This endless fanfare of grievance, innuendo, and motivated misprioritization colors most of the content you’ll find on the most popular conservative news and opinion outlets: vast edifices of bullshit constructed atop small kernels of verifiable information. But this ongoing victim narrative is undermined by the plain fact that, far from being marginalized and undervalued, by most available metrics, right-wing news and opinion is very popular and profitable. Fox News consistently tops the cable news ratings. Conservative radio shows and podcasts top the leaderboards in their respective disciplines. Right-wing Facebook pages are consistently among the most popular issues-based Facebook pages. Substacks dedicated to the proposition that divergent political opinion has no home in the American media earn their proprietors better livings than they ever would have made at the publications they once called home. We are literally living in the Golden Age of Getting Rich and Wielding Influence by Pretending That Your Voice Has Been Silenced—which brings us back to the Twitter Files, and the people to whom they were handed by the wealthiest man in the world.

Offering extremely candid comments from mainstream journalists, the report provides a snapshot of an industry caught between the pressure to deliver page views, the impulse to cover manipulators and “trolls,” and the disgust (expressed in interviewees’ own words) of accidentally propagating extremist ideology.

But the issue is likely not that modern students are learning fewer digital skills, but rather that they’re learning different ones. Guarín-Zapata, for all his knowledge of directory structure, doesn’t understand Instagram nearly as well as his students do, despite having had an account for a year. He’s had students try to explain the app in detail, but “I still can’t figure it out,” he complains.  “They use a computer one way, and we use a computer another way,” Guarin-Zapata emphasizes. “That’s where the problem is starting.” Ford agrees. “These are smart kids,” she says. “They’re doing astrophysics. They get stuff. But they were not getting this.”  Regardless of source, the consequence is clear. STEM educators are increasingly taking on dual roles: those of instructors not only in their field of expertise but in computer fundamentals as well.