You Got Meta In My Google!

I have a confession to make.

I enjoy googling myself. Okay? I admit it.

And as embarrassing as that admission is, I'm also going to really out myself as elderly and plea for help in using google.

So lately, when I google myself -- "David Schraub", in quotes, limited to hits from the last week or month -- a lot of the recent hits are from Facebook and, less often, Instagram. The little snippet you get from Google suggests that it's someone (a poster? a commenter?) talking about something I've written. But if I click the link -- nothing! The comment isn't there. I'm nowhere to be found on the page! The page and the Google snippet result seem to have nothing to do with one another. What gives?

Now, to some extent, the question of "is Google screwing up Meta or is Meta screwing up Google" feels like a por que no los dos? situation. But nonetheless, I am confused about what is going on, and what these search results purport to be. Does anyone know?

(And more broadly: does anyone know how to search for anything on Instagram? I only use it for art related things, but I confess I don't understand the app at all).

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LXXIX: Egypt Losing in the World Cup

(It's a TPBTJF double-header -- click here!)

I've been watching some of the World Cup, though not every game. For example, I missed the Argentina/Egypt game -- unfortunate for me, since apparently it had a very exciting ending, with Argentina coming back from down 2-0 with three goals in the last fifteen minutes of the game to win.

There also was a lot of complaining about the officiating in that game, with the Egyptian coach going so far as to claim the game was "rigged" (most of the controversy centers around a disallowed Egyptian goal earlier in the game).

I'm no soccer expert, so I can't speak to whether the complaints are justified. Of course, anyone who knows anything about FIFA knows that both incompetence and corruption are hardly inconceivable possibilities. And anyone who knows anything about the internet knows that someone will have a different explanation for the outcome of the match.

Since Egypt’s dramatic World Cup exit on Tuesday, French referee Francois Letexier has become the target of intense scrutiny around the globe.

[...]

Within hours of the game ending, someone had edited Letexier’s Wikipedia page to say that he was “born to an Orthodox Jewish family.” The editor later added that the referee’s grandfather fled Nazi persecution.

There was no evidence for the claim — the anonymous editor’s only citation was an article that made no mention of Letaxier’s religious background. But after a screenshot of the edited page was posted on X, soccer fans quickly pounced. 

“Born into an Orthodox Jewish family,” wrote one X user. “That explains a lot of things.”

When one user questioned the claim’s veracity, Grok, X’s artificial intelligence tool, confirmed the misinformation, citing Wikipedia. The Wikipedia page was then updated again to cite Grok.

The referee’s fabricated Jewish identity stayed on the page for nearly eight hours before it was removed, enabling the claim to spread widely. On social media platforms where antisemitism often goes unchecked, simply sharing a screenshot of the Wikipedia page was enough to start a feeding frenzy.

Even after the claim was taken down from Wikipedia — and the responsible editor banned — others shared screenshots of the removal as proof of a coverup.

Grok coming in with the antisemitism assist is, of course, transcendent. And there's something extra to be said about the double-bind Jews find ourselves in, where correcting obvious antisemitic misinformation is proof of a coverup.

In any event, I can't root for Argentina since they ousted my beloved Cape Verde. So who's my team now? Norway, I guess? Their Sam Denby lookalike is pretty good!

Rage Induced by the Machine

I don't really use Facebook anymore. It's an open tab and an app on my phone, so I check it periodically out of habit, but it's not part of my basic rotation.

I'm a millennial, so I started using Facebook in college, when it was limited to college. I didn't at all mind it expanding to "everyone" -- hey, I was graduating too -- and for quite some time it did exactly what I wanted it to do: served as a convenient vector to keep up with friends who had flung themselves around the country. And that would still be a nice use today -- I'd love to know what people are up to these days. So many cute babies!

But alas, these days Facebook is essentially worthless. No, that's too tame -- it's actively malignant. When I open Facebook, it defaults to an algorithmic feed that maybe shows an actual friend's post once in every half a dozen. The majority of posts are either AI slop history lessons or, more often, polarizing political ragebait. The irony is there isn't a clear side to the ragebait, though for me it's mostly Israel- and antisemitism related. But it's invariably someone angry about something and expressing their position in the most inflammatory way possible. Every time I click through to read more, I feel myself becoming a worse person.

And that's not even the bottom of the pit. God help me if I read comments. Even on the rare occasion I get a basically neutral news article or press release, the comments are just full of people being their absolute worst selves. In the wake of the San Diego shooting, here are some of the comment categories that stood out to me as repeated themes:

• On posts by Jews or Jewish institutions condemning the shooting, ostensibly Jewish people blasting the condemnation because Muslims have it coming and Jews should never defend them even from terrorist violence.
• On posts about how the shooter harbored antisemitic views, non-Jewish people blasting Jews for "making it all about you" (what?).
• On any post by anyone, saying this all traces back to Israel.

Again, these were not isolates -- these were categories. I'd see comment after comment like this. The inescapable feeling was grief, anger, and despair over how awful my fellow humans are. It took effort to remind myself that this is not in fact all humans, it is a very limited and non-representative subset. But it was, again, damaging me to keep reading these. When one is swamped with instances of people being terrible, it makes you more terrible too. Even though I know that most people's responses to San Diego shooting are normal, it hacks your brain into thinking that this is how the world is.

That's what Facebook is these days -- an algorithmic machine that tries its level best to make people the worst versions of themselves because that sort of person will engage more. Such a price would be too much to pay even if Facebook was useful as a catch-up tool with old friends -- which it isn't.

And sure, to some extent this is a problem with all social media. But not like this. I actually like Bluesky, and Reddit has been decent since I stay away from politics. Facebook really seems to be in a category of its own (perhaps along with X/Twitter, which I don't use at all anymore) in terms of the intensity with which it pushes awful messaging.

(It's one saving grace right now is that my reel algorithm is mostly handing me standup comedy clips from comedians I actually like. But to by honest, I suspect most of those clips are stolen bot reposts -- not the least because they're increasingly cutting off before the actual joke gets told. Even when you find something good, Facebook finds a way to make it awful).

With Great Blocking Power ....

As everyone knows, one of the main differences between Bluesky and even "old Twitter" is the blocking culture. One of my favorite stories from when I first joined Bluesky came in the wake of a series of negative interactions with a semi-prominent journalist figure. I considered blocking her but then I thought "no -- while this wasn't pleasant, there was nothing abusive here, so I'm going to be better than that." The next morning I woke up and discovered ... she had blocked me! Moral of the story: block first. At least that way you get the satisfaction.

The block-happy culture of Bluesky has led to a lot of chatter about Bluesky turning into an "echo chamber" -- an accusation which, ironically enough, is one of the fastest ways to get yourself blocked on Bluesky. For my part, I think the echo chamber complaint is overblown (in part because very often what we tell ourselves is "exposure to diverse views" actually is a way to reaffirm "wow, those people are maniacs"). But I do think that it is important to start thinking about best blocking practices in a informational system where "block early, block often" is normal and not frowned upon.

Take block lists, for example. These can be valuable tools to ramp up blocking of entire suites of bad actors quickly. But they're also easily abused. I've seen reports of trolls and other bad actors setting up block lists seeded with an assortment of the "usual suspect" controversial accounts and then, once people adopt them, adding in (say) trans rights activists. If you're not paying attention to who is curating the lists, it is easy to get taken in by that sort of move. That doesn't mean "don't use block lists", it just means be mindful when and how you use them. The mantra of "block early, block often" shouldn't be used to disavow one's own responsibility over the choices you make -- rather, it should accentuate it.

A similar concern attaches to "secondary" block lists -- that is, those populated not by the primary bad actors, but by people who follow those bad accounts. Again, it's not that I can't see the use case for these, but they're fraught with danger. Most obviously, people who research, say, antisemitism (to use a random example) may follow all sorts of unlovely accounts for research and monitoring purposes. Follows do not equal endorsement. And the broader version of that insight is that who people follow is their business.  People make follow/unfollow decisions for an infinite number of reasons. We have absolute autonomy over what shows up on our feed, but we shouldn't start claiming authority over other people's feeds. If they start being unpleasant in their own voice, block them, but the moralization over who one follows strikes me as problematic. Tend to one's own garden.

Maybe you have quarrels with either of the above examples. But the bigger picture point I'm trying to make is this: a social media culture in which blocking is normal also has to be one where we take responsibility for the choices we make when blocking. A social media culture where blocking is rare can get away with people being less mindful about it, because they're only going to be acting in the most clear-cut cases -- one doesn't need to do a lot of deep reflecting to justify blocking RandoNazi1488. It's when we move beyond those cases that thought and consideration becomes important. And precisely because there are not and cannot be rules about blocking -- it is, ultimately, a matter of personal discretion -- it is especially important to cultivate a suite of good virtues around blocking. Block people who are abusive, but not people who just disagree. Block people for what they write, not for what the people they follow write. I don't think these are especially onerous, and I think most people are trying to follow them to one degree or another. But it can be easy to conflate Bluesky's quite healthy "block early, block often" mantra into an unhealthy belief that the actual ethos of the community is "I shouldn't have to think at all about my blocking choices." That isn't our ethos, and it shouldn't be our ethos.

A willingness to block often is not the same thing as being cavalier about blocking. Ideally, a healthy blocking culture will entail thinking carefully about how to balance hearing from a range of views and avoiding epistemic silencing with having a pleasant experience and not being inundated with worthless troll blather. I do think most people are capable of striking that balance in a reasonable way, but it isn't something one can do thoughtlessly. With great blocking power comes great blocking responsibility, and that's something we should embrace.

Did Bluesky Win or Did X Lose?

"She only won because I lost. That's not a winner."

"Network effects" refer to situations where a product becomes more valuable to individual users the more total users there are. It's commonly applied to social media platforms -- one wants to be on, for example, Facebook because that's where the people are; a Facebook that had a small user base wouldn't be a lot of fun even if its features and product functionality were vastly superior. On a darker level, network effects are often cited as a reason why it's so difficult to leave even bad or malfunctioning social media platforms -- we're "stuck" there, even if there's widespread agreement that another platform would be better, because of the collective action problem of coordinating a mass decamping to an alternative.

For a long time, Twitter was held out as the epitome of a network effect in action -- because everyone was there, everyone had to be there; leaving Twitter for a competing platform was the equivalent of leaving a bustling party and deciding to shout into a boundless void. This sense of Twitter as a de facto monopoly gave at least some measure of credence at efforts to regulate it as a "common carrier" or "public square" -- the idea being that if Twitter "censored" (banned, throttled, or deprioritized) certain people or views, it was tantamount to blocking them from the premier domain of public conversation.

Now, of course, we are seeing Bluesky ascend as a truly viable alternative to Twitter X. For my part, I've been exclusively on Bluesky for several months (I joined in July 2023, but like many for a long time I straddled both platforms). By now, I'm close to my peak follower count on Twitter, and my engagement on Bluesky is at least as robust (if not better) than it was on Twitter. And while Bluesky isn't wholly immune to some of the worst elements of "old" Twitter, it is generally in my experience a nicer and more humane place (arguably compared to the Twitter of yore, certainly compared to the cesspool it's devolved into as of late).

From my vantage point, seeing Bluesky challenge and, in certain domains, topple Twitter is unprecedented territory. The closest analogue I can think of is Facebook dislodging Myspace, but I don't know (genuinely, I don't) if Myspace was as ubiquitous and dominant in its domain as Twitter was. Outside of that, it's hard to think of a titan that's fallen as far, from as high, as Twitter did. How did this happen? How did Bluesky overcome the network effect hurdle to emerge as a viable alternative? 

I have two stories, and I'm genuinely unsure which is more persuasive.

Story #1 is that Bluesky's emergence shows that the network effect, while certainly real, isn't as big of a hurdle to change as people thought. We're not actually stuck with incumbent social media providers come hell or high water. There's inertia militating against change, but it's not insurmountable. Bluesky is winning because it is fundamentally better than X is right now, as well as better than the other X competitors (Threads, Mastodon, Post) that emerged over the last few years. It's making better choices about the use (or not) of algorithms, it's making better choices about doing content moderation, it made better choices about growing responsibly, and it's reaping the fruits of making those better choices that appeal to more people.

Overall, the moral of this story is that the concerns about Twitter as a functional monopoly that could singlehandedly manipulate the public square without any possibility of public recourse or accountability have been falsified. And that, of course, has implications for the rest of the social media space -- many of our worries about undislodgeable tech monopolies maybe seem overblown. What a relief!

Story #2, which is probably less hopeful but might generate more primal glee inside of me, is that the basic narrative of network effects creating entrenched monopolies is still true, but Elon Musk so epically and catastrophically mismanaged Twitter that he managed to destroy it anyway. Keeping in mind that Musk didn't actually want to buy Twitter in the first place (he made his offer as a troll, only to be forced into a sale when Twitter's leadership realized this was their best chance to cashout at inflated prices), every choice he's made since assuming ownership has been a disaster borne out of his own infinite depth of arrogance and boundless need for public affirmation. 

He had a company with universal brand recognition; he renamed it for no reason. He complained about Twitter allegedly censoring speech to put its thumb on the political scales; he converted X into an explicit megaphone for Donald Trump and far-right MAGA politics. He whined about bots taking over the platform; bots are even more ubiquitous than they were before. Ad sales are down because advertisers don't like their brands being associated with neo-Nazis, to the point where Musk is suing on the theory that it's illegal for people not to give him money. Neutering the utility of the block function served mostly to make harassment and brigading easier. Changing "verified" accounts into paid promotional material nuked the ability of Twitter to serve as a trusted outlet for anyone. 

It's been an utter, unmitigated, arguably unparalleled trainwreck -- and that's why Bluesky was able to overcome the network effect headwinds and establish itself as a competitor. It's not so much "popular discontent can overcome anything," and more "even the biggest ship can sink if its drunken captain insists on ramming it into an iceberg". I don't want to say that's never going to be replicable, but we won't always be so "lucky" as to have someone this incompetent at the helm of our big tech outfits. To take one example, there is plenty of negative things to be said on how Mark Zuckerberg has run Facebook as of late, but as bad as his choices have been and as aggravating as Facebook often is as a platform, nothing Facebook has done has come anywhere close to the abyss of incompetence that characterized how Elon Musk ran Twitter into the ground -- and for that reason, we haven't seen a true competitor emerge to Facebook in a manner akin to Bluesky.

So which story is right? I don't know (and of course, it's more of a spectrum than a binary). I do think Bluesky made some smart choices that it deserves credit for -- there's a reason it is the main competitor (and not Threads or Mastodon). But there's little doubt it got a huge assist from the dizzying array of unfathomably boneheaded choices Elon Musk has made at the helm of X -- a unicorn event that to my eyes stands out even amongst a sea of overconfident, underperforming tech bros.

Who Are The ADL's Donors?

The big news flying about the Jewish blogosphere this week was the announcement by the ADL that they were going to resume buying ads on the-website-formerly-known-as-Twitter. This came in the wake of a cavalcade of antisemitic attacks and conspiracy theories, egged on by Elon Musk, that had the ADL as its target.

A lot of people are calling this a "betrayal", which I get, though it's hard for me to associate that word with such a limp and pathetic decision. It'd be like if Liz Cheney announced tomorrow that she was joining the DeSantis campaign -- sure, it'd repudiate what she had staked her reputation on for the past few years, but ultimately she'd be attaching herself to an abject failure for no discernible gain, so it'd be hard to get into too much of a lather about it.

But don't let my glibness detract from the obvious point that the ADL's decision is both stupid and terrible, and yet another instance of Jonathan Greenblatt's infirm leadership scoring completely unforced own-goals at the expense of the ADL's reputation. The, shall we say, inconsistent principles whereby the ADL refuses to take money from an antisemite like Kyrie Irving, but goes out of its way to give money to an antisemite like Elon Musk, is evidence of a ship gone rudderless. And that at this point my reactions are less that of "anger" and more of the "eyeroll" sort is not a sterling argument in favor of the ADL's current direction.

The constant missteps do raise the question of "why"? What is causing the ADL to blunder so regularly? One prospect, raised by Marisa Kabas in MSNBC, is that Greenblatt is trying to appease its "fervently Zionist donors who support Benjamin Netanyahu’s government" at the expense of the broader Jewish community it is tasked with defending. And that explanation got me to thinking -- in all earnestness -- "who are the ADL's donors"?

I'm asking genuinely, because I'm not sure. Certainly, the "rich donors are perverting our leaders' mission to suit their particular interests" is a popular sort of explanation that could explain why the ADL under Greenblatt's watch keeps on doing boneheaded things. But the explanation depends on the actual identity of the ADL's donors (are they "fervent Zionists who support Netanyahu's government"), and that made me realize that I don't have a strong sense about who the ADL's donor base is. Different possibilities render Kabas' explanation more or less plausible. So let's run through some candidates:

(1) No base. It's possible the ADL doesn't have a donor base. Now, to be clear, obviously the ADL gets a lot of money from donors. But it could be that the money is sufficiently distributed across a wide enough range of (relatively) small dollar contributors that there is no single cluster that looms large enough to constitute a "base". Alternatively, even if there are a relatively small number of mega-givers, if that group is itself ideologically diverse enough, then they would seemingly not form a sufficiently cohesive faction to induce the ADL to make political moves in one direction or another. Either way, such a financial set up would make it unlikely that the ADL's policies are largely being driven by the desire to appease a particular donor contingent.

(2) "Fervently right-wing Zionists". Perhaps the ADL's big donors come from the aggressive Zionist right. Obviously, that's a popular explanation for those who've long thought that the ADL is in the tank for right-wing Israeli policies. And certainly, the right-wing Zionist cadre are very much comprised of folks that tend to adore Elon Musk and are indifferent to if not elated by his attacks on the (wrong sort of) Jews. But the problem is that these sorts of donors tend to hate the ADL; they're the sorts who think the ADL has gone off the rails into the realm of "woke" leftism. Even if we imagine the sort of donor who only cares about bolstering support for right-wing Israel policy uber alles, there are other organizations (like ZOA) that are more natural fits.

(3) The corporate world. It's possible that most of the ADL's funding these days comes from various corporate actors -- some perhaps atoning for this or that discrimination disaster, others who see the ADL as a safe place to make a charitable gesture towards justice. Certainly, it seems that the ADL is a sizeable fish in that ecosystem. But if corporate donors are the driving force behind ADL decisionmaking, I don't see the throughline that gets us to "Greenblatt sticks his neck out to help Elon Musk." Corporate America is currently running away from Musk, not towards him, and I'm not seeing much evidence that they have any especial interest in forestalling Twitter withering on the vine.

(4) Middle America. As the quintessential "mainstream" civil rights organization, perhaps the ADL's donor base sits roughly at the midpoint of American political opinion. Two problems here: (1) given ideological polarization (which leads to a bimodal distribution of ideological views), it's not clear there is a large donor base of politically engaged actors sitting right in the middle of American political opinion; and (2) even if there is, it's again far from clear to me that "bailing out Elon Musk" is high on their priority list.

(5) The median Jew. Maybe the bulk of the ADL's donors sit, not at the center of American political opinion, but at the center of Jewish political opinion (a "center" which, of course, rests well to the left of American political opinion writ large, albeit falling more in the territory of "mainstream Democrat" than "raging socialist"). It certainly seems as if some of the anti-ADL antipathy reflects the fact that the ADL adopts views that are broadly popular with the median American Jew as opposed to, say, Mondoweiss. But I also don't see much in the way of evidence that the ADL is responsive to middle-ground American Jewish opinion. And this explanation, even more than "middle America", seems to point away from intervening to save Elon Musk.

(6) PEPpy sorts. "PEP" stands for "progressive except on Palestine", and while I'm not the biggest fan of the term, I'm thinking of groups like DMFI that are generally favorable towards the sort of mainline liberalism the ADL espouses on the domestic front while also being disposed towards defending hawkish Israeli policies towards Palestinians (or at least, ensuring that Israel faces no tangible blowback for implementing them). This seems like the strongest candidate for roughly tracking Kabas' explanation, since unlike the actual "fervent right-wing Zionists" this group is probably positively disposed towards the ADL. That said, leaving aside the evidentiary question of whether this group actually does comprise the ADL's donor base, I'm not convinced that this cadre (particularly right now, in the midst of the democracy protests) actually is all that enamored with the Netanyahu government specifically; nor am I convinced that they harbor any especial love for Elon Musk. So once again, it seems like they make for a poor explainer for why the ADL is behaving as it is.

Ultimately, I don't know who the ADL's main donor base is. But my confusion, and the fact that none of the above possibilities really seems to fit the ADL's recent behavior and place in the political ecosystem, actually makes me feel more confident that the entire premise we're discussing is wrong. The ADL's repeated, colossal errors of judgment -- most recently in crawling back into Elon Musk's bank account -- are not, I think, primarily donor-driven. I don't think these are externally-imposed failures. I think they represent an internal failure of leadership, and one that falls squarely on Jonathan Greenblatt's head. I can't speak to the precise internal dynamics or culture practices that might have gotten the ADL to this point, or whether a change in leadership will suffice to resolve them. But it seems clear right now that the ADL will not right ship unless Jonathan Greenblatt steps down from the helm.

[Image above from Deadline]

Two Trip Roundup

I have two trips coming up -- one to Colorado to visit my brother and parents, and the second to Seattle to visit friends (and see Liz Miele). I've been shirking my blogging duties of late, and the travel won't help, so here's a roundup to at least get something moving again.

* * * *

JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa) has launched a new journal, Distinctions, focusing on Jewish issues through a Sephardic and Mizrahi lens.

Nice to see some big Hollywood A-Listers step up and support the SAG-AFTRA's strike relief fund.

Ironically, Twitter deciding to become a site solely appealing to grifters and trolls is making it increasingly useless for grifters and trolls.

Does Cornel West actually want Donald Trump to win, or is his vanity presidential campaign a grift to dig out of his tax debts? Hard to say!

There's a new HuffPo "expose" revealing that Richard Hanania had a history of overt White supremacist writings, and I can be 100% honest in saying that it never occurred to me that Hanania ever presented himself as anything but an overt White supremacist (but yeah, apparently there were folks who tried to push the line that he was a "centrist").\

A new, if long-anticipated, frontier of artificial intelligence has hit, as an Indian politician hit with alleged leaks of scandalous material says that the recordings were actually deep fakes -- and it's really hard to figure out who's telling the truth.

Not really a "roundup" item, but I want to give a quick promotion to the internet series "Jet Lag: The Game". It's an online series where each season basically creates a new, full-scale travel board game -- "tag" but across all of western Europe, or "Connect Four" using the western United States. It's wholesome, entertaining, and just a lot of fun. Jill and I have been binging it for the past few weeks, and I'll recommend to all of you as well.

A Thread on the Bluesky Meta

Within the past few days, I've signed up for both Threads and Bluesky. Both also are letting me slowly wean off my Twitter addiction (I'm basically only posting blog links to Twitter these days). At the moment, all three apps have advantages and disadvantages.

(One things that falls into the "disadvantage" column for all three is that none of them right now appear to support letting me automatically cross-post links to my blog entries onto their site. Twitter used to allow for this but eliminated the feature as part of its overall crusade against its own usability. Threads and Bluesky don't seem to have been integrated yet into IFTTT or other similar sites. First site to offer that feature will get a huge leg up in the David sweepstakes).

Threads

Pros

Instagram tie means it has a pre-existing userbase that can scale quickly. This makes it easier to at least initially fill out a follower list. And while nobody is thrilled to jump from an evil billionaire to a somewhat-less evil billionaire, if we're bloodless about it the Meta backing makes Threads the most likely to actually slay the giant. It's no accident that its launch has yielded a visible dent in Twitter's daily traffic.

Cons

Very clearly launched ahead of schedule to take advantage of Twitter's latest disaster (the "metered" tweet fiasco), and so a bunch of really basic features don't exist. No desktop app is virtually a dealbreaker for users like me, and that's just one example. Once you get past your Instagram network, it's actually quite difficult to find your friends, and the app is absolutely obsessed with pushing random "influencer" types into my timeline that I absolutely do not care about and which only serve to gum up the conversations I'm actually interested in following. This may be intentional -- Threads people have suggested that they self-consciously are trying to avoid centering their business around news/commentary -- but that makes it less attractive for me.

Bluesky

Pros

Definitely has the most "Twitter-like" feel without the baggage. That it has both a functioning mobile and desktop version automatically gives it a huge leg up for me. While obviously still in progress, it has most of the features I'd want in a site, and my feed at least looks mostly populated by the types of conversations I want to see. Likewise, when I search for new accounts, it seems to make a modicum of effort at recommending folks I'd want to engage with. Is as of now probably the site I most want to succeed of the three.

Cons

Still growing very slowly via the invite-only model, and the smaller userbase means it's inherently less active. I finally got an invite to Bluesky upon telling a friend I had joined Threads, and in the course of him fulminating about all the ways Bluesky was superior I guilted him into giving me an access code. That doesn't seem scalable, and microblogging social media sites depend on scaling.

Twitter

Pros

Even now it still probably has the greatest range of users and commentary, and of course I already have a pre-existing base of followers which I'm loathe to leave behind. I don't consider myself a major audience chaser, but even I feel a bit of a sting going from 4,000 followers to several dozen, and I don't relish building it back up from scratch. As more than one person has noted, the basic structure of Twitter circa 2021 is what a ton of people want to see replicated, and even as Musk has made it his mission to regularly lop off useful and helpful features and practices, everything that has for now escaped his cullings is comfortingly familiar.

Cons

All the Nazis, obviously. And the crypto scams. And the push to promote far-right conspiracies and bigotry via "verified" promoted accounts (if a blue checkmark no longer means "you are who you say you are", and does mean "you have paid Twitter a fee so it will boost your content", that is the very definition of a "promoted account"). And the searing hatred Musk has for his own customers, regularly intervening to make the user experience worse for no discernable reason other than pique.

Testing a IFTTT Cross-Posting App

Apropos this post, this is a test to see if the IFTTT recipe I just created (with helpful guidance from the Boley Law Library!) works.

This block quote is simply to pad out the text of the post, though it does explain why I'm doing this:

For example: I use IFTTT to autopost links to my blog onto my Twitter account. This is incredibly important for me, as I'm pretty sure at this point virtually my entire readership comes from Twitter links. But as best I can tell, neither Post nor Mastodon has anything (whether via IFTTT or otherwise) that provides similar functionality. At the moment, I'm getting there sideways by an app which autoposts my Tweets to Mastodon (so my blog autoposts to Twitter, which then autoposts to Mastodon). But I've found no equivalent at all for Post. In general, cross-posting functionality is really important especially in the transition period where I want to be using both Twitter and its alternatives.

Wish me luck! 

UPDATE: It didn't work.

Help Me Leave Bird App!

Speaking of off-ramps, I am trying to transition my main microblogging app off of Twitter and onto an alternative. But so far, the two sites I have accounts on -- Mastodon (@schraubd@mastodon.lawprofs.org) and Post (@schraubd) -- aren't fully meeting my needs, and each have problems that significantly deter their ability to fully serve as a Twitter replacement.

For example: I use IFTTT to autopost links to my blog onto my Twitter account. This is incredibly important for me, as I'm pretty sure at this point virtually my entire readership comes from Twitter links. But as best I can tell, neither Post nor Mastodon has anything (whether via IFTTT or otherwise) that provides similar functionality. At the moment, I'm getting there sideways by an app which autoposts my Tweets to Mastodon (so my blog autoposts to Twitter, which then autoposts to Mastodon). But I've found no equivalent at all for Post. In general, cross-posting functionality is really important especially in the transition period where I want to be using both Twitter and its alternatives.

I'm also finding it incredibly difficult to find people to follow, especially on Mastodon but to a lesser extent on Post as well. You can get some people via those sites that trawl through Twitter to see who has posted their new social handles online, but that's been limited so far in my experience. The easiest thing (albeit perhaps the most worrisome from a data privacy standpoint) would be one of those widgets where you plug in your email and it tells you all the accounts which are associated with emails in your contacts. I don't think exists yet for either site, and maybe it shouldn't for privacy reasons. The next best move is to go to the people you're already friends with and see who they're following. But Mastodon, in particular, makes this impossibly unwieldy by refusing to show followers from other servers. You can get there via the scenic route if you go to each profile on its own server, but then you can't just click a button to follow (since you're not logged into that server). It's slow and clunky and needlessly frustrating. And I'll note that even Mastodon's basic search bar functionality has, in my experience, been shaky.

Finally, while comparatively minor Post has some user interface problems that are just outright annoying. Defaulting to the "explore" tab, which is not my feed but the feed of a (presumably curated) section of randos, is not what I want and I resent having to swap over to my personal feed every time I go to the site. Also, Post might suffer from having too generic of a name -- good luck finding an answer to any question you have about its functionality online (imagine Googling "how do I cross-post on post")

So what I want is basically (1) ability to cross-post across platforms, especially autolinking to my Blogger posts, and (2) a relatively easy and straightforward way to find and follow my contacts if and when they join the new sites. Whichever site (Mastodon, Post. or something else) perfects that cocktail may well be my winner.

Can We Convince Elon Musk To Declare Victory and Go Home?

It is clear, even to Elon Musk (one has to think), that Musk's acquisition of Twitter has been a disaster.

It is equally clear that Musk is far too much of a narcissistic egomaniac to ever admit it.

And while it would be nice to leave Twitter outright and hit greener pastures, the current main alternatives to Twitter -- sites like Mastodon or Post -- are not even close to primetime ready. The ideal outcome is Twitter being put back in the hands of the at least semi-reasonable before the site detonates outright.

What Musk needs is an off-ramp -- some way for him to get out of Twitter while still claiming it as a victory.

To be clear: No reasonable observer has to actually think Musk has accomplished anything or that this excuse be anything but a flimsy façade. Much like the US and Vietnam, every rational human will understand it as pure political dissembling -- "saving face" here means only an excuse that will satisfy Musk's most sycophantic fanboys. Fortunately, that cadre is the only group Musk seems to listen to anyway.

He's never going to be able to unload it for a profit -- that's out. But is there some other narrative he could spin ("It was never about the money!") where he retroactively will have "accomplished what he set out to accomplish" and can leave while saving face? Maybe he can say the "Twitter Files" exposed the dirty heart of old Twitter but now he's successfully cleaned house. Maybe he can triple down on the random staffers he's thrown under the bus as the "real problem" and now that they're gone, all is well (none of us have to believe it; again, this is all about spinning a yarn that will successfully soothe a narcissistic manchild who can't possibly admit he screwed everything up).

I don't know. It's weird to try to come up with "pathetic lie for Elon Musk to tell himself so he leaves the rest of us alone." But that's the best exit strategy we have right now, I think. Suggestions welcome.

Is the ADL Losing Its Liberal Base?

The ADL is America's preeminent Jewish civil rights organization.

That position comes with an inevitable share of gripes. Jews who think the ADL is misusing its position. Non-Jews who don't like the idea of a "preeminent Jewish" (or "civil rights") anything. The day where somebody isn't complaining about something the ADL is doing is a day that doesn't end in "y".

That said, the inevitability and ubiquity of complaints faced by the ADL doesn't mean none of them have merit. Moreover, said inevitability and ubiquity doesn't mean there aren't things to be gleaned from patterns -- who is complaining, how they're complaining, and what they're complaining about.

The latest ADL related flare-up came when chieftain Jonathan Greenblatt seemed to laud Elon Musk's potential takeover of Twitter and compared Musk (positively!) to Henry Ford in the process. Using Henry Ford -- one of America's most notorious antisemites -- as a compliment was bad enough. But Musk's prime motivator for buying Twitter, by his own admission, is that he thinks Twitter has been too heavy-handed in "censoring" or tamping down on hate speech on the platform. This flies in the face of the ADL's social media policy, which has been to this point aggressive in demanding that social media platforms do more to combat hateful speech and conspiracies proliferating on their sites. So why on earth would Greenblatt think Musk's purchase of Twitter is a cause for optimism? The impression many got was that, in an effort to curry favor with the right's new fair-haired plutocrat, Greenblatt was selling out his organization's stated committed to fight extremism and hate online. The right-wing loves Musk, so Greenblatt felt obliged to love him too.

Greenblatt has since apologized for the Henry Ford comparison. He also suggested that what he was really doing was "laying down a gauntlet about what we expect Elon Musk to do," which -- talk about don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. Greenblatt was not "laying down a gauntlet," he was very clearly trying to butter up Musk now that Musk has become a right-wing hero. I'd be delighted if he changed course on that. But don't patronize me by pretending you weren't doing what was obvious to all of our eyes.

Again, it must be stressed that Musk has become a right-wing hero because he's sworn to make it easier for the far-right to spread extremism and hate on a major social media platform. The reason this is such a scandal isn't solely or even primarily because of an ill-advised comparison; it is because it seemed as if Greenblatt either no longer had the stomach or no longer had the desire to stand against a truly dangerous development for the safety of Jews online if it meant standing up to a powerful and popular figure on the American right. That failure -- whether of nerve, of will, or of interest -- represents a serious problem for the ADL's credibility.

Now, it isn't at all surprising that the Jewish left would jump all over Greenblatt's miscue. And to the extent that the complaints were coming from the usual "drop the ADL" suspects, there would not be much new to be said under the sun. The source of the critique wouldn't make it wrong (as I like to say, if you fail so badly that JVP can fairly dunk on you, that's a you problem, not a JVP problem), but it wouldn't reflect any broader political shift.

But it did seem to me that this latest incident with Musk was evincing a notable and qualitatively different type of response, both in terms of what was being said and who was saying it. Most specifically, I've been seeing a lot more chatter taking the form of (at least considering) calling for Greenblatt to resign.

Why is that noteworthy? It's not just that it's a relatively drastic demand to make. The bigger story is that resignation calls suggest that discontent with the ADL's direction has migrated over from the aforementioned "usual suspects" to a more moderate liberal tranche. The complaints and frustrations are boiling over not from those who've always hated the ADL and will take any opportunity to stick a knife in, but from those who think the ADL has done and continues to do much good work, but has over the past few months gone badly off the rails.

Simply put, one doesn't call for new leadership in organizations one thinks are intrinsically risible. I detest Mort Klein and ZOA, but I never say "Mort Klein must resign from ZOA". Practically speaking, I don't care who runs ZOA because I think ZOA is at its core a terrible organization. It'd be like me calling for "new leadership" from Hamas. By contrast, I was very vocal in calling for David Harris to resign from helming the AJC because, as annoying as I sometimes find the AJC, they lie on a fundamentally different tranche for me than does ZOA and I do care that about who leads them and what direction they go.

The fact is that the Musk incident is part of a pattern of gaffes and controversies from Greenblatt over the past few months which have infuriated Jewish liberals, virtually all of which have come from attempts to placate or cozy up to right-wing actors. To give a few more examples:

• In July, Greenblatt retweeted a truly unhinged rant by fringe congressional candidate Brian Robinson accusing several liberal Jewish groups (generally those affiliated with JFREJ) being "LARPers" and otherwise masquerading as Jews. The retweet was eventually removed; and the ADL backtracked by saying that "the RT was not meant to imply agreement with all aspects of the thread" and that "we reject any attacks on the Jewish identity of people we have disagreements with."
• In August, Greenblatt said a cartoon which called out AIPAC for backing Republican insurrectionists was "stoking the flames of antisemitism" (the cartoon in question, which was a mashup of a meme featuring Steve Buscemi and a 1/6 insurrectionist, was certainly a very sharp elbow, but it was not antisemitic -- it hit hard because AIPAC made a morally bankrupt decision which they can be hit hard over).
• Last month, Greenblatt sided with groups attacking the New York Times coverage of educational failures in Orthodox private schools, including suggesting without any evidence that the article might contribute to antisemitic violence against Orthodox Jews.
• Also in September, the ADL agreed to "launch a thorough review" of its educational materials in response to complaints by Fox News -- an organization the ADL has often expressly called out for being prime purveyors of hate and bigotry -- that the organization was "far-left" (other organizations which the ADL deems to be vectors of antisemitic extremism tend not to receive such accommodating responses!).

And while I wouldn't characterize it as a "gaffe" per se, all of this has gone hand-in-hand with Greenblatt taking a far more aggressive tone in characterizing anti-Zionism as antisemitism -- a pivot that many observers described as evincing greater "combativeness" by the ADL towards the left. Put it all together, and the pattern from the last few months have been one of a noticeable pivot by the ADL towards the right. And Jewish liberals -- again, mainstream Democrat types, not the far-left -- are noticing this pivot, noticing the associated gaffes, and are increasingly fed up by it.

For their part, the Jewish right has always hated Greenblatt and wanted him out, and nothing about the ADL's more recent change in practice is going to change that. And the Jewish far-left just doesn't like the ADL, period, and so Greenblatt inherited their disdain. Those polar oppositions perhaps could be taken for granted. But it means that if Greenblatt is also losing normcore Jewish liberals, then his base of support starts to look awfully narrow.

For my part, I take no position on whether Greenblatt should call it quits (in part because I share concern that the ADL's next leader might come from even more conservative quarters). I certainly don't endorse the view that the ADL is an irredeemably flawed or toxic organization; I continue to believe they do much great and necessary work. But I do agree that the ADL has been a ship adrift over the past few months -- making decision after decision that are morally indefensible and practically insulting to the mainstream liberal Jews who have historically comprised the core of the ADL's support base. 

One of the most compelling diagnoses of why Bernie Sanders' failed to secure the Democrat nomination was simple: you cannot be the standard-bearer of a party you despise. It doesn't matter how many loud voices on Twitter laud you, it doesn't matter how many donors shower you with resources. If you're going to lead Democrats, you have to like the average Democrat. The ADL would do well to internalize a similar lesson: you cannot be, and will not stay, the preeminent Jewish leader if you disdain the median American Jew. And the median American Jew is politically left-of-center -- not on the far-left, but a mainstream liberal. That might not characterize who trends on Twitter, and that might not characterize the most profligate donors. But it characterizes most Jews, and the ADL chases right-wing clout at our expense at its peril.

The "good news", as it were, is that this is hardly the first time that the ADL has sold out liberal Jews. Relationships can be mended, courses can be corrected. Nonetheless, there does seem to be a sea change occurring, and patience finally wearing thin. If the ADL doesn't change its trajectory quickly, it is far from clear what the future holds for America's preeminent Jewish civil rights organization.

Oh, Farts

I've studiously refrained from commenting on that Tablet article by Eve Barlow (in lieu of a link, please send flowers to the gravesite that marks Tablet's death as a reputable journalistic enterprise). I've been blocked by Barlow since before it was cool (as best I can tell, it's because she was unhappy that I revealed the fabrications in a different "that Tablet article"), and suffice to say I do not find her especially impressive as a public thinker. She has plenty of bad takes, and she has nobody to blame but herself that people recognize her bad takes as bad.

Moreover (this is someone else's point, but alas I can't find it), I'm old enough to remember when people were aghast at the disrespect shown when immigrant detention centers were referred to as concentration camps; those persons seem oddly less perturbed at describing social media harassment as a "pogrom". It is hardly an accident -- but still embarrassing -- that here, of all places, some amount of hyperbole or metaphor drawing on the well of violent antisemitic oppression is accepted.

But having said all that, I have been a bit uncomfortable with how this discourse is being played out. For starters, we're seeing a clean violation of my ninth rule of good internet citizenship:

Resist pile-ons. Yes, accountability is important. And yes, each individual contribution to the pile-on would typically (not always -- see death threats) be proportionate and reasonable if isolated and placed in the context of an individual, face-to-face encounter. But aggregated together, they quickly can spiral out of control, and frequently magnify all the internet's worst qualities.

That's definitely in play here. Yes, Barlow is a deeply unsympathetic actor. But eventually, wave after wave of people bombarding here with farting puns and icons and whatever else really does cease to become "accountability" or "critique" and just turns into a harassment campaign. Likewise, I'm sure that anyone whose name starts with an "-ar" sound has gotten a few stupid "fart" puns from some of the internet's more juvenile actors.* But the difference between a couple stray morons who can be easily shrugged off and harassment is quantity, and there are people who should know better who are eliding that distinction.

Most importantly, there is a great risk -- I think it's already happening -- of people functionally sending a green light to a particular form of style of antisemitic harassment. There are, it should not be controversial to say, plenty of trolls online who like nothing better than to harangue and harass Jewish public figures. And such persons are very much on the look out for styles of harassment which will garner them praise, or at least defense. If there's a way that they can make Jews miserable and be lauded for it, they'll seize upon it faster than you can say "status-production". There is little doubt that this is driving a non-trivial portion of the pile-on -- the raw glee that one can indulge in the decadence of making a public Jewish figure miserable as a Jew, and feel righteous in doing so, and be lauded as righteous for doing so. Does it help that Barlow is an unsympathetic figure? Sure. Does that suffice to explain the totality of what's happening here? No.

And -- putting aside the point that Barlow, as unsympathetic as she is, doesn't deserve harassment -- the utility of a mode of harassment that gets lauded rather than condemned will not stay confined to the likes of Barlow. While I expect this particular moment to peter out sooner rather than later, it certainly was not hard to spot "fart" responses targeting other prominent Jews as a means of demeaning them or denigrating their experiences with antisemitism. Some of the targeted Jews were also raising hyperbolic or foolish points. Others were being entirely reasonable. But the commonality, the trigger that made this response responsive was solely that the targets were Jewish or Jewish-identified, and the belief by their "interlocutors" that if they jumped on them in this way, they'd be immunized from any condemnation or critique. That should worry us.

The fact is, the mechanics of internet harassment and brigading campaigns are not new or novel at this point, nor is the easy dismissal of them by calling them "juvenile" or "just words", or insisting on the  recipient's need to "grow a thicker skin". In all cases, there will be a mix-in of explicit calls for violence or open ethnic, racial, or gendered slurs; but these are the accent points upon a base of "replies" which do not do any of that, replies which, taken as individual, can and should be easily dismissed, but as part of a larger whole and as a constant drumbeat, become intolerable. It happens to people we like, and it happens to people we don't like. But no matter who the proximate target is, we should be very, very leery of cheering it on.

* The juvenile nature of the retort is part of its insulation -- it feels ridiculous to treat it with any sort of seriousness, and that includes writing this post. This is, in a way, a very literal application of Sartre's warning about the antisemites:

They know that their remarks are frivolous ... But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. 

Good Coverage Takes Time

There has been over the past few days a wave of antisemitic violence that's targeted Jews in the U.S. and around the world, often styled as a "response" to Israeli activities in Gaza. For example, here's an L.A. Times article about several Jews getting jumped in front of a sushi restaurant in the Beverly Grove neighborhood. CBS has a story about a 29-year old Jew brutally beaten by pro-Palestinian protesters in New York City's Diamond District. The BBC covered terrifying racial abuse targeting Jews in London. CNN ran a piece about these attacks demonstrating a larger, nationwide trend. I could go on.

In short, it is not good right now. And one thing I've heard from many of my fellow Jews is frustration that these attacks are not appearing to get much coverage or attention, compared to other communities which have been the victims of hateful violence.

Now at one level, this is an unfair charge. I just gave links to coverage in the Los Angeles Times, CBS, BBC, and CNN. It would not have been hard for me to find more. But I'm going to make a perhaps more unpopular take, and simply say the following: news coverage takes time. Good news coverage takes more time. And most issues, affecting most communities, take time to percolate out from those communities and penetrate the broader social (and media) consciousness. 

There's nothing unique about Jews here -- we only notice it because it's our community so of course we hear about it before anyone else does. For example, the Los Angeles attack occurred in a largely Persian Jewish area, and from my time at Berkeley I had several students from that community. So I reached out to check in on them, and wouldn't you know it if they weren't friends with some of the Jews who were injured. Two degrees of separation between me and the victims. It is utterly unsurprising that I was going to hear about this before the national media. It would be wild if the Washington Post scooped me on this. My network and my friend group and my twitter feed mean I start seeing these when they're just reports or viral videos -- well before any national coverage could be expected to come in.

I've talked about this before. Within one's own group, one sees these issues from basically their inception. We know (or know who knows) the individuals involved. We're in the same social media network. We're tied into the local community coverage. And so we see every agonizing hour/day/week where these issues which are huge for us seem to be ignored by the broader public until finally, laboriously, belatedly they scratch their way into the mainstream. Meanwhile, for other groups, we don't have that level of integration and we don't see the process. Our awareness of the issue is essentially coterminous with when it reaches the mainstream media, and we thus mistakenly conclude that the mainstream media covered the issue from the moment it began.

But in reality, that's almost assuredly untrue. The reality there is going to be the same as the reality here -- the issue will be there, known to the community, the talk of the community, infuriating the community, for hours/days/weeks without it ever breaking into the mainstream until finally it does. It's the same dynamic -- the only difference is at what stage you become aware of the process. The Sheikh Jarrah controversy had been live for literally decades before 99.9% of you had ever heard of it, or it got picked up by international media outlets. Ditto issues of police brutality, or #MeToo, or anti-Asian hate crimes. In none of these cases was there no time lag between the issue being one of extensive knowledge and importance within the relevant community and its emergence in prominent mainstream media coverage. 

And I'll go even further still: part of the reason it takes time is because it inevitably takes time (for better or for worse) for a story that affects a particular community to penetrate the particular, rarefied air of the national media. But in addition, it takes time to do good coverage of that story. To verify accounts, to interview sources, to learn about the issue, to contextualize the situation. Good coverage takes more time than retweeting someone else's viral video. And so there's going to be an inevitable gap between when everyone in your Facebook group is talking about a thing that happened in Atlanta and when the Chicago Tribune puts an article about it on its front page. That's just the way it works.

Good coverage takes time. I'm not going to say all the coverage of the hate crimes targeting Jews right now is good. But the fact that we, in the Jewish community, are hearing about it and angsting about it and frightened over it well before most of it is showing up in the media sources our non-Jewish friends read -- well, that's normal.

No Matter How Dumb the Internet Is, Laura Loomer Can Make It Dumber

Some of you might have noticed, a few days ago, that the "translate" option was no longer appearing for Hebrew-language tweets on Twitter. It was a bit frustrating, but I figured it was a glitch and didn't think any more of it. Some time in the past few days functionality was restored, with Twitter confirming it was a bug that had been resolved.

Straightforward, right? Oh you sweet, naive child. Let Laura Loomer educate you:

Twitter didn't seem to care about informing users as to why they decided to stop translating Hebrew tweets, as their decision was casually implemented without an announcement. Jewish, Israeli, and Hebrew speaking Twitter users were not informed of Twitter’s decision to stop translating Hebrew, which effectively cut off all Israeli twitter users and Hebrew speakers from the non Hebrew twitter sphere.

Could they have not informed users in advance because ... it was a bug? Loomer sees through you.

A bug that only affects Hebrew? Nice excuse, but Chinese was translating perfectly fine. The only language affected was Hebrew. You know, than language of the Jews.

Funny how Twitter has no problem with Farrakhan calling Jews actual bugs, but they are so quick to blame their removal of  Hebrew on a make believe "bug". 

Sounds like bias to me!

I just -- it's probably because I'm emotionally exhausted today, but I can't stop laughing at this. "Twitter says it had a 'bug', but did it object to Louis Farrakhan calling Jews 'bugs'? Checkmate, Twitter!"

Apparently reporting on Twitter's removal of Hebrew translation makes me a "conspiracy theorist".

Apparently, just because you find the idea of Twitter having bugs to be outlandishly improbable compared to a secret plot to exclude the Jews (that was silently implemented and then withdrawn within the space of a few weeks), that makes you some sort of "conspiracy theorist." What is the world coming to?

I'm So Tolerant, I Continue To Read Things Which Confirm My Worst Instincts About My Adversaries!

The Hill presents a poll showing that, after losing this election, Democrats are more likely to "unfriend" someone due to their political posts than Republicans. Several thoughts on this:

• What counts as "politics"? For example, if someone makes an unfriending decision because someone posts something nakedly anti-Semitic, is that decision "political"?

• I've never unfriended someone because of their political posts. I have thought about it. But typically, when I do, my conscious mind gives me a sober lecture on the importance of not isolating myself from competing points of view and listening even when it's difficult. But there's another part of me that secretly wonders if the real reason I do it is to confirm all of my worst instincts about what Republicans are really like. Put simply, the people I think about unfriending are not my lucid Republican friends. They are histrionic trolls of the worst order. Making sure the seven daily posts about how Barack Obama is about to implement his Secret Muslim Plan (just you wait) or how Hillary Clinton's emails are the greatest treason our nation has seen since the Civil War stay on my Facebook feed doesn't "challenge" me in any reasonable respect, it just reaffirms my instinct that the opposing side has been taken over by lunatics. For all the "if only we talked, we'd see how much we really have in common", well -- not always.

• I wonder how much work "Democrat" versus "losing this election" is doing. I've always been a proponent of "listen to your adversaries, take seriously challenging points of view" (my Intro to American Politics students got that lecture so often they probably can recite it from memory). But I'll confess it was an easier instinct when I assumed my side was going to come out on top, and listening was a beneficent gift I'd bestow on the electoral losers. At Berkeley, to urge one to listen to conservatives is to urge someone to listen to an utterly powerless minority. It's easy to do because they present no immediate threat. Power doesn't require one to listen to others (obviously), but it does make it easier to do so magnanimously. Marginalization often does force one to listen to others (obviously), but the compulsion tends to make it happen without much good cheer.

In related news, an interesting study finds that much of the biased partisan divergence in factual assessments of the world dissipates if you give people a small monetary incentive to be honest (whether that means "giving the true answer" or "admitting you don't know the true answer"). It's an intriguing add-on to the well-known phenomenon whereby partisans will interpret facts to suit their own agenda (so liberals will say that the economy faltered in conservative administrations regardless of whether it did, conservatives will do so for liberal administrations). The study suggests that persons are doing this not because they "actually" labor under these mistaken beliefs, but simply as a rooting mechanism for their preferred team.