The social media platform pauses the rollout of new features after an online community backlash.

Americans are rightly anguished by gun violence and the question of what’s motivating the young men who have committed a succession of horrific mass murders. We seem to be fumbling around for answers: Is it racism and radicalization, or untreated mental illness, or toxic video games, or too-easy access to guns? All of these may be parts of the problem, but equally none of them makes complete sense outside of the larger context: The gun industry’s modern marketing effort did not just arm these shooters; in a very real sense, it created them.

This is something I know a bit about, as someone who spent a quarter century in the business. Over my years as a rising executive with a successful gun manufacturer, I became more and more disturbed by the sort of firearms the industry was selling, how it was selling them, and to whom. Next week, I am testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform at a hearing that, in the words of its chair, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, “will examine the role of gun manufacturers in flooding our communities with weapons of war and fueling America’s gun violence crisis.”

When I got my first job in the gun industry, in 1995, the marketing centered on hunting, target shooting, and responsible self-defense. Many advertisements evoked a love of craftsmanship and the outdoors, and some, like this 1995 Ruger ad, even directly addressed its customers as “responsible citizens”—a tagline the company dropped from its advertising in 2007.

(Sturm, Ruger & Co.)

Companies such as the European American Armory, an importer of cheap, mostly Eastern European guns, that used cheesy ads—like this one from 2008—to sell imported guns were a rarity. Little did I realize that those tacky exceptions were the gun industry’s future.

(European American Armory)

Those ads, designed to appeal to young men who knew no better, were the starting point for marketing that would create a new customer base and change our country forever.

This transformation received its first boost in the mid-aughts when President George W. Bush allowed the assault-weapons ban to sunset and then signed a bill that gave broad protection from liability to gunmakers. Combined, those moves reduced the social stigma and potential legal penalties for edgy marketing of military-style rifles. Over time, larger, more mainstream gunmakers began to experiment with marketing messages previously relegated to the disfavored fringe of the business.

[Ryan Busse: The rifle that ruined America]

Young men were the target. They had disposable income, a long customer life, and a readily exploited fascination with guns. The push to access these new customers took off in 2010 when the AR-15 maker Bushmaster launched its “Man Card” advertising campaign.

(Bushmaster Firearms International)

The ads, which ran in several gun-industry publications, on websites, and in Maxim magazine, were controversial and gained national attention. More important, they showed the rest of the industry the power of an appeal based on masculinity to the 18–35 male demographic, at a time when images from America’s foreign wars were airing constantly on the evening news.

“The Bushmaster Man Card declares and confirms that you are a Man’s Man, the last of a dying breed, with all the rights and privileges duly afforded,” the ad copy read. If you’re hearing there, in “dying breed,” an anticipatory echo of the “Great Replacement” theory that inspired the alleged killer in May’s mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, you’re not mistaken: The conclusion that this type of marketing has contributed to creating today’s radical violent extremists is inescapable.

Another echo: One of the guns used by the Buffalo shooter was a Bushmaster XM-15. Of course, the great majority of people who own this rifle have never done anything illegal with it, but one other exception is notorious. On December 14, 2012, a troubled young man from Newtown, Connecticut, used an XM-15 rifle to kill 20 children and six staff at Sandy Hook Elementary. Bushmaster ended its “Man Card” campaign soon after the Sandy Hook massacre, but other gun manufacturers had taken notice of the company’s sales success.

Smith & Wesson was a more mainstream, traditional brand that chose to take a chance on marketing weapons nearly identical to those carried by soldiers and cops, which could legally be sold to the general public with minor modifications. Hence the name of its M&P15, essentially the same rifle it supplied to its military and police customers. With behind-the-scenes urging by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the main industry trade association, Smith & Wesson added Sport to its branding of the rifle—relying on the social acceptability of hunting and target practice to launder the lethality of the gun.

(Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc.)

For Smith & Wesson’s move into the AR-15 market to pay off, the industry as a whole would need to shift from an older, more conservative reliance on hunting and self-defense to an approach dominated by the new tactical culture.

[Graeme Wood: Think gun laws are hard to change? Try gun culture.]

Few of this new breed of firearms company are more illustrative of the dramatic transformation that has taken place in the U.S. gun market than Daniel Defense. Like scores of entrepreneurs who saw this opportunity in the early 2000s, Marty Daniel started a gun company that soon turned to AR-15 sales. And he set a new industry standard by leaning into a civilian market for guns touted as the military real deal. One of the company’s early ads, in 2012, lured young men with the promise of being on par with Special Forces soldiers.

By 2016, Daniel Defense marketing was working so well that it won a coveted spot on the cover of Popular Mechanics magazine. The company’s press release proclaimed that the placement of its rifle in the “Tough Guys” issue was a “major accomplishment” because it would help Daniel Defense reach a “more mainstream audience.”

(Hearst Magazines)

Like many other firearms companies, Daniel Defense also sought placement of its products in movies and video games. This Facebook post from 2019 alerts followers to the appearance of one of its DDM4 V7 rifles in the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare game. The DDM4 V7 was used by the 18-year-old gamer turned shooter in Uvalde, Texas.

The gun industry could have shunned this type of promotional activity. Instead, it chose to penalize those who did. When Ed Stack, the then-longtime CEO of the major retail chain Dick’s Sporting Goods, stopped selling AR-15s after the Parkland school murders, the NSSF moved swiftly to expel Dick’s from its membership. By contrast, in 2021 the foundation honored Marty Daniel with a seat on its industry board of governors.

By adopting such aggressive marketing, companies like Daniel Defense dragged older, more established companies into using similar strategies. With the norm-breaking of the boldest setting the trend and demonstrably creating new consumers, the rest had to follow.

By 2016, publicly traded gun-industry stalwarts such as Ruger and Smith & Wesson were deeply dependent on the emerging tactical market; by 2020, Smith & Wesson’s M&P15 had become America’s best-selling rifle. Not surprisingly, the company’s stock price soared—even as its customer base grew to include the young killers in the mass shootings at Parkland, Florida; Aurora, Colorado; and Highland Park, Illinois.

For an insider like me, the part that industry marketing was playing in creating these customers was unmistakable. The danger signs were evident in places like the Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show, the industry’s marquee annual event. Usually held in Las Vegas, the SHOT Show is one of the world’s largest trade conventions. I attended more than 25 of them and witnessed their transformation—from an event that once prohibited the display of militaristic tactical gear to one where that became the default.

(Spike’s Tactical)

At the show in 2018, I noticed a huge ad for Spike’s Tactical, an up-and-coming AR-15 maker from Florida. Although this event was more than two years away from the protests and violence that erupted in American cities in the summer of 2020, the ad encapsulated an explicit appeal to those drawn toward armed confrontation with left-wing agitators. Antifa had a limited national profile before 2017, when its members were among counterprotesters at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, but Spike’s quickly identified it as the enemy of loyal gun-owning Americans. The ad elicited some criticism, but the industry was silent.

[Kimberly Wehle: The best hope for fixing America’s gun crisis]

In June 2020, when towns across America saw Black Lives Matter rallies and armed counterprotests, my own 12-year-old son was assaulted by an armed man dressed like a character from the Spike’s ad. I had to jump in to protect my son, who was doing nothing more than chanting “I can’t breathe” with a group of his friends, when one of those gun-toting goons started screaming uncontrollably and jabbing at his chest. More than 100 armed men like him were at that rally.

In that instant, my fears for what the industry was doing became very personal. I did not myself sell AR-15s or participate in the incendiary marketing, but I could no longer ignore the fact that my business was profiting from promoting images of such men, with their backward-facing ball caps and loaded AR-15 rifles. This type of vigilante or self-styled militiaman was preparing to deploy across the country, in our hometown, or other hometowns like Kenosha, Wisconsin.

(Adam Rogan / The Journal Times / AP)

Kyle Rittenhouse, a boy who also looked as though he had been plucked from that Spike’s ad, killed two people, and wounded a third, during unrest in Kenosha. Most Americans were horrified at this spectacle, but to the gun industry, he was a hero, someone who took “owning the libs” to a deadly and lucrative new level.  

Hours after Rittenhouse was acquitted on all charges, Big Daddy Unlimited, a major firearms retailer based in Gainesville, Florida, sent out a social-media post that appeared to endorse the view that Rittenhouse was not a cautionary tale but a masculine ideal of armed citizenry—as the Fox News host Tucker Carlson put it, “exactly the kind of person you’d want more of in your country.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Big Daddy Unlimited (BDU) (@bigdaddyunlimited)

As I discovered, Big Daddy Unlimited’s post contained another, yet more sinister meaning. I would have missed it if I had not recalled seeing someone wearing a Make Zimbabwe Rhodesia Again ball cap at the 2018 SHOT Show. A friend then reminded me of the Facebook profile image of the mass murderer of nine Black parishioners in a South Carolina church, in which he is seen wearing a jacket decorated with a Rhodesian flag—iconography much celebrated by U.S. white supremacists. Variations of this image from a famous Rhodesian-army recruiting poster crop up across all the main social-media platforms.

The similarity between the Rhodesian-army poster and the Florida retailer’s Rittenhouse social post is too obvious to miss. (Big Daddy Unlimited’s CEO told The New York Times that the meme had been created by a former employee who was unaware of its historical significance and that it was meant only “to recognize justice for Kyle Rittenhouse.”) The retailer aims to be “the premier online destination” for more than 300,000 firearm products and advertises itself to subscribers as a Second Amendment defender: “Join our Revolution today!”

The lionization of Kyle Rittenhouse tapped into something powerful already under way: Fear of rioters and the power to kill them was proving a winning formula for creating new customers. Wilson Combat, an Arkansas gunmaker, was one company poised to take advantage of public anxiety about civil strife, advertising on its website an AR-15 model marketed as the Urban Super Sniper. “There are times when extreme accuracy and rapid follow-up shots are the most important criteria when selecting a rifle,” the site proclaims.

(wilsoncombat.com)

Even the mainstream publication Firearms News had taken up the theme in last year’s edition of its magazine Be Ready!

(firearmsnews.com)

The old responsible industry prohibitions were gone. Everywhere I looked, I saw advertisements that played on the new fear-based tactical culture. In the final months of my gun-industry career, I snapped photos to document the change, such as is evident in this banner from the tactical-gear maker Viktos, above a main entrance to the 2020 SHOT Show. Its combination of fire from a modern AR-15 and a Revolutionary War soldier is a historical mash-up we saw repeated with spooky exactitude at the January 6 Capitol riot a year later, when insurrectionists acted on a “1776 Returns” plan and waved Come and Take It AR-15 flags.

(Courtesy of the author)

Gun sales have soared to historic highs over the past three years. Those sales have only confirmed the industry’s strategy for achieving growth, and so the marketing effort has become only more addicted to conspiracy-theory-fueled political partisanship. One new company, Live Q or Die, began trading on the QAnon cult by selling Q-branded AR-15s (the letter is stamped on the lower receiver of this model advertised on the company’s website).

(liveqordie.com)

Another company, Palmetto State Armory, has used imagery clearly designed to appeal to the Boogaloo Bois, which the FBI has identified as a far-right, domestic terrorist threat, with products such as this AK-47-style pistol decorated in a “Big Igloo Aloha” pattern that closely resembles the group’s signature aloha shirts.

(Palmetto State Armory)

Palmetto State Armory—which is both a major retailer, enjoying the support of big brands like Smith & Wesson, and a manufacturer in its own right, producing tens of thousands of firearms each year—also sells AR-15 parts that carry the anti-Biden slogan “Let’s go, Brandon.”

Palmetto State Armory is far from alone in pitching to violent extremists. Much of that now happens through social-media posts like this one from a leading tactical-gear company that shows a masked gunman wearing a Boogaloo-like shirt and smoking a cigar, which has become a motif of the Proud Boys—including inside the Capitol on January 6.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Shellback Tactical (@shellbacktactical)

By 2021, I had quit the gun industry. I now work on the outside to alert the American public to the dangers I see in this marketing. To me, it undeniably created a culture of extremism that encouraged a new type of “tactical” mass shooter. America is seeing the deadly results of the violence incubated by these dark advertising fantasies.

As for the once-anomalous practice in the industry of using sex to sell products to young men, this is now ubiquitous among the hundreds of companies that sell tactical gear such as helmets, bulletproof vests, and “Contractor AF” (as fuck) pants.

One could be forgiven for wondering how the gun industry could possibly make things worse, now that so many troubled adolescent males have had their “Man Cards” issued, but I’ve learned that it can. After Kyle Rittenhouse, a new industry mascot is coming into view: the tactical toddler set to become the new gun-marketing trend.

A few months ago, the 2022 SHOT Show in Vegas welcomed a pioneer in the field: Wee1 Tactical is a company that uses cartoons to market JR-15s (Junior AR-15s) to kids. Customers flocked to its booth, and the company was named on some “best of” show lists.

(Wee1 Tactical)

On May 16, Daniel Defense posted a photo of a toddler cradling one of its AR-15s, captioned with a Bible verse beginning “Train up a child in the way he should go.” Just over a week later, schoolchildren in Uvalde were mutilated and murdered by shots fired from a Daniel Defense rifle. Since the shooting at Robb Elementary, this image has been vociferously criticized, but not by the firearms industry or the NSSF, which still counts Marty Daniel among its trusted leaders. To the rest of the industry, including those small companies hungry to make their mark, this complicit silence confers approval for this next step in firearms marketing.

(Twitter @DanielDefense)

Through bitter experience, we know what today’s typical mass shooter looks like and where he’s taking his cultural cues from. Now the industry is giving us a glimpse of its next customer: the American child soldier.

A new report from Ofcom has shown young people are turning away from more traditional news outlets.

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The anti-abortion movement spent decades citing states’ rights as an argument for overturning Roe. That facade fell away within weeks.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

New COVID vaccines will be ready this fall. America won’t be. “France has delivered almost nothing” Russia’s invasion is making Ukraine more democratic. Faux Federalists

For years, anti-abortion advocates have insisted that their cause was a federalist one—an effort to return decision-making power to the states. This was not just a legal argument but a political one. “Wouldn’t it be better if such a divisive issue were decided locally?” the advocates argued, pointing to the significant state-to-state variation in support for abortion.

These talking points persisted, briefly, in the direct aftermath of Roe v. Wade’s overturning. The day that the Dobbs v. Jackson decision was announced, Florida Senator Rick Scott—the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the group tasked with winning Senate seats for Republicans—lauded the Supreme Court for defending “the foundational principle of federalism.” The Michigan Senate majority leader praised the decision as affirming “the importance of federalism and states’ rights.” Other senators and state elected officials also parroted this line. But in the few short weeks since then, it’s become clear that the anti-abortion movement won’t sit idly by while states enact the abortion policies their residents want.

Instead, anti-abortion advocates are now focused on enacting federal restrictions on the procedure. Senate Republicans are already discussing a potential national ban on abortion after just six weeks. After the Dobbs decision leaked, indicating that the Court was poised to strike down Roe, The Washington Post reported that the president of a prominent anti-abortion group has been in conversations with 10 potential Republican presidential candidates (including Donald Trump) in which most “assured her they would be supportive of a national ban and would be eager to make that policy a centerpiece of a presidential campaign.”

Right now, state and national Republicans are casting aside “states’ rights” as they seek to outlaw out-of-state abortions for people who live in places where they’re restricted. In a move reminiscent of Texas Senate Bill 8, Missouri Republicans have proposed that private citizens should be allowed to sue anyone who helps another person get an out-of-state abortion. One conservative legal organization, the Thomas More Society, is encouraging other states to adopt similar legislation. And last week in D.C., Senate Republicans blocked the Freedom to Travel for Health Care Act of 2022, which would have made it illegal to “restrict or in [any] way sanction … any individual from traveling to another State to receive or provide reproductive health care that is legal in that State.”  

Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma objected to the bill, arguing that the state restrictions were unlikely to pass. (Where have I heard that before?) But even the specter of legal liability is now undermining abortion access for people who would need to cross state lines: Planned Parenthood of Montana announced earlier this month that it is preemptively limiting abortions for patients from nearby states with severe restrictions to avoid potential criminal charges or lawsuits.

Should we have ever entertained the federalism argument? After all, as recently as 2006, a near-supermajority in the Senate—including 14 Democrats—voted to prohibit minors from evading parental-notification laws by traveling to states with greater freedoms for women. Although the measure never made it to his desk, then-President George W. Bush said he would sign it. Similar legislation has been introduced by Republicans repeatedly over the years, undermining claims that they simply want these decisions to be left up to the states.

Hypocrisy in politics is nothing new. But it’s worth examining just how weak the federalism argument is on the merits.

It sounds reasonable: States are bitterly divided on abortion, so we should let them decide instead of forcing the majority of the country to accept a policy that they strongly disagree with. But today’s America lacks many of the prerequisites that would make federalism an outlet for positive policy change. Instead, it’s now often destructive. The idea that states would act as laboratories of democracy and learn from one another’s experiences requires clear consequences for good or bad policy implementation.

Electoral politics should be one way for those consequences to register, but Americans’ dismal participation in local and state elections, anti-democratic gerrymandering, and single-party-dominated states severely weaken that feedback loop to politicians. Another way is “voting with your feet”—moving away from states that enact policies you disagree with and punishing them with the removal of your tax dollars and economic output.

In decades past, political freedom and economic freedom tended to point in the same direction: For Black Americans fleeing Jim Crow or LGBTQ Americans escaping culturally conservative areas, big cities provided not only political safety but economic opportunity too. Now those arrows point in different directions because the cost of living has grown so significantly in Democratic states. Constituents who are trapped in a state because of financial insecurity are no different—at least to their elected officials—than residents who stay because they are happy with local policies.

Given all of this, the argument that overturning Roe would lower the national temperature is laughable. Instead, it has set the stage for conflict between states that try to assert their dominion over their residents and residents across the country who feel trapped under political regimes that do not reflect their beliefs.

Further reading:

The coming rise of abortion as a crime The abortion policy most Americans want Today’s News More than four years after a mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, sentencing proceedings for the gunman have begun. A jury will determine whether he will be sentenced to death or to life in prison. Anthony Fauci said that he plans to retire by the end of President Joe Biden’s current term. Britain recorded its third-hottest day ever as a heat wave scorches Europe. Dispatches Humans Being: Jordan Calhoun writes that a new Hulu documentary reveals how Victoria’s Secret irreparably damaged our culture. I Have Notes: Nicole Chung offers advice for how to productively write about painful experiences. Work in Progress: Everything about the U.S. economy is weird right now. Derek Thompson explains why. Up for Debate: Gavin Newsom, Jon Stewart, Liz Cheney, Amy Klobuchar: Readers weigh in on who they’d pick to replace Joe Biden in 2024. Evening Read (The Atlantic)

The War in Ukraine Is Dividing Lifelong Friends

By Ruth Madievsky

Friends whom my parents haven’t seen in decades call every year for my birthday. Some have never met me. I was 2 when my family immigrated to Los Angeles from Chișinău, Moldova, in 1993. My whole life, I’ve watched my parents keep in close touch with friends who continued to live in former Soviet republics. First, they made phone calls, and more recently, they expanded to Odnoklassniki (a social network popular with friends and classmates from the former Soviet Union), and then Instagram, and WhatsApp … Nearly every diasporic person I know who grew up in the former Soviet Union has thriving long-distance friendships like this. The unwavering bonds among nashi lyudi—the Russian term for “our people”—across distance and time has always felt miraculous to me.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I’m really pumped to be filling in on the Daily this week! I usually write about institutional failure, particularly as it relates to housing and infrastructure in Democratic states and cities. I just joined The Atlantic a few months ago, but if you enjoyed today’s newsletter, you can read some longer-form thoughts of mine on my antipathy toward local government, how mobility is the prerequisite for other freedoms, and who the real villain in the gentrification story is.

When I’m not writing for The Atlantic, I’m reading speculative fiction (currently on the nightstand: Brandon Sanderson’s Oathbringer and Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest). If any fantasy and science-fiction fans are out there, send me your favorite short stories—I recently read Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation,” and I’m eager for more in that vein.

— Jerusalem

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Friends whom my parents haven’t seen in decades call every year for my birthday. Some have never met me. I was 2 when my family immigrated to Los Angeles from Chișinău, Moldova, in 1993. My whole life, I’ve watched my parents keep in close touch with friends who continued to live in former Soviet republics. First, they made phone calls, and more recently, they expanded to Odnoklassniki (a social network popular with friends and classmates from the former Soviet Union), and then Instagram, and WhatsApp. They regularly swap family photos and memes, life updates and transcontinental gossip. When I visited Russia for the first time in 2019, one of my mother’s childhood friends—whom I hadn’t seen since infancy—tearfully told me how much she adored me and held hands with either me or my mother everywhere we went. Nearly every diasporic person I know who grew up in the former Soviet Union has thriving long-distance friendships like this. The unwavering bonds among nashi lyudi—the Russian term for “our people”—across distance and time has always felt miraculous to me.

Yet, distance and time seem like quaint obstacles to me now, compared with the pain of being on different sides of the war in Ukraine. I talked with several post-Soviet immigrants in the U.S. who, after Russia’s full-scale invasion, are estranged from or barely speaking with longtime friends.

[Veronika Melkozerova: The hate I feel]

My family friend Kate, who asked to be identified by only her first name for fear of harassment over her ethnicity and political views, hasn’t spoken with her friend Vera in more than three months. Kate and Vera (not her real name) grew up in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and have been friends since they were 4. It’s been decades since they’ve lived in the same city—Kate now lives in Los Angeles and Vera in St. Petersburg—but the women talked regularly, and Kate is godmother to Vera’s daughter. In Kate’s telling, they argued over Vera’s belief that the visual evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine is fake. Kate did not expect her friend to publicly oppose the war and risk a 15-year jail sentence. But recently, a mutual friend had to evacuate Kharkiv, and Kate was dismayed that, as she perceives it, even this didn’t cause Vera to soften her views. Kate suspects that Vera might be more skeptical of Russia’s version of events than she felt safe letting on. But their inability to find common ground over the basic facts of the war has fractured 40 years of friendship and cut off Kate from her goddaughter. “It’s hard. I know that she struggles, and I can’t even send her money,” Kate told me, because money-transfer companies such as Western Union have suspended operations in Russia. Sending money abroad is somewhere between an immigrant love language and a duty.

Losing a close friendship under these circumstances is an ambiguous loss. Ambiguous losses lack closure and can leave those experiencing them in a state of emotional limbo. Kate, having grown up in the former Soviet Union, understands her friend’s actions to be a survival skill. Still, the closure-less question of what a friend truly believes, and to what degree they should be held accountable for it in the context of this war, haunted the people I spoke with.

For immigrants who still have relatives in Ukraine, an additional calculation must be made: Stay silent or risk imperiling not only a friendship but also your family’s safety. Alona Ford grew up in Ukraine and moved to Arkansas in her 20s. When, in the early days of the war, a childhood friend living in Moscow posted an Instagram photo of herself flipping off the camera with the pro-war Z symbol stitched on her sleeve, captioned, “We’re going to win,” Alona felt terrible. The two spent summers together at their families’ dachas in Ukraine and kept in touch through social media. “She’s a very educated person. I wanted to message her,” Alona told me. She quietly unfollowed her instead. “All of these Russians, even my friends, know where my people live,” she explained.

If this sounds paranoid to you, you probably aren’t from the former Soviet Union, where civilian informers were essential collaborators in state-sanctioned violence. Human-rights groups attest that the Russian government and police force continue to violently punish civilians who publicly criticize the Kremlin. In that light, confronting a friend over their views of the war could feel like a selfish choice rather than a noble one. For Alona, there was little honor in vigorously defending Ukraine’s right to self-determination from the safety of her home in the U.S. if it meant putting her loved ones at risk.

[Read: What Ukraine needs now]

Another friend of Alona’s, Liza (not her real name), grew up with her in Kherson, Ukraine. They’ve been friends for more than 20 years, and Alona is close with Liza’s son. As Alona recalled, they mostly kept in touch through a group chat with two other Ukrainian women. When the invasion began, Liza refused to talk politics in the chat, and she stopped responding altogether after Alona and the other women said that ordinary Russians should be doing more to oppose the war. Alona believes it may be better for them not to speak for the time being, both to avoid putting Liza at risk and in case Liza “says something bad to us.” She hopes that their friendship will return to normal but suspects it will never be the same. “But it will definitely not change my relationship with her son,” she told me. “It’s not his fault—he is a child.”

Given that this war seems unlikely to reach a swift resolution anytime soon, the question of how long these estrangements will last—and in what form these friendships may return—weighed on the immigrants I spoke with. I was struck by how empathic so many were in explaining that their friends in Russia are victims of an oppressive regime, that they are suffering under international sanctions, that resisting the nonstop drip of state-run misinformation is easier said than done. To some, behavior including unexplained radio silence after decades of friendship and open support of the war was forgivable. One person speculated that because their pro-Russian friend belongs to a marginalized group that has faced intense discrimination in Moscow, outspoken patriotism may be a form of self-protection.

The most intimate saga I’ve watched play out in real time has been among my father’s classmates, most of whom went to elementary through high school together in Moldova and are now scattered across Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and elsewhere in Europe. For years, he has belonged to an active WhatsApp group with more than a dozen other classmates, who frequently share stories, family photos, and jokes. After the war escalated in February, those in Ukraine began posting harrowing updates (“They started bombing at 5:50. We’re drinking our morning coffee. Watching the sky.”). Their messages were largely met with silence from their Russian classmates. Then, in March, a Russian classmate vaguely referenced “the situation,” and a Ukrainian classmate responded, “This isn’t a situation. It’s a shameful war.” Several Ukrainians quietly left the group over what, in my father’s interpretation, was a perceived lack of concern for their families’ safety. Since the Ukrainians’ exit, some Russian members have implored the group to place a moratorium on discussing politics. They say they don’t want to abandon four decades of friendship over differing opinions on the war. The fraught arguments continued even as friends on opposing sides reiterated their love for one another.

My father—who was born in Ukraine, went to school in Moldova, and now lives in Los Angeles—has been a passive observer to all of this, preferring to correspond privately with the member of the group he is closest with. He’s disappointed with his classmates’ support of the war and relieved that things came to a head in the chat. “The fake cheeriness was intolerable,” he told me. He’s been checking on his Ukrainian classmates regularly and has become closer friends with one. Sometimes he tears up sharing her updates, like when she sent him a photo of her baby-faced 20-year-old nephew dressed in army fatigues, cradling a rifle. A couple of years after graduating high school, he is serving in the Ukrainian army, as is his father. Seeing this photo after spending several hours reading my father’s Russian classmates’ pro-war messages left me feeling dejected. “Their opinions aren’t the ones that matter,” my father told me. This was an assertion I’d heard several times by then—that any individual civilian’s support or opposition to the war would not meaningfully affect its outcome.

When I asked the post-Soviet immigrants I spoke with how these conflicts with friends have made them feel, I was often met with a similar sentiment: The strain on their friendships is heavy but pales in comparison with what the war has taken from so many. They hesitated to center their experience of the war from a position of safety. But it is clear that the war has wrought astonishing pain across multiple axes for those living in the diaspora. They spend their days waiting for proof of life from their loved ones and their nights glued to Ukrainian news broadcasts. They watch as their childhood apartments, their schools, the hospitals where they were born, the cemeteries where their grandparents are buried are destroyed. Some are also navigating clashes with family members who support the war.

After several of my father’s Ukrainian classmates left the group chat, one of his Russian classmates wrote, “This is our shared tragedy … We each have our right to our own view of the situation. It’s better to be silent than to fight.” If, like me, you read two months’ worth of WhatsApp messages with this tenor, you might wonder why, given their intensely personal stake in the welfare of the Ukrainian people, so many of the immigrants I spoke with expressed a desire to maintain intimate friendships with those who support the war. How can they stomach that their friends may view the death and displacement of Ukrainian civilians—including people they know and love—as collateral damage? For some, once the initial shock wore off, a creeping sense of inevitability set in. That their friends might be ambivalent, apathetic, or staunchly in support of the war was a foregone conclusion informed by their belief that the minds of those living in Russia are not free. The people I spoke with judge these friends, but they also pity them. Having survived the state-sanctioned violence and repression of the former Soviet Union, many people I talked with know what it’s like to live in fear, cut off from the rest of the world.

Which friendships are worth fighting for is always a personal decision. But some of the many tragic and alienating effects of war are these kind of schisms among lifelong friends who had managed to remain close against the odds. Ultimately, even the friends who want to stay connected will have to grapple with this question: How do you move forward when you cannot agree upon the same reality?

Do machines understand Africa? This is the question Meta started answering this month when it published a research paper (pdf) that details plans to improve the accuracy with which AI algorithms decode African languages.

The plan, expected to look into 55 of Africa’s marginalized languages and improve how AI machines translate them on Facebook, Instagram, and Wikipedia, could boost technological inclusion in the creation and adoption of tech solutions for Africa.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg published on his Facebook profile that his company will be using a supercomputer to lead the translations through advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities.

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The influencer didn't make it clear the picture of her in a Pretty Little Thing dress was an ad.