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Wednesday

Magdalene J. Taylor

Harry Sisson and trial by TikTok

This week, a story emerged about a dozen or so young women who each thought they were monogamously dating 22-year-old Democratic influencer Harry Sisson, albeit digitally. The 11 women, all around the same age as Sisson, claim that he had convinced each of them separately that they were the only woman on his “roster”; that they were the only women he was speaking to. He spoke to many of them for months at a time, with the conversations often being erotic in nature. Nudes were exchanged. But while each woman claims they believed to be the only person Sisson was doing this with, via social media, they have now come to learn that this wasn’t the case – he’d been flirting and sexting with several women at a time.

harry sisson

Monday

Derek VanBuskirk

Melania Trump takes on revenge porn and deepfakes

First Lady Melania Trump held a roundtable on Capitol Hill Monday with victims of revenge porn, deepfakes and sextortion in support of the "Take It Down Act." The “Take It Down Act” is a bipartisan bill cosponsored by Senators Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar that would require social-media platforms to remove any nonconsensual intimate images within forty-eight hours of a victim’s request. While the act passed the Senate with a unanimous vote, FLOTUS hopes it will be passed with the same enthusiasm in the House before being signed into law by her husband. She called for the prioritization of “robust security measures and to uphold strict ethical standards to protect individual privacy.

melania

Friday

Om Malik

How Elon Musk turned Twitter into the post-TV Fox News

Elon Musk has decided it's too much work for him to be the chief executive of Twitter, a fraying social network, in addition to running Tesla and SpaceX and a potpourri of other startups. He recently named Linda Yaccarino, an NBC ad executive, as the new CEO so that she could focus on business operations and he could focus on product design and new technologies. As an employee of Musk's, Yaccarino has an impossible mission — to stem the bleeding, appease the advertisers, and, of course, keep her new boss happy. Good luck to her, I say, for Twitter's current fortunes are going in only one direction — south. When Musk acquired Twitter, he paid $44 billion for a company that no one else wanted nearly as much. Since then, its value has fallen to almost $20 billion.

Saturday

Matt Purple

American celebrity culture has become exhausting

How was your Super Bowl party? I spent mine investing all my money in crypto and then blowing it on Peacock subscriptions. For once it was the commercials that were the most memorable part of the game — not Matthew Stafford's lightning arm, not even 50 Cent entering the halftime show upside-down like a bat. And that was because every ad was a broadside of celebrities. Not a fan of Bud Light Seltzer? Wait until it's pitched to you by Guy Fieri and a race of Eloi-like doppelgangers (spoiler: you still won't be a fan of Bud Light Seltzer). And how can I not order Uber Eats after watching Gwyneth Paltrow smell her own vagina candle while Trevor Noah eats deodorant? I'm old enough to remember when movie stars starred in movies; now they're hawking Doritos and cheap flights to Istanbul.

celebrity