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      Why Donald Trump’s return to Facebook could mark a rocky new age for online discourse

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      Why Donald Trump’s return to Facebook could mark a rocky new age for online discourseThe former president was banned from Instagram and Facebook following the Jan 6 attacks, but Meta argues that new ‘guardrails’ will keep his behaviour in check. Plus: is a chatbot coming for your job?

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      It’s been two years since Donald Trump was banned from Meta, but now he’s back. The company’s justification for allowing the former president to return to Facebook and Instagram – that the threat has subsided – seems to ignore that in the two years since the ban Trump hasn’t changed, it’s just that his reach has reduced.Last week, Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, announced that soon Trump will be able to post on Instagram and Facebook. The company said “the risk has sufficiently receded” in the two years since the Capitol riots on 6 January 2021 to allow the ban to be lifted.What you might not have been aware of – except through media reports – was Trump’s response. That is because the former US president posted it on Truth Social, his own social media network that he retreated to after he was banned from the others. And it is effectively behind a wall for web users, because the company is not accepting new registrations. On that platform, Trump is said to have fewer than 5 million followers, compared to 34 million and almost 88 million he’d had on Facebook and Twitter respectively.Meta’s ban meant that Trump wouldn’t have space on its platforms during the US midterms elections in 2022, but would anything have been different if Trump had been given a larger audience? As Dan Milmo has detailed, almost half of the posts on Trump’s Truth Social account in the weeks after the midterms pushed election fraud claims or amplified QAnon accounts or content. But you wouldn’t know it unless you were on that platform, or reading a news report about it like this one.If given a larger audience, will Trump resume his Main Character role in online discourse (a role that Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has gamely taken on in the past few months)? Or has his influence diminished? This is the gamble Meta is taking.When Musk lifted Trump’s ban on Twitter in November after a user poll won by a slim margin, it was easy to read the former president’s snub of the gesture as a burn on the tech CEO. But it seems increasingly likely that the Meta decision about whether to reinstate him was looming large in Trump’s mind. Earlier this month, NBC reported that Trump’s advisors had sent a letter to Meta pleading for the ban to be lifted, saying it “dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse”. If Trump had gone back to Twitter and started reposting what he had posted on Truth Social, there would have been more pressure on Meta to keep the ban in place (leaving aside the agreement Trump has with his own social media company that keeps his posts exclusive on Truth Social for several hours).Twitter lifting the ban and Trump not tweeting at all gave Meta sufficient cover.The financialsThere’s also the possible financial reasoning. Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America, said Facebook is “a dying platform” and restoring Trump is about clinging to relevance and revenue.For months, Trump has been posting on Truth Social about how poorly Meta is performing financially, and in part trying to link it to him no longer being on Facebook. Meta has lost more than US$80bn in market value, and last year sacked thousands of workers as the company aimed to stem a declining user base and loss of revenue after Apple made privacy changes on its software (£).But what of the ‘guardrails’?Meta’s justification for restoring Trump’s account is that there are new “guardrails” that could result in him being banned again for the most egregious policy breaches for between one month and two years. But that is likely only going to be for the most serious of breaches – such as glorifying those committing violence. Clegg indicated that if Trump is posting QAnon-adjacent content, for example, his reach will be limited on those posts.The ban itself was a pretty sufficient reach limiter, but we will have to see what happens if Trump starts posting again. The unpublished draft document from staff on the January 6 committee, reported by the Washington Post last week, was pretty telling about Meta, and social media companies generally. It states that both Facebook and Twitter, under its former management, were sensitive to claims that conservative political speech was being suppressed. “Fear of reprisal and accusations of censorship from the political right compromised policy, process, and decision-making. This was especially true at Facebook,” the document states.“In one instance, senior leadership intervened personally to prevent rightwing publishers from having their content demoted after receiving too many strikes from independent fact-checkers.“After the election, they debated whether they should change their fact-checking policy on former world leaders to accommodate President Trump.”Those “guardrails” don’t seem particularly reassuring, do they?Is AI really coming for your job?Layoffs continue to hit media and companies are looking to cut costs. So it was disheartening for new reporters in particular to learn that BuzzFeed plans to use AI such as ChatGPT “to create content instead of writers”.(Full disclosure: I worked at BuzzFeed News prior to joining the Guardian in 2019, but it’s been long enough that I am not familiar with any of its thinking about AI.)But perhaps it’s a bit too early to despair. Anyone who has used free AI to produce writing will know it’s OK but not great, so the concern about BuzzFeed dipping its toes in those waters seems to be overstated – at least for now.In an interview with Semafor, BuzzFeed tech reporter Katie Notopoulos explained that the tools aren’t intended to replace the quiz-creation work writers do now, but to create new quizzes unlike what is already around. “On the one hand,” she said, “I want to try to explain this isn’t an evil plan to replace me with AI. But on the other … maybe let Wall Street believe that for a little while.”That seems to be where AI is now: not a replacement for a skilled person, just a tool.The wider TechScape
      This is the first really good in-depth look at the last few months of Twitter since Elon Musk took over.
      Social media users are posting feelgood footage of strangers to build a following, but not every subject appreciates the clickbaity attention of these so-called #kindness videos.
      If you’re an influencer in Australia and you’re not declaring your sponcon properly, you might be targeted as part of a review by the local regulator.
      Speaking of influencers, Time has a good explanation for why you might have seen people posting about mascara on TikTok in the past few days.
      Writer Jason Okundaye makes the case that it’s time for people to stop filming strangers in public and uploading the videos online in the hope of going viral.
      Nintendo rereleasing GoldenEye007 this week is a reminder of how much the N64 game shaped video games back in the day.
      TopicsTechnologyTechScapeSocial mediaDonald TrumpDigital mediaMetaFacebookInstagramnewslettersReuse this content More

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      TikTok CEO to testify before US Congress next month over data privacy

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      TikTok CEO to testify before US Congress next month over data privacyShou Zi Chew will face legislators amid concerns over the social media app’s alleged collusion with Beijing in accessing user data As the US legislative battle over TikTok continues to escalate, Shou Zi Chew, the chief executive of the video-sharing app, will make his first appearance before Congress to testify next month. Chew will testify before the House energy and commerce committee on 23 March, Republican representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers confirmed in a statement on Monday, as scrutiny of the Chinese-owned app over data privacy concerns grows.TechScape: Is ‘banning’ TikTok protecting users or censorship? It depends who you askRead moreThe news comes after the app was banned on government devices and school campuses in a number of states in recent months, as well as on federal devices after a ban was passed in Congress in December. Next month the House foreign affairs committee plans to hold a vote on a bill aimed at blocking the use of TikTok entirely in the US.“ByteDance-owned TikTok has knowingly allowed the ability for the Chinese Communist party to access American user data,” McMorris Rodgers said, adding that Americans deserve to know how these actions impact their privacy and data security.TikTok has denied these claims, stating: “The Chinese Communist party has neither direct nor indirect control of ByteDance or TikTok,” according to a company spokesman. It confirmed on Monday that Chew will testify.“We welcome the opportunity to set the record straight about TikTok, ByteDance and the commitments we are making to address concerns about US national security before the House committee on energy and commerce,” the spokesman said, adding the company hopes “by sharing details of our comprehensive plans with the full committee, Congress can take a more deliberative approach to the issues at hand”.McMorris Rodgers and other Republican lawmakers have demanded more information from TikTok regarding the app’s impact on young people, concerns about harmful content and details on potential sexual exploitation of minors on the platform.TikTok was first targeted in earnest by the Trump administration in 2020, with a sweeping executive order prohibiting US companies from doing business with ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. In the three years since, the company has sought to assure Washington that the personal data of US citizens cannot be accessed and its content cannot be manipulated by China’s Communist party or anyone else under Beijing’s influence.While Biden revoked the Trump administration ban in June 2021, the reversal was made with a stipulation that the US committee on foreign investment (CFIUS) conduct a security review of the platform and suggested a path forward to avoid a permanent ban.That review has been ongoing as the CFIUS and TikTok have been in talks for more than two years aiming to reach a national security agreement to protect the data of US TikTok users. The White House on Friday declined to comment on whether it would support a legislative ban on TikTok or the status of the talks.Reuters contributed to this articleTopicsTikTokUS CongressSocial mediaDigital mediaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Elon Musk reinstates Donald Trump’s Twitter account after taking poll

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      Elon Musk reinstates Donald Trump’s Twitter account after taking poll‘The people have spoken,’ says site’s owner, having acknowledged during online poll that automated bots were voting too Elon Musk has reinstated Donald Trump’s Twitter account after users on the social media platform voted by a slim majority to lift a ban on the former US president.Trump’s account was suspended in 2021 after the January 6 Capitol riot, for violating Twitter guidelines and because of the risk of “further incitement of violence”.The account appeared to be live on Sunday, although the former president had yet to post to the more than 80 million users following him. His last tweet was on 8 January 2021, in which he declared he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the US.Trump did not appear keen to return to Twitter when discussing the issue on Saturday. “I don’t see any reason for it,” the former president said via video when asked about it by a panel at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual leadership meeting.He said he would stick with his new platform Truth Social, developed by his Trump Media and Technology Group startup.Last week, Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 and praised Musk, saying he had always liked him. Nevertheless, Trump also said Twitter suffered from bots and fake accounts, and that the problems it faced were “incredible”.Musk, Twitter’s new owner, announced the move after a poll on his own account in which more than 15m votes were cast, with 51.8% in favour of reinstatement.Shortly after taking over Twitter last month, the Tesla CEO had said no decisions would be taken on reinstatement until a newly announced “content moderation council” had met, later adding that no bans would be lifted until there was a “clear process for doing so”.The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated.Vox Populi, Vox Dei. https://t.co/jmkhFuyfkv— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2022
      During the poll, Musk acknowledged that the vote numbers were being affected by automated bots, which are not operated by people, and suggested there was a need to clean up Twitter polls from being influenced by “bot and troll armies”.Bot & troll armies might be running out of steam soon. Some interesting lessons to clean up future polls.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2022
      Elon Musk summons Twitter engineers amid mass resignations and puts up poll on Trump banRead moreTwitter banned Trump after the January 6 attack last year, saying his posts were “highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the US Capitol”. Trump was also banned from Facebook, Instagram and YouTube after the riot.The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a leading US civil rights organisation, urged all advertisers still funding Twitter to immediately pause their spending after Trump’s reinstatement.The accounts used by the US rapper Ye – formerly Kanye West – and the British-American former kickboxer Andrew Tate have also been reinstated.Ye’s account was suspended in recent weeks after a series of antisemitic comments prompted Adidas and other companies to cut financial ties with him, costing him his status as a billionaire. He tweeted Sunday: “Testing Testing Seeing if my Twitter is unblocked.”Tate was banned in 2017 for breaching Twitter’s guidelines with extreme misogynistic views, including saying women should “bear some responsibility” for being raped.“Any advertiser still funding Twitter should immediately pause all advertising,” said the NAACP’s president, Derrick Johnson. “If Elon Musk continues to run Twitter like this, using garbage polls that do not represent the American people and the needs of our democracy, God help us all.”A Republican member of the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack said he expected Trump to be as troublesome on Twitter as he was previously if he returns to the platform.“This idea that he’s going to come on and be reformed, everybody knows he won’t,” the committee member, Adam Kinzinger, said.Musk admitted this month that Twitter, which relies on ads for 90% of its revenue, had recorded a “massive drop in revenue” after advertisers stopped booking space on the platform because of concerns that content guidelines would be relaxed.Advertisers were also concerned by the botched relaunch of Twitter’s subscription service, Twitter Blue, after impersonators jumped on the offer to be verified by simply paying $7.99 (£7) a month. Omnicom, a media agency whose clients include McDonald’s, Apple and Pepsi, has told companies to pause their Twitter spending because of concerns over brand safety.Yoel Roth, a former head of trust and safety at Twitter who resigned after Musk’s takeover, said in a New York Times op-ed that he quit because it was clear Musk would have unilateral control of content policies. “A Twitter whose policies are defined by unilateral edict has little need for a trust and safety function dedicated to its principled development,” Roth wrote.Musk, a self-described “free-speech absolutist”, first mooted the reinstatement of Trump in May after agreeing a $44bn deal to buy Twitter. He said: “I would reverse the permanent ban,” claiming that Twitter was “left-biased”.This week, Musk reinstated the comedian Kathy Griffin, who had been banned for changing her profile name to “Elon Musk”, which violated his new rule against impersonation without indicating it was a parody account. He has also reinstated Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and author, who was suspended from Twitter after violating the platform’s content policies with a tweet about the transgender actor Elliot Page.Imran Ahmed, CEO of Center for Countering Digital Hate, a campaign group, said the reinstatements had made Musk’s intent for Twitter “crystal clear”.“He is sending a clear message to users and to advertisers that brand safety and an inclusive space for all users is no longer the aim for Twitter. Instead he is turning Twitter into the home for extreme and fringe voices who have been rightly shunned by other platforms,” said Ahmed.On Friday, Musk announced a new content policy of “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach”, stating that “negative/hate” tweets would be “deboosted” and no adverts would appear near them.New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
      Also on Friday, Twitter temporarily closed its offices after an unspecified number of staff quit the company after an ultimatum from Musk that they should commit to “being hardcore” or leave. According to the New York Times, 1,200 of Twitter’s remaining 3,750 workers – a workforce that had already been halved in size after Musk’s takeover – left the business last week.TopicsTwitterDonald TrumpElon MuskUS politicsRepublicansSocial mediaDigital medianewsReuse this content More

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      Unregulated, unrestrained: era of the online political ad comes to midterms

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      Unregulated, unrestrained: era of the online political ad comes to midterms Parties once focused on TV but now a billion-dollar effort embraces the highly targeted and almost rule-free digital worldThe advert is in grainy black and white, with an edgy horror movie soundtrack. As gunfights erupt in the streets, the narrator announces in a gravelly bass voice that John Fetterman, Democratic candidate for a US Senate seat in Pennsylvania, “has a love affair with criminals”.Fetterman has voted “over and over to release the state’s most violent criminals, including murderers”, the narrator says. If elected, he would “keep the drugs flowing, the killers killing, and the children dying”.Republicans and Democrats are spending billions on ads – with very different messagesRead moreThe advert was laser-targeted on a demographic which was seminal in securing Joe Biden’s victory in 2020: women over 25 in the suburbs of Philadelphia. That same group could now hold the fate of the Senate in its hands.Should Philadelphia’s female suburban voters come out for Fetterman on 8 November, they could push him over the winning line in his battle with the Republican nominee, Mehmet Oz. That in turn could help the Democratic party retain control of the upper chamber, and by doing so keep Biden’s agenda alive.The stakes could not be higher. Yet the Philadelphia women who were bombarded with the “Fetterman loves criminals” ad 6m times over just 10 days through YouTube and Google were told next to nothing about who was behind it.“Paid for by Citizens for Sanity” is all that the advert reveals in small type at the end of the 30-second video. It took the sleuthing of the non-profit group Open Secrets to expose the producers as former members of Donald Trump’s inner circle, including the far-right senior White House adviser Stephen Miller.From the other side of the political spectrum comes another grainy black-and-white attack ad, titled Herschel Walker Can’t Be Our Senator. The ad is also targeted exclusively at women, but this time in Georgia, where another nail-bitingly close Senate race is reaching its climax.“Herschel Walker,” the ad begins, referring to the former NFL star now running as a Republican for a Georgia Senate seat. “Decades of violence against women. Guns. Razor blades. Choking. Stalking.”The female voters who were besieged by the ad some 60,000 times over four days were only told that it was created by a group named “Georgia Honor”. Open Secrets records that the group is a Super Pac that supports the incumbent Democratic senator, Raphael Warnock, and has so far spent $34m in assailing Walker.Two grainy black-and-white videos out of a vast mountain of political advertising which is on track this year to smash midterm spending records. It may even exceed the amount poured into the 2020 presidential cycle.The total investment in 2022 is projected by the non-partisan ad tracking firm AdImpact to be $9.7bn, pushing America close to a stunning new norm: the $10bn election.Of that, AdImpact estimates that 30% of the political advertising spend, about $2.9bn, is going into digital advertising or to ads placed through connected TV (CTV) – smart TVs that support video content streaming through apps such as Roku or Apple TV.Such vast sums suggest that the age of the online political ad is firmly upon us. It has been propelled by the “cord-cutting” generation which has dispensed with conventional television in favour of streaming and on-demand formats.Take Priorities USA, the largest Democratic Super Pac. It has decided to place its entire $30m spend in 2022 in the digital basket – the first time it has entirely dropped broadcast TV advertising.“Online is where more people are spending their time, especially Black and Latino voters who are critical to the coalition that we are trying to build,” Aneesa McMillan, Priorities’ deputy executive director, told the Guardian. Some 45% of the Super Pac’s spending this cycle has gone on reaching African American and Latino voters, using platform data on social media and YouTube, as well as keywords associated with demographic groups, to target the message.McMillan said that the shift online was informed by research. The group found that 75% of the TV ads they injected into House races in 2020 went to homes outside the congressional district to be consumed by people who could not even vote in the relevant elections.The conclusion was clear: “Digital is much more efficient,” she said.The rise of online political advertising began tentatively with Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008 and has grown exponentially every cycle since. Despite its billion-dollar size, the world of online political ads remains almost entirely unregulated.Outside groups, which have beamed millions of attack ads on to voters’ smart TVs and tablets this year, can do so without having to meet federal rules on disclosing who they are or whose money they are spending.“We live in an increasingly online society, and political campaigns are moving online, but federal transparency rules have never been updated to take that into account,” said Daniel Weiner, head of the elections and government program at the non-partisan Brennan Center.Adav Noti, legal director of the non-profit Campaign Legal Center, spent 10 years as a lawyer at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) which is responsible for enforcing campaign finance laws. He expressed dismay at the agency’s inability to keep up with a dramatically changing media landscape.“We are more than a decade into an era of campaigns increasingly being conducted through digital, and the only government agency charged with regulating that activity has done nothing about it. Literally not a single piece of regulation.”Noti said that one of the effects of the FEC failing to engage with the explosion in online political advertising has been that social media giants and other big digital platforms have been left to their own devices. “Facebook, Google, TikTok and the rest have become the de facto regulators, and they set their own rules.”The big players have gone in different directions. Facebook and Google have both set up public databases listing their political ads, introducing a modicum of transparency.Other platforms such as TikTok have prohibited political advertising, though candidates are increasingly using the sites directly as megaphones.Attempts by Congress to legislate for more accountability have all succumbed on the rock of Republican intransigence in the US Senate. The Honest Ads Act, a bipartisan bill backed by the Brennan Center that would make digital ads subject to the same disclosure rules as broadcast TV and radio, was included in the Freedom to Vote Act that failed to overcome a Republican filibuster in January.In the absence of central regulation, outside groups can distribute extreme or false messages with impunity. Citizens for Sanity, the Super Pac created by former Trump advisers, blasted out an advert last month attacking Biden’s immigration policy.It was viewed 600,000 times over nine days by voters in the border state of Arizona.“Who is Joe Biden letting in?” its female narrator asks. “Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats have erased our southern border and released a record number of illegal immigrants into the United States, all at your expense.”The ad goes on to warn about a “giant flood of illegal immigration” that was “threatening your family”. It accuses Biden of allowing drug dealers, sex traffickers and violent predators into the country, one of whom raped a little girl.“She was three years old,” the narrator says.The Poynter Institute’s factchecking unit, Politifact, reviewed the ad. It found that the immigrant who allegedly sexually assaulted a three-year old girl had been in the US since at least 2011; he has been behind bars since February 2020 – almost a year before Biden entered the White House.Politifact rated the advert “False”.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsSocial mediaAdvertisingDigital mediaRepublicansDemocratsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      A social network for bigots? No wonder Kanye West wants to buy Parler | Arwa Mahdawi

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      A social network for bigots? No wonder Kanye West wants to buy ParlerArwa MahdawiThe rapper’s antisemitic remarks have got him banned from Twitter and Instagram. But here’s a safe space where he’ll be able to say just what he likes Kanye West, a man who can’t seem to stop saying bigoted things, is buying Parler, a social network designed especially for people who like to say bigoted things. I was a little surprised when this news broke on Monday because I thought Parler was basically a Nazified version of Myspace that nobody used any more. There are a bunch of fringe rightwing social networks out there – Gettr, Gab, Truth Social – and Parler might be the least successful of a very unsuccessful bunch. The Twitter clone was launched in 2018 with the stated aim of countering the “ever-increasing tyranny … of our tech overlords”; it had a brief moment of popularity then that fizzled out. No doubt because of the tyranny of our tech overlords.Despite the fact it’s not a household name, I’m sure I don’t need to explain why West, who has changed his name to Ye, is interested in Parler, which, one imagines, may soon change its name to Er. The musician, who has been moving dramatically to the right in recent years, had his Twitter and Instagram accounts locked this month because of antisemitic comments. Or that’s what us lefties have been saying anyway – West seems to think he was being censored and free speech is dead and liberals are trying to cancel him yada yada yada. Instead of engaging in any sort of introspection following his Twitter suspension, Ye apparently decided to fight for his right to be a bigot. Parler’s parent company, Parlement Technologies, put that in rather more sanitised terms. In a statement, it said West is making “a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again”.If you think you’ve heard this story before, it’s because you have. Rich conservatives are obsessed with creating safe spaces where they can never be criticised or contradicted; where nobody cares about facts and everyone cares about their feelings. Donald Trump launched Truth Social at the beginning of this year after he was banned by Twitter. Elon Musk said he was buying Twitter then said he wasn’t buying Twitter and now seems to be buying Twitter again. Trump-supporting Peter Thiel has put money into Rumble, a more rightwing version of YouTube.While it may look suspiciously like they’re too fragile to deal with other people’s opinions, conservatives always couch their obsession with building echo chambers in terms of “free speech”. George Farmer, the CEO of Parler’s parent company, for example, said he thinks West will “change the way the world thinks about free speech”. I don’t know about that. I do know, however, that the acquisition (which is for an undisclosed sum) is likely to change Farmer’s bank balance.Farmer, it’s important to note, happens to be married to Candace Owens, a rightwing pundit who once suggested the US military invade Australia in order to free its people “suffering under a totalitarian regime”. When she’s not dreaming about liberating Australia, Owens is busy palling around with West; the pair recently wore “White Lives Matter” shirts at Paris fashion week. Owens also defended West after he tweeted that he was going “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE … You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.” This is obviously indefensible, but Owens did her best, saying on her podcast: “If you’re an honest person, when you read this tweet, you had no idea what the hell he was talking about … if you are an honest person, you did not think this tweet was antisemitic.” (If I’m honest, I think it was.) The Farmer-Owens-West connection has led a number of people to suspect that the Parler acquisition was a brilliant manoeuvre on Owens’ part to get West to redistribute some of his wealth to her family. Candace was cashing in on Kanye, in other words.While West’s descent into extremism is disturbing, his acquisition of Parler (assuming it goes through) is not keeping me up at night. If Truth Social is anything to go by, I highly doubt that Parler is going to be influential anytime soon. What is keeping me up at night, however, is the rightward drift of more mainstream platforms such as CNN. What’s keeping me up at night is the rightward drift of politics. West is a very prominent symbol of a much bigger problem. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
      TopicsKanye WestOpinionParlerSocial mediaUS politicsDigital mediaPeter ThielcommentReuse this content More

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      The Storm is Upon Us review: indispensable QAnon history, updated

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      The Storm is Upon Us review: indispensable QAnon history, updated Donald Trump welcomed the conspiracy at the White House. Its followers stormed Congress. Big Tech still seems not to care. Mike Rothschild’s book should sound the alarm for us allWhat is it that has hypnotized so many addled souls who devote themselves to decoding the Delphic clues of the QAnon conspiracy?QAnon’s ‘Q’ re-emerges on far-right message board after two years of silenceRead moreWhat they think they’re getting is “secret knowledge”, from “Q” and a bunch of other military insiders working for Donald Trump, about “the storm … a ringside seat to the final match” in a “secret war between good and evil” that will end with the slaughter of all “enemies of freedom”.In short, an irresistible mix of “biblical retribution and participatory justice”.The bad guys are “Democrats, Hollywood elites, business tycoons, wealthy liberals, the medical establishment, celebrities and the mass media … They’re controlled by Barack Obama” – a Muslim sleeper agent – and Hillary Clinton, “a blood-drinking ghoul who murders everyone in her way … and they’re funded by George Soros and the Rothschild banking family (no relation to the author)”.This updated edition of Mike Rothschild’s exhaustive history of the Q movement is more important than ever. Why? Partly because of the crucial role played by so many QAnon devotees in the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 but mostly because Rothschild documents how much of this insanity has penetrated to the heart of the new Republican party, propelled by many of America’s most loathsome individuals, from Ted Cruz and Donald Trump Jr to Alex Jones, Michael Flynn and Roseanne Barr.As Rothschild writes of Trump’s first national security adviser, “Flynn’s family even filmed themselves taking the ‘digital soldier oath’… part of what would become a total enmeshment between members of the Flynn family and QAnon.”In the two years before the 2020 presidential election, “nearly 100 Republican candidates declared themselves to be Q Believers” while Trump “retweeted hundreds of Q followers, putting their violent fantasies and bizarre memes into tens of millions of feeds”.Asked about a movement which has repackaged most of the oldest and harshest racist and antisemitic conspiracies for a new age, Trump gave his usual coy endorsement of the behavior of America’s most damaged internet addicts.“I don’t know much about the movement,” he mumbled, “other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate.”In winter 2021, as the Omicron variant sent Covid cases skyrocketing, “QAnon promoters were among the most visible anti-vaccine advocates pushing out lies and conspiracy theories” to “dissuade people from getting vaccinated”.As with so many of QAnon adherents’ positions, the message was “both clear and completely contradicted by the available evidence: they believed the pandemic was over and any mandates related to vaccines or masks were totalitarian control mechanisms that were actually killing people”.More than anything else, this is the latest horrific confirmation of what the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently described as “the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached”.Like so many other ghastly conspiracies of recent decades, especially the blood libel that the Sandy Hook massacre was a staged event in which no one was actually killed, QAnon was propelled at warp speed by a combination of the incompetence and greed of all the big-tech big shots: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.Rothschild describes the usual futile internet game of Whac-A-Mole.Reddit “abruptly banned the 70,000-member r/Great Awakening board because members had started harassing other users” and had released the personal information “of at least one person they incorrectly claimed to be a mass shooter”.No matter: Q followers just migrated to Twitter and “closed Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members … Just in 2018, Q believers shared Q YouTube videos over 1.4m times, and drove hundreds of thousands of shares to Fox News, Breitbart and the Gateway Pundit”.By 2019, “Trump was routinely retweeting QAnon-promoting accounts.” By the 2020 election, “Trump had retweeted hundreds … and was regularly sharing memes created by the movement”.When Twitter and Facebook finally started “cracking down on Q iconography in the summer of 2020”, much of the movement just moved on to Instagram. Amazon and Etsy joined in the fun with books and merchandise and there were even “Q apps on the Google Play Store”.‘The lunacy is getting more intense’: how Birds Aren’t Real took on the conspiracy theoristsRead moreQ’s legacy includes what now looks like the permanent deformation of the Republican party. A December 2020 poll by NPR/Ipsos found about a third of Americans believed in a shadowy “deep state” and a robust 23% of Republicans “believed in a pedophilic ring of Satan-worshiping elites”.Rothschild ends by asking behavioral experts if there is anything the rest of us can do to help those who have gone far down this wretched rabbit hole. They say the only effective solution is a complete “unplugging” from the internet.Every time I read another book like this one, I’m increasingly inclined to the idea that this could be the only road back to sanity for all of us.
      The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything is published in paperback in the US by Melville House
      TopicsBooksQAnonThe far rightPolitics booksUS politicsSocial mediaInternetreviewsReuse this content More

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      Jon Ronson on the fall of Alex Jones: Politics Weekly America

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      A couple of weeks ago, the far-right website InfoWars filed for bankruptcy. Its founder, Alex Jones, is facing multiple compensation claims brought by parents of victims of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, an event Jones previously told his followers was a hoax.Documentary maker Jon Ronson has followed Jones’ career from the very beginning. This week, Jonathan Freedland asks him for his take on the fall of one of America’s most famous conspiracy theorists

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      Fake news alert! Donald Trump’s new social media app is a triumph | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Fake news alert! Donald Trump’s new social media app is a triumphArwa MahdawiThe former president’s media venture, Truth Social has got off to a rocky start – with technical problems and potential legal issues to boot Truth hurts, everyone knows that. Nevertheless, I wasn’t expecting my experience with Truth Social, Donald Trump’s new social media venture, to be quite so painful. After months of fanfare, the former president’s new app, which is essentially a Twitter clone, was opened to the US public on Sunday night. Obviously, I signed up straight away – or at least I tried to.Donald Trump’s social media app launches on Apple storeRead moreI spent 20 frustrating minutes attempting to create a new account and getting error message after error message. Eventually, I managed to sign up with the username @stormyd, only to be told that I had been put on a waiting list “due to massive demand”. I was number 194,276 in line, apparently. Which, I’m sure, is a very precise number and not something they just pulled out of the air.It is unclear how many people were actually successful at getting on Truth Social – although the Guardian has reported that at least one Catholic priest managed to join. The fact that you, apparently, needed God on your side to secure an account wasn’t the only issue with the launch: the app has also run into potential legal trouble. It turns out Truth Social may not have just taken inspiration from Twitter, the app’s logo looks suspiciously like that of a British solar power startup called Trailar. “Great to see Donald Trump supporting a growing sustainability business!” Trailar tweeted on Monday. “Maybe ask next time?”If Trump’s new app failed to successfully launch on time, it would hardly be the surprise of the century. The last time he made a lot of noise about launching a new media platform, it turned out to be an underwhelming blog, which shuttered after just a few weeks. It’s not as if Trump put a technological genius in charge of Truth Social: Devin Nunes, head honcho at the app’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), may be most famous for the fact that he once unsuccessfully sued a cow.In 2019, Nunes, who used to be a Republican congressman, filed a $250m lawsuit against Twitter and two parody Twitter accounts: one was called “Devin Nunes’ Mom” and one was called “Devin Nunes’ Cow”. This is no laughing matter, I’ll have you know. The cow was very mean to him: it called the politician a “treasonous cowpoke” whose “boots are full of manure”. It was all very hard for the poor man, whose lawsuit claimed that the parody accounts subjected him to a “defamation campaign of stunning breadth and scope, one that no human being should ever have to bear and suffer in their whole life”.Nunes doesn’t just have beef with cows, by the way. He’s a big fan of suing anyone who says anything mean to him, and has launched defamation lawsuits against a number of journalists. He managed to juggle all these lawsuits with his political career for a while but, in December, announced he was leaving Congress to join TMTG. “The time has come to reopen the internet and allow for the free flow of ideas and expression without censorship,” he proclaimed. Unless cows are involved, obviously. No free speech or free flow of ideas for cows! Or pesky journalists. Or anyone who says anything unflattering, if we’re being honest.Truth Social’s marketing material talks about welcoming diverse opinions but the app’s terms and conditions are rather more restrictive. Under “prohibited activities”, the rules state that users of the site agree not to “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site”.A cynic might wonder whether the fact that you are not allowed to say mean things about Trump on his app may factor in why Melania doesn’t appear to be a big fan of her husband’s latest venture. A couple of weeks ago, you see, the former first lady entered into a “special arrangement” to share “exclusive communications” with the conservative social media app Parler. Why would she announce an exclusive relationship with a direct competitor to Truth Social shortly before it launched ? I’m not even going to begin to speculate. The truth is out there, but there’s a very long waiting list to get to it.
      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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