As of today, the social media platform BlueSky has grown to about 25 million users, which is still a fraction of the 600 million on X, but the recent spike at the former is attributable to people abandoning the latter. After Elon Musk acquired and rebranded Twitter, fired the accountability team, reinstated Trump, and then devoted both X and personal ...
I haven’t posted here since before the election, and admittedly, it has been difficult to resist escapism and simply stop giving a damn. That the United States (and with it the democratic world) is now in jeopardy is not in doubt. Rather, the questions for the moment are the order in which institutions will begin to break and what the ...
It may be true that “democracy dies in darkness,” but it can also be wiped out in blinding light. If Donald Trump is reelected, it will have been 20 years after the launch of Facebook and 18 years after the launch of Twitter—less than one generation for the “greatest invention for democracy” to be the proximate cause of the death ...
It is unoriginal to refer to Donald Trump as a useful idiot, but the question as to whose idiot invokes both plausible and fantastical theories combined with sundry lampoons on social media. That Trump is Putin’s lapdog, for example, remains a popular theme, but Gil Duran, writing for The New Republic, makes a solid case that Trumpism, and specifically the ...
On Wednesday, January 31, the Senate Judiciary Committee presided over a dramatic hearing entitled Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis. The gallery was filled with family members representing young victims of sexual exploitation, drug-related deaths, and adverse mental health effects of social media that can lead to chronic illness and suicide. The witnesses who provided testimony and ...
