Unreal Bird #11: Insult

I've published a new working paper on "Lessons for Safer Digital Spaces," drawing on insights from online video games, written with Samantha Bradshaw for the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

Plus, thoughts on Trump's $1.77 billion anti-weaponization slush fund.

(NOTE: I wrote this before news broke on Monday that Trump is likely to drop plans for the weaponization fund. Unanswered, at least to me, is what happens to the IRS lawsuit now? Regardless, I stand by my original thoughts published below.)

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What I'm up to

My working paper with Sam Bradshaw, "Trust, Play, and Platforms: Sharing Lessons for Safer Digital Spaces," is out with the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. The paper was informed by a one-day symposium on video game trust & safety held last fall at NYU Stern's DC campus. Huge thanks to Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat for her support of this work!

(Mariana also runs the Working Group on Gaming and Regulation, whose newsletter I help curate; sign up here.)

Most of my digital-safety-related work has focused on social media. My professional network is filled with people who work at organizations focused on social media. Almost none of those organizations had staff or programs about online games.

Gaming has come a long way as a hobby, a cultural force, and an industry. By some measures it is a larger industry than sports, music, or film. If this surprises you, it may be because "gaming culture" has long invoked the image of teenage boys guzzling Mountain Dew late at night, illuminated only by the light of a screen. But if you regularly play Candy Crush on your phone, you are also a consumer of the games industry. (As for me, I always preferred Sunkist.)

Games probably receive less attention than social media because they are upstream of politics—but this doesn't mean they are irrelevant to politics. The Gamergate fiasco, a faux-scandal which led to mob harassment of women in both the games industry and games journalism, presaged the emergence of the online alt-right. That was twelve years ago; now the alt-right has grown up and it runs our country.

The lack of focus on games is beginning to change as policymakers shift attention from online extremism to child safety. But instead of creating policies for social media and retroactively applying them to games, what could we learn by examining trust & safety within the games industry as a primary subject of analysis? If every game is a platform, then the games industry has many more platforms than the social media industry. Each of those is a laboratory of its own.

This paper also has one of my favorite introductions I've ever written, relaying the story of conflict between the players and moderators of an old online Star Wars game. Read it here.

Insult

Have you been wronged by the federal government, or are you a right-wing podcaster with a victim complex? Either way, President Trump encourages you to apply to his new $1.77 billion slush fund for victims of "weaponization and/or lawfare."

(EDITORS NOTE: Or at least he did until news broke that he plans to drop the fund, with one official saying it had become a "distraction." My original thoughts, published below, stand so long as you switch some verb tenses.)

The fund is a result of Trump's lawsuit against the IRS, which was itself such a brazen act of corruption that under any other president it would be a fast-track to impeachment. As President, Trump was effectively both plaintiff and defendant in that suit, allowing him to strike a deal with himself for our money.

It would be a farce if it weren't so insulting. There is little guidance on who is eligible for the fund but a lawyer for more than 400 January 6 defendants said he would apply on behalf of his clients. When pressed, Vice President Vance declined to say categorically that insurrectionists who assaulted Capitol Police officers would not receive payment from the fund. (Seemingly, he has learned from saying they should not be pardoned, which they were shortly thereafter.)

I also expect self-proclaimed victims of "censorship" (read: content moderation decisions protected by the First Amendment) to apply. A legal settlement just awarded a $150,000 payout from the federal government to Alex Berenson, a COVID-vaccine skeptic whose case was dismissed last year by a federal judge. Renee DiResta has a great overview of this here. In short, Berenson sued the government; the government changed hands in 2024; presumably, the lawyers for the defendant and the new government lawyers high-fived, and now a COVID antivaxxer has some of your tax money.

I spent about ten years working in "counter disinformation" or "disinformation research" or whatever you want to call it. I find it maddeningly ironic that I know colleagues who were actually persecuted by government actors—subpoenaed, hauled in before congressional committees, had their funding cut, lost jobs and fellowships, had visas revoked, and were subjected to online harassment and death threats as a result of the swirling nexus of untrue bullshit politicians said about them. Meanwhile, the people getting payouts will probably be literal seditionists and media personalities whose main skill is whipping their audience into a mouth-foaming frenzy.

As a former professional disinformation researcher and January 6 investigator, this feels like the punchline of a cosmic joke. As an American, it feels like an insult.

Field notes

"American Anti-Immigrant Organizations Are Building a Network Across Europe," Global Project Against Hate & Extremism. 

• GPAHE maps how a network of US anti-immigrant groups built their European beachhead through Orbán-linked Hungarian institutions and is now diversifying into France, Spain, Serbia, and Slovakia. Several staffers from these organizations now hold senior roles at DHS.

"The new rules for killing a data center," Issie Lapowsky. 

• A retired tech executive beat Microsoft in his home of Caledonia, Wisconsin and is sharing his playbook with activists in other states. As for Microsoft, officials are making new promises, including to refrain from seeking property tax reductions for data centers.

"An Incomplete List of Successful Anti-Data Center Legislation," Matthew Gault. 

• A roundup of data center moratoriums, bans, and pending bills from Michigan and South Carolina to Georgia, Maryland, Oklahoma, and even data-center-heavy Virginia, alongside some notable losses, including Maine Governor Janet Mills's veto of what would have been the country's first statewide moratorium.

Snoot watch

Humble plea

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