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Happy Tuesday. Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, my collection of the past week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.
Content creator crisis
A new Pew Research study finds that 21% of American adults regularly get their news from “news influencers” on social media — content creators who, according to Pew, skew more conservative. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, the number jumped to 37%.
Yikes. I imagine this report will only hasten the calls for Democrats to invest in “their own Joe Rogan” — a desperate quest to mirror the conservative media ecosystem that I don’t think is actually feasible, given that social platforms tend to favor Rogan-esque cynicism and conspiracism (not facts or messages of unity, which Democrats often try to rally around).
No, this turn toward social media influencers for news is a crisis. A crisis of doubt in traditional media platforms — justifiable, at times — that has caused many Americans to turn to content creators on social media platforms that, frankly, are widely used to deceive and radicalize their users.
In this piece, I propose some ways to stem the crisis I’m talking about. Spoiler alert: None of them require a tremendous financial investment in liberal content creators (as much as that might benefit me personally).
I don’t think Democrats need their own Joe Rogan. I don’t think anyone needs their own Rogan, which is to say: The number of Americans getting their news from social media platforms is a problem. And doubling down on it isn’t a solution.
Read more at the Pew Research Center.
X’s new CFO
Elon Musk’s X has hired a new chief financial officer: media executive Mahmoud Reza Banki, who received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump in 2021 after making false statements to federal officials.
Read more at Business Insider.
Farrow talks phone surveillance
Journalist Ronan Farrow’s new HBO documentary, “Surveilled,” explores the frighteningly pervasive world of high-tech surveillance — and the ways that technology has been weaponized by repressive governments.
Watch his interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper below, in which he explains how easily phones can be hacked and used as surveillance tools.
AI’s big impact on the election
For The Atlantic, writer Matteo Wong highlighted how images generated by artificial intelligence — including ones shared by Trump and Musk — appear to have had a bigger impact on the 2024 election than previously realized. One reason? Many of these images — no matter how fake they looked — were used to affirm propaganda their promoters had already been spreading.
Read more at The Atlantic.
DOJ wants Google to sell Chrome
Bloomberg reports that the Justice Department is expected to ask a judge to require that Google sell off its Chrome browser after the company lost an antitrust lawsuit back in August.
Read more at Bloomberg.
The mad men of the ‘manosphere’
Over at Jezebel, writer Kylie Chung has a detailed explainer on the “manosphere,” the toxic online sector known for its misogynistic bile. Chung explains how chronically online men are steered toward this content.
“Now, thanks to social media algorithms, content about weightlifting, video games, MMA fighting, and dating has become a pipeline to the right,” Chung writes.
Read more at Jezebel.
Conservatives’ FOIA-driven purity tests
As they seek to purge civil servants from the federal government, conservatives are using records requests under the Freedom of Information Act to sift through emails and text messages of government employees, looking for things like references to diversity, equity and inclusion programs and climate change.
Read more at CNN.
The Verge’s EIC issues a grim warning
“To be as clear as I can be, the second Trump administration with Elon Musk embedded within it represents the most direct and sustained threat to the First Amendment and the freedom of the press any of us will ever experience.”
That’s a quote from The Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, who sounds just as concerned as I am about the Big Tech oligarchy that has formed around Trump and the risks it poses to the free press.
Read more from Patel’s interview with media journalist Oliver Darcy here.