Category: Nationally relevant

See how this turned out.

In a three-way contest to represent the RI 2nd congressional district in the US House – among Republican Allan Fung, independent William Gilbert, and Democrat Seth Magaziner – polling has consistently shown a dead heat between Fung and Magaziner with considerable uncertainty as to whether Gilbert could serve as a spoiler either way.

In two candidate forums on Oct 17 and 18, Fung struggled to distance himself from the national policies of the Republican Party, essentially saying that he opposes most of what they support but nevertheless promising to help elect them to House leadership if, as is likely, Republicans become the majority party in the chamber. Whether Republicans in Congress would really try to carry out their most radical proposals if they had the power is hardly certain, especially given their track record for many years under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, threatening to repeal Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) health insurance and repeatedly failing to do it. But some of the proposals are shocking.

The Washington Post reported Oct 18, “House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said that if Republicans win control of the House that the GOP will use raising the debt limit as leverage to force spending cuts – which could include cuts to Medicare and Social Security – and limit additional funding to Ukraine.” Catherine Rampell explained this in a separate analysis accompanying the news story in The Washington Post: “Republicans have withheld their support from raising the debt limit before, usually framing their hostage-taking as a commitment to fiscal restraint. But the debt ceiling has nothing to do with new spending; rather, it’s a somewhat arbitrary statutory cap on how much the government can borrow to pay off bills that it has already incurred, through tax and spending decisions that Congress has already made. Refusing to raise the debt limit is like going to a restaurant, ordering the lobster and a $500 bottle of wine, and then declaring yourself financially responsible because you skipped out on the check.” Using the federal deficit as justification for cutting Social Security and Medicare is particularly disgraceful while Republicans in Congress argue to make permanent the Trump tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals and block renewal of the tax credit that cut child poverty in half from 2020 to 2021 before it expired.

A number of Republicans in Congress have advocated even stranger proposals. Ron Johnson, seeking re-election to a third term in the Senate from Wisconsin, wants to convert Social Security and Medicare to discretionary programs, requiring Congress to vote every year whether to fund them, thereby putting them into play as political footballs. Rick Scott, senator from Florida, similarly wants to “sunset” every federal spending program after five years and require votes to renew them, saying “If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” An essential component of Social Security and Medicare is that people can rely on the programs to be there in future years when they need them, and eliminating that assurance would effectively destroy them.

On the one hand, Fung characterized claims that he would support cutting entitlement programs as an “outright lie from Seth,” saying “Here’s why I would not do that. You see that woman that’s sitting in the front row right there? That’s my mom. My mom, who after a 35-year career, opening and running Kong Wen restaurant, a small family business, after her and my dad came to this country as immigrants, retired. She’s on Social Security, that fixed income like millions of other mothers and fathers and grandparents across the country, I will stand up and make sure they do not cut Social Security down in Washington, DC.”

Magaziner immediately attacked Fung’s statement as hypocritical: “The Republican leadership in Washington isn’t even trying to hide it. They have said that one of their top priorities is to cut Social Security and Medicare… The head Republican of the Budget Committee, a guy named Jason Smith… said in an interview with Bloomberg two weeks ago that his top priority if the Republicans take control – his top priority, as chair of the Budget Committee – will be to cut Social Security and Medicare, and that he is willing to shut down the government in order to get his way.… So for [Fung] to say that he’s for Social Security, he’s for Medicare, but he wants to put the leadership team in Washington that has made this one of their top priorities to cut those programs, is beyond disingenuous. That’s like saying, ‘I’m gonna put the fox in charge of the hen-house, but don’t worry, I like hens, I’m pro-hen, I like it. But I’m gonna put the fox in charge, just don’t worry about it.’”

Forum panelist Ian Donnis of the Public’s Radio asked Fung, “You say you would not support a national abortion ban, but it was the Republican Party that engineered the rise of the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade. Considering that, why should women concerned about abortion restrictions vote for you?” Fung answered, “I would preserve that ability for a woman to make that important, deeply personal medical decision and reserve the ability for late-term abortions for the life of the mother, rape, or incest.” Magaziner countered, “Three years ago, many of us worked together to protect abortion rights in Rhode Island. And Allan and a lot of Republicans said, ‘Oh, you know, Roe v. Wade is never going to be overturned, you’re fear-mongering.’ Well, look what happened. We passed a law in Rhode Island three years ago to protect women in Rhode Island. Allan was against that bill, vocally. I was for it just like most Rhode Islanders. There’s a fundamental difference between us here.”

Forum panelist Juliana Lepore, news editor of The Good Five-Cent Cigar, the University of Rhode Island student newspaper, asked all of the candidates, “Should the United States continue to offer aid to Ukraine for the length of its war with Russia?” All answered in the affirmative, with Magaziner simply saying “Yes, absolutely” and Gilbert saying “I would increase it.” But Fung gave a subtly nuanced response (emphasis added): “Yes, I do support additional humanitarian aid there because the devastation you’re seeing coming out of Ukraine is unimaginable.” No one pursued this at the time, but Fung is a very intelligent trained lawyer with 20 years of experience in politics, so it is a good assumption that he chooses his words carefully: Specifically supporting humanitarian aid is diplomatic code for opposing military aid. (Motif invited the Fung campaign to clarify, but they have not responded.)

Evidence is mounting of war crimes by Russia on a scale unseen since World War II: mass graves of thousands of murdered Ukrainian civilians, Iran supplying drone bombs and troops to enable Russia to destroy the Ukraine electric grid and fuel lines, and increasingly unhinged threats from Russia to attack US space satellites if intelligence information is shared. Fung’s seemingly minor distinction in wording may turn out to be enormously significant because support for Ukraine is under attack from both the far-right and the far-left, and McCarthy is reported to plan to cut aid to Ukraine if Republicans retake the US House. Josh Hawley, Republican senator from Missouri, said in May that Ukraine aid is “not in America’s interests” and “allows Europe to freeload.” When President Biden asked Congress to approve an aid package to Ukraine in the spring, all 57 votes in the House and 11 votes in the Senate opposing it were from Republicans. The New York Times reported on Oct 27 that Russian strongman dictator Vladimir Putin is actively soliciting support from “conservative-minded people in the West,” quoting him saying “In the United States there’s a very strong part of the public who maintain traditional values, and they’re with us.” When Putin speaks of “traditional values,” this refers to his long-standing attacks against LGBTQ rights and minority non-Christian religions.

RI congressional districts are lopsided, with the 1st district overwhelmingly Democratic and most of the Republicans in the state concentrated into the 2nd district; in the 2020 presidential election, Biden beat Trump in the 1st district 63.9% – 34.6% (net 29.3 percentage points) and in the 2nd district 56.0% – 42.5% (net 13.5 percentage points).

While Fung has been leading Magaziner in telephone polls (about which we raised substantial systemic accuracy concerns), analysts still consider Magaziner the slight favorite. The non-partisan Cook Political Report as of Oct 25 gives a 4-point advantage to the Democrat, which it considers a “Democratic toss up.” FiveThirtyEight (a subsidiary of ABC News) as of Oct 26 gives Magaziner a 57% chance of winning with an expected vote of 48.8% to 47.5% for Fung (and 3.6% for Gilbert), which it also calls a “toss up.” A telephone poll conducted Oct 1 – 4 by Suffolk University in collaboration with The Boston Globe found Fung leading Magaziner 45% – 37%, but the large 13% undecided bloc means the seat is really up for grabs. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee polling arm DCCC Analytics on Oct 26 released their own poll of 812 likely voters, conducted Oct 23 – 24, showing a tie 48% Fung – 48% Magaziner with 5% undecided; the DCCC is a partisan group and their poll did not include Gilbert.

The real obstacle for Fung is that US House races have become nationalized in a highly-polarized climate where Democrats are struggling to defend their slim 221 – 214 seat majority in a “mid-term” election (that is, without a presidential contest). As of Oct 27, FiveThirtyEight ranks 219 seats either strongly, likely, or leaning Republican; 203 seats either strongly, likely, or leaning Democratic; and 13 seats a toss-up: 218 seats are needed for a majority – resulting in an 82% likelihood of Republicans winning control of the House, but leaving Democrats a respectable 18% chance.

Voters in the RI 2nd congressional district have a rare opportunity to play a major role in national politics by tipping the balance of control in the US House of Representatives. Fung is in the race of his political career, capitalizing on two decades as a known quantity and familiar name to voters, but he is forced to run against his own party to do it. Will voters take that risk? If he wins, is a moderate Republican congressman from New England an anachronism who would find it impossible to function in a hopelessly polarized environment?

Bilow’s Law of Twitter: “No worthwhile ideas can be expressed in 140 characters, and even fewer in 280.”

My public journalist Twitter account (@MikeBilow) was created in 2015 by which time Twitter was fairly mature, although still long before the 2016 election and 2020 pandemic that saw social media sink into a swamp of misinformation and disinformation. For several years, I’ve been the maintainer of the Motif Twitter account (@MotifMagRI) that is an important on-line presence for the magazine.

I created my private personal Twitter account in 2008 when the service was less than two years old and mostly seemed to cater to attendees of the South-by-Southwest Festival. In those days, few had mobile web access and most users interacted with Twitter via text message. More than 14 years later, since what was by technology standards the paleolithic era, the ice age has ended and the glaciers have receded.

To give some sense of time scale, Twitter antedates both the Apple iPhone (2007) and Google Android (2008), which brought mobile internet to the masses. Although mobile internet existed before then – I had a Windows Mobile “Pocket PC” in 2006, replacing a Palm VIIx used for years earlier – it was an inconvenient rarity. For example, web sites were only accessible on the Palm if a “Palm Query App” was designed specifically for the site, and I wrote the PQAs for both The Providence Journal and The Boston Globe. By 2009, either I gave up on Windows Mobile or it gave up on me, and I switched to early Android then at version 2.0.

Nobody had any idea then where social media would go. The sector was dominated by MySpace (founded 2003) from 2005 to 2009 and then by Facebook (founded 2004), but neither was mobile-friendly. Early competitors dropped away: LiveJournal (founded 1999) was sold to a Russian media owner by 2007.

The model for most social media was the “blog,” shortened from “web log” and occasionally even spelled with a leading apostrophe (‘blog) to indicate the elided letters. A blog entry was an essay, usually at least a few hundred words, formulated with thought, care, and editing. Readers could subscribe to someone else’s blog and reply, usually in full sentences formed into paragraphs. LiveJournal turned this into an automated formula where everyone subscribed to the blogs of their friends and could interactively reply.

What Twitter revolutionized was that it was the first social media site intended to be used primarily on mobile, limiting the size of each post to the emphatically anti-blog-like 140 characters of a text message. Go to a show or a concert, or happen to be present at a newsworthy incident at the right time and place, and the place to tell others about it has been Twitter. Everyone with a cellular handset that could handle text-messaging could be a Twitter author in an age before mobile apps, let alone before app stores. By 2020, mobile internet access was so ubiquitous that text-message access to Twitter was discontinued in most of the world.

By emphasizing text as its medium, Twitter was going against the grain from inception. Multimedia seemed the wave of the future, with MySpace and its fellow travelers embracing music, photos, and videos. Eventually entire non-text competitors developed such as Vine, an antediluvian precursor to TikTok with content limited to six-second looping videos, that was bought by Twitter in 2012 and shut down in 2016.

A lot of ideas just collapsed in failure, and the Wikipedia category for defunct social media lists 134 named entities, surely a gross undercount. Quibi, for example, yet another video microblogging service, had the misfortune to launch at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and burned through $1.75 billion of investor money before shutting down after only six months. Yet Twitter has survived, despite being consistently unprofitable during its entire existence.

Financially, investors have been losing confidence in Twitter, with its market capitalization (the stock price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding) crashing from $54.91 billion on Jun 30, 2021 to $34.55 billion on Dec 31, a 37% decline in the value of the company in only six months. A major reason for that lack of confidence is operating losses in 2020 of $1.14 billion and in 2021 of $0.221 billion. More seriously, long-term debt tripled from $1.76 billion at the end of 2018 to $5.32 billion at the end of 2021. The financial community knew this was not sustainable and the depressed stock price made it an attractive target to be acquired by a buyer, preferably one who was willing and able to shovel vast amounts more money into keeping it afloat.

Enter Elon Musk who announced on April 25 a deal to acquire the entire company for $44 billion. He is, among other things, the 7th most-followed user on Twitter (@elonmusk, 86.3 million), neatly squeezed between Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13, 6th, 90.3 million) and Lady Gaga (@ladygaga, 8th, 84.5 million). Widely recognized as the richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $252 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index (well ahead of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in second place at $164 billion), Musk has been involved in running numerous businesses ranging from electric car maker Tesla to aerospace contractor SpaceX. However, he has also too often made public comments that called his judgment into question, including tweeting that children are “essentially immune” from COVID-19, an objectively false statement that almost resulted in his Twitter account being suspended. Musk’s consistently strange tweets were themselves recently the subject of an article in The Guardian, a well-respected UK newspaper, under the headline “Chaotic and crass: a brief timeline of Elon Musk’s history with Twitter.”

Notably, Musk successfully defended himself in a libel trial brought by Vernon Unsworth, a diver who had been instrumental in the rescue of boys trapped in a cave in Thailand, whom Musk in a tweet called a “pedo guy.” According to Reuters, “…the jury was apparently swayed by the arguments put forth by Musk’s attorney, Alex Spiro, who said the tweets in question amounted to an off-hand insult in the midst of an argument, which no one could be expected to take seriously. ‘In arguments you insult people,’ he said. ‘No bomb went off.’… U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson had said the case hinged on whether a reasonable person would take Musk’s Twitter statements to mean he was actually calling Unsworth a pedophile.” The legal community considers the dispute precedent-setting as the first jury verdict about the consequences of a tweet.

Musk took advantage of the depressed price of Twitter shares and began buying up stock in January 2022, disclosing in a required filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (known as a Schedule 13D) only on April 4, after the end of the quarter, that he had acquired 9.1% of the company for $2.64 billion, making him the largest shareholder. By keeping his activity secret as long as he could until the required disclosure, Musk got a huge bargain, implying a market capitalization of only $29.0 billion. Presumably the entity created by Musk to finance the purchase of the company at a reported total price of $44 billion would pay 9.1% of that, or $4.00 billion, to Musk for his existing shares, allowing him to personally pocket a cash profit of $1.36 billion.

The SEC previously fined Musk for what he considered a cannabis-inspired joke in 2018 that he would be buying up all outstanding shares in Tesla to take it private at $420 per share, an announcement that many investors took seriously enough to move the stock price. Musk and Tesla each paid a $20 million fine and were required to vet in advance through lawyers any future statements that could affect the market. Just this morning (April 27), a federal judge came down hard on Musk who was seeking to get out from under what has come to be known as his “Twitter sitter” restriction, writing that “Musk, by entering into the consent decree in 2018, agreed to the provision requiring the pre-approval of any such written communications that contain, or reasonably could contain, information material to Tesla or its shareholders. He cannot now complain that this provision violates his First Amendment rights. Musk’s argument that the SEC has used the consent decree to harass him and to launch investigations of his speech is likewise meritless and, in this case, particularly ironic.”

Twitter has spent years trying to navigate between what should and should not be acceptable to post on the site, a few weeks ago being drawn into a controversy about Adm. Rachel Levine, the head of the US Public Health Service, who identifies as a transgender woman and is the first openly transgender American to hold commissioned four-star rank. The Babylon Bee, a Christian-themed satire web site, tweeted that Levine was their “man of the year,” and their Twitter account was suspended when they refused to delete the tweet; at the same time, Twitter allowed a tweet from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that said “Rachel Levine is a man.” Such inconsistency has exposed Twitter to substantial criticism and accusations of hypocrisy.

On March 25, shortly before disclosing his large acquisition of shares, Musk posted a poll: “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?” resulting in 29.6% yes and 70.4% no with 2,035,924 votes. The next day he replied to his own poll: “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?”

No one is entirely sure what motivated Musk to buy Twitter, but it is generally assumed that he wants to dial down its content moderation policies. “If you’ve been paying attention to how things work in our plutocratic society, this turn of events won’t surprise you. The arsonists routinely cosplay as firefighters,” wrote Anand Giridharadas in a guest essay for The New York Times.

Musk appears to have already breached the non-disparagement clause of his acquisition agreement with the board of directors by publicly attacking two of the top lawyers at Twitter. Getting the deal to completion requires jumping over a number of hurdles, including convincing regulators to allow it and the basic task of convincing shareholders to accept his offer price, and to accomplish both he needs to maintain sufficient self-discipline to keep his mouth shut. The current stock is trading below Musk’s offer price, a clear signal that the market has grave doubts that the deal will really happen: in theory, someone could buy the stock today and wait for it to be acquired at the higher price, which would be a slam-dunk as long as the acquisition goes through.

Serious concerns about privacy and security have been expressed from the tech community about what seem to be Musk’s intent to de-anonymize Twitter users and publish internal algorithms as open source, according to Carly Page on Techcrunch. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leading advocate for personal liberty in technology, called on Musk to reaffirm the previous commitment by Twitter to the Santa Clara Principles, published in 2018 to protect the transparency and accountability of “content moderation at scale,” also endorsed by Apple, Facebook (Meta), Google, Reddit, and Github.

I’ve been outright threatened on Twitter because I said that I thought it was reasonable for schools to require students and employees to wear face coverings in the pandemic, and this resulted in claims that I therefore supported “child abuse” and deserved to die. I don’t throw around terms such as “hate speech” lightly, but if that doesn’t qualify then nothing does. Telling me that I deserve to die may not technically be an illegal threat, but is at best on the very edge skirting First Amendment protection and arguably is outside it. Just because an incitement is not criminal does not imply it is harmless: It would be absurd for the standard of review to be the same for criminal charges and social media bans. While I recognize that someone saying that I deserve to die is not necessarily a criminal threat and may be protected by the First Amendment, it can have very bad real world consequences that justify it being prohibited on social media.

Such incitements can motivate people to undertake clearly criminal acts. While the decision to progress to crime is primarily the responsibility of the one committing it, the party making the incitement has responsibility it would be wrong to ignore. Conspiracy theorists who claimed that a pizza restaurant in Washington DC was a front for senior Democrats including the Clintons abducting children to extract adrenochrome from their blood to be used as an elixir of youth, commonly known as “Pizzagate,” did in fact motivate a man to cross state lines and show up with a rifle in a deluded quest to rescue children held captive in non-existent subterranean tunnels, for which he ended up in federal prison. A woman who believed that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, encouraged by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on InfoWars, made death threats against the parents of the dead children, for which she also ended up in prison.

Twitter is particularly important to journalists because it is their primary means of interacting with each other. I have regular exchanges with writers and academics, and this is very useful and valuable. The key to effective use of Twitter is to be aware of the sources: I know the difference between getting updates from the Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent), an extremely trustworthy and reliable on-the-ground news reporting service, as opposed to random trolls. Official entities are on Twitter, ranging from the ministries of foreign affairs for both Ukraine (@MFA_Ukraine) and Russia (@MFA_Russia) to embassies of countries to each other. Both the Israel Defence Force (@IDF) and the al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas who launch terrorist rockets from Gaza are on Twitter (using various accounts that are often suspended), sometimes interacting with each other to exchange public messages directly. From a news point of view, there is no substitute for this stuff.

At one point I considered joining Gab.ai, an alternative to Twitter that explicitly claims no censorship or restrictions of any kind. In theory this appealed to me, but actually looking at the site made clear that is a refuge for those thrown off Twitter, with the practical result that most of the traffic is from literal fascists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and similar people with whom I have no desire to be associated and even less desire to interact. Twitter is valuable to me because it is not Gab.

I understand that for someone who is an infrequent user of Twitter, it seems to be a flat swamp of people screaming at each other. Much of my responsibility as a journalist is to learn how to tell these apart and sift through these sources, applying my own knowledge and expertise. Just because there are some crazy people (or even a lot of crazy people) does not mean they are all crazy people.

Whether Musk ends up owning Twitter or not, substantial backing away from content moderation would likely destroy it, running it into the ground and rendering it as worthless as MySpace. Economists see the value of social media in the “network effect,” meaning that each user finds it more valuable because of the presence of other users. The term originated with the invention of the telephone: What value is a telephone unless there are people to call? In Musk’s utopian libertarian free-for-all model of social media, all of the sane users would be driven away.

I remember exactly where I was on August 9, 1995, because that was the day of the first dot-com initial public offering: Netscape. By chance I was attending a cookout, and everyone wanted my opinion on it as the “internet expert.” My advice was that I could not understand why the market had valued the company at $2 billion when it had no business model to generate income, and its sole activity at the time was to make software, the web browser, they gave away for free. It took about five years of riding the roller-coaster, but eventually the market figured out that I had a point.

Twitter is a private company owned by its shareholders, and if they want to sell out to Musk then this is their right. Certainly the world has no reasonable expectation that investors will continue to throw money into the firebox indefinitely to keep the fire lit. But there is no law of conservation of money: it can be created or destroyed.