The morning of November 5, hours before I was confronted with the sick realization that the world was again about to get exponentially harder for me and the people I love, I received an email from Kunal Lunawat, CEO and cofounder of Wildr, an app he described to me as a 'troll-free, text-only' social media platform. 'Given the historical import of today, I had to reach out,' he wrote, and I immediately wanted to call bullshit. I get emails like this from startup founders often. This is the app that solves everything, I'm promised. They toss out words like 'game changer.' They characterize what they've built as a 'turning point.' Rarely do those guarantees cash in'70 percent of startups fail between years two and five'and the urgency only seems to mask what's really going on, what maybe these wannabe Zuckerbergs can't see: Their idea just isn't that innovative, no matter how much they dress it up in mechanical cliches. Techies have been trying to make a 'healthier' social media platform for decades now, whether it's been by ditching anonymity, hiding likes, getting rid of bots, even making the network only bots. In Wildr's case, it's AI (of course): The app promises a 'return to the basics' by leveraging a text-only format that would, as I deciphered it, merge the best parts of Reddit, Medium, and early Twitter. Open communication. Robust dialog. Zero trolls. And all of it is monitored by AI that 'nudges' users to post 'frictionless' content. It's a big, perhaps impossible task'and one I wanted to hear more about....

Musk's efforts to influence who wins next week's US presidential election have continued. For example, over the past three months, he has donated more than US$100 million to a political action committee called America PAC that's promoting Trump. But our new research (currently available in preprint form) indicates Musk may be wielding influence in other more subtle ways as well. However, the platform's increasing opacity to researchers makes this difficult to say for certain. Shortly after Musk endorsed Trump's presidential campaign, there was a statistically anomalous boost in engagement with his X account. Suddenly, his posts were getting much higher views, retweets and likes in comparison to other prominent political accounts on the platform. This raises suspicions as to whether Musk has tweaked the platform's algorithm to increase the reach of his posts in advance of the US presidential election. It also demonstrates the problems with how social media platforms like X are currently regulated around the world....

Political violence is hardly new to America. Since the country's inception, gunmen have shaped its political landscape, from the Civil War to the Ku Klux Klan, to high-profile assassinations and the bombing of federal buildings. Yet the threat of political violence has deepened in recent years and intensified during the 2024 election cycle. At least 400 distinct incidents of political violence were reported in the first two quarters of 2024, a nearly 80 percent jump from 2022. Targets have ranged from a former president and politicians to election administrators, municipal leaders, school officials and even emergency responders. The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly underscored the rising threat of political violence, identifying far-right extremists as the most significant domestic threat to American security. A small number of such groups are rallying on the streets, though many more are active online. In the first half of 2024 alone, nearly one in five local elected officials reported receiving threats. This month, the DHS described the threat of violence linked to the 2024 election cycle as 'high'....

In the days following January 6, Meta, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch suspended former president Donald Trump over posts the companies said glorified the violence at the Capitol. It was the most extreme moderation decision these companies had ever made. Platforms also took sweeping actions to remove thousands of accounts belonging to militias, conspiracy theorists, and the content they shared that led the US to that moment. After the 2022 midterms, the balance of power shifted in Congress. Republicans now had a majority'albeit a slim one'in the House of Representatives and used that sliver of power to go after the researchers and trust and safety workers who did the dizzying work of debunking election myths. Jim Jordan was elevated to chair of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and immediately launched investigations stifling the work of academics at best and launching harassment campaigns against entire moderation teams at worst. As a result of these attacks, the Stanford Internet Observatory, one of the top disinformation research groups, shut down for good over the summer....