Zuckerberg Killed the Kids Online Safety Act

The Meta CEO singlehandedly beat back an overwhelmingly bipartisan bill to protect children from the harms of social media.

I am going to confess something. I am not on expert on the Kids Online Safety Act Here’s what I know. There’s broad consensus that social media can have harmful mental heath effects on children. This was explained by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in a June editorial in the New York Times.

The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency — and social media has emerged as an important contributor. Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer of 2023, was 4.8 hours. Additionally, nearly half of adolescents say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies.

It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents. A surgeon general’s warning label, which requires congressional action, would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe.

Murthy laid out a variety of other concerns that he wanted to see addressed with legislation.

Legislation from Congress should shield young people from online harassment, abuse and exploitation and from exposure to extreme violence and sexual content that too often appears in algorithm-driven feeds. The measures should prevent platforms from collecting sensitive data from children and should restrict the use of features like push notifications, autoplay and infinite scroll, which prey on developing brains and contribute to excessive use.

Additionally, companies must be required to share all of their data on health effects with independent scientists and the public — currently they do not — and allow independent safety audits.

I also know that a month after Murthy’s editorial appeared in the New York Times, the U.S. Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act in an overwhelming bipartisan 91-3 vote. The bill acted on many on Murthy’s concerns. Only Republicans Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon opposed passage.

It should have sailed through the U.S. House of Representatives but that didn’t happen. Mark Zuckerberg, whose company Meta owns Facebook and Instagram, hired an army of lobbyists to fight the bill and he showered House Republican leadership and members with donations. As a result, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson killed the legislation and it never came up for a vote.

While I was reading Ruth Reader’s retelling of this story in Politico, I kept hoping for an education on what the bill would actually do, but I was disappointed. Instead, I learned some of the arguments that Zuckerberg’s lobbyists and congressional allies made in opposition to the bill. They said it would “threaten free speech by allowing Washington regulators to squelch conservative and religious voices.” They argued that it would it would strip “American parents and guardians of their authority and choice, replacing them with a council of bureaucrats to parent their kids online.” There were even some lobbyists who told members of the House that the bill would a pose a threat to the “pro-life movement.” But what is not explained by Reader, even to disprove it, is what legislative language is being referred to in these dire predictions.

Frustrated, I scanned through the legislative language myself, and it’s not obvious why conservatives or “the pro-life movement” would be disproportionately targeted, or even targeted at all. I see language that provides increased  parental controls to protect children from harmful content, but nothing sticks out as stripping parents of authority or choice.

In an effort to get more information, I turned to an Associated Press article that Barbara Ortutay wrote back in July when the Kids Online Safety Act originally passed the Senate. Here’s her quick and concise summary of what the bill would provide. Ask yourself, which of these provisions would stifle the free speech of religious conservatives?

What does KOSA do?

KOSA would create a “duty of care” — a legal term that requires companies to take reasonable steps to prevent harm — for online platforms minors will likely use.

They would have to “prevent and mitigate” harms to children, including bullying and violence, the promotion of suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation and advertisements for illegal products such as narcotics, tobacco or alcohol.

Social media platforms would also have to provide minors with options to protect their information, disable addictive product features, and opt out of personalized algorithmic recommendations. They would also be required to limit other users from communicating with children and limit features that “increase, sustain, or extend the use” of the platform — such as autoplay for videos or platform rewards. In general, online platforms would have to default to the safest settings possible for accounts it believes belong to minors.

To gain any clue about plausible objections to the bill, I had to go the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). They raise a lot of good questions, but much of their objection is based on what appears to be deliberate misreadings of the proposed law. To give but one example, the law says the Duty to Care requires a platform to take “reasonable care in the creation and implementation of any design feature to prevent and mitigate… anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors.”

But the EFF interprets that to mean that minors will not be allowed to see content on, e.g., eating disorders or suicide. That’s just not what this legislative language aims to do. It is focused on “design features.” It says explicitly that it’s talking about a design feature that “evidence-informed medical information” indicates will cause mental health issues in minors, like depression, drug addiction, and suicide. These are the things Surgeon General Murthy identified as risks for “adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media.” No one is suggesting that kids are developing eating disorders because they read about eating disorders. The problem is rather a byproduct of the way adolescents interact with these platforms. Social media platforms make kids anxious, depressed and even suicidal, and if there is evidence-based scientific information that implicates some specific design feature as a culprit, that impact must be mitigated or prevented.

The same is true of a provision of the law that goes after design features that create “patterns of use that indicate or encourage addiction-like behaviors by minors.” This targets what Murthy described as “the use of features like push notifications, autoplay and infinite scroll, which prey on developing brains and contribute to excessive use.” The provision does not, as EFF suggests, try to prevent teens from accessing information about substance abuse. It tries to prevent what Ortutay called “addictive product features” that are deliberately designed by social media companies to create teen social media junkies.

Anyway, I said I am not an expert on the bill. It may well have had unintended consequences that stifled free speech or led to too much litigation and liability. But the reason it didn’t progress from being an overwhelmingly bipartisan bill to a law is because Zuckerberg’s lobbyists succeeded in convincing a bunch of conservatives to argue that the law would target them. I could find no evidence whatsoever to support this contention. What I found is Facebook and Instagram showering House Republicans with cash.

And the end result is that parents are still left to fend for themselves in trying to protect their kids from the known harms of social media. And, in fairness, I’ll also note that both Elon Musk and Donald Trump actively supported this bill, and it still died.

 

Episode 20 of the Progress Pondcast: An Interview With Mark Stier

Mark Stier is the executive director of the Pennsylvania Policy Center, and an expert on health care issues.

We just published the 20th episode of the Progress Pondcast. It’s available on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, I Heart Radio and other platforms. Our special guest is an old friend, Mark Stier, who is presently the executive director of the Pennsylvania Policy Center. His bio is truly impressive:

Marc Stier is a long-time activist, teacher, and writer. Before becoming the executive director of the Pennsylvania Policy Center, he was director of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center from 2015 to 2023 and chair of the We The People–PA campaign from 2018 to 2023; executive director of Penn Action; the Pennsylvania director of Health Care for America Now, which led the grassroots effort in support of what became the Affordable Care Act in the state; and the Health Care campaign manager for SEIU Pennsylvania State Council.

Stier was an academic for 25 years. He has a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University and a doctorate from Harvard University, both in political science. He has taught at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks; City College of New York; the University of North Carolina, Charlotte; and Temple University, where he was the associate director and internet coordinator of the Intellectual Heritage Program.

Stier is the author of numerous papers on political philosophy, the history of political thought, and American politics. He is the author of the book Grassroots Advocacy and Health Care Reform, published in 2013. His two latest books, Liberalism and Communitarianism Revisited  and  Civilization and Its Contents: Reflections on Sex and the Culture Wars will be published in 2025. He is also co-editor of  Ambiguity in the Western Tradition.

Like Brendan and me, he’s also a Philadelphia blogger. You can visit his site here.  As you can see, he’s been a tireless worker for improving people’s lives, and he joined us to talk about his efforts to protect Medicaid against cuts that are part of the incoming Trump administration’s plans for paying for an extension of Trump’s tax cuts.

If you want an education on what Medicaid does, how it works, and what can be done to protect it, you won’t want to miss this podcast.

Why AOC Lost Her Bid to Lead Oversight

She was a victim of the House Democrats’ seniority system, and maybe a bit of human compassion for her rival who has been diagnosed with cancer.

Traditionally, the House Democrats have used a rigid seniority system to determine who will lead congressional committees. There are two main advantages to this practice and one additional side effect that has a benefit. The first and primary advantage is that it ensures picking committee leadership isn’t a popularity contest or just a matter of who can raise the most money. To become the chair or ranking member of a committee, a House Democrat must put in a lot of time on that committee and gain experience so that they are well prepared. The second advantage is that the rules are clear and well understood. This avoids a lot of conflict and hurt feelings. And a side effect of this system is that it works to the advantage of minority members who tend to serve in safe seats and thereby have an opportunity to gain seniority.

The Republicans use a different process which has shifted over time. I don’t have a copy of their current rules, but in general seniority is only one factor among many. They also limit how many terms someone can serve as the leader of a committee. I think right now the limit is six years, or three terms in office. This avoids staleness, as the committee leadership is constantly churning. It also makes it a bit easier to control members, as they can be easily denied a leadership role if they step out of line. But it comes at a cost of experience and knowledge, and it causes a lot of internal dissension. The main minority group among House Republicans is women, and they have been shut out of top committee positions in the next Congress.

The Democrats’ way has two big and related downsides. The first is that they frequently discover that the most senior member of a committee is no longer physically or mentally up to the job. This is bound to happen to every member eventually, and when it becomes necessary to force someone out of a leadership position for lack of competence, it can be a painful and divisive process. The second downside is that a strict seniority system ensures that younger generations of Democrats are mostly stuck as backbenchers, having little influence over the crafting of legislation. The lack of flexibility in the system can also be a weakness.

The best way to illustrate this weakness is with the the first impeachment of Donald Trump. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerry Nadler of New York, was seen as so ineffective from a communications standpoint that Nancy Pelosi put the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff of California, in charge of the inquiry. Unsurprisingly, Nadler just lost his bid to remain the ranking member of Judiciary in favor of Jamie Raskin of Maryland. Schiff, who was just elected to the U.S. Senate, and Raskin are very strong communicators, and a party wants to put its best messengers in positions to utilize their talents.

Among the younger generations of Democrats, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stands out as a strong messenger, and it makes sense to put her in a role where her talents can benefit the party as a whole. One of the most prominent committee roles for a party in the minority is as leader of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee. It’s a position formerly held by Raskin. If the Democrats were in the majority in the House, this committee would spend its time harassing the administration and highlighting their incompetence and malfeasance. Since the Democrats are in the minority and cannot control the committee’s agenda, these opportunities will be muted, but could become to the fore after the midterms if the Democrats gain control of the lower chamber. Knowing this, Ocasio-Cortez sought to leapfrog the seniority system and become the ranking member of Oversight, and many Democrats saw an advantage in supporting her bid.

While Pelosi is no longer the leader of the Democrats in the House, she is extremely influential and she successfully argued that leadership of Oversight should remain with the person in the most senior position, Gerry Connolly of Northern Virginia. I suppose you can find things to complain about with any member of Congress, but progressives have no particular reason to be unhappy with Connolly. He’s a strong advocate of the federal workforce, many of whom live in his district. This was a factor in the final vote of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, which reportedly went 34 votes for Connolly and 27 for Ocasio-Cortez.

But things aren’t so simple. Connolly was recently diagnosed with esophageal cancer and, as mistermix at Balloon Juice notes, “the 5 year survival rate for esophageal cancer is 22% (all stages combined). ”

This raises doubt about how well Connolly will be able to fill his messaging role over the next two or four years. Of course, it also makes it more difficult from a human compassion point of view to effectively kick him while he’s down by denying him a position he’s earned through the seniority system.

As for innate talent, Connolly isn’t a bad messenger, but he’s also not a standout. He’s certainly not a star like AOC who boasts an enormous social media following through multiple platforms.

And, in fairness, the Democrats have started to recognize their generational problem. It began when the leadership team of Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn, all octogenarians, was replaced in the last Congress by Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar. It has continued in the battle for ranking member positions in the next Congress, where AOC lost, but Angie Craig and Jared Huffman beat out more senior members for the top positions on Agriculture and National Resources, respectively.

For supporters of AOC, this weakening of the seniority system may make her defeat all the more bitter. But signs of greater flexibility are positive. Rather than having a temper tantrum about the result, I’d rather focus on the overall youth movement and the likelihood that Ocasio-Cortez will be in good position to lead Oversight if and when the Democrats retake the House and the chairman will have actual power to direct the committee.

I wish Connolly good health. He’s a good dude and health permitting he is capable of doing a better than adequate job. But if the day comes when he can’t perform his duties anymore, AOC will be waiting in the wings.

Episode 19 of the Progress Pondcast Features My Brother Phil

Fifty years of weak antitrust policies have hurt the Democrats with working class voters. How can they win them back?

Brendan and I are honored to host my brother Phillip Longman for a big discussion on where the Democrats go from here, with a big focus on the hollowing out of Main Street America. Phil, who is an expert on monopolies,  has worked for publications like U.S. News & World Report, Florida Trend, and is the senior editor of the Washington Monthly. He currently works for the Open Markets Institute, a Washington DC think tank he helped to found that focuses on using “competition policy to build stronger democracies, more just and equitable societies, more innovative and sustainable economies, and a more secure and peaceful world.”

If you want more than a discussion of whether the Democrats lost due to social issues or economic issues related to free trade, this is the podcast for you. We cover a lot of ground, covering competition policies from the Civil War, the Robber Baron Era, the Progressive Era, and up into the 1970’s when Jimmy Carter, Teddy Kennedy and Ralph Nader teamed up to destroy what had made the America Dream accessible up to that point.

When Reagan removed meaningful antitrust enforcement, the game was up. We’ve been on a slow road to losing the Rust Belt and the working class ever since, and now it’s spread to the working class of all races, including in blue states and cities.

What can we do now? And who can do it? To find that out, you have to give us a listen. You can find the episode on Apple, Spotify, IHeartRadio, and Amazon, among other places.

We could also really use some support through our Patreon page to help us keep this project going. The importance of people supporting left-wing podcasters and other influencers is another subject of this episode. Simply put, the billionaires aren’t going to give us Wingnut Welfare or a fair hearing in the papers and on the cable television networks they own. It’s up to us to support our own talent if we want to compete against the Joe Rogans and Steve Bannons on the world.

If you can give, please do, but I hope you give a listen either way.

What the City of Deir ez-Zor Means For the Future of Syria

The city on the Euphrates has a history of resisting outsider occupation, and it’s in the news for a couple reasons today.

There are several ways to romanize Deir ez-Zor, a city on the Euphrates River in eastern Syria. It’s in the news right now for a couple of reasons. The first is that one of its citizens, Syrian activist Mazen Al-Hamada, was found tortured to death in the Harasta military hospital in the Damascus suburbs, and he received a well-publicized and attended funeral on Thursday where he was praised as a hero of the revolution.

Al-Hamada was part of the early anti-Assad protests in 2011 in Deir ez-Zor, and he was detained and tortured twice before gaining asylum in the Netherlands. From there, he became an outspoken critic of the Assad regime and advocate for political prisoners. Sadly, he was lured back to Syria with the promise of the release of some prisoners only to be detained at the airport and disappeared until his badly ravaged body was found several days ago.

The city of his birth has an interesting and troubled history. The Ottomans churned through governors of the region and during the late stages of their rule, it was the end point for Armenian deportations, and tens of thousands of Armenians were murdered there. After World War One, it was first occupied by the British and then by the French, both of which were forced out by insurgencies. During the Syrian Civil War, it was held for a time by ISIS, and then by the regime, and finally by the Kurds.

The Middle East Monitor reported on Wednesday that the Kurds have fled the city and are being attacked on the outskirts by the same Turkey-backed  Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham forces that drove Assad from power.

Syria’s new government has announced the liberation of Deir ez-Zor city from Kurdish militias in the eastern province, as the former opposition continues to capture more territory throughout the country.

According to a telegram post by Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham’s (HTS) Directorate of Military Operations, Commander Hassan Abdul Ghani stated that “our fighters continue to advance in the districts and settlements of Deir ez-Zor province after taking control of the city centre, as well as the western and eastern countryside”.

Earlier this week, the late Deir ez-Zor Military Council – formerly part of the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces’ (SDF) coalition in that eastern province – dramatically abandoned the SDF, announcing its departure from its ranks.

Unrest by local Syrians in Deir ez-Zor then pushed the Kurdish militias out of the main city, with the SDF deciding to withdraw from the area. That consequently made way for the new Syrian HTS-led interim government to move into the city, announcing its liberation from years of being held by the SDF and being fought over by various factions.

Following those developments, HTS-led security forces are reported to currently be carrying out an offensive against the SDF in other areas and the countryside of Deir ez-Zor province, in events which appear to be the result of the new Syrian government’s aim to capture and unify the entirety of the country.

In the north and north-east of Syria, where the heartland of the Syrian Kurdish militias lies, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) has also been advancing against Kurdish positions.

It’s clear that the remote city has an ornery population that resists rule by outsiders. It’s mostly Sunni Arab, with a sizable Armenian remnant, so it’s not surprising they were eager to be rid of both the Alawite regime and occupation by the Kurds.

Yet, even as the Kurds are pressed back to their traditional homeland by forces of the new government, they are trying to be conciliatory.

The semi-autonomous Kurdish administration that holds swathes of Syria’s northeast said today that it will adopt the three-starred independence flag used by the opposition, after rebels toppled longtime president Bashar al-Assad.

The Kurdish authority said in a statement it has “decided to raise the Syrian [independence] flag on all councils, institutions, administrations and facilities affiliated with the Autonomous Administration,” describing the flag as a “symbol of this new stage, as it expresses the aspirations of the Syrian people towards freedom, dignity and national unity.”

Yet, they are still under attack. I tell this story primarily to demonstrate how complicated and difficult it is to understand the dynamics and history of Syria, and what this might mean for predicting and navigating the future.

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We’re All in a Big Yellow Taxi

The American people are not in the mood to uphold our institutions and we won’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone.

Here is something to consider from a Monmouth University poll:

Trump suggested during the presidential campaign that he could suspend some laws and constitutional provisions to go after political enemies in his second term. The public is divided on whether this is something he will seriously do (48%) or if it is more of an exaggeration (47%). Most Democrats take these statements seriously (77%) while most Republicans tend to see them as an exaggeration (71%). Republicans are somewhat less likely to takes these statements seriously now (21%) then they were six months ago (33% in June).

If Trump did suspend some laws and constitutional provisions, 52% of the public would be bothered a lot by this. This number is down from 65% who felt this way in June. Those who say they would be bothered a lot by this ranges from 77% of Democrats (down from 86% in June) to 55% of independents (down from 68%) and just 23% of Republicans (down from 41%).

You would think that barring some extreme threat to the country’s national security, 100 percent of Americans would be “bothered a lot” by a president suspending “some laws and constitutional provisions to go after political enemies.”

Yet, barely over three in four Democrats say they would have a problem with it. That’s identical to the percentage of Democrats who say they take the threat seriously. On the other hand, only about 1 in 5 Republicans are similarly alarmed, and fewer than 1 in 4 would care if he follows through and violates the laws and constitution to settle scores.

The American people just don’t seem to be in a mood to uphold much of anything, whether its norms against murder in the streets, the independence of the Justice Department, disqualifying politicians who commit business fraud, rape, and coup attempts, or the importance of upholding the Constitution.

I would never suggest that living in America has been a paradise, but I think this really is a case of people not knowing what they have until it’s gone. If there’s widespread rage on the frontend here, there will be another kind of outrage on the backend when people see what it’s like when everything breaks  and radicals take away the things they take for granted.

This is what’s coming, mostly metaphorically, of course:

They took all the trees, put ’em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half just to see ’em

But the real challenge here is that someone has to preserve our right to vote out these people when we grow disenchanted. That’s where the importance of the Constitution really matters, because if no one will enforce the law there’s no way to ensure we’ll have another free and fair election.

Heroes may be required.

Frightening and Fascinating Developments in Syria

There are two immediate advantages in post-Assad Syria that were not enjoyed in post-Saddam Iraq. The first is that the people trying to maintain order in Syria are actually Syrians rather than Americans and Brits, and they understand their society. The second is that they have the example of all the mistakes the Americans and Brits made in Iraq. We can already see the difference in how Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) forces are working to maintain government services rather than engaging in wholesale de-Baathification.

As The Soufan Center notes, there’s a notable public relations effort to project a moderate image. The HTS has talked about respecting religious minorities, including Assad’s Alawite sect providing that they separate themselves from the regime. The leader of HTS, has dropped his nom de guerre of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani in favor of his birth name, Ahmed al-Shara. He has also changed his wardrobe “to a combination of more well-coiffed Western attire and military uniforms.”

The change in name is significant for another reason. The Arabic word for the Golan Heights is Jawlān, and he chose the fighting name “Mohammed al-Jolani” to signify his family’s historic roots in the Golan. Al-Shara was born in Saudi Arabia and raised in Damascus, but most likely considers himself as a displaced person from Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. Significantly, as soon as al-Shara arrived in Damascus, the Israelis moved into and past the demilitarized zone in the Golan. They justified this as a purely defensive measure, but it was accompanied by a very heavy bombing campaign throughout the country which destroyed Syria’s navy and hit many military installations, including but not limited to suspected chemical weapons sites. This is an example of opportunism, as Israel exploits a moment of chaos to diminish Syria’s military capabilities in a way that would have been hugely risky during Assad’s time in power. But it’s doing nothing to create conditions for some kind of reset with the nascent government forming in Damascus.

Outside of Moscow and Tehran, almost no one is lamenting the fall of Assad, but a takeover by Sunni Islamists with ties to ISIS and al-Qaeda isn’t reassuring. And the sectarian change in power is the most significant thing here. Just as Iraq flipped in an instant from a Sunni-dominated country to a Shi’a dominated one when Saddam was toppled, the overthrow of Assad has broken Iran’s dominance in Syria. It also has huge consequences for Russia which is reliant on their Syrian naval base and large air base.

Another hugely significant development is the death of Baathism eliminates a secular Sunni alternative to Sunni fundamentalism. Baathism’s intellectual father, Michel Aflaq, was a Christian. The Assad family’s Alawite sect is considered non-Muslim by many, including especially by Sunni fundamentalists. For this reason, Baathism has always had a bit if a legitimacy problem. By aligning with the hardline Shi’a fundamentalists that control Iran, the Assad regime partially resolved this weakness, especially as Iran took a more active and combative anti-Israel role than the Sunni Arab regimes.

What these changes mean is that Syria has an opportunity to take the mantle of resistance to Israel from Iran, but to do it from a Sunni Arab point of view. This is more natural for a host of reasons, including that Syria is mostly Sunni, as are the Palestinians.

This is not what the leaders in Egypt and Jordan want to see, as they value their peace treaties with Israel. It’s also not what Saudi Arabia wants to see, as they’ve clearly been more interested in recent years in normalizing relations with Israel and attracting western investment, the World Cup, etc.

The war in Gaza has made accommodation and peace with Israel problematic for every Arab country, and this is something Syria can exploit to gain street credibility and allegiance. But it isn’t their only choice. After more than a decade of devastating war, Syria isn’t in a position to offer much resistance, and could benefit from international good will to rebuild and repatriate some of the millions who have fled the country.

It might be too optimistic to even posit that the civil war in Syria will end. Outside actors may be too invested in chaos to permit it. Turkey, which sponsored the overthrow of Assad by HTS, wants to crush Kurdish controlled areas. Saudis may want to shift anti-israel jihadi activity to Syria to give cover to their overall strategy of normalization with Israel, and to pressure for some concessions from the Israelis to the Palestinians. Iran may use what’s left of Hezbollah to cause problems. And, of course, Israel may promote divisions to sustain weakness.

But there is at least some chance that Syria can be stabilized if the new government can get a moment to breath and is serious about creating an ecumenical society that resembles what Syria, at its best, offered before the civil war began. I don’t think it will be secular in outlook, though. I believe it will be very religiously conservative and ultimately Sunni-sectarian.

Lebanon is another complete wildcard in this. It has always been dominated by Syria, but never by a Sunni government with this type of orientation. It has to be disorienting.

All these developments are both fascinating and frightening. Most Syrians are really happy about the fall of Assad. I hope they have reason to feel that way for more than a brief period. And I hope that’s true for the rest of us, too.

Server/Database Problems

We are doing a complete rebuild of the database and server.

We’ve been suffering pretty catastrophic database problems for the last few weeks, and we’ve had to do several restores that have erased both articles and comments. Nothing has worked to fix the problems so now we are doing a complete rebuild. It’s quite possible that the server will become disconnected to the database again one or more times before the rebuild is completed, so please be patient and maybe save any comments you care about so you can repost them later.

Part of the problem is that GoDaddy bought out our server company and they provide very limited access and service compared to what we had before, which makes it very hard to identify problems and work on fixes.

Everything is backed up now, so at least we won’t lose our history, but we’re still not sure we have the wherewithal to fix this thing. If not, we’ll figure out next steps, but I don’t have the budget to hire a team to do this.

One way to help out is to visit our Patreon page and become a podcast donor.

I really apologize for the inconvenience. It’s annoying me because I have a long list of things I want to write about, but it’s hard to commit when it feels like it will just get erased in a crash and I’ll have to repost it.

Wish us luck!

Episode 18 of The Progress Pondcast is Live

Giuliani is broke, Maggie Haberman can’t keep up with Trump’s shitty cabinet picks, and Brendan gets dragged back onto social media.

In our first podcast since the devastating reelection of Trump (available at Spotify, Amazon, IHeartRadio and Apple), Brendan and I try to cheer everyone up at Rudy Giuliani’s expense. Then we turn our attention to Trump’s announced cabinet and the public’s inexplicable positive reaction. And we finish up on a positive note by discussing the potential of BlueSky to serve as a tool that can save both the traditional media and left-wing content producers.

We encourage your likes, follows, and subscribes wherever you get your podcasts— The best way to support our work financially is on Patreon.

Ken Paxton Receives a Sermon from BooMan

The Texas attorney general is trying to shut down an Austin ministry for being too committed to the homeless.

I’m not paranoid, but I did notice that just as I was getting a surge of Blue Sky followers coming over from Twitter, my database here at Progress Pond got badly corrupted leading to several days of downtime. It didn’t help that my son had a two-day soccer tournament in Lancaster County this weekend that made it difficult for me to address the problem. In the end, we had to use a backup of the database, which probably erased some people’s recent comments. I apologize for that, but nothing else worked to fix the problem. I still don’t know what caused the crash, so it’s possible it will recur.

In the meantime, I encourage you to try Blue Sky for your social media needs. I have a couple of Starter Packs you can use. One includes people who were prominent parts of the progressive blogosphere and the other is made up of folks who were part of the early days of the Philadelphia chapter of Drinking Liberally. Unsurprisingly, if you know your history, there is some overlap.

The main advantage of Blue Sky over X/Twitter is that it doesn’t have an algorithm that prevents you from actually seeing posts from people you follow. That’s a big problem on Twitter since Elon Musk took over. It works both ways, too. Only a tiny percentage of my followers on Twitter will ever see my tweets. Meanwhile, right-wing content producers are boosted by the algorithm. At Blue Sky I get much more engagement even with a fraction of the followers, and it’s not filled with hate and propaganda, so that’s nice, too.

I’m hoping this will help Brendan and me overcome the problem we’ve faced promoting our podcast. We’ve had a bit of a fallen tree in the forest problem thanks to changes in how both X/Twitter and Facebook treat posts with outside links, as well as Musk’s war on the left-wing influencers. I think at Blue Sky, we have a real chance to get some listeners, and maybe some financial supporters as well. The best way to help us there is to like and subscribe to our podcast, and to head over to Patreon and lend us a hand.

Here is a gift link to Julia Angwin’s New York Times article on how “the red tide that swept across the nation in our recent election marked many things. One of them was a right-wing triumph over social media.” Here’s a taste:

Under heavy pressure from the right, and with the help of X owner Elon Musk, the leading tech platforms opened the floodgates for propaganda to spread unchecked. The result was a flood of lies and distortions flowing through our social media feeds. That led to possibly the most misinformed electorate we’ve ever seen.

Many voters headed to the polls convinced that border crossings are higher than ever before (they are not), violent crime rates are rising (untrue) and inflation is soaring (ditto). We will never know how much this garbage may have swayed voters, but we do know it influenced one side significantly: conservatives.

Combine this lowering of guardrails with the tech chief executives’ obsequious public congratulations to President-elect Donald Trump after his resounding win, and it’s hard not to see this striking turnaround in political terms. “In Trump, Silicon Valley got what it wanted: a president that will kneecap antitrust efforts, embrace deregulation and defang labor laws,” the journalist Brian Merchant wrote in his newsletter, Blood in the Machine.

And with Mr. Trump soon in office, the landscape may get worse before it gets better. Brendan Carr, tapped by the incoming president to be the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, posted on X after securing the nomination a call to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.”

As Nate Cohn details in the New York Times, this all helped move most demographics against the Democrats and the left, particularly among the working class of all races. If you’re a regular reader here, you know I have been warning of this since I did my first autopsy of the 2016 election. Perhaps you should revisit my June 2017 feature article in the Washington Monthly: