Renee DiResta

“Censorship” is a thought-terminating cliché. These people want you to believe that:

- labeling is censorship
- fact-checking is censorship
- transparency is censorship
- research is censorship

What they’re doing is redefining anything that might inconvenience a hard-right populist as censorship.

Europe’s Internet Law Is a Rorschach Test The Facts, the Fiction, and the Political Theater Around the Digital Services Act

Would you like a 101 explainer on the DSA to figure out why you should care?

Gotchu: agentsofinfluence.substack.com/p/europes-in...

(This includes clips from a Lawfare pod with Daphne Keller, Dean Jackson, and Joan Barata, who I can't tag b/c of my shitty plane wifi..)

Reupping this since it looks like X is ab to get hit with a wave of fines under the Digital Services Act and JD Vance is already tweeting about how not complying with transparency and data access laws in the market you operate in is "censorship".

Get caught up:
www.lawfaremedia.org/article/regu...

I am curious to see if Europe takes the approach that Brazil did when Elon simply refuses to follow the laws in the market he's operating in.

And, if you are a non-US citizen who did this work, you and your entire family will be banned from the United States. (I know this is incredible, but read the order—that’s what it says!)

the WH marriage with the worst elements of Big Tech should be one of the big political stories of our time. this is absolutely crazy, totally against the public interest, only benefits a small number of oligarchs and their desire to protect the global right-wing propaganda machine.

If you were a tech company employee who moderated content overseas — say, trying to prevent a repeat of the Myanmar genocide! or maybe policing CSAM! Or hate speech illegal in your country! — you are a “censor” under the definitions of the Republicans in power.

www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

One way to characterize the division between the Left and the Right in the West is as a disagreement over which doom is real, and consequently, which doom we must fight. These two poles of existential anxiety can be summarized simply: the Left is defined by the narrative of Metabolic Collapse, and the Right is defined by the narrative of Demographic Collapse. To accept the other side's crisis is, by definition, to reject the political solutions and power structures you are currently championing, and vice versa. And these are existential threat narratives - e.g. narratives that see the other side as trying to literally eliminate you and yours, an idea that is at the core of most every genocidal campaign in history.

Appreciated @nilsgilman.bsky.social succinctly synthesizing irreconcilable tensions bt existential threat narratives of the left & right: on the left, extinction fears related to breaching ecological limits of the planet; on the right, demographic collapse

nilsgilman.substack.com/p/the-duopol...

Trump Must Reveal What The Govt Knows About UAPs. Conflicting statements by high-level intelligence, military, and security officials require clarification by the Commander-in-Chief 8 3 HRS AGO • MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

He had to walk it back lol

@shellenberger Marco Rubio is the most powerful Secretary of State since Kissinger. As such, it is significant that he believes the US has recovered alien tech and given it to private military contractors. A senior Rubio advisor says, “We’re headed toward massive disclosure.”

Lol. Lmao.

X’s New Feature Reveals Why Trust & Safety Work Was Never About The ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’

For the last few years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have spent considerable energy attacking both academic researchers studying disinformation and the trust & safety teams…

I have to watch it but yes — they were great interviewers! :)

Techdirt has always been an indispensible news source for people following tech policy.

This year @mmasnick.bsky.social has emerged as one of the clearest and most incisive voices explaining our current moment.

Please donate.

Prasad was a *primarily* a skilled social media operator, famous for opinions, not actions.

It’s vital to recognize that’s how he gained power.

That’s true for all of our current medical establishment, who all are flailing with real world responsibility.

sciencebasedmedicine.org/to-deny-the-...

Review | Olivia Nuzzi tries and fails to save her reputation in ‘American Canto’ The flashy reporter who lost her job at New York magazine over a relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. returns with a memoir light on gossip — and reckoning

This review is a very very enjoyable read, largely due to the juxtaposition between the caliber of prose in the evisceration vs the subject material itself.

www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/1...

#authorship HT @maartenvsmeden.bsky.social

This is extremely “natural baby” MAHA coded lol

Yeah well I also PAY to send out my FREE newsletter to via Ghost for ppl who don’t like Substack. Do YOU subscribe? You aren’t paying me. Do you feel like you’re accomplishing something being a dick in my replies?

I will post wherever I want, to reach the audiences that I want to read it.

You know, if that hotel room rendezvous had happened we would all be much better off right now.

The problem, really, is that the rendezvous didn’t happen

They use the Russian and Chinese definition of the term: fake revolutions thrown by the CIA

Timeline summarizing the launch and mainstreaming of the meme in the US -- from RT to Revolver to Q

We wrote about the origin of this effort in 2020, in The Long Fuse, the Election Integrity Partnership's final report.

Darren Beattie, now a US State Dept lead, got very mad at me. A "dark-haired disinformation career girl" was attacking him! 😱 But he also gloated ab making the meme viral.

Get familiar with the “color revolution” meme because the people IN POWER are trying as hard as they possibly can to make it a thing, and they have been for years now. Their base is bought in. The background on this deep lore from a Substack post I wrote in May…

open.substack.com/pub/agentsof...

Yes, it was originally used by foreign powers like Russia and China and other authoritarians to allege that the CIA was behind protests in their sphere of influence. But the MAGA fringe has now alleged for years that the CIA and now USAID secretly ran “treasonous domestic color revolutions” here.

The “color revolution” narrative — of a deep state plot to defy Trump — came out of Revolver News in the 2020 election, with Mike Benz (Frame Game) heavily boosting its present resurgence. Schmitt’s brain is pickled in this stuff but the meme sounds Bond-esque - spy drama! - so it gets pickup.

Counterpoint: this is bad, actually.

When “trust in media” is increasingly rooted in a sense of common identity or mutual agreement, or a parasocial bond with an influencer giving commentary on news they didn’t source, the information environment is broken. The article is worth reading.

Zillow Removes Climate Risk Scores From Home Listings

This is the kind of thing that would be likely to break through. Make people confront the declining value of their own communities. Change the personal cost perception. Too often “Team Facts” thinks they have to be nuanced, and gets bogged down in explanations.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...

Many Fighting Climate Change Worry They Are Losing the Information War

It’s not about information, it’s about identity.

It’s not “misinformation”, it’s propaganda.

The bullshit machine is well-funded & understands the value of networked amplification.

As long as there’s no personal cost to lying or holding false belief, they will.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...

Haha thanks :) We were supposed to get a flurry but it became rain.

Lemon thyme, sage, and marjoram

🌱 it’s basically December and I can still go outside and pick herbs for dinner. We pulled all the wood chips and just let the small “yard” (glorified pavers) get taken over by a few species of thyme and oregano alongside the rosemary and lavender bushes this summer and it was the right call.