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    Big Tech and the Fed

    Some tech companies’ earnings are flagging, in what could be a positive sign for the Federal Reserve.Still big.Noah Berger/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat tech earnings say about the economy The long-booming bottom lines of major tech companies are all of a sudden smaller than expected. That might be a good thing. Big Tech sailed through the pandemic with its profits mostly intact. The fact that some firms’ results are now flagging could be a positive sign for the Federal Reserve, which is trying to engineer a slowdown as it fights the nation’s worst bout of inflation in four decades.The big question for investors, and perhaps the Fed, is whether the profits of Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and the other tech giants, along with corporate America in general, have fallen enough.Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, kicked off what appears to be a disappointing round of quarterly reports for the U.S.’s largest tech companies yesterday. Meta will release its results this afternoon, with Apple and Amazon rounding out Big Tech’s earnings announcements tomorrow.Microsoft’s profits, while below expectations, were still up. Sales of its signature software products, like Office, rose 13 percent. Its cloud services were up 40 percent. And LinkedIn, the professional social network Microsoft bought in 2016, grew 26 percent from a year ago, continuing to benefit from the tightest job market in decades.Alphabet’s sales rose 13 percent. In another good sign for the economy, the jump was driven by better-than-expected sales in its core Google search engine business, while results were mixed elsewhere. A jump in expenses and an exit from its Russian-related businesses caused profits to slump 14 percent.The results were positive enough for investors. Alphabet’s shares rose nearly 5 percent on the earnings news to $110. Microsoft’s shares jumped $10, or nearly 4 percent, to $262. Executives at both companies said they saw evidence of a weaker economy. “We are not immune to what is happening in the macro broadly,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said on a call with analysts. Alphabet’s chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, told analysts that a pullback in spending by some advertisers reflected “uncertainty about a number of factors.”Few are betting that the earnings reports will change the Fed’s approach. Its policymakers are meeting this week, and they are widely expected to continue raising benchmark interest rates. While central bankers “will likely acknowledge a recent weakening in economic momentum, the Fed will likely feel the need to appear resolute in battling inflation until there are clear signs that it is abating,” wrote David Kelly, the chief global strategist of J.P. Morgan Asset Management, in a note to clients earlier this week.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Kraken, the crypto exchange, is under investigation for possible sanctions violations. The Treasury Department is looking into whether Kraken illegally allowed users in Iran and elsewhere to buy and sell digital tokens. Shares of Coinbase, a larger crypto exchange, plunged yesterday after reports that the S.E.C. was investigating whether it allowed trading in unregistered securities. Cathie Wood’s Ark funds reportedly dumped Coinbase shares yesterday for the first time this year.Antitrust legislation aimed at Big Tech may be off the table for now. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, told donors at a Capitol Hill fund-raiser yesterday that the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which he had promised to bring to a vote this summer, lacks the support needed to get it to the Senate floor, Bloomberg reported. The bill’s bipartisan backers have been pressuring Schumer to act fast, before midterm elections that could change the balance of power in Congress.One America News, once a dependable Trump promoter, is struggling to survive. The network is being dropped by major carriers and faces a wave of defamation lawsuits for its outlandish stories about the 2020 election. OAN’s most recent blow is from Verizon, which will stop carrying the network on its Fios television service this week. It is now available to only a few thousand people who subscribe to regional cable providers.Teva Pharmaceuticals reaches a tentative $4.25 billion settlement over opioids. The proposed settlement, which is with some 2,500 local governments, states and tribes, would end thousands of lawsuits against one of the largest producers of the painkillers during the height of the opioid epidemic.Florida’s largest utility secretly funded a website that attacked its critics. Florida Power & Light bankrolled and controlled The Capitolist, a news site aimed at Florida lawmakers, through intermediaries from an Alabama consulting firm, an investigation by The Miami Herald found. The site claimed to be independent, but it advocated rate hikes and legislative favors in efforts that were directed by top executives at the utility.BlackRock downshifts on E.S.G. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, slashed its support for shareholder proposals on environmental and social issues this year, backing only 24 percent of such resolutions in the proxy season that ended in June, down from 43 percent in the previous period. The firm, which has long led the conscious investing movement, said this year’s proposals were “less supportable” and cited new regulatory guidance that opened the door to a broader range of policy-related proposals.The firm has criticized overly “prescriptive” resolutions. In a May memo, BlackRock signaled that Russia’s war in Ukraine was straining global energy supplies and shifting its calculations. “Many climate-related shareholder proposals sought to dictate the pace of companies’ energy transition plans despite continued consumer demand,” wrote the firm’s global head of investment stewardship, Sandy Boss. She noted that shareholders generally supported fewer environmental and social proposals this year as well, voting for 27 percent of resolutions, down from 36 percent in the previous proxy period.Opposition to E.S.G. is mounting. The environmental, social and governance investment push has been labeled “woke capitalism” by critics and is under fire from executives like Tesla’s Elon Musk, major investors like Bill Ackman and Republican politicians. In a speech yesterday, former Vice President Mike Pence, a possible 2024 hopeful, said that big government and big business were together advancing a “pernicious woke agenda.”E.S.G. supporters say critics may have a point. Andrew Behar, C.E.O. of the shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, agrees that many supposed E.S.G. investments don’t reflect true sustainability — with ever more capital directed toward the idea and many funds failing to live up to their promises. Behar argued that more corporate disclosures — which anti-E.S.G. groups oppose — would help to ensure that green investing actually works. He argues that critics also ignore a key financial incentive driving investor interest: knowing and lowering the costs of environmental issues throughout company operations, including risks from changing weather and the transition to more sustainable models. “We don’t have an E.S.G. problem,” Behar told DealBook. “We have a naming problem.”“I quit Starbucks. I had to. I just didn’t feel like that was justifiable. It’s like a small car payment.” — Fontaine Weyman, a 43-year-old songwriter from Charleston, S.C., on changing her coffee habits. Many Americans are dealing with the fastest inflation of their adult lives across a broad range of goods and services.Instagram tries to explain itself Instagram responded yesterday to criticism from some of its most popular users, including Kylie Jenner, about new features that made it more like its top rival, TikTok, the fast-growing video app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s head, said that it was experimenting with several changes, and that he knew users were unhappy. “It’s not yet good,” he said of some of the tweaks in a video post. He stressed Instagram’s commitment to photos, the app’s original focus, but said, “I’m going to be honest, I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time.”Reels, a short-video product, is one of the six main investment priorities at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, according to an internal memo last month from Chris Cox, the company’s chief product officer. Cox said that users had doubled the amount of time they spent on Reels year over year, and that Meta would prioritize boosting ads in Reels “as quickly as possible.” Last week, Instagram announced that almost all videos in the app would be posted as Reels.The changes come as Meta heads into a new phase. Mark Zuckerberg, its founder and chief executive, has cut costs, reshuffled his leadership team and made clear that low-performing employees will be let go, writes The Times’s Mike Isaac. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said on a call late last month. In recent months, profit at Meta has fallen and revenue has slowed as the company has spent lavishly on augmented and virtual reality projects, and as the economic slowdown has hurt its advertising business.The high-profile complaints about Instagram’s revamp started in recent days, when Kylie Jenner, the beauty mogul with 361 million Instagram followers, shared an image on the site that read: “Make Instagram Instagram again. (stop trying to be tiktok i just want to see cute photos of my friends.) Sincerely, everyone.”“PRETTY PLEASE,” Kim Kardashian, Jenner’s half sister and the seventh-most-followed Instagram user, echoed in a later post. Yesterday, Chrissy Teigen, a model and author with 39 million followers, responded to Mosseri in a tweet, saying, “we don’t wanna make videos Adam lol.”Companies have reason to listen when social media stars speak up, writes The Times’s Kalley Huang. In 2018, after Snapchat overhauled its interface, Jenner tweeted: “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me….” Within a week, Snap, the app’s parent company, had lost $1.3 billion in market value.THE SPEED READ DealsThe activist investor Elliott Management reportedly has a stake in Paypal and is pushing it to cut costs faster. (WSJ, Bloomberg)Twitter shareholders will be asked to vote on Elon Musk’s potential acquisition in September. (Bloomberg)PolicyThe Senate advanced an industrial policy bill that includes more than $52 billion in subsidies for chip makers building U.S. plants. (NYT)The short seller Carson Block is being sued over a $14 million award from the S.E.C. that raised questions about the agency’s whistle-blower program. (Bloomberg)After Apple launched a “buy now, pay later” service, the top U.S. consumer finance regulator warned Big Tech about undermining competition in the sector. (FT)A federal judge ruled that Uber doesn’t have to offer wheelchair-accessible cars in every city. (The Verge)Best of the restCredit Suisse, which reported larger second-quarter losses than expected, replaced its C.E.O. (FT)Customers are paying billions of dollars in fees for “free” checking. (Bloomberg)The default settings in Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft products that you should turn off right away. (NYT)This man sells mud to Major League Baseball. (NYT)“The Case of the $5,000 Springsteen Tickets” (NYT)R.I.P., Choco Taco. (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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    Has Democrat John Fetterman found a way to beat the reality-TV politician?

    Has Democrat John Fetterman found a way to beat the reality-TV politician?The Pennsylvania Senate hopeful is wielding social media might against star power. His secret weapon? Snooki Whether it’s Ronald, Donald or Arnold, Americans are all too familiar with the phenomenon of the second-tier celebrity turned politician. So when the TV doctor Mehmet Oz decided to run for Senate in Pennsylvania, his background as a B-lister seemed well suited to the role.As he proudly notes in his official biography, Oz has won Emmys, has written eight bestsellers, and was featured on six seasons of The Oprah Winfrey Show. He is a master of traditional media. But now the daytime TV star is facing a Democratic opponent who has proved himself a media success story in his own right – though his area of expertise is Twitter, not television.Dr Oz embraced Trump’s big lie – will Maga voters reward him in Senate race?Read moreWhen John Fetterman entered the race, the relatively little known lieutenant governor had his work cut out for him: a Bernie Sanders backer who supports universal healthcare and a $15 minimum wage, he is running to replace a Republican in a swing state.But he has rapidly made himself a national name as he tears into Oz on social media – hammering him, in particular, on the question of whether he’s really from Pennsylvania at all. Oz has said he moved there in 2020 – to a place his wife’s parents own. Before that, he lived in New Jersey for decades.In Fetterman’s view, Oz is still a Jersey boy, and the Democrat has weaponized meme after meme against his rival. Fetterman has posted a picture of Oz’s face on a Pennsylvania driver’s license, labeled “McLovin” in an homage to cinema’s best known fake ID. He has mocked his rival for apparently filming an ad for his Pennsylvania campaign in his New Jersey mansion. And he has employed the services of the most Jersey person this side of Bruce Springsteen: Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi.Hey @DrOz 👋JERSEY loves you + will not forget you!!! 🥰 pic.twitter.com/YmaXfMpzUK— John Fetterman (@JohnFetterman) July 14, 2022
    In a clip that has received more than 84,000 likes on Twitter, the Jersey Shore reality star offers some savage sympathy: “I heard that you moved from New Jersey to look for a new job,” she says. “I know you’re away from home and you’re in a new place, but … don’t worry, because you’ll be back in New Jersey soon.”Fetterman’s attacks aren’t limited to the digital world. He had a pilot fly a banner over the Jersey shore saying, “Hey Dr Oz. Welcome home to NJ! ❤️ John.” He posted the image online, flexing Pennsylvania credentials by dedicating it to “yinz and youse down the shore today” – a combination of Pittsburgh and Philly-speak. He’s also selling a “Dr Oz for NJ” sticker. And in a coup de grâce on Thursday, Fetterman confirmed that he had launched a petition to have Oz honored in the New Jersey Hall of Fame, which celebrates the accomplishments of state residents.Oz himself has a ways to go when it comes to the art of the political stunt. He posted pictures of himself visiting Pat’s and Geno’s, the dueling cheesesteak shops, across the street from each other, that are a Philadelphia landmark. It was a rookie error, akin to a New Yorker taking a selfie at Times Square – any local can list at least five cheesesteak places they’ve deemed better than those two. Fetterman called Oz a “tourist”, and even Pat’s itself replied: “Do you even live in [Pennsylvania]? And can you spell the town you live in?” (Oz misspelled the name of his supposed home town, Huntingdon Valley, in a campaign filing.) When you’re getting burned by a cheesesteak shop, you know you need to up your social media game.While Fetterman has proved himself a natural in the art of trolling, you can almost feel the blood, sweat and tears poured into Oz’s efforts. When he posted a doctored image of Bernie Sanders with Fetterman labeled “best friends”, Fetterman replied with a meme mocking Oz’s graphic design skills. When the Republican shared a picture of a dictionary definition of “John Fetterman” – a “Bernie Sanders socialist” who is “wrong for Pennsylvania” – it felt like exactly what it was: an attempt to crowbar old-fashioned political boilerplate into a modern format. (It also placed “John Fetterman” between “justice” and “jurisdiction”, which, as several people pointed out, is not how the alphabet works.)To all yinz + youse down the shore today: hope you saw my very nice message ✈️ to one of NJ’s famous longtime residents 🥰 pic.twitter.com/xiVd6q5JIm— John Fetterman (@JohnFetterman) July 10, 2022
    Perhaps in desperation, Oz has recently adopted a new tactic: a “John Fetterman basement tracker” that records how long it’s been since the Democrat has held a public event. But instead of coming off as a blow to his opponent, the strategy just seems mean-spirited. What took Fetterman off the campaign trail was a stroke on 13 May.Despite his pause from IRL campaigning, Fetterman’s strategy appears to be working. Polls have repeatedly put the Democrat on top in the race, and he has raised about nine times as much as his opponent since April. A win in November may serve as a political lesson about the importance of carving out a digital identity and could be crucial to Democrats’ chances of holding the Senate. Like so many others these days, Fetterman is working from home – and finding that he can still get things done.TopicsUS politicsPennsylvaniaUS SenateSocial mediaTwitterfeaturesReuse this content More

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    Amazon Acquires One Medical in Push Into Health Care

    The internet giant acquired One Medical, a national chain of primary care clinics, for $3.9 billion.Twitter’s shares fell after the social media platform, which is locked in a legal battle with Elon Musk over its future ownership, reported that it lost $270 million in the second quarter. Alphabet, Apple, Meta and Microsoft will report their earnings next week, with many forecasters expecting more disappointing results. Now delivering diagnoses.Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJassy’s big bet on health careYesterday, Amazon announced its first major acquisition during Andy Jassy’s tenure as C.E.O., with the $3.9 billion purchase of One Medical, a national chain of primary care clinics that is backed by the private equity firm the Carlyle Group.Amazon’s ambitions in health care go back more than two decades, writes The Times’s Karen Weise. But none of its forays into the sector have had notable success, or have been as big as the One Medical acquisition. Its previous bets in health care include:Investing in Drugstore.com in 1999. (Jeff Bezos served on the company’s board.)Teaming up with JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway in 2018 to start Haven, in an amorphous effort to explore new ways to deliver health care to their work forces. The venture formally ended last year.Buying the start-up PillPack, an online pharmacy that focuses on recurring monthly medications, in 2018 for $753 million. It later began Amazon Pharmacy, which, like PillPack, delivers medications, and it integrated discounts for customers with Prime memberships.Running its own primary and urgent care service, called Amazon Care, beginning in 2019, to treat its employees. Amazon Care has tried to get other employers to offer its service, with limited success.The One Medical deal gives Amazon access to more data. One Medical built its own electronic medical records system, and it has 15 years’ worth of medical and health-system data that Amazon could tap. Although individual patient records are generally protected under federal health privacy laws, the big data expertise that has fueled Amazon’s success can be powerful in health care — for predicting costs, targeting interventions and developing products and treatments.It could also test the new antitrust regime. Last night, Senator Amy Klobuchar said she was calling on the F.T.C. to “thoroughly investigate” the deal, citing Amazon’s previous investments in health care and its access to data. And while Amazon hardly dominates heath care, the Justice Department and the F.T.C. have sought to rewrite the rules for reviewing big mergers to broaden the scope for intervention. Lina Khan, who leads the F.T.C., has long contended that there is an antitrust argument against Amazon. She has not so far filed a suit against the company in her time as chair. Her agency reviewed and approved Amazon’s acquisition of the movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, though that was before Democrats held a majority on the commission.When asked by The Washington Post last month about Amazon’s push into health care, Khan said, “Our current approach to thinking about mergers still has more work to do to fully understand what it means for these businesses to enter into all these other markets and industries.”HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Turkey promises a deal to get grain out of Ukraine’s blocked ports. The Turkish presidency says that a signing ceremony will be held today for a deal between Ukraine and Russia aiming to allow millions of tons of Ukrainian grain to be exported, alleviating a global food shortage.President Biden has “very mild” Covid symptoms. Biden, 79, tested positive for the coronavirus yesterday. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said he would “continue to carry out all of his duties fully” while isolating.Snap shares plunge after a disappointing quarterly report. The company, which runs the social media platform Snapchat, said it would “substantially reduce” hiring and that revenue growth in its current uncompleted quarter was approximately zero. Jessica Lessin, the editor of the tech-focused news site The Information, said, Snap’s results “raise questions about digital advertising in the current macroeconomic climate.”The U.S. government files its first criminal case about crypto insider trading. A former Coinbase employee and two other men were charged with buying and selling digital assets based on confidential information from the cryptocurrency exchange. The three men, one of whom has fled to India, are said to have made $1.5 million on 14 trades over a 10-month period.China will faces severe heat waves over the next 10 days. Regions could be hit by temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher, forecasts suggest, and some cities in Zhejiang Province, which has many factories, issued red alerts today.Trump’s inaction in actionAs a mob of his supporters assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6, Trump refused to stop them, according to former Trump administration officials, who testified yesterday to the House committee investigating the attack. Over 187 minutes, Trump sat in his dining room off the Oval Office, watching the violence on television, not just ignoring calls to respond, but repeatedly signaling that he did not want anything done.It was one of the most dramatic hearings of the inquiry, write The Times’s Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman. Still, the assertion that Mr. Trump was derelict in duty raised ethical, moral and legal questions, but it might not be the basis for a criminal charge, according to Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia, who led much of last night’s proceedings. The media critic Brian Stelter, of CNN, called yesterday evening’s hearing “the most Fox-centric hearing yet — and none of it was shown live by Fox,” underscoring how divided the U.S. media landscape is.Here were the takeaways:Trump ignored a torrent of pleas from inside and outside the White House to call off his supporters. Members of Congress, aides and his own daughter, Ivanka, pleaded with Mr. Trump to call off the violence as it unfolded in front of him on television, The Times’s Michael S. Schmidt notes. Representative Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who helped lead the hearing, said that the president, after learning of the Capitol breach, resisted putting out a tweet saying, “Stay peaceful.”Even the next day, Trump was not fully willing to concede the race. Outtakes from a taped address of the president’s speech on Jan. 7 showed the president saying he didn’t want to say “the election is over.”Members of Pence’s Secret Service security detail feared for their lives as protesters drew nearer. “I don’t like talking about it, but there were calls to say goodbye to family members, so on and so forth,” one official, whom the committee declined to name, said.Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, told the panel: “You’re the commander in chief. You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America, and there’s nothing? No call? Nothing? Zero?”More hearings are planned for September.YouTube’s policy on pulling abortion-related content has skeptics YouTube said on Twitter yesterday that it would be removing videos over the next few weeks that provided instructions for “unsafe abortion methods.” Citing its medical misinformation policies, it also said that it would be removing content that promoted “false claims about abortion safety” and that it would start including information from health authorities alongside abortion content.YouTube’s announcement was a step in the right direction, but it should have happened a long time ago, said Imran Ahmed, the C.E.O. and founder of the nonprofit organization the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “Even though we welcome any change in their rule, why on earth were home remedies for abortion ever permitted on their site?” he told DealBook, citing the medical risks associated with using dangerous methods. He recommended that YouTube provided a hotline to groups that offer accurate information on reproductive health care.Since the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June, abortion has been banned in at least eight states, and videos offering home remedies to induce abortions have spread on YouTube, TikTok and social media platforms. Experts have urged caution, saying these methods may be dangerous and there is no data on whether they work. A 2020 survey published in the journal JAMA Network Open estimated that 7 percent of American women would attempt a self-managed abortion at some point in their lives.For YouTube, the challenge will be enforcement, said Katharine Trendacosta, an associate director of policy and activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group. Trendacosta told DealBook that she questioned whether YouTube had the staffing and processes in place to pull this off. “I have trouble with these announcements because it doesn’t tell me if they’re going to hire enough people to implement it,” she said.THE SPEED READ DealsThe U.K. competition watchdog cleared a merger of the sports broadcasting businesses of BT Group and Warner Bros. Discovery. (Reuters)Malaysia’s AMMB, a financial services manager, is reportedly considering a sale of its asset-management unit. (Bloomberg)“Amazon Wants 100,000 Electric Vans. Can Rivian Deliver?” (NYT)The toymaker Mattel reported a 20 percent jump in sales. (NYT)PolicyRussia is keeping Germany guessing on gas shipments. (NYT)Truckers protesting a labor law have blocked roads that serve the Port of Oakland in California. (NYT)The E.C.B. has a new tool to keep bond markets in check. It doesn’t want to use it. (NYT)In good news for consumers, the economy and President Biden, gas prices are finally falling. (The Morning)Best of the restSwatch’s $260 MoonSwatch is helping to revive the brand. (Bloomberg Businessweek)A look at the PGA Tour’s lobbying effort against the Saudi-backed LIV golf league. (CNBC)A 35,000-acre forest fire in Spain was accidentally started by a Dutch carbon offset company. (Vice)Despite Putin’s efforts to destroy Ukraine’s economy, tech companies there are still thriving. (NYT)“Pro-Putin Biker Gang Rides Into E.U. Sanctions Roadblock” (FT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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    Twitter Takes Round 1

    Judge Kathaleen McCormick granted the social media giant’s request for an expedited hearing. Now, the two sides are gearing up for a trial in October.Twitter: 1, Musk: 0.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesTwitter suit takes the fast laneTwitter won its effort to expedite its trial with Elon Musk yesterday, in its lawsuit to force Musk to close his $44 billion acquisition of the company. So many people tried to listen to the proceedings that the dial-in hit capacity — and we hear advisers across Wall Street were huddled around speakerphones.It’s a big win for Twitter. In granting an expedited hearing, Judge Kathaleen McCormick effectively repudiated the notion that the court needed to allow time for a deep dive into whether Twitter had accurately counted the number of bots on its platform. She cited the “cloud of uncertainty” that was hanging over the company the longer the case went undecided as the reason for her decision to fast-track the trial. And in what may be another good sign for Twitter, Judge McCormick said she was unsure that damages would be a sufficient remedy for the social media company, which wants Musk to buy it, not pay damages to walk away.Please see Page 5. A centerpiece of Musk’s claims is that Twitter’s disclosures about the percentage of active users on its platform that are bots are misleading, which would have a “material adverse effect” on the company’s value. But Musk has yet to tell the court what, exactly, in Twitter’s disclosures might be false. This became an issue when Musk’s lawyer at Quinn Emanuel, Andy Rossman, took aim at Page 5 of Twitter’s annual report, which explains its bot count. But Twitter’s lawyer at Wachtell, Bill Savitt, in his rebuttal, noted that Twitter fills that page with hedges and warnings that numbers might be off. (It reads, in part: “Our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have estimated.”) Of Twitter’s disclosure, Savitt said: “This does not require a recreation of all things known to humanity.” Judge McCormick seemingly agreed.The two sides are gearing up for a trial in October. Over the next weeks, they have to agree on schedules for depositions and discovery. And Musk will have time to prepare for another hearing before Judge McCormick that month: a defense of his whopping Tesla pay package — money that could come in handy if she forces him to buy Twitter.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Netflix loses fewer subscribers than expected. The streaming service reported yesterday that it lost nearly 1 million subscribers in the second quarter, far fewer than it had forecast. What’s more, Netflix said some of its strategies to stem losses, like an ad-supported option for consumers and a crackdown on password sharing, would boost revenue as soon as next year.A heroic act in an Indiana mall shooting renews the debate over gun access. In the days since a 22-year-old armed bystander killed a gunman two minutes into a shooting spree, the U.S. is again debating the wisdom of easier access to guns. But an analysis of 433 active shooter attacks in the U.S. between 2000 and 2021 found just 22 had ended with a bystander shooting the attacker, according to the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University.The CHIPS Act passes a procedural hurdle in the Senate with more than 60 votes. The legislation, stalled for more than a year, gives chip manufacturers what they say is help they need to build factories in the U.S. The Senate is expected today to officially vote to pass the bill, which has been slimmed down and still needs to return to the House before it can go to the president.Intelligence agencies say Russia remains a threat in elections. Top F.B.I. and National Security Agency officials warned yesterday that Russia could still seek to meddle or promote disinformation during the 2022 midterm races, even as it wages war in Ukraine. Iran and China also remained potent threats, the officials said.The House moves to protect same-sex marriage from Supreme Court reversal. New legislation, which garnered some Republican support, would recognize same-sex marriages at the federal level, but it faces an uncertain path in the Senate. The move was a direct answer to Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the ruling last month that overturned federal abortion rights.The loans that may haunt Silicon ValleyTech workers have taken out loans in recent years based on the value of their start-up stock. But as the start-up economy has deflated, that may come back to haunt them, writes The Times’s Erin Griffith.Start-up loans stem from the way workers are typically paid. As part of their compensation, most employees at privately held tech companies receive stock options. That’s where loans and other financing options come in. Start-up stock is used as a form of collateral for cash advances. The loans vary in structure, but most providers charge interest and take a percentage of the worker’s stock when the company sells or goes public. Some are structured as contracts or investments.This lending industry has boomed in recent years. Many of the providers were created in the mid-2010s as hot start-ups like Uber and Airbnb put off initial public offerings of stock as long as they could, hitting private market valuations in the tens of billions of dollars.Debate has ignited in Silicon Valley over the proliferation of loans backed by stakes in still-private start-ups. Proponents say the loans are necessary for employees to participate in tech’s wealth-creation engine. But critics say the loans create needless risk in an already-risky industry and are reminiscent of the dot-com era in the early 2000s, when many tech workers were badly burned by similar loans.As the start-up economy deflates, these loans can be risky. While most are structured to be forgiven if a start-up fails, employees could still face a tax bill because the loan forgiveness is treated as taxable income.“No one’s been thinking about what happens when things go down,” said Rick Heitzmann, an investor at FirstMark Capital. “Everyone’s only thinking about the upside.”“The thing I’ve always been taught by my parents is to be the first one in and last one out. But there’s no one else there.”— Alex Hyman, who pictured his internship at a Los Angeles entertainment agency this summer as being one part “Entourage” and one part “The Office,” but found it more like “Home Alone.” It’s a common experience in an age of remote-working bosses.Mooch’s crypto problemAnthony Scaramucci, who is famous for his 11-day stint as former President Donald Trump’s communications director, is facing a mass exodus of investors from his funds.Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that Scaramucci’s firm SkyBridge Capital had halted withdrawals from one of its smaller funds, Legion Strategies, which contains just over $200 million. But Scaramucci is also struggling to hold onto investors in SkyBridge’s flagship fund, the SkyBridge Multi-Adviser Hedge Fund Portfolios, which managed as much as $2 billion at the end of March. Its investments lost nearly a quarter of their value in the second quarter.Investors in SkyBridge’s flagship fund are seeking to withdraw as much as $890 million, or about half of the money that it held as of the end of last month, Scaramucci told DealBook. But many of those investors will be stuck in the fund for a while. Under its rules, investors in the Multi-Adviser fund are only allowed to withdraw money during certain windows. Those used to occur four times a year, but SkyBridge cut them to twice a year in 2020, after big losses at the beginning of the pandemic. Earlier this month, SkyBridge told investors they would only collectively receive about 16 percent of the money they requested. The letter said it was issuing investors’ notes that would be paid no later than October.Scaramucci’s losses come just over a year after SkyBridge’s pivot into crypto. SkyBridge’s flagship fund, which Scaramucci bought from Citigroup, has long specialized in buying and selling stakes of other hedge funds. For a time, that, along with strong performance in the years after the 2008 financial crisis, made Scaramucci one of the most powerful players in the hedge fund industry.Scaramucci says he is still a long-term believer in crypto. The fund manager says that about 22 percent of his flagship fund remained in crypto and related investments as of the end of last month. “I am not smart enough to time the market,” he told DealBook. “But we’ve done a tremendous amount of research and we think anyone who has will see that blockchain technology is good and is the future.”THE SPEED READ DealsPimco bought $1 billion worth of debt backing Apollo’s acquisition of a payments company at a steep discount. (Bloomberg)Start-ups are racing for share of the market for home chargers of electric vehicles, and several have already been acquired. (Reuters)“Sam Bankman-Fried Turns $2 Trillion Crypto Rout Into Buying Opportunity” (Bloomberg Businessweek)PolicyDan Cox, a Trump loyalist, won the primary to be the Republican candidate for governor of Maryland. (NYT)Novavax’s Covid vaccine was cleared for use in the U.S. (NYT)The Secret Service said texts requested by the Jan. 6 commission were probably lost for good. (NYT)U.K. inflation has exceeded economists’ forecasts, hitting 9.4 percent (FT)President Vladimir Putin signaled that Russia would resume gas deliveries through a key pipeline but at a reduced level. (NYT)Best of the restLeaked salary data at Twitter showed a pay gap of as much as 225 percent for the same role in different countries. (Input)Soaring overdose rates in the pandemic reflect widening racial disparities. (NYT)How the pain of past economic crises is haunting Italy. (NYT)“Fighting a Brutal Regime With the Help of a Video Game” (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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    Videos Vanish From Doug Mastriano’s Social Media, on Climate, Abortion and More

    The videos were a sort-of virtual ride-along with Doug Mastriano as he crisscrossed Pennsylvania in the governor’s race, regaling viewers with his far-right musings about climate change, abortion and critics within his own party.In one live broadcast on Facebook in April, Mr. Mastriano, a Republican state senator, referred to climate change as “pop science.”In a separate video on his social media from a radio interview, three days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, he dismissed the issue of abortion rights as a distraction. And when trying to explain in April why some Republicans would not support him, Mr. Mastriano, a retired Army colonel, attributed it to their “disdain for veterans.”But now that Mr. Mastriano is the G.O.P. nominee for governor, having been helped by the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump in the primary, he is shifting to the general election — and those videos have vanished.The removal of the videos from his campaign’s Facebook page was reported earlier on Monday by The Philadelphia Inquirer, which listed 14 videos featuring Mr. Mastriano, one of Pennsylvania’s pre-eminent election deniers, that had disappeared since April.It was not the first time that Mr. Mastriano had drawn scrutiny for what critics say is an effort to tone down his profile on social media. Last year, the group Media Matters for America reported that Mr. Mastriano had deleted more than 50 tweets promoting the conspiracy theory QAnon after Media Matters, a journalism watchdog, highlighted his role in an illegitimate election audit in Pennsylvania.But the video footage that once resided on Mr. Mastriano’s campaign Facebook page has not vanished entirely. The New York Times obtained the clips on Monday from American Bridge, a liberal group specializing in opposition research that archived them.A campaign spokesman for Mr. Mastriano denied in a statement on Monday that he had scrubbed his social media accounts of the videos.“The biased mainstream media is trying to manufacture a scandal, but they haven’t done their homework,” said the spokesman, who declined to provide his name but was responding from a campaign email address. “The videos in question were automatically deleted by Facebook after 30 days because of a default Facebook setting.”One of the videos that disappeared was less than 30 days old and was recorded on June 27. And a review of Mr. Mastriano’s Facebook page on Monday showed dozens of Facebook Live videos older than 30 days. The campaign did not respond to a follow-up question about why those videos still appeared.At the end of every Facebook Live broadcast, an automatic prompt asks account holders whether they want their video to be deleted after 30 days or remain on their page, according to the social media company.Critics accused Mr. Mastriano on Monday of trying to distance himself from his extreme views, which they said could alienate voters beyond his far-right political base in the general election against Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee for governor and Pennsylvania’s attorney general.“Doug Mastriano spends every day trafficking conspiracy theories and reminding voters his top priority is banning abortion with no exceptions,” said Manuel Bonder, a campaign spokesman for Mr. Shapiro. “No amount of clicking the delete button can change the fact that Mastriano is the most extreme, dangerous candidate in Pennsylvania history.”David Turner, a spokesman for the Democratic Governors Association, said on Monday that Mr. Mastriano “can’t delete his extreme positions.”“He’s completely out of touch with most Pennsylvanians, calling to ban abortions, trafficking insane election conspiracy theories, and denying climate change,” Mr. Turner said.The Republican Governors Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.In the Facebook Live broadcast on April 6, Mr. Mastriano criticized Gov. Tom Wolf, a term-limited Democrat, for entering Pennsylvania into a regional, multistate compact to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector that Mr. Mastriano said could cost the state billions.“For what?” Mr. Mastriano asked rhetorically in the video, assailing Democrats. “For pop science. Let’s talk about climate change. So they’re hellbent on this theory. It’s a theory. It’s not a fact. Heck, the weatherman can’t get the weather right, you know, 24 hours out.”A link to a video on Mr. Mastriano’s campaign Facebook page said on Monday that the content was no longer available “because the owner only shared it with a small group of people, changed who can see it or it’s been deleted.”In a Facebook Live video from June 27, Mr. Mastriano recorded himself giving a radio interview in which he accused Democrats of trying to turn attention away from the troubled economy to issues like abortion rights and the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (He funded buses to shuttle supporters to the rally before the riot.)“They want us to focus on this and now on the Roe v. Wade decision instead of dealing with life,” he said in the video, which was also no longer visible on his Facebook page.Mr. Mastriano’s claim that the issue of reproductive rights was a distraction echoed remarks he made three days earlier in Binghamton, N.Y., where he appeared with Rudolph W. Giuliani and his son, Andrew Giuliani, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for New York governor. More

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    This ‘I Voted’ Sticker Has 6 Legs, 2 Eyes and 158,500 Votes

    “This is how we all feel about politics right now,” a Twitter user wrote of one submission for a New York county’s “I voted” sticker design contest.Ashley Dittus, an election official in Ulster County, N.Y., vividly remembers her excitement when the first submission for this year’s countywide youth “I voted” sticker design contest appeared in her email this spring. The entry, from Hudson Rowan, 14, was an electric concoction of colors: a pink and purple and turquoise creature with a wild bloodshot stare, a toothy neon grin and spiderlike legs. To the right, scrawled in red letters: I VOTED.Ms. Dittus, the county’s Democratic commissioner of elections, immediately printed out the design and started showing it to people in her office. Everyone’s reaction was the same, she said: It made them smile.“This design is colorful and crazy and kind of weird,” she said. “It’s just not what you think of when you think of a traditional ‘I voted’ sticker, so we all kind of love it.”The Republican election commissioner, John Quigley, agreed. “I found it best when someone tweeted, ‘This is how we all feel about politics right now,’” he wrote in an email.The response to his submission surprised Hudson, who will start his first year at Rondout Valley High School this fall.After his mother persuaded him to enter the competition, he said in an interview, he didn’t dwell much on it, thinking his interpretation wasn’t “classically” patriotic but wanting it to reflect his style anyway.The creature in his drawing has been described as many things, he said, but he’s not exactly sure how to describe it himself. Besides, he said, “it’s more just for the individual to decide what it is.”“Politics right now in the world is all kinds of crazy,” he added, “and I feel like the creature that I drew kind of resembles the craziness of politics and the world right now.”Whatever it is, the “chaotic, random lines” of his drawing, as he describes it, have resonated with many online.Since voting for the winning entry began in July, Hudson’s entry has received more than 158,500 votes, out of the about 169,500 total votes cast — completely overtaking last year’s roughly 2,200 votes. The county has a population of about 180,000 people and about 122,000 active registered voters, but the contest is not limited to county residents.Hudson’s mother, Molly Rowan, said in an interview that she had encouraged him to enter the competition as a way to get him more civically engaged. “I just thought it would be a good way to be involved with politics and a community at the age that he’s at,” she said.“Hudson has always drawn with a lot of feeling,” she said. “I love that he stayed true to his style.”Hudson is one of six finalists whose logos are up for a public vote that will close on July 29. The five runners-up will have their designs printed on stickers for the special election in August. But only the winning logo, which will be announced on Aug. 1, will receive an award from the Ulster County Legislature and appear on stickers distributed in the county’s general election on Nov. 8.Launched last year as part of the election office’s youth engagement initiatives, the contest is open to the county’s 13- to 18-year-olds, Ms. Dittus said, with submissions accepted from early April through the end of June.For its first two years, it was slow to take off, with only 14 submissions this year and 12 last year — until interest in Hudson’s design exploded online.On top of coverage from local and national media, the design has garnered a number of fans on Twitter and TikTok. Ms. Dittus said she hopes that the attention will lead to increased interest from teenagers in the county around voting and that more youth-oriented initiatives will be launched by elections offices across the country.“We just want to leave our mark in the realm of civic engagement so that people know that, No. 1, that we exist and that we’re here as a resource for all voters and people that are interested in voting,” she said.As for Hudson, he’s planning on spending the summer before starting the ninth grade visiting his grandparents, hanging out with his friends and dabbling in new drawings.“I’m trying to think up some ideas,” he said. “You’ll see.”Ana Ley More

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    The Fight Over Truth Also Has a Red State-Blue State Divide

    Several states run by Democrats are pushing for stiffer rules on the spread of false information, while Republican-run states are pushing for fewer rules.To fight disinformation, California lawmakers are advancing a bill that would force social media companies to divulge their process for removing false, hateful or extremist material from their platforms. Texas lawmakers, by contrast, want to ban the largest of the companies — Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — from removing posts because of political points of view.In Washington, the state attorney general persuaded a court to fine a nonprofit and its lawyer $28,000 for filing a baseless legal challenge to the 2020 governor’s race. In Alabama, lawmakers want to allow people to seek financial damages from social media platforms that shut down their accounts for having posted false content.In the absence of significant action on disinformation at the federal level, officials in state after state are taking aim at the sources of disinformation and the platforms that propagate them — only they are doing so from starkly divergent ideological positions. In this deeply polarized era, even the fight for truth breaks along partisan lines.The result has been a cacophony of state bills and legal maneuvers that could reinforce information bubbles in a nation increasingly divided over a variety of issues — including abortion, guns, the environment — and along geographic lines.The midterm elections in November are driving much of the activity on the state level. In red states, the focus has been on protecting conservative voices on social media, including those spreading baseless claims of widespread electoral fraud.In blue states, lawmakers have tried to force the same companies to do more to stop the spread of conspiracy theories and other harmful information about a broad range of topics, including voting rights and Covid-19.“We should not stand by and just throw up our hands and say that this is an impossible beast that is just going to take over our democracy,” Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, a Democrat, said in an interview.Calling disinformation a “nuclear weapon” threatening the country’s democratic foundations, he supports legislation that would make it a crime to spread lies about elections. He praised the $28,000 fine levied against the advocacy group that challenged the integrity of the state’s vote in 2020.“We ought to be creatively looking for potential ways to reduce its impact,” he said, referring to disinformation.The biggest hurdle to new regulations — regardless of the party pushing them — is the First Amendment. Lobbyists for the social media companies say that, while they seek to moderate content, the government should not be in the business of dictating how that’s done.Concerns over free speech defeated a bill in deeply blue Washington that would have made it a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail, for candidates or elected officials “to spread lies about free and fair elections when it has the likelihood to stoke violence.”Governor Inslee, who faced baseless claims of election fraud after he won a third term in 2020, supported the legislation, citing the Supreme Court’s 1969 ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio. That ruling allowed states to punish speech calling for violence or criminal acts when “such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”The legislation stalled in the state’s Senate in February, but Mr. Inslee said the scale of the problem required urgent action.Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat from Washington State, faced baseless claims of election fraud after he won a third term in 2020.Jovelle Tamayo for The New York TimesThe scope of the problem of disinformation, and of the power of the tech companies, has begun to chip away at the notion that free speech is politically untouchable.The new law in Texas has already reached the Supreme Court, which blocked the law from taking effect in May, though it sent the case back to a federal appeals court for further consideration. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the legislation last year, prompted in part by the decisions by Facebook and Twitter to shut down the accounts of former President Donald J. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, violence on Capitol Hill.The court’s ruling signaled that it could revisit one core issue: whether social media platforms, like newspapers, retain a high degree of editorial freedom.“It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a dissent to the court’s emergency ruling suspending the law’s enforcement.A federal judge last month blocked a similar law in Florida that would have fined social media companies as much as $250,000 a day if they blocked political candidates from their platforms, which have become essential tools of modern campaigning. Other states with Republican-controlled legislatures have proposed similar measures, including Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa and Alaska.Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, has created an online portal through which residents can complain that their access to social media has been restricted: alabamaag.gov/Censored. In a written response to questions, he said that social media platforms stepped up efforts to restrict content during the pandemic and the presidential election of 2020.“During this period (and continuing to present day), social media platforms abandoned all pretense of promoting free speech — a principle on which they sold themselves to users — and openly and arrogantly proclaimed themselves the Ministry of Truth,” he wrote. “Suddenly, any viewpoint that deviated in the slightest from the prevailing orthodoxy was censored.”Much of the activity on the state level today has been animated by the fraudulent assertion that Mr. Trump, and not President Biden, won the 2020 presidential election. Although disproved repeatedly, the claim has been cited by Republicans to introduce dozens of bills that would clamp down on absentee or mail-in voting in the states they control.Democrats have moved in the opposite direction. Sixteen states have expanded the abilities of people to vote, which has intensified pre-emptive accusations among conservative lawmakers and commentators that the Democrats are bent on cheating.“There is a direct line from conspiracy theories to lawsuits to legislation in states,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan election advocacy organization at the New York University School of Law. “Now, more than ever, your voting rights depend on where you live. What we’ve seen this year is half the country going in one direction and the other half going the other direction.”TechNet, the internet company lobbying group, has fought local proposals in dozens of states. The industry’s executives argue that variations in state legislation create a confusing patchwork of rules for companies and consumers. Instead, companies have highlighted their own enforcement of disinformation and other harmful content.“These decisions are made as consistently as possible,” said David Edmonson, the group’s vice president for state policy and government relations.For many politicians the issue has become a powerful cudgel against opponents, with each side accusing the other of spreading lies, and both groups criticizing the social media giants. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has raised campaign funds off his vow to press ahead with his fight against what he has called the “authoritarian companies” that have sought to mute conservative voices. In Ohio, J.D. Vance, the memoirist and Republican nominee for Senate, railed against social media giants, saying they stifled news about the foreign business dealings of Hunter Biden, the president’s son.In Missouri, Vicky Hartzler, a former congresswoman running for the Republican nomination for Senate, released a television ad criticizing Twitter for suspending her personal account after she posted remarks about transgender athletes. “They want to cancel you,” she said in the ad, defending her remarks as “what God intended.”OnMessage, a polling firm that counts the National Republican Senatorial Committee as a client, reported that 80 percent of primary voters surveyed in 2021 said they believed that technology companies were too powerful and needed to be held accountable. Six years earlier, only 20 percent said so. “Voters have a palpable fear of cancel culture and how tech is censoring political views.” said Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Florida Republican, has raised campaign funds off his vow to press ahead with his fight against what he has called “authoritarian companies.”Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesIn blue states, Democrats have focused more directly on the harm disinformation inflicts on society, including through false claims about elections or Covid and through racist or antisemitic material that has motivated violent attacks like the massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo in May.Connecticut plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting and to create a position for an expert to root out misinformation narratives about voting before they go viral. A similar effort to create a disinformation board at the Department of Homeland Security provoked a political fury before its work was suspended in May pending an internal review.In California, the State Senate is moving forward with legislation that would require social media companies to disclose their policies regarding hate speech, disinformation, extremism, harassment and foreign political interference. (The legislation would not compel them to restrict content.) Another bill would allow civil lawsuits against large social media platforms like TikTok and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram if their products were proven to have addicted children.“All of these different challenges that we’re facing have a common thread, and the common thread is the power of social media to amplify really problematic content,” said Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel of California, a Democrat, who sponsored the legislation to require greater transparency from social media platforms. “That has significant consequences both online and in physical spaces.”It seems unlikely that the flurry of legislative activity will have a significant impact before this fall’s elections; social media companies will have no single response acceptable to both sides when accusations of disinformation inevitably arise.“Any election cycle brings intense new content challenges for platforms, but the November midterms seem likely to be particularly explosive,” said Matt Perault, a director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina. “With abortion, guns, democratic participation at the forefront of voters’ minds, platforms will face intense challenges in moderating speech. It’s likely that neither side will be satisfied by the decisions platforms make.” More

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    An American’s Murky Path From Russian Propagandist to Jan. 6

    Charles Bausman, a former financial executive who runs websites that promote far-right views, recorded footage in the Capitol for a Russian television producer. Soon after, he fled to Moscow as a “political refugee.”In security footage from Jan. 6, it is easy to overlook the thin man wearing a red Trump hat who filters into the U.S. Capitol Building to record the mayhem with his phone.He blends in with the mob, seemingly unexceptional by the chaotic standards of that day. But what he did afterward was far from routine.Within 24 hours, the man, Charles Bausman, gave his recordings and commentary to a Russian television producer for a propaganda video. He then decamped to Moscow, where, appearing on a far-right television network owned by a sanctioned oligarch, he recently accused American media of covering up for neo-Nazis in Ukraine.“We must understand that in the West,” Mr. Bausman told Russian viewers, “we are already in a situation of total lies.”For Mr. Bausman — an American alumnus of Phillips Exeter Academy and Wesleyan University who speaks fluent Russian — it was the latest chapter in a strange odyssey. Once a financial executive who voted for President Barack Obama, he emerged in 2014 as a public critic of the left and of the United States, boosted by Russian state-sponsored organizations through speaking invitations, TV appearances and awards.Central to his transformation was a series of websites he created pushing anti-America, pro-Russia themes, as well as racist and homophobic messaging. Some of his posts have racked up millions of views, and his 5,000-word screed on “the Jewish problem” has been hailed by antisemites around the world and translated into multiple languages.Mr. Bausman’s path in some ways tracks a broader shift on the political right that embraces misinformation and sympathy toward Russia while tolerating an increasingly emboldened white nationalism. For its part, the Kremlin has sought to court conservatives in the United States and sow discord through a network of expats, collaborators and spies.People who have written for Mr. Bausman’s websites or promoted his work have come under scrutiny by American intelligence, and the founder of a pro-Russia forum that hosted him and others was charged in March with being an unregistered agent of Moscow.Mr. Bausman initially gained some prominence as a Russia apologist, but he has lowered his profile in recent years as he has espoused more extreme views. Yet he has been Zelig-like in exploiting cultural and political flash points, racing from cause to cause.After surfacing as a voluble defender of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, Mr. Bausman became an outspoken Trump supporter. With white nationalism on the rise, he threw himself into promoting it, relocating to rural Pennsylvania and hosting neo-Nazis at his property. He joined Republican protests against coronavirus restrictions and the 2020 election and most recently has reappeared in Russian media to criticize the West’s response to the war in Ukraine.Mr. Bausman attended a 2015 conference hosted by RT, a news channel tied to the Kremlin.Mikhail Voskresenskiy/Sputnik, via APKonstantin Malofeev, an influential oligarch indicted by the United States over alleged sanctions violations, said he had asked Mr. Bausman to appear on his television network because Mr. Bausman was one of the few Russian-speaking Americans willing to do it.“Who else is there to invite?” Mr. Malofeev asked.Mr. Bausman, 58, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. No charges have been brought against him related to the events of Jan. 6, though he appears inside the Capitol in video clips introduced in court cases against others. When a Russian TV host referred to him as “a participant” in storming the Capitol, Mr. Bausman interrupted to say that the description could get him into trouble, and that he was a journalist.Better Understand the Russia-Ukraine WarHistory and Background: Here’s what to know about Russia and Ukraine’s relationship and the causes of the conflict.How the Battle Is Unfolding: Russian and Ukrainian forces are using a bevy of weapons as a deadly war of attrition grinds on in eastern Ukraine.Russia’s Brutal Strategy: An analysis of more than 1,000 photos found that Russia has used hundreds of weapons in Ukraine that are widely banned by international treaties.Outside Pressures: Governments, sports organizations and businesses are taking steps to punish Russia. Here are some of the sanctions adopted so far and a list of companies that have pulled out of the country.Stay Updated: To receive the latest updates on the war in your inbox, sign up here. The Times has also launched a Telegram channel to make its journalism more accessible around the world.But, on other occasions, he has described himself differently. Speaking on a white nationalist podcast in April, in which he attacked critics of Russia as “evil pedophile globalists” who control the “enslaved West,” he explained why he was back in Moscow:“I’m a political refugee here.”Connecticut to MoscowPresident Vladimir V. Putin had just invaded Crimea in 2014 when Mr. Bausman said he had an idea. He would create an alternative news source to counter what he called Western media’s “inaccurate, incomplete and unrealistically negative picture of Russia.”The website, Russia Insider, was directed at an English-speaking audience and offered stories like, “Putin to Obama: You’re Turning the U.S.A. Into a Godless Sewer,” and “Anti-Christian Pogrom Underway in Ukraine.” Content was often aggregated from other pro-Russia sources, including RT, the Kremlin-funded television network.The role of online agitator was not an obvious one for Mr. Bausman, who grew up in the wealthy suburb of Greenwich, Conn., attended prep school and went on to earn a history degree from Wesleyan and study business at Columbia. His experience with Russia dates to his childhood, when his father served as the Moscow bureau chief for The Associated Press.Mr. Bausman with his father, who worked in Moscow for The Associated Press.As a college graduate in the late 1980s, he returned to Russia, and, with help from his father’s connections, worked briefly for NBC News. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, Mr. Bausman found a new role: as a multilingual fixer for entrepreneurs scrambling to cash in on the emerging economy.A. Craig Copetas, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent who wrote a book about the post-Soviet business era, said Mr. Bausman worked with Russians who “were the forerunners of the oligarchs.”“Charlie speaks excellent Russian,” he said, “so he was a valuable asset — he was like the young American prince of Moscow.”Mr. Bausman’s early success was not to last. There are gaps in his résumé, and U.S. court records show that he filed for bankruptcy in 1999.A former business associate recalled Mr. Bausman’s father beseeching people to “help my son” with his career. This person — one of several who did not want to be identified because of Mr. Bausman’s ties to extremists — described him as “just this lost guy” who seemed to struggle professionally despite impressive qualifications. He worked a succession of Russian private equity jobs, never staying in any position longer than a few years.Mr. Bausman’s last role was with the agribusiness investor AVG Capital Partners. A 2012 company presentation, which listed him as director of investor relations, boasted of “strong partnerships” with Russian authorities and included a photo of Mr. Putin.The exact timing of Mr. Bausman’s switch to propagandist is murky, but two profiles on the Russian social media platform VK offer a clue. The first, from 2011, is a sparse page featuring a wan Mr. Bausman in a suit and a link to a group interested in tennis.In the second profile, from two years later, he looks tan and confident in an open-collared shirt. The VK groups he joined were strikingly radical, including a militant Russian Orthodox sect and another called the Internet Militia, whose goal echoed what would soon become Mr. Bausman’s focus: “to protect and defend our native information field” against American attack.Oligarch ConnectionsPublicly, Mr. Bausman turned to crowd funding to pay for Russia Insider. Behind the scenes, however, he was in contact with Mr. Malofeev, a promoter of Orthodox nationalist propaganda.Leaked emails made public in 2014 revealed Mr. Bausman corresponding with a Malofeev associate, saying “we published your Serbia info” and asking for money. In an email to Mr. Malofeev, the associate praised Mr. Bausman’s site as “pro-Russian” and noted that he “wants to cooperate.”Mr. Malofeev was backing another media project at the time with a similar agenda: Tsargrad TV, which he created with a former Fox News employee, John Hanick. Both Mr. Hanick and Mr. Malofeev were charged by the United States this year with violating sanctions imposed in 2014.Mr. Bausman has appeared on the television network of Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian oligarch indicted by the U.S. for alleged sanctions violations.Tatyana Makeyeva/ReutersIn an interview, Mr. Malofeev said he believed Mr. Bausman “has done a great job and that he is a very brave person,” but he denied they had “a financial relationship.”Mr. Bausman has always said he did not receive support from Russian authorities. But there is little doubt that his emergence as an American salesman of pro-Kremlin views was aided greatly by entities controlled by or tied to the Russian state.After Russia Insider went live, Mr. Bausman began appearing on RT and other Russian media, and a news crew from a major state-owned TV channel traveled to his parents’ home in Connecticut to film him discussing his new website. On Facebook, he boasted that “our traffic exploded after this aired.”He was invited to join panel discussions at another state-owned outlet, received an award in 2016 named after a pro-Russia journalist killed in Ukraine, and spoke at a Kremlin-sponsored youth conference in newly captured Crimea. He gave interviews to Russian Orthodox figures, speaking approvingly of Mr. Malofeev.In April 2016, Mr. Bausman’s work was promoted by a Russian website, RIA FAN, that has been linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch indicted by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller. The website initially shared an address with the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government “troll factory” accused of using fake social media accounts and online propaganda to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election.Russia analysts who have followed Mr. Bausman’s work say it has the hallmarks of a disinformation project. Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis who researches Russian propaganda campaigns, said his messaging merged seamlessly with that of Mr. Putin’s government.“The initial purpose of his outlet was to muddle the truth in American circles about Crimea,” she said. “And then you see his outlet and others repurposed to support the Kremlin narrative about Syria, and then the 2016 U.S. elections.“It appears,” she said, “to be a classic Russian influence operation.”Hard-Right TurnWith Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, Mr. Bausman’s media outlet began to promote more extreme views. In a celebratory post after the election, he struck a militant chord that shocked old friends.“Trump’s election is perhaps akin to Luther nailing his theses to the door, but now the demons are wakened, and they know they must fight or be killed, and as in the 16th century, they will not go quietly,” he wrote. “And there will be blood. Let us hope that it is the figurative, digital kind, and not the real, red, hot, sticky stuff.”A turning point came in January 2018, when Mr. Bausman posted a lengthy polemic, “It’s Time to Drop the Jew Taboo,” that was both an antisemitic manifesto and a call to action for the alt-right.“The evidence suggests that much of human enterprise dominated and shaped by Jews is a bottomless pit of trouble with a peculiar penchant for mendacity and cynicism, hostility to Christianity and Christian values, and in geopolitics, a clear bloodlust,” he wrote.It was welcomed by white nationalist figures like Richard Spencer, who called it “a major event.”Outside the far right, Mr. Bausman’s embrace of antisemitism was widely condemned. The U.S. State Department flagged it in a report on human-rights concerns in Russia, and the diatribe prompted a disavowal from RT.After the death in August 2018 of his mother, who left an estate valued at about $2.6 million, Mr. Bausman bought two properties in Lancaster, Pa., where his family had roots.His older sister, Mary-Fred Bausman-Watkins, said last year that her brother “was always short on money” and that their parents frequently helped him out, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has compiled several reports on his activities. Ms. Bausman-Watkins died in May.“They funded his whole life,” she told the center, “and then he inherited their money when they died, and they’re still funding his life.”The InsurrectionWhile living in Lancaster with his Russian wife and two young daughters, Mr. Bausman turned his attention to two new websites devoted largely to white nationalist content. Headlines included: “Out of Control Black Violence” and “Jewish Intellectuals Call on Gays to Perform Sex Acts in Front of Children.”Mr. Bausman concealed his ownership of one of these sites, National Justice, through a private registration, which The New York Times confirmed by reviewing data leaked last year from Epik, a web-hosting service favored by the far right. The site has the same name as a white nationalist organization and featured posts by one of its leaders, though it is not the group’s official site, according to its chairman, Michael Peinovich.In an interview, Mr. Peinovich said Mr. Bausman had hosted party members at his farmstead for an inaugural meeting in 2020 (a large event first reported by a local news outlet, LancasterOnline). But afterward, he said, his group “went our own way” because it did not agree with Mr. Bausman’s preoccupation with supporting Mr. Trump.Three days before Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Bausman allowed Rod of Iron Ministries, a gun-themed religious sect led by a son of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, to meet at his property, according to photos on social media. Members of the sect had been active in “Stop the Steal” rallies, some of which Mr. Bausman had also attended, and were at the Capitol on Jan. 6.On Facebook, Mr. Bausman posted an appeal for people to go to Washington “to support Trump.” At various points during the riot, Mr. Bausman can be seen inside the Capitol, often using his phone to record the chaos.Mr. Bausman, right, has said he entered the Capitol in the capacity of a journalist.via YouTubeAfterward, he returned to Lancaster and gave a lengthy interview for a video about the insurrection produced by Arkady Mamontov, a Russian television host known for splashy pro-Kremlin propaganda pieces. The video also included footage of Mr. Bausman outside his home that appears to have been filmed months earlier. Mr. Mamontov did not respond to a request for comment.In the video, Mr. Bausman suggested, without evidence, that federal agents had instigated the violence at the Capitol to “discredit Trump,” and he painted a dystopian, conspiratorial picture of American society. It is a theme that he has carried forward to more recent appearances on Mr. Malofeev’s television network, in which he has accused Western media of lying about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.It is not clear when Mr. Bausman left the U.S., but he was in Moscow for a TV appearance on the day of President Biden’s inauguration, two weeks after the insurrection at the Capitol. In the white nationalist podcast interview he gave in April from Russia, he said he had not been back home since.When asked by the host if he was still a Trump fan, Mr. Bausman said he was not, before adding with a laugh that there was one thing that could restore his loyalty.“When he pardons me for Jan. 6,” he said.Anton Troianovski More