Thirty years after Pokémon first arrived in Japan, Pikachu and friends have found their way onto just about every type of merch. Polaroid’s latest collaboration, however, gives the familiar characters a new canvas.

Photography courtesy of Polaroid

Created to celebrate Pokémon’s 30th anniversary, the limited-edition Polaroid x Pokémon collection reworks three of the photography brand’s instant cameras around Pikachu, Sylveon, and the franchise’s ubiquitous Poké Ball. Rather than relying solely on printed graphics, the designs borrow their recognizable colors and silhouettes.

Photography courtesy of Polaroid

The compact Polaroid Go takes on two of the more character-driven transformations. The Pikachu edition comes wrapped in the Pokémon’s signature yellow, complete with a lightning-bolt-shaped detail that rises from the camera body. Sylveon gets a softer treatment, pairing a primarily white camera with pink and blue accents and a coordinating ribbon-like strap.

Photography courtesy of Polaroid

For the larger Polaroid Now Generation 3, the Poké Ball provides the inspiration. Its white body is capped with red and punctuated by a circular detail around the lens, translating the familiar object into the existing geometry of the camera.

Photography courtesy of Polaroid

The collaboration also extends beyond the hardware. Special-edition i-Type and Go films add Pokémon-themed frames and custom dark slides, while a camera case, photo album, and strap carry the visual language into accessories. Together, the nine-piece collection turns the act of instant photography into part of the collaboration itself: Pokémon appears not only on the object used to take a picture, but on the physical image it produces.

Photography courtesy of Polaroid

The Polaroid Now Generation 3 Pokémon Edition is priced at $139.99, while the Pikachu and Sylveon Polaroid Go cameras are $99.99 each. Preorders open Aug. 25, 2026, through Polaroid and Pokémon Center in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, with the full collection launching Oct. 5 in limited quantities.

X’s algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it, according to a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled Value misalignment of X’s feed algorithm is a reflection of value tensions in engagement, found that the site’s algorithm prioritized engagement above all else when it generated a user’s For You Page. It also showed that X serves more ragebait to people who say they are Democrats, although the exact reason for that is unclear.

“In 2026 that’s maybe not the most surprising headline ever,” Ziv Epstein, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, and co-author of the paper, told 404 Media. “So we actually dug in a little deeper to figure out why this is actually happening, and it turns out that X's feed algorithm, like a lot of these social media algorithms, is optimized for engagement [but] it turns out that not all types of engagement are considered equally.”

The study’s goal was to understand how a user’s self-professed values system might shape what they see on X. “We recruited a nationally representative sample of N = 715 Americans who are active users of X in September and October 2024, quota matched on ethnicity, gender and partisanship, to install a browser extension to collect their [For You Page] and Following feeds,” the study said.

Epstein said the study was observational and meant to get people asking questions about what they want to see on social media, how their feed is designed, and by whom. “There are these social media algorithms that have enormous amounts of power in our lives, they shape the information that we consume, and we have very little transparency into how they operate and what their implications are,” he said. “And so, we were very interested in trying to understand the particular effects of this particular algorithm, and so I think that has kind of important implications for civil society and just fighting some of the technofeudalistic tendencies of platforms to control these algorithms.”

For the study, researchers collected a “values inventory” of the volunteers using a research tool called the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values. The values inventory in the study is presented as a wheel with 19 points that corresponded to features like “tolerance,” “dominance,” “hedonism,” and “openness to change.” Users also reported their political alignments.

Then researchers watched how users engaged with posts on X and how those posts reflected their self-reported values. “We observe that the inventory of posts from followed accounts reflects users’ self-stated values — but that there is an overall negative correlation (misalignment) between users’ explicit values and the values in content that the algorithm is more likely to amplify,” the study said.

When a user on X sees a post that makes them mad — like a press release from a politician from a political party they don’t like — sometimes they’ll fight about the post in the replies. It doesn’t matter who you follow or what your stated values are, X reads replying as engagement and will send more of the infuriating posts the user’s way.

“When we look at commenting, the act of replying to posts, that's where we actually see some kind of meaningful misalignment between people’s values and the values of the content they’re replying to,” Epstein explained.

Most of the participants liked and reposted content on X and got served more of the same sort of content. Replying was rare, just 6.8% of the interactions according to the study, but had an outsized impact on the algorithm. “Replying is only a fraction of engagement, but there does seem to be some evidence that these algorithms are prioritizing and learning more from this kind of rarer form of engagement,” Epstein said. “So it’s this feedback loop of outrage baiting. The algorithm learns that you get outraged and then continues to serve more content in that direction and that seems to be particularly true of the Democratic users of our study.”

Though this happened across the political spectrum, the study found that ragebaiting occurred more for users that identified themselves as Democrats. “Democrat users confront the abundant value-misaligned content by replying to it, which the algorithm in turn preferentially learns from and continues to feed them,” the study said. “This highlights a core tension with how engagement-maximizing algorithms operate on social media: frictions between users’ stated preferences and their behaviors of reactive confrontation are exploited by engagement-maximizing algorithms to create runaway feedback loops of increasing value misalignment.”

Epstein said he’d need to do more research to find out why X seems to serve ragebait to Democrats more often than Republicans. It could be that there’s more rightwing content on X overall or it could be that Democrats tend to engage with posts they disagree with more often. “There might be some kind of differential effects on information diets there, or it might be something more psychological about how different you know partisan identities are triggering different kinds of actions and reactions, but ultimately I don't want to speculate too much,” he said.

I asked Epstein if he worried that prioritizing “values” in a social media algorithm might lead to more siloed user bases and more echo chambers. “I do think that if we go kind of down this path of thinking through and imagining value line social media feeds, we do have to be very aware of the potentials of value echo chambers, right?” he said. “Where people just, you know, they have the certain values that they have, and all the content they see is just aligned with those values. I think that is a very scary and dark reality.”

But he also said that values are intentional and that thinking about the kind of stuff you want to see on a social media site before you pull up your feed is a positive. “You're pumping the brakes, you're taking a breath, and you're thinking about what you actually really care about. In this world — and I don't have the data for this — but I would speculate that a lot of people actually do care about seeing a diverse set of content and engaging meaningfully across these lines, and you know maybe that isn't a particular value on my 19-dimensional wheel, but this is just a starting point of thinking about our intentions and thinking very deliberately about the kind of information we want to be exposed to, versus the the knee-jerk reaction that we're kind of learning in this very kind of short, shallow attention span, emotion and negative affect-driven model of these very myopic forms of engagement.”

X did not return 404 Media’s request for comment.

The National Park Service (NPS), the agency tasked with managing the U.S. national parks and monuments, has purchased Flock cameras and had them installed at parks including in Yosemite.

Current and former NPS rangers are not happy about it.

“Flock protects property, not people or parks. People should be free to recreate in ways that are respectful to the ecosystem — but the surveillance is a disrespectful invasion of privacy,” a current NPS ranger told 404 Media. 404 Media granted the ranger and others anonymity because they weren’t permitted to speak to the press.

Another current NPS ranger said, “I just think that every American should be free to visit our national parks without their location being traced and tracked by the federal government. Wild places are at the core of American freedom and nobody should be afraid to visit them.”

A former NPS ranger added, “I think if the public knew that their public lands were being surveilled, they would push back.”

Flock cameras constantly scan the license plate, color, model, make, and other identifying features of every vehicle that drives past, creating a timestamped record of where a vehicle was at a particular time, and by extension, a person. This data is then available to Flock’s law enforcement customers and is usually queried by police without a warrant. Many of Flock’s cameras are part of a national network that other law enforcement officials can then query. For example, a cop in Texas might query the network to look for a specific vehicle and search cameras across the country. This, among increased reporting of cops abusing their access to Flock to stalk people with no legitimate investigative purpose, and local cops performing lookups for ICE, has contributed to a nationwide conversation around Flock and whether communities want the company’s cameras in their neighborhoods.

Flock cameras are installed inside Yosemite, WBTW News 13 reported earlier this month. The outlet referenced data from DeFlock, an open source map of Flock and other automatic license plate reader (ALPR) locations. 

There is also a Flock camera on a road towards the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, according to the data.

NPS also plans to install cameras from Verkada, a controversial company with a history of abusing its own products and whose products sometimes have facial detection capabilities, according to a letter from Michael Donato, the acting deputy superintendent of National Capital Parks - East, sent to the Washington Support Office Visitor and Resource Protection Program.

“Some parks have USPP [United States Park Police] Flock cameras for license plate recognition, but for parks that don’t, the Verkada cameras will provide LPR,” the letter, which 404 Media viewed, reads.

The NPS told 404 Media in a statement: “Yosemite National Park uses a traffic-monitoring system to measure vehicle counts, travel times and entrance-station wait times. The system helps the park better understand traffic conditions and provide visitors with information to help them make informed decisions about when to visit and where parking is available. The cameras are not connected to law enforcement or DMV databases.”

One of the current rangers said, “Last year Yosemite changed the rules about hanging flags on El Capitan and tried to backdate the rule change to make it look like the people involved had committed a crime. What happens when that sort of malfeasance is combined with the ability to track any park visitor's location, anywhere in the country? If that happens, we are no longer free in this country.”

They added, “I fear for the day when a visitor's National Park experience is interrupted by being pulled over and held at gunpoint because a license plate reader misread their plate.”

Pornhub's parent company will pay $120 million to settle claims that its platforms violated federal sex trafficking and child sexual abuse imagery laws.

The deal settles two 2021 class action lawsuits in California and Alabama that claim Mindgeek, which has since rebranded to Aylo, profited off of child abuse material allegedly posted by abusers to its platforms. In the California case, a woman alleged that her ex-boyfriend posted child sexual abuse videos of her when she was 16 years old to Pornhub. In the Alabama case, two women claimed to have been trafficked as minors and that their trafficker uploaded videos to Mindgeek's sites; one of the women claimed she was drugged and raped at 16, and that her abuser profited off of the videos of her abuse through Pornhub's Modelhub program. 

The class includes anyone who was under the age of 18 "when they appeared in a video or image that has been made available for viewing" on a Mindgeek-owned or operated website between February 12, 2011 and December 6, 2024.

Mindgeek was bought by Ethical Capital Partners and rebranded to Aylo in 2023. Aylo will pay into the settlement fund with an initial $25 million in 2026 followed by six annual installments over the next six years. In a press release, Aylo noted that the settlement "resolves the matter with no admission of liability or wrongdoing by Aylo and remains subject to court approval." 

In addition to paying $120 million, Aylo agreed to a series of content moderation terms, including verifying that all of the models in uploaded content are over the age of 18, human and automated review of content to prevent child sexual abuse material from going up on its sites, and reporting suspected abuse material to the relevant authorities. Aylo's sites have implemented many of these injunctive reliefs agreed to in the settlement for years. 

In late 2020, following allegations of abuse material on the site and being dropped by major credit card processors including Visa and Mastercard, Pornhub overhauled its trust and safety measures to ban downloads, restrict uploads to verified users, and expand its moderation processes. It also launched its “Trusted Flagger Program" — mentioned as part of this settlement's terms — which allows a group of non-profit internet and child safety organizations around the world to immediately disable content it flags as abusive. In early 2021, Pornhub implemented biometric identity verification for uploaders through Yoti, and in 2024, it started requiring written proof of consent from everyone in every video.

The attorney for the plaintiff class did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Over the years, we have put in place robust measures to help protect our platform from abuse. Only verified content creators can publish on our platform, and every upload is subject to a combination of technological tools and human review by trained moderators before it goes live, to confirm that it complies with our Terms of Service, Community Guidelines and related Policies," Aylo management said in a statement. "Many of the commitments in this settlement reflect practices we already have in place. Trust and Safety should be a priority for every online platform, and we all share responsibility for a safer online experience. Every day, our trust and safety and engineering teams work alongside law enforcement, advocacy groups and other stakeholders to prevent online abuse and to hold those abusers to account.”