Media Storm - News Watch pt.2: Trump's 'new' world order, and who is behind Grok AI deepfakes?

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

Like this episode? Support Media Storm on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! In January alone, Donald Trump abducted the Venezuelan President, listed himself as President of Venezuela on Wikipedia, almost launched another tariff war after demanding Greenland, directly threatened Colombia, Mexico and Cuba, told Honduran vote counters there’d be “hell to pay” if his favourite candidate didn’t win, and dropped bombs on Caribbean boats that killed more than a hundred people. Yet at the World Economic Forum in Davos the same month, he launched his ‘Board of Peace’. Make it make sense! But is Trump's new world order really that new? In a postwar world of covert regime change, privatised ownership of natural resources, and sanctions designed to strangle uncooperative economies, was the international rules-based order just a lie all along?  Plus: headlines told us that "Non-consensual sexualised deepfakes were created by the AI chatbot Grok"  and that "Grok AI made sexualised images of children". But who gave Grok the prompt to do it? Missing from the headlines, as is so often the case when it comes to stories about sexual abuse against women and girls, is MEN. We discuss why no one can seem to name the problem - so much so, our government used a SNAKE to represent male violence in a recent advert (end snake violence against women and girls!) And we end with our new segment: Holding Onto Hope. The episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mathildamall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)  The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok ⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello Media Stormers. Today we are continuing Yellow's Watch. Hello Media Stormers. Today we are continuing yesterday's mega News Watch, where we hatch up to 2026 following the longest January ever. This is also the longest recording ever. Yes, we are recording them back to back and pretending we did it on different days. That's just how dedicated we are. If you haven't listened to our first episode, pause and head back to yesterday's, where we discuss ice in America and the threat of revolution and war in Iran. But don't worry, we also had some positive news to close.

Today, we will cover Trump's New World Order, touching on those crazy headline stories about Venezuela, Greenland and peace in the Middle East. Plus, the virtual dystopia breaking out alongside it, GROC, which is being repurposed to mass-produced image-based sexual abuse. Then Fear Not, another positive news story. We're going to be very successful in Gaza. It's going to be a great thing to watch. He has captured and brought to United States, Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.

Elon Musk's AI chatbot GROC coming under fire over a rise in non-consensual and sexualized deep, big images. My body wasn't mine. I felt like it had just been hijacked. Welcome to Media Storm's News Watch, helping you get your head around the headlines. I'm Helena Wadia. And I'm Matilda Mallinson. This week's Media Storms, Trump's World Order and GROC AI assisted abuse. In January, US President Donald Trump abducted the Venezuelan president, listed himself as president of Venezuela on Wikipedia, and established US ownership of Venezuelan oil. Sorry. Sorry.

Like, what world are we living in? Helen, I'm on a roll here. It's just, I just, like, in January, years present Donald Trump abducted the Venezuelan president. That's not normal. Oh, honey, I'm not even close to halfway through my list. He almost launched another tariff war after Denmark refused to give him Greenland. Greenland also refused, but the hypocrisy of European anti-imperialism is such that Greenland is apparently

Denmark's to give. We'll get to that. Trump also directly threatened Colombia, Mexico and Cuba. He told Honduran vote counters there'd be hell to pay if his favourite candidate didn't win. And he dropped bombs on Caribbean boats that killed more than a hundred people. Oh yeah, and he sent an armada to Iran, as we talked about yesterday. Also known as half an hour ago. Today, aka half an hour later, I want to talk about what happened at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos towards the end of the longest January ever. The World Economic Forum, or W.E.F, is an annual gathering when investors, business leaders and heads of state from around the world congregate in the Swiss mountains to, quote,

improve the state of the world. Or as a Palestinian analyst I spoke to put it, Unaccountable businessman, mercenaries, contractors, private groups, billionaires, despotic regimes, dictators, etc. Sorry, but wait, of all the events you just listed, why is Davos what you want to talk about? Because that's where all the dots join together. And that's where Trump decided to unveil his so-called Board of Peace at a global business forum, which tells us something about the world order he's manifesting, and also what this Board of Peace is actually all about. The board was originally for Gaza, wasn't it?

Yes, this board was initially authorized by the UN to oversee reconstruction of Gaza. However, its 11-page charter, unveiled at Davos, didn't mention Gaza once. Instead, it looks more set to replace the UN altogether. Also, the Gaza Board of Peace doesn't have a single Palestinian on it, let alone a survivor from Gaza. And on that point, I was incredibly disappointed to hear almost no Palestinians invited onto the mainstream media to discuss the Board of Peace, even as some of them were criticizing it for excluding Palestinian voices from the discussion. It was highly ironic. I was lucky enough to speak to Mohamed Shahada, the Palestinian analyst you just heard, who is originally

from Gaza. Speaking to me on Middle East Eye, he gave these words of warning. Whatever the world allows Trump to get away in Gaza will come to your doorstep next. Trump would come next to the Board of Peace of Greenland, the Board of Peace of the Bisk, the Board of Peace of the Kentons around Europe. And it wouldn't stop anywhere in any time soon. Like Trump still has three years in office. You can have a Board of Peace in Iran, a Board of Peace in Panama, all around the world. I also hate seeing all these headlines depicting peace, without mentioning that 500 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed during this so-called ceasefire.

Anywhere else, that would be called a massacre. Yeah, and also, you're right, this is just nothing to do with peace. At the Board of Peace ceremony, as Trump called it, listened to how the US president talked about Gaza. But I said that, you know, this is a great location. It all begins to see, I'm a real estate person at heart. And it's all about location. And I said, look at this location on the sea.

Look at this beautiful piece of property. What it could be for so many people, it'll be so great. People that are living so poorly are going to be living so well. But it all began with the location. That's the vision. Ew. It didn't all begin with a location. It began with a genocide.

We're all part of Trump's property empire now. Mm-hmm. Trump's Board of Peace has less to do with peace in Gaza and more to do with enacting. a body that can engineer a new society wherever Trump decides there's an international crisis zone. With a billion dollar joining fee and no humanitarian requirements for members, it's not so much a transactional world order as an extractive one, a world in which the strong take what they want and the rest just have to deal with it.

Trump would personally chair this Board of Peace in his own capacity, not as the president of the US. He'd have no term limit on his chairmanship. He'd also have the ability to ask whoever he chooses, even if they've coughed up the billion dollars. Billion dollars, billion dollars to join this so-called Board of Peace. What's the current updates with this Board of Peace, if we must call it that? Should we rename it?

Trump's Board of... Pussies? What the hell? Somehow we're told her you made it much worse. Yeah, okay. The updates, the updates are that out of 50 to 60 countries invited, 21 have so far joined. European countries except for Hungary and Bulgaria have abstained. This is because generally they are opposing Putin's membership,

but also because they fear the board will undermine the authority of the existing United Nations model and the international law system that the UN is designed to uphold. But my question today is, is this really such a new world order? The World Economic Forum at Davos, this is widely seen as a symbol of that traditional, international, rules-based order, the order overseen by the United Nations since it was formed at the end of World War II. It proclaims to defend liberal democracy, free trade and self-sovereignty. But does it really? in a post-war world of covert regime change, privatised ownership of natural resources

and sanctions designed to strangle on cooperative economies, was the international rule-based order kind of a lie all along? Right, international law has been applied wildly differently around the world. We've covered this on MediaStone many times. Yeah, I remember on a news watch, we looked at the history of the international criminal court when the Filipino president or former Filipino president, Rodrigo Duterte, was arrested and taken to the Hague in March last year.

Now, his arrest was surprisingly divisive for a man who once told a crowd he would kill so many people that the fish in Manila Bay would grow fat on their bodies. But the reason his arrest was divisive was because his accusation that the International Criminal Court is white man's justice, statistically speaking, kind of holds up. All previous ICC defendants have come from the global self and the vast majority of them, Africa. Putin and Netanyahu are two of only four I can count

from the northern hemisphere. And let's be honest, most of the Western world literally roll out the red carpet for Netanyahu despite the arrest warrant. And when this happened, the lack of awareness of Western media was such that the Times responded to Netanyahu.

who's arrest warrant, saying, the world is full of tyrants. Why is the ICC so obsessed with Israel? Oh my God. It's similar with how the rule of law and human rights are allocated domestically, too. We talked about ICE on yesterday's episode and how the media, as well as the government, see migrants as less worthy of due process than citizens. Yeah, we are literally threatening to leave the European Human Rights Convention right now because it's inconveniently incompatible with nationalist anti-immigration policy. So to Western leaders, Western countries, international law has long been designed to discipline others, not themselves. And arguably, I would say any world order executed with such flagrant hypocrisy, however noble its intentions, was always destined to fail.

Trump didn't discard this order. He just brought. broke the camel's back. And where does the media come into this? You talked about the reactions to the Times, lack of awareness with the ICC. Tell us more. Western media is absolutely key here because the media is so involved in this hypocrisy

by failing to tell us Westerners what the rest of the world is saying. And nowhere is this truer than in the USA and with US media. I always think back to the 2024 episode we did following the outbreak of war in Gaza. and one interview with Kishore Mahbubani, former president of the UN Security Council. He shared his views here on what he called the Anglo-Saxon media.

The puzzling thing about the United States is that on the one hand, it has the world's best universities, and it has the world's best-known academics. It has the world's most powerful and influential newspapers, right? It has the freest media in the world. Now, you add up all these factors by definition, Americans, especially American policymakers, should be among the best informed people in the world. But sadly, they are among the most ignorant people in the world.

We do in the West really credit ourselves with having a free press. However, would you say that our news media in the West has been guilty of perpetuating sort of very subjective biased worldviews? I live in New York for over 10 years. as Ambassador to the UN, and I read the New York Times every day. The New York Times is a great newspaper. It's such a joy to read it every morning. But it's also one of the most arrogant newspapers in the world.

I feel I've been cut off from the rest of the world. It doesn't exist. It's such an insular, self-absorbed, self-referential discourse that takes place. I think that's very, very dangerous in an interdependent, planet. Why is it so important for Western media and education to reflect and understand non-Western views of the world? So if you live in a small interdependent global village and if the West represents 12% of the global village, they cannot solve any global problem until they understand the mindsets of the 88% with whom they share this small planet. World News. As a

it appears in the international pages of our newspapers. It's not the same story here in the West as the story told around much of the world, which is why when watching events unfold at Davos, one moment struck me even more than Trump's attempted coup d'at. And that was the response of Canada's Prime Minister, Mark Carney. He said, today I will talk about a rupture in the world order. The end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality where the geopolitics of the greatest powers are submitted to no limits and no constraints. And he goes on, the power of the less powerful starts with honesty.

This is the part that hit me, because Kani's speech, which earned a rare standing ovation at the forum, is one of the only times I can remember a Western leader openly calling the Western-led world. order a lie. A pleasant fiction? Yes. So I have to say I found it a little bit tame how in response to events at Davos, the Western media responded purely by condemning or in some cases celebrating President Trump for ushering in a new world order when Carney stood up and said it was a pleasant fiction all alone.

Is this really the end of an old world order or simply the open admission of the true world order? I realize I'm being a bit hyperbolic. Like, Trump is a madman of new dimensions. It's just that I would have really liked to see this question ask more because this was a moment for Western introspection and characteristically, we let it pass by. Question? Yes.

Because it was, as you mentioned, very rare to see someone like Mark Carney say something like this. Why do you think Connie said this? I think he's no longer speaking to him. his traditional audience, right? He's not scripting his speech for the old school Western allies. His choice of words show that traditional US allies, like Canada, are finally realizing they can no longer rely

on America under Trump and are reaching for new friendships. So I think with these words, Carney is talking to the global South. He's talking to the world beyond the West, the global majority, who are under no illusion about the world order, before Trump went and said the quiet parts out loud. You know, last week we also saw Canada negotiate

tariff reductions with China, and the EU signed a landmark free trade agreement with India. So yeah, here Kani, he's speaking a more open language, and that's not just a lesson for world leaders, that's a lesson for our media. In the, what, four and a half years since we've been doing media storm, analyzing weekly headlines across the left,

across the right of the political divide, like I have found one, one bias to be more pervasive and less self-aware than any other bias in our media. And that is Western geopolitical bias. Nothing exposed this more than the coverage of Gaza. And it's not just about hypocrisy. It's about bridging divides. If most of the world gets a different narrative of events than we do,

then it's our media's job to at least make us aware of that difference. Yeah. And so I really hope as political leaders start to open up their language and look for new friends, our media follows suit. Because there is a new world order, and it's not new because the old world order followed the rules, and this one doesn't. It's because the old world order was dominated

by traditional Western allegiances, so the rules didn't apply to us, but this one won't be. And that in itself may not be a bad thing. But our media can no longer afford to have its myopic worldview of the West as morally superior or tied together by a, quote, special friendship that the global majority shouldn't be party to, special friendship basically just being a euphemism for white majority

countries. It's time to tackle Western bias in our media. Investing is all about the future. So what do you think's going to happen? Bitcoin is sort of inevitable at this point. I think it would come down to precious metals. I hope we don't go cashless. I would say land is a safe investment.

Technology companies, solar energy. Robotic pollinators might be a thing. A wrestler to face a robot, that will have to happen. So whatever you think is going to happen in the future, you can invest in it at WealthSimple. Start now at WealthSimple.com. You love a game on Media Storm, don't you, Matilda? Oh God, what have I walked myself into? It's okay, it's not that sophisticated a game.

Also, this is a game for everyone listening, not just Matilda. So, listen up. What's wrong with these headlines? GROC AI generated about 3 million sexualised images in 11 days study finds. X to stop GROC AI from undressing images of real people after backlash. Reports that GROC AI makes sexualized images of children. Non-consensual sexualized deepfakes created by the AI chatbot GROC. Did you spot?

Well, unless I've missed a major news update, I didn't realize GROC AI could act of its own accord quite just yet. Yeah, it's not fully formed into a robot with original thoughts yet, I'm pretty sure. But then again, given what's happened in the world this January, I'm not sure anything would surprise me. True, true, true. But this means that if, quote, GROC AI made sexualized images of children, well, someone must have given GROC the prompt. Exactly. Ding, ding, ding, ding.

Missing from the headlines, as is so often the case when it comes to stories about sexual abuse against women and girls is men. How often have we sat here and criticised headlines about rape, sexual assault or sexual harassment, where headlines or even entire articles miss out the key perpetrators? Men. Too often. In case you missed it. Grock, the AI tool on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, run by billionaire, nearly trillionaire, and far-right lover Elon Musk,

has been weaponised by perpetrators to generate misogynistic and violent content at the expense of women and children. Men were typing in prompts about female users. The prompts ranged from something like, GROC put her in a bikini, or GROC put her in transparent underwear, to far more sexually explicit prompts,

and even to death, men were prompting GROC to generate images of female users dying violent deaths. Let's elevate some of the lived experience voices of the women who this happened to. The worst for me was seeing myself undressed, bent over, and then my toddler's backpack in the background, because I had to then see that and see myself violated in that way and such horrific images and then put that same backpack on my son the next day, because it's the one he wears every day to school.

I've had men like DMing me telling me that they've been jerking off to deepfakes of me. I've had people telling me that like people kind of getting off on the fact that like there's nothing that I can do about it for SA victims. And anybody who's been through violence has already been dealing with the feelings of violation and like not being in control. So to have something like this as well, which not only are you not in control of and it is a very violating thing to happen. But you also can't really do anything about it. Like, there's, there doesn't seem to be, from what I know, many ways to, like, take legal action. I think if that is, like, it's not going to be a very short-winded thing. It's going to be a really long-winded thing.

And most people don't have the money to do that. It's just, it's a very traumatizing thing. They started putting me in, asking Grock to put me in micro bikinis of various colors. People asking to increase various parts of my body. So one post, uh, show, posted the image of me. already been altered with my breasts enlarged significantly. I was quite shocked at first. Then I started to feel quite humiliated. And as they started to increase, I actually got quite frightened. It's very destabilising to see a very realistic image that is of you, but it's not

a view. My body wasn't mine anymore. I felt like it had just been hijacked. Now, this affects all women, of course, but something that I felt that I felt, was particularly underreported in the media was how this affected certain minority women. Men weren't just commanding the AI chatbot to undress pictures of women and girls into bikinis. Many perpetrators asked Grock to take off a hijab, a sari, or another kind of religious or cultural piece of clothing.

Oh, this is so grim. Shout out to Wired and to glamour for covering this. Wired's research found Indian sari's and modest Islamic wear were the most common examples in the output, which also featured Japanese school uniforms, burkas, and early 20th century style bathing suits with long sleeves. The Times also reported that a descendant of Holocaust survivors was digitally stripped after men instructed the platform

to generate an image of her in a bikini outside Auschwitz. It was truly horrendous. I will say it's interesting that this was the, only religiously or culturally targeted story the Times chose to highlight. But that's a separate issue we don't have time for. The reality is that behind every GROC AI prompt, there is AI generated image abuse carried out by real perpetrators driven by misogyny. And that's really what we learned from our episode on image-based sexual abuse last year.

We spoke with Madeleine Thomas, the founder of Anti-Share Technology Image Angel. As technology advances and rapidly evolves, so does the nature of image-based sexual abuse, IBSA, leading to arise in AI-generated intimate images, as they're widely referred to, deep fakes. Now, according to online security experts at Security Hero, between 2022 and 2023, deep-fake sexual content increased by over 400%. Madeline, you work in this area of tech-based protections. Are the measures in place that we're seeing going far enough? It's not actually a tech issue. It's a society issue that we can change through tech is where I'm trying to kind of knock on doors and explain to people.

This is how we can make this solution. But what we have right now is the Online Safety Act is asking the platforms that host content to make sure that they're protecting their users from harm. So they're making sure that people who are access, assessing these sites where harmful content may be, aren't children? Is that enough? I don't know. I think what this whole men using GROC AI to abuse women debacle has shown is that it certainly isn't enough.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Offcom published their violence against women and girls' rules to moderate the media last year. Ah, but it wasn't rules, it was guidance. And essentially, these measures are not legally binding. and this month's news proves that when tech companies are left to police themselves, women and girls pay the price. Ofcom are currently still investigating whether GROC AI and X's users broke UK law. I will tell you, though, what strategy was unveiled very recently, though, the government's landmark violence against women and girls strategy. To launch the strategy, they unveiled a video advert titled Enough.

Have a listen to it. Bye! Tracking her every move, restricting her from going online. Your dad and I are starting to get worried. Please call us back. And isolating her from her family is abuse. Enough. End violence against women and girls. Again, no mention of men. End male violence against women and girls.

There's not only no mention of men. The video shows a woman being followed home, a woman being restricted from going online and a woman's phone being held to stop her messaging her family. Oh, sorry, I missed out a crucial part. It's a snake doing all of this, not a man. Snake, snake violence!

End snake violence against women and girls. End snake violence against women and girls. No, the government literally, like, couldn't, can't bear to confront the issue this much that they used a snake to represent a man. I mean, if only we had the means to, like, visually represent men on camera, like, how would we do that? Oh, impossible, snake.

Side note, I was scuba diving with a venomous sea snake recently, and I literally felt safer than I have ever felt in the presence of a man. Okay? Justice for snakes. Uh, ridiculous. Yeah. Thank you to Sydney from this. This ends now for first alerting me to this video, by the way. And I just want to read what Sydney posted online about it.

She said, the video depicts abuse and violence against women and girls as something camouflaged and hidden, a snake lurking in the bushes. Sorry, it's just so ridiculous. This passive framing furthers the narrative that this is a women's safety issue rather than one of men's violence.

If the government can't name the issue, it's hard to see how they plan to meet their goal of halving it within a decade. I'm nodding a lot. And after a fortnight of pushback, what was Elon Musk's solution to this abuse? Well, he made the feature of AI photo editing only available for paid subscribers.

Thanks for monetising abuse, Elon. Um, okay, how did our government react to this? Well, the Prime Minister Kirstama called X's paid subscribers decision horrific, but later said that the UK was vindicated when Musk announced X would geoblock the ability of users to generate images of real people in bikinis, underwear and similar attire in countries where it was illegal. And it said it would do this in the UK in line with law changes

ministers have pledged to introduce. To me, the fact that Kyr Starma sees this as vindication tells me everything I need to know about how much does government understands the ongoing epidemic of male violence against women and girls. Time for holding on to hope. A little positive news at the end of the episode. Now, we did an episode last year with Janie Starling from Level Up UK about their campaign No Births Behind Bars.

This is because evidence shows that pregnancy in prison is inherently unsafe, placing women and babies at serious risk of harm, trauma and even death. It's been a long campaign for Level Up. And here's why it matters. This clip is from our episode where we spoke to a woman who was, We're calling Anna about her experience of being pregnant in prison. Obviously, it was my first son, so I didn't really know what was going to happen. It's a labour, it's unpredictable.

You don't know how fast or slow it's going to be. I started getting some pains in my back. Early hours of the morning, obviously it's a very confined area as well. It got to about 5.30 in the morning. Pressed the cell bell. Told them, I think I might be starting labour. That was ignored. Between the hours of 5.30 and 7.30, the cell bell was pressed four times.

at 7.30, my door was unlocked. And when I said to that officer, oh, I'm pretty sure I'm in labour, or my labour's starting, she looked very shocked. She pulled me at the cell, put me in a communal area and told me I had to wait for the prison nurse. I then had to wait for the ambulance

to be security cleared to come into the prison for me to then go into the back of it before it could leave. I'd been told previously by a governor that I wouldn't be handcuffed when I was in labour. There was one female officer. She then cuffed me to her

and I questioned it. She told me, be grateful she's put me on long cuffed and not short cuffs. So there was a chain between the cuffs rather than wrist to wrist. So she kind of set the tone for how I knew her attitude was going to be. And it just made it very uncomfortable. It is literally, when you go into that situation, yours and your unborn baby's fate is in somebody else's hands.

You have no control over it. Like once you're in that position and you're in that prison environment, there's physically nothing you can do. And what's the positive update? Well, there has been a huge campaign win for level up. In 2021, when they launched the campaign to end the imprisonment of pregnant women and mothers, they had two arse, changed the sentencing guidelines and amend the bail act. And after five years of relentless petitions, protests, legal interventions, lobbying,

and lots of media stories, both have now been achieved. Head to we level up.org for more. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with the first deep dive of the series. You guys sent us so many great ideas on Patreon and we've got a few of them cooking. If you want to support Media Storm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee a month.

The link is in the show notes and a special shout out to everyone in our Patreon community already. We appreciate you so much. And if you enjoyed this episode, please send it to someone. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow a podcast, so please do tell your friends and obviously leave us a five-star rating and a review.

You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal at Helena Wadia. show by at MediaStorm Pod. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helen O'Owadia and Matilda Malinson. The music is by Sunfire.