[scottrogowski]

This should be the top comment. Social media companies can either be monopolies or they can put limits on the speech of their platform... but they can't do both.

While not against the law of freedom of speech, political moderation processes are certainly against the intent. Every once in a while we get a case like this where an unpopular fringe opinion becomes mainstream and underlines the point. But this isn't just a matter of Facebook / Twitter / YouTube needing a better moderation process - this is more fundamental. No person or organization - no matter how benevolent or wise - should have the power to declare truth in a society.

Fringe opinions need constitutional protection - regardless of the era or the technology.

[BurningFrog]

What I would do, if elected Emperor over this, is to add warnings or links to debunkings of fringe theories, but never delete them.

The power to silence will always be abused.

[throw0101a]

> or links to debunkings of fringe theories

Sadly won't be helpful, and may actually make things worse:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backfire_effect

* https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont...

[armchairhacker]

IMO I think it's useful to avoid getting moderates and people who don't know better caught up in the mess.

For people who are already convinced, they're already convinced. Banning the content entirely also doesn't help. People are very good at spreading information, even if you manage to ban all conspiracies from the internet, you have TV, the newspaper, private networks, and just word-of-mouth.

Another good tool would be to teach kids how to identify misinformation. You don't have to worry about belief perseverance when there's no belief yet.

[wslack]

However, in past decades, those other networks didn't cause the same level of propagation of misinformation.

[gowld]

I can't teach your kids to identify misinformation against your will and theirs.

[nitwit005]

That wikipedia link for the backfire effect directly mentions failure to reproduce the findings.

I will assume that's true, or you won't find this reply very convincing.

[meowface]

Of course this is undoubtedly true. However, deleting the information creates a Streisand effect and a much stronger belief perseverance and backfire effect compared to annotating the information with a counter-argument.

Between the three options of "delete", "annotate", and "leave untouched", I think the least-bad option is probably the middle one. It's not going to dissuade many people and will only reinforce beliefs for many, but there's not much else that can be done.

[BurningFrog]

You clearly have a strong belief that it won't be helpful, so I won't try to argue with you.

[edgyquant]

Facebook already does this and people just claim it’s fake news being pushed by “the elite.”

[Mountain_Skies]

I've been on Facebook since you needed an edu address. I've never had anything I posted flagged in anyway until recently during the Colonial Pipeline shutdown. A friend posted a photo of a person filling up buckets with gasoline. I responded with "An oldie but goodie" and a photo of a woman filling up plastic shopping bag with gasoline. A couple days later I got a notification from Facebook that I was spreading disinformation. The image I posted was from 2019, not 2021 their notification said. As punishment, my future posts for a unspecified amount of time will get low ranked in everyone's feeds. Problem is, I never claimed the image was from 2021. I even called it an oldie. I've never run into trouble with Facebook's truthiness machine before but now I'm in some sort of penalty box for who knows how long. As far as I can tell, there's no way to appeal this or even let them know that their process is flawed. Facebook has labeled me as the spreader of disinformation and that's the end of it. Nothing else can be done. Their judgement is final. These are the people we want controlling the flow of information and this is the process we want them to use to do it?

[aliasEli]

I would expect that this was fully automatic response, so there was nobody reading your message. Facebook somehow detected that your photo was too old. On the internet "fake" photo's are frequently posted and it is understandable that Facebook takes countermeasures. It is really difficult to find a good solution.

[pessimizer]

> claim it’s fake news being pushed by “the elite.”

The "fake news" part is always disputable on a case by case basis, but the "elite" part is indisputable. A very small number of very wealthy people get to decide the range of opinions that are acceptable, and the deviations that get administrative comments. The mods aren't the auteurs - mods that correct incorrectly will be fired. Close calls rattle up the chain of command until they hit the CEO/Founder, who is often a billionaire, always very wealthy, always of a particular demographic.

[jkhdigital]

Because it is? Telling someone what to think is the fastest way to guarantee that they will not listen to anything you say.

[edgyquant]

I’m simply responding to someone giving an idea that is already out there and doesn’t work.

[monoideism]

Because much of it is fake news being pushed by the elite. Look at precisely what we're discussing: the lab leak scenario, which Facebook labeled with warnings (at best) or simply banned/deleted/removed (at worst).

And now, the media establishment is doing some kind of re-think, and it turns out that while far from proven, a lab leak (which covers a variety of scenarios, most not involving any kind of "engineered" virus) is a reasonable hypothesis. If that's so, why the capricious banning and warning labels?

We've seen similar situations play out in the past year with masks (at first, they were unnecessary and racist, then absolutely critical, now it's changing again). How about just let people decide for themselves? There will always be some conspiracists on both the left and right, but most people figure this stuff out in a reasonable manner.

[gowld]

> but most people figure this stuff out in a reasonable manner.

That's getting tenuous. Fully 25% of the populace believe "alternative facts" that their Representatives claim are true, but those Representatives cite those very people as the source of truth! It's "citogenesis" in the real world!

[BurningFrog]

Of course some people will disagree.

I don't see that as a problem.

[fsckboy]

WARNING: BurningFrog aspires to be Emperor

[michaelmrose]

You are assuming that the net negative for society is never high enough to justify kicking liars and crazy people off your platform. That seems like a remarkable conclusion. Lets take for example Alex Jones spreading the lie that kids didn't die in school shootings and the people talking about their dead kids are making it up. Do you keep spreading it until a whack job kills somebody? Until some parent commits suicide?

What about health misinformation that if propagated will kill thousands? How many dead is enough to act?

What if false info about vaccines keeps enough from being vaccinated long enough for a new variant to emerge that infects the previously immune and the net effect is millions die?

I don't think you want to be elected Emperor over this at all its a shittier job than you imagine.

[wpietri]

Good thing they aren't monopolies, then. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Reddit are are all very popular places for people to post their views. And that's not counting the myriad lesser places like the one we're using now. And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own.

I also disagree that sites moderating is against the intent. Freedom of speech is one right, but so is freedom of association. Should HN be required by law to platform anybody with an "unpopular fringe opinion"? I'd say no. Using government power to force participation in speech someone finds odious is just as bad as using government power to shut down speech.

[SilverRed]

>And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own.

And no one will read it unless you can post links on facebook, twitter and reddit. In the end, almost all communication online runs through a limited set of american megacorps who all act in the same ways, have the same rules and align to the same culture.

It's no surprise China and Russia ban American sites because those sites control the debate and culture of the places that use them.

[munk-a]

I do think there is a problem with how tightly some big corporations have locked down social media - but the 1st amendment (and equivalent laws elsewhere) don't cover the requirement that anyone actually listen to your speech.

I think if we see social media as being a necessary modern medium for speech then we're going to need to get a government sponsored something in the mix - whether that is a common required protocol for messaging or a full blown nationalized social network is an open debate we can have. The main issue is that as long as we're blindly trusting the market to fix itself - it has decided the fix is that monopolies are great when nobody is breaking up big tech companies.

[tshaddox]

> And no one will read it unless you can post links on facebook, twitter and reddit.

I suppose the question is how long that list of websites really is, and how long it needs to be before people stop calling all those websites "monopolies." Obviously it would be fairly absurd to say "no one will read your website unless you can post links on site 1, site 2, site 3, ... site 3,109,550, and therefore those 3.1 million websites are monopolies."

[lmm]

Long enough that they don't co-ordinate, essentially, which would show in how they acted. When facebook, twitter and reddit all announce the same kind of moderation changes within a few months of each other, you can tell that they're a de-facto cartel, and the specifics of how that happens (such as whether they directly communicated with each other) are kind of irrelevant.

[stevenicr]

I believe there are a LOT of people in the world that would think if your site does not come up in gooogle than it doesn't exist.

I remember reading that there are huge populations in which 'the internet' is facebook - so if fbk censors you - you do not exist.

[pessimizer]

Also, your site will not come up in google.

Google is just another social network that people are gaming (with the lazy consent of the people who run it.) Even if you make it, you can be wiped off google as easily as off twitter, no matter what your traffic.

[monoideism]

I'm more or less in agreement with you on all of those companies except Twitter. Twitter is a notable exception and absolutely does have a monopoly on the social media sector as a "public square" - one which features almost every major politician, journalist, analyst, and activist on the platform, including at times, the US President and many other heads of state. And because of the network effect, this monopoly is unlikely to be challenged in the coming years.

Twitter sought out exactly this kind of political influence, so I'm not sympathetic to any complaints they may have now that they have that influence and are in the spotlight.

In an ideal world, Twitter would have been created as a government site and thus subject to the 1st Amendment, but given that we're not in that world, legislation is needed. I'm willing to concede the other social media companies you cited have competition and/or don't play the central role Twitter plays in the US political process.

Finally, there would be Freedom of Association on Twitter even if it were subject to 1st Amendment rights - no one is forced to follow anyone, and everyone is free to block anyone at all. It should be almost exactly analogous to real-life: you should have the right to associate with whomever you like in our country, but you should not have the right to expel them from the country.

[aliasEli]

I think a very important reason for Twitter's influence is that it is very easy to include tweets in an article. This saves editorial work. There is no need to paraphrase/extract parts of a longer article and so it mostly avoids the problems around incorrect quotes. It also makes attribution of your sources easier because the tweet is the source itself. Of course, Twitter is a horrible platform for nuanced opinions, but these do not seem to be very popular nowadays.

[gowld]

The First Amendment has always applied to private property "town squares" that are open to public, originally this was decided in the case of indoor shopping malls.

[wpietri]

I believe that's incorrect: https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/about/faq/do-individua...

If you're thinking of Pruneyard v Robbins, that only applies in CA. And that wasn't based on the 1st Amendment, but on California's own constitution.

[lmm]

I think/hope there would be raised eyebrows if government agencies set up shop in private malls. Malls have realistic alternatives. Twitter doesn't, even for some government services.

[wpietri]

If Twitter's so incredibly powerful and important, why is it worth 5% of Facebook or 2% or Amazon (which owns Twitch) or Google (which owns YouTube)? That doesn't sound like a dominant market position to me.

A large proportion of the people you mention are active on multiple platforms. Some of them aren't active on Twitter at all. Twitter does have a particular market niche, but it's only the 16th most popular platform in terms of global active users: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

And freedom of association is a right that Twitter's owners also have. They are not obliged to serve anybody they don't want to.

[vineyardmike]

So, I’m not going to claim if it’s a monopoly or not directly, but just provide new angles on this debate…

Twitter may have an x% of market valuations of other companies… but that doesn’t have to be the only metric we base decisions off of. Amazon is more than twitch, so has a bigger evaluation. But obviously that other business doesn’t compete with Twitter.

Twitter might account for (eg) 25% of phone use time (and say fb accounts for another x%). So maybe we define the market as user attention. That might make more sense than a strictly financial approach.

Or maybe, like the OP said, Twitter has 90% of all political actors on it, when the next platform has only 25%. Or maybe it has 75% of all public political discourse. Maybe defining the market as saturation of politicians. After all, it’s way harder to compete if you have to convince all existing politicians to move.

These metrics are harder to gather, but might be more useful to gauge how dominant Twitter is in the political sphere. When people discuss monopoly, they often don’t care about the (vague and interpreted) laws per se, they actually care about how a company has somehow come to be dominant and influential in a negative way.

Throughout American history, antitrust rules has been used against mostly large businesses that were unpopular (politically and colloquially). Business and society had changed a lot, especially with the internet, so if there is a political push, defining monopoly policies against another target and definition is inevitable.

[wpietri]

Sure. Many things are possible. Twitter could be using an embedded hypnotron in their apps to control elite opinion. But when people are talking about effectively nationalizing one company because they don't like its moderation policies, I think we need more than speculation.

And you might not care about why we have antitrust laws or how monopoly impairs free markets. But I sure do.

If somebody wants to make the claim that Twitter has too much power in some way unrelated to monopoly, they're welcome to take a swing at that. But that's a very hard claim to make in that without an actual monopoly, I don't see a plausible mechanism for unfair dominance. Not only is it possible to compete with Twitter, many companies, some of them with vastly more resources, already do. I'd say the rise of TikTok demonstrates there's no particular barrier to entry, and Gab and Parler are eternally claiming success in attracting millions of users.

[monoideism]

> Gab and Parler are eternally claiming success in attracting millions of users.

So Gab and Parler should be absolutely free to operate as they wish, in accordance with US laws?

(Because there many folks who like Twitter's moderation who also believe Gab and Parler should be run off the internet, and have tried their best to do so)

[XorNot]

Except there's no barrier of entry to Twitter's marketplace. Twitter doesn't somehow prevent users installing other apps. They aren't a natural monopoly, seeing as how Facebook has been taking shots at that space for years.

This bizarre HN notion that every big company is a "monopoly" needs to die. Being popular doesn't make you a monopoly.

[monoideism]

I'm not really arguing from an antitrust perspective. My argument is more focused on the central role that Twitter plays in our political process. If you have a better word to use for that concept than "monopoly", I'll edit my post. But I'm sure you disagree with my thesis either way.

That said, from an antitrust perspective, there are strong arguments against some social media companies, particularly Facebook. Furthermore, there is a barrier to entry for Twitter: the network effect. It's an incredibly strong barrier.

Finally, of course not every big company is a monopoly.

[bobthepanda]

The network effect is a big barrier until it isn't, and this can happen rather quickly.

Digg. Myspace. Snap. Tumblr. Honestly even Facebook itself; how many young people are opening new accounts on Facebook? For now people have moved onto Instagram but this is the only trick I'm aware of pulled off successfully.

[XorNot]

You are not entitled to an audience. A monopoly requires an actual barrier, not a social one: i.e. physically limited space in telecommunication conduits in cities, for example.

[wpietri]

And I think you've put your finger on it. A lot of people confuse a right to free speech with a right to be heard. They are BIG MAD that they don't have a god-given right to a large platform. Not that they built the platform and not that they contribute to its upkeep. But they still have strong feelings of entitlement.

[tshaddox]

> My argument is more focused on the central role that Twitter plays in our political process. If you have a better word to use for that concept than "monopoly"

What's the concept then, other than that Twitter is doing things that you don't like? That's obviously not a sufficient argument, and if antitrust law isn't the reason for legal action to be taken against them, what's the reason? The only other legal course I could imagine is significant changes to media laws (which I'm certainly not opposed to, but those seem more difficult to argue for than antitrust action), or perhaps going at it from the other side and changing the laws around how public figures must communicate with the public.

[throwawaysea]

A business doesn’t have to be a monopoly per the current legal definition for it to be subject to regulation. We can simply require social media companies to accept all customers. We can make political views a protected class that prevents denial of service at businesses in general. We can treat these tech companies as utilities because they operate the public town square. There are numerous routes for us to fix the current situation, where a small number of employees controlling these companies with billions of users, can become the sole arbiters of can communicate and what they can communicate. It just requires that we start talking about it, educate people about the problem, and build political will.

[monoideism]

How do you think antitrust laws were created in the first place?

[vineyardmike]

Monopoly is mostly a political definition throughout American history. The policies and laws have been shaped to target businesses not always strictly based on actual market definition in a textbook sense.

[donw]

> Except there's no barrier of entry to Twitter's marketplace.

There absolutely is. Twitter enjoys an incredible geographic monopoly. The territory just happens to be digital.

[ErikVandeWater]

1. You're using the technical definition of monopoly in a debatable way to hand-wave away the issue. Each of these companies have excessive market influence.

2. All of these companies are already in bed with the government (e.g. illegal NSA spying). They also try to enact policies that are in agreement with politicians agenda as a bargaining chip to get more favorable legislation and enforcement.

[throwawaysea]

Facebook has 3 billion users. Their efforts in censoring / shaping public opinion / propagandizing are broader and more influential than any government. I don’t want to argue about whose definition of monopoly should win. The fact remains that this is a problem and it needs to be addressed with regulation, just like we regulate power utilities. Social media is just utility communication like anything else we call “telecom”, except with massive barriers to competition due to network effects and no requirement for interoperability.

[gowld]

> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Corporations do not have inalienable rights. Only their human members do. They are chartered by the government, to promote the General Welfare.

If the CEO of YouTube wants to flex her rights, she should do it herself, not behind the veil of a corporation.

[wpietri]

Companies do face more constraints than individuals, but the government can't just do whatever it wants. One obvious reason being that companies have owners, and they do have rights.

[pavlov]

This argument seems to assume that Internet hosting is like air — a natural resource which by default is available for everyone to use, but social media companies restrict unfairly.

As everyone here should know, it’s not like that: hosting can be awfully expensive, especially for media content. Social media companies receive money from advertisers, and use that money to host content from users and partners that hopefully makes those ads look appealing too. It’s that simple.

Should these companies be compelled by the government to display content that makes their customers (advertisers) look bad? That seems like an awfully deep intrusion into a private business.

If the social media companies truly were monopolies, that would be another thing. But it’s hard to make that argument when new entrants like Snap and TikTok are able to conquer entire market segments and reach $100B valuations in a matter of years.

[R0b0t1]

Real estate is expensive too, but there are "town square" doctrines in some states where presenting yourself as a public space means you must not discriminate on usage.

This goes further -- in some states where such doctrine does not exist it was kind of synthesized because some electoral districts have, say, 80% of the electorate in an apartment building which a judge ruled must be accessible to candidates who run.

[pavlov]

A comment section on a blog presents itself as a public space. Does this mean nobody can moderate comments anymore?

Or if the rule only applies to political expression, can spammers just adopt the formula: “I love candidate $X because he buys viagra at http:yyy”

Or, if the rule is that big enough sites suddenly become “town squares”, that seems like a major disincentive to American companies to grow. Others would walk in without these limitations, like Chinese already did with TikTok.

[lmm]

> A comment section on a blog presents itself as a public space. Does this mean nobody can moderate comments anymore?

A blog comment section usually presents itself as a curated space, and the flip side is that blog owners take some level of responsibility for the contents of their comments.

You can be a private club, or you can be a public space. But you can't be both. We make that kind of distinction in the real world too.

> Or if the rule only applies to political expression, can spammers just adopt the formula: “I love candidate $X because he buys viagra at http:yyy”

Of course not, come off it, judges and juries are not actually complete idiots.

> Or, if the rule is that big enough sites suddenly become “town squares”, that seems like a major disincentive to American companies to grow. Others would walk in without these limitations, like Chinese already did with TikTok.

Then ban those sites from the US, like India does. If you can't support US-style freedom of speech then you shouldn't get access to the US market.

[R0b0t1]

A direct analogue is the concept of an easement. If you get large enough and enough people use your site, that is when the public square doctrine would kick in. Similar to how eventually if you let people keep walking through your yard it becomes public use land.

Usually you have multiple chances to fight it. The owner of a square continues to own it because it makes them money.

[TechBro8615]

It’s not about hosting. It’s about distribution and eyeball minutes. As long as social media sites deliver content through an algorithmic feed, there are a limited number of slots available for the “next page.” The user will stop scrolling eventually. Their limited attention is valuable real estate. It’s also why social media has an incentive to maximize the time on feed.

The best regulatory approach to social media is simple: any algorithmic newsfeed must be opt-in. It must default to a chronological option. The default preference must also be applied retroactively for all existing users.

[slg]

How would you feel if we swapped out "social media sites" and "algorithmic" for "newspapers" and "editorial" in that first paragraph? There are a limited number of slots in the newspaper. Should the government step in a guarantee that the New York Times needs to publish any crackpot theory I come up with?

[caddemon]

NYT can also be held liable for things like slander though, right? If social media sites try to claim they are not responsible for any content posted, that does feel a bit like trying to have their cake and eat it too.

[slg]

I'm not sure the goal here. Do you want increased or decreased moderation? Repealing 230 and making social media companies liable will lead to more moderation and bans not less.

[lmm]

The goal is clear lines of responsibility. If Facebook is responsible for every post, that's ok. If every individual is responsible for their posts, that's also ok. It's when it's blurry that there's a problem.

[caddemon]

I'm not the one that was originally asking for regulation on the social media companies, I just think there are too many fundamental differences between current social media sites and newspaper editorials for that analogy to work.

Personally I feel social media sites have taken some of the moderation too far. I don't have a problem (in a legal sense) with the algorithmic feed downweighting various topics or adding links to countering sources or whatever, but I think if these sites don't want to be held liable for content they should error way on the side of allowing individual user pages to be uncensored.

What was even crazier to me was when Twitter blocked DMs containing that Hunter Biden story. The story was suspect obviously, but to moderate private messages like that is a huge overreach IMO.

[pavlov]

Would TikTok be illegal under this law? They mostly show content chosen by an algorithm from people you don’t follow.

[nescioquid]

I agree with you in spirit, though I feel like the issue is more about whether social media are common carriers [1] or publishers.

They shield themselves when they claim to be a carriers, yet act like publishers. The monopoly aspect, I agree, would be more important to speech, given they behave as publishers of what you may as well consider on-spec content.

I'd like to get clear on to what degree they should be considered carriers or publishers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

[planetree]

They're publishers: they profit from advertising from content, and don't charge a carrier fee. Seems simple enough.

[tonystubblebine]

Not all opinions deserve equal airtime. Fringe opinions should have to work harder to get to the mainstream. Isn’t that exactly what happened here? This is the fringe opinion that had the most inherent value and it’s proved that by breaking through. IMO I wish the platforms had censored more bad info than this. It’s crazy to me that there isn’t more friction for bad ideas.

[setBoolean]

1. Who decides what is a "fringe" theory? You? The Government? The scientific community? Facebook/Twitter etc...?

2. ..Fringe opinions should have to work harder to get to the mainstream... No they shouldn't it is you the reader of those news who should make the decision of how much "brain time" this "fringe" news get.

3. Denying airtime to certain topics doesn't make them go away or sways people that believe them otherwise.

[tonystubblebine]

Well, since you asked if I should decide what a fringe theory is, yes, sometimes I do make that decision. But when I'm wrong those things have a habit of breaking through. I remember being pretty skeptical of intermittent fasting for awhile. I'd held it out of a study we did in 2014 and then held it out of our publishing. Something about it smelled like anorexia light. So on the one hand I kept hearing people swear by it and then on the other hand I hadn't done enough research to be comfortable. I ended up having a detailed conversation with a doctor about the physiological side and then with a therapist about eating disorders (especially in men) before I was ready to allow it into our work. So for about a year I was wrongly gatekeeping on this topic. But that's what I mean about fringe ideas need to work harder. The fringes is where those ideas get stress tested and refined. And since ideas break out of the fringes all the time, I don't have any real fear that gatekeeping other places is overly oppressive.

[refurb]

This is some impressive mental gymnastics.

Why was the lab leak claim labeled “fringe” in the first place?

You want Zuckerberg deciding what ideas you should and shouldn’t see?

[beaner]

On the contrary, actors who are bad at judging what qualifies as a "good" idea should be removed from the filtering process.

[jjoonathan]

How is that contrary? MSM got one wrong in the same time that alternative media has gotten hundreds wrong. MSM isn't just better at rejecting misinformation, it's a lot better.

[beaner]

Wrong. The things it does get wrong have more impact. Russiagate is just one prior example. It was patently false from the outset, but led to mass delusions, promotions of fake news propagandists to the point that they are now embedded within and celebrated by the MSM, the discrediting of the media and the intelligence community, breakdown of trust of those institutions by those who had been clear-headed, and fever-dream level hysteria by those who were misled, greatly fracturing Americans who were already divided.

It may be true that they get fewer specific points wrong, but if the ones they do get wrong count for a lot more, that's not better. That's worse.

[triceratops]

> Russiagate is just one prior example. It was patently false from the outset

What is "Russiagate"? What about it was "patently false"?

The Mueller investigation got multiple indictments against Russian nationals. They also obtained convictions of people working in the Trump campaign or administration for election-related offenses. They found evidence of Russian attempts to influence voters in swing states by illegally buying ads on social media. That Russia attempted to meddle in the 2016 elections isn't in doubt - only whether the meddling worked.

[tablespoon]

> What is "Russiagate"?

It's talk-radioese for the Mueller investigation.

> What about it was "patently false"?

IIRC, a lot of misunderstandings about it (e.g. misunderstanding the proven claims that Russia made signficant efforts to interfere with the election as a claim that they successfully rigged it).

[the_optimist]

This is a very interesting comment for future historians, as it shows how people convince themselves that they have absorbed substance when in fact there is no such substance.

Virtually no aspect of your statement extends beyond press headlines, where the content and follow-on of each of these stories entirely defused the substance of the respective headline. That is why the whole thing that you believe is very important amounted to a pile of dust.

[the_optimist]

DOJ indicted ham-sandwich Russians, then later retreated. Only process crimes charged (lying, interfering). Buying ads on social media isn't illegal, and the amount was de minimus (< $30k). FARA crimes were reverse-engineered, selectively prosecuted, and didn't related to Russia in any way. Everything about these headlines is an utter farce.