Yet Another Columnist Claims Bluesky Is A Liberal Echo Chamber Because Its Users Keeping Kicking Nazis Out Of The Bar

Say That Again

from the what-views,-motherfucker?! dept

Editor’s note: Mike Masnick is on the board of Bluesky, and took no part in editing or reviewing this piece.

Here it is: the dumbest take to date on Bluesky v. xTwitter. There’s been plenty of stupid offered up before by bitter xTwitter users who are trying to pretend they’re not still splashing around in white nationalist dumpster juice while surrounded by bots. Their favorite coping method is to claim Bluesky users are afraid to engage in the marketplace of ideas. But all they offer is a limited market in the darkest alley in town.

None of these arguments are being made in good faith. No one criticizing Bluesky users for routinely rousting Nazis and their fans from this social media platform is making intellectually honest arguments. They’re just bitter that the people they actively dislike (and actively harassed on xTwitter) are no longer willing to slog through the sewage just to have a meaningful interaction or two with their fellow, non-bigoted human beings.

This column for… um… Commentary, written by James Meigs, at least lets you know right up front you’re dealing with a dishonest broker in the marketplace of ideas. You’ll see it immediately in Meigs’ opening paragraph:

When Bluesky opened to the wider public in 2023, more left-leaning users flooded in, many of them hoping to escape the increased visibility of conservative views on Musk’s now laissez-faire platform redubbed “X.”

I mean, it’s right there. This is yet another person who thinks people are closed-minded because they prefer not to engage with “conservative views,” while failing to acknowledge that “conservative views” is a coded term that refers to open racism, white nationalist ideology, anti-trans hatred, bigoted beliefs covering pretty much every race, color, creed, or sexuality, and a general enthusiasm for MAGA-based autocracy.

These are not “conservative views.” These are bigoted views that far too many people hold — people who think they might be perceived as rational if they use this phrase, rather than something more specific that would reveal what these “views” actually are.

The bad faith argument continues, broad-brushing Bluesky users as liberal elites, skeeting from the relative safety of their ivory towers in the general direction of the internet’s peasantry.

Having emerged from the intersectional hothouses of academia, many progressives today view policy disputes through a therapeutic lens: They see themselves—and the marginalized groups they claim to speak for—as victims of trauma. The solution to that trauma is not rigorous debate. Quite the opposite; they need protection. Exposure to dangerous speech could threaten their mental stability. So progressives now treat opposing ideas not as errors that need to be rebutted with facts, but as dangerous contagions that must be quarantined.

Bro, there has been actual trauma inflicted by social media users. It happens on every social media platform, but Bluesky’s robust moderation tools (many of which are controlled by users themselves) — including a Block button that actually works — do offer protection to people who’d rather have a pleasant online experience, rather than one routinely interrupted by harassment from ugly trolls and outright bigots who seem to feel the “marketplace of ideas” obligates the harassed to indefinitely endure harassment.

At least Meigs says there’s some “dangerous speech” out there. That he won’t equate it to the “conservative views” he name-checked earlier is disingenuous. The entry fee for social media interaction should never be subjecting yourself to bigotry and hatred. If the bigots want a playground, they’ve got several to choose from. This just sounds like the whining of bullies who are finding fewer and fewer people to push around.

After a diversion into a bunch of stuff that’s so barely worth discussing even Meigs can’t be bothered to do it any length (and that’s in an op-ed that runs more than 2,400 words) — de-platforming, Biden Adminstration allegedly demanding accounts be blocked or removed, COVID origin conspiracy theories, the banning of Trump from Twitter after the January 6th insurrection) — he goes right back into pretending xTwitter is the only place real social media interaction still takes place. And, of course, he uses phrasing that glosses over the irredeemable shithole xTwitter has become under Musk’s ownership:

When Bluesky gave them an escape hatch from the increasingly freewheeling—and sometimes raucous—debates on X, many jumped through it without looking back.

Oh yeah. “Freewheeling.” “Raucous.” Those are some mighty fine words. But they don’t fool anyone who isn’t already deep in the throes of self-delusion. There’s no “debate” on xTwitter. What’s being referred to as freewheeling, raucous debate is just a steady stream of open racism, transphobia, sexual harassment, death/rape threats, and a bunch of dudes with philosopher bust avatars declaring that everyone calling them bigots are just low-IQ liberal NPCs. And that’s if you can even get past the massive ad load, Bitcoin hucksters, and emoji-laden responses that clutter every single thread on the platform.

There’s more of this throughout the rest of it. The guy speaking on behalf of his fellow “conservatives” continues to proclaim Bluesky is the platform of intolerance and fragility — again, using phrases that refuse to acknowledge the genuine ugliness that is the day-to-day business of xTwitter.

I don’t love X’s somewhat uglier vibe, but I accept the trade-off. I’m willing to tolerate a few angry or idiotic posts in exchange for knowing that right-wing views aren’t being deliberately buried.

[…]

I suspect that the progressives who feel threatened by right-wing “hate” have simply never experienced a cultural environment where conservatives speak as loudly as liberals.

“Right-wing views.” Hate in scare-quotes. “Somewhat uglier vibe.” But who’s really threatened here? It seems to be the “right-wing view” people who are running into a wall of resistance that’s no longer going to engage in the mutual lie of “freewheeling debate.” These are the same people whose “conservative views” make them angry about preferred pronouns, sexual identity, diversity, inclusion, women having personal agency, and any flag that doesn’t have a thin blue line, MAGA logo, or swastika on it.

Once again, Meigs goes back to his core complaint: Bluesky users don’t want our “conservative views” bullshit wrecking up their mostly-pleasant Bluesky experience. And, in doing so, Meigs accidentally advertises what makes Bluesky better than its competitors.

I quickly learned that the site’s core innovation is not finding ways to facilitate thoughtful conversations. Instead, Bluesky’s secret sauce is the powerful tools it gives users to shut down voices they disagree with. Block lists—featuring the names of people you will not permit to see your posts—are public and widely shared and discussed. “People make nasty lists and lists and lists there,” a Bluesky user in Germany explained to me. Many Bluesky regulars import other users’ lists wholesale, allowing them to block hundreds of people they’ve never even heard of.

That’s the real problem Meigs has with Bluesky: it won’t give him a platform to harangue people whose ideas he disagrees with. That’s always been the case, even back when “conservatives” were complaining about being muted, blocked, or banned from (original) Twitter and Facebook. They all carry the same sense of entitlement: a firm belief that if they’ve been given a platform to speak, everyone else should be forced to listen.

And this follow-up makes it clear Meigs is willfully ignoring what has already happened on xTwitter to pretend this is a uniquely Bluesky problem:

In real-world social circles, being a total flaming, um, jerk brings social costs. But in a hermetically sealed social-media bubble, it’s a way to build your status. Bluesky adds another perverse incentive: Anyone adding nuance or pushing back against violent statements risks being ridiculed and even mass-blocked by the online community. This combination of positive and negative rewards creates a one-way ratchet, always pushing users toward extremism.

Exactly. But you only like the bubble that includes you, rather than the one that doesn’t. That’s a pretty universal human trait — resentment towards any group that excludes you. Unfortunately, it’s also a pretty human trait to spend 2,400+ words trying to turn your personal bad experience with Bluesky (if this ever even happened — there doesn’t appear to be an account linked to Meigs on the service at the moment) into a universal experience that reflects a vast majority of internet users.

What’s never even considered in this column is that people are embracing Bluesky for all the reasons you’ve chosen to treat as negatives. Everyone can curate their own experience — something that’s definitely not possible anywhere else. Both Facebook and xTwitter allow pay-to-play amplification for posts, as well as sloppy, profit-first algorithms that shove whatever these sites think will increase “engagement,” rather than assist in curation by being more attentive to what users actually want to see on their timelines. What’s absolutely insane about Meigs’ assertions above is that he’s ignoring his own complaints about xTwitter so he can pretend the real problem here is Bluesky:

If you can’t see the embed, it’s a screenshot of Meigs on xTwitter in 2019 saying:

Twitter’s goal with every change is to have us spend less time doing what WE want to (interact with the people we actually follow) and spend more time doing what Twitter wants them to do (get sucked into “trends” and #StupidHastags and viral outrage mobs).

Here’s a platform that doesn’t pull that bullshit. And Meigs shits on it because “conservative views” (you know the ones…) aren’t gaining a foothold at Bluesky.

I’m a Bluesky user. I don’t mind honest debates. But I’d much rather have a timeline I can closely control — one that gives me access to what I’m looking for and allows me to remove any detritus I come across with a couple of swift clicks — than whatever’s passing itself as “social media” elsewhere.

What’s on display here is the amazing fragility of people who can dish out tons of abuse but just can’t take it. It’s also exposing the people who are facing the uncomfortable fact that lots of internet users don’t like what they post or the people they identify with. Worse, they’re finding out they don’t like they people they identify with much either. Echo chambers aren’t great, but I’m sure people would prefer an echo chamber where most people are polite, helpful, and supportive, rather than the alternative xTwitter provides: a dark pit filled with the worst people you know. Meigs, for some reason, prefers the pit. At least there, he can soak in some tepid applause for owning the liberal snowflakes currently enjoying a site he doesn’t feel obliged to listen to him speak.

Filed Under: conservative tears, content moderation, elon musk, james meigs, nazi bar
Companies: bluesky, twitter

After Killing USAID, MAGA’s Solution: Reinventing USAID, But Worse

Too Much Free Time

from the sophistication-isn't-a-conspiracy dept

The recent book “Character Limit” exposes a perfect case study in destructive arrogance: Twitter was already building more sophisticated versions of everything Musk claimed he wanted. But Musk and his sycophants were so convinced of their own brilliance, and so certain everyone at Twitter was an idiot, they didn’t even bother to understand what was already in place. Instead, they gleefully tore it all down — only to later attempt rebuilding worse versions of the same features, having learned nothing from the ruins.

Now we’re seeing the same thing play out with the US government. Just weeks after illegally killing an agency (which Musk never actually understood) that successfully promoted American interests abroad for decades, the MAGA crew is suddenly discovering they need… an agency that promotes American interests abroad. And just like at Twitter, their “solution” involves rebuilding a stripped-down, flawed version that fundamentally misunderstands what made the original work.

As we recently detailed, USAID’s genius lay in how it wove together humanitarian aid with commercial interests. Every dollar spent fighting disease or supporting development didn’t just protect American health and security — it helped create new markets for US companies. And critically, it did this while maintaining recipient countries’ independence, in stark contrast to China’s Belt & Road Initiative, which deliberately creates debt traps to tie countries to the Chinese economy (and was more directly tied to infrastructure initiatives, rather than broader development goals around health and stability).

The MAGA crew’s sudden amnesia about USAID’s value is particularly striking given their own recent history. Take Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State. Just three years ago, he was one of USAID’s strongest defenders, demanding increased funding specifically to “counter the Chinese Communist Party’s expanding global influence.”

For years, Rubio forcefully argued that USAID’s budget (less than 1% of federal spending) delivered outsized returns for American interests. “I promise you,” he declared in 2017, “it is going to be a lot harder to recruit someone to anti-Americanism and anti-American terrorism if the United States of America is the reason one is even alive today.” He even called out those who wanted to slash foreign aid as liars pushing false narratives about the budget.

But hey, that was three whole years ago. Ancient history!

The cognitive dissonance is reaching absurd levels. Just weeks after killing USAID, Fox News ran a segment bemoaning that America has no answer to China’s Belt & Road Initiative. Trump’s solution to this “crisis”? Apparently it’s Benjamin Black, son of hedge fund giant (and Jeffrey Epstein associate) Leon Black, who Trump is appointing to rebuild what’s left of USAID. Black’s revolutionary idea, as breathlessly reported by the NY Times? Investing in “pro-market” projects.

Here’s the punchline that makes this whole thing darkly comic: USAID was already laser-focused on market development. So focused, in fact, that some of its vocal critics have long complained it prioritized commercial interests over pure humanitarian aid. But USAID understood something Black and his MAGA compatriots don’t: creating sustainable markets requires playing the long game through stability, health, and development.

Black’s grand vision? Moving USAID’s resources to Trump’s pet project from his first term, the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). His qualification for this role? A Substack essay co-written with Peter Thiel protégé Joe Lonsdale arguing that foreign aid should be… wait for it… market-driven.

It’s USAID all over again, just stripped of the sophistication, expertise, and strategic thinking that made it effective. Another case of destroying something complex to rebuild a worse version that fits on a bumper sticker.

In other words, here are the basics of Black’s revolutionary proposal, which I swear I am not making up:

1. Take USAID’s $44 billion budget
2. Give it to the DFC for “market-oriented investments”
3. ???
4. Profit! (No, literally — the proposal promises “returns that would fund future programs”)

The whole thing reads like someone discovered USAID’s actual mission statement, crossed out the sophisticated parts about development and stability, and added “but make it more Finance Bro.” It would be funny if it weren’t so predictable.

And while USAID had its critics on both the left (for being too market-focused) and right (for being “wasteful”), it had evolved sophisticated mechanisms to balance these concerns. The agency’s programs underwent rigorous evaluation and adapted over decades. The DFC, by contrast, largely operates as a standard investment vehicle without this institutional knowledge — it’s like replacing a surgeon with someone who’s played “Operation” once.

Just like Musk “discovering” features Twitter already had, MAGA is now “inventing” development strategies that USAID spent decades refining by actually understanding the realities and nuances of the larger world.

The parallels here are almost too perfect. Just as Musk replaced Twitter’s verification system — which created genuine value through carefully managed trust — with a simplistic “pay for checkmark” scheme, MAGA wants to replace USAID’s sophisticated development strategy with a crude, short-term, “invest for returns” approach. Both changes promise quick, measurable wins while destroying the underlying long-term value and strategic importance that took years to build.

This is the MAGA/Musk playbook in action: take a complex system you don’t understand, declare it broken because you can’t grasp its nuances, tear it down while claiming you’ll build something better, then deliver a simplified version that completely misses the point. Whether it’s Twitter’s trust systems or USAID’s market development strategy, these weren’t just programs — they were calibrated ecosystems built on years of learning and refinement, with longer term goals in mind.

But here’s what makes this pattern truly dangerous: it’s not just ignorance, it’s aggressive ignorance. The Musk/MAGA worldview doesn’t just fail to understand complexity — it treats complexity itself as evidence of incompetence or corruption. They’re not just incapable of seeing the sophistication in these systems; they’re ideologically opposed to admitting such sophistication could exist.

Filed Under: ben black, development, dfc, elon musk, foreign aid, usaid
Companies: twitter, x

Texas Newspaper Traces Racist ExTwitter Account To An ICE Prosecutor

Failures

from the never-send-a-non-racist-to-do-a-racist's-job dept

I realize that using the word “racist” to describe an ExTwitter account is pretty much redundant at this point, but there’s something more to this story. It’s not that a racist is using ExTwitter to make racist posts. It’s that a prosecutor working for ICE is, and has been, posting racist content for years on the platform.

But it took some sleuthing by the journalists at the Texas Observer to tie these racist posts to a government employee — a post that certainly shouldn’t be manned by someone who already believes non-whites to be less human than he is.

And yet, here we are, thanks to this reporting, which shows ICE assistant chief counsel Jim Rodden runs the infamous GlomarResponder ExTwitter account. This is the sort of content that’s not only allowed by platform under Elon Musk, but encouraged by the platform’s pay-to-play verification and Musk’s support and adoration of anything that contains a bunch of bigotry.

Since GlomarResponder was first created in 2012, the account has posted hateful, xenophobic, and pro-fascist content. “America is a White nation, founded by Whites. … Our country should favor us,” GlomarResponder wrote last month. “All blacks are foreign to my people, dumb fuck,” the account posted in September of last year. “Freedom of association hasn’t existed in this country since 1964 at the absolute latest,” GlomarResponder wrote four months prior, further clarifying the post was referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a reply to a comment. “I’m not a commie, I’m a fascist,” GlomarResponder posted a couple weeks later. “Fascists solve communist problems. Get your insults right, retard.”

In August, GlomarResponder posted: “‘Migrants’ are all criminals.” Two months later, GlomarResponder shared an image that reads: “It is our holy duty to guard against the foreign hordes.” Some GlomarResponder posts evoke anti-immigrant violence: “Nobody is proposing feeding migrants into tree shredders,” the account posted in March 2024. “Yet. Give it a few more weeks at this level of invasion, and that will be the moderate position.” And in January: “My WWII vet grandfather didn’t get a chance to kill asians, so he volunteered for Korea. He’d be asking for a short term job with ICE kicking doors and swinging a baton.”

Pretty nasty stuff. Most people wouldn’t want their real names associated with this garbage. People working for the government — especially those handling immigration prosecutions — would definitely not want to be linked to their bigoted social media spewing.

But Jim Rodden fucked up. He carelessly provided enough hints about his current employment and employer that he was sniffed out by the Texas Observer.

“Yeah, I’m in a courthouse wating [sic] on warrants,” GlomarResponder wrote. “Turns out there’s a lot of bitch work to be done to make mass deportations happen.” One day prior, GlomarResponder had posted that he “Can confirm all of those,” regarding a list of cities where ICE was expected to begin deportation operations the next day. “May have a betting pool to see who can guess which one I’m at on any particular day, based on the news,” GlomarResponder wrote.

The paper also used a lawsuit filed in 2021 challenging government mask mandates to nail down GlomarResponder’s real identity. The account mentioned being “party to a lawsuit” involving vaccine mandates. Months down the road, he complained the lawsuit had been vacated by the court. The lawsuit’s formal title? James Joseph Rodden, et al v. Dr. Anthony Fauci.

It should be clear from Rodden’s own posts that he’s incapable of engaging impartially in immigration proceedings. Unfortunately, there’s really not a Brady list equivalent for prosecutors (these lists only prevent or discourage law enforcement officers from testifying in court). And the Supreme Court has made it pretty much impossible to sue any federal official or officer for rights violations, so it’s unlikely Rodden’s bigotry will prevent him from engaging in future prosecutions.

The only hope now is that ICE itself will seek to have him removed. But, given the current administration’s hatred for immigrants and its willingness to turn its bigotry into action, it hardly seems likely ICE supervisors will consider Rodden an impediment to its goals. If anything, officials may see this open bigotry as a force multiplier — one that will ensure maximum cruelty and efficiency as this administration moves forward with its plan to eliminate a large portion of what actually makes this country great: a melting pot that has provided multiple large US companies with reliable employees while simultaneously providing millions of immigrants with more safety and security (job or otherwise) than they could find in their own countries.

Filed Under: glomarresponder, ice, immigration, jim rodden, mass deportations, racism, texas
Companies: twitter, x

ExTwitter Pays Trump $10M to Settle Case It Had Already Won

Legal Issues

from the quite-the-business-model dept

Here’s a dumb thing that happened: Elon Musk’s ExTwitter just agreed to pay Donald Trump $10 million to settle a lawsuit that ExTwitter had already won. (Yes, you read that right: already won.) This is becoming something of a pattern in tech and media these days — call it the digital-age protection racket.

The plot twist was telegraphed back in November, when ExTwitter filed something with the Ninth Circuit that basically said “hey, don’t bother ruling on this appeal, we’re working on a settlement.” The appeal in question? Oh, just Trump’s absolutely batshit lawsuit claiming that Twitter (this was back in the pre-Ex days) violated his First Amendment rights by shutting down his account while he was president.

Let’s do a quick First Amendment refresher: The First Amendment stops the government from silencing speech. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Private companies can moderate their platforms however they want. (This is not exactly a controversial interpretation — it’s First Amendment 101.) But in this case, Trump (who was the head of the government at the time of the events in the case) was suing the private company arguing that it somehow violated his First Amendment rights to ban his account, even if he had violated the company’s rules.

The case had not gone well for Trump. The judge in the case, James Donato, absolutely ripped it to shreds in dismissing it:

Plaintiffs’ main claim is that defendants have “censor[ed]” plaintiffs’ Twitter accounts in violation of their right to free speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution… Plaintiffs are not starting from a position of strength. Twitter is a private company, and “the First Amendment applies only to governmental abridgements of speech, and not to alleged abridgements by private companies.”

Now, Trump’s lawyers tried to get creative here. Their argument went something like: “Okay sure, Twitter is private, BUT…” (There’s always a “but” in these cases.) The theory was that it was actually state action because… well, because the Biden campaign (not even the administration — they weren’t in office yet!) had complained about Section 230 generally. And also because some Democratic members of Congress had opinions about Facebook (not even Twitter!) content moderation decisions. The judge was, let’s say, unimpressed with this legal theory:

Paragraph 55 is said to offer “examples of Democrat legislators threatening new regulations, antitrust breakup, and removal of Section 230 immunity for Defendants and other social media platforms if Twitter did not censor views and content with which these Members of Congress disagreed.” … The actual quotes do not live up to that billing. The statements attributed to “Bruce Reed, Biden’s Top Tech Advisor,” and Michelle Obama are of no moment because Reed and Obama were not legislators…. Other statements in Paragraph 55 pertain only to Facebook, and not Twitter. … (Senator Markey’s question and Mark Zuckerberg’s answer regarding Facebook’s algorithms and policies; Rep. Adam Schiff’s Tweet that “Facebook must ban” Trump). Then-Senator Kamala Harris is quoted three times for calling for “Trump’s Twitter account [to be] suspended” and calling on Dorsey to “do something about this Tweet” from Trump, but conspicuously missing is any threatening remark directed to Twitter….

So Trump did what losing plaintiffs do: he appealed to the Ninth Circuit. (And in what might be the most eyebrow-raising detail of this whole saga, he was represented by former Chief Judge of the Ninth Circuit, Alex Kozinski. Yes, that Alex Kozinski.) The oral arguments are available online, and… well, let’s just say the judges were not buying what Trump was selling. Judge Bybee, in particular, seemed personally offended by the legal theory, noting he couldn’t think of a single case that would support Trump’s arguments. (In judge-speak, that’s basically saying “what are you even doing here?”)

In fact, Judge Bybee got so worked up that he even yelled at Twitter’s lawyer for suggesting that maybe, hypothetically, a more coercive statement from the two top House and Senate officials might count as state action, as compared to the random legislator comments at issue in this case. “A huge landgrab,” he called it, if the court were to accept such an argument. (When a judge is telling the winning side they’re being too generous to the other side’s theory, you know things aren’t going well.)

The case was dead on arrival. It was quite clear that Twitter was going to win the case. Easily. And, I’ll note, that the oral arguments at the Ninth Circuit took place in October 2023, a year after Elon had taken over the company. Which means Elon’s own lawyers were still in court explaining why Trump’s lawsuit was nonsense.

However, the Ninth Circuit decided to hold off on ruling on the case at that time, because one of the claims involved Florida’s social media law, which had been challenged and dumped as unconstitutional by both a district court and the Eleventh Circuit, and a week before the oral arguments were heard in this case, the Supreme Court had said they’d review that law. That’s the case that became Moody v. NetChoice which the Supreme Court eventually ruled on last summer, making it clear that the First Amendment protects a company’s content moderation decisions.

That ruling would only help Twitter’s arguments against Trump’s. If Twitter’s defense against Trump was strong before, it was practically bulletproof after.

All this history matters for one simple reason: to understand just how completely, utterly doomed Trump’s case was. This wasn’t one of those “well, maybe if you squint at it sideways” kind of cases. This was a “lose at the district court, lose at the appeals court, and by the way, here’s a Supreme Court ruling that makes your position even more wrong” kind of case. The kind of case that law professors use as examples of what not to do.

But, of course, that was about the time Elon started supporting Trump. And so now Elon has “settled” the case, giving Donald Trump $10 million. For a case that pretty much everyone knows ExTwitter would win.

If this feels like déjà vu, it should. Just last month, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta pulled exactly the same move, writing Trump a $25 million check for a case that had been sitting on ice specifically waiting for Twitter to finish winning this case.

There’s really no way to pretty this up: The whole thing reeks of corruption. Sure, Elon and Trump are best buddies now. And yes, Elon has already funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into getting Trump elected. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that they’d settle this case just to get it behind them. But paying $10 million to make a losing case go away? That’s not a settlement — that’s a gift with a legal document as wrapping paper.

Between this and Meta’s $25 million payout last month, Trump appears to have discovered a profitable new business model: file legally dubious lawsuits against tech and media companies and wait for politically motivated settlements to roll in. The standard corporate excuse of “settling to avoid legal costs” rings particularly hollow here, given that ExTwitter had already incurred most of those costs and was on the verge of a clear victory.

What we’re witnessing is the emergence of a dangerous precedent in tech and media policy: companies with close ties to political figures can simply bypass their own content moderation policies through post-hoc protection payments. It’s a practice that not only undermines platform governance but also sends a troubling message about the relationship between these companies and political power.

The cynicism isn’t just warranted — it’s necessary. When companies start treating losing lawsuits as investment opportunities in future political favor, we’re way past the point where benefit-of-the-doubt makes any sense. This isn’t normal corporate behavior. This is what corruption looks like when it puts on a suit and pretends to be legitimate business.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 9th circuit, content moderation, donald trump, elon musk
Companies: twitter, x

DOGE’s ‘Genius’ Coders Launch Website So Full Of Holes, Anyone Can Write To It

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the this-would-get-an-intern-at-a-coffee-shop-fired dept

If you want to write something on the U.S. government’s official DOGE website, apparently you can just… do that. Not in the usual way of submitting comments through a form, mind you, but by directly injecting content into their database. This seems suboptimal.

The story here is that DOGE — Elon Musk’s collection of supposed coding “geniuses” brought in to “disrupt” government inefficiency — finally launched their official website. And what they delivered is a masterclass in how not to build government infrastructure. One possibility is that they’re brilliant disruptors breaking all the rules to make things better. Another possibility is that they have no idea what they’re doing.

The latter seems a lot more likely.

Last week, it was reported that the proud racist 25-year-old Marko Elez had been given admin access and was pushing untested code to the US government’s $6 trillion/year payment system. While the Treasury Department initially claimed (including in court filings!) that Elez had “read-only” access, others reported he had write access. After those reports came out, the Treasury Dept. “corrected” itself and said Elez had been “accidentally” given write privileges for the payments database, but only for the data, not the code. Still, they admitted that while they had put in place some security protections, it’s possible that Elez did copy some private data which “may have occasionally included screenshots of payment systems data or records.”

Yikes?

Now, you might think that having a racist twenty-something with admin access to trillion-dollar payment systems would concern people. But Musk’s defenders had a compelling counterargument: he must be a genius! Because… well, because Musk hired him, and Musk only hires geniuses. Or so we’re told.

The DOGE team’s actual coding prowess is turning out to be quite something. First, they decided that government transparency meant hiding everything from FOIA requests. When questioned about this interesting interpretation of “transparency,” Musk explained that actually DOGE was being super transparent by putting everything on their website and ExTwitter account.

There was just one small problem with this explanation. At the time he said it, the DOGE website looked like this:

That was it. That was the whole website.

On Thursday, they finally launched a real website. Sort of. If by “real website” you mean “a collection of already-public information presented in misleading ways by people who don’t seem to understand what they’re looking at.” But that’s not even the interesting part.

These supposed technical geniuses managed to build what might be the least secure government website in history. Let’s start with something basic: where does the website actually live? According to Wired, the source code actually tells search engines that ExTwitter, not DOGE.gov, is the real home of this government information:

A WIRED review of the page’s source code shows that the promotion of Musk’s own platform went deeper than replicating the posts on the homepage. The source code shows that the site’s canonical tags direct search engines to x.com rather than DOGE.gov.

A canonical tag is a snippet of code that tells search engines what the authoritative version of a website is. It is typically used by sites with multiple pages as a search engine optimization tactic, to avoid their search ranking being diluted.

In DOGE’s case, however, the code is informing search engines that when people search for content found on DOGE.gov, they should not show those pages in search results, but should instead display the posts on X.

“It is promoting the X account as the main source, with the website secondary,” Declan Chidlow, a web developer, tells WIRED. “This isn’t usually how things are handled, and it indicates that the X account is taking priority over the actual website itself.”

If you’re not a web developer, here’s what that means: When you build a website, you can tell search engines “hey, if you find copies of this content elsewhere, this version here is the real one.” It’s like telling Google “if someone copied my site, mine is the original.”

But DOGE did the opposite. They told search engines “actually, ExTwitter has the real version of this government information. Our government website is just a copy.” Which is… an interesting choice for a federal agency? It’s a bit like the Treasury Department saying “don’t look at our official reports, just check Elon’s tweets.”

You might think that a government agency directing people away from its official website and toward the private company of its leader would raise some conflict-of-interest concerns. And you’d be right!

But wait, it gets better. Or worse. Actually, yeah, it’s worse.

Who built this government website? Through some sloppy coding, security researcher Sam Curry figured out it was DOGE employee Kyle Shutt. The same Kyle Shutt who, according to Drop Site News, has admin access to the FEMA payments system. The same Kyle Shutt who used the exact same Cloudflare ID to build Musk’s America PAC Trump campaign website. Because why maintain separate secure credentials for government systems and political campaigns when you can just… not do that?

But the real cherry on top came Thursday when people discovered something amazing about the DOGE site database: anyone can write to it. Not “anyone with proper credentials.” Not “anyone who passes security checks.” Just… anyone. As 404 Media reported, if you know basic database operations, you too can be a government website administrator:

The doge.gov website that was spun up to track Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal government is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone, according to two separate people who found the vulnerability and shared it with 404 Media. One coder added at least two database entries that are visible on the live site and say “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.” 

While I imagine those will be taken down shortly, for now, the insertions are absolutely visible:

Look, there’s a reason we called this whole thing a cyberattack. When someone takes over your computer systems and leaves them wide open to anyone who wants to mess with them, we usually don’t call that “disruption” or “innovation.” We call it a cybersecurity breach.

“Feels like it was completely slapped together,” they added. “Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code.”

Both sources said that the way the site is set up suggests that it is not running on government servers. 

“Basically, doge.gov has its codebase, probably through GitHub or something,” the other developer who noticed the insecurity said. “They’re deploying the website on Cloudflare Pages from their codebase, and doge.gov is a custom domain that their pages.dev URL is set to. So rather than having a physical server or even something like Amazon Web Services, they’re deploying using Cloudflare Pages which supports custom domains.”

Here’s the thing about government computer systems: They’re under constant attack from foreign adversaries. Yes, they can be inefficient. Yes, they can be bloated. But you know what else they usually are? Not completely exposed to the entire internet. It turns out that some of that inefficient “bureaucracy” involves basic things like “security” and “not letting random people write whatever they want in federal databases.”

This isn’t some startup where “move fast and break things” is a viable strategy. This is the United States government. And it’s been handed over to people whose main qualification appears to be “posts spicy memes on 4chan.” The implications go far beyond embarrassing database injections — this level of technical negligence in federal systems creates genuine national security concerns. When your “disruption” involves ignoring decades of hard-learned lessons about government systems security, you’re not innovating — you’re inviting disaster.

Filed Under: cyberattack, doge, doge website, elon musk, kyle shutt, security holes, transparency
Companies: twitter, x