The Pennsylvania Senate race is still neck-and-neck, and the Fetterman campaign is hoping that their candidate’s well established meme advantage will help put him over the top.
This kind of online organizing has been a big strategy for Democrats this cycle, as Makena wrote about here — but it remains to be seen whether it will pay off.
A new paper from researchers at the Brookings institute finds that YouTube’s algorithm makes all groups (liberal, moderate and conservative) slightly more conservative, rather than the universal push to extremes that many had assumed.
That’s consistent with teens getting Shapiro-pilled on YouTube, but it’s not quite the “rabbit hole” thesis you hear from most pundits.
Mark Zuckerberg gave an extremely politic answer when we asked about the stalled TikTok ban, which is currently under review by the US Department of Commerce.
Kicking TikTok out of the US would remove a huge rival to Facebook and Instagram — it’s arguably the only company offering them meaningful competition right now. But it would also set a precedent that could blow back on Facebook in years to come.
You may have missed it this morning, but we launched a brand new cybersecurity package, focused on the human element. We’ve got four stories in there now, and we’ll be adding more every day through the end of next week. Check it out!
A cool new graphic from Our World in Data lets you track how much plastic waste the world is generating, country by country, and how much of that plastic ends up in the ocean.
If you start with the “emitted to ocean” map, you might think it’s mostly coming from Africa and southeast Asia but don’t be fooled: the lion’s share of that waste is generated in the US and Europe and then exported for disposal.
[Our World in Data]
As XKCD explained so well, there is a big difference between taking down a website and taking down an actual service. Still, it seems like not a great sign that so many airport websites are going down.
In a poignant personal essay, Jean Guerrero looks back at her youthful desire to upload her consciousness into a computer, and what it says about the current Silicon Valley fad for immortality. If only it were so easy!
