Manufacturing Media Addiction

Today's lesson: Politics, Power, and Profit In Social Media.

Just Couldn't Stay Away

TwiXter

Elmo has been all about "free speech" since he bought Twitter.

He and his butt buddy Trump - along with an army of MAGA twerps - have been posting all manner of shit for years.

And I have matched them almost tweet for tweet.

But suddenly, the TweeXt police jump in and tell me I've crossed the line.

I "appealed", but I'm not holding my breath - I believe I'll just hang for a while and see if they let me back in.

Overheard

The end of fact-checking marks a new Golden Age Of Free Speech

Go ahead

Go nuts

About The Changes

ICYMI: My latest is a long piece on the historic rise in social isolation in America.

Here are the 10 most important, depressing, or just mind-blowing statistics I found in my reporting.

ON SOCIAL ISOLATION

1. Men who watch television now spend 7 hours in front of the TV for… pic.twitter.com/bLvY7bCBqV

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) January 9, 2025

1. Men who watch television now spend 7 hours in front of the TV for every 1 hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. 
2. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species.
3. From the late 1970s to the late 1990s, the frequency of hosting friends for parties, games, dinners, and so on declined by 45%, according to Robert Putnam. Then it got worse. Between the early 2000s and the latest data, the average amount of time that Americans spent hosting or attending social events declined another 32%.
4. A 5-percentage-point increase in alone time is associated with about the same decline in life satisfaction as was a 10% lower household income.
5. From 1965 to 1995, the typical adult gained 6 weekly hours in leisure time. They funneled almost all of it into one activitiy: watching TV.
6. In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent.
7. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s.
8. According to Princeton's Patrick Sharkey, today's adults spend an additional 99 minutes inside their homes on any given day, compared with 2003.
9. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends outside the home on any given night has declined by more than 30% in the past 20 years.
10. I think of restaurants as the ultimate "social"  business. But today, just one-quarter of restaurant traffic is "on-premises"—that is, sitting, ordering, talking with people at a table. With the rise of delivery 74% of all restaurant traffic now comes from “off premises” customers—takeout and delivery. And according to data gathered by OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29% in just the past two years. The top reason given? The need for more “me time.”

The Anti-Social Century

Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.

The Bar Is Closed

A short drive from my home in North Carolina is a small Mexican restaurant, with several tables and four stools at a bar facing the kitchen. On a sweltering afternoon last summer, I walked in with my wife and daughter. The place was empty. But looking closer, I realized that business was booming. The bar was covered with to-go food: nine large brown bags.

As we ate our meal, I watched half a dozen people enter the restaurant without sitting down to eat. Each one pushed open the door, walked to the counter, picked up a bag from the bar, and left. In the delicate choreography between kitchen and customer, not a word was exchanged. The space once reserved for that most garrulous social encounter, the bar hangout, had been reconfigured into a silent depot for customers to grab food to eat at home.

Until the pandemic, the bar was bustling and popular with regulars. “It’s just a few seats, but it was a pretty happening place,” Rae Mosher, the restaurant’s general manager, told me. “I can’t tell you how sad I’ve been about it,” she went on. “I know it hinders communications between customers and staff to have to-go bags taking up the whole bar. But there’s nowhere else for the food to go.” She put up a sign: BAR SEATING CLOSED.

The sign on the bar is a sign of the times for the restaurant business. In the past few decades, the sector has shifted from tables to takeaway, a process that accelerated through the pandemic and continued even as the health emergency abated. In 2023, 74 percent of all restaurant traffic came from “off premises” customers—that is, from takeout and delivery—up from 61 percent before COVID, according to the National Restaurant Association.

The flip side of less dining out is more eating alone. The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30 percent in the past 20 years. “There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business,” the Washington, D.C., restaurateur Steve Salis told me. “I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.” Even when Americans eat at restaurants, they are much more likely to do so by themselves. According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29 percent in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”

The evolution of restaurants is retracing the trajectory of another American industry: Hollywood. In the 1930s, video entertainment existed only in theaters, and the typical American went to the movies several times a month. Film was a necessarily collective experience, something enjoyed with friends and in the company of strangers. But technology has turned film into a home delivery system. Today, the typical American adult buys about three movie tickets a year—and watches almost 19 hours of television, the equivalent of roughly eight movies, on a weekly basis. In entertainment, as in dining, modernity has transformed a ritual of togetherness into an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude.

The privatization of American leisure is one part of a much bigger story. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent. Alone time predictably spiked during the pandemic. But the trend had started long before most people had ever heard of a novel coronavirus and continued after the pandemic was declared over. According to Enghin Atalay, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Americans spent even more time alone in 2023 than they did in 2021. (He categorized a person as “alone,” as I will throughout this article, if they are “the only person in the room, even if they are on the phone” or in front of a computer.)

Eroding companionship can be seen in numerous odd and depressing facts of American life today. Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species. Since the early 2000s, the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has declined by more than a third.

Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many observers have reduced this phenomenon to the topic of loneliness. In 2023, Vivek Murthy, Joe Biden’s surgeon general, published an 81-page warning about America’s “epidemic of loneliness,” claiming that its negative health effects were on par with those of tobacco use and obesity. A growing number of public-health officials seem to regard loneliness as the developed world’s next critical public-health issue. The United Kingdom now has a minister for loneliness. So does Japan.

But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans don’t seem to be reacting to the biological cue to spend more time with other people. Their solitude levels are surging while many measures of loneliness are actually flat or dropping. A 2021 study of the widely used UCLA Loneliness Scale concluded that “the frequently used term ‘loneliness epidemic’ seems exaggerated.” Although young people are lonelier than they once were, there is little evidence that loneliness is rising more broadly today. A 2023 Gallup survey found that the share of Americans who said they experienced loneliness “a lot of the day yesterday” declined by roughly one-third from 2021 to 2023, even as alone time, by Atalay’s calculation, rose slightly.

Day to day, hour to hour, we are choosing this way of life—its comforts, its ready entertainments. But convenience can be a curse. Our habits are creating what Atalay has called a “century of solitude.” This is the anti-social century.

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and technologists about America’s anti-social streak. Although the particulars of these conversations differed, a theme emerged: The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.

The End of the Social Century

The first half of the 20th century was extraordinarily social. From 1900 to 1960, church membership surged, as did labor-union participation. Marriage rates reached a record high after World War II, and the birth rate enjoyed a famous “boom.” Associations of all sorts thrived, including book clubs and volunteer groups. The New Deal made America’s branch-library system the envy of the world; communities and developers across the country built theaters, music venues, playgrounds, and all kinds of gathering places.

But in the 1970s, the U.S. entered an era of withdrawal, as the political scientist Robert D. Putnam famously documented in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone. Some institutions of togetherness, such as marriage, eroded slowly. Others fell away swiftly. From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by nearly half. The decline was astonishingly broad, affecting just about every social activity and every demographic group that Putnam tracked.

What happened in the 1970s? Klinenberg, the sociologist, notes a shift in political priorities: The government dramatically slowed its construction of public spaces. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether,” he told me. Putnam points, among other things, to new moral values, such as the embrace of unbridled individualism. But he found that two of the most important factors were by then ubiquitous technologies: the automobile and the television set.

Starting in the second half of the century, Americans used their cars to move farther and farther away from one another, enabling the growth of the suburbs and, with it, a retreat into private backyard patios, private pools, a more private life. Once Americans got out of the car, they planted themselves in front of the television. From 1965 to 1995, the typical adult gained six hours a week in leisure time. They could have devoted that time—300 hours a year!—to community service, or pickup basketball, or reading, or knitting, or all four. Instead, they funneled almost all of this extra time into watching more TV.

Television transformed Americans’ interior decorating, our relationships, and our communities. In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent. Time diaries in the 1990s showed that husbands and wives spent almost four times as many hours watching TV together as they spent talking to each other in a given week. People who said TV was their “primary form of entertainment” were less likely to engage in practically every social activity that Putnam counted: volunteering, churchgoing, attending dinner parties, picnicking, giving blood, even sending greeting cards. Like a murder in Clue, the death of social connections in America had any number of suspects. But in the end, I believe the likeliest culprit is obvious. It was Mr. Farnsworth, in the living room, with the tube.

Phonebound

If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware has continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience. The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life.

Some of this screen time is social, after a fashion. But sharing videos or texting friends is a pale imitation of face-to-face interaction. More worrisome than what young people do on their phone is what they aren’t doing. Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s.

The decline of hanging out can’t be shrugged off as a benign generational change, something akin to a preference for bell-bottoms over skinny jeans. Human childhood—including adolescence—is a uniquely sensitive period in the whole of the animal kingdom, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation. Although the human brain grows to 90 percent of its full size by age 5, its neural circuitry takes a long time to mature. Our lengthy childhood might be evolution’s way of scheduling an extended apprenticeship in social learning through play. The best kind of play is physical, outdoors, with other kids, and unsupervised, allowing children to press the limits of their abilities while figuring out how to manage conflict and tolerate pain. But now young people’s attention is funneled into devices that take them out of their body, denying them the physical-world education they need.

Teen anxiety and depression are at near-record highs: The latest government survey of high schoolers, conducted in 2023, found that more than half of teen girls said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless.” These data are alarming, but shouldn’t be surprising. Young rats and monkeys deprived of play come away socially and emotionally impaired. It would be odd if we, the self-named “social animal,” were different.

Socially underdeveloped childhood leads, almost inexorably, to socially stunted adulthood. A popular trend on TikTok involves 20‑somethings celebrating in creative ways when a friend cancels plans, often because they’re too tired or anxious to leave the house. These clips can be goofy and even quite funny. Surely, sympathy is due; we all know the feeling of relief when we claw back free time in an overscheduled week. But the sheer number of videos is a bit unsettling. If anybody should feel lonely and desperate for physical-world contact, you’d think it would be 20-somethings, who are still recovering from years of pandemic cabin fever. But many nights, it seems, members of America’s most isolated generation aren’t trying to leave the house at all. They’re turning on their cameras to advertise to the world the joy of not hanging out.

If young adults feel overwhelmed by the emotional costs of physical-world togetherness—and prone to keeping even close friends at a physical distance—that suggests that phones aren’t just rewiring adolescence; they’re upending the psychology of friendship as well.

In the 1960s, Irwin Altman, a psychologist at the Naval Medical Research Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, co-developed a friendship formula characterized by increasing intimacy. In the early stages of friendship, people engage in small talk by sharing trivial details. As they develop trust, their conversations deepen to include more private information until disclosure becomes habitual and easy. Altman later added an important wrinkle: Friends require boundaries as much as they require closeness. Time alone to recharge is essential for maintaining healthy relationships.

Phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it used to be, and crowds are more solitary. “Bright lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd,” Nicholas Carr, the author of the new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, told me. “Boundaries helped us. You could be present with your friends and reflective in your downtime.” Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers.

If Carr is right, modern technology’s always-open window to the outside world makes recharging much harder, leaving many people chronically depleted, a walking battery that is always stuck in the red zone. In a healthy world, people who spend lots of time alone would feel that ancient biological cue: I’m alone and sad; I should make some plans. But we live in a sideways world, where easy home entertainment, oversharing online, and stunted social skills spark a strangely popular response: I’m alone, anxious, and exhausted; thank God my plans were canceled.

Homebound

Last year, the Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey was working on a book about how places shape American lives and economic fortunes. He had a feeling that the rise of remote work might have accelerated a longer-term trend: a shift in the amount of time that people spend inside their home. He ran the numbers and discovered “an astounding change” in our daily habits, much more extreme than he would have guessed. In 2022—notably, after the pandemic had abated—adults spent an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day compared with 2003.

This finding formed the basis of a 2024 paper, “Homebound,” in which Sharkey calculated that, compared with 2003, Americans are more likely to take meetings from home, to shop from home, to be entertained at home, to eat at home, and even to worship at home. Practically the entire economy has reoriented itself to allow Americans to stay within their four walls. This phenomenon cannot be reduced to remote work. It is something far more totalizing—something more like “remote life.”

One might ask: Why wouldn’t Americans with means want to spend more time at home? In the past few decades, the typical American home has become bigger, more comfortable, and more entertaining. From 1973 to 2023, the size of the average new single-family house increased by 50 percent, and the share of new single-family houses that have air-conditioning doubled, to 98 percent. Streaming services, video-game consoles, and flatscreen TVs make the living room more diverting than any 20th-century theater or arcade. Yet conveniences can indeed be a curse. By Sharkey’s calculations, activities at home were associated with a “strong reduction” in self-reported happiness.

A homebound life doesn’t have to be a solitary life. In the 1970s, the typical household entertained more than once a month. But from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, the frequency of hosting friends for parties, games, dinners, and so on declined by 45 percent, according to data that Robert Putnam gathered. In the 20 years after Bowling Alone was published, the average amount of time that Americans spent hosting or attending social events declined another 32 percent.

As our homes have become less social, residential architecture has become more anti-social. Clifton Harness is a co-founder of TestFit, a firm that makes software to design layouts for new housing developments. He told me that the cardinal rule of contemporary apartment design is that every room is built to accommodate maximal screen time. “In design meetings with developers and architects, you have to assure everybody that there will be space for a wall-mounted flatscreen television in every room,” he said. “It used to be ‘Let’s make sure our rooms have great light.’ But now, when the question is ‘How do we give the most comfort to the most people?,’ the answer is to feed their screen addiction.” Bobby Fijan, a real-estate developer, said last year that “for the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill.” From studying floor plans, he noticed that bedrooms, walk-in closets, and other private spaces are growing. “I think we’re building for aloneness,” Fijan told me.

“Secular Monks”

In 2020, the philosopher and writer Andrew Taggart observed in an essay published in the religious journal First Things that a new flavor of masculinity seemed to be emerging: strong, obsessed with personal optimization, and proudly alone. Men and women alike have been delaying family formation; the median age at first marriage for men recently surpassed 30 for the first time in history. Taggart wrote that the men he knew seemed to be forgoing marriage and fatherhood with gusto. Instead of focusing their 30s and 40s on wedding bands and diapers, they were committed to working on their body, their bank account, and their meditation-sharpened minds. Taggart called these men “secular monks” for their combination of old-fashioned austerity and modern solipsism. “Practitioners submit themselves to ever more rigorous, monitored forms of ascetic self-control,” he wrote, “among them, cold showers, intermittent fasting, data-driven health optimization, and meditation boot camps.”

When I read Taggart’s essay last year, I felt a shock of recognition. In the previous months, I’d been captivated by a particular genre of social media: the viral “morning routine” video. If the protagonist is a man, he is typically handsome and rich. We see him wake up. We see him meditate. We see him write in his journal. We see him exercise, take supplements, take a cold plunge. What is most striking about these videos, however, is the element they typically lack: other people. In these little movies of a life well spent, the protagonists generally wake up alone and stay that way. We usually see no friends, no spouse, no children. These videos are advertisements for a luxurious form of modern monasticism that treats the presence of other people as, at best, an unwelcome distraction and, at worst, an unhealthy indulgence that is ideally avoided—like porn, perhaps, or Pop-Tarts.

Drawing major conclusions about modern masculinity from a handful of TikToks would be unwise. But the solitary man is not just a social-media phenomenon. Men spend more time alone than women, and young men are increasing their alone time faster than any other group, according to the American Time Use Survey.

Where is this alone time coming from? Liana C. Sayer, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, shared with me her analysis of how leisure time in the 21st century has changed for men and women. Sayer divided leisure into two broad categories: “engaged leisure,” which includes socializing, going to concerts, and playing sports; and “sedentary leisure,” which includes watching TV and playing video games. Compared with engaged leisure, which is more likely to be done with other people, sedentary leisure is more commonly done alone.

The most dramatic tendency that Sayer uncovered is that single men without kids—who have the most leisure time—are overwhelmingly likely to spend these hours by themselves. And the time they spend in solo sedentary leisure has increased, since 2003, more than that of any other group Sayer tracked. This is unfortunate because, as Sayer wrote, “well-being is higher among adults who spend larger shares of leisure with others.” Sedentary leisure, by contrast, was “associated with negative physical and mental health.”

Richard V. Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me that for men, as for women, something hard to define is lost when we pursue a life of isolationist comforts. He calls it “neededness”—the way we make ourselves essential to our families and community. “I think at some level, we all need to feel like we’re a jigsaw piece that’s going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere,” he said. This neededness can come in several forms: social, economic, or communitarian. Our children and partners can depend on us for care or income. Our colleagues can rely on us to finish a project, or to commiserate about an annoying boss. Our religious congregations and weekend poker parties can count on us to fill a pew or bring the dip.

But building these bridges to community takes energy, and today’s young men do not seem to be constructing these relationships in the same way that they used to. In place of neededness, despair is creeping in. Men who are un- or underemployed are especially vulnerable. Feeling unneeded “is actually, in some cases, literally fatal,” Reeves said. “If you look at the words that men use to describe themselves before they take their own lives, they are worthless and useless.” Since 2001, hundreds of thousands of men have died of drug overdoses, mostly from opioids and synthetics such as fentanyl. “If the level of drug-poisoning deaths had remained flat since 2001, we’d have had 400,000 fewer men die,” Reeves said. These drugs, he emphasized, are defined by their solitary nature: Opioids are not party drugs, but rather the opposite.

This Is Your Politics on Solitude

All of this time alone, at home, on the phone, is not just affecting us as individuals. It’s making society weaker, meaner, and more delusional. Marc J. Dunkelman, an author and a research fellow at Brown University, says that to see how chosen solitude is warping society at large, we must first acknowledge something a little counterintuitive: Today, many of our bonds are actually getting stronger.

Parents are spending more time with their children than they did several decades ago, and many couples and families maintain an unbroken flow of communication. “My wife and I have texted 10 times since we said goodbye today,” Dunkelman told me when I reached him at noon on a weekday. “When my 10-year-old daughter buys a Butterfinger at CVS, I get a phone notification about it.”

At the same time, messaging apps, TikTok streams, and subreddits keep us plugged into the thoughts and opinions of the global crowd that shares our interests. “When I watch a Cincinnati Bengals football game, I’m on a group text with beat reporters to whom I can ask questions, and they’ll respond,” Dunkelman said. “I can follow the live thoughts of football analysts on X.com, so that I’m practically watching the game over their shoulder. I live in Rhode Island, and those are connections that could have never existed 30 years ago.”

Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live around us, which Dunkelman calls the village. “These are your neighbors, the people in your town,” he said. We used to know them well; now we don’t.

The middle ring is key to social cohesion, Dunkelman said. Families teach us love, and tribes teach us loyalty. The village teaches us tolerance. Imagine that a local parent disagrees with you about affirmative action at a PTA meeting. Online, you might write him off as a political opponent who deserves your scorn. But in a school gym full of neighbors, you bite your tongue. As the year rolls on, you discover that your daughters are in the same dance class. At pickup, you swap stories about caring for aging relatives. Although your differences don’t disappear, they’re folded into a peaceful coexistence. And when the two of you sign up for a committee to draft a diversity statement for the school, you find that you can accommodate each other’s opposing views. “It’s politically moderating to meet thoughtful people in the real world who disagree with you,” Dunkelman said. But if PTA meetings are still frequently held in person, many other opportunities to meet and understand one’s neighbors are becoming a thing of the past. “An important implication of the death of the middle ring is that if you have no appreciation for why the other side has their narrative, you’ll want your own side to fight them without compromise.”

The village is our best arena for practicing productive disagreement and compromise—in other words, democracy. So it’s no surprise that the erosion of the village has coincided with the emergence of a grotesque style of politics, in which every election feels like an existential quest to vanquish an intramural enemy. For the past five decades, the American National Election Studies surveys have asked Democrats and Republicans to rate the opposing party on a “Feeling Thermometer” that ranges from zero (very cold/unfavorable) to 100 (very warm/favorable). In 2000, just 8 percent of partisans gave the other party a zero. By 2020, that figure had shot up to 40 percent. In a 2021 poll by Generation Lab/Axios, nearly a third of college students who identify as Republican said they wouldn’t even go on a date with a Democrat, and more than two-thirds of Democratic students said the same of members of the GOP.

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election had many causes, including inflation and frustration with Joe Biden’s leadership. But one source of Trump’s success may be that he is an avatar of the all-tribe, no-village style of performative confrontation. He stokes out-group animosity, and speaks to voters who are furiously intolerant of political difference. To cite just a few examples from the campaign, Trump called Democrats “enemies of the democracy” and the news media “enemies of the people,” and promised to “root out” the “radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

Social disconnection also helps explain progressives’ stubborn inability to understand Trump’s appeal. In the fall, one popular Democratic lawn sign read Harris Walz: Obviously. That sentiment, rejected by a majority of voters, indicates a failure to engage with the world as it really is. Dunkelman emailed me after the election to lament Democratic cluelessness. “How did those of us who live in elite circles not see how Trump was gaining popularity even among our literal neighbors?” he wrote. Too many progressives were mainlining left-wing media in the privacy of their home, oblivious that families down the street were drifting right. Even in the highly progressive borough of Brooklyn, New York, three in 10 voters chose Trump. If progressives still consider MAGA an alien movement, it is in part because they have made themselves strangers in their own land.

Practicing politics alone, on the internet, rather than in community isn’t only making us more likely to demonize and alienate our opponents, though that would be bad enough. It may also be encouraging deep nihilism. In 2018, a group of researchers led by Michael Bang Petersen, a Danish political scientist, began asking Americans to evaluate false rumors about Democratic and Republican politicians, including Trump and Hillary Clinton. “We were expecting a clear pattern of polarization,” Petersen told me, with people on the left sharing conspiracies about the right and vice versa. But some participants seemed drawn to any conspiracy theory so long as it was intended to destroy the established order. Members of this cohort commonly harbored racial or economic grievances. Perhaps more important, Petersen said, they tended to feel socially isolated. These aggravated loners agreed with many dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues coined a term to describe this cohort’s motivation: the need for chaos.

Although chaotically inclined individuals score highly in a popular measure for loneliness, they don’t seem to seek the obvious remedy. “What they’re reaching out to get isn’t friendship at all but rather recognition and status,” Petersen said. For many socially isolated men in particular, for whom reality consists primarily of glowing screens in empty rooms, a vote for destruction is a politics of last resort—a way to leave one’s mark on a world where collective progress, or collective support of any kind, feels impossible.

The Introversion Delusion

Let us be fair to solitude, for a moment. As the father of a young child, I know well that a quiet night alone can be a balm. I have spent evenings alone at a bar, watching a baseball game, that felt ecstatically close to heaven. People cope with stress and grief and mundane disappointment in complex ways, and sometimes isolation is the best way to restore inner equilibrium.

But the dosage matters. A night alone away from a crying baby is one thing. A decade or more of chronic social disconnection is something else entirely. And people who spend more time alone, year after year, become meaningfully less happy. In his 2023 paper on the rise of 21st-century solitude, Atalay, at the Philadelphia Fed, calculated that by one measure, sociability means considerably more for happiness than money does: A five-percentage-point increase in alone time was associated with about the same decline in life satisfaction as was a 10 percent lower household income.

Nonetheless, many people keep choosing to spend free time alone, in their home, away from other people. Perhaps, one might think, they are making the right choice; after all, they must know themselves best. But a consistent finding of modern psychology is that people often don’t know what they want, or what will make them happy. The saying that “predictions are hard, especially about the future” applies with special weight to predictions about our own life. Time and again, what we expect to bring us peace—a bigger house, a luxury car, a job with twice the pay but half the leisure—only creates more anxiety. And at the top of this pile of things we mistakenly believe we want, there is aloneness.

Several years ago, Nick Epley, a psychologist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, asked commuter-train passengers to make a prediction: How would they feel if asked to spend the ride talking with a stranger? Most participants predicted that quiet solitude would make for a better commute than having a long chat with someone they didn’t know. Then Epley’s team created an experiment in which some people were asked to keep to themselves, while others were instructed to talk with a stranger (“The longer the conversation, the better,” participants were told). Afterward, people filled out a questionnaire. How did they feel? Despite the broad assumption that the best commute is a silent one, the people instructed to talk with strangers actually reported feeling significantly more positive than those who’d kept to themselves. “A fundamental paradox at the core of human life is that we are highly social and made better in every way by being around people,” Epley said. “And yet over and over, we have opportunities to connect that we don’t take, or even actively reject, and it is a terrible mistake.”

Researchers have repeatedly validated Epley’s discovery. In 2020, the psychologists Seth Margolis and Sonja Lyubomirsky, at UC Riverside, asked people to behave like an extrovert for one week and like an introvert for another. Subjects received several reminders to act “assertive” and “spontaneous” or “quiet” and “reserved” depending on the week’s theme. Participants said they felt more positive emotions at the end of the extroversion week and more negative emotions at the end of the introversion week. Our modern economy, with its home-delivery conveniences, manipulates people into behaving like agoraphobes. But it turns out that we can be manipulated in the opposite direction. And we might be happier for it.

Our “mistaken” preference for solitude could emerge from a misplaced anxiety that other people aren’t that interested in talking with us, or that they would find our company bothersome. “But in reality,” Epley told me, “social interaction is not very uncertain, because of the principle of reciprocity. If you say hello to someone, they’ll typically say hello back to you. If you give somebody a compliment, they’ll typically say thank you.” Many people, it seems, are not social enough for their own good. They too often seek comfort in solitude, when they would actually find joy in connection.

Despite a consumer economy that seems optimized for introverted behavior, we would have happier days, years, and lives if we resisted the undertow of the convenience curse—if we talked with more strangers, belonged to more groups, and left the house for more activities.

The AI Century

The anti-social century has been bad enough: more anxiety and depression; more “need for chaos” in our politics. But I’m sorry to say that our collective detachment could still get worse. Or, to be more precise, weirder.

In May of last year, three employees of OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence company, sat onstage to introduce ChatGPT’s new real-time conversational-speech feature. A research scientist named Mark Chen held up a phone and, smiling, started speaking to it.

“Hey, ChatGPT, I’m Mark. How are you?” Mark said.

“Hello, Mark!” a cheery female voice responded.

“Hey, so I’m onstage right now,” Mark said. “I’m doing a live demo, and frankly I’m feeling a little bit nervous. Can you help me calm my nerves a little bit?”

“Oh, you’re doing a live demo right now?” the voice replied, projecting astonishment with eerie verisimilitude. “That’s awesome! Just take a deep breath and remember: You’re the expert here.”

Mark asked for feedback on his breathing, before panting loudly, like someone who’d just finished a marathon.

“Whoa, slow!” the voice responded. “Mark, you’re not a vacuum cleaner!” Out of frame, the audience laughed. Mark tried breathing audibly again, this time more slowly and deliberately.

“That’s it,” the AI responded. “How do you feel?”

“I feel a lot better,” Mark said. “Thank you so much.”

AI’s ability to speak naturally might seem like an incremental update, as subtle as a camera-lens refinement on a new iPhone. But according to Nick Epley, fluent speech represents a radical advancement in the technology’s ability to encroach on human relationships.

“Once an AI can speak to you, it’ll feel extremely real,” he said, because people process spoken word more intimately and emotionally than they process text. For a study published in 2020, Epley and Amit Kumar, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, randomly assigned participants to contact an old friend via phone or email. Most people said they preferred to send a written message. But those instructed to talk on the phone reported feeling “a significantly stronger bond” with their friend, and a stronger sense that they’d “really connected,” than those who used email.

Speech is rich with what are known as “paralinguistic cues,” such as emphasis and intonation, which can build sympathy and trust in the minds of listeners. In another study, Epley and the behavioral scientist Juliana Schroeder found that employers and potential recruiters were more likely to rate candidates as “more competent, thoughtful, and intelligent” when they heard a why-I’m-right-for-this-job pitch rather than read it.

Even now, before AI has mastered fluent speech, millions of people are already forming intimate relationships with machines, according to Jason Fagone, a journalist who is writing a book about the emergence of AI companions. Character.ai, the most popular platform for AI companions, has tens of millions of monthly users, who spend an average of 93 minutes a day chatting with their AI friend. “No one is getting duped into thinking they’re actually talking to humans,” Fagone told me. “People are freely choosing to enter relationships with artificial partners, and they’re getting deeply attached anyway, because of the emotional capabilities of these systems.” One subject in his book is a young man who, after his fiancée’s death, engineers an AI chatbot to resemble his deceased partner. Another is a bisexual mother who supplements her marriage to a man with an AI that identifies as a woman.

If you find the notion of emotional intercourse with an immaterial entity creepy, consider the many friends and family members who exist in your life mainly as words on a screen. Digital communication has already prepared us for AI companionship, Fagone said, by transforming many of our physical-world relationships into a sequence of text chimes and blue bubbles. “I think part of why AI-companion apps have proven so seductive so quickly is that most of our relationships already happen exclusively through the phone,” he said.

Epley sees the exponential growth of AI companions as a real possibility. “You can set them up to never criticize you, never cheat on you, never have a bad day and insult you, and to always be interested in you.” Unlike the most patient spouses, they could tell us that we’re always right. Unlike the world’s best friend, they could instantly respond to our needs without the all-too-human distraction of having to lead their own life.

“The horrifying part, of course, is that learning how to interact with real human beings who can disagree with you and disappoint you” is essential to living in the world, Epley said. I think he’s right. But Epley was born in the 1970s. I was born in the 1980s. People born in the 2010s, or the 2020s, might not agree with us about the irreplaceability of “real human” friends. These generations may discover that what they want most from their relationships is not a set of people, who might challenge them, but rather a set of feelings—sympathy, humor, validation—that can be more reliably drawn out from silicon than from carbon-based life forms. Long before technologists build a superintelligent machine that can do the work of so many Einsteins, they may build an emotionally sophisticated one that can do the work of so many friends.

The Next 15 Minutes

The anti-social century is as much a result of what’s happened to the exterior world of concrete and steel as it is about advances inside our phones. The decline of government investments in what Eric Klinenberg calls “social infrastructure”—public spaces that shape our relationship to the world—may have begun in the latter part of the 20th century, but it has continued in the 21st. That has arguably affected nearly everyone, but less advantaged Americans most of all.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to poor neighborhoods in big cities, and the community leaders tell me the real crisis for poor teenagers is that there’s just not much for them to do anymore, and nowhere to go,” Klinenberg told me. “I’d like to see the government build social infrastructure for teenagers with the creativity and generosity with which video-game companies build the toys that keep them inside. I’m thinking of athletic fields, and public swimming pools, and libraries with beautiful social areas for young people to hang out together.”

Improved public social infrastructure would not solve all the problems of the anti-social century. But degraded public spaces—and degraded public life—are in some ways the other side of all our investments in video games and phones and bigger, better private space. Just as we needed time to see the invisible emissions of the Industrial Revolution, we are only now coming to grips with the negative externalities of a phonebound and homebound world. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said of technology that every augmentation is also an amputation. We chose our digitally enhanced world. We did not realize the significance of what was being amputated.

But we can choose differently. In his 2015 novel, Seveneves, Neal Stephenson coined the term Amistics to describe the practice of carefully selecting which technologies to accept. The word is a reference to the Amish, who generally shun many modern innovations, including cars and television. Although they are sometimes considered strictly anti-modern, many Amish communities have refrigerators and washing machines, and some use solar power. Instead of dismissing all technology, the Amish adopt only those innovations that support their religious and communal values. In his 1998 dissertation on one Amish community, Tay Keong Tan, then a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, quoted a community member as saying that they didn’t want to adopt TV or radio, because those products “would destroy our visiting practices. We would stay at home with the television or radio rather than meet with other people.”

If the Amish approach to technology is radical in its application, it recognizes something plain and true: Although technology does not have values of its own, its adoption can create values, even in the absence of a coordinated effort. For decades, we’ve adopted whatever technologies removed friction or increased dopamine, embracing what makes life feel easy and good in the moment. But dopamine is a chemical, not a virtue. And what’s easy is not always what’s best for us. We should ask ourselves: What would it mean to select technology based on long-term health rather than instant gratification? And if technology is hurting our community, what can we do to heal it?

A seemingly straightforward prescription is that teenagers should choose to spend less time on their phone, and their parents should choose to invite more friends over for dinner. But in a way, these are collective-action problems. A teenager is more likely to get out of the house if his classmates have already made a habit of hanging out. That teen’s parents are more likely to host if their neighbors have also made a habit of weekly gatherings. There is a word for such deeply etched communal habits: rituals. And one reason, perhaps, that the decline of socializing has synchronized with the decline of religion is that nothing has proved as adept at inscribing ritual into our calendars as faith.

“I have a view that is uncommon among social scientists, which is that moral revolutions are real and they change our culture,” Robert Putnam told me. In the early 20th century, a group of liberal Christians, including the pastor Walter Rauschenbusch, urged other Christians to expand their faith from a narrow concern for personal salvation to a public concern for justice. Their movement, which became known as the Social Gospel, was instrumental in passing major political reforms, such as the abolition of child labor. It also encouraged a more communitarian approach to American life, which manifested in an array of entirely secular congregations that met in union halls and community centers and dining rooms. All of this came out of a particular alchemy of writing and thinking and organizing. No one can say precisely how to change a nation’s moral-emotional atmosphere, but what’s certain is that atmospheres do change. Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.

The anti-social century is the result of one such cascade, of chosen solitude, accelerated by digital-world progress and physical-world regress. But if one cascade brought us into an anti-social century, another can bring about a social century. New norms are possible; they’re being created all the time. Independent bookstores are booming—the American Booksellers Association has reported more than 50 percent growth since 2009—and in cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C., many of them have become miniature theaters, with regular standing-room-only crowds gathered for author readings. More districts and states are banning smartphones in schools, a national experiment that could, optimistically, improve children’s focus and their physical-world relationships. In the past few years, board-game cafés have flowered across the country, and their business is expected to nearly double by 2030. These cafés buck an 80-year trend. Instead of turning a previously social form of entertainment into a private one, they turn a living-room pastime into a destination activity. As sweeping as the social revolution I’ve described might seem, it’s built from the ground up by institutions and decisions that are profoundly within our control: as humble as a café, as small as a new phone locker at school.

When Epley and his lab asked Chicagoans to overcome their preference for solitude and talk with strangers on a train, the experiment probably didn’t change anyone’s life. All it did was marginally improve the experience of one 15-minute block of time. But life is just a long set of 15-minute blocks, one after another. The way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our decades. “No amount of research that I’ve done has changed my life more than this,” Epley told me. “It’s not that I’m never lonely. It’s that my moment-to-moment experience of life is better, because I’ve learned to take the dead space of life and make friends in it.”

The Reason Why

In 2016, it was micro-targeting on Facebook. People got hip to it, Facebook kinda crumbled, and 2020 was relatively clean.

Then along comes Elmo, and it gets really dirty again.

A scatter plot titled "Poster boy: Posts by Elon Musk on Twitter/X, by time."

The chart tracks the frequency of Musk's posts from 2014 to 2024, with the timeline on the horizontal axis and the time of day (00:00 to 23:59) on the vertical axis.

Each red dot represents one post.

The density of posts increases significantly around 2022, coinciding with Musk's acquisition of Twitter (marked on the chart as "Musk buys Twitter").

Before this, posts were scattered and sparse. After the acquisition, the chart shows a dramatic rise in activity, with dense clusters of red dots throughout the day and night.

The source is listed as Twitter/X and *The Economist*.

Oh, Elmo

Cuz Elon Musk loves "free speech", and he never censors or suppresses content on twixter.

Trump campaign worked with Musk’s X to keep leaked JD Vance file off platform

Journalist who published vetting document on Republican running mate was kicked off site formerly known as Twitter

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign worked with X to prevent information about JD Vance from being posted on the social media platform, a move that resulted in the journalist who revealed the information being kicked off the site, according to reports.

The former president’s team contacted X, owned by the billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk, about a 271-page document compiled by his campaign to vet his running mate that was linked to by Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist, the New York Times has reported.

X responded by blocking links to the material, claiming that it contained sensitive personal information such as the Ohio US senator’s social security number, and banned Klippenstein from the platform.

The materials published by Klippenstein on his Substack in September appear to be related to a hack of the Trump campaign earlier this year, which the FBI has linked to Iran. Documents from the hack have been shared with several media outlets, which have chosen to not publish them.

Media outlets did not reach the same decision when they gave significant attention to files from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign that had been hacked and leaked by Russian intelligence before she ultimately lost that election to Trump. At one point, Trump had said he hoped Russia would be “able to find” some of Clinton’s files.

The leaked dossier on JD Vance is revealing in all the things it doesn’t say

The removal of the material from X has highlighted the increasingly strident support of Musk, the world’s richest person, for Trump’s attempt to return to the White House after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden. After buying Twitter in 2022, Musk said that he was an advocate of free speech and the open sharing of information, even if it offended either political party.

Last week, Musk appeared at a Pennsylvania rally alongside the former president, performing an awkward jump on stage before declaring that “I’m not just Maga – I’m dark Maga” while invoking the Republican nominee’s Make America Great Again slogan.

Musk added that “this will be the last election” if Trump doesn’t win in November against Kamala Harris, complaining that she and her fellow Democrats want “to take away your freedom of speech, they want to take away your right to bear arms, they want to take away your right to vote, effectively”.

Klippenstein, whose X account was restored following the New York Times reporting, said in a Substack post on Friday that Musk had purchased political influence and “is wielding that influence in increasingly brazen ways”.

“The real election interference here is that a social media corporation can decree certain information unfit for the American electorate,” he wrote.

“Two of our most sacred rights as Americans are the freedoms of speech and assembly, online or otherwise. It is a national humiliation that these rights can be curtailed by anyone with enough digits in their bank account.”

Musk is set to appear at further Trump rallies – and he may even knock on voters’ doors for the campaign in Pennsylvania in the coming week. He has funded a political action entity called America Pac that has spent around $80m to help Trump reach voters in crucial swing states like Pennsylvania.

Overheard

(paraphrasing Solzhenitzyn)

Sometimes, the most courageous thing you can do is to not participate in a lie.

Today's Brando

DOJ Indicts Russian Nationals in $10 Million Scheme to Spread Covert Propaganda to U.S. Audiences

Two Russian nationals employed by state-controlled media outlet RT are charged with conspiring to violate U.S. laws by secretly funding and directing pro-Russian content on social media platforms.

The Department of Justice has unsealed an indictment charging two Russian nationals, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, with conspiring to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and money laundering in a scheme to covertly influence U.S. audiences. Both Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva remain at large, according to the DOJ’s announcement today.

The indictment reveals that Kalashnikov, 31, and Afanasyeva, 27, who were employees of Russia's state-controlled media outlet RT, played pivotal roles in funneling nearly $10 million to a Tennessee-based online content creation company, referred to in court documents as U.S. Company-1. The content company, unbeknownst to its viewers, was funded and directed by RT to produce pro-Russian videos aimed at American social media users. This company is believed to be TENET Media, who touts right-wing hosts Lauren Southern, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and others, as part of their roster.

The indictment remarks, "On its website, U.S. Company-I describes itself as a 'network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues'" This phrase matches with the TENET's slogan, which appears on their website.

The indictment further states: "KALASHNIKOV, AFANASYEVA, Founder-I, and Founder-2 also worked together to deceive two U.S. online commentators ("Commentator- I" and "Commentator-2"), who respectively have over 2.4 million and 1.3 million YouTube subscribers. Founder-I and Founder- 2 contracted with Commentator-I and Commentator-2 to produce videos , using Commentator-1's and Commentator-2's own names and leveraging their existing audiences, for license and publication by U.S. Company-I."

These subscriber counts mentioned in the indictment match the number of YouTube subscribers for the accounts of Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, respectively.

"Russia has long sought to exploit our free and open society by secretly influencing public opinion in the United States," said Attorney General Merrick Garland. "The Department of Justice will not tolerate these covert efforts by foreign adversaries to manipulate our democracy."

The DOJ alleges that between October 2023 and August 2024, RT transferred nearly $10 million to U.S. Company-1 through a network of shell companies in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Mauritius. The funds were allegedly used to produce and distribute content designed to sow discord among Americans, amplifying domestic divisions on issues like immigration, inflation, and U.S. foreign policy.

“Russia’s influence operations, as orchestrated by RT, are sophisticated and deceptive,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. “The defendants in this case used fake personas, shell companies, and misleading information to push Russian propaganda to millions of Americans.”

Since its launch in November 2023, U.S. Company-1, believed to be TENET Media, has posted nearly 2,000 videos across platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X, garnering over 16 million views on YouTube alone. The DOJ notes that while the content appeared to offer commentary on domestic issues, it was aligned with the Russian government's goal of weakening U.S. opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The defendants are also accused of deceiving two U.S.-based online commentators with large followings into producing content for U.S. Company-1 without disclosing RT’s involvement. The DOJ alleges that RT used a fictional persona named “Eduard Grigoriann” to conceal its role as the company’s true financial backer.

Within the indictment lies a troubling sequence involving directives from Elena Afanasyeva, alias "Helena Shudra," to manipulate content creation at U.S. Company-1, aiming to tailor videos to specific agendas. Notably, in early 2024, Afanasyeva orchestrated the creation of tailored content that included a video featuring a "well-known U.S. political commentator," who MeidasTouch can identify as Tucker Carlson, during an bizarre visit to a Russian grocery store in which Carlson said he was "radicalized" by how low the prices were in Moscow.

This particular piece was strategically circulated within U.S. Company-1’s Producer Discord Channel, prompting internal concerns among the staff about the overtly promotional nature of the content. Producer-I, a staff member at U.S. Company-1, expressed reservations about posting the video, describing it as “overt shilling.” Despite these concerns, the directive from the higher-ups was clear, with Founder-2 instructing to proceed with publishing the video to align with the broader influence campaign, underscoring the depth of control exerted over the content output to serve specific propagandistic purposes. This episode exemplifies the sophisticated methods employed by RT’s operatives to exploit the credibility of well-known U.S. figures to further their propaganda efforts under the guise of regular social media content.

The indictment underscores RT's ongoing efforts to continue its influence operations in Western countries, despite formal bans and sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. According to the DOJ, RT’s editor-in-chief boasted about creating an "empire of covert projects" to shape public opinion in the West.

Both Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva face charges of conspiracy to violate FARA, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

The FBI is leading the investigation into the case, and authorities are actively seeking the whereabouts of the defendants. This case is part of a broader effort by the U.S. government to counter foreign malign influence operations aimed at undermining American democracy.

Read the full indictment here.

Social Media As WWE

Here's what I have to think is a near-perfect example of the Donald Trump effect.

I think the probability is low that this guy actually believes what he posted. "Influencers" do this as a way to boost their "engagement" numbers, which puts money in their pockets for having brought eyeballs to their page, which means their sponsors have a chance to put their shit in front of potential buyers.

The WWE thing kicks in because there's no need for principles when all you care about is attracting the attention of the passersby.

Trump has taught these parasites well. It doesn't matter if you're the Hero or the Heel. The whole point is to get somebody to swing a spotlight in your direction.

We're All Suckers Eventually

Covert Israeli Disinfo Campaign Targeted Black Democrats

The Israeli government last year paid a firm to create fake “news” websites, and hundreds of fake American accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, which then urged Black Democrats to support funding Israel’s military, the New York Times reported this morning.

Israel, it’s worth noting, is a U.S. ally and already receives billions of dollars in support from the U.S.

Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs paid a Tel Aviv marketing firm $2 million to use the fake accounts to pressure more than a dozen U.S. lawmakers, “particularly ones who are Black and Democrats,” the Times says. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) are specifically named. So is Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY).

The accounts not only pushed pro-Israeli messages, but also sought to stoke concerns about alleged campus antisemitism.

Scholars of social-media bullshit told the Times this is the first confirmed case of the Israeli government using such campaigns to influence U.S. lawmakers. Ooookay.

The Israeli ministry denies its involvement, which unnamed Israeli officials told the Times was a naughty, naughty lie, even though hundreds of “Americans” agreed with it on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

The Times says that the influence campaign had several aspects in common with Israel’s military campaign in Gaza:

• It used artificial intelligence
• It hit the wrong targets (drawing 40,000 followers, many of them fellow bots)
• It was executed poorly (profile pics didn’t match bios)
• It didn’t work

Some of the examples of incompetence are kinda hilarious, notwithstanding the actual human suffering of two million human beings, obvi. At least twice, accounts with profile pics of Black men posted messages about what things are like for them, as a “middle-aged Jewish woman.” And 118 posts passed on pro-Israeli articles with the following, totally human, hear-it-all-the-time phrasing: “I gotta reevaluate my opinions due to this new information.”

The Times didn’t immediately get reaction from U.S. lawmakers, but presumably they gotta reevaluate their opinions due to this new information.

Here It Is

... the gist of it anyway.

This is for everybody who loves to bitch about how "the Dems just don't know how to message, and blah blah blah.

Always remember we're fighting on three fronts - the GOP, and the Wingnut Media Cartel, and a gang of hostile foreign governments slipping in under the back of the tent.

Today's Ryan

This is excellent is a couple of ways.

• He follows up on his own post, in order to make corrections and point out a possible error on his part
• He looks at it from an angle that's way out of his usual frame of reference

This is just good work.

Today's DIP

Deceptive

Image

Persuasion

Keep It Sane

Don't be fooled.

Putin's an asshole, but he's not a mad man and he's not stupid.

Слава Україні

Свобода знаходить шлях

Today's Ryan

I don't know that we're paying enough attention to this. The Russians' Facebook campaign in 2016 kinda sneaked up on us, and it's more than a bit probable that the same thing is at work across the social media universe.

 

NSFW

Sorry to drop this on you like this, but I think it needs to be noticed.

The assholes in the pickup truck are Nazis, leafletting a neighborhood in West Palm Beach FL with some pretty nasty antisemitic shit.

The asshole Nazis in the pickup truck recorded the video, and then posted it on social media. They're proud of what they're doing.

I don't know what it's going to take, but we need to figure out how to beat this shit, and soon.

There's something very wrong with Florida.

Nazis get confronted for tossing anti-Semitic flyers on driveways.
byu/Bizzyguy inPublicFreakout

Elmo Sucks

White House blasts Musk's 'hideous' antisemitic lie, advertisers pause on X

Nov 17 (Reuters) - The White House on Friday condemned Elon Musk's endorsement of what it called a "hideous" antisemitic conspiracy theory on X, while major U.S. companies including Walt Disney Co (DIS.N), Warner Bros Discovery (WBD.O) and NBCUniversal parent Comcast (CMCSA.O) paused their advertisements on his social media site.

Musk on Wednesday agreed with a post on X that falsely claimed Jewish people were stoking hatred against white people, saying the user who referenced the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory was speaking "the actual truth."

That conspiracy theory holds that Jewish people and leftists are engineering the ethnic and cultural replacement of white populations with non-white immigrants that will lead to a "white genocide."

The White House accused Musk of an "abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate" that "runs against our core values as Americans."

“We condemn this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans. We all have a responsibility to bring people together against hate, and an obligation to speak out against anyone who attacks the dignity of their fellow Americans and compromises the safety of our communities.”

Translated: Fuck you, Elmo.

"It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie ... one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust," White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said, referring to the Oct. 7 attack by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas on Israel.

In addition to Disney, Warner Bros Discovery and Comcast, Lions Gate Entertainment (LGFa.N) and Paramount Global (PARA.O) said on Friday they also were pausing their ads on X, formerly Twitter. Axios reported that Apple (AAPL.O), the world's largest company by market value, was also pausing its ads.

IBM (IBM.N) on Thursday halted its advertising on X after a report found its ads were placed next to content promoting Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Media Matters said it found that corporate advertisements by IBM, Apple, Oracle (ORCL.N) and Comcast's Xfinity were being placed alongside antisemitic content.

Advertisers have fled the site, formerly called Twitter, since Musk bought it in October 2022 and reduced content moderation, resulting in a sharp rise in hate speech on X, according to civil rights groups.

Representatives for Musk and X on Friday again declined to comment on his post.

"Many of the largest advertisers are the greatest oppressors of your right to free speech," Musk wrote on X on Friday while promoting a premier tier of the platform that removes ads from users' feeds.

"Premium+ also has no ads in your timeline," he said.

"When it comes to this platform - X has also been extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination. There's no place for it anywhere in the world - it's ugly and wrong. Full stop," X CEO Linda Yaccarino said on Thursday.

Antisemitism has been on the rise in recent years in the United States and worldwide. Following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas after last month's attack, antisemitic incidents in the United States rose by nearly 400% from the year-earlier period, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization that fights antisemitism.

Musk, chief executive of electric vehicle maker Tesla (TSLA.O) and founder of rocket company SpaceX, has blamed the Anti-Defamation League for the ongoing drop in advertisers, without offering any evidence.

Twixter

Antisemitism was rising online. Then Elon Musk’s X supercharged it.

After neo-Nazi protests in Charlottesville, white supremacists were confined mostly to fringe websites. Musk’s purchase of Twitter changed that.

In the weeks following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Twitter user @breakingbaht criticized leftists, academics and “minorities” for defending the militant group. But it wasn’t until the user spoke up on behalf of antisemites that he struck a viral chord with X owner Elon Musk.

Tech is not your friend. We are. Sign up for The Tech Friend newsletter.
The user blamed Jewish communities for bringing antisemitism upon themselves by supporting immigration to the United States, welcoming “hordes of minorities” who don’t like Jews and promoting “hatred against whites.”

“You have said the actual truth,” Musk responded. Soon, @breakingbaht had gained several thousand new followers — and the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews are causing the replacement of White people was ricocheting across the internet once again.

Antisemitism has long festered online, but the Israel-Gaza war and the loosening of content moderation on X have propelled it to unprecedented levels, coinciding with a dramatic rise in real-world attacks on Jews, according to several monitoring organizations.

Since Oct. 7, antisemitic content has surged more than 900 percent on X and there have been more than 1,000 incidents of real-world antisemitic attacks, vandalism and harassment in America, according to the Anti-Defamation League — the highest number since the human rights group started counting. (That includes about 200 rallies the group deemed to be at least implicitly supporting Hamas.)

Factors that predate the Gaza war laid the groundwork for the heightened antisemitic atmosphere, say experts and advocates: the feeling of empowerment some neo-Nazis felt during the Trump presidency, the decline of enforcement on tech platforms in the face of layoffs and Republican criticism, even the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in 2021, which gave rise to harsh criticism of Israel’s actions and sustained antisemitism online.

But Musk plays a uniquely potent role in the drama, disinformation specialists say. His comments amplifying antisemitic tropes to his 163.5 million followers, his dramatic loosening of standards for what can be posted, and his boosting of voices that previously had been banned from the platform formerly known as Twitter all have made antisemitism more acceptable on what is still one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.

Musk’s endorsement of comments alluding to the great replacement theory — a conspiracy theory espoused by neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville in 2017 and the gunmen who killed people inside synagogues in Pittsburgh in 2018 and Poway, Calif., in 2019 — brought condemnation from the White House and advertising cancellations from IBM, Apple, Comcast, and Disney, among others.

Late Friday, Musk was unrepentant: “Many of the largest advertisers are the greatest oppressors of your right to free speech,” he tweeted after word of the cancellations spread. He did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Joan Donovan, a former research director at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center who now teaches at Boston University, included Musk in what she described as “a strata of influencers … who feel very comfortable condemning Jewish people as a political critique.”

“In moments where there is a lot of concern, these right-wing influencers do go mask-off and say what they really feel,” she said.

The Israel-Gaza war also has given new life to prominent Holocaust deniers who have proclaimed on X, Telegram and other platforms that the Hamas attacks that left hundreds of Israelis dead were “false flags.” The #Hitlerwasright hashtag, which surged during the 2021 war, has returned, with Memetica, a digital investigations firm, tallying 46,000 uses of the phrase on X since Oct. 7. Previously, the hashtag appeared fewer than 5,000 times per month.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit focused on online extremism and disinformation, identified 200 posts that promoted antisemitism and other forms of hate speech amid the conflict. X allowed 196 of them to remain on the platform, the group said in a report.

Seventy-six of those posts amassed a collective 141 million views in 24 hours after an explosion at the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City on Oct. 17. The majority of the posts appeared on X Premium accounts, a subscription service that grants a blue “verified” check mark to anyone willing to pay a monthly fee. Previously, such status was available only to public figures, journalists and elected officials.

“Elon Musk has shaped X into a social media universe that revolves around his beliefs and whims while still shaping politics and culture around the world. And he’s using it to spread the most disgusting lies that humans ever invented,” said Emerson Brooking, resident fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council think tank and co-author of the 2018 book “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.”

Antisemitism goes mainstream

Hatred against Jews has long been a feature of the internet. Extremists were early adopters of social media platforms, using them to find like-minded people to share views that would be distasteful in other settings, Brooking said.

In the mid-2000s, lies spread by anonymous users on platforms such as 4chan and Usenet blamed Jews for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and for the 2008 financial crisis. But the most extreme antisemitism, such as Holocaust denial, remained largely confined to the fringe, said Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism at the ADL. Well-known Holocaust deniers had little access to mainstream news media.

By the 2010s, however, an internet subculture that repackaged antisemitism into something seemingly more palatable started to take shape — often on newer and less moderated platforms like Discord, 8chan, and Telegram, and also on mainstream services like Facebook and YouTube. Instead of swastikas, the currency became jokes, memes like Pepe the Frog, and terms for white supremacy like “alt-right.” The election of former president Donald Trump galvanized this group; Richard B. Spencer, then president of the white-supremacist National Policy Institute, made headlines by telling a meeting of supporters after Trump’s election victory, “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!”

“Suddenly, racists and antisemites who had lived at the margins of society found that they had new legitimacy. And a rising generation of far-right Americans saw that it was okay to say and do hateful things, because the president was doing them already,” Brooking said.

The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, organized on Facebook and the gaming platform Discord, became the first time a broad group of Americans, watching on television and online, heard the slogan “Jews will not replace us,” chanted by a torch-carrying crowd seeking to prevent the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

“We saw an inflection point where online expression had turned into bigger real-world organizing,” the ADL’s Segal said of the demonstration.

Trump did little to tamp down these ideas and often amplified them, occasionally retweeting antisemitic memes and famously saying “there were very fine people on both sides” of the Charlottesville rally, at which a neo-Nazi sympathizer drove his car into counterprotesters, killing a woman.

In an emailed statement, the Trump campaign denounced any effort to link the former president to antisemitism. “The real racists and antisemites are deranged Democrats and liberals who are marching in support of terrorist groups like Hamas and calling for the death of Israel,” the statement said. “There has been no bigger champion for Israel than President Trump, as evidenced by moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, signing laws that curb anti-Semitism, and much more.”

The statement added, “For a media organization like The Washington Post to make such a ridiculous charge proves it has its own racism and anti-Semitism issues they must address before casting stones.”

The Trump years also saw the rise of mass shooters steeped in antisemitic fabrications. In New Zealand, El Paso, Buffalo, and at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, shooters cited the great replacement theory as their inspiration, and in some cases posted manifestos about it.

Amid the growing violence, tech platforms that had taken a tolerant approach to antisemitic posts cracked down. YouTube banned Holocaust denial in 2019 and Meta did so in 2020, after CEO Mark Zuckerberg had defended not prohibiting such content just two years earlier. Both companies expanded their hate speech policies to include white-supremacist content in 2019.

Those actions sent antisemitism back to the fringes, and to newer services, such as Gab, that specifically catered to right-wing audiences. “What I can tell you is major accounts that were spreading antisemitism … were falling like dominoes,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “They were quickly re-platforming themselves in places like Gab. But there they were more preaching to the choir as opposed to being able to radicalize random people.”

Then in 2022, Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter closed.

The ripple effect

Musk had been saying for months that one of the reasons he wanted to buy Twitter was to embrace “free speech” and relax the platform’s content moderation practices. Hours after he took over, anonymous trolls flooded the site with racist slurs.

The rise in bigotry on the platform prompted civil rights groups to pressure advertisers — sometimes successfully — to pause spending on Twitter. Last November, Musk extended an olive branch to those activists, pledging in a private meeting not to reinstate banned accounts until there was a process to do that. That concession angered far-right influencers on the site, who accused him of being a traitor to their cause.

Later that month, Musk reinstated thousands of accounts — including Trump’s — that had been banned for threats, harassment and misinformation. Since then, hateful rhetoric on the platform has increased, researchers said.

Musk invited back banned Hitler apologists, sent out his own antisemitic tweets to his followers, and promoted the work of Great Replacement backers including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Those actions demolished the previous bounds of acceptable speech, inviting more people to weigh in with wild theories and emotions about religious and ethnic minorities.

On Wednesday, Gab’s official X account shared a meme celebrating that Musk had affirmed “Jews are the ones pushing anti-White hatred” along with the caption, “We are so back.” (The X post, which has since been deleted, was liked 19,000 times and viewed 720,000 times.)

On Friday, several major companies announced that they were pulling advertising from X, including Apple, Lionsgate Entertainment and Comcast, parent of NBCUniversal. In the first quarter of 2022, Apple was Twitter’s top advertiser, accounting for nearly $50 million in revenue. Media Matters, a nonprofit media watchdog, published a report showing that X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, Amazon and more next to pro-Nazi content. On Saturday, Musk threatened to sue Media Matters, accusing it of misrepresenting “the real experience on X.”

Some news publishers also have pulled out of the platform. NPR shut down its X account in April after Musk falsely labeled the nonprofit broadcaster “state controlled media.” On Thursday, the journalist Casey Newton announced that he would be pulling Platformer, the independent tech news outlet he founded, from X and would no longer include posts on X in the Platformer newsletter.

“It’s the only way I know how to send the message that no one should be there, that this is not a place where you should be going to get news or to discuss news or to have a good time,” he told The Post. “It is just over. If you wouldn’t join Gab, or Parler, or Truth Social, there’s no reason you should be on X. I think it’s time for journalists and publishers, in particular, to acknowledge the new reality and to get the heck off that website.”

Newton said that media companies, including The Post, that continue to pay to advertise on the site are funding Musk’s hate campaigns. “Publishers have to look themselves in the mirror and ask, why did they get into this business in the first place?” he said. “Didn’t it have something to do with speaking out against oppression and bigotry and standing up in the face of oppression?”

A Post spokesperson declined to comment.

Hateful rhetoric that appears on X ripples out to the whole internet, normalizing an unprecedented level of antisemitic hate, experts said. “Twitter is the most influential platform in shifting sentiments,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “[It] has always had an outsize influence in determining what takes start to be perceived as the vox populi.” Musk has sued the CCDH for defamation over its reports on X.

The international reach of big social platforms such as Instagram and TikTok also has served to highlight tensions. TikTok has come under fire for videos critical of Israel or supportive of Palestinians that carry the #freepalestine hashtag; TikTok data show that many of those arise from predominantly Muslim countries, such as Malaysia and Lebanon, where support for Palestinians has long been high.

Dozens of high profile Jewish content creators issued an open letter to TikTok earlier this month, saying that the platform hadn’t done enough to counter hatred and abuse toward the Jewish community on the app. On Wednesday, many of those creators, along with prominent celebrities including Amy Schumer, Debra Messing and Sacha Baron Cohen, met with representatives from the company to voice their concerns. The conversation was heated and intense, according to creators who attended.

“We recognize this is an incredibly difficult and fearful time for millions of people around the world and in our TikTok community,” TikTok said in a statement. “Our leadership has been meeting with creators, civil society, human rights experts and stakeholders to listen to their experiences and feedback on how TikTok can remain a place for community, discovery, and sharing authentically.” Since Oct. 7, TikTok has removed more than 730,000 videos for hate speech, including content promoting antisemitism, the company said.

Content creator Montana Tucker, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who has more than 9 million followers on TikTok and 3 million on Instagram, attended the meeting with TikTok. She said she’s noticed a sharp uptick in antisemitism across all platforms, and plans to stay on X for now.

“It’s happening on every single app, unfortunately,” she said. “All of these people, I’m sure they would love for us to hide and to not post and to not share … but we need to be more vocal. We need to be on these apps and we need to continue to share. I think it’s more of a reason I need to start posting more on [X].”

Outside of social media, white supremacists and neo-Nazis have continued to use lightly moderated messaging platforms such as Telegram and group-run websites to distribute hate messages and propaganda since the Israel-Gaza war began, according to the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit that tracks the groups. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism found that antisemitic and anti-Muslim posts on 4chan, Gab, Odysee, and Bitchute increased 461 percent from 618 to 3,466 from Oct. 6 to Oct. 8.

A researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London think tank that tracks hate and disinformation, said online extremists were having a “field day,” with far-right groups using Hamas propaganda to bolster antisemitic messages.

Russia’s sophisticated disinformation apparatus also has seized on the conflict. One of Russia’s widest ongoing campaigns, known as Doppelgänger, promotes fake articles on clones of major media websites. Links to the pages are sent out rapidly by large networks of automated accounts on X and Facebook.

For the past year, most of these articles have been aimed at undermining Western support for Ukraine, Russia’s top priority. But not long after Oct. 7, some Doppelgänger assets started promoting the idea that the United States cared far more about Israel and would stop sending Ukraine as much aid, according to Antibot4Navalny, a group of volunteers who track Russian disinformation on the internet.

More recently, the social media accounts amplified pictures of the Jewish Star of David spray-painted on buildings in Paris, according to the nonprofit E.U. DisinfoLab. That advanced multiple objectives, the organization said: It generated additional concern about possible increases in antisemitism in France. It likely encouraged antisemites to think they are greater in number. And above all, it focused attention on Israel, rather than Ukraine and Russia.

Benjamin Decker, founder of Memetica, said that a major portion of 4chan links to outside coverage of Israel and Hamas go to articles from media sources in Iran, China or Russia. “You can’t attribute it to these actors yet, but from the beginning there have been cross-platform communities with a vested interest in stoking hate,” he said. “There is a highly digital far-right community who loves celebrating the deaths of Jews, and that dovetails with Hamas.”

“We’re in a really dangerous place,” the CCDH’s Ahmed said. “There’s no clearer link between disinformation, conspiracy theories, and real world hate than there is with antisemitism.”