter and hear in our podcast Panic World. I think it elevates us from just another newsletter running on vibes and baseless predictions about tech and culture.

It’s how we know about Catholic Fundamentalism, the single-largest publisher on Facebook in 2020s, larger than the BBC or The New York Times, even though it’s just a blog run by a retiree from Pittsburgh. It’s why we didn’t fall for the mass panic over TikTokers stanning Osama bin Laden, because we actually know what the most viral content on TikTok is every month. It’s how we spotted Stanley Cups nine months earlier than the rest of the media. And it’s how we know that AI-generated YouTube channels are overtaking MrBeast on Youtube, even as the platform claims they’re demonetizing AI content.

Our first big client was Sherwood News, where we’ve been syndicating our research for the last two years. And thanks to their initial support, we’ve been able to grow big enough to bring on a team of researchers to help us, freelance investigative journalist Ellie Hall and The Trend Report’s Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick.

Ellie’s work with Your Local Epidemiologist has been instrumental in helping us grow what we do. Based on her time reporting on ISIS, she’s been using a “spiderweb” technique to digitally embed in the wellness world, building sprawling lists of influencers to track what they’re sharing every week. Which we then measure against Adam’s treasure trove of data.

And just to give you a sense of how interconnected the world of culture and politics is now, thanks to the platforms we use to navigate the web. Ellie told me that recently the algorithms for her MAHA Instagram and TikTok accounts switched to hardcore white nationalism and she had to retrain them to focus on wellness content again. It only took one or two likes of MAHA posts complaining about people using EBT cards/food stamps to buy unhealthy food to trigger a flood of videos of people in red hats attacking welfare queens and AI-generated videos depicting Black women looting stores. It took over 100 engagements with wellness and “alternative health” posts to deprogram it.

This is how the world works now and it’s confusing and bewildering, but making sense of it is not impossible and we can help. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, email GDMI Director J. Lester Feder at [email protected]. We can’t wait to explore the internet with you.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email us at [email protected] and let’s talk. Thanks!

Some people don’t care about the vibes of their 9-5. And that’s fine. That’s good! Screw the system! Etc etc. Some of us, though, say we don’t really care while getting dangerously close to unmuting to yell: “ANYONE ELSE NOTICE THAT THIS SUCKS?”

If you’re stomping around the office (mandated) while no one else is even there, wanting to high-pitch scream whenever the Teams ringtone blares before you grit your teeth and pick up with a seething “hiiiii.” If you’re ignoring the “use LLMs!” corporate plea as an act of rebellion.

Then you belong with the rest of us on The World’s Best Newsletter. In our corner of the internet, everyone believes that work could be better. Which is what we write about, for free, every two weeks.

NTA. Could be good.

—by Ellie Hall

TikTok user Nikalie Monroe has been calling up religious institutions across the country (including some famous megachurches with high-profile members) and presenting herself as the mother of a 2-month-old baby in desperate need of formula, sometimes calling with a recording of a crying baby in the background. To be clear — because a false narrative is beginning to circulate amongst church defenders — she’s not asking for money to buy formula, she’s specifically asking for a can of formula so that she can feed her baby. 

She’s been doing this for almost two weeks now and her results have been, frankly, shocking. As of yesterday, out of 44 religious organizations that have been contacted, 11 have said yes and 33 have said no. Most of the no’s have been from Protestant Christian churches (including Charlie Kirk’s church); notable yes’s include a mosque (whose imam jumped to help), a Buddhist temple, two traditionally Black Baptist churches, and a tiny church in Appalachia whose pastor asked what “flavor” of formula she needed and planned to deliver it himself.

Organizations that wanted to help Monroe are being flooded with donations (the Appalachian church has received $90,000 so far) and 5-star Google reviews. The churches that said no are being swarmed with criticism on social media, leading many organizations and leaders to post defensive memos about their refusals.

The visible impact of this social experiment is absolutely bonkers, and I’d encourage people to scroll down through the comments on Monroe’s TikToks to get a sense of how this one woman is single-handedly changing the minds of millions of people about religion, the importance of government-provided food assistance, and, perhaps most importantly, the tax-free status of religious organizations.

The big question is how long TikTok will allow this to happen. As we’ve written before, the platform has seemingly been trying to stay out of the national conversation since the not-quite-a-ban went into place in January. And now they’re the epicenter of some pretty nuclear national discourse.

There’s no delicate way to put this: The big new meme on X right now is photoshopping Charlie Kirk’s face into photos and deepfaking it into videos. The meme started spreading after a man who did, honestly, look a lot like Kirk was photographed last week eating at a Chick-Fil-A. Before that, there was a super racist “Kirk Terminator” account going around.

The main account pumping out Kirk edits on X right now is @chilldude74, who is going very very viral putting Kirk’s face on rappers and black athletes. Dissecting exactly how racist this all is is a little tricky, but it’s happening on X, so it’s safe to assume there’s a dimension of it at play here.

Because this is 2025 and everything is incredibly embarrassing and awful all the time, we’ll have to wait and see if official Trump-affiliated X accounts like the Department of Homeland Security or The White House engage with the meme in any way. They seem to understand that they have to acknowledge popular trends on X to assert dominance over their right-wing troll army, but they also need to keep milking Kirk’s sacred martyr status. A complicated position to be in.

Coca-Cola released a new hideous AI-generated Christmas ad that everyone hates. I could go on and on about all the weird inconsistencies in the ad, but I assume you already have a decent sense of how bad it might look. This, also, isn’t Coke’s first experiment with AI. Although, their first ad featuring AI-generated content, back in 2023 was kind of novel, blending Stable Diffusion-style imagery into an ad feature actual human actors and physical sets.

Funnily enough, a recent commenter underneath the YouTube upload of the 2023 wrote about the differences between the two ads: “The difference between this and the recent ad is this has purpose and direction, with a clear passion behind it. The AI was simply a tool in the repertoire of artists alongside conventional methods to help the process along… Coca-Cola ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

And it seems like they are because Coke released a behind-the-scenes video that shows a bunch of fake artists doing fake tweaks to the AI-generated footage. It also says that the team was only five people, which isn’t true. It took a staff of nearly 100 people to make the video.

While we’re talking about AI video, the mega-popular TikTok account Basin Creek Retirement, which featured interview videos of seniors in a care home, was revealed to be completely AI-generated and its engagement has totally cratered.

Sydney Sweeney just had one of the worst box office weekends ever. Her new movie Christy made barely over $1 million, making it one of the worst-performing films of all time to be released in more than 2,000 theaters. There are probably a whole bunch of reasons people didn’t show up to watch Sweeney in a boxing movie. But her box office loss comes amid another round of culture war nonsense surrounding her.

Sweeney did an interview with GQ last week, which wasn’t exactly what the right-wing echo chamber is making it out to be, but, for what it’s worth, the top comment on YouTube reads, “This felt more like a meeting with HR than an actual interview.” If you’ve only seen right-wingers talk about the interview, you’d think that Sweeney gave a fiery defense of white Christian values or something, when really she just said she didn’t feel like talking about the American Eagle ad from the summer. And a screenshot of GQ interviewer Katherine Stoeffel has now become shorthand for an annoying wokescold among X edgelords. To the point where Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen was posting it during a feud with the pope over the weekend. Even Fox News is talking about it.

Sweeney’s box office bomb and refusal to address her new white nationalist fans feels even more notable when you place it next to the huge debut of Predator: Badlands this weekend, which critic Richard Lawson succinctly summed up as, “This Predator is queer and we should say it.” A take that has not been well-received on X.

All of this is to say that the right wants to be the prism through which you understand what is and isn’t popular. But they’re often wrong and if, say, you were someone they were circling, like Sweeney, hypothetically, and, again, hypothetically, you didn’t like that, you could very easily ignore them or tell them to fuck off. Which Sweeney has not done for some reason.

P.S. here’s the soap ghost.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***