Musk, Elon

Subterms

    More stories

    • 263 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

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

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Special Counsel Used Warrant to Get Trump’s Twitter Direct Messages

      by

      The nature of the messages or who exactly wrote them remained unclear, but it was a revelation that such messages were associated with the former president’s account.The federal prosecutors who charged former President Donald J. Trump this month with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election got access this winter to a trove of so-called direct messages that Mr. Trump sent others privately through his Twitter account, according to court papers unsealed on Tuesday.While it remained unclear what sorts of information the messages contained and who exactly may have written them, it was a revelation that there were private messages associated with the Twitter account of Mr. Trump, who has famously been cautious about using written forms of communications in his dealings with aides and allies.The court papers disclosing that prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, obtained direct messages from Mr. Trump’s Twitter account emerged from a fight with Twitter over the legality of executing a warrant on the former president’s social media. Days after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the platform shut down his account.The papers included transcripts of hearings in Federal District Court in Washington in February during which Judge Beryl A. Howell asserted that Mr. Smith’s office had sought Mr. Trump’s direct messages — or DMs — from Twitter as part of a search warrant it executed on the account in January.In one of the transcripts, a lawyer for Twitter, answering questions from Judge Howell, confirmed that the company had turned over to the special counsel’s office “all direct messages, the DMs” from Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, including those sent, received and “stored in draft form.”The lawyer for Twitter told Judge Howell that the company had found both “deleted” and “nondeleted” direct messages associated with Mr. Trump’s account.The warrant was first revealed last week when a federal appeals court in Washington released court papers about Twitter’s attempt to challenge certain aspects of the warrant.The court papers unsealed on Tuesday revealed that Mr. Smith’s prosecutors sought “all content, records and other information” related to Mr. Trump’s Twitter account from October 2020 to January 2021, including all tweets “created, drafted, favorited/liked or retweeted” by the account and all direct messages sent from, received by or stored in draft form by the account.The warrant, which was signed by a federal judge in Washington in January after Elon Musk took over Twitter, now called X, is the first known example of prosecutors directly searching Mr. Trump’s communications and adds a new dimension to the scope of the special counsel’s efforts to investigate the former president.Mr. Trump’s Twitter account was often managed by Dan Scavino, a longtime adviser going back to his days in his private business, and it was unclear if any direct messages were from when he was using the account.CNN earlier reported the revelation that Mr. Trump’s direct messages were sought by the search warrant.A spokesman for Mr. Trump, asked for comment, referred to a post the former president made on his social media website, Truth Social, on Monday, in which he called Mr. Smith a “lowlife” and accused him breaking into his Twitter account. “What could he possibly find out that is not already known,” Mr. Trump wrote.The election charges filed against Mr. Trump accuse him of three overlapping conspiracies: to defraud the United States, to disrupt the certification of the election at a proceeding at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and to deprive people of the right to have their votes counted.Mr. Trump’s relentless use of Twitter is detailed several times in the indictment.The indictment notes, for instance, how Mr. Trump used Twitter on Dec. 19, 2020, to summon his followers to Washington on Jan. 6 for what he described as a “wild” protest. The message ultimately served as a lightning rod for both far-right extremists and ordinary Trump supporters who descended on the city that day, answering Mr. Trump’s call.The indictment also describes how Mr. Trump used Twitter in the run-up to Jan. 6 to instill in his followers “the false expectation” that Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to use his role in overseeing the certification proceeding at the Capitol “to reverse the election outcome” in Mr. Trump’s favor.On Jan. 6, Mr. Trump continued posting messages on Twitter that kept up this drumbeat of “knowingly false statements aimed at pressuring the vice president,” the indictment said. Ultimately, when Mr. Pence declined to give in, Mr. Trump posted yet another tweet blaming the vice president for not having “the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution.”One minute after the tweet was posted, the indictment said, Secret Service agents were forced to evacuate Mr. Pence to a secure location. And throughout that afternoon, it added, rioters roamed the Capitol and its grounds, shouting chants like “Traitor Pence” and “Hang Mike Pence.”When the special counsel’s office obtained the warrant for Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, prosecutors also got permission from a judge to force Twitter not to inform the former president that they were scrutinizing his communications.If Mr. Trump had learned about the warrant, the court papers unsealed on Tuesday said, it “would result in destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses or serious jeopardy to this investigation.”Twitter challenged this so-called nondisclosure order, arguing that prosecutors had violated the company’s First Amendment rights by seeking to keep officials from communicating with Mr. Trump, one of its customers.The company also asked to delay complying with the warrant until the issues surrounding the provision were resolved. Otherwise, it claimed, Mr. Trump would not have a chance to assert executive privilege in a bid to “shield communications made using his Twitter account.”Ultimately, Twitter not only lost the fight but also was found to be in contempt of court for delaying complying with the warrant. Judge Howell fined the company $350,000. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Los ricos están más locos que tú y yo

      by

      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. está delirando. Sus posturas son una mezcla de fantasías de derecha con remanentes del progresista que fue alguna vez: veneración al bitcoin, teorías de conspiración antivacunas, afirmaciones de que el Prozac ocasiona tiroteos masivos, oposición al apoyo estadounidense a Ucrania, pero además habla bien del seguro médico de pagador único. Si no fuera por su apellido, nadie le prestaría atención y, a pesar de ese apellido, tiene cero posibilidades de ganar la nominación presidencial demócrata.Sin embargo, ahora que la campaña de Ron DeSantis (con su lema: “Concienciados, inmigrantes, concienciados, ‘woke’”) parece estar derrapándose, de repente Kennedy está recibiendo el apoyo de algunos de los nombres más importantes de Silicon Valley. Jack Dorsey, fundador de Twitter, le dio su apoyo, mientras que otras figuras destacadas de la tecnología han organizado actos de recaudación de fondos en su nombre. Elon Musk, quien está en proceso de destruir lo que Dorsey construyó, fue su anfitrión en un evento en un Espacio de Twitter.Pero ¿qué nos dice todo esto sobre el papel de los multimillonarios de la industria tecnológica en la vida política moderna de Estados Unidos? Hace poco escribí sobre una serie de tech bros, algo así como hombres alfa de la tecnología, que se han convertido en truthers, quienes creen conocer la verdad, sobre la recesión y la inflación, y han insistido en que las noticias sobre la mejora de la economía son falsas (olvidé mencionar la declaración de Dorsey en 2021 de que la hiperinflación estaba “sucediendo”, ¿cómo va eso?). Lo que el pequeño auge de Kennedy en Silicon Valley muestra es que esto es en realidad parte de un fenómeno más amplio.Lo que parece atraer a algunos de los magnates de la tecnología a RFK Jr. es su gusto por llevar la contra, su contrarianismo: su desprecio por la sabiduría convencional y la opinión de los expertos. Así que antes de adentrarme en los aspectos específicos de los hombres de la tecnología de este momento político tan extraño, permítanme decir algunas cosas sobre llevar la contra.Un hecho triste pero cierto de la vida es que la mayoría de las veces, la sabiduría convencional y la opinión de los expertos están en lo correcto; sin embargo, puede que encontrar los puntos en los que se equivocan tenga grandes beneficios personales y sociales. El truco para conseguirlo consiste en mantener el equilibrio entre un escepticismo excesivo y una credulidad excesiva.Es muy fácil caer en el filo de la navaja en cualquier dirección. Cuando era un académico joven y ambicioso, solía reírme de los economistas mayores y aburridos cuya reacción ante cualquier idea nueva era: “Es banal, está mal y lo dije en 1962”. Estos días, a veces me preocupa haberme convertido en ese tipo.Por otra parte, como lo dice el economista Adam Ozimek, el contrarianismo reflexivo es una “droga que pudre el cerebro”. Quienes sucumben a esa droga “pierden la capacidad de juzgar a otros que consideran contrarios, se vuelven incapaces de distinguir las buenas pruebas de las malas, lo cual provoca un desapego total de la creencia que los lleva a aferrarse a modas contrarias de baja calidad”.Los hombres de la tecnología parecen ser en particular susceptibles a la podredumbre cerebral del contrarianismo. Su éxito financiero suele convencerlos de que son excepcionalmente brillantes, capaces de dominar al instante cualquier tema, sin necesidad de consultar a personas que realmente han trabajado duro para entender los problemas. Y en muchos casos, se hicieron ricos desafiando la sabiduría convencional, lo que los predispone a creer que ese desafío está justificado por dondequiera que se le mire.A esto hay que añadir el hecho de que una gran riqueza hace que sea demasiado fácil rodearse de personas que te dicen lo que quieres oír y validan tu creencia en tu propia brillantez, una suerte de versión intelectual del traje nuevo del emperador.Y si los hombres de la tecnología que llevan la contra hablan, es entre ellos. El empresario tecnológico y escritor Anil Dash nos dice que “es imposible exagerar el grado en que muchos directores ejecutivos de grandes empresas tecnológicas y capitalistas de riesgo se están radicalizando al vivir dentro de su propia burbuja cultural y social”. Llama a este fenómeno del capitalismo de riesgo, venture capitalism en inglés, “VC QAnon”, un concepto que me parece que ayuda a explicar muchas de las extrañas posturas adoptadas últimamente por los multimillonarios tecnológicos.Permítanme añadir una especulación personal. Pudiera parecer extraño ver a hombres de una inmensa riqueza e influencia creyéndose teorías de la conspiración sobre élites que dirigen el mundo. ¿No son ellos las élites? Pero sospecho que los hombres famosos y ricos pueden sentirse especialmente frustrados por su incapacidad para controlar los acontecimientos o incluso para evitar que la gente los ridiculice en internet. Así que en lugar de aceptar que el mundo es un lugar complicado que nadie puede controlar, son susceptibles a la idea de que hay conspiraciones secretas que los tienen en la mira.Aquí hay un precedente histórico. Viendo el descenso de Elon Musk, sé que no soy el único que piensa en Henry Ford, quien sigue siendo en muchos sentidos el ejemplo definitivo de empresario famoso e influyente y que también se convirtió en un teórico de la conspiración furibundo y antisemita. Incluso pagó la reimpresión de Los protocolos de los sabios de Sión, una falsificación que probablemente fue promovida por la policía secreta rusa (el tiempo es un círculo plano).En todo caso, lo que estamos viendo ahora es algo extraordinario. Podría decirse que la facción más alocada de la política estadounidense en este momento no son los obreros de gorra roja en los comedores; son los multimillonarios de la tecnología que viven en enormes mansiones y vuelan en jets privados. De cierto modo, es bastante divertido. Pero, por desgracia, esta gente tiene dinero suficiente para hacer mucho daño.Paul Krugman ha sido columnista de Opinión desde 2000 y también es profesor distinguido en el Centro de Graduados de la Universidad de la Ciudad de Nueva York. Ganó el Premio Nobel de Ciencias Económicas en 2008 por sus trabajos sobre comercio internacional y geografía económica. @PaulKrugman More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Behind RFK Jr.’s Popularity With Tech Elites Like Jack Dorsey

      by

      Robert Kennedy Jr.’s contentious claims on issue including vaccines are drawing acclaim from tech executives who are giving him money and exposure.Tech executives are drawn to Robert Kennedy Jr.’s iconoclastic takes.Ryan David Brown for The New York TimesThe money men aiding Robert Kennedy Jr.’s political surge As the 2024 race heats up, President Biden faces a persistent thorn in his side: Robert Kennedy Jr., the scion of the Democratic dynasty, who both touts an array of fringe theories and boasts surprisingly durable poll numbers.The Times notes that Mr. Kennedy is drawing support from an array of political outsiders. But perhaps his most powerful base is a group of financial and tech moguls, including the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who have given him money and something arguably more important: exposure.Kennedy speaks to many of their interests. That includes things like cryptocurrency — he has spoken at industry conferences and accepts campaign donations in Bitcoin. Mr. Kennedy has also embraced some of their favored podcasts, speaking with popular hosts like Joe Rogan and the venture capitalists behind the show “All-In.”And in endorsing Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Dorsey (who’s also a major Bitcoin booster) cited the candidate’s criticism of government censorship.But Mr. Kennedy’s most powerful draw may be his iconoclasm, particularly his willingness to buck institutional thinking on matters like the benefits of vaccines. (That has led to YouTube removing a Kennedy interview because it promoted vaccine misinformation.)“I think he is a lower-intellect, Democratic version of Donald Trump, so he attracts libertarian-leaning, anti-‘woke,’ socially liberal folks as a protest vote,” Robert Nelsen, an investor at Arch Venture Partners, told KFF Health News.Well-heeled supporters have given him money and airtime. Figures including Elon Musk and the investor David Sacks have pushed for a public debate between Mr. Kennedy and Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher who criticized Mr. Rogan’s decision to let the candidate spout unfounded conspiracy theories on his show.Mr. Sacks and his fellow “All-In” co-hosts Jason Calacanis and Chamath Palihapitiya have had Kennedy on their podcast as well, praising him for being “willing to engage in vibrant debates” and “tearing down all these institutions of power.” Mr. Sacks, who with Mr. Musk also interviewed Kennedy in a Twitter Spaces event, and Mr. Palihapitiya held a fund-raiser for him this month that, according to CNBC, raised $500,000.Meanwhile, the entrepreneur Mark Gorton helped create a Kennedy-focused PAC that, its leaders say, has raised at least $5.7 million. And CNBC reported that the investor Omeed Malik plans to host a $6,600-a-head fund-raiser in the Hamptons for Kennedy next month.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Smoke from Canadian wildfires again threatens U.S. cities. New York City and other places in the Northeast are facing the return of hazardous air quality, after whitish smoke enveloped Midwestern cities like Chicago. Mayors warned residents to take precautions, raising the prospect of further disruptions to outdoor activities and businesses.The Kremlin moves to seize the Wagner Group’s empire. Russian officials told leaders in countries like Syria and the Central African Republic, where the mercenary group operated, that Moscow was assuming its operations there. Meanwhile, a top Russian general who had prior knowledge about the Wagner Group’s short-lived rebellion has reportedly been detained.Nvidia warns against further U.S. curbs on A.I. chip exports. The semiconductor giant’s C.F.O. said that additional steps to limit sales to China of chips meant for artificial intelligence systems could “result in a permanent loss of opportunities” for U.S. companies in a major market. Shares of Nvidia fell yesterday after The Wall Street Journal reported on White House deliberations about new export rules.Aspartame reportedly will be declared “possibly carcinogenic.” The World Health Organization will say next month that one of the world’s most popular artificial sweeteners could cause cancer, according to Reuters. Aspartame is used in countless products, including diet sodas, chewing gum and candy.The fate of Microsoft’s big deal may be decided soonYesterday was a big day in proceedings over the F.T.C.’s effort to block Microsoft’s $70 billion takeover of the video game titan Activision Blizzard, with three key players testifying: Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s C.E.O.; Bobby Kotick, Activision’s leader; and Jim Ryan, who heads Sony’s PlayStation division (and gave evidence by video).If the presiding judge agrees to delay the transaction, as the F.T.C. is asking, Microsoft’s deal will probably die. But if she doesn’t, the agency may drop its opposition.Mr. Nadella and Mr. Kotick said the takeover wouldn’t hurt consumers. The Microsoft chief reiterated that top titles like Call of Duty wouldn’t be restricted to its Xbox platform. “If it was up to me, I would love to get rid of the entire ‘exclusives on consoles,’” Mr. Nadella said — and blamed Sony for maintaining that business model.Mr. Kotick agreed: “You would have a revolt if you were to remove the game from one platform.” (That said, Mr. Ryan testified that he was worried about PlayStation receiving “degraded” versions of Call of Duty if the deal went through.)But testimony showed that Microsoft isn’t averse to exclusives. The company’s gaming chief, Phil Spencer, has acknowledged that the company held discussions about excluding other Activision games from PlayStation. The F.T.C. sought to highlight contradictions in Microsoft’s case, including Mr. Nadella’s recent boasts about sales figures for the latest Xbox console despite Mr. Spencer saying the platform was “not a robust business.” And the agency’s lawyers noted that Mr. Nadella had told investors the new business of cloud gaming was “one of the big bets that’s paying off,” despite downplaying the importance of that market in court.A decision is expected as soon as Monday. At points, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley seemed skeptical of the F.T.C.’s questions. Historically, the F.T.C. drops its opposition to a deal if it loses an injunction request.If that happens, the last hurdle for Microsoft would be an appeal of a British regulator’s decision to block the transaction — a potentially even more uphill battle.Central bankers issue a warning on inflation Two big themes emerged from this week’s central bankers’ meeting in Portugal: Policymakers are far from finished raising interest rates as inflation remains stubbornly high, and it is not yet clear how high they will go.A significant data dump on inflation comes tomorrow. The Commerce Department will publish its report on personal consumption expenditures (P.C.E.) at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, a few hours after the eurozone’s preliminary report on consumer prices is released.Both reports are expected to show that headline inflation is cooling, but that prices are still well above policymakers’ 2 percent target. Jay Powell, the Fed chair, said yesterday that “core” inflation — which excludes energy and food prices — will probably not reach that level until 2025.That is forcing the Fed’s hand on interest rates. Mr. Powell added that the Fed could raise rates at consecutive meetings — and keep them at a “restrictive” level for some time. On the subject of cuts, he said “we’re a long way from that,” adding, “That’s not something we’re thinking about now.”The futures market this morning seems to be getting that message, betting on further rate increases this year and pushing out the forecast for cuts well into 2024.The good news: Powell and his counterparts, including Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England governor, said that a strong labor market was keeping their countries out of recession — for now.What to watch tomorrow: Economists forecast that “headline” P.C.E. came in at 3.8 percent in May, its lowest reading in two years. But “core” P.C.E. is expected to tell a different story, hitting 4.7 percent. A possible bright spot: Some economists expect that used car prices and rents will begin to recede this summer.In Europe, inflation is running hotter. Its C.P.I. data is expected to show that prices rose by 5.7 percent from a year ago. Christine Lagarde, the E.C.B. president, has warned that inflation is beginning to become entrenched in all layers of the economy. Her antidote to that: More interest-rate increases are in the cards.$1 trillion — The drop in the value of deals announced in the first half of 2023, compared with the same period last year, according to Bloomberg. The fall in mergers, acquisitions and I.P.O.s makes this one of the worst periods for deal making in a decade, as high inflation, financing pressures and geopolitical tension have sapped activity.How strong are the nation’s banks, really? Months after Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse set off a panic over America’s smaller lenders, the Fed yesterday gave the country’s biggest banks a clean bill of health. But regulators warned that their recently concluded stress tests were just one way of evaluating stability — and that other risks could still pose a threat.What the tests found: The country’s 23 biggest banks could withstand a 40 percent drop in commercial real estate prices — a major concern for lenders now — and $541 billion in losses without failing. They could also handle steep unemployment and sharp drops in home prices.Though the examinations began well before SVB’s troubles in March, regulators did explore whether eight banks heavily involved in trading could withstand sudden panics in the markets for stocks, bonds and other financial instruments. Bank investors were keenly watching the tests, since strong results mean that lenders are likely to have their capital requirements lowered, allowing them to buy back more stock or pay increased dividends.Banks are expected to unveil their new capital requirements tomorrow, along with any changes in investor payouts.But regulators warned that the stress tests aren’t the final word on banks’ health. “This stress test is only one way to measure that strength,” said Michael Barr, the Fed’s top banking supervisor.Regulators are still overhauling the rules. Beyond ramping up supervision, authorities are expected to tighten capital requirements, including for smaller lenders. That said, even if SVB had been subject to this year’s tests, The Financial Times notes, it might still have passed.In other banking news: Bank of America is sitting on more than $100 billion in paper losses tied to bad bond trades, far more than its rivals. THE SPEED READ DealsHong Kong conglomerates have announced more than $8 billion worth of asset sales to help cut their debt loads amid rising borrowing costs. (Bloomberg)The investment firm Silver Lake plans to focus on only giant takeovers, as its rivals instead keep busy with smaller deals. (FT)Artificial intelligenceTop news publishers, including The New York Times Company, are reportedly discussing the creation of a coalition to address the effects of artificial intelligence on their industry. (WSJ)“How Easy Is It to Fool A.I.-Detection Tools?” (NYT)Best of the restSome applicants for jobs at Bill Gates’s private investment firm were reportedly asked invasive personal questions by a third-party contractor that some experts contend were illegal. (WSJ)OPEC banned reporters from three major news organizations from its next meeting, the second time it has done so in a month. (Bloomberg)Britain could renationalize its biggest water utility after the sudden exit of its C.E.O. and its struggles under $17 billion worth of debt. (Sky News)South Koreans became a year or two younger instantly yesterday. (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Vivek Ramaswamy Is ‘a Hint of the Future’: Our Writers on His Candidacy

      by

      As Republican candidates enter the race for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination, Times columnists, Opinion writers and others will assess their strengths and weaknesses with a scorecard. We rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the candidate will probably drop out before any caucus or primary voting; 10 means the candidate has a very strong chance of receiving the party’s nomination next summer. This entry assesses Vivek Ramaswamy, a hedge fund analyst turned biotech executive. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Robert Kennedy Jr., With Musk, Pushes Right-Wing Ideas and Misinformation

      by

      Mr. Kennedy, a long-shot Democratic presidential candidate with surprisingly high polling numbers, said he wanted to close the Mexican border and attributed the rise of mass shootings to pharmaceutical drugs.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a scion of one of the country’s most famous Democratic families, on Monday dived into the full embrace of a host of conservative figures who eagerly promoted his long-shot primary challenge to President Biden.For more than two hours, Mr. Kennedy participated in an online audio chat on Twitter with the platform’s increasingly rightward-leaning chief executive, Elon Musk. They engaged in a friendly back-and-forth with the likes of Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman turned right-wing commentator; a top donor to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida; and a professional surfer who became a prominent voice casting doubt on coronavirus vaccines.Mr. Kennedy, who announced his 2024 presidential campaign in April, is himself a leading vaccine skeptic, and has promoted other conspiracy theories. Yet he has consistently hovered around 20 percent in polling of the Democratic primary, which the party has otherwise ceded to Mr. Biden.On Monday, he sounded like a candidate far more at ease in the mushrooming Republican presidential contest.He said he planned to travel to the Mexican border this week to “try to formulate policies that will seal the border permanently,” called for the federal government to consider the war in Ukraine from the perspective of Russians and said pharmaceutical drugs were responsible for the rise of mass shootings in America.“Prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events in our country and we’ve never seen them in human history, where people walk into a schoolroom of children or strangers and start shooting people,” said Mr. Kennedy, who noted that both his father and uncle were killed by guns.Mr. Kennedy said he now had “about 50 people” working for his campaign. Unlike Marianne Williamson, the other announced Democratic challenger to Mr. Biden, he does not appear to be aiming to appeal to Democrats who are ideologically opposed to the moderate president or are otherwise uneasy with renominating him. Instead, he has used his campaign platform — and his famous name — to promote misinformation and ideas that have little traction in his party.Asked during the discussion by David Sacks, a top DeSantis donor who is also close to Mr. Musk, “what happened to the Democratic Party,” Mr. Kennedy spent nine uninterrupted minutes attacking Mr. Biden as a warmonger and claimed that their party was under the control of the pharmaceutical industry.“I think the Democratic Party became the party of war,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I attribute that directly to President Biden.” He added, “He has always been in favor of very bellicose, pugnacious and aggressive foreign policy, and he believes that violence is a legitimate political tool for achieving America’s objectives abroad.”The Democratic National Committee and Mr. Biden’s campaign declined to comment about Mr. Kennedy.The event, which at its peak had more than 60,000 listeners, according to Twitter, at times felt as if Mr. Kennedy were interviewing Mr. Musk about his stewardship of Twitter, a platform that has lost more than half of its advertising revenue since the billionaire acquired it in October. For more than 30 minutes at the event’s start, the presidential candidate interrogated the tech mogul about releasing the so-called Twitter files, self-driving cars and artificial intelligence.“These are really interesting topics for people, but I think a lot of the public would like to hear about your presidential run,” Mr. Musk said to Mr. Kennedy.Mr. Kennedy, 69, is a longtime amplifier and propagator of baseless theories, beginning nearly two decades ago with his skepticism about the result of the 2004 presidential election as well as common childhood vaccines. His audience for such misinformation ballooned during the coronavirus pandemic.On Monday, Mr. Kennedy repeated a host of false statements, among them:He said that after the Affordable Care Act of 2010, “Democrats were getting more money from pharma than Republicans.” An analysis by STAT News found that political action committees with ties to pharmaceutical companies gave more money to Republicans than Democrats in 14 out of 16 election years since 1990.He claimed, without evidence, that “Covid was clearly a bioweapons problem.” American intelligence agencies do not believe there is any evidence indicating that is the case.And as he blamed psychiatric drug use for the rise of gun violence in the United States, he contended that the gun ownership rate in the U.S. was similar to that of Switzerland. The United States had the highest civilian gun ownership rate in the world, at an estimated 120.5 firearms per 100 people, according the latest international Small Arms Survey. That was more than double the rate of the second-highest country, Yemen at 52.8, and much higher than Switzerland’s 27.6. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      How the Internet Shrank Musk and DeSantis

      by

      If you had told me several months ago, immediately after Elon Musk bought Twitter and Ron DeSantis celebrated a thumping re-election victory, that DeSantis would launch his presidential campaign in conversation with Musk, I would have thought, intriguing: The rightward-trending billionaire whose rockets and cars stand out in an economy dominated by apps and financial instruments meets the Republican politician whose real-world victories contrast with the virtual populism of Donald Trump.The actual launch of DeSantis’s presidential campaign, in a “Twitter Spaces” event that crashed repeatedly and played to a smaller audience than he would have claimed just by showing up on Fox, instead offered the political version of the lesson that we’ve been taught repeatedly by Musk’s stewardship of Twitter: The internet can be a trap.For the Tesla and SpaceX mogul, the trap was sprung because Musk wanted to attack the groupthink of liberal institutions, and seeing that groupthink manifest on his favorite social media site, he imagined that owning Twitter was the key to transforming public discourse.But for all its influence, social media is still downstream of other institutions — universities, newspapers, television channels, movie studios, other internet platforms. Twitter is real life, but only through its relationship to other realities; it doesn’t have the capacity to be a hub of discourse, news gathering or entertainment on its own. And many of Musk’s difficulties as the Twitter C.E.O. have reflected a simple overestimation of social media’s inherent authority and influence.Thus he’s tried to sell the privilege of verification, the famous “blue checks,” without recognizing that they were valued because of their connection to real-world institutions and lose value if they reflect a Twitter hierarchy alone. Or he’s encouraged his favored journalists to publish their scoops and essays on his site when it isn’t yet built out for that kind of publication. Or he’s encouraged media figures like Tucker Carlson and now politicians like DeSantis to run shows or do interviews on his platform, without having the infrastructure in place to make all that work.It’s entirely possible that Musk can build out that infrastructure eventually, and make Twitter more capacious than it is today. But there isn’t some immediate social-media shortcut to the influence he’s seeking. If you want Twitter to be the world’s news hub, you probably need a Twitter newsroom. If you want Twitter to host presidential candidates, you probably need a Twitter channel that feels like a professional newscast. And while you’re trying to build those things, you need to be careful that the nature of social media doesn’t diminish you to the kind of caricatured role — troll instead of tycoon — that tempts everyone on Twitter.That kind of diminishment is what the Twitter event handed to DeSantis, whose choppy launch may be forgotten but who would be wise to learn from what went wrong. There’s an emerging critique of the Florida governor that suggests that his whole persona is too online — that his talk about wokeness, wokeness, wokeness is pitched to a narrow and internet-based faction within the G.O.P., that he’s setting himself to be like Elizabeth Warren in 2020, whose promise of plans, plans, plans thrilled the wonk faction but fell flat with normal Democratic voters.I think this critique is overdrawn. If you look at polling of Republican primary voters, the culture war appears to be a general concern rather than an elite fixation, and there’s a plausible argument that the conflict with the new progressivism is the main thing binding the G.O.P. coalition together.But it does seem true that the conflict with progressivism in the context of social media is a more boutique taste, and that lots of anti-woke conservatives aren’t particularly invested in whether the previous Twitter regime was throttling such-and-such right-wing influencer or taking orders from such-and-such “disinformation” specialist. And it’s also true that DeSantis is running against a candidate who, at any moment, can return to Twitter and bestride its feeds like a colossus, no matter whatever Republican alternative the Chief Twit might prefer.So introducing himself in that online space made DeSantis look unnecessarily small — smaller than Musk’s presence and Trump’s absence, shrunk down to the scale of debates about shadowbanning and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The Florida governor’s best self-advertisement in a primary should be his promise to be more active in reality than Trump, with his claim to be better at actual governance made manifest through his advantage in flesh-pressing, campaign-trail-hitting energy.The good news for DeSantis is that he doesn’t have billions invested in a social media company, so having endured a diminishing introduction he can slip the trap and walk away — toward the crowds, klieg lights and the grass.For Musk, though, escape requires either the admission of defeat in this particular arena or else a long campaign of innovation that eventually makes Twitter as big as he wrongly imagined it to be.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

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Ron DeSantis vs. the ‘Woke Mind Virus’

      by

      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida could have made his presidential campaign announcement in some idyllic seaside park, surrounded by the wholesome families he’s trying to defend from subversive books and the Walt Disney Company. Instead, he did it in a glitchy audio feed with a socially awkward billionaire. Even if the Twitter rollout had worked smoothly — which it definitely did not — it would have been a debacle.The technological failures are, understandably, dominating the headlines. They were humiliating for everyone involved, making the campaign look amateurish and undermining Elon Musk’s claims that firing most of Twitter’s work force hasn’t impaired the platform. But behind these unforced errors lie deeper failures of political judgment by DeSantis, ones that speak to a blinkered and — for all his cultural populism — elitist worldview. How else do you explain a campaign kickoff with more discussion of crytpo regulation than of inflation?DeSantis’s decision to begin his campaign like this is a sign of weakness in three ways. First, there’s his inability to see what is obvious to Musk’s critics, which is that Musk, while perhaps a genius in some areas, is also often an arrogant screw-up whose projects break down in public. (See: the Tesla Cybertruck’s supposedly shatterproof windows or the explosion of the SpaceX Starship.) You have to be fairly deep in the right-wing echo chamber to believe Musk’s self-presentation as a swaggering Tony Stark figure who can be counted on to deliver.Second, DeSantis’s decision to make his tacit alliance with Musk such an integral part of his campaign identity suggests a submissive and receding quality. He ran for governor in 2018 by emphasizing his worshipful fealty to Donald Trump, cutting an embarrassing commercial in which he lovingly instructed his children in the MAGA gospel. Now, coming out of Trump’s shadow, he’s opted to attach himself to another big, strong friend rather than stand on his own. Last night, after the announcement, his campaign tweeted a bizarre, music-less video that features DeSantis speaking about immigration over a montage of images of him and of Musk, as if they were running for president as a team.Finally, DeSantis is so deeply, fatally online that he doesn’t seem to understand that Musk’s concerns only partly overlap with the concerns of the people he needs to vote for him.DeSantis is betting that anti-wokeness, the belief system that ties him to Musk, is enough to power a presidential race. He’s not necessarily wrong: Though polling about the salience of wokeness is mixed, in an April Wall Street Journal survey, 55 percent of Republicans said “Fighting woke ideology in our schools and businesses” was more important than protecting Social Security and Medicare. The reason DeSantis is a major contender in the first place is the reactionary agenda he’s enacted in Florida, which includes sweeping limitations on what can be taught in public schools, a six-week abortion ban and the cruelest anti-trans policies in America.But anti-wokeness has different flavors. There are the worries about the erosion of what were once called “family values,” and then there are the esoteric concerns of Silicon Valley edgelords. DeSantis emphasized the latter on Wednesday night, discussing niche issues in language that I suspect is unintelligible to ordinary people, even those who might hate the brand of social justice politics derided as wokeness. He spoke, without much explanation, about college “accreditation cartels,” the “E.S.G. movement” — investing that weighs environmental, social and governance factors — and central bank digital currency. A large part of the discussion — far more than about, say, the economy or foreign policy — was about Twitter itself.“The woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural Marxism,” DeSantis said later Wednesday night on Fox News. If you spend time on the right-wing internet, that is a platitude. But my guess is that for a lot of people, it’s gibberish. Now, Trump also repurposes ideas and memes from the far-right internet demimonde, but he does so with a lowest-common-denominator bluntness. “We’re going to defeat the cult of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders, called men and women,” Trump said in South Carolina earlier this year. You don’t have to know exactly what “gender ideology” is to know what he means.In his recent book, “The Courage to Be Free,” DeSantis wrote that his first encounter with the left was at Yale University, where he got his undergraduate degree, and that experiencing “unbridled leftism on campus pushed me to the right.” From there, he went to Harvard Law School, which “was just as left-wing as Yale.” What he doesn’t seem to understand is that for all his hatred of Ivy League pretensions, his political outlook was shaped in the Ivy League’s crucible. He speaks the language not of normal people but of right-wing counter-elites, thinkers and activists who come out of the same rarefied milieus as the progressive intellectuals they despise.Maybe DeSantis’s misunderstanding of elitism has tripped him up. As he wrote in his book, the word “elite,” to him, is not about wealth, talent or achievement. Instead, it’s an epithet for progressives, those who share “the ideology and outlook of the ruling class, which one can demonstrate by ‘virtue signaling.’” He singles out Clarence Thomas as someone who is not an elite, despite being one of the most powerful men in America. Neither, in his view, are wealthy Texas oilmen or Florida car dealers or, presumably, Musk, one of the richest men in the world. It is, of course, a standard right-wing rhetorical move to suggest that so-called wealth creators are part of an oppressed class. The problem with DeSantis is that he seems to believe it, so when he’s speaking to plutocrats on Twitter Spaces, he thinks he’s speaking to the people.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