Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
There’s a good chance that the Chinese company ByteDance still controls the TikTok algorithm, so Trump’s deal does not solve the national security concerns, yet it makes some of Trump’s friends a lot of money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jvd4avDcys
A lot of internet posts and comments about the ICE shooting are bots or foreign trolls trying to weaken America by riling up its people. Social media companies make money when these bots, trolls, and foreign adversaries are successful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_crFFBfnJo
Our inability to figure out what’s real is an important social problem. We are being driven crazy by our technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5QuO_wKPhk
“We shouldn’t let government subsidies distort the market. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick embraced this thinking with his June 2025 decision to drop the NTIA’s “fiber preference,” shifting the agency toward a technology-neutral, cost-driven framework. The policy emphasizes cost-effectiveness among technologies meeting speed and latency standards.
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In many areas, fiber expansion will continue to make sense, but if LEO-based broadband can offer high-quality internet connectivity virtually instantaneously and on the cheap to many in the targeted regions, why should the federal government stand in the way? After all, as Starlink celebrates its 8 million and counting user base, something largely accomplished absent heavy subsidization”
https://reason.com/2025/12/09/the-free-market-can-connect-rural-america-faster-than-the-government/
VPNs are needed for basic privacy, hiding from government overreach, working from home, and corporate security. Banning them like a bill in Michigan does, would be bad economically and an attack on liberty, privacy, and security.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9j-T9mQmiw
The wisdom of the crowds and the efficient market hypothesis require an amount of independence of the people in the crowd. With the internet and social media, people are much more connected and therefore much less independent. The same fads, cults, and appeals that warp people’s political views may also warp their market views. So, markets may have gotten dumber.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1Iok2wyoCw
The online ecosystem of the right includes a heavy dose of straight up anti-semitism. Trump helped break the mold from the beginning of his first political campaign when it comes to rhetoric that used to be unacceptable. Edgy jokes justified by fighting the woke censors pushed the barrier further until today where the far right ecosystem includes actual open Nazis like Nick Fuentes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jyDHToxC-4
“The kids these days have a lot of silly euphemisms. Porn becomes corn. Sex becomes seggs. Nipples are nip nops and a picture of an eggplant can stand in for a penis. Killing someone becomes unaliving them, and people kermit sewerslide instead of committing suicide. Everything slightly risqué or unpleasant becomes baby talk. But not because teens are overgrown infants—it’s a bottom-up response to top-down censorship.
As social media has become a bigger part of modern life, platforms have adopted elaborate policies to appease advertisers and politicians who might not be happy with the content that people organically share. Besides simply deleting content and banning creators, sites can subtly nudge users, algorithmically promoting certain sorts of content while demoting others. The policies are often frustratingly opaque, but many users have figured out well what will or won’t anger the invisible censor.
That doesn’t stop them from talking about taboo topics.
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So teenagers have come up with an elaborate system of cheeky substitutes for words that would otherwise get their content shadow banned. Emojis and wordplay form a language.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/13/algorithmic-censorship-changes-the-way-we-talk/?nab=1
“the idea that people—especially young men—would not be radicalized if it weren’t for social media belies most of human history.
I’ve been listening recently to a podcast called A Twist of History. One episode details Adolf Hitler’s attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic in 1923. Another episode features a riot during a Shakespearean performance in New York City in 1849, fomented by Ned Buntline, a nativist newspaper pundit with ambitions of fame and notoriety. Both instances featured fringe political elements, violence, and deaths.
History is littered with examples like these: men driven to violence by people in close physical proximity, sometimes with the help of inflammatory political rhetoric printed in pamphlets and newspapers.
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if he encountered bad ideas online, it’s because the internet is now where we encounter ideas. If he cloaked his violence in the language of internet memes, it’s because that’s where culture is these days.
In another era, he may have encountered bad ideas at a town hall and dressed up his horrific act in different slogans. But a man with a capacity for such premeditated and dramatic violence is a man with a capacity for such things in any era. And conversely, countless billions of people encounter the same online ecosystem without committing assassinations.”
https://reason.com/2025/09/15/social-media-didnt-kill-charlie-kirk/
One through-line with many assassins and mass shooters beyond ideology is that they are young men with access and familiarity with guns who radicalized on the internet. This is happening with a variety of ideologies. The internet and access to guns are key causes in many of these tragedies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPc1hIR68wY