Social media

In 2009, Twitter formalized a caste system. Notable users could apply for verification, earning a blue check next to their names. This was meant to stop malicious impersonators from adopting their identities. Oddly enough, one person who prompted this move was Kanye West, who had criticized “losers making fake Kanye West Twitter accounts.” Clarifying the identities of users was a valid aim. Still, it introduced class conflict. As Twitter acknowledged when controversy erupted after alt-right organizer Jason Kessler earned verification, being given a blue check was “interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance.” An indicator of importance! Of course, that was obvious when it came to Barack Obama or Taylor Swift.

Another day, another deeply compromising story about America’s first son. This weekend, a hacker on the 4chan messageboard claimed to have cracked Hunter Biden’s iCloud password — and proceeded to dump what appears to be the contents of his phone and iPad online. The images and videos in question are more or less exactly what you’d expect: Hunter smoking crack, Hunter brandishing firearms, Hunter cavorting with sex workers, Hunter naked displaying his large appendage. For readers, such as Cockburn, who managed to sidestep the Big Tech-media effort to suppress the New York Post’s “Laptop from Hell” story in October 2020, the iCloud leak contains no new revelations, just more of the same.

There are two new movies in the works about internet provocateur Matt Drudge, and with the mic dropping on Roe v. Wade, today, they couldn’t come at a more appropriate time. Drudge has been dictating the national news conversation for decades, but he wasn’t always doing it out of the limelight. The tale of how a CBS Studios gift shop clerk came to inform the most powerful leader of the free world (Trump used to be a big fan) and the likes of the late Rush Limbaugh has been documented in articles, books, and a television series. Drudge went dumpster diving, found a discarded contract, and was the first to report that Jerry Seinfeld was negotiating for $1 million an episode for his show. Drudgereport.

Coming out isn’t easy. It especially isn’t easy when you have to sit your wife and five children down and reveal that you are, in fact, an incel. I’m not sure which orphanage to send the children to, but I’m sure they’ll understand that that the screeching Bezos-funded blue checks on Twitter know what they’re talking about. Here’s what happened: I tweeted what turned out to be an old joke on Wednesday June 1. “Every girl is bi,” it said. “You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.” I thought it was the perfect little bit of wordplay to end the first day of Pride Month. And the internet agreed. I’ve had a couple of banger tweets go far in the past. When you have a small account like mine, it’s nice when one passes 1,000 likes.