Three of the biggest data centres in Russia were taken offline this weekend - dramatically changing the social media landscape.

A man from North Carolina has been sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to repay $8.1 million following his conviction for orchestrating a criminal scheme involving AI-generated music and bot-driven streaming fraud. The 54-year-old pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud after uploading thousands of AI-generated songs to streaming platforms, which were then played billions of times through bot accounts. The scheme, active between 2017 and 2024, saw the defendant amass approximately $8 million in royalties by using up to 10,000 bot accounts simultaneously, creating fake email addresses and illegally obtained debit cards to establish accounts on streaming services. According to the Justice Department, his AI-generated tracks accumulated over 80.9 billion combined streams on YouTube Music within a single month, a figure nearly ten times higher than Taylor Swift's streaming statistics during the same period. The case marks the first criminal bot streaming fraud case on record, with the defendant also required to serve two years of supervised release. This development comes amid growing concerns about AI-generated music in the industry, as evidenced by recent lawsuits against AI platforms like Suno, which faced a copyright infringement case from German licensing agency GEMA. Additionally, streaming platform Deezer reported that AI-generated music now accounts for over 50% of daily uploads, surpassing human-made music for the first time, with studies indicating that 97% of people cannot distinguish between real and AI-generated music.