Welcome to the first post-election Tuesday Tech drop. Each Tuesday, I round up the last week’s top stories at the intersection of tech and politics.
In my last Tech Drop, I warned how electing Donald Trump would risk accelerating the trend of wealthy elites consolidating their power over influential tech tools, including social media platforms, to divide Americans. Trump’s victory represents a major win for some of these very rich technocrats, and in the years ahead, it’ll be incumbent upon us as users and consumers to guard against their efforts to weaponize technology against the vulnerable and amass power.
Jack Teixeira sentenced
Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guard member who leaked top secret Pentagon documents on the messaging platform Discord, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Tuesday. Teixeira, who pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act, has been behind bars since his arrest last year. His release had been previously denied after authorities expressed concern that foreign governments could aid his escape and revealed he had a history of violent rhetoric, including a social media post in which he said he would like to “kill a ton of people.”
Read more in Reuters.
The future of the FCC?
Now that Trump is president-elect, media outlets are focusing on his upcoming administration’s personnel. Ars Technica has a rundown on Brendan Carr, an FCC commissioner who’s seen as a potential pick to chair the commission. The profile highlights some of Carr’s MAGA bona fides, including his authorship of Project 2025’s section on the FCC, his contention that the government denying Elon Musk an $886 million contract was a politicized “punishment” and his objection to “Saturday Night Live” featuring Kamala Harris in a segment before the election. (NBC, which airs “SNL” and is also owned by MSNBC’s parent company, provided Trump with equal air time following a NASCAR race the next day.)
Read more at Ars Technica.
Silicon Valley frets over Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown
Silicon Valley tech leaders are openly fretting over how Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown could affect their workforce, particularly because many technology-related jobs in the U.S. are held by people on H1-B visas.
Read more at Business Insider.
Big Tech oligarchy
Following Trump’s election win, I warned on the ReidOut blog about the wealthy Big Tech powerbrokers aligned with the Republican and how the online platforms they control helped to grease the skids for his return to the White House.
Read the blog here.
Musk’s post-election windfall
CNBC reports Elon Musk became $70 billion richer as a result of Trump’s election, primarily due to a spike in Tesla’s stock price. Seems like the decision to turn Twitter into a pro-Trump propaganda machine, at the cost of $44 billion, is netting out quite well for him.
Read more at CNBC.
Toxic MAGA masculinity unleashed
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue released a report on the outburst of online misogyny targeting women since Trump’s election win. Some of that behavior includes men calling for “rape,” “rape squads” and targeting women with the phrase “your body, my choice.”
Read my blog on the report here.
Disturbing Discord predator sentenced
A Michigan man who used Discord to prey on children was sentenced last week to 30 years in prison. FBI Director Christopher Wray said the man, Richard Anthony Reyna Densmore, “orchestrated a community to target children through online gaming sites and used extortion and blackmail to force his minor victims to record themselves committing acts of self-harm and violence.”
Read the Department of Justice’s press release here.
Meta makes the E.U. an offer
In response to pressure from the European Union over its use of targeted ads, Meta has proposed allowing Instagram and Facebook users to opt for “less personalized ads,” according to The Wall Street Journal. The E.U. has taken the lead globally in pushing back against social media manipulation, hate speech and violent extremism online. In the lead-up to the presidential election, JD Vance threatened to drop U.S. support for NATO if European countries don’t “respect free speech” and exempt Musk from their rules.
Read more about Meta’s proposal in The Wall Street Journal.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.