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10 | T UESDAY, AUGUST 13, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITIONSome of the country’s most knowledge-
able physicians can’t tell me with any
certitude why I ended up losing sight
in my right eye and am in danger of
going blind, but one of my column’s
readers figured it out. It’s because I’m
gay.
“You have openly discussed your
homosexuality,” he emailed me two
weeks ago, and, perhaps to his credit,
he attached his name, which enabled
me to determine that he’s not a funda-
mentalist preacher from a deep-red
state but an engineer living in the New
York City suburbs. “That is why God
could not help you. You were living in
flagrant violation of his Law.”
That email was especially mean but
otherwise routine. Just a week earlier,
a woman who teaches at a college in
Manhattan wrote: “Is it really true that
you are a homosexual? I hope not.
Columns written by homosexuals
inevitably have their own homosexual
agenda and viewpoints and cannot be
read with the belief that they are im-partial. I do hope that the rumors
about you are not true.”
Rumors? They’re facts, though she
has obviously encountered them in
corners of the internet where being
gay is regarded as a prompt for se-
crecy and a source of shame. There are
many such corners, and they have
plenty of denizens.
In movies, songs and greeting cards,
I’m always hearing or seeing that love
is forever and that it conquers all. Well,
hate may be even more durable, and it
has the muscle to fight love to a draw.
My inbox is proof of that; the evi-
dence stretches back decades. And I’m
talking in this case not about irate and
sometimes foul-mouthed readers who
dislike my opinions. All columnists
encounter that, and given the privilege
of our megaphones, we should. I’m
talking about readers who detest the
very fact of me, who I am, independent
of any person or issue I lift up or tear
down.
They’re strangers. They’ve never
met me, never taken the measure of
my generosity, kindness, loyalty or
lack thereof. For them I exist in a
category, as a type. That type is all
they see, and that type is contemptible.
This is the kind of hate that Presi-
dent Trump counts and draws on, the
kind of hate that motivated the gun-
men in El Paso, Pittsburgh and too
many other places. But we’re having a
discussion too limited — and indulging
a mind-set woefully naïve — when wemake those massacres principally
about him. He’s a gardener tilling soil
that’s all too fertile.
It was there before him. It will be
there after. And while gentler words
from the White House and a better
president may affect how much grows
in it and how tall, the ugliness will
always take root and always flower.
If you live in a certain category —
black, brown, Jew, Muslim, gay, trans
— you know this, and you experience
events like those of the past week not
just as chilling reflections of the politi-
cal moment but as sad testaments to
human nature. You
register some of our
gauziest bromides as
well-intentioned
delusions:
If only every white
American knew and
interacted with more
black Americans. If only every straight
person was aware and took stock of his
or her gay relatives and friends. If only
there were more mingling of Christians
and Jews, of Jews and Muslims. If only
the right leaders and the right thinking
could reach and teach more people. If
only, if only, if only.
Well, some people are beyond reach-
ing and teaching. Some are hardened,
not softened, by exposure to diversity.
As best I can tell, a few of these gun-
men were plenty exposed. It didn’t dim
their righteousness or dissuade them
of their rightness.It’s easy to lose sight of this, to focus
instead on the hearts and minds that
have been changed, on the progress that
can be made. I’ve been surprised and
moved by the arc of L.G.B.T. Americans
over my lifetime: I’m inexpressibly
grateful for it. According to a recent poll,
63 percent of Americans now support
same-sex marriage. But that leaves 37
percent who don’t. And while most of
them are above the age of 50, some are
below 30 and — for whatever tangle of
religious, cultural and psychological
reasons — cannot bear the likes of me.
They will be around for decades to
come. So will their hate.
I note this to ward off complacency,
which kicked in to some degree under
our previous president. Barack Oba-
ma’s election told a narrative different
from Trump’s. He symbolized the possi-
bility of hatred’s ebb. But it was biding
its time, waiting its turn. It always
does.
That’s not to say that we should give
in or get used to it. No, precisely be-
cause of its awesome stubbornness, we
must do all we can to prevent its un-
leashing and weaponization. We must
change overly permissive gun laws,
take on a largely unregulated internet,
push back at a public dialogue that
abets the most destructive tribalism.
We must punish acts of hate fiercely,
not just to declare our values but also to
make the haters think twice and to
keep them in my inbox, armed with
only words, and not in your child’s high
school, armed with an assault rifle.
Meantime those of us who are hated
will figure out how to muddle through,
with what measures of wariness versus
openness, bitterness versus grace. I
wrote an email back to the professor,
saying that if she had a problem with
my homosexuality, she could and
should stop reading me. Of course that
didn’t shut her up.
“I will pray for you and may God
forgive you,” she responded. “A life of
perversion can be no fun, and the here-
after is sure to be disastrous. I will also
pray for your mother. It must be awful
to have a homosexual son.”
My mother died almost 23 years ago,
after a long and hard-fought battle with
cancer. She knew I was gay and took no
less comfort from me because of it. She
loved me no less. I didn’t tell the profes-
sor that. Instead I informed her that I
was activating my spam filter and
would never again see an email from
her.
A colleague suggested that I report
her to her school’s administration,
because she must have L.G.B.T. stu-
dents. I won’t. If her bigotry was a force
in the classroom, her students would
most likely pick up on that and rightly
complain. Otherwise, I’m not the
thought police. She didn’t do anything
to me. And I don’t know her personal
story: what demons she harbors, and
why. If I did, I might feel more sympa-
thy than anything else for her. The
same goes for the God-fearing engi-
neer, whose name, like hers, I’ll keep to
myself.
The two of them are a reminder that
hate has no particular profession, no
education level, no ZIP code. Its sprawl
is as demoralizing as its staying power.
Emily Dickinson wrote, gorgeously,
that “hope is the thing with feathers.”
Well, hate is the thing with tentacles. It
holds people tight and refuses to let go.Hate is so much bigger than Trump
BEN WISEMANJust look
at history.
Or at
my inbox.Frank Bruni
Even on an internet bursting at the
seams with conspiracy theories and
hyperpartisanship, Saturday marked a
new chapter in our post-truth, “choose
your own reality” crisis story.
It began early Saturday morning,
when news broke that the disgraced
financier Jeffrey Epstein had appar-
ently hanged himself in a Manhattan
jail. Mr. Epstein’s death, coming just
one day after court documents from
one of his alleged victims were un-
sealed, sparked immediate suspicion
from journalists, politicians and the
usual online fringes.
Within minutes, Trump appointees,
Fox Business hosts and Twitter pun-
dits revived a decades old conspiracy
theory, linking the Clinton family to
supposedly suspicious deaths. #Clin-
tonBodyCount and #ClintonCrime-
Family trended on Twitter. Around the
same time, an opposite hashtag —
#TrumpBodyCount — emerged, fo-
cused on President Trump’s decades-
old ties to Mr. Epstein. Each hashtag
was accompanied by GIFs and memes
picturing Mr. Epstein with the Clintons
or with Mr. Trump to serve as a viral
accusation of foul play.
The dueling hashtags and their
attendant toxicity are a grim testament
to our deeply poisoned information
ecosystem — one that’s built for speed
and designed to reward the most in-
cendiary impulses of its worst actors.
It has ushered in a parallel reality
unrooted in fact and helped to pushconspiratorial thinking into the cultural
mainstream. And with each news
cycle, the system grows more efficient,
entrenching its opposing camps. The
poison spreads.
Mr. Epstein’s apparent suicide is, in
many ways, the post-truth nightmare
scenario. The sordid story contains
almost all the hallmarks of stereotypi-
cal conspiratorial fodder: child sex-
trafficking, powerful global political
leaders, shadowy private jet flights,
billionaires whose wealth cannot be
explained. As a tale of corruption, it is
so deeply intertwined with our current
cultural and political rot that it feels, at
times, almost too on-the-nose. The
Epstein saga provides ammunition for
everyone, leading one researcher to
refer to Saturday’s news as the “Disin-
formation World Cup.”
At the heart of Saturday’s fiasco is
Twitter, which has come to largely
program the political conversation and
much of the press. Twitter is magnetic
during massive breaking stories; news
junkies flock to it for up-to-the-second
information. But early on, there’s often
a vast discrepancy between the atten-
tion that is directed at the platform and
the available information about the
developing story. That gap is filled by
speculation and, via its worst users,
rumor-mongering and conspiracy
theories.
On Saturday, Twitter’s trending algo-
rithms hoovered up the worst of this
detritus, curating, ranking and then
placing it in the trending module on the
right side of its website. Despite being a
highly arbitrary and mostly “worthless
metric,” trending topics on Twitter are
often interpreted as a vague signal of
the importance of a given subject.There’s a decent chance that Presi-
dent Trump was using Twitter’s trend-
ing module when he retweeted a con-
spiratorial tweet tying the Clintons to
Epstein’s death. At the time of Mr.
Trump’s retweet, “Clintons” was the
third trending topic in the United
States. The specific tweet amplified by
the president to his more than 60 mil-
lion followers was prominently fea-
tured in the “Clintons” trending topic.
And as Ashley Feinberg at Slate
pointed out in June, the president
appears to have a history of using
trending to find and interact with
tweets.
On Saturday
afternoon, computa-
tional propaganda
researcher Renée
DiResta noted that
the media’s close
relationship with
Twitter creates an
incentive for propa-
gandists and partisans to artificially
inflate given hashtags. Almost as soon
as #ClintonBodyCount began trending
on Saturday, journalists took note and
began lamenting the spread of this
conspiracy theory — effectively turn-
ing it into a news story, and further
amplifying the trend. “Any wayward
tweet... can be elevated to an opinion
worth paying attention to,” Ms. DiResta
wrote. “If you make it trend, you make
it true.”
That our public conversation has
been uploaded onto tech platforms
governed by opaque algorithms adds
even more fodder for the conspiratorial
minded. Anti-Trump Twitter pundits
with hundreds of thousands of follow-
ers blamed “Russian bots” for theClinton trending topic. On the far-right,
pro-Trump sites like the Gateway Pun-
dit (with a long track record of ampli-
fying conspiracy theories) suggested
that Twitter was suppressing and cen-
soring the Clinton hashtags.
Where does this leave us? Nowhere
good.
It’s increasingly apparent that our
information delivery systems were not
built for our current moment — espe-
cially with corruption and conspiracy
at the heart of our biggest national
news stories (Epstein, the Mueller
Report, mass shootings), and the plat-
forms themselves functioning as petri
dishes for outlandish, even dangerous
conspiracy theories to flourish. The
collision of these two forces is so trou-
bling that an F.B.I. field office recently
identified fringe conspiracy theories as
a domestic terrorist threat. In this
ecosystem, the media is frequently
outmatched and, despite its best inten-
tions, often acts as an amplifier for
baseless claims, even when trying its
best to knock them down.
Saturday’s online toxicity may have
felt novel, but it’s part of a familiar
cycle: What cannot be easily explained
is answered by convenient untruths.
The worst voices are rewarded for
growing louder and gain outsize influ-
ence directing narratives. With each
cycle, the outrage and contempt for the
other builds.
Each extreme becomes certain its
enemy has manipulated public percep-
tion; each side is the victim, but each is
also, inexplicably, winning. The poison
spreads.Charlie Warzel
Writer at LargeCHARLIE WARZELcovers technology,
media, politics and online extremism.Epstein’s suicide and false conspiracies
With each
news cycle,
the fake-
information
system grows
more efficient.opinion
Two anniversaries occur this week for Austin Tice,
an American freelance journalist. On Sunday, he
turned 38; on Wednesday, he will start his eighth
year in captivity, probably somewhere in Syria.
Mr. Tice is a graduate of the Georgetown School of
Foreign Service, served as a Marine officer and was
enrolled at Georgetown Law. But he longed to be a
reporter, so in May of 2012, with a year to go in law
school, he set out for Syria to report on how the civil
war was affecting the lives of ordinary people.
The war was just entering its second year, and
there wasn’t much reporting about it — getting into
combat zones from either the government side or the
rebel side was dangerous and difficult. So Mr. Tice
went in illegally. Soon his images, interviews and
reports were appearing in The Washington Post,
McClatchy newspapers, Agence France-Presse and
other news outlets.
Mr. Tice intended to leave after his 31st birthday,
on Aug. 11, after filing his last pieces. On Aug. 14 he
left for Lebanon by car from the Damascus suburb of
Darayya, then in rebel hands. Shortly after, he was
detained at a checkpoint.
Five weeks later, a 47-second video titled “Austin
Tice Still Alive” was posted on a pro-government
web page, in which Mr. Tice is being hustled along a
rocky mountainside by what is meant to appear to be
a group of Islamist militants. They force Mr. Tice to
recite, in clumsy Arabic, a prayer Muslims say be-
fore dying, after which, breathless and distraught, he
says in English: “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.” There were
doubts at the time about the authenticity of the vid-
eo, in part because the captors did not behave as
militants usually do.
Without offering any evidence, other pro-regime
news sources subsequently posted messages de-
scribing Mr. Tice as an Israeli agent or accusing him
of killing three Syrian officers. But there has been no
contact with his captors.
Mr. Tice’s parents, Marc and Debra Tice, are con-
vinced he is alive and have worked tirelessly for his
release, traveling several times to Lebanon, putting
pressure on every diplomat and official they can,
organizing special events to keep his fate in the pub-
lic eye. The State Department has said it is operating
on the presumption that Mr. Tice is alive, and it has
been working through the Czech Embassy in Da-
mascus (the United States Embassy is closed) to
press the Syrian government for information. The
F.B.I. has offered a $1 million reward for information
leading to his return, and journalism organizations
such as Reporters Without Borders and the National
Press Club have joined in campaigning for Mr. Tice’s
freedom.
Mr. Tice was not a combatant. He was a journalist
who went to Syria to report on the plight of people in
a terrible civil war. That he was a freelance contribu-
tor makes no difference — his self-assigned mission
was the same as that of all journalists who confront
the enormous dangers of conflict, hostile govern-
ments and rapacious bandits to let the world know
what is really happening. According to Reporters
Without Borders, 239 journalists and 17 of their as-
sistants are currently known to be imprisoned for
their work.
“Austin is alive, with the hope of once again walk-
ing free,” his parents wrote in a recent open letter.
“We also hold on to that hope and continue to do all
we can to bring him safely home. That said, clearly
our efforts have been insufficient. And until he
comes home, we will have never done enough.” His
parents urged readers to call on their government
representatives to make Mr. Tice’s release a priority.
Recently, Kristian Baxter, a Canadian citizen held
in a Syrian prison since last year, was released fol-
lowing Lebanese mediation. At a news conference
Mr. Baxter said that while detained he was uncertain
whether people knew he was still alive. Last month,
Lebanese officials also mediated the release of the
American traveler Sam Goodwin.
The National Press Club has coordinated a photo
exhibit and rally at the Capitol on Sept. 23 to raise
awareness for Mr. Tice.
Mr. Tice has already paid heavily for his honorable
efforts. Demands for his release must not cease until
he is free.The law
student and
freelance
journalist
was seized
in Syria
in 2012.
He must
be released.FREE AUSTIN TICE FROM CAPTIVITY
A.G. SULZBERGER,PublisherDEAN BAQUET,Executive Editor
JOSEPH KAHN,Managing Editor
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate EditorJAMES BENNET,Editorial Page Editor
JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Deputy Editorial Page EditorMARK THOMPSON,Chief Executive Officer
STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON,President, International
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CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing
HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P.,International Circulation
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