Even by the standards of Congress, the past few weeks have been a lesson in hypocrisy. Last Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed legislation that will require TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or face a ban in the United States—all over concerns that the Communist Party of China uses the app for surveillance. Yet just a few days earlier, Biden had renewed a law synonymous with American surveillance: Section 702.

You may never have heard of Section 702, but the sweeping, George W. Bush–era mandate gives intelligence agencies the authority to track online communication, such as text messages, emails, and Facebook posts. Legally, Americans aren’t supposed to be surveilled through this law. But from 2020 to 2021, the FBI misused Section 702 data more than 278,000 times, including to surveil Americans linked to the January 6 riot and Black Lives Matter protests. (The FBI claims it has since reformed its policies.)

The contradiction between TikTok and Section 702 is maddening, but it points to lawmakers’ continued failure to wrestle with the most basic questions of how to protect the American public in the algorithmic age. It’s quite fair to worry, as Congress does, that TikTok’s mass collection of personal data can pose a threat to our data. Yet Meta, X, Google, Amazon, and nearly every other popular platform also suck up our personal data. And while the fear around foreign meddling that has animated the TikTok ban has largely rested on hypotheticals, there is plenty of evidence demonstrating that Facebook, at least, has effectively operated as a kind of “hostile foreign power,” as The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance put it, with “its single-minded focus on its own expansion; its immunity to any sense of civic obligation; its record of facilitating the undermining of elections; its antipathy toward the free press; its rulers’ callousness and hubris; and its indifference to the endurance of American democracy.”

[Read: The largest autocracy on Earth]

Congress has largely twiddled its thumbs as social-media companies have engaged in this kind of chicanery—until TikTok. ByteDance is hardly a candidate for sainthood, but who would want to beatify Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg? Abroad, America’s surveillance draws much of the same political condemnation Congress is now levying at China. The privacy advocate Max Schrems repeatedly sued Facebook to stop the company from sharing Europeans’ data with the U.S., where the information could be searched by intelligence agencies. He won multiple times. Last year, European Union regulators fined Meta $1.3 billion for transferring Facebook user data to servers in the United States.

Congress’s tech dysfunction extends well beyond this privacy double standard. The growing backlash to platforms such as Facebook and Instagram is not aimed at any of the substantial issues around privacy and surveillance, such as the ubiquitous tracking of our online activity and the widespread use of facial recognition. Instead, they’re defined by an amorphous moral panic.

Take the Kids Online Safety Act, an alarmingly popular bill in Congress that would radically remake internet governance in the United States. Under KOSA, companies would have a duty to help defend minors from a broad constellation of harms, including mental-health impacts, substance use, and types of sexual content. The bill might actually require companies to gather even more data about everything we see and say, every person with whom we have contact, every time we use our devices. That’s because you can’t systematically defend against Congress’s laundry list of digital threats without massive surveillance of everything we say and every person we meet on these platforms. For companies such as Signal, the encrypted-messaging app that political dissidents rely on around the world, this could mean being forced to operate more like Facebook, WhatsApp, and the other platforms they’ve always sought to provide an alternative to. Or, more likely, it would mean that companies that prioritize privacy simply couldn’t do business in the U.S. at all.

Perhaps the biggest protection Americans have against measures such as KOSA is how badly they’re designed. They all rest on proving users’ age, but the truth is that there’s simply no way to know whether someone scrolling on their phone is a teen or a retiree. States such as Louisiana and Utah have experimented with invasive and discriminatory technologies such as facial recognition and facial-age estimation, despite evidence that the technology is far more error-prone when it comes to nonwhite faces, especially Black women’s faces.  

But these misguided bills haven’t completely derailed lawmakers pushing real reforms to U.S. mass surveillance. Within days of the House passing the TikTok ban and Section 702 renewal, it also passed the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, which closes the loophole that lets police pay companies for our data without getting a warrant. Yet the bill now finds itself in limbo in the Senate.

Regulating technology doesn’t have to be this hard. Even when the products are complex, solutions can be shockingly simple, banning harmful business and policing practices as they emerge. But Congress remains unwilling or unable to take on the types of mass surveillance that social-media firms use to make billions, or that intelligence agencies use to grow their ever-expanding pool of data. For now, America’s real surveillance threats are coming from inside the house.

After playing a game of leap frog with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month, Elon Musk’s net worth has surpassed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s own immense wealth.

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Mark Zuckerberg’s gleeful rebrand of Facebook as Meta in 2021 has become a well documented blunder. What was promised — a virtual reality where we hold company meetings or visit far-away family members — has yet to be delivered, and many media outlets have proclaimed Meta’s capital-M Metaverse dead.

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In October 2003, Mark Zuckerberg created his first viral site: not Facebook, but FaceMash. Then a college freshman, he hacked into Harvard’s online dorm directories, gathered a massive collection of students’ headshots, and used them to create a website on which Harvard students could rate classmates by their attractiveness, literally and figuratively head-to-head. The site, a mean-spirited prank recounted in the opening scene of The Social Network, got so much traction so quickly that Harvard shut down his internet access within hours. The math that powered FaceMash—and, by extension, set Zuckerberg on the path to building the world’s dominant social-media empire—was reportedly, of all things, a formula for ranking chess players: the Elo system.

Fundamentally, what an Elo rating does is predict the outcome of chess matches by assigning every player a number that fluctuates based purely on performance. If you beat a slightly higher-ranked player, your rating goes up a little, but if you beat a much higher-ranked player, your rating goes up a lot (and theirs, conversely, goes down a lot). The higher the rating, the more matches you should win.

That is what Elo was designed for, at least. FaceMash and Zuckerberg aside, people have deployed Elo ratings for many sports—soccer, football, basketball—and for domains as varied as dating, finance, and primatology. If something can be turned into a competition, it has probably been Elo-ed. Somehow, a simple chess algorithm has become an all-purpose tool for rating everything. In other words, when it comes to the preferred way to rate things, Elo ratings have the highest Elo rating.

The simplest way to rank chess players, or players in any competitive game, really, is by wins and losses. But that metric is obviously flawed: For one thing, a mediocre player could amass an undefeated record by beating up on newbies while a grand master wins some and loses some against other grand masters. For another, a simple win-loss tally indicates more about how good a player has been than about how good a player is now. Even before Elo, chess had a rating system that was more complex than just wins and losses, but in the mid-1950s, a 13-year-old chess prodigy named Bobby Fischer broke it. He had gotten so good so fast that the rankings—which didn’t sufficiently account for the quality of a player’s opposition—couldn’t keep up. Apparently in response, the U.S. Chess Federation convened a committee to correct these deficiencies, and in 1960 adopted a system devised by a Hungarian American chess master and physics professor named Arpad Elo. The International Chess Federation followed suit a decade later.

More than 50 years later, Elo’s is still the go-to ranking system. It has been modified over time, and different chess governing bodies use slightly different versions (some, for example, are more or less “swingy” to wins and losses), but all of them are still close variations on the original. Elo has become the most important number in chess. “Whenever anyone finds out you play chess, the immediate question is always, ‘What’s your rating?’” Nate Solon, a chess master and data scientist who writes a weekly chess newsletter, told me.

But Elo ratings don’t inherently have anything to do with chess. They’re based on a simple mathematical formula that works just as well for any one-on-one, zero-sum competition—which is to say, pretty much all sports. In 1997, a statistician named Bob Runyan adapted the formula to rank national soccer teams—a project so successful that FIFA eventually adopted an Elo system for its official rankings. Not long after, the statistician Jeff Sagarin applied Elo to rank NFL teams outside their official league standings. Things really took off when the new ESPN-owned version of Nate Silver’s 538 launched in 2014 and began making Elo ratings for many different sports. Some sports proved trickier than others. NBA basketball in particular exposed some of the system’s shortcomings, Neil Paine, a stats-focused sportswriter who used to work at 538, told me. It consistently underrated heavyweight teams, for example, in large part because it struggled to account for the meaninglessness of much of the regular season and the fact that either team might not be trying all that hard to win a given game. The system assumed uniform motivation across every team and every game.

Pretty much anything, it turns out, can be framed as a one-on-one, zero-sum game. You may well have been evaluated by an Elo rating without even knowing it. Elo ratings can be used to grade student assessments and inspect fabric. They can be used to rank venture-capital firms and prioritize different kinds of health-care training. Until a few years ago, Tinder used Elo scores to rate users by desirability and show them potential matches with similar ratings. Computer scientists have begun keeping an Elo-based leaderboard of large language models. Primatologists use Elo ratings to model social-dominance behaviors. At least one person has used them to decide which of their T-shirts to chuck.

The allure of Elo is clear: People are obsessed with data and statistics and ranking things, and Elo provides a sense of quantitative rigor, of objective meritocracy. “The good thing about it in chess is that you have this single number that captures your ability pretty accurately,” Solon told me. Of course on some level you’d want something similar in other aspects of life. “But then the dark side of that is that it can determine your standing within the chess world and even your self-worth … It’s sort of a curse for a lot of players because they’re just fixated on that number.” The great thing about Elo ratings is that you know exactly where you stand relative to everyone else, and the terrible thing about Elo ratings is that you know exactly where you stand relative to everyone else.

In truth, though, Elo doesn’t guarantee anything. The rankings are only as good or meritocratic as the underlying competitions. There’s nothing magic about them: However sophisticated your formula, if your inputs are junk, your outputs will be too. Last summer, someone built a website called Elo Everything, which does exactly what you’d think it would. When you visit the site, it serves up two things and asks, “Which do you rank higher?” A few example face-offs include the U.S. government versus spiders, testosterone versus crispiness, and the One Ring from Lord of the Rings versus the death of Adolf Hitler. Your selection affects the Elo score of the two things in contention, and that in turn affects the overall leaderboard. Currently atop the standings are: (1) The universe, (2) water, (3) knowledge, (4) information, and (5) love. Language, matter, and the “female body shape” were, as of this afternoon, locked in a three-way tie for 24th.

Elo himself understood the limitations of his invention. In his conception, its function was quite narrow: “It is a measuring tool, not a device of reward or punishment,” he once remarked. “It is a means to compare performances, assess relative strength, not a carrot waved before a rabbit, or a piece of candy given to a child for good behavior.” Inevitably, that is what it has become.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is officially wealthier than Elon Musk as Tesla’s rapidly dropping stock tanks Musk’s net worth.

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As you may have heard, mainstream news organizations are facing a financial crisis. Many liberal publications have taken an even more severe beating. But the most dramatic declines over the past few years belong to conservative and right-wing sites. The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing.

This past February, readership of the 10 largest conservative websites was down 40 percent compared with the same month in 2020, according to The Righting, a newsletter that uses monthly data from Comscore—essentially the Nielsen ratings of the internet—to track right-wing media. (February is the most recent month with available Comscore data.) Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent. (The site’s CEO and co-founder, Sean Davis, called that figure “laughably inaccurate” in an email but offered no further explanation.) FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing “only” 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago.

Some amount of the decline over that period was probably inevitable, given that 2020 was one of the most intense and newsiest years in decades, propping up publications across the political spectrum. But that doesn’t explain why the falloff has been especially steep on the right side of the media aisle.

What’s going on? The obvious culprit is Facebook. For years, Facebook’s mysterious algorithms served up links to news and commentary articles, sending droves of traffic to their publishers. But those days are gone. Amid criticism from elected officials and academics who said the social-media giant was spreading hate speech and harmful misinformation, including Russian propaganda, before the 2016 election, Facebook apparently came to question the value of featuring news on its platform. In early 2018, it began deemphasizing news content, giving greater priority to content posted by friends and family members. In 2021, it tightened the tap a little further. This past February, it announced that it would do the same on Instagram and Threads. All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites. The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media, including some liberal-leaning sites—such as Slate (which saw a 42 percent traffic drop), the Daily Beast (41 percent), and Vox (62 percent, after losing its two most prominent writers)—but the impact appears to have been the worst, on average, for conservative media. (Referral traffic from Google has also declined over the past few years, but far less sharply.)

[Adrienne LaFrance: Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand journalism]  

Unsurprisingly, the people who run conservative outlets see this as straightforward proof that Big Tech is trying to silence them. Neil Patel, a co-founder (with Tucker Carlson) of the Daily Caller, told me that the tech giants want “to crush any independent media that was perceived to have been helpful to Trump’s rise.” Patel calls this a form of “Big Tech–driven viewpoint discrimination” that “should scare any fair-minded individual.”

A simpler explanation is that conservative digital media are disproportionately dependent on social-media referrals in the first place. Many mainstream publications have long-established brand names, large newsrooms to churn out copy, and, in a few cases, large numbers of loyal subscribers. Sites like Breitbart and Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, however, were essentially Facebook-virality machines, adept at injecting irresistibly outrageous, clickable nuggets into people’s feeds. So the drying-up of referrals hit these publications much harder.

And so far, unlike some publications that have pivoted away from relying on traffic and programmatic advertising, they’ve struggled to adapt. Rather than stabilizing amid Facebook’s new world order, traffic on the right has mostly continued south. Among the big losers over the past year are The Washington Free Beacon, whose traffic was down 58 percent, and Gateway Pundit, down 62 percent. Compare that with prominent mainstream and liberal sites, which, although still well below their 2020 heights, have at least stanched the bleeding. Traffic to The Washington Post and The New York Times from February 2023 to February 2024 was essentially flat. Slate’s was up 14 percent.

For conservative media publishers, the financial consequences of such a steep decline in readership are hard to know for certain. None of the best-known names publicly reports revenue figures, and many are supported by rich patrons who may not be in it for the money. But the situation can’t be good. Digital media still rely on advertising, and advertising still goes to places with more, not fewer, people paying attention. Traffic also drives subscriptions.

More broadly, the loss of readership can’t be helpful to the ideological cause. Top-drawing sites like the conspiratorial Gateway Pundit and Infowars help keep the MAGA faithful faithful by recirculating, amplifying, and sometimes creating the culture-war memes and talking points that dominate right and far-right opinion. Less traffic means less influence.

[Paul Farhi: Is American journalism headed toward an ‘extinction-level event’?]

The Daily Caller’s Patel insisted that faltering traffic alone isn’t a death sentence for the onetime lords of the conservative web. With the addition of a subscription service and tighter financial management, the Daily Caller’s financial health is solid and improving, he said. Outlets like his own can still succeed with people who “have lost trust in the corporate media and are actively seeking alternatives.”

The trouble is that there are now alternatives to the alternatives. The Righting’s proprietor, Howard Polskin, pointed out to me that the websites that dominated the field in 2016—Fox News, Breitbart, The Washington Times, and so on—are no longer the only players in MAGA world. The marketplace has expanded and fragmented since then, splintering the audience seeking conservative or even extremist perspectives among podcasts, YouTube videos, Substack newsletters, and boutique platforms like Rumble. “There’s a lot of choice,” Polskin said. “Even if [the big] sites went out of business tomorrow, there are a lot of voices still out there.”

The DIY ethic is embodied by the likes of Megyn Kelly, Bill O’Reilly, Steve Bannon, and Carlson, who became conservative celebrities while working for established media organizations but have maintained their profiles after leaving them in disgrace. Since being fired by Fox News last year, Carlson has moved his contentious commentaries and interviews (including one with Vladimir Putin) to X. Kelly has come back from a messy divorce with NBC in 2019 (which followed an unhappy exit from Fox News in 2017) to host a massively popular podcast. O’Reilly, likewise forced out of Fox in 2017, has kept talking via newsletters, video streams, and weekly appearances on the NewsNation cable channel. And Bannon, the former Trump consigliere who left Breitbart, which he founded, after publicly criticizing the Trump family, has gone the podcaster route himself; his War Room podcast was ranked as the leading source of false and misleading information in a broad study of the medium by the Brookings Institution last year.

The precipitous decline in traffic to conservative publications raises a larger and possibly unanswerable question: Did these operations ever really hold the political and cultural clout that critics ascribed to them at their peak? Recall the liberal anger in 2020 when Ben Shapiro was routinely dominating Facebook’s most-engaged content list, generating accusations that Facebook’s algorithm was favoring right-wing posts and pushing voters toward Trump. Yet Joe Biden went on to win the election easily, and Democrats overperformed in the 2022 midterms. Now, as conservatives cry that Big Tech has crushed their traffic, Trump is running neck and neck with Biden in the polls, even with a legal cloud hanging over him and shortfalls of campaign cash. Maybe who wins the traffic contest doesn’t matter as much as it once appeared.