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Siding With Trump, Facebook Suspends Chicago Community Group Issuing ICE Alerts
"This is the same company that had policies allowing for chatbots to have 'sensual' conversations with kids, but discussing local law enforcement among neighbors is a bridge too far, huh?"
Oct 15, 2025
Chicago residents in recent weeks have found numerous ways to resist the Trump administration's deployment of hundreds of federal agents in its increasingly violent "Operation Midway Blitz" anti-immigration campaign—with thousands of people marching to demand armed officers leave the city, some physically intervening in arrests, and community members volunteering to patrol their neighborhoods to warn the public when agents are nearby.
But the alliance between Big Tech and the Trump administration on Tuesday interfered with efforts by more than 80,000 Chicagoland residents to show solidarity with immigrants and people of color, as Facebook suspended a community group where people have been tipping off their neighbors when they see US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents in public areas.
Days after far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who has gained considerable influence in the White House despite holding no formal government position, spoke out against a group called ICE Sighting-Chicagoland, Facebook parent company Meta suspended the group to stop its 84,000 members from sharing information about impending ICE raids and enforcement actions.
Loomer wrote on the social media platform X on Sunday that "Big Tech executives" such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg should "use this as an opportunity to be in compliance and to support President [Donald] Trump’s immigration policies, but they aren’t."
She said the presence of the community group was evidence of Zuckerberg's "leftist subversion of Trump and his policies."
Two days later, US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that action had been taken to stop Chicago area residents from discussing the deployment of federal agents.
"Today, following outreach from the [Department of Justice], Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to dox and target ICE agents in Chicago,” said Bondi Tuesday.
"If the Facebook posts happen to bother Trump, will they still be uncensored, and will their 'free expression' be protected? If you understand what a Trump suck-up Zuckerberg is these days, you can probably take a wild guess."
Bondi repeated a claim by the Department of Homeland Security that immigration agents have faced escalating violence from protesters in Chicago. Few specific examples have backed up the claim, while ICE agents and other officers have been filmed tear-gassing a residential neighborhood; shooting pepper spray at a priest at a demonstration; slamming a congressional candidate on the ground; and holding a journalist on the ground before shoving her in an unmarked car, ramming into another vehicle while speeding away, and eventually releasing her without charges.
The Chicago Sun-Times noted two examples of immigration officers being injured on the job in Chicago recently: one who said his injuries he sustained during a traffic stop that proved fatal for an immigrant named Silverio Villegas González were "nothing major," and another who "hurt his leg chasing a protester."
The administrator of ICE Sighting-Chicagoland posted a screenshot of messages they had received from Meta, which accused the group of failing to follow Facebook's community standards. The group had never been reported or flagged previously.
Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan—a former campaign adviser for Trump during the 2020 election—told the Sun-Times the group had violated Facebook's “Coordinating Harm and Promoting Crime” policy, which bars groups and users from “outing the undercover status of law enforcement, military, or security personnel if the content contains the agent’s name, their face or badge, and any of the following: The agent’s law enforcement organization, the agent’s law enforcement operation, [or] explicit mentions of their undercover status.”
Facebook's policy was revised in 2023; it had previously banned people from sharing explicit identifying information about undercover agents, not mentions of the agencies they work for.
Zuckerberg said earlier this year that content moderation on Facebook had "gone too far" and apologized to Republican lawmakers for previously stopping users from spreading misinformation about Covid-19.
"If the Facebook posts happen to bother Trump, will they still be uncensored, and will their 'free expression' be protected? If you understand what a Trump suck-up Zuckerberg is these days, you can probably take a wild guess," wrote Joe Kukura at SFist on Tuesday.
Zuckerberg was one of several tech billionaires who attended Trump's inauguration in January. Last month he and other Silicon Valley executives attended a White House dinner where they "lavished praise" on the president as they discussed their investments in artificial intelligence and their hopes for a "pro-business, pro-innovation" approach to the technology from the administration.
At the AV Club on Wednesday, Mary Kate Carr said the removal of the ICE Sighting group was "yet another installment of 'How are tech billionaires carrying water for Donald Trump today?'"
"This is the same company that had policies allowing for chatbots to have 'sensual' conversations with kids, but discussing local law enforcement among neighbors is a bridge too far, huh?" wrote Carr.
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Nationwide Backlash Brewing Against Big Tech's Energy-Devouring AI Data Centers
"For any Democrat who wants to think politically, what an opportunity,” said Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to US Sen. Bernie Sanders. “The people are way ahead of the politicians.”
Oct 14, 2025
America's biggest tech firms are facing an increasing backlash over the energy-devouring data centers they are building to power artificial intelligence.
Semafor reported on Monday that opposition to data center construction has been bubbling up in communities across the US, as both Republican and Democratic local officials have been campaigning on promises to clamp down on Silicon Valley's most expensive and ambitious projects.
In Virginia's 30th House of Delegates district, for example, both Republican incumbent Geary Higgins and Democratic challenger John McAuliff have been battling over which one of them is most opposed to AI data center construction in their region.
In an interview with Semafor, McAuliff said that opposition to data centers in the district has swelled up organically, as voters recoil at both the massive amount of resources they consume and the impact that consumption is having on both the environment and their electric bills.
"We’re dealing with the biggest companies on the planet,” he explained. “So we need to make sure Virginians are benefiting off of what they do here, not just paying for it.”
NPR on Tuesday similarly reported that fights over data center construction are happening nationwide, as residents who live near proposed construction sites have expressed concerns about the amount of water and electricity they will consume at the expense of local communities.
"A typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households, and the largest under development will consume 20 times more," NPR explained, citing a report from the International Energy Agency. "They also suck up billions of gallons of water for systems to keep all that computer hardware cool."
Data centers' massive water use has been a consistent concern across the US. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Monday that residents of the township of East Vincent, Pennsylvania have seen their wells dry up recently, and they are worried that a proposed data center would significantly exacerbate water shortages.
This is what has been happening in Mansfield, Georgia, a community that for years has experienced problems with its water supply ever since tech giant Meta began building a data center there in 2018.
As BBC reported back in August, residents in Mansfield have resorted to buying bottled water because their wells have been delivering murky water, which they said wasn't a problem before the Meta data center came online. Although Meta has commissioned a study that claims to show its data center hasn't affected local groundwater quality, Mansfield resident Beverly Morris told BBC she isn't buying the company's findings.
"My everyday life, everything has been affected," she said, in reference to the presence of the data center. "I've lived through this for eight years. This is not just today, but it is affecting me from now on."
Anxieties about massive power consumption are also spurring the backlash against data centers, and recent research shows these fears could be well founded.
Mike Jacobs, a senior energy manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists, last month released an analysis estimating that data centers had added billions of dollars to Americans' electric bills across seven different states in recent years. In Virginia alone, for instance, Jacobs found that household electric bills had subsidized data center transmission costs to the tune of $1.9 billion in 2024.
"The big tech companies rushing to build out massive data centers are worth trillions of dollars, yet they’re successfully exploiting an outdated regulatory process to pawn billions of dollars of costs off on families who may never even use their products," Jacobs explained. "People deserve to understand the full extent of how data centers in their communities may affect their lives and wallets. This is a clear case of the public unknowingly subsidizing private companies' profits."
While the backlash to data centers hasn't yet become a national issue, Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), predicted in an interview with Semafor that opposition to their construction would be a winning political issue for any politician savvy enough to get ahead of it.
“For any Democrat who wants to think politically, what an opportunity,” he said. “The people are way ahead of the politicians.”
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Parents' Group Says New Revelations About Meta's AI Chatbot 'Confirm Our Worst Fears'
"When a company's own policies explicitly allow bots to engage children in 'romantic or sensual' conversations, it's not an oversight, it's a system designed to normalize inappropriate interactions with minors," said one advocate.
Aug 15, 2025
Four months after the children's rights advocacy group ParentsTogether Action issued an advisory about the potential harms Meta's artificial intelligence chatbot could pose to kids, new reporting Wednesday revealed how the Silicon Valley company's standards for the AI product have allowed it to have sexually provocative conversations with minors as well as make racist comments.
Reuters reported extensively on an internal Meta document titled "GenAI: Content Risk Standards."
The document said that Meta's generative AI products—which are available to users as young as 13 on the company's platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—are permitted to engage in "romantic or sensual" role-play with minors.
Examples of acceptable remarks from the AI bot included "Your youthful form is a work of art" and "Every inch of you is a masterpiece," which the document suggested could be said to a child as young as 8.
An example of an acceptable comment made to a high school student was, "I take your hand, guiding you to the bed."
New Republic contributing editor Osita Nwanevu said the reporting shows that "if we're going to have this technology, the content used to train models needs to be legally licensed from its creators and their applications need to be regulated."
"For example: I do not think we should allow children to be groomed by the computer," he said.
Reuters reported that Meta changed the document after the news outlet brought the sexually suggestive comments to the company's attention, with spokesperson Andy Stone saying such conversations with children should not have been allowed.
"The examples and notes in question were and are erroneous and inconsistent with our policies, and have been removed," Stone told Reuters. "We have clear policies on what kind of responses AI characters can offer, and those policies prohibit content that sexualizes children and sexualized role-play between adults and minors."
But Stone didn't say the company had revised the content standards to disallow other concerning comments, like those that promote racist views.
The document stated that the AI chatbot was permitted to "create statements that demean people on the basis of their protected characteristics"—for example, a paragraph about Black people being "dumber than white people."
Reuters' reporting suggested that Meta's allowance of sexually suggestive AI conversations with children was not an accident, with current and former employees who worked on the design and training of the AI products saying the document reflected "the company's emphasis on boosting engagement with its chatbots."
"In meetings with senior executives last year, [CEO Mark] Zuckerberg scolded generative AI product managers for moving too cautiously on the rollout of digital companions and expressed displeasure that safety restrictions had made the chatbots boring, according to two of those people," reported Jeff Horwitz at Reuters. "Meta had no comment on Zuckerberg's chatbot directives."
In April, ParentsTogether Action issued a warning about Meta's AI chatbots and their ability to "engage in sexual role-play with teenagers," which had previously been reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Wednesday's reporting provided "a fuller picture of the company's rules for AI bots," the group said.
"These internal Meta documents confirm our worst fears about AI chatbots and children's safety," said Shelby Knox, campaign director for tech accountability and online safety at ParentsTogether Action. "When a company's own policies explicitly allow bots to engage children in 'romantic or sensual' conversations, it's not an oversight, it's a system designed to normalize inappropriate interactions with minors."
The group said it tested Meta AI earlier this year, posing as a 14-year-old, and was told by the bot, "Age is just a number" as it encouraged the fictional teenager to pursue a relationship with an adult.
"No child should ever be told by an AI that 'age is just a number' or be encouraged to lie to their parents about adult relationships," said Knox. "Meta has created a digital grooming ground, and parents deserve answers about how this was allowed to happen."
As Stone assured Reuters that the company was reviewing its content standards for its AI chatbot, other new reporting suggested Meta isn't likely to impose strict rules discouraging the bot from making racist or otherwise harmful remarks any time soon.
As CNN reported Wednesday, Meta has hired Robby Starbuck, a "conservative influencer and anti-DEI agitator," to serve as an anti-bias adviser for its AI products.
The arrangement is part of a legal settlement following a lawsuit Starbuck filed against Meta in April, saying the chatbot had falsely stated he took part in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
An executive order signed by President Donald Trump last month seeks to rid AI products of so-called "woke" standards and prohibit the federal government from using AI technology that is "infused with partisan bias or ideological agendas such as critical race theory"—the term used by many conservatives in recent years for the accurate teaching of race relations in US history.
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