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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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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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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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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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 more0:00 /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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The Trump Administration has perfected a particular type of political content drop: take a pile of documents, strip them of context, pace the release for maximum drama, and narrate it with insinuations that travel faster than any correction. It’s part opposition research dump, part conspiracy serial, and the audience
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Someone is wrong on the internet so I thought I’d send out a newsletter. This time, it’s about European tech regulation…a topic that rightly makes any normal person’s eyes glaze over, but in 2025 is part of the culture wars and trade wars simultaneously. So, it
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Ten years ago, a measles outbreak at Disneyland sickened 125 people – a quarter of them under 5 years old. Nearly 20% were hospitalized. Fortunately, no one died. This happened as California was emerging from its worst whooping cough epidemic in 70 years. At the time, I was a new mom,
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This past Wednesday marked the deadline for public comments in the FTC’s Request for Public Comment Regarding Technology Platform Censorship. Calls for comment are always an interesting exercise in democratic participation: you get industry professionals and policy wonks with a stake in the outcome, and very passionate citizens who
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Two days ago Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok developed a singular fixation with white genocide in South Africa. No matter what users asked it, it found a way to connect the issue to its preferred topic of conversation. A user posted a video of a kitten playing with water
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In an alternate universe, I run a sprawling cabal. I wrote about it last year: my supposed secret double life as a CIA agent orchestrating a Censorship Industrial Complex from within Stanford University. The full mythology of the nonexistent censorship complex spans dozens of serialized posts, forming a sprawling cinematic
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“We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law.” - Arthur Miller, The Crucible Hello! Two months have gone by since my last newsletter post. 🙈 In that time, Congress - the Senate and the
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Hey all! Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2025 just came out, and it crystallized something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Instead of trying to time a newsletter around the never-ending series of dramatic events from the DOGE Administration, this is a post that is perhaps more about
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