Weekly Scroll: The Final EnKirkification
Cross-cultural Twitter, a very viral Erika Kirk post, and Section 230 in danger
Japanification
Let’s kick off with something that was, for the most part, incredibly wholesome. The App Formerly Known As Twitter changed its algorithm last week and started promoting more posts into the For You feed from other countries, automatically translating using AI. In practice, the two biggest languages on X are Japanese and English1, so this meant a lot of English-language posts showing up for Japanese users and Japanese posts for English speaking users.
X/Twitter has always been wildly popular in Japan - there are actually more daily active Japanese users than any other country, including America. And the collision of two userbases that had existed completely separately until now has been pretty fun!
There’s cultural sharing of all kinds. Americans are explaining the nuances of ‘lowkirkenuinely’. Japanese folks are talking about how friendly Americans are. Both sides are creating race and language-swapped versions of each other’s memes, including this Japanese chad:
For some reason, the main topic for Japanese users has been American Barbecue. Seriously so, so many posts about BBQ. Turning loose Japanese posts has been incredible for the quality of my timeline. But as Ben Braddock points out, the ease of this change suggests that a lot of the miserable shit you normally see on the X feed is there by choice. And because it’s the hellsite, the Japanese racists and American racists have found and started promoting each other.
The Final Stages of EnKirkification
The parody post from comedian Druski titled How Conservative Women in America act is currently sitting at 1.2 million likes and 180M views. It’s legitimately one of the biggest videos of any kind on X in years, and it’s worth talking about how both Charlie and Erika Kirk became such enormous memes in the wake of his death.
Charlie Kirk was always fodder for memes, even before his death. Whether it was TP-USA formatted memes or just his face getting continuously smaller, he was always a figure of fun and derision for everyone who wasn’t a diehard pro-Trump conservative.
After Kirk was murdered, the political right spent a great deal of energy and effort to deify him, and turn a man who was effectively a digital Rush Limbaugh into Martin Luther King. People were fired from their jobs for making Kirk jokes. And the backlash to this How-Dare-You attitude is what led to Kirk’s memeification:
The practice is so widespread and Kirk’s face is being plastered on so many different kinds of images that it may actually be poisoning AI inputs and causing every image to look like Kirk. And it’s a direct backlash to the attempts to make him a martyr, as analyst Aidan Walker notes:
“The internet wanted to take control of his image. People took these Kirkification memes and used them as a way to destabilize whatever image conservatives wanted to create. And so I don’t think anyone will be able to look at Kirk 100 percent seriously now.”
This is the backdrop for the 1.2 million likes above mocking Erika Kirk. I’ve resisted doing any commentary on Kirk’s widow for almost half a year now, out of the basic belief that grieving family members should be given some grace and shouldn’t be subjected to the discourse cycle if they don’t want to. But as Kirk has continued growing her own profile, giving speeches, raising money, and making herself a political figure, that stance can’t really hold.
I don’t really care to get into the why of Erika Kirk. Maybe she’s just publicity and fame hungry, maybe she’s a true believer, or maybe she’s just been unwittingly sucked into a machine that profits when she makes embarrassing public appearances. But whatever the reason for her publicity spree, Druski’s video seems like the dam bursting, the final nail in the coffin of the Kirk family’s efforts and seriousness and respectability. The meme has spread so far that non-Kirk conservatives are getting hit with collateral damage.
Is Section 230 in danger?
A jury in Los Angeles found that both Meta and YouTube were negligent in a landmark trial concerning young people and social media, and awarded $3 million in damages to a young woman who said that she became addicted to the platforms. Just a day earlier, Meta was ordered by a New Mexico court to pay $375 million for violating state law and endangering children.
Long time readers will know that I’m very aware of the potential harms that social media can have on young people. I’m Haidt-pilled. And yet I’m pretty uncomfortable with the logical consequences of allowing individual users to sue platforms for emotional distress. The argument in this case was essentially that as a minor, the plaintiff was depressed and the platforms made her addicted and even more depressed with clever algorithmic design, infinite scrolling, etc. I hate to hand it to Taylor Lorenz, but I’m not sure she’s wrong here:
‘Social media made me depressed’ just doesn’t seem like a valid reason to be able to sue social media companies for millions of dollars. Imagine saying the same thing about cable news, or Spotify, or any other digital product. If reading the New York Times makes me anxious, is that worthy of legal damages? Can I sue Spotify’s algorithms if they realize I like sad, depressing music and keep feeding it to me? And if the answer is yes - are you prepared for the ramifications of that answer? It’s hard to see how social media as a business model could survive if every mentally ill person has carte blanche to sue at any time. Section 230 shields websites from being sued on the basis of user-generated content (it’s why you can’t sue corporate Substack if an individual blog libels you), and the First Amendment protects publishers. I’m very curious to see if this ruling will hold up on appeal, because I don’t see how it’s compatible with those two principles.
Of course, given that Taylor Lorenz was involved she wasn’t content to let it sit with ‘Section 230 is good and trying to undermine it is bad’. She also said, well…
Far be it from me to tell Taylor what to do, but someone who admits they have a daily average screen time of more than sixteen hours per day probably shouldn’t be the face of ‘social media addiction is fake’.
Links
Repeat the mantra - It’s always in Infinite Scroll first. This time, it looks like The Atlantic and The Guardian only took a year to figure out what vice signaling is. And not a single backlink, sad!
OpenAI has shut down video-generating app Sora. There are two basic reasons why this is happening. The first is simply that generating video is brutally expensive, even when compared to other AI uses. AI companies are virtually all in ‘happy to burn money startup mode’, but there’s a limit. There were rumors that training the next generation of Sora was going to be so resource intensive and require so much processing power it would slow down timelines on the company’s main product, ChatGPT. The second reason Sora’s dying is that OpenAI was attempting to grow it as a social media platform, not an individualized consumer application like ChatGPT. Much like Meta’s Vibes, the idea of an all-AI generated feed never took off at all.
Twitter’s head of product Nikita Bier announced that they would be demonetizing accounts that comment on American politics while being overseas. Twitter’s new monetization scheme has created an entire industry of right-leaning ragebait accounts, a political slop economy chasing impressions any way they can, and it’s become a real problem for the site. The change was almost universally applauded, with the sole exception of said right-wing international accounts… who appealed directly to Elon Musk and got him to suspend the change.
It’s more than I had time to cover here, but friend of the blog Cartoons Hate Her had a great summary of why ‘anal sex’ and ‘reflect on the blowjob’ were trending last weekend.
It’s been a rough week for Clavicular - first he was arrested for battery in Florida, he’s under investigation by the Fish & Wildlife authorities for shooting up a dead alligator, and was somehow banned from Kick, the streaming site whose allure is letting any malcontent freak stream anything at all. And don’t forget last month’s drug charges in Arizona! The predictable consequences of looksmaxxing and brain-minning, I suppose.
For all the bizarre headline enjoyers out there - Charlie Kirk’s Mentor Jeff Webb, the Father of Modern Cheerleading, Dies in Freak Pickleball Accident
CBS News is facing a catastrophic ratings wipeout under Bari Weiss.
Baltimore is first U.S. city to sue over Grok deepfake porn as legal pressure mounts on Musk’s xAI.
The rise and fall of Fruit Love Island.
Posts
There are actually more active daily X users in Japan
I know you are reluctant to police the Internet, but in the same way that governments put restrictions on companies who generate negative environmental externalities (water pollution, air pollution, etc) there needs to be some way to encourage social media companies to price in the societal costs of the negative social externalities they're creating. I don't love litigation for this, but I don't have a better solution either and social media is doing real harm to society, especially to children.