📲 Mike Waltz accidentally adds Osama Bin Laden to Signal group
Also inside #7: 🔗 Sketchy Altman ✅ Content moderation game, 🖼️ censored selfie
This week: reports are emerging that US national security advisor Mike Waltz accidentally added notorious terrorist Osama Bin Laden to a private Signal group where members of the Trump administration discussed active war plans.
Intelligence experts are struggling to understand how Waltz’s security breach could have been so severe that it had the effect of resuscitating the Al Qaeda leader, who was shot dead by US Navy Seals in 2011, before going on to grant him access to top secret intel.
Bin Laden’s Signal account, under the username ‘Osama Bin Laden, The One From 9/11 - I Hate America Burn The Flag 🔥🇺🇸’, appears to have been confused by Waltz with the account of a senior US official with a similar username.
A screenshot from the Signal group shows Bin Laden responding with the ‘🥵’ emoji to a message from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth detailing emergency plans to send US Navy Seals to kill him for the second time.
A spokesperson for the US administration denied that bringing Bin Laden back to life and allowing him access to the plans of his own re-killing had any detrimental effect on US national security.
(Link to the original story on Attention.)
🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION
Great account of the failed coup against Sam Altman at OpenAI. My takeaways: Sam Altman is sketchy, and the coup was extremely incompetent — Wall Street Journal
One of my favourite papers, a study of YouTube videos by sampling them randomly, was turned into a fun piece by the BBC looking at what makes up the platform — BBC
(Something I cite often from the paper is that 16 YouTube videos account for over half of the overall views of the 10,000-strong sample. You’d expect the distribution to be lopsided, but it still shocks me just how top-heavy it is, lending weight to the argument that we need to know the most viewed videos on these platforms.)
Wondering how content moderation can be so hard? Try your hand at this game, which shows you the kinds of decisions and compromises involved in keeping all your users (and governments) happy — Trust & Safety Tycoon
A handy method to return a lost wallet to its rightful owner — Reddit
🇬🇧 ATTENTION IRL
We had the first ever Attention meetup in a London pub last week! Four wonderful people came along, among them Liat Fainman-Adelman, who writes the (brilliant) Doomscrollers newsletter about tech and Gen-Z — well worth subscribing — and Toby Mather, who cleverly started networking with Attention’s senior leadership shortly after his birth.
Always privacy-aware, I offered everyone their censorship method of choice after taking a selfie together:
Then, in the rush to get this newsletter out, I failed to follow up — so these boxes, scrawls and icons have almost nothing to do with what anyone wanted. Sorry folks!
A few things we chatted about:
Why social media is not really social any more (here’s a thing I wrote that relates)
How being extremely attractive probably makes you think dating apps work great. I was unfortunately unable to speak to my lived experience
The bizarreness of looking behind the veil at someone’s personalized social feed in 2025, as seen on Liat’s @uncultured_insights research-Insta
Looking at running the next Attention meetup in Boston, Massachusetts on Saturday 10th May! Will be back in a couple of weeks with a time and place.
🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION
This is Directing Attention, where we share a little about what's going on behind-the-scenes at Attention HQ.
The London meetup was an amazing vindication of the idea that making tech fun is...fun! I really couldn’t believe how the time flew, as we nattered about all the things we think are ridiculous, weird, funny, cool about tech today. It felt like a safe space for me to talk way more about tech than is healthy in a normal social situation (sometimes you have to accept that your cousin Dave isn’t interested in the subtle differences between Bluesky and Mastodon, and that you should probably take that conversation elsewhere).
Other than that, this week I’m trying to keep the newsletter short and snappy. I’ve been loosely doing a format of ‘one light piece + one analytical piece + bits and bobs’. The problem is that trying to write a good analytical piece under time pressure is hard. So it feels better to kick the can down the road and spend unpressured time making something more substantial, either for the next newsletter or to publish later in the week. I feel it’s OK for the newsletter to be a relatively light, fun touchpoint, and for weightier things to feature elsewhere. Hit reply if you agree/disagree!