Technology

Hundreds of Fake Pro-Trump Avatars Emerge on Social Media

NYTimes Technology • Sat, 18 Apr 2026

The artificial-intelligence-generated fake influencers have surged on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in an apparent bid to hook conservative voters.

What happened?

The artificial-intelligence-generated fake influencers have surged on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in an apparent bid to hook conservative voters.

Story details

The artificial-intelligence-generated fake influencers have surged on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in an apparent bid to hook conservative voters.

Why it matters

This story helps build a stronger internal English tech archive around Technology, giving search visitors more reasons to keep browsing the site instead of bouncing after a single headline.

Original source

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/business/media/artificial-intelligence-trump-social-media.html

Bluesky is once again having a wobble. The platform said some of its systems are down and that it’s “investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos” (that’s Bluesky’s typo, not mine). The issue appears to have started at 1:42AM ET and was still persisting as of 11AM when this story was originally published. Since then, the site has been experiencing intermitent interuptions, including at times to its status page where users should be able to monitor outages. At 7:47PM ET, the platform explained that it’s been attempting to mitigate “a sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which intensified throughout the day.” It said the attack had caused interruptions to users’ feeds, notifications, threads and search, all of which the Engadget team experienced first-hand at various points through the day. While DDoS attacks are frequently used as virtual smokescreens for hacks, Bluesky says it has “not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private user data.” The social media service had another brief outage earlier this month. In a later update on April 17, Bluesky noted that the DDoS attacks are “ongoing” but that the service has been stable since about 9PM PT last night. The company also reaffirmed that it hasn’t seen any evidence of access to user data. The next update is set to arrive by end of day Friday. Update, April 17, 12:47PM ET: This story was updated with Bluesky’s latest outage update. Update, April 16, 8PM ET: This story was updated after publish with an of the outage from Bluesky. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/bluesky-blames-ddos-attack-for-server-outages-150515882.html?src=rss

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