Both Trump and Carlson "were children of privilege" who "sought the respect of the establishment" but never got it. And, like Trump, he found success "by catering to people who despised the world that had spurned him."

Throw a dart at any show on the calendar and you will hit an absurdity. Carlson once said vaccine requirements in the military were used to “identify the sincere Christians in the ranks, the free thinkers, the men with high testosterone levels, and anybody else who doesn’t love Joe Biden and make them leave immediately.” He called January 6 rioters “orderly and meek," trying to reframe them as "sightseers.”

Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy requires us to report the bad (negative) with the good (positive), and the neither-bad-nor-good, in rough proportion to what's said in reliable sources, which in this case are largely major news outlets. This is one of the five pillars of Wikipedia—a group of fundamental principles central to the function of this website. Since reliable sources are widely critical of Trump, this article reflects that. Wikipedia policy is not established at individual articles. If you think that a policy should be changed, you could try Wikipedia:Village pump (policy), although you are unlikely to be taken very seriously there without a substantial history of Wikipedia editing.

“The media” (or “mainstream media”): a meaningless phrase because there are countless very different media, which don’t act in concert.

“Gets it”: a social media phrase that is used to mean “agrees with me”.

Usually, though, people who claim to have been “cancelled” mean “criticised”, “convicted of sexual assault”, “replaced by somebody who isn’t an overt bigot” or simply “ignored”.

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (the complete guide on how to write in just 13 pages). He lists other “worn-out and useless” words and phrases that were disappearing in his day: jackboot, Achilles heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno. The same fate later befell words overused in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: “heroes” (a euphemism for victims) and “greatest country on earth” (meaning largest military and GDP).

After a roughly yearlong inquiry, the FBI closed out the investigation in July 2016, finding that Clinton did not intend to break the law. The bureau reopened the inquiry months later, 11 days before the presidential election, after discovering a new batch of emails. After reviewing those communications, the FBI again opted against recommending charges.

The relevant Espionage Act cases brought by the Justice Department over the past century, Comey said, all involved factors including efforts to obstruct justice, willful mishandling of classified documents and indications of disloyalty to the U.S. None of those factors existed in the Clinton investigation, he said.That’s in contrast to the allegations against Trump, who prosecutors say was involved in the packing of boxes to go to Mar-a-Lago and then actively took steps to conceal classified documents from investigators. The indictment accuses him, for instance, of suggesting that a lawyer hide documents demanded by a Justice Department subpoena or falsely represent that all requested records had been turned over, even though more than 100 remained in the house.The indictment repeatedly cites Trump’s own words against him to make the case that he understood what he was doing and what the law did and did not permit him to do. It describes a July 2021 meeting at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, which he showed off a Pentagon “plan of attack” to people without security clearances to view the material and proclaimed that “as president, I could have declassified it.”“Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” the indictment quotes him as saying.ADVERTISEMENT

Though Attorney General Merrick Garland in January named a second special counsel to investigate the Biden documents, no charges have been brought and, so far at least, no evidence has emerged to suggest that anyone intentionally moved classified documents or tried to impede the FBI from recovering them. While the FBI obtained a search warrant last August to recover additional classified documents, each of the Biden searches has been done voluntarily with his team’s consent.The Justice Department, meanwhile, notified Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, earlier this month that it would not bring charges after the discovery of classified documents in his Indiana home. That case also involved no allegations of willful retention or obstruction.

If you want a chance at changing minds, you need a new strategy: Stop using your values as a weapon, and start offering them as a gift.

One way the agency achieves its aim is the installation of hardware. Documents show Roskomnadzor mandated installation of “censorship boxes” by local internet providers. These devices allowed the Russian government to become the man-in-the-middle when public sentiment turned against it, giving it the power to throttle services utilized by government critics. They also allow the government to pull the plug on services whenever it deems it necessary. Twitter access has been repeatedly throttled. The agency has also completely blocked access to Facebook and Instagram and ensured VPN services are unusable by Russian citizens.

In some cases, censors recorded their screens showing detail down to the movements of their computer mouse as they watched over the internet. They monitored overtly political videos and, at other times, focused on less obviously worrisome content, like this viral song by the young rapper KEML. Bashkortostan is known as a hub for rap in Russia.

"People seek simple solutions [and] the truth is kind of boring sometimes. Anybody who's got good innovations on reducing polarization, getting the truth to be as interesting as the crazy stuff, that would be well worth investing in," Gates told Forbes.

“No Campus Free Speech Controversies at the Vast Majority of Colleges This Week” isn’t a headline that can exist.

I think that the difficulty in top-down moderation means that platforms have a great responsibility to provide users with tools to block, mute, go private, and avoid certain terms and topics.

Most of my own readers are disillusioned leftists and liberals, but certainly I host many conservatives here, and I’m fine with that. And, yes, it’s entirely possible for the anti-woke beat to become a shtick, and because there are financial incentives involved, for writers to dedicate more and more time to it. That in turn can provoke people to fixate on problems with language norms or minor culture war kerfuffles, to the detriment of bigger issues of greater intrinsic concern to the country.

Woke and anti-woke are not the same in a simplistic way, but it’s true that they’re caught in a mutually-reinforcing cycle.

Honestly, I’ve never thought of myself as a contrarian leftist at all; I just think of myself as an old-school materialist and civil libertarian leftist who’s unhappy with the evolution of contemporary liberalism. It’s perfectly fair, though, to argue that my priorities are off and that I spend too much time worrying over liberal culture than about structural injustice.

When I complain that there’s a strain of liberal historiography that seems to deny that people of color have ever had agency, and in doing so makes white people the protagonists of history, that doesn’t seem anti-woke to me; it seems to be an argument for a more expansive vision of what respect for people of color entails.

I think the woke/anti-woke binary is a dead end. Everyone has already taken their places on the stage, and the back-and-forth that exists feels tired and rehearsed. I am 100% open to the idea that the discursive and language controversies I talk about so often are of less importance to deeper issues of structural politics. I might have lost the plot. But as social justice politics have become the language of institutions, albeit opportunistically on the part of those institutions, the need for a vibrant counternarrative has only grown. I think for all of its pitfalls and susceptibility to corruption, “anti-woke” discourse is profoundly necessary. Critical thinking about cancel culture is necessary. A world where Goldman Sachs flies Pride flags outside its offices is a world where left-wing skepticism of woke morals is needed.

we need a mechanism when there is an emergency threat to human life for infrastructure providers to work expediently with legal authorities in order to ensure the decisions we make are grounded in due process. Unfortunately, that mechanism does not exist and so we are making this uncomfortable emergency decision alone.

York points to a 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Marsh v. Alabama, which held that private entities can become sufficiently large and public to require them to be subject to the same Constitutional constraints as government entities. Though York says this ruling has “not as of this writing been applied to the quasi-public spaces of the internet”

even if YouTube were treated as an extension of government due to its size and required to retain every non-criminal video uploaded to its service, it would make as much of a political statement elsewhere, if not more. In France and Germany, it — like any other company — must comply with laws that require the removal of hate speech, laws which in the U.S. would be unconstitutional

Several European countries have banned Google Analytics because it is impossible for their citizens to be protected against surveillance by American intelligence agencies.

TikTok has downplayed the seriousness of its platform by framing it as an entertainment venue. As with other platforms, disinformation on TikTok spreads and multiplies. These factors may have an effect on how people vote. But the sudden alarm over yet-unproved allegations of algorithmic meddling in TikTok to boost Chinese interests is laughable to those of us who have been at the mercy of American-created algorithms despite living elsewhere. American state actors have also taken advantage of the popularity of social networks in ways not dissimilar from political adversaries.

what York notes is how aligned platforms are with the biases of upper-class white Americans; not coincidentally, the boards and executive teams of these companies are dominated by people matching that description.

It should not be so easy to point to similarities in egregious behaviour; corruption of legal processes should not be so common. I worry that regulators in China and the U.S. will spend so much time negotiating which of them gets to treat the internet as their domain while the rest of us get steamrolled by policies that maximize their self-preferencing.

to ensure a clear set of values projected into the world. One way to achieve that is to prefer protocols over platforms.

Yes, the country’s light touch approach to regulation and generous support of its tech industry has brought the world many of its most popular products and services. But it should not be assumed that we must rely on these companies built in the context of middle- and upper-class America.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube each took first steps to rein in the worst behavior on their platforms in the heat of the election, but none have confronted how their spaces were structured to become ideal venues for outrage and incitement.

The first step in the process is realizing that the problems we’re experiencing in digital life — how to gather strangers together in public in ways that make it so people generally behave themselves — aren’t new. They’re problems that physical communities have wrestled with for centuries. In physical communities, businesses play a critical role — but so do public libraries, schools, parks and roads. These spaces are often the groundwork that private industry builds itself around: Schools teach and train the next generation of workers; new public parks and plazas often spur private real estate development; businesses transport goods on publicly funded roads; and so on. Public spaces and private industry work symbiotically, if sometimes imperfectly.

These kinds of public spaces mostly don’t exist online. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Twitch each offer some aspects of these experiences. But ultimately, they’re all organized around the need for growth and revenue — incentives which are in tension with the critical community functions these institutions also serve, and with the heavy staffing models they require.

Recent peer-reviewed research from three professors at the University of Virginia demonstrates how dramatically the design of platforms can affect how people behave on them. In their study, in months where conservative-leaning users visited Facebook more, they saw much more ideological content than normal, whereas in months where they visited Reddit more they “read news that was 50 percent more moderate than what they typically read.” (This effect was smaller but similar for political liberals). Same people, different platforms, and dramatically different news diets as a result.

Wikipedia is probably the best-known example of this kind of institution — a nonprofit, mission-driven piece of digital infrastructure. The nonprofit Internet Archive, which bills itself as a free “digital library,” a repository of books, movies and music and over 500 billion archived webpages to create a living history of the internet, is another. But what we need are not just information services with a mission-driven agenda, but spaces where people can talk, share and relate without those relationships being distorted and shaped by profit-seeking incentive structures.

Users can post only once a day, every post is read by a moderating team, and if you’re too salty or run afoul of other norms, you’re encouraged to rewrite. This is terrible for short-term engagement — flame wars drive attention and use, after all — and as a business model, all those moderators are costly. But there’s a long-term payoff: two-thirds of Vermont households are on the Forum, and many Vermonters find it a valuable place for thoughtful public discussions.

In fact, public digital infrastructures might be the right place to start exploring how to reinvent governance and civil society more broadly.

If mission, design and governance are important ingredients, the final component is what might be called digital essential workers — professionals like librarians whose job is to manage, steward, and care for the people in these spaces. This care work is one of the pillars of successful physical communities, which has been abstracted away by the existing tech platforms. S

The truth is that Facebook, Google and Twitter have displaced and sucked the revenue out of an entire ecosystem of local journalistic enterprises and other institutions that served some of these public functions.