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    How the Kids Online Safety Act Was Dragged Into a Political War

    The Senate was set to pass the Kids Online Safety Act on Tuesday, but the legislation faces an uphill battle in the House because of censorship concerns.Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union sent 300 high school students to Capitol Hill to lobby against the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill meant to protect children online.The teenagers told the staffs of 85 lawmakers that the legislation could censor important conversations, particularly among marginalized groups like L.G.B.T.Q. communities.“We live on the internet, and we are afraid that important information we’ve accessed all our lives will no longer be available,” said Anjali Verma, a 17-year-old rising high school senior from Bucks County, Pa., who was part of the student lobbying campaign. “Regardless of your political perspective, this looks like a censorship bill.”The effort was one of many escalations in recent months by those who oppose the bill. In June, a progressive nonprofit, Fight for the Future, organized students to write hundreds of letters to urge lawmakers to scrap it. Conservative groups like Patriot Voices, founded by the former Republican senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, are also protesting with an online petition.What was supposed to be a simple piece of legislation to protect children online has been dragged into a heated political war. At the heart of the battle are concerns about how the bill could affect free speech on culturally divisive issues, which both sides of the spectrum worry could be weaponized under the guise of child safety. Liberals worry about censorship of transgender care, while conservatives are concerned about the same with anti-abortion efforts. The tech industry has also latched onto the same First Amendment arguments to oppose the bill.The controversy stems from the specific terms of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA. The legislation would require social media platforms and other sites to limit features that can heighten cyberbullying, harassment and the glorification of self-harm. The bill would also require tech companies to turn on the highest privacy and safety settings for users under 17 and let them opt out of some features that have been shown to lead to compulsive use.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A K-Pop Star’s Lonely Downward Spiral

    Goo Hara’s life was a struggle from the start. She ended it at 28, isolated and harassed online.The K-pop star looked utterly drained. Her face scrubbed of makeup, Goo Hara, one of South Korea’s most popular musical artists, gazed into the camera during an Instagram livestream from a hotel room in Japan. In a fading voice, she read questions from fans watching from around the world.“You going to work, fighting?” one asked.In halting English, she gave a plaintive answer: “My life is always so fighting.”By the time she climbed into bed at the end of the livestream in November 2019, she had reached a low point after a lifetime of struggle. As a child, she was abandoned by her parents. Her father at one point attempted suicide. After grueling training, she debuted in a K-pop group at 17, early even by the standards of the Korean hit-making machine.With the group, Kara, she found international fame, and Ms. Goo became a regular on Korean television, eventually anchoring her own reality series. But with celebrity came ravenous attacks on social media from a Korean public that is as quick to criticize stars as it is to fawn over them. Following a sordid legal fight with an ex-boyfriend, the harassment only intensified, as commenters criticized her looks, her personality and her sex life.Ms. Goo in 2018, the year before she died by suicide.Choi Soo-Young/Imazins, via Getty ImagesOn Nov. 23, 2019, less than a week after her Instagram appearance, she posted a photo of herself tucked in bed, with the caption “Good night.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    U.S. Warns Allies Russia Could Put a Nuclear Weapon Into Orbit This Year

    The American assessments are divided, however, and President Vladimir Putin denied having such an intention, saying that Russia was “categorically against” it.American intelligence agencies have told their closest European allies that if Russia is going to launch a nuclear weapon into orbit, it will probably do so this year — but that it might instead launch a harmless “dummy” warhead into orbit to leave the West guessing about its capabilities.The assessment came as American intelligence officials conducted a series of rushed, classified briefings for their NATO and Asian allies, as details of the American assessment of Russia’s intentions began to leak out.The American intelligence agencies are sharply divided in their opinion about what President Vladimir V. Putin is planning, and on Tuesday Mr. Putin rejected the accusation that he intended to place a nuclear weapon in orbit and his defense minister said the intelligence warning was manufactured in an effort to get Congress to authorize more aid for Ukraine.During a meeting with the defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, Mr. Putin said Russia had always been “categorically against” placing nuclear weapons in space, and had respected the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits weaponizing space, including the placement of nuclear weapons in orbit.“We not only call for the observance of the existing agreements that we have in this area,” he was quoted as saying by the Russian state media, “but we have proposed many times to strengthen these joint efforts.”On Wednesday, Mr. Putin reinforced the central role he believes Russia’s nuclear arsenal plays in the country’s defenses: Visiting an aviation factory, he climbed into the bomb bay of a Tu-160M strategic bomber, the most modern in the Russian fleet.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    MAGA’s Violent Threats Are Warping Life in America

    Amid the constant drumbeat of sensational news stories — the scandals, the legal rulings, the wild political gambits — it’s sometimes easy to overlook the deeper trends that are shaping American life. For example, are you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?Late last month, I listened to a fascinating NPR interview with the journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman regarding their new book, “Find Me the Votes,” about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. They report that Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had trouble finding lawyers willing to help prosecute her case against Trump. Even a former Georgia governor turned her down, saying, “Hypothetically speaking, do you want to have a bodyguard follow you around for the rest of your life?”He wasn’t exaggerating. Willis received an assassination threat so specific that one evening she had to leave her office incognito while a body double wearing a bulletproof vest courageously pretended to be her and offered a target for any possible incoming fire.Don’t think for a moment that this is unusual today. Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial, has been swatted, as has the special counsel Jack Smith. For those unfamiliar, swatting is a terrifying act of intimidation in which someone calls law enforcement and falsely claims a violent crime is in process at the target’s address. This sends heavily armed police to a person’s home with the expectation of a violent confrontation. A swatting incident claimed the life of a Kansas man in 2017.The Colorado Supreme Court likewise endured terrible threats after it ruled that Trump was disqualified from the ballot. There is deep concern for the safety of the witnesses and jurors in Trump’s various trials.Mitt Romney faces so many threats that he spends $5,000 per day on security to protect his family. After Jan. 6, the former Republican congressman Peter Meijer said that at least one colleague voted not to certify the election out of fear for the safety of their family. Threats against members of Congress are pervasive, and there has been a shocking surge since Trump took office. Last year, Capitol Police opened more than 8,000 threat assessments, an eightfold increase since 2016.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump’s Campaign of Humiliation Against Ron DeSantis

    The former president’s brutal, yearlong campaign of humiliation helped torpedo the Florida governor’s White House hopes and left his next moves in politics uncertain.Donald J. Trump plumbed new depths of degradation in his savage takedown of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a yearlong campaign of emasculation and humiliation that helped force one of the party’s rising stars out of the presidential race after just one contest and left him to pick up the pieces of his political future.In front of enormous rally audiences, Mr. Trump painted Mr. DeSantis as a submissive sniveler, insisting that he had cried and begged “on his knees” for an endorsement in the 2018 Florida governor’s race.In a series of sexually charged attacks, Mr. Trump suggested — without a shred of proof — that Mr. DeSantis wore high heels, that he might be gay and that perhaps he was a pedophile.He promised that intense national scrutiny would leave Mr. DeSantis whining for “mommy.”Mr. DeSantis shied from fighting back, which only inflicted more pain on his campaign. The governor had portrayed himself as one of the Republican Party’s fiercest political brawlers, but he pulled his punches in the most important race of his life.Now he is both defeated and debased. His departure from the race on Sunday was a far fall from grace after opening his campaign as the heir apparent in a Trumpified Republican Party. Rehabilitating that reputation as he considers his next political move will require plenty of repair work with donors and Republican voters, thanks to Mr. Trump’s ruthless parade of insults over 242 days on the campaign trail.“I don’t care if he’s a Republican,” Mr. Trump said of his belittlement of Mr. DeSantis at a November gathering of the Republican Party of Florida — the governor’s home turf. “We hit him hard, and now he’s like a wounded falling bird from the skies.”But even more crushing was Mr. DeSantis’s response, or lack thereof.After releasing a campaign video in 2022 that made him out to be a political fighter sent from the heavens, he appeared either unwilling or unable to swing back at Mr. Trump or go on the attack. Even Mr. Trump’s aides were surprised that the DeSantis campaign did not go harder at the former president on issues where he might be vulnerable with conservatives, like abortion.And the prickly nature of Mr. DeSantis’s personality, which could manifest itself in an awkward mix of detachment, moodiness and facial tics, amounted to an irresistible target for Mr. Trump, who seemed to relish bullying Mr. DeSantis as if he were stuffing a freshman in a high school locker.Still, Mr. DeSantis remains popular in his home state, and beyond Florida he’s viewed relatively favorably. As a presidential candidate, he needed to succeed where every Republican before him had failed: prying loyal Trump supporters away from the former president without alienating them.Staff members from Mr. DeSantis’s campaign gathered on Sunday at a restaurant in Manchester, N.H., hours after he suspended his bid for president.Sophie Park for The New York TimesMr. Trump has long trampled over the boundaries of generally accepted political behavior, relentlessly pushing the racist “birther” lie about President Barack Obama and urging supporters to lock up Hillary Clinton. But his campaign hit new levels of cruelty against a fellow Republican.The missives were often led by Mr. Trump’s chief spokesman, Steven Cheung, who leaned into his background as a public relations operative for the Ultimate Fighting Championship to deliver brutal slams with the force of the sport’s suffocating guillotine chokehold.In November, Mr. Cheung told The Wall Street Journal that in Iowa, Mr. DeSantis would face “unimaginable pain that he’s never felt before in his life.”In a news release, he cast doubt on Mr. DeSantis’s masculinity, saying that he walked like “a 10-year-old girl who had just raided her mom’s closet and discovered heels for the first time.”Mr. Cheung also referred to the Florida governor as a “desperate eunuch,” questioned why Mr. DeSantis would “cuck himself” in front of the entire country — sexual slang that implies weakness in a man — and accused him of searching for “new sugar daddies” to fund his campaign. He called Mr. DeSantis a “disloyal dog.”Mr. DeSantis fought back with a more traditional approach.His campaign rolled out a “Trump Accident Tracker” in a daily email to the news media that highlighted Mr. Trump’s missteps on the trail. He criticized Mr. Trump’s “juvenile insults,” saying voters did not like them. (The eruption of laughter inside Trump rallies suggested otherwise.)Mr. DeSantis eventually tried to up his game.Responding to accusations that he wore lifts in his cowboy boots to appear taller, Mr. DeSantis questioned Mr. Trump’s manhood.“If Donald Trump can summon the balls to show up to the debate, I’ll wear a boot on my head,” Mr. DeSantis said.The line did not seem to land. Mr. DeSantis himself has admitted that, unlike Mr. Trump, he is “not an entertainer.”At the same time, pro-Trump online influencers formed a troll army pumping out content like videos showing a man with Mr. DeSantis’s face being kicked in the groin. In comparison, Mr. DeSantis’s online operation proved haplessly inept.The differing approaches stemmed, in part, from a fixation on Mr. DeSantis inside Trump headquarters, where animosity for the governor ran high.Not only was Mr. Trump incensed by what he viewed as a striking lack of loyalty from Mr. DeSantis, but the Trump campaign also includes former DeSantis campaign aides who had been fired or felt otherwise mistreated by the Florida governor, including Susie Wiles, one of the former president’s closest confidantes. Many still had axes to grind.“Bye, bye,” Ms. Wiles posted on Sunday on social media about her erstwhile boss, who had tried to blackball her from Republican politics.The quick endorsement from Mr. DeSantis on Sunday may help salve some of those wounds. Hours later, Mr. Trump vowed that he would retire the “DeSanctimonious” nickname, and his allies began posting messages welcoming Mr. DeSantis back into the Trump fold.But aides said that Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis had still not talked.Asked about whether the two men could repair their relationship, Mr. Cheung held his fire.“We’re focused on New Hampshire,” he said.Ken Bensinger More

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    In Tense Election Year, Public Officials Face Climate of Intimidation

    Colorado and Maine, which blocked former President Donald J. Trump from the ballot, have grappled with the harassment of officials.The caller had tipped off the authorities in Maine on Friday night: He told them that he had broken into the home of Shenna Bellows, the state’s top election official, a Democrat who one night earlier had disqualified former President Donald J. Trump from the primary ballot because of his actions during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.No one was home when officers arrived, according to Maine State Police, who labeled the false report as a “swatting” attempt, one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response.In the days since, more bogus calls and threats have rolled in across the country. On Wednesday, state capitol buildings in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana were evacuated or placed on lockdown after the authorities said they had received bomb threats that they described as false and nonspecific. The F.B.I. said it had no information to suggest any threats were credible.The incidents intensified a climate of intimidation and the harassment of public officials, including those responsible for overseeing ballot access and voting. Since 2020, election officials have confronted rising threats and difficult working conditions, aggravated by rampant conspiracy theories about fraud. The episodes suggested 2024 would be another heated election year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Trump me atacó. Después, Musk lo hizo. No fue casualidad

    Timo LenzenCuando trabajaba en Twitter, ahora conocida como X, dirigí al equipo que puso por primera vez una etiqueta de verificación de hechos en uno de los tuits de Donald Trump. Tras la violencia del 6 de enero, ayudé a tomar la decisión de suspender su cuenta en Twitter. Nada me preparó para lo que ocurriría después.Respaldado por sus seguidores en las redes sociales, Trump me atacó públicamente. Dos años después, tras su adquisición de Twitter y después de que yo dimití de mi puesto como responsable de confianza y seguridad de la empresa, Elon Musk echó más leña al fuego. He vivido con guardias armados en la puerta de mi casa y he tenido que trastocar la vida de mi familia, así como esconderme durante meses y mudarme una y otra vez.No es una historia que me guste recordar. Pero he aprendido que lo que me ocurrió no fue casualidad. No fue solo una venganza personal o la “cultura de la cancelación”. Se trató de una estrategia que no solo afecta a personas específicas, como en mi caso, sino a todos nosotros, ya que está cambiando a gran velocidad lo que vemos en internet.Los individuos —desde investigadores académicos hasta trabajadores de empresas de tecnología— son cada vez más objeto de demandas, comparecencias ante el Congreso y despiadados ataques en línea. Estos ataques, organizados en gran medida por la derecha, están teniendo el efecto deseado: las universidades están reduciendo sus esfuerzos para cuantificar la información abusiva y engañosa que se difunde en internet. Las empresas de redes sociales están evitando tomar el tipo de decisiones difíciles que mi equipo tomó cuando intervinimos ante las mentiras de Trump sobre las elecciones de 2020. Las plataformas no empezaron a tomarse en serio estos riesgos sino hasta después de las elecciones de 2016. Ahora, ante la posibilidad de ataques desproporcionados contra sus empleados, las empresas parecen cada vez más reacias a tomar decisiones controvertidas, lo cual permite que la desinformación y el abuso se enconen para evitar provocar represalias públicas.Estos ataques a la seguridad en internet se producen en un momento en el que la democracia no podría estar más en riesgo. En 2024, está prevista la celebración de más de 40 elecciones importantes, entre ellas las de Estados Unidos, la Unión Europea, la India, Ghana y México. Lo más probable es que estas democracias se enfrenten a los mismos riesgos de campañas de desinformación respaldadas por los gobiernos y de incitación a la violencia en línea que han plagado las redes sociales durante años. Deberíamos preocuparnos por lo que ocurra.Mi historia comienza con esa verificación de datos. En la primavera de 2020, tras años de debate interno, mi equipo decidió que Twitter debía aplicar una etiqueta a un tuit del entonces presidente Trump que afirmaba que el voto por correo era propenso al fraude y que las próximas elecciones estarían “amañadas”. “Conoce los hechos sobre la votación por correo”, decía la etiqueta.El 27 de mayo, la mañana siguiente a la colocación de la etiqueta, la asesora principal de la Casa Blanca, Kellyanne Conway, me identificó de manera pública como el director del equipo de integridad de Twitter. Al día siguiente, The New York Post publicó en su portada varios tuits en los que me burlaba de Trump y otros republicanos. Los había publicado años antes, cuando era estudiante y tenía pocos seguidores, sobre todo amigos y familiares, en las redes sociales. Ahora, eran noticia de primera plana. Ese mismo día, Trump tuiteó que yo era un “odiador”.Legiones de usuarios de Twitter, la mayoría de quienes días antes no tenían ni idea de quién era yo ni en qué consistía mi trabajo, comenzaron una campaña de acoso en línea que duró meses, en la que exigían que me despidieran, me encarcelaran o me mataran. La cantidad de notificaciones de Twitter arrunió mi teléfono. Amigos de los que no tenía noticias desde hacía años expresaron su preocupación. En Instagram, fotos antiguas de mis vacaciones y de mi perro se inundaron de comentarios amenazantes e insultos (algunos comentaristas, que malinterpretaron el momento de manera atroz, aprovecharon para intentar coquetear conmigo).Me sentí avergonzado y asustado. Hasta ese momento, nadie fuera de unos pocos círculos bastante especializados tenía idea de quién era yo. Los académicos que estudian las redes sociales llaman a esto “colapso de contexto”: las cosas que publicamos en las redes sociales con un público en mente pueden acabar circulando entre un público muy diferente, con resultados inesperados y destructivos. En la práctica, se siente como si todo tu mundo se derrumba.El momento en que se desató la campaña en contra de mi persona y mi supuesta parcialidad sugería que los ataques formaban parte de una estrategia bien planificada. Los estudios académicos han rebatido en más de una ocasión las afirmaciones de que las plataformas de Silicon Valley son tendenciosas contra los conservadores. Pero el éxito de una estrategia encaminada a obligar a las empresas de redes sociales a reconsiderar sus decisiones quizá no requiera la demostración de una verdadera mala conducta. Como describió en una ocasión Rich Bond, expresidente del Partido Republicano, tal vez solo sea necesario “ganarse a los árbitros”: presionar sin cesar a las empresas para que se lo piensen dos veces antes de emprender acciones que podrían provocar una reacción negativa. Lo que me ocurrió fue parte de un esfuerzo calculado para que Twitter se mostrara reacio a moderar a Trump en el futuro y para disuadir a otras empresas de tomar medidas similares.Y funcionó. Mientras se desataba la violencia en el Capitolio el 6 de enero, Jack Dorsey, entonces director general de Twitter, anuló la recomendación del departamento de confianza y seguridad de que se bloqueara la cuenta de Trump debido a varios tuits, incluido uno que atacaba al vicepresidente Mike Pence. En cambio, se le impuso una suspensión temporal de 12 horas (antes de que su cuenta se se suspendiera indefinidamente el 8 de enero). Dentro de los límites de las normas, se animó a los miembros del personal a encontrar soluciones para ayudar a la empresa a evitar el tipo de reacción que da lugar a ciclos de noticias furiosas, audiencias y acoso a empleados. En la práctica, lo que sucedió fue que Twitter dio mayor libertad a los infractores: a la representante Marjorie Taylor Greene se le permitió violar las normas de Twitter al menos cinco veces antes de que una de sus cuentas fuera suspendida de manera definitiva en 2022. Otras figuras prominentes de derecha, como la cuenta de guerra cultural Libs of TikTok, gozaron de una deferencia similar.En todo el mundo, se están desplegando tácticas similares para influir en los esfuerzos de confianza y seguridad de las plataformas. En India, la policía visitó dos de nuestras oficinas en 2021 cuando comprobamos los hechos de las publicaciones de un político del partido gobernante y la policía se presentó en la casa de un empleado después de que el gobierno nos solicitó bloquear cuentas implicadas en una serie de protestas. El acoso volvió a rendir frutos: los ejecutivos de Twitter decidieron que cualquier acción que pudiera ser delicada en la India requeriría la aprobación de los más altos mandos, un nivel único de escalada de decisiones que, de otro modo, serían rutinarias.Y cuando quisimos revelar una campaña de propaganda llevada a cabo por una rama del ejército indio, nuestro equipo jurídico nos advirtió que nuestros empleados en la India podrían ser acusados de sedición y condenados a muerte. Así que Twitter no reveló la campaña sino hasta más de un año después, sin señalar al gobierno indio como autor.En 2021, antes de las elecciones legislativas de Rusia, los funcionarios de un servicio de seguridad estatal fueron a la casa de una alta ejecutiva de Google en Moscú para exigir la retirada de una aplicación que se usaba para protestar en contra de Vladimir Putin. Los agentes la amenazaron con encarcelarla si la empresa no cumplía en 24 horas. Tanto Apple como Google retiraron la aplicación de sus respectivas tiendas y la restablecieron una vez concluidas las elecciones.En cada uno de estos casos, los empleados en cuestión carecían de la capacidad para hacer lo que les pedían los funcionarios de turno, ya que las decisiones subyacentes se tomaban a miles de kilómetros de distancia, en California. Pero como los empleados locales tenían la desgracia de residir dentro de la jurisdicción de las autoridades, fueron objeto de campañas coercitivas, que enfrentaban el sentido del deber de las empresas hacia sus empleados contra los valores, principios o políticas que pudieran hacerles resistirse a las demandas locales. Inspirados por la idea, India y otros países comenzaron a promulgar leyes de “toma de rehenes” para garantizar que las empresas de redes sociales contrataran personal local.En Estados Unidos, hemos visto que estas formas de coerción no las han llevado a cabo jueces y policías, sino organizaciones de base, turbas en las redes sociales, comentaristas de noticias por cable y, en el caso de Twitter, el nuevo propietario de la empresa.Una de las fuerzas más recientes en esta campaña son los “archivos de Twitter”, una gran selección de documentos de la empresa —muchos de los cuales yo mismo envié o recibí durante mis casi ocho años en Twitter— entregados por orden de Musk a un puñado de escritores selectos. Los archivos fueron promocionados por Musk como una forma innovadora de transparencia, que supuestamente exponían por primera vez la forma en que el sesgo liberal de las costas de Estados Unidos de Twitter reprime el contenido conservador.El resultado fue algo muy distinto. Como dijo el periodista de tecnología Mike Masnick, después de toda la fanfarria que rodeó la publicación inicial de los archivos de Twitter, al final “no había absolutamente nada de interés” en los documentos y lo poco que había tenía errores factuales importantes. Hasta Musk acabó por impacientarse con la estrategia. Pero, en el proceso, el esfuerzo marcó una nueva e inquietante escalada en el acoso a los empleados de las empresas tecnológicas.A diferencia de los documentos que por lo general saldrían de las grandes empresas, las primeras versiones de los archivos de Twitter no suprimieron los nombres de los empleados, ni siquiera de los de menor nivel. Un empleado de Twitter que residía en Filipinas fue víctima de doxeo (la revelación de información personal) y de acoso grave. Otros se han convertido en objeto de conspiraciones. Las decisiones tomadas por equipos de decenas de personas de acuerdo con las políticas escritas de Twitter se presentaron como si hubieran sido tomadas por los deseos caprichosos de individuos, cada uno identificado por su nombre y su fotografía. Yo fui, por mucho, el objetivo más frecuente.La primera entrega de los archivos de Twitter se dio tras un mes de mi salida de la empresa y unos cuantos días después de que publiqué un ensayo invitado en The New York Times y hablé sobre mi experiencia como empleado de Musk. No pude evitar sentir que las acciones de la empresa eran, hasta cierto punto, represalias. A la semana siguiente, Musk fue incluso más allá y sacó de contexto un párrafo de mi tesis doctoral para afirmar sin fundamentos que yo aprobaba la pedofilia, un tropo conspirativo que suelen utilizar los extremistas de ultraderecha y los seguidores de QAnon para desprestigiar a personas de la comunidad LGBTQ.La respuesta fue todavía más extrema que la que experimenté tras el tuit que Trump publicó sobre mí. “Deberías colgarte de un viejo roble por la traición que has cometido. Vive con miedo cada uno de tus días”, decía uno de los miles de tuits y correos electrónicos amenazantes. Ese mensaje y cientos de otros similares eran violaciones de las mismas políticas que yo había trabajado para desarrollar y hacer cumplir. Bajo la nueva administración, Twitter se hizo de la vista gorda y los mensajes permanecen en el sitio hasta el día de hoy.El 6 de diciembre, cuatro días después de la primera divulgación de los archivos de Twitter, se me pidió comparecer en una audiencia del Congreso centrada en los archivos y la presunta censura de Twitter. En esa audiencia, algunos miembros del Congreso mostraron carteles de gran tamaño con mis tuits de hace años y me preguntaron bajo juramento si seguía manteniendo esas opiniones (en la medida en que las bromas tuiteadas con descuido pudieran tomarse como mis opiniones reales, no las sostengo). Greene dijo en Fox News que yo tenía “unas posturas muy perturbadoras sobre los menores y la pornografía infantil” y que yo permití “la proliferación de la pornografía infantil en Twitter”, lo que desvirtuó aún más las mentiras de Musk (y además, aumentó su alcance). Llenos de amenazas y sin opciones reales para responder o protegernos, mi marido y yo tuvimos que vender nuestra casa y mudarnos.El ámbito académico se ha convertido en el objetivo más reciente de estas campañas para socavar las medidas de seguridad en línea. Los investigadores que trabajan para entender y resolver la propagación de desinformación en línea reciben ahora más ataques partidistas; las universidades a las que están afiliados han estado envueltas en demandas, onerosas solicitudes de registros públicos y procedimientos ante el Congreso. Ante la posibilidad de facturas de abogados de siete dígitos, hasta los laboratorios de las universidades más grandes y mejor financiadas han dicho que tal vez tengan que abandonar el barco. Otros han optado por cambiar el enfoque de sus investigaciones en función de la magnitud del acoso.Poco a poco, audiencia tras audiencia, estas campañas están erosionando de manera sistemática las mejoras a la seguridad y la integridad de las plataformas en línea que tanto ha costado conseguir y las personas que realizan este trabajo son las que pagan el precio más directo.Las plataformas de tecnología están replegando sus iniciativas para proteger la seguridad de las elecciones y frenar la propagación de la desinformación en línea. En medio de un clima de austeridad más generalizado, las empresas han disminuido muy en especial sus iniciativas relacionadas con la confianza y la seguridad. Ante la creciente presión de un Congreso hostil, estas decisiones son tan racionales como peligrosas.Podemos analizar lo que ha sucedido en otros países para vislumbrar cómo podría terminar esta historia. Donde antes las empresas hacían al menos un esfuerzo por resistir la presión externa; ahora, ceden en gran medida por defecto. A principios de 2023, el gobierno de India le pidió a Twitter que restringiera las publicaciones que criticaran al primer ministro del país, Narendra Modi. En años anteriores, la empresa se había opuesto a tales peticiones; en esta ocasión, Twitter accedió. Cuando un periodista señaló que tal cooperación solo incentiva la proliferación de medidas draconianas, Musk se encogió de hombros: “Si nos dan a elegir entre que nuestra gente vaya a prisión o cumplir con las leyes, cumpliremos con las leyes”.Resulta difícil culpar a Musk por su decisión de no poner en peligro a los empleados de Twitter en India. Pero no deberíamos olvidar de dónde provienen estas tácticas ni cómo se han extendido tanto. Las acciones de Musk (que van desde presionar para abrir los archivos de Twitter hasta tuitear sobre conspiraciones infundadas relacionadas con exempleados) normalizan y popularizan que justicieros exijan la rendición de cuentas y convierten a los empleados de su empresa en objetivos aún mayores. Su reciente ataque a la Liga Antidifamación demuestra que considera que toda crítica contra él o sus intereses empresariales debe tener como consecuencia una represalia personal. Y, en la práctica, ahora que el discurso de odio va en aumento y disminuyen los ingresos de los anunciantes, las estrategias de Musk parecen haber hecho poco para mejorar los resultados de Twitter.¿Qué puede hacerse para revertir esta tendencia?Dejar claras las influencias coercitivas en la toma de decisiones de las plataformas es un primer paso fundamental. También podría ayudar que haya reglamentos que les exijan a las empresas transparentar las decisiones que tomen en estos casos y por qué las toman.En su ausencia, las empresas deben oponerse a los intentos de que se quiera controlar su trabajo. Algunas de estas decisiones son cuestiones fundamentales de estrategia empresarial a largo plazo, como dónde abrir (o no abrir) oficinas corporativas. Pero las empresas también tienen un deber para con su personal: los empleados no deberían tener que buscar la manera de protegerse cuando sus vidas ya se han visto alteradas por estas campañas. Ofrecer acceso a servicios que promuevan la privacidad puede ayudar. Muchas instituciones harían bien en aprender la lección de que pocas esferas de la vida pública son inmunes a la influencia mediante la intimidación.Si las empresas de redes sociales no pueden operar con seguridad en un país sin exponer a sus trabajadores a riesgos personales y a las decisiones de la empresa a influencias indebidas, tal vez no deberían operar allí para empezar. Como a otros, me preocupa que esas retiradas empeoren las opciones que les quedan a las personas que más necesitan expresarse en línea de forma libre y abierta. Pero permanecer en internet teniendo que hacer concesiones podría impedir el necesario ajuste de cuentas con las políticas gubernamentales de censura. Negarse a cumplir exigencias moralmente injustificables y enfrentarse a bloqueos por ello puede provocar a largo plazo la necesaria indignación pública que ayude a impulsar la reforma.El mayor desafío —y quizá el más ineludible— en este caso es el carácter esencialmente humano de las iniciativas de confianza y seguridad en línea. No son modelos de aprendizaje automático ni algoritmos sin rostro los que están detrás de las decisiones clave de moderación de contenidos: son personas. Y las personas pueden ser presionadas, intimidadas, amenazadas y extorsionadas. Enfrentarse a la injusticia, al autoritarismo y a los perjuicios en línea requiere empleados dispuestos a hacer ese trabajo.Pocas personas podrían aceptar un trabajo así, si lo que les cuesta es la vida o la libertad. Todos debemos reconocer esta nueva realidad y planear en consecuencia.Yoel Roth es académico visitante de la Universidad de Pensilvania y la Fundación Carnegie para la Paz Internacional, y fue responsable de confianza y seguridad en Twitter. More

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    I Was Attacked by Donald Trump and Elon Musk. I Believe It Was a Strategy To Change What You See Online.

    Timo LenzenWhen I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. Following the violence of Jan. 6, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether. Nothing prepared me for what would happen next.Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just personal vindictiveness or “cancel culture.” It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.Private individuals — from academic researchers to employees of tech companies — are increasingly the targets of lawsuits, congressional hearings and vicious online attacks. These efforts, staged largely by the right, are having their desired effect: Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online. Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Platforms had finally begun taking these risks seriously only after the 2016 election. Now, faced with the prospect of disproportionate attacks on their employees, companies seem increasingly reluctant to make controversial decisions, letting misinformation and abuse fester in order to avoid provoking public retaliation.These attacks on internet safety and security come at a moment when the stakes for democracy could not be higher. More than 40 major elections are scheduled to take place in 2024, including in the United States, the European Union, India, Ghana and Mexico. These democracies will most likely face the same risks of government-backed disinformation campaigns and online incitement of violence that have plagued social media for years. We should be worried about what happens next.My story starts with that fact check. In the spring of 2020, after years of internal debate, my team decided that Twitter should apply a label to a tweet of then-President Trump’s that asserted that voting by mail is fraud-prone, and that the coming election would be “rigged.” “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” the label read.On May 27, the morning after the label went up, the White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway publicly identified me as the head of Twitter’s site integrity team. The next day, The New York Post put several of my tweets making fun of Mr. Trump and other Republicans on its cover. I had posted them years earlier, when I was a student and had a tiny social media following of mostly my friends and family. Now, they were front-page news. Later that day, Mr. Trump tweeted that I was a “hater.”Legions of Twitter users, most of whom days prior had no idea who I was or what my job entailed, began a campaign of online harassment that lasted months, calling for me to be fired, jailed or killed. The volume of Twitter notifications crashed my phone. Friends I hadn’t heard from in years expressed their concern. On Instagram, old vacation photos and pictures of my dog were flooded with threatening comments and insults. (A few commenters, wildly misreading the moment, used the opportunity to try to flirt with me.)I was embarrassed and scared. Up to that moment, no one outside of a few fairly niche circles had any idea who I was. Academics studying social media call this “context collapse”: things we post on social media with one audience in mind might end up circulating to a very different audience, with unexpected and destructive results. In practice, it feels like your entire world has collapsed.The timing of the campaign targeting me and my alleged bias suggested the attacks were part of a well-planned strategy. Academic studies have repeatedly pushed back on claims that Silicon Valley platforms are biased against conservatives. But the success of a strategy aimed at forcing social media companies to reconsider their choices may not require demonstrating actual wrongdoing. As the former Republican Party chair Rich Bond once described, maybe you just need to “work the refs”: repeatedly pressure companies into thinking twice before taking actions that could provoke a negative reaction. What happened to me was part of a calculated effort to make Twitter reluctant to moderate Mr. Trump in the future and to dissuade other companies from taking similar steps.It worked. As violence unfolded at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Jack Dorsey, then the C.E.O. of Twitter, overruled Trust and Safety’s recommendation that Mr. Trump’s account should be banned because of several tweets, including one that attacked Vice President Mike Pence. He was given a 12-hour timeout instead (before being banned on Jan. 8). Within the boundaries of the rules, staff members were encouraged to find solutions to help the company avoid the type of blowback that results in angry press cycles, hearings and employee harassment. The practical result was that Twitter gave offenders greater latitude: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was permitted to violate Twitter’s rules at least five times before one of her accounts was banned in 2022. Other prominent right-leaning figures, such as the culture war account Libs of TikTok, enjoyed similar deference.Similar tactics are being deployed around the world to influence platforms’ trust and safety efforts. In India, the police visited two of our offices in 2021 when we fact-checked posts from a politician from the ruling party, and the police showed up at an employee’s home after the government asked us to block accounts involved in a series of protests. The harassment again paid off: Twitter executives decided any potentially sensitive actions in India would require top-level approval, a unique level of escalation of otherwise routine decisions.And when we wanted to disclose a propaganda campaign operated by a branch of the Indian military, our legal team warned us that our India-based employees could be charged with sedition — and face the death penalty if convicted. So Twitter only disclosed the campaign over a year later, without fingering the Indian government as the perpetrator.In 2021, ahead of Russian legislative elections, officials of a state security service went to the home of a top Google executive in Moscow to demand the removal of an app that was used to protest Vladimir Putin. Officers threatened her with imprisonment if the company failed to comply within 24 hours. Both Apple and Google removed the app from their respective stores, restoring it after elections had concluded.In each of these cases, the targeted staffers lacked the ability to do what was being asked of them by the government officials in charge, as the underlying decisions were made thousands of miles away in California. But because local employees had the misfortune of residing within the jurisdiction of the authorities, they were nevertheless the targets of coercive campaigns, pitting companies’ sense of duty to their employees against whatever values, principles or policies might cause them to resist local demands. Inspired, India and a number of other countries started passing “hostage-taking” laws to ensure social-media companies employ locally based staff.In the United States, we’ve seen these forms of coercion carried out not by judges and police officers, but by grass-roots organizations, mobs on social media, cable news talking heads and — in Twitter’s case — by the company’s new owner.One of the most recent forces in this campaign is the “Twitter Files,” a large assortment of company documents — many of them sent or received by me during my nearly eight years at Twitter — turned over at Mr. Musk’s direction to a handful of selected writers. The files were hyped by Mr. Musk as a groundbreaking form of transparency, purportedly exposing for the first time the way Twitter’s coastal liberal bias stifles conservative content.What they delivered was something else entirely. As tech journalist Mike Masnick put it, after all the fanfare surrounding the initial release of the Twitter Files, in the end “there was absolutely nothing of interest” in the documents, and what little there was had significant factual errors. Even Mr. Musk eventually lost patience with the effort. But, in the process, the effort marked a disturbing new escalation in the harassment of employees of tech firms.Unlike the documents that would normally emanate from large companies, the earliest releases of the Twitter Files failed to redact the names of even rank-and-file employees. One Twitter employee based in the Philippines was doxxed and severely harassed. Others have become the subjects of conspiracies. Decisions made by teams of dozens in accordance with Twitter’s written policies were presented as having been made by the capricious whims of individuals, each pictured and called out by name. I was, by far, the most frequent target.The first installment of the Twitter Files came a month after I left the company, and just days after I published a guest essay in The Times and spoke about my experience working for Mr. Musk. I couldn’t help but feel that the company’s actions were, on some level, retaliatory. The next week, Mr. Musk went further by taking a paragraph of my Ph.D. dissertation out of context to baselessly claim that I condoned pedophilia — a conspiracy trope commonly used by far-right extremists and QAnon adherents to smear L.G.B.T.Q. people.The response was even more extreme than I experienced after Mr. Trump’s tweet about me. “You need to swing from an old oak tree for the treason you have committed. Live in fear every day,” said one of thousands of threatening tweets and emails. That post, and hundreds of others like it, were violations of the very policies I’d worked to develop and enforce. Under new management, Twitter turned a blind eye, and the posts remain on the site today.On Dec. 6, four days after the first Twitter Files release, I was asked to appear at a congressional hearing focused on the files and Twitter’s alleged censorship. In that hearing, members of Congress held up oversize posters of my years-old tweets and asked me under oath whether I still held those opinions. (To the extent the carelessly tweeted jokes could be taken as my actual opinions, I don’t.) Ms. Greene said on Fox News that I had “some very disturbing views about minors and child porn” and that I “allowed child porn to proliferate on Twitter,” warping Mr. Musk’s lies even further (and also extending their reach). Inundated with threats, and with no real options to push back or protect ourselves, my husband and I had to sell our home and move.Academia has become the latest target of these campaigns to undermine online safety efforts. Researchers working to understand and address the spread of online misinformation have increasingly become subjects of partisan attacks; the universities they’re affiliated with have become embroiled in lawsuits, burdensome public record requests and congressional proceedings. Facing seven-figure legal bills, even some of the largest and best-funded university labs have said they may have to abandon ship. Others targeted have elected to change their research focus based on the volume of harassment.Bit by bit, hearing by hearing, these campaigns are systematically eroding hard-won improvements in the safety and integrity of online platforms — with the individuals doing this work bearing the most direct costs.Tech platforms are retreating from their efforts to protect election security and slow the spread of online disinformation. Amid a broader climate of belt-tightening, companies have pulled back especially hard on their trust and safety efforts. As they face mounting pressure from a hostile Congress, these choices are as rational as they are dangerous.We can look abroad to see how this story might end. Where once companies would at least make an effort to resist outside pressure, they now largely capitulate by default. In early 2023, the Indian government asked Twitter to restrict posts critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In years past, the company had pushed back on such requests; this time, Twitter acquiesced. When a journalist noted that such cooperation only incentivizes further proliferation of draconian measures, Mr. Musk shrugged: “If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.”It’s hard to fault Mr. Musk for his decision not to put Twitter’s employees in India in harm’s way. But we shouldn’t forget where these tactics came from or how they became so widespread. From pushing the Twitter Files to tweeting baseless conspiracies about former employees, Mr. Musk’s actions have normalized and popularized vigilante accountability, and made ordinary employees of his company into even greater targets. His recent targeting of the Anti-Defamation League has shown that he views personal retaliation as an appropriate consequence for any criticism of him or his business interests. And, as a practical matter, with hate speech on the rise and advertiser revenue in retreat, Mr. Musk’s efforts seem to have done little to improve Twitter’s bottom line.What can be done to turn back this tide?Making the coercive influences on platform decision making clearer is a critical first step. And regulation that requires companies to be transparent about the choices they make in these cases, and why they make them, could help.In its absence, companies must push back against attempts to control their work. Some of these decisions are fundamental matters of long-term business strategy, like where to open (or not open) corporate offices. But companies have a duty to their staff, too: Employees shouldn’t be left to figure out how to protect themselves after their lives have already been upended by these campaigns. Offering access to privacy-promoting services can help. Many institutions would do well to learn the lesson that few spheres of public life are immune to influence through intimidation.If social media companies cannot safely operate in a country without exposing their staff to personal risk and company decisions to undue influence, perhaps they should not operate there at all. Like others, I worry that such pullouts would worsen the options left to people who have the greatest need for free and open online expression. But remaining in a compromised way could forestall necessary reckoning with censorial government policies. Refusing to comply with morally unjustifiable demands, and facing blockages as a result, may in the long run provoke the necessary public outrage that can help drive reform.The broader challenge here — and perhaps, the inescapable one — is the essential humanness of online trust and safety efforts. It isn’t machine learning models and faceless algorithms behind key content moderation decisions: it’s people. And people can be pressured, intimidated, threatened and extorted. Standing up to injustice, authoritarianism and online harms requires employees who are willing to do that work.Few people could be expected to take a job doing so if the cost is their life or liberty. We all need to recognize this new reality, and to plan accordingly.Yoel Roth is a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the former head of trust and safety at Twitter.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