Society

Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the script has been flipped. Pontificators at all points of the ideological spectrum are spinning to figure out what his intentions are with the platform and how that pertains to platform moderation going forward. Musk is seemingly making up Twitter policy on the spot by tweet — and then asking his team to come up with a justification post-tweet. This has happened on several occasions. His actions all came to a head Thursday night when Twitter, apparently under the direct instruction of Musk, suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists from the New York Times (Ryan Mac), the Washington Post (Drew Harwell), the Intercept (Micah Lee), Mashable (Matt Binder), Voice of America (Steve Herman) and CNN (Donie O’Sullivan).

Dr. Anthony Fauci sat for a seven-hour deposition last week as part of a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana. The suit claims that the Biden administration colluded with social media platforms to censor information surrounding the origins and circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as information that went against CDC guidelines and mandates around vaccines and efficacy masks. Fauci, the NIAID and chief medical advisor to President Biden (and others), didn’t say much. In fact he used the term “I cannot recall,” or some variation, over 190 times.

The gradual release of the Twitter Files is impressive in its scale and its revelations about the internal workings of Twitter over the past several years. The cooperative release of information was driven by new Twitter chieftain Elon Musk, via a collection of heterodox thinkers such as Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger.

What do Santa Claus and the Chinese Communist Party have in common? They both see you when you’re sleeping, and they both know when you’re awake — especially if you have communist spyware like TikTok installed on your phone. Whether you’re a teenage girl or a government employee with a top secret clearance, TikTok wants to brainwash you and steal your secrets — maybe even both! While spending all your time on any social media platform can’t be good for your health, TikTok in America is specifically programmed to hook its users, with documented mental health problems plaguing teenage girls. A recently viral “blackout challenge” on the platform literally resulted in kids dying while they strangled each other — or themselves.

Margaret (not her real name) is a board certified OB-GYN practicing in a Catholic, pro-life hospital system in Michigan. Ever since the Dobbs decision this summer, abortion politics have made it harder to do her job. In particular, as she explained to me, messaging from pro-choice campaigners and politicians has left patients thinking that laws that restrict abortion also restrict the ability of doctors to provide medical care for miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies or life-threatening complications of pregnancy. The weekend after the Dobbs decision came down, Margaret witnessed a woman put in danger by medical professionals because of this misinformation and their misunderstanding of the abortion laws in her state.

There is a lot to dig into amid Pope Francis’s recent interview with America magazine, but the most interesting tidbits might be his commentary on foreign affairs. Whereas the traditional head of state represents the interests of a nation, the Holy Father’s most important duty is the shepherding of the Catholic faithful. His message thus carries much weight, not because of the raw power at his disposal, but because it is backed by the moral authority of the Catholic Church. The pope has been in some hot water recently over both the war in Ukraine and the Vatican’s relations with China. Though he has long condemned the violence in Ukraine, he has not been as clear in condemning Russia and Putin specifically.

Amid the renewed energy around antitrust enforcement in recent years, one name has been notably missing: Microsoft. The antitrust villain of the 1990s has skated through the ongoing techlash largely unscathed, happy to play the dutifully chastened elder statesman of the tech ecosystem while privately pushing for Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple to take their lumps. But if Microsoft thought leaning into the techlash would reduce its level of regulatory scrutiny, they appear to be mistaken. The company recently made an all-cash $69 billion bid to buy the video game giant Activision Blizzard, developer and publisher of games like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush.

What does throwing soup on a piece of art have to do with the environment? When we hear the word environmentalist, what comes to mind is something like an Extinction Rebellion or JustStopOil activist: young, urban, progressive, with an expressly political agenda. But what if there are other categories of environmentalists that are expressly ignored, that may have the insights we need to solve the very real environmental problems we face? In my PhD research, I spoke with people who produced a significant amount of food for their own consumption in and around Chicago. Many of them were were disaffected by the focus on climate change and the obsession with consumption as activism.

I am a dental basket case. When I was a child, my orthodontist used to joke that he could drive a Mack truck between my two front teeth. I didn’t have braces so much as fight a losing battle against the evil telekinetic forces at work in my mouth, which seemed to shift my molars and incisors around at will. This was back in the 1990s when orthodontics was a matter of steel torture devices glued to your teeth — and I had all of them. There was the expander, a kind of bear trap in the roof of my mouth, which every night my mother would tighten by inserting and twisting a key. There was the headgear, the wires that circumnavigated half my head, which my orthodontist was delusional enough to think I was going to wear to school.

Twitter probably isn’t going anywhere. Major platforms don’t just vanish, after all. If we’re not still posting in 2023, then I’ll buy you all a drink — a bet you poor saps won’t be able to hold me to because you won’t be able to find me on Twitter. Still, if Musk’s “decimate and innovate” plans don’t work then Twitter will decline. It might get slower and buggier and more prone to crashing. Platforms don’t have sudden deaths, but they do have slow and painful ones. Even Myspace still exists. Will Twitter follow it into online obscurity? Not soon, perhaps, but it will in the end. Nothing lasts forever. So our thoughts turn meditative. Writers sometimes comment on Twitter as if it has trapped them in a toxic relationship.

It’s been less than two weeks since Elon Musk took over Twitter — and Cockburn is finding the app more chaotic than ever. The news of the tech takeover really separated the kids from the grown-ups. One by one, the haughtiest users have bravely announced their departure from the bird website. Ciao! The latest to go is the British actor Stephen Fry, who posted a picture of Scrabble letters spelling out "goodbye" to his 12.5 million followers. He’s since headed over to Mastodon. Never heard of it? Neither had Cockburn until he got his tech-savvy nieces to give him a hand. And now he can say, with authority, that it is even worse than Twitter. When signing up to Mastodon, users choose a "server," which is based on your interests. "Mindly.

Americans: watch your backs. Last week, Forbes released a bombshell report that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, the popular video recording and meme app, was planning to monitor and track the physical location of Americans. It’s not the first time there have been national security and human rights questions swirling around ByteDance, the China-based technology company that owns all of TikTok’s offshore data and could easily be leveraged by the Chinese government. Forbes would not specifically say which Americans ByteDance was targeting, but it would not be too farfetched to assume they would be influential figures in media and politics — the same folks China tracked during Hong Kong’s volatile freedom and democracy protests.

“The bird is freed,” tweeted Elon Musk last Thursday, when he acquired full ownership of Twitter. The day before, he strode into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a white ceramic wash basin to impart the message that his new ownership should “sink in.” Musk has repeatedly signaled his intention to liberalize the platform by relaxing its limits on free expression. Since taking over, he's stated that Twitter protocols and account bans will remain in place pending review by an internal, ideologically diverse “content moderation council.

Whether on British television news panels or late-night TV in America, it is hard to get away from talk about artificial intelligence (AI). Even the president of the United States has weighed in on AI, introducing an "AI Bill of Rights." The popular thing is to amplify the current media narrative — that AI will render millions jobless. It will eventually become more powerful than humans and destroy its creators. Just Google “AI doomsday” and then run and hide under the covers. I will be the first to admit that all technology has a dark side. Email came with spam and scammers; mobile phones came with robocalls and endless tracking by companies like Facebook. Artificial intelligence, too, will be used for nefarious purposes.

When the United Nations General Assembly convened in New York in September, climate-watchers may have noticed a pesky, pigtailed vacuum. Greta Thunberg, who spent the summer of 2019 stalking the East Coast after taking a prince of Monaco’s yacht across the Atlantic, reached her zenith that September — the last time this body met in person — at the Climate Action Summit where she delivered her creepy, memed-into-oblivion “how dare you” speech. But the chilling little entity straight out of Kubrick was notably absent at this year’s assembly, at a time when the Biden administration is pushing climate hysteria more fervently than ever.