pizzagate

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
by Elizabeth Williamson
Published 8 Mar 2022

In this imaginary lexicon, “cheese pizza,” for example, meant child pornography. Pizzagate is the direct predecessor of QAnon, the false worldview that several years later caught fire among some Americans. Both delusions rest on a pastiche of ancient tropes. Secret satanic meetings, the ravaging, selling, and killing of innocents by bloodthirsty elites—Pizzagate and QAnon contained elements of blood libel, the hateful, centuries-old falsehood that Jews murder Christian children as part of religious rituals. Days before the November 8 vote, Pizzagate popped up on the radar of Will Sommer, a reporter then working for the Washington City Paper, who had been covering the far right during the 2016 election and had been to Comet many times.

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Greene has also shared posts on Facebook calling Sandy Hook a hoax, claims she has since renounced. Will Sommer, now a reporter at the Daily Beast, calls QAnon a “rebranding” of Pizzagate. “It’s fair to peg the Comet arson to QAnon,” he told me. “These kids are walking the same path tread by their Pizzagate forebears, and it all starts anew.” * * * — I visited James Alefantis on a summerlike afternoon in late October 2020, exactly four years after he first heard the word “Pizzagate.” I wanted to learn whether he still believed that what happened was an aberration, a localized seizure induced by a short circuit in our political consciousness.

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He learned that on December 1, 2016, three days before Welch traveled to Washington, he sent a text message to his girlfriend, telling her he’d been researching Pizzagate and it was making him sick. Welch had watched Pizzagate videos for hours that day, YouTube algorithms sending him one after another. He visited Comet’s website. That night after 8:00 p.m., Welch texted a friend a link to a YouTube video, writing, “Watch PIZZAGATE: The Bigger Picture on YouTube.” Alefantis searched for the video. It was an Infowars broadcast. “I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ ” Alefantis told me. “Like, holy shit, this fucking gunman came here because of Jones!

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything
by Kelly Weill
Published 22 Feb 2022

v=pp_b1H8SHAo&t=0s. 157 starting at $11,900 Over the Poles home page, Wayback Machine, Internet Archive, May 12, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20180512054019/https://www.overthepoles2018.com/. 157 in whiteout conditions Hugh Morris, “The Trouble with Flying over Antarctica—and the Airline That’s Planning to Start,” Telegraph, April 17, 2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-truths/do-planes-fly-over-antarctica/. 158 “I hope you understand that one day” “Edgar Maddison Welch, ‘Pizzagate’ Gunman,” video, “Pizzagate’s Violent Legacy, Washington Post, February 16, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/02/16/pizzagate-qanon-capitol-attack. 158 “PIZZAGATE: The Bigger Picture” United States of America v. Edgar Maddison Welch, affidavit filed December 12, 2016, in US District Court for the District of Columbia, https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/pizzagate-affidavit.pdf. 158 “in our own backyard” Merlan, Republic of Lies, 60. 158 actor of the same name Nathan Francis, “Edgar Maddison Welch PizzaGate Theory: Was the Comet Ping Pong Shooter a Crisis Actor?

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He went outside, where police officers had gathered to demand his exit, and lay on the ground at their command. “Pizzagate,” one irate officer announced while Welch mumbled into the pavement about a pedophile ring. “He’s talking about Pizzagate.” After the shooting, Pizzagate’s highest-profile advocates denounced Welch as “controlled opposition,” because they’d found a web page for an amateur actor of the same name. And not even Welch, who had seen the inside of Comet Ping Pong firsthand, was fully dissuaded from the conspiracy theory. “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” he told the New York Times. A judge called it “sheer luck” he didn’t hurt anyone. Unchastened and unchecked, Pizzagate carried on, eventually transferring much of its momentum to QAnon, which borrows many of its foundational claims.

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The video was the completion of a conspiratorial cycle. Earlier that day, Welch had mainlined YouTube videos on the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which made him “sick,” he later told investigators. Pizzagate had been thriving on YouTube, where far-right vloggers had uploaded hours-long videos explaining why they believed Hillary Clinton was routinely abusing kidnapped children in a secret dungeon beneath the pizza parlor. Shortly before leaving to drive to DC, Welch tried to enlist two friends to the conspiracy theory, urging both to watch YouTube videos like “PIZZAGATE: The Bigger Picture.” The video he made from the road mimicked the style of his favorite conspiracy theorists, with Welch speaking directly into the camera as he waxed poetic about tyranny and his personal heroism.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media
by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
Published 15 Mar 2018

utm_term=.c6f0a6afc33b. 127 “There’s no such thing”: Jack Holmes, “A Trump Surrogate Drops the Mic: ‘There’s No Such Thing as Facts,’” Esquire, December 1, 2016, http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/videos/a51152/trump-surrogate-no-such-thing-as-facts/. 127 shielded their terrified children: Marc Fisher, John Woodrow Cox, and Peter Hermann, “Pizzagate: From Rumor, to Hashtag, to Gunfire in D.C.,” Washington Post, December 6, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pizzagate-from-rumor-to-hashtag-to-gunfire-in-dc/2016/12/06/4c7def50-bbd4-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.c84c2847b899. 127 customers made a run for it: Amanda Robb, “Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal,” Rolling Stone, November 16, 2017, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/pizzagate-anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-w511904. 127 an employee holding pizza dough: Fisher, Cox, and Hermann, “Pizzagate.” 127 tiny computer room: Ibid. 128 “lucid, deadly serious”: Spencer S.

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utm_term=.c84c2847b899. 127 customers made a run for it: Amanda Robb, “Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal,” Rolling Stone, November 16, 2017, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/pizzagate-anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-w511904. 127 an employee holding pizza dough: Fisher, Cox, and Hermann, “Pizzagate.” 127 tiny computer room: Ibid. 128 “lucid, deadly serious”: Spencer S. Hsu, “Pizzagate Gunman Says He Was Foolish, Reckless, Mistaken—and Sorry,” Washington Post, June 14, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/pizzagate-shooter-apologizes-in-handwritten-letter-for-his-mistakes-ahead-of-sentencing/2017/06/13/f35126b6-5086-11e7-be25-3a519335381c_story.html?utm_term=.63e54b2d390d. 128 tearful farewell: Grace Hauck, “‘Pizzagate’ Shooter Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison,” CNN, June 22, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/22/politics/pizzagate-sentencing/index.html. 128 sentenced to four years: Ibid. 128 For James Alefantis: Ibid. 128 known collectively as #Pizzagate: Fisher, Cox, and Hermann, “Pizzagate.” 128 1.4 million mentions: Robb, “Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal.” 128 “Something’s being covered up”: Ibid. 128 Russian sockpuppets working: Ibid. 128 nearly half of Trump voters: Catherine Rampell, “Americans—Especially but Not Exclusively Trump Voters—Believe Crazy, Wrong Things,” Washington Post, December 28, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2016/12/28/americans-especially-but-not-exclusively-trump-voters-believe-crazy-wrong-things/. 128 “the intel on this”: Adam Goldman, “The Comet Ping Pong Gunman Answers Our Reporter’s Questions,” New York Times, December 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/edgar-welch-comet-pizza-fake-news.html. 129 Posobiec was relentless: Fisher, Cox, and Hermann, “Pizzagate.” 129 “They want to control”: Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec), “ANNOUNCING: My next book 4D Warfare: How to Use New Media to Fight and Win the Culture Wars!

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It was actually the symbol of a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. #Pizzagate blazed across social media, garnering 1.4 million mentions on Twitter alone. On the Infowars YouTube channel, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones told his 2 million subscribers, “Something’s being covered up. All I know, God help us, we’re in the hands of pure evil.” Spying opportunity, the Russian sockpuppets working in St. Petersburg also latched onto the #Pizzagate phenomenon, their posts further boosting its popularity. #Pizzagate not only dominated far-right online conversation for weeks, but actually increased in power following Clinton’s electoral defeat.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

Curious web users who googled for information were, like DiResta, directed to YouTube videos affirming the conspiracy or, if they searched on Facebook, to Pizzagate discussion groups. Fake-news sites like YourNewsWire repackaged the posts into articles, which they posted back to Facebook. The site’s algorithm treated them as credible news stories on a high-interest topic, blasting them out. In the week before the election, the social web was dominated by polls, campaign stories, and Pizzagate. “It really was jarring to see it unfold,” Adam said. People he knew from real life were sharing Pizzagate memes on their Facebook pages. It was as if a wall separating the mainstream and extremist internet was crashing down.

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Facebook’s largest anti-vaccine network filled with Q dog whistles. TikTok surged with Pizzagate conspiracies. One twenty-year-old TikToker, who’d helped spark the Pizzagate resurgence, said she’d learned about it from a viral YouTube video. When Plandemic’s producers released a sequel, the video was predominantly pushed via Q pages. By the pandemic’s outset, the QAnon cause, amid its now almost impenetrably dense lore and esoterica, had sharpened around a core belief: President Trump and loyal generals were on the verge of a glorious military coup that would overturn the cabal that had orchestrated Pizzagate and that secretly dominated American life.

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Though she had no way to know it, she was witnessing the birth of a digitally generated movement that, within four years, would become a wing of the Republican Party, a millions-strong conspiracy cult, and the vanguard of a campaign to topple American democracy. At first, it organized under a name that made it hard to take seriously: Pizzagate. DiResta, alert to the danger of oddball Facebook causes, googled “Pizzagate.” The search engine, privileging results from YouTube, its golden goose, returned a series of videos from the platform that mostly affirmed the conspiracy. They claimed that the police investigation of Anthony Weiner, a former Democratic congressman caught sexting a fifteen-year-old girl, had discovered evidence that Weiner, along with his wife, Huma Abedin, and his wife’s boss, Hillary Clinton, were all involved in a child sex ring.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

‘Emails in Anthony Weiner Inquiry Jolt Hillary Clinton’s Campaign’, www.nytimes.com, 29 October 2016. 42. Associated Press, ‘Leaked DNC emails reveal details of anti-Sanders sentiment’, www.theguardian.com, 24 July 2016. 43. ‘Pizzagate: How a 4chan conspiracy went mainstream’, www.newstatesman.com, 8 December 2016. 44. Brian Patrick Byrne, ‘Minecraft Creator Alleges Global Conspiracy Involving Pizzagate, a “Manufactured Race War,” a Missing Tabloid Toddler, and Holistic Medicine’, www.thedailybeast.com, 28 August 2017. 45. Joshua Gillin, ‘How Pizzagate went from fake news to a real problem for a D.C. business’, www.politifact.com, 5 December 2016. 46. ‘Fake News Onslaught Targets Pizzeria as Nest of Child-Trafficking’, www.nytimes.com, 21 October 2016. 47.

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People with no idea of the conspiracy’s origins began investigating – just as the Gamergaters had investigated their own marks – but this time with a code to unravel and much higher stakes. This was LARPing on a whole new scale, with the people playing having no idea they were playing a game and instead believing they were solving real crimes. The Pizzagate conspiracy was born.45 People had been motivated to make death threats and even launch potentially deadly SWAT raids simply because they didn’t like people’s views on video games, or disliked their opposition to a group they were part of. What might people do if they became convinced that murderous paedophiles were operating in their midst, close to the centre of power, and with no chance of being convicted through the criminal justice system?

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Comet (as it is known to locals) was co-founded by James Alefantis, a connected member of DC’s elite once named on GQ’s list of the fifty most powerful people in Washington,46 who had dated senior figures in the not-for-profit world (including the CEO of left-wing media watchdog Media Matters for America).47 The dark corner of the internet that was Pizzagate had now convinced itself not only that there was a child abuse conspiracy underway, but that they knew where it was happening – in the basement of Comet Ping Pong. Inevitably, someone took things into their own hands. In the middle of the afternoon on 4 December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch walked into Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15 rifle (the civilian version of the US military’s M16 automatic rifle) and a Colt .38 pistol, and fired three shots into the air, demanding to be allowed to investigate the pizzeria’s basement and the crimes within.48 By some miracle no one was injured, and before he was detained – alive – by law enforcement, Welch was shown a simple fact about Comet Ping Pong he could probably have discovered without heavy weaponry: the restaurant did not have a basement.

Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind
by Annalee Newitz
Published 3 Jun 2024

The leaked emails inspired the “#Pizzagate” conspiracy, a precursor to QAnon. People frequenting online community 4chan’s right-wing forums identified “secret messages” in Podesta’s emails. They believed they had uncovered an international conspiracy to kidnap children and rape them in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a DC pizza joint popular with DNC workers. Late in 2016, a #Pizzagate believer drove to Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. He threatened customers with it, searching the premises because he believed the Clinton campaign was raping children in the basement.28 Ten months after the #Pizzagate attack, a shady figure named “QClearancePatriot” (later just Q) started posting in the /pol/ (Politically Incorrect) forums on 4chan, and the QAnon movement was born.29 This bonkers sequence of events is a perfect example of the kind of chaos that IRA psyops unleash.

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“Hand Grenade Fragments Were Found in the Bodies of Victims in Prigozhin’s Plane Crash, Putin Claims,” AP News, October 5, 2023. 27. Bump, Philip, “How Russian Agents Allegedly Hacked the DNC and Clinton’s Campaign,” Washington Post, October 23, 2021. 28. Aisch, Gregor, Jon Huang, and Cecilia Kang, “Dissecting the #PizzaGate Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times, December 10, 2016. 29. Miller, Michael E., “The Pizzagate Gunman Is Out of Prison. Conspiracy Theories Are Out of Control,” Washington Post, February 16, 2021. 30. Perlroth, Nicole, Sheera Frenkel, and Scott Shane, “Facebook Exit Hints at Dissent on Handling of Russian Trolls,” New York Times, March 19, 2018. 31.

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During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once.”42 It’s just a joke, man Methods of information warfare that seemed novel in 2016 are now a part of our everyday lives. We have officially entered an age of what experts call “stochastic terrorism,” a term that has become increasingly popular in the last decade to explain random violence inspired by online media. The gunman who showed up at Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15, inspired by #Pizzagate, is a stochastic terrorist, as are members of the January 6 mob at the US Capitol and many mass shooters, like white supremacist Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people at Bible study in a Black church. Like those latent fascists whom Else Frenkel-Brunswik and her colleagues studied in The Authoritarian Personality, a stochastic terrorist is someone who becomes activated and violent when triggered by outside pressures.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018

They knew what he’d been dealing with on the site recently, namely all the harassment that had accumulated thanks to Pizzagate. The r/pizzagate subreddit was only two weeks old, but it was extremely fast-growing in terms of subscriber numbers. It had launched on November 7, the day before the U.S. presidential election, and some of its roots can be traced in part to a highly organized effort among subscribers of The_Donald to comb through and disseminate information from the Wikileaks files of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Upon its launch r/pizzagate was dedicated to discussing the bizarre theory that attempted to link the Clinton Foundation to a pedophilia ring based in the basement of a pizza joint that had no basement.

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Soon it was being spread around in the ecosystem of fake news, including Infowars, and even was tweeted by soon-to-be national security adviser Mike Flynn. On Reddit, members of conspiracy-theory-heavy subreddits piled onto r/pizzagate. R/pizzagate’s problems were not limited to disseminating fake news and wild theories, as well as spoofs of these theories, provided by lulz-seeking trolls. The Reddit community team noted instances of doxing—and warned moderators their community could be subject to a ban. Five days later, personal information was still flying. Reddit admin Susie Vass sent Pizzagate’s moderators a note, midday on the twenty-second: “We recognize that you feel this is an important investigation, however as it has become clear that this community is unable to stay within our sitewide rules we will be banning the subreddit at 4:00 PM PST.”

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Plus, he didn’t like that they propagated a vibe on T_D and Pizzagate that he was out to get them. Huffman knew the reality was the opposite: While he despised these users’ posts, their attitude, and their politics, he’d been the one defending their right to exist on the platform. At times he’d specifically defended The_Donald’s existence to staff who disagreed. Just maybe, he thought, he could relate to them, or push them to relate to him, on the level they were operating. Level: troll. So Huffman went into the site’s code, and navigated to The_Donald’s front page, where a thread about r/pizzagate being banned was taking off.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
by Roger McNamee
Published 1 Jan 2019

Department of, 32, 34 Delaney, John, 167 Dell, 35, 152 democracy, 2, 3, 10–12, 17, 37, 84, 85, 93, 103, 112, 117, 122, 126–27, 129, 133, 136, 159, 162, 200, 203, 204, 217, 220, 233–35, 238, 239, 242, 253–57, 263–65, 258, 268–69, 277–83 Facebook’s threat to, 242–45, 258, 280, 281 four pillars of, 243–45 see also elections Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), 11, 111, 114, 116 Democratic National Committee (DNC), 11, 111, 114, 116, 124, 125 Democratic Party, Democrats, 121, 130–33, 167, 197, 210, 212, 227 Pizzagate and, 124–26, 130 Depression, Great, 43 developing countries, 179–80, 233 Diamond, Larry, 243 Diana, Elisabeth, 231–32 Digital Equipment, 46, 152 DiResta, Renée, 92–93, 121–23, 127, 128, 146, 242 disinformation and fake news, 94–96, 117, 123, 173, 229, 233, 234, 237, 253, 257–58, 260, 274 on Facebook, 89, 94–96, 119, 159, 165, 166, 208–9, 228, 243, 245, 258, 270, 281 Free Basics and, 180 Pizzagate, 124–26, 130 Russia and, 121–24, 174; see also Russia on Twitter, 177 on YouTube, 177–78 see also conspiracy theories Disney Company, 143–44, 193 Doerr, John, 26–27, 61 dopamine, 86, 88, 107, 147, 258, 271, 273 Dorsey, Jack, 229 dot-com bubble, 27, 38–40, 48, 49 Doubleclick, 65, 138–39 Doyle, Mike, 210 Dropbox, 41 Drummond, Jamie, 159 DuckDuckGo, 271 Dwoskin, Elizabeth, 168 eBay, 36, 38 economy, economics, 43–48, 82, 155, 162–63, 201, 220, 225, 235, 238, 254, 262–63, 281 Edelman, Gilad, 155 Edelman, Joe, 108 Edge, 28–29 education, 257 Egypt, 243 8chan, 102, 123 Einstein, Albert, ix, 53 elections, 82, 122, 129, 141, 156, 159, 208, 215, 216, 227, 238, 243, 244, 251–55, 258–59, 269, 274, 280, 282 microtargeting and, 237–38 2016 presidential, see presidential election of 2016 of 2018 and 2020, 12, 111, 119, 127, 153, 220, 235, 278, 279, 281 Electronic Arts, 14, 26 Elevation Partners, 13–14, 17–18, 30, 61, 72, 147 EMC, 152 emerging economies, 179–80, 233 emotions, 69, 81, 126 contagion of, 88–89, 92, 103, 233, 234 Facebook and, 9, 11, 68, 69, 75, 233, 270 Facebook study on, 88–89 “lizard brain,” 9, 88 energy, renewable, 248 Engelbart, Douglas, 33, 34 entrepreneurs, 224, 238, 261, 265 see also startups Equifax, 226 Estrin, Judy, 220, 233 European Union (EU), 162 Brexit and, 8–9, 96, 180, 196, 198, 244 Global Data Protection Regulation in, 221, 222, 224, 259–60 Google and, 138, 260, 281–82 Excite, 42 extreme views, 91–93, 102, 119, 173, 214, 232, 253, 260, 279 Facebook, 47–51, 53–79, 110, 139–40, 156, 163, 202–12, 213–20, 223, 224, 232–35, 238–40, 241–48, 251, 255, 256, 258, 262–64, 274, 275, 278, 279, 282, 283, 287 addiction to, 63, 281 advertising and, 11–12, 47, 59–61, 63, 68–77, 85, 103, 119, 128–29, 130, 132, 143, 148, 173, 184, 185, 202, 207–9, 211, 217–19, 237–28, 258, 265, 270, 281, 283–84 algorithms of, 4, 9, 11, 66, 74, 76, 81, 87, 91, 128–29, 143, 166, 232, 235, 243, 270, 274, 277, 281 Android and, 204 artificial intelligence of, 10, 11, 69, 85, 87, 91, 95, 108, 203, 219–20, 230, 261 banks and, 231–32 Beacon, 60, 62, 64, 142 behavior modification and, 63, 278 Black Lives Matter and, 8, 243 Bosworth memo and, 204–6 Cambridge Analytica and, 78, 180–98, 199, 202–4, 207, 208, 210, 213, 216–18, 251, 259 Center for Humane Technology and, 166–67 changing personal usage of, 270 Clear History, 218–19 community standards and, 103, 179, 228, 244–45 Congress and, 122, 127–33 Connect, 62, 63, 68, 72, 158, 218, 249, 270 Connectivity, 232 content moderation by, 229–30, 232, 237 content suppliers harmed by, 283 criticisms of, and responses, 3, 65, 95–96, 141, 143, 146, 147–49, 151–53, 158–61, 169, 174–75, 178–80, 192–93, 207, 216, 217, 230, 247–48, 280, 281 Custom Audiences, 76–77 data brokers banned by, 208 dating service, 207, 218 deactivating account, 99 decision making and organization of, 144–45, 154, 155, 160 democracy threatened by, 242–45, 258, 278, 280, 281 disinformation on, 89, 94–96, 119, 159, 165, 166, 208–9, 228, 243, 245, 258, 270, 281 early days of, 16–17 earnings in 2018, 216–17, 228 Elevation and, 17–18, 72 emotional contagion study of, 88–89 emotions and, 9, 11, 68, 69, 75, 233, 270 F8 conference, 217–18 fake accounts deleted by, 229, 230, 265 FarmVille, 184, 195, 196 filter bubbles and, 78, 87, 90, 96, 116–19, 124–27, 141, 166, 209, 215, 245, 257, 258 financial value of, 9, 284 Free Basics, 179–80, 232, 245 FriendFeed and, 63 FTC and, 182–84, 188–90 games, 184, 191, 195, 196 Global Data Protection Regulation and, 221, 259 Goldman’s tweet and, 169–73 Groups, 7–8, 51, 78, 89–92, 94–96, 115–17, 119, 124, 126, 130–32, 165–66, 207–8, 270 Growth group at, 76, 84, 148 hackers and, 280 hate speech and, 178–79, 203, 204, 215, 216, 228, 230, 245, 280 History, 270 housing discrimination and, 11, 129, 245 influence power of, 10–11, 141, 204, 215 innovation threatened by, 246–47 Instagram and, 70, 139, 140, 144, 223, 261, 270–71 IPO (initial public offering) of, 70–75, 78, 145, 169, 184, 190 Jones and Infowars and, 228–29 lack of alternative to, 92, 100, 141, 223, 280 Like button, 63, 68, 72, 98 Live, 74 Lookalike Audiences, 76, 77, 115 marketing messages sent by, 174 market power of, 46 McGinn’s departure from, 167–69, 172 McNamee’s investment in, 1, 17–18, 59 Messenger, 67, 70, 85, 139, 140, 207, 232 Messenger Kids, 254 metrics of, 76–78, 206, 216 Microsoft and, 14, 15, 59–60, 65 mobile platforms and, 106, 228 monopoly power and antitrust issues, 47–48, 100, 136–41, 162, 225–26, 234, 246, 247, 261–63, 284 Moonalice and, 73–75 motto and philosophy of, 41, 51, 72–73, 142–43, 193 as national security threat, 282 network effects and, 47, 246 new kind of marketplace created by, 283 News Feed, 59, 60, 68, 70, 74, 75, 88, 89, 90–91, 97, 165–66, 208–9, 243, 244, 247 as news source, 10 nondisclosure agreement for employees of, 169, 172 Oculus and, 139, 144, 223, 261 Onavo and, 139–40 Open Graph, 70, 71, 74 persuasive technology used by, 17 photo tagging on, 59, 63, 68, 98–99 Platform, 188, 190–91 Portal, 281 presidential election and, 183, 190, 232, 278; see also Cambridge Analytica; Russia privacy settings of, 97 privacy threatened by, 246 public health threatened by, 246 regulation and, 112, 280 Russian interference and, 90, 115–17, 119, 124, 126, 130–32, 145–46, 149, 152–54, 166, 168–72, 187, 193–94, 203, 207–8, 217, 228, 244, 245, 251 Sandberg’s joining of, 5, 16, 60, 61, 64 self-regulation of, 280 smartphones and, 59 Snapchat and, 140, 246 Social Graph, 70 Sponsored Stories, 71 state attorneys general and, 120, 172, 227 stock price in 2018, 228, 265 team philosophy of, 145 and technology as value neutral, 129 terms of service of, 97, 178, 182, 211, 253–54 Trending Stories, 166 Truth About Tech conference and, 166, 167 user browsing history and, 218–19 user data and, 4–5, 9, 62, 72, 75–76, 78, 87, 131–32, 141–42, 174, 180–98, 202–4, 210–11, 216–19, 223, 258–59 user engagement and, 9 user growth and numbers, 62–63, 65, 71–72, 77, 78, 84, 128, 140–41, 143, 151, 184, 187, 215, 228, 233, 234 user trust and, 2, 7 “war room” opened by, 281 WhatsApp and, 139, 140, 144, 223, 261, 270–71, 280 words associated with, 231 work environment at, 45 Yahoo and, 14–16, 56, 57 Zuckerberg considers selling, 13–16 Zuckerberg’s launch of, 4, 39, 42, 50–51, 35–56, 104, 141, 189, 203, 241 Zuckerberg’s plan for addressing problems with, 158–59 Facemash, 53, 60 fact-checking, 103, 178, 179 Fair Housing Act, 11, 245 fake news, see disinformation and fake news FarmVille, 184, 195, 196 Fast Company, 53 FBI, 209, 252 fear of missing out (FOMO), 98, 99, 253, 269 Federal Communications Commission, 136 Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 113–14, 136, 182–84, 188–90, 200, 286 Feinstein, Dianne, 132 Fernando, Randima, 167 Ferrell, Will, 156 filter bubbles, 66–67, 87, 94, 109, 125–27, 157–58, 246, 269, 278–81 extreme views and, 91, 93 Facebook and, 78, 87, 90, 96, 116–19, 124–27, 141, 166, 209, 215, 245, 257, 258 polarization and, 89–90, 274 Financial Times, 224–25 FireEye, 229 Fisher, Adam, 55 5G wireless technology, 261–62 Foer, Franklin, 167 Fogg, B.

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The Russians would have placed the story in the Facebook Groups they controlled, counting on Facebook’s filter bubbles to ensure widespread acceptance of the veracity of the story, as well as widespread sharing. Trolls and bots help, but the most successful disinformation and conspiracy theories leveraged American citizens who trusted the content they received from fellow members of Facebook Groups. An example is Pizzagate, a disinformation story that claimed that emails found by the FBI on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, a disgraced former member of Congress and the husband of the vice chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, suggested the presence of a pedophilia ring connected to members of the Democratic Party at pizza parlors in the Washington area.

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The story, which appeared nine days before the 2016 election, was a complete fabrication, but many people believed it. One man bought in to such a degree that he showed up at the pizza parlor in December, armed with an AR-15, and fired three shots into the building. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Untangling a conspiracy theory is tricky, but Pizzagate’s origins are clearer than most. The story first appeared on a white supremacist Twitter account. Wikipedia states that accounts on 4chan and Twitter parsed the stolen DNC emails in search of coded messages and claimed to have found many. A range of conspiracy sites, including Infowars, picked up the story and amplified it on the far right.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win
by Chris Kuenne and John Danner
Published 5 Jun 2017

In our experience, doing so may actually exacerbate the challenge, creating a tension between empathy and execution. That’s what Angelo Pizzagalli, the cofounder of PC Construction, nowone of the nation’s two hundred largest construction firms, discovered. He’s truly a builder’s builder. He and his brothers, Remo and Jim, wanted a friendly, comfortable workplace to reflect their own relationship. It was an early element of a culture that came to be called the “PC way,” but it had some downsides. “We had kind of a philosophy,” Pizzagalli says, “We hired people we liked . . . ‘Don’t hire anybody you don’t want to have breakfast with.’ That sounds good, but our hardest thing was we didn’t set the bar high enough for people.

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The fact they share the same first name is just coincidental, though it’s emblematic of their symbiotic founding partnership. “You gotta look beyond the recipe . . . have imagination.” Angelo Pizzagalli ran into some problems scaling his construction business, first because his aversion to outside funding and leverage translated into pressure on current cash flow. In his words, “We had to make money!” That meant scaling was a job-by-job grind, and the growth opportunities from future investment in people, technology, or equipment were constrained by the profits available from the current portfolio of projects. Pizzagalli found that reigniting the entrepreneurial spark in his key people was difficult as the company grew to become a major player in its industry and became more systematic and regimented: “We used to have a lot of discussions with some of the managers because they weren’t acting entrepreneurially.

…

In fact, your firm may have some things to learn itself from the leadership style and skills you bring to bear in inspiring followers to embark on that quest. Furthermore, as with your Explorer counterparts, your corporate sponsor may be able to surround you with the very kind of operational get-it-done skills that prevail in most companies. As we’ve seen with builders like Nate Morris and Angelo Pizzagalli, Crusaders tend to focus on longer-range objectives and are comfortable with delegating large swaths of the routine operations to others. Making it easier and faster for you to recruit a fully functioning team can turbocharge your Builder Personality. Your insider sponsor will have to strike a fine balance here between a legitimate concern about operational execution under your leadership as a Crusader and your need to build your form of new business value with your own distinctive personality.

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 6 Mar 2018

Marc Fisher, John Woodrow Cox, and Peter Hermann, “Pizzagate: From Rumor, to Hashtag, to Gunfire in D.C.,” Washington Post, December 6, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pizzagate-from-rumor-to-hashtag-to-gunfire-in-dc/2016/12/06/4c7def50-bbd4-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html. Time has reported that the Senate investigation into Russia’s election intervention includes an examination of whether Russia targeted Pizzagate and other anti-Clinton stories at specific audiences, noting that Democratic operatives have produced evidence showing that Google searches for Pizzagate “were disproportionately higher in swing districts and not in districts likely to vote for Trump.”

…

Many Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—dismissed this absurd “Pizzagate” story as a sideshow until an armed man turned up at the pizzeria in question, seeking answers. Yet the ability of such a far-fetched story to gain traction illustrates the way in which political bots can be deployed to manufacture interest in a nonstory and create the illusion of widespread anger (or support) that then burrows into the consciousness of some in the broader public.14 According to Jonathan Albright, the research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a leading researcher in mapping how fake news spreads, the #pizzagate hashtag was tweeted thousands of times daily, with a disproportionate number of accounts (many of them bots) tweeting from the Czech Republic, Cyprus, and Vietnam.

…

These bots are providing the online crowds that are providing legitimacy.”15 It is significant that, according to the declassified US intelligence assessment, the Russians had prepared a social media campaign, in anticipation of Secretary Clinton’s victory, to amplify doubts about the validity of the results and “cripple her presidency from its start.” With polling in late October 2016 showing that over half of Republicans believed Clinton could win only due to illegal voting or vote rigging, the Russian campaign would likely have resonated with a significant number of voters had Clinton won.16 The evolution of stories like Pizzagate from alt-right stalking horse to trending Twitter discussion and even front-page news underscores one of the great dangers of a media environment manipulated by targeted social media interventions. As demonstrated by decades of behavioral science research on agenda-setting, “elements emphasized by the mass media come to be regarded as important by the public.”17 More recently, social scientists have begun to produce empirical evidence that media coverage not only directs public attention but also influences how people think about a given issue or person.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 17 Jul 2018

One of the tactics used by the alt-right to spread its ideas online, Marwick and Lewis argue, is to initially dilute more extreme views as gateway ideas to court a wider audience; among some groups of young men, they write, “it’s a surprisingly short leap from rejecting political correctness to blaming women, immigrants, or Muslims for their problems.” Many misogynist and white supremacist memes, in addition to a lot of fake news like Pizzagate, originate or gain initial momentum on sites like 4chan and Reddit—before accumulating enough buzz to make the leap to Facebook and Twitter, where they can attract more mainstream attention. Renee DiResta, who studies conspiracy theories on the web, argues that Reddit can be a useful testing ground for bad actors—including foreign governments like Russia—to try out memes or fake stories to see how much traction they get.

…

Fake news is nothing new, of course: sensationalized press coverage helped drum up public support for the Spanish-American War, and Julius Caesar spun his conquest of Gaul as a preventive action. But the internet and social media allow rumors, speculation, and lies to flash around the world in a matter of seconds: like the preposterous Pizzagate stories and the baseless stories claiming that the man behind the massacre of fifty-eight people in Las Vegas in October 2017 was an anti-Trump liberal who followed MoveOn.org and had recently become a Muslim. During the last three months of the 2016 presidential campaign, BuzzFeed News reported, “top-performing” fake election news stories on Facebook generated more reader engagement than top stories from major news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, and The Huffington Post.

…

study on online disinformation: Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online, Data and Society Research Institute, May 15, 2017. “once groups have been red-pilled”: Marwick and Lewis, “Online Radicalization We’re Not Talking About.” “it’s a surprisingly short leap”: Ibid. a lot of fake news: BBC Trending, “The Saga of ‘Pizzagate’: The Fake Story That Shows How Conspiracy Theories Spread,” BBC News, Dec. 2, 2016. Reddit can be a useful testing ground: Ali Breland, “Warner Sees Reddit as Potential Target for Russian Influence,” Hill, Sept. 27, 2017; Roger McNamee, “How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us,” Washington Monthly, Jan.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway
Published 2 Oct 2017

Gottfried, Jeffrey, and Elisa Shearer. “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016.” Pew Research Center. May 26, 2016. http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/. 34. Briener, Andrew. “Pizzagate, explained: Everything you want to know about the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria conspiracy theory but are too afraid to search for on Reddit.” Salon. December 10, 2016. http://www.salon.com/2016/12/10/pizzagate-explained-everything-you-want-to-know-about-the-comet-ping-pong-pizzeria-conspiracy-theory-but-are-too-afraid-to-search-for-on-reddit/. 35. Williams, Rhiannon. “Facebook: ‘We cannot become arbiters of truth—it’s not our role.’” iNews.

…

Just hire a few “media watchdog” firms to give you cover. As far as the machine sees it, one click = one click. So, entire editorial operations hatch all over the world to optimize production to this Facebook machine. They create crazy fake stories that serve as clickbait for the left and the right. Pizza Gate—the story about Comet Ping Pong, a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.—got a lot of momentum around the 2016 election. It claimed that the brother of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, was running a child prostitution ring in the back rooms, hidden from where the customers eat. Lots of people believed it.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us
by James Ball
Published 19 Aug 2020

They are employees of the Daily Caller, a hard-right US political website with connections to the USA’s white supremacist movement, and a track record of pushing dangerous and often incoherent conspiracy theories – including the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy, which alleged senior Democratic officials were using code words such as ‘cheese pizza’ in their emails to cover up a paedophile ring in which they were members.2, 3 The woman dancing next to Pai in his YouTube clip – which he had deliberately uploaded on the internet with the intention of going viral, this was no secretly recorded footage – was Martina Markota, who had herself recorded a video endorsing the insane conspiracy theory, which had led to an armed man forcing his way into a DC pizzeria, demanding to be allowed into its (non-existent) basement dungeon.4 Thankfully, no one was hurt. Markota opens her Pizzagate video talking about testimony from a woman who she described as ‘an ex-CIA sex slave’ who in the 1990s had accused Hillary Clinton of being a lesbian involved in trafficking sex slaves – and then talking about the ‘really, really fascinating’ links between that and the ‘Pizzagate stuff’, with its code words. When ‘her source’ had told her one of those code words was ‘cheese pizza’, her eyes had lit up – she’d heard that code word in connection to this conspiracy before, she said.

…

Pai’s companions on the dance floor, four millennials, raise further questions. They are employees of the Daily Caller, a hard-right US political website with connections to the USA’s white supremacist movement, and a track record of pushing dangerous and often incoherent conspiracy theories – including the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy, which alleged senior Democratic officials were using code words such as ‘cheese pizza’ in their emails to cover up a paedophile ring in which they were members.2, 3 The woman dancing next to Pai in his YouTube clip – which he had deliberately uploaded on the internet with the intention of going viral, this was no secretly recorded footage – was Martina Markota, who had herself recorded a video endorsing the insane conspiracy theory, which had led to an armed man forcing his way into a DC pizzeria, demanding to be allowed into its (non-existent) basement dungeon.4 Thankfully, no one was hurt.

…

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here, here, here, here Read, Max, here Reagan, Ronald, here Reddit, here Register, The, here Rekhter, Yakov, here, here Requests for Comments (RFCs), here, here, here, here Right Media, here, here Roberts, Brian, here, here, here Rockefeller, John D., here Roosevelt, Franklin D., here routers, here, here Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), here, here Rubenstein, Michael, here Rusbridger, Alan, here Russia, here, here, here, here Sainsbury’s/Asda merger, here Schneidermann, Eric, here secure operations centres (SOCs), here sensitive compartmented information facilities (SCIFs), here Shaw, Mona, here Silicon Valley, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sinclair Broadcast Group, here Skype, here, here, here, here Snapchat, here, here Snowden, Edward, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here ‘social credit’, here Soundcloud, here South Korea, here sovereign immunity, here Spotify, here Stanford Research Institute (SRI), here, here, here, here, here, here, here Stripe, here Sun, 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Bob, here World Economic Forum, here World Wide Web, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Wu, Tim, here Yahoo, here, here, here YouTube, here, here, here, here, here, here Zittrain, Jonathan, here Zuckerberg, Mark, here, here, here, here, here, here Zynga, here BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1b 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 This electronic edition published 2020 Copyright © James Ball, 2020 James Ball has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work All rights reserved.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
by Timothy Snyder
Published 2 Apr 2018

Though internet platforms Facebook products: Elizabeth Dwoskin, Caitlin Dewey, and Craig Timberg, “Why Facebook and Google are struggling to purge fake news,” WP, Nov. 15, 2016. 56 million: Craig Timberg, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say,” WP, Nov. 24, 2016. Russians promote Fox and Breitbart: Eisentraut, “Russia Pulling Strings.” The “pizzagate” Marc Fisher, John Woodrow Cox, and Peter Hermann, “Pizzagate: From rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in D.C.,” WP, Dec. 6, 2016; Ben Popken, “Russian trolls pushed graphic, racist tweets to American voters,” NBC, Nov. 30, 2017; Mary Papenfuss, “Russian Trolls Linked Clinton to ‘Satanic Ritual,’ ” HP, Dec. 1, 2016. Russian platforms served Ben Collins, “WikiLeaks Plays Doctor,” DB, Aug. 25, 2016.

…

Much of what Russia did was to take advantage of what it found. Hyperpartisan stories on Fox News or outbursts on Breitbart gained viewership thanks to retransmission by Russian bots. Russian support helped fringe right-wing sites such as Next News Network gain notoriety and influence. Its videos were viewed about 56 million times in October 2016. The “pizzagate” and “spirit cooking” fictions show how Russian intervention and American conspiratology worked together. Both fictions began with the Russian hack of the emails of John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s campaign. Some Americans wished to believe that what is private must be mysterious, and they were coaxed along by Russia.

…

Trolls and bots, some of them Russian, began to spread the fiction that the pizzeria’s menu was a code for ordering children for sex, and that Clinton ran a pedophilia ring from its basement. InfoWars, a leading American conspiracy site, also spread the story. This fiction ended with a real American shooting a real gun in a real restaurant. The popular right-wing internet activist Jack Posobiec, who had himself spread the Pizzagate lie on Twitter, claimed that the American who fired the shots was an actor paid to discredit the truth. Podesta was also in touch with someone who invited him to a dinner party that he did not attend. The hostess of the dinner party was an artist who had once titled a painting Spirit Cooking; Russian trolls and bots spread the story that the dinner party was a Satanic ritual involving the consumption of human bodily fluids.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020

The thirty-year-old Nevada resident Matthew P. Wright, who blocked off a highway close to the Hoover Dam in an armoured vehicle in June 2018, had subscribed to the QAnon motto: ‘For where we go one, we go all’.17 Two years earlier, Edgar Welsh, firefighter and father from South Carolina and firm believer in Pizzagate – the QAnon predecessor conspiracy theory which claimed that Democrats were running a massive child-abuse network from their alleged headquarters at Comet Ping Pong, a DC pizza restaurant – opened fire in the pizzeria to free nonexistent children.18 In January 2019, a QAnon supporter killed his brother with a sword because he believed that he was a lizard.19 ‘Military, we need a plan and must expose evil to light,’ Max writes in late 2018.

…

Available at https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/12/03/456677535/apocalypse-chow-we-tried-televangelist-jim-bakkers-survival-food. 16See for example https://www.emergencyfoodstorage.co.uk/products/brexit-box. 17‘Terrorism suspect makes reference to extremist conspiracies’, SPLC, 20 July 2018. Available at https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/07/20/terrorism-suspect-makes-reference-extremist-conspiracies. 18Mark Fisher, John W. Cox and Peter Herman, ‘From rumor to hashtag to gunfire in D.C.’, Washington Post, 6 December 2016. Available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pizzagate-from-rumor-to-hashtag-to-gunfire-in-dc/2016/12/06/4c7def50-bbd4-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.30b166abe2bf. 19Blake Montgomery, ‘A Man Allegedly Killed His Brother with a 4-Foot Sword Because He Thought He Was A Lizard Person’, BuzzFeed, 10 January 2019. Available at https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/man-brother-murder-charge-sword. 20‘The Book of Q: The biggest drop ever’, 20 November 2017.

…

M. here, here b4bo here bin Laden, Osama here, here, here birthrates here, here Bissonnette, Alexandre here, here BitChute here bitcoin here, here, here Blissett, Luther here Bloc Identitaire here blockchain technology here bloggers here Blood & Honour here Bloom, Mia here Bloomberg, Michael here Böhmermann, Jan here Bowers, Robert here Breed Them Out here Breitbart here, here, here Breivik, Anders Behring here, here ‘Brentonettes’ here Brewer, Emmett here Brexit here, here Britain First here British National Party (BNP) here, here, here Broken Heart operation here Brown, Dan here Bubba Media here Bumble here, here Bundestag hack here, here BuzzFeed here C Star here, here ‘Call of Duty’ here, here Cambridge Analytica here, here Camus, Renaud here Carroll, Lewis here CBS here Channel programme here Charleston church shooting here Charlie Hebdo here Charlottesville rally here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Chemnitz protests here, here Choudary, Anjem here Christchurch 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Foundation here Merkel, Angela here, here, here, here MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) here, here, here MI6, 158, 164 migration here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also refugees millenarianism here Millennial Woes here millennials here Minassian, Alek here Mindanao here Minds here, here misogyny here, here, here, here, here see also Incels mixed martial arts (MMA) here, here, here, here Morgan, Nicky here Mounk, Yascha here Movement, The here Mueller, Robert here, here Muhammad, Prophet here, here, here mujahidat here Mulhall, Joe here MuslimCrypt here MuslimTec here, here Mussolini, Benito here Naim, Bahrun here, here Nance, Malcolm here Nasher App here National Action here National Bolshevism here National Democratic Party (NPD) here, here, here, here National Health Service (NHS) here National Policy Institute here, here National Socialism group here National Socialist Movement here National Socialist Underground here NATO DFR Lab here Naturalnews here Nawaz, Maajid here Nazi symbols here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also Hitler salutes; swastikas Nazi women here N-count here Neiwert, David here Nero, Emperor here Netflix here Network Contagion Research Institute here NetzDG legislation here, here Neumann, Peter here New Balance shoes here New York Times here News Corp here Newsnight here Nietzsche, Friedrich here, here Nikolai Alexander, Supreme Commander here, here, here, here, here, here 9/11 attacks here, here ‘nipsters’ here, here No Agenda here Northwest Front (NWF) here, here Nouvelle Droite here, here NPC meme here NSDAP here, here, here Obama, Barack and Michelle here, here, here, here, here Omas gegen Rechts here online harassment, gender and here OpenAI here open-source intelligence (OSINT) here, here Operation Name and Shame here Orbán, Viktor here, here organised crime here Orwell, George here, here Osborne, Darren here, here Oxford Internet Institute here Page, Larry here Panofsky, Aaron here Panorama here Parkland high-school shooting here Patreon here, here, here, here Patriot Peer here, here PayPal here PeopleLookup here Periscope here Peterson, Jordan here Pettibone, Brittany here, here, here Pew Research Center here, here PewDiePie here PewTube here Phillips, Whitney here Photofeeler here Phrack High Council here Pink Floyd here Pipl here Pittsburgh synagogue shooting here Pizzagate here Podesta, John here, here political propaganda here Popper, Karl here populist politicians here pornography here, here Poway synagogue shooting here, here Pozner, Lenny here Presley, Elvis here Prideaux, Sue here Prince Albert Police here Pro Chemnitz here ‘pseudo-conservatives’ here Putin, Vladimir here Q Britannia here QAnon here, here, here, here Quebec mosque shooting here Quilliam Foundation here, here, here Quinn, Zoë here Quran here racist slurs (n-word) here Radio 3Fourteen here Radix Journal here Rafiq, Haras here Ramakrishna, Kumar here RAND Corporation here Rasmussen, Tore here, here, here, here Raymond, Jolynn here Rebel Media here, here, here Reconquista Germanica here, here, here, here, here, here, here Reconquista Internet here Red Pill Women here, here, here, here, here Reddit here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here redpilling here, here, here, here refugees here, here, here, here, here Relotius, Claas here ‘Remove Kebab’ here Renault here Revolution Chemnitz here Rigby, Lee here Right Wing Terror Center here Right Wing United (RWU) here RMV (Relationship Market Value) here Robertson, Caolan here Robinson, Tommy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Rockefeller family here Rodger, Elliot here Roof, Dylann here, here Rosenberg, Alfred here Rothschilds here, here Rowley, Mark here Roy, Donald F. here Royal Family here Russia Today here, here S., Johannes here St Kilda Beach meeting here Salafi Media here Saltman, Erin here Salvini, Matteo here Sampson, Chris here, here Sandy Hook school shooting here Sargon of Akkad, see Benjamin, Carl Schild & Schwert rock festival (Ostritz) here, here, here Schilling, Curt here Schlessinger, Laura C. here Scholz & Friends here SchoolDesk here Schröder, Patrick here Sellner, Martin here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Serrano, Francisco here ‘sexual economics’ here SGT Report here Shodan here, here Siege-posting here Sleeping Giants here SMV (Sexual Market Value) here, here, here Social Justice Warriors (SJW) here, here Solahütte here Soros, George here, here Sotloff, Steven here Southern, Lauren here Southfront here Spencer, Richard here, here, here, here, here, here Spiegel TV here spoofing technology here Sputnik here, here SS here, here Stadtwerke Borken here Star Wars here Steinmeier, Frank-Walter here Stewart, Ayla here STFU (Shut the Fuck Up) here Stormfront here, here, here Strache, H.

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

Nikolas Cruz” for Valentine’s Day school shooting’, We Hunted the Mammoth, 14 February 2018; Anna North, ‘Men’s Rights Activists Come Out In Support Of Salon Killer’, Jezebel (www.jezebel.com), 14 October 2011. CHAPTER FIVE 1. After about twenty minutes . . . Matthew Haag and Maya Salam, ‘Gunman in “Pizzagate” Shooting is Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison’, New York Times, 23 June 2017; ‘The saga of “Pizzagate”: The fake story that shows how conspiracy theories spread’, BBC Trending, 2 December 2016; Amanda Robb, ‘Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal’, Rolling Stone, 16 November 2017; Mark Segraves, ‘Charging documents for Edgar Welch’, Twitter.com, 5 December 2016; Andrew Kaczynski, ‘Michael Flynn quietly deletes fake news tweet about Hillary Clinton’s involvement in sex crimes’, CNN, 14 December 2016. 2.

…

A young man with dirty fair hair and a scraggly beard, he is a small-time screenwriter and bit-part actor with minor credits in a string of slasher horror movies. He has come, dressed in light blue jeans and t-shirt, to ‘self-investigate’ rumours of an elite paedophile ring. Internet stories say that Hillary Clinton and top-level Democrats are trafficking child sex slaves out of the Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Washington DC: the infamous ‘Pizzagate’. Staff and diners at the pizzeria are faced with an agitated, gun-toting man who may be about to kill them. They flee, in hectic panic. He fires some shots into the floor and begins stalking the restaurant looking for the tunnels through which the children are allegedly being hustled. A restaurant employee who has gone to get some pizza dough from the freezer in the alley, comes back in to find Welch turning the rifle on him.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
by Sarah Kendzior
Published 6 Apr 2020

Some of the people threatening me said they were inspired by the article in Kushner’s paper, which proclaimed I was a Soros plant who worked for a website run by Democratic Party operative David Brock, among other falsehoods. The main tactic of the Trump camp and their backers, I would discover over the next few years, was not to directly threaten you with violence, but to smear you to the point that a fanatic might find murdering you an appealing prospect. This was the strategy they used in “Pizzagate,” when a vigilante convinced that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophilic cult out of a D.C. pizza parlor nearly shot up the place. The hit piece on me was standard fare for Kushner. Throughout his tenure as owner of the Observer (which he relinquished in 2017), Kushner used the newspaper as a way to target his enemies.44 The paper was one of two in the United States to endorse Trump in an official capacity: the other was the National Enquirer.

…

and Fairness Doctrine 2000 presidential election Bush (George W.) administration and criminal networks and propaganda “war on terror” Cadwalladr, Carole Cambridge Analytica Canada capitalism and American exceptionalism doctrine disaster capitalists and organized crime in Russia Caputo, Michael Carpenter, John Casablancas, John “A Cassandra in Trumpland” (profile of Kendzior) Central Park Five conspiracy theory Chabad Chalupa, Alexandra Chalupa, Andrea Chambers, Austin Chao, Elaine Chechnya Christie, Chris Churkin, Vitaly Citizens United v. FEC climate change Clinton, Bill loosening of financial regulations under speech to United Nations on international money-laundering (1995) Clinton, Hillary assumptions about victory of FBI behavior toward and Pizzagate conspiracy Trump’s call for Russia to obtain Clinton emails 2016 presidential campaign and Wisconsin voters Cohen, Michael and birtherism conspiracy and “catch and kill” operations Congressional testimony of convicted of campaign finance violations and Mogilevich, Semion and Sater, Felix threats made by as Trump’s personal lawyer Cohn, Roy death and funeral of and Epstein, Jeffrey and Manafort, Paul and Stone, Roger strategies used by and Trump, Donald Comey, James announcement of reopening of investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails firing of and investigation into 2016 election removal of Semion Mogilevich from Ten Most Wanted List warning from Harry Reid of 2016 election interference conspiracism and conspiracy theories American susceptibility for in authoritarian states birtherism and Breitbart (website) Central Park Five conspiracy-mongering accusations and the internet and mob behavior and networked authoritarianism as propaganda Corn, David Crimea, Russian invasion and annexation of Czech Republic Daly, Mary dark money and Citizens United v.

…

See September 11, 2001 1984 (Orwell) Nixon, Jay Nixon, Richard normalcy bias North Korea autocratic kinship ties in Biegun, Stephen (special representative to North Korea) Kim Jong Un Trump’s threats to nostalgia and The Apprentice under authoritarianism for the future for what never was nuclear weapons and Trump, Donald Obama, Barack and birtherism conspiracy theory declaration of organized crime as national emergency and Missouri voters and Russia 2008 presidential election 2012 presidential election Obama administration Lynch, Loretta and Magnitsky Act research funding cuts on former Soviet Union on Russian interference in 2016 election and Treasury breach unemployment rate Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria Occupy Wall Street movement oligarchs Abramovich, Roman Blavatnik, Len and Caputo, Michael definition of Deripaska, Oleg Firtash, Dmitry and June 2016 Trump Tower meeting and Kleptocracy Initiative (Hudson Institute) and Kushner, Jared and Lauder, Ronald Leviev, Lev and Magnitsky Act and Manafort, Paul Mogilevich, Semion and the National Rifle Association and Putin, Vladimir and Republican Party and “right of return” sanctions on and Sater, Felix and “torturers’ lobby” firm of Manafort and Stone and Trump, Donald and Trump officials Omar, Ilhan Orbán, Viktor organized crime Clinton, Bill, on and Cohn, Roy death toll from transnational activities “The Evolving Organized Crime Threat” (Mueller “Iron Triangles” speech) Italian mafia and Mogilevich, Semion Obama, Barack, on state as proxy for transnational organized crime and Trump, Donald Orwell, George Papadopoulos, George Pecker, David Pence, Mike Pendergast, Tom Pentagon Papers Pieczenik, Steve Pizzagate conspiracy Podesta, Tony Politkovskaya, Anna Pompeo, Mike post-employment economy Powell, Kajieme Powers, Kajieme Prince, Erik propaganda “alternative facts” as and American media “Big Lie” (Third Reich technique) conspiracy theories as dark money campaigns and digital media “fake news” and gun issues inoculation against and investigative journalism of Trump and networked authoritarianism scandal covering up crime (Trump technique) and sense of time in Syria protest and Andijan massacre anti-globalization protests anti-Iraq War protests anti-Trump protests Arab Spring romanticizing of See also Ferguson protest public good public leverage Putin, Vladimir authoritarianism of and axis of autocrats and Burnett, Mark and Caputo, Michael and Chabad and “the color revolutions” and Deng, Wendi and hypercapitalism and Lauder, Ronald and Lazar, Berel meeting with Trump at G20 and murder of Anna Politkovskaya and oligarchs Order of Friendship granted to Rex Tillerson by pardon power of and poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and Russian interference in 2016 presidential election and Stein, Jill and Trump’s 2013 visit to Moscow Trump’s admiration of underestimation of QAnon Qatar racism and birtherism conspiracy and Central Park Five conspiracy and election of Barack Obama and Ferguson unrest and Missouri and partial repeal of Voting Rights Act and policy racist attacks on Elijah Lovejoy rebranded as populism systemic racism and Tea Party movement and Trump, Donald and Trump administration in works of Mark Twain and Yosef, Yitzhak Rather, Dan Reagan, Ronald and deregulation economic policy and Fairness Doctrine and Soviet Union Red Scare Reid, Harry Reid, Joy Roberts, Virginia Robinson, Don Rogers, Fred Romney, Mitt Rosenbaum, Ron Ross, Wilbur Rove, Karl RT (Russian state media outlet) Rubenstein, Howard Russia.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021

I am especially fortunate because I get paid to do it.”10 That second sentence hints at another motivation: profit. People like Alex Jones, who were nonentities in the reality-based world, discovered they could build commercial empires as conspiracy theorists. They could use their visibility to get on TV, hawk T-shirts, sell clicks to advertisers. Stefanie MacWilliams, who propagated the “Pizzagate” theory that Hillary Clinton was involved in a child prostitution ring hidden beneath a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, told the Toronto Star, “I really have no regrets, and it’s honestly really grown our audience.”11 (This, after an armed man searching for child sex slaves entered the pizzeria, discharged his rifle, and put diners to flight.)

…

Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux, “The ‘Need for Chaos’ and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors,” preprint, May 2020, https://psyarxiv.com/6m4ts/. 9. Dudley Clendinen, “Conservative Paper Stirs Dartmouth,” New York Times, October 13, 1981. 10. Dinesh D’Souza, Letters to a Young Conservative (Basic Books, 2002), p. 135. 11. “Belleville Woman Helped Cook Up Pizzagate,” Toronto Star, December 7, 2016. 12. Abby Ohlheiser, “This Is How Facebook’s Fake-News Writers Make Money,” Washington Post, November 18, 2016. 13. This and succeeding quotations are from Renée DiResta, “Of Virality and Viruses: The Anti-Vaccine Movement and Social Media,” Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, November 8, 2018. 14.

…

See also biases Pereira, Andrea, 31, 38 Perrino, Nico, 245 perseverance bias, 27 persuasion: accountability and, 105; checking errors and, 97; conformity bias and, 196–97; Constitution of Knowledge requiring, 92–94, 98, 99, 109, 111, 131; critical, 93–94, 113; disinformation campaigns vs., 165; marketplace of, 92–94, 109–13; outrage vs., 135; reason and, 22–24; in social networks, 65, 92; Wikipedia and, 143 Persuasion.community, 246 Petersen, Michael Bang, 159–60 Pew Research Center, 176–77, 188, 236 Phelps-Roper, Megan, 36 physics, 65–66, 68 Picciuto, Elizabeth, 217–18 Pinker, Steven, 214–15 Pinterest, 146 Pipes, Daniel, 190 Pizzagate, 160, 179 platforms. See digital media Plato: authoritarianism and, 38–39; The Republic, 3, 156; Theaetetus, 1–4, 17, 105, 108, 264 pluralism: in academia, 237–38; emotional safetyism vs., 208; fallibilism and, 95–96; Hobbes and, 44, 56; liberal science and, 112, 113; Madison on, 191; in reality-based communities, 105–06; spirals of silence vs., 198–99; Wikipedia and, 143 Poe, Edgar Allan, 121 Polanyi, Michael: “The Republic of Science,” 71, 77 polarization: compromise and, 84; conservative media and, 176, 181; creed war and, 38, 40–41; digital media and, 132–34; disinformation campaigns and, 163, 184; identity and, 33; Trump and, 173 political correctness, 14, 231.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
by Kashmir Hill
Published 19 Sep 2023

“I loved Hoan from the second I met him,” Johnson said. “He showed up dressed in this flowery suit thing, made in Vietnam. He wore the most outlandish, craziest shit. He’s not like the other kids in the sandbox.” They had dinner with Mike Cernovich, a men’s rights advocate who had used his considerable clout on Twitter to boost the #PizzaGate conspiracy theory alleging child sex trafficking by Democrats in the nonexistent basement of a D.C. pizzeria. Cernovich tweeted a photo of his dinner mates making the controversial “OK” hand gesture, an “all is well” signal co-opted by conservatives to communicate tribal solidarity and infuriate liberals.

…

Had the infiltrators been infiltrated, as in a Spy vs. Spy cartoon? MacAuley said that the D.C. Antifascist Coalition had hatched a harebrained scheme to find out. A few members of the coalition invited Tyler to Comet Ping Pong—selected humorously, she said, because it was the unfortunate pizzeria at the center of the #PizzaGate conspiracy theory. Over beers there, the antifascists told Tyler about a plan to stink bomb DeploraBall attendees and set off the sprinklers inside the National Press Club to disrupt the proceedings. The “plot,” which seemed ripped from a dumb 1980s movie, had been made up, MacAuley said, in the hope of feeding false information to their enemies and outing Tyler if he was a spy.

…

See also cameras; driver’s license photographs; mug shots background photo searches, 247 physics of, 179 public profile photos, 142–143 punch photographs, 24–25 stock photo sites, 192 visa application photos, 68–69 PHP, 5 phrenology, 18 physiognomy, 13, 17–18, 19–20, 31, 40–41 Picasa, 101 PimEyes, 197–198, 199, 200–201 Pinterest, Smartcheckr and, 53 PitchBook, xi, xiv Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (“PittPatt”) Acquisti and, 107, 108, 110, 126 early work of, 105 founding of, 104–105 Google’s purchase of, 103, 108–109, 110 IARPA and, 106 Intel and, 124 #PizzaGate conspiracy theory, 12, 55 Podesta, John, 259n10 Polar Rose, 108 pornography, 197–200, 221–222. See also child sexual abuse material (CSAM) Pressley, Ayanna, 239 Prince, Erik, 51–52 principal components analysis, 47 privacy description of, viii laws regarding, 191 right to, viii, 204–205 privacy paradox, 106, 107 privacy policies, 123 private right of action, 85, 86 private surveillance, law enforcement and, 204 probable cause, absence of, 180 probe images, 180 Project on Speech, Privacy, and Technology, 202 Project Veritas, 55 Proud Boys, 50 proxy networks, 58 Public by Default, 280n77 punch photographs, 24–25 Python, 194–195 Q Queensland Police Service, 136 R race variation in accuracy and, 65, 70–71, 156, 178–179, 239, 240 wrongful arrests and, 183 racism, 19, 20, 23, 33, 94, 259n10 railroad industry, 23–25 Railway News, The, 24 Raji, Inioluwa Deborah, 278n71 Rank One Computing, 180 RapidSOS, 232 Ravikant, Naval, 4–5, 6, 8, 118 Raviv, Shaun, 268n38 Raytheon, 60 Reagan, Ronald, 117 Real Time Crime Center (RTCC), 132, 230, 231–236 RealWear, 164 “Reclaim Your Face” campaign, 238 Reddit, 10, 53, 200 Reflectacles, 241 Reid, Randal, 183 Rekognition, 116, 137–138, 162, 238 repeat offenders eugenics and, 25 identifying, 21–22 Republican Attorneys General Association, 138–139 Republican Party convention, 3, 10–11, 12, 13–14, 27 revenge porn, 200 “Ricky Vaughn” Twitter account, 93–94 “Right Wing Gossip Squad,” 94 Rockefeller Foundation, 36 Roe, Phil, 274n52 Rogers, John, 84, 85 Rolling Stone, 11 Ronan, James, 301n175 Roskomsvoboda, 222–223 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 136 Royal Geographical Society, 19 RTCC (Real Time Crime Center), 132, 230, 231–236 Rudin Management, 129 Russia, 34–35, 220–223, 237.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021

The answer is that it depends what you mean by “believe.” Mercier notes that holders of weird beliefs often don’t have the courage of their convictions.40 Though millions of people endorsed the rumor that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington (the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, a predecessor of QAnon), virtually none took steps commensurate with such an atrocity, such as calling the police. The righteous response of one of them was to leave a one-star review on Google. (“The pizza was incredibly undercooked. Suspicious professionally dressed men by the bar area that looked like regulars kept staring at my son and other kids in the place.”)

…

The Psychology of Apocrypha Once we appreciate that humans can hold beliefs they don’t treat as factually true, we can begin to make sense of the rationality paradox—how a rational animal can embrace so much claptrap. It’s not that the conspiracy theorists, fake-news sharers, and consumers of pseudoscience always construe their myths as mythological. Sometimes their beliefs cross the line into reality with tragic results, as in Pizzagate, anti-vaxxers, and the Heaven’s Gate cult, whose thirty-nine devotees committed suicide in 1997 in preparation for their souls to be whisked away by a spaceship following the Hale-Bopp comet. But predispositions in human nature can combine with mythological truthiness to make weird beliefs easy to swallow.

…

See deep learning patterning, random vs. nonrandom, 112–13 Paxton, Ken, 130–31 peace, democracy and, 264, 266, 269–72, 327 Peanuts (cartoon), 286, 298 Pearl, Judea, 261 Pearson, Egon, 221–22 peer group, expressive rationality and, 297–98 peer review, 41, 58, 160, 300–301, 316 Pence, Mike, 82–83 Pennycook, Gordon, 310–11 perceptrons. See deep learning p-hacking, 145 Pizzagate conspiracy theory, 299, 302, 304 plane crashes as risk, 33, 120, 121, 122 Plato, Euthyphro, 67 poker, 231 police and correlation–causation confusion, 260 evidence-based evaluation of, 317 killing African Americans, 123, 124–25, 141 reporting concerns to, 299, 308 policy avoiding sectarian symbolism in, 312 behavioral insights from cognitive science, 56 deliberative democracy and, 317 discounting the future, 51–52 evidence-based, 316, 317 libertarian paternalism, 56 randomized controlled trials to test, 265 rational choice axioms and, 191, 193–94 signaling equality and fairness, 165 taboo tradeoffs and, 63–64 See also government political commentary.

How to Do Nothing
by Jenny Odell
Published 8 Apr 2019

Instances of censorship, he says, “are rather marginal when compared to what is essentially an immense informational overload and an actual siege of attention, combined with the occupation of the sources of information by the head of the company.”19 It is this financially incentivized proliferation of chatter, and the utter speed at which waves of hysteria now happen online, that has so deeply horrified me and offended my senses and cognition as a human who dwells in human, bodily time. The connection between the completely virtual and the utterly real, as evidenced by something like Pizzagate, or the doxing and swatting of online journalists, is deeply, fundamentally disturbing on a human phenomenological level. I know that in the months after the election, a lot of people found themselves searching for this thing called “truth,” but what I also felt to be missing was just reality, something I could point to after all of this and say, This is really real

…

This new lack of context can be felt most acutely in the waves of hating, shaming, and vindictive public opinion that roll unchecked through platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Though I believe the problem is built into the platforms themselves, and people throughout the political spectrum are implicated, it’s a favorite tool of far-right propagandists like Mike Cernovich (who helped propagate the #pizzagate conspiracy theory) to dig through someone’s old tweets and re-present the ones that look the most offensive out of context. Lately, journalists and other public figures have been a favorite target. What I find most upsetting about this is not how conniving Cernovich and others are, but how quickly and dutifully everyone else has piled on.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy
by David Gelles
Published 30 May 2022

Together, Welch and Trump had come to understand just how powerful lies could be in the age of social media. At the time, their antics were written off as buffoonery and bluster, the mad musings of washed-up tycoons. But their falsehoods found a willing audience, helping propel Trump to the Oval Office, and laying the groundwork for Pizzagate, QAnon, and the endless cascade of falsehoods that would soon come from President Trump himself. Reflecting on the loony news cycles sparked by Birtherism and the jobs numbers conspiracy, the news anchor Chuck Todd foresaw the insanity to come. “The idea that Donald Trump and Jack Welch—rich people with crazy conspiracies—can get traction on this,” Todd said, “is a bad trend.”

…

(1980 documentary), 19 NBC Nightly News (TV program), 53 30 Rock (TV program), 139–40 Today (TV program), 117, 135, 195 NBC Universal, 175 Neal, Richard, 82 Neff, Tom, 78 negative externalities, 167–201, 230 at Amazon, 171–74, 182 at Under Armour, 182 at AT&T, 175–76, 177, 182 at Boeing, 186–94 of dealmaking and financialization, 175–85 of downsizing, 168–74 at GE under JW, 168, 169, 171 market concentration, 79–80, 176–78, 219 nature of externalities, 167–68 at 3G Capital, 177–82 Donald Trump and, 194–201 wealth concentration, 10–12, 183–85 of Welchism, 168–85 Nestlé, 204 net disposable income (NDI), 209–10 Netflix, 175 Neumann, Adam, 134, 171 “Neutron Jack,” 117 meaning of, 5 Newsweek and, 42, 49, 132, 152 as role model for other CEOs, 72–73, 78–80, 81, 88, 111, 123–26, 175, 177–82, 191–94 Newark (N.J.) public schools, 134 New Deal, 20, 24, 38–39 New England Patriots, 195, 221 Newsweek, 91 origins of “Neutron Jack” nickname at, 42, 49, 132, 152 see also “Neutron Jack” New York City public schools, 132–33, 134 New York Daily News, 120, 162 New York Post, 159 New York Times, 21, 35–36, 117, 174, 190–94 Nielsen, 77 Nixon, Richard, 15 Nortel, 77, 107 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 157 Norwegian Cruise Line, 223 Noryl, 29–30 NYC Leadership Academy, 132–33, 134 Obama, Barack, 8, 12, 93–94, 156–60, 196, 198 Occupy Wall Street movement, 150–51 Offshoring, see downsizing (generally); downsizing at GE Olympic Games, 52–53 Oracle, 223 Outsourcing, see downsizing (generally); downsizing at GE overtime work, 100, 170–71, 172, 200–201, 217 Owens Corning, 77 Pacific Investment Management Company (Pimco), 115–16 PaineWebber, 61 Patagonia, 212, 213 PayPal, 207–11, 215, 220 Peltz, Nelson, 57, 162 Perelman, Ronald, 57 Pickens, T. Boone, 57 Pierson, Ed, 156 Pigou, Arthur Cecil, 167–68 Pizzagate, 160 Plank, Kevin, 182 Polaris, 77, 84–85, 107, 116 Polman, Paul, 139–40, 203–7, 211, 217, 220 Powell, Lewis, 36–37, 39 private equity firms: dealmaking by, 2, 51, 54, 57, 70, 105, 110–11, 142, 175–82, 185, 213–14 stakeholder capitalism and, 213–14 Procter & Gamble, 102, 204 profit maximization, see shareholder capitalism Pruitt, Scott, 198–99 public benefit corporations, 212–13 QAnon, 160 Qatar Airways, 130 Rather, Dan, 131 RCA: GE acquisition, 51–54, 56, 57, 95, 152, 175, 176 GE sell-off of, 51–52, 152 RCA Records, 51 Reagan, Ronald, 7, 15–16, 24, 38–39, 47, 51, 65, 95, 196 Reaganomics, 15–16, 93 Real-Life MBA, The (Welch and Welch), 131 Regan, Donald, 39 REI, 215–16 Republican Party, 12, 156–60, 196–200 Restaurant Brands International, 179 Reuters, JW as contributor, 11, 131 Ries, Eric, 139 RJR Nabisco, 57, 70 Robertson, Pat, 134 Rocheleau, Dennis, 44, 56 Rockefeller, John D., 184 Rogers, Tom, 60, 62 Rohatyn, Felix, 51, 95 Roker, Al, 135 Rose, Charlie, 131 Rubbermaid, 77 SABMiller, 178 Sanchez, Lauren, 174 Sanders, Bernie, 162–63 Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002), 126 Saudi Aramco, 135 Saudi Basic Industries, 137 scandals inside GE, 92–93 Hudson River PCB pollution, 93, 139, 168 Justice Department subprime mortgage investigation, 165, 225 JW divorce and remarriage, 117–20, 174 Kidder Peabody trading schemes, 54–55 pension fund shortfall, 162 SEC accounting fraud suits and settlements, 126, 147–48, 225 SEC long-term-care shortfall investigation and settlement, 164–65 Schrager, James, 107 Schulman, Dan, 207–11, 220 Schwab, Klaus, 211–12 Scott, MacKenzie, 174 Scott Paper, 71 Seamless, 170 Sears, 165 Securities Act of 1933, 65 Security Capital Group, 137 September 11 terrorist attacks (2001), 7, 82, 113–15, 117, 136–37, 138, 228 Seventh Generation, 212 Shad, John, 39 shareholder capitalism: activism for, 149–52 broad acceptance of, 93–95 Business Roundtable and, 37, 93, 214, 223–24 Covid-19 pandemic and, 221–26 critiques of, 70, 72–73, 84–85, 92–97 Friedman doctrine and, 3–4, 6–7, 35–40, 93–94, 229 GE as the most valuable company on earth, 3, 4–8, 20, 34, 50–51, 58, 68, 79, 90, 113, 137, 162, 195, 226 Golden Age of Capitalism vs., 222, 229 impact in corporate America, 8–13, 175–85, 229 JW denunciation of, 151–52 in JW vision for GE, 2–3, 4–8, 20, 33–35, 52, 68, 151–52 stakeholder capitalism vs., 36, 37, 151–52, 203–20, 231 Welchism and, 8–9, see also Welchism Sharer, Kevin, 106 Sheffer, Gary, 39–40 Siegel, Marty, 54–55 60 Minutes (CBS TV program), 42, 131 Six Sigma, 101, 112–13, 127 Skilling, Jeffrey, 124 Sloan, Alfred, 25 Smith, Greg, 190 Smith, Kyle, 89 Sonnenfeld, Jeffrey, 164 Sorscher, Stan, 89 Southwest Airlines, 190 S&P Dow Jones Indices, 165 Spencer Stuart, 78 Spitzer, Eliot, 109–10, 125–26 Sprint, 169 SPX, 77, 105 stack ranking: Amazon and, 171–74 at Ford, 171 at Microsoft, 171 by 3G Capital, 179 at 3M, 112, 171 Vitality Curve at GE, 4, 44–45, 96–97, 152, 171, 172, 174 at WeWork, 171 stagflation, 18, 25, 33 stakeholder capitalism, 203–20, 231 activism and, 149–52 B Corp movement / public benefit corporations in, 212–13 at BlackRock, 213–14 Business Roundtable and, 26, 214, 222–24 at Chrysler, 216 at Delta Air Lines, 215 employee board representation, 216–17 employee compensation, 207–11, 215–16, 220 executive compensation in, 217–18, 219–20 GE as once-model corporate citizen, 4, 16, 20, 21–26, 42–43, 74, 165 long-term view in, 217–18 minimum wage and, 93, 183, 209, 215, 218, 223 nature of, 12–13 need for, 12–13 at PayPal, 207–11, 215, 220 at REI, 215–16 shareholder capitalism vs., 36, 37, 151–52, 203–20, 231 strengthening antitrust policies, 219 sustainability and good governance in, 205–7 taxation in, 23, 218–19 at Unilever, 203–7, 211, 217, 220 upskilling workers, 216 World Economic Forum and, 211–12 see also Golden Age of Capitalism Stanley, Frederick T., 80 Stanley Works, 77, 83–84, 110 Starbucks, 170 Stephanopoulos, George, 157 Stephenson, Randall, 175 Stiglitz, Joseph, 132 stock buybacks, see financialization (generally); financialization at GE stock market performance, see shareholder capitalism Stone, Roger, 196 Stonecipher, Harry, 87–90, 127, 128–29, 187, 191, 194 Stumo, Michael, 194 Stumo, Samya, 194 subprime mortgage crisis, 8, 137–38, 141–45, 148–49, 150, 165, 225 Success magazine, 91, 132 Summers, Larry, 93–94 Sunbeam Products, 71–72 Sundstrand, 87 Swope, Gerard, 22–23, 43 Symantec, 77, 105–6 Taco Bell, 170 TaskRabbit, 170 taxation: “active financing” exception, 62–63 corporate headquarters in Bermuda, 81–82 decline in U.S. corporate taxes, 63 in GE dealmaking, 51, 61, 62–63 in stakeholder capitalism, 23, 218–19 tax breaks for corporate expansion / relocations, 88–89, 173, 219 tax reduction efforts, 10, 63, 81–82, 88–89, 162, 185, 200–201 Trump and, 200–201 terrorist attacks (September 11, 2001), 7, 82, 113–15, 117, 136–37, 138, 228 Tester, Jon, 190 30 Rock (NBC TV program), 139–40 Thomson, 52, 82–84 3G Capital, 177–82, 206–7 3M, 9, 77, 107, 111–13, 127, 171 Tichy, Noel, 77 Tiller, Tom, 84–85, 107, 116 Time Warner, 175–76 Tim Hortons, 179 TiVo, 60, 62, 77 Today (NBC TV program), 117, 135, 195 Todd, Chuck, 160 “total war,” 34 Trani, John, 83–84, 110 Trump, Donald: The Apprentice (NBC TV program), 121, 134–35, 195 business advisory councils, 199–200 Charlottesville, Virginia white nationalist violence (2017), 199–200 conspiracy theories, 158, 160 JW and, 12, 59, 90–91, 121, 134–35, 158, 194–201, 221 presidency, 12, 166, 169, 188, 197–200, 214 Trump International Hotel and Tower, 7, 59, 119, 121, 195 Tungsram, 83 Tyco International, 124–25 Uber, 170, 226 Under Armour, 182 Unilever, 139–40, 203–7, 211, 217, 220 unions: at Boeing, 88, 89, 128–30 at Chrysler, 216 decline of, 46–47, 49–50 employee compensation and, 46–47, 49 JW opposition to, 11, 46–47, 132 United Auto Workers, 216 United Financial Corporation of California, 66–67 U.S.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
by Jia Tolentino
Published 5 Aug 2019

The Gamergaters—estimated by Deadspin to number around ten thousand people—would mostly deny this harassment, either parroting in bad faith or fooling themselves into believing the argument that Gamergate was actually about noble ideals. Gawker Media, Deadspin’s parent company, itself became a target, in part because of its own aggressive disdain toward the Gamergaters: the company lost seven figures in revenue after its advertisers were brought into the maelstrom. In 2016, a similar fiasco made national news in Pizzagate, after a few rabid internet denizens decided they’d found coded messages about child sex slavery in the advertising of a pizza shop associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This theory was disseminated all over the far-right internet, leading to an extended attack on DC’s Comet Ping Pong pizzeria and everyone associated with the restaurant—all in the name of combating pedophilia—that culminated in a man walking into Comet Ping Pong and firing a gun.

…

There is a version of this mutual escalation that applies to any belief system, which brings me back to Bari Weiss and all the other writers who have fashioned themselves as brave contrarians, building entire arguments on random protests and harsh tweets, making themselves deeply dependent on the people who hate them, the people they hate. It’s ridiculous, and at the same time, here I am writing this essay, doing the same thing. It is nearly impossible, today, to separate engagement from magnification. (Even declining to engage can turn into magnification: when people targeted in Pizzagate as Satanist pedophiles took their social media accounts private, the Pizzagaters took this as proof that they had been right.) Trolls and bad writers and the president know better than anyone: when you call someone terrible, you just end up promoting their work. * * * — The political philosopher Sally Scholz separates solidarity into three categories.

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination
by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
Published 12 Jul 2021

Facebook’s data scientists and security officials noted a 300 percent increase, from June through August 2020, in content related to the conspiracy theory QAnon. QAnon believers perpetuated a false theory that liberal elites and celebrities like Bill Gates, Tom Hanks, and George Soros ran a global child trafficking ring. They built their following on the foundation laid by “Pizzagate,” a conspiracy theory that claimed that Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats were abusing children in the basement of a Washington, DC, restaurant. While the theory was repeatedly proven false—the restaurant in question did not even have a basement—the idea that there was a conspiracy being hatched among the global elites persisted and grew under the Trump administration.

…

See freedom of speech issues Hemphill, Scott, 229–232, 261 Hertz, Jessica, 297 Hoefflinger, Mike, 55 Holocaust deniers, Facebook policy and, 205–207, 276–278, 281 Holt, Lester, 257–258 Horowitz, Ben, 191–192 Hughes, Chris New York Times op-ed, 219–222 on origins of Facebook, 253 Wu and, 231–232 Zuckerberg’s “pivot to privacy” and, 224–227 Ifill, Sherrilyn, 255 Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, of UN, 186 Information Technology Industry Council, 165 Infowars, 204 Instagram, 7, 8, 166, 193–194, 221, 222, 253, 259, 295 Facebook’s “pivot to privacy” and, 222–224 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and, 68 interoperability of messaging apps and, 227–228 Russian Internet Research Agency and, 133 Trump and, 267, 288–290, 292 Wu and Hemphill’s evaluation of Facebook’s acquisition of, 230–231 Zuckerberg’s broken commitment to founders of, 2, 194, 227–229 International Association of Privacy Professionals, 64–65 International Criminal Court, 185–186 Internet Association, 241 Internet Research Agency (IRA), of Russia, 130–134, 137, 143, 144–145 Internet.org, 175–177 iSEC Partners, 101 James, Letitia, 1–2, 3 “JJDIDTIEBUCKLE” (leadership principle), 246 Jobs, Steve, 48, 51, 174 Jones, Alex, 82, 204–205, 206 Kalanick, Travis, 207 Kang-Xing Jin, 51 Kaplan, Joel, 197, 241, 260, 276, 278 Biden administration and, 297–298 Cambridge Analytica and, 150 election of 2016 and, 81, 108–109, 111–112, 123, 125 Kavanaugh hearings and, 200–203 manipulated video of Pelosi and, 236, 238 personality of, 14 political contributions and, 164–165 Sandberg and, 14, 87 Trump administration and, 161, 243–247 Trump and COVID-19, 267–268, 269 Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate speech issues, 11–15 Kaplan, Laura Cox, 200 Kavanaugh, Ashley Estes, 200 Kavanaugh, Brett, 200–203 Kaye, David, 174–175 Kellogg, Hansen law firm, 295 Kendall, Tim, 36–37, 51 Kennedy, John, 153 Kenosha Guard, 279–281 Kimmel, Jimmy, 166 King, Bernice, 254, 259 Kirkpatrick, David, 114–115 Klobuchar, Amy, 153 Kogan, Aleksandr, 152–153, 155 Koum, Jan, 194, 229 Kraff, Brian, 41 Krieger, Mike, 228–229 Kushner, Jared, 15, 243–244, 256 Kustomer, acquired by Facebook, 299 Le Pen, Marine, 118 Lean In (Sandberg), 79, 127, 157–158 Leibowitz, Jonathan, 67, 154, 199 Leone, Isabella, 131 Lewandowski, Corey, 112–113 Libra (blockchain currency), 241–242, 256–257, 300 LinkedIn, 175 London, Eric, 155 Losse, Katherine, 49, 50, 124 Lynton, Michael, 56 Ma, Olivia, 26 Mac, Ryan, 272 Macron, Emmanuel, 118, 124–125, 219, 221, 237 Martin, Jenny Beth, 81 Martin, Kevin, 80, 112 Mauer, Greg, 80, 112, 140 Mayer, Marissa, 102–103 McKinsey and Company, 41, 50 McNamee, Roger, 44, 232 Mercer, Robert, 149 MeToo movement, 150, 200–201, 203 Microsoft, 31, 165, 174, 175, 241 advertising and, 51, 53, 54 Modi, Narenda, 106 Montgomery, Kathryn, 58, 60 Moran, Ned, 95–98, 100–101, 105, 129–132, 147 Moskovitz, Dustin, 31 Mossberg, Walt, 43 Mosseri, Adam, 114, 228, 261 Moveon.org, 59 Mubarak, Hosni, 157 Mueller, Robert, 147 Murphy, Laura, 248, 249 Myanmar, hate speech against Rohingya and, 85, 169–173, 176, 178–182, 185–187, 293–294 Narendra, Divya, 21 “net neutrality,” 230 Netscape, 25, 52 New Republic, The, 287 New York Times, 88, 272, 285 Cambridge Analytica and, 149 Chester on behavioral advertising and, 59 Clegg’s op-ed in, 240 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and, 1 Hughes’ op-ed in, 219–222 Myanmar and, 186 Russian election interference and, 130, 215 New Yorker, The, 66 Newsom, Gavin, 266 Next One Billion project, of Facebook, 176–177 Nielsen, 56 Nuland, William, 147 Nuñez, Michael, 70–79 Oath Keepers, 287–288 Obama, Barack and administration of, 11, 67, 82, 118, 121, 138, 146, 184, 230, 236, 248, 251, 252, 255 Observer, 149 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 257 Oculus VR headset, 80, 81, 190 O’Donnell, Nora, 157–159 Olivan, Javier, 194, 195, 260 Onavo, 195–196, 260 O’Neill, Catlin, 140, 236, 297 Only the Paranoid Survive (Grove), 192 Open Society Foundation, 108 Option B (Sandberg), 79, 258 Overstock, 59–60 Page, Larry, 43, 44, 65, 192 Palihapitiya, Chamath, 51 Parakilas, Sandy, 152, 164 Parikh, Jay, 9, 10 Parker, Sean, 26, 28, 44, 221 Parscale, Brad, 15, 247 Pearlman, Leah, 62–63 Pelosi, Nancy, 233–234, 297 Facebook and manipulated video of, 234–240 Pence, Mike, 290 Philippines, 85, 106, 177, 291 Phillips Exeter Academy, 19–20 Pichai, Sundar, 198 “Pizzagate,” 278 Podesta, John, 100 politics, and Facebook Biden administration and, 286, 296–298 Clegg’s policy of not fact-checking political ads, 249–252 Facebook’s PAC for political contributions, 164–165 liberal favoritism at Facebook, 12–13, 74–75, 78 political ads on Facebook, 212–214 Trump administration and Facebook executives, 243–247 see also election of 2016; election of 2020; freedom of speech issues Price, Bill, 89–92 Pritchett, Lant, 41 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 182–183 Proud Boys, 288 Putin, Vladimir, 121, 123 QAnon, 278–279, 281 Red-State Secession group, 288 Reich, Robert, 226 Reynolds, Tom, 141, 145 Rice, Brian, 141 Robinson, Rashad, 249, 251, 276–277 Rose, Dan, 44, 45, 46, 51 Rosen, Guy, 195, 260, 285 Rosensweig, Dan, 43–44 Rubio, Marco, 161 Russian disinformation, on Facebook platform, 3, 282 Congressional interest in, 127–128, 133–134, 139–145 Facebook board of director’s interest in, 134–137 Facebook employees and, 190 Facebook public relations team and, 208–215 Facebook’s security team’s investigation of, 117–127 French election of 2017 and, 118, 121 Russian Internet Research Agency and, 130–134, 137, 143, 144–145 Sandberg and, 215–217 U.S. election campaign of 2016 and, 95–101, 105–109, 124–125, 248 Zuckerberg and, 196, 204, 215–217 Ryan, Paul, 78 Sai Sitt Thway Aung, 169 Sandberg, Michelle, 43, 44 Sandberg, Sheryl backlash to Lean In and, 157–158 behavioral advertising and data collecting, at Facebook, 2–3, 45–46, 51–56, 59, 60–63, 67, 87, 225 Biden administration and, 297 books by, 79, 127, 157–158, 258 Cambridge Analytica and, 153, 154–156, 159, 160–161 Capital Building storming in January 2021 and, 286–287 Congress and, 153, 170–171, 197–200 Couric’s interview of, 258–260 cyber security and, 97–98, 210 diversity and gender equity and, 50, 202–203, 273 education and professional positions before Facebook, 39–43, 46–47, 50, 52–53 election of 2016 and conservatives, 82–83 election security and, 210 Facebook and privacy, 67 Facebook’s earnings call in 2021 and, 298–299 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and, 45, 295, 296 Goldberg’s death and, 79–81, 233 hate speech issues and, 11–14, 275–277 Hillary Clinton and, 79, 111–112, 243–244 Instagram and WhatsApp and, 228–229 Kaplan and, 14, 87 Kaplan and Kavanaugh hearings and, 201–202 manipulated video of Pelosi and Facebook debates about, 234–240 meets Zuckerberg, 4 Nuñez’s reporting and, 79 organizational changes in 2018 and, 194 parents and siblings of, 41, 44 Pelosi and, 233–234 personal life of, 41, 43, 258, 295 personality of, 2, 45, 199–200 as protective of her image, 4 reaction to emotional contagion research, 183 response to criticisms of Facebook, 156–157 responsible growth and, 86 Russian disinformation investigation and, 118–119, 120, 121, 122–123, 126, 127–128, 134, 136, 139, 143–144, 147, 196–197 Schrage and, 87–88, 89–92 Stamos and, 10–11, 103–104 Zuckerberg hires, 43–48 Zuckerberg’s working relationship with, 54–57, 86–87, 190, 260–261 Sanders, Bernie, 100, 132, 140, 221, 226 Sandy Hook Elementary School, shooting at, 82, 157, 204–205 Sanghvi, Ruchi, 32, 34, 274 Saverin, Eduardo, 30 Scavino, Dan, 243 Schatz, Brian, 166, 236 Schiff, Adam, 140, 142–144 Schissler, Matt, 171–173, 177–182 Schmidt, Eric, 42, 44, 46, 62, 192, 207 Schrage, Elliot Definers Public Affairs and, 216–217 Russian disinformation and, 119, 123, 125–126, 134–135 Sandberg and, 87–88, 89–92 Schumer and, 66–67, 88 Trump’s 2015 anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate speech issues, 12, 13 Schroepfer, Mike, 194, 291 Schumer, Chuck, 66–67, 68, 88 Scott, Kim, 47 Secureworks, 98 Segall, Laurie, 160 Sidley Austin law firm, 295 Smith, Matthew, 185–187, 294 Snapchat, 240, 253 Snowden, Edward, 8 Sorkin, Andrew Ross, 156 Soros, George, 108, 156–157, 215–216, 226 South Park Commons, 274 Sparapani, Tim, 65, 66 Sperling, Gene, 248 Stamos, Alex background before Facebook, 101–103 election of 2020 and, 283–284 investigation and report on Russian meddling and disinformation, 97, 100, 103–107, 116, 117–127, 130, 132, 145–147 2015 report on security of user’s information, 7–11 2018 Facebook reorganization and, 194 as “warranty canary,” 103, 134, 145 Standard Oil, Facebook’s parallel with, 230 Steyer, Jim, 89, 91, 232, 261, 275–276 Stop the Hate for Profit, 275 “Stop the Steal” groups, 288, 292 Stretch, Colin Cambridge Analytica and, 150 Russian disinformation and, 97, 100, 107, 119–120, 125, 135, 144–145, 146, 147 Students Against Facebook News Feed, 34, 35 Sullivan, Joe, 103–104 Summers, Lawrence, 39-42, 47 Swisher, Kara, 29–30, 43, 203–208 Systrom, Kevin, 194, 228–229 Talking Back to Facebook (Steyer), 89, 91 TechCrunch, 64, 65 TechCrunch Disrupt conference, 88, 174 Thiel, Peter Facebook’s board of directors and, 30, 81, 86, 202 Gawker lawsuit and, 202 Zuckerberg and, 25, 29, 31, 206, 244, 256 ThreatConnect, 98 Tiger, Roi, 195 TikTok, 240, 245, 253 Tillery, Kristopher, 20 Time magazine, 127, 177 TPG Capital, 89 Traynham, Robert, 271 Trump, Donald J., 213, 221, 232 Access Hollywood tape and, 100 accusations of voter fraud in 2020 election and, 273–275, 283–285, 290 accused of inciting violence in January 2021 and banned from Facebook, 286–292, 294 anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate speech and, 11–17, 85, 249 comments after George Floyd’s death, 268–273 Facebook and COVID-19 and, 267–268 hackers and 2016 campaign, 105–106, 140 meeting with Facebook executives, 161, 243–247 number of Facebook followers and interactions with, 244, 283 Pelosi and, 234, 235 on Twitter, 232, 244–245, 268–271, 276 Zuckerberg and, 256 Twitter, 15, 37, 63, 75, 98, 231, 240, 253, 287 Cambridge Analytica and, 153 election interference and, 98, 142, 144–145 privacy and, 56, 63–64 Sandberg and, 197–198 Trump and, 232, 244–245, 268–271, 276 Ukraine, Bidens and, 251 United Kingdom, Brexit and, 154 Vaidhyanathan, Siva, 61 Vargas, Jose Antonio, 66 Verge, the, 272 Villarreal, Ryan, 73, 76 Vladeck, David, 199 Vox, 154, 166 Walk Away campaign, 292 Wall Street Journal, 1, 43, 47–48, 88 Walz, Tim, 268 Warner, Mark, 127–128, 132, 246 Warren, Elizabeth, 221, 226, 242, 259, 295 Washington Post, 24, 26–29, 30, 47, 84, 141, 164–165, 234, 236, 272 Wasserman Schultz, Debbie, 100 Waters, Maxine, 256–257 WeChat, 175, 245 Weedon, Jen, 108–109, 129, 147 Weibo, 175 Wexler, Nu, 83 What You Do Is Who You Are (Horowitz), 191–192 WhatsApp, 71–72, 166, 193–194, 221 data security and, 8, 222 Facebook’s acquisition of, 196, 295 Federal Trade Commission and, 68 interoperability of messaging apps and, 227 “pivot to privacy” and, 222–224 Wu and Hemphill’s evaluation of Facebook’s acquisition of, 230–231 Zuckerberg’s broken commitment to founders of, 2, 194, 227–229 Whetstone, Rachel, 204, 206–207 Wicker, Roger, 162 Williams, Maxine, 272–273 Willner, Dave, 92–93 WilmerHale law firm, 160, 197 Winklevoss, Cameron, 21 Winklevoss, Tyler, 21 Wirathu, Ashin, 172 Women@Google, 50 World Anti-Doping Agency, data stolen from, 99 Wu, Tim, 229–232, 261 Xi Jingping, 176 Yahoo, 8, 26–27 global expansion and, 42, 175 Goldberg and, 43–44 offer to buyout Facebook declined by Zuckerman, 30–32, 44 Stamos and, 101–103 Yang, Jerry, 42 Zients, Jeff, 297 Zuboff, Shoshana, 3, 61 Zucked (McNamee), 232 Zuckerberg, Ethan, 163 Zuckerberg, Mark Beacon feature and, 57–63 Black Lives Matter memo and, 71–73 Cambridge Analytica and, 16, 153, 154–156, 160, 204 coding at Phillips Exeter, 19–20 “company over country” and, 124 cyber security and, 97–98 decline of Yahoo’s buyout offer, 30–32, 44 earnings call in 2021 and, 298–299 election of 2016, 113–116 election security and, 210 employees’ internal conversations and, 70 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and, 295–296 free speech issues and, 74–75, 252–261, 263, 269, 281 goals of global expansion and end of economic inequality, 173–177 Goldberg’s death and, 79 hate speech and disinformation issues, 11, 193, 204–208, 275–277 hearing regarding Libra and, 256–257 Kaplan and Kavanaugh hearings and, 201–202 Kaplan’s organization of dinners with politicians, 243–247 manipulated video of Pelosi and, 236–240 meets Sandberg, 4 News Feed and apology for, 32–36 Nuñez’s reporting and, 79 personal privacy and image guarded by, 4, 65–66 personality of, 29–30, 45–46, 48–49 philanthropy of, 174, 262 “pivot to privacy” and reactions to, 222–227, 235 plans for Facebook’s future, 299–300 portrayed in attorneys general complaint, 2 public opinion and, 257–258 reaction to Hughes’ New York Times op-ed, 219–222 reaction to Stamos’ 2015 report on data security, 7, 8–10 reorganization of Facebook in 2018 and, 193–194 responsible growth and, 86 reversing of promises made when acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp, 2, 194, 227–229 Russian disinformation investigation and, 117, 118–119, 120, 121, 126, 134, 136–137, 139, 142, 147, 196, 204 Sandberg’s hiring and, 43–47 testimony before Congress, 150–151, 153, 160–167, 210 Trump banned by, 290–292, 294 “wartime” leadership philosophy and, 189–193, 207 working relationship with Sandberg, 54–57, 86–87, 190, 260–261 yearly goals of, 261–263 About the Authors Sheera Frenkel covers cybersecurity from San Francisco for the New York Times.

The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family
by Jesselyn Cook
Published 22 Jul 2024

The videos also raised new suspicions surrounding issues that Alice was already familiar with, including spyware surveilling private citizens and the monopolistic corporate power of Monsanto, a genetically modified crops producer. Although certain points gave Alice pause—such as when Ossebaard emphasized that the French phrase “J’aime les enfants” (I love children) was similar to the name of James Alefantis, who owned the pizzeria at the center of the “Pizzagate” child-trafficking rumors—many of the bombshells were as staggering to her as those unburnt trees. The deeper into the series she got, the more outrageous the claims became, but they were stacking in her mind like building blocks: If this one crazy thing was true, couldn’t this other, slightly crazier thing also be true?

…

PART II CONSPIRACY CRUTCH 7 HOOKED —Emily— GreatAwakening.win was the bleakest place on the internet Adam had ever visited. To open the Far Right message board was to enter a dystopian alternate reality in which risible nonsense was met with a chorus of cultish credulity. In threads filed beneath a banner displaying a large “Q” in dark-blue storm clouds, Pizzagate was a national tragedy, Princess Diana was still alive, and Wayfair, the online furniture retailer, was selling storage cabinets with missing children locked inside. Spending just an hour skimming the latest content from the site’s tens of thousands of users was enough to make even the most logically inclined question their sanity—not for the absurdity of the conspiracy theories themselves, but for the near-unanimous conviction with which they were embraced.

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media
by Tarleton Gillespie
Published 25 Jun 2018

utm_term=.e85377696beb; Angie Drobnic Holan, “2016 Lie of the Year: Fake News,” Politifact, December 13, 2016, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/dec/13/2016-lie-year-fake-news/. For a survey of the fake news phenomenon, see also Jack, “Lexicon of Lies.” 38Associated Press, “‘Pizzagate’ Shooting Suspect: ‘The Intel on This Wasn’t 100 Percent,’” December 8, 2016, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/pizzagate-shooting-suspect-edgar-maddison-welch-intel-wasnt-100-percent/. 39Kaveh Waddell, “Facebook and Google Won’t Let Fake News Sites Use Their Ad Networks,” Atlantic, November 15, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/facebook-and-google-wont-let-fake-news-sites-use-their-ads-platforms/507737/. 40This has expanded: for example, Google started letting users flag when their “snippets” when they’re incorrect.

The Fiume Crisis
by Dominique Kirchner Reill
Published 1 Dec 2020

Scott, John Tehranian, and Jeremy Mathias, “The Production of ­Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent ­Family Surname,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 1 (2002): 4–44. 78. For a fascinating handbook explaining how the Italian Fascist name-­change laws w ­ ere enacted, see Aldo Pizzagalli, Per l’italianità dei cognomi: Nella Provincia di Trieste (Trieste: Libreria Treves-­Zanichelli, 1929). 79. Consiglio nazionale italiano, Name-­change law, March 27, 1919, cass. 41, prot. 2140, AFV. 80. Giovanni Marussich, Name-­change application, January 22, 1919, cass. 30, prot. 1182, AFV. 81.

…

Francesco Ursić, Name-­change application, February 4, 1920, cass. 38, prot. 519, AFV. Thanks to Ivan Jeličić for pointing out the funny grammatical ­mistake. “Da Fiume” or “Di Fiume” would be the grammatically correct versions to indicate “from Fiume.” 87. Ettore Lust, Name-­change application, May 17, 1920, 541 Općina Rijeka 1918–1945, Opći spisi L19 / 19, HR-­DARI. 88. Pizzagalli, Per l’italianità dei cognomi. 89. All of ­these cases are in the April 1919 name-­change files held at 1919, 541 Općina Rijeka 1918–1945, Opći spisi L19 / 19, HR-­DARI. 90. Consiglio nazionale italiano, Directive that only Italian language materials to be used by state offices, July 9, 1919, cass. 33, prot. 4387, AFV.

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
by Paul Krugman
Published 28 Jan 2020

So major affairs of state are being decided not by the national interest, nor even by the interests of major groups within the nation, but by the financial interests and/or ego of the man in the White House. Is America amazing, or what? 17 On the Media BEYOND FAKE NEWS AFTER THE 2016 ELECTION, AS PEOPLE ASKED HOW SUCH A THING COULD happen, there was a lot of talk about the role of “fake news”—conspiracy theories and false claims spreading through social media. For example, Pizzagate—the claim, based on nothing, that high-ranking Democratic officials were connected with a child sex ring involving a Washington pizzeria—spread widely over the Internet, leading among other things to death threats to restaurant owners. Such false claims have overwhelmingly favored Donald Trump.

…

L., 147 mercantilism, 250 Merkel, Angela, 98 microeconomics, 407, 408 middle class: cutting benefits for, 30, 196, 309 and financial managers, 92–94 and income distribution, 266, 273 and income mobility, 277, 278 raising taxes on, 199 Mildenberger, Matto, 305, 306 Minskyism, 409 Mississippi, income inequality in, 291–92 Mnuchin, Steven, 322 moderation, instability of, 407–10 financial instability, 409–10 intellectual instability, 407–8 political instability, 408–9 Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), 125, 152, 154, 203 monetarism, 133, 409 monetary economics, 176 monetary policy, 128–29, 140, 143, 144, 153 money: conventional (currency), 412–14 cryptocurrency, 411–14 dollar cash holdings, 413 dollar notes, 413–14 fiat currencies, 414 speculative, 413 as store of value, 112 “Money and Morals” (Krugman), 260, 285–87 money managers, 92–94 money supply, central banks’ control of, 110, 112, 124, 133 “Monopolistic Competition and Optimum Product Diversity” (Dixit and Stiglitz), 396–98 monopoly power, 228, 236 monopsony power, 316–17 Moore, John, 147 Moore, Michael, 44, 45 Moore, Roy, 309 Moretti, Enrico, The New Geography of Jobs, 292 mortgage rates, 87 mortgages, subprime, 90–91, 136 “Most Important Thing, The” (Krugman), 327–28 motives, talk about, 8 Moulton, Seth, 76 movement conservatism, 297–98, 302–4, 307 definition of, 302 keeping zombie ideas alive via, 8 and Republican Party, 297, 299–301, 302, 368 and Tea Party, 303 white resentment as basis of, 343 “Movement Conservativism” (Krugman), 297–98 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 5 Mueller, Robert, 307 Mueller investigation, 360 Mulford, David, 405 Mulligan, Casey, 144 Mulvaney, Mick, 207, 225 Murdoch, Rupert, 297, 375 Murphy, Kevin, 279 Murray, Charles, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, 285–86 Mussolini, Benito, 346 “Myths of Austerity” (Krugman), 158, 160–62, 165 NAFTA, 372 NAIRU (non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment), 114 NASA, 163 National Association of Realtors, 84 National Climate Assessment, 332, 336 National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, 198–200 nationalism, 343 National Older Women’s League, 198 National Review, The, 301 national security: and elections, 306 and tariffs, 251, 253, 255 NATO, 244 neoclassical economics, 132, 133, 139–40, 147 neoliberal ideology, 315 Netherlands, economy of, 184 New Deal, 107, 293, 308 New Geography of Jobs, The (Moretti), 292 New Hampshire, economic freedom in, 317, 317 New Jersey, health care in, 76, 78 New Keynesian views, 129, 139–40, 143, 145, 147 New York: health care in, 74, 318 infant mortality in, 317, 317 Medicaid expanded in, 318 New York Times, The, 348, 349 Nicaragua, and Iran-Contra, 300 Nimbyism, 291 Nixon administration, and media, 300 Nordhaus, William, 396 Norman, Victor, 398 “normative” economics, 1 Northam, Ralph, 308, 309 North Carolina: health care in, 77 Republican Party in, 359 Norway, economy of, 323 Obama, Barack: conservatives vs., 150, 208, 302, 320, 362 on health care, 53–55, 66, 339, 361 and international trade, 252 and taxes, 216, 219, 229 Obama administration: on debt and unemployment, 208 “hijacked” commission of, 198–200 and revenue growth, 225 stimulus plan of, 104, 107–8, 113–14, 115–17, 118–20, 131, 193, 206, 362 Obamacare, see Affordable Care Act O’Brien, Michael, 126 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria (AOC), 234, 236, 237, 320–21 Occupy Wall Street, 285 O’Connor, Reed, 367, 369 oil shocks, 126 Oklahoma, tax cuts in, 293 Okun’s Law, 113 oligarchy, 283, 349, 350 Olson, Mancur, The Logic of Collective Action, 354–55 Operation Coffee Cup (1961), 322 optimum currency areas, 177 Palin, Sarah, 54 Panama Papers, 349 Pangloss, Doctor (fict.), 135, 140 “paperclip maximizers,” 357 “Paranoid Style in American Politics, The” (Hofstadter), 346 parasites, 354–57 Paulson, Henry, 91 PBS Newshour, 169–71 Pelosi, Nancy: achievements of, 361–63 and Affordable Care Act, 35–36, 55, 361, 367 and financial reform, 362 as House Speaker, 76, 344, 362, 363 on “monstrous endgame,” 367, 369 on Social Security, 15, 35, 306, 361 and stimulus plan, 362 and trade agreement, 372 on the wall as “manhood thing,” 370 Pence, Mike, 73 pensions: defined benefit, 14 defined contribution, 14–15 401(k)-type plans, 31–32 private, decline of, 31–32 Perlstein, Rick, 302, 354, 355 Perot, H. Ross, 245 personal savings rate, 88 Peterson, Pete, 193 Piketty, Thomas, 219 Capital in the 21st Century, 238 Pimco bond fund, 83, 89 Pizzagate, 375 Poland: Law and Justice Party in, 358 threats to democracy in, 188, 189, 344, 346, 358, 359, 360 white nationalism in, 346 polarization, 5–9, 291, 297–98, 356 policy discussion, absence of, 13 political action, 355–56 political realism, 251–52 politicization: pressures from the right, 3–4 and racism, 4–5, 226, 301, 307, 308–10, 360 roots of, 2–5 PolitiFact, 386 Ponzi scheme, 92–93 population, aging of, 16 population density, 87 population growth, 225, 271, 272 “populism,” use of term, 351–53 Portugal, economy of, 178 “positive” economics, 1 post-truth politics, 61 poverty: and cuts in benefits, 30 of elderly, 23–24 and health care, 47, 66 precious metals, 411 Prescott, Edward, 139 productivity, 283 and income distribution, 268–69, 272, 273 slowdown in, 267, 289 and technology, 289 and wages, 289 professional conservative economists, 149 profit, appearance of, 92–93 progressive expenditure, categories of, 210–11 propagandists, 149 protectionism, 353 prudence, downside of, 104, 106, 107–8, 117 “public good,” use of term, 354–55 public goods, 30 public health, 355 public works, spending on, 116, 133, 143, 205–6, 206 punditry: author’s rules for, 5–9 honesty about dishonesty, 7–8 staying with easy stuff, 6 talking about motives, 8–9 writing in English, 6–7 Putin, Vladimir, 371 racism: and hate-mongering, 54 interracial marriages, 215 and politicization, 4–5, 226, 301, 307, 308–10, 360 Rajan, Raghuram, 136 Rampell, Catherine, 5 Rand, Ayn, Atlas Shrugged, 219 rationality: assumption of, 134, 138, 139, 144–45, 148 investor irrationality, 135 limitations of, 131, 132 Rawls, John, 3 Reagan, Ronald: and economic growth, 262, 275–76 and health care, 45, 53, 322 as icon of conservative purity, 300, 302 and supply-side economics, 271 and taxes, 7, 19, 215, 299 and Voting Rights Act, 300 Reagan administration: and income inequality, 271 and Iran-Contra, 300 and private contractors, 300 “real business cycle” theory, 139 real estate: housing bubble, 82, 83–85, 86–88 land-use restrictions, 87 recessions: causes of, 138–39, 185 central banks’ roles in, 103–4, 124, 133 demand-side view of, 139 desirability of, 144, 147 “double-dip” (1979–1982), 215 effects of, 126–27 fears of, 81–82 and fiscal policy, 140, 141, 215, 275 and government debt, 124, 142 and printing money, 4, 104, 105 and unemployment insurance claims, 106 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (1934), 250, 252, 254–55 “Red-Baiting in the 21st Century” (Krugman), 313–14 red ink, fear of, 107, 116 Regan, Trish, 319, 320 regulation, minimal, 315 Reid, Harry, 28, 29 Reinhardt, Uwe, 35 Reinhart, Carmen, 158, 163 Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act (2011), 59 Republican Party: campaign (2020), 313 center-right delusion of, 305–7 climate denial of, 337, 365 conspiracy theorizing by, 345–46, 365 corruption in, 335–37, 343, 358, 368 dark side of, 334, 336, 368 democracy undermined by, 367–69 double standards of, 208, 209 double talk of, 225–26 economic doctrine of, 229 facts or logic ignored by, 28, 237, 366 “Flimflam Man” of, 194, 195–97, 362 frauds promoted by, 74–75, 224–26 and health care, 65–66, 69, 70, 71–72, 73–75, 76–77, 309, 338 hostility to science, 335, 337 and immigration, 303 IRS defunded by, 350 lying by, 225–26 and movement conservatism, 8, 297–98, 299–301, 302–4, 307, 343, 368 one-party rule sought by, 358–60 paranoid style in, 345–47 and party loyalty, 67, 150–51, 226, 368 policy analysis shunned by, 73–74, 77 power plays by, 359–60, 369 privatization of public assets as goal of, 338 racism of, 226 radicalization of, 189, 298, 309 realities of, 197 state governments controlled by, 65–66, 68, 77 and Supreme Court, 345, 346, 352 tax plans of, 222, 224–26, 236, 309 Trumpism of, 335–37, 343, 345–46, 359–60, 370–72 voter preferences vs., 309 workable ideas lacking in, 69, 74 retirement, economics of, 15, 22, 23–24, 31–32, 362 retirement accounts: private, 17, 19, 22–24 real rate of return on, 23 Return of Depression Economics, The (Krugman), 82 Reynolds, Alan, 273, 274 Ricardo, David, 289 risk: elimination of, 81 in financial innovation, 90–91 reward vs., 135 Rivlin, Alice, 263 Roach, Stephen, 83, 85 Roberts, David, 307 Roberts, Paul Craig, 273, 274, 279 Robin, Corey, 315–16 robot, defined, 288 Rodgers, Cathy McMorris, 60 Rogers, Will, 297 Rogoff, Ken, 158, 163 Romer, Christina, 234, 236 Romer, David, 139 Romney, Mitt, 51–52, 54, 219, 320 Roosevelt, Franklin D.: and balanced budget, 107 on health care, 46 and reciprocal trade act, 247, 250, 252, 254 and Social Security, 25, 26 Roosevelt, Theodore, 239 Roosevelt (FDR) administration, and international trade, 244 rule of law: disdain of, 252, 256, 301, 347 interpretation and enforcement of, 367–68 rules for research, 399–404 dare to be silly, 401–2, 404 listen to the gentiles, 399–400, 404 question the question, 400–401, 404 simplify, simplify, 402–4 Russia, and trade, 256 Ryan, Jack, 381 Ryan, Paul, 28, 203, 219, 363 as flim-flam man, 194, 195–97, 362 and Medicare, 225 and Ryan plan, 193–94, 195–97, 201–2 super PAC of, 225 Saez, Emmanuel, 219, 234–35, 236, 238–39 safety-net programs, 4, 224, 313, 317, 320, 321, 323, 370 Samuelson, Paul, 124, 403, 407, 408, 410 San Diego, housing in, 87 “sand states,” unemployment in, 170 Santorum, Rick, 303 Sawhill, Isabel, 280 Scaife, Richard Mellon, 380 Schultz, Howard, 212, 308, 310 Schumer, Chuck, 93 Schumpeter, Joseph A., 132, 134, 395 Schwartz, Anna, 133 SeaWorld, 352 secular stagnation, 206 Securities and Exchange Commission, 93 segregationists, 346 Seltzer, Marlene, 166 Senate, role of, 368 September 11, 2001, attacks, aftermath of, 13 Sessions, Pete, 59 Shapiro, Ben, 354, 355, 356, 357 Shiller, Robert, 84, 136, 141, 146 Shleifer, Andrei, 146 Sicko (movie), 44–45 silver and gold coins, 411, 412 “silver-loading,” 71 Simple Art of Murder, The (Chandler), 327 Simpson, Alan, 198, 199, 203, 218 Sinema, Kyrsten, 365 “Skewing of America, The” (Krugman), 259–60 “skills gap,” 159, 166–68, 290 Slemrod, Joel, 277 Smith, Adam, 132, 138, 411 Smith, Noah, 95 smoking, dangers of, 333, 334 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (1930), 247 snake oil, peddling, 357 Snow, John, 81 social democracy, 313–14, 317, 320–21, 323 social dysfunction, indicators of, 286 socialism, 219, 313–14, 316, 319–21, 322–24 social justice, 3 social media, see media Social Security: cuts in benefits, 17, 32 expansion of, 30, 32, 212, 240 financial condition of, 16–17, 20, 28–29 guaranteed benefits of, 24 historic success of, 21, 22, 24, 31–32 importance to voters, 14, 26, 31, 306 as independent entity, 20 “Life Expectancy for Social Security” (Web site), 26 percentage of revenues going to benefits, 22 politicization of, 25–27 privatization of, 14–15, 19–21, 22–24, 25–27, 28–29, 32, 35, 302, 306, 361, 377, 378 retirement age for, 199 supported by dedicated tax on payroll earnings, 19 threats to, 16–18, 198, 199, 200, 223, 224 Trump administration’s lies about, 225 trust fund of, 20 Social Security Act (1934), 26 Solow, Bob, 396, 405 Soros, George, 345, 346, 365 Soviet Union: central planning by, 323 economy of, 324 fall of, 177 Spain: anti-establishment forces in, 99 economy of, 178–80, 184 and euro, 177, 178–79, 181, 187, 188 housing bubble in, 181 internal devaluation in, 179 loans to, 182 public debt of, 179 unemployment in, 182, 184 speculation: destructive, 135 short-term, 133 stagflation (1970s), 124, 133 Stalin, Joseph, 239, 324 “State of Macro, The” (Blanchard), 130 statistics, uses and abuses of, 262 Stein, Herbert, 271 Stiglitz, Joseph E., 5, 396–98, 403 “Stimulus Arithmetic” (Krugman), 104, 113–14 stock market bubble, 83, 84, 86 Stokes, Leah, 305, 306 Stone Center for the Study of Socioeconomic Inequality (CUNY), 259 Stross, Charlie, 357 sugar, import quotas on, 250 Summers, Larry, 136, 145–46 “Sum of All Fears, The” (Krugman), 81 supply-side economics, 128, 275–76, 299 Supreme Court, U.S.: on Affordable Care Act, 65, 68, 77 Kavanaugh appointment to, 345, 346, 352 moral authority destroyed, 345, 360 partisanship in, 346 sustainable growth rate, 153–54, 204 Sweden, economy of, 239, 323 Switzerland, health care in, 37 system overhaul, 210, 212 tanning parlors, tax on, 211 tariffs, 244, 246–48, 251, 252–53, 254–56 taxes: carbon tax, 339 corporate, see corporate taxes cutting, 8, 16–17, 19, 20, 116–17, 199, 201, 215–17, 218–20, 224–26, 227–29, 230–33, 231–33, 232, 236–37, 306–7, 351, 361, 370, 371 and debt, 154, 222–23, 224–26 economic effects of, 7, 222–23, 224–26, 233, 236–37 incentive effects of, 154 and income inequality, 238–39 low, 315 on middle class, 221–23 and monopoly power, 236 narrow-gauge, 211 optimal top rates of, 234–35 on payroll, 212 political trade-offs in, 153 on pollution, 339 progressive taxation, 238–40, 323 raising, 185, 196, 199, 219, 229, 380 tariffs, 244, 246–48, 251, 252–53, 254–56 temporary breaks, 222 top marginal income tax rates, 236–37, 236 Trump’s frauds, 348–50 value-added, 154, 212 on the wealthy, see wealthy on working class, 20, 221–23 tax evasion, 349–50, 413, 414 tax liabilities, 414 tax loopholes, 93, 349 Tax Policy Center, 196, 202, 283 tax reform, 26, 198–99 Tea Party, 53–54, 303 technology, and income inequality, 260, 288–90 Tennessee, health care in, 68 tethering, 413–14 Thatcher, Margaret, 22, 23, 128 “That Eighties Show” (Klugman), 124 “Theoretical Framework for Monetary Analysis, A” (Friedman), 144 Thompson, Fred, 47, 52 tobacco companies, 333, 334 Toles, Tom, 333 torture, 300 totalitarianism, 324 trade theory, 399–400, 401, 403 trade war, 353, 361, 371–72 see also international trade transcription costs, 411–14 transportation, greenhouse gases from, 339–40 Treasury, U.S.: on income gains, 279–81 Office of Tax Analysis, 278 partisan functions of, 26 and Social Security, 16 Trichet, Jean-Claude, 161 “Triumph of Macroeconomics, The” (Krugman), 103–5 Trotsky, Leon, 324 trucking industry, 290 Trump, Donald: attacks on media by, 347 attitude toward truth, 364–66 belligerent ignorance of, 246, 307, 337, 345, 346–47, 352 campaigning, 309, 370 contempt for rule of law, 252, 256, 347 corruption of, 335–37, 338, 343, 349, 350, 368, 389 and cronyism, 256, 343 as deal-maker, 348–50 election of (2016), 13, 343, 372, 375, 387–89 family history of, 348–49 foreign dictators admired by, 346–47, 365, 371 humiliating others, 352–53 and inequality, 260, 291 and international trade, 245, 246, 247–48, 249, 252–53, 254–56, 353, 361 laziness of, 352 as liar, 348, 353, 364, 365 on manhood, 370, 371, 372 on neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” 365 and populism, 351–53 and racism, 246, 310, 360 and Republican Party, 335–37, 359, 372 scandals about, 388–89 and socialism, 322–23 State of the Union address (2019), 207–9, 322 supporters scammed by, 353, 372, 389 and taxes, 216, 221–23, 224–26, 227–29, 230–33, 306–7, 308, 350, 361, 371 tax returns of, 359 tough-guy posturing by, 334, 346–47, 370–72 and 2020 election, 227, 347, 361 and the wall, 370, 371 Trump, Fred (father), 348 Trump administration: anti-science views of, 332 as anti-worker, 351–53 appointments to, 352 bad faith of, 151, 332, 365 charlatans and cranks in, 149, 151, 329, 331, 333 climate change deniers in, 329–31, 332–34, 335–37 and collapse of freedom, 187 compared to that of G.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by Jaron Lanier
Published 28 May 2018

Tweaking to optimize your design within a system that isn’t based on the unbounded nature of nature, but is instead based on a bounded, abstract, human construction, will inevitably kill creativity and progress by rutting you in a petty valley in the energy landscape. ARGUMENT SIX: SOCIAL MEDIA IS DESTROYING YOUR CAPACITY FOR EMPATHY 1.   https://www.snopes.com/pizzagate-conspiracy/ 2.   Here I am using the term “empathy” to mean an ability to understand what other people are experiencing and why; to imagine one being in another’s place. The term can mean different things at different times. When it entered the English language about a century ago, it was originally meant to convey the way a person might imagine it would feel to be any other part of the universe, like a mountain or a grape, which were two examples from the earliest thought experiments; it was a term of art for the aesthetic and psychological premonitions of virtual reality.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

Raskin opened a copy of the prior day’s Washington Post and read, “YouTube recently suggested videos that politicians, celebrities and other elite figures were sexually abusing or consuming the remains of children, often in Satanic rituals.” He looked up. Certain videos claimed that Hillary Clinton and her top aide assaulted a young girl and drank her blood. This was Frazzledrip, a bizarre cousin of Pizzagate, a theory that had, by then, morphed into QAnon, the cultlike conspiracy theory and movement. “What is your company policy on that?” Raskin asked. At that time YouTube was working on a major overhaul of its recommendation engine to bury conspiracy clips and other footage deemed “harmful” in its penalty box.

…

See: “Family Violence and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Victim-Survivors,” https://www.vic.gov.au/victorian-family-violence-research-agenda-2021-2024. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT prior day’s Washington Post: Craig Timberg, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Tony Romm, and Andrew Ba Tran, “Two Years After #Pizzagate Showed the Dangers of Hateful Conspiracies, They’re Still Rampant on YouTube,” The Washington Post, December 10, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/hateful-conspiracies-thrive-on-youtube-despite-pledge-to-clean-up-problematic-videos/2018/12/10/625730a8-f3f8-11e8-9240-e8028a62c722_story.html.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

In the last US federal election, far-right forces—including the Russian government, via troll farms intent on sowing division in the US and supporting Donald Trump—found algorithmically sorted, highly emotional social media an enormously useful lever. Everywhere from Facebook to YouTube to Reddit and Twitter, hoaxes and conspiracies thrived. There was the infamous “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton ran a child-sex ring out of a Washington restaurant; there were memes claiming Clinton had a Democratic staffer murdered. Meanwhile, white-nationalist memes, crafted on relatively lesser-known right-wing sites, used Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks to make the jump into the mainstream.

…

See efficiency Organization Man, The (Whyte), ref1 OR gate, ref1 O theory, ref1 Pac-man (game), ref1 Page, Larry, ref1, ref2 Pao, Ellen, ref1 Papert, Seymour, ref1, ref2, ref3 Parr, Ben, ref1 Parrish, Lynn, ref1, ref2 Parsons, Richard, ref1 Pascal, Blaise, ref1 Passionate Programmer, The (Fowler), ref1 Patapati, Sowmya, ref1 pattern matching bias, ref1 Patterson, Meredith L., ref1 Payne, Alex, ref1, ref2 PayPal, ref1, ref2, ref3 PDP-1, ref1 Pearlman, Leah, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 penetration testers (pentesters), ref1 Penny, Laurie, ref1 People.ai, ref1 Perl computer language, ref1 Perry, Dallis, ref1 personalities of coders. See INTJ personalities persuasive computing, ref1 phatic communications, ref1 Phiber Optik (Mark Abene), ref1 Philippines, ref1 Phillips, Steve, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 phishing kits, ref1 Photoshop, ref1 Pichai, Sundar, ref1, ref2 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, ref1 Podesta, John, ref1 politics, of coders, ref1, ref2 blend of Democratic and Republican views, ref1 communitarian spirit in, ref1 government regulation of tech companies, opposition to, ref1 left-leaning thinking of, ref1 libertarianism, ref1, ref2, ref3 robber baron worldview of tech elite, ref1 study on, ref1 Posner, Miriam, ref1 Pound, Ezra, ref1 presidential election, 2016, ref2, ref3, ref4 Pretty Good Privacy, ref1 privacy, ref1 crypto wars, ref1 cypherpunks (See cypherpunks) entertainment and copyright law and, ref1 FBI arrests of hackers for breaking into systems, ref1 infosec workers, ref1 LeapChat.org and, ref1 malware attacks and, ref1 MIT-hacker clashes over, in 1960s and 1970s, ref1 munitions law, ref1, ref2 Stallman invents General Public License, ref1 Zimmermann’s creation of Pretty Good Privacy, ref1 programmers.

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence
by Amy B. Zegart
Published 6 Nov 2021

“Economist/YouGov Poll,” December 17–20, 2016, https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/ljv2ohxmzj/econTabReport.pdf (accessed July 26, 2017). 130. In 2016, one popular conspiracy theory claimed that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile ring from the basement of a Washington pizzeria. “Pizzagate: From Rumor, to Hashtag, to Gunfire in D.C.,” Washington Post, December 6, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pizzagate-from-rumor-to-hashtag-to-gunfire-in-dc/2016/12/06/4c7def50-bbd4-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html (accessed June 16, 2020). As the COVID-19 virus spread from Wuhan, China, across the globe, Chinese officials began pushing anti-American conspiracy theories on Twitter and YouTube that the U.S.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs
by Kerry Howley
Published 21 Mar 2023

He published the emails from Hillary’s campaign not as a dump but as a monthslong tease, a devastating series of emails from the embassy in which he had promised not to interfere in world affairs. “You need both a public and a private position,” Clinton had told some lobbyists, which is precisely what Assange maintained about feminism. It was a “close reading” of these emails, a creative take on their “hidden messages,” that led to Pizzagate, the conspiracy Joe Biggs is best known for promoting. In the summer, just before the Democratic convention, WikiLeaks published 20,000 emails about Clinton, some of which showed the DNC pushing for Hillary over Bernie. There was for instance an email suggesting the DNC go hard against Bernie Sanders’s faith.

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy
by Talia Lavin
Published 14 Jul 2020

I also encountered a channel run by Paul Nehlen, once a congressional primary challenger to Paul Ryan endorsed by Donald Trump, whose virulent anti-Semitism saw him banned from Twitter and the Wisconsin Republican Party. I joined Gen Z Y K L O N; K i K e S C e N T R a L; Jewish Ritual Murder Abortion Satanism Pizzagate; Judenpresse Monitor/Archive; Holohoax Memes & Info; Jews Own USA (Wars Media Banks). A chat called “MakeAmerica110” was named after a frequently floated white-supremacist statistic—that Jews had been expelled from 109 countries. They wanted to make America the next. The chats varied in membership, with some as small as twenty-two members and others as large as five thousand members.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

The guy who shows up at the Comet pizza parlor in Northwest DC with a gun because he thinks that prominent liberals are running a pedophile dungeon downstairs, or the guy who parks his truck on the Hoover Dam and demands that certain imaginary indictments be unsealed isn’t just a little bolder and action oriented than the typical “Pizzagate” or “QAnon” conspiracy theorists; he fundamentally misunderstands the meaning and purpose of those labyrinthine theories, taking them as literal claims about the world rather than as what they are for their creators (a sport, a grift, a hobby) and for most of their participants (political entertainment and an odd form of virtual community).

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

More people edit the page for Justin Bieber than the page for Pascoag, Rhode Island, and Bieber’s page has more visitors, but that does not correspond with more revenue. Both pages meet Wikipedia’s notability guideline, which does not reflect where the internet traffic is raining down at any given moment. This also explains why Wikipedia wasn’t a vector for QAnon or Pizzagate conspiracies. Its standards for notability and reliable sources help prevent the spread of conspiracies and hoaxes—unreliable information is deleted. There is only one Wikipedia page for each subject. There’s no redundancy. The single page might seem simple and obvious (it is an encyclopedia, after all), but in today’s media environment, this constraint means attention is siphoned to a page that can be maintained and guarded.

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back
by Jacob Ward
Published 25 Jan 2022

At one time, this sort of unconscious decision-making and group formation, and the way that technology companies catered to it, was mostly considered a social aberration, an innocent addiction, a time waster. Our video games, chat rooms, and niche pornography were just the profitable eccentricities of a newly connected era. But now it’s clear that what Artis is measuring in conflict zones is taking form here in the United States as we form online groups committed to conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon. Sacred values and group identity cause us to abandon our critical faculties. In Hamid’s experiments, MRI scans of people angry about a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad or about the occupation of Palestine showed that their cost-benefit centers weren’t lighting up. That would clearly have been true of anyone inside the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World
by Jevin D. West and Carl T. Bergstrom
Published 3 Aug 2020

A few years before Brandolini formulated his principle, Italian blogger Uriel Fanelli had already noted that, loosely translated, “an idiot can create more bullshit than you could ever hope to refute.” Conspiracy theorist and radio personality Alex Jones need not be an evil genius to spread venomous nonsense such as his Sandy Hook denialism and Pizzagate stories; he could be an evil idiot—or even a misguided one. Within the field of medicine, Brandolini’s principle is exemplified by the pernicious falsehood that vaccines cause autism. After more than twenty years of research, there is no evidence that vaccines cause autism; indeed there is overwhelming evidence that they do not.

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War
by Jeff Sharlet
Published 21 Mar 2023

“I called them up.” He was not just a believer in the Trumpocene’s conspiracy theories, he was a soldier on their behalf, convicted in a deep-state court of law. On December 4, 2016, a man traveled from North Carolina to a Washington, DC, pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong, the basement of which, according to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, was the heart of a Democratic child-sex-trafficking ring. The man was there to save the children, which he attempted to do by opening fire with an AR-15. Inspired, Jones decided to do his part. Three days after the assault, according to testimony he later gave, Jones called another pizzeria down the street.

Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy
by Jennifer Carlson
Published 2 May 2023

To wit, a rioter, facing federal charges in the aftermath of January 6th, tearfully explained his decision to come to Washington, DC: “He [Trump] was the commander-in-chief and the leader of our country … And he was calling for help! I thought he was calling for help! … I thought I was doing the right thing.”5 They were die-hard Trump supporters; many were taken in by QAnon, Pizzagate, and other loosely coherent “big tent conspiracy” theories that encouraged skepticism at all costs. Others were confederate flag-carrying white supremacists who saw in Trump an ally who was in the top office of American political power, and they were committed by any means necessary to keep him there.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

Global Anti-Scam’s website said that it was a nonprofit run by victims of pig butchering who volunteered to help others. But its generic name and clip-art-filled website made me suspect it was itself a scam. Another detail I read on its site raised my eyebrows even higher: The group claimed to fight “human trafficking,” a seemingly unconnected phenomenon—and a buzz phrase among Pizzagate-style conspiracy theorists. “All over the world, thousands of men and women in the prime of their lives are victimized, impoverished, and devastated by online scams,” the group wrote. “Help us to end this global crisis by lifting up victims, raising cybercrime awareness, and fighting human trafficking.”

Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War
by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff
Published 8 Jul 2024

A Star Wars fan, Raj liked to think of DIUx as part of the Rebel Alliance. When we delivered the tanker app, we felt like Luke Skywalker dropping a proton torpedo into an exhaust port of the Death Star. But the exhilaration was short-lived, and we now found ourselves at the remote edge of the galaxy on a planet covered in ice and snow. PIZZAGATE It didn’t help that at this very moment Chris was quoted in the press calling the sitting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “weak on strategic thinking.” The AP news story broke on a Sunday evening, the latest from a trove of hacked emails from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News
by Eric Berkowitz
Published 3 May 2021

Now, “censorship works by drowning us in too much undifferentiated information, crippling our ability to focus.”101 A large part of the deluge of falsehoods about the coronavirus pandemic—much of it also spreading pro-Trump conspiracy theories and calling for an early end to quarantines—was driven by online trolls and bots.102 As in China and Turkey, the relentless conspiracies and waves of falsehoods that back them (remember “Pizzagate” or “Obamagate,” anyone?) are not intended to be convincing as much as wearying and overwhelming. So long as flooding is pushed by governments that see benefit in the confusion and distrust it produces, and so long as it is profitable to the platforms by increasing engagement, it will be a challenge for people to agree even on which way is up.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

For example, Google search results fed the racism of Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people in a historically black South Carolina church in 2015. Roof said that when he googled “black on white crime,” he found posts from white supremacist organizations alleging a “white genocide” in progress. “I have never been the same since that day,” he said.36 #Pizzagate conspiracy theory spurred at least one gunman to “investigate” baseless allegations of sexual abuse at a Washington pizzeria while toting an AR-15. In the fever swamp of automated search results, support for climate denialists, misogynists, ethno-nationalists, and terrorists easily grows and spreads.37 Google’s autocompletes—its automatic effort to anticipate the rest of a search query from its first word or two—have also sparked controversy.38 They often repeat and reinforce racist and sexist stereotypes.39 Google image search absurdly and insultingly tagged some photos of black people as gorillas.

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All
by Laura Bates
Published 2 Sep 2020

Harassment, the data shows’, Newsweek, 25 October 2014 5 ‘Milo Yiannopoulos’s Twitter ban, explained’, Vox, 201 July 2016 6 ‘Man who harassed MP Luciana Berger online is jailed for two years’, The Guardian, 8 December 2016 7 ‘I will not be silenced: Australian Muslim fights Twitter “troll army” ’, CNN, 27 February 2015 8 ‘Chat logs show how 4chan users created #GamerGate controversy’, Ars Technica, 10 September 2014 9 ‘Visualizing The Two Sides Of #Gamergate’s Twitter Debate’, Fast Company, 28 October 2014 10 ‘Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart’, Breitbart, 1 September 2014 11 ‘If we took “Gamergate” harassment seriously, “Pizzagate” might never have happened’, Washington Post, 14 December 2016 12 ‘Trolls for Trump’, New Yorker, 31 October 2016 13 ‘When in Doubt, Whip it Out’, Danger & Play, 27 February 2012 14 ‘Macroanonymous Is The New Microfamous’, Fimoculous, 18 February 2009 15 ‘Man admits sending sickening death threats to MP Angela Eagle’, Liverpool Echo, 19 October 2016 16 ‘Britain’s vilest troll: “I’m here to expose hypocrisy” ’, Daily Telegraph, 5 February 2015 17 ‘Britain’s worst troll: We expose dad-of-two youth football coach living double life as UK’s sickest troll – targeting celebs including Katie Price with barrage of vile racist tweets’, The Sun, 21 February 2018 18 ‘Heavily pregnant woman’s bold response to a man who refused to let her sit down on a bus is taking the Internet by storm’, Daily Mail, 10 September 2018 19 ‘Online abuse and harassment’, Ipsos MORI, 20 November 2017 20 ‘Review of the Committee on Standards in Public Life into the Intimidation of Parliamentary Candidates’, National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, 8 September 2017 21 ‘Mistreatment of women MPs revealed’, BBC, 25 January 2017 22 ‘Diane Abbott more abused than any other female MP during election’, The Guardian, 5 September 2017 23 ‘It Started as an Online Gaming Prank.

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend
by Barbara Oakley Phd
Published 20 Oct 2008

John Livesley et al., “Genetic and Environmental Contributions of Dimensions of Personality Disorder,” American Journal of Psychiatry 150, no. 12 (1993): 1826–31. 92. Carl Vogel, “A Field Guide to Narcissism,” Psychology Today, January/February 2006, pp. 68–74. 93. A. Benvenuti et al., “Psychotic Features in Borderline Patients: Is There a Connection to Mood Dysregulation?” Bipolar Disorders 7 (2005): 338–43; D. Pizzagalli et al., “Brain Electric Correlates of Strong Belief in Paranormal Phenomena: Intracerebral EEG Source and Regional Omega Complexity Analyses,” Psychiatry Research 100, no. 3 (2000): 139–54; A. Sbrana et al., “The Psychotic Spectrum: Validity and Reliability of the Structured Clinical Interview for the Psychotic Spectrum,” Schizophrenia Research 75, no. 2 (2005): 375–89. 94.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral
Published 14 Sep 2020

The fake news included memes about Black Lives Matter, the mistreatment of American veterans, the Second Amendment and gun control, the supposed rise of sharia law in the United States, and well-known falsehoods like the accusation that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C. (known as “PizzaGate”). They spread these memes through organic sharing and paid promotion to boost their reach on social media. On Twitter, they established a smaller number of source accounts, which posted fake content, and close to four thousand sharing accounts, which amplified the content through retweets and trending hashtags.

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future
by Jean M. Twenge
Published 25 Apr 2023

Although the protests began as a movement against police brutality, they came to symbolize issues around anti-Black racism more generally. By 2021 and 2022, political candidates were debating whether critical race theory should be taught in schools and whether certain books should be banned. Beginning around 2016, online misinformation spread bizarre conspiracy theories on the far right, like the “Pizzagate” belief that Democrats were running child-trafficking rings out of a pizza joint in Washington, D.C.; a man entered the establishment and fired a gun into a wall and table in the restaurant in December 2016, saying he was trying to help the children. Right-wing groups such as neo-Nazis and the Proud Boys gained more public attention than they had in years, including at the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which some marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us.”

How Emotions Are Made: The New Science of the Mind and Brain
by Lisa Feldman Barrett
Published 6 Mar 2017

Stanford Law Review 64: 851. Kahan, Dan M., and Martha C. Nussbaum. 1996. “Two Conceptions of Emotion in Criminal Law.” Columbia Law Review 96 (2): 269–374. Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Macmillan. Kaiser, Roselinde H., Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna, Tor D. Wager, and Diego A. Pizzagalli. 2015. “Large-Scale Network Dysfunction in Major Depressive Disorder: A Meta-Analysis of Resting-State Functional Connectivity.” JAMA Psychiatry 72 (6): 603–611. Kaminski, Juliane, Juliane Bräuer, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello. 2009. “Domestic Dogs Are Sensitive to a Human’s Perspective.” Behaviour 146 (7): 979–998.

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

The most effective action against fake news was to “downrank” it in the News Feed, so it would take a lot of scrolling to see it. The action Facebook steadfastly refused to take, however, was eliminating such content. By not exercising that nuclear option, Facebook didn’t have to take responsibility for saying—This is false and it’s out! Better to avoid that controversy and make the Pizzagate stories less likely to appear in someone’s News Feed. The internal struggles continued after Anker left and was replaced in 2017 by a former New York Times digital manager named Alex Hardiman. “The question then was whether or not Facebook had the appetite, given the risks, to define and promote quality journalism,” she says.

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism
by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
Published 31 Dec 2018

When populist rhetoric is coupled with authoritarian values, emphasizing the importance of group conformity, security, and loyalty, this combination can generate a combustible mix that challenges the legitimate authority of institutions checking executive power, opening the door for rule by strongman leaders, social intolerance, and illiberal governance.36 By undermining the legitimacy of the conventional power structures in democracies, and providing no effective channels for ‘the people’ to speak, populist language provides rich opportunities for demagogues to claim sweeping powers – ostensibly on behalf of the people.37 Populist agitators like Trump and his supporters are most effective in disrupting the old equilibrium, spreading paranoid conspiracy theories (the ‘Birther’ movement, ‘Pizzagate’), and polarizing politics around divisive wedge issues like race and immigration. When actually in office, they are less effective in implementing 462 The Authoritarian-­Populist Challenge political reforms, forging legislative compromises, and rebuilding trust in democratic governance.38 Actors of various political persuasions who adopt populist discourse share a common language about what they are against, depicting themselves as radical insurgents fighting the establishment on behalf of the people.

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

He tweeted out a screenshot of a paragraph of Roth’s University of Pennsylvania doctoral dissertation, titled “Gay Data,” which noted discussed ways that gay hookup sites such as Grindr could deal with users under the age of eighteen. Musk commented, “Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services.” Roth had nothing to do with pedophilia, but Musk’s insinuations stirred up Pizzagate-style conspiracists lurking in the dark recesses of Twitter who unleashed a barrage of homophobic and anti-Semitic attacks. A tabloid then published Roth’s address, forcing him to go into hiding. “Musk made the decision to share a defamatory allegation that I support or condone pedophilia,” Roth later said.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky
Published 1 May 2017

Ochsner et al., “Your Pain or Mine? Common and Distinct Neural Systems Supporting the Perception of Pain in Self and Other,” SCAN 3 (2008): 144; this is the source of the Ochsner quote. 15. N. Eisenberger et al., “Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion,” Sci 302 (2003): 290; D. Pizzagalli, “Frontocingulate Dysfunction in Depression: Toward Biomarkers of Treatment Response,” Neurophyschopharmacology 36 (2011): 183. 16. C. Lamm et al., “The Neural Substrate of Human Empathy: Effects of Perspective-Taking and Cognitive Appraisal,” J Cog Nsci 19 (2007): 42; P. Jackson et al., “Empathy Examined Through the Neural Mechanisms Involved in Imagining How I Feel Versus How You Feel Pain,” Neuropsychologia 44 (2006): 752; M.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

“The program kept getting bigger and bigger, and finally when you stretched it all out, it was like fifty feet of Teletype paper.”21 The boys would take the bus to C-Cubed and spend evenings and weekends hunkered down in the terminal room. “I became hard-core,” Gates boasted. “It was day and night.” They would program until they were starving, then walk across the street to a hippie hangout called Morningtown Pizza. Gates became obsessed. His room at home was strewn with clothes and Teletype printouts. His parents tried to impose a curfew, but it didn’t work. “Trey got so into it,” his father recalled, “that he would sneak out the basement door after we went to bed and spend most of the night there.”22 The C-Cubed executive who became their mentor was none other than Steve “Slug” Russell, the creative and wry programmer who as a student at MIT had created Spacewar.