Over the weekend, TikTok very briefly died in the United States before being reborn some 12 hours later, bearing a jaunty new banner. 

“As a result of President Trump’s efforts,” it read, in part, “TikTok is back in the U.S.”

The biggest tech and social media companies have consolidated behind Trump.

Trump was not yet president on Sunday, when TikTok began restoring U.S. access despite a Supreme Court ruling Friday upholding a law meant to ban it. But the deeper message was unmistakable: the Chinese-owned company ByteDance and its CEO Shou Zi Chew would do anything to placate Trump and keep its most profitable app online for American users. Trump also said on Sunday that he’d issue an executive order delaying the implementation of TikTok’s ban in the U.S.

As many pointed out, it was a long way from 2020, when Trump vowed to ban the app “immediately” as a threat to national security. On TruthSocial, Trump even suggested a deal to keep TikTok online that would involve the U.S. gaining “a 50% joint ownership” position. TikTok hasn’t yet responded to idea, but the Chinese government has signaled it wouldn’t object.

A day after the app’s American resurrection, Chew came to Washington for Trump’s inauguration, along with two other social media giants, Twitter/X owner Elon Musk, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Also present was Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook. Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world and a booster of both Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was also in the room.

All of this, of course, points to one simple fact: the total consolidation of the biggest tech and social media companies behind the new president. “What this effectively means is that every social media platform, mass social media platform in the United States, has been taken over by the right wing,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said in a Sunday video posted—ironically, but unavoidably—to Meta-owned Instagram.

The conciliatory approach social media companies have taken to Trump caps a long process of retreat from the social media companies playing an active role in policing deceptive speech and false information, including Twitter’s rollback of enforcing rules around disinformation and continuing with Meta’s recent decision to replace fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes. Trump and conservative leaders have long claimed that such initiatives censored right-wing views. 

Besides its laudatory banner, on Sunday night TikTok also hosted the Power 30 Awards inauguration party, which paid tribute to conservative influencers who use the platform as the company handed out TikTok-branded swag and chocolates. Spotify and Google also hosted parties over the weekend celebrating Trump’s return to power.

Over the weekend, TikTok very briefly died in the United States before being reborn some 12 hours later, bearing a jaunty new banner. 

“As a result of President Trump’s efforts,” it read, in part, “TikTok is back in the U.S.”

The biggest tech and social media companies have consolidated behind Trump.

Trump was not yet president on Sunday, when TikTok began restoring U.S. access despite a Supreme Court ruling Friday upholding a law meant to ban it. But the deeper message was unmistakable: the Chinese-owned company ByteDance and its CEO Shou Zi Chew would do anything to placate Trump and keep its most profitable app online for American users. Trump also said on Sunday that he’d issue an executive order delaying the implementation of TikTok’s ban in the U.S.

As many pointed out, it was a long way from 2020, when Trump vowed to ban the app “immediately” as a threat to national security. On TruthSocial, Trump even suggested a deal to keep TikTok online that would involve the U.S. gaining “a 50% joint ownership” position. TikTok hasn’t yet responded to idea, but the Chinese government has signaled it wouldn’t object.

A day after the app’s American resurrection, Chew came to Washington for Trump’s inauguration, along with two other social media giants, Twitter/X owner Elon Musk, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Also present was Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook. Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world and a booster of both Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was also in the room.

All of this, of course, points to one simple fact: the total consolidation of the biggest tech and social media companies behind the new president. “What this effectively means is that every social media platform, mass social media platform in the United States, has been taken over by the right wing,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said in a Sunday video posted—ironically, but unavoidably—to Meta-owned Instagram.

The conciliatory approach social media companies have taken to Trump caps a long process of retreat from the social media companies playing an active role in policing deceptive speech and false information, including Twitter’s rollback of enforcing rules around disinformation and continuing with Meta’s recent decision to replace fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes. Trump and conservative leaders have long claimed that such initiatives censored right-wing views. 

Besides its laudatory banner, on Sunday night TikTok also hosted the Power 30 Awards inauguration party, which paid tribute to conservative influencers who use the platform as the company handed out TikTok-branded swag and chocolates. Spotify and Google also hosted parties over the weekend celebrating Trump’s return to power.

On Friday night, just days before his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump took to X to celebrate…the launch of his new meme coin. “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for,” he wrote, “WINNING!” It’s a move that, at least on paper, seemed to inflate Trump’s personal wealth by billions ahead of ushering in the most crypto-friendly administration in history.

With this launch, Trump joins the ranks of celebrities like Iggy Azalea, Caitlyn Jenner, and more recently, Haliey Welch, better known as the “Hawk Tuah” girl, all of whom have launched their own meme coins in the last year. Wired describes these currencies as “type of cryptocurrency that generally has no utility beyond financial speculation.”

Trump’s coin has recently reached a market capitalization of $5.2 billion and a fully diluted valuation of $26 billion, referring to the theoretical value if all possible coins were in circulation. Trump’s new pal Elon Musk is known for being a big proponent of one of the most famous meme coins, the dogecoin, named for the same meme that inspired his newly created Department of Government Efficiency.

“It is literally cashing in on the presidency.”

Though the website for the coin states that it “is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office or governmental agency,” some critics argue that there are serious ethical concerns. “Unlike traditional Trump-branded ventures, cryptocurrency’s pseudonymous nature means anyone globally can invest without identity checks, potentially creating concerns about undue influence on a sitting president,” Boaz Sobrado, a fintech analyst, wrote in Forbes. Adav Noti, the executive director of Campaign Legal Center, noted in the New York Times that, “it is literally cashing in on the presidency—creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office.”

“We now have a president-elect who, the weekend before inauguration, is launching new businesses along with promises to deregulate,” Jordan Libowitz, vice president for communications at the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Politico.

Trump’s own former spokesperson, now a staunch critic, Anthony Scaramucci posted that $TRUMP is “Idi Amin level corruption,” and “mocks the industry we are working so hard to build.”

The meme coin is just the latest in a bizarre line of grifty, super-weird takes on “merch.” Last February, Trump showed off gold “Never Surrender High-Tops” for $399 at Sneaker Con, which had Fox News applauding his appeal to Black voters. In March, he began endorsing the $59.99 “God Bless the USA Bible,” which includes the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and handwritten lyrics to the chorus of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” (Trump’s inaugural committee has confirmed that he will not be using one of these Bibles to swear the presidential oath of office on Monday.) In August, Trump released a new round of his “baseball card” NFTs. “These cards show me dancing and even holding some Bitcoins,” Trump explained in a video on Truth Social. Maybe in the next round, he’ll be holding his own meme coins.

On Friday night, just days before his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump took to X to celebrate…the launch of his new meme coin. “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for,” he wrote, “WINNING!” It’s a move that, at least on paper, seemed to inflate Trump’s personal wealth by billions ahead of ushering in the most crypto-friendly administration in history.

With this launch, Trump joins the ranks of celebrities like Iggy Azalea, Caitlyn Jenner, and more recently, Haliey Welch, better known as the “Hawk Tuah” girl, all of whom have launched their own meme coins in the last year. Wired describes these currencies as “type of cryptocurrency that generally has no utility beyond financial speculation.”

Trump’s coin has recently reached a market capitalization of $5.2 billion and a fully diluted valuation of $26 billion, referring to the theoretical value if all possible coins were in circulation. Trump’s new pal Elon Musk is known for being a big proponent of one of the most famous meme coins, the dogecoin, named for the same meme that inspired his newly created Department of Government Efficiency.

“It is literally cashing in on the presidency.”

Though the website for the coin states that it “is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office or governmental agency,” some critics argue that there are serious ethical concerns. “Unlike traditional Trump-branded ventures, cryptocurrency’s pseudonymous nature means anyone globally can invest without identity checks, potentially creating concerns about undue influence on a sitting president,” Boaz Sobrado, a fintech analyst, wrote in Forbes. Adav Noti, the executive director of Campaign Legal Center, noted in the New York Times that, “it is literally cashing in on the presidency—creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office.”

“We now have a president-elect who, the weekend before inauguration, is launching new businesses along with promises to deregulate,” Jordan Libowitz, vice president for communications at the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Politico.

Trump’s own former spokesperson, now a staunch critic, Anthony Scaramucci posted that $TRUMP is “Idi Amin level corruption,” and “mocks the industry we are working so hard to build.”

The meme coin is just the latest in a bizarre line of grifty, super-weird takes on “merch.” Last February, Trump showed off gold “Never Surrender High-Tops” for $399 at Sneaker Con, which had Fox News applauding his appeal to Black voters. In March, he began endorsing the $59.99 “God Bless the USA Bible,” which includes the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and handwritten lyrics to the chorus of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” (Trump’s inaugural committee has confirmed that he will not be using one of these Bibles to swear the presidential oath of office on Monday.) In August, Trump released a new round of his “baseball card” NFTs. “These cards show me dancing and even holding some Bitcoins,” Trump explained in a video on Truth Social. Maybe in the next round, he’ll be holding his own meme coins.

The Supreme Court on Friday allowed a ban on TikTok to take effect. Last year, President Joe Biden signed a law that would ban the platform unless its Chinese parent-company, ByteDance, sold it. In handing down its ruling, the court rebuffed an effort by the platform, some of its users, numerous free-speech advocates, and President-elect Donald Trump to halt the ban from taking effect.

The case pitted Congress’ national security concerns against the free speech rights of TikTok and its users. The court released an unsigned majority opinion, along with two separate concurring opinions but no dissents.

The majority held the ban passes constitutional muster because any potential free speech implications would be overridden by serious threats to national security. “There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community,” the court held. “But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.” It concluded that the law does “not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights.”

The court took the case on an expedited basis, with just nine days between last week’s oral arguments and the deadline for the ban to take effect. As a result, the justices stressed their decision is narrow and declined to reach significant questions such as whether the First Amendment was indeed implicated and, if so, how much.

In spring 2024, Congress passed the law requiring ByteDance to sell US-based TikTok, or else the platform would go dark. TikTok sued to halt it, as did several content creators. The federal government has warned that ByteDance’s ownership puts the Chinese government in a position to use the app to spy on Americans by vacuuming up their personal data, and that it could enable China to manipulate the algorithm to further geopolitical goals.

The court found TikTok’s data collection activities to be a significant national security concern that alone justified the law. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a concurring opinion, stressed that social media algorithms, as the court recently held in a separate case, are a form of protected speech. “TikTok engages in expressive activity by ‘compiling and curating’ material on its platform,” she wrote.

Along with TikTok and some users, Trump mounted his own campaign to keep the platform online, asking the justices to halt the law until after his inauguration, on the premise that he alone could broker a deal to preserve the app while alleviating the government’s national security concerns. This was not exactly a legal request, but more of a request for an extralegal action.

The court’s decision to let the law take effect does not preclude Trump from trying to negotiate a sale of TikTok that would allow the platform to remain online, including by brokering a deal involving a political supporter. Trump is also reportedly mulling an executive action to halt the law—although legally, that is unlikely to succeed because presidents cannot overturn laws by fiat.

During his first term, Trump sought to ban TikTok, but he made an about-face, apparently after determining that the app—and his newfound vocal support for it—would help his 2024 presidential campaign. While the sell-or-ban law was passed on a bipartisan basis, a number of Republicans have recently followed Trump’s lead in walking back support for the measure. Democrats, too, have begun to change course. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said yesterday that he would work with the new administration to find a solution, and the Biden administration announced that it would defer implementation to the next president. It seems that without bipartisan support, there is little political will to implement what Congress said it needed—and what the Supreme Court just green-lighted.

Whatever happens, the platform’s future is no longer in the court’s hands, but back in the realm of politics.

The Supreme Court on Friday allowed a ban on TikTok to take effect. Last year, President Joe Biden signed a law that would ban the platform unless its Chinese parent-company, ByteDance, sold it. In handing down its ruling, the court rebuffed an effort by the platform, some of its users, numerous free-speech advocates, and President-elect Donald Trump to halt the ban from taking effect.

The case pitted Congress’ national security concerns against the free speech rights of TikTok and its users. The court released an unsigned majority opinion, along with two separate concurring opinions but no dissents.

The majority held the ban passes constitutional muster because any potential free speech implications would be overridden by serious threats to national security. “There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of engagement, and source of community,” the court held. “But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.” It concluded that the law does “not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights.”

The court took the case on an expedited basis, with just nine days between last week’s oral arguments and the deadline for the ban to take effect. As a result, the justices stressed their decision is narrow and declined to reach significant questions such as whether the First Amendment was indeed implicated and, if so, how much.

In spring 2024, Congress passed the law requiring ByteDance to sell US-based TikTok, or else the platform would go dark. TikTok sued to halt it, as did several content creators. The federal government has warned that ByteDance’s ownership puts the Chinese government in a position to use the app to spy on Americans by vacuuming up their personal data, and that it could enable China to manipulate the algorithm to further geopolitical goals.

The court found TikTok’s data collection activities to be a significant national security concern that alone justified the law. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a concurring opinion, stressed that social media algorithms, as the court recently held in a separate case, are a form of protected speech. “TikTok engages in expressive activity by ‘compiling and curating’ material on its platform,” she wrote.

Along with TikTok and some users, Trump mounted his own campaign to keep the platform online, asking the justices to halt the law until after his inauguration, on the premise that he alone could broker a deal to preserve the app while alleviating the government’s national security concerns. This was not exactly a legal request, but more of a request for an extralegal action.

The court’s decision to let the law take effect does not preclude Trump from trying to negotiate a sale of TikTok that would allow the platform to remain online, including by brokering a deal involving a political supporter. Trump is also reportedly mulling an executive action to halt the law—although legally, that is unlikely to succeed because presidents cannot overturn laws by fiat.

During his first term, Trump sought to ban TikTok, but he made an about-face, apparently after determining that the app—and his newfound vocal support for it—would help his 2024 presidential campaign. While the sell-or-ban law was passed on a bipartisan basis, a number of Republicans have recently followed Trump’s lead in walking back support for the measure. Democrats, too, have begun to change course. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said yesterday that he would work with the new administration to find a solution, and the Biden administration announced that it would defer implementation to the next president. It seems that without bipartisan support, there is little political will to implement what Congress said it needed—and what the Supreme Court just green-lighted.

Whatever happens, the platform’s future is no longer in the court’s hands, but back in the realm of politics.

Last Thursday, as wildfires continued to blaze through Los Angeles, firefighters appeared to be no match for the deadly combination of winds and flames. But one entrepreneur in the LA suburb of El Segundo had an idea. Augustus Doricko, a 24-year-old who runs a geoengineering startup called Rainmaker, announced on X his attention to help. “Rainmaker will do what it can,” he posted, “starting Saturday.”

Doricko may not be a tech celebrity like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but he isn’t a nobody, either—at least not anymore. Just four years ago, Doricko was a lowly undergrad conservative activist at the University of California, Berkeley, where he launched the school’s chapter of America First Students, the university arm of the political organization founded by white nationalist “Groyper” and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. But for Doricko as for many young aspiring tech entrepreneurs, a college degree was not a prerequisite for success.

Last year, PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s foundation granted Doricko a Thiel Fellowship, a grant awarded annually to a select group of entrepreneurs who have foregone a college degree in order to pursue a tech-focused business venture. In Doricko’s case, that venture was Rainmaker, which seeks to increase the US water supply through cloud-seeding technology. Like many tech entrepreneurs, Doricko believes his work is the solution to an urgent problem. “Cloud seeding is a necessary technology to avert worsening drought,” he posted recently.

But he also believes his work manifests God’s will. In August, he told his followers on X, “One of our Lord’s first commandments was to subdue the earth and tend to it! He desires that mankind control the weather for the sake of building the kingdom of God on earth and stewarding it well.” In another post, he wrote, “Dams modify rivers, Jesus was a carpenter who modified forests (cut trees) to build houses. We aim to serve God.” Cloud seeding is just the next step in the evolution of man’s relationship with nature for the greater glory of the Divine.

Doricko didn’t say exactly how he and his few dozen employees planned to help with the fires. But the practical details seemed to be beside the point, at least to his admiring followers on social media who responded to his post. “Augustus promises to do what he can to stop the bleeding,” enthused one fan on X. “He plans to command the heavens and make the angels cry for life to prevail.” Another added, “Godspeed brethren, may the good Lord bless you and keep you.”

Doricko is just one example within a rising tide of American Christianity that appears to be cresting in California’s tech enclaves. Recent news stories have described a new generation of tech bros flocking to church in the famously secular San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, discovering Christianity through PayPal founder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel, and investing in a Christ-centered real estate enclave in rural Kentucky. There are the usual reasons for this surging interest in Christianity like yearning for community and searching for the greater meaning of life. And for those immersed in a tech culture that has long been obsessed with longevity, the promise of eternal life must offer a special appeal.

But there are other forces at play, which revolve around a very specific kind of Christianity: that of the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial and Gen Z, ultraconservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of this branch of Protestant Christianity—known as Reformed or Reconstructionist—is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law. While the TheoBros’ beliefs are extreme—many of them think women shouldn’t be able to vote, and that the Constitution has outlived its usefulness and we should instead be governed by the Ten Commandments—their movement is moving out of the fringe. In part because they are very savvy about broadcasting it on a multitude of platforms—on podcasts and YouTube shows, on X, at a seemingly never-ending round-robin of conferences. Doricko attends a church that is part of the TheoBros denomination in an LA suburb, as do others in his El Segundo tech community and beyond.

The TheoBros also have made inroads to the upper reaches of political power. In November, President-elect Trump nominated one of their allies, former Fox News commentator Pete Hegseth, to lead the Department of Defense. Hegseth attends a church in Tennessee that is affiliated with the TheoBro movement, and his children attend a school affiliated with the network of classical Christian schools that Wilson helped found. JD Vance has brushed shoulders with the TheoBros, too—he spoke at last summer’s National Conservatism Conference, where Wilson also spoke, and he co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a powerful group of Republican donors, with Chris Buskirk, a board member of the unofficial TheoBro magazine, American Reformer.

The TheoBros’ burgeoning connections with the Trump administration mark a divergence from the style of Christianity that the MAGA world had once embraced. During Trump’s first term, he forged connections with leaders in what’s known as the New Apostolic Reformation, a charismatic movement whose adherents believe that Christians are called to take over the government. Those leaders went on to become instrumental figures in the “Stop the Steal” campaign that led to the Capital insurrection of 2021. Yet the TheoBros are, for the most part, much more militant in their political and social beliefs than the New Apostolic Reformation adherents. Recent pieces in American Reformer have bemoaned the “feminization” of Christianity, lambasted the “willfully childless feminists in the media,” and predicted that “traditional American holidays that reflect our Christian and Anglo heritage will become battlegrounds in the contest over the soul of America among the disparate groups now populating the country.”

TheoBros are also more tech- and media-savvy than many of their New Apostolic Reformation counterparts. As Rachel Tabachnick, an extremism researcher who has been studying Christian nationalism for decades, told me when I interviewed her for a piece on the TheoBros last year, “They are going to be free to be entrepreneurs in all different senses, including the tech world that they’re mixing with so freely.”

With the prominence of figures like Elon Musk and Peter Theil, the tech industry has gained a greater profile in Trump world, and so too are the links between the Trump administration and the TheoBro universe deepening. Shortly before Christmas, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club hosted a group of tech investors for a luncheon of butternut squash soup, roasted cod, and Trump Chocolate Cake (double chocolate cake, dark chocolate glaze, vanilla ice cream) for dessert. Among the firms represented was 1789 Capital, the firm that Donald Trump, Jr. joined in November. 1789 Capital’s founder is American Reformer’s Buskirk.

Another attendee was a 24-year-old entrepreneur named Isaiah Taylor, a friend of Rainmaker’s Doricko. Taylor runs a startup he founded in 2023 called Valar Atomics, which says it is “scaling nuclear energy for heavy industrial power and clean hydrocarbon fuel production.” He too currently lives in El Segundo, but he is originally from Moscow, Idaho, which, in 2023, he described on X as “a silly little town in northern Idaho (pop. 20k).” He lived there, he wrote, “in order to be part of a medium-sized church community,” specifically Christ Church, the reformed evangelical church founded by Wilson, the TheoBro patriarch.

Today, with Doricko as a fellow worshipper, Taylor attends Christ Church Santa Clarita, a southern California member church in the denomination that Wilson founded. In 2023, Taylor wrote on X that Wilson had been “a huge influence on me regarding wealth.” Wilson has written that he sees technology as something like a divine gift. “If you have a smartphone, you have more wealth in your pocket than Nebuchadnezzar accumulated over the course of his lifetime,” he wrote in his 2020 book, Ploductivity: A Practical Theology of Work and Wealth. “We have a responsibility to turn a profit on these astounding resources.”

“I believe that the world is a gift from God which we must tend and care for like a garden. So naturally I want to reindustrialize the United States and build 1,000 nuclear reactors.”

In keeping with that philosophy, Taylor told The Information’s Julia Black in December that he saw his company’s mission as spiritual in nature. “I think God created the world full of abundant energy and we have to unlock it,” he explained. On X, he put it differently. “I’m a Christian environmentalist,” he posted in 2023. “I believe that the world is a gift from God which we must tend and care for like a garden. So naturally I want to reindustrialize the United States and build 1000 nuclear reactors.”

The hypermasculine aesthetics of TheoBros would seem to fit right into the El Segundo tech scene, the overwhelmingly male members of which refer to themselves as “’Gundo Bros.” In an article last February, Forbes’ David Jeans and Sarah Emerson described guys in defense tech startups who “pump iron while they code, host weekly bonfires on the beach, and shotgun energy drinks.” Vanity Fair’s Zoë Bernard observed the Gundo Bros’ “outsize respect for their country and men in uniform. They love fast cars, tobacco products, and their lord and savior Jesus Christ.”

The Gundo Bros have a way of casually mixing the realms of tech, masculinity, and Christianity. (“El Segundo is where you can: try to end scarcity, reverse engineer meteorological RF equipment, machinate about geopolitical GTM strategy, eat milk and steak for lunch, scheme w cracked engineers, squat a 5×5 of back squats w a disgusting amount of ammonia, praise god,” posted Doricko last year. In another post, he mused, “The physiques at Gold’s are markedly better after church hours on Sunday. Angelically sanctioned anabolism.”)

Many of the Gundo Bros have benefitted from the largesse of tech investor Marc Andreessen, a major Trump supporter, friends with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and close adviser to Trump’s newly convened Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. “Big Tech spent a decade doing everything possible to be the best conceivable progressive ally,” Andreessen posted on X in November. “They got treated with utter contempt, pounded daily, crucified in return. A full rethinking is required.” To that end, through his firm Andreessen Horowitz, he started a $500 million fund for tech companies, several of which have headquarters in El Segundo, which are “solving our country’s most vexing challenges.” Andreessen has TheoBro connections, too: Last month, Forbes reported that Andreessen backed New Founding, an investment firm that aims to build a conservative Christian community and real estate empire in rural Appalachia. Andreessen didn’t respond to emailed questions from Mother Jones.

Another powerful force in the El Segundo scene is Discipulus Ventures, an accelerator program, funded in part by Andreessen Horowitz, that says it seeks to build “a network of the smartest, most contrarian individuals whose aspirations to change the world have been overlooked by their respective universities and companies.” Discipulus’ guiding principles are “religion, patriotism, and family”; its participants must have “a strict devotion to truth and goodness.” The cohort of 10 entrepreneurs starts each day with a 6 a.m. workout, then the participants learn from more seasoned entrepreneurs. Mentors include Rainmaker’s Doricko and Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen’s firm.

It doesn’t look like Doricko’s company was able to make much progress against the fires over the past few days; the only evidence on X is a single post on Friday, by a Rainmaker engineer, showing a photo of some people holding a large white balloon attached to a spool of what looks like kite string. Doricko didn’t respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment for this piece. But he and his friends are aiming higher, anyway. In October, he reposted an X post from Valar Atomics’ Isaiah Taylor. “I don’t think most ‘hard tech investors’ even have the right categories,” Taylor wrote. “This is the real game. Who gets to own space logistics? Who gets to own the weather? Who gets to own energy? Think bigger.”

Meanwhile, the TheoBros’ mingling with MAGA elites is likely just getting started. This week, just a few days before Trump’s inauguration, Valar Atomics’ Taylor, who also didn’t respond to a request for comment, is scheduled to return to Mar-a-Lago, this time to present at an event called Nuclear Energy Space & Defense Tech Investor Summit. “I’ll be speaking on Nuclear Energy and the Founding Fathers,” he posted on X in early January. “Come ready to restart America’s energy engine. We’re gonna fix this thing.”

Update, January 14: After this story was published, Nate Fischer, CEO of New Founding and co-founder of American Reformer, clarified to Mother Jones that Buskirk’s listing in tax filings as the editor and publisher of American Reformer had been a “clerical error (presumably copying his bio from American Greatness, where he was editor and publisher)” and that Buskirk was actually a board member of American Reformer. The sentence has been revised.

Ketan Joshi did not mean to become the manager of all things climate on Bluesky, the fast-growing social media platform that’s trying to compete directly with Twitter.

GreenSky was designed to be this overarching, overall thing that encompassed all the communities. I see that emerging through the GreenSky feed, because you see people from very disparate communities talking to each other.

The 39-year-old Australian expat who now lives in Oslo, Norway has spent his career writing about green energy as a communications specialist for renewable energy companies and author of Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil-Free Future, but found it especially hard to share climate information on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Those sites seemed built toward sowing discord and had secret rules about what posts would do well. Immediately, he noticed that Bluesky was different.

Built as an open-source decentralized network, Bluesky’s architects, which included Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, wanted to create something that was user-led rather than company-led. (Dorsey is no longer involved and the project is led by Jay Graeber, who promises to “billionaire proof” the site.) What it means is that Bluesky has no all-powerful algorithm directing content. Instead of trusting a privately-owned, sometimes-biased, often-inflammatory and increasingly misinformed system, users can choose multiple feeds from thousands of mini-algorithms built by users. Or make their own.

Early on in the project Dorsey, who is no longer involved, stated: “Existing social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health.” Bluesky’s goal was to change that.

The appeal seems to be working. The platform now has 25 million users, and counting. In the days following Donald Trump’s re-election in a campaign that was supercharged by Elon Musk, who owns Twitter , over 1 million new users joined the site.

Joshi has been on Bluesky for a while–since the site had less than 100,000 users. He built up his climate community on Bluesky by searching manually for folks involved in climate change work. He followed and added their names to spreadsheet to keep track

At first the spreadsheet was just for Joshi, but quickly there was interest from those in his network, so he shared it widely. 

(Nowadays, Bluesky has improved on the spreadsheet sharing with a function where users can curate lists of other users called Starterpacks with the option to “follow” or “block” all of them.)

Joshi also created a feed that congregated all the posts from users on his climate list. It, like many other early Bluesky feeds, like Blacksky and BookSky, combined a keyword with sky—”GreenSky”—each varying in capitalization. The result was a unique space where everyone was talking about the environment. 

GreenSky is a “Top-50” feed with near-constant engagement and frequent debates as those in different climate camps come face off on policy disagreements in real time. In early January, in the midst of devastating fires in Los Angeles, posters used the feed to stay up to date, grapple with how climate led to their ferocity, and sift through misinformation. Top climate voices, like energy transition engineer Jesse Jenkins and Farhana Sultana, author of Confronting Climate Coloniality, are members and frequent posters.

Mother Jones spoke to Joshi about the unique climate dialogues emerging on BlueSky, facilitated by GreekSky, how he is trying to manage it, and the role that social media plays in climate engagement broadly.

How has GreenSky changed since the early days, beyond sheer growth?

I added a keyword filter which limits posts to [77] climate keywords only. But Bluesky is such a flexible, open platform, so I created a second version that is just the unfiltered thoughts of everybody on that list, if you desire to have it that way. And then, a friend on Bluesky decided that he liked green sky, but wanted a different filtering on it, so he created a version that not only filters for the keywords, but also filters for sort of popularity and engagement. 

It’s a basic thing that people can riff off. They can make their own version. I think that’s really quite wonderful. 

You have a presence on several social media platforms, and seem to be in the habit of making a climate community on each one. How did that experience translate into managing climate posting on Bluesky?

The key thing that I find on the other sites, very consistently, is that in the process of trying to find your people and then communicate with your people, you’re kind of swimming against the tide.

Instagram is a nice example where there’s a sort of this behavioral culture of people trying to act and speak and present their content in a way that pleases a secret formula. And I’ve done that. I’m there googling the type of thumbnail to use and the type of description to use and the perfect length to please the sort of secret algorithms.

So Bluesky is quite different?

One thing I have noticed is people are very quickly unlearning the habits of trying to please the algorithm. Other websites down rank hyperlinks because they don’t want people leaving the website. They don’t want the eyeballs of the people going away from the website and away from advertisers. That doesn’t happen on Bluesky unless somebody makes a feed that has the formula inside it. But no one’s going to subscribe to that feed because we all love seeing each other’s work. That really stands out to me, where there’s a lot of sharing of work, there’s a lot of sharing of reports, people link to other places on the internet. Bluesky is a conduit.

Bluesky gets the critique of being an echo chamber a lot, but I’ve noticed a huge diversity of opinions in the climate side of Bluesky. What are your observations?

The climate community has its own bubbles: climate science and ecological sciences, energy technology and investment innovation, indigenous rights. I don’t wring my hands about [this]. You see this anxiety about cross chatter between communities and or even Bluesky being a silo but it’s just, it’s simply not the case? That’s not how communities form on a well designed social media site. What you get is people cluster with topics they want to hear from and people they want to hear from, and then they sort of cross through each other, sometimes often in bad ways, often in good ways.

GreenSky was designed to be this overarching, overall thing that encompassed all the communities. I see that emerging through the GreenSky feed, because you see people from very disparate communities talking to each other.

What do those debates look like on Greensky?

I very intentionally designed it so that replies show up in the feed so people are replying to each other. I want it to be a little bit noisy. I want it to be a little bit overwhelming. 

I’ve seen debates occur in very refreshing and unique ways that are passionate, but they never default to hate and personal invective. You can tell that the blood pressure is high and that people feel strongly when they’re replying. It’s not dispassionate or boring. But, I have not seen it sort of like falling to insults or to snide, snippyness, like we have seen on other sites.

It’s a nice style of interaction, because it’s a fight. It’s a proper fight, people mean it, but at the same time, they’re not full of hate or developing beef. 

People who have been on X for a while now, they’ve been subject to the design of the website, which is obviously encouraging conflict as much as possible as a way to keep people on there. 

I’m sure there are many examples of actual, proper, personal, interpersonal hate on arguments in Bluesky and even in the climate space. But I would say, as a general thing, it feels like an improvement.

What are some of the biggest debates on GreenSky right now?

Permitting reform, the abundance agenda, gas terminals, Biden’s overall agenda. 

A big one is how to deploy clean energy in the US. On one side, you’ve kind of got the people who say wind power and solar power should be somewhat deregulated and rolled out in a faster way to achieve quicker, deeper emissions reductions. It’s justified on the grounds of: this is an urgent problem, and when you have too much process, then you end up with people like blockers and NIMBYs, and they sort of block like wind funds and solar farms. 

And then the other side, which I’m a little bit more aligned with is like: “Yes, permitting needs to be reformed, but it should be reformed in a way that encourages more community engagement and community benefit sharing, because that will actually result in the quicker roll out.” 

These two sides of the debate are like red hot right now, because the political change was so clearly stressful on a lot of people who are allies but have a different idea about how to reach the same goal, and so the intensity of these debates has increased. 

What about management? How have you handled the influx of billions people onto Bluesky and thousands of people to your feed?

This is something that I’m a little daunted by because my criteria when I first started making this list, was literally “climate people,” and that can mean quite a lot of things. It can mean somebody who doesn’t work in any professional sense in climate, but is extremely interested in it. I always told myself that the keyword filtering will do the job. 

I actually haven’t updated it with the new opt-in requests from the great surge of earlier, so it’s going to get a lot noisier in the next couple of weeks. It’s probably going to double in size or so. 

I monitor the feed pretty closely to see who’s posting in it and what type of topics get filtered through the keyword filter. It seems okay so far. 

One thing I really want to try and preserve is how diverse the climate community is across those different groups, while at the same time sort of acknowledging who’s missing. There’s quite a few groups missing, and it’s because they haven’t really joined Bluesky yet. Climate activists who rely very much on strong preexisting networks. They can’t just quit their network and then just hope that everybody else will run behind them. That’s going to take longer, but the clusters of people will expand pretty significantly over the next year or so. 

What about moderating bad stuff?

One day somebody’s going to request to join, who is, for instance, sailing close to the wind of being a climate denier or a delayer.

The initial policy that I had on GreenSky was “no dickheads,” which is an Australian term. I will only kick somebody off the list if they’re either abusive, if they’re breaching any of Bluesky’s basic moderation rules, or if it’s a pretty cut and dried case of mis- or disinformation spreading.

The feed is probably going to grow. It’s going to need to have a lot more transparency around how I deal with a lot of those questions. I am thinking about a log of content that has been flagged.

I guess that makes me a forum moderator type due, and that is not something I’ve ever done before. That’s the only thing I wish I had prepared for, but I’m lucky. I’ve got access to a huge community of people who will offer good advice.

What is the future of climate online, Bluesky or otherwise?

I’ve spoken to climate activists about the social media they’re using and what they prefer and what they and what they’re interested in. I think someone once jokingly referred to it as a millennial retirement home when it was first set up. That just cut deep out of its sheer truthfulness. 

Something that occurred to me when they told me about that is that they don’t need to join Bluesky. This is an open protocol. It should hypothetically, eventually be such that it would be incredibly easy to set up your own [social] server. 

Some people really need video. Some people really need a network that is secure and can’t be taken down by an authoritarian regime. 

I’m imagining a future for different climate communities where it’s not about Bluesky or GreenSky, but the protocol that enables interconnectedness between different purposes and needs for the community.

The Supreme Court on Friday heard oral arguments on the future of TikTok—whether to let the platform go dark on January 19 according to a bipartisan law passed by Congress, or to intervene and spare the platform.

The case pits the First Amendment free speech rights of TikTok and its users against the government’s assertions that the platform poses a national security risk. With bipartisan support, Congress passed a law that will essentially ban TikTok in the United States on January 19 unless ByteDance, the Chinese-based company that owns TikTok, divests the platform.

Genuflecting to national security over fundamental rights has led to some of the court’s most regrettable decisions.

The Supreme Court does not generally like to second-guess the federal government when it comes to national security concerns, and is therefore likely to ultimately uphold the law. While the justices did express doubts about some of the government’s national security rationale, it’s unclear if there are strong enough to delay the law from taking effect, or to overturn it as an unconstitutional infringement on the right to free speech.

The government’s national security arguments are twofold. First, that TikTok vacuums up user data that it then sends to its corporate owner, the China-based ByteDance, where the Chinese government can access it. The People’s Republic of China has been designated a foreign adversary with a documented strategy of gathering vast quantities of data on Americans.

The justices seemed genuinely concerned about this national security risk. Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised the fear that China would gather data on teenagers and people in their twenties “that they would use that information over time to develop spies, to turn people, to blackmail people, people who, a generation from now, will be working in the FBI or the CIA or in the State Department.” Even the lawyers for TikTok and content creators challenging the law acknowledged the threat. But, they said, it was not enough to make the law constitutional.

The government’s second national security argument, which the justices were more skeptical of, is that China can use TikTok to covertly manipulate its 170 million users. Multiple justices had problems with this rationale. After Prelogar suggested that China might benefit from fomenting arguments between Americans, Chief Justice John Roberts sensed an opportunity for a joke. “Did I understand you to say a few minutes ago that one problem is ByteDance might be, through TikTok, trying to get Americans to argue with each other?” he asked, then answered with the punchline. “If they do, I say they’re winning.”

The courts use various levels of scrutiny to determine whether a law is constitutional. If a law abridges the right to free speech, for example, the courts subject it to a higher level of scrutiny, forcing the government must prove it had a compelling interest to abridge that right. The level of scrutiny can also be determined by whether the government is restricting certain viewpoints. In this case, TikTok and the content creators fighting the law claim that Congress passed a content-based free speech restriction. The government denies this. The law, they say, is content neutral; they are not banning any particular speech, but rather, the manipulation of that speech for geopolitical gain. “TikTok, if it were able to do so, could use precisely the same algorithm to display the same content by the same users,” Prelogar explained. “All the act is doing is trying to surgically remove the ability of a foreign adversary nation to get our data and to be able to exercise control over the platform.”

But the justices seemed to raise an eyebrow at the government’s defense here. Justice Elena Kagan, in particular, pushed back against the idea that a ban on manipulation is content-neutral because, ultimately, it does effect what content is shown. “Content manipulation is a content-based rationale,” Kagan said.

Moreover, the justices seemed dismissive of the idea that covert algorithmic manipulation is an actual national security problem. Kagan drew laughs from the courtroom when she stressed that, at this point, everyone knows China is behind TikTok. “It’s just because people don’t know that China is pulling the strings? That’s what ‘covert’ means?” Kagan asked. “Everybody now knows that China is behind it.”

Prelogar attempted to push back on this. “The problem with just saying, as a general matter, China has this capability and might at some point be able to exercise it and manipulate the platform is it doesn’t put anyone on notice of when that influence operation is actually happening, and, therefore, it doesn’t guard against the national security harm from the operation itself.”

Automatically genuflecting to government assertions of national security peril, especially when fundamental rights are at stake, is a habit that has led to some of the Supreme Court’s most regrettable decisions, including Korematsu, when it upheld the use of detention camps for United States citizens of Japanese origin during World War II. As Jeffrey Fisher, a Stanford Law professor who represented TikTok users, put it on Friday, “The government just doesn’t get to say ‘national security’ and the case is over.”

But the justices’ downplaying of the risk of covert manipulation also ignored the extraordinary power of social media and the difficulty of detecting and counteracting propaganda, misinformation, and narratives intended to weaken the United States or harm its citizens.

During the 2016 election, Russia used social media, including dozens of accounts on Instagram, to dissuade Black people from voting. Often, the Kremlin-backed effort would create accounts with an apolitical focus, then shift them to politics once it had gathered an audience. With TikTok, China’s ability to manipulate is far greater. Instead of working to gather an audience through popular content, it could simply use algorithmic manipulation, powered by its vast data trove, to show certain voters information that would dissuade them from voting. They could use the algorithm to threaten public health by increasing fear of vaccines. The scenarios go on and on.

The justices seemed to dismiss the idea covert algorithmic manipulation is an actual security problem.

Algorithms are a potent tool. Because fear grabs users’ attention, algorithms have long prioritized scary and sensationalist material. It’s one reason that Facebook and YouTube radicalized an untold number of people to fear vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic and helped spread conspiracy theories like Q’Anon. And these algorithmic decisions were motivated by profit—not ones designed to create geopolitical dominance by an enemy nation.

It’s quite possible that a majority of the justices could deem TikTok’s algorithm protected speech but also determine that the government’s national security interest is strong enough to curtail that right. It’s also possible that the justices could decide that algorithmic manipulation is a protected right of TikTok, a US-based company, but not, ByteDance, a foreign company. That may be the government’s argument: TikTok is free to use whatever algorithm it wants, but ByteDance, and through it, the Chinese government, does not have a similar right.

One wildcard is that the law is set to take effect the day before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Trump has asked the court to halt implementation of the law on the premise that he alone can reach a better resolution, claiming that “President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government.” During oral argument, Francisco likewise argued that the court should halt implementation of the law until the next administration.

Justice Samuel Alito, who suspiciously spoke by phone with Trump on Tuesday, raised the possibility of an administrative stay—a maneuver by which a court hits the pause button on a new law or regulation to give the it extra time to assess the situation. This may sound like a compromise solution, but halting a law passed by Congress from taking effect to allow a new administration to ignore it is a significant exercise of judicial authority.

The justices don’t appear happy about any of their options. But they have nine days to do something.

The Supreme Court on Friday heard oral arguments on the future of TikTok—whether to let the platform go dark on January 19 according to a bipartisan law passed by Congress, or to intervene and spare the platform.

The case pits the First Amendment free speech rights of TikTok and its users against the government’s assertions that the platform poses a national security risk. With bipartisan support, Congress passed a law that will essentially ban TikTok in the United States on January 19 unless ByteDance, the Chinese-based company that owns TikTok, divests the platform.

Genuflecting to national security over fundamental rights has led to some of the court’s most regrettable decisions.

The Supreme Court does not generally like to second-guess the federal government when it comes to national security concerns, and is therefore likely to ultimately uphold the law. While the justices did express doubts about some of the government’s national security rationale, it’s unclear if there are strong enough to delay the law from taking effect, or to overturn it as an unconstitutional infringement on the right to free speech.

The government’s national security arguments are twofold. First, that TikTok vacuums up user data that it then sends to its corporate owner, the China-based ByteDance, where the Chinese government can access it. The People’s Republic of China has been designated a foreign adversary with a documented strategy of gathering vast quantities of data on Americans.

The justices seemed genuinely concerned about this national security risk. Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised the fear that China would gather data on teenagers and people in their twenties “that they would use that information over time to develop spies, to turn people, to blackmail people, people who, a generation from now, will be working in the FBI or the CIA or in the State Department.” Even the lawyers for TikTok and content creators challenging the law acknowledged the threat. But, they said, it was not enough to make the law constitutional.

The government’s second national security argument, which the justices were more skeptical of, is that China can use TikTok to covertly manipulate its 170 million users. Multiple justices had problems with this rationale. After Prelogar suggested that China might benefit from fomenting arguments between Americans, Chief Justice John Roberts sensed an opportunity for a joke. “Did I understand you to say a few minutes ago that one problem is ByteDance might be, through TikTok, trying to get Americans to argue with each other?” he asked, then answered with the punchline. “If they do, I say they’re winning.”

The courts use various levels of scrutiny to determine whether a law is constitutional. If a law abridges the right to free speech, for example, the courts subject it to a higher level of scrutiny, forcing the government must prove it had a compelling interest to abridge that right. The level of scrutiny can also be determined by whether the government is restricting certain viewpoints. In this case, TikTok and the content creators fighting the law claim that Congress passed a content-based free speech restriction. The government denies this. The law, they say, is content neutral; they are not banning any particular speech, but rather, the manipulation of that speech for geopolitical gain. “TikTok, if it were able to do so, could use precisely the same algorithm to display the same content by the same users,” Prelogar explained. “All the act is doing is trying to surgically remove the ability of a foreign adversary nation to get our data and to be able to exercise control over the platform.”

But the justices seemed to raise an eyebrow at the government’s defense here. Justice Elena Kagan, in particular, pushed back against the idea that a ban on manipulation is content-neutral because, ultimately, it does effect what content is shown. “Content manipulation is a content-based rationale,” Kagan said.

Moreover, the justices seemed dismissive of the idea that covert algorithmic manipulation is an actual national security problem. Kagan drew laughs from the courtroom when she stressed that, at this point, everyone knows China is behind TikTok. “It’s just because people don’t know that China is pulling the strings? That’s what ‘covert’ means?” Kagan asked. “Everybody now knows that China is behind it.”

Prelogar attempted to push back on this. “The problem with just saying, as a general matter, China has this capability and might at some point be able to exercise it and manipulate the platform is it doesn’t put anyone on notice of when that influence operation is actually happening, and, therefore, it doesn’t guard against the national security harm from the operation itself.”

Automatically genuflecting to government assertions of national security peril, especially when fundamental rights are at stake, is a habit that has led to some of the Supreme Court’s most regrettable decisions, including Korematsu, when it upheld the use of detention camps for United States citizens of Japanese origin during World War II. As Jeffrey Fisher, a Stanford Law professor who represented TikTok users, put it on Friday, “The government just doesn’t get to say ‘national security’ and the case is over.”

But the justices’ downplaying of the risk of covert manipulation also ignored the extraordinary power of social media and the difficulty of detecting and counteracting propaganda, misinformation, and narratives intended to weaken the United States or harm its citizens.

During the 2016 election, Russia used social media, including dozens of accounts on Instagram, to dissuade Black people from voting. Often, the Kremlin-backed effort would create accounts with an apolitical focus, then shift them to politics once it had gathered an audience. With TikTok, China’s ability to manipulate is far greater. Instead of working to gather an audience through popular content, it could simply use algorithmic manipulation, powered by its vast data trove, to show certain voters information that would dissuade them from voting. They could use the algorithm to threaten public health by increasing fear of vaccines. The scenarios go on and on.

The justices seemed to dismiss the idea covert algorithmic manipulation is an actual security problem.

Algorithms are a potent tool. Because fear grabs users’ attention, algorithms have long prioritized scary and sensationalist material. It’s one reason that Facebook and YouTube radicalized an untold number of people to fear vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic and helped spread conspiracy theories like Q’Anon. And these algorithmic decisions were motivated by profit—not ones designed to create geopolitical dominance by an enemy nation.

It’s quite possible that a majority of the justices could deem TikTok’s algorithm protected speech but also determine that the government’s national security interest is strong enough to curtail that right. It’s also possible that the justices could decide that algorithmic manipulation is a protected right of TikTok, a US-based company, but not, ByteDance, a foreign company. That may be the government’s argument: TikTok is free to use whatever algorithm it wants, but ByteDance, and through it, the Chinese government, does not have a similar right.

One wildcard is that the law is set to take effect the day before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Trump has asked the court to halt implementation of the law on the premise that he alone can reach a better resolution, claiming that “President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government.” During oral argument, Francisco likewise argued that the court should halt implementation of the law until the next administration.

Justice Samuel Alito, who suspiciously spoke by phone with Trump on Tuesday, raised the possibility of an administrative stay—a maneuver by which a court hits the pause button on a new law or regulation to give the it extra time to assess the situation. This may sound like a compromise solution, but halting a law passed by Congress from taking effect to allow a new administration to ignore it is a significant exercise of judicial authority.

The justices don’t appear happy about any of their options. But they have nine days to do something.

At the beginning of every year, the best and brightest tech companies and retailers come to Las Vegas, Nevada for the Consumer Electronics Show, which is also simply known as CES, to announce, unveil and showcase the latest and greatest in tech and home entertainment. Over the course of CES 2025 at the Las Vegas […]

As Big Tech scrambles to placate Donald Trump before he reassumes office, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company would replace their fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes, beginning in the United States and then rolling out globally. Zuckerberg said in a video and in an announcement on Threads that the shift—largely the same system that Twitter/X uses—represented a return to the company’s roots and way of “restoring free speech.” He acknowledged, however, that the change “means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff,” adding, “but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Even as the incoming president threatens news outlets, Zuckerberg gave Trump a specific shoutout.

In his pre-recorded video and in his Threads post, Zuckerberg said the company planned to “simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He pledged to “remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.” In a particularly curious detail, he also announced plans to “move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.” 

Zuckerberg also gave Trump a specific shoutout in his Threads announcement, writing that the company will “work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.” Even as the incoming president and his allies threaten news outlets, the United States, Zuckerberg argued, “has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.”

The New York Times reported Tuesday that incoming Trump administration officials were given a heads-up about the new policies before they were announced. As they were being rolled out, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, sat for an exclusive interview on Fox and Friends. Kaplan called the new setup “a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression.” The third-party fact-checking system, Kaplan told the beaming Fox hosts, “had too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check, and how.” Kaplan added that people want to “discuss and debate” topics like “ immigration, trans issues [and] gender.” 

“If you can say it on TV, you can say on the floor of Congress,” Kaplan said, “you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship.” 

Since the emergency phase of the Covid pandemic abated, social media companies have shown a strong desire to stop policing disinformation on their platforms. Under Elon Musk, Twitter rolled back its Covid misinformation policy in 2022, and then followed up by establishing a laissez faire attitude towards both general disinformation and hate speech. Meta conducted mass layoffs in May of 2023 that gutted the teams responsible for stemming disinformation and hate speech. Trump himself was, of course, banned from Facebook and Instagram for two years following the insurrection attempt at the Capitol on January 6, 2021; his accounts were reinstated in 2023, with the company promising “new guardrails to deter repeat offenses.” 

Zuckerberg’s announcement comes shortly after Meta announced that it would donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, part of a round of Big Tech companies who are doing the same.

As Big Tech scrambles to placate Donald Trump before he reassumes office, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company would replace their fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes, beginning in the United States and then rolling out globally. Zuckerberg said in a video and in an announcement on Threads that the shift—largely the same system that Twitter/X uses—represented a return to the company’s roots and way of “restoring free speech.” He acknowledged, however, that the change “means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff,” adding, “but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Even as the incoming president threatens news outlets, Zuckerberg gave Trump a specific shoutout.

In his pre-recorded video and in his Threads post, Zuckerberg said the company planned to “simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He pledged to “remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.” In a particularly curious detail, he also announced plans to “move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.” 

Zuckerberg also gave Trump a specific shoutout in his Threads announcement, writing that the company will “work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.” Even as the incoming president and his allies threaten news outlets, the United States, Zuckerberg argued, “has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.”

The New York Times reported Tuesday that incoming Trump administration officials were given a heads-up about the new policies before they were announced. As they were being rolled out, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, sat for an exclusive interview on Fox and Friends. Kaplan called the new setup “a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression.” The third-party fact-checking system, Kaplan told the beaming Fox hosts, “had too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check, and how.” Kaplan added that people want to “discuss and debate” topics like “ immigration, trans issues [and] gender.” 

“If you can say it on TV, you can say on the floor of Congress,” Kaplan said, “you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship.” 

Since the emergency phase of the Covid pandemic abated, social media companies have shown a strong desire to stop policing disinformation on their platforms. Under Elon Musk, Twitter rolled back its Covid misinformation policy in 2022, and then followed up by establishing a laissez faire attitude towards both general disinformation and hate speech. Meta conducted mass layoffs in May of 2023 that gutted the teams responsible for stemming disinformation and hate speech. Trump himself was, of course, banned from Facebook and Instagram for two years following the insurrection attempt at the Capitol on January 6, 2021; his accounts were reinstated in 2023, with the company promising “new guardrails to deter repeat offenses.” 

Zuckerberg’s announcement comes shortly after Meta announced that it would donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, part of a round of Big Tech companies who are doing the same.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

Congratulations on your part-time job! Please report to the nearest grocery store, scan your weekly essentials, move them to the doll-sized bagging area, and prepare to be gaslit by the robot voice insisting that you better place that item in the bagging area.

Just to be clear, I already did.

At some point in the process, you likely will need to call in reinforcements from a fellow grocery worker—the one with an actual badge. “Help is [allegedly] on the way,” the machine assures you. We have officially nullified the “self” in “self-checkout.” Now, it’s time for a real human interaction—but the two clerks in charge of an area with 20 machines are busy helping everyone else besieged by what I would like to suggest is one of the worst technological “innovations” of the last few decades. (Yes, I understand the competition is stiff: social media or fast fashion, for instance. Those ugly shoes with the individual toes…)

The limited staff, theoretically, is there to ensure that you are old enough to buy wine and that you scanned that peanut butter instead of slipping it unobtrusively into your bag. But they’re usually too busy making all the machines shut up and stop flashing lights to have the time to check.

At least they’ll get minimum wage for it. Your role as a self-checkout scanner comes with no compensation or benefits. Unless you count the CCTV security footage of yourself from the worst possible angle as a perk, the most you will receive are a cascade of error messages and mounting frustration.

As Amanda Mull pointed out in a 2023 Atlantic article, these kiosks initially were advertised as a win-win for grocers and customers: Grocers would be able to cut back and pay fewer cashiers, and customers could avoid long lines.

Sure, scanning machines can’t call in sick, and while family emergencies do not interrupt their productivity, plenty of tech outages do. And about all those potential time savings? The opposite is true. Most of us aren’t professional cashiers. We haven’t mastered the mysteries of bar code placements, nor have we memorized produce SKUs. Plus, we can’t check our own IDs. Stacking up a week’s worth of scanned groceries Tetris-style in the tiny space allotted is yet another time suck.

Please don’t misunderstand! I would love to contribute to improved employment conditions for overworked, underpaid grocery staff. Plus, it might translate to lower food prices based on lower overhead costs. But it definitely doesn’t seem as though self-service benefits the staff. We’re not freeing up cashiers for cart-return duty, restocking, and general customer service. Instead, there are simply fewer cashiers to deal with the work. Corporations are quick to blame the dearth of employees on talent shortages and pressure for increased wages; they’ll be less likely to mention their market consolidation and year-over-year increases in net profit.

According to CBS, 67 percent of shoppers agree that self-checkout systems leave much to be desired. I’d like to start a petition to transfer these machines back to the dystopia from which they came. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, self-checkout machines are unable to process returns.

Elon Musk’s calls for a so-called “efficient” US government—including wanting to end the already endangered right to work from home, a disability accommodation for many—are less surprising when you view him as a techno-eugenicist.

The eugenicists of the early 20th century used medical violence like forced hysterectomies in a pseudoscientific campaign to prevent “inferior” immigrants from entering the US, and push certain groups —especially disabled, non-white, and otherwise marginalized people—out of the gene pool.

Big Tech successors like Musk and PayPal billionaire-turned-arms dealer Peter Thiel have overtly promoted fraudulent race science, with Musk amplifying users on X who argue that people of European descent are biologically superior. In response to another user’s deleted post suggesting that students at historically Black institutions have lower IQs, Musk posted, “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE”—diversity, equity, and inclusion, misspelled. In 2016, Thiel buddied up to a prominent white nationalist, and, the same year, was said by a Stanford dorm-mate to have complimented South Africa’s “economically sound” system of racial apartheid.

Data was “deployed by eugenic researchers…to not just track and surveil the poor, [but] to argue for their segregation.”

In her new book Predatory Data, from the University of California Press, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign information sciences and media studies professor Anita Say Chan looks at the history and current use of data in devaluing human beings along eugenicist lines.

I spoke to Chan about the history of predatory data in the United States, why the moral and ethical implications of data collection remain a crucial subject, and how we can fight against its misuse.

Can you share a bit about how data has been used, historically, to cast many disabled people, immigrants, and people of color as being part of the “undeserving poor”—and how that continues today?

For large parts of history, poverty was seen as a largely inevitable phenomenon brought about from a general condition of scarcity. While a “soft” version of poverty as individual failure might have attributed poverty to laziness or immoral behavior, eugenics introduced a “harder” version of a biologically determined undeserving poor as a central object of data collection.

Eugenic researchers labored, and grew a global disinformation movement, across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to demonstrate poverty not as the result of scarcity or structural exploitations, as labor reformers then argued, but as the result of inherited deficiencies that directly limited intellectual potential, encoded harmful and immoral personal proclivities, and circumscribed economic achievement. In the US, varied datafication methods—from IQ exams and immigrant literacy tests, to criminal databases, biometric archives—were deployed by eugenic researchers in an effort to not just track and surveil the poor, and to argue for their segregation from so-called “fit” populations, but to collect data that eugenicists insisted would prove the higher incidences of moral, physical and mental “unfitness” among the poor.

Our contemporary datafication systems continue to do this today—not only by allowing their growth to be fueled by the expansion of online platforms and social media systems that minimize protections for minoritized users, but by enabling the amplification of political violence against minorities in the interest of protecting their profits.

The incoming Trump administration is very anti-immigrant—not that this country has ever been purely pro-immigration. To go back about a century, how did interpretations of intelligence lead to a dramatic increase in rejections at Ellis Island?

The Immigration Act of 1924 was a historic gain [for eugenicists] that is remembered for imposing a severe national quota system designed to keep non-Anglo-European immigrants out of the United States. Its passage allowed immigration from northern Europe to increase significantly, while Jewish immigration fell from 190,000 in 1920 to 7,000 in 1926, with immigration from Asia—already severely restricted from the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the 1870s onward—almost completely cut off until the 1950s. But the historic passage of the 1924 act came as a result of direct lobbying from US eugenicists.

Eugenics introduced a “harder” concept of a biologically determined,
undeserving poor as a central object of data collection.

The US psychologist and eugenicist Henry Goddard played an especially critical role. He first introduced the term “moron” in medicine to establish a multi-tiered classification for the “feeble-minded”. With fellow eugenicists, he strove to prove low intelligence as the primary indicator of deficient self-control, criminality, alcoholism, laziness, prostitution, and even political dissent. He advocated intelligence testing for all US immigrants to exclude so-called “unfit” arrivals. In 1913 he began an infamous study on immigrant intelligence that included as assessment questions that he delivered in English to respondents: “What is Crisco?”—the US-made cooking product introduced just two years earlier as an alternative to butter, and “Who is Christy Mathewson?”—an American [baseball] player.

Based on responses to such questions, he classified over 80 percent of his respondents as feebleminded—confirming, as Goddard wrote when the study was published in 1917, “that a surprisingly large percentage of immigrants are of relatively low mentality.” Goddard ended the article by proudly sharing the dramatic expansion in deportations of mentally defective populations from Ellis Island—by 350 percent and 570 percent in 1913 and 1914, respectively—that his study had triggered.

Data has also been used in imagining what a future can look like, such as with the Futurama exhibit at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. How did America’s embrace of eugenics lead to a smart city design being envisioned with only non-disabled people in mind?

The Futurama was General Motors’ celebrated “smart city” exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair. It was also a homage to how streamlining principles, channeled into urban planning and design, could yield enthusiasm and awe for eugenic utopias. This was the sublime perfection that could scale when designers and engineers controlled growth and design to ensure perfection—not only over how the future city functioned, but over the eugenic social future it helped evolve. It’s no accident then, that a 1939 Life Magazine article reveled in the unabashedly fit, tanned, heteronormative, ableist masculinity standardized at the center of the streamlined society when it covered the Futurama.

This was a future utopia where the benefits of intelligent planning and evolutionary progress were driven by eradication of problems of excess, uncertainty, and wasteful heterogeneity—not only in technology but in society at scale. And it drew in an unprecedented audience of some forty-four million visitors—the most of any World’s Fair until the time—with such a promise.

Even during the rise of the eugenics movement in North America, data has also been used as a tool of resistance. Can you talk about the pioneering work at Chicago’s Hull House, and how that can serve as a model today? 

Although it’s largely overlooked today, Hull House was broadly recognized at the turn of the century for its leadership in the nineteenth-century urban settlement movement that helped grow more than 400 other settlements in the US, and that played a key role in the passage of key legal reforms from the eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, and the elimination of child labor and workplace safety laws. It was also committed to building research communities and to advancing community-centered data methods.

Intelligence tests for would-be immigrants demanded answers about Crisco—then a brand-new product—and baseball star Christy Mathewson.

Volumes it published, and that were written by women and immigrant authors, like the Hull House Maps & Papers of 1895, not only documented the impacts of sweatshop labor on the largely immigrant families of Chicago’s West Side, but quickly placed them at the forefront of new social science techniques by showcasing the use of innovative data methods from social surveys to color-coded neighborhood wage maps. Such methods later helped establish standard data collection methods for social science professions. Its approach helped to shift the public’s understanding of poverty by emphasizing poverty’s roots in labor exploitation, and political disenfranchisement.

But Hull House’s unique success was importantly grounded in its commitment to developing social coalitions, and its numerous collaborations with labor associations, civic groups, working families and immigrants where it was based in Chicago’s 19th Ward. It’s a reminder of not only of what can be achieved when predatory forms of eugenic data practice are explicitly refused but of the power of alternative data traditions that have long been rooted in justice-based coalition work.

With figures like Elon Musk playing major roles in the upcoming Trump administration, do you think conversations about how data is used have become more important? 

I’ve already seen an uptick in communities working to get new laws passed at the local level to require greater public oversight over the acquisition of new surveillance technologies by police and city authorities. My community in Urbana, Illinois, currently has an ordinance [now tabled] before the city council to this end.

These have been commonsense approaches to maintaining public transparency and protecting civil rights, civil liberties, and due process. But they also emerge from a growing awareness that even in normal conditions, it would not be unthinkable to imagine that data collected on targeted individuals by public agencies with the initial intent to promote safety and health could be repurposed for malicious and discriminatory use.

Dozens of US cities began passing laws to prevent facial recognition data capture after 2019 reports revealed that hundreds of millions of driver’s license photos stored in states’ Department of Motor Vehicles databases were being used by ICE to search for immigrants of interest.

Many universities, including my own, refuse to keep records on such data points as which students have DACA status, to prevent undue risks to students and to the educational environment writ large. And, of course, there’s a long history of US eugenic researchers leveraging data pools they were allowed to collect by using public institutions to help monitor populations to pass varied anti-immigration and pro-forced sterilization laws targeting “the unfit” in the name of public health and safety.

I’m heartened to see conversations already re-energized around the political implications of data collection and to see new coalition-making around what resources we might be able to protectively leverage at the local level. This kind of solidarity-making across diverse constituencies, and drawing from traditions in justice-based coalition-making, is what we’re going to need to become well-practiced at.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Weeks before the Supreme Court’s emergency session that could determine the fate of TikTok in the United States, Donald Trump on Friday issued a legal filing asking the high court to pause the law that would ban the Chinese-owned social media app if it isn’t sold by January 19.

The filing did not comment on the legal arguments of the law, which was signed under President Biden over national security concerns that have mounted in recent years. Instead, it touted Trump as “one of the most powerful, prolific, and influential users of social media in history,” noting his 14.7 million followers on TikTok. The president also echoed TikTok’s arguments that the law illegally restricts the First Amendment.

The filing marks the latest chapter in Trump’s shifting views regarding the popular app after he tried, and failed, to ban it in 2020. After meeting with TikTok’s CEO earlier this month, Trump hinted at possibly intervening before the law’s implementation, saying that he had a “warm spot” for the platform. In March, Trump experienced a similar reversal following a meeting with Jeff Yass, a conservative hedge-fund manager who happens to have a $33 billion stake in TikTok. All of this has come against the backdrop of Trump’s increasing coziness with some of tech’s most prominent billionaires.

D. John Sauer, Trump’s lawyer and nominee for solicitor general, wrote on Friday: “President Trump takes no position on the underlying merits of this dispute. Instead, he respectfully requests that the Court consider staying the Act’s deadline for divestment of January 19, 2025, while it considers the merits of this case, thus permitting President Trump’s incoming Administration the opportunity to pursue a political resolution of the questions at issue in the case.”

Whether the conservative Supreme Court with three Trump appointees will see the president-elect’s views as mere recommendations or as marching orders will be determined soon. As it stands now, the federal ban will go into effect next month—just one day before Trump’s inauguration, when as my colleague Pema Levy reports, an unprecedented era of political corruption will begin.

Weeks before the Supreme Court’s emergency session that could determine the fate of TikTok in the United States, Donald Trump on Friday issued a legal filing asking the high court to pause the law that would ban the Chinese-owned social media app if it isn’t sold by January 19.

The filing did not comment on the legal arguments of the law, which was signed under President Biden over national security concerns that have mounted in recent years. Instead, it touted Trump as “one of the most powerful, prolific, and influential users of social media in history,” noting his 14.7 million followers on TikTok. The president also echoed TikTok’s arguments that the law illegally restricts the First Amendment.

The filing marks the latest chapter in Trump’s shifting views regarding the popular app after he tried, and failed, to ban it in 2020. After meeting with TikTok’s CEO earlier this month, Trump hinted at possibly intervening before the law’s implementation, saying that he had a “warm spot” for the platform. In March, Trump experienced a similar reversal following a meeting with Jeff Yass, a conservative hedge-fund manager who happens to have a $33 billion stake in TikTok. All of this has come against the backdrop of Trump’s increasing coziness with some of tech’s most prominent billionaires.

D. John Sauer, Trump’s lawyer and nominee for solicitor general, wrote on Friday: “President Trump takes no position on the underlying merits of this dispute. Instead, he respectfully requests that the Court consider staying the Act’s deadline for divestment of January 19, 2025, while it considers the merits of this case, thus permitting President Trump’s incoming Administration the opportunity to pursue a political resolution of the questions at issue in the case.”

Whether the conservative Supreme Court with three Trump appointees will see the president-elect’s views as mere recommendations or as marching orders will be determined soon. As it stands now, the federal ban will go into effect next month—just one day before Trump’s inauguration, when as my colleague Pema Levy reports, an unprecedented era of political corruption will begin.

Charlotte, a green sea turtle, was hit by a boat back in 2008. This left it with an affliction colloquially referred to as the “bubble butt,” a kind of floating syndrome that makes it impossible for a turtle to dive. Most sea turtles suffering from issues like this simply die at sea, since the condition leaves them stranded at the surface where they can’t forage, sleep, and avoid predators like sharks. But fate had other plans for Charlotte.

Charlotte didn’t end up as a shark’s lunch and didn’t starve to death floating helplessly in the ocean. Instead, it got rescued shortly after the boat accident and eventually found a home at Mystic Aquarium in Stonington, Connecticut, where it received professional care. That was the first time Charlotte got lucky. The second time came when a collaboration formed: Adia, a company specializing in 3D-printing solutions; Formlabs, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of 3D printers; and New Balance Athletic, a sportswear giant based in Boston. This team chose Charlotte as a technology showcase, which basically turned the turtle into an Oscar Pistorius of the sea—just without the criminal conviction.

Weights and diet

Sea turtles are marine reptiles, which means they don’t have gills like fish—they need air to breathe. The lungs also play a key role in their buoyancy regulation system, which allows them to rest for extended periods of time at the sea floor or float at a precisely chosen depth. A sea turtle can precisely choose the depth at which it achieves neutral buoyancy by inhaling the exactly right volume of air.

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In an interview this week, Eric Trump promised that his father will build a “very large wall” between the incoming first family’s private business interests and any government business. Then, apparently without a hint of irony or shame, he took the stage at a crypto conference—which he attended as a representative of the crypto company his father has deep financial ties to—and spoke passionately about how President Trump would bolster the crypto industry as a whole.

The younger Trump sat for the interview with Reuters while in Abu Dhabi for the pro-crypto conference and said a number of potentially reassuring things about how his family intends to avoid conflicts of interest between the Trump Organization and the Trump presidential administration. But he stopped short of offering ironclad safeguards.

“There’s going to be, obviously, a very large wall between anything having to do with our company and anything to do with government,” Eric Trump told Reuters, promising to take the obligation seriously and pointing to his father’s first term as an example. While many government ethics expert agree that President Trump did not do enough to prevent conflicts the first time around—he refused to divest ownership of the Trump Organization, for example—Trump did refrain from making new deals with foreign investors between 2017 and 2021. Of course, Trump continued to do business with his pre-existing foreign partners, giving them preferred access at his 2017 inauguration and refusing to disclose exactly how much money foreign governments paid to rent hotel rooms at his various properties.

But this week—during the very same interview in which he pledged to take ethics issues seriously—Eric Trump described a far narrower promise: no new Trump Organization deals directly with foreign governments. That notably wouldn’t cover new deals resembling business partnerships the Trumps currently have in countries like India, Indonesia, Turkey, Oman, and, most recently, Saudi Arabia. It’s also not clear whether the promise not to deal directly with foreign governments includes Trump’s ongoing partnerships with LIV Golf, the golf league owned by the Private Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund which, at the behest of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, invests profits from Saudi Arabia’s oil industry.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump-Vance transition team, did not directly respond to a question about foreign deals, but said Donald Trump had already taken steps to remove himself from any conflicts and would be sacrificing even more wealth by serving as president.

“President Trump removed himself from his multi-billion-dollar real estate empire to run for office and forewent his government salary, becoming the first President to actually lose net worth while serving in the White House,” Leavitt responded. “Unlike most politicians, President Trump didn’t get into politics for profit – he’s fighting because he loves the people of this country and wants to make America great again.”

The final plan for how Donald Trump and his progeny will handle these potential conflicts hasn’t been released—a formal arrangement is currently being negotiated between Trump’s attorneys and the Office of Government Ethics. But despite, Eric Trump’s pledge to take the ethics issue seriously, he almost immediately appeared to undermine his own words.

Taking the stage at the same conference, Eric Trump told the crowd that his own family saw value in crypto as a way to circumvent the gatekeepers in the traditional investment world. He touted World Liberty Financial, the crypto company Trump founded earlier this year.

Then, Eric Trump riled up the crowd by asking if they liked current Gary Gensler, the current Securities and Exchange commissioner who is widely viewed as an enemy in the crypto world.

“Gary Gensler waged war against the industry that we all love and everybody knows it,” Eric Trump told attendees. Then he lauded Paul Atkins, a pro-crypto lawyer who Donald Trump has picked to replace Gensler.