【附录】

 

范志红：不吃早饭到底有多伤身？

《纽约时报》Sorry, There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

 

 

 

On the first day of the sprawling RSA security industry conference in San Francisco, a giant screen covering the wall of the Moscone Center’s cavernous lobby cycles through the names and headshots of keynote speakers: steely-eyed National Security Agency director Michael Rogers in a crisp military uniform; bearded and besuited Whitfield Diffie and Ron Rivest, legendary inventors of seminal encryption protocols that made the Internet safe for communication and commerce. And then there’s Moxie Marlinspike, peering somberly into the distance wearing a bicycle jersey and an 18-inch-tall helmet shaped like a giant spear of asparagus. “It was the only picture I could find,” Marlinspike deadpans as we walk into the building.

Even without the vegetable headwear, Marlinspike’s wire-thin 6'2" frame and topknot of blond dreadlocks doesn’t fit the usual profile of the crypto world’s spooks and academ­ics, nor RSA’s corporate types. Walking toward the ball­room where he’s set to speak on the annual Cryptographers’ Panel, however, he tells me it’s not his first time at the conference.

In fact, when Marlinspike made his debut visit to RSA 20 years ago, as a teenager, he wasn’t invited. Lured by the promise of seeing his cryptographer heroes in person, he snuck in, somehow snagging a confer­ence badge without paying the $1,000 registration fee. Later, he made the mistake of handing it off to friends who were more interested in scoring lunch than in hearing about pseudo-random-­number generators. They were spotted and kicked out. RSA organizers must have gone so far as to report Marlinspike’s mischief to law enforcement, he says; years later he requested his FBI file and discovered a reference to the incident.

A middle-aged man in a sports coat and jeans approaches us, carrying a Wall Street Journal. He shakes Marlin­spike’s hand and thanks him for creating the encrypted messaging app Signal, which the man says was recommended to him by a friend, a former FBI agent. Marlinspike looks back at me with raised eyebrows.

Signal, widely considered the most secure and easiest-to-use free encrypted messaging and voice-calling app, is the reason he’s been invited to speak as part of the very same crypto Jedi Council he had worshipped as a teenager. Marlinspike designed Signal to bring uncrackable encryp­tion to regular ­people. And though he hadn’t yet revealed it at the time of the conference in March, Signal’s encryption protocol had been integrated into WhatsApp, the world’s most popular messaging app, with over a billion users.

“I think law enforce­ment should be difficult. And it should actually be possible to break the law.”

For any cypherpunk with an FBI file, it’s already an interesting morning. At the very moment the Cryptographers’ Panel takes the stage, Apple and the FBI are at the height of a six-week battle, arguing in front of the House Judiciary Commit­tee over the FBI’s demand that Apple help it access an encrypted ­iPhone 5c owned by San Bernardino killer Syed Rizwan Farook. Before that hearing ends, Apple’s general counsel will argue that doing so would set a dangerous legal precedent, inviting foreign govern­ments to make similar demands, and that the crypto-cracking software could be co-opted by criminals or spies.

The standoff quickly becomes the topic of the RSA panel, and Marlinspike waits politely for his turn to speak. Then he makes a far simpler and more radical argument than any advanced by Apple: Perhaps law enforcement shouldn’t be omniscient. “They already have a tremendous amount of information,” he tells the packed ballroom. He points out that the FBI had accessed Farook’s call logs as well as an older phone backup. “What the FBI seems to be saying is that we need this because we might be missing something. Obliquely, they’re asking us to take steps toward a world where that isn’t possible. And I don’t know if that’s the world we want to live in.”

Marlinspike follows this remark with a statement that practically no one else in the privacy community is willing to make in public: that yes, people will use encryption to do illegal things. And that may just be the whole point. “I actually think that law enforcement should be difficult,” Marlinspike says, looking calmly out at the crowd. “And I think it should actually be possible to break the law.”

Over the past several years, Marlinspike has quietly positioned himself at the front lines of a quarter-century-long war between advocates of encryption and law enforcement. Since the first strong encryption tools became publicly available in the early ’90s, the government has warned of the threat posed by “going dark”—that such software would cripple American police departments and intelligence agencies, allowing terrorists and organized criminals to operate with impunity. In 1993 it unsuccessfully tried to implement a backdoor system called the Clipper Chip to get around encryption. In 2013, Edward Snowden’s leaks revealed that the NSA had secretly sabotaged a widely used crypto standard in the mid- 2000s and that since 2007 the agency had been ingesting a smorgasbord of tech firms’ data with and without their cooperation. Apple’s battle with the FBI over Farook’s iPhone destroyed any pretense of a truce.

As the crypto war once again intensifies, Signal and its core protocol have emerged as darlings of the privacy community. Johns Hopkins computer science professor Matthew Green recalls that the first time he audited Marlinspike’s code, he was so impressed that he “literally discovered a line of drool running down my face.”

While Marlinspike may present himself as an eccentric outsider, his ability to write freakishly secure software has aligned him with some of the tech industry’s biggest companies. For a time he led Twitter’s security team. His deal with WhatsApp means that the Facebook-owned company now uses his tools to encrypt every message, image, video, and voice call that travels over its global network; in effect Marlinspike has enabled the largest end-to-end encrypted communications network in history, transmitting more texts than every phone company in the world combined. In May, Google revealed that it too would integrate Signal—into the incognito mode of its messaging app Allo. And last month, Facebook Messenger began its own rollout of the protocol in an encryption feature called “secret conversations,” which promises to bring Signal to hundreds of millions more users. “The entire world is making this the standard for encrypted messaging,” Green says.

So far, governments aren’t having much luck pushing back. In March, Brazilian police briefly jailed a Facebook exec after WhatsApp failed to comply with a surveillance order in a drug investigation. The same month, The New York Times revealed that WhatsApp had received a wiretap order from the US Justice Department. The company couldn’t have complied in either case, even if it wanted to. Marlin­spike’s crypto is designed to scramble communications in such a way that no one but the people on either end of the conversation can decrypt them (see sidebar). “Moxie has brought us a world-class, state-of-the-art, end-to-end encryption system,” WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton says. “I want to emphasize: world-class.”

For Marlinspike, a failed wiretap can mean a small victory. A few days after Snowden’s first leaks, Marlin­spike posted an essay to his blog titled “We Should All Have Something to Hide,” emphasizing that privacy allows people to experi­ment with lawbreaking as a precursor for social progress. “Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100 percent effective, such that any potential offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed,” he wrote. “How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same-sex marriage should be permitted?”

He admits that dangerous criminals and terrorists may use apps like Signal and WhatsApp. (ISIS has even circulated a manual recommending Signal.) But he argues that those elements have always had the incentive and ability to encrypt their communications with tougher-to-use tools like the encryption software PGP. His work, he says, is to make those protections possible for the average person without much tech savvy.

To some, Marlinspike’s logic isn’t quite as airtight as his code. Not all criminals are tech masterminds—the San Bernardino killers, for example. Former NSA attorney and Brookings Institution fellow Susan Hennessey wonders who determines which lawbreakers deserve to be wiretapped, if not a democratically elected government? Americans have long agreed, she argues, to enable a certain degree of police surveillance to prevent truly abhorrent crimes like child pornography, human trafficking, and terrorism. “We could set up our laws to reject surveillance outright, but we haven’t,” she says. “We’ve made a collective agreement that we derive value from some degree of government intru­sion.” A spokesman for the FBI, when asked to comment on Marlinspike’s law-breaking philosophy, replied, “The First Amendment protects people who hold whatever view they want. Some people are members of the KKK. I’m not going to engage in a debate with him.”

Marlinspike isn’t particularly interested in a debate, either; his mind was made up long ago, during years as an anarchist living on the fringes of society. “From very early in my life I’ve had this idea that the cops can do whatever they want, that they’re not on your team,” Marlinspike told me. “That they’re an armed, racist gang.”

Marlinspike views encryption as a preventative measure against a slide toward Orwellian fascism that makes protest and civil disobedience impossible, a threat he traces as far back as J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI wiretapping and blackmailing of Martin Luther King Jr. “Moxie is compelled by the troublemakers of history and their stories,” says Tyler Rein­hard, a designer who worked on Signal. “He sees encryption tools not as taking on the state directly but making sure that there’s still room for people to have those stories.”

Ask Marlinspike to tell his own story, and—no surprise for a privacy zealot—he’ll often answer with diversions, mono­syllables, and guarded smiles. But anyone who’s crossed paths with him seems to have an outsize anecdote: how he once biked across San Francisco carrying a 40-foot-tall sailboat mast. The time he decided to teach himself to pilot a hot-air balloon, bought a used one from Craigslist, and spent a month on crutches after crashing it in the desert. One friend swears he’s seen Marlinspike play high-stakes rock-paper-scissors dozens of times—with bets of hundreds of dollars or many hours of his time on the line—and has never seen him lose.

But before Marlinspike was a subcultural contender for “most interesting man in the world,” he was a kid growing up with a different and far less interesting name on his birth certificate, somewhere in a region of central Georgia that he describes as “one big strip mall.” His parents—who called him Moxie as a nickname—separated early on. He lived mostly with his mother, a secretary and paralegal at a string of companies. Any other family details, like his real name, are among the personal subjects he prefers not to comment on.

Marlinspike hated the curiosity-killing drudgery of school. But he had the idea to try programming videogames on an Apple II in the school library. The computer had a Basic interpreter but no hard drive or even a floppy disk to save his code. Instead, he’d retype simple programs again and again from scratch with every reboot, copying in commands from manuals to make shapes fill the screen. Browsing the computer section of a local bookstore, the preteen Marlin­spike found a copy of 2600 magazine, the catechism of the ’90s hacker scene. After his mother bought a cheap desk­top computer with a modem, he used it to trawl bulletin board services, root friends’ computers to make messages appear on their screens, and run a “war-dialer” program overnight, reaching out to distant servers at random.

To a bored middle schooler, it was all a revelation. “You look around and things don’t feel right, but you’ve never been anywhere else and you don’t know what you’re missing,” Marlin­spike says. “The Internet felt like a secret world hidden within this one.”

By his teens, Marlinspike was working after school for a German software company, writing developer tools. After graduating high school—barely—he headed to Silicon Valley in 1999. “I thought it would be like a William Gibson novel,” he says. “Instead it was just office parks and highways.” Jobless and homeless, he spent his first nights in San Francisco sleeping in Alamo Square Park beside his desktop computer.

Eventually, Marlinspike found a programming job at BEA-owned Web­Logic. But almost as soon as he’d broken in to the tech industry, he wanted out, bored by the routine of spending 40 hours a week in front of a keyboard. “I thought, ‘I’m supposed to do this every day for the rest of my life?’” he recalls. “I got interested in experimenting with a way to live that didn’t involve working.”

For the next few years, Marlinspike settled into a Bay Area scene that was, if not cyberpunk, at least punk. He started squatting in abandoned buildings with friends, eventually moving into an old postal service warehouse. He began bumming rides to political protests around the country and uploading free audio books to the web of himself reading anarchist theorists like Emma Goldman.

He took up hitchhiking, then he upgraded his wanderlust to hopping freight trains. And in 2003 he spontaneously decided to learn to sail. He spent a few hundred dollars—all the money he had—on a beat-up 27-foot Catalina and rashly set out alone from San Francisco’s harbor for Mexico, teaching himself by trial and error along the way. The next year, Marlin­spike filmed his own DIY sailing documentary, called Hold Fast. It follows his journey with three friends as they navigate a rehabilitated, leaky sloop called the Pestilence from Florida to the Bahamas, finally ditching the boat in the Dominican Republic.

Even today, Marlinspike describes those reckless adven­tures in the itinerant underground as a kind of peak in his life. “Looking back, I and everyone I knew was looking for that secret world hidden in this one,” he says, repeating the same phrase he’d used to describe the early Internet. “I think we were already there.”

If anything can explain Marlinspike’s impulse for privacy, it may be that time spent off society’s grid: a set of experi­ences that have driven him to protect a less observed way of life. “I think he likes the idea that there is an unknown,” says Trevor Perrin, a security engineer who helped Marlinspike design Signal’s core protocol. “That the world is not a completely surveilled thing.”

 

The Keys to Privacy

Beneath its ultrasimple interface, Moxie Marlinspike’s crypto protocol hides a Rube Goldberg machine of automated moving parts. Here’s how it works.

 

Through those years, Marlinspike took for granted that authority was the enemy. He describes harbor patrols and train yard guards who harassed him and his fellow hobo voyagers. Cops evicted him from squats, hassled him in the towns he and his friends passed through, and impounded their car on what seemed to be thin pretenses. But merely going to demonstrations never felt like the right way to challenge the world’s power structures.

Instead, around 2007 he turned his political interests back to the digital world, where he’d seen a slow shift toward post–Patriot Act surveillance. “When I was young, there was something fun about the insecurity of the Internet,” he says, with its bounty of hackable flaws available to benign prank­sters. “Now Internet insecurity is used by people I don’t like against people I do: the government against the people.”

In 2008, Marlinspike settled in a decrepit brick mansion in Pittsburgh and started churning out a torrent of security software. The next year he appeared for the first time at the Black Hat security conference to demonstrate a program he called SSLstrip, which exposed a critical flaw in web encryption. In 2010 he debuted GoogleSharing, a Firefox plugin that let anyone use ­Google services anonymously.

That year, with the growth of smartphones, Marlin­spike saw his biggest opportunity yet: to secure mobile communica­tions. Helped by a friend who was getting a robotics PhD at Carnegie Mellon, he launched Whisper Systems, along with a pair of Android apps: Text­Secure, to encrypt text messages, and RedPhone, to protect voice calls. Anti-­authoritarian ideals were built in from the beginning; when the Arab Spring exploded across North Africa, Whisper Systems was ready with an Arabic version to aid protesters.

Marlinspike dreamed of bringing his encryption tools to millions of people, an ambition that required some sort of business model to fund them. He moved back to San Francisco to promote Whisper Systems as a for-profit startup. The company had barely gotten off the ground when Twitter approached him with a buyout offer, hoping to use his expertise to fix the shambolic security that had led to repeated hacks of celebrity and journalist accounts. The terms of the resulting deal were never made public. Marlin­spike describes it only as “more money than I’d ever encountered before. But that’s a low bar.”

Marlinspike became the director of product security at Twitter. A coworker remembers that his expertise was “revered” within the company. But his greater goal was to alter the platform so that it didn’t keep logs of users’ IP addresses, which would make it impossible for authorities to demand someone’s identity, as they’d done with one Occupy Wall Street protester in 2012.

That project clashed with the priorities of executives, a coworker says. “Moxie couldn’t care less if Twitter made a lot of money,” the former colleague says. “He was more interested in protecting users.” Meanwhile, his contract stipulated that he’d have to work for four years before cashing out the stock he’d been paid for his startup. Marlinspike’s cypherpunk apotheosis would have to wait.

One fall evening after work, Marlinspike and a friend made a simple plan to sail a 15-foot catamaran out 600 feet into the San Francisco Bay, where they’d drop anchor and row back in a smaller boat, leaving the sailboat to wait for their next adventure. (Anarchist sailors don’t like to pay dockage fees.) Marlinspike headed out into the bay on the catamaran with his friend following in a rowboat.

Only after Marlinspike had passed the pier did he realize the wind was blowing at a treacherous 30 miles an hour. He decided to turn back but discovered that he’d misrigged the craft and had to fix his mistake. As the sun sank toward the horizon, he shouted to his friend that they should give up and return to shore, and the friend rowed back to safety.

Then, without warning, the wind gusted. The catamaran flipped, throwing Marlinspike into the ice-cold water. “The suddenness of it was unbelievable, as if I was on a tiny model made of paper which someone had simply flicked with their finger,” he would later write in a blog post about the experience.

Soon the boat was fully upside down, pinned in place by the wind. Marlinspike tried to swim for shore. But the pier was too far away, the waves too strong, and he could feel his body succumbing to hypothermia, blackness creeping into the edges of his vision. He headed back to the overturned boat. Alone now in the dark, he clung to the hull, took stock of the last hour’s events, and realized, with slow and lonely certainty, that he was very likely going to die.

When a tugboat finally chanced upon his soaked and frozen form he was nearly unconscious and had to be towed up with a rope. When he arrived at the hospital, Marlinspike says, the nurses told him his temperature was so low their digital thermometers couldn’t register it. As he recovered over the next days, he had the sort of realization that sometimes results from a near-death experience. “It definitely sharpened my focus,” he says of the incident. “It made me question what I was doing with my life.”

A normal person might have quit sailing. Instead, Marlinspike quit Twitter. A year and a day after he had started, he walked away from over $1 million in company stock.

Marlinspike quickly picked up where he’d left off. In early 2013 he relaunched his startup as an open source project called Open Whisper Systems. To fund it, he turned to Dan Meredith, director of the Open Technology Fund, a group supported by the Broad­casting Board of Governors, best known for running Radio Free Europe. Meredith had long admired Marlinspike’s encryption apps. As a former security tech at Al Jazeera, he had relied on them to protect reporters and sources during the Arab Spring. “They were what our most sensitive sources used,” Meredith says. “I knew Moxie could do this, and we had the money to make it possible.” The OTF gave Open Whisper Systems around $500,000 in its first year and in total has funneled close to $2.3 million to the group.

With that funding and more from wealthy donors that Marlinspike declines to name, he began recruiting devel­opers and hosting them at periodic retreats in Hawaii, where they’d alternate surfing and coding. In quick succession, Open Whisper Systems released Signal and then versions for Android and the Chrome browser. (Open Whisper Systems has since integrated changes from dozens of open source contributors but still uses the same cryptographic skeleton laid out by Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin in 2013.)

Marlinspike’s time at Twitter had given him an ambitious sense of scale: He was determined to encrypt core chunks of the Internet, not just its fringes. By chance, he met a Whats­App engineer at a family reunion his girlfriend at the time threw at his house. Through that connection, Marlinspike wangled a meeting with WhatsApp’s cofounder Brian Acton. Later, Marlinspike met with the company’s other cofounder, Jan Koum, who had grown up in Soviet Ukraine under the constant threat of KGB eavesdropping.

Both men were almost immediately interested in using Marlinspike’s protocols to protect WhatsApp’s international users, particularly its massive user bases in privacy-loving Germany and surveillance regimes in the Middle East and South America. “We were aligned pretty early,” Acton says. “When we got past the hairstyle, we were like, ‘Let’s get down to business.’”

In a hotel room above San Francisco’s Soma district a few hours after his RSA panel, Marlinspike pulls out a slim laptop and enters his password to decrypt its hard drive. Or rather, attempts to; the string of characters is so long and complex that he mistypes it three times and, with a slightly embarrassed grin, has to reboot the computer. Finally he succeeds and opens a video file. It’s a rough cut of an ad for Signal he’s hoping to spread online, a montage of footage of the Russian punk protest band Pussy Riot, Daniel Ellsberg, Jesse Owens, Hong Kong’s pro-­democracy Umbrella protesters, and Martin Luther King Jr. “They tell us to stay quiet and follow the rules,” a rough voice intones over the images. “We believe in the power of your words … Speak up, send a message.”

Marlinspike’s intention with the spot, whose script he wrote, was to create a “Nike ad for privacy,” he says. “Nike has a boring product. They don’t talk about the shoes. They celebrate great athletes. We’re trying to do the same thing, celebrating people with a contestational relationship to power. Activists, whistle-blowers, journalists, artists.”

Today, those people include Edward Snowden, who has written that he uses Signal “every day.” (Marlinspike recently visited the exiled whistle-blower in Moscow.) Laura Poitras, the Pulitzer- and Oscar-­winning recipient of Snowden’s NSA leaks, recommends it to docu­mentary filmmakers and journalists. Women’s rights activists in Latin America who help women find abortions use Signal. So do North Korean defectors evading Kim Jong-un’s spies. Attorneys at the National Lawyers Guild use it to speak about clients. Members of Hands Up United, one of the groups leading the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri, two years ago, started using Signal after noticing police cars following them home or parked outside of their meetings and strange tones and dropped calls on their cell phones. (The Intercept revealed last summer that the Department of Homeland Security monitored the protesters.) “Signal gave us so much confidence to continue our work,” says Hands Up United organizer Idalin Bobé.

But these are only the early adopters in Marlinspike’s master plan. He outlines his endgame: In the past, government-friendly phone companies have practically partnered with law enforcement to make wiretaps easy. Now people are increasingly shifting to what he calls overlay services—apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger—to communicate. And that switch offers a chance to start fresh, with a communications infrastructure that can be built to resist surveillance. “The big win for us is when a billion people are using WhatsApp and they don’t even know it’s encrypted,” Marlinspike says. “At this point, I think we’ve already won the future.”

The next day, Marlinspike is rushing over to Open Whisper Systems headquarters, where he’s late for a meeting. As I speed-walk to keep up with his long legs, he grouses about the day-to-day of running a software project: the bug reports and constant tweaks to keep up with operating systems’ improvements, the deadening hours of sitting in front of a computer.

Marlinspike surprises me by admitting that he looks forward to the moment when he can quit. “Someday Signal will fade away,” he states unsentimentally. Instead, he says, Open Whisper System’s legacy will be the changes Signal will have inspired in better-funded, for-profit communi­cation apps.

That time may not be so far off. “I don’t really want to do this with the rest of my life,” Marlin­spike says. “Eventually, you have to declare victory.”

But cypherpunks like Marlinspike—let’s be honest—haven’t yet won the crypto war. In fact, the war may be unwinnable by either side. If the rise of end-to-end encrypted messaging enables the sort of benign law breaking Marlinspike has preached, sooner or later it will also shield some indefen­sible crimes. And that means every technological move toward privacy will be answered with a legal one aimed at shifting the equilibrium back toward surveillance: If law enforcement continues to be foiled by uncrackable encryption, it will come back with an order for “technical assistance,” demanding companies weaken their security measures and rewrite their code to help the cops, as the FBI demanded of Apple. Some form of crypto backdoor might even be built in secret. And Congress still threatens to advance legislation that could ban user-­controlled encryption outright.

But these legal and political battles may not be Marlin­spike’s to fight. “He definitely romanticizes being an amateur,” says one particularly frank friend. “He likes to give up once he’s an expert.” Marlinspike, she says, seeks the “zero point, when you have nothing to lose, when you have no property, no lover, nothing to hold you back.”

I’m reminded of that underlying restlessness on the last evening I spend with Marlinspike, at a Sunday night screening of Hold Fast, hosted by a sailing club at the Berkeley Marina. As his doc plays to a crowd of a few dozen people, we sit in the back next to a wood-burning stove, with a spring storm churning the bay outside the window behind us.

Early in the film, the narration goes off on a tangent, telling the story of Bernard Moitessier, whom Marlinspike describes reverentially as a sailing mystic. In 1969, Moites­sier was winning the Golden Globe, a solo, globe-circling yacht race. Moitessier, a monklike eccentric, didn’t even carry a radio, instead using a slingshot to hurl film canisters containing messages to nearby ships. Just as Moitessier was set to finish ahead of his competitors in Plymouth, England, he shot off a message rejecting the competition and explaining that he would rather simply keep sailing for the Pacific Islands. “I am continuing nonstop because I am happy at sea,” the note read, “and perhaps because I want to save my soul.”

When the screening ends, the lights come up and Marlin­spike takes questions. A middle-aged woman asks him what he’s doing now, nine years after the film’s release. Along with plenty of other people in this audience, she knows him only as Moxie Marlinspike the rogue sailor, not as a cryptographer.

Marlinspike takes a second to think, as if he’s never actually considered the question before. “I don’t know,” he says finally, sighing with what sounds like sincere uncertainty. “Maybe I should go back to sailing cheap.”

The crowd laughs at Marlinspike’s show of self-effacing confusion. But he seems to mean what he says. And over their heads, out the window, past the bay, lies the Pacific Ocean: dark, unknown, and inviting.

 

 

 

 

《纽约时报》Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine

How a strange new class of media outlet has arisen to take over our news feeds

 

 

Open your Facebook feed. What do you see? A photo of a close friend’s child. An automatically generated slide show commemorating six years of friendship between two acquaintances. An eerily on-target ad for something you’ve been meaning to buy. A funny video. A sad video. A recently live video. Lots of video; more video than you remember from before. A somewhat less-on-target ad. Someone you saw yesterday feeling blessed. Someone you haven’t seen in 10 years feeling worried.

 

And then: A family member who loves politics asking, “Is this really who we want to be president?” A co-worker, whom you’ve never heard talk about politics, asking the same about a different candidate. A story about Donald Trump that “just can’t be true” in a figurative sense. A story about Donald Trump that “just can’t be true” in a literal sense. A video of Bernie Sanders speaking, overlaid with text, shared from a source you’ve never seen before, viewed 15 million times. An article questioning Hillary Clinton’s honesty; a headline questioning Donald Trump’s sanity. A few shares that go a bit too far: headlines you would never pass along yourself but that you might tap, read and probably not forget.

 

Maybe you’ve noticed your feed becoming bluer; maybe you’ve felt it becoming redder. Either way, in the last year, it has almost certainly become more intense. You’ve seen a lot of media sources you don’t recognize and a lot of posts bearing no memorable brand at all. You’ve seen politicians and celebrities and corporations weigh in directly; you’ve probably seen posts from the candidates themselves. You’ve seen people you’re close to and people you’re not, with increasing levels of urgency, declare it is now time to speak up, to take a stand, to set aside allegiances or hangups or political correctness or hate.

 

Facebook, in the years leading up to this election, hasn’t just become nearly ubiquitous among American internet users; it has centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way. According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook. These are approximate exterior dimensions and can tell us only so much. But we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.

 

The Facebook product, to users in 2016, is familiar yet subtly expansive. Its algorithms have their pick of text, photos and video produced and posted by established media organizations large and small, local and national, openly partisan or nominally unbiased. But there’s also a new and distinctive sort of operation that has become hard to miss: political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook, uniquely positioned and cleverly engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the news feed. These are news sources that essentially do not exist outside of Facebook, and you’ve probably never heard of them. They have names like Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle; Addicting Info; RightAlerts; Being Liberal; Opposing Views; Fed-Up Americans; American News; and hundreds more. Some of these pages have millions of followers; many have hundreds of thousands.

 

Using a tool called CrowdTangle, which tracks engagement for Facebook pages across the network, you can see which pages are most shared, liked and commented on, and which pages dominate the conversation around election topics. Using this data, I was able to speak to a wide array of the activists and entrepreneurs, advocates and opportunists, reporters and hobbyists who together make up 2016’s most disruptive, and least understood, force in media.

 

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.

 

 

In 2006, when Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college to run his rapidly expanding start-up, Mark Provost was a student at Rogers State University in Claremore, Okla., and going through a rough patch. He had transferred restlessly between schools, and he was taking his time to graduate; a stock-picking hobby that grew into a promising source of income had fallen apart. His outlook was further darkened by the financial crisis and by the years of personal unemployment that followed. When the Occupy movement began, he quickly got on board. It was only then, when Facebook was closing in on its billionth user, that he joined the network.

 

Now 36, Provost helps run US Uncut, a left-leaning Facebook page and website with more than 1.5 million followers, about as many as MSNBC has, from his apartment in Philadelphia. (Sample headlines: “Bernie Delegates Want You to See This DNC Scheme to Silence Them” and “This Sanders Delegate Unleashing on Hillary Clinton Is Going Absolutely Viral.”) He frequently contributes to another popular page, The Other 98%, which has more than 2.7 million followers.

 

Occupy got him on Facebook, but it was the 2012 election that showed him its potential. As he saw it, that election was defined by social media. He mentioned a set of political memes that now feel generationally distant: Clint Eastwood’s empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention and Mitt Romney’s debate gaffe about “binders full of women.” He thought it was a bit silly, but he saw in these viral moments a language in which activists like him could spread their message.

 

Provost’s page now communicates frequently in memes, images with overlaid text. “May I suggest,” began one, posted in May 2015, when opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership was gaining traction, “the first 535 jobs we ship overseas?” Behind the text was a photo of Congress. Many are more earnest. In an image posted shortly thereafter, a photo of Bernie Sanders was overlaid with a quote: “If Germany, Denmark, Sweden and many more provide tuition-free college,” read the setup, before declaring in larger text, “we should be doing the same.” It has been shared more than 84,000 times and liked 75,000 more. Not infrequently, this level of zeal can cross into wishful thinking. A post headlined “Did Hillary Clinton Just Admit on LIVE TV That Her Iraq War Vote Was a Bribe?” was shared widely enough to merit a response from Snopes, which called it “quite a stretch.”

 

This year, political content has become more popular all across the platform: on homegrown Facebook pages, through media companies with a growing Facebook presence and through the sharing habits of users in general. But truly Facebook-native political pages have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture. This strange new class of media organization slots seamlessly into the news feed and is especially notable in what it asks, or doesn’t ask, of its readers. The point is not to get them to click on more stories or to engage further with a brand. The point is to get them to share the post that’s right in front of them. Everything else is secondary.

 

While web publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of Facebook’s audience, these pages have thrived. Unburdened of any allegiance to old forms of news media and the practice, or performance, of any sort of ideological balance, native Facebook page publishers have a freedom that more traditional publishers don’t: to engage with Facebook purely on its terms. These are professional Facebook users straining to build media companies, in other words, not the other way around.

 

From a user’s point of view, every share, like or comment is both an act of speech and an accretive piece of a public identity. Maybe some people want to be identified among their networks as news junkies, news curators or as some sort of objective and well-informed reader. Many more people simply want to share specific beliefs, to tell people what they think or, just as important, what they don’t. A newspaper-style story or a dry, matter-of-fact headline is adequate for this purpose. But even better is a headline, or meme, that skips straight to an ideological conclusion or rebuts an argument.

 

Rafael Rivero is an acquaintance of Provost’s who, with his twin brother, Omar, runs a page called Occupy Democrats, which passed three million followers in June. This accelerating growth is attributed by Rivero, and by nearly every left-leaning page operator I spoke with, not just to interest in the election but especially to one campaign in particular: “Bernie Sanders is the Facebook candidate,” Rivero says. The rise of Occupy Democrats essentially mirrored the rise of Sanders’s primary run. On his page, Rivero started quoting text from Sanders’s frequent email blasts, turning them into Facebook-ready memes with a consistent aesthetic: colors that pop, yellow on black. Rivero says that it’s clear what his audience wants. “I’ve probably made 10,000 graphics, and it’s like running 10,000 focus groups,” he said. (Clinton was and is, of course, widely discussed by Facebook users: According to the company, in the last month 40.8 million people “generated interactions” around the candidate. But Rivero says that in the especially engaged, largely oppositional left-wing-page ecosystem, Clinton’s message and cautious brand didn’t carry.)

 

Because the Sanders campaign has come to an end, these sites have been left in a peculiar position, having lost their unifying figure as well as their largest source of engagement. Audiences grow quickly on Facebook but can disappear even more quickly; in the case of left-leaning pages, many had accumulated followings not just by speaking to Sanders supporters but also by being intensely critical, and often utterly dismissive, of Clinton.

 

Now that the nomination contest is over, Rivero has turned to making anti-Trump content. A post from earlier this month got straight to the point: “Donald Trump is unqualified, unstable and unfit to lead. Share if you agree!” More than 40,000 people did.

 

“It’s like a meme war,” Rivero says, “and politics is being won and lost on social media.”

 

In retrospect, Facebook’s takeover of online media looks rather like a slow-motion coup. Before social media, web publishers could draw an audience one of two ways: through a dedicated readership visiting its home page or through search engines. By 2009, this had started to change. Facebook had more than 300 million users, primarily accessing the service through desktop browsers, and publishers soon learned that a widely shared link could produce substantial traffic. In 2010, Facebook released widgets that publishers could embed on their sites, reminding readers to share, and these tools were widely deployed. By late 2012, when Facebook passed a billion users, referrals from the social network were sending visitors to publishers’ websites at rates sometimes comparable to Google, the web’s previous de facto distribution hub. Publishers took note of what worked on Facebook and adjusted accordingly.

This was, for most news organizations, a boon. The flood of visitors aligned with two core goals of most media companies: to reach people and to make money. But as Facebook’s growth continued, its influence was intensified by broader trends in internet use, primarily the use of smartphones, on which Facebook became more deeply enmeshed with users’ daily routines. Soon, it became clear that Facebook wasn’t just a source of readership; it was, increasingly, where readers lived.

 

Facebook, from a publisher’s perspective, had seized the web’s means of distribution by popular demand. A new reality set in, as a social-media network became an intermediary between publishers and their audiences. For media companies, the ability to reach an audience is fundamentally altered, made greater in some ways and in others more challenging. For a dedicated Facebook user, a vast array of sources, spanning multiple media and industries, is now processed through the same interface and sorting mechanism, alongside updates from friends, family, brands and celebrities.

 

From the start, some publishers cautiously regarded Facebook as a resource to be used only to the extent that it supported their existing businesses, wary of giving away more than they might get back. Others embraced it more fully, entering into formal partnerships for revenue sharing and video production, as The New York Times has done. Some new-media start-ups, most notably BuzzFeed, have pursued a comprehensively Facebook-centric production-and-distribution strategy. All have eventually run up against the same reality: A company that can claim nearly every internet-using adult as a user is less a partner than a context — a self-contained marketplace to which you have been granted access but which functions according to rules and incentives that you cannot control.

 

The news feed is designed, in Facebook’s public messaging, to “show people the stories most relevant to them” and ranks stories “so that what’s most important to each person shows up highest in their news feeds.” It is a framework built around personal connections and sharing, where value is both expressed and conferred through the concept of engagement. Of course, engagement, in one form or another, is what media businesses have always sought, and provocation has always sold news. But now the incentives are literalized in buttons and written into software.

 

Any sufficiently complex system will generate a wide variety of results, some expected, some not; some desired, others less so. On July 31, a Facebook page called Make America Great posted its final story of the day. “No Media Is Telling You About the Muslim Who Attacked Donald Trump, So We Will ...,” read the headline, next to a small avatar of a pointing and yelling Trump. The story was accompanied by a photo of Khizr Khan, the father of a slain American soldier. Khan spoke a few days earlier at the Democratic National Convention, delivering a searing speech admonishing Trump for his comments about Muslims. Khan, pocket Constitution in hand, was juxtaposed with the logo of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. “It is a sad day in America,” the caption read, “where we the people must expose the TRUTH because the media is in the tank for 1 Presidential Candidate!”

 

Readers who clicked through to the story were led to an external website, called Make America Great Today, where they were presented with a brief write-up blended almost seamlessly into a solid wall of fleshy ads. Khan, the story said — between ads for “(1) Odd Trick to ‘Kill’ Herpes Virus for Good” and “22 Tank Tops That Aren’t Covering Anything” — is an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood and a “promoter of Islamic Shariah law.” His late son, the story suggests, could have been a “Muslim martyr” working as a double agent. A credit link beneath the story led to a similar-looking site called Conservative Post, from which the story’s text was pulled verbatim. Conservative Post had apparently sourced its story from a longer post on a right-wing site called Shoebat.com.

 

Within 24 hours, the post was shared more than 3,500 times, collecting a further 3,000 reactions — thumbs-up likes, frowning emoji, angry emoji — as well as 850 comments, many lengthy and virtually all impassioned. A modest success. Each day, according to Facebook’s analytics, posts from the Make America Great page are seen by 600,000 to 1.7 million people. In July, articles posted to the page, which has about 450,000 followers, were shared, commented on or liked more than four million times, edging out, for example, the Facebook page of USA Today.

 

Make America Great, which inhabits the fuzzy margins of the political Facebook page ecosystem, is owned and operated by a 35-year-old online marketer named Adam Nicoloff. He started the page in August 2015 and runs it from his home outside St. Louis. Previously, Nicoloff provided web services and marketing help for local businesses; before that, he worked in restaurants. Today he has shifted his focus to Facebook pages and websites that he administers himself. Make America Great was his first foray into political pages, and it quickly became the most successful in a portfolio that includes men’s lifestyle and parenting.

 

Nicoloff’s business model is not dissimilar from the way most publishers use Facebook: build a big following, post links to articles on an outside website covered in ads and then hope the math works out in your favor. For many, it doesn’t: Content is expensive, traffic is unpredictable and website ads are both cheap and alienating to readers. But as with most of these Facebook-native pages, Nicoloff’s content costs comparatively little, and the sheer level of interest in Trump and in the type of inflammatory populist rhetoric he embraces has helped tip Nicoloff’s system of advertising arbitrage into serious profitability. In July, visitors arriving to Nicoloff’s website produced a little more than $30,000 in revenue. His costs, he said, total around $8,000, partly split between website hosting fees and advertising buys on Facebook itself.

Then, of course, there’s the content, which, at a few dozen posts a day, Nicoloff is far too busy to produce himself. “I have two people in the Philippines who post for me,” Nicoloff said, “a husband-and-wife combo.” From 9 a.m. Eastern time to midnight, the contractors scour the internet for viral political stories, many explicitly pro-Trump. If something seems to be going viral elsewhere, it is copied to their site and promoted with an urgent headline. (The Khan story was posted at the end of the shift, near midnight Eastern time, or just before noon in Manila.) The resulting product is raw and frequently jarring, even by the standards of this campaign. “There’s No Way I’ll Send My Kids to Public School to Be Brainwashed by the LGBT Lobby,” read one headline, linking to an essay ripped from Glenn Beck’s The Blaze; “Alert: UN Backs Secret Obama Takeover of Police; Here’s What We Know ...,” read another, copied from a site called The Federalist Papers Project. In the end, Nicoloff takes home what he jokingly described as a “doctor’s salary” — in a good month, more than $20,000.

 

Terry Littlepage, an internet marketer based in Las Cruces, N.M., has taken this model even further. He runs a collection of about 50 politically themed Facebook pages with names like The American Patriot and My Favorite Gun, which push visitors to a half-dozen external websites, stocked with content aggregated by a team of freelancers. He estimates that he spends about a thousand dollars a day advertising his pages on Facebook; as a result, they have more than 10 million followers. In a good month, Littlepage’s properties bring in $60,000.

 

Nicoloff and Littlepage say that Trump has been good for business, but each admits to some discomfort. Nicoloff, a conservative, says that there were other candidates he preferred during the Republican primaries but that he had come around to the nominee. Littlepage is also a recent convert. During the primaries, he was a Cruz supporter, and he even tried making some left-wing pages on Facebook but discovered that they just didn’t make him as much money.

 

In their angry, cascading comment threads, Make America Great’s followers express no such ambivalence. Nearly every page operator I spoke to was astonished by the tone their commenters took, comparing them to things like torch-wielding mobs and sharks in a feeding frenzy. No doubt because of the page’s name, some Trump supporters even mistake Nicoloff’s page for an official organ of the campaign. Nicoloff says that he receives dozens of messages a day from Trump supporters, expecting or hoping to reach the man himself. Many, he says, are simply asking for money.

 

Many of these political news pages will likely find their cachet begin to evaporate after Nov. 8. But one company, the Liberty Alliance, may have found a way to create something sustainable and even potentially transformational, almost entirely within the ecosystem of Facebook. The Georgia-based firm was founded by Brandon Vallorani, formerly of Answers in Genesis, the organization that opened a museum in Kentucky promoting a literal biblical creation narrative. Today the Liberty Alliance has around 100 sites in its network, and about 150 Facebook pages, according to Onan Coca, the company’s 36-year-old editor in chief. He estimates their cumulative follower count to be at least 50 million. Among the company’s partners are the former congressman Allen West, the 2008 election personality Joe the Plumber, the conservative actor Kirk Cameron and the former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Victoria Jackson. Then there are Liberty’s countless news-oriented pages, which together have become an almost ubiquitous presence on right-leaning political Facebook in the last few years. Their names are instructive and evocative: Eagle Rising; Fighting for Trump; Patriot Tribune; Revive America; US Herald; The Last Resistance.

 

A dozen or so of the sites are published in-house, but posts from the company’s small team of writers are free to be shared among the entire network. The deal for a would-be Liberty Alliance member is this: You bring the name and the audience, and the company will build you a prefab site, furnish it with ads, help you fill it with content and keep a cut of the revenue. Coca told me the company brought in $12 million in revenue last year. (The company declined to share documentation further corroborating his claims about followers and revenue.)

 

Because the pages are run independently, the editorial product is varied. But it is almost universally tuned to the cadences and styles that seem to work best on partisan Facebook. It also tracks closely to conservative Facebook media’s big narratives, which, in turn, track with the Trump campaign’s messaging: Hillary Clinton is a crook and possibly mentally unfit; ISIS is winning; Black Lives Matter is the real racist movement; Donald Trump alone can save us; the system — all of it — is rigged. Whether the Liberty Alliance succeeds or fails will depend, at least in part, on Facebook’s algorithm. Systemic changes to the ecosystem arrive through algorithmic adjustments, and the company recently adjusted the news feed to “further reduce clickbait headlines.”

 

For now, the network hums along, mostly beneath the surface. A post from a Liberty Alliance page might find its way in front of a left-leaning user who might disagree with it or find it offensive, and who might choose to engage with the friend who posted it directly. But otherwise, such news exists primarily within the feeds of the already converted, its authorship obscured, its provenance unclear, its veracity questionable. It’s an environment that’s at best indifferent and at worst hostile to traditional media brands; but for this new breed of page operator, it’s mostly upside. In front of largely hidden and utterly sympathetic audiences, incredible narratives can take shape, before emerging, mostly formed, into the national discourse.

 

Consider the trajectory of a post from August, from a Facebook page called Patriotic Folks, the headline of which read, “Spread This: Media Rigging the Polls, Hiding New Evidence Proving Trump Is Winning.” The article cited a litany of social-media statistics highlighting Trump’s superior engagement numbers, among them Trump’s Facebook following, which is nearly twice as large as Clinton’s. “Don’t listen to the lying media — the only legitimate attack they have left is Trump’s poll numbers,” it said. “Social media proves the GOP nominee has strong foundation and a firm backing.” The story spread across this right-wing Facebook ecosystem, eventually finding its way to Breitbart and finally to Sean Hannity’s “Morning Minute,” where he read through the statistics to his audience.

 

Before Hannity signed off, he posed a question: “So, does that mean anything?” It’s a version of the question that everyone wants to answer about Facebook and politics, which is whether the site’s churning political warfare is actually changing minds — or, for that matter, beginning to change the political discourse as a whole. How much of what happens on the platform is a reflection of a political mood and widely held beliefs, simply captured in a new medium, and how much of it might be created, or intensified, by the environment it provides? What is Facebook doing to our politics?

 

Appropriately, the answer to this question can be chosen and shared on Facebook in whichever way you prefer. You might share this story from The New York Times Magazine, wondering aloud to your friends whether our democracy has been fundamentally altered by this publishing-and-advertising platform of unprecedented scale. Or you might just relax and find some memes to share from one of countless pages that will let you air your political id. But for the page operators, the question is irrelevant to the task at hand. Facebook’s primacy is a foregone conclusion, and the question of Facebook’s relationship to political discourse is absurd — they’re one and the same. As Rafael Rivero put it to me, “Facebook is where it’s all happening.”

 

 

 

 

Steven Brill: