"feed"

HELEN BUYNISKI—Charlie Warzel, a Times columnist who styles himself an expert in “online radicalization,” has implored his readers not to “go down the rabbit hole,” in a Thursday op-ed luridly depicting the dangers of evaluating new information, questing out into the internet armed with nothing but one’s own mind. Thinking critically can lead to giving away one’s precious attention to dastardly conspiracy theorists whose only apparent goal is to dupe you, he warns, as opposed to the friendly narrative managers at the New York Times, who just want to make sure your brain is quivering with the required fear quota – of viruses, Russians, your neighbors, terrorists, white people or, now, the capacity for believing wrongthink lurking within your own brain.

ALAN MACLEOD—While attempting to combat the spread of misinformation is a laudable goal, those calling most loudly for it are often those most responsible for pushing some of the most dangerous lies themselves. Furthermore, the effect has been to limit public debate and discourage legitimate criticism of those in power. Fake news and conspiracy theories continue to run rampant on the Internet, but legitimate criticism to power is harder to find every day.

Conservative Twitter has been in full gloat-mode after the Special Counsel team called a BuzzFeed report claiming Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen lied to Congress on his boss’ orders “not accurate.” Twitter has been set alight by a sudden twist in a BuzzFeed story that claimed to have proof that President Donald Trump directly instructed his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie before Congress on his plans to build a hotel in Moscow that would have seen him meeting Russian officials.