Why X's Community Notes is Struggling to Factcheck the LA Mayoral Election
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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Red Mirage, Blue Shift, Online Cope
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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Settlements-as-Spin: The Trump DOJ’s Slush-Fund Politics
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 Was Falsely Accused of "Censorship" in The Free Press. Then Their Editors Censored The Truth.
I 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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Participation Trophies and Million-Dollar Verdicts
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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From Epstein to Everything
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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“Who has the power to define the truth?”
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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Crisis of Trust 2026: The Retreat Into Insularity
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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Shopping for Receipts: How a viral video about Somali daycares triggered federal action
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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The Rumor Mill and the Propaganda Machine
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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Transparency is Censorship
In my newsletter from just before Thanksgiving, I wrote about the little scandal on X in which a whole lot of MAGA folks suddenly learned that many of their favorite paidcheck influencers were not what they seemed. MAGAMom1776 was actually in Nigeria! BasedChad with the eagle avi was a man
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On the Internet No One Knows You’re a “MAGA patriot” in Lagos
This weekend, X quietly did something useful. A new “About this account” feature now shows where accounts are based. Some of the loudest bluecheck anon “MAGA patriot” influencers—accounts that shout about the deep state and immigrants and whatnot—were outed as being in India. Or Pakistan. Or Nigeria. Or
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Source Wars and Bespoke Realities: Wikipedia, Grokipedia, and The Battle for Truth
Control what Wikipedia considers reliable, and you control what machines—and then people—learn about the world… It’s not a small thing that Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s co‑founder turned chief critic, has recently been arguing that The Epoch Times should be treated as a reliable source. Over the
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Who was president in 2020?
Hello! It’s been a while since I’ve emailed – work has been busy. I just turned in the epilogue for the upcoming paperback version of Invisible Rulers, an academic paper that took three years to get out the door is finally finished, and I published a whitepaper with a
Read moreNo Clapping Allowed: A Social Media Free Speech Debate Without the Usual Theater
0:00 /5:23 1× Last month I participated in an event called “Truth in Turmoil” — a debate on free expression and shared truth in the digital age, hosted by American Public Square. I was joined by Jonathan Turley, George Washington University law professor and Fox commentator, and Laura Clark
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