Death was in the discourse leading up to Friday night’s boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson. Marketing the fight, the two combatants repeatedly threatened to kill each other; a Netflix promo documentary referenced the bitten and bloodied ear Tyson left Evander Holyfield with in a 1997 match; social-media chatter reveled in the possibility that Paul, one of the internet’s favorite villains, would be murdered on air.

But once the match began, streamed from a packed arena to 60 million households, it felt morbid in an unexpected way—in the way of a retirement home, not a slasher movie. Paul, a 27-year-old YouTube star, jabbed and jabbed with the precision of a piston. Tyson, the 58-year-old heavyweight legend who retired nearly two decades ago, hobbled around the ring and gnawed his glove anxiously, only occasionally returning fire. He looked his age, and at times quite a bit older. Six rounds into the eight-round match—which ended in a unanimous decision for Paul—the commentator Rosie Perez, a longtime friend of Tyson’s, dropped any pretense of being entertained. This was, she said, “a hard story to watch.”

As I took that story in, I thought not only about how old Tyson is, but about how old the internet is—how far we are into the process of reality being hollowed-out by digital forces. The ropes advertised tech products: Meta Quest, the VR headset; DraftKings, the gambling network repopularizing one of humankind’s oldest addictions. Paul cut an imposing figure, his neck as thick as a ship’s mast, his tattooed legs swathed in diamond-draped shorts. It was breathtaking to remember that, a little more than decade ago, he became famous as a happy-go-lucky teen goofing around online with his brother, Logan. Now he’s an emblem of a generation of men—and a wider culture—starving for purpose while gorging on spectacle.

To trace the Paul brothers’ career is to trace a few epochs of the internet. They got famous on Vine in 2013 by doing boys-will-be-boys stuff: tasing each other, jumping on strangers’ backs, talking to pineapples in the supermarket. These hijinks were like a last flare of the internet’s OMG-so-random era, when logging on felt like an escape to a fantasy world of cat videos and violent stick-figure cartoons. But soon, the Paul brothers came to represent a new paradigm, in which distinctions between the online world and the offline world became more blurred. They were some of the first influencers, leveraging their lives into clickbait.

Which means that, suddenly, they needed to figure out what to do with the eyeballs they’d attracted. They began to augment their antics with charity efforts and self-help content. Jake joined a Disney Channel show as an actor but left halfway through its second season, then rebranded as a rapper. Logan founded a podcast that now has more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube. The continual search for the next gimmick also subjected the Pauls to plenty of internet outrage. They earned backlash for offenses as varied as insulting Kazakhstanis, publicizing shady cryptocurrency ventures, and filming a dead body. Their cockiness grew with each attempted cancellation; they tended to apologize and then bounce onward.

Yet to call these guys pure trolls isn’t quite right. Every time I see Jake speak, I discern something searching and sad within his boastfulness. In a video endorsing Donald Trump before the 2024 election, he delivered familiar MAGA talking points in a tone of puppy-eyed desperation. “I don’t come to you to make this video to create more division,” he said. “I believe love is the key to the universe and that we should all love each other more and more and more.” The video made me think less about his politics than about his soul. He seemed like a man looking for a cause, and finding it—as so many others have—in Trump’s promise to transform everything.

At first, boxing appeared to be just another stunt. In 2018, Logan booked a match against another YouTuber, and Jake fought on the undercard. In the years after that, Logan—whose intense, reptilian demeanor belies presidential aspirations—moved into the scripted battling of WWE. Jake, who has more of a crazy-fox kind of personality, stuck with boxing. In both cases, picking up an athletic side hustle was savvy. Combat sports have experienced a renaissance of cultural relevance over the past decade, driven by legalized betting and the popularity of MMA. Trump has deep links to the world of wrestling; just this past weekend he went to a UFC match. If you’re a man making entertainment for other men these days, chances are you have some sort of relationship to combat sports.

[Read: Can a boxer return to the ring after killing?]

Even so, Jake’s boxing career has been more durable and significant than anyone would have predicted in 2018. His fight with Tyson produced his 11th win out of 12 bouts. He says he wants to become a bona fide champion, and followers have been treated to footage of him sparring, ice-bathing, and scarfing hamburgers to bulk up. He started his own promotion company; he even tried (unsuccessfully so far) to get fighters to unionize. Why is he doing all of this? Aren’t there easier ways to make money? In a 2023 Netflix documentary about Jake, Logan explained, “He definitely found something with boxing that I think gave him worth”—worth that he didn’t get from “making stupid little insignificant vlogs on YouTube.”

Those stupid vlogs were, in some ways, quite significant, helping rewire the aspirations of an entire culture. A Morning Consult survey last year found that a majority of Gen Z—and 41 percent of all American adults—want to be influencers. Trump waged his presidential campaign by enlisting online entertainers in the Paul brothers’ model, such as the prank-pulling Nelk Boys. (He also joined Logan on his podcast.) Yet for all the growth of the influencer economy, the career path can be hellish, involving constant hustle, relentless criticism, and existential meaninglessness. Mugging to the camera for views certainly doesn’t fit neatly with old ideals of masculinity. In that 2023 documentary, Logan remarked, proudly and disgustedly, “We’re fucking media whores.” Jake explained his turn to boxing like this: “I was sick of not being respected.”

In this context, the popularity of combat sports is more than just a fad. Today’s American dream tends to involve virtual pursuits—influencing, making a killer app, getting lucky with crypto—but the gladiatorial ring is a macho, meat-space proving ground. No wonder Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match. In the case of the Paul brothers, winning substantiates their right to do what they’ve always done: peacock. As Norman Mailer wrote of Muhammad Ali, reflecting on his tendency for trash talk, “The closer a heavyweight comes to the championship, the more natural it is for him to be a little bit insane, secretly insane, for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not, but there is a real possibility he is. It is like being the big toe of God.”

The problem for Jake Paul is that he really doesn’t have anywhere near a claim to “toughest man in the world.” He’s widely seen as an interloper, a clown, disrupting and degrading a sport that’s supposed to be meritocratic. His fights have almost all been novelty bouts against influencers and stars from other sports (his only loss was to the most qualified professional boxer he’s previously fought). The respect he’s seeking still hasn’t been found. In publicity leading up to Friday’s fight, he played up the idea that defeating the legendary Mike Tyson would shut up his doubters forever. “I want him to be that old savage Mike,” Jake said at a press conference. “I want the hardest match possible Friday night, and I want there to be no excuses from everyone at home when I knock him out.”

But as probably could have been predicted, Tyson turned out to be a 58-year-old man whose body has taken a lifetime of abuse, facing a wealthy 27-year-old who’s devoted his past few years to training. Jake set out to prove he was something realer than a media whore, but he showed only that he had the clout to overhype a terribly unfair fight. Coming so soon after an election partly decided by highly online men who feel their status to be under threat, this outcome seems like an omen: Old systems may soon be torn down, with little to replace them but bluster spun as redemption.

“There’s a shift in the world, and good is rising,” Jake said, sweating and panting, in the after-match interview. “The truth is rising. I’m just honored to be a part of America. It feels like we’re back, baby.”

After the 2016 elections, critics blamed Facebook for undermining American democracy. They believed that the app’s algorithmic News Feed pushed hyperpartisan content, outright fake news, and Russian-seeded disinformation to huge numbers of people. (The U.S. director of national intelligence agreed, and in January 2017 declassified a report that detailed Russia’s actions.) At first, the company’s executives dismissed these concerns—shortly after Donald Trump won the presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg said it was “pretty crazy” to think that fake news on Facebook had played a role—but they soon grew contrite. “Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it,” Zuckerberg would say 10 months later. Facebook had by then conceded that its own data did “not contradict” the intelligence report. Shortly thereafter, Adam Mosseri, the executive in charge of News Feed at the time, told this magazine that the company was launching a number of new initiatives “to stop the spread of misinformation, click-bait and other problematic content on Facebook.” He added: “We’ve learned things since the election, and we take our responsibility to protect the community of people who use Facebook seriously.”

Nowhere was the effort more apparent than in the launch of the company’s “war room” ahead of the 2018 midterms. Here, employees across departments would come together in front of a huge bank of computers to monitor Facebook for misinformation, fake news, threats of violence, and other crises. Numerous reporters were invited in at the time; The Verge, Wired, and The New York Times were among the outlets that ran access-driven stories about the effort. But the war room looked, to some, less like a solution and more like a mollifying stunt—a show put on for the press. And by 2020, with the rise of QAnon conspiracy theories and “Stop the Steal” groups, things did not seem generally better on Facebook.

[Read: What Facebook did to American democracy]

What is happening on Facebook now? On the eve of another chaotic election, journalists have found that highly deceptive political advertisements still run amok there, as do election-fraud conspiracy theories. The Times reported in September that the company, now called Meta, had fewer full-time employees working on election integrity and that Zuckerberg was no longer having weekly meetings with the lieutenants in charge of them. The paper also reported that Meta had replaced the war room with a less sharply defined “election operations center.”

When I reached out to Meta to ask about its plans, the company did not give many specific details. But Corey Chambliss, a Meta spokesperson focused on election preparedness, told me that the war room definitely still exists and that “election operations center” is just another of its names. He proved this with a video clip showing B-roll footage of a few dozen employees working in a conference room on Super Tuesday. The video had been shot in Meta’s Washington, D.C., office, but Chambliss impressed upon me that it could really be anywhere: The war room moves and exists in multiple places. “Wouldn’t want to over-emphasize the physical space as it’s sort of immaterial,” he wrote in an email.

It is clear that Meta wants to keep its name out of this election however much that is possible. It may marshal its considerable resources and massive content-moderation apparatus to enforce its policies against election interference, and it may “break the glass,” as it did in 2021, to take additional action if something as dramatic as January 6 happens again. At the same time, it won’t draw a lot of attention to those efforts or be very specific about them. Recent conversations I’ve had with a former policy lead at the company and academics who have worked with and studied Facebook, as well as Chambliss, made it clear that as a matter of policy, the company has done whatever it can to fly under the radar this election season—including Zuckerberg’s declining to endorse a candidate, as he has in previous presidential elections. When it comes to politics, Meta and Zuckerberg have decided that there is no winning. At this pivotal moment, it is simply doing less.

Meta’s war room may be real, but it is also just a symbol—its meaning has been haggled over for six years now, and its name doesn’t really matter. “People got very obsessed with the naming of this room,” Katie Harbath, a former public-policy director at Facebook who left the company in March 2021, told me. She disagreed with the idea that the room was ever a publicity stunt. “I spent a lot of time in that very smelly, windowless room,” she said. I wondered whether the war room—ambiguous in terms of both its accomplishments and its very existence—was the perfect way to understand the company’s approach to election chaos. I posed to Harbath that the conversation around the war room was really about the anxiety of not knowing what, precisely, Meta is doing behind closed doors to meet the challenges of the moment.

She agreed that part of the reason the room was created was to help people imagine content moderation. Its primary purpose was practical and logistical, she said, but it was “a way to give a visual representation of what the work looks like too.” That’s why, this year, the situation is so muddy. Meta doesn’t want you to think there is no war room, but it isn’t drawing attention to the war room. There was no press junket; there were no tours. There is no longer even a visual of the war room as a specific room in one place.

This is emblematic of Meta’s in-between approach this year. Meta has explicit rules against election misinformation on its platforms; these include a policy against content that attempts to deceive people about where and how to vote. The rules do not, as written, include false claims about election results (although such claims are prohibited in paid ads). Posts about the Big Lie—the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen—were initially moderated with fact-checking labels, but these were scaled back dramatically before the 2022 midterms, purportedly because users disliked them. The company also made a significant policy update this year to clarify that it would require labels on AI-generated content (a change made after its Oversight Board criticized its previous manipulated-media policy as “incoherent”). But tons of unlabeled generative-AI slop still flows without consequence on Facebook.

[Read: “History will not judge us kindly”]

In recent years, Meta has also attempted to de-prioritize political content of all kinds in its various feeds. “As we’ve said for years, people have told us they want to see less politics overall while still being able to engage with political content on our platforms if they want,” Chambliss told me. “That’s exactly what we’ve been doing.” When I emailed to ask questions about the company’s election plans, Chambliss initially responded by linking me to a short blog post that Meta put out 11 months ago, and attaching a broadly circulated fact sheet, which included such vague figures as “$20 billion invested in teams and technology in this area since 2016.” This information is next-to-impossible for a member of the public to make sense of—how is anyone supposed to know what $20 billion can buy?

In some respects, Meta’s reticence is just part of a broader cultural shift. Content moderation has become politically charged in recent years. Many high-profile misinformation and disinformation research projects born in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection have shut down or shrunk. (When the Stanford Internet Observatory, an organization that published regular reports on election integrity and misinformation, shut down, right-wing bloggers celebrated the end of its “reign of censorship.”) The Biden administration experimented in 2022 with creating a Disinformation Governance Board, but quickly abandoned the plan after it drew a firestorm from the right—whose pundits and influencers portrayed the proposal as one for a totalitarian “Ministry of Truth.” The academic who had been tasked with leading it was targeted so intensely that she resigned.

“Meta has definitely been quieter,” Harbath said. “They’re not sticking their heads out there with public announcements.” This is partly because Zuckerberg has become personally exasperated with politics, she speculated. She added that it is also the result of the response the company got in 2020—accusations from Democrats of doing too little, accusations from Republicans of doing far too much. The far right was, for a while, fixated on the idea that Zuckerberg had personally rigged the presidential election in favor of Joe Biden and that he frequently bowed to Orwellian pressure from the Biden administration afterward. In recent months, Zuckerberg has been oddly conciliatory about this position; in August, he wrote what amounted to an apology letter to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, saying that Meta had overdone it with its efforts to curtail COVID-19 misinformation and that it had erred by intervening to minimize the spread of the salacious news story about Hunter Biden and his misplaced laptop.  

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, used to donate large sums of money to nonpartisan election infrastructure through their philanthropic foundation. They haven’t done so this election cycle, seeking to avoid a repeat of the controversy ginned up by Republicans the last time. This had not been enough to satisfy Trump, though, and he recently threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison for the rest of his life if he makes any political missteps—which may, of course, be one of the factors Zuckerberg is considering in choosing to stay silent.

Other circumstances have changed dramatically since 2020, too. Just before that election, the sitting president was pushing conspiracy theories about the election, about various groups of his own constituents, and about a pandemic that had already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. He was still using Facebook, as were the adherents of QAnon, the violent conspiracy theory that positioned him as a redeeming godlike figure. After the 2020 election, Meta said publicly that Facebook would no longer recommend political or civic groups for users to join—clearly in response to the criticism that the site’s own recommendations guided people into “Stop the Steal” groups. And though Facebook banned Trump himself for using the platform to incite violence on January 6, the platform reinstated his account once it became clear that he would again be running for president

This election won’t be like the previous one. QAnon simply isn’t as present in the general culture, in part because of actions that Meta and other platforms took in 2020 and 2021. More will happen on other platforms this year, in more private spaces, such as Telegram groups. And this year’s “Stop the Steal” movement will likely need less help from Facebook to build momentum: YouTube and Trump’s own social platform, Truth Social, are highly effective for this purpose. Election denial has also been galvanized from the top by right-wing influencers and media personalities including Elon Musk, who has turned X into the perfect platform for spreading conspiracy theories about voter fraud. He pushes them himself all the time.

In many ways, understanding Facebook’s relevance is harder than ever. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that 33 percent of U.S. adults say they “regularly” get news from the platform. But Meta has limited access to data for both journalists and academics in the past two years. After the 2020 election, the company partnered with academics for a huge research project to sort out what happened and to examine Facebook’s broader role in American politics. It was cited when Zuckerberg was pressed to answer for Facebook’s role in the organization of the “Stop the Steal” movement and January 6: “We believe that independent researchers and our democratically elected officials are best positioned to complete an objective review of these events,” he said at the time. That project is coming to an end, some of the researchers involved told me, and Chabliss confirmed.

The first big release of research papers produced through the partnership, which gave researchers an unprecedented degree of access to platform data, came last summer. Still more papers will continue to be published as they pass peer review and are accepted to scientific journals—one paper in its final stages will deal with the diffusion of misinformation—but all of these studies were conducted using data from 2020 and 2021. No new data have or will be provided to these researchers.

When I asked Chambliss about the end of the partnership, he emphasized that no other platform had bothered to do as robust of a research project. However, he wouldn’t say exactly why it was coming to an end. “It’s a little frustrating that such a massive and unprecedented undertaking that literally no other platform has done is put to us as a question of ‘why not repeat this?’ vs asking peer companies why they haven't come close to making similar commitments for past or current elections,” he wrote in an email.

The company also shut down the data-analysis tool CrowdTangle—used widely by researchers and by journalists—earlier this year. It touts new tools that have been made available to researchers, but academics scoff at the claim that they approximate anything like real access to live and robust information. Without Meta’s cooperation, it becomes much harder for academics to effectively monitor what happens on its platforms.

I recently spoke with Kathleen Carley, a professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, about research she conducted from 2020 to 2022 on the rise of “pink slime,” a type of mass-produced misinformation designed to look like the product of local newspapers and to be shared on social media. Repeating that type of study for the 2024 election would cost half a million dollars, she estimated, because researchers now have to pay if they want broad data access. From her observations and the more targeted, “surgical” data pulls that her team has been able to do this year, pink-slime sites are far more concentrated in swing states than they had been previously, while conspiracy theories were spreading just as easily as ever. But these are observations; they’re not a real monitoring effort, which would be too costly.

“Monitoring implies that we’re doing consistent data crawls and have wide-open access to data,” she told me, “which we do not.” This time around, nobody will.

Traditionally, a campaign’s closing argument is supposed to hammer home its main themes. At a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump did exactly that—by once again fantasizing about violence against his perceived enemies.

Describing how his open-air podium was mostly surrounded by bulletproof glass, the former president noted a gap in that protection, and added: “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much.” And by “fake news,” he meant the members of the press covering his rally.

[Read: The great, disappearing Trump campaign]

The crowd whooped and clapped. Many of Trump’s rallies feature a moment’s hate for the journalists in attendance, whom he blames for, among other things, distorting his message, not praising him enough, reflexively favoring Kamala Harris, fact-checking his statements, noticing empty seats, and reporting that people leave his events early.

But journalists are only some of the many “enemies from within” whom Trump has name-checked at his rallies and on his favored social network, Truth Social. He has suggested that Mark Zuckerberg should face “life in prison” if Facebook’s moderation policies penalize right-wingers. He has suggested using the National Guard or the military against “radical-left lunatics” who disrupt the election. He believes people who criticize the Supreme Court “should be put in jail.” A recent post on Truth Social stated that if he wins on Tuesday, Trump would hunt down “lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” who had engaged in what he called “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery.” Just last week, he fantasized in public about his Republican critic Liz Cheney facing gunfire, and he previously promoted a post calling for her to face a “televised military tribunal” for treason. In all, NPR found more than 100 examples of Trump threatening to prosecute or persecute his opponents. One of his recent targets was this magazine.

Does this rhetoric matter to voters? It certainly ought to. Persecuting journalists is what autocrats do—and yet Trump’s many boosters on the right, who claim to care deeply about free speech, seem resolutely unmoved. However, his campaign has tried to clean up today’s offending remarks, something that his team rarely bothers to do. (The most recent major example was after the comedian Tony Hinchliffe called Puerto Rico “an island of garbage” while warming up the crowd at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden last weekend.)

Following today’s speech in Lititz, Team Trump is trying to spin his comments as nothing more than tender concern for the welfare of reporters. “President Trump was brilliantly talking about the two assassination attempts on his own life,” Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson, wrote in a statement. (Let’s have a moment to enjoy the self-abasement required to write that brilliantly.) He continued:

The President’s statement about protective glass placement has nothing to do with the Media being harmed, or anything else. It was about threats against him that were spurred on by dangerous rhetoric from Democrats. In fact, President Trump was stating that the Media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also. There can be no other interpretation of what was said. He was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!

The word Orwellian is overused, but come on, Steven Cheung. You expect people to believe this crock? That jaunty final exclamation mark gives the entire statement a whiff of sarcasm, and rightly so. Trump plainly meant that, if he were targeted from a nearby rooftop, he would at least draw some small consolation if a blameless camera operator from a local TV station were taken out first.

The rest of Trump’s speech was the usual minestrone of cheap insults, petty grievances, and bizarre digressions. He repeated a claim that he’d previously made on The Joe Rogan Experience—where he said he wanted to be a “whale psychiatrist”—that offshore wind farms are killing whales. He suggested that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after losing the 2020 election. At times, he appeared to be boring himself, regretting that he had to deliver a stump speech that the audience had probably heard “900 times.”

He took aim at his most-hated Democrats: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was “not a smart girl”; Harris was “lazy as hell”; and Adam Schiff had an “enlarged watermelon head.” He complained about “Barack Hussein Obama” and said that because Obama’s wife had criticized him, “I think we’re gonna start having a little fun with Michelle.” Notably, given his other remarks about the media, he also threatened CBS’s broadcast license because, he contended, the network had deceptively edited one of Harris’s answers in her interview with 60 Minutes. (The network denies the allegation.) For those who dismiss Trump’s threats as merely overblown rhetoric, it should be noted that he has also launched a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS in a part of Texas where the sole federal judge is a Republican.

[Read: Inside the ruthless, restless final days of Trump’s campaign]

Trump’s current mood might be attributable to his stalled momentum in recent polls and a slump in his odds of victory in betting markets. Accordingly, in Lititz, he added a new name to his list of adversaries: J. Ann Selzer, the widely respected Iowa pollster who has a track record of producing surprising results that are borne out on Election Day. Last night, her poll for The Des Moines Register found that Harris was leading by three points in Iowa, a state that Trump won in 2020 by eight. Last year, when Selzer’s poll correctly showed Trump ahead in the state’s Republican primary campaign, he called her a “very powerful” pollster who had delivered a “big beautiful poll.” In Lititz, however, he described Selzer as “one of my enemies” and lumped her together with the media: “The polls are just as corrupt as some of the writers back there.”

The campaign is coming to an unruly close. Trump’s surrogates are going rogue: Elon Musk has said that his drive for government efficiency would cause “temporary hardship”; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged this weekend to remove fluoride from drinking water; and House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that Republicans would “probably” repeal the CHIPS Act, which subsidizes U.S. semiconductor production. None of these is a winning message for the Republicans. (Johnson later said he wouldn’t try to kill the bill.)

But the bigger issue is the candidate himself. The more professional elements of the campaign appear to be losing their grip on Trump, who is tired and bored and restless for revenge. Whatever happens on Tuesday, we can say authoritatively that this has been Trump’s darkest campaign yet.