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The omnibus spending bill Congress is considering right now isn’t just about spending money we don’t have and saddling future generations with debt. It’s also about chipping away at their data privacy, too.

Buried deep in the omnibus bill—we’re talking 2,200 pages in—is legislation intended to give the feds access to data held by American companies overseas. It also will have the effect of making it easier for foreign countries to gain access to data being stored here in America, and that makes human rights and privacy groups very, very concerned.

The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, acronymed the CLOUD Act, seeks, in part, to resolve a current dispute between the Department of Justice and Microsoft that is before the Supreme Court. The feds want access to data connected to a drug trafficking suspect. This data is being stored in Dublin, Ireland, not on American soil, and therefore Microsoft has been resisting.

The CLOUD Act would require that communication providers cough up this information even if the data is stored outside the United States, provided it’s about an American citizen.

That’s not all the act does, and the rest of it has human rights groups worried about the implications. The act also changes and apparently simplifies the process for foreign governments to also request data about their citizens when that data is stored on American soil. It reduces the amount of bureaucratic oversight in the process and reduces the ability of Congress or the judicial branch to step in to potentially block data sharing with countries that have reputations for using this private information for oppressive purposes.

As such, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Campaign for Liberty oppose the CLOUD Act.

Over at The Hill, Neema Singh Guliani of the ACLU warned about the consequences of giving only a couple of high-ranking people in the executive branch the authority to determine which governments the United States would cooperate with:

The bill would give the attorney general and the secretary of State the authority to enter into data exchange agreements with foreign governments without congressional approval. The country they enter into agreements with need not meet strict human rights standards – the bill only stipulates that the executive branch consider as a factor whether a government “demonstrates respect” for human rights and is similarly vague as to what practices would exclude a particular country from consideration. In addition, the bill requires that countries adopt procedures to protect Americans’ information, but provides little specificity as to what these standards must include. Moreover, it would allow countries to wiretap on U.S. soil for the first time, including conversations that foreign targets may have with people in the U.S., without complying with Wiretap Act requirements.

In a letter sent by the groups to lawmakers, they also warn that CLOUD Act doesn’t include a warrant requirement for communications over 180 days old, meaning that it doesn’t guarantee constitutional standards are followed, or require law enforcement to alert people when the government gets access to their data.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) complained last night on Twitter about the CLOUD Act getting shoved into the omnibus bill so that there will be no debate about what it does. He clearly doesn’t like it, nor does his bipartisan partner in online privacy, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon). Microsoft’s president, however, supports it, because no doubt with this process in place, the company can point to it and not have to take responsibility (or legal liability) when a government violates somebody’s rights.

So now Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and head honcho at Facebook, is going all in on government regulation.

“The question,” he told Wired‘s Nicholas Thompson, “isn’t ‘Should there be regulation or shouldn’t there be?’ It’s ‘How do you do it?'” On CNN, he said, “I actually am not sure we shouldn’t be regulated. I think in general technology is an increasingly important trend in the world. I think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than ‘yes or no should we be regulated?'”

What gives? I’d like to suggest that Zuckerberg’s response has little or nothing to do with civic-mindedness in the wake of ridiculously overblown panics over Russian trolls buying campaign ads showing Jesus wrestling Satan, or still-cresting fears that Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to deny Hillary Clinton her rightful role as first woman president.

Rather, Zuckerberg is using these incidents as a way to cement Facebook’s centrality in a radically volatile social-media landscape. It was only a few weeks ago, after all, that we were treated to a spate of stories about how Facebook was losing younger users by the millions. From a representative account at Inc.:

Last year alone, the social network lost more than 1.4 million users in the 12 to 17-year old demographic, according to new report from research firm eMarketer. That represents a decline of nearly 10 percent, or roughly three times what analysts had predicted. Notably, 2017 was the first time that analysts expected the company to see a drop in usage for any age group. Overall, Facebook lost 2.8 million U.S. users under the age of 25, the data found….

2018 isn’t shaping up to look any better. EMarketer predicts another 5.6 percent decline in users between 12 and 17 years old, and a 5.8 percent decline for those between 18 and 24. That likely has executives worried about the long-term dominance of the social media platform.

Only the paranoid survive in Silicon Valley, right? Zuckerberg may be young (he’s just 33) but he’s old enough to remember MySpace and Friendster. He hangs around with people who don’t just remember AOL and Netscape but also invested in them. The history of business is a cemetery of whales, of “too big to fail” juggernauts who are barely remembered these days. The supermarket chain A&P once had bigger market share in its sector than Walmart does today. It revolutionized the buying and selling of groceries and has passed away, little-remembered and little-missed. Only 60 companies that appeared in the 1955 version of the Fortune 500 were still there in last year’s list, economist Mark Perry reminds us. More important for the current conversation (emphasis in original):

At the current churn rate, about half of today’s S&P 500 firms will be replaced over the next 10 years as “we enter a period of heightened volatility for leading companies across a range of industries, with the next ten years shaping up to be the most potentially turbulent in modern history” according to Innosight.

Go ask your kids if they’re still playing Minecraft and get back to me. Zuckerberg surely understands all this better than most of us. And he’s surrounded by folks who, despite libertarian bona fides, recognize a corollary too: Regulation often isn’t forced upon leading firms in an industry but welcomed and even demanded by them, as a means to fix the market when they’re in a particularly good position. This is part of the insight that guides the public-choice school of political economy, but it’s not just libertarians such as Nobel laureate James Buchanan who think this way. Forty years ago, the socialist historian Gabriel Kolko rewrote the received interpretation of the Progressive Era along the same lines. By looking at how regulation unfolded during the Gilded Age, Kolko concluded that railroad tycoons and other robber barons actively sought out regulatory regimes that would keep them at the table. As Roy Childs, writing in Reason in 1971, summarized it: “Facing falling profits and diffusion of economic power, these businessmen then turned to the state to regulate the economy on their behalf.”

More recently, we saw a variation on this rent-seeking theme with Uber. The disruptive company had barely stolen market share from taxi cabs in American cities before it started lobbying for rules that would benefit it while limiting new competition. As the Mercatus Center’s Matt Mitchell told Reason in 2014, “They sort of stepped inside this regulatory velvet rope and then put it up right behind them.” In the autonomous-vehicle race, Uber and other ride-sharing companies are already pushing for a ban on individuals owning their own self-driving cars.

So goes Facebook. By not simply relenting to regulation but actively embracing it and, more important, shaping it to his company’s maximum benefit, Zuckerberg might just make sure that Facebook sticks around far longer than it would otherwise. In the parlance of historian Burton W. Folsom, the “market entrepreneur,” who makes a fortune by providing a new or improved service at a great price, almost inevitably evolves into the “political entrepreneur,” who uses regulation and other connections to stay on top. This predictable but dispiriting two-step may well be the greatest challenge to libertarian economics. It certainly is one of the toughest problems to fix.

In response to the torch-lit marches in Charlottesville last August, the University of Virginia signed an $18,500 annual contract with Social Sentinel, a private security firm, to monitor the social media accounts of its students and others.

UVA began working with Social Sentinel in September to keep an eye on potentially dangerous campus activity. University officials and the UVA police force have assured the community this step is necessary for campus security, yet students and others are concerned about their privacy rights.

“Enhanced technology is just one piece of the University’s safety and preparedness efforts,” Officer Ben Rexrode, the Crime Prevention Coordinator for the University Of Virginia Police Department, told Reason via email. “As the University grows and new standards for best in class operations evolve, we take steps to improve when prudent and appropriate.”

Using an algorithm, Social Sentinel scans social media accounts and targets threatening words, images and phrases included in Sentinel’s “library of harm.” When these terms or images are used in context with the university’s name, location, or events, a report is sent to the police, who determine if the content merits further investigation.

While officials consider the context of posts that are flagged, algorithms may fail to distinguish between dangerous phrases and phrases like “You’re the bomb!” or “Nice shot!,” leading to unnecessary tagging. It’s also difficult to expect someone who is so far removed from a conversation to fully grasp what a student meant by a particular choice of words. Neither the algorithm nor the officers reading the material may understand what is said.

“It’s not so much that they’re looking at your Twitter or your Instagram, it’s casting a very wide net and getting metadata and producing a report,” UVA Spokesperson Anthony de Bruyn told The Cavalier Daily.

Yet once a report is drawn up about a particular post, officers are able to read and view students posts, be they on Twitter or Instagram. So while Big Brother is not actively scrolling through students’ feeds, officers have records of conversations that students or other persons may have preferred to keep from the government. Social Sentinel told The Daily Progress it does not archive the data it scans, but university police officials said the department would record and store any alerts that prompted police action.

“The University has not confined the scanning to any particular group,” said Rexrode.”The service can only view publicly viewable sources; it cannot see private or direct messages, or accounts set to private. The service merely aggregates publicly available information.”

This betrays a serious limitation: Persons who wish to do harm often plot and exchange information in private chat groups, via text message, or in other online forms that wouldn’t be accessed by this technology.

UVA officials say Social Sentinel’s mass data collection has allowed authorities to prevent some campus events, including instances of self-harm, but Social Sentinel is scanning everyone’s data in order to do so. This raises obvious concerns for civil libertarians.

“We see a trend in law enforcement in general to want to employ new technology before we really understand all of the implications of that technology,” Bill Farrar, the Director of Strategic Communications for ACLU of Virginia, told Reason. “While we don’t object to use of technology in law enforcement, we do object to usage policies and practices that violate people’s expectation of privacy and other civil liberties. We are opposed to any sort of mass government surveillance for any future law enforcement services.

“Law enforcement is essentially grabbing everyone’s data and holding on it, just in case they might need it for some future unspecified purpose,” said Farrar. “We don’t think that’s right—and it’s not just students’ data that’s being monitored, it’s anyone on that campus who posts on social media. They are being watched, and that’s a problem.”

If services like Social Sentinel cause students to feel they are being watched or targeted online, how will it affect campus dialogue? Universities should be places where everyone feels like they can speak freely—the presence of a ubiquitous social media monitoring service might chill speech.

And then there’s the potential for abuse. For instance, late last year, Georgia Tech came under fire for targeting a student activist, Matthew Wolfsen, when it was revealed that the university had binders full of information on him, including several pages of his public social media posts.

It’s difficult to determine where such monitoring could lead when its implemented in a university setting. UVA appears to have made trade-off on behalf of its student body and the public, trading their privacy for some degree of security that has yet to be determined. And trading students’ privacy for an increased feeling of security seems like a dubious undertaking.

Republicans are once again proving why they actually deserve the label of the biggest swamp spenders, writes Veronique de Rugy. The latest gigantic omnibus spending bill would fund the government for the remainder of the fiscal year—with a price tag of $1.3 trillion. That doesn’t include entitlement funding or payments for the interest on our debt—which continue to grow and drive our debt higher, as Republicans have apparently given up on slowing down spending.

You can expect Republicans and President Trump to spin this as a “yuge” victory for their team. After all, isn’t it a sign that they can govern? Sure, if you tolerate massive deficit spending, being irresponsible, and pushing all that liability down the throat of future generations.

View this article.

Sometime around 2 a.m. last night, Reddit banned several long-running sex worker forums from the platform. The move comes just hours after the Senate passed a bill making digital facilitation of prostitution a federal crime. Under the new law, social media sites and other hubs of user-generated content can be held criminally liable.

For months, sex workers have warned that the passage of “SESTA” or “FOSTA”—two similarly bad bills that were competing for dominance; FOSTA passed yesterday—would mark the end of all online forums for communication with clients, lawyers, or each other. To sex workers like Liara Roux, Louise Partridge, and Jiz Lee, Reddit’s takedown of these subreddits confirmed their fears about the new legislation.

Even if individuals aren’t targeted by law enforcement for placing ads, and even if individual cases brought by state prosecutors are struck down as unconstitutional, a lot of platforms will preemptively ban anything remotely related to sex work rather than risk it.

So far, four subreddits related to sex have banned: Escorts, Male Escorts, Hookers, and SugarDaddy. None were what could accurately be described as advertising forums, though (to varying degrees) they may have helped connect some people who wound up in “mutually beneficial relationships.” The escort forums were largely used by sex workers to communicate with one another, according to Partridge. Meanwhile, the “hooker” subreddit “was mostly men being disgusting,” according to Roux, “but also was a place that sometimes had people answering educational questions in good faith.”

This sub had a slur in the name and was mostly men being disgusting but also was a place that sometimes had people answering educational questions in good faith. Instead of increased moderation and a name change, it was removed entirely today. Dead canary. pic.twitter.com/efAFMW9R4z

— Liara Roux (@LiaraRoux) March 22, 2018

If you visit the Reddit “Hooker” community now, you’ll see a notice that “this subreddit was banned due to a violation of our content policy.” The “Escorts” and “Male Escots” pages provides a little more detail: “This subreddit was banned due to a violation of our content policy, specifically, a violation of Reddit’s policy against transactions involving prohibited goods or services.”

Reddit yesterday announced changes to its content policy, now forbidding “transactions for certain goods and services,” including “firearms, ammunition, or explosives” and “paid services involving physical sexual contact.” While some of the prohibited exchanges are illegal, many are not.

Yet they run close enough up against exchanges that could be illegal that it’s hard for a third-party like Reddit to differentiate. And the same goes for forums where sex workers post educational content, news, safety and legal advice. Without broad Section 230 protections, Reddit could be in serious financial and legal trouble if they make the wrong call.

Some have suggested that the new content policy, not FOSTA, is to blame for the shutdown of the sex-related subreddits. But FOSTA may also help explain Reddit’s new content policy overall. (Reddit did not respond to my request for comment Thursday morning.)

FOSTA seriously chips away at Section 230, the federal provision that protects web publishers from being treated as the speaker of user-generated content. Proponents of FOSTA have insisted this is just a renovation of Section 230, not a demolition. But as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)—who coauthored the Section 230 language in the ’90s—noted yesterday, once you carve out a loophole for one bad thing (in this case, the change is allegedly meant to stop sex trafficking), it’s easy for legislators and courts to carve out loopholes and justifications for everything.

After all, murder is pretty bad. And everyone’s pretty jazzed up about the “opioid epidemic” right now. Guns, too. Do you think Congress can resist asking if websites that facilitate these crimes shouldn’t be just as liable as those that broker sex?

In case it’s not clear, Reddit’s actions today in updating their policies prove that sites will react to SESTA/FOSTA quickly and in the ways we feared most. I don’t want to be alarmist, but we are in danger of losing the ability to even talk about sex work in theory online.

— Liara Roux (@LiaraRoux) March 22, 2018

But as Wyden also pointed out yesterday, this strategy doesn’t mean that more sex traffickers—or murderers, illegal arms dealers, etc.—will be caught and punished (and perhaps less overall, for a vareity of reasons). It just means treating websites like the criminals instead—which would make the government a lot of money, but do nothing for safety or justice.

“Section 230 was never about protecting incumbents,” Wyden told his colleagues from the Senate floor Wednesday. Yet “despite the fact that section 230 undergirds the framework of the internet as we know it today, there’s a signifficant effort to take it town and collapse it.” The result will be “an enourmous chilling effect on speech in America,” Wyden warned.

Looks like we’re already seeing the effects.

Economists and pro-trade organizations were quick to criticize President Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, a maneuver that many analysts say will harm far more workers, businesses, and consumers than it will help.

Now, it seems, even pro-tariff protectionists agree with that assessment.

A study released this week by the Coalition for a Prosperous America—and trumpeted on the pro-tariff organization’s website under the not very convincing headline “Steel and Aluminum Tariffs Produce Minimal Impact on Jobs”—shows that Trump’s tariffs will produce an overall decline in both jobs and gross domestic product, leaving Americans with less work and less wealth.

While tariffs will boost employment in the production of iron, steel, and aluminum, those gains will be offset by bigger losses across other sectors of the economy. The manufacturing and construction sectors rely heavily on steel, and those companies would pay more for it due to the tariffs. Unsurprisingly, they are projected to lose the most jobs as a result of the cost increase. The U.S. manufacturing sector is projected to lose 10,000 jobs and the construction industry is projected to lose 7,500 jobs, according to CPA’s analysis. Jeff Ferry, CPA’s research director, tries to put a positive spin on those jobs loses by claiming that “losses would be negligible, as the 19,000 jobs gained in the steel and aluminum sectors would largely offset any job losses in metal-consuming industries,” but that’s probably not much comfort to workers in auto plants across the country, keg manufacturers in Pennsylvania, or farm suppliers in Iowa.

The study also fails to account for the potential fallout from retaliatory tariffs that could be imposed by the European Union or China. The study claims that agricultural jobs will increase because of tariffs, but the farm industry is likely to be a major target in any trade war launched against the United States.

“The debate is no longer whether these tariffs will be harmful to the U.S. economy—the protectionists have effectively run a white flag up the pole on that question—but rather the magnitude of the damage,” concludes Colin Grabow, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute, after reviewing the CPA study.

Other projections suggest the damage could be much worse. The most detailed analysis of Trump’s tariffs comes from the Trade Partnership, a Washington-based pro-trade think tank. According to that study, tariffs could grow the steel, iron, and aluminum industries by about 33,400 jobs, but will also wipe out more than 179,000 other jobs. That’s about 146,000 net job losses—or five jobs lost for every job gained.

And that’s before retaliatory tariffs kick-in. If the EU and other American trading partners follow through on current threats to raise import taxes on American goods, a separate Trade Partnership analysis shows, domestic job losses would soar to over 468,000.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the CPA study is the group’s attempt to find some scenario in which jobs are not lost under Trump’s tariffs. Because the tariffs will raise an estimated $5.97 billion in new revenue for the federal government, and “if this revenue is proactively invested by the federal government, it could lead to net job creation.”

Given the federal government’s history with money, that seems lie a pretty big “if.”

But there it is. Tariffs can be good for the economy if you discount possible retaliation, if you underestimate the consequences on agricultural jobs, and if you trust the federal government to spend $6 billion in the wisest way possible. That’s literally the best argument the protectionists have made.

The election of Donald Trump hasn’t just brought a poorly mannered reality TV star into the Oval Office and our newsfeeds. It has also popularized the concept of gaslighting, or tricking rational people into thinking they’re insane. The phrase is a reference to a 1944 movie in which Charles Boyer tries to convince his young bride, played by Ingrid Bergman, that she’s nuts so he can cover up a murder and search for jewels hidden in the house they share (the house’s gas lamps flicker due to Boyer’s late-night searches, hence the title).

Go Google “Donald Trump is gaslighting America” and you’ll find a constantly growing list of stories from outlets ranging from CNN to Teen Vogue to Vanity Fair to Refinery 29. The common thread is some variation on the theme that Trump’s brazen lies, misstatements, and rhetorical sleights of hand are designed to drive us all batshit crazy by contradicting what we plainly see happening to the United States of America. At rock bottom, Trump’s detractors believe there is simply no way that he could have legitimately won the 2016 election, especially against Hillary Clinton, of whom President Obama said, “I don’t think that there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office.”

Yet it’s not Donald Trump who is gaslighting us, but Hillary Clinton, whose complete and utter refusal to take responsibility for her loss is at the heart of what’s so weird about contemporary America. You read it here first: Trump is the effect and not the cause of the ongoing mudslide that is the daily news. Ever since about 11 p.m. ET on November 8, 2016, Clinton and her allies in the media have worked overtime to provide increasingly fanciful explanations for her failure to beat the least-credible candidate ever in American history. Sometimes the apologias are conscious, sometimes not, but nobody really wants to accept what happened (in fact, even Trump himself couldn’t believe it for a while, which helps explain why his transition was so incompetent). The result is a non-stop barrage of stories, some more credible than others, that Trump’s win was the result of some sort of sinister machination that has undermined our democracy. Following from this interpretation every aspect of his behavior, from his bro-ing out with Vladimir Putin to his indifferent spelling and capitalization while tweeting, is just one more sign that we are living in a world gone stark, raving mad.

To be fair, Trump trades in delusion, such as his insistence that violent crime is at or near all-time highs, that massive voter fraud was the only reason he lost the popular vote, and that his inauguration was the most-viewed ever. These sorts of patently false statements do indeed constitute attempts at gaslighting. So, too, do his unconvincing denials about a sexual relationship with the porn star known as Stormy Daniels, his doctor’s statement that he only weighs 239 lbs. (giving rise to the “Girther” movement), and his fanciful stories about how Japanese car makers use bowling balls in quality-assurance tests. Against such a backdrop, even the president’s so-far-not-contradicted denial that his campaign colluded with Russia seems like a form of gaslighting. In fact, everything he says seems like it’s intended to drive us insane or at least seriously question basic reality.

On their face, this week’s exposes about Cambridge Analytica, the market-research firm that harvested information from as many as 30 million Facebook users while working for the Trump campaign, don’t just further the Trump-gaslighting narrative; they pour gasoline on it. Finally, you can hear #NeverTrump partisans and #theResistance cells all over the country scream with relief, we finally know how he won! While previous explanations have yet to be vindicated by evidence (the Russians hacked it!), widely embraced (the GOP suppressed the minority vote!), or pass the laugh test (white women succumbed to “ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should”), the notion that Trump dialed deep into our psychographic hearts of darkness seems self-evident. As The Guardian puts it, Cambridge Analytica was not only able “to turn tens of millions of Facebook profiles into a unique political weapon,” it “also attracted interest from a key Russian firm with links to the Kremlin.” Christopher Wylie, the magenta-haired “data war whistleblower,” is not exactly measured when he dishes on how he created “Steven Bannon’s pyschological warfare mindfuck tool” that launched “an extraordinary attack on the U.S.’s democratic process.”

What a gift to all of us Ingrid Bergmans suffering under the depredations of latter-day Charles Boyers! The large takeaway from the Cambridge Analytica story is supposed to be that of all the sad sacks in the Western world, Donald Trump and his former Minister of Dark Arts, Steve Bannon—currently palling around with French ultra-rightists—had super-special treachery that helped them steal an election properly owed to Hillary Clinton. We can finally rest easy knowing that, to paraphrase the final line of King Kong, “It wasn’t Trump’s overt racism and appeals to our basest instincts, it was social media that killed the Clinton campaign.”

And yet the Cambridge Analytica angle is pretty much horseshit. Recall that the firm had a remarkably weak track record when it worked with the awful Ted Cruz campaign before getting hired by the Trump folks and that “even Cambridge Analytica didn’t believe its own hype.” Or that a New York Times reporter, Kenneth P. Vogel, tweeted this week, “It was (& is) an overpriced service that delivered little value to the TRUMP campaign, & the other campaigns & PACs that retained it — most of which hired the firm because it was seen as a prerequisite for receiving $$$ from the MERCERS.”

In a smart piece published earlier this week, National Review‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty argues that the liberal-leaning solons of Silicon Valley and folks in the media are in the middle of creating a moral panic over social media now that they realize it may be used by right-of-center folks just as effectively (or not) as by left-of-center types:

Silicon Valley is working with its media and governmental critics to limit the damage to the center-Left going forward. You can see the dynamic in the way that the media generates a moral panic out of stories about how Brexit and the Trump election happened, and the way Silicon Valley responds. Fake news becomes a problem, and Silicon Valley responds by hiring progressive journalists as censors. I mean “fact-checkers.” You can see it in the demonetization of YouTube videos. Or in the new sets of regulation being imposed in European countries that deputize the social-media networks themselves as an all seeing social censor.

Dougherty notes that when the Obama campaign used Facebook and other forms of social media to win its presidential races, the press swooned. Writing in MIT’s Technology Review in 2012, Sasha Issenberg gushed that Obama’s team had created “a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.” That, says Dougherty, was just one more sign that Barack got it, that he was an iPod-using cool kid:

Today’s Cambridge Analytica scandal causes our tech chin-strokers to worry about “information” you did not consent to share, but the Obama team created social interactions you wouldn’t have had. They didn’t just build a psychological profile of persuadable voters, and algorithmically determine ways of persuading them, but actually encouraged particular friends — ones the campaign had profiled as influencers — to reach out to them personally. In a post-election interview, the campaign’s digital director Teddy Goff explained the strategy: “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” he told Time‘s Michael Sherer, “Who do they trust? Their friends?” This level of manipulation was celebrated in the press.

But all of this presupposes that the reason why Trump won and Clinton lost was because the billionaire availed himself of unfair, shady, and possibly illegal information. And while there’s little doubt that Facebook needs to “step up” regarding its privacy policies (in the words of Mark Zuckerberg), the reality is less interesting but ultimately more convincing. Exit polls showed that Clinton simply didn’t turn out the voters she needed to in order to win. Around 136 million votes were cast and it turned out that about 77,000 of them in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and especially Michigan determined the outcome. Republicans and Democrats can reliably turn out a certain minimum number of voters; in presidential contests, the winner will be the one who either generates more enthusiasm (such as Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012) among partisans, or doesn’t completely turn off his own party members (Trump). Hillary Clinton ignored at her peril voters in states that she assumed to be locks for her. In December 2016, Politico‘s Edward Isaac-Dovere noted that had Clinton managed to hold Michigan, which had voted Democratic in the past six presidential elections, she would be president today. Yet “Trump won the state despite getting 30,000 fewer votes than George W. Bush did when he lost it in 2004.” Isaac-Dovere argues

In results that narrow, Clinton’s loss could be attributed to any number of factors — FBI Director Jim Comey’s letter shifting late deciders, the lack of a compelling economic message, the apparent Russian hacking. But heartbroken and frustrated in-state battleground operatives worry that a lesson being missed is a simple one: Get the basics of campaigning right.

Clinton never even stopped by a United Auto Workers union hall in Michigan, though a person involved with the campaign noted bitterly that the UAW flaked on GOTV commitments in the final days, and that AFSCME never even made any, despite months of appeals.

Instead of nailing down every electoral vote in less-glamorous precincts, the Clinton campaign spent time raising money and running up popular vote counts in California and New York (she won the popular vote by about 3 million). The same take-it-for-granted attitude that led to her loss was on brazen display in her recent comments to an Indian audience, where she explained “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product… I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward…. We don’t do well with married, white women…and part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”

Whenever an election is unexpectedly close, there will always be weird things that crop up to “explain” the result. But just as with George W. Bush’s razor-thin victory in 2000, the real question isn’t what put the underdog over the top but how the hell the odds-on favorite managed to squander such a lead. In 2000, Bush didn’t win so much as Al Gore lost. So it is with 2016: Trump didn’t win as much as Hillary Clinton did everything possible to lose. And now we are paying for her loss by being treated to an endless procession of explanations that will take the measure of every possible reason except for her own incompetence, arrogance, and sense of entitlement.

• President Donald Trump is expected to announce tariffs against China today.
• Austin bomber Mark Anthony Conditt reportedly recorded a 25-minute confession on his phone before blowing himself up.
• “Nearly a year before Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired senior FBI official Andrew McCabe for what Sessions called a ‘lack of candor,’ McCabe oversaw a federal criminal investigation into whether Sessions lacked candor when testifying before Congress about contacts with Russian operatives.”
• Republican Rick Saccone has officially conceded to Democrat Conor Lamb in the Pennsylvania special election.
• “I actually am not sure we shouldn’t be regulated,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told CNN. “I actually think the question is more, what is the right regulation… People should know who is buying the ads that they see on Facebook, and you should be able to go on any page and see all the ads that people are running to different audiences.”

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In the first days of January, a meme spread through Iran. The image featured Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Jahromi drop-kicking the logos of Tor, an encrypted proxy network, and several social media platforms—a reference to the Iranian government’s ban of the messaging service Telegram in response to protests in late December.

On January 4, the meme ended up on the front page of Ghanoon, a newspaper aligned with the country’s liberal Reformist movement. The same day, Jahromi reposted it on his Instagram account along with the caption: “The National Security Council—which the Telecommunications Ministry is not part of—has decided, along with other security measures, to impose temporary restrictions on cyberspace in order to establish peace…instead of addressing the roots of the protests and unrest, some are trying to blame cyberspace.”

The minister’s acknowledgment that the crackdown was ill-advised would foreshadow a reversal in Iranian President Hasan Rouhani’s response to the unrest, writes Matthew Petti.

View this article.

Kings College London blocked a lecture on free speech by one of its own faculty to the school’s Libertarian Society because the speaker has “attracted controversy in the past.” Adam Perkins, a lecturer in neurobiology, has defended President Donald Trump’s travel ban, which earned him condemnation from the school’s Somali Society as well as its intersectional feminist group. Officials said they could not guarantee safety if Perkins spoke.