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      Elon Musk Is Tweeting Through a Tide of Criticism

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      The new owner of Twitter has embarked on a tweeting spree to push back, spar and justify his actions.Illustration By The New York Times; Photo By Adrees Latif/reutersUnder pressure and facing a wave of criticism, Elon Musk has increasingly turned to his favorite release valve: Twitter.Since Saturday, Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter, has embarked on a tweeting spree so voluminous that he is on a pace to post more than 750 times this month, or more than 25 times a day, according to an analysis from the digital investigations company Memetica. That would be up from about 13 times a day in April, when Mr. Musk first agreed to buy Twitter.His recent tweets have covered an increasingly broad range of topics. Over the last four days, Mr. Musk, 51, needled the comedian Kathy Griffin and beefed with the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on the platform. He made masturbation jokes aimed at a rival — and much smaller — social media platform. He posted, then deleted, a tweet engaging with a quote from a white nationalist. And he defended his ownership of Twitter, including why he had laid off 50 percent of the company’s staff and why people should not impersonate others on the service.All in all, Mr. Musk, who described himself in his Twitter profile as “Chief Twit” before later changing the description to “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator,” has tweeted more than 105 times since Friday, mainly about Twitter, according to a tally by Memetica.“Birds haven’t been real since 1986,” Mr. Musk tweeted on Sunday in a discussion thread about Twitter, including a meme from an absurdist conspiracy theory that posits that birds are actually robot spies. He did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Musk is under tremendous scrutiny 11 days after completing his $44 billion deal for Twitter, which was the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. On Friday, he cut roughly 3,700 of the company’s 7,500 employees, saying he had no choice because Twitter was losing $4 million a day. At the same time, he has found himself embroiled in the same content debates that have plagued other social media companies, including how to give people a way to speak out without spreading misinformation and toxic speech.More on Elon Musk’s Twitter TakeoverA Familiar Playbook: In his first days at Twitter, Elon Musk has been emulating some of the actions of Mark Zuckerberg, who leads Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.A Different Kind of Deal: Silicon Valley moguls used to buy yachts and islands. Now they are rich enough to acquire companies they fancy.‘Hard Fork’: In an episode of The Times’s tech podcast, two Twitter employees described the atmosphere inside the company in the aftermath of the acquisition.Effect on Midterms: Mr. Musk is in the middle of firing thousands of Twitter employees, including many who helped fight misinformation. What could that mean for the upcoming elections?Already Mr. Musk has had to delay the rollout of a subscription product that would have given people check marks on their Twitter profiles. Advertisers have paused their spending on Twitter over fears that Mr. Musk will loosen content rules on the platform. And the midterm elections are set to be a test of how a slimmed-down Twitter will perform in catching inflammatory posts and misinformation about voting and election results.In a report that was published on Monday, researchers at the Fletcher School at Tufts University said the early signs of Mr. Musk’s Twitter “show the platform is heading in the wrong direction under his leadership — at a particularly inconvenient time for American democracy.”The researchers said they had tracked narratives about civil war, election fraud, citizen policing of voting, and allegations of pedophilia and grooming on Twitter from July through October. “Post-Musk takeover, the quality of the conversation has decayed” as more extremists and misinformation peddlers have tested the platform’s boundaries, the researchers wrote.Amid the hubbub, Mr. Musk’s behavior on Twitter suggests that he intends to simply post through it. And while he has always been a prolific tweeter, he has raised the level in recent days.On Friday, Mr. Musk, who has more than 114 million followers on Twitter, proposed a “thermonuclear name & shame” campaign against brands that had stopped advertising on the platform. He said that he had done everything he could to appease advertisers but that activists had worked against him to cause brands to drop out of spending on Twitter.At the same time, the billionaire was embroiled in a fight over his plan to charge Twitter users $8 a month for a subscription service, Twitter Blue, which would give a check mark to anyone who paid. The check mark had been free for notable people whose identities had been verified by the company, including celebrities, politicians and journalists, as a way to protect against impersonation.Critics were unhappy about Mr. Musk’s plans to monetize the check mark, saying it could lead to the spread of misinformation and fraud on the platform. In protest, some Twitter accounts that had check marks changed their display names and photographs to match Mr. Musk’s account over the weekend, a move intended to illustrate why it would be confusing if anyone could buy a check mark.On Sunday, Mr. Musk announced that he would permanently suspend any account “engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody.’” The billionaire, who had previously criticized Twitter when it permanently barred users, then barred Ms. Griffin, who had posed as him on the service.Mr. Musk, who has called himself a “free speech absolutist,” is learning the basic expectation of content moderation for popular social networks, said Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center.“His ideas have been incoherent for a while,” she said.On Sunday night, Mr. Musk responded to a tweet featuring a quote from a white nationalist, before deleting the post and moving on to squabble with Mr. Dorsey over Birdwatch, a feature that lets community members add context to tweets that they believe are misleading. Mr. Musk, who previously lauded the feature, proposed changing the feature’s name to “Community Notes.”“Community notes is the most boring Facebook name ever,” replied Mr. Dorsey, who owns a $1 billion stake in Mr. Musk’s Twitter.Then on Monday, Mr. Musk suggested he might pursue civil society groups and activists who were pushing for Twitter advertiser boycotts, when he replied to a right-wing commentator that “we do” have grounds for legal action. Legal experts said the holding of boycotts for social and political goals is protected under the First Amendment.Mr. Musk also tweeted that people should vote Republican in Tuesday’s midterm elections. “Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” he tweeted. He later posted that he was an independent with a “voting history of entirely Democrat until this year.”He soon moved on. Mr. Musk’s attention became fixed on Mastodon, a Twitter competitor that has gained traction over the past 10 days. Playing off Mastodon’s name, he made several crude jokes about masturbation — then deleted those posts an hour later.Tiffany Hsu More

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      Russia Reactivates Its Trolls and Bots Ahead of Tuesday’s Midterms

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      Researchers have identified a series of Russian information operations to influence American elections and, perhaps, erode support for Ukraine.The user on Gab who identifies as Nora Berka resurfaced in August after a yearlong silence on the social media platform, reposting a handful of messages with sharply conservative political themes before writing a stream of original vitriol.The posts mostly denigrated President Biden and other prominent Democrats, sometimes obscenely. They also lamented the use of taxpayer dollars to support Ukraine in its war against invading Russian forces, depicting Ukraine’s president as a caricature straight out of Russian propaganda.The fusion of political concerns was no coincidence.The account was previously linked to the same secretive Russian agency that interfered in the 2016 presidential election and again in 2020, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, according to the cybersecurity group Recorded Future.It is part of what the group and other researchers have identified as a new, though more narrowly targeted, Russian effort ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. The goal, as before, is to stoke anger among conservative voters and to undermine trust in the American electoral system. This time, it also appears intended to undermine the Biden administration’s extensive military assistance to Ukraine.“It’s clear they are trying to get them to cut off aid and money to Ukraine,” said Alex Plitsas, a former Army soldier and Pentagon information operations official now with Providence Consulting Group, a business technology company.The campaign — using accounts that pose as enraged Americans like Nora Berka — have added fuel to the most divisive political and cultural issues in the country today.It has specifically targeted Democratic candidates in the most contested races, including the Senate seats up for grabs in Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania, calculating that a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives could help the Russian war effort.The campaigns show not only how vulnerable the American political system remains to foreign manipulation but also how purveyors of disinformation have evolved and adapted to efforts by the major social media platforms to remove or play down false or deceptive content.Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an alert warning of the threat of disinformation spread by “dark web media channels, online journals, messaging applications, spoofed websites, emails, text messages and fake online personas.” The disinformation could include claims that voting data or results had been hacked or compromised.The agencies urged people not to like, discuss or share posts online from unknown or distrustful sources. They did not identify specific efforts, but social media platforms and researchers who track disinformation have recently uncovered a variety of campaigns by Russia, China and Iran.The State of the WarGrain Deal: Russia rejoined an agreement allowing the shipment of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea, one of the few areas of cooperation amid the war, easing uncertainty over the fate of a deal seen as crucial to preventing famine in other parts of the world.On the Diplomatic Front: The Group of 7 nations announced that they would work together to rebuild critical infrastructure in Ukraine that has been destroyed by Russia’s military and to defend such sites from further attacks.Turning the Tables: With powerful Western weapons and deadly homemade drones, Ukraine now has an artillery advantage in the south, where a battle for the city of Kherson appears to be imminent. The work of reconnaissance teams penetrating enemy lines has also proven key in breaking Russia’s hold in the territory.Refugees: The war has sent the numbers of Ukrainians seeking shelter in Europe soaring, pushing asylum seekers from other conflicts to the end of the line.Recorded Future and two other social media research companies, Graphika and Mandiant, found a number of Russian campaigns that have turned to Gab, Parler, Getter and other newer platforms that pride themselves on creating unmoderated spaces in the name of free speech.These are much smaller campaigns than those in the 2016 election, where inauthentic accounts reached millions of voters across the political spectrum on Facebook and other major platforms. The efforts are no less pernicious, though, in reaching impressionable users who can help accomplish Russian objectives, researchers said.“The audiences are much, much smaller than on your other traditional social media networks,” said Brian Liston, a senior intelligence analyst with Recorded Future who identified the Nora Berka account. “But you can engage the audiences in much more targeted influence ops because those who are on these platforms are generally U.S. conservatives who are maybe more accepting of conspiratorial claims.”Many of the accounts the researchers identified were previously used by a news outlet calling itself the Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has previously linked the news outlet to the Russian information campaigns centered around the Internet Research Agency.The network appears to have since disbanded, and many of the social media accounts associated with it went dormant after being publicly identified around the 2020 election. The accounts started becoming active again in August and September, called to action like sleeper cells.Nora Berka’s account on Gab has many of the characteristics of an inauthentic user, Mr. Liston said. There is no profile picture or identifying biographical details. No one responded to a message sent to the account through Gab.The account, with more than 8,000 followers, posts exclusively on political issues — not in just one state but across the country — and often spreads false or misleading posts. Most have little engagement but a recent post about the F.B.I. received 43 responses and 11 replies, and was reposted 64 times.Since September the account has repeatedly shared links to a previously unknown website — electiontruth.net — that Recorded Future said was almost certainly linked to the Russian campaign.Electiontruth.net’s earliest posts date only from Sept. 5; since then, it has posted articles almost daily ridiculing President Biden and prominent Democratic candidates, while criticizing policies regarding race, crime and gender that it said were destroying the United States. “America under Communism” was one typical headline.The articles all have pseudonyms as bylines, like Andrew J, Truth4Ever and Laura. According to Mr. Liston, the website domain was registered using Bitcoin accounts.Electiontruth.net lists a cafe in Cotter, Ark., as its contact. The cafe has closed, replaced by the Cotter Bridge Market. The market’s owners said they knew nothing about the website.Trent Bozeman for The New York TimesFor its contact information, electiontruth.net lists a cafe inside a converted gas station in Cotter, Ark., a town of 900 people on a bend in the White River. The cafe has closed, however, and been replaced by Cotter Bridge Market, a produce shop and deli whose owners said they knew nothing about the website. No one at Election Truth responded to a request for comment submitted through the site.Mr. Liston said that links to electiontruth.net appeared to be closely coordinated with the accounts on Gab linked to the Russians.In another campaign, Graphika identified a recent series of cartoons that appeared on Gab, Gettr, Parler and the discussion forum patriots.win. The cartoons, by an artist named “Schmitz,” disparaged Democrats in the tightest Senate and governor races.One targeting Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who is Black, employed racist motifs. Another falsely claimed that Representative Tim Ryan, the Democratic Senate candidate in Ohio, would release “all Fentanyl distributors and drug traffickers” from prison.The cartoons received little engagement and did not spread virally to other platforms, according to Graphika.A recurring theme of the new Russian efforts is an argument that the United States under President Biden is wasting money by supporting Ukraine in its resistance to the Russian invasion that began in February.Nora Berka, for example, posted a doctored photograph in September that showed President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as a bikini-wearing poll dancer being showered with dollar bills by Mr. Biden.“As working class Americans struggle to afford food, gas, and find baby formula, Joe Biden wants to spend $13.7 billion more in aid to Ukraine,” the account posted. Not incidentally, that post echoed a theme that has gained some traction among Republican lawmakers and voters who have questioned the delivery of weapons and other military assistance.“It’s no secret that Republicans — that a large portion of Republicans — have questioned whether we should be supporting what has been referred to as foreign adventures or somebody else’s conflict,” said Graham Brookie, senior director of the Digital Forensics Lab at the Atlantic Council, which has also been tracking foreign influence operations.The F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency did not respond to requests for comment about the Russian efforts. Mr. Brookie called the revived accounts “recidivist behavior.” Gab did not respond to a request for comment.As before, it may be hard to measure the exact impact of these accounts on voters come Tuesday. At a minimum, they contribute to what Edward P. Perez, a board member with the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan election security organization, called “manufactured chaos” in the country’s body politic.While Russians in the past sought to build large followings for their inauthentic accounts on the major platforms, today’s campaigns could be smaller and yet still achieve a desired effect — in part because the divisions in American society are already such fertile soil for disinformation, he said.“Since 2016, it appears that foreign states can afford to take some of the foot off the gas,” Mr. Perez, who previously worked at Twitter, said, “because they have already created such sufficient division that there are many domestic actors to carry the water of disinformation for them.” More

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      What Twitter’s Shake-Up Could Mean: Midterm Misinformation Run Amok

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      Declining trust in institutions is fostering mistrust about voting, leading many Americans to embrace conspiracy theories about elections.A recent exchange between David Becker, a nonpartisan elections expert, and a Twitter user named “@catturd2” — an account with nearly a million followers that sometimes exchanges posts with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter — offered a telling example of why misinformation is such an intractable problem.“Funny how we could easily count every vote in every state on election night until a few years ago,” the account tweeted. The false claim racked up 67,000 likes.“With all due respect to catturd,” Becker clarified to his much smaller list of 15,000 followers, “we have never, in the history of our nation, come close to counting all the votes on election night. Every state takes weeks to count all the ballots (incl military) and officially certify the results. Every state. Always.”Why does this matter? Because false information about the mechanics of voting fosters mistrust and is leading many Americans — overwhelmingly on the right — to embrace conspiracy theories about elections.And by the way, Musk is in the middle of firing thousands of Twitter employees, including members of the trust and safety teams that manage content moderation.“It’s an egregiously irresponsible thing to do just days before midterms that are likely to be mired by voter intimidation, false claims of election rigging and potential political violence,” said Jesse Lehrich, a co-founder of the nonprofit watchdog group Accountable Tech.First: Lest there be any doubt, the notion that America ever counts every vote on election night is both flatly untrue and easily checkable. California, for instance, has never come anywhere within shouting distance of that goal. Close races there can take weeks to call. New York State is notoriously slow at counting votes; in 2020, local election boards did not start counting absentee ballots until seven days after Election Day. Some waited even longer.There’s no conspiracy here. It takes a long time to count votes in a country as big as the United States. This is why states have processes in place to certify the results over the course of weeks. Alaska, for instance, isn’t planning to tabulate and release unofficial results of its election until Nov. 23. That’s entirely normal.But with Twitter in turmoil, Lehrich is worried about how misinformation about voting might spread unchecked over the next few days and weeks. “Things are going to fall through the cracks, even if Elon doesn’t do anything intentional to sabotage stuff,” he said.Tweeting alonePart of what’s going on here is declining levels of trust in the pillars of American civic life — a decades-long trend captured vividly in “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam’s famous book from 2000.The numbers are even worse now. Jeffrey Jones, an analyst at Gallup, noted in July that Americans had reached “record-low confidence across all institutions.”News organizations polled near the bottom of Gallup’s list. Just 16 percent of the public said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, and only 11 percent said the same for TV news.The differences by party were stark. Just 5 percent of Republicans and 12 percent of independents said they had high confidence in newspapers, and only 35 percent of Democrats said the same. All of these numbers had declined from a year earlier.Coming in the middle of a midterm election in which journalists are trying to inform millions of voters about what’s happening and to help them assess the ideas and personal characteristics of the candidates, Gallup’s finding was alarming.And that’s just one data point. A recent poll by Bright Line Watch, a project run by a group of political scientists, found that 91 percent of Democrats were confident that their vote would be counted, versus just 68 percent of Republicans. That lack of trust is the starter fuel of election denialism.Organized groups on the right have been going after the press for decades, and conservative politicians often take up the chorus. Richard Nixon’s ill-fated vice president, Spiro Agnew, called journalists “nattering nabobs of negativism”; Donald Trump attacked the news media as the “fake news” and the “enemy of the people”; Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida ripped the “corporate media” despite being a frequent guest on Fox News — which, yes, is a corporation. If Walter Cronkite walked among us today, he’d be pilloried as a liberal shill.The left has its own beef with the news media. This week, Dan Froomkin, a reliably acerbic liberal critic of political coverage, wrote a post asking, “Why aren’t mainstream journalists sounding the alarm about the threat to democracy?” He lamented how, in his view, political reporters were “just covering it like another partisan fight.”Political reporters do cover partisan fights; there’s an election going on, and readers care about who is winning, who is losing and why.But mainstream news outlets also invested heavily this year in coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings, election denialism, political violence, dangers to election workers, plots to disrupt the midterms, misinformation and threats to democracy more generally. There’s been a lot of tough, critical coverage of election denialism.Local news is often another story. Here’s a tweet from KTNV, a television station in Nevada: “Democrat Cisco Aguilar and Republican Jim Marchant are running to be the next Secretary of State in Nevada. And both have the same focus: election integrity.”The text of the article implies that Marchant, the leader of a far-right slate of candidates for top election posts in several states who deny the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, is spreading “unfounded claims of widespread election fraud.” But it doesn’t say so explicitly.In an interview, Aguilar pointed to the KTNV article as an example of how news coverage had treated the candidates too evenhandedly and was giving Marchant a platform he didn’t deserve. (Marchant did not respond to an email sent to three of his known addresses.)When I asked Adrian Fontes, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, how he planned to combat misinformation if he wins his race against Mark Finchem, a far-right Republican who has stoked conspiracy theories about elections, he made a similar argument.“Actually, it’s not a hard problem,” Fontes said, urging journalists to stop “chasing shiny objects” and “crazy conspiracy theories” and focus instead on what election workers do.“As secretary of state,” he said, “I plan on celebrating them, elevating them and making sure that guys like you, respectfully, don’t ignore them in favor of the weirdos.”Facts are stubborn things, except when they’re not.Increasingly, though, millions of Americans aren’t getting their information from people like me. They’re following sources that have none of the checks and balances — however imperfect — that most mainstream outlets have in place.Over the last few decades, as it has stoked mistrust in the mainstream media, the right has built up a closed-off alternate ecosystem that includes Fox News, but also fringier outlets like Newsmax or One America News Network. But even those places put their names behind their stories, and viewers have a good sense of the perspective and slant they represent.This morning, I asked @catturd2 on Twitter if the user behind the account planned to issue a correction or delete the incorrect information. No response yet, but the account wrote in another tweet: “LOL – Look what Twitter did to my tweet – trying to fact check it with the fake news commie NYT,” followed by five laugh-cry smiley face emojis.Surveys show that younger people increasingly trust what they see on social media about as much as they trust traditional news sources. Data also shows that readers often can’t tell the difference between news reporting and opinion, even when they are labeled explicitly. Social media timelines jumble them all up together.And, as the Pew Research Center has noted, people don’t even agree on what a “fact” is: “Members of each political party were more likely to label both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed more to their political side,” Pew wrote in 2018.Those people staking out drop boxes in Arizona to intimidate voters based on false information, or demanding the hand-counting of ballots in Nevada? They aren’t getting their information from mainstream sources.How do honest and fair reporters reach them with accurate news? That’s a much deeper societal challenge, and nobody seems to have any good answers.What to read tonightDonald Trump is expected to announce a third White House campaign soon after the midterms, possibly as soon as Nov. 14, Michael Bender and Maggie Haberman write.In Wisconsin, one the nation’s most evenly divided swing states, Republicans are close to capturing supermajorities in the State Legislature that would render the Democratic governor irrelevant, even if he wins re-election, Reid Epstein reports.San Luis, Ariz., a small farming outpost on the border, played a critical role in the making of “2,000 Mules,” a conspiratorial movie about supposed election fraud in 2020. Now some residents are scared to vote, Jack Healy and Alexandra Berzon write.Sheera Frenkel looks at the phenomenon of “participatory misinformation” on the internet, where hunting for voter fraud has became a game.viewfinderDon Bolduc arriving on Wednesday at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, N.H., for his debate against Senator Maggie Hassan.John Tully for The New York TimesFist-pumping in a classic political battlegroundAt 5:30 p.m., there was an all-out sprint from campaign workers, volunteers and supporters.The goal: to find the best view of a parking lot where Senator Maggie Hassan and her Republican challenger, Don Bolduc, would arrive for their final debate. Each candidate’s supporters fought for position so their signs would be visible.Inside the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, the stage was being set for Hassan, a Democrat, and Bolduc, whose Senate race has tightened in recent weeks, giving Republicans hope for an upset victory.Hassan was the first to arrive, working the line for about a minute before heading inside. Within 30 seconds or so, Bolduc arrived, to cheers and jeers.He pumped his fists in front of supporters, and I captured this image — a look at grass-roots political theater in New Hampshire.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Elon Musk Takes a Page Out of Mark Zuckerberg’s Social Media Playbook

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      As Mr. Musk takes over Twitter, he is emulating some of the actions of Mr. Zuckerberg, who leads Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.Elon Musk has positioned himself as an unconventional businessman. When he agreed to buy Twitter this year, he declared he would make the social media service a place for unfettered free speech, reversing many of its rules and allowing banned users like former President Donald J. Trump to return.But since closing his $44 billion buyout of Twitter last week, Mr. Musk has followed a surprisingly conventional social media playbook.The world’s richest man met with more than six civil rights groups — including the N.A.A.C.P. and the Anti-Defamation League — on Tuesday to assure them that he will not make changes to Twitter’s content rules before the results of next week’s midterm elections are certified. He also met with advertising executives to discuss their concerns about their brands appearing alongside toxic online content. Last week, Mr. Musk said he would form a council to advise Twitter on what kinds of content to remove from the platform and would not immediately reinstate banned accounts.If these decisions and outreach seem familiar, that’s because they are. Other leaders of social media companies have taken similar steps. After Facebook was criticized for being misused in the 2016 presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s chief executive, also met with civil rights groups to calm them and worked to mollify irate advertisers. He later said he would establish an independent board to advise his company on content decisions.Mr. Musk is in his early days of owning Twitter and is expected to make big changes to the service and business, including laying off some of the company’s 7,500 employees. But for now, he is engaging with many of the same constituents that Mr. Zuckerberg has had to over many years, social media experts and heads of civil society groups said.Mr. Musk “has discovered what Mark Zuckerberg discovered several years ago: Being the face of controversial big calls isn’t fun,” said Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School. Social media companies “all face the same pressures of users, advertisers and governments, and there’s always this convergence around this common set of norms and processes that you’re forced toward.”Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and a Twitter spokeswoman declined to comment. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, declined to comment.Elon Musk’s Acquisition of TwitterCard 1 of 8A blockbuster deal. More

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      How the Right Became the Left and the Left Became the Right

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      One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.These reversals are especially evident in a pair of prominent headlines from the last week. If you had been told at any point from, say, 1970 to 2005 that a disturbed-seeming man living in the Bay Area with a history of involvement with nudist activists and the hemp jewelry trade had allegedly followed his paranoid political delusions into a plan to assault an important national politician, the reasonable assumption would have been that his delusions belonged to the farthest reaches of the left and therefore his target was probably some notable Republican.By the same token, if you had been told in George W. Bush’s presidency that a trove of government documents would reveal the Department of Homeland Security essentially trying to collude with major corporations to regulate speech it considers dangerous or subversive, an effort extending from foreign threats to domestic ones, you would have assumed that this was all Republican overreach, a new McCarthyism — and that progressives would be up in arms against it.In our world, though, things are otherwise. The man who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi while hunting the speaker of the House did, seemingly, belong to left-wing, Left Coast culture in the not-so-distant past. But at some point in his unhappy trajectory, he passed over to the paranoias of the extreme right — probably not in some semi-rational radicalization process in which he watched too many attack ads against Nancy Pelosi but more likely in a dreamlike way, the nightmares of QAnon matching his mental state better‌ than the paranoias of the left.His journey’s violent endpoint was singular and extreme, but this kind of left-to-right migration has more normal correlatives: the New Age-QAnon overlap, the Covid-era migration of formerly left-wing skeptics of Big Pharma onto right-wing shows and platforms, the way that all doubts about the medical establishment are now coded as right-wing, Trumpy, populist.And the political right’s response to the Pelosi attack reflects these shifts as well. The ethos of Fox Mulder in “The X-Files,” “Trust no one,” is a now dominant value on the right, which in this case encouraged a swift leap from reasonable questions about the details of the assault, based on inaccurate initial reports, to a very specific narrative about a gay assignation that the cops and the Pelosis were presumably covering up.As of this writing, several public references to this theory from prominent conservatives have been deleted. But the cover-up narrative will probably survive indefinitely as a reference point, an underground “truth,” like the left-wing conspiracies of old.One of those deleted tweets belonged to Elon Musk, the new impresario of Twitter, and it inevitably became an exhibit in the case for liberal panic over his takeover: What could be more indicative of the platform’s imminent descent into a democracy-destroying hellscape than conspiracy theories spread by the Chief Twit himself?But the alternative to Musk’s reign was clarified by the second recent illustration of our left-right reversal: a story from The Intercept, by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein, detailing the Department of Homeland Security’s migration into the social-media surveillance and the pressure the department has tried to exert on internet companies to flag and censor content along lines favored by the national security bureaucracy.On the surface, this is not a partisan story: The Intercept is a left-wing publication, and the current version of the D.H.S. anti-disinformation effort got started in the Trump administration.But everyone understands those efforts’ current ideological valence. The war on disinformation is a crucial Democratic cause, the key lawsuit filed against the Biden administration on these issues comes from Republican attorneys general (joined by doctors critical of the public-health establishment), and the most famous flashpoint remains the social-media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which Fang and Klippenstein suggest followed from what one could reasonably call a deep-state pressure campaign.Meanwhile, according to a draft report from the D.H.S. obtained by The Intercept, the list of online subject areas that the department is particularly concerned about includes “the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine” — mostly areas where, whether in wisdom or in folly, the populist right is more likely to dissent from the establishment position.And for the future of Twitter, in particular, it’s notable that the Intercept story first points out that a committee advising DHS on disinformation policy included Twitter’s then-head of legal policy, trust and safety, Vijaya Gadde, and then notes that Gadde was one of the first people fired by Musk. It’s a tacit nod to the left-right switch: Under Musk the social-media giant is widely seen as moving “rightward,” but that could mean becoming less entangled with an arm of what was once George W. Bush’s national security state.The point of emphasizing this reversal isn’t to suggest that either side is likely to flip back. The evolving attitudes of right and left reflect their evolving positions in American society, with cultural liberalism much more dominant in elite institutions than it was a generation ago and conservatism increasingly disreputable, representing downscale constituencies and outsider ideas.But a stronger awareness of the flip might be helpful in tempering the temptations that afflict both sides. For progressives, that could mean acknowledging that the Department of Homeland Security’s disinformation wars, its attempted hand-in-glove with the great powers of Silicon Valley, would have been regarded as a dystopian scenario on their side not so long ago. So is it really any less dystopian if the targets are Trumpistas and Anthony Fauci critics instead of Iraq War protesters? And if it is a little creepy and censorious and un-American, doesn’t that make some of the paranoia evident on the right these days a little less unfathomable and fascist seeming, even a little more relatable?Then the Fox Mulder right might benefit from recalling the thing that conservatives — or this conservative, at least — used to find most insufferable about the anti-establishment left, which was not its skepticism but its credulity, not the eagerness to question official narratives but the speed with which implausible alternatives took root. (If parts of Oliver Stone’s “J.F.K.” make you understand where conspiracy theories come from, the part where the conspiracy gets “explained” should make you a Nixon Republican.)This is the key problem with the right today, whether the issue is the 2020 election or the Covid-vaccine debate or the attack on Paul Pelosi. Not the baseline of skepticism, not being attuned to weaknesses and inconsistencies in official narratives, not being open to scenarios of elite self-dealing and conspiracy and cover-up, all of which emphatically exist. It’s the swift replacement of skepticism with certainty, the shopping around for any narrative — even if it comes from Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell — to vindicate your initial theory, the refusal to accept that even institutions you reasonably mistrust sometimes get things right.Or to put this in terms of Musk and his hopes for Twitter: The ideal virtual town square would be a place where conservatives could discuss speculative, even conspiratorial theories of the day’s events — but also a place where they could be persuaded to abandon bad theories when the evidence dissolves them.Social-media and tribal incentives being what they are, that seems exceedingly unlikely. But if I had just paid billions to own a social media platform — and become both its main character and arguably the most important right-leaning figure in American life, pending the Donald Trump-Ron De‌ ‌Santis slugfest — I would be thinking about what it would take for a spirit of contrarianism and rebellion to aim, not simply at transgression, but at truth itself.In addition to my two weekly columns, I’m starting a newsletter, which will go out most Fridays and cover some of my usual obsessions — political ideas, religion, pop culture, decadence — in even more detail. You can subscribe here.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More