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Trump is back on Facebook, Instagram too
Meta to restore Trump's Facebook, Instagram accounts
So this means he's back on all major platforms. I think this shows that maybe, alluding to the below about JK Rowling, that cancel culture does not work as well as on famous, rich targets: they get more chances, and also because they are such big draws and have so many fans, that it's shooting oneself in the foot to cancel them. I have observed the same on YouTube, with Rogan ,Jordan Peterson , and Fox News views being heavily promoted. I tested this by opening YouTube on an EC2 instance US IP, no browsing history. Big tech companies, like all companies, are motivated by profits in the end, more so than ideology. The big question is, will trump post? I think so eventually, come election season . At this point, I think the left has sustained a major defeat in the culture wars.
I prefer to view Trump's reinstatement as evidence that he's a spent force and no longer a threat. The cathedral wouldn't be letting him back on respectable platforms if he still had serious disruption potential.
The entire point of the cathedral is that academia, govt, media, etc aren't explicitly maliciously coordinating, but are made up of people who mostly genuinely try to advance progressive causes, gain personal influence or have 'impact, etc. If the cathedral decides something, that means it's the headline of a few NYT articles, several think tanks have published reports on it, it's buzzing on twitter, etc. And that isn't true of "trump is no longer a threat, so we'll unban him".
This claim could mean multiple things. One: a specific, hidden, powerful person believes "Trump is no longer a threat to <my hidden network>, therefore we should reinstate him so he can take attention from potential threats. Therefore I'm directing <hidden contact A> to talk to <person B in twitter/facebook/etc> to unsuspend trump".
Two: A consensus develops among various media people and progressive activists that trump isn't that much of a threat anymore. Some progressive ideologues inside twitter/facebook/etc get that idea, and then unsuspend trump because they believe he will soak up attention from other threats to progressivism.
Three: A consensus develops among ... that trump isn't a threat anymore. This diffuses to progressives at twitter. As a result, they put less continuous pressure on trump saying suspended, and he gets unsuspended. This differs via the lack of explicit planning or desire to use him as sort of a neutered opposition.
Four: There isn't really a consensus that trump isn't a threat anymore, but the cathedral is paying less attention to the trump threat, they're more worrying about desantis, SCOTUs, cops, whatever. As a result, less pressure, internal and external, are on twittter/facebook to keep trump suspended, so more 'centrist' heads prevail inside twitbook and trump gets unsuspended.
Claim 1 doesn't seem likely. There aren't any signs of it in e.g. the twitter files (where twitter consistently resisted external influence), it's not consistent with other secondhand reports from the internals of social media moderation, and it's not really consistent with how random and ineffective social media political moderation is.
Claim 2 doesn't seem likely (3 as well), because there isn't consensus among the cathedral that trump doesn't have disruption potential! Again, the cathedral is 'the media, academia, govt, and people around them". Many of them are still very worried about trump. Less worried than four years ago? Arguable, but that isn't 'doesn't think he has disruptive potential'.
Claim 3 and 4 are, crucially, not based on a deep evaluation that, with certainty, "he does not have serious disruption potential", but a sense that he's somewhat less of a threat.
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Seems self-evident he still has disruption potential.
Indeed, perhaps the best explanation is they WANT his disruptive force in play, specifically because it will be most disruptive for the GOP primaries.
And if he presents an inkling of a new threat to the regime, he can be clamped down again.
Yes, that would mean they're risking a Trump redux.
Will the cathedral allow Desantis to have a major social media presence? So far he and his proxies have had a free hand.
This looks like it’s a response to enforcement actions taken with respect to the Texas social media law(which, considering it’s being enforced by Ken Paxton, is probably a wise move).
Unlike Trump he currently holds serious political clout in his own party and in his quite populous state.
So there's actually a risk of some form of retaliation (see what he did to Disney) if they attempt to deplatform him without strong justification.
Yes, and there’s a strong argument to be made that Facebook returned trump at the behest of Ken Paxton, who has almost as much clout in a more populous state.
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Agreed. The left and right have each (finally) come to the conclusion that DeSantis is more powerful, and playing spoiler in GOP primaries is now a well entrenched strategy for the Democratic party for several cycles running.
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As someone who will be voting red, I can’t stand that Trump is back. I think DeSantis has a much higher chance of (1) winning the WH and (2) doing something positive when there.
These are both correct in my view.
However, if Desantis is going to be effective as an executive on the Federal level, finding a way to sideline Trump (or, in a true triumph, secure his endorsement) prior to the primaries is going to be a relatively small challenge.
I am certain they have a plan to handle Trump, if nothing else.
It will be fun to watch the ladies on The View immediately transition to "why can't the GOP nominate a moderate like Trump instead of foaming-mouth radical like DeSantis" should this happen.
I don't think they'll say that. I think they'll talk about "Trump era radicalization continues." with the usual shibboleths about our democracy and all that. If they praise any GOP leaders in comparison, it'll be Romney and Cheney.
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It's a great counter-argument to the oft-repeated idea that "deplatforming my enemies works." I always said that, maybe it does for now, but that will last until the corporations stop being aligned with those interests (which isn't very hard to imagine when I'm talking with, say, an anarcho-communist). This outcome should have been foreseeable from the start, and it was ridiculous that people who claim to hold corporations in such contempt trusted them absolutely to be the enforcement arm of their will. Though admittedly, I never thought I'd end up being right about this one, so I can understand why they got so comfortable.
I also assume that if all the stuff we hear about stochastic terrorism is true, we should see some uptick in crimes, since banning him (and many others who are unbanned) was supposedly a necessary action to prevent real violence.
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I think that we're seeing with the tech layoffs from big platforms that money is tight and they can't afford to lose out on anything that will draw attention. Whatever the opinion of Trump, he's got a built-in audience from both fans and detractors. If the likes of the NYT do articles on 'latest outrageous statement on platform X', that's getting engagement for platform X. I don't think it says anything about cancel culture, unless the obvious that it's only when money is plentiful that the DEI stuff is pandered to; once budgets are tight, the DEI stuff goes with the other luxuries. In fact, the platforms are probably depending on cancel culture; if thousands of outraged voices are not dusting off their old Facebook etc. accounts to demand Something Must Be Done, then there's no point in letting Trump come back.
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Yawn, sorry, who are we talking about? That dude who used to be the president or something? Didn't he go to jail or…something…hey look a squirrel!
They're letting him back on because we've already moved on. Trump was super fun to beat on when he was in the news, but that's in the past now, and we are bored with that. He didn't get any juice from announcing his campaign, we've got some hot new conservatives and liberals to fight over, Trump is boring, hey look a squirrel!
Culture has no attention span. He is back on because nobody gives a shit—and the social media zeitgeist is now all about TiTok, and none of this tired old Boomer bullshit plays on there.
Still early. likely attention will grow in 2024 as the election nears
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Somebody tell IPSOS that!
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I regularly check youtube / other social media sites from fresh IPs / browser profiles (just out of curiousity), and things like fox news, peterson, and other popular center-right figures have been popular & algorithmically promoted since at least 2017. Youtube's censorship of right-wing figures has mostly been on specific topics like (their words) "election denial" or "vaccine misinformation", or on farther-right ideas, not the most mainstream center-right figures. The most popular facebook content has been significantly center-right since at least mid 2020 which is when that account started. So other than trump's return, that's mostly the status quo, as opposed to a left-wing defeat
That facebook stat I always have found to be misleading. Yes, Ben Shapiro is (or was) #1 in gross, but think about how he and fox are basically the only two big name outlets looking to attract some 50% of facebook (and America). Meanwhile, the Times, Post, CNN, MSNBC, Tribune, Sentinel, Vox, etc are all fighting for a slice of the other 50%.
Its like noticing "Jim always has the fattest goats at auction" while failing to note that Jim takes his goats to a field outside town to browse, while everyone else uses the beat up and over used town commons.
It's not just ben and fox - dan bongino, trump, breitbart get (or got in trump's case) a lot of top 10 slots, and there's a long tail of cons just like the long tail of libs. I agree this doesn't show conservatives dominating facebook, and more recent posts often have kpop as #1 and seem pretty even between Rs and Ds - but I just intended it to show that conservative popularity on social media isn't a recent change, but how it's been for a while.
But where is the aggregate stat? It is consistently absent as consistent with the recent Caplan rebuttal to Hanania.
Ben Shapiro can get 3 million views. The NFL gets 30 million, and the news program that follows naturally absorbs a huge % of that, typically around 1/3. The stats linked also talk about the best post of the day. The most intriguing post of the day will always be as such! Ben or Dan or Donald do a few posts per day. CNN does 100.
Everything is stacked in favor of making that stat look stupid.
I'm not sure what you mean. If you're saying libs get most of non-top-10 slots but republicans get most of the top slots, so daily top 10 makes republicans look more popular than they are - maybe, it could go either way, my guess is both Rs and Ds get similar chunks of the non-top-10 slots. My reason for linking that account wasn't to suggest republican dominance, just providing some external confirmation to "republican content has been big on social media for a while, and it being big now doesn't suggest any change".
It is almost impossible for it to go either way, unless conservatives are massively over-represented as facebook users. There are just so many more left of center outlets.
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The Lib argument tends to be inherently more fractitious compared to the ageing middle American heartland that's still pretty defining for the Republican party. Facebook's increasingly becoming dominated by the sort of demographics that tend to vote Republican. The kids have fled elsewhere, leaving their parents and grandparents.
Democrat voters also tend to be more diverse in their spoken languages of choice & consumption, which further splits the popularity of the biggest channels communicating to them.
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I agree but I think you could expand that to really anything. The law does not work as well on famous rich targets. Two presidents and a vice president have just been found to be illegally in possession of classified documents and nothing is likely to happen. Britney grinner was rescued from jail in Russia for a crime she committed in exchange for an arms dealer so notorious that his nicknamed the merchant of death. And this was for a drug possession crime that US citizens are locked up in US jails for right now.
While the rich and famous may have more leeway they are not invulnerable, and once they are disciplined both them, and onlookers, can experience the chilling effect for whatever it is they did.
These are the same thing.
none of these people stand to be a significant change to the status quo, and all of them know their place. Rogan didn't like vaccines and and trans women in womens sports. Peterson did like being FORCED to say pronouns, but would say them if asked. I am not going to address fox news.
They have been found in possession, but they have not been found in illegal possession, because they are unlikely to have acted with the requisite criminal state of mind.
It doesn't require intent for a pleb. A standard part of classified handling that everyone gets taught before they are allowed to touch anything.
Please follow the links in the article to the relevant statutes
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Actually, how many people in US actually are jailed for a possession of a less than a gram of weed? Does it actually happen in practice?
The number of people in prison for marijuana possession is the same as the number of wrongfully convicted people on death row. They might exist but the number approaches zero. And yet these two potentially non-existent categories somehow loom large in the popular dialogue around these topics.
These are probably similar numbers but I don't think they're similar ratio. Roughly:
200 people have been Exonerated while on death row since 1970
2,000 people are on death row each year
Actual Executions aren't very common at all https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/12/28/u-s-ends-year-with-fewest-executions-since-1991/
Given the sheer difficulty of actually exonerating someone, the accuracy of convictions seems suspect.
I admit that "jailed for drug possession" is pretty much a myth/meme that Libertarians like to drop - including myself in the past.
Thank you. I think I was conflating "innocent people are not being executed" with "innocent people are not on death row". Seems I was wrong.
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Very few to none. Almost all significant jail time for marijuana is for intent to distribute. Most states which haven't made it legal decriminalized it in small quantities or don't actively prosecute cases as of decades ago.
Its easy to assume that based on public info, but it is still an assumption. "Nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country did not submit any data in 2021 to a newly revised FBI crime statistics collection program" https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/06/14/what-did-fbi-data-say-about-crime-in-2021-it-s-too-unreliable-to-tell
I'm willing to believe its extremely rare for simple possession to be the only thing a person is in jail for, but the threshold for intent to distribute is at like .5 oz. A half ounce of weed is more likely to be a purchase by a person who doesn't want to go buy weed every week than someone who plans on selling 1 gram at a time. Really makes me wonder how many people in jail for selling weed were ever even selling weed at all.
Half an ounce could really go either way. You're underestimating how much weed dealing is really, really petty nonsense.
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Intent to distribute/felony possession is different from state to state, but many are in the pounds and few (maybe none) are as low as half an ounce. Federal numbers have been absurdly large for a while since they're mostly interested in international trafficking.
Fair point about felony thresholds, it seems only 5-10 states care whether you have a half ounce or not (based on this ). The thing is though, i'm pretty sure if you are caught going between states with weed you can get hit with trafficking in those states, so even if the feds don't care, a local PD could decide to be a dick about how they write up that 1/2 ounce.
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Yes, but adding "intent to distribute" to a simple possession charge is routine.
Is it? I thought I heard some urban legend about how "intent to distribute" was something they could tack on just on the basis of sheer mass, but that it still required meeting some minimum threshold. But the drug war hasn't been something I've paid attention for a long time.
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Its common for people with extensive previous records or who are involved in violent crime. I don't think that's what people are thinking about when they hear someone went to jail for Marijuana for years.
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The ones that talked back to the cop who found it.
I suspect that these might have gotten a ride and an overnight stay, but are there people who actually serving jail sentence for less than a gram of weed right now? How many of them?
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Cops don't determine sentencing, or even charging for that matter.
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If they got caught with less than a gram of wax in an airport? Straight to jail.
This doesn’t seem to be true. See eg. https://www.laattorney.com/amp/what-if-i-get-caught-with-weed-while-flying.html which claims that it basically never happens in California. Does it happen anywhere else?
I am really interested in actual figures. Are we talking about 10 000 people currently being imprisoned for possessing less than a gram of weed? 1000? 10? 2 unlucky guys in Kentucky?
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In practice in California itself or California to Nevada there is no worry transporting small amounts the TSA doesn’t care in the slightest neither do the local cops they might ring up. Maybe some states could book you, but those are getting fewer and fewer.
I know California cops don't particularly care. But I sure would have thought that the TSA would enforce Federal drug laws. A gram of cannabis wax is probably a big problem to get caught with in an airport.
Waxes and other concentrates are legally distinct and way more illegal even in some "cool" states, so yeah i would not advise travelling with your dab pen.
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I don't know about a gram, but for solely marijuana possession with no prior sentences, a very small amount in state prison and now none in federal prison, Biden pardoned them 3 months ago. However to my knowledge the federal law hasn't come off the books so anyone can still be charged. Overall enforcement by police is way down though.
Good point on the pardon.
Yeah, I know it’s on the books, but it doesn’t matter. We have a lot of laws are on the books but don’t really get enforced in a way books specify. What I really am interested about is actual figure. I know that this is really rare, and most incarcerated people are there for much more serious offenses, but how many people actually currently serve a sentence for simple possession of less than a gram of weed? 1000? 100? 10? Nobody?
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It was never that high. There was a report in the early 2000s where the median weed offender in state or federal prison had over 100 lbs (perhaps kgs, I'd have to re-check) in their possession. That is median, not mean.
Federal is the key word there. Most weed offenders are at the state level
No it included both.
you edited your post
I did not.
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Why not? It equally counts people caught with .000000000001 lbs. Going by median is how you diminish outliers.
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Alternatively wokeness is waning a bit, the market turned and suddenly the people who objected to trump coming back stopped looking like valuable lawsuit insurance and started looking like deadweight while you're desperately trying to surface for air. That doesn't mean it's dead in other areas but the tech platforms are definitely slowing their roll a bit.
Basically this. I get that it's practically an article of faith amongst mottezens that wokeness will prevail, and that PMC gatekeeping is inviolable, but FOX News is supposedly drawing something like 2 - 3 times the nightly viewership of MSNBC and CNN. CNN is rumored to be suffering serious financial issues, and staff are reportedly pissed that the new CEO is looking to eliminate a lot of the "opinion journalism". Likewise, at an alleged 10 million viewer a show and growing Rogan seems to be on track to attain the sort of reach that Limbaugh held at his peak where he as an individual was regularly outperforming major outlets.
Sure the woke SV types might be trying to put their fingers on the algorithmic scales to promote their favored sources but at the end orf the day the advertisers (and their money) are going to go where the eyeballs are, and if google doesn't deliver that they're dead.
History demonstrates over and over and over again that a well-placed, motivated, disciplined, and effective minority can completely dominate and quell a disorganized, lazy, and indisciplined majority. British india - a nation of scores of millions - was run by a couple thousand clerks. The Bolsheviks were a tiny splinter faction of one minority party. The Nazis never got above 33% of the vote in an open election. And on and on.
But the open question is whether that minority is well-placed, disciplined or effective. They have some things going for them, but the jury is out.
The East India Company and the Bolsheviks both played the game of violence more effectively than their rivals within the context of empires that were already falling apart. Wokies are playing low-violence politics within the context of a liberal republic with venerable institutions. Wokies are trying to white-ant those institutions, but can they succeed in the face of opposition? Time will tell.
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I think most mottizens would agree that Fox News and other conservative content is quite popular among the proles. The problem is the near complete woke capture of the elite class.
Elite opinion is arguably all that matters as well. Throughout history the opinions of the masses mattered very little. A small number of coordinated elites can impose their will on a huge body of non-elites. During the French revolution, for example, there were mass killings of priests and nuns during a time when the vast majority of the population were devout Catholics.
The fact that 70% or whatever of the working class prefers Fox News to liberal media should be cold comfort to conservatives. That same Fox News is basically considered banned hate speech in places that matter.
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Hasn't this been true throughout the ascension of wokeness, too, though?
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I don't think it's that so much. I think it's pessimism, rooted in the failure of past predictions that wokeness will blow over. Remember the "it's just some kids on college campuses"? That aged like milk. After a rather large failure like that prediction, I can't blame people for being skeptical of future similar predictions.
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I don't know if that's a "rumor". Well, I suppose the specifics of how CNN itself is doing is slightly a rumor.
But the stitched-together shambling corpse that is Warner Bros. Discovery is objectively in terrible shape.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/06/david-zaslav-warner-bros-discovery-cash-flow-debt.html
NYTimes has done some fantastic reporting on the gamma ray burst of stupid that caused all this nonsense with Warner, but, paywall.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/business/media/att-time-warner-deal.html
That's not even the worst merger Time Warner has been involved in, they gave 55% of the company for AOL in Jan 2000. It didn't look good by the end of the quarter.
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Lol. Warner should probably be a persons largest stock position. Up 50% this year. It was just spun out of AT and T which probably didn’t have a clue how to convert to a streaming player. And some bumps in the restructuring from that. It ran into problems with a lot of the equity being spun out to AT and T holders (dividend investors) and then a tough stock market and tax loss selling late last year.
The debt isn’t a problem. The average maturity is like 14 years at 4.5% rates. It’s locked in long term mostly so the article completely misses the point that there’s no interest rate risks with the firm. High rates might even helps them because it makes market values of existing debt cheaper to buy on the open market.
CNN was a fiasco. Wish they didn’t own it but a legacy asset. And HBO though gone a little wokey still is the preferred venue for artists.
If they figure out streaming no reason some day they can’t pay off a lot of debt and get a Netflix like valuation. Then that 30 billion market cap could be an 8-12 bagger.
Im not sure streaming firms ever get the valuations of the old days but the main issue is an industry with a few scaled players and more competition when it use to just be Netflix. Wasn’t a woke story but a too much competition story. And wbd suffers from having to pivot from an old high cash flow model to a new format which companies do struggle with. But the content library is as good as anyones so they have a fighting chance.
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It is worth noting that Fox is pretty much the only right-leaning option, while there's more to split between on the left-leaning media, which might skew the numbers a little. But as you point out, there certainly is a large right-wing market; right about half the voting population of the USA votes Republican.
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It’s worth noting that Facebook has dialed down on ideological censorship in a very big way recently just in general, probably due to Texas’s social media law. They unbanned the Texas nationalist movement from Facebook a bit before Trump and were facing an enforcement action from the Texas attorney general’s office over something to do with their ban(probably not unbanning fast enough).
Oh, I missed that.
Though I do remember being pleasantly surprised at the Texas nationalist signs outside our courthouse this last November.
Having a blóc quebecois is probably good for our politics inasmuch as it keeps local politicians focused on local issues rather than federal ambitions, regardless of what you think about Texas independence in general.
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