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      The D.N.C. Didn’t Get Hacked in 2020. Here’s Why.

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      A devastating email breach of the D.N.C. roiled Democrats in the final months of 2016. An unassuming security official made it his mission to prevent a recurrence.As the country learns more about a broad Russian hijacking of American federal agencies and private companies and now another Russian hack, which was revealed on Thursday, it can look to the Democratic National Committee for a more positive development in the effort to prevent cyberattacks: Unlike four years ago, the committee did not get hacked in 2020.It’s worth remembering the D.N.C.’s outsized role in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, when a spearphishing email roiled the Democratic Party in the final months of the campaign.That March, Russian hackers broke into the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, unlocking a decade’s worth of emails, before dribbling them out to the public with glee. The D.N.C. chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, resigned after emails appeared to show her favoring Mrs. Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.A simultaneous Russian hack of the D.N.C.’s sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tainted congressional candidates with accusations of scandal in a dozen other races.By the time Donald J. Trump was in the White House in January 2017, “The D.N.C.’s house was ablaze,” Sam Cornale, the committee’s executive director, said in an interview this week.That month, Bob Lord, an unassuming, bespectacled chief security officer at Yahoo, was still mopping up the largest Russian hacks in history: a 2013 breach of more than three billion Yahoo accounts and a second breach in 2014 of 500 million Yahoo accounts. Mr. Lord, who discovered the breaches when he took over the job, helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation identify the assailants. A courtroom sketch of Karim Baratov, one of the hackers in the Yahoo case, still hangs on his wall.Mr. Lord left the team Yahoo affectionately calls “The Paranoids,” took a six-figure pay cut and headed to Washington in January 2017 to become the D.N.C.’s first chief information security officer.The way he saw it, the D.N.C.’s 2016 breach wasn’t so much a cybersecurity issue as it was a problem of workflow and corporate culture.Mr. Podesta’s aide, for instance, had asked a staff member to vet whether the infamous Russian spearphishing email was safe, and the aide responded that the email was “legitimate.” It was a typo; he later said he had meant to write “illegitimate.” By the time anyone realized what was happening, Mr. Podesta’s risotto recipes, and excerpts from Mrs. Clinton’s Wall Street speeches, were being dissected online by the news media and conspiracy theorists.“After that, few would even pick up a flier, let alone a hose to help in 2017,” Mr. Cornale said. “Bob showed up with five fire trucks while putting on his suspenders, and ran in to the house.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Lord told his staff on Friday that he was leaving, clearing the way for the D.N.C. to get a replacement to get ahead of whatever adversaries may have planned for the midterms.Over the past four years, Mr. Lord has been a persistent and pervasive presence, speaking at every all-hands meeting, reminding employees that staving off the next cyber threat would come down to individual accountability: not reusing passwords, turning on two-factor authentication, running software updates. He urged them to use Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to lock down their Venmo accounts; he also advised them to avoid clicking on suspicious links.A “Bobmoji”— a digital caricature of Mr. Lord — hangs above the men’s urinal and adorns the walls of the women’s restroom, reminding staff members of the checklist.Mr. Lord has had significantly smaller security budgets than he did at Yahoo, or that of any government agency and technology companies that Russia breached over the past year. And so he became something of a digital Marie Kondo — the Japanese tidying expert — decluttering the D.N.C.’s networks, excising old software and canceling extraneous vendor contracts, then took those extra discretionary funds and put them towards cybersecurity. But he knew cybersecurity technologies can go only so far. “If adding security technologies could fix our cybersecurity problems, we would have fixed things 25 years ago,” he said in an interview.His real legacy, D.N.C. staff members said, is that he single-handedly changed a culture.“To survive in Bob’s role, you have to drive people a little crazy,” Nellwyn Thomas, chief technology officer at the D.N.C., said.When the committee sent out an innocuous email asking staff members to enter their T-shirt size and address for some free swag, not a single employee complied, employees said.Mr. Lord had proudly turned them paranoid. More

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      Facebook Ban Hits Trump Where It Hurts: Messaging and Money

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      Facebook has increasingly become one of the most vital weapons in a political campaign’s arsenal, and few had tapped into its potential for advertising and fund-raising as aggressively as Mr. Trump’s.The decision by Facebook on Wednesday to keep former President Donald J. Trump off its platform could have significant consequences for his political operation as he tries to remain the leader of the Republican Party, thwarting his ability to amplify his message to tens of millions of followers and hampering his fund-raising ability.Facebook has increasingly become one of the most vital weapons in a political campaign’s arsenal, with its ability to juice small-dollar online-fund-raising numbers into the millions, expand and acquire contact information, help build out data on a campaign’s voter file and provide the most sophisticated advertising platform available.Few campaigns had tapped into Facebook’s potential for advertising and fund-raising as aggressively as Mr. Trump’s. His successful 2016 campaign said its prolific use of Facebook had allowed it to send millions of different, hyper-targeted political ads to small slices of the population.“Facebook was the method,” Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign manager in 2020 and digital director in 2016, told “60 Minutes” in 2017. “It was the highway which his car drove on.”That continued in 2020, as his re-election operation devoted a nine-figure budget to Facebook advertising. And much like he did with his Twitter account, Mr. Trump often turned to Facebook’s advertising platform in times of political crisis.During Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial in September 2019, his campaign began flooding Facebook with ads criticizing the impeachment as a hoax and subversive effort by far-left Democrats.Though Mr. Trump is out of office and living at his resort in Florida, he retains broad influence over the Republican Party. But his platform for reaching Americans has diminished greatly without access to big social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which has permanently suspended the former president. Some Trump aides think that the absence of Facebook, which was crucial to his success in 2016, will hinder him if he decides to run again in 2024, which he has told several advisers is his plan.Facebook’s ruling was delivered by an oversight board, which also said the company’s indefinite suspension was “not appropriate’’ and gave Facebook six months to come up with a final decision on whether Mr. Trump would regain access.His Facebook ads proved a useful tool to draw out big crowds to his signature rallies. Days before the president was scheduled to arrive in a given city, Facebook users around the region would begin seeing ads about the rally, with a link to sign up for a free ticket.The decision by Facebook does not immediately hamper Mr. Trump’s fund-raising ability — he still maintains control of a large number of supporter email addresses and phone numbers. But fund-raising lists must be continually refreshed, and Facebook has proved a crucial place for Mr. Trump to do so.“He has the best fund-raising list, but that decays over time if you’re not adding back into it,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist. “So because they don’t have the ability to run ads on Facebook, they’re losing out on petitions to grow their email list, surveys, things like that — the tactics that every campaign has to be doing 365 to really maintain their fund-raising.”Throughout 2020, the Trump campaign would run ads asking users to “take this SOCIALISM poll” or “Wish Melania a Happy Birthday,” which would help both with keeping lists current while occasionally expanding or adding new names to their lists, or getting a direct donation from the ad.In recent days, Mr. Trump’s operation has begun to more aggressively solicit supporters for cash via text message — including one reacting to the Facebook decision on Wednesday. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s team announced he would begin posting his thoughts on political developments to his own website, trying to brand it as “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump.” But the power of Mr. Trump’s pronouncements on social media had been their ability to ricochet quickly across the web and into the streams of his supporters — something far harder to achieve while being deplatformed.But even without Facebook, some Republican strategists note that Mr. Trump still has one of the largest megaphones in the world, simply because of the public interest in his plans, which might lessen the impact of Facebook’s ban.“I compare it to somebody who has a sprained ankle,” said Tim Cameron, a Republican digital strategist. “It’s kind of hobbling for a little bit, and he’s not going to be at the strength that he would be with the ability to reach people on Facebook and other social platforms, but it’s certainly not something that’s going to stop him.”Even with the Facebook spigot turned off since January, Mr. Trump began the spring with more than $85 million in his various political committees, according to an adviser, after banking tens of millions of dollars that he raised after the election.But perhaps most immediately, the ban against running any political ads hampers one of Mr. Trump’s most current prized roles: Republican primary kingmaker.“He’s really committed to settling scores and making sure his allies get boosted,” Mr. Wilson said. “They won’t have access to Facebook to help the candidates he wants to support in the primaries in 2022.” More

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      Trump Ban From Facebook Upheld by Oversight Board

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      A company-appointed panel ruled that the ban was justified at the time but added that the company should reassess its action and make a final decision in six months.SAN FRANCISCO — A Facebook-appointed panel of journalists, activists and lawyers on Wednesday upheld the social network’s ban of former President Donald J. Trump, ending any immediate return by Mr. Trump to mainstream social media and renewing a debate about tech power over online speech.Facebook’s Oversight Board, which acts as a quasi-court over the company’s content decisions, said the social network was right to bar Mr. Trump after he used the site to foment an insurrection in Washington in January. The panel said the ongoing risk of violence “justified” the move.But the board also said that an indefinite suspension was “not appropriate,” and that the company should apply a “defined penalty.” The board gave Facebook six months to make its final decision on Mr. Trump’s account status.“Our sole job is to hold this extremely powerful organization, Facebook, to be held accountable,” Michael McConnell, co-chair of the Oversight Board, said on a call with reporters. The ban on Mr. Trump “did not meet these standards,” he said.The decision adds difficulties to Mr. Trump rejoining mainstream social media, which he had used during his White House years to cajole, set policy, criticize opponents and rile up his tens of millions of followers. Twitter and YouTube had also cut off Mr. Trump in January after the insurrection at the Capitol building, saying the risk of harm and the potential for violence that he created were too great.But while Mr. Trump’s Facebook account remains suspended for now, he may be able to return to the social network once the company reviews its action. Mr. Trump still holds tremendous sway over Republicans, with his false claims of a stolen election continuing to reverberate. On Wednesday, House Republican leaders moved to expel Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from her leadership post for criticizing Mr. Trump and his election lies.Representatives for Mr. Trump did not immediately return requests for comment. On Tuesday, he unveiled a new site, “From the desk of Donald J. Trump,” with a Twitter-like feed, to communicate with his supporters.Mr. Trump’s continued Facebook suspension gave Republicans, who have long accused social media companies of suppressing conservative voices, new fuel against the platforms. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has testified in Congress several times in recent years about whether the social network has shown bias against conservative political views. He has denied it.Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said the Facebook board’s decision was “extremely disappointing” and that it was “clear that Mark Zuckerberg views himself as the arbiter of free speech.” And Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, said Facebook, which faces antitrust scrutiny, should be broken up.Democrats were also unhappy. Frank Pallone, the chairman of the House energy and commerce committee, tweeted, “Donald Trump has played a big role in helping Facebook spread disinformation, but whether he’s on the platform or not, Facebook and other social media platforms with the same business model will find ways to highlight divisive content to drive advertising revenues.”The decision underlined the power of tech companies in determining who gets to say what online. While Mr. Zuckerberg has said that he does not wish his company to be “the arbiter of truth” in social discourse, Facebook has become increasingly active about the kinds of content it allows. To prevent the spread of misinformation, the company has cracked down on QAnon conspiracy theory groups, election falsehoods and anti-vaccination content in recent months, before culminating in the blocking of Mr. Trump in January.“This case has dramatic implications for the future of speech online because the public and other platforms are looking at how the oversight board will handle what is a difficult controversy that will arise again around the world,” said Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford University’s law school.He added, “President Trump has pushed the envelope about what is permissible speech on these platforms and he has set the outer limits such that if you are unwilling to go after him, you are allowing a large amount of incitement and hate speech and disinformation online that others are going to propagate.”In a statement, Facebook said it was “pleased” that the board recognized that its barring of Mr. Trump in January was justified. The company added that it would consider the ruling and “determine an action that is clear and proportionate.”Mr. Trump’s case is the most prominent that the Facebook Oversight Board, which was conceived in 2018, has handled. The board, which is made up of 20 journalists, activists and former politicians, reviews and adjudicates the company’s most contested content moderation decisions. Mr. Zuckerberg has repeatedly referred to it as the “Facebook Supreme Court.”But while the panel is positioned as independent, it was founded and funded by Facebook and has no legal or enforcement authority. Critics have been skeptical of the board’s autonomy and have said it gives Facebook the ability to punt on difficult decisions.Each of its cases is decided by a five-person panel selected from among the board’s 20 members, one of whom must be from the country in which the case originated. The panel reviews the comments on the case and makes recommendations to the full board, which decides through a majority vote. After a ruling, Facebook has seven days to act on the board’s decision.Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, testified before during the Senate judiciary committee last year. He has denied that the platform showed political bias.Pool photo by Hannah Mckay/EPA, via ShutterstockSince the board began issuing rulings in January, it has overturned Facebook’s decisions in four out of the five cases it has reviewed. In one case, the board asked Facebook to restore a post that used Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, to make a point about the Trump presidency. Facebook had earlier removed the post because it “promoted dangerous individuals,” but complied with the board’s decision.In another case, the board ruled that Facebook had overreached by taking down a French user’s post that erroneously suggested the drug hydroxychloroquine could be used to cure Covid-19. Facebook restored the post but also said it would keep removing the false information following guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.In Mr. Trump’s case, Facebook also asked the board to make recommendations on how to handle the accounts of political leaders. On Wednesday, the board suggested the company should publicly explain when it was applying special rules to influential figures, though it should impose definite time limits when doing so. The board also said Facebook should more clearly explain its strikes and penalties process, and develop and publish a policy that governs responses to crises or novel situations where its regular processes would not prevent imminent harm.“Facebook has been clearly abused by influential users,” said Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a co-chair of the Oversight Board.Facebook does not have to adopt these recommendations but said it “will carefully review” them.For Mr. Trump, Facebook was long a place to rally his digital base and support other Republicans. More than 32 million people followed him on Facebook, though that was far fewer than the more than 88 million followers he had on Twitter.Over the years, Mr. Trump and Mr. Zuckerberg also shared a testy relationship. Mr. Trump regularly assailed Silicon Valley executives for what he perceived to be their suppression of conservative speech. He also threatened to revoke Section 230, a legal shield that protects companies like Facebook from liability for what users post.Mr. Zuckerberg occasionally criticized some of Mr. Trump’s policies, including the handling of the pandemic and immigration. But as calls from lawmakers, civil rights leaders and even Facebook’s own employees grew to rein in Mr. Trump on social media, Mr. Zuckerberg declined to act. He said speech by political leaders — even if they spread lies — was newsworthy and in the public interest.The two men also appeared cordial during occasional meetings in Washington. Mr. Zuckerberg visited the White House more than once, dining privately with Mr. Trump.The politeness ended on Jan. 6. Hours before his supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Trump used Facebook and other social media to try to cast doubt on the results of the presidential election, which he had lost to Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Trump wrote on Facebook, “Our Country has had enough, they won’t take it anymore!”Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Trump was barred from the platform indefinitely. While his Facebook page has remained up, it has been dormant. His last Facebook post, on Jan. 6, read, “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence!”Cecilia Kang More

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      A Facebook panel will reveal on Wednesday whether Trump will regain his megaphone.

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      Facebook’s Oversight Board, an independent and international panel that was created and funded by the social network, plans to announce on Wednesday whether former President Donald J. Trump will be able to return to the platform that has been a critical megaphone for him and his tens of millions of followers.The decision will be closely watched as a template for how private companies that run social networks handle political speech, including the misinformation spread by political leaders.Mr. Trump was indefinitely locked out of Facebook on Jan. 7 after he used his social media accounts to incite a mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol a day earlier. Mr. Trump had declined to accept his election defeat, saying the election had been stolen from him.At the time that Facebook barred Mr. Trump, the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in a post: “We believe the risks of allowing the president to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great.”Two weeks later, the company referred the case of Mr. Trump to Facebook’s Oversight Board for a final decision on whether the ban should be permanent. Facebook and the board’s members have said the panel’s decisions are binding, but critics are skeptical of the board’s independence. The panel, critics said, is a first-of-its-kind Supreme Court-like entity on online speech, funded by a private company with a poor track record of enforcing its own rules.Facebook’s approach to political speech has been inconsistent. In October 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg declared the company would not fact check political speech and said that even lies by politicians deserved a place on the social network because it was in the public’s interest to hear all ideas by political leaders. But Mr. Trump’s comments on Jan. 6 were different, the company has said, because they incited violence and threatened the peaceful transition of power in elections.On Monday, Mr. Trump continued to deny the election results.“The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” he said in an emailed statement. More

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      Will Miami's Mayor Francis Suarez be Nikki Haley’s Vice Presidential Pick for 2024?

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      Big names in tech including Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois have moved to Miami in the past year. Mayor Francis Suarez is welcoming them with open arms in his zeal to transform Miami into the next tech hub. The sell? Sunshine, low taxes and a mayor who is always willing to take their calls (or, as Kara Swisher puts it, “pet them.”)In this conversation, Swisher presses Suarez on whether Miami — a city with rising sea levels and without an institution like Stanford in its back yard — can really become the next Silicon Valley. She also asks what he’s angling for in the long term. Suarez, a Republican, attracted national attention during the pandemic for his tensions with Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and President Donald Trump.He’s now rumored to be a contender to be Nikki Haley’s running mate in the 2024 presidential race — speculation that he also welcomes with open arms. “I certainly was not shy about wanting to build a bond and a relationship with her,” he says. So, does Suarez want to be on a Republican ticket? His answer: “I wouldn’t say no.”Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Pete Marovich for The New York TimesThoughts? Email us at sway@nytimes.com. Transcripts of each episode are available midday.Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Liriel Higa, Michelle Harris and Isvett Verde.“Sway” is produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Heba Elorbany, Matt Kwong and Daphne Chen, and edited by Nayeema Raza and Paula Szuchman; fact-checking by Kate Sinclair; music and sound design by Isaac Jones; mixing by Erick Gomez. More

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      100 Days Without Trump on Twitter: A Nation Scrolls More Calmly

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      Democrats are breathing easier. Republicans are crying censorship. For all of the country’s news consumers, a strange quiet has descended after a four-year bombardment of presidential verbiage.That soothing sound that Gary Cavalli hears emanating from Twitter these days? It is the sound of silence — specifically, the silence of former President Donald J. Trump.“My blood pressure has gone down 20 points,” said Mr. Cavalli, 71, whose obsessive hate-following of Mr. Trump ended for good when Twitter permanently barred the former president in January. “Not having to read his latest dishonest tweets has made my life so much happier.”It seems like just yesterday, or perhaps a lifetime ago, that Mr. Trump swaggered through the corridors of Twitter as if he owned the place, praising himself and denigrating his enemies in an endless stream of poorly punctuated, creatively spelled, factually challenged ALL-CAPS DIATRIBES that inflamed, delighted and terrified the nation to varying degrees. That all ended on Jan. 8, two days after a mob egged on by his incendiary remarks had stormed the United States Capitol in an ill-conceived effort to overturn the results of the presidential election.One hundred days have now elapsed since the start of the ban — a move that raised questions of free speech and censorship in the social media age, upset pro-Trump Republicans and further enraged a now-former president who still refuses to accept the fact that he lost the election.To many of the former president’s detractors, the absence of a daily barrage of anxiety-provoking presidential verbiage feels closer to a return to normalcy than anything else (so far) in 2021.“I legitimately slept better with him off Twitter,” said Mario Marval, 35, a program manager and Air Force veteran in the Cincinnati area. “It allowed me to reflect on how much of a vacuum of my attention he became.”For Matt Leece, 29, a music professor in Bloomsburg, Pa., the Twitter suspension was akin to a clearing of the air: “It’s like living in a city perpetually choked with smog, and suddenly one day you wake up and the sky is blue, the birds are singing, and you can finally take a full, nontoxic breath.”Yet for millions of Trump loyalists, his silence has meant the loss of their favorite champion and the greatest weapon in their fight against the left.“I miss having his strong, conservative, opinionated voice on Twitter,” said Kelly Clobes, 39, a business manager from southern Wisconsin. “Other people have been allowed to have free speech and speak their minds, and they haven’t been banned. Unless you’re going to do it across the board, you shouldn’t do it to him.”Even in a forum known for turning small differences into all-out hostility, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed was unique. There was its sheer volume. From 2009, when he posted his first tweet (“Be sure to tune in and watch Donald Trump on Late Night with David Letterman as he presents the Top Ten List tonight!”), to Jan. 8 of this year, when he posted his last (“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20”), Mr. Trump tweeted more than 56,000 times, according to an online archive of his posts. He tweeted so often on some mornings in office that it was hard to believe he was doing much else.Then there were the presidential tweets themselves.The one where he predicted that if he were to fight Joe Biden, Mr. Biden would “go down fast and hard, crying all the way.” The one where he called Meryl Streep “one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood.” The one where he accused former President Barack Obama of wiretapping him. The one where he boasted that his “Nuclear Button” was “much bigger & more powerful” than that of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. (“And my Button works!” he added.)Love it or hate it, it was impossible to ignore Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed, which flowed from the platform directly into the nation’s psyche. His tweets were quoted, analyzed, dissected, praised and ridiculed across the news media and the internet, featuring often in people’s “I can’t believe he said that” conversations. For his opponents, there was a rubbernecking quality to the exercise, a kind of masochistic need to read the tweets in order to feel the outrage.Seth Norrholm, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit and an expert on post-traumatic stress, said that Twitter had offered Mr. Trump a round-the-clock forum to express his contempt and anger, a direct channel from his id to the internet. Every time he used all-caps, Professor Norrholm said, it was as if “an abuser was shouting demeaning statements” at the American people.Although “out of sight, out of mind really works well for a lot of people in helping them to move forward,” he continued, Mr. Trump has refused to go away quietly. Indeed, he has set up a sort of presidential office in exile at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort, emerging intermittently to issue statements on quasi-presidential letterhead and to heap derision on Republicans he deems insufficiently loyal.“It’s as if you’re in a new relationship with the current administration, but every now and then the ex-partner pops up to remind you that ‘I’m still here’ — that he hasn’t disappeared entirely and is living in the basement,” Professor Norrholm said. “What’s going to happen over the next couple of years is that you will hear rumbles from the basement. We don’t know whether he’ll emerge or not, or whether it’s just some guy in the basement making some noise.”But how significant is the noise? Many Republicans still seem to be hanging on Mr. Trump’s every word. But others say that without Twitter or indeed the presidency, his voice has been rendered nearly impotent, much the way Alpha, the terrifying Doberman pinscher in the movie “Up,” becomes ridiculous when his electronic voice malfunctions, forcing him to speak with the Mickey Mouse-like voice of someone who has inhaled too much helium.“He’s not conducting himself in a logical, disciplined fashion in order to carry out a plan,” the anti-Trump Republican lawyer George Conway said of the former president. “Instead, he’s trying to yell as loudly as he can, but the problem is that he’s in the basement, and so it’s just like a mouse squeaking.”Not everyone agrees, of course. Even some people who are no fans of Mr. Trump’s language say that the Twitter ban was plain censorship, depriving the country of an important political voice.Ronald Johnson, a 63-year-old retailer from Wisconsin who voted for Mr. Trump in November, said that Twitter had, foolishly, turned itself into the villain in the fight.“What it’s doing is making people be more sympathetic to the idea that here is somebody who is who is being abused by Big Tech,” Mr. Johnson said. Although he doesn’t miss the former president’s outrageous language, he said, it was a mistake to deprive his supporters of the chance to hear what he has to say.And many Trump fans miss him desperately, in part because their identity is so closely tied to his.Last month, a plaintive tweet by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, that bemoaned Mr. Trump’s absence from the platform was “liked” more than 66,000 times. It also inspired a return to the sort of brawl that Mr. Trump used to provoke on Twitter, as outraged anti-Trumpers waded in to inform Mr. Giuliani exactly what he could do with his opinion.It is exactly that sort of thing — the punch-counterpunch between the right and left, the quick escalation (or devolution) into name-calling and outrage so often touched off by Mr. Trump — that caused Mr. Cavalli, a former sportswriter and associate athletic director at Stanford University, to leave Twitter right before the election. He had been spending an hour or two a day on the platform, often working himself up into a frenzy of posting sarcastic responses to the president’s tweets.When he called Kayleigh McEnany, the president’s press secretary, a “bimbo,” Twitter briefly suspended him.“I thought, maybe God’s sending me a message here, and this is something I shouldn’t be doing,” he said. “So I quit.” His wife was happy; he has tried to channel his pent-up outrage by writing letters to the editor of The San Francisco Chronicle.Joe Walsh, a former Trump-supporting Republican congressman who is now an anti-Trump talk-radio host, said that even some people who hate the former president are suffering from a kind of withdrawal, their lives emptier now that Mr. Trump is no longer around to serve as a villainous foil for their grievances.“I completely get that it’s cool and hip to say, ‘I’m going to ignore the former guy’ — there’s a lot of performance art around that — but a lot of people miss being able to go after him or talk about him every day,” he said. “We’re all so tribal and we want to pick our tribes, and Trump made that dividing line really easy. Where do you stand on Biden’s infrastructure plan? That’s a little more nuanced.” More

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      How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations

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      Online donors were guided into weekly recurring contributions. Demands for refunds spiked. Complaints to banks and credit card companies soared. But the money helped keep Donald Trump’s struggling campaign afloat.Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.“It felt,” Russell said, “like it was a scam.”But what the Blatts believed was duplicity was actually an intentional scheme to boost revenues by the Trump campaign and the for-profit company that processed its online donations, WinRed. Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.The tactic ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.“Bandits!” said Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old Californian, who made a $990 online donation to Mr. Trump in early September via WinRed. It recurred seven more times — adding up to almost $8,000. “I’m retired. I can’t afford to pay all that damn money.”The sheer magnitude of the money involved is staggering for politics. In the final two and a half months of 2020, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts issued more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors. All campaigns make refunds for various reasons, including to people who give more than the legal limit. But the sum the Trump operation refunded dwarfed that of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign and his equivalent Democratic committees, which made 37,000 online refunds totaling $5.6 million in that time.The recurring donations swelled Mr. Trump’s treasury in September and October, just as his finances were deteriorating. He was then able to use tens of millions of dollars he raised after the election, under the guise of fighting his unfounded fraud claims, to help cover the refunds he owed.In effect, the money that Mr. Trump eventually had to refund amounted to an interest-free loan from unwitting supporters at the most important juncture of the 2020 race.Russell Blatt’s brother, Stacy, who was a supporter of Mr. Trump, died of cancer in February. Katie Currid for The New York TimesMarketers have long used ruses like prechecked boxes to steer American consumers into unwanted purchases, like magazine subscriptions. But consumer advocates said deploying the practice on voters in the heat of a presidential campaign — at such volume and with withdrawals every week — had much more serious ramifications.“It’s unfair, it’s unethical and it’s inappropriate,” said Ira Rheingold, the executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.Harry Brignull, a user-experience designer in London who coined the term “dark patterns” for manipulative digital marketing practices, said the Trump team’s techniques were a classic of the “deceptive design” genre.“It should be in textbooks of what you shouldn’t do,” he said.Political strategists, digital operatives and campaign finance experts said they could not recall ever seeing refunds at such a scale. Mr. Trump, the R.N.C. and their shared accounts refunded far more money to online donors in the last election cycle than every federal Democratic candidate and committee in the country combined.Over all, the Trump operation refunded 10.7 percent of the money it raised on WinRed in 2020; the Biden operation’s refund rate on ActBlue, the parallel Democratic online donation-processing platform, was 2.2 percent, federal records show.How Refunds to Trump Donors Soared in 2020Refunds are shown as the percentage of money received by each operation to date via WinRed and ActBlue. More

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      I Used to Think the Remedy for Bad Speech Was More Speech. Not Anymore.

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      I used to believe that the remedy for bad speech is more speech. Now that seems archaic. Just as the founders never envisioned how the right of a well-regulated militia to own slow-loading muskets could apply to mass murderers with bullet-spewing military-style semiautomatic rifles, they could not have foreseen speech so twisted to malevolent intent as it is now.Cyber-libertarianism, the ethos of the internet with roots in 18th-century debate about the free market of ideas, has failed us miserably. Well after the pandemic is over, the infodemic will rage on — so long as it pays to lie, distort and misinform.Just recently, we saw the malignancies of our premier freedoms on display in the mass shooting in Boulder, Colo. At the center of the horror was a deeply disturbed man with a gun created for war, with the capacity to kill large numbers of humans, quickly. Within hours of the slaughter at the supermarket, a Facebook account with about 60,000 followers wrote that the shooting was fake — a so-called false flag, meant to cast blame on the wrong person.So it goes. Toxic misinformation, like AR-15-style weapons in the hands of men bent on murder, is just something we’re supposed to live with in a free society. But there are three things we could do now to clean up the river of falsities poisoning our democracy.First, teach your parents well. Facebook users over the age of 65 are far more likely to post articles from fake news sites than people under the age of 30, according to multiple studies.Certainly, the “I don’t know it for a fact, I just know it’s true” sentiment, as the Bill Maher segment has it, is not limited to seniors. But too many older people lack the skills to detect a viral falsity.That’s where the kids come in. March 18 was “MisinfoDay” in many Washington State high schools. On that day, students were taught how to spot a lie — training they could share with their parents and grandparents.Media literacy classes have been around for a while. No one should graduate from high school without being equipped with the tools to recognize bogus information. It’s like elementary civics. By extension, we should encourage the informed young to pass this on to their misinformed elders.Second, sue. What finally made the misinformation merchants on television and the web close the spigot on the Big Lie about the election were lawsuits seeking billions. Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, two election technology companies, sued Fox News and others, claiming defamation.“Lies have consequences,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in their complaint. “Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process.”In response to the Smartmatic suit, Fox said, “This lawsuit strikes at the heart of the news media’s First Amendment mission to inform on matters of public concern.” No, it doesn’t. There is no “mission” to misinform.The fraudsters didn’t even pretend they weren’t peddling lies. Sidney Powell, the lawyer who was one of the loudest promoters of the falsehood that Donald Trump won the election, was named in a Dominion lawsuit. “No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” her lawyers wrote, absurdly, of her deception.Tell that to the majority of Republican voters who said they believed the election was stolen. They didn’t see the wink when Powell went on Fox and Newsmax to claim a massive voter fraud scheme.Dominion should sue Trump, the man at the top of the falsity food chain. The ex-president has shown he will repeat a lie over and over until it hurts him financially. That’s how the system works. And the bar for a successful libel suit, it should be noted, is very high.Finally, we need to dis-incentivize social media giants from spreading misinformation. This means striking at the algorithms that drive traffic — the lines of code that push people down rabbit holes of unreality.The Capitol Hill riot on Jan. 6 might not have happened without the platforms that spread false information, while fattening the fortunes of social media giants.“The last few years have proven that the more outrageous and extremist content social media platforms promote, the more engagement and advertising dollars they rake in,” said Representative Frank Pallone Jr., chairman of the House committee that recently questioned big tech chief executives.Taking away their legal shield — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — is the strongest threat out there. Sure, removing social media’s immunity from the untruthful things said on their platforms could mean the end of the internet as we know it. True. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.So far, the threat has been mostly idle — all talk. At the least, lawmakers could more effectively use this leverage to force social media giants to redo their recommendation algorithms, making bogus information less likely to spread. When YouTube took such a step, promotion of conspiracy theories decreased significantly, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who published their findings in March 2020.Republicans may resist most of the above. Lies help them stay in power, and a misinformed public is good for their legislative agenda. They’re currently pushing a wave of voter suppression laws to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.I still believe the truth may set us free. But it has little chance of surviving amid the babble of orchestrated mendacity.Timothy Egan (@nytegan) is a contributing opinion writer who covers the environment, the American West and politics. He is a winner of the National Book Award and author, most recently, of “A Pilgrimage to Eternity.”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