There Are No Girls on the Internet

The girlboss era promised that if women just worked hard enough, leaned in hard enough, optimized hard enough, equality was within reach. It wasn't. And now, a decade later, the same voices are back with the same urgency and the same "you'll be left behind" framing. The product this time? AI.
Bridget sits down with Samantha and Anney from Stuff Mom Never Told You to talk about why Sheryl Sandberg, Reese Witherspoon, Mel Robbins, and the original girlboss herself Sophia Amoruso are all suddenly very invested in getting women onto AI platforms and why the women who aren't rushing to adopt it might actually be the ones paying closest attention.


Let us know what you think by emailing [email protected] or leaving a comment on Spotify.
Bridget's forthcoming audiobook with Simon & Schuster, Love At First Prompt, explores AI, sex, and intimate relationships. Pre-order at LoveAtFirstPrompt.ai
Follow Bridget: Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | Bluesky
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There Are No Girls on the Internet is a weekly podcast hosted by Bridget Todd. Every week, we break down the tech and internet stories that deserve more attention — especially when they're about AI, power, gender, race, and who actually gets hurt when systems fail.
This week: Elon Musk using a Hollywood casting decision to push white nationalist conspiracy theories. The government is surveilling people who oppose data centers as potential terrorists. The DOJ is going after a billionaire who helped fund E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit against Trump. And researchers who study online hate speech being threatened with deportation.
If that sounds like your thing — Apple Podcasts | Spotify | and come back every week.
HERE’S WHAT WE’RE WATCHING THIS WEEK:
🔗 Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is partnering with Jared Leto — a man with nine sexual abuse allegations — to scan people's eyeballs. Altman's company World has already been banned in multiple countries for exploiting people in impoverished nations for their biometric data. Now it's partnering with Jared Leto — who has nine sexual abuse allegations against him, including behavior toward a minor — to scan fans' irises to buy concert tickets. Altman himself has also faced his own sexual misconduct allegation.
🔗 Lupita Nyong'o was cast as Helen of Troy. Elon Musk is using it to push white nationalist conspiracy theories. Christopher Nolan cast Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy in The Odyssey. Musk spent days melting down about it. Experts say it's the "great replacement" theory — a white nationalist belief that white people are being deliberately replaced by people of color — applied to a casting decision.
🔗 The government is now surveilling people who oppose AI and data centers as potential extremists. Leaked documents show the FBI and Homeland Security have created a new threat category called "anti-tech extremism." A nonprofit called More Perfect Union made a video about the harm data centers cause to communities — nothing illegal, nothing violent. The feds flagged it as a potential terrorist threat. Meanwhile Trump, his sons, and his administration all have direct financial stakes in AI data center expansion.
🔗 The DOJ is trying to unmask anonymous Reddit and X users who criticized ICE. Jeanine Pirro's office has subpoenaed Reddit and X for the names, addresses, and financial data of users who made negative comments about ICE online. No charges have been filed. No one has been notified.
🔗 A federal investigation has been opened into the tech billionaire who funded E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit against Trump. He says it's retaliation. Reid Hoffman donated money to support Carroll's sexual abuse and defamation lawsuits — lawsuits a jury ruled in her favor. Now those donations are under federal criminal investigation. Hoffman says Trump is using the government to silence anyone who supports women who speak up against him.
🔗 Meta keeps deleting LGBTQ+ accounts with no explanation. Now they're getting sued. Queer nightclubs, magazines, and sexual health organizations kept waking up to find their Instagram accounts gone — no warning, no explanation, no real way to appeal. Global nonprofit Repro Uncensored and a coalition of Dutch LGBTQ+ organizations are taking Meta to court for discrimination in the first case to use the EU's Digital Services Act to challenge discriminatory content moderation by a major platform.
🔗 The Trump administration is threatening to deport researchers who study online hate speech. A lawsuit just hit federal court. The government can now deny or revoke visas for foreign nationals who do trust and safety research, fact-checking, and content moderation work — framing it as protecting Americans from "censorship." Researchers have already left the country, stopped publishing, and self-censored. The Coalition for Independent Technology Research just sued to stop it.
🔗 The Department of Labor told employees to report coworkers for DEI activities — going back three years before Trump even took office. Employees could be reported for DEI work that was literally required by their job under the previous administration. One employee called it "pure witch-hunt territory."
🔗 A study found that when men and women use AI for their resumes, women get judged way more harshly — even when the resumes are identical. Researchers created identical resumes for "Emily Clarke" and "James Clarke." Emily was twice as likely to have her competence questioned. Reviewers said James "just needed help." They said Emily "can't even write a CV herself."
🔗 86% of the workers most likely to lose their jobs to AI are women. They're being told to just figure it out. Administrative assistants — one of the most female-dominated fields in the country — are racing to learn AI out of fear, not enthusiasm. If they use it, they get called lazy. If they don't, they risk being automated out of a job. Employers are giving them no plan.
🔗 Software engineering is being transformed by AI and new mothers are being left behind. Women who took maternity leave in 2024 came back to jobs that had been completely transformed by AI. One woman sent out 40 applications and got one interview. She's now considering landscape architecture.
🔗 The White House launched a website comparing immigrants to aliens. It listed over 700 American citizens as people who were arrested. The arrest counter on the homepage is completely fake and runs on a timer. The data listed over 700 American-born citizens as arrestees. The site appears to be using a pirated X-Files theme song. This is a real government website.
🔗 Meta, TikTok, Snap, and YouTube agreed to pay a Kentucky school district $27 million for harming kids. Over 1,300 school districts have sued social media companies for deliberately creating addictive products that cause depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicide in young users. They settled for a fraction of what was demanded, made no admission of wrongdoing, and walked away. Bloomberg estimates all the lawsuits combined could cost them $400 billion.
🔗 Most Americans don't want data centers in their communities. Women oppose them the most. A new Gallup poll found more than two thirds of Americans oppose data centers. Women oppose them more intensely than men and are leading the fight in communities across the country — because they bear the most direct environmental and health costs.
🔗 A Google engineer misused confidential internal data to gamble on Polymarket and made $1.2 million. The FBI caught him. He had access to data showing which celebrities would top Google's most searched list before it went public, placed $2.7 million in bets on Polymarket, and won with near-perfect accuracy.
🔗 AI is still getting things wrong — it's just gotten much better at sounding confident while doing it. When people pushed back on wrong answers in one study, the AI responded with flattery instead of corrections. Experts call it a "plausibility engine" not a truth engine.
🔗 People are building their own technology and rejecting the version Silicon Valley is selling. A growing movement of women, queer people, and artists are building custom devices from salvaged parts — and imagining a version of technology that serves communities instead of extracting from them.
Want to hear us break these stories down? There Are No Girls on the Internet drops a new episode every Friday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
🎧 Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Let us know what you think by emailing [email protected] or leaving a comment on Spotify.
Bridget's forthcoming audiobook with Simon & Schuster, Love At First Prompt, explores AI, sex, and intimate relationships. Pre-order at LoveAtFirstPrompt.ai
Follow Bridget: Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | Bluesky
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the 2nd episode of a 2-part series about a case where security goons from eBay travelled across the country to stalk and harass a husband-wife journalist duo. If you haven't listened to part 1 yet, you probably should. We published it on May 19, 2026.
For over two decades, the pair have been publishing EcommerceBytes, a respected trade publication for eBay sellers. But in 2019, someone started harassing them. It began with a spray painted fence, then quickly escalated to death threats and fetal pigs and a mysterious van outside their house. Eventually, they discovered that eBay's own security team was behind it all, with the campaign put into motion by then-CEO Devin Wenig. This bizarre and frightening story is a cautionary tale about the rise of private armies. It starts in San Francisco, takes us to the small community of Natick, Massachusetts, and ultimately takes TANGOTI listeners right back to Madison Square Garden. Buckle up.

Let us know what you think by emailing [email protected] or leaving a comment on Spotify.

Bridget's forthcoming audiobook with Simon & Schuster, Love At First Prompt, explores AI, sex, and intimate relationships. Pre-order at LoveAtFirstPrompt.ai
Follow Bridget: Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | Bluesky
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

THIS WEEK ON THERE ARE NO GIRLS ON THE INTERNET
There Are No Girls on the Internet is a weekly podcast hosted by Bridget Todd. Every week we drop our news roundup — the tech and internet stories that don't get enough attention, the ones about AI, power, gender, race, and who actually gets hurt when systems fail.
This week: A man films men at urinals to catch "groomers." A Texas woman gets arrested for a Facebook post about brown water. And the word "Black" keeps disappearing from places it needs to be.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. New roundup episode every Friday.
📰 Here's what we were watching this week:
Schools posted photos of their students online — now criminals are turning them into explicit deepfakes and demanding money. For years, schools have proudly posted photos of their students online. Now criminals are scraping those photos, using AI to create explicit images of children, and blackmailing schools to keep them quiet. One UK school had 150 images made from their website alone. Experts are now urging schools to take all student photos down immediately. 🔗 The Guardian
A female JPMorgan banker was accused of turning her male colleague into a sex slave — now she's suing him back, saying he made it all up. Last month, a JPMorgan VP accused his female colleague of coercing him into sex, threatening him with racial slurs, and saying she "owned" him. The story went viral. Now she's fighting back, saying he fabricated everything to get money and attention — and that the lies have destroyed her life with nonstop harassment and memes. JPMorgan offered him $1 million to settle before he even filed. 🔗 The Guardian
Elon Musk's ex says he told her he had secret access to real-time election data before the results came in. Ashley St. Clair, who dated Elon Musk, is claiming he bragged to her about having access to election numbers before they were publicly announced — and that he knew Trump was going to win hours early. He also allegedly referenced "10,000 lasers in space" and an "anomaly in the matrix." Musk's team is calling it total nonsense. She has no proof — but the internet has thoughts. 🔗 Yahoo
A new law now forces social media platforms to remove explicit deepfakes and revenge porn within 48 hours of reporting — or face massive fines. The Take It Down Act is now fully in effect. If someone posts explicit images of you without your consent — real or AI-generated — platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit are legally required to take them down within 48 hours of reporting. Companies that don't comply face fines of over $53,000 per violation. It's already led to one conviction. But critics warn the law could be abused as a censorship tool — and Trump himself joked at his State of the Union that he planned to use it for himself. 🔗 The 19th | 🔗 The Verge
A man was jailed for 37 days for sharing a meme after Charlie Kirk was killed — a court just ordered the sheriff to pay him $835,000. After conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed last year, a Tennessee man shared some memes on Facebook. His local sheriff decided that was a threat and had him arrested in the middle of the night. His bail was set at $2 million. He sat in jail for over a month before the charge was dropped. Now the sheriff owes him $835,000. 🔗 The New York Times
The DOJ just punished PayPal for creating a fund to help Black-owned businesses — and called it illegal discrimination. In 2020, PayPal created a $530 million fund to help Black and minority-owned small businesses. The Trump DOJ investigated it as illegal discrimination against white people. To settle, PayPal must now redirect that support to veteran-owned and farming businesses instead. No law was found to have been broken — but PayPal caved anyway. 🔗 Reuters
Congress quietly removed the word "Black" from a bill designed to save Black mothers' lives — and advocates are furious. Black women in America are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. Congress has been trying to pass a bill to fix this for years. It was called the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act. Now, under pressure from Trump's anti-DEI crackdown, lawmakers have stripped "Black" from the title and almost everywhere in the text. Supporters say it had to be done to survive. Critics say a bill that won't name Black women can't save them. 🔗 What I'm Reading
A white doctor is suing a directory called "Find A Black Doctor" for not letting him list his practice on it. "Find A Black Doctor" is a directory founded to help Black patients find Black physicians. A white Colorado dermatologist, backed by a conservative anti-DEI group, is now suing it for not listing him. The same group previously went after a Coca-Cola distributor for hosting a women's empowerment event. 🔗 Black Enterprise
A Texas woman posted on Facebook that her town's water was making people sick — the city had her arrested for it. Jennifer Combs posted on Facebook that residents in Trinidad, Texas were being hospitalized from bacteria in the water. The city arrested her for "filing a false report." But the water was brown. A boil notice was later issued. The mayor admitted the pipes date back to the 1950s. She's now suing the city for political retaliation. 🔗 FOX 4
A man who wore Meta smart glasses to a Pride event to catch "groomers" was arrested for secretly filming men at the urinals. A Florida man wore Meta smart glasses to a Pride event, claiming he was there to expose child groomers. He used them to secretly record men at the urinals and posted the video online. The men he filmed were undercover cops. He also tried to bring a gun — then came back with an AR-15. Naples Pride responded: "A man who publicly accused our community of 'grooming' now stands accused of unlawfully recording people in a place where privacy is expected. The irony is difficult to ignore." 🔗 LGBTQ Nation
Bridget's forthcoming audiobook with Simon & Schuster, Love At First Prompt, explores AI, sex, and intimate relationships. Pre-order at LoveAtFirstPrompt.ai
Follow Bridget: Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | Bluesky

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is part 1 of a 2-part arc about one of wildest tech stories I've seen in a long time. For over two decades, a husband and wife duo have been publishing EcommerceBytes, a respected trade publication for eBay sellers. But in 2019, someone started harassing them. It began with a spray painted fence, then quickly escalated to death threats and fetal pigs and a mysterious van outside their house. Eventually, they discovered that eBay's own security team was behind it all, with the campaign put into motion by then-CEO Devin Wenig. This bizarre and frightening story is a cautionary tale about the rise of private armies. It starts in San Francisco, takes us to the small community of Natick, Massachusetts, and ultimately takes TANGOTI listeners right back to Madison Square Garden. Buckle up.

Let us know what you think by emailing [email protected] or leaving a comment on Spotify.

Bridget's forthcoming audiobook with Simon & Schuster, Love At First Prompt, explores AI, sex, and intimate relationships. Pre-order at LoveAtFirstPrompt.ai
Follow Bridget: Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | Bluesky
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.