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      How the Rise of QAnon Broke Conspiracy Culture

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      The date was Jan. 20, 2021, and Stephen Miles Lewis was trying to keep the peace.Two weeks before, a mob of pro-Trump protesters had stormed the Capitol building, and the circles Mr. Lewis ran in were now brimming with tension. Many of his closest friends had been outraged by what they saw. But he also knew someone who had been there, who now claimed that the violence had been stirred up by antifa agents disguised as Trump supporters.Mr. Lewis, a middle-aged man with a round face and a gray beard who goes by the nickname SMiles, sat at his desk, in front of a wall covered with posters of aliens, flying saucers and Bigfoot. In a YouTube video, he urged viewers to “take a step back and hopefully think, meditate, reflect on the times that we’re in,” to not “malign the others’ viewpoint.” He expressed frustration that the term “conspiracy theorist” was increasingly being used as an insult. After all, he pointed out: “I am a conspiracy theorist.”At the time, Mr. Lewis was trying to project calm, to help ensure that the community he’d been part of since he was 18 didn’t tear itself apart. But in the years since, he has found himself unsettled by the darker elements of a world he thought he knew.Over the past year, I’ve been part of an academic research project seeking to understand how the internet changed conspiracy theories. Many of the dynamics the internet creates are, at this point, well understood: We know its capacity to help users find one another, making it easier than ever for people to get involved in conspiracy networks; we also know how social media platforms prioritize inflammatory content and that as a result, ideas and information that make people angry travel farther.What we felt was missing from this story, though, was what this period of change looked like from the perspective of conspiracy theorists themselves.My team has been speaking to researchers and writers who were part of this world or connected to it in the pre-social media era. And we’ve learned something surprising: Many of the people we’ve interviewed told us they, too, have spent the past few years baffled by the turn conspiracy culture has taken. Many expressed discomfort with and at times outright disgust for QAnon and the related theories claiming the 2020 election had been stolen and said that they felt as if the very worst elements of conspiracy culture had become its main representatives.It’s worth noting that our sample was biased by who agreed to speak to us. While all of conspiracy culture can be characterized by its deep skepticism, that skepticism doesn’t always point in the same direction. Although we’ve approached as many people as possible, so far it’s mostly been those on the left of the political spectrum who have been interested in talking to university researchers. (They’ve also been overwhelmingly men.)Still, what our interviewees had to say was striking: The same forces that have made conspiracy theories unavoidable in our politics have also fundamentally changed them, to the extent that even those who pride themselves on their openness to alternative viewpoints — Sept. 11 truthers, Kennedy assassination investigators and U.F.O. cover-up researchers — have been alarmed by what they’ve seen.Mr. Lewis’s sense that conspiracy networks would be rived by tensions in the aftermath of Jan. 6 was well founded. Rumors immediately began circulating that the rioters had been infiltrated by agents instigating violence — an accusation that some of the rioters themselves took to social media to denounce. Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who was fatally shot by a police officer during the attack, was simultaneously lionized as a martyr and derided as a false flag.All this ultimately left Mr. Lewis less inclined to play peacemaker and more inclined to take a step away from it all. Today, he says, he increasingly avoids some of the language that floats around the conspiracysphere: Terms like “the illuminati” used to feel like fun ideas to play with. Now he worries they could be used to create scapegoats, or even encourage violence.SMiles Lewis grew up in Austin, Texas, with his mother — his parents separated when he was very young — and it was his close connection with her that first sparked his interest in the unexplained: “There was a sense, early on with my Mom and I, where we felt like we were reading each other’s minds,” he said. The two of them would watch shows like “That’s Incredible!,” which retold stories of paranormal encounters. Mr. Lewis recalls his mother telling him after one episode: “If you are ever in distress, just concentrate on me really hard, and I will get the message.” Her theory got put to the test when Mr. Lewis was a teenager: Once, when home alone, he heard voices in their yard after dark. Afraid, he considered calling his mother, but the fear of losing precious new adult freedoms stopped him. The next day she asked him if everything had been all right, because out of nowhere, she had felt the overwhelming urge to call. Mr. Lewis took this as confirmation that there was more to human abilities than science could yet rationalize.Once Mr. Lewis graduated from high school, he joined the Austin chapter of the Mutual U.F.O. Network, an organization for enthusiasts to meet and discuss sightings. From there, he became the leader of a support group for people who believed they’d had close encounters with aliens. Mr. Lewis never had such an experience himself, but he said the group didn’t mind — they just appreciated that he kept an open mind.U.F.O.s and conspiracy theories have always been intertwined, but it was Sept. 11 that really turned Mr. Lewis political. As he speculated in an editorial for The Austin Para Times after the planes hit the towers, he felt that he had “been a witness to Amerika’s greatest Reichstag event ” — a planned disaster to justify fascist encroachment on civil liberties, something many of the writers Mr. Lewis admired had warned of.For Mr. Lewis, conspiracism was always about thinking critically about the narratives of the powerful and questioning your own biases. In our interviews, he saw his interest in the parapolitical — in how intelligence and security services quietly shape the world — as connected to his political activism, not so different from attending an abortion rights rally or joining a local anti-Patriot Act group. All were about standing up for civil liberties and citizen privacy against an opportunistic, overreaching state.But for all Mr. Lewis’s political idealism, there was also something undeniably invigorating about conspiracy culture. This was a scene free from the stifling hegemony of sensible mainstream thought, a place where writers, filmmakers and artists could explore whatever ideas or theories interested them, however weird or improper. This radical commitment to resisting censorship in all its forms sometimes led to decisions that, from the perspective of 2023, look like dangerous naïveté at best: Reading countercultural material from the 1990s can feel like navigating a political minefield, where musings about the North American “mothman” and experimental poetry sit side-by-side with Holocaust denial. Conspiracy culture was tolerant of banned or stigmatized ideas in a way many of our interviewees said they found liberating, but this tolerance always had a dangerous edge.Still, Mr. Lewis looks back nostalgically on days when there seemed to be more respect and camaraderie. The aftermath of Sept. 11 and the war on terror presented, he said, a threat to citizens that the conspiracy-friendly left and right could unite over. Now the rift between the two was deep and vicious. He felt as if the ideas that had first attracted him to conspiratorial thought had been “weaponized,” pointing people away from legitimate abuses of power and toward other citizens — the grieving parents of Sandy Hook, for example — and at times involved real-world violence.When I asked Mr. Lewis when he first heard of QAnon, he told me a story about a family member who’d sent him a video that began with what he saw as a fairly unobjectionable narrative of government abuses of power. “I’m nodding my head, I’m agreeing,” he said. Then it got to the satanic pedophile networks.The conspiracy culture that Mr. Lewis knew had celebrated the unusual and found beauty in the bizarre. He had friends who considered themselves pagans, friends who participated in occult rituals. “The vast majority of them are not blood-drinking lunatics!” he told me. Some of his friends were no longer comfortable talking about their beliefs for fear of becoming targets.Others we interviewed told us similar stories: about a scene that had once felt niche, vibrant and underground but had transformed into something almost unrecognizable. Greg Bishop, a friend of Mr. Lewis’s and editor of the 1990s zine The Excluded Middle, which covered U.F.O.s, conspiracy theories and psychedelia, among other things, told me that as the topics he’d covered had become more mainstream, he’d watched the vitriol and division increase. “You’d see somebody at a convention who was frothing at the mouth or whatever, figuratively, and that’s changed into something that’s basically a part of the culture now.”Joseph E. Green, an author and parapolitical researcher, described how in the past, attending conferences on conspiracy topics, “there’s always a couple of guys in there who will tell you after they get familiar with you that the Jews run the world.” Mr. Green had no interest in such ideas, but nor did he think they ran much risk of going mainstream. But somewhere along the way, conspiracy spaces on the internet had become “a haven” for the “lunatic fringe” of the right wing, which in turn spilled back into the real world.Jonathan Vankin, a journalist who wrote about the conspiracy scene of the 1990s, said watching the emergence of QAnon had been disillusioning. Mr. Vankin never considered himself a conspiracy theorist, but as a journalist he felt an appreciation for them. They may not have always gotten the facts right, but their approach was a way of saying, “The official story, the way we’re fed that every day, isn’t really necessarily the way it is.” Now, he said, conspiracy theories felt more like “tools of control” that changed how people saw the world, not in a liberatory sense but “in a distorted way” — one that no longer challenged power but served its interests.Have conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists gotten nastier? It’s worth recalling that the reactionary, violent impulse that we think of as characterizing contemporary conspiracism was always there: The John Birch Society of the 1960s and its hunt for secret Communists in the very top levels of government has been described by some historians as an early ancestor of QAnon. And it’s also worth remembering that the historical friendliness between left and right conspiracism could be ethically murky. When Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more, he said he was acting in retaliation for the Waco siege of 1993 and its aftermath — what he and many others in militia circles saw as the government covering up a deliberate massacre of its own citizens. Some liberal writers in the conspiracy scene defended him — some even went as far as to suggest he had been framed.What does seem clear is that conspiracy theories have become less of a specialist interest and more of an unavoidable phenomenon that affects us all, whether in the form of anti-vaccination sentiments or election denialism. With both Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump running for president, none of this seems likely to fade away anytime soon.Michael Barkun, a scholar of religious extremism and conspiracy theories, describes conspiracy-minded networks as spaces of “stigmatized knowledge” — ideas that are ignored or rejected by the institutions that society relies on to help us make sense of the world. Recently, though, Mr. Barkun writes, in part because of the development of the internet, that stigma has been weakening as what “was once clearly recognizable as ‘the fringe’ is now beginning to merge with the mainstream.”The story we’ve heard from our interviewees is that this mainstreaming process has had profound effects, fundamentally altering the character of both the theories themselves and those who claim to be adherents, by making conspiracy theories more accessible and more potentially profitable. It’s these shifts that have left people like Mr. Lewis feeling so out of place in the spaces they once saw as their ideological homes.The conspiracy scene, on left and right, immediately grasped the significance of the World Wide Web’s arrival in the 1990s. For people who wanted to explore stigmatized topics, the liberatory potential was obvious, and most of the people we spoke to were early adopters. Mr. Lewis himself at one point had between 70 and 80 registered domain names.And yet, despite pouring more effort into his passion than some people put into their jobs, Mr. Lewis never made much, if any, money from it. When I asked him about it, it didn’t even seem to have occurred to him to try. This wasn’t unusual; the biggest names in conspiracy culture before the internet — radio hosts like Bill Cooper and Mae Brussell — may have sold books and tapes but hardly built media empires. Making money seemed secondary to the principle of getting the truth — as they saw it, at least — out there, for like-minded people to debate and discuss.Today’s conspiracy theorists are different. Termed “conspiracy entrepreneurs” by academics, they combine the audience-growth strategies of social media lifestyle influencers with a mixture of culture war and survivalist rhetoric. They’re active on various platforms, constantly responding to new developments, and most of them are selling their audience something on the side.One of the first entrepreneurs to pioneer this approach was Alex Jones, who a recent court case revealed had an estimated combined net worth with his company of up to $270 million. Before his name became synonymous with conspiracy theories, Mr. Jones got his start in Austin community access television in the 1990s — a scene that Mr. Lewis was intimately familiar with. But as Mr. Lewis and others tell it, Mr. Jones always possessed both an aggressive streak and a sense of showmanship that many of his contemporaries lacked, making him perfect for social media, where conspiracy theorists, like everyone else, are competing in an attention economy.“The last thing I want to do is sit on a recorded video and say to you, ‘In our day, conspiracy theories were kinder and gentler,’” said Ruffin Prevost, an editor at ParaScope, a now-defunct site set up in 1996 that covered U.F.O.s, secret societies, and mind control, among other subjects. “But there is definitely a different tenor to how people go about this stuff now,” he said. “It’s almost like you’ve got to be strident and hard-core about whatever your thing is to have enough bona fides to capture that audience.”The belief that the incentives of social media had shorn conspiracy research of its serious, scholarly edge was a common theme. “The things that we’re describing are not really the same thing,” Mr. Green declared to me flatly, comparing the archival work and conferences that he had been involved with to the salacious videos of QAnon influencers. The scholarly work “is never going to have that commercial appeal,” he said. “You know, just like if I try to get somebody to watch a film by Ingmar Bergman, it’s much more difficult than to get them to watch a film by Michael Bay. It’s almost not even the same thing, right?”In the minds of many conspiracy theorists, Mr. Jones and his imitators don’t deserve the title. In his 2017 book, “Trumpocalypse Now!: The Triumph of the Conspiracy Spectacle,” Kenn Thomas, a towering figure in the world of 1990s conspiracy, termed the recent crop of opportunists looking to profit from the hard work of researchers “conspiracy celebrities.” And the conspiracy celebrity in chief, Mr. Thomas said, was Donald Trump, who referred to conspiracy theories he hadn’t researched and didn’t understand. To the world at large, it might seem as if we’re living in a time in which conspiratorial thinking is ascendant. But in his foreword to Mr. Thomas’s book, Robert Sterling, editor of a 1990s and 2000s countercultural conspiracy blog called The Konformist, argued otherwise: “If this moment is a victory for the conspiracy culture,” he wrote, “it is a Pyrrhic victory at best.”“There’s a few different stories we can tell about what happened,” Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and author, told me. Conspiracy culture up through the ’90s was dominated by what could be called a “radio sensibility.” Fringe topics were mostly discussed on late-night talk shows. There were guest experts, and listeners could call in, but the host still functioned as a (lenient) gatekeeper, and the theories themselves conformed to a narrative format. They were, for the most part, complete stories, with beginnings, middles and ends.In the digital age, he said, sense-making had become a fragmented, nonlinear and crowdsourced affair that as a result could never reach a conclusion and lacked internal logic. There were always potential new connections to be spotted — in the case of the 2020 election, for instance, two imprisoned Italian hackers, or a voting machine company founded by Venezuelans. This lack of satisfying resolution meant the new theories had no natural stopping point, he said, and their perpetual motion eventually brought them to a place that was “much more strident” — “even amongst the left.”The new “born-digital” conspiracy theories, like QAnon and the Great Reset, are constantly looking forward by necessity. Attaching themselves to the fast-paced flow of current events and trending topics is a matter of survival on social media, which can also explain why those who perpetuate them rarely stay focused on unpacking just one event: The Great Reset theory, for example, began by alleging that the Covid-19 pandemic had been deliberately engineered by the global elite, but soon expanded to encompass climate change, economic inflation and local traffic schemes.Some academics have argued that even when conspiracy theories warn of dark and dystopian futures, they are fundamentally optimistic: They are assertions that humans are ultimately in control of events, and humans can stop whatever terrible catastrophe is coming around the corner. But perhaps the problem is that human beings are no longer really in control of the conspiracy theories themselves. Even when Q, the anonymous figure who sparked the QAnon movement, stopped posting, the movement’s adherents carried on.Before we had even spoken over Zoom, Mr. Lewis sent me a 2022 Medium article written by Rani Baker that he said summed up a lot of his feelings about the topic. It was titled “So When, Exactly, Did Conspiracy Culture Stop Being Fun?” It was a question he said he had been struggling with too.When I asked Mr. Lewis if he had become more moderate over time, he was ambivalent. He said he maintains his skepticism about power and the state, but he’s less dogmatic these days — perhaps because he’s gained a new appreciation for the destructive power of uncompromising narratives. His thinking on Sept. 11, in particular, has evolved, from what truthers call MIHOP (Made It Happen on Purpose) to LIHOP (Let It Happen on Purpose) to today, when he allows it might have been something very different: an event foreseeable in the abstract, but as a horrific consequence of decades of U.S. interference in the Middle East, not a government’s deliberate attack on its own people.But from Mr. Lewis’s perspective, asking if he had moderated his views wasn’t quite the right question. For him and many of the others we spoke to, the paranormal and the parapolitical had been their passion and their home for their entire adult lives, places where they had found friends, ideas and ways of theorizing about the world that fascinated and excited them. They were used to their interest in these topics making them outsiders. Now they found themselves living with one foot in and one foot out of the current conspiracy scene, which had become increasingly popular, ubiquitous and dangerous. As they saw it, it wasn’t that they had rejected conspiracy culture; conspiracy culture was leaving them behind.As we wrapped up one of our interviews, Mr. Lewis told me that he finds himself increasingly returning to listening to old broadcasts of his to see if he can make sense of when that turning point began.“I keep trying to imagine,” he said. “Like, I think of the time before, and I think of the time now, and it’s like, yeah, where did the transition happen? Were there milestones along the way? Were there signs, portents, that we could have recognized?” He trails off and pauses. “And I don’t have the answer to this, but that’s kind of where my mind keeps going.”Annie Kelly is a postdoctoral researcher working on conspiracy theories at King’s College London and the University of Manchester. She is also the British correspondent for the podcast “QAnon Anonymous.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in US Politics

      The big idea: is it too late to stop extremism taking over politics?

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      Welcome to the 2020s, the beginning of what history books might one day describe as the digital middle ages. Let’s briefly travel back to 2017. I remember sitting in various government buildings briefing politicians and civil servants about QAnon, the emerging internet conspiracy movement whose adherents believe that a cabal of Satan-worshipping elites runs a global paedophile network. We joked about the absurdity of it all but no one took the few thousand anonymous true believers seriously.Fast-forward to 2023. Significant portions of the population in liberal democracies consider it possible that global elites drink the blood of children in order to stay young. Recent surveys suggest that around 17% of Americans believe in the QAnon myth. Some 5% of Germans believe ideas related to the anti-democratic Reichsbürger movement, which asserts that the German Reich continues to exist and rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state. Up to a third of Britons believe that powerful figures in Hollywood, government and the media are secretly engaged in child trafficking. Is humanity on the return journey from enlightenment to the dark ages?As segments of the public have headed towards extremes, so has our politics. In the US, dozens of congressional candidates, including the successfully elected Lauren Boebert, have been supportive of QAnon. The German far-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland is at an all-time high in terms of both its radicalism and its popularity, while Austria’s xenophobic Freedom party is topping the polls. The recent rise to power of far-right parties such as Fratelli d’Italia and the populist Sweden Democrats bolster this trend.I am often asked why the UK doesn’t have a successful far-right populist party. My answer is: because it doesn’t need to. Parts of the Conservative party now cater to audiences that would have voted for the BNP or Ukip in the past. A few years ago, the far-right Britain First claimed that 5,000 of its members had joined the Tory party. Not unlike the Republicans in the US, the Tories have increasingly departed from moderate conservative thinking and lean more and more towards radicalism.In 2020, Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski was asked to apologise for attending the National Conservatism conference in Rome. The event is well known for attracting international far-right figures such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the hard-right US presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. This year, an entire delegation of leading Conservatives attended the same conference in London. It might be hard for extreme-right parties to rise to power in Britain, but there is no shortage of routes for extremist ideas to reach Westminster.Language is a key indicator of radicalisation. The words of Conservative politicians speak for themselves: home secretary Suella Braverman referred to migrants arriving in the UK as an “invasion on our southern coast”, while MP Miriam Cates gave a nod to conspiracy theorists when she warned that “children’s souls” were being “destroyed” by cultural Marxism. Using far-right dog whistles such as “invasion” and “cultural Marxism” invites listeners to open a Pandora’s box of conspiracy myths. Research shows that believing in one makes you more susceptible to others.I sometimes wonder what a QAnon briefing to policymakers might look like in a few years. What if the room no longer laughs at the ludicrous myths but instead endorses them? One could certainly imagine this scenario in the US if Donald Trump were to win the next election. In 2019 – before conspiracy myths inspired attacks on the US Capitol, the German Reichstag, the New Zealand parliament and the Brazilian Congress – I warned in a Guardian opinion piece of the threat QAnon would soon pose to democracy. Are we now at a point where it is it too late to stop democracies being taken over by far-right ideologies and conspiracy thinking? If so, do we simply have to accept the “new normal”?There are various ways we can try to prevent and reverse the spread of extremist narratives. For some people who have turned to extremism over the past few years, too little has changed: anger over political inaction on economic inequality is now further fuelled by the exacerbating cost of living crisis. For others, too much has changed: they see themselves as rebels against a takeover by “woke” or “globalist” policies.What they have in common is a sense that the political class no longer takes their wellbeing seriously, and moves to improve social conditions and reduce inequality would go some way towards reducing such grievances. But beyond that, their fears and frustrations have clearly been instrumentalised by extremists, as well as by opportunistic politicians and profit-oriented social media firms. This means that it is essential to expose extremist manipulation tactics, call out politicians when they normalise conspiracy thinking and regulate algorithm design by the big technology companies that still amplify harmful content.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf the private sector is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution. Surveys by the Edelman Trust Barometer found that people in liberal democracies have largely lost trust in governments, media and even NGOs but, surprisingly, still trust their employers and workplaces. Companies can play an important role in the fight for democratic values. For example, the Business Council for Democracy tests and develops training courses that firms can offer to employees to help them identify and counter conspiracy myths and targeted disinformation.Young people should be helped to become good digital citizens with rights and responsibilities online, so that they can develop into critical consumers of information. National school curricula should include a new subject at the intersection of psychology and internet studies to help digital natives understand the forces that their parents have struggled to grasp: the psychological processes that drive digital group dynamics, online engagement and the rise of conspiracy thinking.Ultimately, the next generation will vote conspiracy theorists in or out of power. Only they can reverse our journey towards the digital middle ages. Julia Ebner is the author of Going Mainstream: How Extremists Are Taking Over (Ithaka Press).Further readingHow Democracies Die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky (Penguin, £10.99)How Civil War Starts by Barbara F Walter (Penguin, £10.99)Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon by Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko (Redwood, £16.99) More

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      in Elections

      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Insists He Is Not Antisemitic During House Hearing

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      At a hearing convened by House Republicans, the Democratic presidential candidate defended himself against charges of racism and antisemitism.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThe Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came to Capitol Hill on Thursday and pointedly declared that he is neither an antisemite nor a racist, while giving a fiery defense of free speech and accusing the Biden administration and his political opponents of trying to silence him.Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who turned to anti-vaccine activism and has trafficked in conspiracy theories, was referring to the storm that erupted after The New York Post published a video in which he told a private audience that Covid-19 “attacks certain races disproportionately” and may have been “ethnically targeted” to do more harm to white and Black people than to Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.Mr. Kennedy appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government — a panel created by Republicans to conduct a wide-ranging investigation of federal law enforcement and national security agencies. He said he had “never been anti-vax” and had taken all recommended vaccines except the coronavirus vaccine.Thursday’s hearing was devoted to allegations by Mr. Kennedy and Republicans that the Biden administration is trying to censor people with differing views. It was rooted in a lawsuit, filed last year by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and known as Missouri v. Biden, that accused the administration of colluding with social media companies to suppress free speech on Covid-19, elections and other matters.The subcommittee’s chairman, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and an acolyte of former President Donald J. Trump, opened the hearing by citing an email that emerged in that case, in which a White House official asked Twitter to take down a tweet in which Mr. Kennedy suggested — without evidence — that the baseball legend Hank Aaron may have died from the coronavirus vaccine.The tweet, which was not taken down, said Mr. Aaron’s death was “part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly” following vaccination. There was no such wave of suspicious deaths. As Mr. Kennedy often does, he phrased his language carefully; he did not explicitly link the vaccine to the deaths, but rather said the deaths occurred “closely following administration of #COVID #vaccines.”Representative Jim Jordan opened the hearing by citing an email in which a White House official asked Twitter to take down a tweet by Mr. Kennedy.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThursday’s session had all the makings of a Washington spectacle. A long line had formed outside the hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building by the time Mr. Kennedy arrived. Kennedy supporters stood outside the building holding a Kennedy 2024 banner.Despite the theater, the hearing raised thorny questions about free speech in a democratic society: Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?Democrats accused Republicans of giving Mr. Kennedy a forum for bigotry and pseudoscience. “Free speech is not an absolute,” said Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, the top Democrat on the subcommittee. “The Supreme Court has stated that. And others’ free speech that is allowed — hateful, abusive rhetoric — does not need to be promoted in the halls of the People’s House.”Even by Mr. Kennedy’s standards for stoking controversy, his recent comments about Covid-19 were shocking. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, who is Jewish, tried unsuccessfully on Thursday to force the panel into executive session; she insisted that Mr. Kennedy had violated House rules by making “despicable antisemitic and anti-Asian comments.” She also helped organize Democrats to sign a letter calling on Republican leaders to disinvite him from the hearing.Mr. Kennedy waved the letter about during his opening remarks. “I know many of the people who wrote this letter,” he said. “I don’t believe there’s a single person who signed this letter who believes I’m antisemitic.”Mr. Kennedy has been steeped in Democratic politics for his entire life, but his campaign has drawn supporters from the fringes of both political parties. He has made common cause with Republicans and Trump supporters who accuse the federal government of conspiring with social media companies to suppress conservative content.Thursday’s hearing was billed as a session to “examine the federal government’s role in censoring Americans, the Missouri v. Biden case and Big Tech’s collusion with out-of-control government agencies to silence speech.” One of the lawyers involved in that case, D. John Sauer, also testified, as did Emma-Jo Morris, a journalist at Breitbart News, and Maya Wiley, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.Mr. Kennedy showed a flash of the old Kennedy style, invoking his uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a Democrat and legislative giant who frequently worked across the aisle. He called for kindness and respect, recalling how his uncle brought Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican with whom he partnered on major legislation, to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass.And Mr. Kennedy was joined by a former member of Congress: Dennis J. Kucinich, who served in the House as a Democrat from Ohio and is Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager.“We need to elevate the Constitution of the United States, which was written for hard times,” Mr. Kennedy declared at one point, “and that has to be the premier compass for all of our activities.”Amid the vitriol, members of both parties did come together around a lament from Representative Gerald E. Connolly, Democrat of Virginia.“I’ve been in this Congress 15 years, and I never thought we’d descend to this level of Orwellian dystopia,” Mr. Connolly said.Representatives Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, and Harriet M. Hageman, Republican of Wyoming, nodded their heads and smiled. “I agree with that,” they said in unison. More

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      in Elections

      Cambodia Strongman Hun Sen Wields Facebook to Undermine Democracy

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      The Cambodian People’s Party created its Cyber War Room about a decade ago. The goal was to support Prime Minister Hun Sen’s regime through social media propagandizing. Led by the prime minister’s son Hun Manet, a troll army used Facebook and other digital platforms to attack his father’s opposition with disinformation and even allegedly wield death threats.Fast forward to the Cambodian election taking place next month. The CPP’s Cyber War Room is back up and running. General Manet, commander of the Cambodian Army and most likely the country’s next prime minister, is reportedly back at the helm, this time defending his father’s legacy and himself.Facebook is extremely popular in Cambodia, with roughly 12 million of the country’s almost 17 million people on the site. Many people in Cambodia use Facebook as a core means of getting information, and social media platforms are critical for the few journalists still producing independent reporting. The populations of many other countries where governments have continually used social media for manipulation, including the Philippines and Turkey, rely heavily on Facebook as well. So why has state-sponsored trolling like this been allowed to endure for 10 years?It will come as no surprise when I say that Big Tech has a lot of problems on its plate, including fury about transnational digital propaganda campaigns, a global outcry about networked disinformation during the pandemic and panic about both real and hypothetic threats of generative A.I.But as one issue pops into the immediate view, the others don’t go anywhere. Instead, the global problems with our online information ecosystem compound. And while society and tech’s most powerful firms jump from one issue to the next, the abusive disinformation practices in places like Cambodia become entrenched. Governments refine their techniques, and opposition groups become less and less present because they are either trolled into submission, arrested, exiled or killed. It all benefits Big Tech, from Meta to Alphabet, which publicly seizes upon the idea du jour while cutting staffs and curbing efforts aimed at combating standing informational issues.What does this mean for the people of Cambodia? For a people who, in living memory, endured the horrors of genocide and totalitarianism?The Cambodian news ecosystem and the lives of Cambodians are controlled by Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has led them in some capacity for 38 years. He is quick to justify his long reign by pointing to economic gains before Covid — by which time the country achieved lower-middle-income status through tourism, textile exports and a growing relationship with China. His people have languished in many other ways, however: Environmental degradation is rife, corruption is commonplace, and human rights abuses are worsening.Mr. Sen and his cronies own or control all but the thinnest sliver of the country’s media outlets. They recently banned the main opposition party from running in the coming election because of an alleged clerical error. And curtailing speech on social media has been critical to the consolidation of their power. Facebook, Telegram and other platforms have been central to the CPP’s illicit, strategic and authoritarian control of Cambodia’s information space and, consequently, public opinion.Other despots have made use of highly organized state-sponsored trolling outfits to quash dissent. Some, like Mr. Sen, have also hired their kids to run them. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s Office of Hate, run by his sons, used social media to defame journalists and threaten opposition. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the autocrat recently re-elected as president of Turkey, benefited greatly from organized troll armies operating on Twitter. Back in Southeast Asia, the increasingly tyrannical regimes of Thailand, the Philippines and Myanmar have all deployed cyber-troops to do their oppressive bidding.Another factor is central to understanding why social media firms have failed to curb state-sponsored trolling around the globe: language.Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms have overwhelmingly focused their efforts to counter harmful and purposely misleading content in English. One reason is that they are based in the United States. Another is the malignant supremacy of Western concerns. But the larger reason is that social media companies cannot or will not supply the resources necessary to moderating content in other languages — particularly those such as Cambodia’s Khmer, which is complex and spoken by about 18 million people worldwide. That’s a small number when compared with the roughly 1.5 billion who speak English.This issue is a major problem for our own democracy too. During the 2020 and 2022 elections, social media platforms failed spectacularly in quashing hateful and disenfranchising content aimed at the tens of millions of Americans who speak Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Tagalog and a variety of other languages. This resulted in communities of color and groups already marginalized in our political system bearing the brunt of digital hate and purposely false information about these contests. According to my research and work with community leaders, this structural disinformation causes apathy, anger and civic disenchantment among minority voters, and as a result, many don’t show up to vote.The strength of global democracy is tied to the number of countries around the world that truly practice it. And while the leaders of relatively strong democracies like the United States obsess over information technology problems and political spectacle in Washington, they fail to do their duty to protect the less fortunate, both in their own country and elsewhere. This, in turn, lets social media companies off the hook.I recently returned from a lecture tour in Cambodia, where I spoke to more than 12 groups of professional journalists, citizen reporters, scholars, students and activists about the informational and political challenges they face online and offline. All told me that they still use platforms like Facebook and Telegram to coordinate, organize and share information about breaking news and elections.Facebook is especially popular in the country, in part because of its controversial Free Basics program, which offers free internet in a number of developing countries via a constrained number of websites (including, naturally, Facebook). Critics derided this as less a benevolent bid to connect the world and more a heavy-handed effort to “capture more of the market in the name of connectivity.” The promise of social media — that it can be the conduit for communication in countries with controlled media systems — remains true for the people I spoke to in Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville. But this potential is quickly dwindling as people lose faith in the safety of online communication. Meanwhile, Facebook remains a potent means for disseminating propaganda.If Meta, Alphabet and other tech firms do not take swift action to curb state-sponsored trolling, and if policymakers and civil society groups in the United States and other democracies don’t put more pressure on authoritarians like Hun Sen, then Cambodians and many others around the world will lose one of their last means of fighting back. We must speak out about the oppression surrounding the Cambodian election, which takes place on July 23 — and speak out about digital injustice.Samuel Woolley is the author of “Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity” and a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Ron DeSantis Doesn’t Know Whether He’s Coming or Going

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      Gail Collins: Bret, about Ron DeSantis. Last week, I criticized him for weenie stuff like big book advances and questionable road repair materials. At the time, I definitely felt like I was carping.Then his people shared an ad on L.G.B.T.Q. issues that … wow.Bret Stephens: “Wow” just about covers it.Gail: It began with a clip of Donald Trump defending gay rights in days of yore, which was very clearly supposed to make viewers … hate Trump. Followed by praise for Florida laws DeSantis signed that “literally threaten trans existence.” Followed by a super-duper weird montage showing men flexing muscles, Brad Pitt in Trojan-warrior garb and Governor Ron with lightning flashes coming out of his eyes.Pete Buttigieg, who is President Biden’s secretary of transportation and one of the best-known gay figures in politics, rightly pointed out “the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders.”Any thoughts?Bret: I guess my main takeaway is that DeSantis isn’t going to be the next president. He makes Trump seem tolerant, Ted Cruz seem likable, Mitch McConnell seem moderate, Lauren Boebert seem mature and Rick Santorum seem cool. Not what I would have expected out of the Florida governor six months ago, but here’s where I confess: You were right about him, and I was wrong.Gail: My other takeaway is that Republicans are focusing more on L.G.B.T.Q. issues now that they’ve come to understand that attacking abortion isn’t a national winner — or even a state winner in most places.In the long run, stomping on gay rights isn’t going to do it either, because such a huge number of people — even conservative Republicans — have friends, family, colleagues who are gay. May take a while to come to grips with that, but once you realize someone you care about is gay, the idea of persecuting them presumably seems way less attractive.Just recalling how my conservative Catholic mother wound up, in old age, riding on a float in Cincinnati’s Gay Pride parade.Bret: As you mentioned last year in that wonderful column you wrote about Allen Ginsberg.Gay bashing is morally intolerable as well as politically inept. But a lot of people — including many Democrats and independents — have honest and serious concerns about some aspects of the trans issue, especially as it concerns the integrity of women’s sports, the morality of drastic medical interventions in teenagers and the anti-scientific denial of basic biology when it comes to questions of sex. I also detest terms like “bodies with vaginas” as a substitute for “women.” It isn’t a sensitive or inclusive use of language; it’s misogynistic and Orwellian.DeSantis could have addressed these issues in a sober and nuanced way. Instead, he went full Trojan, and I suspect his campaign will meet a similar fate to Troy’s.Gail: Full Trojan? Just like Brad Pitt in that ad!Bret: Switching topics, Gail, can we talk about homelessness? The problem just keeps getting worse, particularly out west, and it’s doing real damage to urban life. Your thoughts on what does and does not work?Gail: What works is pretty simple: more housing and outreach for the mentally ill. Both are difficult, of course, ranging from pretty darned to stupendously.Bret: What also works are ordinances forbidding “camping” on public lands so that homeless people are required to use shelter beds, which some liberal judges have blocked cities from doing. One of the problems of our public discussion of the issue is that we treat homelessness as a problem of the homeless only. It’s also a public safety issue and a quality-of-life issue. People ought to have a right to walk down urban sidewalks that haven’t been turned into tent cities and open-air toilets.Gail: New York is still dealing with a flood of new migrants, mainly from Latin America, who have been coming in huge numbers for more than a year. Most of them are ambitious and hopeful, and they could be a great shot to our local economy — if they had permanent places to stay.Bret: Completely agree. I also think the migrant problem is qualitatively different from the kind of homelessness issues that cities like San Francisco or Portland, Ore., are experiencing. Migrants are struggling with poverty but not, generally, mental health or drug-dependency issues. What migrants typically need is a room and a job.Gail: Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, has talked about finding some of them homes in the suburbs, where there’s obviously more room and housing prices are sometimes a lot lower. Said suburbs rose up in rage to stop an incursion of needy people. It’s so irritating, although I have to admit that my liberal Manhattan neighborhood — which has plenty of programs for the homeless — consistently rebels against talk of any big new housing projects for any income group.Your turn.Bret: I’m skeptical of the theory that we could solve the crisis just by building a lot more housing. First, because we can’t build quickly and cheaply enough to keep up with the growing number of homeless people. Second, because even when the homeless are housed, they often fall back into the kinds of behaviors that ultimately lead them to return to the streets.My own view is that people living on the street should be required to go into shelters, which can be built much more quickly and cheaply than regular housing, be required to get mental health screenings and be required to be treated if they have drug or alcohol dependencies.Gail: Well, if the mental health treatments were great, that might be an argument. But they often aren’t — just because there’s a terrific shortage of personnel.And the shelters are no picnic either. A lot of the people you see on the street have been, at one time or another, threatened by a mentally troubled co-resident, gotten into a fight as a result of shared emotional problems or in some other way come to feel that living on the street is safer.Bret: The other big story from last week, Gail, is the ruling by a federal judge that forbade the Biden administration to work with social media companies to remove content it didn’t like, mainly connected to alleged Covid misinformation. What the administration was doing seems to me like a serious infringement on people’s freedom of speech, but I’d like to know your view.Gail: Gee, I was under the impression one of the jobs of the executive branch was to make sure people were getting the right information about health issues. And it’s not as if the Biden folks marched in and removed a bunch of posts themselves. Conferring with the social media companies seems like something they ought to do.Bret: One good way of thinking about the issue is putting the shoe on the other foot. For instance, we now know that the Steele dossier was malicious partisan misinformation, secretly and illicitly paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and that some of its most salacious allegations, like the pee-tape stuff, were false. How would you react if you had learned that the Trump administration had been putting heavy pressure on executives at MSNBC to forbid Rachel Maddow from ever mentioning it back when she had her show?Gail: Hey, it’s hot and humid outside. No fair trying to take me down the Hillary Clinton road. Look — the whole world changed with the advent of social media. If you’ve got influencers with millions of followers warning that, say, giving milk to babies is dangerous, you’ve got to do something more than issue a press release.Bret: I’m pretty sure we could get the word out that milk is generally fine for babies or vaccines are generally safe without setting a precedent that the federal government can work with Big Tech to censor individual speech.Gail: Of course I agree with you about freedom of expression. But in the process of protecting it, it’s natural to argue about specific cases with particular details. We will pursue this again soon. Well, forever probably.But let me be boring for a second and ask you about Congress. Just got through that deficit crisis, and another one will be coming around the bend this summer. What’s your long-term advice? Spend less? Tax more? Ignore the whole thing and figure it’ll work out somehow like it always does?Bret: My advice: Talk less, smile more. Seriously, what we need from Congress and the president is to get through the next 18 months without another manufactured domestic crisis. Between the war in Ukraine, Iran’s creeping nuclearization and China’s saber-rattling over Taiwan, we have more than enough to worry about abroad.Gail: Hmm. One writer’s manufactured domestic crisis is maybe another’s reasonable disagreement. And while Congress isn’t always fascinating, it’s at the top of the critical-if-possibly-boring ladder.Bret: Before we go, Gail, I have to put in a word for Penelope Green’s funny, fabulous obituary in The Times of Sue Johanson, a Canadian sex educator who died last month at 92. It has the single most memorable paragraph to appear in the paper for at least a month, if not a year. I have to quote it in full:Is it weird to put body glitter on your boyfriend’s testicles? Is it safe to have sex in a hot tub? Could a Ziploc baggie serve as a condom? If condoms are left in a car and they freeze, are they still good? Answers: No. No (chlorinated water is too harsh for genitals, particularly women’s). Definitely not. And yes, once they’ve been defrosted.I mean, after that, what else is there to say?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      These 2024 Candidates Have Signed Up For Threads, Meta’s Twitter Alternative

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      The bulk of the G.O.P. field is there, with some notable holdouts: Donald J. Trump, the front-runner, and his top rival, Ron DeSantis.While the front-runners in the 2024 presidential race have yet to show up on Threads, the new Instagram app aimed at rivaling Twitter, many of the long-shot candidates were quick to take advantage of the platform’s rapidly growing audience.“Buckle up and join me on Threads!” Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, wrote in a caption accompanying a selfie of himself and others in a car that he posted on Thursday — by that morning, the app had already been downloaded more than 30 million times, putting it on track to be the most rapidly downloaded app ever.But President Biden, former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida remain absent from the platform so far.And that may be just fine with Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, who told The Times’s “Hard Fork” podcast on Thursday that he does not expect Threads to become a destination for news or politics, arenas where Twitter has dominated the public discourse.“I don’t want to lean into hard news at all. I don’t think there’s much that we can or should do to discourage it on Instagram or in Threads, but I don’t think we’ll do anything to encourage it,” Mr. Mosseri said.The app, released on Wednesday, was presented as an alternative to Twitter, with which many users became disillusioned after it was purchased by Elon Musk in October.Lawyers for Twitter threatened legal action against Meta, the company that owns Instagram, Facebook and Threads, accusing it of using trade secrets from former Twitter employees to build the new platform. Mr. Musk tweeted on Thursday, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”Mr. Trump has not been active on Twitter recently either, despite Mr. Musk’s lifting the ban that was put on Mr. Trump’s account after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The former president has instead kept his focus on Truth Social, the right-wing social network he launched in 2021.But many of the G.O.P. candidates have begun making their pitches on Threads.Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador and former governor of South Carolina, made a video compilation of her campaign events her first post on the app. “Strong and proud. Not weak and woke,” she wrote on Thursday. “That is the America I see.”Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota posted footage of his July 4 campaign appearances in New Hampshire, alongside a message on Wednesday that said he and his wife were “looking forward to continuing our time here.”And Will Hurd, a former Texas congressman, made a fund-raising pitch to viewers on Wednesday.“Welcome to Threads,” he said in a video posted on the app. “I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation here with you on the issues, my candidacy, where I’ll be and everything our campaign has going on.”Francis Suarez, the Republican mayor of Miami, and Larry Elder, a conservative talk radio host, also shared their campaign pitches on the platform, as did two candidates running in the Democratic primary: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading vaccine skeptic, and Marianne Williamson, a self-help author. Even Cornel West, a professor and progressive activist running as a third-party candidate, has posted.Former Vice President Mike Pence and Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur, also established accounts — but have yet to post.Among the holdouts: Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, both Republicans.The White House has not said whether Mr. Biden will join Threads. Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said on Thursday that the administration would “keep you all posted if we do.” More

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      DeSantis Uses L.G.B.T.Q Issues to Attack Trump in Twitter Video

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      The Florida governor sought to contrast his record opposing gay and transgender rights in a video highlighting comments made by the former president during the 2016 campaign — but has gotten some pushback.Gov. Ron DeSantis’s campaign shared a provocative video on Friday attacking the record of former President Donald J. Trump regarding L.G.B.T.Q. people that was widely condemned as homophobic, including by a prominent group representing gay and lesbian Republicans.The video, posted on Twitter by the “DeSantis War Room” account, opens by showing Mr. Trump proclaiming, “I will do everything in my power to protect our L.G.B.T.Q. citizens.” Mr. Trump made those remarks at the Republican National Convention in July 2016, after invoking the horror of the Pulse nightclub shooting the previous month. The massacre, at a popular gay nightclub in Orlando, in Mr. DeSantis’s home state of Florida, left 49 people dead.The video goes on to show Mr. Trump expressing support for transgender people using the bathrooms of their choice. It then attempts to contrast Mr. Trump’s position with the hard-line stance of Mr. DeSantis, abruptly transitioning into a jarring series of images of Mr. DeSantis (including one with lasers shooting out of his eyes) that are interspersed with right-wing internet memes (the smiling, heavily muscled man known online as “GigaChad”), news headlines (“Pride event in St. Cloud canceled after DeSantis signs ‘Protection of Children Act’ into law”) and pop culture references (among them shots of the titular character from the film version of the serial killer narrative “American Psycho”).The DeSantis team shared the video the same day that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Christian web designer who refused to create wedding websites for same-sex couples, putting the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people on shaky legal footing.Mr. DeSantis has frequently cast himself as a lightning rod for unfair criticism by liberals and has used such attacks to rally support from his political base. The video, compiled by another Twitter user, seemed intended, in part, to attract more liberal outrage at a time when he is struggling to gain traction in polls against Mr. Trump.It was the type of move — devised to provoke a reaction — that Mr. Trump often deployed from his Twitter account during the 2016 campaign.Earlier in his career, as a congressman, Mr. DeSantis did not seem consumed by combating the L.G.B.T.Q. community. At the time, he privately told a counterpart he didn’t care about people’s sexuality.And when he first ran for governor five years ago, Mr. DeSantis suggested he would take a more moderate approach on some L.G.B.T.Q. rights issues, saying that Republicans needed to move beyond debating which bathrooms transgender people should use. “Getting into bathroom wars, I don’t think that’s a good use of our time,” he said at a Republican candidate forum in 2018.But in this campaign for the Republican nomination, Mr. DeSantis has sought to highlight — and expand — his ultraconservative credentials in an effort to position himself to the right of his chief rival.The new video drew criticism not only from Democrats but also from some in his own party, including the Log Cabin Republicans, which describes itself as the nation’s largest organization for “L.G.B.T. conservatives and allies.” The group, which endorsed Mr. Trump in 2019 and has used his Mar-a-Lago club for events, called the video “divisive and desperate” and said it “ventured into homophobic territory.”Sarah Longwell, a moderate Republican political strategist, wrote on Twitter: “The consultants who think this kind of ‘running to Trump’s right’ is going to be effective should be sacked.” And Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman and Trump critic, said, “Outrage after outrage is the only way these guys know how to campaign.”Mr. DeSantis’s campaign shared the video on Twitter with the text: “To wrap up ‘Pride Month,’ let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it,” referring to Mr. Trump.Former President Donald J. Trump, who spoke this week at an event in New Hampshire, is well ahead of Mr. DeSantis in national polls.John Tully for The New York TimesMr. Trump, who grew up in liberal New York and was a businessman for decades, was seen during his 2016 campaign by some Republicans as more open to the L.G.B.T.Q. community. But he also chose Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana and a staunch conservative who had signed into a law a religious freedom act that was seen as hostile to L.G.B.T.Q. people, as his running mate. As president, Mr. Trump systematically dismantled L.G.B.T.Q. protections put into effect by President Barack Obama, particularly those concerning transgender people. The video shared by the DeSantis campaign reflects a race to the right on a number of issues in the primary. In Florida, Mr. DeSantis has signed bills restricting classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, punishing businesses that admit minors to “adult live performances” such as drag shows and making it a misdemeanor trespassing offense for people to use bathrooms in public buildings that do not correspond to their sex at birth.And with its barrage of references to obscure right-wing memes, the video also shows how heavily Mr. DeSantis’s campaign has leaned into the brash and provocative parlance of fringe online conservatives. The Florida governor, who is running well behind Mr. Trump in national polls, signaled from the beginning of his campaign that he hoped to connect with right-wing voters online, including by announcing his candidacy in a glitchy livestream event on Twitter with Elon Musk.But by openly courting such insular conservative communities, Mr. DeSantis, who has told donors that he is the only Republican who can beat President Biden, may risk alienating the more moderate voters he will most likely need in a general election.The video also risks putting off some Republican donors, some of whom are more moderate on issues like L.G.B.T.Q. rights and are watching to see how Mr. DeSantis progresses before committing to his candidacy.In addition to implicitly comparing Mr. DeSantis to Christian Bale’s homicidal character in “American Psycho,” who in the book is a mega-fan of then-businessman Donald J. Trump, the video — set to a thrumming bass — without much explanation also highlights Leonardo DiCaprio’s role as a hedonistic, drug-addicted financial fraudster in the film “The Wolf of Wall Street,” as well as Brad Pitt’s depiction of Achilles in “Troy.” (Achilles, the hero of “The Iliad,” was often portrayed in later Classical Greek literature as the lover of his male companion, Patroclus.)For his part, Mr. Trump noted last month, sounding pleased, that the issue of limiting rights for transgender people had become a major animating force for conservative Republican voters.“It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that,” Mr. Trump said during a speech in North Carolina in June. “I talk about transgender, everybody goes crazy. Five years ago, you didn’t know what the hell it was.” More

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      Hun Sen’s Facebook Page Goes Dark After Spat with Meta

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      Prime Minister Hun Sen, an avid user of the platform, had vowed to delete his account after Meta’s oversight board said he had used it to threaten political violence.The usually very active Facebook account for Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia appeared to have been deleted on Friday, a day after the oversight board for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, recommended that he be suspended from the platform for threatening political opponents with violence.The showdown pits the social media behemoth against one of Asia’s longest-ruling autocrats.Mr. Hun Sen, 70, has ruled Cambodia since 1985 and maintained power partly by silencing his critics. He is a staunch ally of China, a country whose support comes free of American-style admonishments on the value of human rights and democratic institutions.A note Friday on Mr. Hun Sen’s account, which had about 14 million followers, said that its content “isn’t available right now.” It was not immediately clear whether Meta had suspended the account or if Mr. Hun Sen had preemptively deleted it, as he had vowed to do in a post late Thursday on Telegram, a social media platform where he has a much smaller following.“That he stopped using Facebook is his private right,” Phay Siphan, a spokesman for the Cambodian government, told The New York Times on Friday. “Other Cambodians use it, and that’s their right.”The company-appointed oversight board for Meta had on Thursday recommended a minimum six-month suspension of Mr. Hun Sen’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram, which Meta also owns. The board also said that one of Mr. Hun Sen’s Facebook videos had violated Meta’s rules on “violence and incitement” and should be taken down.In the video, Mr. Hun Sen delivered a speech in which he responded to allegations of vote-stealing by calling on his political opponents to choose between the legal system and “a bat.”“If you say that’s freedom of expression, I will also express my freedom by sending people to your place and home,” Mr. Hun Sen said in the speech, according to Meta.Meta had previously decided to keep the video online under a policy that allows the platform to allow content that violates Facebook’s community standards on the grounds that it is newsworthy and in the public interest. But the oversight board said on Thursday that it was overturning the decision, calling it “incorrect.”A post on Facebook by Cambodian government official Duong Dara, which includes an image of the official Facebook page of Mr. Hun Sen.Tang Chhin Sothy/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe board added that its recommendation to suspend Mr. Hun Sen’s accounts for at least six months was justified given the severity of the violation and his “history of committing human rights violations and intimidating political opponents, and his strategic use of social media to amplify such threats.”Meta later said in a statement that it would remove the offending video to comply with the board’s decision. The company also said that it would respond to the suspension recommendation after analyzing it.Critics of Facebook have long said that the platform can undermine democracy, promote violence and help politicians unfairly target their critics, particularly in countries with weak institutions.Mr. Hun Sen has spent years cracking down on the news media and political opposition in an effort to consolidate his grip on power. In February, he ordered the shutdown of one of the country’s last independent news outlets, saying he did not like its coverage of his son and presumed successor, Lt. Gen. Hun Manet.Under Mr. Hun Sen, the government has also pushed for more government surveillance of the internet, a move that rights groups say makes it even easier for the authorities to monitor and punish online content.Mr. Hun Sen’s large Facebook following may overstate his actual support. In 2018, one of his most prominent political opponents, Sam Rainsy, argued in a California court that the prime minister used so-called click farms to accumulate millions of counterfeit followers.Mr. Sam Rainsy, who lives in exile, also argued that Mr. Hun Sen had used Facebook to spread false news stories and death threats directed at political opponents. The court later denied his request that Facebook be compelled to release records of advertising purchases by Mr. Hun Sen and his allies.In 2017, an opposition political party that Mr. Sam Rainsy had led, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, was dissolved by the country’s highest court. More recently, the Cambodian authorities have disqualified other opposition parties from running in a general election next month.At a public event in Cambodia on Friday, Mr. Hun Sen said that his political opponents outside the country were surely happy with his decision to quit Facebook.“You have to be aware that if I order Facebook to be shut down in Cambodia, it will strongly affect you,” he added, speaking at an event for garment workers ahead of the general election. “But this is not the path that I choose.” More