Kind: Reads

A Firehose of Insanity and The Republican Cycle of Radicalization by Teri Kanefield

There was an explosion of news this week with a theme: The increasing radicalization of the Republican Party. First, we have the abortion pill mifepristone debacle in which a federal judge in Texas attempted to outlaw mifepristone for the entire nation. Here’s the timeline (I find that a bullet point timeline is the best tool …

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About six months ago, Elon Musk bought your favorite neighborhood bar. Then he fired veteran bouncers and bartenders, tried to stiff the landlord and at least one vendor, and demanded that regulars pay a cover charge. He has frequently struggled to serve his customers, yet he has penalized them for mentioning the competition. He has tamped down the revelry in general, really — a lot of conversation at his watering hole has been drowned out by Musk’s own never-ending stage act, which consists mainly of him yelling dad jokes at customers through a bullhorn. Pour one out for Twitter, then. I had been open to Musk’s purchase of the social network, but half a year in, it has been an unmitigated disaster. Musk moved fast and broke nearly everything — the speed and totality with which he has ruined the site has been almost impressive. By Musk’s own reckoning, the company is now worth less than half of what he paid for it. It has lost many large advertisers, most of its employees and, with them, much of its functionality.

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Elon Musk said the Twitter Files are basically dead by Matt Binder

Following his interview on the BBC, Musk told followers that it was time to "move on" from the Twitter Files.

The April issues of Maximum PC and MacLife are currently on sale at a newsstand near you—assuming there is a newsstand near you. They’re the last print issues of these two venerable computer magazines, both of which date to 1996 (and were originally known, respectively, as Boot and MacAddict). Starting with their next editions, both […]

He wants to smear the Manhattan district attorney who is prosecuting Donald Trump. But there are some silver linings.

The New York Times does not plan to stop using Twitter, its top editor said Saturday, despite the fact that Elon Musk, the company's owner, has taken seemingly targeted actions against the Times, and has called the outlet's work "propaganda."

How to ruin your day with this one weird trick.

Respect for the Supreme Court is at an all-time low, and rightfully so. Stuart Stevens believes that Gen Z has the power, ethics, and drive to restore the Court to a state worthy of Americans' trust.

Fascism and racism on display in the GOP-controlled Tennessee House have further galvanized young voters against Republicans, writes Victor Shi.

In statehouses and on the streets, the defenders of democracy are taking action.

In the meantime, one other subject took over my Notes feed Thursday: Substack CEO Chris Best’s interview Thursday on the Decoder podcast, in which host Nilay Patel pressed him on the company’s content moderation capabilities. Asked whether Substack would remove (the implication was remove from Notes) a post that said “all brown people are animals and they shouldn’t be allowed in America,” Best refused to answer. “I’m not going to get into gotcha content moderation,” he said. I wouldn’t really say it’s a “gotcha” to ask a platform about the limits of its community standards. Particularly when a company that had previously built email and web infrastructure for independent entrepreneurs — some of whom have plainly noxious beliefs — suddenly throws them all together in a ranked social feed. A service where every reader has to manually opt in to receiving a publication, as with Substack’s emails, can get away with doing less moderation. For the most part, it’s merely providing the plumbing. But now Substack is going to take those same noxious writers and promote them to its wider user base, using the same opaque algorithms that drive everyone insane on every other social product. For the moment, Substack appears to be hoping that the laissez-faire ethos it brings to content moderation as an infrastructure provider can survive the jump to making full-fledged social products. If Substack did, it would be a first. We’ve seen what radically scaling back content moderation has done for Twitter. Of all the ways Substack could clone that platform, this is not the one I would choose.

Substack enters new territory with the launch of Substack Notes. Can it handle content moderation, running a consumer product, and beefing with Elon Musk and Twitter?

Substack CEO Chris Best Doesn’t Realize He’s Just Become The Nazi Bar by Mike Masnick

I get it. I totally get it. Every tech dude comes along and has this thought: “hey, we’ll be the free speech social media site. We won’t do any moderation beyond what’s required.” Even Twitter initially thought this. But then everyone discovers reality. Some discover it faster than others, but everyone discovers it. First, you […]

Twitter Suspends User For Sharing Washington Post Story About Pentagon Docs Leaker by Mike Masnick

You know the drill by now. In October of 2020, the NY Post ran a story about the contents of a laptop hard drive that Hunter Biden apparently left at a computer repair store. There were questions about the provenance of that hard drive, and, given the history of foreign election interference, as well as […]

I think of myself as having decent critical faculties, but somehow I got suckered again by a bog-standard publishing venture masquerading as a useful...

A new HBO documentary dives deep into the music, marriage, and psyche of the gifted songwriter

Attacks on Sullivan are attacks on the building blocks of democracy, and they should concern everyone who cares about free speech, regardless of political affiliation.