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      George Saunders on the ‘Braindead Megaphone’ That Makes Our Politics So Awful

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      George Saunders is regarded as one of our greatest living fiction writers. He won the Booker Prize in 2017 for his novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” and has published numerous short-story collections to wide acclaim, including his most recent book, “Liberation Day.” He also happens to be one of my favorite people to read and to talk to.Saunders is an incredibly prescient and sharp observer of American political culture. Way back in 2007, he argued that our media environment was transforming politics into a competition within which the loudest voices would command the most attention and set the agenda for everyone else. With the rise of social media — and the advent of the Trump era — that observation has been more than vindicated. So as we approach the midterm elections, I wanted to have Saunders back on the show to talk about how politics and media have changed, and how those changes are shaping the way we interact, communicate and even think.[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]We discuss how Twitter takes advantage of — even warps — our “malleable” selves, how politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene strategically manipulate our attentional environments, how Barack Obama leveraged our human desire to be recognized as our best selves, whether discipline or gentleness is more effective in helping others grow, what options we have to resist anti-democratic tendencies in our politics, whether a post-scarcity future — with jobs for everyone — would leave us more or less satisfied, how the greatest evils can be committed by those trying to care for their loved ones, what attending Trump rallies taught Saunders about political violence and more.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Zach Krahmer“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Mary Marge Locker. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      Resistance to Misinformation Is Weakening on Twitter, a Report Found

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      Concerns about misinformation on Twitter have flared in the days since Elon Musk’s takeover on Oct. 27, pushing away advertisers, rattling researchers and increasing fears that conspiracy theories and false narratives could pollute the political discourse on the platform ahead of the midterm elections.Researchers at the Fletcher School at Tufts University said in a report that “early signs show the platform is heading in the wrong direction under his leadership — at a particularly inconvenient time for American democracy.”The researchers said they had tracked narratives about civil war, election fraud, citizen policing of voting, and allegations of pedophilia and grooming on Twitter from July through October. They said they had found that the discussion reflected a commitment to combating misinformation, hate speech and toxic ideas.“Post-Musk takeover, the quality of the conversation has decayed,” as more extremists and misinformation peddlers tested the platform’s boundaries, the researchers wrote.Before Mr. Musk took control of Twitter, posts pushing back against misinformation, hate and other toxic speech were usually many times greater than the original false or misleading posts, the Tufts researchers discovered.Conspiracy theories focused on unfounded allegations of pedophilia or “grooming,” which advance an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. message, have encountered less resistance from a Musk-led Twitter, the Tufts report found. Earlier spikes in the topic were accompanied by strong condemnation; after Oct. 28, researchers wrote, “the conversation deteriorated quickly” as users tested Twitter moderators by repeatedly writing “GROOMER,” in an echo of a coordinated campaign to spread antisemitic content as the platform adjusted to Mr. Musk.On Monday, with hours to go before the vote, Mr. Musk tweeted out a link to Twitter’s rules, which he said “will evolve over time.” Watchdog groups quickly noticed that the page did not explicitly address misinformation, although it did prohibit users from using the platform to manipulate or interfere in elections, employ misleading and deceptive identities or share harmful synthetic or manipulated media. A separate page about misinformation in Twitter’s “Help Center” section remained live.Fears about ads appearing in proximity to misinformation and other problematic posts have led General Mills, United Airlines and several other large companies to pause their spending on Twitter in recent days. Content moderation has sparked heated exchanges on Madison Avenue with and about Mr. Musk. More

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      Elon Musk Is Tweeting Through a Tide of Criticism

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      The new owner of Twitter has embarked on a tweeting spree to push back, spar and justify his actions.Illustration By The New York Times; Photo By Adrees Latif/reutersUnder pressure and facing a wave of criticism, Elon Musk has increasingly turned to his favorite release valve: Twitter.Since Saturday, Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter, has embarked on a tweeting spree so voluminous that he is on a pace to post more than 750 times this month, or more than 25 times a day, according to an analysis from the digital investigations company Memetica. That would be up from about 13 times a day in April, when Mr. Musk first agreed to buy Twitter.His recent tweets have covered an increasingly broad range of topics. Over the last four days, Mr. Musk, 51, needled the comedian Kathy Griffin and beefed with the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on the platform. He made masturbation jokes aimed at a rival — and much smaller — social media platform. He posted, then deleted, a tweet engaging with a quote from a white nationalist. And he defended his ownership of Twitter, including why he had laid off 50 percent of the company’s staff and why people should not impersonate others on the service.All in all, Mr. Musk, who described himself in his Twitter profile as “Chief Twit” before later changing the description to “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator,” has tweeted more than 105 times since Friday, mainly about Twitter, according to a tally by Memetica.“Birds haven’t been real since 1986,” Mr. Musk tweeted on Sunday in a discussion thread about Twitter, including a meme from an absurdist conspiracy theory that posits that birds are actually robot spies. He did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Musk is under tremendous scrutiny 11 days after completing his $44 billion deal for Twitter, which was the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. On Friday, he cut roughly 3,700 of the company’s 7,500 employees, saying he had no choice because Twitter was losing $4 million a day. At the same time, he has found himself embroiled in the same content debates that have plagued other social media companies, including how to give people a way to speak out without spreading misinformation and toxic speech.More on Elon Musk’s Twitter TakeoverA Familiar Playbook: In his first days at Twitter, Elon Musk has been emulating some of the actions of Mark Zuckerberg, who leads Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.A Different Kind of Deal: Silicon Valley moguls used to buy yachts and islands. Now they are rich enough to acquire companies they fancy.‘Hard Fork’: In an episode of The Times’s tech podcast, two Twitter employees described the atmosphere inside the company in the aftermath of the acquisition.Effect on Midterms: Mr. Musk is in the middle of firing thousands of Twitter employees, including many who helped fight misinformation. What could that mean for the upcoming elections?Already Mr. Musk has had to delay the rollout of a subscription product that would have given people check marks on their Twitter profiles. Advertisers have paused their spending on Twitter over fears that Mr. Musk will loosen content rules on the platform. And the midterm elections are set to be a test of how a slimmed-down Twitter will perform in catching inflammatory posts and misinformation about voting and election results.In a report that was published on Monday, researchers at the Fletcher School at Tufts University said the early signs of Mr. Musk’s Twitter “show the platform is heading in the wrong direction under his leadership — at a particularly inconvenient time for American democracy.”The researchers said they had tracked narratives about civil war, election fraud, citizen policing of voting, and allegations of pedophilia and grooming on Twitter from July through October. “Post-Musk takeover, the quality of the conversation has decayed” as more extremists and misinformation peddlers have tested the platform’s boundaries, the researchers wrote.Amid the hubbub, Mr. Musk’s behavior on Twitter suggests that he intends to simply post through it. And while he has always been a prolific tweeter, he has raised the level in recent days.On Friday, Mr. Musk, who has more than 114 million followers on Twitter, proposed a “thermonuclear name & shame” campaign against brands that had stopped advertising on the platform. He said that he had done everything he could to appease advertisers but that activists had worked against him to cause brands to drop out of spending on Twitter.At the same time, the billionaire was embroiled in a fight over his plan to charge Twitter users $8 a month for a subscription service, Twitter Blue, which would give a check mark to anyone who paid. The check mark had been free for notable people whose identities had been verified by the company, including celebrities, politicians and journalists, as a way to protect against impersonation.Critics were unhappy about Mr. Musk’s plans to monetize the check mark, saying it could lead to the spread of misinformation and fraud on the platform. In protest, some Twitter accounts that had check marks changed their display names and photographs to match Mr. Musk’s account over the weekend, a move intended to illustrate why it would be confusing if anyone could buy a check mark.On Sunday, Mr. Musk announced that he would permanently suspend any account “engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody.’” The billionaire, who had previously criticized Twitter when it permanently barred users, then barred Ms. Griffin, who had posed as him on the service.Mr. Musk, who has called himself a “free speech absolutist,” is learning the basic expectation of content moderation for popular social networks, said Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center.“His ideas have been incoherent for a while,” she said.On Sunday night, Mr. Musk responded to a tweet featuring a quote from a white nationalist, before deleting the post and moving on to squabble with Mr. Dorsey over Birdwatch, a feature that lets community members add context to tweets that they believe are misleading. Mr. Musk, who previously lauded the feature, proposed changing the feature’s name to “Community Notes.”“Community notes is the most boring Facebook name ever,” replied Mr. Dorsey, who owns a $1 billion stake in Mr. Musk’s Twitter.Then on Monday, Mr. Musk suggested he might pursue civil society groups and activists who were pushing for Twitter advertiser boycotts, when he replied to a right-wing commentator that “we do” have grounds for legal action. Legal experts said the holding of boycotts for social and political goals is protected under the First Amendment.Mr. Musk also tweeted that people should vote Republican in Tuesday’s midterm elections. “Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” he tweeted. He later posted that he was an independent with a “voting history of entirely Democrat until this year.”He soon moved on. Mr. Musk’s attention became fixed on Mastodon, a Twitter competitor that has gained traction over the past 10 days. Playing off Mastodon’s name, he made several crude jokes about masturbation — then deleted those posts an hour later.Tiffany Hsu More

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      Twitter Said to Delay Changes to Check Mark Badges Until After Midterms

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      Users and employees had raised concerns that Elon Musk’s plan to give check marks to those who paid a monthly fee could be misused to sow discord.Twitter is delaying the rollout of verification check marks to subscribers of its new $7.99 a month subscription service until after Tuesday’s midterm elections, according to an internal post viewed by The New York Times and two people with knowledge of the decision.The company made the call a day after announcing that it was rolling out the program for people to receive a verification check mark on their profile for the monthly fee. On Saturday, the company had said in notes accompanying a new update to the Twitter app that the paid verification system was now a feature of the website’s subscription service, Twitter Blue.“Power to the people,” the announcement said. “Your account will get a blue check mark, just like the celebrities, companies, and politicians you already follow.”But many Twitter users and employees raised concerns that the new pay-for-play badges could cause confusion ahead of Tuesday’s elections because users could easily create verified accounts — say, posing as President Biden or as lawmakers or news outlets and publishing false information about voting results — which could potentially sow discord. In an internal Slack channel on Saturday, one Twitter employee asked why the social network was “making such a risky change before elections, which has the potential of causing election interference.”A manager working on the verification badge project responded on Sunday that “we’ve made the decision to move the launch of this release to Nov. 9, after the election.”Twitter, whose communications team has been almost entirely laid off, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Nov. 9 is the day immediately following Tuesday’s election, and many races may still be undecided as votes are tallied.Charging for the verification check mark program had been one of the changes made by Elon Musk, who took over Twitter late last month in a $44 billion buyout. The billionaire is under financial pressure from the deal, which he partly financed with $13 billion in debt. Twitter has long been unprofitable and, like other social media companies, it faces a weakening in digital advertising spending as the global economy tips toward a recession.On Friday, Mr. Musk laid off roughly half of Twitter’s employees, or about 3,700 jobs. He said at the time that he had no choice but to make the cuts because the company was losing $4 million a day.Mr. Musk and his advisers have also been discussing various ways to wring more money out of Twitter. In addition to the check mark program, they have talked about adding paid direct messages — which would let users send private messages to high-profile users — to the service, as well as “paywalled” videos, which would mean that certain videos could not be viewed unless users paid a fee. They have also discussed reviving Vine, a onetime short-form video platform.On Sunday, Mr. Musk said Twitter would continue to crack down on accounts that pretend to be other people. “Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended,” Mr. Musk said in a tweet. More

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      How Molly Jong-Fast Tweeted Her Way to Liberal Media Stardom

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      Molly Jong-Fast had just finished interviewing Vice President Kamala Harris for her podcast when she hopped in an Uber S.U.V. headed to the Century, the Manhattan literary club where she was throwing a book party for the media critic Margaret Sullivan, a friend. The editors of Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair greeted her with hugs. The owner of The New Republic, Win McCormack, stopped to say hello.“I just interviewed the vice president!” Ms. Jong-Fast gushed.“The vice president?” Mr. McCormack replied, brow furrowing. “ … Of the United States?”For much of her life, Ms. Jong-Fast, 44, was known for being the daughter of her mother, Erica Jong, whose novel “Fear of Flying” is a feminist classic. Ms. Jong-Fast went to rehab at 19, married at 23, and wrote a couple of novels and a book of essays about her bohemia-by-way-of-Park-Avenue upbringing.Now, within a certain rarefied slice of American political life, she is a star. On Wednesday, she joined Vanity Fair as a special correspondent. One million people follow her on Twitter. The first guest on her new podcast, distributed by the mega network iHeartMedia, was President Biden’s chief of staff. In the run-up to Tuesday’s midterm elections, she has interviewed Senators Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Fetterman and Ms. Harris — a lineup rivaling MSNBC.In Woody Allen’s “Purple Rose of Cairo,” a moviegoer steps into the screen and enters the world of her favorite film. From her Upper East Side living room, Ms. Jong-Fast marshaled a weapons-grade Twitter habit and a penchant for sliding into journalists’ DMs to catapult herself into the beating heart of left-wing media: the MSNBC Mom who starts actually appearing on MSNBC.Her rise is a testament to the power of social media, the increasingly blurred lines between armchair pundits and professional commentators, and the opportunism of writers, on the right and the left, who used Donald Trump’s presidency to reinvent themselves. It’s about the flight to ideological comfort among news consumers in a partisan era. But it’s also about Ms. Jong-Fast and her ability to win friends, wear her privilege lightly and help anxious liberals cope with a chaotic moment.“She speaks and writes in a way that is incredibly relatable to a group of people that don’t ordinarily have a columnist that speaks to them,” said Noah Shachtman, the editor of Rolling Stone, who praised her “lack of harrumph.” One superfan, the artist Diana Weymar, stitched enough needlepoints of Ms. Jong-Fast’s aphoristic tweets (“What if killing your constituents is bad for your re-election?”) to fill an exhibit at a Chelsea gallery. Ms. Jong-Fast is not an adversarial interviewer — “Do you think, personally, that democracy can survive a second Trump term?” she asked Ms. Harris — but her progressive fans don’t seem to mind. “I think she’s found her sense of purpose,” Ms. Sullivan said at the book party, as Ms. Jong-Fast, in periwinkle glasses and a Thom Browne cardigan, darted among guests. “There are very few people that meet Molly that don’t wind up rooting for Molly.”‘I’m so grateful I got sober before social media.’ — @mollyjongfastMs. Jong-Fast with her mother, Erica Jong, in New York, in July.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesLast month, Ms. Jong-Fast sat barefoot in her spacious but homey Upper East Side co-op, surrounded by the bric-a-brac of uptown literary life: Fornasetti candles, her grandfather’s Emmy, a pillow needlepointed with the cover of The New York Post. As one dog was groomed in the dining room, another nestled in her lap. In her makeshift home podcast studio, Ms. Jong-Fast had just wrapped a Zoom interview with Gisele Barreto Fetterman, wife of the Pennsylvania Senate candidate. (“You look a-mazing,” Ms. Jong-Fast cooed, as Ms. Fetterman asked after her pets.)The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.“I was a drug addict, I nearly died, I got sober; I’ve had this incredible run,” Ms. Jong-Fast said. “A lot of kids who grew up like I grew up are not high functioning. I feel very grateful.”Her parents split up when she was 3. Her mother, busy being a cultural icon, often left Ms. Jong-Fast with her grandparents, including Howard Fast, the “Spartacus” novelist and Communist activist who served prison time in the McCarthy era and introduced Molly to left-wing politics.Her mother, Ms. Jong-Fast notes, was an early adopter of oversharing. In 1985, Erica moved 6-year-old Molly from New York to the Beverly Hilton for a month because she was developing a sitcom based on her daughter’s experience with divorce. A pilot aired, but not before Ms. Jong-Fast’s father, Jonathan Fast, sued and demanded that his ex-wife change the character’s name from Molly to Megan. (A review in The New York Times praised the show’s “appealing breeziness.”)Ms. Jong-Fast is dyslexic and did poorly in school; her ejection from Dalton, she said, was a “seismic” shock for her ur-intellectual family. She got into alcohol and drugs. After spending time at Hazelden, the A-list rehab center, Ms. Jong-Fast, at 21, published a roman à clef about her struggles. “That was what my mother did,” she said, referring to the act of novelizing one’s life. “So I just thought that was what you’re supposed to do.” The reviews were vicious.She married her husband, an English professor turned venture capitalist, had three children, and wrote another book. But she felt at a loss. “I was like, ‘My life has no meaning,’” she recalled. “I was not put on this earth to write chick-lit novels.” Her writing on politics, at The Forward, drew little notice.Then Mr. Trump came down the escalator. “At some point I realized this guy was gonna win and I was like, ‘Why isn’t everyone hysterical?’” she recalled. “That’s when I really started tweeting.”She tweeted her angst five, 10, 15 times a day. (Sometimes she would merely reply to Mr. Trump’s tweets, scoring likes and retweets for her punchy responses.) She replied to journalists and posted links to their stories. The conservative commentator Bill Kristol hired her to write for his site The Bulwark. She traveled, on her own dime, to cover Trump rallies and conservative conferences, mingling with the network of reporters she was cultivating online.She turned her lack of reportorial expertise into an asset, forsaking complex political analysis for a “can you believe this?” astonishment. (When she started a newsletter at The Atlantic, she called it “Wait, What?”) For anguished liberals in the Trump era seeking a voice in the media, simply underlining the preposterousness of events was enough. “Sometimes everyone will say something and I’ll be like, ‘How’?” Ms. Jong-Fast said. “I just feel like a lot of times I’m like, this doesn’t smell right, and I think that has been really helpful in my life.”‘Democrats continue to bring a stuffed animal to a knife fight.’ — @mollyjongfastOne evening in 2019, I arrived at Ms. Jong-Fast’s building for a party she was throwing in honor of the actress Kathy Griffin. Inside the door was Resistance Twitter come to life.The writer E. Jean Carroll, who had recently accused Mr. Trump of sexual assault, was engrossed in conversation with George T. Conway III, husband of Kellyanne Conway, when Ms. Griffin, in an ecru Valentino dress, approached. “Who has Mrs. Mueller’s number?” she asked mischievously, laying out a “Lysistrata”-style scheme in which the wife of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, would withhold physical relations from her husband until he divulged damning details about Mr. Trump.Her planning was interrupted by the arrival of the Momofuku catering. “This is the best party I’ve been to all year,” Ms. Carroll said as she glided toward the slow-roasted pork. (Later, when she sued Mr. Trump for defamation, she hired a lawyer that Mr. Conway recommended to her that evening.)Philippe Reines, a former senior aide to Hillary Clinton, surveyed the room of liberal writers, comedians and cable news green room habitués, and compared the gathering to the TV show “Lost”: shellshocked survivors wandering a beach. “If we all went down on the plane, who would get the obit?” he asked. The consensus: Ms. Griffin.Washington has its famed political hostesses — Sally Quinn, Pamela Harriman — but latter-day New York has lacked for gatherers. Ms. Jong-Fast, with her ample personality (and ample apartment), filled the void. “I walked in and the first sight I see is Erica Jong talking with Joyce Carol Oates,” said Ms. Sullivan, a former public editor of The Times. “I felt like I was in literary heaven.”These gatherings — which extend to a semiregular Washington party at the home of the NBC reporter Jonathan Allen — have doubled as another prong of Ms. Jong-Fast’s path to media success. Many attendees are people Ms. Jong-Fast has met online. (“It’s just one of those friendships that develops through direct messages,” Mr. Conway recalled.) When she started a podcast in 2020 at The Daily Beast, “The New Abnormal,” Ms. Jong-Fast leaned on those connections to secure guests like Ben Stiller, Sharon Stone, and Mary Trump. The podcast, co-hosted with the former Republican consultant Rick Wilson, sailed toward the top of the charts.Noah Shachtman, the editor of Rolling Stone, with Ms. Jong-Fast at a book party for Margaret Sullivan, right, in New York, last month.Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“I was sort of like, ‘Meh, OK, does the world really need another podcast?’” recalled Mr. Shachtman, the Rolling Stone editor who ran The Daily Beast at the time. “And it became hugely important to us — hugely.”Ms. Jong-Fast left for The Atlantic in late 2021, where she remained until joining Vanity Fair. In September, she moved her podcast to iHeartMedia, which advertises the show across its radio stations. So far, “Fast Politics” — a two-person operation consisting of Ms. Jong-Fast and a producer who previously recorded songs for The Misfits — is hovering around the Top 50 of Apple’s news category.The Trump era produced no shortage of wannabe pundits. Ms. Jong-Fast credits some of her success to a tenacity honed by years as a freelancer; to secure Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, for her podcast, she pestered his staff for months. “I’m used to so much rejection,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Do you have five minutes for me? You could do it in your car!’”A high-end Rolodex helps. Her first MSNBC appearance was with Lawrence O’Donnell, who, she admits, once went on a date with her mother. “There are people I am more connected to than others,” she said. When Ms. Jong-Fast, on Oct. 20, tweeted about the death of her dog, Cerberus, she received condolences from Aimee Mann, Padma Lakshmi, Daryl Hannah, and Megyn Kelly.She is particularly close with Ms. Griffin, who said in an interview that when she met Ms. Jong-Fast, “about 75 percent of my friends had dumped me permanently.” (Ms. Griffin had been widely castigated for posting a photo of herself with a facsimile of Mr. Trump’s decapitated head.) When Ms. Griffin had surgery in 2021 to remove a tumor in her lung, Ms. Jong-Fast stayed with her in Malibu, Calif.“We’d watch the news or she’d be online the whole time,” Ms. Griffin recalled.‘My life may not turn out how I want it but at least I won’t be buried on my second husband’s golf course.’ — @mollyjongfastPhilip Vukelich for The New York TimesMs. Jong-Fast says she wants to fill a perceived void in the political podcast space, arguing that conservative megastars like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino need more liberal rivals. (Mr. Shapiro is not exactly a fan, once tweeting that the fact Ms. Jong-Fast is paid “to say and write words” proves that “in a big, beautiful, capitalistic democracy like ours, literally anyone can make a living.”) Ms. Jong-Fast acknowledges a debt to “Pod Save America,” the lefty podcast started by Barack Obama alumni, and expressed some jealousy that they booked Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has repeatedly turned her down.Her podcast is unlikely to move the needle with purple-state voters, so why do boldface politicians like Ms. Harris even bother? The audience, said one Democratic operative, is not voters so much as elite liberals with money; for Democrats, accessing the donor class is as much a part of the left-wing media game as swaying hearts and minds. Ms. Jong-Fast is a relatively friendly conduit.Ms. Jong-Fast, after years of struggling to break into top-tier magazines, marvels at Twitter’s ability to bypass media gatekeepers. But her million-strong Twitter account is a powerful megaphone in its own right: Several journalists confided to me they often text their stories to Ms. Jong-Fast as a surefire path to clicks.In recent days, she has been heckling Elon Musk on Twitter, although she is relatively sanguine about the medium’s future under its new owner. “We’re still gonna need a place to push content,” she said.There are downsides. Ms. Jong-Fast has received death threats. (“I told the doormen and they were like, ‘Again?’”) She shrugged them off. “One thing that was helpful — or made me pathological, depending on your viewpoint — is that my mother wrote about me my whole life, so I never had this assumption of privacy,” she said.Erica Jong is suffering from memory issues, but her daughter said she enjoys seeing her appearances on cable news. “It makes her feel good about her parenting choices,” Ms. Jong-Fast said, wryly.In the age of Trump, partisan punditry is a kind of modern therapy: How many liberals attribute their sanity to nightly sessions with Rachel Maddow? Some of Ms. Jong-Fast’s fans feel the same: “I get emails that are like, ‘I live in Montana, I’m 88 years old, you make me feel like it’s going to be OK.’”For Ms. Jong-Fast, who on Wednesday celebrated 25 years sober, the treatment might go both ways. “My husband is like, ‘Oh my god, democracy is dying in front of us,’” Ms. Jong-Fast said as a dog hopped off her lap. “And I’m like, ‘I’m just going to write another piece.’” More

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      Twitter’s mass layoffs, days before US midterms, could be a misinformation disaster

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      Twitter’s mass layoffs, days before US midterms, could be a misinformation disasterInternal chaos at the company – and the decimation of its staff – has created ideal conditions for falsehoods and hateful content The mass layoffs at Twitter that diminished several teams, including staff on the company’s safety and misinformation teams, could spell disaster during the US midterm elections next week, experts have warned. The company has laid off around 50% of its workforce, according to news reports; a figure that Musk and others have not disputed, amounting to an estimated 3,700 people.The internal chaos unfolding at Twitter, in addition to a sudden lack of staff and resources dedicated to counteracting misinformation, has created ideal conditions for election misinformation to thrive, said Paul Barrett, an expert in disinformation and fake news at New York University.What changes has Elon Musk made at Twitter and what might he do next?Read more“Twitter is in the midst of a category 5 hurricane, and that is not a good environment for fostering vigilance when dealing with inevitable attempts to spread falsehoods and hateful content on a very influential platform,” he said.Elon Musk and other senior figures have sought to re-assure the public. Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth, said in a tweet on Friday that the layoffs affected “approximately 15%” of the trust and safety team – responsible for combating misinformation – with its “frontline moderation staff experiencing the least impact”.Musk also stated that he had spoken to civil society leaders at the Anti-Defamation League and the nonprofit Color of Change about “how Twitter will continue to combat hate and harassment and enforce its election integrity policies”.However, members of those groups claimed on Friday that in laying off the teams responsible for retaining election integrity, Musk had “betray[ed]” those promises. They called on advertisers to pull funding from Twitter as risks around elections continue to mount.“Retaining and enforcing election-integrity measures requires an investment in the human expert staff, factcheckers, and moderators, who are being shown the door today,” said Jessica J González, co-CEO of civil liberties group Free Press. In addition to a portion of its trust and safety team, Twitter appears to have axed the entire curation team, responsible for creating guides to authoritative information often surfaced alongside topics with high risk of misinformation. A London-based team member tweeted on Friday that the group at Twitter “is no more”. Another former team member echoed the claims on Friday, stating that the changes “will make Twitter noisier, more dangerous and less interesting”.Twitter also appears to have eliminated its ethics, transparency, and accountability team, which is in charge of opening up the platform’s algorithm for external review and studying the amplification of misinformation and other content.Although Musk has not made any concrete policy changes, nor allowed back any high-profile banned figures such as Donald Trump, the lack of staffing could pose a major problem for enforcing existing policies, Barrett said. Although automated systems are likely to continue to run, “you need human beings to pick up subtle forms of misinformation”.“It does not seem like there will be many people at the desk in the office prepared for oversight of content that could contribute to the continuing erosion of trust in our election system,” Barrett said.Twitter layoffs raise questions about future of infrastructure and moderationRead moreIn addition to misinformation concerns on Twitter, cuts to infrastructure have raised alarm that the platform itself may not survive the influx of traffic expected during the elections. The issue was called into focus earlier this year when a whistleblower accused the company of “egregious” failings in security and safety.An internal source at the company told Reuters that the infrastructure cuts were “delusional”, adding that when user traffic surges, the service can fail “in spectacular ways”.While it is too soon to measure concrete impacts of Twitter’s restructuring, early tracking shows hate speech is increasing. Researchers from Montclair State University found in the 12 hours immediately after Musk took ownership on Twitter, “vulgar and hostile” rhetoric saw an “immediate, visible and measurable spike”, including a rise in racial slurs.“What we have seen so far has been a canary in the coal mine for what might come in the days immediately before and – crucially – in the days after the election,” Barrett said. “This is an all-hands-on-deck situation, and unfortunately many of those hands are out the door.”TopicsTwitterUS midterm elections 2022US politicsSocial mediaElon MusknewsReuse this content More

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      What Twitter’s Shake-Up Could Mean: Midterm Misinformation Run Amok

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      Declining trust in institutions is fostering mistrust about voting, leading many Americans to embrace conspiracy theories about elections.A recent exchange between David Becker, a nonpartisan elections expert, and a Twitter user named “@catturd2” — an account with nearly a million followers that sometimes exchanges posts with Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter — offered a telling example of why misinformation is such an intractable problem.“Funny how we could easily count every vote in every state on election night until a few years ago,” the account tweeted. The false claim racked up 67,000 likes.“With all due respect to catturd,” Becker clarified to his much smaller list of 15,000 followers, “we have never, in the history of our nation, come close to counting all the votes on election night. Every state takes weeks to count all the ballots (incl military) and officially certify the results. Every state. Always.”Why does this matter? Because false information about the mechanics of voting fosters mistrust and is leading many Americans — overwhelmingly on the right — to embrace conspiracy theories about elections.And by the way, Musk is in the middle of firing thousands of Twitter employees, including members of the trust and safety teams that manage content moderation.“It’s an egregiously irresponsible thing to do just days before midterms that are likely to be mired by voter intimidation, false claims of election rigging and potential political violence,” said Jesse Lehrich, a co-founder of the nonprofit watchdog group Accountable Tech.First: Lest there be any doubt, the notion that America ever counts every vote on election night is both flatly untrue and easily checkable. California, for instance, has never come anywhere within shouting distance of that goal. Close races there can take weeks to call. New York State is notoriously slow at counting votes; in 2020, local election boards did not start counting absentee ballots until seven days after Election Day. Some waited even longer.There’s no conspiracy here. It takes a long time to count votes in a country as big as the United States. This is why states have processes in place to certify the results over the course of weeks. Alaska, for instance, isn’t planning to tabulate and release unofficial results of its election until Nov. 23. That’s entirely normal.But with Twitter in turmoil, Lehrich is worried about how misinformation about voting might spread unchecked over the next few days and weeks. “Things are going to fall through the cracks, even if Elon doesn’t do anything intentional to sabotage stuff,” he said.Tweeting alonePart of what’s going on here is declining levels of trust in the pillars of American civic life — a decades-long trend captured vividly in “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam’s famous book from 2000.The numbers are even worse now. Jeffrey Jones, an analyst at Gallup, noted in July that Americans had reached “record-low confidence across all institutions.”News organizations polled near the bottom of Gallup’s list. Just 16 percent of the public said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, and only 11 percent said the same for TV news.The differences by party were stark. Just 5 percent of Republicans and 12 percent of independents said they had high confidence in newspapers, and only 35 percent of Democrats said the same. All of these numbers had declined from a year earlier.Coming in the middle of a midterm election in which journalists are trying to inform millions of voters about what’s happening and to help them assess the ideas and personal characteristics of the candidates, Gallup’s finding was alarming.And that’s just one data point. A recent poll by Bright Line Watch, a project run by a group of political scientists, found that 91 percent of Democrats were confident that their vote would be counted, versus just 68 percent of Republicans. That lack of trust is the starter fuel of election denialism.Organized groups on the right have been going after the press for decades, and conservative politicians often take up the chorus. Richard Nixon’s ill-fated vice president, Spiro Agnew, called journalists “nattering nabobs of negativism”; Donald Trump attacked the news media as the “fake news” and the “enemy of the people”; Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida ripped the “corporate media” despite being a frequent guest on Fox News — which, yes, is a corporation. If Walter Cronkite walked among us today, he’d be pilloried as a liberal shill.The left has its own beef with the news media. This week, Dan Froomkin, a reliably acerbic liberal critic of political coverage, wrote a post asking, “Why aren’t mainstream journalists sounding the alarm about the threat to democracy?” He lamented how, in his view, political reporters were “just covering it like another partisan fight.”Political reporters do cover partisan fights; there’s an election going on, and readers care about who is winning, who is losing and why.But mainstream news outlets also invested heavily this year in coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings, election denialism, political violence, dangers to election workers, plots to disrupt the midterms, misinformation and threats to democracy more generally. There’s been a lot of tough, critical coverage of election denialism.Local news is often another story. Here’s a tweet from KTNV, a television station in Nevada: “Democrat Cisco Aguilar and Republican Jim Marchant are running to be the next Secretary of State in Nevada. And both have the same focus: election integrity.”The text of the article implies that Marchant, the leader of a far-right slate of candidates for top election posts in several states who deny the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, is spreading “unfounded claims of widespread election fraud.” But it doesn’t say so explicitly.In an interview, Aguilar pointed to the KTNV article as an example of how news coverage had treated the candidates too evenhandedly and was giving Marchant a platform he didn’t deserve. (Marchant did not respond to an email sent to three of his known addresses.)When I asked Adrian Fontes, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, how he planned to combat misinformation if he wins his race against Mark Finchem, a far-right Republican who has stoked conspiracy theories about elections, he made a similar argument.“Actually, it’s not a hard problem,” Fontes said, urging journalists to stop “chasing shiny objects” and “crazy conspiracy theories” and focus instead on what election workers do.“As secretary of state,” he said, “I plan on celebrating them, elevating them and making sure that guys like you, respectfully, don’t ignore them in favor of the weirdos.”Facts are stubborn things, except when they’re not.Increasingly, though, millions of Americans aren’t getting their information from people like me. They’re following sources that have none of the checks and balances — however imperfect — that most mainstream outlets have in place.Over the last few decades, as it has stoked mistrust in the mainstream media, the right has built up a closed-off alternate ecosystem that includes Fox News, but also fringier outlets like Newsmax or One America News Network. But even those places put their names behind their stories, and viewers have a good sense of the perspective and slant they represent.This morning, I asked @catturd2 on Twitter if the user behind the account planned to issue a correction or delete the incorrect information. No response yet, but the account wrote in another tweet: “LOL – Look what Twitter did to my tweet – trying to fact check it with the fake news commie NYT,” followed by five laugh-cry smiley face emojis.Surveys show that younger people increasingly trust what they see on social media about as much as they trust traditional news sources. Data also shows that readers often can’t tell the difference between news reporting and opinion, even when they are labeled explicitly. Social media timelines jumble them all up together.And, as the Pew Research Center has noted, people don’t even agree on what a “fact” is: “Members of each political party were more likely to label both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed more to their political side,” Pew wrote in 2018.Those people staking out drop boxes in Arizona to intimidate voters based on false information, or demanding the hand-counting of ballots in Nevada? They aren’t getting their information from mainstream sources.How do honest and fair reporters reach them with accurate news? That’s a much deeper societal challenge, and nobody seems to have any good answers.What to read tonightDonald Trump is expected to announce a third White House campaign soon after the midterms, possibly as soon as Nov. 14, Michael Bender and Maggie Haberman write.In Wisconsin, one the nation’s most evenly divided swing states, Republicans are close to capturing supermajorities in the State Legislature that would render the Democratic governor irrelevant, even if he wins re-election, Reid Epstein reports.San Luis, Ariz., a small farming outpost on the border, played a critical role in the making of “2,000 Mules,” a conspiratorial movie about supposed election fraud in 2020. Now some residents are scared to vote, Jack Healy and Alexandra Berzon write.Sheera Frenkel looks at the phenomenon of “participatory misinformation” on the internet, where hunting for voter fraud has became a game.viewfinderDon Bolduc arriving on Wednesday at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, N.H., for his debate against Senator Maggie Hassan.John Tully for The New York TimesFist-pumping in a classic political battlegroundAt 5:30 p.m., there was an all-out sprint from campaign workers, volunteers and supporters.The goal: to find the best view of a parking lot where Senator Maggie Hassan and her Republican challenger, Don Bolduc, would arrive for their final debate. Each candidate’s supporters fought for position so their signs would be visible.Inside the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, the stage was being set for Hassan, a Democrat, and Bolduc, whose Senate race has tightened in recent weeks, giving Republicans hope for an upset victory.Hassan was the first to arrive, working the line for about a minute before heading inside. Within 30 seconds or so, Bolduc arrived, to cheers and jeers.He pumped his fists in front of supporters, and I captured this image — a look at grass-roots political theater in New Hampshire.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More