Pelosi’s bad hair day. Back in early March, San Francisco was the first, major American city to shut down essential services. Seven months later, it’s one of the last to open. Tabling for now the necessity of such measures and the question of whether or not some far greater calamity than economic depression has been averted, the impact on our city, already precariously positioned, has been disastrous. We have seen a massive uptick in crime, including burglary, which our District Attorney refuses to prosecute, the widespread closure of beloved small businesses, a slow-motion collapse of public transportation, and a declining population as young workers and families flee the city in record numbers. This will of course impact the tax base, which will impact our budget, and in this regard it seems we are also basically screwed. To say things are tense around town would be an understatement, and with the national media increasingly focused on our admittedly calamitous state of affairs, it should be no surprise to anyone that a story about goofy rich hypocrisy from our local celebrity politician and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi would make national news. Alas, the New York Times’ crackerjack tech team would have you believe this entire controversy, as with everything else that ills our broken world, is Mark Zuckerberg’s fault.

Kevin’s been sharing information from CrowdTangle, a Facebook tool that helps publishers measure “story popularity,” for a couple years now. From the start, he’s tried to paint Facebook as a right-wing cesspool, attempting both to undermine the notion among Republicans in Washington that the technology industry is biased against conservatives and further pushing the longstanding left-wing fever dream that Russian bots on Facebook, by pushing conspiracy theories and fake news, elected Donald Trump. But, in the first place, it’s not entirely clear which stories on Facebook are most popular, which, explicitly in the context of Kevin’s Facebook series, Casey Newton reported back in July. Casey’s reporting largely drew on commentary from John Hegeman, Head of newsfeed at Facebook, who responded to Kevin publicly, and dismantled his right-wing bias claim by explaining the difference between “engagement” and “reach.” CrowdTangle measures engagement, which is to say clicking, commenting, sharing. It doesn’t measure how many people actually see a story, or how “popular” it is. That information, when presented, paints a dramatically different picture of what kind of content people on Facebook are actually seeing:

While Facebook has done itself no favors by sharing information so easily taken out of context, it’s now clear the engagement metric presented as a measure of widespread penetration on the platform is essentially wrong. But here we are months later, in September, and Kevin is still sharing the information out of context, both from his personal account, as in the case of the Pelosi story I shared at the top of this wire, and from a fully fuck Facebook-dedicated Twitter account to which I can’t, for sake of journalistic integrity, link. Today, “people aren’t reading the New York Times” is his bread-and-butter beat, which would be an embarrassing thing for a New York Times’ columnist to report on were it even true. But, again, it doesn’t seem to be true. Rejoice, authority bias fetishists, the New York Times is thriving. In the case of the Pelosi story, all we know for sure is people were highly engaged on the subject. This is to say Americans were talking about 1) their elected representatives in the context of 2) a catastrophic pandemic. The Pelosi blowout is also a story about class (buying your way around rules), and hypocrisy (setting rules and disregarding them). This is just the kind of story people like to talk about. This is the kind of story people have always liked to talk about. The Democrats understood the story was politically nuclear, which is why they forced Pelosi to apologize (which by the way she also fumbled). Why, then, is the story from the Times’ vantage point not our Speaker of the House, but rather that people are saying mean things about our Speaker of the House on the internet? Is this all starting to feel a little — *gasp* — partisan to you?

Well, it took me a minute to get there. At first, I really just thought the Times’ problem with Facebook was professional. Many people in media, and the loud commentator Twitter types in particular, feel disrespected by a culture increasingly unimpressed by institutional media power. From where I’m sitting people discussing their political representatives on a widely-accessible public platform seems to be an unambiguous good, but media people tend to see something nefarious at foot. I implied as much publicly:

For a person who talks about the world professionally, it’s understandable how this increasingly-dominant aspect of public discourse might feel threatening. Media institutions are arbiters of truth. This is sort of the entire value proposition: “here is an accurate picture of what is happening in the world.” If that status is thoroughly corroded while a platform for circumventing broken media institutions thrives, people like Kevin will probably lose their jobs. While many of his colleagues may achieve tremendous solo success on platforms like Substack, the average person is just not interested in paying for out-of-context listicles. That’s the kind of thing that only really works as a money-losing brand leader for a much larger institution. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized this couldn’t be about job security, or at least not entirely. Facebook is only a single piece of the platform puzzle. YouTube is an absolute beast, and anyone really obsessed with the pulse of information lives on Twitter, where everyone, including everyone achieving success on Facebook, comes to learn about the world. Why, then, is Facebook so disproportionately targeted?

For the last six months, YouTube and Twitter have been openly and aggressively censorious of right-wing or “fake” content. Now, I’m still waiting for a definition of “fake” that doesn’t make institutions like the World Health Organization, which has been systematically wrong about the coronavirus pandemic, invulnerable from critique, but Jack Dorsey doesn’t need my approval. He gets that from Kara Swisher. On the other hand, while Facebook’s official policy is technically fairly censorious, Zuckerberg has been more reluctant to punish Trump, and he has spoken openly about a culture of free speech, which is newly unpopular on the far left. For him, this is obviously not about politics. Zuckerberg is just one of the few leaders in tech who understands two or three speech platforms not only powerful enough to silence politicians but willing to do so is something politicians will never stand for. This is especially complicated because the censorship seems to be disproportionately hitting Republicans, historical allies of business (though the paradigm seems to be shifting), at the same time Democrats are promising to punitively dismantle the industry. Zuckberberg is trying to save tech from a bi-partisan targeting that Jack and the walking bobbleheads at Google either don’t see coming or don’t care about. But do the Kevin Rooses of the world just see the Trump stuff? Do they actually believe the wrong things they’re saying, and is that scaring them? Is this really just run-of-the-mill political activism dressed up as journalism?

I’m almost… sad? It’s just so average!

👏👏👏 safe to brag again 👏👏👏. It’s worth contextualizing the concerted anti-tech activism we’ve seen from media outlets like the New York Times with the story of VC Brags, a wildly popular anti-tech Twitter account that was, we now know, calling from inside the house. From the start, Brags’ game was simple: point at leaders in the industry who appear to be successful, rich, high status, or all of the above, and laugh. People loved it. At first, the targets were all venture capitalists, most of whom — let’s just be crystal clear, okay? — are absolutely clowns. From the start, Brags was too mean-spirited for my taste, and I sensed him coming from an anti-success worldview I find disgusting, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand where some of the venom was coming from. No one likes a braggart, especially when it’s unclear what the braggart has actually achieved, and there are no shortage of loud venture capitalists on Twitter who have never returned a fund.

But Sonya Mann, in the piece linked above, does a thorough job parsing the history of Brags, and points out how often, and from the start, the account veered away from good-natured egg throwing at kind of ridiculous rich people tweets (of which, come on folks let’s be real, there have been a few), and directly into bullying. Even in the context of annoying venture capitalists this is toxic, but Brags didn’t just target venture capitalists. He quickly began to target tech broadly. The spirit of the thing was softly reminiscent of Valleywag, which, for those of you too young to recall, was a hate-fueled misery engine that existed for the sole purpose of maliciously and indiscriminately maligning people in tech. The Gawker people used to call it “speaking truth to power,” pretending, as many in media do today, that they were not themselves a fount of power. But really what they sold was gossip and schadenfreude, for which there’s been a market for as long as we’ve had words. It feels good to be mean, and once we’ve whipped up a mob, people become very good at rationalizing clearly-unhealthy behavior as in some way valuable. But this wasn’t valuable. Really, it was just another wasted opportunity, because the truth is we could use a little healthy critique.

The technology industry is home to many legitimately powerful people. The industry is not, and should never be, above criticism. I want to live in a world that calls out Google when they build a censorship engine for a totalitarian prison state abroad, for example. The problem is the technology industry is almost never critiqued in good faith for its narrow, specific failures. Criticism rather tends to contribute to a high-level narrative critiquing our entire existence. From the media this is fueled partly by professional fear and partly by politics, while folks within the industry tend to focus on a kind of psychopathic Twitter status game. Targeting people in tech for talking about their work is a great example of the phenomenon. Excepting the few worthy dunks, Brags was mostly targeting well-meaning chatter about success and excitement, with zero critique of the actually nefarious. His audience punished his victims for the sins of an entire industry, but being happy about your work is not a sin. And who even were these people? It wasn’t Sundar Pichai or Tim Cook. It was Becky from the product team at Uber with 10k followers and a clunky Tweet. DESTROY HER. NO MERCY.

I’ve been reluctant to talk about Brags because I’m worried people in tech are learning exactly the wrong lesson here. Critique of the actual things our leaders are saying on a public forum has to be fair game, and while the occasional venom is unhelpful and gross I also think, by the way, we should mostly just suck it up, or — if really bad and from a huge platform — grow a spine and fire back. There are men and women in tech building tools that impact literally the entire world. At that scale, a lot of good can be done. But mistakes scale too, which we’ve made before and we’re making today. The culture of Chinese-style censorship we’re normalizing, for example, is a huge and dangerous problem. But not everyone in tech wields equal power, and tech itself is not the enemy. We’re never going to get a fair shake from the New York Times, but we can at least lose the self-harm, and improve our good faith self-critique.

It’s a tough task, but there’s never been an industry in history with so high a concentration of intelligence, imagination, and will. I know we can do this. Because not to get all inspirational Instagram post on you but I’m pretty sure we can do anything.

(Ship it, Brags)

-SOLANA