They are for the most part acting as the middle man here. As GPU processing power further increases and becomes more easily available to the general public (together with suitable tools as done by StableDiffusion), it is expected that photostock companies and not just the artists who provided the photos in the first place will eventually cease to exist as well.
Thousands of scientific journals exist and new ones get created on a regular basis even by dissident scientists who want to publish their own research, however crazy it might be (there is notably long-running one even for cold fusion topics, I'm aware several exist for parapsychology, etc), but they don't have the "Impact Factor" of Nature, so almost nobody cites or even reads the papers they feature.
Yep, just have a look at MEMRI's board of advisors and directors.
I don't subscribe to the fed's hidden database hypothesis. The attackers probably got such material from the dark web. Occasionally there are news about large discussion forums with hundreds of thousands of users there closing down. So many users implies there isn't even a high barrier to access to it.
Bitchute blocks content on a per-country basis, by the way. From the USA one might have the impression it is a generally free-speech streaming video website, but from the point of view of other countries things might be different.
It's just a personal general (and likely not very popular) impression, but the Japanese 'weeb' culture and its influence have been declining for years while the Chinese seem to understand what made it popular and are increasingly able to not just pull off cheap imitations. At this rate, as more original works come from the region, in the next years it might even start becoming attractive to learn Mandarin (from an utilitarian perspective it already is, putting aside possible dystopian futures).
When I started learning Japanese more than 20 years ago due to my interest in Japanese-only games and visual novels, as well as prior exposure to tons of anime and manga, Japan dominated what came out of Asia to the West, and the country was culturally very strong.
I'm still strongly biased towards Japanese media, but nowadays circumstances are different I'm not sure if younger generations in the West are culturally influenced from it like I was many years ago. So, to answer the question, if I was 20 years younger today, I don't know if I would be motivated enough to learn Japanese from scratch.
or do i have to learn Japanese and get the original one?
I would recommend learning Japanese if you're a fan of the original works, in either case. Luckily I did that before woke translations were a thing and when Chinese or Korean media were still pretty much irrelevant. If I were to start now, I wouldn't be so sure.
Then this will blow your mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromostereopsis I think it's what is going on in the opening image due to the color choice. Here is an even clearer example (try moving your head while staring at the red dots): https://i.imgur.com/GT5t9J0.png
The article was mostly written by an LLM.