How Google Spent 15 Years Creating a Culture of Concealment

“Trying to avoid antitrust suits, Google systematically told employees to destroy messages, avoid certain words and copy the lawyers as often as possible.

Nov. 20, 2024Updated 9:19 a.m. ET

Ben Wiseman

In late 2008, as Google faced antitrust scrutiny over an advertising deal with its rival Yahoo and confronted lawsuits involving patent, trademark and copyright claims, its executives sent out a confidential memo.

“We believe that information is good,” the executives told employees in the memo. But, they added, government regulators or competitors might seize on words that Google workers casually, thoughtlessly wrote to one another.

To minimize the odds that a lawsuit could flush out comments that might be incriminating, Google said, employees should refrain from speculation and sarcasm and “think twice” before writing one another about “hot topics.” “Don’t comment before you have all the facts,” they were instructed.

The technology was tweaked, too. The setting for the company’s instant messaging tool was changed to “off the record.” An incautious phrase would be wiped the next day.

The memo became the first salvo in a 15-year campaign by Google to make deletion the default in its internal communications. Even as the internet giant stored the world’s information, it created an office culture that tried to minimize its own. Among its tools: using legal privilege as an all-purpose shield and imposing restraints on its own technology, all while continually warning that loose lips could sink even the most successful corporation.

How Google developed this distrustful culture was pieced together from hundreds of documents and exhibits, as well as witness testimony, in three antitrust trials against the Silicon Valley company over the last year. The plaintiffs — Epic Games in one case, the Department of Justice in the other two — were trying to establish monopoly behavior, which required them to look through emails, memos and instant messages from hundreds of Google engineers and executives.

The exhibits and testimony showed that Google took numerous steps to keep a lid on internal communications. It encouraged employees to put “attorney-client privileged” on documents and to always add a Google lawyer to the list of recipients, even if no legal questions were involved and the lawyer never responded.

Sundar Pichai, center, Google’s chief executive, arriving at federal court in San Francisco for an antitrust trial last November.Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Companies anticipating litigation are required to preserve documents. But Google exempted instant messaging from automatic legal holds. If workers were involved in a lawsuit, it was up to them to turn their chat history on. From the evidence in the trials, few did.

Google is far from the only company trying to keep newer forms of communication out of the courtroom. As instant messages and text messages have become popular office tools, corporations and regulators have increasingly clashed over how the missives can be used in court.

A generation ago, a water-cooler conversation or a phone call might have been incriminating, but the words would have dissolved in the air. Someone might remember them, but they could always be denied. Perhaps listeners misheard or misunderstood.

Companies would like instant messages to be as ephemeral as a real-life conversation. A comment made by text to a subordinate about the implications of a merger is just so much chatter, they argue. But regulators, and litigants, see them as fair game.

In August, the Federal Trade Commission, which is suing to stop a $25 billion supermarket merger between Albertsons and Kroger, said several Albertsons executives had demonstrated “a pervasive practice” of deleting business-related text messages in defiance of legal requirements to keep them.

Some of these texts, the F.T.C. argued, suggested that at least one executive thought prices might increase as a result of the merger. The judge said Albertsons “failed to take reasonable steps” to preserve the messages, but did not punish the chain. Albertsons declined to comment.

In April, the F.T.C. said in a legal filing as part of its antitrust case against Amazonthat company executives had used the disappearing message tool Signal to discuss competition issues, even after they were required to keep all communications in the case. Amazon said the assertions that it had destroyed information were “baseless and irresponsible.”

The Justice Department, which is led by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, above, has been embroiled in two antitrust trials with Google.Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press

But Google has faced the broadest criticism for its actions, with the judges in all three antitrust cases chastising the company for its communications practices.

Judge James Donato of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, who presided over the Epic case, said that there was “an ingrained systemic culture of suppression of relevant evidence within Google” and that the company’s behavior was “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.” He added that after the trial, he was “going to get to the bottom” of who was responsible at Google for allowing this behavior. Judge Donato declined to comment.

Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, who is overseeing Google’s antitrust case involving advertising technology, said at a hearing in August that the company’s document retention policies were “not the way in which a responsible corporate entity should function.” She added, “An awful lot of evidence has likely been destroyed.”

The Justice Department has asked Judge Brinkema for sanctions, which would be a presumption that the missing material was unfavorable to Google on the issues it is on trial for, including monopoly power and whether its conduct was anticompetitive. Closing arguments in the case are scheduled for Monday.

In a statement, Google said it took “seriously our obligations to preserve and produce relevant documents. We have for years responded to inquiries and litigation, and we educate our employees about legal privilege.”

From Google’s point of view, it was the Marie Kondo of corporations, merely tidying up its records and files. But it did this so comprehensively and obsessively that it created the illusion of deceit that it was trying so hard to dispel, said Agnieszka McPeak, a professor at Gonzaga University School of Law who has written about evidence destruction.

“Google had a top-down corporate policy of ‘Don’t save anything that could possibly make us look bad,’” she said. “And that makes Google look bad. If they’ve got nothing to hide, people think, why are they acting like they do?”

Microsoft’s Long Shadow

Google was founded in September 1998, a few months after the era’s most dominant tech company — Microsoft — was sued by the Justice Department for antitrust violations. Seeking to show that Microsoft was illegally monopolizing the web browser market, the department did not have to look far for damning memos.

“We need to continue our jihad next year,” a company vice president wrote to Microsoft’s chief executive, Bill Gates, in one memo. Another executive, trying to persuade Apple to kill a feature, said, “We want you to knife the baby.”

Microsoft lost the case, though the verdict was partly overturned on appeal. Still, it was enough of a near-death experience to make the next generation of tech companies, including Google, wary of both documents and loose comments.

The trouble was, technology made it so very easy to produce and preserve an abundance of both. Google produced 13 times as many emails as the average company per employee did before it was a decade old, Kent Walker, Google’s top lawyer, testified in the Epic trial. Google felt overwhelmed, he said, and it was clear to the company that things would only become worse if changes weren’t made.

The 2008 memo that said chat messages would be automatically purged was signed by Mr. Walker and Bill Coughran, an engineering executive. They noted that Google had “an email and instant messaging culture.” Its instant messaging tools, first called Talk, later Hangouts and then Chat, were quickly taken up by employees.

Chat was where engineers could go a little wild, safely. As one Googler wrote in a chat that surfaced as a courtroom exhibit, the need to be cautious “makes for less interesting, sometimes even less useful written communication. But that’s why we have off-the-record chats.”

Microsoft, led by Bill Gates, left, was sued by the Justice Department in the late 1990s for antitrust violations.Dan Levine/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Google, like many corporations, deals with so many lawsuits that some employees are subject to multiple litigation holds at the same time. A few may be on litigation holds for their entire career.

Lauren Moskowitz, an Epic lawyer, asked Mr. Walker during his testimony in the case how putting employees in control of the process actually worked.

“You expected your employees, hundreds, thousands of employees, to stop what they were doing for every instant message that they ever sent or received every day, and parse through a list of topics on some legal hold, to decide whether they should take an action to change a default setting in their Chat before conducting the rest of their business,” Ms. Moskowitz said.

Mr. Walker responded that the policy had been “reasonable at the time.”

As Google became bigger, its vocabulary became smaller. In a memo from 2011 titled “Antitrust Basics for Search Team,” the company recommended avoiding “metaphors involving wars or sports, winning or losing,” and rejecting references to “markets,” “market share” or “dominance.”

In a subsequent tutorial for new employees, Google said even a phrase as benign as “putting products in the hands of new customers” should be avoided because it “can be interpreted as expressing an intent to deny consumers choice.”

If using the right words and deleting messages did not keep Google out of the courthouse, the company concluded, invoking the lawyers would.

Kent Walker, Google’s top lawyer, at a Senate hearing in September. In court, he has testified that before Google was a decade old, it produced 13 times as many emails per employee as the average company did.Pete Kiehart for The New York Times

In the Epic case, the plaintiff contended that Google’s many evocations of attorney-client privilege were merely for show, to keep the documents out of the courtroom. Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, wrote in one 2018 email to another executive, “Attorney Client Privileged, Confidential, Kent pls advice,” referring to Mr. Walker. The email, about a nonlegal issue, was withheld by Google and stripped of its privilege only after Epic challenged it.

Mr. Walker was asked to explain Google’s behavior to the judge. He denied that there was “a culture of concealment” but said one problem was Googlers unsure of the meaning of certain words.

“They think of the word ‘privilege’ as similar to ‘confidential,’” he said.

A message surfaced in the Epic trial in which a Google lawyer identified the practice of copying lawyers on documents as “fake privilege” and seemed rather amused by it. Mr. Walker said he was “disappointed” and “surprised” to hear that term.

The jury hearing the case ruled in favor of Epic on all 11 counts in December.

Mr. Pichai and Mr. Walker declined to comment. Last month, three advocacy groups, led by the American Economic Liberties Project, asked for Mr. Walker to be investigated by the California State Bar for coaching Google to “engage in widespread and illegal destruction” of documents relevant to federal trials.

‘What Happens in Vegas’

In September 2023, as Google went on trial in an antitrust case over its dominance in internet search, the Justice Department asserted that the company had withheld tens of thousands of documents, saying they were privileged. When the documents were reviewed by the court, they were deemed not privileged after all.

“The court is taken aback by the lengths to which Google goes to avoid creating a paper trail for regulators and litigants,” Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote. Google, he noted, had clearly learned Microsoft’s lesson: It had effectively trained its employees not to create “bad” evidence.

Judge Mehta said it ultimately did not matter: In August, he found Google guiltyof being a monopoly. Still, he said, he did not think the company was behaving well.

“Any company that puts the onus on its employees to identify and preserve relevant evidence does so at its own peril,” he wrote, adding that Google might not be so lucky to avoid sanctions in the next case.

The next case arrived in September, when the Justice Department argued in Judge Brinkema’s courtroom in Virginia that Google had built a monopoly in the highly profitable technology that served online ads.

Exhibits in the cases showed that Googlers had learned to be a little paranoid for the good of Google and their own careers. Talk in the dark, they insisted over and over, rather than in the light.

“How do we turn History off?” Adam Juda, a vice president for product management, wrote in a 2020 chat. “I don’t do History on 🙂.”

Sometimes executives were so worried about leaving a record that they defaulted to obsolete technology.

In September, Google went on trial in a Virginia courtroom over whether it had built a monopoly in the highly profitable technology that served online ads.Tom Brenner for The New York Times

In 2017, Robert Kyncl, then the chief business officer at the Google subsidiary YouTube, asked his boss, Susan Wojcicki, if she had a fax machine at home. Mr. Kyncl explained he had a “privileged doc” and “just didn’t want to send email.” Ms. Wojcicki, who died in August, did not have a fax machine.

If employees wanted to keep an electronic record, they were rebuked. In a group chat from 2021, one employee inquired: “ok for me to keep history on here? need to keep some info for memory purposes.”

Not OK, said Danielle Romain, the vice president of Trust, a Google team that looks for solutions that enhance user privacy and trust. “The discussion that started this thread gets into legal and potentially competitive territory, which I’d like to be conscientious of having under privilege,” she said. “I’d like to stick to the default of history off.”

Julia Tarver Wood, a Justice Department lawyer, said at an August hearing in the ad-tech case that Google employees “referred to these off-the-record chats as ‘Vegas.’ What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

Google maintained that it did its best to provide the government with the documents it could, and that, in any case, the Justice Department did not establish that the deleted conversations were crucial to its case. The Justice Department said it could not do that because the material had been deleted.

Regulators have recently underlined that there is no “Vegas” in chats. This year, the F.T.C. and the Justice Department’s antitrust division made it “crystal clear”in an enforcement memo: Communications through messaging apps are documents and must be preserved if there is threat of litigation.

Last year, Google changed its procedures. The default became saving everything, including chats. Employees on litigation holds can no longer turn chat history off.

Old habits die hard, however. In one chat, employees responded to the news by forming a group to secretly communicate on WhatsApp, Meta’s secure messaging app.

David Streitfeld writes about technology and the people who make it and how it affects the world around them. He is based in San Francisco. More about David Streitfeld“

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Earth’s second moon confirmed : Scientists discover new natural satellite orbiting our planet

November 17, 2024

Earth’s second moon confirmed : Scientists discover new natural satellite orbiting our planet - © The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

“In a groundbreaking astronomical discovery, scientists have confirmed that Earth now has a second moon. This celestial companion, known as asteroid 2024 PT5, was captured by our planet’s gravity on September 29, 2024. The revelation has sparked excitement in the scientific community and offers new opportunities for studying near-Earth objects.

Astronomers at the Complutense University of Madrid first spotted this intriguing event using a powerful telescope in Sutherland, South Africa. The tiny asteroid, measuring just 37 feet wide, has been temporarily ensnared by Earth’s gravitational pull, transforming it into a mini-moon.

Richard Binzel, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), explains, “These happen with some frequency, but we rarely see them because they’re very small and very hard to detect. Only recently has our survey capability reached the point of spotting them routinely.”

While Earth’s primary moon boasts a diameter of 2,159 miles, 2024 PT5 is comparatively minuscule. To put it in perspective :

• Earth’s moon : 2,159 miles wide
• Asteroid 2024 PT5 : 37 feet wide
• Size difference : Earth’s moon is over 300,000 times wider

Despite its small size, this temporary satellite provides valuable insights into our cosmic neighborhood and the dynamics of near-Earth objects.

The journey of Earth’s new mini-moon

Asteroid 2024 PT5 belongs to the Arjuna asteroid belt, a group of space rocks that follow orbits similar to Earth’s, approximately 93 million miles from the sun. Some Arjuna asteroids can approach our planet at a close range of around 2.8 million miles, traveling at relatively low velocities of less than 2,200 miles per hour.

According to data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Horizons system, 2024 PT5’s stay in Earth’s orbit will be brief. The capture began at 3 :54 p.m. EDT on September 29, 2024, and is expected to end at 11 :43 a.m. EDT on November 25, 2024.

Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, a professor and mini-moon expert from the Complutense University, likens the asteroid’s behavior to that of a window shopper. He states, “Asteroid 2024 PT5 will not describe a full orbit around Earth. You may say that if a true satellite is like a customer buying goods inside a store, objects like 2024 PT5 are window shoppers.”

This celestial visitor’s journey serves as a reminder of the dynamic nature of our solar system. While it won’t remain in Earth’s orbit for billions of years like our primary moon, its fleeting presence offers a unique opportunity for scientific study.

The significance of mini-moons in astronomical research

Mini-moons like 2024 PT5 provide scientists with valuable opportunities to study near-Earth objects up close. These temporary captures act as natural cosmic laboratories, offering insights into the composition of asteroids and the intricate workings of our solar system.

Binzel emphasizes the importance of these events, stating, “These temporary captures are natural cosmic laboratories. They help us understand the small bodies that come close to Earth and could be important for future space missions.”

While mini-moons are too small and dim for most amateur astronomers to observe, they fall within the detection range of professional-grade telescopes. To spot 2024 PT5, one would need :

Equipment	Specifications
Telescope diameter	At least 30 inches
Detector	CCD or CMOS

The study of mini-moons contributes to our understanding of near-Earth asteroids and their potential impact on our planet. By analyzing these temporary satellites, scientists can refine their models of asteroid behavior and improve our ability to predict and mitigate potential collisions.

Future implications and ongoing research

As technology advances, researchers hope to study these fleeting visitors more closely. Future missions may even attempt to gather samples or test new spacecraft designs using mini-moons as targets.

The discovery of 2024 PT5 and other mini-moons highlights the ever-changing nature of our cosmic environment. It serves as a reminder that our solar system is a dynamic place, full of surprises and opportunities for scientific exploration.

While Earth’s second moon may be temporary, its presence opens up new avenues for research and discovery. As we continue to scan the skies, who knows what other celestial wonders we might uncover ? The universe never ceases to amaze, and each new finding brings us one step closer to unraveling its mysteries.“

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Voyager 1 Breaks Its Silence With NASA via a Radio Transmitter Not Used Since 1981

“The farthest spacecraft in the universe went momentarily rogue, but scientists breathed a sigh of relief when it reconnected at an unexpected radio frequency

Margherita Bassi

November 6, 2024 12:55 p.m.

NASA's aging Voyager 1 spacecraft entered interstellar space in 2012 and has faced a handful of technical issues over the last year, even as it continues to collect scientific data. NASA / JPL-Caltech

In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and 2: a pair of spacecraft tasked with touring Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune by taking advantage of a rare alignment of the outer planets that only happens once every 175 years. The two probes had both completed their encounters with these worlds by 1989, and since then, they’ve traveled to the outer limits of our solar system and beyond, sending critical scientific data back to Earth.

Recently, however, Voyager 1 briefly fell silent. It broke communication with NASA in mid-October, then restored contact in an unexpected way: a backup radio transmitter that had been inactive since 1981.

“The spacecraft recently turned off one of its two radio transmitters, and the team is now working to determine what caused the issue,” according to a NASA blog post.

NASA’s twin Voyager probes have been flying for 47 years, which means the agency’s scientists and engineers back on Earth have increasingly had to deal with age-related maintenance issues, per Space.com’s Samantha Mathewson. Last December, for instance, Voyager 1 started sending nonsensical transmissions. Engineers solved the problem five months later, restoring the craft to its full abilities by this summer.

On October 16, Voyager 1 experienced another hiccup. Scientists sent the probe a command to turn on one of its heaters, but for some reason, the command triggered its fault protection system, which is built to respond autonomously to issues onboard. To preserve energy, the fault protection system occasionally turns off nonessential processes, but Voyager 1 should have had enough energy to run the heater.

Because the probe is currently more than 15 billion miles away—making it the farthest spacecraft from Earth—it takes almost 23 hours for a command to reach the craft and another 23 hours for its response to reach scientists. That means the NASA team only noticed something was wrong two days later, when they didn’t detect a response from the probe.

This image from a set of animations shows NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft exploring a region in our solar system called the magnetic highway, where the sun's magnetic field lines connect with interstellar magnetic fields. NASA / JPL-Caltech

Scientists communicate with both Voyager probes by using a radio transmitter that operates on X-band frequencies, within a range of 8 to 12 gigahertz, via NASA’s Deep Space Network, a web of giant radio antennas that make up the world’s biggest and most sensitive scientific telecommunications system. NASA quickly realized, however, that to preserve energy, Voyager 1 had begun sending signals at a lower rate on the transmitter, and teams found the new signal successfully.

Then, on October 19, Voyager 1 fell silent again. The team speculated that the probe might have completely turned off its X-band transmitter in favor of a backup S-band radio transmitter, which operates at a much lower frequency of two to four gigahertz—an instrument it hadn’t used in 43 years. Communicating on the S-band uses less power, but its signal is also fainter, so if that was the case, NASA scientists weren’t sure whether they’d be able to detect it from Earth. Coupled with the fact that Voyager 1 is much farther away now than it was when it last used the S-band in the ’80s, finding the signal could have been a difficult task.

Luckily, the Deep Space Network was indeed able to pick up the new, weaker signal, and scientists are now working to understand what caused Voyager 1 to switch off its X-band transmitter.

The agency’s engineers will proceed with caution, since they don’t want to risk the spacecraft’s welfare by trying to turn the X-band back on prematurely, as Bruce Waggoner, the Voyager mission assurance manager, tells CNN’s Ashley Strickland. But if they can get the transmitter back online, it might tell them what went wrong.

“The S-band signal is too weak to use long term,” Waggoner tells CNN. “So far, the team has not been able to use it to get telemetry (information about the health and status of the spacecraft), let alone science data. But it allows us to at least send commands and make sure the spacecraft is still pointed at Earth.”

Despite how long ago the twin probes launched, the Voyager spacecraft were built to last. “A profound insight gleaned from Voyager 1’s odyssey is the significance of redundancy in mission-critical hardware,” Eric Ralls writes for Earth.com. “The foresight to incorporate a backup radio transmitter, decades ago, underscores the necessity of planning for the unforeseen in space exploration.”

“We didn’t design them to last 30 years or 40 years, we designed them not to fail,” John Casani, Voyager project manager from 1975 to 1977, says in a NASA statement.

In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to cross out of the heliosphere—a sort of bubble surrounding the solar system filled with the solar magnetic field and solar wind—making it the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space. Voyager 2 reached the cosmic milestone six years later.

Voyager 1 will likely have enough power to run its scientific instruments until 2025, per Newsweek’s Tom Howarth, but NASA should be able to maintain communication with the spacecraft into the 2030s.“

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Efforts to combat disinformation in retreat as voters head to the polls

Cat ZakrzewskiNovember 2, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

(Washington Post illustration/iStock)

“During the chaos after the 2020 election, tech companies erected unprecedented defenses to prevent misinformation from spreading on their platforms.

Twitter’s Trust and Safety team added fact-checking labels to false claims about the election and blocked some of then-President Donald Trump’s posts about vote fraud from spreading. Facebook peppered election posts with links to its voter information center, which was filled with reliable information about the legitimacy of mail-in ballots and voting in general. Several weeks after the race was called, YouTube began removing videos that made claims of widespread election fraud.

Four years later, all those platforms are in retreat.

Under Elon Musk, Twitter — now X — eliminated most of its content moderation staff, replacing them with a crowdsourced, and flawed, fact-checking experiment. Facebook, now Meta, has scaled down its voter information center, and has decreased the visibility of posts about politics across Facebook and Instagram. And YouTube now allows claims of election fraud on the network.

Facing legal threats and political pressure, programs to combat the spread of disinformation have waned at social media giants; most companies have declined to update their policies to respond to the 2024 election. A once-thriving ecosystem of academic and government programs intended to monitor the spread of hoaxes and foreign interference online also has diminished, opening the door for threats against election workers and viral, unproven claims about voting irregularities.

This new environment has fostered a flood of exaggerated claims about irregularities in the voting process, which researchers say has escalated as Election Day approaches. Some election officials and researchers argue this ecosystem exposes voters to an information free-for-all, warping their perception of the results and potentially contributing to political instability.

“After 2020, the platforms really felt like ‘mission accomplished,’” said Color of Change president Rashad Robinson, whose digital civil rights group has pushed tech companies to adopt tougher rules against voter suppression. “And so [now] when you talk to them, they have moved a lot on believing that they know how to deal with the problem.”

Some experts argue the saturation of online conspiracies could translate into dangerous offline actions. A large quantity of voter-fraud propaganda might prime the public to distrust the outcome of the election, for example, laying the political groundwork for GOP leaders to challenge the results.

Individual pieces of election misinformation could inspire physical or digital attacks against poll workers, election officials or immigrant communities.

“We saw the dry run in 2020 of [election workers] being followed home and attacked, [facing] death threats online, [and] photos of them circulating on Facebook,” said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel of the digital rights group Free Press.

Meta spokesman Corey Chambliss said in a statement that protecting the U.S. 2024 elections remains a top priority for the social media giant and “no tech company does more to protect its platforms — not just during election periods but at all times.”

“We have around 40,000 people globally working on safety and security — more than during the 2020 cycle — and have invested more than $20 billion in teams and technology in this area since 2016,” Chambliss added.

YouTube spokeswoman Audrey Lopez said in a statement that the company will “support elections with a multilayered approach to effectively connect people to high-quality, authoritative news and information.” A spokesperson for X did not respond to a request for comment.

The corporate retreat is fueled by several factors. A conservative legal and political campaign over allegations of censorship has successfully pressured government agencies, tech companies and outside researchers to stop working together to detect election falsehoods. Musk, who has dramatically reduced X’s misinformation programs, has inspired other companies to roll back safeguards against propaganda.

Some platforms aren’t just allowing false claims of election fraud to spread, they are actively soliciting them. X owner Elon Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC, America PAC, last month launched an Election Integrity community page on X to encourage more than 58,000 members to post examples of potential voter fraud in the 2024 election, creating a database that includes many unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations.

“What is happening is much, much bigger than someone making a business decision to have less curated news sources and to have less content moderation,” said Eddie Perez, who once ran Twitter’s civic integrity team and is now a board member of the nonprofit OSET Institute. “Musk, in his support for Trump, is actually going to another extreme, which is to use the power of the platform in a proactive way, in favor of very specific antidemocratic viewpoints.”

The deluge of election denialism arrives as the unfounded claim that the 2020 election was rigged against former president Donald Trump has become a mainstream talking point among conservatives. In the months before the vote, these claims have ballooned into a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories.

Since 2021, tech companies have opened the door to politicians contesting the election results. Trump has returned to Meta platforms, YouTube and X after the companies suspended his account in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Meta started allowing politicians to put 2020 election rigging claims in political ads, though fraud claims about the 2024 vote remained barred.

Twitter once banned misleading claims that could undermine the public’s confidence in an election “including false information about the outcome of the election.” By 2023, a year after Musk took over the platform, that prohibition haddisappeared from the company’s civic integrity policy, according to its website.

“They all get to a point where they’re like ‘we can’t do this for every election in the past,’” said Katie Harbath, CEO of the tech consultancy Anchor Change and a former Facebook public policy director. “They might be more willing to take action for 2024 stuff than they are spending a ton of time constantly re-litigating 2020 and other past elections.”

Internet companies also have dramatically shifted how they promote accurate information about the election. Four years ago, Meta ran a voter information center with continuous updates about the election from outside groups, including the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank. The voter information center now directs users to static government websites, after Meta lobbyists complained that relying on the think tank could make them appear biased, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak on private deliberations.

A Twitter curation team, which included some seasoned journalists, pushed election-related articles from news outlets in Spanish and English to a dedicated election page on the platform’s Explore tab. Today, the program doesn’t exist. The company is directing users to a government voter registration page.

Both X and Meta have de-emphasized news stories in users’ news feeds, blunting the reach of mainstream journalists who share accurate updates about the election. Meta scrapped a news tab on Facebook promoting credible articles about elections and reduced the visibility of accounts that talk about politics and social issues.

While Meta has said shifting away from news and politics exposes users to less vitriolic content they don’t want, experts and activists have argued the move could lower the quality and diversity of information online, particularly for people who don’t actively seek out quality journalism from other sources.

“I think in many ways, the solution for companies in the election context is simply to remove the possibility of accountability,” Benavidez said. “And one way to do that is by depoliticizing feeds.”

Tech companies are also receiving less support from federal agencies this year to fight disinformation because the White House was mired in litigation with Republican state attorneys’ general. Their lawsuit, Murthy v. Missouri, alleged the Biden administration’s coordination with the tech companies to tamp down on election and vaccine falsehoods amounted to censorship. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected the conservatives’ effort in June, but communication between internet platforms and government watchdogs is now more limited.

The Department of Homeland Security has pulled back from direct outreach to companies such as Meta, Google and X after years of holding joint meetings with them to discuss election threats including foreign influence campaigns, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The FBI said in a statement that it was sharing information with social media companies and recently updated its procedures so that the platforms are aware they “are free to decide on their own” whether to take action.

Meanwhile, federal programs that combat foreign disinformation are in jeopardy. The Global Engagement Center, which was founded in 2016 to combat propaganda campaigns that undermine the United States, is expected to shutter in December unless Congress votes to extend its authorization. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) have co-sponsored an amendment to let the program to continue, but it faces resistance from House Republicans, who accuse the agency of “mission creep” and say its work could violate the First Amendment.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken “has publicly made it clear that continuing this vital work overseas is a priority,” the State Department said in a statement.

Some disinformation research programs have also folded or shifted strategies to avoid being targeted by probes from House Republicans and conservative activists investigating allegations of digital censorship. Others are simply having trouble performing the research at all after both Twitter and Meta reduced or eliminated access to tools widely used to track viral misinformation on their platforms.

Now, researchers are waiting with trepidation to see how tech companies’ reduced defenses against misinformation and rising political propaganda will affect voters as they head to the polls.

“The world of misinformation and disinformation is much broader than it was in 2020,” said Tim Harper, who leads election work for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington nonprofit that advocates for digital rights and freedom of expression. “How this plays out will be difficult to determine until the election is over.”

A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles

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“An endorsement of democracy, solving problems, and Kamala Harris.

Nilay PatelOct 29, 2024 at 8:00 AM EDT

Image: Mr.Nelson design for The Verge / Getty Images

Donald Trump is a dangerous maniac who can barely complete a sentence, and it is lunacy to believe he can even recognize the existentially threatening collective action problems facing our nation, let alone actually solve them.

Collective action problem is the term political scientists use to describe any situation where a large group of people would do better for themselves if they worked together, but it’s easier for everyone to pursue their own interests. The essential work of every government is making laws that balance the tradeoffs between shared benefits and acceptable restrictions on individual or corporate freedoms to solve this dilemma, and the reason people hate the government is that not being able to do whatever you want all the time is a huge bummer. Speed limits help make our neighborhoods safer, but they also mean you aren’t supposed to put the hammer down and peel out at every stoplight, which isn’t any fun at all.

Every Verge reader is intimately familiar with collective action problems because they’re everywhere in tech. We cover them all the time: making everything charge via USB-C was a collective action problem that took European regulation to finally resolve, just as getting EV makers to adopt the NACS charging standard took regulatory effort from the Biden administration. Content moderation on social networks is a collective action problem; so are the regular fights over encryption. The single greatest webcomic in tech history describes a collective action problem.

The problem is that getting people to set aside their own selfishness and work together is generally impossible even if the benefits are obvious, a political reality so universal it’s a famous Tumblr meme. 

You can sum up the history of civilization as a long fight about where the government’s authority to tell everyone what to do comes from

This is such an intractable problem that you can sum up the history of civilization as a long fight about where the government’s authority to tell everyone what to do comes from. Ancient rulers just went ahead and considered themselves gods, which made things pretty easy — anyone who lives in a neighborhood with an overzealous HOA president can see this approach in action today. Quite a few European kings decided they’d operate one layer up the stack and announced that they were empowered by God with the divine right to absolute control, which also made things somewhat easy but caused several wars and assassinations by other kings who’d gotten drunk and high enough to see Jesus.

Every so often, the world gets some bozo who decides his desire for absolute control is justified because of an emergency, which inevitably leads them to spend a lot of time convincing people that the very existence of foreigners is an emergency so they can hold onto that power forever. This is basically a hack, but it’s an effective one — there are always foreigners, after all. You know why Trump has lately taken to standing in front of backdrops that read DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW? It’s because when you put this dude under any pressure at all, he reflexively creates a Brown People Emergency to justify his authoritarian instincts.

It is extremely frustrating that the Harris campaign keeps going on about Trump being a danger to democracy without explaining why his whole deal is so deeply incompatible with America, so here’s the short version: the radical founding principle of the United States of America is the idea that the government’s authority to make laws and solve collective action problems comes from the consent of the governed. A clean rewrite, replacing centuries of architectural debt with what was, at the time, a cutting-edge foundation mostly unproven at scale. We vote for our leaders, they are given the power to tell us all what to do so that we might help each other reach better outcomes and be happier, and if they are bad at their jobs, we can simply throw the bums out. We open-sourced the authority, in other words. It was a big bet, and so far, it’s paid off.

Like any large open-source project, American democracy is kind of messy, requires a lot of volunteer effort, and often uses way too much memory. But it enables everyone to submit requests for changes so that we might better direct the power of our communities at every level toward solving our problems, and the democratic process provides an essential stability which allows people to keep buying into our country as the platform on which to build their own big ideas.

Trump doesn’t give a shit about any of this because he only cares about himself. He generally does not care to solve problems unless it benefits him personally, and the intellectual foundation of the MAGA movement that’s built up around him is the complete denial that collective action problems exist at all. The MAGA worldview is now so batshit that it requires its proponents to look at obvious failures of collective action and declare them immutable features of modern life — or, in an even stupider twist — announce them to be good things.

For example, school shootings represent a complete failure to solve a collective action problem — a uniquely American failure because not only have we not solved the problem, we have actively made it worse. Just look at this chart:

Credit: American Enlightenment Project / K-12 Shooting Database

That’s the alarming increase in school shootings since the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, which basically made any meaningful gun regulation impossible. With a bare 5–4 majority behind him, Antonin Scalia decided to fully reinterpret the Second Amendment and reset the balance of liberties in America to favor the rights of gun owners in what is now a clear tradeoff against the safety of our communities.

You can argue about this chart, or this specific tradeoff, or even that Scalia failed to foresee the rise of a wildly irresponsible gun culture that should otherwise moderate these harms but which has instead produced tactical cosplay chuds and would-be lifestyle influencer Don Jr. That’s fine! All of that would be evidence of a rational political culture: one that makes policy choices, evaluates the outcomes, and accepts the reality of the results so as to make better tradeoffs in the future.

But Trump is not rational, and Trumpism cannot abide the idea of a collective action problem. You might think that Trump’s brain is mush, but JD Vance’s weasel-like mind is constantly, actively finding ways to sanitize the chaos, and the philosophical demands of MAGA required him to look America directly in the eye at a recent rally and say that school shootings are “a fact of life.”

It should be easy for Vance to imagine a world in which school shootings don’t happen — that is the pre-Heller world he grew up in! — but fixing the problem of school shootings requires admitting that a collective action problem exists. It requires admitting that the current policy solution — sending kids to school with fucking Kevlar in their backpacks — is less effective than restricting gun ownership in any meaningful way. He cannot do that. Trump cannot do that. Trumpism cannot allow that debate to happen.

Do you want to live in a country where the vice president refers to schools as “soft targets”? That’s a vote for JD Vance. That’s a vote for Donald Trump — a vote for the line on the school shootings chart to keep going up, forever.

That’s a vote for Donald Trump — a vote for the line on the school shootings chart to keep going up, forever

It’s the same with vaccines, which are a near-perfect collective action problem — they are generally only effective if almost everyone in a community gets them, which means either everyone has to agree to get them or the government has to mandate compliance. When everyone cooperates and gets vaccinated, our vaccines can be highly effective: the measles were effectively eradicated in this country nearly a quarter-century ago.

Then presumptive Trump health secretary RFK Jr. hit the scene to spew his dangerous anti-vax bullshit, convinced enough people to stop getting vaccinated, and the fucking measles came back. When this man visited Samoa in 2019, he contributed to a measles outbreak so bad that 83 people died, almost all of them children. But to see this failure of collective action would require a break with the MAGA worldview, so these dummies have fallen back to saying getting measles is actually good.

Do you trust Donald Trump to see this tradeoff and understand this outcome? To adjust to it and use the power of the Oval Office to convince Americans that the balance of harms favors vaccinations over a rise in measles cases? He couldn’t even do it for the covid vaccines his own Operation Warp Speed produced, and Vance is now blowing anti-vax dog whistles as loudly as he can in his public speeches. It is a near certainty that Trump will just blame the next measles outbreak on immigration because at least he can shoot at brown people.

Trump simply cannot use the tools of democracy to run the country on our behalf. His brain does not work that way, even when it appears to be working. He is too selfish, too stupid, too cognitively impaired, too fucked in the head by social media — too whatever. He just can’t do it. He will make our collective action problems worse because he doesn’t even know what kind of problems they are. There is a reason he loves dictators and that all his biggest ideas involve forcing people to do things at the barrel of a gun: mass deportations, arresting his critics, sending the military into American cities to quell protests. He is unable to imagine a world where people cooperate for any reason other than the threat of violence, and so violence has become an inextricable part of his movement.

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The list of massive collective action problems facing our nation is almost overwhelming to consider, and they threaten to tear us apart: our population is getting older, with a looming healthcare crisis to come. Education. Housing. Income inequality. There are so many more.

We are not doing well right now, and when I look at the problems The Vergespecifically covers and has covered for over a decade, the failures are blinding.

Solving climate change is the biggest collective action problem of our lifetimes — and nested within it, there are even more collective action problems like transitioning to EVs and rethinking our sources of power. Trump cannot concede that this problem requires collective action to solve, so the MAGA approach is to simply deny climate change exists while Trump blathers on about wanting to be a “whale psychiatrist.”

As a country, we have almost entirely failed to regulate the tech industry. There are almost no meaningful checks on its size or influence, or even requirements to be responsible with its power, even though American consumers express their clear preferences to rein in tech companies all the time. There is simply no other way to look at millions of Instagram users — including the company’s own celebrity influencers — enthusiastically posting legalistic incantations for over a decade commanding Meta to stop doing things with their content. Fundamentally, they are all trying to renegotiate the Instagram terms of service, which everyone signed without reading. But as individuals, they have no real leverage with which to drag Mark Zuckerberg to the bargaining table.

As a country, we have almost entirely failed to regulate the tech industry

This is a pure market failure. Despite this sustained, dramatic expression of consumer demand, there have been no policy changes, and there are no meaningful competitors differentiated by privacy. The industry has learned from this and imposed an ever more extractive set of platform policies with little meaningful consequence. Resetting all this is what the government is for — a functional federal privacy law would effectively provide a baseline terms of service agreement with every platform that would protect us all, and then we could see how well it’s working and adjust.

The tech industry is also racing ahead with AI, even though it’s shown no ability to restrain itself from causing the most obvious problems: our social networks choked to death with AI slop, the death of photographic truth, and sexualized deepfakes of teenagers. These problems were all predicted and warned against in the most dire ways, and yet they have all come to pass. Solving these problems will require creative and flexible lawmaking that considers a huge balance of interests, benefits, and harms, and a rigorous approach to thinking through the tradeoffs over time.

There is no shortage of proposed legislation to solve these problems floating around, and there are other countries making laws that we might look at to evaluate the tradeoffs. But the Republican Party is so resistant to solving collective action problems that Meta has spent years saying it welcomes regulation because it knows half of our government will never allow it to happen. Hell, one of the very first tech bills passed during the first Trump administration was a rollback of rules preventing ISPs from sharing your data, and Trump signed it immediately — pure ghoul shit.

In most normal circumstances, America would slowly, incrementally figure this stuff out. States would pass some laws, there’d be some litigation, maybe some Supreme Court decisions, maybe some federal legislation in the end. But the absolutely fucked thing about the United States in 2024 — the looming dread that keeps me up at night — is that a bunch of tech billionaires have decided it would be easier if they were simply in charge of remaking society and have fallen in line behind a man they clearly despise because it’s easier for them to get what they want by manipulating the addled mind of a narcissistic monster than by winning people’s dollars in the market or votes in the ballot box.

Let’s just name some important ones: Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos — they have all decided to kiss the ring in various ways and sell out the very concept of America. They’d rather fly their helicopters over the burned-out husks of our cities to their private beaches and secure bunkers than participate in our democracy. They would prefer to remake our country into a broken oligarchy where they have finally ended the free market and privatized our lives into an overlapping series of enshittified subscription monopolies, and they have taken to openly wishcasting what they would do with unchecked power. “Competition is for losers” is not just a thing Peter Thiel says — it’s a worldview that’s produced the monarchy-curious JD Vance arguing that the purpose of antitrust is to regulate the speech Google distributes and Trump himself saying the company has to be careful or get shut down.

Our Silicon Valley billionaires don’t actually believe in this sloppy gloss on competition law. Rather, these men are all trying to protect or create their very own empires, and they are funding, supporting, or at least accepting of Trump’s strongman instincts because they each understand how it will benefit them individually, even though it will cost us all much more. These would-be oligarchs are a collective action problem, personified: they cannot curb their individual greed so we must all endure their furious attempts to prop up a madman who might end the American experiment.

Let’s not fool ourselves.

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Kamala Harris is not a perfect candidate for president. It is possible to pick apart her policy ideas and extremely easy to criticize her unusually circular speaking patterns — she often sounds like she’s vamping until her internal search algorithm finds the right keyword and issues a preloaded response. Did you know she prosecuted transnational criminal organizations? You will.

But look beyond the locked-in message discipline to her approach to campaigning, and it is clear Harris is deeply, meaningfully committed to solving collective action problems. She has assembled a politically diverse group of people to support her that range from AOC to Liz Cheney to Mark Cuban, and most of her claims about how she’ll run the country differently than Biden come down to putting Republicans in her Cabinet and reaching across the aisle more. She has, for better or worse, made approaches to the crypto community while championing restrictions on price gouging and regulations on banks. She had antimonopoly Senator Elizabeth Warren onstage at the Democratic National Convention while having Google antitrust defense lawyer Karen Dunn serve as her debate advisor.

You might not agree with some of the depressingly averaged-out policy positions produced by this unnervingly big tent. You might have some serious problems with, say, her proximity to the current administration and its approach to the war in Gaza. But this is what happens when the other party in our two-party system can only generate policy ideas that amount to AI-generated blood libel and RETVRN memes on X. Trump and the MAGA movement have stripped the Republican Party of the ability to govern democratically, so that process has moved inside the Harris coalition.

In many ways, the ecstatic reaction to Harris is simply a reflection of the fact that she is so clearly trying. She is trying to govern America the way it’s designed to be governed, with consensus and conversation and effort. With data and accountability, ideas and persuasion. Legislatures and courts are not deterministic systems with predictable outputs based on a set of inputs — you have to guide the process of lawmaking all the way to the outcomes, over and over again, each time, and Harris seems not only aware of that reality but energized by it. More than anything, that is the change a Harris administration will bring to a country exhausted by decades of fights about whether government can or should do anything at all.

It is time to stop denying the essential nature of the problems America faces. It is time to insist that we use the power of our democracy the way it’s intended to be used. And it is far past time to move beyond Donald Trump. 

A vote for Harris is a vote for the future. It is a vote for solving collective action problems. It is a vote for working together, instead of tearing our world to shreds.“