Billionaire hedge fund managers
As X swirls around the Musk sewer, social media users not of the MAGA persuasion are fleeing to Bluesky. What was a sleepy outpost with little traffic (at least for me) is now surging as an alternative. My follows have over tripled since the election.
That means it’s time for a culling by billionaires with more money than sense.
Case in point: Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and big Democratic donor. He proposes buying and shutting down Bluesky to “prevent further fracturing of the town square.”
On October 19, Axios considered America’s gullibility crisis and found Ackman there:
Bill Ackman, a hedge fund billionaire with 1.4 million followers on X, obsessively promoted allegations from an ABC News “whistleblower” that the network had given Harris questions in advance of her debate with Trump. On Wednesday, more than a month later, Ackman admitted it was “fake.”
Zachary Basu wrote:
The big picture: The misinformation crisis may be playing out online, but the real-world implications are vast.
- The deadly hurricanes that swept across the Southeast in recent weeks exposed the staggering extent to which people have become prone to conspiracy theories, spurring threats against emergency responders.
- “The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality,” The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote in an article about hurricane conspiracies headlined: “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is.”
- 54% of respondents in an Axios Vibes survey published last month agreed with the statement, “I’ve disengaged from politics because I can’t tell what’s true.”
The bottom line: Never before have so many people been so exposed to so much misinformation. Given the increasing ubiquity of AI-generated content, this may be only the beginning.
Thank you, Dear Readers, for sustaining this humble little island of sanity.
Update: Melissa Ryan shares her take on why “people are rediscovering that social media can only be social if there are consequences for antisocial behavior.”