Attention to the Unseen

Reuters reports: The two Southern tech entrepreneurs had the two qualities that Donald Trump’s Truth Social startup needed: tech-industry expertise and a politically conservative worldview aligned with the former president, a rare combination in the liberal-leaning industry centered in San Francisco. Josh Adams and Billy Boozer – the company’s chiefs of technology and product development – joined the venture last year and quickly became central players in its bid to build a social-media empire, backed by Trump’s powerful brand, to…

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Yahoo reports: Former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social app is seeing a 93% drop in signups and similarly steep decline in traffic after a rocky rollout last month fraught with technical issues and an extensive waiting list for new signups to actually use the service. After going live on President’s Day, the Twitter-lookalike app saw installs decline by more than 800,000 since its launch week, according to Sensor Tower. Installs on the Apple app store this month have fallen to…

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David French writes: I want to share with you two remarkably similar numbers. At first glance, they should have nothing to do with each other. On closer examination, they’re inextricably linked. The first number is 57. That’s the percentage of Republicans who told Yahoo News/YouGov pollsters that the United States should take Ukraine’s side as it defends itself against Russian invasion (28 percent said the U.S. should back neither, and 5 percent said we should back Russia). By contrast, 76…

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Judd Legum reports: Most people have probably never heard of the website Conservative Brief. It employs just three writers and it does not produce any original reporting. Nearly all of its articles are aggregations of Tweets, YouTube videos, or other media websites, presented with a far-right spin. Recent headlines include “More Damning Evidence Surfaces Against Hillary Clinton in Durham Probe,” and “Trump Gives Love To Mike Lindell, Showers Him With Praise For The Good He Has Done.” Conservative Brief has…

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The New York Times reports: “Open your eyes,” the online post began, claiming, “Many in our govt worship Satan.” That warning, published on a freewheeling online message board in October 2017, was the beginning of the movement now known as QAnon. Paul Furber was its first apostle. The outlandish claim made perfect sense to Mr. Furber, a South African software developer and tech journalist long fascinated with American politics and conspiracy theories, he said in an interview. He still clung…

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Matthew Hindman, Nathaniel Lubin, and Trevor Davis write: If you want to understand why Facebook too often is a cesspool of hate and disinformation, a good place to start is with users such as John, Michelle, and Calvin. John, a caps-lock devotee from upstate New York, calls House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “PIGLOSI,” uses the term negro, and says that the right response to Democrats with whom they disagree is to “SHOOT all of them.” Michelle rails against the “plandemic.” Calvin…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Peter Thiel, one of Facebook’s earliest investors and its longest-serving outside board member, is planning to step down from his position at the social-media giant, parent company Meta Platforms Inc. said Monday. Mr. Thiel intends to focus his efforts on helping Republican candidates supporting the agenda of former President Donald Trump in the 2022 midterm elections, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Thiel, a multibillionaire who has made his fortune as one…

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Ezra Klein writes: In his 2020 book “Politics Is for Power,” Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts, sketched a day in the life of many political obsessives in sharp, if cruel, terms. I refresh my Twitter feed to keep up on the latest political crisis, then toggle over to Facebook to read clickbait news stories, then over to YouTube to see a montage of juicy clips from the latest congressional hearing. I then complain to my family about all…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: For an entire year, Donald Trump has been banned from mainstream social-media outlets. For the tech companies and the former president, there have been benefits. From the business side, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube have all been able to say they took action against one of the most powerful voices on their platforms—after years of criticism that they failed to aggressively apply their rules to their highest-profile users. Across the platforms, Mr. Trump had amassed…

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