The Bluestocking, XXXIV: Donald's daughter, wartime spies and unfunny jokes

It's too hot and I need a holiday. So I'm having one. This is a bumper newsletter to make up for that, complete with a bit where I got carried away analysing Facebook.

See you in a few weeks!
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Ivanka and Jared

There is something Murdochian in the way that Kushner seems to be relishing his newfound role as a billionaire outsider, tweaking the more delicate sensibilities that he was once immersed in. Responding to Trump’s left-wing critics, especially in the media, Kushner makes familiar arguments about the reverse intolerance of liberalism, warning, in his Observer letter, about the dangers of political correctness run amok: “If even the slightest infraction against what the speech police have deemed correct speech is instantly shouted down with taunts of ‘racist’ then what is left to condemn the actual racists? What do we call the people who won’t hire minorities or beat others up for their religion?”

What happens when you're a liberal, cool young couple and also related to an absurdly clownish quasi-fascist? Donald Trump's favourite child and her husband are finding out.


The vast right-wing conspiracy

Breitbart’s genius was that he grasped better than anyone else what the early 20th century press barons understood—that most readers don’t approach the news as a clinical exercise in absorbing facts, but experience it viscerally as an ongoing drama, with distinct story lines, heroes, and villains. Breitbart excelled at creating these narratives, an editorial approach that's lived on. “When we do an editorial call, I don’t even bring anything I feel like is only a one-off story, even if it’d be the best story on the site,” says Alex Marlow, the site’s editor in chief. “Our whole mindset is looking for these rolling narratives.” He rattles off the most popular ones, which Breitbart Newscovers intensively from a posture of aggrieved persecution. “The big ones won’t surprise you,” he says. “Immigration, ISIS, race riots, and what we call ‘the collapse of traditional values.’ But I’d say Hillary Clinton is tops.”

The guy who ran Breitbart is now Trump's campaign manager. So that's good.

There is no "technology industry"

This also contributes to spreading tech’s well-known shortcomings around inclusion and diversity into new fields. Today, companies described as tech startups are doing everything from making mayonnaise to preparing grilled cheese sandwiches to delivering pizza. But given that companies ranging from AirBNB to Uber have relied on their status as “tech companies” to systematically shirk inconvenient laws in each new city they enter, we can expect that at least one of these food companies entering the market as part of the “tech industry” are going to similarly find the rules around sanitation and inspection too onerous and use their tech status to evade health regulations.

Anil Dash makes a compelling case that *every* business now uses technology - apps, the internet, GPS, whatever - so talking about Uber and a mayonnaise manufacturer as members of the "tech industry" is meaningless.


Inside Facebook's unintentionally gigantic, hyper-partisan political machine

Individually, these pages have meaningful audiences, but cumulatively, their audience is gigantic: tens of millions of people. On Facebook, they rival the reach of their better-funded counterparts in the political media, whether corporate giants like CNN or The New York Times, or openly ideological web operations like Breitbart or Mic. And unlike traditional media organizations, which have spent years trying to figure out how to lure readers out of the Facebook ecosystem and onto their sites, these new publishers are happy to live inside the world that Facebook has created. Their pages are accommodated but not actively courted by the company and are not a major part of its public messaging about media. But they are, perhaps, the purest expression of Facebook’s design and of the incentives coded into its algorithm — a system that has already reshaped the web and has now inherited, for better or for worse, a great deal of America’s political discourse.

Sorry, there is a theme to this week's newsletter, and it's this: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. There are plenty of factors driving the hyper-polarisation of politics, and social media is one. This NYT story uncovers a group of people who make money from political memes on Facebook. I'd call them activists, but there's not a lot of evidence in the story that they passionately believe in the causes they are advocating - one of them is a Cruz supporter pumping out pro-Trump content for clicks. Another is a former Bernie Bro who can't muster a nice word about Hillary Clinton because his audience share is built on hating her from the primaries.

A couple of things strike me:

1) Facebook incentivises strongly partisan content, because of the way its algorithm rewards sharing. Who wants to share bland procedural pieces or substantive policy analysis? This is clearly something the company has realised and is trying to get ahead of, hence the announcement that "clickbait" headlines would be downgraded in future.
2) Facebook is awesomely powerful. By presenting itself as a neutral platform, it has become the internet - i the same way that AOL pursued a "walled garden" strategy in the 1990s. Understandably, it wants people to stay inside the Facebook ecosystem. And people are pretty happy to do that - most people just want a bit of news in their diet. When I wrote my Jeremy Corbyn on Facebook piece, Labour's digital team claimed that they had reached 1/3 of UK internet users in a single week. (His page now has close to 800,000 followers.)
3) Facebook has "debranded" news organisations. Yes, legacy brands still have name recognition - you spot a New York Times or Guardian piece in your feed - but there are whole swathes of sites which are presented as being on exactly the same level as them, despite their lower staff levels, lower editorial standards (on things like libel and fact-checking) and frankly, lower accuracy. To a normal human (think: someone who's not on Twitter), how much signalling difference do they see between a BBC article and one from Breitbart or the Canary? Facebook is stripping publishers of their authority and putting them all in the same pool of news slurry. Should there be some sort of formal checkmark system of accreditation that you only get as a publisher if you don't publish batshit conspiracy theories? I don't see how that would work (or where the political will comes from to interrogate it), but god I wish there was.
4) Sites that have gone all-in on Facebook are screwed. (Admittedly, in the long term, as Keynes should have said, we're all screwed.) Remember Upworthy? Screwed by algorithm changes. What about Buzzfeed now, perhaps the best mainstream organisation at using Facebook? They're still no more than tenants, and Facebook can hike the rent or change the terms of the lease at any moment. While no organisation can ignore the importance of Facebook sharing, I want to put more resources into building readers who are OUR readers, not drive-bys.

Sinking giggling into the sea

Steve Fielding, an academic, went further and argued in 2011 that in accepting this view of politicians as uniformly corrupt and useless, the public are embracing a dangerous new stereotype, since it ‘can only further reinforce mistrust in the public realm, a mistrust that some political forces seek to exploit’. ‘Comedy,’ he continued, ‘has always relied on stereotypes. There was a time when the Irish were thick; the Scots were careful with money; mothers-in-law fierce and ugly; and the Welsh stole and shagged sheep. The corrupt politician is one such stereotype, one that is neither racist nor sexist and seemingly acceptable to all.’ The idea that politicians are morally inferior to the rest of us is ‘a convenient view, for it means we, the audience, the voters, are not to blame for anything: we are not to blame because we are the victims of a politics gone wrong.’

Here's another thing screwing politics: everything being pre-digested and postmodern. Jonathan Coe on Boris Johnson bons mots makes for chilling reading. (It's also tackled on Malcolm Gladwell's new podcast, but I haven't finished listening to that yet, so I have no opinion.)

Podcast recommendation: Former SAS commander Graeme Lamb on wartime spy Christine Granville. "These girls had balls," he observes halfway through. They certainly did.

Quick links: "Just 4,300 users posted about 145 comments apiece, or 67 percent of all NPR.org comments for the two months." How an obscure Yeah Yeah Yeahs song became the most influential tune of the 21st century. Why women drink. A long, incredible story about Munchausens' by proxy. Hillary Clinton's pitch to women not to put up with stuff. The 12 year-old Trump organiser. Philip "wheeler dealer" Hammond. Theodore Dalrymple on the violence of Raoul Moat and Mohammed Emwazi (although you'll notice something which is missing from his analysis, which is gender). Anne Leibovitz's portrait of the 97-year-old black woman who was the Apollo missions' "human computer". Why we need to "STFU about the MSM" - a really good piece on how anti-media rhetoric misses the real problems with the media. The trolls are winning, argues TIME (I don't buy the thesis, but the piece is full of fascinating detail.)

Pretty stoked for the new series of Strictly, so here's a picture of Ed Balls:

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