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sophie-writings · 4 years

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Masterlist ☁️

A masterlist with all my works!!

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Have a good read 💖

☁️ Last updated: 18.06.2020 ☁️

Bakugou Katsuki

Headcanons

How he would be as a boyfriend

Being told “I love you” for the first time

Girlfriend starts to ignore him

Having a s/o with crackhead energy

S/o makes him flustered with innuendos

S/o carries him after he’s hurt during battle

Bakugou reacting to an dancer s/o

Getting jealous of his crush “boyfriend”

Getting jealous of Todoroki

Getting jealous of a teddy bear

Trying to get his s/o to talk to him

Bakugou with a s/o who’s self-conscious of her body

Grumpy Bakugou after not sleeping enough

Bakugou with a s/o who has the same quirk and costume as Hela

Defending his s/o from perverts

Bakugou with a s/o who keeps cute photos of him on their phone

A cuddly Bakugou after a tough day

Disneyland date with his crush

Bakugou meets his favorite shoujo manga writter

Undercover mission with crush

S/o comes out as bi

Falling in love with his best friend

Taking care of his lactose intolerant s/o

He hurts his s/o’s feelings

S/o who has really high pain tolerance

Quarantined with teacher s/o

Innocent looking s/o who’s actually dirty minded

Bakugou dating his polar opposite

Dating a s/o who had a major surgery when younger

He’s hit by a quirk that turns him into a child

Pro!Hero Bakugou ruins his crush’s date

Meeting his s/o’s father who has the same personality as him

S/o gets hit by a baby quirk

Soulmate AU: Timer on your wrist that stops counting when you meet your soulmate

Platonic bff’s with Bakugou

S/o who’s self-conscious of her moles

His kid doesn’t recognize him after he’s been away for a long term mission

Bakugou finds out his s/o’s bi

Prompt: “Do you have a plan?” “Yes” “If we’re burning something it’s not a plan”

Prompt: "How come she loves you?"

Jealous Bakugou headcanons

Comforting s/o who’s self-conscious of her battle scars

S/o calls him ugly

Rejecting his insistent crush

Helping his s/o fall asleep

Scenarios

Bakugou’s s/o had a bad day so he cheers them up.

Pro!Hero Bakugou s/o’s is being targeted by the media and attacked online.

Prompt: “I made her cry. How could I do that?"

Prompts: “I wish I didn’t love you so much.” + “You hurt me so well.”

Prompt: “You don't believe the rumors are true?” “It's just fake pr to sell charms to lovesick fools”

Fics

“I won’t say I’m in love”: Bakugou just might have the biggest tiniest crush on you, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to admit it to anyone — or even himself. Inspired by: “I won’t say (I’m in love)” from Hercules.

SMAU’s

“I’m literally the guy in the picture”

Bakugou with a s/o who keeps cute photos of him on their phone

Drunkly confessing his feelings

“I want a baby” text prank

Wrong text from his s/o ranting about how much she loves him

Midoriya Izuku

Headcanons

How he would be as a boyfriend

Girlfriend starts to ignore him

Having a s/o with crackhead energy

Midoriya telling his s/o that they are beautiful

Midoriya with a s/o who has the same quirk and costume as Hela

Helping his s/o study for exams

S/o who sings for him

He’s hit by a quirk that turns him into a child

S/o gets hit by a baby quirk

His kid doesn’t recognize him after he’s been away for a long term mission

Receiving/giving hickeys

Comforting s/o who’s self-conscious of her battle scars

Jealous of Bakugou

Scenarios

Findinding his s/o crying

Pro!Hero Midoriya’s crush asks him to be their fake boyfriend for a night

SMAU’s

“I’m literally the guy in the picture”

Wrong text from his s/o ranting about how much she loves him

Todoroki Shouto

Headcanons

How he would be as a boyfriend

Girlfriend starts to ignore him

Todoroki with a loud and bubbly s/o

Todoroki with a s/o who’s self-conscious of her body

Todoroki with a s/o who has the same quirk and costume as Hela

Todoroki with a s/o who suffers from amnesia after a blow to the head part 1| part 2

Disneyland date with crush

Todoroki with a s/o with fluffy hair

Todoroki’s first crush

Todoroki with a s/o who grew up in the countryside

S/o comes out as bi

Falling in love with his best friend

S/o who has really high pain tolerance

S/o who’s self-conscious of her moles

His kid doesn’t recognize him after he’s been away for a long term mission

He turns into a baby/His s/o turns into a baby

Comforting s/o who’s self-conscious of her surgery scars

Rejecting his insistent crush

Scenarios

Todoroki’s s/o wearing his clothes

Todoroki forgets about a date with his s/o

SMAU’S

“I’m literally the guy in the picture”

“I want a baby” text prank

Kirishima Eijirou

Headcanons

Girlfriend starts to ignore him

Kirishima and his s/o go camping

Kirishima takes care of sick s/o on their birthday

Meeting his s/o’s father who has the same personality has Bakugou

SMAU’S

S/o snaps them a TikTok dance

“I want a baby” text prank

Tenya Iida

Headcanons

Iida with an emotionally drained s/o

Taking care of his lactose intolerant s/o

Prompt: "You own my heart. For all of eternity."

Iida dating his polar opposite

SMAU’S

S/o snaps them a TikTok dance

Kaminari Denki

Headcanons

Undercover mission with crush

Taking care of his lactose intolerant s/o

His s/o breaks up with him

S/o who needs a lot of medical care

Innocent looking s/o who’s actually dirty minded

Dating a s/o who has a coffee addiction

Dyeing hair with his s/o

Singing “I want it that way” with Denki

SMAU’s

“I want a baby” text prank

Hanta Sero

Headcanons

Pocky game with s/o

Complimenting Sero’s cute butt

Getting jealous oh his crush “boyfriend”

Sero with an artsy s/o

S/o comes out as bi

Sero and his bestie

Helping his s/o study for exams

Dating a s/o who has a coffee addiction

Braiding his hair

Receiving/giving hickeys

Scenarios

Hurts s/o with his tape

SMAU’s

“I want a baby” text prank

Wrong text from his s/o ranting about how much she loves him

Tamaki Amajiki

Headcanons

Girlfriend starts to ignore him

Pocky game with s/o

Tamaki takes care of sick s/o on their birthday

Defending his s/o from perverts

Quarantined with teacher s/o

He’s hit by a quirk that turns him into a child

Dating a s/o who has a coffee addiction

S/o gets hit by a baby quirk

Prompt: “I wanted to say “I love you” for the first time without stuttering, but that failed.”

Receiving/giving hickeys

Jealous of his crush best friends

Prompt: "You own my heart. For all of eternity."

SMAU’s

Drunkly confessing his feelings

Wrong text from his s/o ranting about how much she loves him

Mirio Togata

Headcanons

Mirio takes care of sick s/o on their birthday

Mirio with a touch-starved s/o

Mirio with a s/o who keeps cute photos of him on their phone

S/o who brings him lunch everyday

SMAU’S

Mirio with a s/o who keeps cute photos of him on their phone

Drunkly confessing his feelings

Wrong text from his s/o ranting about how much she loves him

Hitoshi Shinsou

Headcanons

Shinsou sneaking into UA’s dorms to be with his s/o

Having a s/o with crackhead energy

Pocky game with s/o

Platonic friendship with Shinsou

Playing video-games with his s/o

Getting jealous oh his crush “boyfriend”

Getting jealous of a teddy bear

Getting jealous of otome games

Bakugou with a s/o who has the same quirk and costume as Hela

Disneyland date with his crush

Defending girlfriends from perverts

Finding his s/o’s body pillows

S/o is his complete opposite

Undercover mission with crush

Making up after a fight

Taking care of his lactose intolerant s/o

S/o who needs a lot of medical care

S/o who has really high pain tolerance

Quarantined with teacher s/o

Innocent looking s/o who’s actually dirty minded

Dating a s/o who had a major surgery when younger

S/o who sings for him

Dating a s/o who has a coffee addiction

He turns into a baby/His s/o turns into a baby

Receiving/giving hickeys

Soulmate AU: Every time your soulmate lies, their words are written on you.

Scenarios

Finding his s/o crying

“Stop biting your lip, it’s distracting” and “Shut up, do you want us to get caught” Nsfw Prompts

SMAU’S

S/o snaps them a TikTok dance

Drunkly confessing his feelings

Aizawa Shouta

Headcanons

Aizawa and crush take care of Eri

Aizawa with s/o who keeps cute photos of him on their phone

His s/o gets hurt while protecting the students

S/o who sings for him

First meeting with his future s/o while shopping at 2am

Braiding his hair

SMAU’S

Aizawa with a s/o who keeps cute photos of him on their phone

Hawks

Headcanons

S/o who sings for him

Saving his s/o from a deadly attack

Fatgum

Headcanons

Relationship headcanons

SMAU’s

Wrong text from his s/o ranting about how much she loves him

#bnha #bnha x reader #mha #mha x reader #masterlist

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enigmasalad · 5 years

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Come Out Traitor!

(I was inspired by the cover of Bad Girl Online by Oktavia and by amaris_888 on TikTok. Oh and not to mention the recent sanders sides video) No one knew how the corruption started. What they did know is everyone was being affected terribly. They also knew that the side who was corrupting them must be cut out so Thomas can be back to his normal self. This unfortunately made all the sides very desperate.

So here they all were, in the living room. Roman looked disheveled and had blood staining his clothes. Logan was messy and his eyes kept shifting around, as if he was going to have an outburst. Poor Patton had black tear marks and was slightly colorless and less bright than usual. Virgil’s eye shadow was out of control and his eyes were completely black.

“Never closer a group of friends, and yet somethings amiss.” Patton said. “Seems within the bounds, someone’s playing foul!” Roman stated with aggression. “Yes, we have what you’d call a traitor in our midst.” Logan agreed, glancing at everyone in the room. Virgil sighed and put his hands in his hoodie pockets. “I don’t know about you but those other vile sides who’ve been hiding seem rather suspicious don’t you think?” Roman proposed. “I honestly doubt they had corrupted everything. After all they’ve kept to themselves.” Logan countered, fiddling with his tie. “Besides wouldn’t it be hard for them to corrupt us?” Patton said. “I honestly agree with Princey. Its one of them. Has to be.” Virgil said, voice distorted. Roman let out a slight hurrah at the fact someone agreed with him, but his celebration was cut short by a smooth voice. “My oh my, could it be that everyone here has equipped a mask to some delusive fear?” Deceit.

Everyone turned to the snake-like side. He was leaning against a cane and looked paler and messier, but besides that he showed no signs of problems. “It was you!” Roman accused, pulling out his sword. “Roman stop!” Patton cried. Deceit laughed humorlessly. “I can assure it was not me. Since I’m being corrupted, I cough up some weird black stuff when I lie. Hurts like a bitch too.” Logan sighed and tried to adjust his tie, but to no avail. “The traitor is among us, but which side could it be?” Logan pondered, eyes shifting from each side repeatedly. Roman slammed his fist on the wall and growled. “Come out, come out whoever you are! Divine judgement awaits, you’ll never get that far!” Patton yelped in fear. “Two, three, four, five catch the mole alive.” Deceit mumbled. “Seven, eight, nine, ten don’t let them go again.” Virgil said, narrowing his eyes. It had been a week since the “meeting” was held. Patton had been worried. Not just about Thomas’s well-being but about who this traitor is. He wanted to believe that none of his family would have betrayed them! They couldn’t have! But as more time went by, he knew that there had to be a traitor. Patton was looking through a book of his family’s photographs when a knock came to his door. “Come in” The door opened, and Virgil stepped in. Patton smiled slightly at him, trying to hide the fact that his insides felt like they were melting. “Just a moment please, I have to tell you something.” Virgil said, voice even more distorted. “Sure kiddo. What’s up?” Patton asked. Virgil sat next to Patton and took a moment before speaking.

“Deceit, all he cares about is bad mouthing.” “I know he’s not the nicest but right now he can’t lie! He said s-“ “Just because he said he’d cough up shit means he’s telling the truth?” Virgil interrupted. Virgil did make sense. It would be easy for Deceit to claim he’s innocent with a lie that he couldn’t physically lie.

“I’m your best friend yes?” Virgil asked while holding Patton’s hands. “Yes?” “So with that I suggest you keep clear of his way.” Later a meeting was called once again. Patton stopped looking at his book and went to leave his room. As he gripped the handle, he gasped. His hands were pitch black. He gulped but exited the room anyways. When he entered the living room, Roman was practically screaming at Deceit. “Wait a sec! You don’t even pass the check! And your treachery isn’t exactly quality!” “You can smile wide and shake everyone’s hands, but it will never cover your obvious plan.” Virgil added with a growl. Deceit sighed and gripped the cane tighter. “My oh my, could it be that everyone here has equipped a mask to some delusive fear?” At that moment Logan stepped in, wheeling a machine of sorts. “Cut it! We’ll know your real ID!” Logan snapped. Deceit smirked for a moment.

“Thomas is dea-“ At that moment he curled in on himself in pain and coughed up black inky fluid. It splattered on the ground at his feet. Around the room eyes went wide. Deceit couldn’t lie. “Is everyone against me?” Now the question that hung thick in the air battered through everyone’s brains. Who caused the corruption? “Don’t blame me, I didn’t have a clue!” Roman desperately declared. “I-It’s not my fault! Im innocent like you!” Patton suddenly found himself saying. “Don’t you know that’s also what he claims?” Deceit wheezed out. Logan rubbed his temples. “This will never work if we all say the same. That is why I brought this lie detector.” Logan explained, running his hands through his hair, messing it up further. He put his hand on the center of the device. “I didn’t start the corruption.” Logan said. The machine blinked green, indicating Logan was telling the truth. Roman hurried over to the machine, obviously desperate to clear his name. “I didn’t start the corruption!” He cried. The machine blinked green. Roman sighed in relief and moved aside so Patton could put his hand on the machine. “I didn’t start the corruption.” Green lights blinked again. Patton sighed in relief, but horror quickly filled his chest. He looked at Virgil and then Deceit. It was one of them. But Deceit just proved that he couldn’t lie! This meant- “I didn’t start the corruption.” Deceit said, his hand on the machine. It blinked green. Roman gasped and all heads turned to Virgil. “W-Wait! It still could have been one of the others! Virgil might not be the traitor!” Patton cried. He looked at Virgil, tears in his eyes. Virgil was visibly trembling, but he sighed and placed his hand on the machine. “I started the corruption.” Patton heard his heart beat in his ears as his body grew freezing. The machine was green. “N-No! Please no! The machine is broken! Has to be!” Patton cried, falling to his knees. “Why did you do this to us?! We trusted you!” Roman roared, tears spilling over.

Logan just stared at Virgil with wide eyes. Even Logic couldn’t believe Virgil couldn’t do such a thing. Virgil was

protecting

Thomas, not harming him!

“What the hell’s this?! I’m going to be sick!” Roman spat, eyes on Virgil as he was pulling out his katana.

“That’s enough now!” Logan ordered.

“Im just saying, I’m so pissed!”

“Guys I know how you feel, but this is going too far, it’s unreal.” Deceit said, moving to hold back Roman.

Roman easily broke out of the weaker side’s grasp and charged at Virgil. Suddenly, Virgil wasn’t there anymore.

“Come out! Come out! Wherever you are!” Roman demanded, looking around him.

Logan’s eyes began to shift all around the room, as if he was looking out from an attack from an assassin.

Patton sobbed and got to his feet. If he found Virgil first, he could save him! He ran.

“GET BACK HERE!”

Patton found himself not even knowing where he was going, he just ran. He couldn’t breathe or think. He had to get to his dark strange son before the others found him! Suddenly he was pulled into a room and thrown onto the floor.

“Ow!” Patton cried out.

“Fuck! Sorry Pat! I thought you were Roman!”

Patton looked up to see Virgil offering a hand. Patton politely refused the hand and stood up. He saw that Virgil had a black mist around him. Patton yelped and stumbled back a bit, but something told him that Virgil wouldn’t hurt him.

“Patton, I’m so sorry. I-I was trying to protect Thomas a-and all of you from the others. It got out of hand. I never meant for it to escape my room.” Virgil shakily explained, fiddling with his hoodie.

“What?” Patton asked.

“The corruption. I was making my room more intense on purpose so I could protect you all better. I didn’t know the anxiety would follow me out of the room!”

“S-So if..if we were around you we were corrupted?”

“Worse.”

They heard footsteps in the distance.

“Divine judgement awaits, you’ll never get that far!” Roman declared.

“If you alert him of your presence he will easily escape! Then we can’t fix this!” Logan snapped.

“Yes, self-preservation is filling the mindscape.” Deceit pointed out.

Virgil looked at Patton for a moment. He smiled reassuringly with a two-finger salute.

With that, he was gone.

Weeks passed and the corruption slowly disappeared. Thomas was back to normal, and so were all the sides. However, despite everything being fixed, Virgil was missing. Patton wondered every day where he was, and if he would come back. Probably not, but he would have dreams about it.

Everyone still couldn’t believe Virgil betrayed them even Thomas. However, they all knew deep down, Virgil never meant to. Did that mean he was forgiven? To Roman and Logan, no. He had hurt them too much to be forgiven. They urged Patton to move past this and try to do his job.

Patton sat in the living room next to the new light side member. Deceit sat next to Patton, watching old Tom and Jerry cartoons with popcorn.

“I won’t admit, I don’t wish Virgil was with us.”

Patton looked at Deceit.

“Even though he tried to frame you?” Patton asked.

Deceit smiled slightly, throwing a piece of popcorn in his mouth.

“No. To me, I don’t think we’re even. I didn’t hurt him, he didn’t hurt me. It isn’t even.”

Patton looked at the TV, eating some popcorn.

“Well, I’m glad to have this moment with you Dee.”

#tw deceit #tw blood #tw swearing #tw swords #tw anxiety #Sanders sides #sanders sides fanfiction #sanders sides fanfic #Roman sanders #patton sanders #logan sanders #deceit sanders #virgil sanders #thomas sanders #sanders sides fic

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xtruss · 4 years

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The TikTok Fiasco Reflects the Bankruptcy of Trump’s Foreign Policy

— By Evan Osnos | September 25, 2020 | The New Yorker

President Trump’s strong-arm effort to force a sale of the Chinese social platform’s U.S. operations has resulted in little discernible improvement in data security.Photograph by Kiyoshi Ota / Bloomberg / Getty

At first glance, the Trump Administration’s decision to ban the popular Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat had the look of hard-nosed diplomacy. China, after all, already blocks more than ten of the largest American tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, out of fear that they facilitate unmanageable levels of free speech and organization. In Washington, U.S. officials have been increasingly worried about the rise of TikTok, which is best known for its minute-long videos of people dancing, and WeChat, the vast social-media platform that allows users to text, call, pay bills, buy things, and, of course, swap videos of people dancing. Like similar apps, they collect valuable data on the viewing habits of millions of Americans and could, it is feared, allow the Chinese Communist Party to expose Americans to propaganda and censorship. Under Chinese law, authorities have broad power to intervene in the work of private companies; a spy agency, for instance, could examine the private chats of an American user, or, in theory, direct a stream of TikTok videos and advertisements that could shape the perceptions of viewers in one part of the United States.

Last month, in an unusual intervention in the operations of a business, President Trump ordered ByteDance, the Beijing-based company that owns TikTok, to find an American owner for its U.S. operations. That touched off a chaotic scramble for a sale, culminating last Saturday, when Trump abruptly announced a deal involving Walmart and Oracle, which is headed by one of his major supporters, Larry Ellison. The announcement was vague and grandiose: it heralded the creation of a new U.S.-based company, TikTok Global, which would shift ownership into American hands while creating both twenty-five thousand new jobs in the U.S. and a very ill-defined five-billion-dollar educational fund. As Trump put it, that money would be applied so that “we can educate people as to [the] real history of our country—the real history, not the fake history.” Within days, those promises were unravelling. In Beijing, TikTok’s parent company said that it would retain control over the algorithms and the code that constitute the core of its power. Analysts could discern hardly any improvements in data security or protections against propaganda, and people involved let reporters know that the education fund was a notion added, at the last minute, to assuage Trump.

All sides agreed that Oracle and Walmart would gain a stake worth twenty per cent of the new U.S.-based company, and data from American users would reside in Oracle’s cloud. But the parties agreed on little else, especially who would own what; ByteDance said that it would retain eighty per cent of TikTok, while Oracle countered that the stake would belong to ByteDance’s investors, many of whom are American. Many critics noted that Oracle, led by a Trump supporter, potentially stood to earn a huge windfall in revenue, such that, as one put it, “the very concept of the rule of law is in shambles.” Taking stock of the mess, Bill Bishop, a China analyst and the author of the Sinocism newsletter, commented, “Struggling to find the right Chinese translation for clusterf$$!”

Meanwhile, the effort to bar WeChat also has, for the moment, run into objections. On Sunday, a federal judge in California issued an injunction against regulations issued by the Commerce Department, which seeks to bar U.S. companies from offering downloads or updates for TikTok and WeChat. Free-speech advocates had raised questions about whether the ban would harm First Amendment rights. For the moment, WeChat and TikTok would remain accessible to American users, but their futures were as unclear as Trump’s purported deal. Taken together, what Trump presented as a bold expression of American values and power has turned out to be precisely the opposite: a gesture of wall-building and retreat, suffused with the aroma of potential corruption.

In a new book, “An Open World,” the foreign-policy scholars Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper begin the process of planning for a “day after Trump”—which they compare to a period of “post–natural disaster recovery”—in which the United States should focus on keeping “the international system open and free.” Lissner, an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College, told me that the threat to ban TikTok and WeChat “has put the United States on the wrong side, and set an unfavorable precedent.” There are plausible concerns, she said, that the Chinese Communist Party could use popular apps to collect data on American users, or continue to bar American companies in the name of governing the Internet according to its political anxieties. But the response should not be “replicating a C.C.P.-style approach to assertions of cyber sovereignty, as Trump has done.” Instead, she said, the U.S. should seek to be a leader in establishing rules that protect privacy and the free flow of information “regardless of the nationality of programs they’re using.” Lissner added, “Trump’s whack-a-mole approach doesn’t actually address the underlying risks, which reach far beyond TikTok and WeChat. Even worse, it makes it more likely that China’s preferred approach to Internet governance will triumph.”

The implications of this dispute extend far beyond the question of whether American teen-agers will be able to post to Chinese social-media sites. It represents what the Financial Times’ Tom Mitchell called the latest “proxy wars between the two reigning superpowers.” In contrast to America’s showdowns with the former Soviet Union, these battles are stirring not in Afghanistan and El Salvador but in corporate boardrooms. The Trump Administration opened its first front, in the spring of 2018, by banning American tech companies from selling components to ZTE, a Chinese telecom company that had been caught violating U.S. export controls on shipments to Iran. But Trump, who was eager to make a big trade deal with China, cut the pressure on ZTE, which settled with the U.S. Commerce Department. The battles have continued, though, and, as Mitchell observed, “it is China that has the early lead.”

The effort to wrest TikTok from China’s grip has been a boon for nationalist media sources in Beijing, which cited it as evidence that the U.S. is determined to prevent China from challenging American primacy. On Chinese state television last week, the news anchor Pan Tao derided the “hunt” for TikTok, asking, “Isn’t that behavior akin to a hostage situation? A deadline to sell on their terms, or else?” The opening of this “Pandora’s box,” Pan suggested, would make it impossible to trust American intentions. “If someone does this on Day One, who knows what they’re capable of doing on day fifteen?” Global Times, a nationalist state tabloid newspaper, called it a “thorough exhibit of Washington’s domineering behavior and gangster logic,” and predicted that leaders in Beijing would not ratify the agreement.

To Trump’s admirers in Washington, the move against Chinese tech companies is an act of reciprocity, an acknowledgment that China was the first to splinter the Internet into separate domains divided by a digital iron curtain. That sequence, of course, is true—but it does not follow that the right response to China’s fear is to impose additional barriers, instead of demonstrating that Americans have the capacity and the confidence to win on the strength of our competition. David Wertime, the author of the China Watcher newsletter at Politico, likened Trump’s decision to bar Americans from access to WeChat to the discomfiting new era in which America’s failure in the face of the coronavirus pandemic has left its people unwelcome at foreign borders. A U.S. passport “no longer ranks among the world’s most powerful,” he wrote. “A series of moves away from global institutions like the World Health Organization signal an inward retreat, keeping foreign elements out while also trapping Americans further within their homeland.”

Trump’s approach to TikTok and WeChat, like much of his foreign policy, is a gesture of defeatism camouflaged as strength. From his earliest days in politics, he has stood for the closure of the American mind, and the withdrawal of American power and confidence. He exited the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris climate accord, and the Iran nuclear agreement; he ordered American troops in Syria to abandon the Kurds and other American allies, a move that James Mattis regarded as so disloyal and imprudent that he resigned as Secretary of Defense. In the present case, Trump would rather wall off Americans digitally and philosophically than establish guidelines on privacy, free speech, and data collection.

The TikTok fiasco is a product of cronyism, empty bombast, and nationalism—a political recipe that, historically, America has tended to criticize in its opponents. But, as a Pew survey reported this month, global confidence in the United States, especially among allies, is as low as it has been since the measurements began, nearly two decades ago. In the most damning indicator, Trump inspires less confidence than Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

It takes some doing to earn less trust than those leaders, but Trump has achieved that. In a similar spirit, it is not often that one finds a note of prudent prediction in Global Times. But it’s hard to disagree with one of the paper’s observations in an editorial this week, in comments on the TikTok case. “As cybersecurity becomes more of a universal issue,” the paper observed, “there will be imitators around the world who will take action against U.S. companies. The bad precedent set by the United States will eventually come back to bite it.”

— Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008 and covers politics and foreign affairs. His book on China, “Age of Ambition,” won the National Book Award in 2014.

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

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New story in Politics from Time: How Far-Right Personalities And Conspiracy Theorists Are Cashing In On The Pandemic Online

On the evening of Feb. 6, as U.S. news networks reported the death of a doctor in Wuhan, China, who had warned of a deadly new virus, thousands of Americans were tuning in to a different kind of show.

“The good news is I heard actually that you can’t get this if you’re white,” Nick Fuentes, a far-right political commentator, told viewers on his “America First” channel on the streaming platform DLive. “You’re only really susceptible to this virus if you’re Asian,” Fuentes continued. “I think we’ll be O.K.”

Fuentes, 22, a prolific podcaster who on his shows has compared the Holo-caust to a cookie-baking operation, argued that the segregation of Black Americans “was better for them,” and that the First Amendment was “not written for Muslims,” is doing better than O.K. during the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s part of a loose cohort of far-right provocateurs, white nationalists and right-wing extremists who have built large, engaged audiences on lesser-known platforms like DLive after being banned from main-stream sites for spreading hate speech and conspiracy theories.

The model can be lucrative. Viewers pay to watch the livestreams through subscriptions and donations, and the platform allows the content creators to keep most of the revenue. Fuentes appears to have earned more than $140,000 off his DLive streams, cementing himself as the most viewed account on the platform, according to calculations provided to TIME by a livestreaming analyst who was granted anonymity because of their work tracking these accounts. Fuentes is hardly alone. Eight of the 10 top earners on DLive this year as ranked by Social Blade, a social-media analytics website, are far-right commentators, white-nationalist extremists or conspiracy theorists.

The social disruption and economic dislocation caused by the virus–as well as the nationwide protests and civil un-rest that followed the death of George Floyd in late May–has helped fuel this growing, shadowy “alt tech” industry. As public spaces shut down in March, millions of Americans logged online; the livestreaming sector soared 45% from March to April, according to a study by software sites StreamElements and Arsenal.gg. As people became more socially isolated, many increasingly turned to pundits peddling misinformation, conspiracy theories and hate speech. And even as mainstream platforms cracked down on far-right propagandists, online audiences grew. Over the past five months, more than 50 popular accounts reviewed by TIME on sites like DLive have multiplied their viewership and raked in tens of thousands of dollars in online currency by insisting COVID-19 is fake or exaggerated, encouraging followers to resist lockdown orders and broadcasting racist tropes during the nationwide protests over police brutality. Many of these users, including Fuentes, had been banned by major social-media platforms like YouTube for violating policies prohibiting hate speech. But this so-called deplatforming merely pushed them to migrate to less-regulated portals, where some of them have attracted bigger audiences and gamed algorithms to make even more money. In addition, clips of their broadcasts on less-trafficked sites still frequently make it onto YouTube, Twitter and other mainstream platforms, essentially serving as free advertising for their streams elsewhere, experts say.

As social-media giants like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook target hate speech and misinformation, sites like DLive seem to be turning a blind eye, former users and employees say, recognizing that much of their traffic and revenue comes from these accounts. “They care more about having good numbers than weeding these people out,” a former employee of DLive, who was granted anonymity because he still works in the livestreaming sector, tells TIME. (DLive did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Which means ordinary users on gaming and streaming platforms, many of them teenagers, are often one click away from white-nationalist content. Many of these far-right personalities allege they are being unfairly censored for conservative political commentary or provocative humor, not hate speech. Most of these viewers won’t respond to streamers’ often cartoonish calls to action, like the “film your hospital” movement in April meant to show that no patients were there, thus “proving” that COVID-19 was fake. But this murky ecosystem of casual viewers, right-wing trolls–and the occasional diehard acolyte–creates a real challenge for technology companies and law-enforcement agencies.

And it doesn’t take much to trigger a tragedy. Over the past two years, terrorists inspired by online right-wing propa-ganda have livestreamed their own deadly attacks in New Zealand and Germany. In March 2019, a Florida man who had been radicalized by far-right media and online conspiracy theorists pleaded guilty to sending more than a dozen pipe bombs to prominent critics of President Donald Trump. A month later, a gunman armed with an AR-15 shot four people, killing one, in a synagogue in Poway, Calif., after allegedly posting a racist and anti-Semitic screed on the site 8chan. About three months later, a man killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, after posting a racist manifesto online, according to authorities.

With COVID-19 continuing to surge in parts of the country, ongoing protests over racial injustice and the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election, the next few months promise to offer fertile ground for bad actors in unmoderated virtual spaces. Far-right propagandists “are really capitalizing on this conspiratorial moment,” says Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard University Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project. “Everyone’s locked inside while there is what they refer to as a ‘race war’ happening outside their windows that they are ‘reporting on,’ so this is prime content for white-nationalist spaces.”

The migration of far-right personalities to DLive illustrates how, despite mainstream platforms’ recent crack-downs, the incentives that govern this ecosystem are thriving. Anyone with an Internet connection can continue to leverage conspiracy theories, racism and misogyny for attention and money, experts say.

The outbreak of COVID-19 arrived during a period of reinvention for far-right propagandists in the aftermath of the white-nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. Over the past three years, social-media giants, which had endured criticism for giving extremists safe harbor, have increasingly attempted to mitigate hate speech on their sites. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, as well as payment processors like PayPal and GoFundMe, have all shut down accounts run by far-right agitators, neo-Nazis and white supremacists. In late June, YouTube removed the accounts of several well-known figures, including David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, and Richard Spencer, a prominent white nationalist. Reddit, Facebook and Amazon-owned streaming site Twitch also suspended dozens of users and forums for violating hate-speech guidelines.

But these purges hardly solved the problem. Many online extremists were on main-stream platforms like YouTube long enough to build a devoted audience willing to follow them to new corners of the Internet. Some had long prepared for a crackdown by setting up copycat accounts across different platforms, like Twitch, DLive or TikTok. “These people build their brand on You-Tube, and when they get demonetized or feel under threat they’ll set up backup channels on DLive or BitChute,” says Megan Squire, a computer scientist at Elon University who tracks online extremism. “They know it’s going to happen and plan ahead.”

While the suspensions by social-media companies have been effective at limiting the reach of some well-known personalities like conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was banned from YouTube, Facebook and Apple in 2018, others have quickly adapted. “Content creators are incredibly adept at gaming the systems so that they can still find and cultivate audiences,” says Becca Lewis, a researcher at Stanford University who studies far-right subcultures online, describing these efforts as a “game of whack-a-mole.” Many white-nationalist accounts have tied their ban to the right-wing narrative that conservatives are being silenced by technology companies. For platforms like DLive, becoming what their users consider “free speech” and “uncensored” alternatives can be lucrative. “More speech also means more money for the platform, and less content moderation means less of an expense,” says Lewis.

The prospect of being pushed off main-stream social-media, video-streaming and payment platforms has also prompted extremists to become more sophisticated about the financial side of the business. While Twitch takes a 50% cut from livestreamers’ earnings and YouTube takes 45%, platforms like DLive allow content creators to keep 90% of what they make. And as many found themselves cut off from mainstream payment services like PayPal, GoFundMe and Patreon, they began to embrace digital currencies.

DLive was founded in December 2017 by Chinese-born and U.S.-educated entrepreneurs Charles Wayn and Cole Chen, who made no secret of their ambition to build a platform that rivaled Twitch. They described the site as a general-interest streaming platform, focused on everything from “e-sports to lifestyle, crypto and news.” But two things set it apart from its competitors: it did not take a cut of the revenue generated by its streamers, and it issued an implicit promise of a less moderated, more permissive space.

DLive’s first big coup came in April 2019 when it announced an exclusive streaming deal with Felix Kjellberg, known as PewDiePie. In just two months, DLive’s total number of users grew by 67%. At the time, Kjellberg was the most popular individual creator on YouTube, with more than 93 million subscribers and his own controversial history. In 2018, he came under fire for making anti-Semitic jokes and racist remarks, and more than 94,000 people signed a Change.org petition to ban his channel from YouTube for being a “platform for white-supremacist content.” The petition noted that “the New Zealand mosque shooter mentioned PewDiePie by name and asked people to subscribe.”

DLive’s community guidelines theoretically prohibit “hate speech that directly attacks a person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, disease, age, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity.” But it soon became apparent to both employees and users that executives were willing to ignore venomous content. By early 2019, “political” shows were gaining traction on the site. Those programs devolved into “streams dedicated to white pride and a lot of anti-Semitism, entire streams talking about how Jewish people are evil,” says the former DLive employee who spoke to TIME, adding that moderators acted much more quickly when it came to copyright concerns. “Your stream would be taken down faster for streaming sports than saying you hate Jews.”

The employee recalls raising the matter with Wayn, noting how off-putting it was for new users coming to watch or broadcast streams of popular video games. According to the employee, Wayn explained that the company “didn’t want to get rid of these problematic streamers because they brought in numbers.” The founders knew they had to keep viewers because, as Wayn noted in a 2019 interview, if they wanted to “compete with Twitch on the same level and even take them down one day, DLive needs to match its scale.” Wayn did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

By June 2020, DLive seemed to be openly cultivating a right-of-center audience. On Twitter, it briefly changed its bio to read “All Lives Matter,” a right-wing rallying cry in response to Black Lives Matter. The site has increasingly become a haven for fanaticism, says Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. “Before, on YouTube, some of these people would do a dance with the terms of service,” she tells TIME. “But on DLive, the gloves are off, and it’s just full white-supremacist content with very few caveats.”

On the night of June 29, Fuentes had 56% of the site’s total viewership at 10 p.m., according to the review of the site’s analytics provided to TIME. An additional 39% was viewers of 22 other extremist personalities streaming their commentary. At one point on the night of Aug. 10, just 176 of the more than 15,000 viewers on the top 20 channels on the site were not watching accounts linked to far-right figures. Popular programming in recent months has included alarmist footage of racial-justice protests, antivaccine propaganda, conspiracies linking 5G networks to the spread of COVID-19 and calls to “make more white babies while quarantined.”

The company may be even more reliant on those accounts now. Some users have left the site, complaining publicly about the virulent racism and anti-Semitism spilling over into regular channels and game streams. “DLive is a safe-haven for racists and alt-right streamers,” one user wrote on Twitter on June 22. “Seems to me DLive is the new platform for white supremacists,” wrote another, echoing complaints that it’s a “literal Nazi breeding ground” and “the place where racists don’t get deplatformed.”

The migration of hate speech to far-flung corners of the Internet could make it harder to track, increasing the risk that it spills into the offline world. Experts say law-enforcement and national-security agencies are still unprepared to tackle right-wing extremism. They lack expertise not only in the rapidly evolving technology but also in the ideological ecosystem that has spawned a battery of far-right movements. The recently repackaged white-nationalist youth movement, with new names like “America First” or the “Groypers,” looks more like “gussied-up campus conservatives,” as Friedberg of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center puts it, “so they are not triggering the same warning bells.”

Recent incidents show how this online environment that blends political commentary and hate speech can be dangerous. An 18-year-old accused of firebombing a Delaware Planned Parenthood clinic in January was identified through his Instagram profile, which contained far-right memes reflecting popular beliefs in the young white-nationalist movement, according to BuzzFeed News. In June, Facebook deactivated nearly 200 social-media accounts with ties to white-nationalist groups rallying members to attend Black Lives Matter protests, in some cases armed with weapons.

Analysts who track extremist recruitment online also warn that the pandemic may have long-term effects on young people who are now spending far more time on the Internet. Without the structure of school and social activities, many children and teenagers are spending hours a day in spaces where extremist content lurks alongside games and other benign entertainment, says Dana Coester, an associate professor at West Virginia University who researches the impact of online white extremism on youth in Appalachia. It’s common, she notes, to see teenagers sharing Black Lives Matter messages alongside racist cartoons from popular Instagram accounts targeting middle schoolers. “So many parents I’ve spoken with say their kids are on devices until 3 in the morning,” she says. “I can’t begin to imagine how much damage can be done with kids that many hours a day marinating in really toxic content.”

Analysts warn that both U.S. law enforcement and big technology companies need to move quickly to hire experts who understand this new extremist ecosystem. Experts say the mainstream platforms’ recent purges are reactive: they patch yesterday’s problems instead of preventing future abuses, and focus on high-profile provocateurs instead of the underlying networks.

One solution may be to follow the money, as content creators migrate to new platforms in search of new financial opportunities. “[White supremacists] have become particularly as-siduous at exploiting new methods of fundraising, often seeking out platforms that have not yet realized how extremists can exploit them,” said George Selim, senior vice president of programs of the Anti-Defamation League, in testimony before a House subcommittee in January. “When a new fund-raising method or platform emerges, white supremacists can find a window of opportunity. These windows can, however, be shut if platforms promptly take countermeasures.”

On the evening of Aug. 11, Joe Biden’s pick of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate dominated the news. “She hates white people,” Fuentes told viewers on DLive. “She is going to use the full weight of the federal government … to destroy conservatives, to destroy America First, anybody that speaks up for white people.” NBC and ABC News–which have a combined 13 million subscribers on YouTube–had an average of 6,100 concurrent viewers watching their coverage. Fuentes’ show had 9,000.

–With reporting by ALEJANDRO DE LA GARZA/NEW YORK

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ladystylestores · 4 years

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Edtech is surging, and parents have some notes – TechCrunch

Unlike most sectors, edtech has been booming over the last few months. Flashcards startup Quizlet is now a unicorn, digital textbook company Top Hat is finding unprecedented surges in usage and student success business Edsights raised nearly $2 million from high-profile investors, all from inbound interest. Investors are so confident that homeschooling might become a trend that they just invested $3.7 million in Primer, which creates a “full-stack infrastructure” to help parents get started.

But as tired parents juggle work, family and sanity all day, nearly every day, they say edtech is not a remedy for all education gaps right now.

Parents across all income groups are struggling with homeschooling.

“Our mental health is like whack-a-mole,” said Lisa Walker, the vice president of brand and corporate marketing at Fuze. Walker, who lives in Boston but has relocated to Vermont for the pandemic, has two kids, ages 10 and 13. “One person is having a good day. One person is having a bad day, and we’re just going throughout the family to see who needs help.”

Socioeconomically disadvantaged families have it even worse because resources are strapped and parents often have to work multiple jobs to afford food to put on the table.

One major issue for parents is balancing a decrease in live learning with an uptick in “do it at your own pace” learning.

Walker says she is frustrated by the limited amount of live interaction that her 10-year-old has with teachers and classmates each day. Once the one hour of live learning is done, the rest of the school day looks like him sitting in front of a computer. Think pre-recorded videos, followed up by an online quiz, capped with doing homework on a Google doc.

Asynchronous learning is complicated because, while it is not interactive, it is more inclusive of all socioeconomic backgrounds, Walker said. If all learning material is pre-recorded, households that have more kids than computers are less stressed to make the 8 a.m. science class, and can fit in lessons by taking turns.

“Even though I know there’s a lot of video fatigue out there, I would love there to be more live learning,” Walker said. “Tech is both part of the problem and part of the solution.”

TraLiza King, a single mother living in Atlanta who works full time as a senior tax manager for PWC, points out the downside of live video instruction when it comes to working with younger children.

One challenge is overseeing her four-year-old’s Zoom calls. King needs to be available to help her daughter, Zoe, use the platform, which isn’t intuitive for kids at that age. She helps Zoe log on and off and mute when appropriate so instruction can go on interrupted, ironically enough.

Her 18-year-old college freshman could supervise the four-year-old’s learning, but King doesn’t want her older daughter to feel responsible for teaching. It leaves King to play the role of Zoom tech support, and teacher, in addition to mom and full-time employee.

“This has been a double-edged sword; there’s beauty in it that I get to see what my girls are learning and be a part of their everyday,” she said. “But I am not a preschool teacher.”

Some parents are finding success in pretending it is business as normal. The moment that Roger Roman, the founder of Los Angeles-based Rythm Labs, and his wife saw that there was a shutdown, they scrambled to create a schedule for the children. Breakfast at 6 a.m., physical education right after, and then workbook time and homework time. If their five-year-old checks all the boxes, he can “earn” 30 minutes of screen time.

The Roman family’s schedule for their child.

Technology definitely helps. Roman says he relies on a few apps like Khan Academy Kids and Leapfrog to give him some time to take work calls or meetings. But he says those have been more like supplements instead of replacements. In fact, he says one big solution he found is a bit more low-tech.

“Printers have been a godsend,” he said

The kids being at home has also given the Roman family an opportunity to address the racial violence and police brutality in our country. The existing school curriculums around history have been scrutinized for lacking a comprehensive and accurate account of slavery and Black leaders. Now, with parents at home, those disparities are even more clear. Depending on the household, the gaps around education on slavery can either inspire a difficult conversation on inequality in the country, or leave the talk tabled for schools to reopen.

Roman says he doesn’t remember a time where he wasn’t aware of racism and injustice, and assumes the same will be true for his sons.

“The murders of Ahmaud, Breonna, and George have forced my wife and me to be brutally honest with my five-year-old about this country’s long, dark history of white supremacy and racial oppression,” he said. “We didn’t expect to have these discussions so soon with him, but he’s had a lot of questions about the images he’s been seeing, and we’ve confronted them head-on.”

Roman used books to help illustrate racism to his sons. Edtech platforms have largely been silent on how they’re addressing anti-racism in their platforms, but Quizlet says it is “pulling together programming that can make a real impact.”

What’s next for remote learning?

In light of the struggles parents and educators alike are seeing with the current set of online learning tools and their inability to inspire young learners, new edtech startups are thinking about how the future of remote learning might look.

Zak Ringelstein, the co-founder of Zigazoo, is launching a platform he describes as a “TikTok for kids.” The app is for children from preschool to middle school, and invites users to post short-form videos in response to project-based prompts. Exercises could look like science experiments — like building a baking soda volcano or recreating the solar system from household items — and the app is controlled by parents.

The first users are Ringlestein’s kids. He says they became disengaged with learning when it was just blind staring at screens, leading him to conclude that interaction is key. Down the road, Zigazoo plans to forge partnerships with entertainment companies to have characters act as “brand ambassadors” and feature in the short-form video content. Think “Sesame Street” characters starting a TikTok trend to help kids learn what photosynthesis is all about.

A preview of Zigazoo, a “TikTok for kids” and its video-based prompts“As an educator, I’ve been surprised at how little content exists for parents that is not just entertaining but is actually educational,” he said.

Lingumi is a platform that teaches toddlers critical skills, like learning English. The company began because preschool classes are packed with so many students that teachers can’t give one on one feedback during the “sponge-like years.” Lingumi uses another startup, SoapBox, and its voice tech to listen and understand children, assess how they are pronouncing words and judge fluency.

“Edtech products were designed to work in the classroom and a teacher was supposed to be in the mix somewhere,” said Dr. Patricia Scanlon, the CEO of SoapBox. “Now, the teacher can’t be with the kids individually and this is a technology that gives updates on children’s progress.”

Another app, Make Music Count, was started by Marcus Blackwell to help students use a digital keyboard to solve math equations. It serves 50,000 students in more than 200 schools, and recently landed a partnership with Cartoon Network and Motown records to use content as lessons for followers. If you log onto the app, you are presented with a math problem that, once solved, tells you which key to play. Once you solve all the math problems in the set, the keys you played line up to play popular songs from artists like Ariana Grande and Rihanna.

youtube

The app is using a well-known strategy called gamification to engage its younger users. Gamification of learning has long been effective in engaging and contextualizing studies for students, especially younger ones. Add a sense of accomplishment, like a song or a final product, and kids get the positive feedback they’re looking for. The strategy is found in the underpinnings of some of the most successful education companies we see today, from Quizlet to Duolingo.

But in Make Music Count’s case, it’s forgoing gamification’s usual trappings, like points, badges and other in-app rewards to instead deliver something far more fun than virtual items: music that kids enjoy and often seek out on their own.

Gamification, much like technology more broadly, is not all-encompassing of the deeply personal and hands-on aspects of school. Yet that is what parents need right now. We’re left with a reminder that technology can only help so much in a remote-only world, and that education has always been more than just comprehension and test-taking.

The missing piece to edtech: School isn’t just learning, it’s childcare

At the end of the day, if the future of work is remote, parents will need more support with childcare assistants. Some startups trying to help that include Cleo, a parenting benefits startup that recently partnered with on-demand childcare service UrbanSitter.

“As working moms desperate for a solution to the crisis facing parents today, we were focused on developing a solution that didn’t just work for our members and enterprise clients, but also one that we’d use ourselves. After experimenting and trying everything from virtual care to scheduling shifts to looking for new caregivers ourselves, we realized the only solution that would work for families would require a new model of childcare designed for the unique issues COVID-19 has created,” Cleo CEO Sarahjane Sacchetti told TechCrunch in May.

Sara Mauskopf, the co-founder of childcare marketplace Winnie, said that tech companies trying to help remote learning need to remember that “it’s not just the education aspect that has to be solved for.”

“School is a form of childcare,” she said.

“The thing that irks me is that I see these tweets all the time that ‘more people are going to homeschool than ever before,” Mauskopf said. “But no one is going to feed my toddler mac and cheese or change their diaper.”

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DLive’s community guidelines theoretically prohibit “hate speech that directly attacks a person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, disease, age, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity.” But it soon became apparent to both employees and users that executives were willing to ignore venomous content. By early 2019, “political” shows were gaining traction on the site. Those programs devolved into “streams dedicated to white pride and a lot of anti-Semitism, entire streams talking about how Jewish people are evil,” says the former DLive employee who spoke to TIME, adding that moderators acted much more quickly when it came to copyright concerns. ��Your stream would be taken down faster for streaming sports than saying you hate Jews.”

–With reporting by ALEJANDRO DE LA GARZA/NEW YORK

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