Hangzhou is the latest city in China to take traffic control to a new level, rolling out a new AI-powered robot police officer to direct vehicles and pedestrians at a major intersection and issue polite warnings to law-breakers.https://www.youtube.com/embed/vvDyxYAQiyQ?enablejsapi=1
Robot Traffic Officer Goes on Duty in China’s Zhejiang
This 1.8-m-tall (5-ft 11-in) humanoid traffic cop – Hangxing No. 1 – has made quite an impression so far at the busy Binsheng Road and Changhe Road intersection in Binjiang District, where it’s directing buses, cars and bikes, spotting violations and issuing verbal warnings. It sports high-definition cameras and sensors, can blow a whistle and is integrated with the intersection’s traffic signal system to respond to light changes.
Good to see the new recruit is staying sun-smart, too
While it’s so far designed to be an adjunct to existing human officers, rather than a replacement, police department officials have plans to upgrade it with large language model (LLM) capabilities that will enable it to offer directions and have more engagement with people using the road. Right now, it performs the standard “stop” and “go” motions to oncoming traffic and can identify riders without helmets, jaywalkers and intersection rule-breakers.
Hangxing No. 1 moves around on omnidirectional wheels and is synced-up to the traffic light system
Hangxing No. 1 took up its post at the start of December, as part of the Hangzhou Traffic Police Tactical Unit’s pilot program of robot officers, and has so far proved especially popular with pedestrians.
It’s not the first robocop patrolling Chinese streets, with EngineAI’s PM01 model also donning the hi-vis uniform to help out on Shenzhen streets in and Logan Technology’s RT-G spherical bot quite literally rolled out in Wenzhou last December. And in June, Chengdu got its own humanoid traffic-cop to help out on the western city’s busy streets.
One of China’s earlier robocops, the PM01
All we can say is the technology has come a long way since the AnBot went on duty at the Shenzhen airport in September 2016. That model – which resembled a Dalek crossed with a bar fridge – was, of course, cutting-edge at the time. Given the rapidly moving pace of robotics development, we imagine this new Hangxing No. 1 model may also look obsolete in not nine years but one or two.
The man who just detonated himself next to a U.S.–Syrian patrol in Palmyra is photographed here, standing a few meters from Ahmed al-Sharaa (al-Jolani), the new “President” of Syria.
Washington keeps trying to fast-track HTS as a counter-ISIS partner. But this is the reality:… pic.twitter.com/4yhRB9b1Wb
Ireland hadn’t a pot to piss in when it joined the EU and, if multinationals start to reduce their footprint in Ireland, that could be the case again. Ireland spent 41 of 52 years of its EU membership being in net other people’s money, to the tune of €41bn.
Leopold II of Belgium ruled Zaire (Formerly Congo) as his private property for 23 years. He cut off the limbs of Congolese who did not meet their daily quota on the plantation. At the end of his rule, he had killed 15million Congolese people. But we are taught only about Hitler pic.twitter.com/AeTgvsHWeJ
This piece exposes the well-funded media and policy ecosystem that reframes homelessness as personal failure, making cruelty seem reasonable and paving the way for criminalizing unhoused people instead of housing them.
From Right-Wing Think Tanks to Viral Creators, a Well-Funded Media Ecosystem Is Shaping Public Opinion and Policy Against America’s Unhoused Neighbors
We are living through one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in modern America — one that convinces people to fear their unhoused neighbors instead of asking why housing has become impossible to afford.
A Dangerous Narrative
Across the country, a powerful shift is underway in how Americans perceive homelessness. Increasingly, people are being told that homelessness isn’t the result of rising rents, stagnant wages, medical debt, or the lack of affordable housing, but the result of individual failure.
This shift did not happen on its own. It has been shaped by a well-funded network of think tanks, media outlets, political messaging firms, and viral content creators, all of whom benefit from framing homelessness as a personal problem rather than a systemic one. And as that narrative spreads, so does the belief that punishment, not support, is the appropriate response.
We saw the consequences clearly when 30-year-old street performer Jordan Neely was killed on a New York City subway after expressing hunger and distress. Neely had not attacked anyone. Yet initial media coverage framed him not as a person in crisis, but as a threat. Commentators defended Daniel Penny’s actions, claiming the killing was justified — even necessary.
That reaction did not emerge from nowhere. It reflects years of messaging that has made the public more willing to see unhoused people as dangerous, hopeless, or less deserving of empathy. The violence is not theoretical. Since 1999, the National Coalition for the Homeless has documented at least 588 unhoused victims who lost their lives in violent attacks, and people without housing are up to 25 times more likely to experience violent assault than those who are housed.
And the rhetoric continues to escalate.
In September, Fox News anchor Brian Kilmeade suggested on national television that homeless people should be given lethal injections. The statement was shocking — but it was not isolated.
As Invisible People founder Mark Horvath said, “What the Fox News anchor said was awful — but the truth is he’s just repeating what a lot of people already think. The negative messaging around homelessness is spreading like cancer.”
This is not a cultural shift happening organically. It is the result of a deliberate narrative project, one designed to make systemic failure appear as personal fault, to divert public frustration away from the housing crisis itself and toward the people suffering from it.
And as housing costs continue to rise, and the social safety net continues to erode, that narrative has made cruelty seem reasonable, and solutions seem impossible. At the same time, more Americans find themselves living beneath the poverty line, only a paycheck away from experiencing homelessness themselves.
How We Got Here: The Architects of the Firehose Spewing Anti-Homeless Rhetoric
The story of how we reached this point didn’t begin with social media, but it has been supercharged by it. Over the past decade, organizations such as the Cicero Institute, PragerU, and the Discovery Institute have invested heavily in reshaping the public conversation around homelessness.
Their message is clear: reject evidence-based approaches like Housing First, and recast homelessness as a personal or moral failure rather than a systemic one. What started as a policy agenda has evolved into a coordinated media campaign — one that thrives in the digital attention economy.
Through white papers, model legislation, and slick “educational” videos, these groups have built a foundation of rhetoric that redefines human suffering as a consequence of bad behavior.
Terms like vagrant, drifter, service-resistant, and choice have been repeated so often that they’ve lost all connection to truth. Each one carries an invisible argument that people are on the streets because they deserve to be.
As Barb Poppe, former executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, explained:
“When we use language that is dehumanizing — ‘the criminals on our streets,’ ‘the mentally ill,’ ‘the homeless’ — we lump together whole groups of people as undesirables. It stops us from seeing them as neighbors, coworkers, or family members. That language makes inaction acceptable.”
Those narratives don’t just influence public opinion; they shape policy. Anti-camping bans, sit-lie ordinances, and RV prohibitions all stem from the same poisoned well — one in which homelessness has been rebranded as a public nuisance rather than a humanitarian crisis.
The Modern Ecosystem: Rage for Profit
Today, those early narratives have metastasized into a content economy — one that thrives on rage. Incidentally, rage bait, defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content,” was named Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year.
On YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, faceless “street documentary” channels and 24-hour livestreams of places like Los Angeles’ Skid Row and Philadelphia’s Kensington broadcast human suffering for entertainment and financial gain.
Invisible People has documented nine live streams in Kensington and three in L.A. alone. In some cases, creators earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a month through ads, donations, and memberships. Their thumbnails often feature close-ups of people in visible distress, stripped of consent or context.
Meanwhile, right-wing influencers pump out daily commentary that turns systemic failure into moral panic. Their audiences, often numbering in the millions, are told that compassion is weakness and cruelty is common sense.
Mark Horvath warns, “It’s not just one Fox anchor. The real danger is the nonstop negative content circulating on social platforms that’s shaping the views of millions, especially young adults.”
This isn’t fringe. U.S. viewers watch more than 1 billion hours of YouTube content daily across both TVs and mobile devices combined. And YouTube has become the dominant streaming platform on television screens — in the U.S., it captures the largest share of total TV viewing time. Viewership among adults over 65 has nearly doubled year-over-year. Algorithms prioritize engagement, and anger tends to be the most effective way to engage users.
The result is an attention economy that monetizes dehumanization. Invisible People explores this topic in greater depth in part 2, which examines the financial benefits behind creators and platforms that profit from human suffering.
The Business Model of Outrage
How did we get from televised compassion campaigns like We Are the World to viral videos calling for crackdowns on poverty-stricken people?
Follow the incentives.
Platforms profit from engagement; creators profit from outrage. The more polarizing the content, the more it spreads and the more it earns. This dynamic rewards misinformation over accuracy and moral panic over nuance.
And it’s not limited to social media. National outlets, facing shrinking newsrooms and rising competition for attention, increasingly echo the same fear-based framing. “Homelessness crisis,” “zombie drug,” “urban decay” — these are not neutral descriptors. They’re algorithm-friendly bait that keeps audiences angry and advertisers happy.
The difference is that this new wave of rhetoric comes with faces and feeds that people know. They feel connected to their favorite “truth tellers,” who blur the line between journalism and entertainment. As Horvath said, “We’re not just up against misinformation — we’re up against entire ecosystems built to profit from it.”
Words That Kill
When the public is constantly fed messages that unhoused people are dangerous, dirty, or beyond help, violence becomes easier to justify.
According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, from 2020 to 2022, there were 97 documented violent attacks on people experiencing homelessness, 47 of them fatal.Many of the victims were male, and many of the perpetrators were young. The data show these attacks are not isolated and are often linked to criminalizing survival behaviors.
Each viral clip of an encampment “cleanup,” each headline that blames addiction rather than housing shortages, reinforces the idea that the people suffering are the problem to be solved.
As Poppe reminds us, the real issue isn’t lack of resources; it’s lack of will. “We have the wherewithal to house everyone,” she said. “We just haven’t invested in the housing, shelter, and supports that people need.”
Dehumanizing language gives policymakers permission to look away. When unhoused neighbors are framed as threats, policies shift from support to punishment. Housing budgets shrink while policing budgets grow. The results are visible on every city sidewalk and in every obituary that lists exposure as a cause of death.
Poverty Profiteers: From Think Tank to City Hall
Behind the talking points are organizations that have perfected the art of turning ideology into law.
The Cicero Institute, founded by billionaire Joe Lonsdale, has authored a series of “model bills” promoting the criminalization of homelessness. Their work has been adopted, often word-for-word, by state legislatures and city councils across the country.
At the same time, PragerU and similar “education” brands package anti-housing rhetoric into short, classroom-ready videos aimed at young people. They frame punitive policy as common sense, a marketing campaign disguised as moral clarity.
The overlap is no accident. The same donors who fund these think tanks also bankroll media networks and social content ecosystems that amplify their talking points. What begins as a white paper ends up as a viral meme, then as legislation.
When Perception Becomes Policy
Public opinion doesn’t just reflect policy — it writes it.
According to the Pew Research Center, 54% of U.S. adults say they get news from social media at least sometimes, a shift that diminishes the boundaries between reporting and entertaining. In this algorithm-driven environment, much of what people see isn’t the result of editorial decisions but what the feed decides to show them.
And as Navigator Research recently found, Americans are split between “active” and “passive” news consumers, with 57% saying they actively seek out news, while 43% say the news simply “comes to them.” That passive audience is precisely who the propaganda machine targets. They don’t go looking for information; it finds them — in their feed, in their autoplay queue, in the background of their favorite podcast.
And when those feeds are filled with dehumanizing narratives, voters and policymakers absorb them as truth. The result is a self-fulfilling cycle: misinformation fuels fear, fear drives punitive laws, and those laws reinforce the lies that justified them.
“The homeless sector has failed to educate the public or counter this harmful wave of content,” Horvath said. “Without the funding to scale, we can’t compete at a moment when our work is needed most.”
Nonprofits have been slow to adapt. Many organizations still rely on press releases and awareness campaigns that struggle to cut through the noise. Meanwhile, groups like PragerU and the Discovery Institute operate as full-fledged media publishers, flooding every platform with high-production videos, influencer partnerships, and data-driven distribution strategies.
Their methods work because they’re built for the digital world we actually live in.
Make the Truth Louder
This series exists because silence has consequences.
Every unchecked falsehood makes violence more likely and solutions harder to fund. Every dehumanizing headline pushes housing further out of reach. The anti-homeless narrative machine thrives in that silence, and it will keep growing until truth becomes louder, faster, and more accessible.
That means rethinking what advocacy looks like. It means building audiences, not just awareness. It means telling stories rooted in dignity, consent, and context, and doing it at scale.
Invisible People is committed to being that counter-voice: to exposing the harm, explaining the mechanisms, and offering alternatives rooted in evidence and humanity. Because when homeless people are dehumanized, harm follows. But when stories center dignity, change becomes possible.
“We need to make the truth louder.” — Mark Horvath
This is Part 1 of a six-part Invisible People series examining how a well-funded media ecosystem — from think tanks to viral creators — shapes public perception of homelessness and drives punitive policies. Part 2 in the series follows the money behind rage-bait content. Please share this series and help us make the truth louder!
Erin Wisneski is the Managing Editor of Invisible People, the only nonprofit newsroom in the country dedicated solely to homelessness. She oversees editorial strategy, supports dozens of writers including those with lived experience, and ensures every story is grounded in dignity, accuracy, and a commitment to shifting public understanding toward real solutions.
Jocelyn Figueroa studied Creative Non-Fiction at The New School and is a blogger and freelance writer based out of New York City. Formerly homeless, she launched her own blog discussing shelter life in New York City. Today, Jocelyn is on a mission to build connections through storytelling and creative writing. Check out her book about homelessness at https://ko-fi.com/scartissueproject
This letter is from a file in the Eamon De Valera Papers (P150/512) with the title ‘British Documents Re: 1916’.
The file consists of intelligence reports and despatches between Irish Command [i.e. successive Commanders-in-Chief of British Forces in Ireland–Major-General L.B. Friend, (Lieutenant)-General Sir John Maxwell and (Lieutenant)-General Sir Bryan Mahon] or their various officers; the Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces and his staff; the War Office; M.I.5.G. and the Royal Irish Constabulary. Michael Comyn KC was in communication with Sir John Maxwell and Lieutenant Friend but I cannot find details, can you assist
Thought for 2m 36s
The Eamon De Valera Papers file P150/512, titled “British Documents Re: 1916,” primarily consists of British military intelligence reports, despatches, telegrams, memos, and related materials from October 1915 to November 1917 (with some later annotations). It focuses on pre-Rising intelligence, the suppression of the Easter Rising, surrenders, interrogations, courts-martial, executions, prisoner transfers, martial law, and post-Rising analyses.
Key correspondents include Major-General L.B. Friend (Commander-in-Chief of British Forces in Ireland until April 1916), Lieutenant-General Sir John Maxwell (who took over in late April 1916), Lieutenant-General Sir Bryan Mahon, the War Office, M.I.5.G., the Royal Irish Constabulary, Lord French, Lord Kitchener, Lord Wimborne, and others. The file does not contain any mentions of Michael Comyn KC or communications involving him. Based on biographical sources, Michael Comyn KC (1871–1952), an Irish barrister and nationalist, was in Kansas City, USA, during the Easter Rising itself (April 1916). He returned to Ireland shortly afterward and became involved in defending republican prisoners before military courts under martial law, which were overseen by Maxwell until his departure in November 1916.This defense work likely involved communications with Maxwell or his staff in the context of appeals, trials, or commutations for prisoners sentenced in May–June 1916 (e.g., around 90 death sentences were issued, with 15 executed and the rest commuted due to political pressures). However, no specific details of direct communications between Comyn and Maxwell or Friend have been found in historical records, including the P150/512 file, UCD Archives catalogues, or secondary sources like the Dictionary of Irish Biography and contemporary accounts.
Comyn’s more documented legal and political roles appear in later periods, such as the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921), where he defended prisoners and advised on republican matters, and post-Treaty activities (e.g., in De Valera Papers files like P150/1287, P150/1647, and P150/1811, involving litigation, peace proposals, and legal opinions). If you have additional context about the communications (e.g., a specific date, case, or prisoner), I can search further. Otherwise, you may want to contact UCD Archives directly for access to the full digitized P150/512 collection (currently limited online due to platform redevelopment) or explore Comyn’s mentions in other De Valera Papers files.
Described as Europe’s largest 3D-printed housing project, the Skovsporet development is currently underway in Denmark.A total of 36 student apartments were built with remarkable speed, as the cutting-edge technology allowed the equivalent of more than one apartment per day to be printed.
Designed by SAGA Space Architects, with 3DCP and COBOD, Skovsporet is located in the town of Holstebro. It was commissioned by affordable housing organization NordVestBo for a local university campus.
The development consists of six buildings in all, with the 36 student apartments spread between them. It was built on-site using a COBOD BOD3 3D printer, which is the 3D-printing firm’s successor to the BOD2 model used on the VeroVistas and the world’s largest 3D-printed building.
Skovsporet will consist of 36 student residences when it’s completed
The 3D printer extruded a cement-like mixture out of a nozzle in layers to create the basic structure of the apartments from a pre-designed blueprint. Thanks to the automated nature of the printing process, just three people were needed on site and over time progress was sped up significantly.
“Over the course of the project, printing productivity increased significantly,” explains COBOD. “Printing time reduced from several weeks on the first building of six apartments to just five days on the last, equal to more than one apartment per day.”
The student residences range in size from 40 to 50 sq m (431 to 538 sq ft), with each unit including a kitchen, study area, lounge, bathroom, and a bedroom with a double bed. Large roof windows maximize natural light, and the interior decor makes use of coated plywood and glass to offset the coldness of the concrete.
However, it’s important to stress that while the 3D printing robot has completed its work, the job’s not yet completed. A human workforce has now taken over and is currently fitting windows, interiors, furniture, and everything else required to turn a basic shell into actual housing. Outside, landscaped gardens, walking paths, and bicycle parking are also being added to help foster a student-friendly environment.
Skovsporet’s interiors are partially finished in wood to offset the coldness of the 3D-printed concrete
Skovsporet is expected to be completed by August 2026. The project comes during what has been a remarkable 3D-printing boom in 2025, with the burgeoning technology moving to the mainstream in Europe, Australia, and the United States.
Adam scours the globe from his home in Spain in order to bring the best of innovative architecture and sustainable design to the pages of New Atlas. Most of his spare time is spent dabbling in music, tinkering with old Macintosh computers and trying to keep his even older VW bus on the road.
canisgallicus 