Trump Gets a “Time out”

Twitter gave President Trump a "time out." His account was locked and he couldn't tweet for 12 hours. @jack wanted some tweets deleted and, after Trump complied, Twitter reinstated his account. Facebook, on the other hand, has suspended Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts for a minimum of two weeks, but have threatened an indefinite period. Snapchat locked (but didn't delete) Trump's account. Right or wrong? Why now? Continue Reading →
Earlier this month, a second federal judge blocked the Trump administration's efforts to ban TikTok. On Monday, the Department of Justice appealed the injunction, citing national security concerns and arguing that the video-sharing app could supply personal data from TikTok's 100 million U.S. users to the Chinese government. Continue Reading →

Check Your Ballot Status

Vote
If you voted by mail, you can Google "check ballot status." Google is doing a pretty good job of surfacing the correct local links to this query. There is no central voter database, so I put the links for every state I could find here. Continue Reading →
Dinner
This past week, I sat with my friends to count our blessings and rejoice in the season of winter festivals. It will not surprise you to learn that we had some unexpected guests including the President of the United States. Not in person, of course, but he was “in the house.” I won’t bore you with the general split. You already know everything you need to know about the topic and what each side believes. But here’s what I didn’t know. The people who are most influenced by sockpuppeted, bot-influenced, social media-infused, AI-generated, deepfaked content are the ones who are the most certain that they are not influenced at all. Continue Reading →
Jack Dorsey
Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, announced that Twitter will no longer accept paid political advertising. He tweeted his reasons, “This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.” Continue Reading →