Now I understand why Schmitt freaked out last week at @daphnek.bsky.social's "the one that you lost?" comment to him regarding his failed lawsuit over "social media censorship." He has a new book out where he pretends he won that (and many other cases he lost). @noupside.bsky.social has a review.

Senator Eric Schmitt’s book "How To Beat The Left In Court" isn't ab law. It’s about using courts as stages for political spectacle. He brazenly lies about deposition testimony and omits losses. This is litigation as narrative warfare: the filing is the victory, truth is someone else’s problem.

"The point is not accuracy. As Schmitt tells the reader, the point is the story. And in the age of framing and attention games, this realization is unfortunately not entirely wrong." @noupside.bsky.social discusses Senator Eric Schmitt's new book.

@noupside.bsky.social demolishes Senator Eric Schmitt’s account of his various tilts against the Biden administration. But his type have been successful enough, I fear, that we are *much* less prepared to deal with disinformation than we’ve ever been before, and we’re less safe and secure for it.

Michael Shellenberger, midwit, seems to have missed who’s been “hyping” foreign election interference and demanding censorship lately. 😂 Instead he once again wrote thousands of words ab my report on Russian interference, pretending it was “$100k of FB ads” rather than a $20M+ multiyear effort. 🤷🏻‍♀️

The @nationalacademies.org Awards for Excellence in #scicomm have honored some of the best thinkers & creatives I know, like @chanda.blacksky.app @neillewisjr.bsky.social @cbo.bsky.social Top award: $40,000. Deadline: April 3. Explore & apply www.nationalacademies.org/programs/NAE...

where are the community notes my based son saxon orders CHEESEBURGERS at the sushi restaurants pls get it rightt

🌱 gardeningsky: can anyone explain why my hyacinths do this flopping thing? Is it too much shade? Old bulbs? Can I fix it? It happens every year and it’s basically immediately when they bloom.

FBI and CISA issue joint warning of Russian phishing on Signal. I got something just like this yesterday. Don’t accept random messages.

Appreciating my front row seat to this show. Pleased that our episode was noticed by all the right people.

How the Iran war and resulting economic mess is actually Joe Biden’s fault, by Michael Shellenberger

Mike Benz’s fantasy has always been bullshit but pay attention: if Orbán loses this is how right wing populist liars are going to allege “The Steal” in Hungary. It was cEnSorShIp. Someone censored 22 miLlioN tWeEts, perhaps. 🙄 Frame Game preemptively framing events.

Fantastic interview with Renee who breaks this down for those of you who haven't followed the Biden v. Missouri / censorship industrial complex debate over disinfo research

In early 2025, aides to JD Vance ordered a small office at the State Dept to document how European regulators were censoring online speech. “We did not find anything,” said one of the ppl. “It was not politically convenient that we could not find anything." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Breaking: we are doing this stupid thing again. Reminder that this is rooted in Tulsi Gabbard's baseless claim of a "treasonous coup" that never happened, which was wholly unsupported by material that she declassified. www.axios.com/2026/03/19/c...

I had wondered why we’d not gotten a notice of appeal here. That explains that. Will be interesting to see if this is now going to be a way to stretch things out so these goons don’t make the midterms even worse for Rs or if they actually do try to quickly pull together a new committee.

Those of us with kids of a certain age probably remember the proliferation of weird Chinese animation that popped up for kids on YouTube about a decade ago, including Mickey Mouse snuff films… second go-round now with AI slop letting anyone get in the game. (Also Cocomelon is slop, don’t @ me.)

We do have that right, yes, as Daphne Keller pointed out. More importantly, Senator Schmitt failed the “Who was President in 2020?” test. EIP not only didn’t cEnSor cOnTenT, it sure as hell didn’t do it on behalf of the BIDEN regime, since Trump appointees ran the govt during the 2020 election.

Jon is joined by misinformation researcher @noupside.bsky.social, who is currently being sued by Stephen Miller for her work, and Platformer editor @caseynewton.bsky.social. They break down the tension between government and social media platforms and how that impacts our elections.

Behemoth doesn’t need to jump up on counters to be a bad cat, he just stands up. Making a classic dessert in honor of the holiday…

Bad day for alternate universes

Looking forward to this dropping tomorrow! Talking the SAFE Act, the ideological arcs of platform oligarchs, and election denier shenanigans in Congress and the courts.

It was a TREAT to talk platforms and oligarchs with my close friend (aspirational) Jon Stewart

“No this isn’t happening” —> “You trying to stop it is ceNsorShiP” arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

“No this isn’t happening” —> “You trying to stop it is ceNsorShiP” arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

This is a lie on a scale of Elon Musk saying he would cut the deficit to zero. Just insane. Not just untrue, but the opposite of the truth, which is that immigrants are lowering the deficit. www.cato.org/white-paper/...

Someone tell Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger this sounds like an abuse of the first amendment

Iran? Spreading disinformation and war propaganda? No!! AI content...manipulating the discourse..on X??!!! FAKE NEWS MEDIA amplifying it on social media? Surely a Community Note will fix that... (in 14 hours) If only we had, idk, agencies & partnerships & verification tools for such things.

Re the alleged Netanyahu-is-secretly-dead videos: he doesn’t have a 6th finger, and the foam in the coffee clearly shifts. We are really in bad shape with AI doubt at this point, but what I keep coming back to is “conspiracy-without-the-theory”: WHY would the Israeli govt conceal his death w/fakes?

RFK Jr has always been extremely weird and cringe and it’s incredible to see both MAGAs and Very Serious Scientists like Jay Bhattacharya twist themselves in knots to pretend this is normal, cool even, totally not nanny state shit to take away your twinkies while saying vaccines cause autism.

Covid conspiracies are no longer keeping up the income stream for this prince of the intellectual dark web, so he’s going full Candace.

Just submitted a paper on the dismantling of verification infrastructure on social media & the verification vacuum it’s creating. Spent the last month reading thousands of pages of policy docs & exec statements…the buildup in 2016-2018, specialization, then teardown as “censorship” frame took hold.

A new lawsuit accuses the administration of violating the First Amendment by threatening the visas of researchers for work on disinformation and content moderation of social media. n.pr/4be42ye

“Ahhh! Mom!! Look! It’s duck duck goose!” 🦆 We are hanging out by the Potomac since it’s a nice day. Two Canada geese just landed in the mix of mallards and the 5yo is losing her mind lol.

My piece was called "perhaps the best account of what really happened to USAID" in Devex this week. Read it here timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/everyone-i...

They are openly bragging about this tbc.

Everyone else in the room when a former DOGE employee was deposed.

ArXiv is hiring a CEO. This would be a cool gig for someone. Maybe someone awesome who got DOGE’d at one of the govt sciences orgs… jobs.chronicle.com/job/37961678...

NEW: Right-wing activists are circulating a draft executive order that purports to give Trump sweeping power over federal elections. @mollyroberts.bsky.social and I got new details on the activists, lawyers, and conspiracy theorists behind the proposed order: www.lawfaremedia.org/article/in-c...

Stephen Miller’s America First Legal and Jenin Younes’ New Civil Liberties Alliance gloated about their depositions and posted them online to get civil servants harassed but the DOGE boys are delicate flowers and rules dont apply.

The Brazilians really know how to fight and it’s so great to see. The regime’s favorite lying drunk Darren Beattie — the “kneel before MAGA” guy — got his visa revoked 😂 Brings me joy.

It is extremely funny to me that Shellenberger is out here talking ab how Jeffrey Epstein was absolutely not a CIA agent while he continues to tell people that I am. 😂 Hugo Chavez’s former PR boy says whatever advances his/client’s political goals. That’s it. He has no thought process beyond that.

undefeated king of cope right here

These are the stories media needs to be covering. Every time an infant dies of a refusal, tell the story. Use those words. The NYT has some of the most abysmal, sympathetic coverage of the AV movement because it can’t bring itself to offend, so we get writing implying we don’t know why it’s grown🤷🏻‍♀️

Oh is this happening? The administration gutted state capacity to disrupt it, and smeared the very ethical researchers quoted, who have for years done nonpartisan work to address this problem. The deranged ketamine addict running X fell for Shellenbullshit about “censorship”. And here they are.

Most accurate portrait of modern culture currently available

Mike Benz — Frame Game — laying out his operating philosophy in his own voice. A pathological liar who duped one rube after another. Matt Taibbi. Jacob Siegel. They legitimized him, then never walked back anything they wrote. Just quietly pretended they’d never taken him seriously as a source lol.

Since we got “Iran interfered in the election!” as a justification for war, have Maduro sitting in jail, and Tulsi was snuffling around Georgia looking for “evidence” of god knows what—here are the Chinese, Vezuelan, Italian, Iranian, etc conspiracy theories liars in power are dredging back up. 📡💻🗳️

Playing a family game of Clue and the 5yo is contributing by periodically just yelling MUSTARD!!! like she’s Kendrick.

You need to read this thread Jay Bhattacharya should not have been allowed anywhere near NIH leadership He has shown—over & over—that he will impede the careers of early career researchers He told my Duke colleague, a young post-doc who studies health disparities, that his science was “bad”