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      Musk Lifted Bans for Thousands on Twitter. Here’s What They’re Tweeting.

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      Many reinstated users are tweeting about topics that got them barred in the first place: Covid-19 skepticism, election denialism and QAnon.Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in October, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” has ad-libbed his way through the company’s moderation policies.He initially argued that bans should be reserved for spam accounts, offering “amnesty” to thousands of suspended users and reinstating former president Donald J. Trump. Last week, he suspended several journalists, claiming they had shared public flight data revealing his private location. (Many of the bans were later reversed.)To gauge how Mr. Musk’s content decisions influenced Twitter’s content, The New York Times analyzed tweets from more than 1,000 users whose accounts were recently reinstated. The posts were collected for The Times by Bright Data, a social media tracking company, using a list of reinstated users identified by Travis Brown, a Berlin-based software developer who has tracked extremism on Twitter.Most of the reinstated accounts were deeply partisan — often vocal supporters of Mr. Trump — and they appeared eager to bring their fiery takes back to the social network. It was not clear from the data why the users were originally suspended or why they were reinstated, though their post histories suggest many were banned as Twitter cracked down on Covid-19 and election-related misinformation.Imran Ahmed, the founder and chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said the message Mr. Musk sent to the formerly suspended users was clear: “‘Welcome back, welcome home.”Inside Elon Musk’s TwitterA Management Guru?: To many, Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter may look like an unmitigated disaster. But his unsparing style has still made him a hero to leaders in Silicon Valley.Rival Platforms: Twitter rolled out a new policy to prevent users from sharing links and user names from rival social platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Mastodon. After a backlash from users, the policy was curtailed.Account Suspensions: Twitter’s decision to suspend (and later reinstate) the accounts of several journalists set off a heated debate about free speech and online censorship.A Flood of Bots: People protesting China’s Covid rules shared their demonstrations on Twitter. But despite Mr. Musk’s vow to remove bots, spam accounts drowned out their posts.Twitter and Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.“I finally got this account back after being banned for being a #Republican thanks @elonmusk,” one user tweeted. Just 10 minutes later, the same person wrote: “Joe Biden is an illegitimate president and the 2020 election was stolen.”Here is some of what these users have been saying on Twitter since their return.Covid-19 misinformation and vaccine doubtsDuring the pandemic, Twitter introduced a policy that banned misinformation about the virus, suspending over 11,000 accounts, including many prominent users, after they pushed falsehoods. But in November of this year, after Mr. Musk took control of the company, Twitter said that it would no longer enforce that policy.Several reinstated users who were banned after the Covid-19 policies went into effect started posting again about the virus and its vaccines. Some raised doubts about the effectiveness of vaccines or suggested, without evidence, that vaccines kill people.Several posts mentioned “Died Suddenly,” a misleading documentary released this year that claimed people were dying from the vaccine. Others shared their own unsupported anecdotes.“If you watched ‘Died Suddenly’ here is more confirming evidence,” one user tweeted, adding a link to a website titled “Covid Jab Side Effects.” Before being banned in January 2021, the user had posted several times about Covid-19, including posts that the virus was not dangerous.Election fraudTwitter cracked down on election fraud conspiracy theories after the 2020 election, suspending thousands of accounts that pushed false and misleading ideas about the election results. Hundreds of users have since returned to Twitter, pushing those ideas once again.Many reinstated users focused on close races in the midterm elections, including the governor’s race in Arizona and the Senate race in Pennsylvania. Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, lost her race but has refused to concede, citing problems with the voting process and claiming fraud. Many reinstated users echoed her ideas.Those tweets recycled falsehoods and conspiracy theories from the 2020 election, including that voting machines were rigged to influence the outcome.“Voters, not voting machines, used to decide elections in Arizona,” one reinstated user tweeted. “That’s no longer the case.”QAnonQAnon, the online conspiracy theory, appeared to reach its peak on Jan. 6, 2021, when hundreds of Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol Building. Twitter suspended over 70,000 accounts linked to the group afterward. But many of the movement’s core ideas have continued playing a significant role in the far-right imagination.On Twitter, reinstated users have returned to familiar themes in QAnon lore, raising questions about prominent Democrats and their association with Jeffrey Epstein, a former financier who was charged with child sex trafficking and is a central figure in QAnon conspiracies.They have claimed without evidence that Democrats and Hollywood personalities are engaged in widespread sex trafficking and pedophilia. And they have also repeated claims that liberals are “grooming” children using drag performances and sex education.“I just was reinstated today after 2 years of permanent suspension,” wrote one reinstated user with “QAnon” in his user name. “I guess I owe that to the new owner thank you Elon Musk.” More

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      John Fetterman’s TikTok Whisperer

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      Newt Gingrich was not happy. It was the night of Dec. 6, minutes before the U.S. Senate race in Georgia was called for Raphael Warnock, and over on the Fox News show “Hannity,” the finger-pointing for Herschel Walker’s imminent loss had begun. One major culprit: TikTok.TikTok? The Chinese-owned social media platform, which hadn’t even existed at the beginning of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, should be banned “for national security reasons,” Mr. Gingrich said. “But as long as it’s legal,” he continued, “we have to learn to compete in a place like that, because that’s where Generation Z gets such a high percent of their information.” “We have to learn how to be competitive within it,” he added.That is one — and likely the only — point on which Mr. Gingrich and Annie Wu Henry would agree. At 26, Ms. Henry — or @Annie_Wu_22, as she’s known on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok — had been a relatively low-level staffer since July on Senator-elect John Fetterman’s campaign against Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race, when she took over Mr. Fetterman’s TikTok account. “John already had this amazing comms team working for him, and he himself had been a Twitter guy for years,” Ms. Henry, said on a video call from her apartment in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia. She was wearing sweats and a hoodie (“very on-brand today,” she said with laugh). “But we were able to move his voice and his message to other platforms,” she said.And those other platforms were even “more important than it might have been normally,” Ms. Henry said, because Mr. Fetterman couldn’t be out on the trail after his stroke in May.Ms. Henry quickly became, according to Mr. Fetterman’s director of communications, Joe Calvello, their “TikTok Queen.” The account accrued more than 240,000 followers in three months, with three million likes and tens of millions of views. Ms. Henry’s was able to make the fun serious, and the serious fun; and her motto — in life and on TikTok — is “embrace the cringe.” That is, let the world see you as your messy, authentic self. ‘Trust Young People’Of course you need to have a candidate who’s willing to let you do this. “John isn’t an Instagram dude” — polished, carefully curated — “and it also wouldn’t be him to put him on TikTok dancing around,” she said. “But if we can use a kind of a weird, quirky sound and edit our messages to be a little, well, not messy, but not superrefined, it aligns with who he is, who this campaign is.” Some of her hits: the video of Dr. Oz boasting about growing up “south of Philadelphia” followed by a map showing that on the other side of the water is … New Jersey, overlaid with Smash Mouth’s “All Star” (“Somebody once told me the world is going to roll me/I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed”). Another one of her more cutting examples: a trippy TikTok duet of the heavy metal puppets in Psychostick’s “Numbers (I Can Only Count to Four)” with Dr. Oz being unable to count the number of houses he owns.After Mr. Fetterman’s stroke in May, communicating using social media was even “more important than it might have been normally,” Ms. Henry said.Michelle Gustafson for The New York TimesWhile she did not create Mr. Fetterman’s response to Dr. Oz’s infamous crudités video, in which he complains about the price of “crudités” and conflates the Philly grocery stores Wegmans and Redner’s, she did have a eureka fund-raising moment. For any donation above $5, donors would receive a sticker that read: “Wegners: Let Them Eat Crudité.” Very quickly, the money rolled in.“Annie is like this generational force,” said a young political operative known as Memes. He runs a Twitter account called @OrganizerMemes, an aggregator for clever political images and texts, which also serves as a place where harried young staffers can vent without being outed to their bosses. (Memes is 25, works in politics and would like to keep his job, hence the anonymity.) He considers Ms. Henry a close friend, though they just met non-virtually for the first time in Georgia, when Ms. Henry made a last-minute decision to fly to Georgia and help get out the Asian vote for Senator Warnock during the runoff. “Young people are often not trusted on campaigns to do stuff,” Memes said. “Annie is what happens when you trust young people to do what they’re good at.” Political tchotchkes and pop culture references fill Ms. Henry’s apartment in Philadelphia. Taylor Swift merch is mixed in with signed copies of books by Jimmy Carter and Gloria Steinem.Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times‘She Will Get What She Wants’Ms. Henry grew up in a rural, deeply conservative town in York County, Pa., the only child of Tom and Beth Henry, both special education teachers. She was adopted in China at 13 months. When her exhausted and thrilled parents were handed their new daughter, Mr. Henry said, the nurse told them, “This one is very proud, she will get what she wants in life.” From a very early age, her parents said, injustice would make her head explode. Her liberal but devoutly Methodist parents despaired when they could not get their daughter to go to church with them once she learned what gay marriage was, and that their church wouldn’t allow it. “I think because she was adopted in China and we had very few other ethnic races in our town, she might have felt like an underdog herself,” her father said. “Sometimes she was picked on. But when she saw someone else being picked on, she was furious.” She got her first smartphone in high school and was tweeting about the 2012 election before she could vote. Four years ago, she led the Black Lives Matter protests in her mostly white hometown.And it was her father who first told her about Mr. Fetterman. “When he was mayor of Braddock, I admired him for really helping people who were down and out, for standing up for the common person,” Mr. Henry said. “When he announced he was thinking about running for Senate, I told Annie, ‘This is a man you need to think about. This is someone you can support.’”She graduated from Lehigh University in 2018 — her honors thesis was about the intersection of identity and social media — and then worked a series of jobs: organizing for a couple of local Philadelphia politicians and doing social media for a bridal company to pay the bills. At the beginning of the pandemic, she wrote an essay that got attention about dealing with her ethnicity for the first time and feeling truly afraid as an Asian American in a country where the president was calling Covid-19 “the China Flu.” Wearing a mask in public, she would remind herself to “look friendly” and not sneeze or cough. Last year, she made her first viral tweet with a friend: a Stop Asian Hate meme that got millions of views, helped along by reposts from celebrities including Chrissy Teigen and Ellen Pompeo. Sophie Ota, Mr. Fetterman’s digital director, hired her at the end of July. The next few months, Ms. Henry said, were a blur. There were no days off. There was no time to check out what pundits were saying about the predicted “red wave,” and Ms. Henry and other staff members assiduously tuned out the news.Ms. Henry was also one of the only people on the campaign who had a car, which meant she was driving co-workers from one part of the state to the other, logging about 1,000 miles a week; the joke was that she had memorized the Pennsylvania turnpike, and knew all the best rest stops and coffee joints. (At one point the compliance officer, who checks on staffers’ expenses, looked at how many lattes she was buying and wanted to know who she was buying coffee for every day. They were just for her.)While she and Mr. Fetterman were often in different places, she would turn up at events early so she could shoot and post photos of the crowds, the lines, the people. At most events there was a tracker: a guy from the Oz team who monitored the goings-on. “That’s really common,” Ms. Henry said, “but this guy was there mostly to see if he could record John messing up words so they could make fun of John’s health. He recorded John’s kids too. There are ways to do this where you’re not rude and disrespectful.” Ms. Henry had a final word of contempt: “And he was using a camcorder.”Ms Henry has a fairly high online profile apart from her Fetterman connection. Her personal Instagram account (which has more than 80,000 followers) alternates information on how to get involved fighting racism and protecting abortion rights with selfies with rally pals like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker or the actress Kerry Washington. And Ms. Henry is not shy about supporting low-paying political work with a side hustle or two. She has teamed up not only with nonprofits that promote reproductive rights or protect democracy, but also with the occasional skin cream or vibrator manufacturer.Political tchotchkes and pop culture references — “just little references to people I look up to — fill her apartment. Her doormat reads, “In this house, we understand that basic human rights are not political issues and that science is a matter of fact not opinion. Welcome.” Taylor Swift merch is scattered around, and signed copies of books by Jimmy Carter and Gloria Steinem lie on the coffee table. Next to her door is a tote bag that reads: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Miss Elections.”She is trying to catch up on her real life after the blur of the past few months — answering emails, paying a speeding ticket and, perhaps most important, snagging tickets to the upcoming Taylor Swift concert. (She and Mr. Fetterman’s wife, Giselle, have “text bonded” over Taylor Swift, she said.) She is single and jobless, but like many of her ‌peers, not panicked.“I don’t know how this is going to play out, and I don’t necessarily want to know,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll have this, like, one big dream job forever.” She said she doesn’t think she wants to work on the Hill, though a recent Instagram post features her looking very Jackie O, mysteriously visiting the White House.And she is enjoying that first taste of celebrity. She said that she had recently been walking down the street and a man rolled down his window and yelled, “Are you Annie?” “I said ‘Yes,’ but kinda surprised/confused,” she texted to me. Then he shouted, “Thanks for all you did,” and sped off. More

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      Meet Kyrsten Sinema, Former Democrat of Arizona

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I hope I’ve succeeded in turning you into a World Cup fan. In the meantime, any choice words about, or for, Kyrsten Sinema, former Democrat of Arizona?Gail Collins: Well, Bret, you’ve at least turned me into a fan of the Times coverage of World Cup … activities. I also sorta like times like this when there are a billion different games on TV — not just soccer — and for a while every day, people don’t feel obliged to think about the rest of the world.Bret: Such as …Gail: Such as Kyrsten Sinema. Not a fan of hers from the get-go. Always seemed as if her compulsive effort to prove she wasn’t really a loyal Democrat was less about political independence and more about making wealthy donors happy.Bret: And this is on the theory that other politicians don’t care for what their wealthy donors think?Gail: But her official spin is that the two-party system is broken, and virtue lies in standing outside as an independent. I hate that kind of thinking.Bret: Whereas I love it. To me, the choice these days between Republicans and Democrats is about as appealing as a dinner invitation from Hannibal Lecter: Either you get your heart cut out or your brain removed, and both get served with a side of fava beans and a nice Chianti.Seriously, you don’t see any virtue to wanting to break this awful political duopoly?Gail: Virtue, for me, lies in fighting to make the two parties better. Pick the one that’s closest to your beliefs and get busy. Fight for the good local leaders and nominees.It’s way easier to just announce you’re superior to both of them and start your own group. The new gang probably won’t last long, and even if it does, its big achievement will most likely be to draw votes away from the major party candidates you most agree with.Never recovered from Ralph Nader’s Green Party candidacy for president in 2000 — a noble quest on the issues front that wound up costing Al Gore the job.Bret: A few years ago I would have agreed with you. But the Republican Party is pretty much irredeemable, while the Democrats are … just not the team I’m ever going to bat for.Gail: Come on in. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are waiting with open arms …Bret: Not so sure the Dems would ever want me in the first place: I heart Texas not taxes.As for Sinema, having her join someone like Maine’s Angus King as an independent shows it’s at least possible to have an alternative. I realize she has some very self-interested political reasons for doing so, since the move will spare her a primary challenge from the left if she runs for re-election in 2024. But it also reminds the party establishments that they shouldn’t take their centrist voters for granted. Now I wish a few sane-minded Republicans might go ahead and join her. Lisa Murkowski, hello?Gail: Hey, weird that of the two of us, I’m the one who thinks somebody should try to save the Republican Party.Bret: Raising the dead is beyond our powers, Gail.Gail: You know I don’t do foreign affairs, but I do feel obliged to ask you about Brittney Griner. Do you think Joe Biden did the right thing in making the trade that got her out of prison in Russia?Bret: Well, obviously I’m happy for Griner and her family that she’s back after her 10-month ordeal. And it says everything about the moral difference between the United States and Russia that they will take a harmless person hostage so they can trade her for one of their most notorious gangsters.On the other hand, I don’t understand why we didn’t prioritize the release of Paul Whelan, an American who has been wrongfully detained in a Russian prison for four years but doesn’t have the benefit of Griner’s celebrity. Nor should we forget Marc Fogel, a 61-year-old American teacher trapped in one of Putin’s prisons. My advice to the Biden administration is to tell Russia that $1 billion of its foreign reserves will be seized for every additional day these two stay in prison.Gail: Hope they’re listening.Bret: Oh, and speaking of dealing with gangsters — your thoughts on the current crop of legal cases against the former guy?Gail: I’ve never thought — and still don’t — that a former president is going to go to jail, even for stealing federal documents or rousing violent crowds to march on the Capitol.Bret: Agree. Alas.Gail: But I’ve always had a yearning that he might wind up bankrupt and, say, living in a Motel 6. Knew that was impossible — told myself to remember all the money he can make just on speaking tours or hosting parties at Mar-a-Lago.Bret: Pretty depressing how American culture has descended from “My Dinner With Andre” to that dinner with Kanye.Gail: Now, though, I’m sort of wondering. Is there going to be a market for this guy — chooser of terrible Senate candidates and breaker of bread with neo-Nazis — even just as a celebrity?Bret: I had nearly lost hope that the day would ever come, but I think we are finally watching Trump self-destruct before our eyes even faster than anyone else can destroy him. The midterm results seem to have persuaded a critical mass of Republican voters and politicians that he’s toxic for their chances. Dinner with his antisemitic pals seems to have been the icing on the cake — or whatever the exact opposite of “icing on the cake” is. Toxic algae in the cesspool?Gail: Rotting rutabaga in the refuse? Sorry, that doesn’t actually make much sense. I was seduced by all the R’s.Bret: Gail, would you mind if I rant for a minute?Gail: Bret, I love it when you rant. Even when I hate it.Bret: There’s a special place in hell for the Paul Ryan Republicans — let’s call them PRR’s. What I mean is a certain type of well-heeled, intellectually minded conservative who never liked Trump’s person or politics and who occasionally tut-tutted at his vilest excesses, but who consistently made excuses for him and his presidency while heaping scorn on Never Trumpers as a bunch of virtue-signaling prigs. These Trump-appeasing PRR’s were prepared to defend and vote for him again until the day after the midterms, when they finally realized that he was a titanic political liability.Gail: Well, I truly do love this rant. Go on.Bret: To adapt something Winston Churchill purportedly said to Neville Chamberlain after Munich in 1938: In 2016 conservatives were given the choice between electoral defeat and personal dishonor. They chose dishonor. In the end, they still got defeated.Gail: You know I’m going to ask who’s a Churchillian pick in the Republican world. For instance, Ron DeSantis was never a huge Trump pal, but I think that was only because he was eyeing his job.Bret: So, weirdly, I have much less of a moral objection to those Republicans like DeSantis who liked Trump to begin with, whether because they agreed with most of his policies or appreciated his thumb-in-the-eye personality, or both. At least they came about their support for Trump honestly, without convoluted rationalizations and self-exculpations and various suspensions of disbelief. Of course I don’t agree with them, but I long ago stopped disdaining them.Speaking of disdain, any views on all of these disclosures about Twitter’s speech policies?Gail: Is there any way we can make it illegal for the richest man in the world to own one of the largest social networks? Guess not, huh?Bret: Probably not, though I doubt Musk will profit from the acquisition.Gail: Definitely felt sorry for the Twitter workers who discovered that Musk was putting beds in their work space. And his wild political seesawing would ruin the influence of anybody who wasn’t closing in on a quarter of a trillion dollars.But here we are, and I don’t have any great strategy for making him behave in a more responsible way when it comes to things like … keeping violent hatemongers off his platform. Do you have one?Bret: Violent hatemongers aside, I thought it was pretty appalling to see the lengths to which pre-Musk Twitter went to ban legitimate news stories, like The New York Post’s scoop about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and to downplay views that went against conventional wisdom, like the Stanford professor of medicine who warned about the ill-effects of lockdowns, and to coordinate its decisions with the Biden team — and then mislead the public about what it was doing. Even progressives like Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley in Congress, warned Twitter about its anti-free speech attitude, which is entirely to his credit and not at all to theirs.Gail: Bret scores …Bret: I guess the point is, we don’t want giant corporations banning political speech, whether it comes from the left or the right, and that goes especially for companies whose entire business model relies on the principle of free speech. For exposing this, I have to give Musk credit.Gail: We’ll pick this up again, Bret. Somehow I suspect Elon Musk will follow us into the new year.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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      What Are the Politics of Elon Musk? It’s Complicated.

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      Elon Musk has tweeted about political topics regularly since taking over Twitter, often belittling some liberal causes. But what he stands for remains largely unclear.He has called himself an independent and a centrist, yet “economically right of center, maybe.” He has said he was until recently a supporter of only Democrats and voted for President Biden. He’s encouraged people to vote Republican, which he said he did for the first time this year. Last year, he once even declared himself indifferent about politics, saying he’d rather stay out of it altogether.Elon Musk, ever a bundle of contradictions and inconsistencies, has long made his politics tricky to pin down. To many of his critics, though, his relentless flurry of tweets in the six weeks since he took over Twitter has exposed his true conservative bent, and intensified their fears that he would make the social network more susceptible to right-wing misinformation.And at times, he’s made it hard to argue with that. He has said he’d welcome former President Donald J. Trump back on Twitter; suggested that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was lying about the attack at their home that left him hospitalized; and reinstated accounts that have trafficked in offensive ethnic stereotypes and bigotry, including for the artist formerly known as Kanye West. (Mr. Musk later suspended Mr. West’s account again after the rapper-entrepreneur posted an image of a swastika.)His copious tweeting has generated huge amounts of attention. In a 24-hour period late this week, he tweeted more than 40 times, often with little rhyme or reason. He criticized the Biden administration’s deal with Russia that freed Brittney Griner, the Women’s National Basketball Association star. He asked Elton John to clarify his complaint about misinformation flourishing unchecked on Twitter. At times, Mr. Musk was acting like Twitter’s in-house customer service representative, boasting about new features and improved functions.And maybe that is a big part of the point — improving the image of his new $44 billion property, which he has said repeatedly is in dire financial straits.Yet Mr. Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, continues to defy easy political categorization. His views have been described as libertarian, though these days his politics seem more contrarian than anything else. He is more clear about what he is against than what he is for.It’s true Mr. Musk certainly sounds a lot like a Republican — and, sometimes, a lot like Mr. Trump — with his missives on Twitter against “woke” politics and Covid restrictions, his attacks on “elite” media and his efforts to draw attention to allegations that Hunter Biden profited from his father’s political clout.More on Elon Musk’s Twitter TakeoverAn Established Pattern: Firing people. Talking of bankruptcy. Telling workers to be “hard core.” Twitter isn’t the first company that witnessed Elon Musk use those tactics.Rivals Emerge: Sensing an opportunity, new start-ups and other social platforms are racing to dethrone Twitter and capitalize on the chaos of its new ownership under Mr. Musk.The ‘Twitter Files’: Mr. Musk and Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist, set off an intense debate with a release of internal Twitter documents regarding a 2020 decision to restrict posts linking to a report in the New York Post about Hunter Biden.Hard Fork: The Times podcast looks at Mr. Musk’s two-day clash with Apple, which he had accused of trying to sabotage Twitter before saying the “misunderstanding” had been resolved.But where Mr. Musk has seemed most in line with the G.O.P. of Mr. Trump is in the tenor of his political commentary, which if anything seems more spiritedly anti-left than ideologically pro-right. While he has not been shy about sharing his disdain for many Democrats, his enthusiasm for Republicans has been more muted. He has stressed repeatedly that his problems are with extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.“To be clear, my historical party affiliation has been Independent, with an actual voting history of entirely Democrat until this year,” he wrote on Twitter the day before the midterm election. “And I’m open to the idea of voting Democrat again in the future.”As with many people who describe themselves as politically independent now, the hostility Mr. Musk harbors toward Democrats appears to have drawn him closer to the Republican Party over the last few years. He considers himself as part of the “center 80% of people, who wish to learn, laugh & engage in reasoned debate.”He has eagerly encouraged his followers to weigh in with their views on the country’s culture wars and traded tweets with some of the right’s favorite punching bags, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. When she criticized his plan to charge Twitter users $8 a month to have a verified account with one of the social media service’s signature blue check marks — “Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that ‘free speech’ is actually a $8/mo subscription plan,” she wrote — he dismissed her.“Your feedback is appreciated, now pay $8,” Mr. Musk shot back.Many of his recent tweets have had that kind of “own the libs” tone, the shorthand on the right for when conservatives think they’ve deftly, often sarcastically, swatted down a liberal. A couple of weeks ago, he posted video on Twitter of a closet full of T-shirts with the slogan “#stay woke” that he said he had found at the social media company’s headquarters. Then he followed up with a tweet that linked to a Justice Department report that undercut one of the central narratives of the mass protests against police brutality: that Michael Brown, a Black teenager killed by the police in Ferguson, Mo., had his hands raised when a white officer shot him.On occasion, his remarks have raised concerns that he has planted himself firmly among right-wing conspiracy theorists. When he tweeted about the attack on Ms. Pelosi’s husband, he shared the unfounded claim that there was “a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” He later deleted the tweet, which linked to an article from a fringe website.He also said he would support Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for president in 2024, though his endorsement was not especially resounding. He merely replied “Yes” when someone on Twitter asked him. Mr. DeSantis, a hard-line conservative, would be an odd choice for someone who professes to want centrist governance in Washington.Mr. Musk has always claimed his concerns with Twitter’s previous management were about the ability of a small group of the company’s employees whom he described as “far left” to censor content. And over the past week, he has cheered on tweets about internal communications before he took over. The communications, which were given to two writers who have posted their findings on Twitter, calling them the Twitter Files, showed how the company went about deciding what information got suppressed.It’s been a mixed bag of revelations. Some showed how Twitter employees made it harder to see tweets from a Stanford University professor who warned about how Covid lockdowns could harm children — a view many public health experts have come around to accept well after the fact. Other documents show how more conventional, conspiracy-theory-embracing conservatives were shut down, like Dan Bongino, the radio host who was one of the biggest amplifiers of lies about the 2020 election.Mr. Musk has not professed to have any profound attachment to Republican policies, though, which is consistent with his posture before taking over Twitter.He has been highly critical of climate change deniers and said he’s proud of how Tesla forced the rest of the automobile industry to embrace electric vehicles. In 2020, he revealed that he’d spoken to Mr. Trump numerous times about the importance of developing sustainable energy, which the former president dismissed in favor of traditional fossil fuel-based sources. And Mr. Musk quit Mr. Trump’s business councils after the administration pulled out of the Paris climate accord.In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, he described his politics as “middle-of-the-road.” “I’m socially very liberal. And then economically right of center, maybe, or center. I don’t know. I’m obviously not a communist.”His political giving supports that claim. According to the Federal Election Commission, which reports spending in federal but not state races, he has donated just shy of $1 million since 2003 to candidates as conservative as former President George W. Bush and as liberal as Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat. More recently, in 2020, he donated to senators of both political parties — including Chris Coons and Gary Peters, both Democrats, and Susan Collins and John Cornyn, both Republicans.Often, it seems, his posts are motivated by personal pique, not political philosophy. He’s criticized the Biden administration, for instance, as “not the friendliest” and for excluding Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle maker, from a White House summit on zero-emission vehicles in August 2021. His speculation on the reason for the exclusion: General Motors and the other car companies invited are union companies; Tesla is not. “Seems to be controlled by unions,” he complained at the time.Many of the views he has espoused on Twitter over the last two years have become popular in today’s Republican Party but are hardly exclusive to card-carrying Republicans. His criticism of progressives he views as overly censorious and sanctimonious is a sentiment many on the left have expressed. And his public condemnation of strict Covid containment measures in 2020 channeled what would become a growing skepticism of widespread public health restrictions. Though he was more exercised about them than most. “Fascist,” he once declared.Often, his tweets can seem to imply he leans in one direction when it’s just as likely that he is trying to court controversy. How to interpret, for instance, a post last week of what he said was an image of his bedside table? It had a revolver on it and a musket in a wooden case decorated with an image of George Washington crossing the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War.“Greetings, I’m Musket, Elon Musket,” he wrote.A few days later, he sounded pleased with himself as he remarked on the way Twitter had changed since his purchase was completed in October. “So many interesting posts on Twitter these days!” More

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      Donald Trump Is Weak. And Powerful. Now What?

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      Everyone knows by now how many Trump candidates lost this year, especially the higher-profile, more hard-core ones who claimed the 2020 election was stolen. Kari Lake lost in Arizona. Doug Mastriano lost in Pennsylvania. Most of the notable pro-Trump secretary of state candidates lost. The Senate candidates, too. The Democrats even added on in Georgia on Tuesday, with the same, central animating force behind each development: that Donald Trump forced his party to run a candidate, Herschel Walker, who lost, weakening Mr. Trump and the party — a mutual descent.What everyone does not know by now is what to do with Mr. Trump’s third candidacy for president. What is this campaign? He’s a candidate without opponents, who has made less frequent public appearances since his announcement than he did before, whose party’s other notable members seem to want to move on but often still don’t really say so publicly. The 2022 incarnation of Mr. Trump is like some kind of trap: He keeps losing and forcing others to go with him, in part because of his and their nature and in part because without him, Republicans might not quite be able to win, either.Looming over every aspect of Mr. Trump’s current campaign is the simple question: Will this be like before? That has a technical, outcome-driven dimension (will he win and become president?) and a more cultural, psychological one (will he dominate American life, and will each day’s news turn on the actions and emotions of one person cascading through society?). Politics is about a lot more than just the outcomes of elections; a long time separates us from the 2024 election, and each day has the potential to influence the ones after. Something can be weak and a considerable force in politics or culture at the same time; someone can be losing and influential at the same time. These things are compatible.The country spent nearly two years hearing about voting machine conspiracies and the possibility of subversion in future elections. Voters rejected all that in many cases. What did the last two years mean for Mr. Trump and these candidates? For all of us? Nobody got anything of real value out of conspiracy theories and Trump recriminations. Not the Republicans, certainly, and that’s been the tenor of much post-election coverage and conversation — the way Mr. Trump’s choices produced certain outcomes that hurt the Republican Party.“The people that were on the crazy side, they’ve kind of been sent off to the frontier,” Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, told Semafor this week. “If you’re denying the last election or any election, I think that balloon has been popped.” Even so, it’s no great gift to the country as a whole that candidates ran for two years on suspicion about normal election practices or advancing conspiracy theories, which people heard and internalized — a more intangible result with effects harder to measure.Since Mr. Trump’s announcement for president, as you have also heard by now, he’s repeatedly demanded that the 2020 election be redone, even straight up saying that there could be a “termination” of the Constitution. Two nights before Thanksgiving, he ate dinner with a white supremacist and Kanye West, who can’t stop saying antisemitic things. These events can also be viewed through this dual dynamic of weakness and influence. In the most basic horse race political sense, Mr. Trump’s actions almost certainly hurt him; more Republicans have criticized him, and we have multiple election cycles of results suggesting that people reject his choices. This weakens him. But he still has influence, and through this one dinner, for instance, many, many people heard about an extreme racist they probably never heard about before.In 2022, even when Mr. Trump seems to be fading politically, nobody has conclusively resolved the question of how to deal with him — when to step in and when to ignore, how to measure one action against another. The central issue flows from an understanding that most people in this country seem to share, however they feel about him: Mr. Trump will not be stopped from endlessly wanting things. And he will not confine himself to the ways in which a president or public person is supposed to behave, in pursuit of this endless array of wants and needs.Faced with this uncontrollability, people fall into complex emotional dynamics of how to react to Mr. Trump — to care or not care, how to demonstrate caring, to ignore him or this or that, to never ignore it, how far to go, when to walk away, when to stay, when someone else’s silence becomes unacceptable. How is a person supposed to be? What can a single person do? What are our duties and obligations? These questions animate centuries of literature and philosophy, but Mr. Trump’s chemical mix of emotion and power turns them into an hourly concern. He will not change; you can. This is an exhausting texture of American life in this era, even now.It’s almost hard to remember what the first campaign was like, though it, too, started with a weak hand. Mr. Trump defeated a splintered field with, initially, mere pluralities of votes. And you were constantly finding out how weak American institutions were: the thinness of political belief among Republican politicians, the inability of different institutions to do anything about Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the true incentives of cable news, how game people were to go along with, for instance, an attack on Mexicans or Gold Star parents. Practically overnight, Republican and conservative groups went from opposing Mr. Trump to caving in to the reality of his candidacy to emphatically supporting him. This general dynamic repeated again and again for years.Seven years in, one of the more disorienting aspects of the Trump era is the way there’s never any sense of resolution. The entire population hangs in a kind of eternal suspense, without past or future. Since the week of Jan. 6, 2021, without Mr. Trump’s ceaseless presence on the major social platforms, things have been somewhat different. But who knows where he goes from here? He might return to Twitter. He might really be fading. He might lose to Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor. He might not accept a loss to anyone, at any point. He might be president again. Could we really revert to the full chaotic, exhausting, late-2010s immersion in Mr. Trump’s emotions?The need to know how it ends with Mr. Trump, what will happen next and how people respond to him, can obscure the current situation. And over the past year, it’s become clearer how power and weakness and influence can exist in one space and in one person. In this dark environment, Mr. Trump can lose an election and still change American life indefinitely.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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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      Christian Walker Lashes Out On Twitter After Father’s Georgia Senate Loss

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      Christian Walker, the estranged son of Herschel Walker, unleashed a string of fiery tweets late Tuesday after his father, a Republican, was defeated in Georgia’s Senate race. He lashed out at both his father and Republican leadership, accusing them of betraying him and the party. A right-wing influencer with half a million followers on Instagram and another 250,000 on TikTok, Mr. Walker called his father a “backstabber” and claimed the Republican Party cynically made him their candidate mainly “because he was the same skin color as his opponent.” He also wrote that former President Donald J. Trump courted the elder Mr. Walker for months, “DEMANDING that he run.” The first tweet was posted just four minutes before The Associated Press called the runoff for Senator Raphael Warnock, the elder Mr. Walker’s Democratic opponent. In all, the younger Mr. Walker posted eight times, ending with a tribute to his mother, saying he was “so happy she can rest now, and this bull crap is over with.” The younger Mr. Walker rose to national prominence in October, after being critical of his father following a series of scandals — including that he had three children that he had not previously mentioned publicly and that he’d paid for an abortion for a former girlfriend and encouraged her to have a second abortion, despite being staunchly pro-life (a second unnamed woman later said he paid for her to have an abortion, too). Mr. Walker denied the abortion allegations and, after his son’s October outburst, tweeted: “I LOVE my son no matter what.”But he has been largely quiet since then, a silence he attributed on Tuesday night to his desire not to “swing voters to Warnock.” In an impromptu session Tuesday night on Twitter Spaces, the social media site’s live audio platform, the younger Mr. Walker said that with the Georgia contest decided, he could speak freely.The wide-ranging monologue was delivered to more than 1,300 listeners, with Mr. Walker repeatedly saying he was a longtime supporter of Mr. Trump. But he accused the former president of incorrectly assuming that his father would win because “he’s Georgia royalty” without realizing “he’s not a good candidate.” He said that his preferred candidate for the 2024 presidential race would be Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Mr. Walker attacked Senator Lindsey Graham, saying that both Democrats and Republicans disliked him and that his father should not have campaigned with him, which he did multiple times throughout the race. He also recounted his own surreal experience of learning that he has three half-siblings through reports in the national media and feeling outraged at his father’s dishonesty. “He would lie to the campaign and then the journalists would come out and find the story,” said Mr. Walker, who lives in Miami. “It was just absurd.”Chase Oliver, the Libertarian candidate whose losing bid in the Senate race in November helped push the contest into a runoff, called in to wish the younger Mr. Walker the best and said: “I’m glad this is over for you.” He also proposed ranked-choice voting in Georgia and said that if Herschel Walker had reached out to him directly, he might have been able to encourage his supporters — he earned about 80,000 general election votes — to vote for him.In a bizarre moment, a person identifying himself as Chi Ossé, a sitting member of the New York City Council, called into the audio platform to tell Mr. Walker he was a “huge fan” despite being a “radical leftist.” In response to a question about his own political ambitions, the younger Mr. Walker laughed, saying he would “never” run for office. More

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      Inside the Face-Off Between Russia and a Small Internet Access Firm

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      The cat-and-mouse experience of Proton, a Swiss company, shows what it’s like to be targeted by Russian censors — and what it takes to fight back.After Moscow erected a digital barricade in March, blocking access to independent news sites and social media platforms to hide information about its unfolding invasion of Ukraine, many Russians looked for a workaround. One reliable route they found came from a small Swiss company based nearly 2,000 miles away.The company, Proton, provides free software that masks a person’s identity and location online. That gives a user in Russia access to the open web by making it appear that the person is logging in from the Netherlands, Japan or the United States. A couple of weeks after the internet blockade, about 850,000 people inside Russia used Proton each day, up from fewer than 25,000.That is, until the end of March, when the Russian government found a way to block Proton, too.Targeting Proton was the opening salvo of a continuing back-and-forth battle, pitting a team of about 25 engineers against a country embarking on one of the most aggressive censorship campaigns in recent memory.Working from a Geneva office where the company keeps its name off the building directory, Proton has spent nine pressure-packed months repeatedly tweaking its technology to avoid Russian blocks, only to be countered again by government censors in Moscow. Some employees took Proton off their social media profiles out of concern that they would be targeted personally.The high-stakes chess match mirrors what is playing out with growing frequency in countries facing coups, wars and authoritarian rule, where restricting the internet is a tool of repression. The blocks drive citizens to look for workarounds. Engineers at companies like Proton think up new ways for those people to secretly reach the open web. And governments, in turn, seek out new technical tricks to plug leaks.The digital censorship battle is reaching “an inflection point,” said Grant Baker, a research analyst for technology and democracy at Freedom House, which recently reported that internet censorship globally had reached a new high in 2022. While Russia has spent years working on a more closely controlled, sovereign internet, the controls imposed after the war are “a stark contrast” to anything Moscow had ever done before, Mr. Baker said.Companies rarely discuss being targeted by an authoritarian government out of fear of escalating the conflict. But Andy Yen, Proton’s founder and chief executive, said that after a period of trying to keep its “head down,” Proton wanted to raise awareness about the increasing sophistication of governments, in Russia and elsewhere, to block citizens from reaching the open web and the need for technologists, companies and governments to push back.Proton’s account provides a rare inside look at what it’s like to be entangled in Russia’s censorship net as President Vladimir V. Putin tries to suppress information about the war and mounting battlefield losses in Ukraine.Dozens of VPN services have been blocked inside Russia, but Proton, perhaps best known for its encrypted email service, seemed to receive extra attention from the authorities. In June, Russia’s internet regulator labeled the company a “threat.”“We’re gearing up for a long fight,” Mr. Yen said in an interview at the company’s office. “Everybody hopes this will have a happy ending, but it’s not guaranteed. We don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, in fact, but you keep going because if we don’t do it, then maybe nobody else will.”The VPN team at Proton, whose virtual private network gives users a way around government internet restrictions.Aurélien Bergot for The New York TimesProton, which makes money by selling $10-a-month subscriptions for extra features, was founded in 2014 by a team of young engineers from the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, the institute outside Geneva where the worldwide web was created. Their main project was working on the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, a $5 billion instrument built to unlock some of the world’s biggest scientific mysteries.After the disclosures of mass digital surveillance that were made by Edward Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence contractor, Mr. Yen and a few colleagues created an email service that encrypts messages so they cannot be intercepted, simplifying use of a technology that had been too complicated for many people. It became popular with activists, journalists and privacy-conscious consumers.The State of the WarStriking Deep in Russia: In its most brazen attack into Russian territory, Ukraine used drones to strike two military bases hundreds of miles inside Russia, showing an ability to take the war beyond its borders.Weaponizing Winter: Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure have left millions without power, heat or water as the snow begins to fall. The Daily looks at what life is like in Ukraine as winter sets in.Russian Oil Price Cap: The E.U. agreed on a $60-a-barrel limit for Russian oil, the latest effort by Western allies to try to deprive Moscow of revenue to finance its war in Ukraine. Here’s how it will work.Mr. Yen, who grew up in Taiwan, said the threat of Chinese aggression looming over the island’s democracy had shaped his worldview. Privacy and fighting censorship were core to Proton’s mission from the start, he said, and the company seemed to almost relish confronting authoritarianism.In 2017, after several governments, including Turkey and Russia, temporarily blocked access to the email service, Proton created its virtual private network, or VPN, a technology used to sidestep internet restrictions.The technology behind a VPN traces back to the 1990s. It is a relatively basic tool used most commonly by people trying to pirate movies or watch a sports broadcast available only in another country. Yet in recent years the systems, which are easy to use and often difficult to detect, have become a vital tool for circumventing internet restrictions.The Kremlin spent years building the legal foundation and technological abilities to control the internet more closely. Yet even as Russia blocked certain websites and interrupted access to Twitter last year, few thought it would outright block major social media platforms and independent news websites. While television has always been heavily censored, the internet had been less restricted.The crackdown in March interrupted communications and commerce for many otherwise apolitical Russians, said Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel at Access Now, a group focused on online speech-related issues. VPN use was already high among tech-savvy Russians, she said, but the blocks and news of harsh punishment for online protest led even more casual internet users to seek ways around the restrictions.Demand for VPNs surged in Russia, with downloads in March jumping 2,692 percent from February, said Simon Migliano, head of research for the review site Top10VPN.com. Proton was a popular choice, he said, hovering among the 10 most popular products despite being slower than some other choices.Since then, VPNs have become a way of life for many. Roskomsvoboda, a Russian civil society group focused on internet freedom, estimates that a quarter of the Russian population is using one.“To simply read independent news or to post a picture, you had to open your VPN,” said Viktoriia Safonova, 25, who now delivers food by bike in Sweden after she fled Russia in July. Both she and her husband were racked by anxiety after the invasion. Finding independent news and information was difficult. Workarounds often weren’t reliable.“If the one you’re using gets blocked, you have to find another VPN,” Ms. Safonova said.She recalled the paranoia that set in as new internet restrictions and surveillance took effect. She and her husband, Artem Nesterenko, worried about whether they could criticize the war online, even on international social networks. He recalled how the police had come to check on their building after he scrawled “No to war” in the elevator. He feared being arrested for things he posted online.As people turned to VPN services to avoid the blocks, Proton struggled to keep up. Over a weekend in March, engineers scrambled to buy and configure more than 20 new servers to avert a crash of its entire network.At the same time in Moscow, censors were at work trying to patch holes in the government’s internet controls.The first block that took down Proton, at the end of March, was a technically basic interruption that company engineers quickly overcame, but they figured more powerful attempts loomed.The battle took on a “Spy vs. Spy” dynamic in Proton’s headquarters. Mr. Yen said a network of people within the government, telecommunications firms and civil society groups had helped Proton operate in Russia, providing access to local networks and sharing intelligence about how the censorship system worked. But those contacts began to go dark as the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent intensified.At the start of June, censors struck again.The service, which had more than 1.4 million daily users inside Russia at this point, collapsed as employees were going about their day. Complaints from Russian users poured into Proton’s customer service email. The company concluded that the government had deployed more sophisticated software that could filter through all internet traffic to identify when a person was trying to connect to Proton’s VPN service. Russia had used similar technology to block Twitter and other social media sites.Around this time, the company noticed a suspicious spike in negative reviews of its service in the Apple and Google app stores, reducing its search ranking.“They had clearly studied us,” said Antonio Cesarano, a senior engineer working on the VPN project.Some at Proton questioned whether they should continue the fight with Russia. It was costing millions of dollars and slowing down development of other products. But after Proton faced criticism in 2021, when the French police obtained the IP address of a climate activist using its email service, backing down from Russia could have added another bruise to the company’s reputation.Over about two weeks in June, Proton created yet another workaround that bounced internet traffic to servers in different geographical areas faster than censors could track. It was a technically complex move that would take considerable resources for Russia to counter.The fix worked — for about six weeks.Mr. Yen was interrupted during a staff meeting in mid-July with news that Russian censors had come up with an even more elaborate block. A corporate chart from the time shows use dropping off a cliff. Russian engineers had identified what is known as an authentication “handshake,” the vital moment when Proton’s VPN connection gets established before reaching the wider web. Blocking the link made Proton’s service essentially unusable.“We had no idea what was happening and how they were doing it,” Mr. Cesarano said.By August, after working around the clock for days to find a fix, Proton acknowledged defeat and pulled its app from Russia. The company has spent the months since then developing a new architecture that makes its VPN service harder to identify because it looks more like a regular website to censorship software scanning a country’s internet traffic. Proton has been successfully testing the system in Iran, where Proton has seen a sharp increase in VPN use during recent political demonstrations.In Russia, Proton has reintroduced its apps using the new system. Mr. Yen acknowledged that it probably wasn’t a long-term fix. He has confidence in the new technology, but figures Russian engineers will eventually figure out a new way to push back, and the game will continue. More

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      Facebook Failed to Stop Ads Threatening Election Workers

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      The ads, submitted by researchers, were rejected by YouTube and TikTok.Facebook says it does not allow content that threatens serious violence. But when researchers submitted ads threatening to “lynch,” “murder” and “execute” election workers around Election Day this year, the company’s largely automated moderation systems approved many of them.Out of the 20 ads submitted by researchers containing violent content, 15 were approved by Facebook, according to a new test published by Global Witness, a watchdog group, and New York University’s Cybersecurity for Democracy. Researchers deleted the approved ads before they were published.Ten of the test ads were submitted in Spanish. Facebook approved six of those ads, compared with nine of the 10 ads in English.TikTok and YouTube rejected all the ads and suspended the accounts that attempted to submit them, the researchers said.The tests underscored the challenges that social networks face in moderating increasingly partisan and violent content around elections, especially as poll workers are facing additional threats from election deniers and far-right extremists. The Justice Department and other federal agencies warned ahead of this year’s midterm elections that threats against election workers had surged.In a statement, a spokesman for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said it later disabled several accounts that had submitted the ads. The company also said that ads continue to be reviewed after they go live.“This is a small sample of ads that are not representative of what people see on our platforms,” the spokesman said in a statement. “Content that incites violence against election workers or anyone else has no place on our apps, and recent reporting has made clear that Meta’s ability to deal with these issues effectively exceeds that of other platforms.”The research adds to previous tests conducted by the same groups, including one this year in which 20 ads were submitted containing political misinformation. In that test, Facebook approved only two of the misleading ads in English from an account in the United States, while TikTok approved about 90 percent of them. YouTube suspended the account that tried to submit the ads.But this round used more overt language that tested Facebook’s largely automated moderating system. Those included direct threats of violence, which were sourced from real statements by election deniers and other far-right extremists in the United States. One ad, which was approved by Facebook, read: “We are going to kill you all.” Another ad, which threatened to abuse children, was also approved.“It was really quite shocking to see the results,” said Damon McCoy, an associate professor at N.Y.U. “I thought a really simple keyword search would have flagged this for manual review.”In a statement, researchers also said they wanted to see social networks like Facebook increase content moderation efforts and offer more transparency around the moderation actions they take.“The fact that YouTube and TikTok managed to detect the death threats and suspend our account, whereas Facebook permitted the majority of the ads to be published shows that what we are asking is technically possible,” they wrote. More