After RFK Jr. found himself getting a rebuke from the court system over his ACIP reorganization from last year, in which the courts issued a preliminary injunction on the vaccine schedule changes ACIP recommended and staying further work from the panel, I’ve been waiting for the government to appeal the order. That appeal has not yet come to be, much to my surprise. That being said, I’m not even sure on what grounds the appeal would be made, since the court’s decision centered on a fairly plain reading of the Administrative Procedure Act, which reads as though it was written for this exact situation.
Essentially, the APA makes it unlawful for, among other things, a federal agency taking action, reporting, or making conclusions in its work that are not based on evidence, are otherwise arbitrary or unsupported by evidence or fact. It also makes it unlawful for leaders of a federal agency to take actions that exceed their authority or statutory rights.
And perhaps it’s that last bit that RFK Jr. is attempting to work around by amending ACIP’s charter in ways that are both subtle and not so subtle. Let’s start with the subtle one:
Most notably, the current charter includes a lengthy sentence on membership terms that begins by stating that ACIP members “shall be selected by the Secretary …” But the renewal notice today includes a nearly identical sentence, with the change that ACIP members “shall be selected and appointed by the HHS Secretary.” The edit appears to enshrine Kennedy’s ability to unilaterally install ACIP members.
I can’t imagine how that slight change is in any way useful… other than to get past the part of the APA that limits actions by agency leaders to their authorized actions. This is essentially enshrining in the charter that RFK Jr. can pick his ACIP team personally and not only select the members, but fully placing them in their roles at his sole authority. In other words, this is rewriting the charter to more specifically grant him the authority to do what he already did last year. Whether a rewritten charter that has no checks and balances from the other two branches of governments is enough to satisfy the courts is an open question, but I have very serious doubts that it would.
And I don’t think that the more stark changes to the charter would do anything to change the court’s stance on the type of evidence-free changes that the ACIP panel previously made.
The membership criteria are also dramatically different between the current charter and today’s renewal. Currently, ACIP members “shall be selected from authorities who are knowledgeable in the fields of immunization practices and public health, have expertise in the use of vaccines and other immunobiologic agents in clinical practice or preventive medicine, have expertise with clinical or laboratory vaccine research, or have expertise in assessment of vaccine efficacy and safety.” These specific core requirements of expertise in immunization practices and vaccine science were central to Murphy’s findings that Kennedy’s appointees were unfit to be on the committee.
The renewal notice did not mention these criteria, but instead discussed members having a “geographic balance” (representing different parts of the country) and a “balance of specialty areas.” It provided a lengthy list of specialty areas that span a much larger swath of medical and scientific fields and potentially beyond. They include: “biostatistics, toxicology, immunology, epidemiology, pediatrics, internal medicine, family medicine, nursing, consumer issues, state and local health department perspective, academic perspective, public health perspective, etc.”
It didn’t seem to me that the court was relying on ACIP’s specific charter when putting a stay on its work in this new iteration of the panel, however. Put another way, if the charter was instead written to state that ACIP “should be staffed by a group of bumblefucks that have all kinds of knowledge that have little to nothing to do with immunizations”, I don’t think the courts would state that all is now well with the appointments of said bumblefucks.
What this charter really does is turn ACIP, a panel that is specifically tasked with recommendations on immunization schedules, into something completely different. Medicine, like nearly all sciences, is a highly specialized endeavor. You don’t go to a surgeon to advise you on a cancer diagnosis. You don’t see a pediatrician to address your elderly mother’s varicose veins. And you don’t generally need input from consumer representatives and the like to chime in on immunization schedules.
Unless you’re being led around by the nose by your grifting partners in the anti-vaxxer crowd, that is.
Some of the changes in the renewal may stem from a push made by an anti-vaccine group close to Kennedy. The group is Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), headed by Kennedy’s anti-vaccine ally Del Bigtree, who is working with Aaron Siri, a lawyer who worked on Kennedy’s failed presidential campaign and has filed numerous lawsuits seeking compensation for alleged vaccine injuries. Siri is also notable for petitioning the Food and Drug Administration to revoke the polio vaccine.
Last month, ICAN urged Kennedy to revise ACIP’s charter, and Siri’s law firm provided a draft, complete with track-changed text, of what they want for the new charter. The draft states that ACIP members should have expertise in any area “deemed relevant by the Secretary.” But, it specifically states that “At least two members shall have direct and substantial experience advocating for and/or treating those injured by vaccines.”
We’ll see what comes next, but I don’t expect Kennedy to take the loss and quit with his antics. He will try again and again, whether it’s appealing the court decision or attempting to fashion loopholes such as this.
Remember when the Biden administration set up something called the “Disinformation Governance Board” and the entire MAGA universe lost its collective mind? It was the “Ministry of Truth.” It was “government speech police.” It was the single most Orwellian thing any American administration had ever done in the history of civilization. Nina Jankowicz, the researcher tapped to lead it, received death threats. The whole thing was shut down within weeks because of the outcry.
Of course, all of it was an exaggeration. That board was actually set up to coordinate efforts to counter foreign disinformation — not to police Americans’ speech. We said so at the time, even while criticizing DHS for the monumentally stupid way they named and rolled it out. The name was terrible. The communication around it was worse. But the underlying mission — helping coordinate the government’s own efforts to respond to (not censor) foreign influence operations — was legitimate and, frankly, important in this era of information warfare.
Well, Secretary of State Marco Rubio just signed a cable doing something that sounds vaguely similar, but way worse. Specifically, he’s directing U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide to launch coordinated campaigns countering foreign propaganda — and the cable explicitly endorses Elon Musk’s X as an “innovative” tool for the effort. It also admits that this is pure psyops work:
The cable instructs those embassies and consulates to pursue five broad goals: countering hostile messaging, expanding access to information, exposing adversary behavior, elevating local voices who support American interests, and promoting what it calls “telling America’s story”. Embassies are told to recruit local influencers, academics and community leaders abroad to carry counter-propaganda messaging, an approach designed to make American-funded narratives feel locally organic rather than centrally directed.
“These campaigns seek to shift blame to the United States, sow division among allies, promote alternative worldviews antithetical to America’s interests, and even undermine American economic interests and political freedoms,” the cable says. “Using digital platforms, state-controlled media, and influence operations, they pose a direct threat to US national security and fuel hostility toward American interests.”
Notably, the cable tells diplomatic offices to coordinate their work with “the Department of War’s Psychological Operations” – the military unit more commonly known as Miso, or Military Information Support Operations, formerly Psyop, which is part of the Pentagon.
This is far more expansive than anything the Disinformation Governance Board ever even contemplated — and the same people who screamed about the Ministry of Truth are, once again, completely silent.
The idea that the State Department would issue a formal cable endorsing a specific social media platform by name as a tool of U.S. diplomacy—let alone military psychological operations—would have been, until recently, almost unthinkable. But the structural transformation that has taken place over years has made the news feel almost ordinary today. It was a transformation that dismantled, piece by piece, the legal accountability, operational independence and institutional resilience that once made such a cozy relationship between government and platforms inconceivable.
And see if any of this sounds familiar:
Rubio identifies five operational goals—countering hostile messaging, expanding information access, exposing adversarial behavior, elevating local voices sympathetic to U.S. interests, and “telling America’s story”—and instructs embassies to recruit local influencers and community leaders to carry U.S.-funded narratives in ways designed to feel organically local rather than centrally directed.
Why, that sounds quite similar to what the Biden DHS said about the Disinformation Governance Board. Except, suddenly: no partisan freakout. No weeks of stories on Fox News. No screaming in the NY Post about speech police. Gee. I wonder why.
The U.S. State Department is instructing embassies to recruit local influencers to carry U.S.-funded narratives in ways designed to feel organically local rather than centrally directed. This is, by definition, a covert influence operation. It’s the kind of thing that, when other countries do it, we call propaganda. It’s the kind of thing the Global Engagement Center was specifically designed to expose.
Oh, right. About the Global Engagement Center.
You may recall that one of the early moves of the returning Trump administration was to shut down the GEC, the State Department office specifically created to help identify and counter foreign influence campaigns. At the time, Rubio — the same Marco Rubio who just signed this cable — framed the shutdown as a free speech victory:
Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving. This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.
That was always a lie. The GEC (just like the Disinformation Governance Board) didn’t “silence and censor” Americans. It studied foreign influence campaigns — the kind run by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, by ISIS recruitment networks, by Chinese state-linked information operations — and helped expose them. It’s the kind of work that requires sustained expertise, institutional knowledge, and sophisticated analytical capacity. The kind of thing you can’t just spin up overnight when you suddenly realize you need it.
So all of the hand-wringing about the Disinformation Governance Board, the GEC, and the idea that governments were too close to social media platforms was a bunch of nonsense all along. It was always about trying to gain and then keep power, destroying the institutions that dealt with foreign disinformation campaigns until they could capture them for their own purposes.
Klonick traces how Twitter/X became susceptible to exactly this kind of capture:
Musk systematically dismantled Twitter’s trust, safety, and content moderation infrastructure. The teams that had worked, however imperfectly, to maintain platform integrity not just for commercial reasons but to limit the spread of coordinated inauthentic behavior, state-linked influence operations, and targeted harassment were gone within months of Musk’s ownership. With both the corporate accountability architecture and the internal operational safeguards stripped away, the platform’s amplification and suppression mechanics became, in effect, tools that could be deployed at anyone’s, but namely Musk’s, discretion.
Before Musk’s acquisition, the major US tech platforms — whatever their flaws — generally bent over backwards to avoid being captured as instruments of state messaging.
The Rubio cable, on the other hand, specifically endorses X’s Community Notes feature as a tool for countering “anti-American propaganda operations without compromising free speech.” Klonick correctly identifies this as:
…a remarkable exercise in circular reasoning: the government endorsing, for use in state-directed information operations, a moderation tool on a platform owned by a former (and perhaps still current) senior government advisor.
But it’s worse than circular reasoning. Community Notes is a crowdsourced system. Its outputs are determined by which users participate and how they coordinate. While it’s (actually very cleverly) designed to avoid brigading attacks, that does not mean it’s perfect in avoiding manipulation. If the U.S. government can organize sympathetic actors to use Community Notes to surface pro-American narratives as part of a formal PSYOP-adjacent campaign, then so can every other government on the planet. China can coordinate its own actors. Russia already runs exactly these kinds of operations. Iran has entire units dedicated to this. The cable essentially advertises to every adversary exactly how to game the system — and the people who actually understood these vulnerabilities, the trust & safety teams, the GEC researchers, the disinformation scholars, are exactly the people this administration spent years attacking and driving out of their jobs.
Oh, unless they expect Elon Musk to tilt the playing field to their advantage — which is exactly the kind of thing these very same people were loudly freaking out about when Biden was president.
Now, some might point out that the broader “censorship industrial complex” crusade wasn’t only about counter-messaging efforts like the DGB and the GEC. It was also about the Murthy v. Missouri case, which dealt with something categorically different: the allegation that the Biden administration pressured platforms to remove third-party users’ speech. The Rubio cable, by contrast, directs government employees themselves to use the platform for their own messaging. These are genuinely different things.
But the supposed animating principle behind the entire crusade was that the government had no business being entangled with social media platforms on matters of information and speech. Not just “the government shouldn’t pressure platforms to remove user content,” but the much broader claim that any government-platform coordination on information amounted to a sinister censorship machine.
Jim Jordan’s “censorship industrial complex” hearings didn’t just target White House communications with platform trust & safety teams. They went after researchers. They went after the GEC. They went after nonprofits studying foreign manipulation. The message was that any institutional involvement in the information ecosystem was inherently suspect. That principle, it turns out, had an expiration date — specifically, January 20, 2025.
And remember, in the Murthy case itself, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the Biden admin’s communications with platforms constituted coercion. The plaintiffs couldn’t even establish standing because they couldn’t show the government actually changed platform behavior. Meta felt totally comfortable telling the White House “no” — as Zuckerberg himself admitted repeatedly on Joe Rogan, just weeks before telling Elon he was happy to silence people at the Trump White House’s request.
So the same political movement that treated government staffers sending cranky emails — emails that platforms felt perfectly free to ignore — as an existential constitutional crisis now sees nothing wrong with a formal State Department cable directing coordination with a specific privately-owned platform and military PSYOP. If the principle only matters when your political opponents are the ones in the White House, it was always just about weaponizing the systems of government for your own benefit.
Klonick puts the broader structural picture together:
The privatization of Twitter removed all traces of public accountability. The gutting of content moderation infrastructure removed operational resistance. The political alliance between the administration and the tech sector removed institutional resistance. And now a formal diplomatic cable removes the last pretense of arms-length separation between U.S. government messaging objectives and the platforms that carry them.
The legal questions that Murthy left unresolved—about when government pressure on private platforms crosses the constitutional line—will almost certainly be relitigated in this new context. But the more immediate reality is that the internet Americans and global audiences navigate is increasingly shaped not merely by the preferences of platform owners and advertisers, but by the strategic communication objectives of the U.S. government, implemented through platforms that have every financial and regulatory reason to cooperate.
This is the pattern we’ve watched unfold for years: wrap your power grab in the language of the thing you’re destroying. Call fact-checking “censorship.” Call attempts to expose foreign influence campaigns “the speech police.” Dismantle the institutions that actually did the thing you claim to value, then use the resulting vacuum to do exactly what you falsely accused your opponents of doing — only bigger, more openly, and with military coordination.
The sheer audacity of the sequencing is what makes all of this so infuriating. They spent years pointing at the Disinformation Governance Board and screaming “Ministry of Truth!” They shut down the Global Engagement Center while Rubio called it censorship. They destroyed the research infrastructure and the institutional knowledge that actually helped identify and counter foreign influence operations. And now, having cleared the field of anyone who might push back, they’re running their own influence operations through a platform with no independent oversight, no transparency mechanisms, and no institutional resistance — and they’re doing it openly, through formal diplomatic channels, in coordination with military psychological operations.
Klonick closes with the right question:
The question is no longer whether the government can use social media as a tool of statecraft. It already is. The question now is whether any institution—legal, normative, or structural—retains the capacity to check it.
Given that the people who claimed to care about checking government entanglement with social media are now the ones wielding it most aggressively — and spent years systematically destroying every institution that might have served as a check — don’t hold your breath.
Since the New York Times published its semi-viral big profile of Medvi last week — the “AI-powered” telehealth startup that it breathlessly described as a “$1.8 billion company” supposedly run by just two brothers — I’ve had multiple friends and family members send me the article with some version of the same message: “Can you believe this guy built a billion-dollar company with AI? Why haven’t you done this?” The story is making rounds, and giving people the impression that with a ChatGPT account and a little bit of marketing know-how, you too could be raking in millions every month.
The problem is that most of the story is utter nonsense.
Let’s start with the headline number itself. The NYT admits — buried deep in the piece — that Medvi “has not raised outside funding” and “has no official valuation.” A company’s value is typically established by investors, an acquisition offer, or public market pricing. Medvi has none of those. What it has is a revenue run rate — a projection based on early-2026 sales extrapolated across a full year. Calling that a “$1.8 billion company” is like calling someone who found a twenty on the sidewalk a “future millionaire.” Any business reporter should know the difference. Even the NYT tips its hand:
Medvi is technically not a one-person $1 billion company, since Mr. Gallagher hired his brother and has some contractors. The start-up, which has not raised outside funding, also has no official valuation.
“Technically not” doing quite a bit of heavy lifting there.
But the misleading valuation is almost the least of it. Even if you accept revenue as the relevant metric, how sustainable is that run rate for a company that just got an FDA warning letter, is facing a class action lawsuit for spam, has a key partner being sued over allegations that a major product doesn’t actually work, and is operating in an industry that regulators are actively trying to rein in?
Oh, wait, did the NYT forget to mention all of those things? They sure did! Not to mention the legions of fake, apparently AI generated doctors and patients who keep showing up in Medvi advertisements. Yes, the NYT eventually alludes to some of that, but it claims these were mere “shortcuts” that were fixed last year (they weren’t).
That said, you can feel the pull of the narrative that seduced the NYT: a scrappy founder with a rags-to-riches backstory, two brothers taking on the world, AI tools stitching it all together, Sam Altman himself anointing the achievement as proof that his prediction of a “one man, one billion dollar company, thanks to AI” was correct.
It’s a hell of a story. The problem is that almost none of it holds up to even the most basic scrutiny, and the fact that the New York Times — the New York Times — fell for it (or worse, didn’t care) is an embarrassment. As much as I’ve made fun of the NYT for its bad reporting over the years, this is (by far) the worst I’ve seen. They didn’t just misunderstand something, or try to push a misleading narrative, they got fully played on a bullshit story that any competent reporter or editor should have realized from the jump. This one stinks from top to bottom.
Medvi’s success has very little to do with “AI” and quite a lot to do with fake doctors, deepfaked before-and-after photos, misleading ads, probable snake oil, and the kind of old-fashioned deceptive marketing that has been separating marks from their money for centuries. The only thing AI really “turbocharged” here was the company’s ability to generate bullshit at scale. Oh, and also the NYT somehow missed out on the FDA already investigating the company, as well as the multiple lawsuits accusing the company and its partners of extraordinarily bad behavior.
Let’s start with what the NYT actually published. Reporter Erin Griffith’s piece reads like a press release that the NYT re-formatted as a newspaper article:
Matthew Gallagher took just two months, $20,000 and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his start-up off the ground.
From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used A.I. to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created A.I. systems to analyze his business’s performance. And he outsourced the other stuff he couldn’t do himself.
His start-up, Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it gained 1,000 more. In 2025, Medvi’s first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales.
Mr. Gallagher then hired his only employee, his younger brother, Elliot. This year, they are on track to do $1.8 billion in sales.
A $1.8 billion company with just two employees? In the age of A.I., it’s increasingly possible.
And then, because no AI hype piece would be complete without the requisite papal blessing from San Francisco:
In an email, Mr. Altman said that it appeared he had won a bet with his tech C.E.O. friends over when such a company would appear, and that he “would like to meet the guy” who had done it.
Altman “would like to meet the guy.” Well of course he would! The NYT hand-delivered him the perfect anecdote for his next AI hype session. The reporter seemingly solicited that quote to validate a pre-existing thesis: “Sam Altman was right about one-person billion-dollar AI companies.” The fact that the company is a dumpster fire of regulatory violations and consumer fraud was, apparently, a secondary concern to the “Great Man and A Great AI” narrative of innovation. This piece was built around a thesis — Sam Altman was right — and then a company was located to prove it.
To its minimal credit, the NYT does kind of acknowledge — eventually, if you make it past the thirtieth paragraph — that things weren’t entirely on the up and up:
Medvi’s initial website featured photos of smiling models who looked AI-generated and before-and-after weight-loss photos from around the web with the faces changed. Some of its ads were AI slop. A scrolling ticker of mainstream media logos made it look as if Medvi had been featured in Bloomberg and The Times when it had merely advertised there.
I mean… shouldn’t that have raised at least one or two red flags within the NYT offices? Medvi’s website featured a scrolling ticker of media logos — including the New York Times logo — to make it look like these outlets had written about the company, when they hadn’t. A year ago, Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré had even called this out directly (along with Medvi’s penchant for bullshit AI slop advertising).
Just underneath these images, MEDVi includes a rotating list of logos belonging to websites and news publishers, ranging from health hubs like Healthline to reputable publications like The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Forbes, among others — suggesting that MEDVi is reputable enough to have been covered by mainstream publications.
…. But… there was no sign of MEDVi coverage in the New York Times, Bloomberg, or the other outlets it mentioned.
And then, despite this, the New York Times went ahead and wrote the glowing profile that Medvi had been falsely claiming existed. The paper of record became the validation that the fake credibility ticker was trying to manufacture.
And the NYT frames all of what most people would consider to be “fraud” as mere “shortcuts” that the founder later “fixed.” Eighteen paragraphs after burying the admission, it reports:
That gave Matthew Gallagher breathing room to fix some shortcuts he had initially taken, like swapping out the before-and-after weight-loss photos for ones from real customers.
“Shortcuts.” Using deepfake technology to steal strangers’ weight-loss photos from across the internet, alter their faces with AI, give them fake names and fabricated health outcomes, and pass them off as your own satisfied customers — that’s a “shortcut.” Ctrl-F is a shortcut. This sounds more like fraud.
And it turns out those “shortcuts” hadn’t actually been fixed at all. As Futurism’s Dupré reported in a follow-up piece published after the NYT article:
As recently as last month, nearly a year after the NYT said that Medvi had cleaned up its act, an archived version of Medvi.org shows that it was again displaying before-and-after transformations of alleged customers. They bore the same names as before — “Melissa C,” “Sandra K,” and “Michael P” — and again listed how many pounds each person had purportedly lost and the related health improvements they apparently enjoyed.
Even though they had the same names, these people that the site now called “Medvi patients” now looked completely different from the original roundup of Melissas, Sandras, and Michaels. Worse, some of the images now bore clear signs of AI-generation: the new Sandra’s fingers, for example, are melted into her smartphone in one of her mirror selfies.
They kept the same fake names and the same fake weight-loss numbers but swapped in entirely different fake people. What the NYT claims was “fixing shortcuts” appears to actually be just “updating the con.”
In a great takedown video by Voidzilla, it’s revealed that at least one set of original images appeared to have been sourced from Reddit forums on weight loss having nothing to do with Medvi, and even with the modified images it used, it massively overstated how much weight the original person claimed to have lost. And while Medvi later switched out the photos with someone totally different, they kept the same name and same false weight loss claims.
And again, all of this was publicly known information that Griffin or her editors could have easily found with some basic journalism skills. We already mentioned that Futurism article from May of 2025, nearly a full year before the NYT piece ran. That investigation traced the deepfaked before-and-after photos back to their real sources, found that a doctor listed on Medvi’s site had no association with the company and demanded to be removed, and documented the AI-slop advertising. That investigation was widely available. A Google search would have found it.
But the fake photos and fraudulent branding are almost quaint compared to what the NYT chose not to mention at all. Six weeks before the NYT piece was published, the FDA sent Medvi a warning letter for misbranding its compounded drugs. The letter admonished Medvi for marketing its products in ways that falsely implied they were FDA-approved and for putting the “MEDVI” name on vial images in a way that suggested the company was the actual drug compounder. The letter warned:
Failure to adequately address any violations may result in legal action without further notice, including, without limitation, seizure and injunction.
The NYT did not mention this letter. And yes, Gallagher now insists that the FDA letter was targeting an affiliate that was using a nearly identical name, and it was that rogue affiliate that was the problem. But the letter is addressed to MEDVi LLC dba MEDVi, which is the name of his company. If he’s allowing affiliates to use his exact name, then that alone seems like a problem. Indeed, it certainly seems to highlight how this is all just, at best, a pyramid scheme of snake oil salesmen, where Gallagher has affiliates willing to deceive to sell more snake oil.
Separately, on March 20, 2026 — thirteen days before the NYT piece ran — a class action lawsuit was filed against Medvi in the Central District of California alleging that the company uses affiliate marketers to blast out deceptive spam emails with spoofed domains and falsified headers. The complaint alleges Medvi is responsible for over 100,000 spam emails per year to class members. The lawsuit seeks $1,000 per violating email.
The NYT did not mention this lawsuit either, even as it was yet another bit of evidence that either Medvi is up to bad shit, or it has a bunch of out of control affiliates potentially breaking laws left and right to increase sales.
A Drug Discovery & Development review conducted on April 3 of MEDVi’s website, Facebook advertising and public records found a pattern of apparent AI-generated personas, including some presented with medical titles, alongside marketing practices that appeared to go beyond the issues identified so far by regulators. A search of Meta’s Ad Library for “medvi” returned more than 5,000 active ads, many of them running under fabricated physician personas. One Facebook page for “Dr. Robert Whitworth,” which ran sponsored ads for MEDVi’s QUAD erectile dysfunction product, was categorized as an “Entertainment website” and listed an address of “2015 Nutter Street, Cameron, MT, 64429,” a location that does not appear to exist. Other ads ran under names including “Professor Albust Dongledore” and “Dr. Richard Hörzgock,” used AI-generated video testimonials and recycled identical scripts across multiple fabricated personas. In several cases, the page displayed a doctor headshot while the ad itself featured an unrelated person delivering a patient testimonial.
After public scrutiny following the article, those fake doctor accounts started disappearing. In fact, Medvi’s own website fine print acknowledges the practice:
Individuals appearing in advertisements may be actors or AI portraying doctors and are not licensed medical professionals.
Seems like maybe something the NYT should have noticed?
Oh, and that same Drug Discovery and Development article highlights how other snake oil sales sites are using the same named doctors… but with totally different images.
Same names… different people. Drug Discovery and Development has a bit more info about Drs. Carr and Tenbrink:
MEDVi’s current site lists two physicians: Dr. Ana Lisa Carr and Dr. Kelly Tenbrink. Both are licensed doctors who work together at Ringside Health, a concierge practice in Wellington, Florida, that serves the equestrian community. Neither is identified on MEDVi’s site as being affiliated with Ringside Health. On MEDVi’s site, Dr. Tenbrink is listed under “American Board of Emergency Medicine.” Dr. Carr is listed under St. George’s University, School of Medicine, her medical school. The Florida Department of Health practitioner profiles for both physicians state that neither “hold any certifications from specialty boards recognized by the Florida board.” A search of the American Board of Emergency Medicine‘s public directory, which lists 48,863 certified members, returned no current affiliation for Dr. Tenbrink.
Did the NYT do any investigation at all? Serving the equestrian community?
Even the few real doctors Medvi claims to work with turn out to be questionable. From Futurism’s article from last May (again, something the NYT should have maybe checked on?):
We contacted each doctor to ask if they could confirm their involvement with MEDVi and NuHuman. We heard back from one of those medical professionals at the time of publishing, an osteopathic medicine practitioner named Tzvi Doron, who insisted that he had nothing to do with either company and “[needs] to have them remove me from their sites.”
Then there’s what a class action lawsuit filed last November against Medvi’s main partner, OpenLoop Health, alleges about the actual products being sold. The NYT frames OpenLoop as basically making what Gallagher is doing possible, noting that while Gallagher has his AI bots creating marketing copy OpenLoop handles: “doctors, pharmacies, shipping and compliance.” You know, the actual business.
So it seems kinda notable that way back in November of last year, this lawsuit was filed that claims that the compounded oral tirzepatide tablets — one of Medvi’s key offerings — are essentially pharmacologically inert when delivered as a pill. Tirzepatide (marketed as Zepbound by Eli Lilly) is an FDA approved weight-loss drug as an injectable. But OpenLoop and Medvi have apparently been selling it in pill form. And Eli Lilly says that there are no human studies, let alone clinical trials, involving any tirzepatide pills.
All of that seems like the kind of thing reporters from the NYT should point out.
What we actually have here is a marketing operation that used AI to automate the production of deceptive advertising at a scale and speed that would have been harder to achieve otherwise. Snake oil salesmen have existed forever. What AI gave Matthew Gallagher (and, I guess, his affiliates) was the ability to crank out fake doctors, fabricated testimonials, and deepfaked before-and-after photos faster than any human team could — and to do it cheap enough that a guy with $20,000 and no morals could build it from his house. That’s the actual AI story the Times should have written.
Being good at deceptive marketing while selling weight-loss and erectile dysfunction drugs online has been a thing since the dawn of email spam. The only novelty here is the tools used to do it. The New York Times just wrapped that up in a neat bow and presented it as the proof of Sam Altman’s big promises for AI.
For what it’s worth, Gallagher has been whining about all this on X, per Futurism’s Dupre:
Though Medvi has yet to respond to our questions, the company’s founder, Gallagher, has spent the last few days on X defending his company. He complained in one post — seemingly in reference to criticism — that “the most low t [testosterone] guys” are “the loudest online” and the “Karens of the internet.” In another post, he wrote that it’s “actually a little crazy the number of people who form a whole opinion from a headline and then publicly wish horrible things will happen.”
Ah yes. The guy complaining about “low t guys” and “karens on the internet” for questioning his “AI business” skills, sure is a trustworthy kind of business person that deserves a NYT puff piece.
The real issue now is what the New York Times plans to do about this. A standard correction noting a few missing details won’t cut it. The entire premise of the article — that this company represents the exciting realization of AI’s business potential — is nonsense. Every element of the narrative is tainted: the growth story is built on deceptive marketing, the product claims are contradicted by the FDA and the manufacturers of the actual drugs, the “$1.8 billion” figure is a projection with no valuation to back it up, and the company is currently facing legal action on multiple fronts. The entire article should be retracted.
The NYT says it “was given access to Medvi’s financials to verify its revenue and profits.” Great. They verified that a company engaged in widespread deceptive practices was, in fact, making money from those deceptive practices. Congrats to the NYT for auditing a snake oil salesman and presenting your findings as if he were an upstanding pharmaceutical salesman.
So to my friends and family members wondering why I haven’t built my own billion-dollar AI company: apparently the missing ingredient wasn’t AI — it was being willing to run a deepfake-powered spam operation selling potentially inert pills to desperate people. The AI just made the lying faster. And the New York Times made one guy appear respectable.
MAGA Republicans spent year swaddling themselves in phony “America first!” rhetoric (including suffering an embolism over Chinese influence over TikTok), but have suddenly gone mysteriously quiet now that $24 billion in Saudi, Chinese, and other foreign cash is helping to bankroll right wing billionaire Larry Ellison’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers.
The Wall Street Journal (Reuters non-paywalled alternative) indicates that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has finalized plans to provide roughly $10 billion to help fund the deal, with another $14 billion split between Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi’s L’imad Holding. China’s Tencent is also expected to contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to fund Ellison’s media play.
Because the Trump administration is a corrupt, pay-to-play kakistocracy subservient to the interests of global oligarchs and autocrats, Paramount executives don’t expect any meaningful regulatory review, despite the obvious competition, labor, and foreign influence issues that plague the major deal:
Paramount executives do not expect the funds’ involvement to trigger a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. or Federal Communications Commission, the Journal said.
That’s before you even get to the problems with having Middle East countries back the ongoing Republican plan to dominate consolidated corporate media and destroy what’s left of U.S. journalism. Democrats have performatively urged FCC boss Brendan Carr to investigate, but that’s obviously not happening, despite Carr’s history of phony outrage at foreign government meddling.
This has all been a pretty standard road map for autocracies around the world, including Orban’s Hungary. Party-friendly oligarchs buy up all the media, which then gets to work pummeling the public with right wing propaganda while the government strangles independent journalism just out of frame.
It will continue to accelerate here in the States until the public reaches critical mass and our so-called “opposition party” develops an actual, functional backbone and cultivates more ruthless leadership.
You’re never safe when you’re working for Trump. That much was obvious in Trump’s first term, when he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and FBI Director James Comey. They were all fired for the same reason: failing to be completely loyal to Trump.
This time around even die-hard MAGA loyalists are being fired. DHS head Kristi Noem was dismissed from her position, despite being the enthusiastic figurehead of anti-migrant cruelty Trump definitely wanted in that position. Now, she’s cooling her heels and watching the dust settle on her political hopes as the doesn’t-sound-made-up-at-all “Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.”
In recent weeks, Ms. Bondi tried to shore up her position by moving more aggressively against investigative targets singled out by Mr. Trump, including the former Obama official John O. Brennan and a former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the president has accused of lying about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, according to officials briefed on the effort.
It is not entirely clear if any specific action or event finally tipped the balance for Mr. Trump, who had been reluctant to fire senior officials to avoid reprising the chaotic turnstile personnel turnover of his first administration.
But with the dismissal of Ms. Noem and now Ms. Bondi, that might be changing. His calculus appears to have shifted after the quick confirmation of Markwayne Mullin as Ms. Noem’s replacement.
Bondi’s head may have been destined for the chopping block months ago, when Trump (in what appeared to be a personal message accidentally posted on main) berated Bondi for not doing all the impossible stuff he wanted done right now, like engaging in vindictive prosecutions that were (1) obviously vindictive, and (2) didn’t have enough evidence to support the hallucinatory charges dreamed up by Trump and his DOJ enablers.
Nothing has improved since then. Lots of prosecutors have left the DOJ, refusing to engage in Trump’s overt politicization of the department. Others have been dismissed for the same reason. A handful of handpicked prosecutors have been sidelined by judges because they were never formally appointed. And grand juries are frequently refusing to buy what the government’s selling, terminating prosecutions before they can even get off the ground.
Not that we should expect anything better (or more ethical) from her replacement. Todd Blanche is a true Trump loyalist. But he’s taking over a DOJ that’s short on experience, long on MAGA loyalty, and whose reputation has been completely destroyed by this administration and its actions.
The stuff Bondi failed to get done will continue to not happen. Anyone stepping into this position should know it’s only going to be temporary. The president who thinks he’s a king will continue to see courts stifle his worst impulses. Changing the name on the letterhead isn’t suddenly going to make vindictive, politically motivated prosecutions any more legal or feasible.
But I don’t have any sympathy for anyone being shit-canned for failing to satisfy the whims of a megalomaniac who thinks he’s a king, rather than a temporarily elevated politician. They’re far more than merely complicit. They’re fully supportive of destroying America and its institutions to usher in a new age of white Christian nationalism. So, fuck ’em. They got what they deserved.
The UK is moving forward with its efforts to ban social media for young people. Ahead of this week’s House of Lords debate on the topic, we’re getting you situated with a primer on what’s been happening and what it all means.
What was the last vote about?
On 9 March, the House of Commons discussed amendments tabled by the House of Lords in the government’s flagship legislation, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
The House of Lords previously tabled an amendment to “prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users” of “all regulated user-to-user services,” to be implemented by “highly-effective age assurance measures,” which effectively banned under-16s from social media. When this proposal came before the House of Commons, MPs defeated it by 307 votes to 173.
Instead, the Commons proposed its own amendment: enabling the Secretary of State to introduce provisions “requiring providers of specified internet services” to prevent access by children, under age 18 rather than 16, to specified internet services or to specified features; and to restrict access by children to specified internet services which ministers provide.
Who does this give powers to?
The Commons proposal redirects power from the UK Parliament and the UK’s independent telecom regulator Ofcom to the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, currently Liz Kendall, who will be able to restrict internet access for young people and determine what content is considered harmful…just because she can. The amendment also empowers the Secretary of State to limit VPN use for under 18s, as well as restrict access to addictive features and change the age of digital consent in the country; for example, preventing under-18s from playing games online after a certain time.
Why is this a problem?
This process is devoid of checks or accountability mechanisms as ministers will not be required to demonstrate specific harms to young people, which essentially unravels years-long efforts by Ofcom to assess online services according to their risks. And given the moment the UK is currently in, such as refusing to protect trans and LGBTQ+ communities and flaming hostile and racist discourses, it is not unlikely that we’ll see ministers start restricting content that they ideologically or morally feel opposed to, rather than because the content is harmful based, as established by evidence and assessed pursuant to established human rights principles.
We know from other jurisdictions like the United States that legislation seeking to protect young people typically sweeps up a slew of broadly-defined topics. Some block access to websites that contain some “sexual material harmful to minors,” which has historically meant explicit sexual content. But some states are now defining the term more broadly so that “sexual material harmful to minors” could encompass anything like sex education; others simply list a variety of vaguely-defined harms. In either instance, this bill would enable ministers to target LGBTQ+ content online by pushing this behind an under-18s age gate, and this risk is especially clear given what we already know about platform content policies.
How will this impact young people?
The internet is an essential resource for young people (and adults) to access information, explore community, and find themselves. Beyond being spaces where people can share funny videos and engage with enjoyable content, social media enables young people to engage with the world in a way that transcends their in-person realm, as well as find information they may not feel safe to access offline, such as about family abuse or their sexuality. In severing this connection to people and information by banning social media, politicians are forcing millions of young people into a dark and censored world.
How did each party vote?
The initial push to ban under-16s from social media came from the Conservative Party, who have since accused the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer of “dither and delay” for not committing to the ban. The Liberal Democrats have also called this “not good enough.” The Labour Party itself is split, with 107 Labour Party MPs abstaining in the vote on the House of Lords amendment.
But we know that the issue of young people’s online safety is a polarizing topic that politicians have—and will continue to—weaponize for public support, regardless of their actual intentions. This is why we will continue to urge policymakers and regulators to protect people’s rights and freedoms online at all moments, and not just take the easy route for a quick boost in the polls.
How does this bill connect to the Online Safety Act?
The draft Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that came from the Lords provided that any regulation pertaining to the well-being of young people on social media “must be treated as an enforceable requirement” with the Online Safety Act. The Commons amendment, however, starts out by inserting a new clause that amends the Online Safety Act.
For more than six years, we’ve been calling on the UK government to pass better legislation around regulating the internet, and when the Online Safety Act passed we continued to advocate for the rights of people on the internet—including young people—as Ofcom implemented the legislation. This has been a protracted effort by civil society groups, technologists, tech companies, and others participating in Ofcom’s consultation process and urging the regulator to protect internet users in the UK.
The MPs amendment essentially rips this up. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall recently said that ministers intended to go further than the existing Online Safety Act because it was “never meant to be the end point, and we know parents still have serious concerns. That is why I am prepared to take further action.” But when this further action is empowering herself to make arbitrary decisions on content and access, and banning under-18s from social media, this causes much more harm than it solves.
Is the UK alone in pushing legislation like this?
Sadly, no. Calls to ban social media access for young people have gained traction since Australia became the first country in the world to enforce one back in December. On 5 March, Indonesia announced a ban on social media and other “high-risk” online platforms for users under 16. A few days later, new measures came into effect in Brazil that restricts social media access for under-16s, who must now have their accounts linked to a legal guardian. Other countries like Spain and the Philippines have this year announced plans to ban social media for under-16s, with legislation currently pending to implement this.
What are the next steps?
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill returns to the House of Lords on 25 March for consideration of the new Commons amendments. The bill will only become law if both Houses agree to the final draft.
We will continue to stand up against these proposals—not only to young people’ free expression rights, but also to safeguard the free flow of information that is vital to a democratic society. The issue of online safety is not solved through technology alone, especially not through a ban, and young people deserve a more intentional approach to protecting their safety and privacy online, not this lazy strategy that causes more harm than it solves.
We encourage politicians in the UK to look into what is best, not what is easy, and explore less invasive approaches to protect all people from online harms.
The latest Pew Research Center survey, conducted Jan. 20-26, 2026, finds that most White evangelicals (69%) approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president. And a majority (58%) say they support all or most of his plans and policies.
Let that sink in for a bit. The operative term here is probably “white,” but Trump has been embraced by the evangelical community, despite his being about as far removed from the ideals of Christianity as their arch-nemesis, trans people the Devil. (And let’s not forget I’m talking about the ideals, which are often preached but rarely practiced.)
Here’s how Trump handled Easter morning, one of the holiest (no pun intended) holidays observed by the people most likely to support him no matter what:
President Trump: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
In Trump’s own words, at 5:03 am on Easter Sunday:
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
Now, I have to admit that when I first read this, I thought Trump was announcing some new celebration of US infrastructure before derailing his own train of thought. But it’s definitely not that.
Both sides have threatened and hit civilian targets like oil fields and desalination plants critical for drinking water. Iran’s U.N. mission on social media called Trump’s threat “clear evidence of intent to commit war crime.”
Iran’s military joint command warned of stepped-up retaliatory attacks on regional oil and civilian infrastructure if the U.S. and Israel attack such targets there, according to state television.
The laws of armed conflict allow attacks on civilian infrastructure only if the military advantage outweighs the civilian harm, legal scholars say. It’s considered a high bar to clear, and causing excessive suffering to civilians can constitute a war crime.
While it looks like both sides in this war are willing to strike civilian infrastructure, the United States should be trying to take the high road (the one without war crimes). And if it can’t be bothered to do that, the administration should — at the very least — try to keep the president from publicly saying we’re going to commit war crimes.
But, alas, there’s no one willing to stop him. Pete Hegseth is definitely relishing his unearned role as the Secretary of Defense (“Back to the Stone Age.”) And he appears to be firing anyone who disagrees with things like drone-killing people in international waters and, you know, engaging in war crimes.
Shamefully, they won’t see a drop in support despite Trump threatening war crimes, dropping an F-bomb, and promising to send people halfway around the world to hell, as if he were a god himself. And that’s a damning indictment of an entire segment of Americans who choose to treat their religion as a weapon and want the world to be remade in their own image — something they often accuse Muslims of doing. The irony is lost on them, along with the man they’ve chosen to treat as God’s appointed leader.
We’ve had a lot of low points as a nation, but usually we’ve at least tried to improve. That’s no longer the case. We’re under the rule of people who debase and abuse the nation they claim to love. Happy Fuckin’ Easter, you crazy bastards. Welcome to Hell.
Fact-checking is not censorship. Asking a publication to correct factual errors is not censorship. Pointing out that someone’s book contains demonstrably false claims is not censorship. None of this should require explanation. And yet here we are, because author Jacob Siegel has decided that Renee DiResta requesting corrections to false statements he made about her — in his book and in reviews of his book — constitutes some kind of sinister suppression campaign. He’s gone as far as writing an article at The Free Press (which I have no intention of linking to and giving more traffic) publicly accusing her of plotting to censor a review of his book published in The Baffler. He spent a morning on Twitter calling her “a figure connected to the US government” (she’s not) who “pressure[d] a publication to remove its review of my book” (she didn’t).
This is all, to put it plainly, absolute nonsense. But it’s a specific strain of “free speech absolutist” nonsense that we keep seeing over and over again. And I say that as someone who has spent decades fighting for free speech, but is pretty damn sick of these free speech tourists, pretending to support free speech when they’re really just trying to protect themselves and their friends from social consequences for saying something stupid, or just something blatantly false.
We’ve seen this playbook before. Six years ago, a group of prominent intellectuals published what became known as the “Harper’s Letter,” ostensibly warning of a rising tide of censorship and illiberalism supposedly threatening free expression. But when you actually looked at the cases they cited, what you mostly found was… people criticizing them (or their friends). Sometimes sharply. Sometimes even unfairly. But the “intolerance” they described was just other people exercising their own free speech to push back on ideas they disagreed with. As we noted at the time, the whole thing amounted to famous people with massive platforms, and little self-awareness, using those very platforms to complain about being silenced.
But the Harper’s Letter crowd, for all their hand-wringing, were at least mostly operating in the realm of opinion and social consequences. They didn’t like that people disagreed with them loudly. Fair enough. It was thin-skinned and cringey, but mostly harmless. Siegel is doing something worse, because he made demonstrable factual errors in his book. Rather than owning them, he’s accusing the person he published false information about of censorship for having the temerity to ask for corrections.
If asking for a correction to a false factual claim counts as censorship, the word has been stretched so far that it no longer means anything. Which is probably the point. The more the term gets diluted, the easier it is to weaponize against anyone who challenges you on the facts.
Some background: Siegel published a book called The Information State, which is basically a book-length expansion of his 2023 Tablet essay about what he and a small group of MAGA-leaning grifters call the “censorship industrial complex.” One of his main arguments centers on the Election Integrity Partnership, an academic research project DiResta worked on during the 2020 election. Siegel’s book says the EIP “classified 21,897,364 tweets” as “misinformation incidents,” and he places this number in a context carefully designed to make readers believe the project flagged 22 million tweets to platforms for removal. As DiResta explains:
A couple of pages before the number appears, Siegel spends a some time on a character sketch establishing me as dishonest. Then he describes me as leading “the Election Integrity Partnership, at the time perhaps the largest public-private social media monitoring and censorship initiative in existence.” He then writes that “over a hundred employees in the EIP network maintained nearly round-the-clock coverage of social media” and sent “alerts and takedown requests” that platforms responded to in under an hour. Immediately after that operational framing — the censorious leader, round-the-clock monitoring, the takedown requests, the rapid platform response — he drops the 22 million number: the EIP “reported collecting more than 859 million tweets for analysis and classifying 21,897,364 tweets on ‘tickets’ as unique ‘misinformation incidents’ just between August 15 and December 12, 2020.”
Read in sequence, the clear implication is that this was the scale of the “censorship operation”: a hundred people working around the clock flagged 22 million tweets to platforms, which obediently took them down within the hour. That is how people on Twitter are reading it, too.
That is not what happened.
What actually happened, as we’ve covered in detail before, is that the 22 million figure comes from a post-election academic analysis of how viral election narratives spread across social media — a research dataset, not a list of items flagged for removal. During the actual election, EIP flagged roughly 4,800 URLs total, including 2,890 tweets, to platforms for possible policy violations like impersonating poll workers. As DiResta notes:
Of those, approximately 65 percent received no platform action whatsoever, about 25 percent were labeled, and ~10 percent were removed — by the platforms, under their own policies. No government agency directed or funded any of it. Those are the real numbers. A few hundred tweets came down. This is in the public record, in our publications, in amicus briefs, in legal filings, and in congressional testimony. Every flagging ‘ticket’ we sent to a platform was turned over to Jim Jordan’s Weaponization Subcommittee under subpoena. Even Jordan’s deeply partisan report does not attempt to substantiate the “22 million” framing — because it can’t be substantiated, because it isn’t true.
Because this point apparently can’t be stated enough: the EIP flagged fewer than 3,000 total tweets, essentially asking Twitter: “hey, does this violate your rules?” Many of those reports actually came from local election officials worried about disinformation — things like false information about where and when to vote — who figured that a coordinated flag from a research partnership might get more attention than a single complaint.
But what EIP did was really no different than what ANYONE could do by seeing a piece of content on social media and clicking the ever-available “report” button. I’ll note (because I just checked) even X (the supposed, but not really, free speech platform) still lets anyone report any content, and among the categories you can report content for is… “civic integrity.”
In the case of EIP, it submitted fewer than 5,000 such URLs across multiple platforms and the platforms DID NOTHING in response to the majority of them, finding that they did not, in fact, violate any policies. While they took action on 35%, most of those were “labeling” (i.e., providing more speech) and only 10% involved removals (and most of the ones that were removed involved blatant election disinformation, such as telling people to vote in places that had no polling place).
That’s just a few hundred tweets removed, decided by the private companies based on their own decisions.
The 22 million number, which Matt Taibbi and others pushed for many months was what EIP wrote about months later, when they wrote a report about how misinformation spread. It was not content they asked to be removed. It was not content they alerted platforms to. It was just what their (months later) after report reviewed on the platform, trying to show how misinformation spread.
Siegel, apparently, knows all of this. DiResta claims she told him in person before he published. He published the misleading framing anyway. That’s on him. If that leads others to repeat that false information and later being asked for a correction, that is 100% on Siegel for failing to do his own homework and choosing to publish information he was told, point blank, was false.
So when reviews of his book repeated the 22 million number as if it described the scale of active censorship — because Siegel’s book is designed to make readers draw exactly that conclusion — DiResta contacted three separate publications and asked for corrections. This is the most normal thing a person can do when they’ve been written about inaccurately. It happens every day across every type of journalism. It is, in the most basic sense, counterspeech. “Hey, you published this thing, it got some important facts wrong, here’s what they are, and why they’re wrong. Can you issue a correction?”
In no definition of “censorship” is that censorship.
Of the three publications DiResta alerted that they were repeating false statements, there were three very different responses: The Brownstone Institute did nothing. The Free Beacon issued a correction. The Baffler pulled their review entirely. As DiResta makes clear:
To be unambiguously clear, I did not ask The Baffler to pull their review. I asked for a correction. The fact that they pulled it, though, made Siegel lose his mind.
That last part is key. DiResta asked for a correction. The Baffler, after reviewing the evidence, independently decided to pull the review — presumably because the errors were significant enough that a simple correction wouldn’t suffice. That was the publication’s editorial decision. But Siegel treated it as proof that DiResta was running a censorship operation against him. He falsely accused her of pressuring a publication to remove its review in his Free Press article. On X, he went even further and dropped the “pressuring” qualifier and just flatly accused her of being behind the decision.
Siegel was wrong about the supposed “censorship operation” DiResta supposedly ran during the 2020 election. And now he’s wrong about the “censorship operation” he thinks she’s running against his book now.
Is he ever right about anything?
And the Free Press ran this without anything resembling proper fact-checking. When DiResta asked Bari Weiss’s (and now CBS’s) the Free Press how Siegel’s blatantly false claims made it through editorial review, the answer was remarkable:
When I asked The Free Press how Siegel’s theory made it through fact-checking, they told me that Siegel emailing me to demand my correspondence with The Baffler, The Free Beacon, and The Brownstone Institute was the factcheck.
So to be clear: the “fact-check” on an article accusing someone of orchestrating censorship consisted of the accuser sending his target a hostile email demanding she turn over her correspondence. I know that fact checking is a dead art, but that’s not how fact checking works. For a publication that built its brand on being a corrective to mainstream media sloppiness, it’s embarrassing.
DiResta describes the trap Siegel has constructed:
Siegel’s article is designed so that every possible response feeds his narrative. If I stay quiet, the lies ossify. If I ask for corrections, that’s “suppression.” As I push back publicly here, watch, I’ll become an ‘unhinged woman.’ If a publication independently decides his claims don’t hold up, that’s my fault too.
This is the core of the problem, and it extends well beyond Siegel. This specific rhetorical move has been gaining traction for years: the redefinition of “censorship” to include any form of factual challenge, correction, or even disagreement. We saw it when the NY Post declared that fact-checking was censorship. We’ve seen it when people accused social media of “censorship” for merely adding more speech to a discussion.
And the accusation does double duty as marketing. Every correction request becomes a news hook. Every pushback becomes evidence of the conspiracy described in the book. The victimhood is the product. It drives sales, generates sympathetic coverage in friendly outlets, and turns the factual question — was the book accurate? — into a secondary concern.
DiResta puts it well:
The allegations that I’m debunking here are load-bearing walls in Siegel’s book. If 22 million tweets weren’t flagged — and they weren’t — then “perhaps the largest public-private social media monitoring and censorship initiative in existence” shrinks to an academic project in which researchers tagged a few thousand URLs to private platforms, most of which they ignored. That’s why Siegel is so angry. It’s not that I’m “censoring” him. It’s that I was never a government-puppet “censor” at all.
Pull out the load-bearing claims and the whole structure collapses. When the structure is a sweeping conspiracy theory about a “censorship industrial complex,” the author has every incentive to make sure nobody pulls those claims out. Reframing factual corrections as censorship is how you protect a weak foundation — it turns your biggest vulnerability into your biggest rhetorical asset.
Free speech means Siegel can publish his book. He did! It’s out there, for sale, being reviewed, being discussed. Free speech means DiResta can point out that the book contains factually false claims about her. She did that too. Free speech means publications can decide whether to correct, retract, or stand by reviews based on their own editorial judgment. The Baffler made its call. The Free Beacon made a different one.
None of this is censorship. It is the system working as intended. The proverbial “marketplace of ideas” that free speech advocates claim to champion depends on people being able to challenge false claims without being accused of suppression. If “censorship” means “someone publicly disagreed with me and a publication decided my claims didn’t hold up,” then the concept has been gutted.
Siegel published a book making grand claims about a censorship machine. The subject of those claims had the receipts proving those claims false. She asked for corrections through entirely normal channels. One publication issued a correction, one did nothing, and one pulled its review entirely. Siegel’s response was to accuse her of censorship — from his perch at a well-funded publication, with a book on the market and an audience on X hanging on his every word.
Rather than being gagged, he’s simply being corrected. The fact that he can’t tell the difference — or, more likely, that he can tell the difference and has decided that pretending otherwise is more profitable — tells you everything you need to know about how seriously to take his claims.
Last election season the Trump campaign lied to everyone repeatedly about how his second administration would “rein in big tech,” and be a natural extension of the Lina Khan antitrust movement. As we noted at the time, that was always an obvious fake populist lie, but it was propped up anyway by a lazy U.S. press and a long line of useful idiots (including some purported “antitrust experts“.)
The Wall Street Journal last week published a new interesting story about that last bit. Specifically, it’s about how Mike Davis, a radical Trump loyalist and corporate lobbyist, found it relatively trivial to oust the small handful of actual antitrust reformers embedded within the MAGA coalition who occasionally cared about the public interest (Gail Slater and Mark Hamer):
“A Journal investigation found that Davis pushed antitrust officials at the Justice Department to approve his deals—and he went over their heads when they wouldn’t comply, according to interviews with more than three dozen DOJ employees, lobbyists, lawyers and others familiar with the antitrust division.”
Davis, who opportunistically pivoted to pseudo-big-tech criticism after being refused a job in the industry, is a transactional bully who was very excited about Trump’s plan to put minority children in cages last election season. He’s also, according to the Journal, been pivotal in elbowing out any remaining real antitrust enforcers to help Trump operate an even more “pay to play” government:
“Davis, despite having little experience practicing antitrust law, is one of the most visible practitioners of a change playing out across the division. Current and former antitrust officials said some mergers now get approval or draw mild settlements based on political ties rather than public interest. The new dynamic casts a shadow over the Justice Department’s integrity, they said, and has alarmed even some Trump loyalists in the department.”
And this is the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal; not exactly the bastion of progressive left wing thought. In Davis’ head, he’s not easily exploiting the comical levels of corruption in the Trump White House, he’s just exceptional, according to comments he made to the Journal:
“I’m the best fixer in Washington, period. Full stop,” said the 48-year-old Iowan. “I know the people. I know the process. I know their pressure points. I know how to win.”
That Trump 2.0 was going to be a corrupt shitshow–and that the movement’s fake dedication to “reining in big tech” and “antitrust reform would be completely hollow–was one of the easier election season predictions I’d ever had to make. It should have been particularly and abundantly obvious to the ostensible fans of antitrust still peppered within the administration.
Even these “antitrust enforcers” within MAGA weren’t what you’d call remotely consistent when it comes to reining in corporate power. And while the Journal sort of romanticizes the first Trump term for “having guardrails,” it too was full of all manner of mindless rubber stamping of harmful deals that eroded competition and drove up costs (like the Sprint T-Mobile merger).
Yet, again, there were no shortage of press outlets (and supposed progressive antitrust experts like Matt Stoller) that spent much of last election season insisting that while Trump 2.0 might be problematic, it would feature ample populist checks on corporate power. You were to believe a sizeable chunk of the GOP had suddenly and uncharacteristically seen the light on antitrust reform.
Building meaningful and productive alliances with authoritarians is like trying to cultivate an intimate relationship with a running chainsaw. And the act of treating them as serious actors on antitrust reform (something Stoller and the press broadly did, repeatedly, with everyone from JD Vance to Josh Hawley) gave them press and policy credibility they never had to earn.
MAGA leadership is largely comprised of transactional bullies whose primary interest is in wealth accumulation and power. Everything else, whether it’s MAHA, or the administration’s purported antiwar stance, or its love of “antitrust reform” was an obvious populist lie, designed to convince a broadly befuddled electorate that dim, violent, and corrupt autocracy would be good for them.
Right wing broadcasters are having a very good time under Brendan Carr, who has looked to destroy all remaining media consolidation limits to let them merge. Such companies, like Sinclair, Nexstar, and Tegna, don’t do journalism so much as they do soggy, right wing propaganda and infotainment, usually with endless fear mongering about drugs, homelessness, and crime rates.
They’re just one part of the right wing’s effort to remake the entirety of media into a massive safe space for dim autocrats.
Carr’s latest effort: he rubber stamped Nexstar Media Group’s $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna behind closed doors. Carr let the merged companies ignore our remaining media consolidation limits, which prevent one company from being the primary broadcast news voice for more than 39 percent of households (the new combined company reaches 54.5 percent).
Nexstar (a very Republican friendly company that also owns The Hill), not that long ago fired a journalist whose reporting angered Trump. Combined with Tegna, the two companies will own 221 Big Four broadcast stations, or more than half of the U.S. stations affiliated with FOX, NBC, ABC, or CBS.
Carr’s been on a campaign to ensure these right-wing loyal companies have more power in their dealings with their national counterparts (remember how they helped Carr censor Jimmy Kimmel?). The efforts come as local Americans increasingly live in “local news deserts” where quality local journalism simply no longer exists.
Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat left at the FCC (Republicans refuse to fill the other seat), didn’t have nice things to say about Carr’s decision to ignore the public interest protections without a transparent, public vote (indicating Carr very clearly knew this would be very unpopular):
NEWS: The FCC has approved the unlawful Nexstar-TEGNA merger behind closed doors.The consequences of this rubber stamp approval will be felt in living rooms and newsrooms across the country, resulting in fewer voices, less competition, and higher costs for consumers.
As always, Carr’s order approving the merger leverages all manner of pseudo-legalistic sounding bullshit to justify ignoring Congress and the law. And he parrots a bunch of completely empty promises by Nexstar that they’ll ramp up the production of more “local news”:
“We note that Nexstar has made significant commitments in the agency’s record as well, further ensuring that this transaction promotes the public interest. To further serve its local communities, Nexstar commits to expanding its investment in local news and programming, including increasing the amount of local news it provides in acquired markets.”
Except again, by “news” we mean right wing propaganda. And Brendan Carr never meaningfully holds corporate power accountable for anything, unless it involves a comedian making fun of the president or companies not being suitably racist enough for the president’s liking.
Eight states have already filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the decision. The lawsuits understandably focus heavily on the competition impacts, and the likely higher cable TV prices that will result for most of you:
“By consolidating with a major competitor, Nexstar would likely acquire the power to charge MVPDs higher retransmission consent fees for Big 4 station content. In turn, those MVPDs would likely pass on the increased retransmission consent fees, in large measure, to their subscribers in the form of substantially higher cable and satellite bills.”
California regulators attempted to slow the process down by proposing a standard timing agreement with Nexstar, where the company would suspend its acquisition of Tegna until the state completed its investigation.
But something of particular note: on pages 16-17 of the states’ amended complaint, it becomes clear that Nexstar completely ignored the State AGs for 8 days, then ignored their lawsuit for another 18 hours, and then told the state AGs “The relief sought in your Complaint is no longer available.”
In other words, what passes for some of the only real antitrust enforcement we have (a scattered coalition of states) have to fight both consolidated corporate power and the authoritarian, corrupt government simultaneously to make any inroads in the public interest.
“This is completely unprecedented,” Free Press (the consumer group, not the Bari Weiss troll farm) Research Director S. Derek Turner told me via email. “Nexstar and the Trump DOJ and FCC seem to have acted in concert to deprive the citizens of of these 8 states their rights to have our AG enforce the antitrust laws on our behalf.”
If Carr succeeds here, I suspect it won’t be long before you see Sinclair and this new combined company merge. Carr is also fielding requests by the big four national broadcasters to eliminate restrictions preventing them from merging as well (one of many reasons they’ve been so feckless). After that, you’ll likely see more consolidation across telecom, tech, and media.
It is, just in case we’ve forgotten, the complete opposite of the “antitrust reform populism” Trump, and a long line of useful idiots, promised last election season.
While this is certainly an act of some desperation (less than 20% of all U.S. TV viewing is now broadcast), claiming this doesn’t matter because this is “just local broadcasting” and the “future is the internet” (something I see often) is a violent misread of the dire stakes of the situation. This aggressive, Trump-loyal consolidation hasn’t, and isn’t, just being confined to broadcast television (see: Twitter, TikTok).
This is, to be clear, a coordinated and illegal authoritarian/corporatist effort to ignore the public interest and the law to expand right wing propaganda’s power over an already clearly befuddled and broadly misinformed electorate. Right wingers will continue to engage in this quest to dominate the entirety of U.S. media (following in the steps of Victor Orban in Hungary) until they run into something other than the political and policy equivalent of soft pudding.
