Kevin Drum

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Instagram "helps connect and promote" a huge network of pedophile sites:

Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities. Its algorithms promote them. Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.

A related report from Stanford's Internet Observatory notes that searches on Instagram for pedophile content sometimes throw up a warning—but, oddly, include an option to "see results anyway":

It's one thing to host content inadvertently. No social media platform can monitor and control 100% of its content. But the Achilles heel of these platforms—for illicit content but also more generally—is their recommendation algorithms, which have the capacity to actively promote and connect users to dangerous or addictive material. Instagram is especially culpable in this case since the Internet Observatory report notes that TikTok doesn't have a similar pedophilia problem. "TikTok appears to have stricter and more rapid content enforcement," the report says, and if TikTok can do it then so can Instagram—if they bother trying.

The third edition of CREDO, a study of charter school performance, was released today. It covers the years 2014-2019 and shows much stronger performance for charter schools than the previous two studies:

Performance is measured here in "days of learning," with 180 days as the baseline. The latest study shows that in reading, charter students average 16 more days of learning compared to public school students. In math the difference is 6 days.

But these averages conceal an astonishing difference by race. Charter schools are good for Black and Hispanic students but not for anyone else:

Generally speaking, the study shows positive charter results for:

• Black and Hispanic students
• Students in poverty
• Urban students
• Schools in northeastern states
• Charter Management Organizations (CMOs)

Results outside of these areas can be quite different from the averages. For example, Ohio charters showed -4% growth in reading and -38% growth in math compared to local public schools. Nationally, children not in poverty showed only small growth in reading and no growth in math. Standalone charters (not part of a CMO) showed a small fraction of the growth of CMO charters. Special education students showed negative results in both reading and math.

It's not clear why the results line up this way. Poor urban charters are probably almost entirely Black and Hispanic, so the strong results for these groups are likely because urban charters are systemically different from suburban charters in some way. The report doesn't speculate about what this difference might be, and I don't have any guesses myself. Perhaps urban charters tend more toward the "no excuses" philosophy than suburban charters?

This is the interior, looking up, of "Connector," a monumental sculpture by Richard Serra. It stands in the courtyard of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, where it is alleged to connect all its disparate elements.

A few days ago I came across a chart showing that high school boys had gotten suddenly more conservative over the past couple of years. Unfortunately, after a frustrating search I was unable to track down the source data, so eventually I gave up on it and moved on.

But I've since seen a couple of similar claims, though without much data to back them up. For example, one survey shows that Gen Z men are a little less likely than others to say "Feminism has made America a better place." This is mildly suggestive but hardly evidence of a sharp turn to the right. That's especially true since other responses from the same survey generally portray Gen Z men as a little more liberal in their views toward women than older men:

None of this is close to definitive. I was still curious, though, so I turned to the good old reliable General Social Survey. They've been asking people for decades if they consider themselves liberal or conservative, and they break down the answers in a variety of ways.

What I found was surprisingly clear. In most ways, there's been little change in political ID. Among Blacks and whites, high school and college educated, married and single, identification as liberal or conservative has bounced around a bit but has generally stayed fairly steady. But there are two exceptions:

Young men were pretty stable in their ID until 2022, when they suddenly and inexplicably started to identify as dramatically more conservative. This spike didn't show up for either women or for older age groups. Only for young men.

This is about clear as it can be: for some reason, over the course of a single year, young men became noticeably more conservative. But why? Is it related to either the pandemic or the backlash to pandemic protections such as masking? Is it related to Donald Trump and his crowd of MAGA copycats? Or maybe to the growing popularity of Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, and other champions of the "new masculinity"? Is it a backlash against wokeness?

Beats me. I can't make sense of it, and I don't know if it's just a brief upsurge or the start of a long-term trend. But for now, at least, it's real.

Here's a couple of interesting inflation data points. Two different groups at the New York Fed have constructed measures of underlying inflation, one called the Underlying Inflation Gauge and the other a more recent measurement called the Multivariate Core Trend. Both are based on similar models that deconstruct the price data, remove the pieces due to transitory shocks, and keep only the persistent common components. Naturally, both claim to be more accurate at predicting inflation trends than common measures like CPI or core PCE.

What's interesting about them is that both recorded large revisions last month that substantially reduced their current measures of underlying inflation. Both now estimate that underlying inflation in April was only 3.4%:

This is well under both the April core PCE rate of 4.7% and the April core CPI rate of 5.0%. If they're accurate, then inflation has already fallen to a rate only moderately above the Fed's long-term target—and will probably reach the Fed's target by the end of the year. It's yet more evidence that inflation is cooling off enough that there's no need for further Fed rate hikes.

Reports of unruly passengers skyrocketed during the pandemic, but how are we doing since then? Not so well: IATA, an international airline trade association, reported a couple of days ago that incidents of bad behavior were up 37% in 2022.

This is sort of perplexing since the pandemic year of 2021 saw a skyrocketing amount of bad behavior on airlines. It hardly seems possible that 2022 could have been even worse—and for domestic flights, anyway, the FAA reports just the opposite. The rate of unruly passenger reports has been stable for the past year:

These numbers for 2022 are way down compared to the record-setting pandemic year of 2021. And 2023 is on track to be lower still:

If there's anything odd here, it's that even in 2023 unruly passenger reports are on track to be nearly double their pre-pandemic average. It's as though everyone got mad during the pandemic and we've stayed mad ever since. But why?

From Alex Stamos, director of Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, on the capabilities of modern AI language tools:

I think we’re entering an incredible era of bullshit.

I can hardly wait.

When I first put up this chart in February, Republicans had introduced 362 anti-trans bills. As of June, they've introduced 556:

This is stark raving mad, and there's no reason for it aside from pure tribal insanity. The whole business simply beggars belief.

Today I learned about ERIC, a national data clearinghouse that helps states keep their voter rolls accurate. It does this by sharing information among states about voters who have moved, changed their registration, mistakenly registered in multiple places, or died.

Since Republicans are constantly complaining about inaccurate voter lists that can lead to fraud, you'd think they'd be enthusiastic supporters of ERIC. And they were until recently. Then they began to drop out. Why?

In January 2022, the extreme right-wing website Gateway Pundit published a series of articles accusing ERIC of being “essentially a left-wing voter registration drive disguised as voter roll cleanup.” It claimed that the program was funded by George Soros — eternally the dark mastermind of every liberal corruption in the right-wing mind-set — and described one of its founders, David Becker, as a “hard-core leftist.” (Mr. Soros has given money to Pew but not to ERIC, not that it really matters.) Gateway Pundit also strongly suggested, without the slightest proof, that ERIC was somehow connected to Democratic Party databases.

....The misinformation worked. One week later, Louisiana dropped out of the program and didn’t give a clear reason. Other states, all Republican-led, began to follow, each with dubious rationales. Some said they didn’t like being required to spend money to reach out to unregistered voters, who they believed (wrongly) are more likely to vote for Democrats. Others cited the Soros conspiracy theory. Florida officials cited undefined “partisan tendencies” and concerns about data security (though ERIC has never had a data breach). The basic theme of all the complaints was distilled in a social-media post by Donald Trump, who claimed in March that ERIC “pumps the rolls” for Democrats.

God almighty. Is there any conspiracy theory that conservatives won't eagerly follow off the cliff of common sense? Apparently not. Gateway Pundit is among the crankiest of the conservative cranks, cavalierly inventing endless gibberish that a five-year-old wouldn't take seriously. Yet MAGA Republicans take it in like holy writ and Republican politicians are afraid to tell them they're being played for chumps by hustlers and frauds. Instead they cave in and ruin a project they themselves had praised only months before. There's just no end to it, is there?

A federal judge today granted a preliminary injunction against the Florida law that bans puberty blockers and other gender-affirming care for transgender teens. In order to do this, the judge had to conclude the plaintiffs were likely to win their case on the merits when it goes to trial. He did so in no uncertain terms:

State action motivated by purposeful discrimination, even if otherwise lawful, violates the Equal Protection Clause....The statute and rules at issue were motivated in substantial part by the plainly illegitimate purposes of disapproving transgender status and discouraging individuals from pursuing their honest gender identities. This was purposeful discrimination against transgenders.

The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their equal-protection claim.

Judge Robert Hinkle ruled that Florida's law didn't survive even the low barrier of rational-basis scrutiny because the state was unable to show any reason that its interests would be affected by teens receiving appropriate and widely accepted medical treatment. The motivation for the law was not medical at all, nor did it have anything to do with children's safety. The motivation was primarily mere disapproval of trans people:

In support of their position, the defendants have proffered a laundry list of purported justifications for the statute and rules. The purported justifications are largely pretextual....The state’s disapproval of transgender status—of a person’s gender identity when it does not match the person’s natal sex—was a substantial motivating factor in enactment of the challenged statute and rules.

Hinkle's ruling is not nuanced. He is repulsed by Florida's intolerance and doesn't hesitate to say so ("There has long been, and still is, substantial bigotry directed at transgender individuals. Common experience confirms this.") It is not clear if an appellate court will be willing to share his uncompromising view, but in the meantime, at least, Florida's law is blessedly on hold.