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Yoel Roth

@yoyoel.com
80K followers 258 following 841 posts

Internet sanitation enthusiast and full-time corgi wrangler.

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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 09/09/2026
Apple quietly dropped a ton of detail about the Apple Watch’s new always-on don’t-call-it-transcription feature and it is FASCINATING. support.apple.com/en-us/148354
Like all of our products and features, Audio Intelligence on Apple Watch was built from the ground up to protect your privacy.
• Audio is not recorded or stored. Audio Intelligence features don't create audio recordings. No audio can be accessed by the operating system, apps, you, or even Apple.
There is no recording to share, forward, or produce if requested by any party, because no recording exists.
• Raw audio is never accessible. Audio flows into a protected buffer inside the S11 chip's Secure Exclave — a hardware-isolated compartment built into the silicon of Apple Watch and iPhone that processes sensor data separately from the rest of the system. Data that is processed and analyzed in the Secure Exclave can't be accessed by the operating system, apps, you, or even Apple. Once processed, this data is immediately deleted.
• Siri Recap and Live Rewind help jog your memory, not provide a detailed record. Siri Recap doesn't produce a transcript. It generates a brief, high-level summary — comparable to notes you might jot down after a conversation. Live Rewind shows a text snippet of what was just said in the last 15 seconds, so you can catch something you missed.• No speaker attribution. By design, Audio Intelligence features don't identify and attribute speakers. Siri Recap may contain names if mentioned in the conversation, but doesn't directly attribute speakers (for example, "John said..." or labeling as "Speaker A" versus
"Speaker B"). Similarly, Live Rewind may transcribe what someone said word-for-word, but does not attribute quotes to speakers.
• Audible and visible signals for Live Rewind.
When activated, an audible chime plays from the speaker on your Apple Watch, even if your Apple Watch is on silent or you have headphones connected. A full-display animation and microphone indicator appear on the display, and a distinct double-press gesture is required to activate Live Rewind. This is to alert those nearby that the feature has been activated.
• Omitted content. Siri Recaps are designed to omit potentially harmful content, such as language that promotes self-harm or hateful speech, and sensitive information, such as financial data, government-assigned identifiers, authentication data, and certain personal identifiers.
• Be mindful of those around you. While audio is not recorded and stored, and no speakers are attributed, consider those around you where conversations might be private or sensitive.
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 29/06/2026
How the email found me
Apparently a child who was stung by a bee, but idk Rijksmuseum this honestly seems like demonic possession at the very least
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 29/06/2026
How the email found me
A cherub, not pleased, having its throat slit
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 04/04/2026
It’s fine, just hold the power button until you hear the startup chime
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 06/03/2026
I asked Claude to generate a book jacket blurb for a novel inspired by Heated Rivalry and the Lumen database, and, umm…
NOTICE AND TAKEDOWN
Every day, thousands of removal requests flow into the Lumen Database — the public archive where the internet's most powerful actors are forced to show their work. Most requests are routine. Some are weapons.
When copyright attorney Marcus Vega files a takedown notice targeting Clearwire, a scrappy digital rights nonprofit, he expects the usual: compliance, a form letter, maybe a sternly worded reply. What he gets instead is Eli Marsh - Clearwire's counternotice specialist, former EFF researcher, and the most infuriating person Marcus has ever had the professional misfortune of opposing.
Eli knows the law. He also knows Marcus - knows his firm's clients, his win rate, the pattern of industries he protects. What Eli can't account for is what happens when the two of them end up at the same internet governance conference in Geneva, arguing in bad faith over cocktails until they're not arguing at all.The notices keep coming. So do the counternotices.
So do the emails that start as legal correspondence and become something neither of them can quite name.
Marcus has spent his career making inconvenient things disappear. Eli has spent his making sure they can't. Between them sits every question the internet has failed to answer about who gets to control what's public, what's private, and who decides.
Some things, it turns out, can't be taken down.
For readers of Heated Rivalry, Better Than People, and anyone who has ever found themselves deeply, inconveniently attracted to someone who sends documents with tracked changes turned on.
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 29/12/2025
I appreciate the forthright acknowledgement of the mistake from the author, and look forward to decisive action by @princetonupress.bsky.social to correct this error, and any others, that made it past their robust editorial process.
Dear Mr. Roth, 
 
I am not sure how it happened, but you are right that I made a mistake in treating the words quoted from your essay as a representation of your views.  It may be that when I returned to your essay (which I had previously read) in finishing a draft of the book, I interpreted the bolded text as a “pull quote.”  That was a mistake, for which I am extremely sorry.  It was my mistake and not that of my co-author. 
 
I am working with Princeton University Press to have that sentence deleted from the book (all future printings and the Kindle edition).  Once the Press’s offices re-open after January 2, we will explore the possibilities for an errata statement on the book’s web pages.  I will also send out a message on Twitter acknowledging the mistake in misleadingly using the passage from your essay. 
 
I want to offer you my sincere apologies for this very regrettable mistake.  My aim and that of my co-author has been to try to cast some light on difficult and important matters about which there is much disagreement.  It is far from my intention to mislead concerning the pandemic and decisions made in response to it.  Our book has 935 footnotes, but this was not a footnoting error.  I deeply regret having made this mistake.
 
Sincerely,    Stephen Macedo
 Thank you for the direct acknowledgement of the error, and for the commitment to addressing it. I look forward to confirmation that the steps you outlined have been taken, and hope that you and the team at PUP will do a thorough review of the text to ensure other such errors haven't snuck through.

Dr. Roth
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 27/12/2025
Requested a correction from @princetonupress.bsky.social. Let's see what happens.
Dear Princeton University Press Editorial Team,

I am writing to request a correction to In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee. The book contains a significant misquotation that inverts the meaning of my published work.

In 2023, I published an article for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University titled "Getting the Facts Straight: Some Observations on the Fifth Circuit Ruling in Missouri v. Biden." In that piece, I directly refuted false claims about government jawboning of social media platforms. One claim I specifically pushed back against was the myth that the FBI demanded Twitter censor online speech.

And yet, I was recently surprised to find that In Covid's Wake quotes me as stating that "the FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands" — the exact claim I was refuting, presented as though I endorsed it. The book uses my refutation of a false narrative to support that very narrative, employing my name, former position, and scholarly writing to buttress the authors' argument at the expense of the integrity of my own views.

This is not a case of authors disagreeing with my interpretation or selectively quoting from a nuanced argument. The book attributes to me a position that is the precise opposite of what I argued. The passage the authors quote is a section heading that introduces my refutation of that claim, not an endorsement of it.

The misrepresentation is particularly harmful because it lends Princeton University Press's credibility to demonstrably false claims about government censorship. My article exists specifically to establish what actually happened versus what conspiracy theories allege. By quote-mining a section heading and divorcing it from the argument that follows, the book weaponizes my attempt to establish facts against the truth itself.I request that the authors and Princeton University Press:
Issue a formal correction acknowledging the misquotation
Revise the relevant passage in future editions to accurately represent my argument
Post an erratum on the book's webpage
I recognize that scholarly interpretation involves judgment calls about sources. However, quoting someone's statement of a position they are about to refute as though they endorse that position is not interpretation — it is dishonest, misleading, and a self-evident factual error. This is not a matter of academic disagreement but of basic accuracy in representing published work.

I hope Princeton University Press shares my commitment to factual rigor and will address this matter promptly.

Sincerely,

Yoel Roth, PhD
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 24/12/2025
One such refutation appears in my paper under the heading “The FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands.” I spend several hundred words explaining that that didn’t happen.
The FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands
In the Fifth Circuit's analysis, the line between permissible information sharing and threat alerting and coercive moderation demands is a porous one. If representatives of the government share indicators of compromise (IOCs) with private sector entities, is a coercive demand to take some kind of action implicit in that sharing? The Fifth Circuit takes this to be the case:
... we do find the FBI's requests came with the backing of clear authority over the plattorms.
Atter all, content moderation requests "might be inherently coercive if sent by ... [al law enforcement officer."
... although the FBI's communications did not plainly reference adverse consequences, an actor need not express a threat aloud so long as, given the circumstances, the message intimates that some form of punishment will follow noncompliance.®
The implications of this argument are striking. The Fifth Circuit appears to hold that any information-sharing from the FBI to platforms is de facto coercive, simply by virtue of who it originated with.
Even in situations where platforms actively solicit information from the government-as was regularly the case on election security matters between platforms and the FBI-the resulting
communications are taken to be coercive because of the FBI's standing as a law enforcement entity.Receiving and acting on external reports is a core function of plattorm content moderation teams, and the essential nature of this work is an independent evaluation of reported content under the platform's own policies. The fact, cited in Missouri v. Biden, that platforms only acted on approximately half of reports from the FBI shows clearly that the standards platforms applied were not wholly, or even mostly, the government's.
Finally, it does not withstand factual scrutiny that platforms were so petrified of adverse consequences from the FBI that they uncritically accepted and acted on information sent to them by the government. The Twitter Files themselves document clearly at least two instances in which, presented with low-quality information or questionable demands, Twitter pushed back on the FBI's requests. In one case, the FBI passes on a request-seemingly from the NSA-that Twitter "revis[e] its terms of service" to allow an open-source intelligence vendor to collect data from the Twitter APIs to inform the NSA's activities. This request is arguably as close to jawboning as any interaction between Twitter and the FBI gets; yet, in response, I summarily dismissed not only the request for a meeting to discuss the topic, but the entire premise of the request, writing, "The best path for NSA, or any part of government, to request information about Twitter users or their content is in accordance with valid legal process." The question was not raised again.
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 24/12/2025
A small (personal) example of this book’s intellectual dishonesty: My father-in-law is reading In Covid’s Wake, and excitedly told me he found a passage where I’m quoted. The quote in question is me saying the FBI worked to censor speech on social media. Huh? When did I say that?!
A passage from the book In Covid’s Wake, with a highlighted sentence reading: “Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, states that "the FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands," including demands involving domestic speech.”
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 07/01/2025
Genuinely baffled by the unempirical assertion that Community Notes “works.” Does it? How do Meta know? The best available research is pretty mixed on this point. And as they go all-in on an unproven concept, will Meta commit to publicly releasing data so people can actually study this?
We are now changing this approach. We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program. We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 17/11/2024
How the email found me
A beheaded man holding his own head, not looking especially thrilled about the whole situation
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 16/11/2024
How the email found me
An extremely unhappy nun
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 06/11/2024
Election Day timeline cleanse, featuring Toast and Rye
Two black and white corgis sitting on a white and gray rug on top of a dark brown wood floor, in front of a metal and wood bookshelf
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 11/10/2024
Look at these tiny little penguins!
Two Australian little penguins, a small blue-gray bird with a white belly
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 17/08/2024
We shall call her Toast, destroyer of gardens
A black and white corgi puppy sitting on gray gravel eating a green fern
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 16/08/2024
The corgis wish you a happy Friday.
Two black and white corgis sitting on a white sofa
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 10/08/2024
An especially happy Friday to Rye, who is doing a remarkably good job not eating Toast for lunch despite her constant barking and face-biting.
Two black and white corgis, one 10 months old, the other 10 years old, on a gray stone patio.
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 07/08/2024
This is the face of someone who just chewed up a bunch of the irrigation system and feels no remorse whatsoever.
A black and white corgi puppy standing in between two large green ferns
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 31/07/2024
She fell asleep in her water bowl.
A black and white corgi puppy asleep with her face in a blue and gray water bowl
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 29/07/2024
Update: Rye and Toast have reached a peaceful coexistence.
Two black and white corgis, one 10 years old, the other 9 weeks old, curled up napping side by side.
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 28/07/2024
Meet Toast!
A black and white dog with very large ears and her tongue sticking out
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 18/05/2024
Sounds right to me www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...
The Toilet Theory of the Internet
CHARLIE WARZEL
TECHNOLOGY | THE ATLANTIC
Allow me to explain my toilet theory of the internet. The premise, while unprovable, is quite simple: At any given moment, a great deal of the teeming, frenetic activity we experience online-clicks, views, posts, comments, likes, and shares-is coming from people who are scrolling on their phones in the bathroom.
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 13/05/2024
Just came back to my hotel room to find that someone left me complimentary reading material, and honestly, I’m not mad at the selection.
A German-language book called “Warrior Cats” that mysteriously appeared in my hotel room at some point this afternoon
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 24/04/2024
I’m in Australia for meetings and was telling someone how cute I find the kangaroo and emu in the Australian coat of arms. Without missing a beat, the guy I was talking to said, “Lots of countries have animals in their coats of arms, but Aussies are the only ones who eat the animals in ours.”
The Australian coat of arms, featuring a kangaroo and an emu who look like they absolutely do not fuck around
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 12/04/2024
How the email found me
An angel with a lute who honestly isn’t that pleased about everything going on
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 11/04/2024
Maybe I completely missed this when it happened, but was there ever any coverage of the fact that Wikileaks now quietly throw a 500 error when you try to access the 2016 DNC hack-and-leak? Literally nothing else on the Wikileaks site errors out in this way.
A screenshot of an attempt to access the "DNC Emails" page on Wikileaks, returning an Internal Server Error
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 11/04/2024
How the email found me
An illuminated manuscript depicting the bust of a woman who simply CANNOT with the serpents about to eat her (the serpents aren’t especially feeling it either)
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 08/04/2024
This is a really good conversation between Nilay Patel and Cloudflare's CEO. www.theverge.com/24121399/clo... I especially like this bit re: content moderation's usual failure conditions — which have little to do with moderation, and everything to do with a lack of institutional trust.
But I think that the thing that we’ve done is that when we have come to these hard issues, we haven’t just said, “Paragraph 13G of our terms of service, beyond that, no comment.” We’ve tried to walk through: here’s why this is hard and here’s why we struggle with it and here’s the good and here’s the bad and here’s why these are tricky issues. It just happens to be that neo-Nazis are about the grossest thing that you could imagine, and so people who are trying to be gross either are or pretend to be neo-Nazis. So you get tough conversations around this. What’s different about us than other companies is that we’re willing to talk about it, whereas most other companies don’t. The reason we’re willing to do that is that I think transparency is key to trust.
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 29/02/2024
New paper from me and @samlai.bsky.social out today in the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, looking at the moderation capabilities of federated and decentralized social media, and what needs to happen to make these platforms resilient to online harms. doi.org/10.54501/jot...
Screenshot of the first page of the journal article linked in this post. The screenshot contains the title, authors, abstract, and first two paragraphs of the introduction. The full PDF of the article is available at the link in the post.
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 29/11/2023
Every once in a while, you come across a sentence that really drives home the crazy scale Apple is operating at these days, and this is one of those sentences.
Macworld article excerpt: “A new report from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg (fave.co/3tW4Ype) gives some insight into Apple’s plans to revamp its AirPods line. According to the report, Apple plans to overhaul the entire AirPods line starting next year and continuing through 2025. The AirPods were once viewed as just an accessory, but now sell tens of millions of units a year and bring in an estimated $15 billion to $20 billion in revenue. On their own, the AirPods would be a Fortune 500 company.”
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 18/11/2023
This guy is 9 years old today! I still remember what a tiny little nugget he was the day we brought him home. Happy birthday, Rye!
Rye, a black and white cardigan welsh corgi, age 9Rye, age 8 weeks
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 14/11/2023
The San Francisco doom spiral has entered the “emitting beams of light” stage, apparently
Photo of the San Francisco skyline featuring a light projection installation
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 06/11/2023
Reading @matt-levine.bsky.social’s newsletter is frequently the highlight of my day, and today is no exception. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...
Someone programmed a robot with Elon Musk’s sense of humor

Seems bad? Also though it “has real-time access to info via the X platform,” formerly known as Twitter, “which is a massive advantage over other models.” Is it? Isn’t Twitter/X where people go to post lies and jokes? I just? “I have programmed a robot with Elon Musk’s business acumen and engineering skills,” terrific. “I have programmed a robot with Elon Musk’s Twitter jokes, and also everybody else’s Twitter jokes,” why? What is that robot for? Is the answer “getting engagement on Twitter”? Why?
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 31/10/2023
This piece from @jameeljaffer.bsky.social about the social media cases before SCOTUS is packed to the brim with absolute gems, but going into 2024’s elections, this bit stands out as especially important:
Construing First Amendment rights so broadly that the government is precluded from sharing information and from encouraging powerful private corporations to act on it would compromise public discourse, not protect it. We need a First Amendment framework that can distinguish government speech that informs the platforms’ editorial autonomy from government speech that overrides it.
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 28/10/2023
Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, decrying the lack of preparation of everyone around her
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 05/10/2023
Reddit have had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad year when it comes to the whole don't-alienate-your-users thing, but to give credit where credit is due, their latest transparency report is excellent. Especially good: the "notable requests" blurbs. www.redditinc.com/policies/202...
Notable U.S. Requests

We go out of our way to prioritize user privacy and freedom of speech, particularly in the context of legal requests to unmask account holders. Here are some of the most notable requests we received between January and June 2023 where we pushed back based on these principles:

Reddit received a subpoena seeking information on an account with strong indications that it belonged to a journalist and/or protest organizer. As a result of our objections, law enforcement withdrew the request.

Reddit received a court order extending the non-disclosure period for a search warrant, despite the fact that law enforcement announced the investigation and related Reddit account to the public through the press. Reddit challenged the non-disclosure order in court; however, the court ultimately sided with law enforcement.

Reddit received a search warrant seeking information on eight accounts. One of the accounts posted about a crime, while the other accounts were commenters whoTable of Investigation Types for Global Government and Law Enforcement Agency non-emergency requests (January - June 2023)Insights

Australia

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner submitted 11% of all government and law enforcement removal requests received during this reporting period, resulting in a 100% removal rate for violations of our Content Policy (including 4% of reported content that was already removed at time of receipt). Reported issues included: the non-consensual sharing of intimate images and video (image-based abuse) (50%), sexualization of minors (20%), harassment (18%), and the posting of private information (12%).

India

86% of removal requests from India were “hybrid” requests, i.e. seeking both the removal of content and the disclosure of user data. 82% of content identified in these requests was removed for violations of our Content Policy (mostly NCIM violations), 6% was geo-restricted, and 12% we declined to take action on. No user data was disclosed in response to any of these requests. For more information please refer to the Information Requests section of this report.
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 05/10/2023
This is an excellent complication of the concept of jawboning to include pressure to carry speech — pressure that we’ve seen platforms give in to all too often, to the detriment of their users and the integrity of public discourse.
The sum of this is that today, government pressure to carry or amplify certain kinds of speech that platforms would otherwise not is at least as great a threat to the public square as pressure to suppress it. This long-running effort is also a form of jawboning, and controversial laws on social media content moderation in Florida and Texas and congressional hearings over unsubstantiated allegations based on the “Twitter Files” are extensions of it. Censorship and propaganda are complementary: Political actors use both to control the public square, and rarely does one exist without the other. This logic is what allows conservatives to decry content moderation and cancel culture even as they pull books from library shelves, or burn them. The two positions are connected, not contradictory, and together they represent a far greater threat to public discourse than anything in the Missouri v. Biden case. This is evident from the consequences that platforms have already faced in practice: Exe
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 05/10/2023
this-is-fine.gif
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 22/09/2023
At a Death Cab for Cutie concert? Really?!
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 20/09/2023
The unflinching legitimization of violence embedded in the phrase “make people upset” is kind of stunning. I get upset all the time about all sorts of things. My response to that feeling isn’t to tell people I disagree with politically that they should be thrown alive into wood chippers.
Daily Caller headline that reads, “Twitter’s former top censor shocked that banning the president would make people upset”
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 08/09/2023
Interesting tidbit at the end of the report: A North Korean APT used Mastodon (along with other platforms) to distribute malware. The fediverse’s collective vulnerability to spam and security threats is one of the things that keeps me up at night. (See also: www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-res...)
Google Threat Analysis Group update identifying a Mastodon account - @paul091_@infosec.exchange - as connected to a North Korean APT.
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 06/09/2023
With Musk going full-on antisemite, I missed this update to B̶i̶r̶d̶w̶a̶t̶c̶h̶ Community Notes: Tweets with matching images and videos will automatically display Notes created on other posts. This is one of those cool ideas that I’m not certain is a workable solution to the problem it’s trying to address.
A screenshot of this tweet: https://twitter.com/CommunityNotes/status/1697036063045239017
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 05/09/2023
Anya from Buffy singing about bunnies, but with bots substituted for bunnies
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 31/08/2023
Is anyone else getting absolutely inundated with spam AppleCare screen sharing requests today, or just me? (Separately, if this is anything other than a bug on Apple’s end, it seems scary from a security standpoint. No one outside Apple should be able to trigger this request, right?)
Pop up notification asking to share my iPhone screen with AppleCare
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 29/08/2023
I think Meta's decision not to listen to the Oversight Board in this case is wrong — but, in fairness, it's not straightforward. Vittoria Elliott (who isn't active on Bluesky, AFAIK) has written very thoughtfully about the tradeoffs of a decision like this in Wired: www.wired.com/story/cambod...
With the regime’s power over the country secured, there is less jeopardy for the government in blocking Facebook. “We see that as a real threat now,” says Golda Benjamin, Asia-Pacific campaigner with Access Now. “Because the election is over, I think there’s a real threat of blocking the platform and then also threatening the physical presence of any Facebook staff in Cambodia.”

The threat of a ban complicates Meta’s decisionmaking, and introduces both commercial and freedom-of-speech considerations into its deliberations: Is it better for the platform to enforce its policy strictly and risk millions of people losing access to information and services, or to compromise its policy—and the integrity of the Oversight Board—to keep them online?An Oversight Board member, speaking to WIRED on condition of anonymity, says the board did take into consideration the possibility of a countrywide ban of Meta’s platforms when formulating its decision. “It was our judgment that it was more important to keep the regime from being able to use the platform to threaten the political opposition, even at the risk that Facebook might be shut down now,” they say. “The point of a decision of this sort is not just to take down one post, but to try to nudge the company in the direction of more consistent enforcement of its already existing rules having to do with abuse of the platform.”

It’s not clear that suspending Hun Sen would have a material impact on his ability to reach supporters.
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 29/08/2023
Update: Facebook say "nah." transparency.fb.com/oversight/ov...
Our commitment: Upon assessing Hun Sen’s Facebook Page and Instagram account, we determined that suspending those accounts outside our regular enforcement framework would not be consistent with our policies, including our protocol on restricting accounts of public figures during civil unrest.

Considerations: We have removed the content that was the subject of this case and, consistent with our policies, applied appropriate account-level penalties associated with that action. There is not currently any basis to suspend Hun Sen’s account under our policies.
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 28/08/2023
The whole piece is spectacular, but this bit in particular is just a perfect illustration of the axiom that the amount of effort required to refute bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than the effort required to produce it.
When looking at the Mirror World, it can seem obvious that millions of people have given themselves over to fantasy, to make-believe, to playacting. The trickier thing, the uncanny thing, really, is that’s what they see when they look at us. They say we live in a “clown world”, are stuck in “the matrix” of “groupthink”, are suffering from a form of collective hysteria called “mass formation psychosis” (a made-up term). The point is that on either side of the reflective glass, we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality – we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation.

For instance, in July 2022, Wolf went on a rightwing podcast carried by something called Today’s News Talk and shared what she described as her “latest thinking”. She had noticed that when she went into New York City, where the vast majority of the population has been vaccinated, the people felt … different. In fact, it was as if they were not people at all.“You can’t pick up human energy in the same way, like the energy field is just almost not there, it’s like people are holograms … It’s like a city of ghosts now, you’re there, you see them, but you can’t feel them.”

And she had noticed something even more bizarre: “People [who are vaccinated] have no scent any more. You can’t smell them. I’m not saying like, they don’t smell bad or they don’t smell – like I’m not talking about deodorant. I’m saying they don’t smell like there’s a human being in the room, and they don’t feel like there’s a human being in the room.”

This, she explained to the host, was all due to the “lipid nanoparticles” in the mRNA vaccines, since they “go into the brain, they go into the heart, and they kind of gum it up”. Perhaps even the “wavelength which is love” was experiencing this “gumming up … dialing down its ability to transmit”. She concluded, “That’s how these lipid nanoparticles work.”

That is not how lipid nanoparticles work. It is not how vaccines wo
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 25/08/2023
This is an important story about the ever-shifting Overton window of social media policies. One push by a single extremist changes the entire aperture of “acceptable” moderation practices. Gift link: wapo.st/3EbFvdb
Following Elon Musk’s lead, Big Tech is surrendering to disinformation

Facebook and YouTube are receding from their role as watchdogs against conspiracy theories ahead of the 2024 presidential election
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 24/08/2023
I just can’t with this weirdo.
A black and white corgi laying on an orange bedspread
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Yoel Roth @yoyoel.com · 22/08/2023
Update:
A black and white corgi with his head behind a door, for reasons.
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