Hello, good morning, happy Friday. It snowed a lot in Chicago this week. Thankfully, the forecast for next week predicts temps between 40 and 50, so maybe we are finally on the verge of spring? But I’m not going to hold my breath.
Anyway much like the temperatures from our prior psuedo-warmth reprieve, this week the stock market tanked, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling more than it has for all of history. Therefore I give you the following:
But the President says everything is fine, and he is a markets genius (see below), what could possibly go wrong? Well, other than wiping out 5 trillion dollars of value. What else could go wrong? What we really need is a Savior:
Was this a long-winded way for me to work in that I finally unlocked my first Destiny 2 title? Maybe. Was it also a way for me to work in that Stonks image so I could use it as the social media preview for the newsletter this week? Yes, definitely.
There is a lot of content this week, I hope you are excited. I even had to trim some of the section header images to get everything to fit in the email. And if you like it, don’t forget that you can share it:
Genius thinking
Here is an actual top post on r/WallStreetBets at the time of publication, just to give you some context about the folks we’re talking about here:
The stonks thing was also so I could lead with the story of r/WallStreetBets getting duped, not because the stock he was pumping was good but because he wrote about it:
The user posted D[ue ]D[iligence] on this sub on the name. Due to the low attention span of users, a post of greater than a paragraph was taken as genius thinking. Users and others that visit the forum then bought calls in large amounts […].
Right, sure, if you’re posting stock tips on Reddit and you write any more of an iota about the stocks, people will think you are some kind of genius or insider. Matt Levine has great coverage of the situation, because of course he does:
Great, just great. We have spent the last, like, five years talking about a hypothetical future in which 99% of all stock-market investments are in passive index vehicles. What would it mean for valuation and price discovery and capital allocation? Well … this, right? It would look like this. Sober responsible people would invest passively in broad market indexes, stocks would mostly move in lockstep with broad macroeconomic trends, and the single-stock price action would come from weird online hobbyist speculation. The future is here!
And then yesterday someone decided to track how frequently stocks are discussed on r/WSB:
I mean if it updates every day it’s not exactly a passive index vehicle, and if the stocks touted on WallStreetBets often move at the open on coordinated buying activity, then tracking r/WSB on any sort of lag will miss a lot of performance. Still just go with it. You could build an exchange-traded fund that tries to mirror popularity on WallStreetBets. (The ticker RWSB seems to be available.) Then people who want to invest passively in stocks favored by Reddit could do that. I wrote yesterday, about r/WSB, that it reflects the barbell future of investing: “Sober responsible people would invest passively in broad market indexes, stocks would mostly move in lockstep with broad macroeconomic trends, and the single-stock price action would come from weird online hobbyist speculation.” But what if you somehow want both at once? Passive, but for weird online hobbyist speculation? I bet that ETF would do well.
I guess if the market demands it, then you should sell it. Someone should model and test this over the next month and let me know how it (hypothetically) performs.
Not-okay boomers
A widely-circulated NPR story this week reported that “Facebook users 65 and over posted seven times as many articles from fake news websites, compared with adults under 29.”
Look, a focus of the story is that there are some of these older folks who are, god bless ‘em, seeking out training on tech literacy and learning how to identify fake news. But this group of what appears to be 6 people is not going to marginally affect the danger betrayed by the statistic above. Think about your millenial friends and how they can be prone to share what is easily verified as bullshit, then multiply the frequency of that by seven times, then think about how many boomers are reading those articles and how that frequency is going to create massive feedback loops within their social circles. Not great!
I want to get off Mike Bloomberg’s wild ride
Friend of the show Taylor Lorenz has another banger this week:
Several high-profile Instagram accounts posted sponsored content for Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign on Wednesday afternoon.
World Star Hip Hop, Funny Hood Vidz, Banger Buddy, Nugget, and Wasted, all accounts with millions of followers, posted ads in the form of fake “relatable” tweets and edited videos.
The posts do not make use of Instagram’s official system for disclosing that money has changed hands. The company has said that all creators posting sponsored content on behalf of presidential campaigns must use the official branded content tool. Branded content is a form of advertising.
The story covers what has been a ruthless and exhausting combination of tactics from Bloomberg - not only does he spend ridiculous amounts of money to get everyone he can find to advertise for him, he does so without following the established compliance procedures that have been created by the platforms he’s advertising on.
Liz Bourgeois, a spokeswoman for Facebook, which owns Instagram, wrote in a statement to The New York Times that the company does not “have visibility into financial relationships taking place off our platforms, which is why we’ve asked campaigns and creators to use our disclosure tools. On the broader topic of political branded content, we welcome clearer guidelines from regulators.”
Oh, you asked? You asked them nicely and expected that they would just comply? This is Mike Fucking Bloomberg, a billionaire, he has so much money that he doesn’t comply with anything unless you force him to. A fine is a price and he has won the money game, so he can pay all of the prices. Short of starting to hand out bans, he is not going to voluntarily comply and he is not going to stop.
There was just one problem: Facebook’s team was relying on the influencers to label themselves.
The memers who created the first round of Bloomberg posts two weeks ago were asked by Facebook to retroactively label their posts through the official tool. However, many ads posted since then have not done so. Facebook is currently investigating how to crack down on these violations. So far, no meme accounts have been penalized.
Yes, right, of course. If you can’t get the influencers to do the labeling, you certainly can’t get the campaign to tell them to.
Oh, Donny boy, the mods, the mods are calling
Right Richter by friend of the show Will Sommer is great this week, it covers a lot of good content, but I want to specifically highlight that it looks like r/The_Donald is finally about to get banned from Reddit:
Reddit brass have been at odds with The_Donald for years and made the forum harder to find last June after users advocated for violence against police officers. On Tuesday, they went further, ousting some of the subreddit’s moderators and declaring that new moderators will need to be “vetted” by Reddit administrators before they can run the forum.
A Reddit spokesperson confirmed the moves in an email to me.
I think this dovetails nicely with the Bloomberg thing above. Reddit has been extremely slow-going on banning r/The_Donald, obviously because it is associated with the President and they have the ridiculous fear about “political bias” and shit that is plaguing Facebook and YouTube, despite the fact that the subreddit and its participants have been blatantly violating Reddit rules for years.
What is especially funny is that Reddit knows a heavy-handed approach is necessary with these communities; it has banned plenty of hate-based subreddits, and sometimes those bans actually come quite quickly after one pops up. But processes move more slowly when there’s more potential heat associated with the move, because the real issue is politics, not policy. Reddit is worried that if they enforce their rules that they will suffer political backlash. Which, you know, not a bad worry on the face of it, but it’s not all that hard to come up with a process that can be easily audited and shows that you did your due diligence on the issue. They just don’t want to bite the bullet. Or at least they haven’t wanted to, historically. Maybe they’re finally realizing their mistake.
Elsewhere in conservative nonsense: Did Ben Domenech admit that the Federalist is funded by slavery? Or just his spending money? Mike Cernovich is doing a hard pivot to magic-fueled conspiracy theories. Chicago cops show how dedicated they are to their “serve and protect” mission. If you think your political opponents have hired someone to criticize you, obviously you should just hire someone to criticize them. “To be woke is to live in perpetual fear that someone, somewhere, is enjoying life,” which is perhaps the most obvious projection of all time (no need to click through, the article itself is almost entirely devoid of content).
The feet pics, darling
Look, I am going to let this one speak for itself:
Everyone in New York has a story about a close-call with a celebrity. In a city that's home to one million millionaires and almost 80 billionaires, a run-in with the rich and famous is bound to happen eventually. I don't frequent the right ticketed sex parties and don't have the foresight to book tables 10 months in advance, so this is a rare occasion for me. But one time, I showed up to an indie zine fair allegedly 10 minutes after Jeff Bezos, his body-double, and a bodyguard detail, left.
My only regret in my entire six years as a Brooklyn resident is not leaving my apartment for this event even 11 minutes earlier. Not because I need to get a glimpse of that shiny head perusing anti-capitalist art, but to get a peekie-see at his feetsies.
Treat yourself
Dana Schwartz wrote about a “surprise travel agency” and it is probably my favorite story of the week. The first paragraph betrays that she is an excellent writer and that the story is important for her:
I came to the airport with a backpack, carry-on luggage, and no idea where the plane I was about to get on would land. In my hands I held a large white envelope that I was forbidden to open until I had arrived at the terminal. (Inside: Information about where I was actually…going.) The arrangement made me feel like a secret agent or a mafia assassin or James Bond. In fact, I was off on a weekend adventure somewhere in the United States.
This is another one I think you should just read. I found her writing and her perspective both soothing and affirming and I enjoyed it very much.
Also the company seems pretty neat and I have bookmarked this so I remember to check them out when I have a little money from the new job.
Toppling pyramids
In a photo she posted on Instagram of her 2017 cruise to the Caribbean, Katie Willis smiles at the camera, her hair perfectly braided and her teeth blindingly white. She and her husband sport matching straw fedoras and clutch drinks, while standing in front of a crystal-blue ocean, a massive cruise ship in the background. In another photo, she wears a kimono and sunglasses, standing in the middle of the ocean with her arms outstretched, as if she can’t quite believe she’s really there. A third simply shows her perfectly manicured toes resting on a window, the expanse of blue sea in front of her. “And this, my friends, is the LuLaRoe life,” reads the caption.
In reality, Willis now says, she was completely miserable the entire trip, which she had been invited on after being one of the top sellers for LuLaRoe in 2016.
There are few things that I enjoy more than a long-form investigation into how pyramid schemes are bullshit.
What is common across stories like this is that there is always someone who is making a lot of money. But ultimately the goods are not the product, the people are - someone has to be losing, and if the goods were so impressive on their own they would just be sold in stores. There is nothing inherently more efficient about the MLM model other than that it forces its way into social networks at the expense of those doing the networking. If you don’t care about burning your salespeople and their buyers, sure, no problem! But obviously that model has not caught on for, you know, Amazon or whatever. Or even for individual companies other than those specifically built around the model itself!
The companies at issue always have flashy products that rely on fancy presentations and the charisma of their purveyors. They offer trainings and conferences and incentives to sell more and more and more, and they deceive the sellers into forgetting what they are doing to achieve more sales.
If you can tell that I’m bitter about this, it’s because I was lured into selling CutCo when I was in high school and I’m not over it. Sure, the knives are fine, but the sales practices are scummy and I don’t like what it did to me. There are now countless companies doing this to countless people, it’s disgusting, it is the one of the worst facets of capitalism. Down with the pyramids, I say.
No miracles, just money
What if I told you there was a magic Bible that oozed oil:
From then on, more oil appeared almost every time Jerry picked up the Bible, a leather-bound copy of the New King James translation. The oil moved to the back of the book, saturated the endpapers—a heart-shaped splotch appeared over a map of Israel—and then started at the beginning, in Genesis 1. Eventually Jerry had to put the book in a Ziploc bag, and then in a large plastic bin he bought at Tractor Supply.
This story involves evangelicals and Trump and oil and money and power. Someone will probably purchase the movie rights to the story in the next few years and Tim Roth will play the pastor. I will excitedly buy a ticket.
You can tell where the story is going, I’m sure, it’s one of those stories where you know the end from the beginning, but those are often my favorites. A good story is often about the journey, not the ending.
PragerU gets schooled
If the rapid-fire round above led you to believe that this week’s newsletter would not contain any more conservative nonsense, I apologize, this is too good not to include.
As Popehat notes, “[the] [d]eciding judges [were] appointed by Clinton, Bush I, Bush II. Roll out your “Jay Bybee is a liberal” hot takes.” Here is a direct link to the opinion.
The crux of PragerU’s complaint is this:
YouTube tagged several dozen of PragerU’s videos as appropriate for the Restricted Mode. YouTube also “demonetized” some of PragerU’s videos, which means third parties cannot advertise on those videos. PragerU appealed the classifications through YouTube’s internal process, but at least some of the videos remain restricted or demonetized.
So PragerU brings first amendment and false advertising claims against YouTube, gets its complaint dismissed at the trial level, and gets absolutely bench-slapped by the appellate panel:
The relevant function performed by YouTube—hosting speech on a private platform—is hardly “an activity that only governmental entities have traditionally performed.” Halleck, 139 S.Ct. at 1930. Private parties like “[g]rocery stores” and “[c]omedy clubs” have “open[ed] their property for speech.” Id. YouTube does not perform a public function by inviting public discourse on its property. “The Constitution by no means requires such an attenuated doctrine of dedication of private property to public use.” Lloyd Corp., 407 U.S. at 569. Otherwise “every retail and service establishment in the country” would be bound by constitutional norms. Cent. Hardware Co. v. NLRB, 407 U.S. 539, 547 (1972) (private parking lots do not become state actors just because they are open to the public).
The panel viewed the false advertising claim to be similarly lacking:
YouTube’s braggadocio about its commitment to free speech constitutes opinions that are not subject to the Lanham Act. Lofty but vague statements like “everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories” or that YouTube believes that “people should be able to speak freely, share opinions, foster open dialogue, and that creative freedom leads to new voices, formats and possibilities” are classic, non-actionable opinions or puffery. See Newcal Indus., Inc. v. Ikon Office Sol., 513 F.3d 1038, 1053 (9th Cir. 2008). Similarly, YouTube’s statements that the platform will “help [one] grow,” “discover what works best,” and “giv[e] [one] tools, insights and best practices” for using YouTube’s products are impervious to being “quantifiable,” and thus are non-actionable “puffery.” Id. The district court correctly dismissed the Lanham Act claim.
Is it troubling that YouTube has such a huge market share for content production and that its content moderation decisions have massive impact on our information economy? Sure! But under the current law, these claims were obviously baseless, and it’s fun to see Dennis Prager’s hissy fits get the judicial smackdown they deserve. Perhaps he should have consulted with an expert before filing suit.
You deserve some good animal content
“Parker the Snow Dog sworn in as honorary mayor of Georgetown”
Have a great weekend, everyone. See you next week.