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“No one can predict how a revolution starts,” the Iranian American poet and author Roya Hakakian writes this week in The Atlantic. And make no mistake, she told me in an interview yesterday: The wave of protests now sweeping Iran is a revolution. After 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody following her arrest for improperly wearing the hijab earlier this month, Iranian men and women have filled the streets and set fire to the head coverings that have, for many, come to represent a collective loss of freedom since they were made mandatory following the 1979 revolution. I spoke with Hakakian about Iran’s “Ukrainian moment”—and about what comes next.

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

Is this the beginning of the end of the internet? What Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson don’t understand about war American family policy is holding schools back.

“We Are All Mahsa Amini”

Kelli María Korducki: You were a young teen when Iran’s mandatory dress code went into effect in 1981, three years before you left the country for good. Do you see any echoes of that transition period in the current moment?

Roya Hakakian: This revolution in Iran is 43 years old. On March 8, 1979, which was barely even a month after the Iranian Revolution had succeeded, women took to the streets to protest the hijab and the ayatollah’s reinstatement of a mandatory dress code.

I was 13. But this confrontation between the women of the country and the regime is the oldest, most enduring standoff in Iran. And I think the women are winning.

Korducki: You write in your essay, “Today I feel what so many Iranian women feel: We are all Mahsa Amini.” What do you mean by that?

Hakakian: What happened to Mahsa Amini happened to every single one of us. We’ve all been stopped [by Iran’s religious police], and some of us have been detained. I was stopped many, many times. When you think back to all the conversations that you have had with the people who have stopped you, you realize that a slight shift in tone or something very, very small could have gone wrong to get the person who had stopped you to deliver a blow to your head. All of us, the women who’ve lived under this regime, we all know what it’s like and that we could be a victim like Mahsa Amini.

Korducki: You write that Amini’s death has sparked an unusual degree of outrage and solidarity across Iran. What’s different about this particular incident, and why is it uniting so many people from such varied walks of life?

Hakakian: I think it’s in part because all previous hopes for change have been lost. In 2009, there were a lot of young people—university students, especially—who really had placed their hope in the 2009 presidential elections and were rooting for [the reformist presidential candidate, Mir Hossein] Mousavi. When Mousavi lost—the votes disappeared—millions of people took to the streets asking, Where is my vote?

Since then, there have been other demonstrations over simple, tangible, legitimate issues that people generally take to their governments. And because none of those things was ever resolved, I think the natural conclusion that people have come to is that the system is rotten and incapable of responding to our needs. So now nobody’s saying, Where’s my vote? They’re simply saying, This cast of characters has to go.

Korducki: You describe the protests as Iran’s “Ukrainian moment,” and call for the U.S. to act accordingly. What do you mean by that?

Hakakian: I testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, and subsequently had several meetings with various senators. The moment you mentioned Iran, all of these senators started thinking about Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria—that’s their context. And, in fact, that’s the wrong context.

The people in Iran aren’t asking for any foreign powers to invade the country, to come and do the job. They have done the work. They’re not demanding anything from the international community other than the sort of support that the international community, the Western world, must give to those who are vying for democratic values in one of the most dangerous parts of the world. The context to me seems far more similar to the Ukrainian context.

We support Ukrainians in their war against invading Russian forces. Iranians are, in a way, also essentially at war with a very, very powerful and highly armed government, and they need our support now. The regime’s riot police have been throwing women demonstrators against the cement curbs, and there are videos being circulated online that show police opening fire on protesters. Yet the U.S.—which has been investing in democracy promotion in Iran for at least the past two decades—is still sitting at the table and holding nuclear negotiations with these very people. To me, it seems very reasonable to demand that negotiations be stopped until the riot police stop exercising violence.

Like in every other revolution that has ever taken place, if it isn’t supported by governments that believe in the prodemocratic values that the demonstrators are demanding, these protesters will fail.

Related:

The bonfire of the headscarves Iran’s knucklehead assassination strategy

Today’s News

Hurricane Ian made landfall on Florida’s western coast; the Category 4 hurricane is one of the most powerful storms to hit the United States in decades. Follow The New York Times’ live updates here. The European Union proposed new sanctions against Russia as a response to its escalation of the war in Ukraine, including a cap on oil prices and restrictions on trade. Parents of Sandy Hook shooting victims testified in the defamation case against Alex Jones.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: What if the Senate passed an international climate treaty and nobody noticed? That’s what happened last week, Robinson Meyer writes. Wait, What?: Molly Jong-Fast follows the GOP’s frantic search for a new midterm message.

Evening Read

Twentieth Century Fox / Pictorial Press / Alamy

Hollywood Learned All the Wrong Lessons From Avatar

By David Sims

When the director James Cameron was working on Avatar, he was holding the biggest bargaining chip imaginable. His last major feature, 1997’s Titanic, was the most successful film in Hollywood history, overcoming its budgetary woes and behind-the-scenes drama to become a box-office phenomenon unlike any other. Avatar was another risky bet in theory, an original sci-fi epic about nine-foot-tall blue aliens called the Na’vi who’d be rendered through advanced CGI and motion-capture technology. But still, this would be a James Cameron film—a fact the director said he had to remind the honchos of during production.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

What did Axios do? The great Senate stalemate Photos: A new generation of shepherds in the French Pyrenees

Culture Break

Paramount Pictures / Alamy; The Atlantic

Read. “Hill Station,” a new short story by Madhuri Vijay.

“They had been driving for hours, and the city still hadn’t loosened its grimy hold.”

Watch. The 1999 comedy Election, starring Reese Witherspoon as an overachieving (and unlikeable) student, Tracy Flick.

Revisit the movie, available to stream on multiple platforms, and then hear from Tracy Flick’s creator, Tom Perrotta, about where the character is now.

Listen. The trailer for Season 3 of our How To podcast series, in which our happiness columnist explores what happens when expectations don’t meet reality.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Journey from the Land of No, Hakakian’s acclaimed 2004 memoir about her own coming-of-age in revolutionary Iran, provides essential context for the current unrest in Iran. “It precisely tells the story of [what happened between] 1977 and 1984, and the transition from monarchy to theocracy, and no hijab to forced hijab,” Hakakian told me in an email following our conversation. The book recounts what Hakakian described to me as “the randomness that we all experienced” in daily-life interactions with Iran’s oppressive regime.

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

The Federal Reserve is laser-focused on stemming price increases in the United States. But countries thousands of miles away are reeling from its hardball campaign to strangle inflation, as their central banks are forced to hike interest rates faster and higher and a runaway dollar pushes down the value of their currencies.

Many people postponed routine medical care because of disruptions related to the Covid-19 pandemic. That includes a decline in cancer screenings, such as mammograms and colonoscopies. In the meantime, cancer remains one of the major causes of death in the United States, second only to heart disease.

In Argentina and the United States, dozens of people have gathered to show their support for Iranian women.

Many American schools are failing to provide all students with a quality education, and policy makers don’t seem to know what to do about it. Even before schools closed during the pandemic, 30 percent of graduating seniors failed to reach a basic level of competency in reading, and 40 percent failed to do so in math, according to national data. Performance gaps across race and socioeconomic status in both subjects have persisted to some degree for decades. Meanwhile, teachers are among the most stressed-out workers in America, and though concerns about educators leaving in droves have yet to materialize, the number of young people entering the profession has been dwindling for years.

Over the past two decades, government officials have made various attempts to improve the state of American education—ramping up standardized testing, expanding charter schools, and urging states to adopt uniform benchmarks for student achievement—to little avail. Perhaps understandably, these efforts have mostly fixated on what takes place within the halls of America’s K–12 public schools. But less attention has been given to another profound influence on our educational system: our nation’s family policy. My reporting suggests that many of the elements fostering children’s academic success have roots outside of school—and that if America wants to help teachers, it will have to do a better job of supporting parents.

The United States is a difficult place to raise a kid. Paid leave and affordable child care, common benefits in many of our peer countries, are not guaranteed. Available supports, such as tax credits or (unpaid) job-protected family and medical leave, sometimes exclude the poorest citizens. Many aids targeted specifically at needy families can be very difficult to access or come with employment requirements—a big ask in a country with little infrastructure to back working parents. These conditions not only make life unnecessarily difficult for caregivers; they also compromise the entire project of teaching American kids.

[Read: America’s child-care equilibrium has shattered]

A child’s education begins the moment they are born, Dana Suskind, a founder and co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health at the University of Chicago and the author of Parent Nation, told me. The majority of physical brain development occurs within the first few years of life, before most children ever step into a classroom. This is a sensitive time, when kids are both particularly vulnerable to stress and well primed to gain cognitive ground. Parents play a major role during this stage as “children's first and most important brain architects,” Suskind said. Engaging kids in rich interactions—tuning in to what interests them, talking and reading to them, and letting them “talk” back—helps stimulate and strengthen the neural connections that build brain power and lay the foundation for learning. Many parents, such as those without paid leave or with punishing work schedules, have fewer opportunities to devote such attention to their children. Wealthier families can outsource the labor to professionals, but, as the country grapples with a massive shortage of child-care workers, more parents and kids are on their own.

When children don’t get early support, their ability to learn suffers. According to Suskind, the nurturing back-and-forth between caregiver and child is linked to achievement in literacy, math, spatial reasoning, and self-regulation—all of which are all crucial to academic success. Without sufficient engagement, children risk entering school already behind. By one estimate from the 2017–18 school year, half of American 3-to-5-year-olds aren’t “on track” in at least one area of scholastic readiness, such as math and expressive language, or emotional development and behavioral management. “Asking teachers to try to make up the difference … is basically impossible,” Suskind said. Policy makers often point to universal pre-K as a potential solution, but although that could certainly help, it doesn’t start early enough. As young as nine months old, low-income children score worse on cognitive-development tests than their wealthier peers, and the disparity widens as they enter toddlerhood.

[Read: The problem with kindergarten]

The trouble may begin in early childhood, but the strain on American parents can continue to create issues once children start school. As caregivers, parents are expected to do a lot to support their children’s education: drop them off and pick them up, buy supplies, attend meetings with teachers, manage the logistics of extracurriculars and sports, help with homework. And if a child has a learning difficulty related to their health, such as trouble with their eyesight or hearing or a developmental disorder, parents are responsible for making and taking them to appointments and sometimes even implementing strategies learned in therapy at home. This high level of involvement in a child’s education is a powerful predictor of academic success, but it’s very difficult for many to undertake. “If you’re not able to either predict your work schedule, or get time off from your job to do those kinds of things, that kind of wipes out” your ability to be so engaged, Jennifer Lansford, the director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University, told me.

For low-income parents, the challenges can be more extreme. Children cannot learn effectively when their basic needs—food, shelter, sleep, safety—are unmet. Stress at home can lead to misbehavior in class and cycles of learning disruption, Lindsay Popilskis, a psychologist in Clarkstown Central School District, in New York, told me. When children act out, they miss class time, fall behind, and become frustrated. “So then they act out again,” Popilskis said. Although teachers employ a variety of strategies to manage classroom disruptions, with some success, they can only do so much if they can’t address the source of the problem.

Suzanne Langlois, who has spent the past 17 years teaching at a public high school in a wealthy part of Maine, has no doubt that the resources among her students’ families make her job easier. She told me that she rarely sees the behavioral issues that she used to when she worked in a district with much higher levels of poverty. She finds it much easier to engage teens who aren’t distracted by concerns about their family’s health or employment. Having grown up with so much support, her current students are generally more confident learners. They still have problems, as all kids do, but those tend to be less pressing and easier for her to address. “It’s amazing how much more I get to actually teach,” Langlois told me. “When I was in [my previous district], I always felt like I had so many kids who had needs and I wasn’t meeting any of them. It felt terrible.” Now, with fewer kids in crisis, she has the bandwidth to check in with anyone who is having a hard time. “I get to feel more successful. And that brings more energy to the teaching.”

Schools can be a lifeline and haven, especially for those with difficult home lives. “Right now we are and have been the unacknowledged social safety net for America,” Theo Moriarty, a teacher in Seattle, told me. Schools not only provide food, care, and vaccines, but also connect families with various community aids, or assist them as they navigate the labyrinthine process for obtaining Medicaid, housing, and other services. But this is a lot of responsibility to put on one institution. And ultimately, a child’s ability to succeed in the classroom is strongly influenced by the level of support they receive at home. Addressing the forces holding back American education is not possible without assisting America’s families. Leaving it to schools to play catchup is unfair to teachers and parents alike.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his generals aren’t the only people who think that the more ruthless, hypermasculine, and reflexively brutal an army is, the better it performs on the battlefield. That view also has fans in the United States.

Last year, Senator Ted Cruz recirculated a TikTok video that contrasted a Russian military-recruitment ad, which showed a male soldier getting ready to kill people, with an American recruitment video that told the story of a female soldier—the daughter of two mothers—who enlisted partly to challenge stereotypes. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea,” Cruz tweeted sarcastically. The Texas Republican is not alone in trumpeting a Putinesque ideal. Several months earlier, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson had similarly complained about a supposedly “woke” Pentagon, which he likened to the Wesleyan University anthropology department. By promoting diversity and inclusion, he insisted, military leaders were destroying American armed forces, supposedly the last great bastion of merit in the country. More recently, Carlson has complained that America’s armed forces are becoming “more feminine, whatever feminine means anymore,” just as China’s are “more masculine.”

Arguments like these were much easier to make before Putin unleashed his muscle-bound and decidedly unwoke fighting machine on the ostensibly weak Ukrainians, only to see it perform catastrophically. More than seven months into the war, the Ukrainian army continues to grow in strength, confidence, and operational competence, while the Russian army is flailing. Its recent failures raise many questions about the nature of military power. Before Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine, many analysts described his military as fast and powerful and predicted that it would “shock and awe” the overmatched defenders. The Ukrainian armed forces were widely assumed to be incapable of fighting the mighty Russians out in the open; their only option, the story went, would be to retreat into their cities and wage a form of guerrilla war against the invaders.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine is waging a new kind of war]

The success of the Ukrainian military over the past few months, along with the evolution of the Ukrainian state itself toward a more tolerant, more liberal norm, reveals what makes a better army in the modern world. Brains mean more than brawn, and adaptability means more than mindless aggression. Openness to new ideas and new equipment, along with the ability to learn quickly, is far more important than a simple desire to kill.

From the moment the Russian military crossed the border, the Ukrainians have outfought it, revealing it to be inflexible and intellectually vapid. Indeed when confronted with a Ukrainian military that was everything it was not—smart, adaptable, and willing to learn—the Russian army could only fall back on slow, massed firepower. The Battle of the Donbas, the war’s longest engagement, which started in late April and is still under way, exposed the Russian army at its worst. For months, it directed the bulk of personnel and equipment toward the center of a battle line running approximately from Izyum to Donetsk. Instead of breaking through Ukrainian lines and sending armored forces streaking forward rapidly, as many analysts had predicted, the Russian army opted to make painfully slow, incremental advances, by simply blasting the area directly in front of it. The plan seemed to be to render the area uninhabitable by Ukrainians, which would allow the Russians to advance intermittently into the vacuum. This was heavy-firepower, low-intelligence warfare on a grand scale, which resulted in strategically meaningless advances secured at the cost of unsustainably high Russian casualties. And in recent weeks, the Ukrainians have retaken much of the territory that Russia managed to seize at the start of the battle—and more.

I struggle to think of another case in the past 100 years when a major military power has performed as poorly against an adversary it was heavily favored to defeat. The supposedly second-strongest army in the world, with its martial spirit, brilliant doctrines, and advanced equipment, was thwarted and is now being pushed back by a Ukrainian military whose prospects most outsiders had dismissed before the war.

The persistence of the Putin-Cruz-Carlson vision of war is surprising, because we have decades, even centuries, of evidence to the contrary. Since the Industrial Revolution, and in many ways before, the ability to run a complex system has been the cornerstone of strategic success. Though much military popular literature likes to stress the human drama of combat—the bravery and sacrifice, the cowardice and atrocity—it is not nearly as important in victory or defeat as many people assume. In state-to-state wars—a category that includes the current Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as broader conflicts such as the two world wars—the side that can most efficiently deploy more effective equipment operated by better-trained personnel has typically emerged victorious.

The combination of education and technology overcame brute force during World War II, when the most militarily skillful and adaptable countries—the United States and the United Kingdom—were able to fight their enemies at a relatively small cost in casualties. The U.K., even though it fought around the world from 1939 to 1945, lost only 384,000 soldiers in combat. The U.S. lost even fewer, suffering approximately 290,000 battle deaths. The German armed forces, by contrast, lost more than 4 million soldiers.

That the British and American armed forces kept their casualties comparatively low is especially notable because they were confronted with an overwhelming majority of German arms, planes, and ammunition. Because of the sickening number of human casualties, the fighting on the Eastern Front between the Nazis and Soviets is widely deemed World War II’s largest engagement, but Germany had to send far more of its war production to fight the British and Americans than it did to fight the U.S.S.R.

The Ukrainians are trying, albeit with far fewer advantages, to do to Russia what the U.S. and the U.K. did to Germany. Ukrainian forces have learned to skillfully use advanced weaponry—in this case NATO-standard systems such as HIMARS and HARM missiles—to neutralize the brute strength of the Russian army. They have accomplished this because Ukrainian society is more flexible, technologically conversant, and willing to learn than the Russian invaders are. They have shown more cleverness and wisdom, and over time that advantage has allowed them to start taking the initiative.

[From the October 2022 issue: Ukrainians are defending the values Americans claim to hold]

Just as the ability to absorb information is better than lunkhead hypermasculinity in a modern army, diversity and societal integration also bring major advantages. As Ukraine has become more diverse and tolerant, its army has benefited. In contrast with Putin’s homophobic military, the Ukrainian armed forces include LGBTQ soldiers who have incorporated “unicorn” insignia into their uniforms. The valor of these soldiers, and the rallying of the Ukrainian people around a vision of a tolerant and diverse society, has led to an overall increase in Ukrainian support for gay rights—and it underscores the belief that everyone has a role to play in the country’s defense.

The Russian experience could not be more different. Putin has made suppressing gay rights one of the hallmarks of his rule. Determined to capitalize on culture-war tropes of the American right, he has portrayed Russia as a victim of cancel culture. He has retained rigid control over Russian society. While the Ukrainians are opening up, he is clamping down—with what we are now seeing as rather extreme results.

Last week, Putin called for a partial mobilization, which appears to be much broader than was originally announced. Now faced with the prospect of being forced into his army, large numbers of Russian men are desperately trying to get out of the country, and protests and even sabotage have occurred against government authorities. Whether Russian citizens generally view service in Putin’s army as a worthy national endeavor is in doubt. The Ukrainians, conversely, undertook a far more successful conscription at the start of the invasion.

Recent events should banish the idea that the more aggressive killing machine wins the war. Intelligence, technological savvy, and social integration are the assets that matter most on the modern battlefield.

Occasionally, something happens that is so blatantly and obviously misguided that trying to explain it rationally makes you sound ridiculous. Such is the case with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’s recent ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton. Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the law tells big social-media companies that they can’t moderate the content on their platforms. YouTube purging terrorist-recruitment videos? Illegal. Twitter removing a violent cell of neo-Nazis harassing people with death threats? Sorry, that’s censorship, according to Andy Oldham, a judge of the United States Court of Appeals and the former general counsel to Texas Governor Greg Abbott.  

A state compelling social-media companies to host all user content without restrictions isn’t merely, as the First Amendment litigation lawyer Ken White put it on Twitter, “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.” It’s also the type of ruling that threatens to blow up the architecture of the internet. To understand why requires some expertise in First Amendment law and content-moderation policy, and a grounding in what makes the internet a truly transformational technology. So I called up some legal and tech-policy experts and asked them to explain the Fifth Circuit ruling—and its consequences—to me as if I were a precocious 5-year-old with a strange interest in jurisprudence.

[Evelyn Douek: The year that changed the internet]

Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, who has been writing for decades about the intersection of tech policy and civil liberties, told me that the ruling is “fractally wrong”—made up of so many layers of wrongness that, in order to fully comprehend its significance, “you must understand the historical wrongness before the legal wrongness, before you can get to the technical wrongness.” In theory, the ruling means that any state in the Fifth Circuit (such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) could “mandate that news organizations must cover certain politicians or certain other content” and even implies that “the state can now compel any speech it wants on private property.” The law would allow both the Texas attorney general and private citizens who do business in Texas to bring suit against the platforms if they feel their content was removed because of a specific viewpoint. Daphne Keller, the director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, told me that such a law could amount to “a litigation DDoS [Denial of Service] attack, unleashing a wave of potentially frivolous and serious suits against the platforms.”

To give me a sense of just how sweeping and nonsensical the law could be in practice, Masnick suggested that, under the logic of the ruling, it very well could be illegal to update Wikipedia in Texas, because any user attempt to add to a page could be deemed an act of censorship based on the viewpoint of that user (which the law forbids). The same could be true of chat platforms, including iMessage and Reddit, and perhaps also Discord, which is built on tens of thousands of private chat rooms run by private moderators. Enforcement at that scale is nearly impossible. This week, to demonstrate the absurdity of the law and stress test possible Texas enforcement, the subreddit r/PoliticalHumor mandated that every comment in the forum include the phrase “Greg Abbott is a little piss baby” or be deleted. “We realized what a ripe situation this is, so we’re going to flagrantly break this law,” a moderator of the subreddit wrote. “We like this Constitution thing. Seems like it has some good ideas.”

Everyone I spoke with believes that the very future of how the internet works is at stake. Accordingly, this case is likely to head to the Supreme Court. Part of this fiasco touches on the debate around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which, despite its political-lightning-rod status, makes it extremely clear that websites have editorial control. “Section 230 tells platforms, ‘You’re not the author of what people on your platform put up, but that doesn’t mean you can’t clean up your own yard and get rid of stuff you don’t like.’ That has served the internet very well,” Dan Novack, a First Amendment attorney, told me. In effect, it allows websites that host third-party content to determine whether they want a family-friendly community or an edgy and chaotic one. This, Masnick argued, is what makes the internet useful, and Section 230 has “set up the ground rules in which all manner of experimentation happens online,” even if it’s also responsible for quite a bit of the internet’s toxicity too.

But the full editorial control that Section 230 protects isn’t just a boon for giants such as Facebook and YouTube. Take spam: Every online community—from large platforms to niche forums—has the freedom to build the environment that makes sense to them, and part of that freedom is deciding how to deal with bad actors (for example, bot accounts that spam you with offers for natural male enhancement). Keller suggested that the law may have a carve-out for spam—which is often filtered because of the way it’s disseminated, not because of its viewpoint (though this gets complicated with spammy political emails). But one way to look at content moderation is as a constant battle for online communities, where bad actors are always a step ahead. The Texas law would kneecap platforms’ abilities to respond to a dynamic threat.

“It says, ‘Hey, the government can decide how you deal with content and how you decide what community you want to build or who gets to be a part of that community and how you can deal with your bad actors,’” Masnick said. “Which sounds fundamentally like a totally different idea of the internet.”

“A lot of people envision the First Amendment in this affirmative way, where it is about your right to say what you want to say,” Novack told me. “But the First Amendment is just as much about protecting your right to be silent. And it’s not just about speech but things adjacent to your speech—like what content you want to be associated or not associated with. This law and the conservative support of it shreds those notions into ribbons.”

The implications are terrifying and made all the worse by the language of Judge Oldham’s ruling. Perhaps the best example of this brazen obtuseness is Oldham’s argument about “the Platforms’ obsession with terrorists and Nazis,” concerns that he suggests are “fanciful” and “hypothetical.” Of course, such concerns are not hypothetical; they’re a central issue for any large-scale platform’s content-moderation team. In 2015, for example, the Brookings Institution issued a 68-page report titled “The ISIS Twitter census,” mapping the network of terrorist supporters flooding the platform. The report found that in 2014, there were at least 46,000 ISIS accounts on Twitter posting graphic violent content and using the platform to recruit and collect intelligence for the Islamic State.

I asked Masnick whether he felt that Oldham’s ruling was rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the internet, or whether it was more malicious—a form of judiciary trolling resulting from former President Donald Trump getting kicked off of Twitter.

He likened the ruling to this past summer’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and took away Americans’ constitutional right to an abortion. “You had 50 years of conservative activists pushing for the overturning of Roe, but this Texas ruling actually goes against almost everything the conservative judicial activists have worked for for decades,” Masnick said. “You have Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, the [Masterpiece Cakeshop] case, which are all complicated, but at the core, they are rooted in how to conceive of First Amendment rights. And in all cases, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court have been all about the right to expand First Amendment rights inside organizations, especially the right to exclude.”

[Charlie Warzel: How the internet became a doom loop]

If the case ends up before the Supreme Court, many of the justices would have to decide against their priors in order to uphold the Texas law. Specifically, Justice Brett Kavanaugh would need to directly contradict his opinion in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, a case where Kavanaugh clearly argued that private forums have First Amendment rights to editorial discretion.

Keller, of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, has tried to game out future scenarios, such as social networks having a default non-moderated version that might quickly become unusable, and a separate opt-in version with all the normal checks and balances (terms-of-service agreements and spam filters) that sites have now. But how would a company go about building and running two simultaneous versions of the same platform at once? Would the Chaos Version run only in Texas? Or would companies try to exclude Texas residents from their platforms?

“You have potential situations where companies would have to say, ‘Okay, we’re kicking off this neo-Nazi, but he’s allowed to stay on in Texas,” Masnick said. “But what if the neo-Nazi doesn’t live in Texas?” The same goes for more famous banned users, such as Trump. Do you ban Trump’s tweets in every state except Texas? It seems almost impossible for companies to comply with this law in a way that makes sense. The more likely reality, Masnick suggests, is that companies will be unable to comply and will end up ignoring it, and the Texas attorney general will keep filing suit against them, causing more simmering resentment among conservatives against Big Tech.

What is the endgame of a law that is both onerous to enforce and seemingly impossible to comply with? Keller offered two theories: “I think passing this law was so much fun for these legislators, and I think they might have expected it would get struck down, so the theater was the point.” But she also believes that there is likely some lack of understanding among those responsible for the law about just how extreme the First Amendment is in practice. “Most people don’t realize how much horrible speech is legal,” she said, arguing that historically, the constitutional right has confounded logic on both the political left and right. “These legislators think that they’re opening the door to some stuff that might offend liberals. But I don’t know if they realize they are also opening the door to barely legal child porn or pro-anorexia content and beheading videos. I don’t think they’ve understood how bad the bad is.”

NetChoice v. Paxton is likely an opening salvo in a long, complex, and dangerous legal battle. But Keller offered up a more troubling possibility: This law amounts to a legal speed run that could drastically alter First Amendment law in such a way as to quickly end the battle. “The Supreme Court could strike this down but offer a framework for future litigation that opens the door to new kinds of laws we’ve never seen before,” she said. “Who knows what rule set we’ll be playing with after the Supreme Court weighs in.”

What does seem clear is that this law is an outgrowth of politicians waking up to the raw power of the internet as a communications platform. Lawmakers’ desire to preserve or destroy content moderation is a battle for the soul of the internet, the limits of free expression, and the direction of our politics. We, the users, are caught in the middle.

After a dominant win against the United States and a draw against hard-fighting Ecuador, many of the gaps in Japan's expected World Cup lineup have ...