On Wednesday, Facebook exercised its long-threatened nuclear option in its ongoing spat with Australian lawmakers over a pending law that would see it pay news outlets when users interact with their content on its platform, and pulled the plug on Australian media Facebook pages and links.

By Thursday afternoon, one estimate by Business Insider (using Chartbeat data) suggested that Facebook-driven Australian visits to news sites was down 10%, and international visits down 20%. Meanwhile, “Chartbeat’s analysis showed… Australian users remained on Facebook and didn’t switch to other social platforms amid the publisher blackout to get their news fix,” Business Insider…

Can you report on invasive surveillance without being invasively surveillant? Wrestling with this at The New York Times, Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson seemed to decide: sort of. Warzel and Thompson used a leaked data file that “included about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones” to trace the movements of thousands of people near the Capitol on January 6. The data traced “around 130 devices inside the Capitol exactly when Trump supporters were storming the building.”

The data itself is the kind smartphone apps silently collect all the time, and which is commonly used for advertising and customer…

Here’s a new version of a story we’ve heard before:

An August 2020 internal presentation at Facebook revealed that the platforms Groups “tied to mercenary and hyperpartisan entities” were using the platform’s tools “to build large audiences,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week. “Many of the most successful Groups were under the control of administrators that tolerated or actively cultivated hate speech, harassment and graphic calls for violence,” the presentation reportedly showed. …

For the past few days GameStop, the beleaguered retailer that’s seen its share price skyrocket under the influence of a Reddit mob attempting the mother of all short squeezes, has dominated the text group I have with a handful of high school friends. Not usually a crew for deep-dives into finance, we’re suddenly following every twist of the saga. I suspect we’re not alone. …

It feels like we dodged something — at least for now. For all the wild events in recent weeks, it feels like they could have been wilder. It’s tempting to look at the January 6 mob invasion of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. as the culmination of a period we’ve now left, as a collective experience that’s ended. This is unlikely. Instead of asking “what happened?” we should ask “what’s happening?”

Examining media isn’t the only way to answer that question, but it feels like a good place to start, not least because Trump was not just a creation of…

If you find it difficult now to tell where the sprawling tentacles of the QAnon/5G/anti-vaccine conspiracy theories end and support for Donald Trump — and the erroneous claims of election fraud — begin, you’re not alone. More and more, it seems there is no separating them. The two camps, if they ever really were distinct, have bled together. If the Q posters and t-shirts at Trump events weren’t enough, then the list of those arrested for their roles in the break-in at the Capitol on January 6 make the point.

One way to explain the sprawling Q-Trump delusional universe that…

Watching footage of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham being accosted this week by hardcore Trump supporters in an airport probably offered, for some, a moment of schadenfreude. Here, it seemed, were the chickens finally coming home to roost. All the aggressive fealty, the dogma, the conspiracy, and the violence Graham helped enable as he defended Trump for the last few years had finally been directed back at him. “Traitor!” the crowd shouted in his face. “You know it was rigged!” one woman screamed at him, as he tried to walk through the terminal.

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and…

Perhaps the most deeply unnerving part of Wednesday’s insurrectionist spectacle in Washington, D.C., was the posing. Having breached the Capitol building, the mob proceeded to lounge and loot. They kicked back in the Senate chamber. They put their feet up in the speaker’s office. They held the Confederate flag aloft. They screamed from the gallery and hauled away whatever wasn’t bolted down, smiling like some extremist Waldos wandering through bizarro chaos. Of the entire sad event, these were among the most ghoulish moments and the photos of them the most macabre images of democracy’s (near) death.

But the most troublesome…