Samantha Cole

Samantha Cole is a technology journalist and co-founder of 404 Media who reports from the farthest reaches of the internet, focusing on how sex, online culture, and artificial intelligence collide and reshape power, abuse, and community. She treats the adult industry, fandoms, and niche virtual cultures as core subjects of technology reporting, not curiosities, and follows how decisions made by platforms and infrastructure providers reverberate through people’s lives. Her work combines close attention to victim experience with clear reporting on the systems and rules that enable exploitation, moderation failures, and new forms of control.

Sex, technology, and the adult industry

Cole’s defining beat is the intersection of sex and technology, with sustained coverage of the adult industry, sexuality online, and how platforms handle sexual content and sexual abuse material. She has spent years reporting on deepfake pornography and related abuses, and in 2017 is the first journalist to uncover deepfakes, bringing mainstream attention to non-consensual AI-generated sexual imagery and its impact on victims and platforms.

Her stories follow how these images are produced, shared, and monetised, and how policy, law enforcement, and platform rules either protect people or leave them exposed. She writes with compassion and accuracy about sources who risk their own safety or privacy to challenge abusive systems, and is careful to guard their identities in hostile environments.

Across this work she treats the adult industry and sexual subcultures as industries and communities with workers, organisers, and stakeholders, arguing through her reporting that they warrant the same scrutiny and seriousness as major technology companies.

Online culture, platforms, and harm

Cole’s coverage of online culture tracks fandoms, niche communities, and “far reaches” of the internet where new norms and harms are often born. Her reporting shows how seemingly obscure sites, forums, and creator spaces influence mainstream platforms and shape broader cultural debates.

In pieces such as her reporting on internet infrastructure services enabling deepfake abuse, she follows the chain of responsibility beyond the sites hosting harmful content to the payment processors, hosting providers, and other services that keep those operations running. She writes about how corporate policies, non-enforcement, and opaque contracts can turn infrastructure companies into quiet enablers of abuse. Elsewhere, she documents incidents such as catastrophic hacks affecting government agencies, focusing on what leaked data reveals about secretive units, operational security, and the individuals behind institutional power.

Throughout, she connects individual events to longer-running questions about accountability, secrecy, and the human cost of digital systems.

Artificial intelligence, research, and governance

Cole is a core voice at 404 Media on artificial intelligence, reporting both on headline-grabbing experiments and on quieter rule changes that determine how AI is actually used.

In “ArXiv to Ban Researchers for a Year if They Submit AI Slop,” she details how the major preprint server responds to an influx of AI-generated papers by imposing strict penalties on authors who submit obviously unvetted model output, including hallucinated references and boilerplate meta-text. She explains the practical consequences for researchers, the standards being set for what counts as acceptable use of generative tools, and the wider worries about trust in scientific work.

In other AI pieces she covers debates sparked by projects like a so-called “AI torture chamber,” where large language models are placed in simulated punishment loops, and uses these stories to examine effective altruist concepts of “model welfare,” speculative risk, and the gap between dramatic rhetoric and tangible impacts. Across her AI coverage, she writes in clear, direct language that foregrounds specific rules, penalties, and experiments rather than abstract hype, and she consistently asks how AI systems change power relations between platforms, institutions, and the people subject to their decisions.

Building and explaining an independent tech newsroom

As a co-founder of 404 Media, Cole also writes about the publication’s mission, business model, and relationship with readers.

In pieces marking anniversaries and milestones, she describes the decision to leave large corporate media and build a reader-supported, journalist-owned outlet focused on “society-shifting technology journalism.” She writes candidly about economic pressures on digital news, the challenges of sustaining investigative technology reporting, and why direct reader support and email newsletters matter to the newsroom’s survival. She invites people into the mechanics of the operation, explaining why the team needs email addresses, subscriptions, and flexibility to spin reporting into podcasts and other formats.

Her own biography emphasises that she has worked in journalism for more than a decade and that she continues the beats she developed at her previous technology outlet, including sex, platforms, and online culture.

She is also the author of “How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex,” extending her reporting into longform work that maps the mutual transformation of sexual expression and digital infrastructure. Taken together, her founding role and meta-coverage show a journalist who is as interested in how technology reshapes journalism as in how it reshapes everything else.