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    Meet Kyrsten Sinema, Former Democrat of Arizona

    Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I hope I’ve succeeded in turning you into a World Cup fan. In the meantime, any choice words about, or for, Kyrsten Sinema, former Democrat of Arizona?Gail Collins: Well, Bret, you’ve at least turned me into a fan of the Times coverage of World Cup … activities. I also sorta like times like this when there are a billion different games on TV — not just soccer — and for a while every day, people don’t feel obliged to think about the rest of the world.Bret: Such as …Gail: Such as Kyrsten Sinema. Not a fan of hers from the get-go. Always seemed as if her compulsive effort to prove she wasn’t really a loyal Democrat was less about political independence and more about making wealthy donors happy.Bret: And this is on the theory that other politicians don’t care for what their wealthy donors think?Gail: But her official spin is that the two-party system is broken, and virtue lies in standing outside as an independent. I hate that kind of thinking.Bret: Whereas I love it. To me, the choice these days between Republicans and Democrats is about as appealing as a dinner invitation from Hannibal Lecter: Either you get your heart cut out or your brain removed, and both get served with a side of fava beans and a nice Chianti.Seriously, you don’t see any virtue to wanting to break this awful political duopoly?Gail: Virtue, for me, lies in fighting to make the two parties better. Pick the one that’s closest to your beliefs and get busy. Fight for the good local leaders and nominees.It’s way easier to just announce you’re superior to both of them and start your own group. The new gang probably won’t last long, and even if it does, its big achievement will most likely be to draw votes away from the major party candidates you most agree with.Never recovered from Ralph Nader’s Green Party candidacy for president in 2000 — a noble quest on the issues front that wound up costing Al Gore the job.Bret: A few years ago I would have agreed with you. But the Republican Party is pretty much irredeemable, while the Democrats are … just not the team I’m ever going to bat for.Gail: Come on in. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are waiting with open arms …Bret: Not so sure the Dems would ever want me in the first place: I heart Texas not taxes.As for Sinema, having her join someone like Maine’s Angus King as an independent shows it’s at least possible to have an alternative. I realize she has some very self-interested political reasons for doing so, since the move will spare her a primary challenge from the left if she runs for re-election in 2024. But it also reminds the party establishments that they shouldn’t take their centrist voters for granted. Now I wish a few sane-minded Republicans might go ahead and join her. Lisa Murkowski, hello?Gail: Hey, weird that of the two of us, I’m the one who thinks somebody should try to save the Republican Party.Bret: Raising the dead is beyond our powers, Gail.Gail: You know I don’t do foreign affairs, but I do feel obliged to ask you about Brittney Griner. Do you think Joe Biden did the right thing in making the trade that got her out of prison in Russia?Bret: Well, obviously I’m happy for Griner and her family that she’s back after her 10-month ordeal. And it says everything about the moral difference between the United States and Russia that they will take a harmless person hostage so they can trade her for one of their most notorious gangsters.On the other hand, I don’t understand why we didn’t prioritize the release of Paul Whelan, an American who has been wrongfully detained in a Russian prison for four years but doesn’t have the benefit of Griner’s celebrity. Nor should we forget Marc Fogel, a 61-year-old American teacher trapped in one of Putin’s prisons. My advice to the Biden administration is to tell Russia that $1 billion of its foreign reserves will be seized for every additional day these two stay in prison.Gail: Hope they’re listening.Bret: Oh, and speaking of dealing with gangsters — your thoughts on the current crop of legal cases against the former guy?Gail: I’ve never thought — and still don’t — that a former president is going to go to jail, even for stealing federal documents or rousing violent crowds to march on the Capitol.Bret: Agree. Alas.Gail: But I’ve always had a yearning that he might wind up bankrupt and, say, living in a Motel 6. Knew that was impossible — told myself to remember all the money he can make just on speaking tours or hosting parties at Mar-a-Lago.Bret: Pretty depressing how American culture has descended from “My Dinner With Andre” to that dinner with Kanye.Gail: Now, though, I’m sort of wondering. Is there going to be a market for this guy — chooser of terrible Senate candidates and breaker of bread with neo-Nazis — even just as a celebrity?Bret: I had nearly lost hope that the day would ever come, but I think we are finally watching Trump self-destruct before our eyes even faster than anyone else can destroy him. The midterm results seem to have persuaded a critical mass of Republican voters and politicians that he’s toxic for their chances. Dinner with his antisemitic pals seems to have been the icing on the cake — or whatever the exact opposite of “icing on the cake” is. Toxic algae in the cesspool?Gail: Rotting rutabaga in the refuse? Sorry, that doesn’t actually make much sense. I was seduced by all the R’s.Bret: Gail, would you mind if I rant for a minute?Gail: Bret, I love it when you rant. Even when I hate it.Bret: There’s a special place in hell for the Paul Ryan Republicans — let’s call them PRR’s. What I mean is a certain type of well-heeled, intellectually minded conservative who never liked Trump’s person or politics and who occasionally tut-tutted at his vilest excesses, but who consistently made excuses for him and his presidency while heaping scorn on Never Trumpers as a bunch of virtue-signaling prigs. These Trump-appeasing PRR’s were prepared to defend and vote for him again until the day after the midterms, when they finally realized that he was a titanic political liability.Gail: Well, I truly do love this rant. Go on.Bret: To adapt something Winston Churchill purportedly said to Neville Chamberlain after Munich in 1938: In 2016 conservatives were given the choice between electoral defeat and personal dishonor. They chose dishonor. In the end, they still got defeated.Gail: You know I’m going to ask who’s a Churchillian pick in the Republican world. For instance, Ron DeSantis was never a huge Trump pal, but I think that was only because he was eyeing his job.Bret: So, weirdly, I have much less of a moral objection to those Republicans like DeSantis who liked Trump to begin with, whether because they agreed with most of his policies or appreciated his thumb-in-the-eye personality, or both. At least they came about their support for Trump honestly, without convoluted rationalizations and self-exculpations and various suspensions of disbelief. Of course I don’t agree with them, but I long ago stopped disdaining them.Speaking of disdain, any views on all of these disclosures about Twitter’s speech policies?Gail: Is there any way we can make it illegal for the richest man in the world to own one of the largest social networks? Guess not, huh?Bret: Probably not, though I doubt Musk will profit from the acquisition.Gail: Definitely felt sorry for the Twitter workers who discovered that Musk was putting beds in their work space. And his wild political seesawing would ruin the influence of anybody who wasn’t closing in on a quarter of a trillion dollars.But here we are, and I don’t have any great strategy for making him behave in a more responsible way when it comes to things like … keeping violent hatemongers off his platform. Do you have one?Bret: Violent hatemongers aside, I thought it was pretty appalling to see the lengths to which pre-Musk Twitter went to ban legitimate news stories, like The New York Post’s scoop about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and to downplay views that went against conventional wisdom, like the Stanford professor of medicine who warned about the ill-effects of lockdowns, and to coordinate its decisions with the Biden team — and then mislead the public about what it was doing. Even progressives like Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley in Congress, warned Twitter about its anti-free speech attitude, which is entirely to his credit and not at all to theirs.Gail: Bret scores …Bret: I guess the point is, we don’t want giant corporations banning political speech, whether it comes from the left or the right, and that goes especially for companies whose entire business model relies on the principle of free speech. For exposing this, I have to give Musk credit.Gail: We’ll pick this up again, Bret. Somehow I suspect Elon Musk will follow us into the new year.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

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    What Are the Politics of Elon Musk? It’s Complicated.

    Elon Musk has tweeted about political topics regularly since taking over Twitter, often belittling some liberal causes. But what he stands for remains largely unclear.He has called himself an independent and a centrist, yet “economically right of center, maybe.” He has said he was until recently a supporter of only Democrats and voted for President Biden. He’s encouraged people to vote Republican, which he said he did for the first time this year. Last year, he once even declared himself indifferent about politics, saying he’d rather stay out of it altogether.Elon Musk, ever a bundle of contradictions and inconsistencies, has long made his politics tricky to pin down. To many of his critics, though, his relentless flurry of tweets in the six weeks since he took over Twitter has exposed his true conservative bent, and intensified their fears that he would make the social network more susceptible to right-wing misinformation.And at times, he’s made it hard to argue with that. He has said he’d welcome former President Donald J. Trump back on Twitter; suggested that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was lying about the attack at their home that left him hospitalized; and reinstated accounts that have trafficked in offensive ethnic stereotypes and bigotry, including for the artist formerly known as Kanye West. (Mr. Musk later suspended Mr. West’s account again after the rapper-entrepreneur posted an image of a swastika.)His copious tweeting has generated huge amounts of attention. In a 24-hour period late this week, he tweeted more than 40 times, often with little rhyme or reason. He criticized the Biden administration’s deal with Russia that freed Brittney Griner, the Women’s National Basketball Association star. He asked Elton John to clarify his complaint about misinformation flourishing unchecked on Twitter. At times, Mr. Musk was acting like Twitter’s in-house customer service representative, boasting about new features and improved functions.And maybe that is a big part of the point — improving the image of his new $44 billion property, which he has said repeatedly is in dire financial straits.Yet Mr. Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, continues to defy easy political categorization. His views have been described as libertarian, though these days his politics seem more contrarian than anything else. He is more clear about what he is against than what he is for.It’s true Mr. Musk certainly sounds a lot like a Republican — and, sometimes, a lot like Mr. Trump — with his missives on Twitter against “woke” politics and Covid restrictions, his attacks on “elite” media and his efforts to draw attention to allegations that Hunter Biden profited from his father’s political clout.More on Elon Musk’s Twitter TakeoverAn Established Pattern: Firing people. Talking of bankruptcy. Telling workers to be “hard core.” Twitter isn’t the first company that witnessed Elon Musk use those tactics.Rivals Emerge: Sensing an opportunity, new start-ups and other social platforms are racing to dethrone Twitter and capitalize on the chaos of its new ownership under Mr. Musk.The ‘Twitter Files’: Mr. Musk and Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist, set off an intense debate with a release of internal Twitter documents regarding a 2020 decision to restrict posts linking to a report in the New York Post about Hunter Biden.Hard Fork: The Times podcast looks at Mr. Musk’s two-day clash with Apple, which he had accused of trying to sabotage Twitter before saying the “misunderstanding” had been resolved.But where Mr. Musk has seemed most in line with the G.O.P. of Mr. Trump is in the tenor of his political commentary, which if anything seems more spiritedly anti-left than ideologically pro-right. While he has not been shy about sharing his disdain for many Democrats, his enthusiasm for Republicans has been more muted. He has stressed repeatedly that his problems are with extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.“To be clear, my historical party affiliation has been Independent, with an actual voting history of entirely Democrat until this year,” he wrote on Twitter the day before the midterm election. “And I’m open to the idea of voting Democrat again in the future.”As with many people who describe themselves as politically independent now, the hostility Mr. Musk harbors toward Democrats appears to have drawn him closer to the Republican Party over the last few years. He considers himself as part of the “center 80% of people, who wish to learn, laugh & engage in reasoned debate.”He has eagerly encouraged his followers to weigh in with their views on the country’s culture wars and traded tweets with some of the right’s favorite punching bags, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. When she criticized his plan to charge Twitter users $8 a month to have a verified account with one of the social media service’s signature blue check marks — “Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that ‘free speech’ is actually a $8/mo subscription plan,” she wrote — he dismissed her.“Your feedback is appreciated, now pay $8,” Mr. Musk shot back.Many of his recent tweets have had that kind of “own the libs” tone, the shorthand on the right for when conservatives think they’ve deftly, often sarcastically, swatted down a liberal. A couple of weeks ago, he posted video on Twitter of a closet full of T-shirts with the slogan “#stay woke” that he said he had found at the social media company’s headquarters. Then he followed up with a tweet that linked to a Justice Department report that undercut one of the central narratives of the mass protests against police brutality: that Michael Brown, a Black teenager killed by the police in Ferguson, Mo., had his hands raised when a white officer shot him.On occasion, his remarks have raised concerns that he has planted himself firmly among right-wing conspiracy theorists. When he tweeted about the attack on Ms. Pelosi’s husband, he shared the unfounded claim that there was “a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” He later deleted the tweet, which linked to an article from a fringe website.He also said he would support Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for president in 2024, though his endorsement was not especially resounding. He merely replied “Yes” when someone on Twitter asked him. Mr. DeSantis, a hard-line conservative, would be an odd choice for someone who professes to want centrist governance in Washington.Mr. Musk has always claimed his concerns with Twitter’s previous management were about the ability of a small group of the company’s employees whom he described as “far left” to censor content. And over the past week, he has cheered on tweets about internal communications before he took over. The communications, which were given to two writers who have posted their findings on Twitter, calling them the Twitter Files, showed how the company went about deciding what information got suppressed.It’s been a mixed bag of revelations. Some showed how Twitter employees made it harder to see tweets from a Stanford University professor who warned about how Covid lockdowns could harm children — a view many public health experts have come around to accept well after the fact. Other documents show how more conventional, conspiracy-theory-embracing conservatives were shut down, like Dan Bongino, the radio host who was one of the biggest amplifiers of lies about the 2020 election.Mr. Musk has not professed to have any profound attachment to Republican policies, though, which is consistent with his posture before taking over Twitter.He has been highly critical of climate change deniers and said he’s proud of how Tesla forced the rest of the automobile industry to embrace electric vehicles. In 2020, he revealed that he’d spoken to Mr. Trump numerous times about the importance of developing sustainable energy, which the former president dismissed in favor of traditional fossil fuel-based sources. And Mr. Musk quit Mr. Trump’s business councils after the administration pulled out of the Paris climate accord.In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, he described his politics as “middle-of-the-road.” “I’m socially very liberal. And then economically right of center, maybe, or center. I don’t know. I’m obviously not a communist.”His political giving supports that claim. According to the Federal Election Commission, which reports spending in federal but not state races, he has donated just shy of $1 million since 2003 to candidates as conservative as former President George W. Bush and as liberal as Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat. More recently, in 2020, he donated to senators of both political parties — including Chris Coons and Gary Peters, both Democrats, and Susan Collins and John Cornyn, both Republicans.Often, it seems, his posts are motivated by personal pique, not political philosophy. He’s criticized the Biden administration, for instance, as “not the friendliest” and for excluding Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle maker, from a White House summit on zero-emission vehicles in August 2021. His speculation on the reason for the exclusion: General Motors and the other car companies invited are union companies; Tesla is not. “Seems to be controlled by unions,” he complained at the time.Many of the views he has espoused on Twitter over the last two years have become popular in today’s Republican Party but are hardly exclusive to card-carrying Republicans. His criticism of progressives he views as overly censorious and sanctimonious is a sentiment many on the left have expressed. And his public condemnation of strict Covid containment measures in 2020 channeled what would become a growing skepticism of widespread public health restrictions. Though he was more exercised about them than most. “Fascist,” he once declared.Often, his tweets can seem to imply he leans in one direction when it’s just as likely that he is trying to court controversy. How to interpret, for instance, a post last week of what he said was an image of his bedside table? It had a revolver on it and a musket in a wooden case decorated with an image of George Washington crossing the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War.“Greetings, I’m Musket, Elon Musket,” he wrote.A few days later, he sounded pleased with himself as he remarked on the way Twitter had changed since his purchase was completed in October. “So many interesting posts on Twitter these days!” More

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    Inside the Face-Off Between Russia and a Small Internet Access Firm

    The cat-and-mouse experience of Proton, a Swiss company, shows what it’s like to be targeted by Russian censors — and what it takes to fight back.After Moscow erected a digital barricade in March, blocking access to independent news sites and social media platforms to hide information about its unfolding invasion of Ukraine, many Russians looked for a workaround. One reliable route they found came from a small Swiss company based nearly 2,000 miles away.The company, Proton, provides free software that masks a person’s identity and location online. That gives a user in Russia access to the open web by making it appear that the person is logging in from the Netherlands, Japan or the United States. A couple of weeks after the internet blockade, about 850,000 people inside Russia used Proton each day, up from fewer than 25,000.That is, until the end of March, when the Russian government found a way to block Proton, too.Targeting Proton was the opening salvo of a continuing back-and-forth battle, pitting a team of about 25 engineers against a country embarking on one of the most aggressive censorship campaigns in recent memory.Working from a Geneva office where the company keeps its name off the building directory, Proton has spent nine pressure-packed months repeatedly tweaking its technology to avoid Russian blocks, only to be countered again by government censors in Moscow. Some employees took Proton off their social media profiles out of concern that they would be targeted personally.The high-stakes chess match mirrors what is playing out with growing frequency in countries facing coups, wars and authoritarian rule, where restricting the internet is a tool of repression. The blocks drive citizens to look for workarounds. Engineers at companies like Proton think up new ways for those people to secretly reach the open web. And governments, in turn, seek out new technical tricks to plug leaks.The digital censorship battle is reaching “an inflection point,” said Grant Baker, a research analyst for technology and democracy at Freedom House, which recently reported that internet censorship globally had reached a new high in 2022. While Russia has spent years working on a more closely controlled, sovereign internet, the controls imposed after the war are “a stark contrast” to anything Moscow had ever done before, Mr. Baker said.Companies rarely discuss being targeted by an authoritarian government out of fear of escalating the conflict. But Andy Yen, Proton’s founder and chief executive, said that after a period of trying to keep its “head down,” Proton wanted to raise awareness about the increasing sophistication of governments, in Russia and elsewhere, to block citizens from reaching the open web and the need for technologists, companies and governments to push back.Proton’s account provides a rare inside look at what it’s like to be entangled in Russia’s censorship net as President Vladimir V. Putin tries to suppress information about the war and mounting battlefield losses in Ukraine.Dozens of VPN services have been blocked inside Russia, but Proton, perhaps best known for its encrypted email service, seemed to receive extra attention from the authorities. In June, Russia’s internet regulator labeled the company a “threat.”“We’re gearing up for a long fight,” Mr. Yen said in an interview at the company’s office. “Everybody hopes this will have a happy ending, but it’s not guaranteed. We don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, in fact, but you keep going because if we don’t do it, then maybe nobody else will.”The VPN team at Proton, whose virtual private network gives users a way around government internet restrictions.Aurélien Bergot for The New York TimesProton, which makes money by selling $10-a-month subscriptions for extra features, was founded in 2014 by a team of young engineers from the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, the institute outside Geneva where the worldwide web was created. Their main project was working on the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, a $5 billion instrument built to unlock some of the world’s biggest scientific mysteries.After the disclosures of mass digital surveillance that were made by Edward Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence contractor, Mr. Yen and a few colleagues created an email service that encrypts messages so they cannot be intercepted, simplifying use of a technology that had been too complicated for many people. It became popular with activists, journalists and privacy-conscious consumers.The State of the WarStriking Deep in Russia: In its most brazen attack into Russian territory, Ukraine used drones to strike two military bases hundreds of miles inside Russia, showing an ability to take the war beyond its borders.Weaponizing Winter: Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure have left millions without power, heat or water as the snow begins to fall. The Daily looks at what life is like in Ukraine as winter sets in.Russian Oil Price Cap: The E.U. agreed on a $60-a-barrel limit for Russian oil, the latest effort by Western allies to try to deprive Moscow of revenue to finance its war in Ukraine. Here’s how it will work.Mr. Yen, who grew up in Taiwan, said the threat of Chinese aggression looming over the island’s democracy had shaped his worldview. Privacy and fighting censorship were core to Proton’s mission from the start, he said, and the company seemed to almost relish confronting authoritarianism.In 2017, after several governments, including Turkey and Russia, temporarily blocked access to the email service, Proton created its virtual private network, or VPN, a technology used to sidestep internet restrictions.The technology behind a VPN traces back to the 1990s. It is a relatively basic tool used most commonly by people trying to pirate movies or watch a sports broadcast available only in another country. Yet in recent years the systems, which are easy to use and often difficult to detect, have become a vital tool for circumventing internet restrictions.The Kremlin spent years building the legal foundation and technological abilities to control the internet more closely. Yet even as Russia blocked certain websites and interrupted access to Twitter last year, few thought it would outright block major social media platforms and independent news websites. While television has always been heavily censored, the internet had been less restricted.The crackdown in March interrupted communications and commerce for many otherwise apolitical Russians, said Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel at Access Now, a group focused on online speech-related issues. VPN use was already high among tech-savvy Russians, she said, but the blocks and news of harsh punishment for online protest led even more casual internet users to seek ways around the restrictions.Demand for VPNs surged in Russia, with downloads in March jumping 2,692 percent from February, said Simon Migliano, head of research for the review site Top10VPN.com. Proton was a popular choice, he said, hovering among the 10 most popular products despite being slower than some other choices.Since then, VPNs have become a way of life for many. Roskomsvoboda, a Russian civil society group focused on internet freedom, estimates that a quarter of the Russian population is using one.“To simply read independent news or to post a picture, you had to open your VPN,” said Viktoriia Safonova, 25, who now delivers food by bike in Sweden after she fled Russia in July. Both she and her husband were racked by anxiety after the invasion. Finding independent news and information was difficult. Workarounds often weren’t reliable.“If the one you’re using gets blocked, you have to find another VPN,” Ms. Safonova said.She recalled the paranoia that set in as new internet restrictions and surveillance took effect. She and her husband, Artem Nesterenko, worried about whether they could criticize the war online, even on international social networks. He recalled how the police had come to check on their building after he scrawled “No to war” in the elevator. He feared being arrested for things he posted online.As people turned to VPN services to avoid the blocks, Proton struggled to keep up. Over a weekend in March, engineers scrambled to buy and configure more than 20 new servers to avert a crash of its entire network.At the same time in Moscow, censors were at work trying to patch holes in the government’s internet controls.The first block that took down Proton, at the end of March, was a technically basic interruption that company engineers quickly overcame, but they figured more powerful attempts loomed.The battle took on a “Spy vs. Spy” dynamic in Proton’s headquarters. Mr. Yen said a network of people within the government, telecommunications firms and civil society groups had helped Proton operate in Russia, providing access to local networks and sharing intelligence about how the censorship system worked. But those contacts began to go dark as the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent intensified.At the start of June, censors struck again.The service, which had more than 1.4 million daily users inside Russia at this point, collapsed as employees were going about their day. Complaints from Russian users poured into Proton’s customer service email. The company concluded that the government had deployed more sophisticated software that could filter through all internet traffic to identify when a person was trying to connect to Proton’s VPN service. Russia had used similar technology to block Twitter and other social media sites.Around this time, the company noticed a suspicious spike in negative reviews of its service in the Apple and Google app stores, reducing its search ranking.“They had clearly studied us,” said Antonio Cesarano, a senior engineer working on the VPN project.Some at Proton questioned whether they should continue the fight with Russia. It was costing millions of dollars and slowing down development of other products. But after Proton faced criticism in 2021, when the French police obtained the IP address of a climate activist using its email service, backing down from Russia could have added another bruise to the company’s reputation.Over about two weeks in June, Proton created yet another workaround that bounced internet traffic to servers in different geographical areas faster than censors could track. It was a technically complex move that would take considerable resources for Russia to counter.The fix worked — for about six weeks.Mr. Yen was interrupted during a staff meeting in mid-July with news that Russian censors had come up with an even more elaborate block. A corporate chart from the time shows use dropping off a cliff. Russian engineers had identified what is known as an authentication “handshake,” the vital moment when Proton’s VPN connection gets established before reaching the wider web. Blocking the link made Proton’s service essentially unusable.“We had no idea what was happening and how they were doing it,” Mr. Cesarano said.By August, after working around the clock for days to find a fix, Proton acknowledged defeat and pulled its app from Russia. The company has spent the months since then developing a new architecture that makes its VPN service harder to identify because it looks more like a regular website to censorship software scanning a country’s internet traffic. Proton has been successfully testing the system in Iran, where Proton has seen a sharp increase in VPN use during recent political demonstrations.In Russia, Proton has reintroduced its apps using the new system. Mr. Yen acknowledged that it probably wasn’t a long-term fix. He has confidence in the new technology, but figures Russian engineers will eventually figure out a new way to push back, and the game will continue. More

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    Facebook Failed to Stop Ads Threatening Election Workers

    The ads, submitted by researchers, were rejected by YouTube and TikTok.Facebook says it does not allow content that threatens serious violence. But when researchers submitted ads threatening to “lynch,” “murder” and “execute” election workers around Election Day this year, the company’s largely automated moderation systems approved many of them.Out of the 20 ads submitted by researchers containing violent content, 15 were approved by Facebook, according to a new test published by Global Witness, a watchdog group, and New York University’s Cybersecurity for Democracy. Researchers deleted the approved ads before they were published.Ten of the test ads were submitted in Spanish. Facebook approved six of those ads, compared with nine of the 10 ads in English.TikTok and YouTube rejected all the ads and suspended the accounts that attempted to submit them, the researchers said.The tests underscored the challenges that social networks face in moderating increasingly partisan and violent content around elections, especially as poll workers are facing additional threats from election deniers and far-right extremists. The Justice Department and other federal agencies warned ahead of this year’s midterm elections that threats against election workers had surged.In a statement, a spokesman for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said it later disabled several accounts that had submitted the ads. The company also said that ads continue to be reviewed after they go live.“This is a small sample of ads that are not representative of what people see on our platforms,” the spokesman said in a statement. “Content that incites violence against election workers or anyone else has no place on our apps, and recent reporting has made clear that Meta’s ability to deal with these issues effectively exceeds that of other platforms.”The research adds to previous tests conducted by the same groups, including one this year in which 20 ads were submitted containing political misinformation. In that test, Facebook approved only two of the misleading ads in English from an account in the United States, while TikTok approved about 90 percent of them. YouTube suspended the account that tried to submit the ads.But this round used more overt language that tested Facebook’s largely automated moderating system. Those included direct threats of violence, which were sourced from real statements by election deniers and other far-right extremists in the United States. One ad, which was approved by Facebook, read: “We are going to kill you all.” Another ad, which threatened to abuse children, was also approved.“It was really quite shocking to see the results,” said Damon McCoy, an associate professor at N.Y.U. “I thought a really simple keyword search would have flagged this for manual review.”In a statement, researchers also said they wanted to see social networks like Facebook increase content moderation efforts and offer more transparency around the moderation actions they take.“The fact that YouTube and TikTok managed to detect the death threats and suspend our account, whereas Facebook permitted the majority of the ads to be published shows that what we are asking is technically possible,” they wrote. More

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    Elon Musk Is Tweeting Through a Tide of Criticism

    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