Fact Twitter Quotes

They're called 'facts', and my role is to amplify those, not cheerlead. And I don't care at all what you think of my motives.

Grab the work when it comes, my man. Your competition is now a fourteen-year-old in pajamas with the username Truth-ninja-12 who believes fact-checking a story is reading his subject’s Twitter feed. Be afraid.

I know it's a really hard concept to process, but the fact that Govt accuses someone of being a Terrorist doesn't mean they are.

Always beware of the fact, that the only thing hindering an all out revolution is your fear of losing the scraps they throw at you.--Twitter post, July 29, 2012

As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld. The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience. The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches. Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.” The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.

How do god fit him ass in them jeans when he is, in fact, Everywhere

the biggest bubble that I participate in is Conservative Facebook. It's a world where whatever Trump says is gospel, any criticism is an obvious lie and all other perspectives are Marxist. All absolute positions with no room for discussion with memes used as a foundation of fact (9/11/2020 on Twitter)

I used the word “genitals” too much in this chapter so I went on Twitter to ask what a gender-neutral word for junk was and I got three hundred responses in ten minutes without a single person’s questioning why I was asking. A few of my favorites that I didn’t get to share earlier: “niblets,” “nethers,” “naughty bits,” “no-no zone,” “squish mittens,” “Area 51,” “the danger zone,” “the south 40,” “the situation” (with a suggested circular hand motion near said area), “the Department of the Interior,” “crotchal region,” “fandanglies,” “groinulars,” “groinacopia,” “my hoopty,” “my bidness,” “my chamber of secrets,” “my charcuterie,” “front butt,” “privy parts,” “private parts,” “pirate parts” (which I suspect was a typo but now I’m embracing it), and my personal favorite, “the good china.” This is exactly why I love the Internet. That and the fact that it’s where those fancy dictionary robots that yell “cockchafer” at each other live. The Internet is a goddamn wonderland, y’all.

But as those who do hold Trump to the standards of any other person have found out on Twitter and other social media outlets these Trump followers are a nasty fascistic lot. Dowd is lucky he didn’t get death threats like Kurt Eichenwald. Or maybe he did and refuses to acknowledge them. If you voted for Trump and continue to support him and you think you are better than these bigoted virulent trolls, you’re not. Your silence enables them just as it did in the racist campaign that Trump and Bannon ran. In fact, hiding behind a civilized veneer in your support of fascism I consider more dangerous. We’re past describing you as collaborators at this point. That lets you off the hook. You’re Russo-American oligarchical theocratic fascists.

The Internet is a beautiful thing and you sent a tweet an hour after we met that day: I smell cheeseburgers. #CornerBistroIsMakingMeFat And let me tell you, for a moment there, I was concerned. Maybe I wasn’t special. You didn’t even mention me, our conversation. Also: I talk to strangers is a line in your Twitter bio. I talk to strangers. What the fuck is that, Beck? Children are not supposed to talk to strangers but you are an adult. Or is our conversation nothing to you? Am I just another stranger? Is your Twitter bio your subtle way of announcing that you’re an attention whore who has no standards and will give audience to any poor schmuck who says hello? Was I nothing to you? You don’t even mention the guy in the bookstore? Fuck, I thought, maybe I was wrong. Maybe we had nothing. But then I started to explore you and you don’t write about what really matters. You wouldn’t share me with your followers. Your online life is a variety show, so if anything, the fact that you didn’t put me in your stand-up act means that you covet me. Maybe even more than I realize...

Then I spoke with proven shapers I knew—Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Reed Hastings, Muhammad Yunus, Geoffrey Canada, Jack Dorsey (of Twitter), David Kelley (of IDEO), and more. They had all visualized remarkable concepts and built organizations to actualize them, and done that repeatedly and over long periods of time. I asked them to take an hour’s worth of personality assessments to discover their values, abilities, and approaches. While not perfect, these assessments have been invaluable. (In fact, I have been adapting and refining them to help us in our recruiting and management.) The answers these shapers provided to the standardized questions gave me objective and statistically measurable evidence about their similarities and differences. It turns out they have a lot in common. They are all independent thinkers who do not let anything or anyone stand in the way of achieving their audacious goals. They have very strong mental maps of how things should be done, and at the same time a willingness to test those mental maps in the world of reality and change the ways they do things to make them work better. They are extremely resilient, because their need to achieve what they envision is stronger than the pain they experience as they struggle to achieve it. Perhaps most interesting, they have a wider range of vision than most people, either because they have that vision themselves or because they know how to get it from others who can see what they can’t. All are able to see both big pictures and granular details (and levels in between) and synthesize the perspectives they gain at those different levels, whereas most people see just one or the other. They are simultaneously creative, systematic, and practical. They are assertive and open-minded at the same time. Above all, they are passionate about what they are doing, intolerant of people who work for them who aren’t excellent at what they do, and want to have a big, beneficial impact on the world.

Social media is the ultimate soapbox derby...

Are you going to believe your own eyes or the headlines? This is the dilemma of people who live in totalitarian societies. Trusting one’s own perceptions is a lonely lot; believing one’s own eyes and being vocal about it is dangerous. Believing the propaganda—or, rather, accepting the propaganda as one’s reality—carries the promise of a less anxious existence, in harmony with the majority of one’s fellow citizens. The path to peace of mind lies in giving one’s mind over to the regime. Bizarrely, the experience of living in the United States during the Trump presidency reproduces this dilemma. Being an engaged citizen of Trump’s America means living in a constant state of cognitive tension. One cannot put the president and his lies out of one’s mind, because he is the president. Accepting that the president continuously tweets or says things that are not true, are known not to be true, are intended to be heard or read as power lies, and will continue to be broadcast—on Twitter and by the media—after they have been repeatedly disproven means accepting a constant challenge to fact-based reality. In effect, it means that the two realities—Trumpian and fact-based—come to exist side by side, on equal ground. The tension is draining. The need to pay constant attention to the lies is exhausting, and it is compounded by the feeling of helplessness in the face of the ridiculous and repeated lies. Most Americans in the age of Trump are not, like the subjects of a totalitarian regime, subjected to state terror. But even before the coronavirus, they were subjected to constant, sometimes debilitating anxiety. One way out of that anxiety is to relieve the mind of stress by accepting Trumpian reality. Another—and this too is an option often exercised by people living under totalitarianism—is to stop paying attention, disengage, and retreat to one’s private sphere. Both approaches are victories for Trump in his attack on politics.

one consequence of the fact that our popular historical understanding erases roughly 1870 to 1932 from public memory is that many Americans have a distinctly warped view of how resilient american democracy actually is (11/12/2020 on Twitter)

At some point, sisters began to talk about how unseen they have felt. How the media has focused on men, but it has been them - the sisters - who were there. They were there, in overwhelming numbers, just as they were during the civil rights movement. Women - all women, trans women - are roughly 80% of the people who were staring down the terror of Ferguson, saying “we are the caretakers of this community”. Is it women who are out there, often with their children, calling for an end to police violence, saying “we have a right to raise our children without fear”. But it is not women’s courage that is showcased in the media. One sister says “when the police move in we do not run, we stay. And for this, we deserve recognition”. Their words will live with us, will live in us, as Ferguson begins to unfold and as the national attention begins to really focus on what Alicia, Opal and I have started. The first time there’s coverage of Black Lives Matter in a way that is positive is on the Melissa Harris-Perry show. She does not invite us - it isn’t intentional, I’m certain of that. And about a year later she does, but in this early moment, and despite the overwhelming knowledge of the people on the ground who are talking about what Alicia, Opal and I have done, and despite of it being part of the historical record, that it is always women who do the work even as men get the praise. It takes a long time for us to occur to most reporters and the mainstream. Living in patriarchy means that the default inclination is to center men and their voices, not women and their work. The fact seems ever more exacerbated in our day and age, when presence on twitter, when the number of followers one has, can supplant the everyday and heralded work of those who, by virtue of that work, may not have time to tweet constantly or sharpen and hone their personal brand so that it is an easily sellable commodity. Like the women who organized, strategized, marched, cooked, typed up and did the work to ensure the civil rights movement; women whose names go unspoken, unknown, so too that this dynamic unfolds as the nation began to realize that we were a movement. Opal, Alicia and I never wanted or needed to be the center of anything. We were purposeful about decentralizing our role in the work, but neither did we want, nor deserved, to be erased.

Believing that God is not only watching you but has high expectations creates one kind of society. Believing that getting “likes” on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat (or whatever comes next) undoubtedly creates another kind. The average iPhone user unlocks his or her phone at least eighty times per day, and that number is rising every year. 8 And yet, despite the fact each of us has access to more information in our pockets than any scholar in the world had twenty years ago, we don’t use it. We drown in information but we starve for knowledge.

All was thus well and tranquil for the rulers of Bangistan, a resolute non-member of any collective organization of men and peoples, with no internal or external opposition to speak of. It could indeed have remained that way for the rest of time. Then the Akims had made their fatal move. They had joined Twitter

Here's the problem. Here's what news used to be: information. That's what news is. Now, every article in the New York Times starts, no matter what it is, it starts with, "On a rocky road in Afghanistan..." It's like, three paragraphs 'til you get to "a bomb blew up something in Afghanistan." The bomb is the news, the beginning is the writing. Facts are what's important in news, but no one is interested in facts anymore. People are interested--and this I find astonishing--they're interested in other people's opinions. So, unbiased news, I don't think we'll have anymore, because no one seems to know what news is. They turn on the news and they watch people give their opinions. That's what they watch on TV, that's what they see on the Internet, that's what they participate in. Here's how I feel when someone on CNN says, "Here's our Twitter number whatever-you-call-it...we want to know what you think." And I think, "Really? I don't.

Faced with a totally controlled, monitored and owned online world, in which every utterance is immediately scanned and filed away, many have yet to make the connection that the best solution may not be running Tor and eighteen proxies, but writing things down on paper and talking face-to-face. Remember the mail? Remember conversations? Yeah, those still exist. Want to shake somebody out of their online trance? Send them a letter. Send them art. Want to record something that will last longer than a few seconds on Facebook or Twitter? Write a book. The physical world didn’t go anywhere. In fact, physical artifacts and experiences have only grown in totemic power the more we’ve pushed them away.

But Trump responded to the coronavirus with the same belligerent dishonesty that characterized his treatment of Mueller and impeachment. In the critical early days of the pandemic, when it might have been contained, he behaved with characteristic self-obsession, preferring to hound his enemies on Twitter rather than to learn the facts about the virus and protect the American people.

To understand what ended up happening in the 2016 presidential election, you have to understand this: When protests toppled the Ukrainian government, Putin interpreted that as the United States coming into Russia, akin to an act of war; when he launched his counterattack—annexing Crimea, creeping into eastern Ukraine—he weaponized information and showed a willingness to lie, using traditional media like television, and new media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to spread disinformation into open, Western societies like a virus. Eventually, the Russians would come into America, as they believed we’d gone into Ukraine. They took advantage of the fact that we were worn down by decades of political polarization and the balkanization of our media. America’s antibodies to the sickness of Russian disinformation were weak, if they were there at all.

With 21 million people following her on Facebook and 18 million on Twitter, pop singer Ariana Grande can’t personally chat with each of her loves, as she affectionately calls her fans. So she and others are spreading their messages through new-style social networks, via mobile apps that are more associated with private, intimate conversation, hoping that marketing in a cozier digital setting adds a breath of warmth and a dash of personality. It’s the Internet’s equivalent of mailing postcards rather than plastering a billboard. Grande could have shared on Twitter that her most embarrassing moment on stage was losing a shoe. The 21-year-old instead revealed the fact during a half-hour live text chat on Line, an app built for close friends to exchange instant messages. It’s expensive to advertise on Facebook and Twitter, and the volume of information being posted creates uncertainty over what people actually notice. Chat apps including Line, Kik, Snapchat, WeChat and Viber place marketing messages front and center. Most-used apps The apps threaten to siphon advertising dollars from the social media leaders, which are already starting to see chat apps overtake them as the most-used apps on smartphones, according to Forrester Research. Chat apps “demand attention,” said Rebecca Lieb, an analyst at consulting firm Altimeter Group.

If I didn't know what I know, I would be happy to extend the same benefit of the doubt to Twitter and Facebook. But when you look around at the employees who work at these big tech platforms or you consider the fact that just about everyone who's had problems with censorship has been conservative, it becomes clear that this is no accident or technological hiccup. It is a deliberate attempt by hipster liberals in Silicon Valley to shut down the voices that hardworking Americans want to hear.

By the way, the quote at the beginning of this section, “Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation,” was made by someone named Tom Williamson who randomly strings together words from Deepak Chopra’s Twitter stream. Two of today’s random fictional Chopra quotes at Williamson’s site (wisdomofchopra.com) are “A formless void is inside the barrier of facts” and “Intuition reflects your own molecules.” The site is discussed in an irresistibly interesting paper by psychologist Gordon Pennycook, entitled “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit.

Even without a profile, searching your name on twitter is extremely common, especially if you're a celebrity, as I am and will be until the day I die. I shamefully admit that after quitting twitter, I used to search 'James Acaster' numerous times throughout the day. Don't get me wrong, the very act of searching 'James Acaster' isn't anything to be ashamed of. Most people search those very words during their lifetime. In fact, it's one of the most popular web searches out there. It only adopts a tinge of sadness when the person searching 'James Acaster' is James Acaster himself and as James Acaster, that's the position I found myself in.

Every year or so I like to take a step back and look at a few key advertising, marketing, and media facts just to gauge how far removed from reality we advertising experts have gotten. These data represent the latest numbers I could find. I have listed the sources below. So here we go -- 10 facts, direct from the real world: E-commerce in 2014 accounted for 6.5 percent of total retail sales. 96% of video viewing is currently done on a television. 4% is done on a web device. In Europe and the US, people would not care if 92% of brands disappeared. The rate of engagement among a brand's fans with a Facebook post is 7 in 10,000. For Twitter it is 3 in 10,000. Fewer than one standard banner ad in a thousand is clicked on. Over half the display ads paid for by marketers are unviewable. Less than 1% of retail buying is done on a mobile device. Only 44% of traffic on the web is human. One bot-net can generate 1 billion fraudulent digital ad impressions a day. Half of all U.S online advertising - $10 billion a year - may be lost to fraud. As regular readers know, one of our favorite sayings around The Ad Contrarian Social Club is a quote from Noble Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who wonderfully declared that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I think these facts do a pretty good job of vindicating Feynman.

The channel does not pay lip service to fairness. It does not employ any neutral commentators. On the contrary, it celebrates its own ability to manipulate reality. At one point in 2018, the station showed a clip from a press conference; the then leader of the opposition party, Grzegorz Schetyna, was asked what his party achieved during its eight years in government, from 2007 to 2015. The clip shows Schetyna pausing and frowning; the video slows down and then ends. It’s as if he had nothing to say. In reality, Schetyna spoke for several minutes about the mass construction of roads, investments in the countryside, and advances in foreign policy. But this manipulated clip—one example of many—was deemed such a success that for several days, it remained pinned to the top of Telewizja Polska’s Twitter feed. Under Law and Justice, state television doesn’t just produce regime propaganda; it draws attention to the fact that it is doing so. It doesn’t just twist and contort information, it glories in deceit.

Jack Dorsey is best known as the creator of Twitter and as the founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. His Essentialist approach to management is a relatively rare one. At a dinner I attended recently where he spoke, he said he thinks of the role of CEO as being the chief editor of the company. At another event at Stanford University he explained further: “By editorial I mean there are a thousand things we could be doing. But there [are] only one or two that are important. And all of these ideas … and inputs from engineers, support people, designers are going to constantly flood what we should be doing…. As an editor I am constantly taking these inputs and deciding the one, or intersection of a few, that make sense for what we are doing.”3 An editor is not merely someone who says no to things. A three-year-old can do that. Nor does an editor simply eliminate; in fact, in a way, an editor actually adds. What I mean is that a good editor is someone who uses deliberate subtraction to actually add life to the ideas, setting, plot, and characters.

The unbelievable speed of this process has been principally caused by the fact that a handful of businesses in Silicon Valley (notably Google, Twitter and Facebook) now have the power not just to direct what most people in the world know, think and say, but have a business model which has accurately been described as relying on finding ‘customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behaviour’.2 Yet although we are being aggravated by a tech world which is running faster than our legs are able to carry us to keep up with it, these wars are not being fought aimlessly. They are consistently being fought in a particular direction. And that direction has a purpose that is vast. The purpose – unknowing in some people, deliberate in others – is to embed a new metaphysics into our societies: a new religion, if you will. Although the foundations had been laid for several decades, it is only since the financial crash of 2008 that there has been a march into the mainstream of ideas that were previously known solely on the obscurest fringes of academia. The attractions of this new set of beliefs are obvious enough. It is not clear why a generation which can’t accumulate capital should have any great love of capitalism. And it isn’t hard to work out why a generation who believe they may never own a home could be attracted to an ideological world view which promises to sort out every inequity not just in their own lives but every inequity on earth. The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’, ‘identity group politics’ and ‘intersectionalism’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology. To

Isn’t this the weekend of Xander Eckhart’s party?” “Yes.” Jordan held her breath in a silent plea. Don’t ask if I’m bringing anyone. Don’t ask if I’m bringing anyone. “So are you bringing anyone?” Melinda asked. Foiled. Having realized there was a distinct possibility the subject would come up, Jordan had spent some time running through potential answers to this very question. She had decided that being casual was the best approach. “Oh, there’s this guy I met a few days ago, and I was thinking about asking him.” She shrugged. “Or maybe I’ll just go by myself, who knows.” Melinda put down her forkful of gnocchi, zoning in on this like a heat-seeking missile to its target. “What guy you met a few days ago? And why is this the first we’re hearing of him?” “Because I just met him a few days ago.” Corinne rubbed her hands together, eager for the details. “So? Tell us. How’d you meet him?” “What does he do?” Melinda asked. “Nice, Melinda. You’re so shallow.” Corinne turned back to Jordan. “Is he hot?” Of course, Jordan had known there would be questions. The three of them had been friends since college and still saw each other regularly despite busy schedules, and this was what they did. Before Corinne had gotten married, they talked about her now-husband, Charles. The same was true of Melinda and her soon-to-be-fiancé, Pete. So Jordan knew that she, in turn, was expected to give up the goods in similar circumstances. But she also knew that she really didn’t want to lie to her friends. With that in mind, she’d come up with a backup plan in the event the conversation went this way. Having no choice, she resorted to the strategy she had used in sticky situations ever since she was five years old, when she’d set her Western Barbie’s hair on fire while trying to give her a suntan on the family-room lamp. Blame it on Kyle. I’d like to thank the Academy . . . “Sure, I’ll tell you all about this new guy. We met the other day and he’s . . . um . . .” She paused, then ran her hands through her hair and exhaled dramatically. “Sorry. Do you mind if we talk about this later? After seeing Kyle today with the bruise on his face, I feel guilty rattling on about Xander’s party. Like I’m not taking my brother’s incarceration seriously enough.” She bit her lip, feeling guilty about the lie. So sorry, girls. But this has to stay my secret for now. Her diversion worked like a charm. Perhaps one of the few benefits of having a convicted felon of a brother known as the Twitter Terrorist was that she would never lack for non sequiturs in extracting herself from unwanted conversation. Corinne reached out and squeezed her hand. “No one has stood by Kyle’s side more than you, Jordan. But we understand. We can talk about this some other time. And try not to worry—Kyle can handle himself. He’s a big boy.” “Oh, he definitely is that,” Melinda said with a gleam in her eye. Jordan smiled. “Thanks, Corinne.” She turned to Melinda, thoroughly skeeved out. “And, eww—Kyle?” Melinda shrugged matter-of-factly. “To you, he’s your brother. But to the rest of the female population, he has a certain appeal. I’ll leave it at that.” “He used to fart in our Mr. Turtle pool and call it a ‘Jacuzzi.’ How’s that for appeal?” “Ah . . . the lifestyles of the rich and famous,” Corinne said with a grin. “And on that note, my secret fantasies about Kyle Rhodes now thoroughly destroyed, I move that we put a temporary hold on any further discussions related to the less fair of the sexes,” Melinda said. “I second that,” Jordan said, and the three women clinked their glasses in agreement

One current trend is to offer “free registration” to get access to resources rather than “subscribing” to emails. This is taking advantage of the fact that most web users are used to registering for services they find valuable. The more your opt-in process looks like something they’ve done a dozen times before, like signing up for Facebook or Twitter or for a free account with an online app or webmail service, then the more natural it will seem to do so with you too. Using this type of registration approach you’d put your lead magnet and other free resources into a private membership site that subscribers get access to by signing up. This feeling of exclusive access and similarity with other online services may well result in increased sign up rates. Right now it’s too early to tell, but a number of big online marketers like Copyblogger are going down this route.

The nautical expression that “Rats leave a sinking ship” is an observed truth. Not only will they attempt to save themselves but they will also assist in saving others. In fact studies show that they will be more apt to help their fellow rats if they had experienced a previous dunking themselves. Although detested by human’s rats are in fact very compassionate social animals that crave company. Research has proven that they will help another rat in distress before searching for food even though they may be hungry. Although not proven it has been observed that they have an innate knowledge of impending disaster and if they are seen abandoning ship, it just might be wise to follow. This is born out in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act I, Scene II where he wrote: “In few, they hurried us aboard a bark, bore us some leagues to the sea; where they prepared a rotten carcass of a boat, not rigged, nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats instinctively had to quit it.” Of course this nautical concept is fortunately not frequently witnessed, however in a metaphorical sense it is now being witnessed politically. The New York Times's Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns have written articles concerning the tumult behind the scenes in the world of Donald Trump. “In private, Mr. Trump's mood is often sullen and erratic, his associates say. He veers from barking at members of his staff to grumbling about how he was better off following his own instincts…” Many others claim that he is not up to the task and could actually be a danger to our country if not the World. On Twitter, Bill Kristol a conservative and the Editor at large of the Weekly Standard says that the New York Times story suggest suggests prominent members of Trump's team are already beginning their recriminations in anticipation of a Republican defeat in November. Although I usually save my political remarks for my personal Facebook page, the obvious cannot be ignored and it has been universally apparent that our “Ship of State” has been heading into uncharted waters, rife with dangers herebefore unknown!

So I announced my decision to endorse Hillary Clinton, while making it clear I was only doing it for my personal safety. People laughed. They assumed I was joking. But I stuck to my endorsement, mentioning it often, and always appending “for my safety” to the end as an explanation. I wasn’t joking. I was quite serious about trying to lower my risk. The number of people on Twitter accusing me of being Goebbels slowed to a trickle almost immediately.

A common media trope imagines connectivity devices functioning as mere “alienating screens.” In fact, especially in protests, they act as “inte- grating screens” because many people use their devices to connect with other people, not hide from them.

Based on the findings of a recent qualitative survey carried out in Switzerland, in fact, most of us have up to ten discreet interdependent social identities—identities, the study concludes, which are often in conflict.16 Let’s imagine a middle-aged bank teller living in Pensacola, Florida. He is a father, a son and a husband. He is a Floridian. He is a bank employee. He is also a bicyclist and a recreational runner, and at night, drinking with his friends, he is “the funny one.” He is also a vegetarian, an amateur guitarist, and on weekends he helps coach soccer at his daughter’s high school. Then there are his online identities, including his Facebook, Twitter and Instagram selves. Most surprising is that the man’s ethical mind-set, honesty, sociability and even level of social engagement changes from personality to personality. Imagine that in his professional role, for example, he may be primed to dissembling, or outright deceit, while simultaneously, as a dad, he finds dishonesty repellent.

A filmmaker made a short documentary about this happy-go-lucky teenager on death row, called My Last Days. It showed Zach living happily, hanging out with his family, and playing music. Everybody loved Zach. When you see the footage, you can’t help but like him. As you watch him laugh and love and sing, you catch yourself forgetting: this kid is about to die. Zach’s family tells the camera how knowing he would die has helped them realize what matters in life and to find true meaning. “It’s really simple, actually,” Zach says. “Just try and make people happy.” As the 22-minute film closes, Zach looks into the camera, smiling, and says, “I want to be remembered as the kid who went down fighting, and didn’t really lose.” Not long after he said those words, Zach passed away. When Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley of Upworthy saw the film, they thought, This is a story that needs to be heard. Now just over a year old, Upworthy has become quite popular. In fact, it recently hit 30 million monthly visitors, making it, according to the Business Insider, the fastest-growing media company in history.* (Seven-year-old BuzzFeed was serving 50 million monthly visitors at the time.) The Zach Sobiech story illustrates how Upworthy used rapid feedback to do it: According to Upworthy’s calculations, My Last Days had the potential to reach a lot of people. But so far, few had seen it. The filmmaker had posted the documentary under the headline, “My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech.” Though descriptive, it was suboptimal packaging. In the ADD world of Facebook and Twitter, it’s no surprise that few people clicked. Upworthy reposted the video with a new title: “We Lost This Kid 80 Years Too Early. I’m Glad He Went Out with a Bang,” and shared it with a small number of its subscribers, then waited to see who clicked.

The fact that establishment scientists say something doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It only means that science has no effective way to measure it.

Ticker tape fever. During the run-up to the 1929 crash on Wall Street, many people had become addicted to playing the stock market, and this addiction had a physical component—the sound of the ticker tape that electronically registered each change in a stock’s price. Hearing that clicking noise indicated something was happening, somebody was trading and making a fortune. Many felt drawn to the sound itself, which felt like the heartbeat of Wall Street. We no longer have the ticker tape. Instead many of us have become addicted to the minute-by-minute news cycle, to “what’s trending,” to the Twitter feed, which is often accompanied by a ping that has its own narcotic effects. We feel like we are connected to the very flow of life itself, to events as they change in real time, and to other people who are following the same instant reports. This need to know instantly has a built-in momentum. Once we expect to have some bit of news quickly, we can never go back to the slower pace of just a year ago. In fact, we feel the need for more information more quickly. Such impatience tends to spill over into other aspects of life—driving, reading a book, following a film. Our attention span decreases, as well as our tolerance for any obstacles in our path.

The third conclusion I’ve made is: if governments are collaborating, so must we. When it comes to expression, one thing remains certain: no one will moderate the speech of governments or their officials. Sure, Twitter will fact-check Trump, and Facebook will boot members of foreign governments (and maybe someday even the president of the United States), but in the grand scheme of things, we might be watching the watchers, but no citizen has the power to silence them.

How exactly does social selling work? For the purposes of prospecting for new business, social selling involves contacting prospective customers on social media platforms, most commonly LinkedIn and Twitter. Here are some pointers: Cultivate a relationship: Social selling is not for the quick wins, generally speaking. You can start simply by following a prospect, engaging with their content, and then inviting them to connect. You want to draw their attention, but not overwhelm them. Don’t pitch right away: In the early days of social selling, it was possible to immediately pitch a prospect online with some success. That time has passed, so don’t assume that when someone accepts your connection request it means they want to buy from you. Be someone worth talking to: Your prospects will see your public profile, so be sure to demonstrate your expertise in your profile and content. If you’re still using your LinkedIn account as a resume, you’re doing it wrong. Move from online to offline: The goal of social selling is not to run through the entire sale over social media. As with all initial contacting, your goal is to set up a real-time conversation over the phone or in person. While nearly all great salespeople communicate with prospects across all three of these channels, it’s best to become confident with one before adding another. Cold calling, while unattractive to many, will yield the greatest number of opportunities to learn which offers and messaging resonate with our prospects. The skill of adapting to prospects in live conversation is invaluable throughout the sales process. In fact, it’s one of the most important skills to master in order to advance your sales career.

The fact that my 75 year-old Asian mom has two shots of the Moderna vaccine in her arm makes me want to cry. The fact that my 75 year-old Asian mom no longer feels safe walking down the street by herself also makes me want to cry. #America (3/31/2021 on Twitter)

Did you know that if you’re a middle-aged woman, you have only a small window of opportunity between the beginning of perimenopause and the start of menopause to start estrogen replacement therapy to protect not only your brain but also your bones and cardiovascular system? I did not, until I dug into the science, because as a woman who was diagnosed with a stage 0 breast lump, I was scared off like so many of us from the results of the Women’s Health Initiative, which got blasted out all over the news and initially showed a link between estrogen replacement therapy and breast cancer, but guess what? That study had so many flaws, its findings are little more than useless and possibly harmful. Worse, women like me without uteri show a decrease in breast cancer with estrogen replacement therapy. But this information never made it either into the headlines or into our gynecologists’ offices. I had to find it in scientific publications such as The Lancet online. In fact, get this: Our medical system barely trains gynecologists in menopausal medicine. A recent study found that only 20 percent of ob-gyn residency programs in the U.S. provide any menopause training. Yes, any. Which means that 80 percent of all gynecological residents in school today are getting no training whatsoever in post-reproductive women’s health. These are people whose job it is to know everything going on in our ladyparts, but they have not been taught the basic tenets of how to care for either us or our plumbing after we stop menstruating. And by “us” I mean 30 percent of all women alive on earth at any given moment. Half of my middle-aged female friends deal with chronic urinary tract infections. Oh, well, we think, throwing up our hands in defeat and consuming far too many antibiotics than are rational or safe or even good for the future safety of humanity. It took Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist in Washington, D.C., reaching out to me over Twitter to explain that UTIs in menopausal women do not have to be recurrent. They can be mitigated with, yes, vaginal estrogen. Not once was I ever

Tesla > NYT. Elon Musk used the instrumental record of a Tesla drive to knock down an NYT story. The New York Times Company claimed the car had run out of charge, but his dataset showed they had purposefully driven it around to make this happen, lying about their driving history. His numbers overturned their letters. Timestamp > Macron, NYT. Twitter posters used a photo’s timestamp to disprove a purported photo of the Brazilian fires that was tweeted by Emmanuel Macron and printed uncritically by NYT. The photo was shown via reverse image search to be taken by a photographer who had died in 2003, so it was more than a decade old. This was a big deal because The Atlantic was literally calling for war with Brazil over these (fake) photos. Provable patent priority. A Chinese court used an on-chain timestamp to establish priority in a patent suit. One company proved that it could not have infringed the patent of the other, because it had filed “on chain” before the other company had filed. In the first and second examples, the employees of the New York Times Company simply misrepresented the facts as they are wont to do, circulating assertions that were politically useful against two of their perennial opponents: the tech founder and the foreign conservative. Whether these misrepresentations were made intentionally or out of “too good to check” carelessness, they were both attempts to exercise political power that ran into the brick wall of technological truth. In the third example, the Chinese political system delegated the job of finding out what was true to the blockchain. In all three cases, technology provided a more robust means of determining what was true than the previous gold standards — whether that be the “paper of record” or the party-state. It decentralized the determination of truth away from the centralized establishment.

How do companies, producing little more than bits of code displayed on a screen, seemingly control users’ minds?” Nir Eyal, a prominent Valley product consultant, asked in his 2014 book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. “Our actions have been engineered,” he explained. Services like Twitter and YouTube “habitually alter our everyday behavior, just as their designers intended.” One of Eyal’s favorite models is the slot machine. It is designed to answer your every action with visual, auditory, and tactile feedback. A ping when you insert a coin. A ka-chunk when you pull the lever. A flash of colored light when you release it. This is known as Pavlovian conditioning, named after the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who rang a bell each time he fed his dog, until, eventually, the bell alone sent his dog’s stomach churning and saliva glands pulsing, as if it could no longer differentiate the chiming of a bell from the physical sensation of eating. Slot machines work the same way, training your mind to conflate the thrill of winning with its mechanical clangs and buzzes. The act of pulling the lever, once meaningless, becomes pleasurable in itself. The reason is a neurological chemical called dopamine, the same one Parker had referenced at the media conference. Your brain releases small amounts of it when you fulfill some basic need, whether biological (hunger, sex) or social (affection, validation). Dopamine creates a positive association with whatever behaviors prompted its release, training you to repeat them. But when that dopamine reward system gets hijacked, it can compel you to repeat self-destructive behaviors. To place one more bet, binge on alcohol—or spend hours on apps even when they make you unhappy. Dopamine is social media’s accomplice inside your brain. It’s why your smartphone looks and feels like a slot machine, pulsing with colorful notification badges, whoosh sounds, and gentle vibrations. Those stimuli are neurologically meaningless on their own. But your phone pairs them with activities, like texting a friend or looking at photos, that are naturally rewarding. Social apps hijack a compulsion—a need to connect—that can be even more powerful than hunger or greed. Eyal describes a hypothetical woman, Barbra, who logs on to Facebook to see a photo uploaded by a family member. As she clicks through more photos or comments in response, her brain conflates feeling connected to people she loves with the bleeps and flashes of Facebook’s interface. “Over time,” Eyal writes, “Barbra begins to associate Facebook with her need for social connection.” She learns to serve that need with a behavior—using Facebook—that in fact will rarely fulfill it.

What do you want that couldn’t wait until the morning?” Arik asked as he led the way inside. The Pride’s king headed to the bar he’d had installed in the corner of his living room. He pulled a bottle of whiskey from a shelf. He poured them each a generous dollop. “I want permission to go after the Northern Lakes Pack.” “Am I going to regret asking why?” “They’re threatening Arabella.” “Who’s that?” “Jeoff’s sister.” Arik tossed back the fiery liquid before asking with a frown, “Why the fuck would I let you start a war over Jeoff’s sister?” “Because those pricks attacked us on home turf.” A snort escape Arik. “Ah yes, that puny attempt at a kidnapping. You caused quite a stir with your antics. Part of your stunt even made it onto YouTube before we could squash it. I had to have our PR department spin a Twitter thread on how it was part of a scene being taped for a movie.” “You can’t blame me for that. I had to stop them.” He did, but what he didn’t tell Arik was he’d never once thought of the repercussions of his actions. He saw Arabella in danger and had to go to her rescue. Bystanders and witnesses be damned. “I can see why you’d feel like you had to act. I mean, they made you look silly by catching you off guard like that, but, next time, could you be a little more discreet?” “No.” Why lie? The reply took his leader aback. “What do you mean no? Discretion is a fact of life. One girl isn’t worth drawing undue attention to ourselves.” “One girl might not be, but my mate is.” Want to stop conversation dead? Drop a bombshell. “Close your mouth, Arik, before you catch flies.” Only Arik’s mate could hope to tease him like that and get away with it. Dressed in yoga pants and a sweatshirt, Kira emerged from the bedroom and perched on a barstool. “Did you hear what he said?” a still astonished Arik demanded. “Yes. He’s fallen victim to the love bug. I think it’s cute.” “I would have said impossible,” Arik muttered. “You and me both, old friend. But, the fact of the matter is, I’m like ninety-nine percent sure that Arabella is supposed to be mine.” “And the one percent that isn’t sure?” “Is going to get eaten by my lion.

This warning applies well beyond books to the majority of online platforms where we spend our time. They are “public” in a limited sense of the word: they are open spaces, but they are also private ones, where the rights Americans claim to hold dear—namely, protections for free speech and privacy—do not apply. When the CEO of Twitter tells users to “think of Twitter as a global town square,” he elides the fact that we don’t have to click “agree” on a Terms of Service, a binding contract, before entering an urban plaza.

It’s easy to sloganize lazily, to try to reduce complex arguments to something that fits on the side of a bus or sounds good on Twitter, but in so doing you usually lose nuance and depth. In fact, it’s worse than that: the temptation to sloganize can result in arguments that are not merely wrong but are utterly bizarre and have some terrible consequences when you turn them around.

Little known Max fact: I invented the word TWIRGIN (a Twitter virgin).

Yet lost in the debate about America’s true intentions in the Middle East was the fact that large majorities in every Muslim-majority state surveyed told pollsters they wanted to see their countries move toward greater democracy. A wave of democratic fervor across the Middle East created a renewed sense of hope for scores of people who had spent their lives in autocratic societies but who now looked forward to the possibility of having a say, even if in the most limited of ways, in their own political destinies. The Green Movement in Iran lit the fuse, employing new social media technologies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to break the government’s monopoly over the media and to demonstrate to the world their aspiration for freedom and liberty.

A WHILE BACK, a game designer friend of mine named Phil Fish made a plea on Twitter, “Hey bloggers, no more ‘blank rebuilt in Minecraft’ posts, please. We get it. You can make things in Minecraft. Thanks.” Fish was referring to the popular online game Minecraft, in which players hunt for resources that are used to construct models and apparatuses with the game’s characteristic, cubical visual style. The Internet being what it is, given such tools extreme fans do insane things, like elaborately reconstructing the city King’s Landing from Game of Thrones using nothing but this square matter mined from Minecraft. Seeing Fish’s tweet, an enterprising ironoiac recreated the form of the embedded tweet itself inside Minecraft, a fact that the tech blog VentureBeat then dutifully blogged about, thus completing not one but two cycles of an ironoia self-treatment the environmental philosopher Timothy Morton names “anything you can do I can do meta.”14 In a futile attempt to prevent further metastasis, the blogger concluded his post with the line, “Yes, we’re fully aware of the irony of this post.”15 But rather than satisfying anyone, such a provocation only further irritated the ironoiac itch. Fish tweeted a link to the blog post covering the Minecraft construction of a model of Fish’s tweet protesting blog posts about Minecraft constructions, which one of his followers one-upped by observing the fact that Fish had in fact “tweeted about somebody blogging about somebody making [his] tweet about Minecraft in Minecraft.” Another chimed in, “How long ’til someone recreates that blog post in Minecraft?” Each step represents an attempt to overcome the absurdity of the last by fixing it in a new voice, even though each ironic gesture was evanescent, quickly replaced by yet another layer of buffer from yet another desperate ironoiac. Why do we do it, then? Today, satisfaction is more elusive than ever. In part, the precarity of life after the 2008 global financial collapse and the Great Recession that followed it (and whose effects still linger) makes every transaction with the world feel suspect and risky. We fear that things might turn on us, because we have good evidence that they can, and do. But

When Jayne Juvan, a partner at the law firm Roetzel & Andress in Cleveland, Ohio, started using social media, very, very few lawyers used these tools. Because her profession is so conservative, many of the attorneys she interacted with didn't see the opportunity. After only a few months of blogging, Crain's Cleveland Business interviewed Juvan on the use of social media by lawyers. In her first year of practice, she landed a client via social media. That was a game changer, because her colleagues began to see her as an owner, not just an employee. When she started to land wins, it became harder to navigate her profession because the legal industry was quite competitive. But, as she shares, "I didn't back off, because I now knew how powerful social media was." Good thing. When she was a third- and fourth-year associate, in 2007 to 2008, the economy collapsed. Her class experienced deep layoffs across the industry, which she sidestepped, in part because of her social media efforts. Most of the accolades she has received can be traced to social media. When she was considered for promotion to partner, the fact that she was being followed by prominent professionals on Twitter bolstered her case in a major way, as the CEO saw the potential of these relationships. According to Catalyst, only 20 percent of partners in law firms are women, and only 16 percent of them have $500,000 worth of business or more.6 Jayne Juvan made partner at age thirty-two, and at thirty-four, her billing reports placed her in the small percentage of women with $500,000-plus of business. Once Juvan had acquired the basic competencies involved in practicing law, social media became her distinctive strength, propelling her into the partnership ranks at her law firm.

Then I asked him the question that would change my life. “Mr. Trump,” I said, “one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter. However, that is not without its downsides. In particular, when it comes to women. You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals.’” “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” he quipped. The crowd chuckled at his Rosie O’Donnell comment. I passed no judgment on the audience, but I was not going to join them in laughing. “For the record,” I said, “it was well beyond Rosie O’Donnell.” Trump knew it too. “I’m sure it was,” he said. We had fact-checked every word of that question. Rosie had, no question, been vicious toward Trump too, and if it had only been her, I would not have asked that question. But what I’d seen in my research binder was that he’d made a habit of attacking women regularly with these sorts of terms—mocking their looks and sexualizing them. The women he’d belittled in the terms I used in my question included, but were not limited to, Arianna Huffington, Bette Midler, New York Times columnist Gail Collins, and a lawyer requesting a prearranged break to pump breast milk for her baby (“disgusting”). There were many, many others. “Your Twitter account,” I continued, “has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who is likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the ‘war on women’?” First Trump said that we’d gotten too politically correct in this country. And then this: “What I say is what I say. And honestly, Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.” He looked angry, I thought. After all my planning for that moment, I was relieved that he hadn’t attacked me personally in his response. Still, I felt his anger, and understood him perfectly. He was making a veiled but very clear threat. I’d known Trump for several years by this point. We’d had a mostly good—but also complicated—relationship. Seared into my mind was a threat he’d made to me by phone just four days earlier to “unleash” what he called his “beautiful Twitter account” on me. I expected I would find out what he meant by that soon, and indeed I would.

Many toxic people, ranging from some of the most powerful people in the world down to your difficult relative, will find themselves locked into Twitter wars or Facebook spats because they could not filter their negative words, and they will sometimes find themselves having to issue a mea culpa after the fact.

I could see reminders of why I had cast aside my phone in the first place. I sat in Café Heaven, a lovely little place in the West End of Provincetown, and ate an eggs Benedict. Next to me there were two men in, I guess, their mid-twenties. I shamelessly eavesdropped on their conversation while pretending to read David Copperfield. It was clear they had met on an app, and this was the first time they had seen each other in person. Something about their conversation seemed odd to me, and I couldn’t place it at first. Then I realized they weren’t, in fact, having a conversation at all. What would happen is the first one, who was blond, would talk about himself for ten minutes or so. Then the second one, who was dark-haired, would talk about himself for ten minutes. And they alternated in this way, interrupting each other. I sat next to them for two hours, and at no point did either of them ask the other person a question. At one point, the dark-haired man mentioned that his brother had died a month before. The blond didn’t even offer a cursory “I’m so sorry to hear that”; he simply went back to talking about himself. I realized that if they had met up simply to read out their own Facebook status updates to each other in turn, there would have been absolutely no difference. I felt like everywhere I went, I was surrounded by people who were broadcasting but not receiving. Narcissism, it occurred to me, is a corruption of attention—it’s where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego. I don’t say this with any sense of superiority. I am embarrassed to describe what I realized in that week that I missed most about the web. Every day in my normal life—sometimes several times a day—I would look at Twitter and Instagram to see how many followers I had. I didn’t look at the feed, the news, the buzz—just my own stats. If the figure had gone up, I felt glad—like a money-obsessed miser checking the state of his personal stocks and finding he was slightly richer than yesterday. It was as if I was saying to myself, See? More people are following you. You matter. I didn’t miss the content of what they said. I just missed the raw numbers, and the sense that they were growing.

The JSON returned by Twitter’s API includes tweet IDs twice, once as a JSON number and once as a decimal string, to work around the fact that the numbers are not correctly parsed by JavaScript applications

Vox and other outlets have been quick to identify these experiences as examples of what technology and social-media scholar danah boyd would call “context collapse.” A 2011 study that boyd conducted with Alice E. Marwick found that Twitter users who had built the most successful personal brands did so by recognizing the fact that they no longer really knew who their audience was. To tweet was to throw a message into a void that could include close friends, family, potential employers, and (as recent events have shown us) sworn enemies. Marwick and boyd describe how context collapse creates a “lowest-common-denominator philosophy of sharing [that] limits users to topics that are safe for all possible readers.”4

See, that's the problem with you kids and your iPods and your micropayments - nobody understands the concept of a concept album anymore. Everything's got to be in bite-size pieces. You've got to take a moment to reflect on the fact that it's impossible to say anything meaningful in such an abbreviated form.

In March, I tweeted from my personal account that the perpetrator of the New Zealand mosque shooting was “a socialist, environmentalist, who hates capitalists & free trade.” I also wrote that the killer believed his attack would “lead to more gun control” in New Zealand and the United States. After Twitter locked my account, I wrote about it in a New York Daily News article.23 Twitter then locked the Crime Prevention Research Center account for linking to the Daily News article.

The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century give us the starkest examples of such insanity. Stalin persecuted genetics researchers in the 1930s and ostentatiously praised the scientist Trofim Lysenko when he claimed that genetics was a “bourgeois perversion” and geneticists were “saboteurs”. The resulting crop failures killed millions. For an encore, Stalin ordered the killing of the statistician in charge of the 1937 census, Olimpiy Kvitkin. Kvitkin’s crime was that his census revealed a fall in population as a result of that famine. Telling that truth could not be forgiven. In May, the great crop scientist Yuan Longping died at the age of 90. He led the research effort to develop the hybrid rice crops that now feed billions of people. Yet in 1966, he too came very close to being killed as a counter-revolutionary during China’s cultural revolution. In western democracies we do things differently. Governments do not execute scientists; they sideline them. Late last year, Undark magazine interviewed eight former US government scientists who had left their posts in frustration or protest at the obstacles placed in their way under the presidency of Donald Trump. Then there are the random acts of hostility on the street and the death threats on social media. I have seen Twitter posts demanding that certain statisticians be silenced or hunted down and destroyed, sometimes for doing no more than publishing graphs of Covid-19 cases and hospitalisations. Even when this remains at the level of ugly intimidation, it is horrible to hear about and must be far worse to experience. It is not something we should expect a civil servant, a vaccine researcher or a journalist to have to endure. And it would be complacent to believe that the threats are always empty.

In March 2019, immediately after the New Zealand attack, I tweeted that the shooter was “a socialist, environmentalist, who hates capitalists & free trade.”63 I also wrote that the killer believed his attack would “lead to more gun control” in New Zealand and the United States. Twitter locked my account for two months so that I couldn’t post anything or even read messages from other users.

During the Vietnam War, a new generation of scholars such as William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko challenged long-standing legends about the workings of US foreign policy. Social and cultural historians in the 1970s and 1980s wrote new histories of the nation from the bottom up, expanding our view to include long-overlooked perspectives on gender, race, and ethnic identities and, in the process, showing that narrow narratives focused solely on political leaders at the top obscured more than they revealed. Despite the fact that the term revisionist history is often thrown around by nonhistorians as an insult, in truth all good historical work is at heart “revisionist” in that it uses new findings from the archives or new perspectives from historians to improve, to perfect—and, yes, to revise—our understanding of the past. Today, yet another generation of historians is working once again to bring historical scholarship out of academic circles, this time to push back against misinformation in the public sphere. Writing op-eds and essays for general audiences; engaging the public through appearances on television, radio, and podcasts; and being active on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Substack, hundreds if not thousands of historians have been working to provide a counterbalance and corrections to the misinformation distorting our national dialogue. Such work has incredible value, yet historians still do their best work in the longer written forms of books, articles, and edited collections that allow us both to express our thoughts with precision in the text and provide ample evidence in the endnotes. This volume has brought together historians who have been actively engaging the general public through the short forms of modern media and has provided them a platform where they might expand those engagements into fuller essays that reflect the best scholarly traditions of the profession.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t angry, but like most of my colleagues, there had been no particularity in my outrage. That was a constant thing, like cigarette smoke, so present I barely noticed. I was furious instead at everyone who announced their indignation after ignoring a four-year parade of coffins. It couldn’t have been the blood that shocked, because blood had pooled on the streets for years. It was the casual pull of the trigger. There was no space for an alternative narrative, no time between the gunshot and the thump of a dead body to claim the dead man pulled a gun, no room to say he deserved it, she deserved it, that all of this was just propaganda. These were the only facts available. The child, confident her father was a cop, the cop asking the mother and son if they wanted to die, the gun, the trigger, once, twice, again, both dead in an instant. “This is not who we are,” read a last Twitter post. This was exactly who we were.

All the headlines would be factually correct, but there were facts, and then there was the Truth.

A 2016 study, comparing white nationalist versus ISIS-related social media networks, revealed that during the data collection period on Twitter, three white nationalist accounts and four Nazi accounts were suspended, compared with around 1,100 ISIS accounts.12 This despite the fact that the same study revealed American white nationalist movements “outperform ISIS in nearly every social metric, from follower counts to tweets per day.

The importance of taking this realist approach to power and politics is not only theoretical or academic, but also has practical implications. Those who wish to bring about political change cannot hope to do so if they adopt populist methods or have faith that at some point a critical mass of the public will suddenly reach a ‘tipping point’ after which elites will be inevitably toppled. Change always takes concerted organisation and cannot hope to be achieved simply by convincing the greatest number of people of your point of view. Power does not care, in the final analysis, how many likes you got on your Twitter account. In practice, the great bulk of people will adjust to new realities after the fact of change and reorient themselves to the new power structure one way or the other. In any case, ‘manufacturing consent’ can only be carried out once a group is de facto in power. A group may achieve de jure power only to find that they cannot execute or manufacture consent because they have not achieved de facto power—and, realistically, de facto power is the only power that counts.

You often hear people say the news is full of lies. But most of the time that’s not exactly right. Much of what you see on television or read in The New York Times is in fact true in the literal sense, But that doesn’t make it true. It’s not true. At the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie. A lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind. Facts have been withheld on purpose along with proportion and perspective. You are being manipulated.

Instead, Donald withdraws to his comfort zones—Twitter, Fox News—casting blame from afar, protected by a figurative or literal bunker. He rants about the weakness of others even as he demonstrates his own. But he can never escape the fact that he is and always will be a terrified little boy.

While Iris mercilessly teased Christine until the poor girl looked ready to start flinging icicles, Alex and Andrew continued their merciless assault on Kevin. “You put the ‘k’ in otaku.” “When people look up otaku in the dictionary, they see your face.” “You’ve even got an otaku meme on Twitter.” “Shut up! I am not an otaku!” Kevin stood up and slammed his hands on the stone table. He glared at his friends. “I’m not! Just because I like anime that doesn’t mean I’m an otaku. And you two have no right to say anything!” He pointed an accusing finger at Alex and Andrew. “You watch and read just as much anime and manga as I do!” “You make a good point,” Alex admitted. “It doesn’t change the fact that you are, indeed, an otaku.” Andrew nodded at his brother’s words. “Only a true otaku would deny being otaku.” “No, they wouldn’t! Otaku are people who proudly proclaim their status even though they know others will look down on them for it. That’s half the reason they get such a bad rep in Japan, and even then, Japanese society has begun to accept otaku culture more readily in the last few years. I once read an article on Rocket News 24 that some people are beginning to think that being otaku isn’t something to be ashamed of.” “And how could you possibly know that unless you were an otaku?” Iris teased. Kevin grabbed his hair and threw his head back. “Arggghhh!” “Poor Kevin.” Lilian giggled. “Getting ganged up on by everyone.” “Ha…” Kevin sat down and pouted at his mate. “You’re not really helping me out, you know. You should be backing me up.” “I can only back you up when something isn’t true.” “Now you’re just being mean.” “I’m sorry,” Lilian said in mock contrite, her eyes glittering with mirth. “Would a hug make it better?” Kevin sniffled. “Maybe.” Lilian spread her arms wide. “Okay. Come here, Kevin.” “Lilian.” “Kevin!” “Lilian!” “Would you two knock it off already!” Christine snapped out of her state of perpetual humiliation long enough to shout at the hugging couple.

In December 2016, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted, “What’s the most important thing you want to see Twitter improve or create in 2017?” One user responded, “Comprehensive plan for getting rid of the Nazis.” “We’ve been working on our policies and controls,” Dorsey replied. “What’s the next most critical thing?” Oh, what’s our second highest priority after Nazis? I’d say number two is also Nazis. And number three. In fact, you can just go ahead and slide “Nazis” into the top one hundred spots.

I was watching a news channel the other day and fell asleep waiting for the fact.

Being an engaged citizen of Trump’s America means living in a constant state of cognitive tension. One cannot put the president and his lies out of one’s mind, because he is the president. Accepting that the president continuously tweets or says things that are not true, are known not to be true, are intended to be heard or read as power lies, and will continue to be broadcast—on Twitter and by the media—after they have been repeatedly disproven means accepting a constant challenge to fact-based reality. In effect, it means that the two realities—Trumpian and fact-based—come to exist side by side, on equal ground. The tension is draining. The need to pay constant attention to the lies is exhausting, and it is compounded by the feeling of helplessness in the face of the ridiculous and repeated lies. Most Americans in the age of Trump are not, like the subjects of a totalitarian regime, subjected to state terror. But even before the coronavirus, they were subjected to constant, sometimes debilitating anxiety. One way out of that anxiety is to relieve the mind of stress by accepting Trumpian reality. Another—and this too is an option often exercised by people living under totalitarianism—is to stop paying attention, disengage, and retreat to one’s private sphere. Both approaches are victories for Trump in his attack on politics.

If I didn’t know what I know, I would be happy to extend the same benefit of the doubt to Twitter and Facebook. But when you look around at the employees who work at these big tech platforms or you consider the fact that just about everyone who’s had problems with censorship has been conservative, it becomes clear that this is no accident or technological hiccup. It is a deliberate attempt by hipster liberals in Silicon Valley to shut down the voices that hardworking Americans want to hear.

Now, if you’re at work, I want you to do an exercise. (This is especially important to do if you’re a Twitter employee.) Those of you not currently at work can do this the next time you’re at work. Ready? Stand up. Look around. Are you currently in a national park? No? Are you in a government building? Also no? Great. Then the first amendment does not apply to you, or to the people that use your service. You do not need to hang a little brown metal sign that says “Free Speech Area” in your workplace. In fact, and this is the really interesting part, you are allowed to hang a “management refuses the right to service” sign in your office, as long as you don’t refuse the right to serve a discriminated group. Again, there are —and should be—limits.

The blue Twitter bird is named Larry.

Often the pursuit of thin lasts a lifetime and the goal is never reached. To these people, thin isn’t really about being slender. Thin is being more beautiful than you are. Thin is coming from a wealthier family. Thin is a bigger chest. Thin is a smaller nose. Thin is more followers on Twitter. Thin is a more popular channel on YouTube. Thin is more friends on Facebook. Thin is more famous. Thin is a perfect score on the SAT. Thin is your first choice college. Thin is an iPhone not a rip-off. Thin is having a better singing voice. Thin is being from somewhere better. Thin is being respected. Thin is loving yourself. Thin may be one of these things or all of them or something else entirely. The reason it’s impossible for so many p[people to ever get thin is that what they truly seek is something that can’t be microwaved or ladled into a bowl. In fact, the more obsessed someone is in getting thin, the more certain it becomes that one will never get there.

Markets can govern behavior through the use of mechanism design and various incentives—not money alone, but the trifecta of human motivations that may be summarized as fun, fame, and fortune. In fact, on many platforms, money is far less important than the more intangible, subjective form of value known as social currency. The idea behind social currency is to give something in order to get something. If you give fun in a photo, you can get people to share it. Social currency, measured as the economic value of a relationship, includes favorites and shares.39 It also includes the reputation a person builds up for good interactions on eBay, good news posts on Reddit, or good answers on Stack Overflow. It includes the number of followers a user attracts on Twitter and the number of skill endorsements she garners on LinkedIn.

Here’s an example of why the idea that humans are rational is pure nonsense. One of my Twitter followers copied President Trump’s inauguration speech and showed it to a “leftist friend,” telling him it was President Obama’s speech. His friend loved it.

I was a font of useless information. The only thing that had ever rivaled my Chase obsession was my love of all things trivia. Trivial Pursuit games ended with me drinking the tears of my fellow players and leaving a trail of their bloodied hearts all over the board. After my grandparents left the Amish in Pennsylvania and moved out to California, one of the first things they bought was a TV. When I lived with them decades later, they still had that same television. The only program they ever watched was Jeopardy!, and I remember sitting on their uncomfortable couch in between them as they missed so many questions. My guess was that my love for weird cultural minutiae came from them. Alex Trebek was kind of my hero. So I tweeted out random facts. Which was better than having to hear Lexi say, “If you say one more thing about stoplight colors, I will slip arsenic into your orange juice.” Twitter was a good outlet for my useless knowledge. 

Atomic Shred Testo Booster The data that you gather about Male Enhancement Pills is something that you need to keep consecrated. You would prefer not to Facebook or get all over Twitter about your exploration. Presumably you will be somewhat the fool of the day. The truth is that a great many people are juvenile. You need to converse with the individuals that you trust in your life. Likewise conversing with you specialist or doctor about the thing the organizations are placing in the enhancements will likewise help you from going on a superfluous outing to the trauma center. We as a whole have things that we are sensitive to out there, and in light of the fact that the side of the jug says All-Natural, doesn't imply that it's consistently alright for YOU.

Why does Voldemort use Twitter only? He prefers followers, not friends. How does HP dump a rash? By quit-itch. How can one identify a pureblood? They will tell you, so don’t worry about it.

Trusting one’s own perceptions is a lonely lot; believing one’s own eyes and being vocal about it is dangerous. Believing the propaganda—or, rather, accepting the propaganda as one’s reality—carries the promise of a less anxious existence, in harmony with the majority of one’s fellow citizens. The path to peace of mind lies in giving one’s mind over to the regime. Bizarrely, the experience of living in the United States during the Trump presidency reproduces this dilemma. Being an engaged citizen of Trump’s America means living in a constant state of cognitive tension. One cannot put the president and his lies out of one’s mind, because he is the president. Accepting that the president continuously tweets or says things that are not true, are known not to be true, are intended to be heard or read as power lies, and will continue to be broadcast—on Twitter and by the media—after they have been repeatedly disproven means accepting a constant challenge to fact-based reality. In effect, it means that the two realities—Trumpian and fact-based—come to exist side by side, on equal ground. The tension is draining. The need to pay constant attention to the lies is exhausting, and it is compounded by the feeling of helplessness in the face of the ridiculous and repeated lies. Most Americans in the age of Trump are not, like the subjects of a totalitarian regime, subjected to state terror. But even before the coronavirus, they were subjected to constant, sometimes debilitating anxiety.

In a 2005 Russian “state of the nation” speech, Vladimir Putin had said: “Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our cocitizens and copatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.” He blamed the United States for that disaster and wanted nothing more than for Russia to regain glory at our expense. By May 2017, when Jim Comey was fired and I began appearing on the talk shows, we’d learned that the Russian operation had been even more expansive than the IC had assessed in January. We knew now that the Russians had thousands of Twitter accounts and tens of thousands of bots that posted more than a million tweets. They posted more than a thousand videos on YouTube with days of streaming content. Facebook has said Russian content reached 126 million of its American users—an astonishing number, considering that only 139 million Americans voted.

Thiel has stood before countless audiences arguing that we no longer live in a technologically accelerating world, and that there haven’t been any true, futuristic innovations since the 1960s. In fact, his firm’s slogan, “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters,”3 is a slight to both innovators and to Twitter.

Ev Williams: Twitter didn’t find immediate product-market fit. Why did it then grow? Because we changed it! And—little-known fact—after that fateful South by Southwest, growth stalled again. And then we changed it more.

This, my first book, is dedicated to you, the reader. I may never get to meet you, but know that I think the world of you, and the fact that you've shared your greatest treasure with me, your personal time, to read even a page of my story thrills my little heart until it's ready to pop. I wrote this thinking of you. Smiles, Suz (come find me on twitter @SuzDC)

I hope not, either. I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?” He turned his head to flash a glance that was almost teasing at her. Nearly a quarter of his face was cleared of brash, and he was starting to look different. Not quite so brutish. “If you don’t work around here, you don’t eat,” Susannah said, and turned back into the house. When she returned a few minutes later, she was carrying a pair of gray hose she had just finished knitting and one of her father’s shirts. The shirt was sure to be hopelessly too small for him, but it was the best she could do for the moment. Certainly it was better than having him go around bare-chested. What was left of his own shirt was fit for nothing but the ragbag, once it was clean. “When you’ve finished, you may put these on. I don’t know how things are done in England, but around here we’re careful of our modesty. I expect you to keep yourself decently covered in future.” “I’ve finished.” Connelly turned away from the washstand, a towel to his face as he wiped away the soap. “And speaking of modesty, given the fact that you’ve already seen me in the altogether—it was you who bathed me, wasn’t it?—I don’t see that it matters.” “Caring for an unclothed sick man is a very different matter from being constantly confronted with an unclothed healthy one, especially in a household that consists mostly of young ladies. I’ve my sisters to think of.” “Ah, the three twittering birds from the auction. I remember.” He finished with the towel as he spoke and tossed it in the general direction of the nightshirt. About to inform him that the pile of laundry waiting to be washed was the other way and that he might add towel and nightshirt to it, Susannah never got the words out. Her attention

The average message is now just over 100 characters—Twitter-sized, in fact.

[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Building Insurance Your Guide" by michael a.n.p. cretikos.] ________________________________________ 5 out of 5 stars ________________________________________ Share This Review FacebookTwitterLinkedInPinterestShare ________________________________________ Building Insurance: How to Select the Correct Building Sum Insured Value for Low-Rise and High-Rise Structures authored by Michael A. N. P. Cretikos is a comprehensive guide on how to select the best policy and factors to consider to avoid being in a situation of underinsurance. According to the author, he filled in the gap that exists in knowledge by introducing the Building Sum Insured Value (BSI) based on current rental value, and according to him, this method is the most accurate that there is. The author highlighted situations in which underinsurance is inevitable and underlined ways to avoid such situations. Taxes such as stamp duties on insurance could be disincentives, and the author discouraged it. He advised the readers to always opt for 100% coverage so that the loss can be fully catered for and the insured reinstated back to their previous position. Several acts and policies were stated, and the authors made suggestions for innovations; the ICA code wasn’t left out; he highlighted the fault in it and gave feasible solutions. This book was very informative, and I enjoyed reading it. The author's in-depth research shines through and adds a layer of authenticity to the book. I loved the fact that as much as the author criticized the already existing policies, he made suggestions for improvement. I equally appreciated the fact that there were so many quotations backed up with references so the readers can verify at their will. The step-by-step calculations and clearly outlined tables also enhanced my understanding of how numerical values are arrived at, and I absolutely loved it. As much as I enjoyed reading this book, I found some parts overly repetitive, and I also found the consistent use of bold texts quite distracting. I loved the keypoints outlined in every section; it made the important information very easy to grasp. Overall, this book was an enlightening read and would keep readers eager to learn more. I rate this book five out of five stars because of its informative contents and the fact that my dislikes weren’t enough to remove a star. I didn't find any errors while reading, which implies that the book was perfectly edited. I’d recommend this book to people who are interested in the workings of building insurance.