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    Trump me atacó. Después, Musk lo hizo. No fue casualidad

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    Timo LenzenCuando trabajaba en Twitter, ahora conocida como X, dirigí al equipo que puso por primera vez una etiqueta de verificación de hechos en uno de los tuits de Donald Trump. Tras la violencia del 6 de enero, ayudé a tomar la decisión de suspender su cuenta en Twitter. Nada me preparó para lo que ocurriría después.Respaldado por sus seguidores en las redes sociales, Trump me atacó públicamente. Dos años después, tras su adquisición de Twitter y después de que yo dimití de mi puesto como responsable de confianza y seguridad de la empresa, Elon Musk echó más leña al fuego. He vivido con guardias armados en la puerta de mi casa y he tenido que trastocar la vida de mi familia, así como esconderme durante meses y mudarme una y otra vez.No es una historia que me guste recordar. Pero he aprendido que lo que me ocurrió no fue casualidad. No fue solo una venganza personal o la “cultura de la cancelación”. Se trató de una estrategia que no solo afecta a personas específicas, como en mi caso, sino a todos nosotros, ya que está cambiando a gran velocidad lo que vemos en internet.Los individuos —desde investigadores académicos hasta trabajadores de empresas de tecnología— son cada vez más objeto de demandas, comparecencias ante el Congreso y despiadados ataques en línea. Estos ataques, organizados en gran medida por la derecha, están teniendo el efecto deseado: las universidades están reduciendo sus esfuerzos para cuantificar la información abusiva y engañosa que se difunde en internet. Las empresas de redes sociales están evitando tomar el tipo de decisiones difíciles que mi equipo tomó cuando intervinimos ante las mentiras de Trump sobre las elecciones de 2020. Las plataformas no empezaron a tomarse en serio estos riesgos sino hasta después de las elecciones de 2016. Ahora, ante la posibilidad de ataques desproporcionados contra sus empleados, las empresas parecen cada vez más reacias a tomar decisiones controvertidas, lo cual permite que la desinformación y el abuso se enconen para evitar provocar represalias públicas.Estos ataques a la seguridad en internet se producen en un momento en el que la democracia no podría estar más en riesgo. En 2024, está prevista la celebración de más de 40 elecciones importantes, entre ellas las de Estados Unidos, la Unión Europea, la India, Ghana y México. Lo más probable es que estas democracias se enfrenten a los mismos riesgos de campañas de desinformación respaldadas por los gobiernos y de incitación a la violencia en línea que han plagado las redes sociales durante años. Deberíamos preocuparnos por lo que ocurra.Mi historia comienza con esa verificación de datos. En la primavera de 2020, tras años de debate interno, mi equipo decidió que Twitter debía aplicar una etiqueta a un tuit del entonces presidente Trump que afirmaba que el voto por correo era propenso al fraude y que las próximas elecciones estarían “amañadas”. “Conoce los hechos sobre la votación por correo”, decía la etiqueta.El 27 de mayo, la mañana siguiente a la colocación de la etiqueta, la asesora principal de la Casa Blanca, Kellyanne Conway, me identificó de manera pública como el director del equipo de integridad de Twitter. Al día siguiente, The New York Post publicó en su portada varios tuits en los que me burlaba de Trump y otros republicanos. Los había publicado años antes, cuando era estudiante y tenía pocos seguidores, sobre todo amigos y familiares, en las redes sociales. Ahora, eran noticia de primera plana. Ese mismo día, Trump tuiteó que yo era un “odiador”.Legiones de usuarios de Twitter, la mayoría de quienes días antes no tenían ni idea de quién era yo ni en qué consistía mi trabajo, comenzaron una campaña de acoso en línea que duró meses, en la que exigían que me despidieran, me encarcelaran o me mataran. La cantidad de notificaciones de Twitter arrunió mi teléfono. Amigos de los que no tenía noticias desde hacía años expresaron su preocupación. En Instagram, fotos antiguas de mis vacaciones y de mi perro se inundaron de comentarios amenazantes e insultos (algunos comentaristas, que malinterpretaron el momento de manera atroz, aprovecharon para intentar coquetear conmigo).Me sentí avergonzado y asustado. Hasta ese momento, nadie fuera de unos pocos círculos bastante especializados tenía idea de quién era yo. Los académicos que estudian las redes sociales llaman a esto “colapso de contexto”: las cosas que publicamos en las redes sociales con un público en mente pueden acabar circulando entre un público muy diferente, con resultados inesperados y destructivos. En la práctica, se siente como si todo tu mundo se derrumba.El momento en que se desató la campaña en contra de mi persona y mi supuesta parcialidad sugería que los ataques formaban parte de una estrategia bien planificada. Los estudios académicos han rebatido en más de una ocasión las afirmaciones de que las plataformas de Silicon Valley son tendenciosas contra los conservadores. Pero el éxito de una estrategia encaminada a obligar a las empresas de redes sociales a reconsiderar sus decisiones quizá no requiera la demostración de una verdadera mala conducta. Como describió en una ocasión Rich Bond, expresidente del Partido Republicano, tal vez solo sea necesario “ganarse a los árbitros”: presionar sin cesar a las empresas para que se lo piensen dos veces antes de emprender acciones que podrían provocar una reacción negativa. Lo que me ocurrió fue parte de un esfuerzo calculado para que Twitter se mostrara reacio a moderar a Trump en el futuro y para disuadir a otras empresas de tomar medidas similares.Y funcionó. Mientras se desataba la violencia en el Capitolio el 6 de enero, Jack Dorsey, entonces director general de Twitter, anuló la recomendación del departamento de confianza y seguridad de que se bloqueara la cuenta de Trump debido a varios tuits, incluido uno que atacaba al vicepresidente Mike Pence. En cambio, se le impuso una suspensión temporal de 12 horas (antes de que su cuenta se se suspendiera indefinidamente el 8 de enero). Dentro de los límites de las normas, se animó a los miembros del personal a encontrar soluciones para ayudar a la empresa a evitar el tipo de reacción que da lugar a ciclos de noticias furiosas, audiencias y acoso a empleados. En la práctica, lo que sucedió fue que Twitter dio mayor libertad a los infractores: a la representante Marjorie Taylor Greene se le permitió violar las normas de Twitter al menos cinco veces antes de que una de sus cuentas fuera suspendida de manera definitiva en 2022. Otras figuras prominentes de derecha, como la cuenta de guerra cultural Libs of TikTok, gozaron de una deferencia similar.En todo el mundo, se están desplegando tácticas similares para influir en los esfuerzos de confianza y seguridad de las plataformas. En India, la policía visitó dos de nuestras oficinas en 2021 cuando comprobamos los hechos de las publicaciones de un político del partido gobernante y la policía se presentó en la casa de un empleado después de que el gobierno nos solicitó bloquear cuentas implicadas en una serie de protestas. El acoso volvió a rendir frutos: los ejecutivos de Twitter decidieron que cualquier acción que pudiera ser delicada en la India requeriría la aprobación de los más altos mandos, un nivel único de escalada de decisiones que, de otro modo, serían rutinarias.Y cuando quisimos revelar una campaña de propaganda llevada a cabo por una rama del ejército indio, nuestro equipo jurídico nos advirtió que nuestros empleados en la India podrían ser acusados de sedición y condenados a muerte. Así que Twitter no reveló la campaña sino hasta más de un año después, sin señalar al gobierno indio como autor.En 2021, antes de las elecciones legislativas de Rusia, los funcionarios de un servicio de seguridad estatal fueron a la casa de una alta ejecutiva de Google en Moscú para exigir la retirada de una aplicación que se usaba para protestar en contra de Vladimir Putin. Los agentes la amenazaron con encarcelarla si la empresa no cumplía en 24 horas. Tanto Apple como Google retiraron la aplicación de sus respectivas tiendas y la restablecieron una vez concluidas las elecciones.En cada uno de estos casos, los empleados en cuestión carecían de la capacidad para hacer lo que les pedían los funcionarios de turno, ya que las decisiones subyacentes se tomaban a miles de kilómetros de distancia, en California. Pero como los empleados locales tenían la desgracia de residir dentro de la jurisdicción de las autoridades, fueron objeto de campañas coercitivas, que enfrentaban el sentido del deber de las empresas hacia sus empleados contra los valores, principios o políticas que pudieran hacerles resistirse a las demandas locales. Inspirados por la idea, India y otros países comenzaron a promulgar leyes de “toma de rehenes” para garantizar que las empresas de redes sociales contrataran personal local.En Estados Unidos, hemos visto que estas formas de coerción no las han llevado a cabo jueces y policías, sino organizaciones de base, turbas en las redes sociales, comentaristas de noticias por cable y, en el caso de Twitter, el nuevo propietario de la empresa.Una de las fuerzas más recientes en esta campaña son los “archivos de Twitter”, una gran selección de documentos de la empresa —muchos de los cuales yo mismo envié o recibí durante mis casi ocho años en Twitter— entregados por orden de Musk a un puñado de escritores selectos. Los archivos fueron promocionados por Musk como una forma innovadora de transparencia, que supuestamente exponían por primera vez la forma en que el sesgo liberal de las costas de Estados Unidos de Twitter reprime el contenido conservador.El resultado fue algo muy distinto. Como dijo el periodista de tecnología Mike Masnick, después de toda la fanfarria que rodeó la publicación inicial de los archivos de Twitter, al final “no había absolutamente nada de interés” en los documentos y lo poco que había tenía errores factuales importantes. Hasta Musk acabó por impacientarse con la estrategia. Pero, en el proceso, el esfuerzo marcó una nueva e inquietante escalada en el acoso a los empleados de las empresas tecnológicas.A diferencia de los documentos que por lo general saldrían de las grandes empresas, las primeras versiones de los archivos de Twitter no suprimieron los nombres de los empleados, ni siquiera de los de menor nivel. Un empleado de Twitter que residía en Filipinas fue víctima de doxeo (la revelación de información personal) y de acoso grave. Otros se han convertido en objeto de conspiraciones. Las decisiones tomadas por equipos de decenas de personas de acuerdo con las políticas escritas de Twitter se presentaron como si hubieran sido tomadas por los deseos caprichosos de individuos, cada uno identificado por su nombre y su fotografía. Yo fui, por mucho, el objetivo más frecuente.La primera entrega de los archivos de Twitter se dio tras un mes de mi salida de la empresa y unos cuantos días después de que publiqué un ensayo invitado en The New York Times y hablé sobre mi experiencia como empleado de Musk. No pude evitar sentir que las acciones de la empresa eran, hasta cierto punto, represalias. A la semana siguiente, Musk fue incluso más allá y sacó de contexto un párrafo de mi tesis doctoral para afirmar sin fundamentos que yo aprobaba la pedofilia, un tropo conspirativo que suelen utilizar los extremistas de ultraderecha y los seguidores de QAnon para desprestigiar a personas de la comunidad LGBTQ.La respuesta fue todavía más extrema que la que experimenté tras el tuit que Trump publicó sobre mí. “Deberías colgarte de un viejo roble por la traición que has cometido. Vive con miedo cada uno de tus días”, decía uno de los miles de tuits y correos electrónicos amenazantes. Ese mensaje y cientos de otros similares eran violaciones de las mismas políticas que yo había trabajado para desarrollar y hacer cumplir. Bajo la nueva administración, Twitter se hizo de la vista gorda y los mensajes permanecen en el sitio hasta el día de hoy.El 6 de diciembre, cuatro días después de la primera divulgación de los archivos de Twitter, se me pidió comparecer en una audiencia del Congreso centrada en los archivos y la presunta censura de Twitter. En esa audiencia, algunos miembros del Congreso mostraron carteles de gran tamaño con mis tuits de hace años y me preguntaron bajo juramento si seguía manteniendo esas opiniones (en la medida en que las bromas tuiteadas con descuido pudieran tomarse como mis opiniones reales, no las sostengo). Greene dijo en Fox News que yo tenía “unas posturas muy perturbadoras sobre los menores y la pornografía infantil” y que yo permití “la proliferación de la pornografía infantil en Twitter”, lo que desvirtuó aún más las mentiras de Musk (y además, aumentó su alcance). Llenos de amenazas y sin opciones reales para responder o protegernos, mi marido y yo tuvimos que vender nuestra casa y mudarnos.El ámbito académico se ha convertido en el objetivo más reciente de estas campañas para socavar las medidas de seguridad en línea. Los investigadores que trabajan para entender y resolver la propagación de desinformación en línea reciben ahora más ataques partidistas; las universidades a las que están afiliados han estado envueltas en demandas, onerosas solicitudes de registros públicos y procedimientos ante el Congreso. Ante la posibilidad de facturas de abogados de siete dígitos, hasta los laboratorios de las universidades más grandes y mejor financiadas han dicho que tal vez tengan que abandonar el barco. Otros han optado por cambiar el enfoque de sus investigaciones en función de la magnitud del acoso.Poco a poco, audiencia tras audiencia, estas campañas están erosionando de manera sistemática las mejoras a la seguridad y la integridad de las plataformas en línea que tanto ha costado conseguir y las personas que realizan este trabajo son las que pagan el precio más directo.Las plataformas de tecnología están replegando sus iniciativas para proteger la seguridad de las elecciones y frenar la propagación de la desinformación en línea. En medio de un clima de austeridad más generalizado, las empresas han disminuido muy en especial sus iniciativas relacionadas con la confianza y la seguridad. Ante la creciente presión de un Congreso hostil, estas decisiones son tan racionales como peligrosas.Podemos analizar lo que ha sucedido en otros países para vislumbrar cómo podría terminar esta historia. Donde antes las empresas hacían al menos un esfuerzo por resistir la presión externa; ahora, ceden en gran medida por defecto. A principios de 2023, el gobierno de India le pidió a Twitter que restringiera las publicaciones que criticaran al primer ministro del país, Narendra Modi. En años anteriores, la empresa se había opuesto a tales peticiones; en esta ocasión, Twitter accedió. Cuando un periodista señaló que tal cooperación solo incentiva la proliferación de medidas draconianas, Musk se encogió de hombros: “Si nos dan a elegir entre que nuestra gente vaya a prisión o cumplir con las leyes, cumpliremos con las leyes”.Resulta difícil culpar a Musk por su decisión de no poner en peligro a los empleados de Twitter en India. Pero no deberíamos olvidar de dónde provienen estas tácticas ni cómo se han extendido tanto. Las acciones de Musk (que van desde presionar para abrir los archivos de Twitter hasta tuitear sobre conspiraciones infundadas relacionadas con exempleados) normalizan y popularizan que justicieros exijan la rendición de cuentas y convierten a los empleados de su empresa en objetivos aún mayores. Su reciente ataque a la Liga Antidifamación demuestra que considera que toda crítica contra él o sus intereses empresariales debe tener como consecuencia una represalia personal. Y, en la práctica, ahora que el discurso de odio va en aumento y disminuyen los ingresos de los anunciantes, las estrategias de Musk parecen haber hecho poco para mejorar los resultados de Twitter.¿Qué puede hacerse para revertir esta tendencia?Dejar claras las influencias coercitivas en la toma de decisiones de las plataformas es un primer paso fundamental. También podría ayudar que haya reglamentos que les exijan a las empresas transparentar las decisiones que tomen en estos casos y por qué las toman.En su ausencia, las empresas deben oponerse a los intentos de que se quiera controlar su trabajo. Algunas de estas decisiones son cuestiones fundamentales de estrategia empresarial a largo plazo, como dónde abrir (o no abrir) oficinas corporativas. Pero las empresas también tienen un deber para con su personal: los empleados no deberían tener que buscar la manera de protegerse cuando sus vidas ya se han visto alteradas por estas campañas. Ofrecer acceso a servicios que promuevan la privacidad puede ayudar. Muchas instituciones harían bien en aprender la lección de que pocas esferas de la vida pública son inmunes a la influencia mediante la intimidación.Si las empresas de redes sociales no pueden operar con seguridad en un país sin exponer a sus trabajadores a riesgos personales y a las decisiones de la empresa a influencias indebidas, tal vez no deberían operar allí para empezar. Como a otros, me preocupa que esas retiradas empeoren las opciones que les quedan a las personas que más necesitan expresarse en línea de forma libre y abierta. Pero permanecer en internet teniendo que hacer concesiones podría impedir el necesario ajuste de cuentas con las políticas gubernamentales de censura. Negarse a cumplir exigencias moralmente injustificables y enfrentarse a bloqueos por ello puede provocar a largo plazo la necesaria indignación pública que ayude a impulsar la reforma.El mayor desafío —y quizá el más ineludible— en este caso es el carácter esencialmente humano de las iniciativas de confianza y seguridad en línea. No son modelos de aprendizaje automático ni algoritmos sin rostro los que están detrás de las decisiones clave de moderación de contenidos: son personas. Y las personas pueden ser presionadas, intimidadas, amenazadas y extorsionadas. Enfrentarse a la injusticia, al autoritarismo y a los perjuicios en línea requiere empleados dispuestos a hacer ese trabajo.Pocas personas podrían aceptar un trabajo así, si lo que les cuesta es la vida o la libertad. Todos debemos reconocer esta nueva realidad y planear en consecuencia.Yoel Roth es académico visitante de la Universidad de Pensilvania y la Fundación Carnegie para la Paz Internacional, y fue responsable de confianza y seguridad en Twitter. More

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

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      Timo LenzenWhen I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. Following the violence of Jan. 6, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether. Nothing prepared me for what would happen next.Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just personal vindictiveness or “cancel culture.” It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.Private individuals — from academic researchers to employees of tech companies — are increasingly the targets of lawsuits, congressional hearings and vicious online attacks. These efforts, staged largely by the right, are having their desired effect: Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online. Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Platforms had finally begun taking these risks seriously only after the 2016 election. Now, faced with the prospect of disproportionate attacks on their employees, companies seem increasingly reluctant to make controversial decisions, letting misinformation and abuse fester in order to avoid provoking public retaliation.These attacks on internet safety and security come at a moment when the stakes for democracy could not be higher. More than 40 major elections are scheduled to take place in 2024, including in the United States, the European Union, India, Ghana and Mexico. These democracies will most likely face the same risks of government-backed disinformation campaigns and online incitement of violence that have plagued social media for years. We should be worried about what happens next.My story starts with that fact check. In the spring of 2020, after years of internal debate, my team decided that Twitter should apply a label to a tweet of then-President Trump’s that asserted that voting by mail is fraud-prone, and that the coming election would be “rigged.” “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” the label read.On May 27, the morning after the label went up, the White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway publicly identified me as the head of Twitter’s site integrity team. The next day, The New York Post put several of my tweets making fun of Mr. Trump and other Republicans on its cover. I had posted them years earlier, when I was a student and had a tiny social media following of mostly my friends and family. Now, they were front-page news. Later that day, Mr. Trump tweeted that I was a “hater.”Legions of Twitter users, most of whom days prior had no idea who I was or what my job entailed, began a campaign of online harassment that lasted months, calling for me to be fired, jailed or killed. The volume of Twitter notifications crashed my phone. Friends I hadn’t heard from in years expressed their concern. On Instagram, old vacation photos and pictures of my dog were flooded with threatening comments and insults. (A few commenters, wildly misreading the moment, used the opportunity to try to flirt with me.)I was embarrassed and scared. Up to that moment, no one outside of a few fairly niche circles had any idea who I was. Academics studying social media call this “context collapse”: things we post on social media with one audience in mind might end up circulating to a very different audience, with unexpected and destructive results. In practice, it feels like your entire world has collapsed.The timing of the campaign targeting me and my alleged bias suggested the attacks were part of a well-planned strategy. Academic studies have repeatedly pushed back on claims that Silicon Valley platforms are biased against conservatives. But the success of a strategy aimed at forcing social media companies to reconsider their choices may not require demonstrating actual wrongdoing. As the former Republican Party chair Rich Bond once described, maybe you just need to “work the refs”: repeatedly pressure companies into thinking twice before taking actions that could provoke a negative reaction. What happened to me was part of a calculated effort to make Twitter reluctant to moderate Mr. Trump in the future and to dissuade other companies from taking similar steps.It worked. As violence unfolded at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Jack Dorsey, then the C.E.O. of Twitter, overruled Trust and Safety’s recommendation that Mr. Trump’s account should be banned because of several tweets, including one that attacked Vice President Mike Pence. He was given a 12-hour timeout instead (before being banned on Jan. 8). Within the boundaries of the rules, staff members were encouraged to find solutions to help the company avoid the type of blowback that results in angry press cycles, hearings and employee harassment. The practical result was that Twitter gave offenders greater latitude: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was permitted to violate Twitter’s rules at least five times before one of her accounts was banned in 2022. Other prominent right-leaning figures, such as the culture war account Libs of TikTok, enjoyed similar deference.Similar tactics are being deployed around the world to influence platforms’ trust and safety efforts. In India, the police visited two of our offices in 2021 when we fact-checked posts from a politician from the ruling party, and the police showed up at an employee’s home after the government asked us to block accounts involved in a series of protests. The harassment again paid off: Twitter executives decided any potentially sensitive actions in India would require top-level approval, a unique level of escalation of otherwise routine decisions.And when we wanted to disclose a propaganda campaign operated by a branch of the Indian military, our legal team warned us that our India-based employees could be charged with sedition — and face the death penalty if convicted. So Twitter only disclosed the campaign over a year later, without fingering the Indian government as the perpetrator.In 2021, ahead of Russian legislative elections, officials of a state security service went to the home of a top Google executive in Moscow to demand the removal of an app that was used to protest Vladimir Putin. Officers threatened her with imprisonment if the company failed to comply within 24 hours. Both Apple and Google removed the app from their respective stores, restoring it after elections had concluded.In each of these cases, the targeted staffers lacked the ability to do what was being asked of them by the government officials in charge, as the underlying decisions were made thousands of miles away in California. But because local employees had the misfortune of residing within the jurisdiction of the authorities, they were nevertheless the targets of coercive campaigns, pitting companies’ sense of duty to their employees against whatever values, principles or policies might cause them to resist local demands. Inspired, India and a number of other countries started passing “hostage-taking” laws to ensure social-media companies employ locally based staff.In the United States, we’ve seen these forms of coercion carried out not by judges and police officers, but by grass-roots organizations, mobs on social media, cable news talking heads and — in Twitter’s case — by the company’s new owner.One of the most recent forces in this campaign is the “Twitter Files,” a large assortment of company documents — many of them sent or received by me during my nearly eight years at Twitter — turned over at Mr. Musk’s direction to a handful of selected writers. The files were hyped by Mr. Musk as a groundbreaking form of transparency, purportedly exposing for the first time the way Twitter’s coastal liberal bias stifles conservative content.What they delivered was something else entirely. As tech journalist Mike Masnick put it, after all the fanfare surrounding the initial release of the Twitter Files, in the end “there was absolutely nothing of interest” in the documents, and what little there was had significant factual errors. Even Mr. Musk eventually lost patience with the effort. But, in the process, the effort marked a disturbing new escalation in the harassment of employees of tech firms.Unlike the documents that would normally emanate from large companies, the earliest releases of the Twitter Files failed to redact the names of even rank-and-file employees. One Twitter employee based in the Philippines was doxxed and severely harassed. Others have become the subjects of conspiracies. Decisions made by teams of dozens in accordance with Twitter’s written policies were presented as having been made by the capricious whims of individuals, each pictured and called out by name. I was, by far, the most frequent target.The first installment of the Twitter Files came a month after I left the company, and just days after I published a guest essay in The Times and spoke about my experience working for Mr. Musk. I couldn’t help but feel that the company’s actions were, on some level, retaliatory. The next week, Mr. Musk went further by taking a paragraph of my Ph.D. dissertation out of context to baselessly claim that I condoned pedophilia — a conspiracy trope commonly used by far-right extremists and QAnon adherents to smear L.G.B.T.Q. people.The response was even more extreme than I experienced after Mr. Trump’s tweet about me. “You need to swing from an old oak tree for the treason you have committed. Live in fear every day,” said one of thousands of threatening tweets and emails. That post, and hundreds of others like it, were violations of the very policies I’d worked to develop and enforce. Under new management, Twitter turned a blind eye, and the posts remain on the site today.On Dec. 6, four days after the first Twitter Files release, I was asked to appear at a congressional hearing focused on the files and Twitter’s alleged censorship. In that hearing, members of Congress held up oversize posters of my years-old tweets and asked me under oath whether I still held those opinions. (To the extent the carelessly tweeted jokes could be taken as my actual opinions, I don’t.) Ms. Greene said on Fox News that I had “some very disturbing views about minors and child porn” and that I “allowed child porn to proliferate on Twitter,” warping Mr. Musk’s lies even further (and also extending their reach). Inundated with threats, and with no real options to push back or protect ourselves, my husband and I had to sell our home and move.Academia has become the latest target of these campaigns to undermine online safety efforts. Researchers working to understand and address the spread of online misinformation have increasingly become subjects of partisan attacks; the universities they’re affiliated with have become embroiled in lawsuits, burdensome public record requests and congressional proceedings. Facing seven-figure legal bills, even some of the largest and best-funded university labs have said they may have to abandon ship. Others targeted have elected to change their research focus based on the volume of harassment.Bit by bit, hearing by hearing, these campaigns are systematically eroding hard-won improvements in the safety and integrity of online platforms — with the individuals doing this work bearing the most direct costs.Tech platforms are retreating from their efforts to protect election security and slow the spread of online disinformation. Amid a broader climate of belt-tightening, companies have pulled back especially hard on their trust and safety efforts. As they face mounting pressure from a hostile Congress, these choices are as rational as they are dangerous.We can look abroad to see how this story might end. Where once companies would at least make an effort to resist outside pressure, they now largely capitulate by default. In early 2023, the Indian government asked Twitter to restrict posts critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In years past, the company had pushed back on such requests; this time, Twitter acquiesced. When a journalist noted that such cooperation only incentivizes further proliferation of draconian measures, Mr. Musk shrugged: “If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.”It’s hard to fault Mr. Musk for his decision not to put Twitter’s employees in India in harm’s way. But we shouldn’t forget where these tactics came from or how they became so widespread. From pushing the Twitter Files to tweeting baseless conspiracies about former employees, Mr. Musk’s actions have normalized and popularized vigilante accountability, and made ordinary employees of his company into even greater targets. His recent targeting of the Anti-Defamation League has shown that he views personal retaliation as an appropriate consequence for any criticism of him or his business interests. And, as a practical matter, with hate speech on the rise and advertiser revenue in retreat, Mr. Musk’s efforts seem to have done little to improve Twitter’s bottom line.What can be done to turn back this tide?Making the coercive influences on platform decision making clearer is a critical first step. And regulation that requires companies to be transparent about the choices they make in these cases, and why they make them, could help.In its absence, companies must push back against attempts to control their work. Some of these decisions are fundamental matters of long-term business strategy, like where to open (or not open) corporate offices. But companies have a duty to their staff, too: Employees shouldn’t be left to figure out how to protect themselves after their lives have already been upended by these campaigns. Offering access to privacy-promoting services can help. Many institutions would do well to learn the lesson that few spheres of public life are immune to influence through intimidation.If social media companies cannot safely operate in a country without exposing their staff to personal risk and company decisions to undue influence, perhaps they should not operate there at all. Like others, I worry that such pullouts would worsen the options left to people who have the greatest need for free and open online expression. But remaining in a compromised way could forestall necessary reckoning with censorial government policies. Refusing to comply with morally unjustifiable demands, and facing blockages as a result, may in the long run provoke the necessary public outrage that can help drive reform.The broader challenge here — and perhaps, the inescapable one — is the essential humanness of online trust and safety efforts. It isn’t machine learning models and faceless algorithms behind key content moderation decisions: it’s people. And people can be pressured, intimidated, threatened and extorted. Standing up to injustice, authoritarianism and online harms requires employees who are willing to do that work.Few people could be expected to take a job doing so if the cost is their life or liberty. We all need to recognize this new reality, and to plan accordingly.Yoel Roth is a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the former head of trust and safety at Twitter.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      First Republican Presidential Debate Draws 12.8 Million Viewers

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      The figure exceeded the expectations of some television executives, who believed that Mr. Trump’s absence would lead to far fewer viewers.The first Republican debate on Wednesday night drew an audience of 12.8 million viewers, according to Nielsen, indicating robust interest despite the absence of former President Donald J. Trump, the front-runner in the race.The viewership figure, which includes totals from both Fox News (11.1 million viewers) and the Fox Business Network (1.7 million), was significantly higher than anything else on television on Wednesday night, and outperformed the broadcast network totals combined. It was also the most-watched cable telecast of the year outside of sports, surpassing an episode of Paramount’s “Yellowstone,” which had 8.2 million viewers, according to Nielsen.The audience total, however, is a far cry from the record 24 million viewers who tuned in to Fox News for the opening Republican debate in the 2016 election cycle, which featured Mr. Trump on a debate stage for the first time. Nor did it reach the 18.1 million who watched one of the early Democratic debates in June 2019.But the figure still exceeded expectations of some television executives, who had believed that the numbers could be low given Mr. Trump’s absence as well as cable television’s reduced presence in American homes compared with just a few years ago.Mr. Trump, leading by a wide margin in the polls and engaged in a running feud with Fox, skipped the debate. Instead, he appeared for an interview with Tucker Carlson — the former prime-time star, who was ousted by Fox News this year — on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The interview was posted shortly before the debate began on Wednesday evening.Mr. Trump declared his X interview a “blockbuster” on Thursday morning. It is not clear, however, how many people watched the interview. Anytime users on X scroll past a post with the video in their feed, it counts as a “view” — one of the few metrics the social network makes public — whether they watched the video or not. Nielsen’s television ratings more rigorously track the number of people who watched a program.The Fox News debate featured eight candidates, who often sparred aggressively with one another. They were Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Tim Scott, Asa Hutchinson and Doug Burgum.The Fox News debate moderators, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, spent about 10 minutes of questions on Mr. Trump and his four criminal indictments, with Mr. Baier saying he had to acknowledge the “elephant not in the room.”The next Republican debate will be on Sept. 27 on Fox Business. More

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

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

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      US special counsel obtained search warrant for Trump’s Twitter account

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      The US special counsel who is investigating Donald Trump obtained a search warrant for the former president’s Twitter account, and the social media platform delayed complying, a court filing on Wednesday showed.The delay in compliance prompted a federal judge to hold Twitter in contempt and fine it $350,000, the filing showed.The filing says the team of US special counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant in January directing Twitter, which recently rebranded to X, to produce “data and records” related to Trump’s Twitter account as well as a non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Twitter from disclosing the search warrant.The filing says prosecutors got the search warrant after a court “found probable cause to search the Twitter account for evidence of criminal offenses”. The court found that disclosing the warrant could risk that Trump would “would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior”, according to the filing.It’s unclear what information Smith may have sought from Trump’s Twitter account. Possibilities include data about when and where the posts were written, their engagement and the identities of other accounts that reposted Trump’s content.Twitter objected to the non-disclosure agreement, saying four days after the compliance deadline that it would not produce any of the account information, according to the ruling. The judges wrote that Twitter “did not question the validity of the search warrant” but argued that the non-disclosure agreement was a violation of the first amendment and wanted the court to assess the legality of the agreement before it handed any information over.The warrant ordered Twitter to provide the records by 27 January. A judge found Twitter to be in contempt after a court hearing on 7 February, but gave the company an opportunity to hand over the documents by 5pm that evening. Twitter, however, only turned over some records that day. It didn’t fully comply with the order until 9 February, the ruling says. The delay in compliance prompted the court to Twitter in contempt, and on Wednesday, the federal court in Washington upheld that decision.Smith has charged Trump over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in an attempt to stay in power in a criminal indictment unsealed last week.Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.Trump says he is innocent and has portrayed the investigation as politically motivated. His legal team has indicated it will argue that Trump was relying on the advice of lawyers around him in 2020 and had the right to challenge an election he believed was rigged.Trump had been a prolific user of Twitter, both before and during his presidency. Amassing more than 88 million followers, he used the platform to attack opponents, promote racist ideology, encourage violence against journalists, and even threaten nuclear war.Trump was banned from the platform following the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the Capitol for inciting violence.Trump’s account was reinstated in November 2022, following Tesla billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform. The decision was condemned by online safety and civil rights advocates who say Trump’s online presence has created risks of real-world violence.Trump has yet to tweet after being allowed back on to Twitter, preferring his own platform, Truth Social. His campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the former president posted to Truth Social on Wednesday that the Justice Department “secretly attacked” his Twitter account, and he characterized the investigation as an attempt to “infringe” on his bid to reclaim the White House in 2024.Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      Republicans attack FTC chair and big tech critic Lina Khan at House hearing

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      Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, faced a grueling four hours of questioning during a House judiciary committee oversight hearing on Thursday.Republicans criticized Khan – an outspoken critic of big tech – for “mismanagement” and for “politicizing” legal action against large companies such as Twitter and Google as head of the powerful antitrust agency.In his opening statement, committee chair Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, said Khan has given herself and the FTC “unchecked power” by taking aggressive steps to regulate practices at big tech companies such as Twitter, Meta and Google.He said Khan carried out “targeted harassment against Twitter” by asking for all communications related to Elon Musk, including conversations with journalists, following Musk’s acquisition because she does not share his political views.Khan, a former journalist, said the company has “a history of lax security and privacy policies” that did not begin with Musk.Other Democrats agreed. “Protecting user privacy is not political,” said congressman Jerry Nadler, a Democrat of New York, in response to Jordan’s remarks.Republicans also condemned Khan for allegedly wasting government money by pursuing more legal action to prevent mergers than her predecessors – but losing. On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled against the FTC’s bid to delay Microsoft from acquiring video game company Activision Blizzard, saying the agency failed to prove it would decrease competition and harm consumers. The FTC is appealing against that ruling.“She has pushed investigations to burden parties with vague and costly demands without any substantive follow-through, or, frankly, logic, for the requests themselves,” said Jordan.Another Republican member, Darrell Issa, of California, called Khan a “bully” for trying to prevent mergers.“I believe you’ve taken the idea that companies should have to be less competitive in order to merge, [and] that every merger has to be somehow bad for the company and good for the consumer – a standard that cannot be met,” Issa said.Khan earlier came under scrutiny from Republicans participating in an FTC case reviewing Meta’s bid to acquire a virtual reality company despite a recommendation from an ethics official to recuse herself. She defended her decision to remain on the case Thursday, saying she consulted with the ethics official. Khan testified she had “not a penny” in the company’s financial stock and thus did not violate ethics laws.But enforcing antitrust laws for big tech companies such as Twitter has traditionally been a bipartisan issue.“It’s a little strange that you have this real antipathy among the Republicans of Lina Khan, who in many ways is doing exactly what the Republicans say needs to be done, which is bringing a lot more antitrust scrutiny of big tech,” said Daniel Crane, a professor on antitrust law and enforcement at the University of Michigan Law School.“There’s a broad consensus that we need to do more, but that’s kind of where the agreement ends,” he said.Republicans distrust big tech companies over issues of censorship, political bias and cultural influence, whereas Democrats come from a traditional scrutiny of corporations and concentration of economic power, said Crane.“I don’t fundamentally think she’s doing something other than what she was put in office to do,” he said.Congress has not yet passed a major antitrust statute that would be favorable to the FTC in these court battles and does not seem to be pursuing one any time soon, said Crane. “They’re just going to lose a lot of cases, and that’s foreseen.”The FTC’s list of battles with big tech companies is growing.Hours earlier on Thursday, Twitter – which now legally goes by X Corp – asked a federal court to terminate a 2011 settlement with the FTC that placed restrictions on its user data and privacy practices. Khan noted Twitter voluntarily entered into that agreement.Also on Thursday, the Washington Post reported the FTC opened an investigation in OpenAI on whether its chatbot, ChatGPT, is harmful to consumers. A spokesperson for the FTC would not comment on the OpenAI investigation but Khan said during the hearing that “it has been publicly reported”.In 2017, Khan, now 34, gained fame for an academic article she wrote as a law student at Yale that used Amazon’s business practices to explain gaps in US antitrust policy. Biden announced he intended to nominate the antitrust researcher to head the FTC in March 2021. She was sworn in that June.“Chair Khan has delivered results for families, consumers, workers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs,” White House spokesperson Michael Kikukawa said in a statement. More

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      What to Watch for as FBI Director Christopher Wray Testifies Before Congress

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      Stoked by former President Donald J. Trump, congressional Republicans have been trying to undermine the F.B.I.’s legitimacy with the public.Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, confronted an extraordinary political storm on Wednesday in testifying before Congress, with Republicans who once defended the bureau now denouncing it as a weapon wielded against former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters.Mr. Wray, who is appearing for the first time before the House Judiciary Committee since Republicans won the House, is most likely girding for the worst. The committee, led by Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, has said it “will examine the politicization” of the F.B.I. under Mr. Wray and Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.In his opening statement, Mr. Jordan accused the bureau of a litany of abuses. He urged Democratic lawmakers to join Republicans in blocking the reauthorization of a warrantless surveillance program known as Section 702 and raised questions about funding for the bureau’s new headquarters.“I hope they will work with us in the appropriations process to stop the weaponization of the government against the American people and end this double standard that exists now in our justice system,” he said.Anticipating the questioning to come, the top Democrat on the committee, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, described the hearing as “little more than performance art.” He countered that Republicans had initiated an array of “baseless investigations” in a bid to “protect Donald Trump from the consequences of his actions.”Stoked by the former president, congressional Republicans have adopted an increasingly caustic tone in their criticism of the country’s premier law enforcement agency, trying to damage its legitimacy and to undermine its standing with the public.That criticism was once trained on the bureau’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia during the 2016 election. It is now focused on other flash points: Mr. Trump’s indictment in an inquiry into his handling of classified documents; the F.B.I.’s role in the search of his estate in Florida in August, as part of that inquiry; unfounded claims of a “two-tiered” system of justice favoring Democrats; and the Justice Department’s plea agreement with President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.So far, Republicans have not provided evidence that the F.B.I. and Mr. Wray are partisan, but they will try to catch him off balance and seed doubt about his motives.Here is what to look for:How will Mr. Wray respond?Mr. Wray infuriated Mr. Trump, who viewed the director’s declaration of independence as disloyalty. But Mr. Wray has previously testified before Congress, steadfastly defending the F.B.I. as nonpartisan and taking fire on Twitter from Mr. Trump, while he was president.Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Wray in 2017 after he fired James B. Comey, who as F.B.I. director had opened the Russia investigation. Since then, Mr. Wray has been under constant pressure from Republicans, who have simultaneously decried lawlessness in cities run by Democrats while attacking the F.B.I.’s role in political investigations.In the past, Mr. Wray has responded to attacks by parsing his words carefully. In his opening statement, he forcibly defended the F.B.I. and declined to discuss open investigations, which is the policy of the Justice Department.“I want to talk about the sheer breadth and impact of the work the F.B.I.’s 38,000 employees are doing, each and every day,” he said, citing the bureau’s work in addressing violent crime, fentanyl trafficking and efforts by China to steal trade secrets. “Because the work the men and women of the F.B.I. do to protect the American people goes way beyond the one or two investigations that seem to capture all the headlines.”Republicans are going to war.Mr. Trump and his supporters — as well as a vocal group of former F.B.I. officials who have aligned themselves with Republicans in Congress — believe the government is trying to silence and punish conservatives and see the bureau as a dangerous extension of that effort.Case in point: In January, House Republicans voted to investigate law enforcement, creating the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.Republicans have claimed that the F.B.I. prodded Twitter to discriminate against their party as well as conservative or right-wing protesters at school board meetings and abortion clinics. Those issues have proved to be powerful drivers of voter turnout in the party’s pro-Trump base.The subcommittee is led by Mr. Jordan, a close ally of Mr. Trump’s.Last month, House Republicans on the Oversight Committee moved to hold Mr. Wray in contempt of Congress. But they called off a planned vote days later after the bureau said it would make available a document at the center of their dispute, involving an unverified allegation of bribery against Mr. Biden when he was vice president.Mr. Trump and his supporters have promoted the idea that the Mar-a-Lago search was intended to neutralize his electoral chances.Mr. Trump and his allies have raged at his indictment and the search of Mar-a-Lago in August, when F.B.I. agents descended on his residence and uncovered hundreds of classified documents.The former president and his supporters have said that Mr. Trump declassified the records, meaning there was no misconduct to start, and that the search was an example of an uneven application of justice.But so far no evidence has emerged that the documents were declassified or that the search, which was approved by a federal judge, was improper or politically motivated. In fact, the search unfolded after Mr. Trump repeatedly resisted the government’s requests that he return the material.In recent weeks, Steven D’Antuono, the former top F.B.I. agent overseeing the documents case, testified behind closed doors before Mr. Jordan.Asked if “anyone was motivated by animus” in the documents investigation, Mr. D’Antuono said no, according to a transcript of his testimony.Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Wray in 2017 after he fired James B. Comey.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesHunter Biden reached a plea deal. Republicans hate it.Under the deal with the Justice Department, Mr. Biden agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his 2017 and 2018 taxes on time and to be sentenced to probation. The department also said it would not prosecute him for buying a handgun in 2018 during a period when he was using drugs.Republicans have assailed the deal, calling it too lenient, even though years of investigation by a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney found evidence to charge Mr. Biden only on the narrow tax and gun issues, rather than the wide-ranging international conspiracies peddled by Mr. Trump and his allies.That U.S. attorney, David C. Weiss, who signed off on the agreement, has also come under fire. On Monday, Mr. Weiss rebutted a key element of testimony to Congress by an Internal Revenue Service official who said that Mr. Weiss had complained about being blocked from pursuing more serious charges.Republicans will claim the Durham investigation showed that the F.B.I. was politically motivated in pursuing its Russia inquiry.A final report by John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel, looked at the origins of the F.B.I.’s investigation into any ties Mr. Trump’s campaign had with Russia but found no evidence of politically motivated misconduct.Still, Mr. Durham’s report has continued to fuel Republican claims of bias, with some accusing the F.B.I. of making moves motivated by political favoritism.That charge almost immediately resurfaced during Mr. Wray’s hearing. Mr. Durham’s “ lengthy report reluctantly concluded that the F.B.I. quote, failed uphold its mission of strict fidelity to the law,” Representative Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, said shortly after Mr. Wray’s testimony began.Even as Mr. Trump and his loyalists had long insisted that Mr. Durham’s investigation would unearth a “deep state” conspiracy intended to damage him politically, Mr. Durham never charged high-level government officials.Instead, Mr. Durham developed only two peripheral cases involving accusations of making false statements, both of which ended in acquittals, while using his report to cite flaws in the F.B.I.’s early investigative steps that he attributed to confirmation bias.Will Americans trust the F.B.I.?Republicans have claimed the Justice Department is “weaponized” against conservatives, but the allegations that were brought forth by aggrieved former F.B.I. officials have foundered.Instead, Democratic investigators have uncovered that those former F.B.I. officials have trafficked in right-wing conspiracy theories, including about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, and have received financial support from a top ally of Mr. Trump’s.In a heated exchange, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, said the American public trusted the F.B.I. more under J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s first director, than under the leadership of Mr. Wray. Mr. Wray countered that the number of F.B.I. applicants had surged in Mr. Gaetz’s home state. Mr. Gaetz said he was “deeply proud” of these people and “they deserve better than you.”Still, the back-and-forth is having an impact. Mr. D’Antuono, in his testimony, rebuffed allegations of political bias and rejected calls to defund the bureau — but expressed concern about the future.“In my opinion,” he said, “the more the American people hear about not trusting the F.B.I., it’s not a good day for this country.” More

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      How the Internet Shrank Musk and DeSantis

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

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      Ron DeSantis vs. the ‘Woke Mind Virus’

      by

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