Twitter

Donald Trump’s go-to tactic for hijacking the news cycle is simple: bash enemies, mercilessly, and insinuate that they are part of a terrible conspiracy.The President has spent the last few days again tweeting conspiracy theories about the mysterious 2001 death of an aide to then-Rep. Joe Scarborough, who now hosts Morning Joe on MSNBC. Cue outrage and the news cycle shifts in the President’s direction. He does it every time. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1265624335898869760 But Cockburn has noticed that the President is straining for something shocking or strange enough to flip the world’s attention. As November approaches, he will become ever more desperate for electoral outrage-fodder.

The cardinal rule of a good milkshake-ducking: it's not over until the duck has been declared racist. So it goes for Alison Roman, the popular (or formerly so) New York Times food writer who earlier this month became a loathed and villainous avatar of privilege after some ill-considered remarks about celebrity lifestyle-empresses Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo sparked a storm of backlash. The scandal ultimately became big and beefy enough to make the mainstream news: Teigen announced to her 12 million Twitter followers that Roman's comments had wounded her. Roman apologized, and then apologized again, and then stopped posting at all. The tide of takes inspired by the controversy will keep rolling until June.

Do masks help contain COVID-19? Right now the answer is yes, definitely yes. Sort of. Maybe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are sure masks help. Now.But in January, Dr Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, said during a briefing, ‘the virus is not spreading in the general community. We don’t routinely recommend the use of face masks by the public to prevent respiratory illness. And we certainly are not recommending that at this time for this new virus.’And on March 1, 2020, the Surgeon General repeated that masks are ‘not effective’ and warned people to stop buying them lest they be in short supply for medical staff.

Donald Trump is often called a troll — and, in the internet sense, he is. Certainly, he has elevated the art of irritating people online into a form of politics, diplomacy and statesmanship. It’s perhaps his most significant innovation. But the trouble with innovation, as we all know, is that at some point the Chinese will copy you — and that’s exactly what some influential Twitter voices are doing right now to counter Trump’s viral appeal. Take for instance the curious account of Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of Chinese and English editions of the Global Times, another CCP rag which spews out state propaganda dressed as journalism.Xijin is another fanatical nationalist, or at least pretends to be for public advancement.

For Hindus, cows are objects of veneration. Govinda, protector of cows, resides in Goloka and tends to a herd of creatures that bring nourishment and strength. Krishna lives here, and cows roam lush grasslands in peace.My head is swimming slowly, meditatively. Am I in Goloka? There are cows here: giant beasts with gentle eyes. But these are not grasslands. This is a gigantic, stinking barn, where cows are huddled up together in unbearable heat. In the distance there are moans. A calf is being dragged from its mother.

It's not easy being a woman online, or so the saying goes. When we're not being dismissed as dime-a-dozen bimbos, there's a very optimistic creep in our DMs trying to corral us into ‘showing bobs and vagene’ from thousands of miles away. Twitter in particular seems to be an unwinnable terrain. That said, the constant search for validation on the internet brings out the worst in some of us. If we can only build an audience, we tell ourselves, it will be easier to tune out the occasional misogynistic troll. Thus we resort to building an army of followers in some awfully predictable ways. *** Subscribe for three months’ free access to The Spectator USA website — then just $3.

It’s Lent and the good Catholic schoolgirl in me loves this season of fasting and rending the heart and not my garments and all that jazz, so I dug deep and asked myself the hard question: what would be the most challenging thing in my life to give up? Since I’ve already given up heroin, cocaine, alcohol, weed, cigarettes and toxic men, two primary substance addictions remain: coffee and Twitter. If I’m honest with myself, Twitter is the most hardcore addiction I have and it’s also the one that robs me of the most productivity. So. Into the media desert I go...I rip the Band-Aid off around 5 p.m. PST on Tuesday, logging out from my account and removing the app from my phone. Goodbye, my love. Day 1: Holy Moly. I have a problem. 6 a.m. PST: Ash Wednesday.

What strange creatures we 21st-century humans are. The less informed we are about a particular subject, the more we feel the need to pronounce on it with great authority. This is a well-observed internet phenomenon — nobody has to know anything; everybody can look stuff up. When it comes to a global health pandemic, however, the desperation to sound wise starts to turn to feverish frenzy. In times of panic, bullshit grows, exponentially — check the graphs if you don’t believe me. Everywhere you look on social media now you’ll find amazing numbers of Google-enabled experts on epidemiology, virology, the history of plagues, and so on. Many of these people spend most of their time on Twitter, yet somehow they have mastered vast amount of virus-related literature.