What X’s Chinese bot takedown tells us about the counter-disinformation infrastructure we dismantled On Monday I wrote about Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers’ extraordinary effort to leak documents from the State Department’s now-dismantled Global Engagement Center. Rogers claimed that some decontextualized screenshots proved the
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To mark the paperback of Invisible Rulers, I’m releasing audio from a Twitter Space in which Matt Taibbi meets then-unknown political operative named Mike Benz. It is the origin story of the “censorship industrial complex”.
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Trump is expected to revive his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, using selectively declassified intelligence as “receipts.” Here’s how to spot the tricks used to sell that story.
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JD Vance admitted he promoted the debunked "eating the pets" claim because he had to "create stories" to get media attention. This essay explores how political narratives are intentionally engineered to outlast factual corrections.
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A federal court dismissed Hines v. Stamos in full — the America First Legal "censorship" suit against the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project.
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The "Spencer Pratt got 0 out of 24,000 votes” rumor was obviously false. Fifty Community Notes tried to debunk it. So why did none of them appear?
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What Spencer Pratt's viral campaign tells us about online hype, election fraud spin, and what we'll see in the 2026 midterms.
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Pandemic contrarian Alex Berenson just got a $150,000 payout, and the spin machine is hard at work. But a look at the primary documents makes it clear: no court found that Biden officials had him censored.
Read moreI prefer to keep drama off main in this newsletter, so I would rather not have to publish a post like this. But one of the things I've been meaning to write about is the way that partisan media ecosystems protect their own. This is a case study.
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TL;DR: In just three days, two social media “censorship” decisions, two major jury verdicts on platform design harms, and a cautious Meta Oversight Board advisory opinion highlighted the limits of framing every platform issue as related to speech—while spotlighting accountability questions around product design and user safety. For
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The Epstein files are real. The conspiracy theories they're re-fueling aren't. Here's why Pizzagate and Wayfair are surging once again, and why Cenk Uyghur went 9/11 truther.
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A Doha Debates conversation between Glenn Greenwald, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and me on free speech, content moderation, and the realities of platform governance
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70% are hesitant to trust “the other side.” The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer offers “trust brokering” tactics—but no clear path back to a shared reality.
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Two weeks ago I wrote about the fusion of the rumor mill and the propaganda machine—how online claims get picked up by political elites who lend them credibility and turn them into political reality, whether they’re true or not. The Brown shooting witch hunt was the specific situation
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Last week, a mob on X falsely accused a college student of mass murder. The aftermath of the Brown/MIT shootings was a time of high anxiety. The appetite for answers was enormous, and the police hadn’t yet identified a suspect. And in that vacuum, X did what it
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