Parler’s Rise Was Also Its Downfall

On the last day of Parler, the vibe was electric.It was the weekend after supporters of President Donald Trump had stormed the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the certification of the election. With just more than a 24-hour warning, the “free speech social network” and aspiring Twitter alternative was being cut off by its cloud-hosting provider, Amazon...

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Watching MAGA World Fracture in Real Time

Bryson Gray, a 29-year-old rapper and Donald Trump superfan from North Carolina, wants to make one thing clear: It was a group of the president’s most loyal supporters that rioted in the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday, and nobody else. When I spoke with Gray yesterday, he said he had been “too late” to get inside the Capitol itself with the rest...

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Better Security Cannot Stop a Coup

This week, a mob of extremists, incited by President Donald Trump, bypassed police lines and entered the Capitol. They smashed windows and furniture, stole a lectern and laptops, and broke into the Senate chambers. They disrupted Congress and forced lawmakers to evacuate to security bunkers. Five people died, including a Capitol Police officer, and...

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Trump’s Internet Is Celebrating

Updated at 9:20 a.m. ET on January 7, 2020.The internet is real life.This was the lesson of Pizzagate in 2016, which made clear that conspiracy theorizing on message boards can lead to a man carrying a rifle into a restaurant. This was the lesson of the deadly Charlottesville rally in 2017, which made clear that online hate is a precursor to offline...

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The Dark Reality of Betting Against QAnon

QAnon—the conspiracy theory that elite Democrats, government officials, and celebrities are part of a cannibalistic, child-sex-trafficking cult, and Donald Trump is the hero destined to stop them—has allegedly inspired kidnappings, car chases, and a murder. It has also made 28-year-old Patrick Cage a lot of money.In 2018, Cage, a Californian who works...

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The First Major Anti-MLM Platform

This week, when TikTok announced an updated version of its community guidelines, one small addition was more surprising than the others. Under a section of policy prohibiting various types of “Frauds and Scams”—which used to focus on outright Ponzi schemes, get-rich-quick hoaxes, and phishing attempts—the company became the first major social-media...

Dec 2020

Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

The Doomsday Machine was never supposed to exist. It was meant to be a thought experiment that went like this: Imagine a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life. Now suppose that machine is buried deep underground, but connected to a computer, which is in turn hooked up to sensors in cities and towns across the United States.The...

Dec 2020

Are the New ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ Services Legit?

This article was published online on December 15, 2020.Everyone is born a mark, and you have to hope you wise up from there. Getting purposefully and repeatedly fooled is one of the fundamental experiences of childhood—by peekaboo, by Santa Claus, by the idea that you’ll grow a watermelon in your tummy if you swallow the seeds. The more kids realize...

Dec 2020

Dressed for the Plague. No, Not This One.

Alexandra Vega calls her four pet leeches “the Squish Squad.” They eat once every six months; yes, they drink blood; and yes, she lets them feed on her body. They’re her friends! The leeches, named Chungus, Burrito, Wormitha, and Chocolate Chip, live in a fishbowl, but they’re curious about the world. “They each have their own personalities,” Vega,...

Dec 2020

The Secret Internet of TERFs

Updated at 1:56 p.m. ET on Dec. 8, 2020.Mary Kate Fain, a 27-year-old engineer and writer living in Houston, has always considered herself a feminist. Growing up, she told me, she had a pretty standard set of progressive values—her primary focus was animal rights, and her feminism was reflexive, mainstream. In college, however, her ideas about feminism...

Dec 2020