What Happened Today: January 12, 2023
Stovegate(™); Russian Twitter bots got no bite; White House and Big Tech and vaccine misinformation
The Big Story
“If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands,” Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson tweeted on Tuesday. I know we live in polarizing times, but how exactly did cooking instruments become a flash point in the culture war?
It all seemed to start with a new study that claims 12.7% of all childhood asthma cases can be attributed to the use of gas stoves in homes. The study prompted Congressional Democrats to send a letter in December to Alexander Hoehn-Saric, chair of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, urging him to improve standards on gas stoves and possibly advise the nation on the risks of their continued use. Soon after, CPSC put gas stoves in its crosshairs, with Commissioner Rich Trumka Jr. noting in a speech that “we need to be talking about regulating gas stoves, whether it’s drastically reducing emissions or banning gas stoves entirely,” a sentiment he reiterated in a Monday interview with Bloomberg. As Trumka’s statement made clear, the real impetus for targeting stoves appears to be about facilitating the administration’s green-energy agenda and targeting the fossil fuel industry—not guarding children’s health. As even The Washington Post had to note this week, two of the four authors on the study have a major conflict of interest: working for the environmental organization RMI.
Unsurprisingly, and in perfect choreography, people like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez began singing their parts. “Did you know that ongoing exposure to NO2 from gas stoves is linked to reduced cognitive performance?” wrote Rep. Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday, who had previously made several viral videos while cooking at … her gas stove. At this point, seemingly everyone and their mother has chimed in on Stovegate™. Both Trumka Jr. and Hoehn-Saric of the CPSC have insisted that even if a ban did go into place, it wouldn’t involve confiscation, just “new products.” Governor of New York Kathy Hochul alluded to this in her State of the State speech on Tuesday, proposing to end “the sale of any new fossil-fuel-powered heating equipment by 2030.” Mark your calendars for December 2029 and the premiere of Stovegate: Redux.
In the Back Pages: Inventing the Crypto King
The Rest
→ What was the final verdict, anyway, on whether or not Russian Twitter bots moved the needle for Trump in 2016? According to a new study by NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, the answer is: not very much at all.
Researchers examined the Twitter accounts of 1,500 Americans and found that “the relationship between the number of posts from Russian foreign influence accounts that users are exposed to and voting for Donald Trump is near zero (and not statistically significant).”
The vast majority of exposure to Russian posts reached only 1% of users, most of whom were Trump-supporting Republicans.
And just as the Twitter files recently revealed, despite several requests by the FBI for Twitter executives to pull any notable Russian bot accounts off the platform in 2020, “Our review thus far shows a small-scale domestic troll effort that was amplified in some creative ways by real people—but not a significant bot or foreign angle,” Twitter’s former Head of Trust & Safety, Yoel Roth, told FBI agent Elvis Chan.
→ Quote of the Day:
Now, in the midst of a continuing public health crisis and a growing federal deficit, is not the time for Moderna to be quadrupling the price of this vaccine. Now is not the time for unacceptable corporate greed.
Sen. Bernie Sanders to Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel on the announcement that Moderna plans to raise the price per dose of its COVID-19 vaccine to $130 once the initial government contract has expired. It’s great to see Bernie back in the saddle of screaming at billionaires, but he could have picked a different target. In his letter, Sanders leans heavily on the idea that the Moderna shots are a net positive for public health, and wants the price to stay down so that Americans can continue to receive booster after booster. But more than a year ago, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, France, and Germany issued guidance that men under age 30 should not receive Moderna due to possible risk of heart inflammation. Also, members of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee are now saying that Moderna slow-rolled the release of relevant data before their meeting about debating a recommendation for the new bivalent boosters—data that showed more recipients of the bivalent got infected than those who’d received only the original vaccine. This data was deemed not statistically significant, but based on other relevant data, “The experience of the past year has taught us that chasing these Omicron variants with a bivalent vaccine is a losing game,” Dr. Paul Offit, one of the top U.S. vaccinologists, wrote on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
→ Lawmakers discussing the drug overdose epidemic said on Wednesday that fentanyl’s current temporary Schedule I designation should be made permanent, which sounds about right for a substance that has quickly become the No. 1 killer of Americans aged 18 to 45. The House Energy and Commerce Committee panel had also taken up the issue of the recent Drug Enforcement Administration report that said the agency seized 50 million fentanyl pills and 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder last year, which once came primarily from China but is now made cheaply and quickly in Mexico before being smuggled into the United States through checkpoints along the southern border. Along with the wave of fentanyl flowing into the United States, there has been an increase in the presence of xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer known colloquially by users as “tranq” or “zombie drug.” Like fentanyl, xylazine can be used to cut other drugs, and a report this summer found it in the drug supply across 36 states. In Philadelphia, 90% of recent opioid samples tested positive for xylazine, which can cause severe withdrawals, eat a user’s flesh, and decay skin tissue, leaving terrifying wounds that can become infected, sometimes requiring amputation.
→ Video of the Day:
We were reminded again Wednesday that guitar gods are not actually immortal with the passing of Jeff Beck, 78, from a sudden case of bacterial meningitis. Beck was an idol and a mentor to generations of electric guitar heroes with his nearly linguistic mastery of the strings. Amazingly, Beck grew up with Led Zeppelin’s legendary lead guitarist Jimmy Page in Surrey, England, and the two of them would challenge each other on their adolescent axes, later going on to play together in the groundbreaking group The Yardbirds. Beck went on to put together an eclectic career: He was less showy than contemporaries like Eric Clapton, Page, or Paul McCartney but worthy of two introductions to the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame nonetheless. We leave you with a video to remember him by, but also with these words from his childhood pal Page: “The six stringed Warrior is no longer here for us to admire the spell he could weave around our mortal emotions. Jeff could channel music from the ethereal. His technique unique. His imaginations [sic] apparently limitless. Jeff: I will miss you along with your millions of fans. Jeff Beck, Rest in Peace.”
→ Big Tech (and the White House) is in everybody’s business, everywhere, all the time, with the most recent example coming now from a First Amendment lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri, Missouri v. Biden, that concerns the government’s role censoring content from social media platforms. In March 2021, White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty sent off angry emails to Facebook regarding “borderline content” on vaccines, saying, “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy—period.” Later in the thread, Andy Slavitt, one of Biden’s senior COVID advisors, chimed in, “Internally we have been considering our options on what to do about it.” This, of course, prompted a response from the redacted Facebook executive offering to get the White House “the specific information needed to successfully manage the vaccine rollout.” As well, a new drop of Twitter files by journalist Alex Berenson has revealed that former FDA chair and current Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb wrote to a Twitter lobbyist in August 2021 to complain that a post by Dr. Brett Giroir, another former FDA head, could “end up going viral and driving news coverage.” The post? Giroir said that natural immunity was superior to vaccine immunity but concluded the post by saying that if you hadn’t yet been infected, you should get vaccinated. Naturally Twitter took Gottlieb’s hint and appended a “misleading” tag to the tweet.
→ SweepWizard, an app developed to help law enforcement coordinate massive arrests, has been found to be not only flawed but also dangerously insecure, according to a new Wired magazine investigation. The Wired team found years of openly accessible police records from the app posted online, many with suspects’ exact descriptions and sometimes even social security numbers. The major concern is that potential perps might have been alerted to their impending arrest before it happened, giving them time to flee—and now major police departments that have been compromised, including the LAPD, are investigating. The app developer ODIN Intelligence told Wired, “Thus far, we have been unable to reproduce the alleged security compromise to any ODIN system. In the event that any evidence of a compromise of ODIN or SweepWizard security has occurred, we will take appropriate action.”
Read More: https://www.wired.com/story/sweepwizard-police-raids-data-exposure/
→ The fiercely anti-LGBT leader of Israel’s Noam party, Avi Maoz, seems to be pushing toward new immigration practices that would prevent non-halachic Jews (i.e., people not born to a Jewish mother) from making Aliyah. Maoz is limited in what he’s able to do—for now—due to the parameters of the Law of Return, which allows all those with one Jewish grandparent to become citizens, but he’s recruited Israel’s Chief Rabbinate to his cause. If the campaign is successful, it could cause hardships for immigrants from the former Soviet Union specifically, as Maoz oversees the Nativ office that handles their immigration.
→ Disgraced crypto kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried released yet another tactless blog post Thursday morning, trying to explain himself and offload blame onto his ex-girlfriend and business partner, Caroline Ellison, who in turn is working with the government against him. His paper-napkin estimate is that his company Alameda Research (run by Ellison) was worth $100 billion in 2021 but was not properly hedged against an extreme crash like the one that occurred in 2022 after a run against his primary company, FTX. Ellison has already admitted that she and SBF made up financial statements. But he is doubling down on his essential goodness, saying that he “didn’t steal funds” and “certainly didn’t stash billions away,” as some have alleged. Okie doke. In possibly more legitimate good news for ruined FTX investors, the executives who replaced SBF announced Wednesday that they’d “found” $5 billion in cash and are hoping to sell an additional $4.6 billion in assets to help make investors whole.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Church of Harry by Maggie Phillips
The prince’s waning religiosity, and the decline of Episcopalianism in America
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Big Fat Nonbinary Mistake by Blake Smith
The queen of queer theory sought to relieve the persecution complex that haunted the West. Instead, her work has intensified it.
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Inventing the Crypto King
How the media created the myth of Sam Bankman-Fried
One of the most striking things about the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, once counted among the world’s largest, is the extent to which it caught the supposed watchdogs of the tech industry by surprise. How could Sam Bankman-Fried, the brainiac financial visionary, crowned earlier this year the “crypto emperor” by The New York Times, have steered his armada of crypto firms into the rocks so recklessly? With allegations of an enormous, brazen fraud lingering, the first place to look is at the central role of the media in this fiasco. Through an almost endless churn of fawning coverage, the news media turned an inexperienced—and, it seems, ethically deranged—trader into the second coming of Warren Buffett.
Over the past two years, Bankman-Fried cultivated the media lavishly, if not carefully. Drawing on what then seemed like an unlimited pool of cash, SBF (as we’ll call the mythologized version of the real person) dispersed investments, advertising dollars, sponsorships, and donations to key news outlets—including ProPublica, Vox, Semafor, and The Intercept—with extraordinary effectiveness.
Bankman-Fried’s head has filled the frame of the most coveted business news covers in the world, including Fortune (“The next Warren Buffett?”) and Forbes (“Only Zuck has been as rich (23 billion) this young (29)!”). CNBC star Jim Cramer once compared Bankman-Fried, who has been active in crypto finance for only a handful of years, to John Pierpont Morgan, the giant of industry who worked in banking for nearly four decades before striking out on his own.
Remarkably, some major news outlets have continued to round the edges of the SBF myth, even after the discovery of at least a billion-dollar hole in FTX’s books, the assets seeming to vanish into the crypto ether. This week, Twitter erupted in outrage when The New York Times published what many have described as a “puff piece” on Bankman-Fried, whose whereabouts remain unknown.
The Times story on Bankman-Fried, who allegedly funneled FTX customer money into his private hedge fund, Alameda Research, is couched in passive, soft-touch language reflected even in the headline: “How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Empire Collapsed.” The Times pieces describes Bankman-Fried’s misallocation of funds—which, if true, amounts to mass-scale fraud—in terms that remove active agency, writing: “Alameda had accumulated a large ‘margin position’ on FTX, essentially meaning it had borrowed funds from the exchange, Mr. Bankman-Fried said.” The piece, which describes Bankman-Fried as “surprisingly calm,” lays little to no blame at SBF’s feet, writing that FTX “lent as much as $10 billion to Alameda.” In contrast, business writer Trung Phan noted in a widely shared tweet that “fraud,” “crime,” “stolen,” “theft,” “criminal,” and “hidden,” make no appearance amid the article’s 2,000-plus word count.
But if critics found the recent Times article full of off-the-charts puffery, previous coverage makes this latest, post-FTX collapse piece look like searing investigative journalism. A May 2022 article by the same writer, The New York Times’ David Yaffe-Bellany, titled “A Crypto Emperor’s Vision: No Pants, His Rules,” jump-cuts from rapt audiences “roaring” with laughter at Bankman-Fried’s wit to his penchant for living “modestly” (in a $40 million Bahamas penthouse) to his chummy relationship with Tom Brady that purportedly began with Brady approaching the unassuming Bankman-Fried at a party to talk crypto.
In its flattery, the 3,500-word Times article flipped the famous fable about a naked emperor alluded to in the piece’s headline; rather than showing a naked emperor who thinks he’s elegantly clothed, it paints a picture of a figure we might all consider larger than life but who, by the Times’ account, is just a regular do-gooder whose smarts led him, almost haphazardly, to invent a proprietary money-printing machine.
Far from a one-off, the May Times piece was the culmination of a drumbeat of coverage by the paper that, collectively, helped to create the myth of SBF as “an uncannily sharp altruistic billionaire,” as Vox recently described him. A narrative of this scope, especially one that lacks substance to this degree, is never the product of an article or two, or even of a few dedicated news cycles. Rather, it’s the result of sustained, coordinated effort.
The famously acerbic Times tech columnist Kara Swisher quoted SBF approvingly, noting “Sam Bankman-Fried was right when he pointed to the unbanked and those left out of the system: ‘The [crypto] industry has the potential to improve a lot of people’s lives.’” A July Dealbook interviewgave Bankman-Fried free rein to opine on trading crypto derivatives. Another Times piece, which cited SBF’s “penchant for haphazardly tied shoes and company-branded T-shirts,” focused on an FTX Super Bowl commercial featuring Larry David.
With all of the puff pieces from the press, there was apparently little interest in investigating SBF’s web of interlocking firms. A number of high profile outlets best known for investigative reporting took money from Bankman-Fried—in some cases money earmarked to fund investigative journalism—and yet did little, it appears, to investigate the source of those funds.
This was the case with a $5 million pledge to ProPublica from Bankman-Fried’s family foundation, Building a Stronger Future. Vox, which published a March 2021 interview with Bankman-Fried, introduced the FTX founder by praising his “civic-mindedness,” which was guided by an algorithmlike statement of purpose: “Make a tremendous amount of money by any means necessary. Then give it all away by the best means possible.” Perhaps their praise paid off: In a recent article on the fall of SBF, Vox mentions—albeit buried in the form of a parenthetical “Full Disclosure” in the middle of the piece—that they had receieved an undisclosed sum from Bankman-Fried’s foundation. (Vox and ProPublica did not respond to requests for comment.)
Semafor, the new publication led by former New York Times media columnist Ben Smith, similarly received an unspecified investment from Bankman-Fried. Notably, Semafor prominently publicized this information in a piece about Matt Yglesias’ and Nate Silver’s refusal to join a different venture funded by SBF.
SBF possesses a kind of media aptitude that you would not expect to find in a young finance-focused techie, or even in a fairly seasoned media hand—a media canniness Bankman-Fried has displayed again and again, including with his foray into backing, buying, or producing his own media.” In one example, Bankman-Fried interviewed the famous Princeton ethicist Peter Singer about effective altruism, a philosophical movement founded by Singer and philosopher William MacAskill that Bankman-Fried has aligned himself with. The interview received a fairly paltry number of views for a video featuring two big names, but it successfully drove headlines and helped burnish Bankman-Fried’s reputation and image, his connection to Singer cited repeatedly as evidence of his ethical bona fides.
This is the kind of strategic decision-making that top PR firms employ when building the brands of their biggest and best clients. Key to this strategic approach was Bankman-Fried’s exceptional ability to continually create fresh headlines about himself and his company. One of the most important tactics he used to do this was the creation of top-tier brand partnerships that would drive headlines. FTX’s relationships with Mercedes’ F1 team, naming rights negotiated with the Miami Heat, stage-sharing with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (a pair not usually known for their altruism), the launch of an FTX gaming unit, the Larry David Super Bowl Ad—each one represented another PR opportunity that would generate dozens of headlines. With so much news real estate devoted to breathlessly boosting the latest FTX deal, sponsorship, or main-stage appearance, there was hardly room left over for investigations—or even for a critical op-ed.
Perhaps the most ironic moment of media myth-making was Fortune’s “Warren Buffett” cover story from this past August. Despite the question mark included in the copy on the cover—“Is Sam Bankman-Fried the next Warren Buffett?”—the phrase was not a question but a statement. While Buffett and his longtime business partner Charlie Munger have said timeand again that their success came with years of patience, Fortune crowned Bankman-Fried the next Buffett seemingly because he’d become so rich so quickly.
Only months before the Fortune cover, another business media heavyweight had put Bankman-Fried on its cover. The 2021 Forbes 400 list annotated its cover image of SBF with an unnervingly prescient quote from Bankman-Fried: “I got involved in crypto without any idea what crypto was.” If there was a single tipping point in the creation of the SBF myth, this was it. Beyond mere inclusion on the Forbes 400 list (the one Kanye West frequently invoked in his recent antisemitic tirades, and which made headlines for reincluding Trump), Bankman-Fried was now the very face of America’s most hallowed symbol of financial success.
The piece included all the usual SBF tropes—the black hoodie, the extreme wealth, the effective altruism. “He’s a mercenary,” Fortune wrote, “dedicated to making as much money as possible (he doesn’t really care how) solely so he can give it away (he doesn’t really know to whom, or when).” SBF had won.
And yet Forbes had also been pulled into the Bankman-Fried money vortex. In February, Binance, another major—but even larger—crypto exchange, invested $200 million in Integrated Whale Media, the Hong Kong-based company that owns Forbes. Binance was also a major holder of FTX’s cryptocurrency, FTT, with at least $580 million worth of the currency banked away.
It was Binance’s $580 million holding of FTT that precipitated FTX’s fall. But crucially, what triggered that sequence of events was not a monthslong investigation by a mainstream news outlet, like the ones Bankman-Fried had invested in or donated to, which employ dozens or in some cases hundreds of investigative journalists. Rather, it was the work of far smaller—and far more diligent—news outlets doing their jobs.
On Nov. 2, CoinDesk broke the news of the connection between FTX and Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund, Alameda Research. This quickly led to a Substack called Dirty Bubble Media questioning FTX’s solvency. The CoinDesk piece and the Dirty Bubble Media Substack in turn led to Binance’s CEO tweeting that the company was dumping its holdings of FTT, triggering a financial domino effect that led to FTX’s swift collapse.
In the space of four days, media participants that lie far outside the highly capitalized mainstream did more investigative work than the entire corporate media had done in two years. Once the bubble—financial and conceptual—was popped, however, the media began whirring into action, manufacturing a new SBF myth, this one as breathless, hyped and sure of itself as the old one, with the Times rushing to tell its readers not about SBF’s misdeeds but about his “surprisingly calm” state of mind. “You would’ve thought that I’d be getting no sleep right now,” SBF tells his worried handlers at the Times. “And instead I’m getting some. It could be worse.”
There was once a time, not so long ago, when I would read something like “a new study that claims 12.7% of all childhood asthma cases can be attributed to the use of gas stoves in homes” and update my mental model of the world accordingly. Now I read something like that and think “bullshit. What’s their agenda?”
First Science killed God. Now Science is dead. What comes next?
Mr. Rindsberg nails the NYT which as he pointed out in his excellent book, for missing the facts and selling the narrative that it created as the NYT has done far too many times