“CEO said a thing!”

A blistering guide to what lazy journalism too often looks like

Who are the rightwing influencers filling Trump’s head with visions of antifa?

Meet the content creators whose videos from Portland and Chicago shape the president’s distorted view of reality

Trump and Hegseth use 9/11 memorial remarks at Pentagon to defend war on Iran

President and defense secretary try to link worst terrorist attack in US history to current unpopular war

Former CIA Officer: President Obama Should Pardon Edward Snowden

He let Americans evaluate omniscient domestic surveillance for themselves

Andrew Sullivan: My Distraction Sickness — and Yours

An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too.

Trump acknowledges ‘real problems’ at reflecting pool after $14m makeover, blaming ‘vandalism’

US president also claims vandals have been arrested, as Washington attraction sees algae bloom and peeling paint

Sharing without clicking on news in social media

Social media have enabled laypersons to disseminate, at scale, links to news and public affairs information. Many individuals share such links without first reading the linked information. Here we analysed over 35 million public Facebook posts with uniform resource locators shared between 2017 and 2020, and discovered that such ‘shares without clicks’ (SwoCs) constitute around 75% of forwarded links. Extreme and user-aligned political content received more SwoCs, with partisans engaging in it more than politically neutral users. In addition, analyses with 2,969 false uniform resource locators revealed higher shares and, hence, SwoCs by conservatives (76.94%) than liberals (14.25%), probably because, in our dataset, the vast majority (76–82%) of them originated from conservative news domains. Findings suggest that the virality of political content on social media (including misinformation) is driven by superficial processing of headlines and blurbs rather than systematic processing of core content, which has design implications for promoting deliberate discourse in the online public sphere.

The Trump Administration Group Chat, Signal: The Coke of Secure Messaging, Transparency Versus Security

The Trump administration’s Signal gaffe raises fascinating questions about secure messaging and the trade-off inherent in transparency.

The Longest Suicide Note in American History

The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy targets liberal democracy itself.