Tag: politicians

How the White House Correspondents Dinner Broke the Democratic Party

When I was a political reporter in Washington, I used to loathe the White House Correspondents Dinner. I hated how it portrayed Beltway journalism as a game. How it reduced the project of government accountability to performative antagonism practiced daily by reporters in White House press briefings — a performance exposed annually at a dinner where the most powerful people in the world would rub elbows and yuck it up about funny “inside jokes” like George W. Bush’s bungling of the Iraq War and the media’s culpability in helping him do it.

Maybe because I was a reporter at the time, I always considered the dinner’s rottenness from the perspective of the relationship between the media and politicians, lamenting that images from the Washington Hilton of the press mingling with administration officials in black tie undercut the public’s faith in an independent media.

But the further away I’ve gotten from the experience — and the faster our republic has tumbled toward oblivion — the more I’ve considered how the dinner contributed in other, significant ways to the brokenness of our current political moment: The dinner highlights the laughable disconnect between the people in Washington with the power to do something (the dinner attendees) and the rest of us mere mortals (people largely not watching the dinner at home on C-SPAN).

The presidency of Barack Obama transformed the Democratic Party in ways many pundits already have explored ad nauseum, from a revolution in data analytics to Obama’s creation of an entire political infrastructure outside of the Democratic National Committee. Yet, the White House Correspondents Dinner, now that it’s back from its hiatus in the two years we acknowledged the ongoing pandemic as real, is also a reminder of perhaps Obama’s worst contribution to modern politics: the marriage between actual Hollywood and the “Hollywood for ugly people” known as Washington.

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Twitter’s “autoblock” feature blocks citizens from responding to, or even seeing, elected politicians’ tweets

Twitter is a “social” network that is paradoxically becoming ever more insular and anti-social – apparently, all in a bid to “protect” users from one another. This seems to be the idea behind testing new features such as the one called “Safety Mode,” that includes something called, “autoblock.”

At some point, the question might start arising in the minds of some, or even many, people: why even use a platform that you consider to be so potentially dangerous that it has to implement such a granular and complex system of separation and prevention of access to content and accounts?

But at this time, Twitter is still widely used and marching on its chosen path. And, right now, the “autoblock” is producing effects like a user getting blocked from viewing the profile of a public servant – in this case, that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

While the problem has affected many, it was Laura Marston, an advocate for lowering the cost of insulin for diabetes sufferers, that most recently found her account blocked from highlighting problems with a recent bill that Marston feels falls short.

Those affected by the issue not only can’t comment on the politician’s tweets but they are also not even allowed to see them.

The Twitter notice that popped up instead of the Pelosi profile said that the user is temporarily blocked from interacting with the account’s tweets because “they were in Safety Mode” – while Twitter flagged previous interactions as “potentially” abusive or spammy.

The notice goes on to state that the social media company is aware “autoblocks” don’t work as intended all the time – another way of saying that flimsy automated algorithms and/or unreliable third party fact checkers are once again used to carry out the “Safety Mode” goals, and will highly likely be getting things wrong.

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