Mediaboss Marketing

Strategic, surgical efforts by former President Trumps campaign to overhaul obscure Republican Party rules in states around the nation, including California, have created an opportunity for the GOP front-runner to quickly sew up his party's presidential nomination.

The former president's aides have sculpted rules in dozens of states, starting even before his 2020 reelection bid. Their work is ongoing: In addition to California, state Republican parties in Nevada and Michigan have recently overhauled their rules in ways clearly designed to favor Trump.

This election, "despite a large number of candidates, only the Trump campaign went out and did the really hard grunt work of talking to state parties to try and get them to meld their rules to Donald Trump's favor," said Ben Ginsberg, a veteran GOP attorney who represented the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush notably during the 2000 Florida recount and Mitt Romney.

The Trump campaign succeeded in changing the rules "in part because they knew what they were doing and in part because everyone else is asleep at the switch," Ginsberg added.

The changes could discourage campaigning and decrease voter participation, said Dan Lee, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"There's all this uncertainty, and there hasn't been much campaigning going on in Nevada. I think that's due to that uncertainty," Lee said.

The success of the Trump campaign's effort is partly attributable to his aggressive courting of state GOP leaders. The former president has headlined fundraisers that have raised millions of dollars for state parties. He wooed their leaders at the White House when he was president and has feted them at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida since leaving office.

Its sort of an advantage no one else is going to naturally have, said Clayton Henson, a member of the Trump campaigns political team who worked on political affairs at the White House during the former presidents tenure.

The Trump campaign's rule changes have focused on ensuring he benefits from how all-important delegates are awarded after each state caucus or primary.

Read more: Tensions flare as California GOP gives Trump a boost by overhauling state primary rules

Though much of the media attention in presidential campaigns focuses on polling, particularly in early-voting states, the outcome is ultimately determined by delegates chosen in each state. The wonky quilt of rules determining how delegates are awarded to candidates vary across the 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. territories. Each will send delegates to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next summer, when the party will formally pick its nominee.

"The way delegate-selection rules are written by each state party every four years can make a huge difference to individual candidates and how many delegates they get," Ginsberg said.

Trump's success in changing the rules ahead of 2024 marks a complete reversal from his first presidential campaign, he added. "The Trump campaign in 2016 was five guys on a pirate ship who did not have the organization to go out and really work the rules."

Trump's 2024 campaign started working on shaping delegate-allocation rules in November, seeking modifications that were beneficial for the state parties as well as the campaign, Henson said.

"Parties are extremely keen on being more important in the primary and thats why were seeing more winner-take-all rules and seeing more early primaries or caucuses when they have the opportunity, Henson said. What that amounts to is a front-runner set of rules, something that benefits the front-runner, and delegates being allocated quickly.

But the work started in earnest years ago changes were made in 30 states and territories in 2019, according to Josh Putnam, a political scientist who focuses on the presidential nomination process and runs FrontloadingHQ. Among the rules changes were switching from proportional delegate allocation, where multiple candidates can win delegates in a state, to winner-take-all. In some states, delegates are also being awarded based on the outcome of party-run caucuses among GOP activists, many of whom remain loyal to Trump, rather than official state primary elections.

"The Trump team was unusually active in nudging state parties toward changes for 2020 that 1) made it easier for Trump to gobble up delegates as the nomination process moved through the calendar of contests and 2) made it much more difficult for multiple candidates to win delegates," he wrote in March.

In the 2024 race, opinion polls show that the former president enjoys a commanding lead in the race for the GOP nomination. A UC Berkeley survey co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times released earlier this month found Trump has the support of about 55% of likely California Republican voters, compared with 16% for his top challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. If Trump can maintain that level of support in California's March primary, he will win all of the state's 169 delegates the most of any state in the nation and about 14% of what a candidate needs to win the GOP nomination.

Read more: Trump is on track to sweep California's delegates in presidential race, poll shows

DeSantis backers said they focused on courting voters rather than trying to modify state party protocols.

The effort we put into delegate rules is almost zero, said Ken Cuccinelli, founder of the pro-DeSantis Never Back Down super PAC. Its one/10,000th of what we do. But talking to voters is a big part of what we do.

He added that the Trump campaign is focused on delegate rules because it recognizes that DeSantis is the most formidable threat to the former president's candidacy.

He knows who his challenger is itsRon DeSantis. This is effectively a two-person race. It's why they've spent tens of millions of dollars attacking DeSantis," Cuccinelli said."DeSantisstill has the highest favorables in the race. It's why they're playing the delegate rule games. We're not doing that. We're playing defense there, but we're not trying to rig the rules. We're trying to keep them from being rigged.

That said, decisions to change the delegate-allocation process in California, Nevada and elsewhere prompted the DeSantis super PAC to reduce its efforts in those states. The group's supporters had already knocked on about 130,000 doors in California.

This was a huge factor inourdecision.We started door-knocking with the expectation thatthe rules would remain consistent inCalifornia," Cuccinelli said.

He said they would not have started their efforts in the state if they knew the state GOP would shift its rules from ones that rewarded grassroots campaigning to ones that give the edge to campaigns that bombard the airwaves: "We met a lot of voters, we answered a lot of questionsone-on-one."

Campaigns in both parties have long tried to work party rules to benefit their candidates, sometimes resulting in confusing outcomes a candidate can win a state primary or caucus but his or her rival can collect more of its delegates.

Read more: Column: Donald Trump is rotten and despicable but that doesn't mean he should be kicked off the presidential ballot

In 2008, Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama in the Nevada vote 51% to 45%, but Obama won one more of the state's delegates because of how they are awarded based on regional caucuses around the state a game-changing moment in the campaign, said Bill Burton, who was Obama's national press secretary at the time.

"It was a dog fight," he said. "If Hillary was able to pull off a real victory there, it could have been real trouble for us in terms of momentum. But because it was a split decision and we won more delegates, she didn't get the boost she could have."

As a novice candidate in 2016, Trump had a similar experience as Clinton. He won Louisiana, yet Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was awarded more of the states delegates an example of his team being outflanked by Cruzs campaign, whose strategists understood the intricacies of the state's nomination process.

In 2016, the Trump campaign did not have an appreciation early on for the importance of actual delegates, said Ron Nehring, a national spokesman and California chairman for the Cruz campaign who is also a former leader of the state GOP. Part way through 2016, Trump said the process was rigged. What he was whining about was that the Cruz people absolutely outmaneuvered him in states where Trump won the primary.

Ultimately, the delegate hunt was moot because Trump won so much support from GOP voters and Cruz dropped out. But Nehring said the former president clearly learned from that experience, given his current campaigns successful efforts to change state party rules across the country in a manner that blatantly favors Trump over other candidates.

It's an effort that he argues is grossly inappropriate.

"Changing the rules once the campaign has begun and changing the rules based on the political conditions of the race that's why it's unfair," said Nehring, who is not aligned with a 2024 presidential candidate.

Others argue that the Trump campaign is doing what campaigns have historically always done, such as working existing delegate rules as former Texas Rep. Ron Paul's ardent supporters did in the 2012 presidential campaign. Although former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney had effectively clinched the party nomination, Paul's backers worked arcane party rules to take over GOP delegations across the nation.

For example, while Paul finished a distant third in the Iowa caucuses, 23 of the state's 28 delegates who went to the nominating convention were Paul supporters who were not bound to support the victor of the states first-in-the-nation voting contest.

National Republicans fought back, raising the number of states required to put a name in contention and allowing campaigns to select state delegates.

Incumbent presidents have also often reshaped the rules, as Trump did before the last presidential election.

"He and his team laid the groundwork for this in 2020. They were active in turning the knob on making it really front-runner friendly in how the rules were crafted," Putnam said.

Several of Trump's top advisors in the 2024 campaign, including Chris LaCivita, are deeply versed in the intricacies of winning delegates.

Theres an understanding from the senior campaign staff that this is how its done, LaCivita said. The president made it clear he wants an organization, he wants an organized, efficient campaign that is built around ensuring that some of the unknowns that they faced in 16 are not faced this time.

LaCivitia said the former president's campaign has focused on advocating for winner-take-all delegate rules that benefit a front-runner, and if that's not possible, proportional delegate allocation based on statewide vote tallies. They also pushed for caucuses, which draw the most committed conservative voters, rather than primaries in some states. And they supported rules requiring delegates to support the candidate who won in their state, cutting down on convention uncertainty.

They have had a number of successes: Nevada will award all of its delegates based on the results of a Feb. 8 in-person caucus, two days after a meaningless all-mail state primary an uncommon scenario. The primary may be canceled if no candidate files to appear on the ballot, and there is talk of the state party not allowing any candidate who appears on the ballot to compete in the caucus. Michigan will allocate most of its delegates through caucuses on March 2 rather than the states primary on Feb. 27. Colorado and Louisiana are considering revamping their rules so delegates are bound to a candidate during a second round of voting if no candidate receives a majority during the first round.

Operatives in California, Nevada and elsewhere say they were forced to change their rules to align with national Republican Party requirements, which include mandating some proportional delegate allocation opportunities in states where contests take place before March 15. Though they claim these modifications do not benefit any candidate, most political experts are skeptical, partly because the leaders of many of these groups are Trump loyalists.

In California, the state GOP voted in late July to award all of their 169 delegates to a candidate who receives more than 50% of the vote in the March primary, and to allocate them proportionally based on the statewide vote if no candidate clears that benchmark. The state previously awarded them by congressional district, theoretically allowing candidates to target certain regions without having to advertise across a state that contains some of the most expensive media markets in the nation.

The change is largely viewed as making the state less competitive for candidates who cant afford to blanket the airwaves before California and 14 other states vote on March 5, Super Tuesday.

Read more: Lawsuit argues Trump disqualified from appearing on California ballot

However, some argue this rule change may have created additional risk for Trump if he falters before then.

"If they're coasting to the nomination, then the old rules would have served them fine, but now, if theystumble, they probably don't take as many delegates as they likely would have under the old rules," said Rob Stutzman, a veteran GOP strategist who does not support Trump.

This presidential election is unlikely to be like any other. Trump has been indicted over his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, his handling of confidential government documents after leaving the White House and his payments to an adult film star during the 2016 campaign in an attempt to conceal their affair.

A judge recently set March 4 one day before Super Tuesday as the start of the federal trial over his efforts to stop the transfer of power after his 2020 election loss and his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Conservative grassroots activists also hope to upend the California rule change at the state partys convention on Oct. 1 a Herculean task because of the two-thirds vote required to make such a modification.

While DeSantis backers say they are not behind the insurgent effort to overturn the new delegate-allocation plan, they are angry about the former presidents meddling in state party rules.

If Trumpisgoingto keep breaking these rules in ways that just moveeverythingaway from grassroots campaigning,that meansvoters are going to have less and less contact with candidates. Thatsexactly the opposite of what ordinary Americans want," Cuccinelli said. "So this is Trump versus the little people.He can't pull it off in every state, but he pulled it off in California.

Get the best of the Los Angeles Times politics coverage with the Essential Politics newsletter.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Here is the original post:
Trump team changes obscure GOP rules in hopes of clinching presidential nomination early - Yahoo News

The smartest account of the past few bizarre, awful years in America is a movie you might not have heard of: Hello Dankness. Its brilliant, its funny, and its made by a two-person team known as Soda JerkAustralian-born siblings Dan and Dominique Angeloro, who are now based in New York. Masters of sampling, theyve distilled our warped political and cultural realityand how its felt to live through itby seamlessly combining clips from movies, news, and memes into a feature-length creation. Film Forum in New York pounced on it for a theatrical run through September 28; The New York Times responded with a Critics Pick. Forget novelty mash-upsHello Dankness just might be a definitive summation of the 2016-2020 saga none of us has really processed.

It was really about how weird that all felt in 2016, the pair said about the rise of Trump. When we embarked on it, we didnt know the pandemic would happen, and we didnt anticipate the shitshow of events that unfolded afterward. They felt the need to set down a record of the eraa psychic ledger. In Hello Dankness, a first encounter with MAGA folk is hilariously portrayed with clips of Tom Hanks (from The Burbs) nervously checking out his new neighbors, an ominous house where a Hillary for Prison sign sits in the window (thanks to Soda Jerks clever digital alterations). Matching different clips, Reyn Doi from Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar pedals along on a bike, delivering newspapers, while Wayne and Garth wander the street, affiliation unknown.

A still from Hello Dankness.

Soda Jerk started in the music and activist worlds of Sydney, after growing up in the suburbs. Appropriation was the move: experimental hip-hop and noisecore, Napster music-sharing, artist squats, and seizing real estate were all fair game. Thats really where our practice emergedthe politics of sampling, they said, calling it a form of civil disobedience. The duo teamed up creatively to make an IP battle royale called Hollywood Burn (2002), then came to New York in 2012, where they found home in the film community. We joined Spectacle Theater collective, which runs a microcinema in Brooklyn, and met a community of cinephiles that have kept us there ever since.

Video installations in museums and galleries first showed Soda Jerks work, but the siblings fixated on feature-length filmmaking with Terror Nullius (2018)a wild anticolonial dismantling of Australian history and culture that one funder called un-Australian. The experience of sustaining a work and an audience at this length was a turning point. People will go to a cinema and watch it from beginning to endnone of this gallery bullshit where they walk in and walk out, they said. Hello Dankness followedincorporating and critiquing Internet influences while expanding to encompass the pandemics abyssand premiered at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival, then New Yorks cutting-edge new fest Prismatic Ground, before the Film Forum run.

A still from Hello Dankness.

Soda Jerk spoke with me over video from a hotel in South Korea, where they were jurors at the Seoul International Womens Film Festival for its 25th edition. Audiences had questions about Hello Dankness, they said, but you realize these things are so collective for so many people. Thats precisely the genius behind Soda Jerks style of sampling: these arent disposable meme-style references, but a harnessing of the expressive power within the original movies to new purposes. In this way, Hello Dankness works on multiple levels. Hankss shuffling haplessness in The Burbs is the perfect look for a well-meaning voter overwhelmed by electoral forces that feel aggressive. The suburban setting bespeaks actual voter bases, according to each characters vibe and manner: Hanks is a Bernie voter, Annette Bening from American Beauty stumps for Hillary, while Wayne and Garth... maybe you dont want to know. Later, dazed daytime scenes from A Nightmare on Elm Street capture the unreality of soldiering on in the face of the pandemic and, well, everything else.

Creating Hello Dankness was a constant process of clip-and-idea formation, with the timeline of current events providing a spine. We have these whiteboards in our studio, representing the different acts and chapters, and theyre constantly being reworked in terms of plotlines, Soda Jerk said. Genre films were effective for representing the complete rupture to the everyday. Stoner postapocalyptic comedy This Is the End, for example, gets new life by representing the shock of Trumps 2016 victory.

The artistic teamwork of Soda Jerk feels inspiredand inspiring. Were both in the studio every day. Cutting the edit, doing all of the sampling and generative stuff together. (I manage to coax out one difference: Dan rotoscopesthe act of digitally masking footage in a sample frame-by-frametill the cows come home, but hates doing emails.) Next up: a joyous Big gay film. They welcome the change of pace. Hello Dankness has a vexed relationship to hope, the pair said. We dont even know if hope is the thing we need right now. Hope doesnt kick your ass. Words to live by in these timesand with Hello Dankness, a visual vocabulary to make sense of it all.

Read this article:
Meet the Filmmakers Reimagining Donald Trump's Presidency - W Magazine

When I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trumps 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 companys head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. Ive lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.

This isnt a story I relish revisiting. But Ive learned that what happened to me wasnt an accident. It wasnt 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. Trumps 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 Trumps 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 Twitters 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 hadnt 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 Safetys recommendation that Mr. Trumps 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 Twitters 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 employees 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, weve 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 Twitters case by the companys 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. Musks 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 Twitters 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 Twitters 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 couldnt help but feel that the companys 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. Trumps 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 Id 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 Twitters 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 dont.) 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. Musks 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 theyre 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.

Its hard to fault Mr. Musk for his decision not to put Twitters employees in India in harms way. But we shouldnt 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. Musks 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. Musks efforts seem to have done little to improve Twitters 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 shouldnt 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 isnt machine learning models and faceless algorithms behind key content moderation decisions: its 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. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Read the original:
Opinion | I Was Attacked by Donald Trump and Elon Musk. I Believe ... - The New York Times

Kevin McCarthy has yet to make an official endorsement for the Republican presidential nominee, but judging by what he said on Fox News, the House speaker has at least made up his mind about whos strongest among the two front-runners.

During a lengthy one-on-one interview on Fox News Sunday Morning Futures, McCarthy was riffing on President Joe Bidens policies when host Maria Bartiromo suggested things like inflation and rising gas prices might be the reason Trump is leading in most current polls.

Whats your take on this, that as we see more indictments of Donald Trump, he seems to be gaining in terms of popularity with the public? Bartiromo asked. Will he be the nominee?

I think he will be the nominee, McCarthy was quick to respond. President Trump is stronger today than he was in 2016 or 2020, and theres a reason why: They saw the policies of what he was able to do with putting America first, making our economy stronger. We didnt have inflation. We didnt have these battles around the world. We didnt look weak around the world.

Bartiromo then suggested that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, trailing Trump as a distant second in GOP primary polling, is working with your colleagues in trying to push for a government shutdown.

Yeah, but I dont think that would work anywhere, McCarthy said. A shutdown would only give strength to the Democrats. It would give the power to Biden. It wouldnt pay our troops, our border agents I actually want to achieve something, and this is why President Trump was so smart, he was successful in this.

Thats when Bartiromo brought up recent polls showing Trump beating Biden in a head-to-head match.

Hes stronger than he has ever been in this process, McCarthy said. And, look, I served with Ron DeSantis, hes not at the same level as President Trump, by any shape or form. He would not have gotten elected without President Trumps endorsement.

Watch McCarthys remarks around the 8-minute mark in the video above.

The post Kevin McCarthy Tells Fox News Donald Trump Is Stronger Than Ever, Ron DeSantis Not at the Same Level (Video) appeared first on TheWrap.

View original post here:
Kevin McCarthy Tells Fox News Donald Trump Is Stronger Than Ever, Ron DeSantis Not at the Same Level (Video) - Yahoo Entertainment

Donald Trumps booking documents in Fulton County, Georgia, manage to repeat a familiar untruth about the former presidentand even establish a brand-new one. Once again, Trump, whose height peaked at 62, claims to be 63. Hes been doing this for years, even though, as a 77-year-old man, he has surely been shrinking, not growing, and frankly isnt particularly likely to be 62 still.

But Donald Trumps booking documents also note Trumps weight, pre-supplied by Trump himself: 215 pounds.

Six-three and 215! Those are some impressive stats. Those are Muhammad Ali in his prime numbers. As one point of comparison, Trumps doctorhad him at 239in 2018 (and itsthis guy, so, grain of salt). As another point of comparison, I am 59, and I would say my body shape is comparable to Trumps. I weigh, like, 240. And I play soccer sometimes, unlike Trump, who never exercises because he believes that his body contains a finite amount of energy, like a battery.

Donald Trump, of course, lies about basically everything. Its his comfort zone. The mug shot itself is a kind of lie, or at least a very rehearsed performance, one for which hes surely been preparing for weeks. Where his alleged co-conspirators displayed varying levels of shock, despair, and derangement, Trump glowered at the camera, creating an indelible photo. His allies are already making great use of it. It will be a more popular image than the Mona Lisa, Laura Loomer told Reuters. Want a beer koozie with the mug shot on it? Thatll be $15 for a set of two, paid to the Trump campaign.

It is a little funny, at least, that at a jailhouse booking, a place where your privacy is sacrificed on an altar for the public good, where youre branded with the mug shot that will follow you for life, you are nonetheless allowed to declare your own weight. Yes, you are being thrown into a cell, but if youve always wanted to be a buck-eighty, well, nows your chance. Officer, I didnt kill that manand Im a Size 4.

Ostensibly, the mug shot and other identifying information are released so that if you wiggle free from the system, youll be easier to recognize and capture. Thats patently absurd in this instance; no highway patrolman will fail to identify a bail-jumping Donald Trump, but more particularly, no patrolman will let him go because they believed the former president to be 63. (Thats why the other three jurisdictions where hes been indicted dispensed with the mug shot rigmarole entirely.) So its hard, in this case, to get too outraged at Donald Trumps extremely obvious fibs. Who among us, still burdened by outdated, damaging body-image issues, might not seize the opportunity to put into the public record our target weight, rather than the inconvenient number that just happens to appear on the scale this week?

One of the great annoyances of the Donald Trump era is that for all his evil, all his cruelty, all his shitheadedness, the guy is still, somehow, a little relatable. Ive got a whole box of shirts in my basement I intend to wear once I definitely, eventually, get down to 215. Maybe Donald Trump does too. Or maybe hell be getting a new supply in orangejust a tiny bit snug.

Visit link:
Donald Trump prison: No, he does not weigh 215 pounds like he told the Fulton County Jail. - Slate