Category: Politics

The American standard for copyright protects commercial interests, not creative integrity

There’s a corner of the internet that’s existed for decades, largely unbothered, largely self-regulating, and largely misunderstood by the people who probably should be paying closest attention to it. It’s the world of fan fiction where millions of stories, updated daily, written by people who love a character, a world, or a universe so completely that they can’t stop at consuming it. They have to live inside it, push it, stress-test it, take it somewhere its creators never intended, and then share what they found with others who feel exactly the same way.

Fan fiction writers, almost universally and almost instinctively, understand something that intellectual property law has spent decades failing to articulate cleanly: there’s a fundamental difference between engaging with a character and exploiting one. The Archive of Our Own alone hosts over ten million works across tens of thousands of fandoms, and these people aren’t pirates nor are they counterfeiters. They are, in fact, the most engaged fans and audience that an author or creator could ever hope to have. These fans are people so invested in a fictional world that they contribute unpaid labour to expanding it. And the implicit contract they operate under is straightforward: this isn’t a commercial undertaking nor is it a challenge to ownership, and if it ever becomes either of those things, the rules change.

The unwritten rules of fanfiction

That implicit contract is more sophisticated than most formal licensing agreements, and what makes it remarkable is that it holds without legal compulsion or enforcement mechanisms. Fanfic communities self-police, tag content meticulously for audiences, distinguish between canon-compliant works and divergent ones, credit their sources, and pull works when creators object — not just because the law demands it but because the community understands that ethical norms around someone else’s IP matter more than what they can technically get away with. The irony is that IP lawyers are the people least equipped to understand any of this, because their frameworks were built for a world where creative engagement was a transaction rather than a relationship.

Why characters are different from everything else

Fanfiction works as a creative and ethical space precisely because it operates almost exclusively in the domain of character and visual identity, and that’s the hardest category of IP to abstract, remix, or adapt without taking something essential from its origin. A melody can be sampled and transformed, and a plot can be retold through a different lens without borrowing its architecture wholesale. But a character — especially a visual one with a fixed appearance, a known personality, a set of relationships and a history that audiences have internalised — doesn’t separate easily from what makes it itself. When fanfic writers work with Hermione Granger or Zuko or Geralt of Rivia, they’re not sampling an abstraction but working with something specific, coherent, and deeply associated with its origin. They know this, and it’s exactly why they don’t sell it

This is where the comparison with professional derivative works gets instructive, and uncomfortable. The film Brightburn, released in 2019, asks a genuinely interesting question: what if the Superman origin story produced not a hero but a predator? An infant of extraterrestrial origin arrives on Earth, humans raise him, he develops extraordinary abilities, and he chooses violence. The film never names Superman nor does it touch his iconography, his costume, his mythology, or his supporting cast. What it does it it interrogates the archetype because the foundling with hidden power is as old as Moses, as old as Romulus, as old as narrative itself. Brightburn earns its premise because it brings something to the archetype rather than borrowing an identity, and fanfic communities would recognize it immediately as a work that does the creative work rather than just taking the shortcut.

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, released in 2023 after the 1926 A.A. Milne illustrations entered the public domain in the United States, is a different operation entirely. It takes Pooh and Piglet, characters with fixed visual identities, personalities, and a century of cultural association with innocence and childhood warmth, and turns them into slasher villains.

The horror framing adds nothing that required these specific characters, because any beloved children’s IP would’ve served the same shock-value purpose. Heck, you don’t even need an existing IP, Chucky, anyone? Or Gremlins, for that matter. Hell, Happy Tree Friends was something else altogether for the young Gen X and senior Millennials at the time.

The filmmakers chose Pooh entirely and cynically for the recognition by weaponizing familiarity, and there’s no coherent argument that the film engages creatively with what these characters are. It uses their faces because it legally could, and it markets itself on the dissonance that creates. It’s cynicism with a distribution deal.

How copyright law fails the character question

The distinction between these two films isn’t complicated: one engages with an idea while the other appropriates an identity. A fanfic writer understands this distinction reflexively because they live inside it daily. They know when they’re writing a story that genuinely engages with a character’s qualities and when they’re simply using a character’s name and face as a vehicle for something entirely unrelated to what made that character worth caring about. The law doesn’t make this distinction nor does it try to, asking only whether the copyright has expired or whether the use falls within fair use provisions, which are entirely the wrong questions when the issue isn’t legality but integrity.

Copyright, as a legal instrument, was constructed to solve an economic problem. It gives creators a temporary monopoly over their work in exchange for its eventual return to the cultural commons, but it was never designed to protect the dignity of a character, the integrity of a creative vision, or the relationship between a work and its audience. French law probably comes closest to addressing this through the concept of droit moral or moral rights that include the right to the integrity of a work, perpetual and non-transferable. Under a French moral rights framework, distorting a work in ways that harm the creator’s honor or reputation remains actionable regardless of copyright status. It’s an imperfect instrument, but it at least acknowledges that legal ownership and ethical stewardship aren’t the same thing, and that the law has an interest in the latter as well as the former. Importantly, parodies and satirical works are protected by French law but it works within a strict legal requirement that authors or creators must make it clear that their work is parody or satire.

What the law protects and what it doesn’t

Anglo-American copyright tradition has largely rejected moral rights, or incorporated them so weakly that they’re meaningless in practice. What it has instead is trademark, which fills some of the gap but anchors protection to commercial identity rather than creative integrity. Mickey Mouse, whose earliest incarnation entered the public domain in 2024, remains under Disney’s control through trademark because Mickey functions as a brand identifier, and nobody can use him in a way that implies Disney’s endorsement or creates consumer confusion. That protection doesn’t expire, but it exists to prevent commercial deception rather than to honor what the character actually is. Important to restate that anyone can now use the old Steamboat Willie character but they can’t use it to make people think their creation represents Disney or that it’s an official Disney release.

The law protects Mickey’s face because it’s a logo, not because he’s a character with a history and an audience that’s grown up alongside him, and that distinction matters because it means the protection is contingent on commercial association rather than creative investment — a standard that has nothing to say about what’s right and everything to say about what’s profitable.

When characters become bigger than their owners

The characters that sit in the most complicated territory are the ones that have genuinely worked their way into shared culture across generations. Tintin, Astro Boy, Superman, Sherlock Holmes, these aren’t merely IP assets but reference points through which people understand certain ideas, certain archetypes, certain ways of being in the world. People grow up with them and form attachments to them that have nothing to do with commercial relationships, and the claim that these characters belong entirely and permanently to a single entity sits uneasily against that reality. But so does the claim that their public familiarity gives anyone the right to do anything with them.

What Blood and Honey exploits isn’t the public domain. It exploits the care that audiences invested over decades in something they grew up loving, without those audiences ever being consulted about what someone could do with it. A.A. Milne built that, generations of readers sustained it, and filmmakers who contributed nothing to it cashed it out.

The Sherlock Holmes litigation makes this point sharply. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate spent years arguing that while the character of Sherlock Holmes was in the public domain, the specific traits and emotional dimensions that Doyle introduced in his later stories remained protected until those stories expired too. It was a legally awkward argument but an ethically coherent one — a recognition that a character isn’t a static entity but an accumulation of qualities developed over time, and that different layers of that accumulation might warrant different treatment. The courts were largely unsympathetic, because copyright law has no good tools for thinking about characters as evolving entities rather than fixed works, but the underlying instinct — that there’s something more to a character than its earliest legally unprotected iteration — points to a real failure in how the law handles visual and character IP.

From fanfic to commercial publishing

What fanfic writers have worked out through practice and community rather than legislation is a framework the law hasn’t managed to produce. Creative engagement with a character is legitimate when it comes from genuine investment in what that character is: their qualities, their relationships, their place in a larger world, and it becomes exploitation when someone uses a character’s identity as raw material while contributing nothing to what made that identity worth using. The line between the two isn’t always clean, but it’s rarely as unclear as the law pretends.

When a fanfic writer decides to go commercial, they understand they have to make it their own by changing the names, alter the iconography, build enough distance from the source that the new work stands independently, because they recognize that commercial benefit changes the terms of the relationship with the original IP fundamentally.

Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fan fiction, and its journey to publication required it to become something else entirely. Similarly with the books The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley which started out as a fanfic about Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger titled Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love, and Alchemised by SenLinYu — originally also a Harry Potter fanfic, titled Manacled, which was about what happened after Voldemort killed Potter and won the battle of Hogwarts. All these titles took significant rewrites to avoid copyright entanglements ahead of their commercial publications but they all have become their own thing.

The law isn’t equipped for any of this, and it was never built to be. It doesn’t ask the right questions, and where it does intervene — as in the Blood and Honey situation — it does so only to confirm that something is permitted rather than to assess whether it’s justified.

Legality has never been a reliable test of what’s right, and in the domain of creative IP it’s a particularly blunt one. What’s needed isn’t longer copyright terms or more expansive legal protection, but a willingness to treat creative integrity as something worth protecting on its own terms rather than as a byproduct of commercial interest.

The fanfic community figured that out decades ago, without legislation, enforcement, and lawyers. The people who actually care about these characters always understood where the line was. The law just never thought to ask them.

Komdigi’s media circus at Meta’s Jakarta office

Communications and Digital Minister Meutya Hafid showed up unannounced at Meta’s Jakarta office on Wednesday with a full media entourage in tow — cameras rolling, reporters trailing, executives summoned, questions fired, headlines secured.

The official justification was that Meta had complied with just 28.47 percent of the government’s requests to act on online gambling and DFK content — disinformation, defamation, and hate speech — making it one of the lowest-performing platforms operating in Indonesia. That is a legitimate regulatory concern. With Facebook and WhatsApp each reaching around 112 million Indonesian users, the scale of exposure to harmful content is not hypothetical.

During the meeting, the Minister also raised Meta’s content moderation practices more broadly, including the removal of a photo she had posted from a visit to Palestine. Posts supporting Iran or Palestine are routinely flagged or taken down while comparable content directed elsewhere passes without review. These are real problems that deserve real scrutiny.

But serious regulatory scrutiny does not typically arrive with a press pack — or with the Director General of Digital Space Supervision, the State Intelligence Agency, the National Cyber and Encryption Agency, TNI Cyber Command, and Bareskrim Polri all in tow. That is not a regulatory inspection. That is a show of state force conducted in front of television cameras, and the distinction matters.

What happened on Wednesday looked far less like oversight and far more like a carefully staged demonstration of authority, timed to produce the evening news clip that shows the Minister doing something, at the precise moment when public anxiety about children and social media makes that image most politically useful. Look tough. Look decisive. Look morally righteous. The optics write themselves.

The trouble is that optics are not policy, and performative enforcement doesn’t fix anything. The content moderation problems she raised on Wednesday are real but they won’t be resolved by a televised office visit any more than Indonesia’s children will be protected by an access ban the platforms can’t meaningfully enforce and teenagers will circumvent within hours. Both moves share the same logic: do the thing that looks like action, and let the appearance of having acted carry the political weight.

That’s a reasonable strategy if the goal is the news cycle. It’s a poor substitute for the harder work of making platforms structurally accountable, which requires leverage, sustained regulatory pressure, and the willingness to demand compliance rather than just demonstrate displeasure in front of cameras.

Indonesia to limit social media for under-16s but it’s solving the wrong problem

There’s a more powerful way to protect Indonesian children online, and Indonesia has the numbers to force it.

Every generation decides that something new is destroying children. Comic books. Rock music. Television. Video games. The diagnosis changes. The panic is the same.

Indonesia has now joined the queue. On Friday, Communications Minister Meutya Hafid announced the implementation of a regulation restricting children under 16 from platforms the government classifies as higher-risk — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Threads, Bigo Live, Roblox. Children under 13 are blocked entirely. Thirteen to fifteen-year-olds get access to platforms the ministry considers lower-risk. Full access at 16. Sanctions fall on platforms that fail to comply, not on children or parents. Phased implementation begins March 28, one year since the President signed the PP Tunas regulation.

The intent is not invented. UNICEF data cited by the government found around half of Indonesian children have encountered sexual content on social media. Forty-two percent said it made them feel frightened or uncomfortable. That’s not a moral panic. That’s a real problem that deserves a real response.

This isn’t one.

The mechanism doesn’t work. Age-gating requires age verification. Age verification requires either self-declaration — which every child on the internet already knows how to defeat — or something more invasive: NIK-linked identity checks, biometric data, government databases. Indonesia’s government databases have leaked repeatedly. SIM card registrations. Voter records. Millions of NIK-linked personal records circulating because someone decided security was someone else’s problem. The confidence required to trust a new verification layer built on the same infrastructure has no basis.

Then there’s the VPN problem. Indonesia has always been among the top nations for VPN usage — penetration reached 61% in previous years — though by 2025 that figure had come down to around 31% according to Meltwater, still placing it fourth globally. The infrastructure for circumvention is normalised, widely installed, and modelled by adults in the household. When the government blocked PayPal and gaming platforms in July 2022, VPN demand jumped 196% in a single day. A 14-year-old who wants TikTok will have it within hours.

And even if enforcement worked perfectly, the harms would still be there because they are the result of design, not of access. Recommendation algorithms amplify harmful content because engagement is revenue and they are not calibrated to real-world emotional impact. Infinite scroll removes natural stopping points. Notifications are engineered to pull users back. A 16-year-old encounters the same architecture as a 14-year-old, and there is no reliable technical mechanism to change that at the platform level without structural redesign. Delaying access doesn’t change what they walk into.

Europe worked this out. The EU’s approach to tech — GDPR, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code — places the compliance burden on the platforms. Not on citizens. Europeans are not banned from TikTok. TikTok is required to change how it works.

The consequences have been real. Apple withheld Apple Intelligence from EU users at launch, citing DMA regulatory uncertainty, before eventually releasing it in April 2025. Meta declined to launch its latest Llama model in Europe, citing the unpredictable regulatory environment. Google withheld AI Overviews. Platforms have had to build separate compliance infrastructure for the European market rather than simply exit it.

On children specifically: the UK Children’s Code prohibits algorithmic curation and targeted advertising for minors. In direct response, TikTok stopped sending push notifications to children in the evenings. YouTube disabled autoplay, personalisation, and targeted advertising on content made for kids. The platforms changed their products because the cost of not doing so was higher than the cost of compliance.

That’s the playbook. Restrict what platforms can do to citizens. Not restrict citizens from platforms.

The question is leverage. Europe’s came from market size. TikTok’s own DSA report put its average monthly active users — or recipients as they call them — across EU member states at 178 million by the end of February 2026, with the broader European figure reaching 200 million by September 2025.

TikTok’s own published figures put Indonesia at 160 million users as of November 2025 — second only to the US, if not the largest market in the world. A separate measure of TikTok’s adult advertising audience by Data Reportal, which excludes under-18 and uses a different methodology, puts that figure at 180 million, the largest adult TikTok audience of any country globally. Those users spend nearly 45 hours per month on the app, among the highest engagement rates globally. Add the broader Southeast Asian picture: 460 million TikTok users across the region — more than double Europe’s 200 million.

Indonesian users aren’t just a revenue line, they’re a core driver of the content loops that keep global audiences on the app. The creator economy runs on engagement. Losing Indonesian audiences doesn’t just affect ad revenue. It affects what TikTok is. The company already lost India, they don’t want to lose Indonesia, too.

That’s a different kind of leverage but at least it’s still leverage that the government could have used.

Indonesia isn’t using it, however. Instead of demanding that platforms restructure their products, it’s restricting its own people’s access to them. That’s the wrong target. It’s also the weaker negotiating position, because it costs the platforms nothing.

Malaysia is already moving on the same issue. The Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand are watching. If Indonesia led a coordinated regional push, not for access bans, but for platform-level obligations, the numbers become harder to ignore. Southeast Asia already exceeds Europe’s TikTok footprint. A unified regulatory framework from five of those markets is not a marginal threat.

ASEAN has never coordinated at this level. Non-interference is a founding principle and a genuine obstacle. But children’s safety is politically uncontroversial across every member state. That’s rare common ground. It’s worth using.

What Indonesia should actually demand is not restricted versions of these platforms for children. It’s less predatory versions for everyone — with children as the primary beneficiaries. Disable algorithmic amplification by default, for all users: opt in to recommendation, not out of it. No compulsive notification design, no engineered pull-back for any user, minor or adult. Restrict stranger interaction by default, not as a parental unlock. Tie feature access to account history: new accounts get conservative defaults, and trust expands as behavior is established, not when an identity document is produced.

Reddit has run on a version of this model for two decades. The platform doesn’t need to know you’re a child. It just needs to stop assuming you’re a safe adult the moment you arrive. Automated filters calibrated to account age and karma, community moderators with real removal powers, conservative defaults for new accounts regardless of declared age. None of this requires a national ID. It requires intent.

These are not radical asks, the UK Children’s Code already mandates several of them, TikTok and YouTube have already complied in Europe, and the framework for enforcement exists. What’s missing is a government willing to use its market position to demand compliance rather than restrict its own citizens’ access.

Platforms already accept that accessibility is a non-negotiable compliance requirement. Screen readers, keyboard navigation, color contrast standards, these add development time, they complicate QA, and no platform gets to opt out on the grounds that inclusion is expensive. The legal and reputational cost of being inaccessible is now high enough that the work gets done. Child safety is a universal value in a way that very few things are, and there is no principled argument for why it should be treated as optional where accessibility is not.

Theme parks don’t let you on a ride if you’re under the height requirement. They don’t let you board if you’re pregnant, or if the ride poses a risk to people with certain health conditions. Nobody describes this as censorship or an infringement on personal freedom. It’s a safety standard applied at the point of access, and the burden of enforcing it falls on the operator, not on the person being turned away. The same logic applies here. If a platform cannot ensure a reasonably safe experience for a 12-year-old, it should not be permitted to let a 12-year-old on. The design choices that make it unsafe are in the platform’s control.

The problem isn’t identification. It’s intent. Platforms already know a great deal about their users without ever asking for a government ID. Behavioral signals, what content a user engages with, how long they stay on certain types of posts, what they search for, what time of day they’re active, how their interaction patterns compare to known demographic clusters, are processed continuously and used to target advertising with remarkable precision. A platform that can infer that a user is likely a woman in her late twenties with an interest in fitness and a recent interest in pregnancy is not a platform that lacks the tools to infer that a user is probably fourteen.

The distinction between age verification and age estimation matters here. Verification ties a user to an identity document. Estimation uses behavioral and interaction signals to assign a probability range. Instagram and TikTok have both deployed versions of age estimation in limited contexts already. Instagram in particular uses it to reclassify accounts that show signals of being underage even when no age was declared. The UK Children’s Code endorses a version of this logic directly: if a significant proportion of a platform’s users are likely to be children, apply protective standards to all users unless there is a positive reason not to. That’s not surveillance. It’s designing conservatively.

Conservative defaults are the cleanest answer to the identification problem. If a platform cannot determine with confidence whether a user is fourteen or twenty-four, the appropriate response is to treat them as fourteen until there is a positive reason to do otherwise, not to treat them as twenty-four and make protection an optional extra that requires parental setup. The current architecture is inverted: full algorithmic engagement is the default, and restrictions are the opt-in. Flipping that default requires no new technology. It requires intent.

Platforms also already collect birthdates but most use them for nothing protective. The UK Children’s Code requires that if a platform collects a birthdate showing the user is a child, it must actually apply child-appropriate settings. That is not a technically demanding ask. It is a demand that platforms act on information they already have.

None of this is difficult to build. Kaskus has moderated a large, pseudonymous community since 1999 using account signals, behavioural patterns, and community escalation without ever requiring identity documents. Reddit has done the same at far larger scale for two decades, automated filters calibrated to account age and karma, community moderators with real removal powers, shadowbanning for persistent bad actors. Neither platform knows who its users are. Both have functional accountability structures. The missing ingredient on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube is not technical capability. It is the cost structure that makes investment in moderation and protective defaults worthwhile, and that only changes when non-compliance becomes more expensive than compliance.

China’s solution doesn’t work. The identity question comes up because it sounds like the obvious enforcement mechanism: if platforms know who someone is, they can verify their age and apply the right rules. China went furthest with this logic. Real-name registration tied to national identity, facial recognition deployed by Douyin and other major platforms, internet curfews for all under-18s from 10pm to 6am, screen time caps that limit children under 8 to 40 minutes a day.

The results were real in places: gaming hours among under-18s fell sharply, Tencent reported a 96% drop, sedentary behaviour among children decreased and physical activity went up. But more than three-quarters of heavy young gamers found workarounds within months through relatives’ accounts, rented adult credentials, photographs held up to facial recognition cameras. A black market in adult accounts emerged. Some children were scammed trying to buy access to their own internet.

Age and identity verification affects everyone. Real-name registration doesn’t just verify age. It makes every online action traceable to a person’s identity, which has effects that go well beyond screen time. It’s a chilling mechanism for political speech, for religious expression, for any view that might attract attention from authorities. Anonymity is not a design flaw. It’s a protection for people whose safety depends on not being findable, and for the ordinary possibility of holding an opinion without a record. Once the surveillance infrastructure is built and normalised, who controls it and what it gets used for is not a question that can be answered in advance.

Functional accountability doesn’t require knowing who your users are, it requires investing in the infrastructure to enforce it. TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, however, have not, because moderation is expensive and impunity is good for engagement. That is a deliberate design choice. One that is reversible if a powerful enough force necessitates it. It requires these companies to spend money they would rather not spend, and the only way to make them spend it is to make non-compliance more costly than compliance. That requires leverage. Indonesia has leverage but it’s not using it.

The regulation that rolls out on the 28th restricts Indonesian citizens from platforms rather than restricting platforms from harming Indonesian citizens. It relies on verification infrastructure built on databases that have already failed the people it’s supposed to protect. It will be circumvented by a population that has been circumventing government internet restrictions for years, with the tools already installed. And it does nothing — nothing — to change the architecture that produces the harm.

Indonesia has 270 million reasons to ask for more than the appearance of having done something but the government won’t do it. Or maybe they can’t. The President already signed a trade agreement with the US which makes it much more difficult to regulate US companies. Indonesia traded away leverage over U.S. platforms in exchange for tariff relief that the US Supreme Court then invalidated anyway.

They Taught the World to Rise. And then Forgot How.

America loves a good story about itself. Freedom, liberty, rebellion, all sung in a major key and wrapped in a flag. They turned revolution into a genre, democracy into a Broadway soundtrack, and tyranny into something that only happens somewhere else.

For years, they sang along to Hamilton like it was gospel. They memorized the verses, quoted the lines, cosplayed on TikTok, cried over the Founding Fathers recast as rappers, a nation rediscovering its roots through rhyme. “Rise up!” they cheered, fists raised in theaters that cost more than a week’s rent. “History has its eyes on you!” they shouted, and then went home to post about how democracy works best when everyone just calms down.

They turned a revolution into karaoke.

What could have been a cultural reawakening became merch, mugs, magnets, tote bags. They treated it like nostalgia porn, not civic scripture. Hamilton made them feel brave for three minutes at a time, but not brave enough to stand up when their leaders turned liberty into a punchline.

And here we are, a government once founded on the act of defying tyranny now bending to a tyrant who rules by resentment and applause. He doesn’t wear a crown; he wears grievance. He doesn’t demand fealty through divine right; he earns it through fear. He’s convinced millions that oppression looks like fairness and equality looks like persecution, the oldest trick in the imperial playbook.

The same Americans who quote “Not throwing away my shot” on Instagram are now throwing away their rights, willingly, comfortably, with flag emojis. The same nation that fetishizes freedom lets it erode inch by inch, as long as someone else pays the price: immigrants, queer people, the press, the poor, teachers, women. Anyone whose existence complicates the myth of greatness.

But at least something is happening. Seeds have been sown and they’ve grown. Not everyone’s asleep.

There are pockets of resistance, people who still remember what courage feels like. Activists, journalists, students, veterans, mothers, workers, ordinary Americans trying to shake a system that’s calcified around comfort and cowardice. You can feel them humming under the surface, restless, angry, aware that something is deeply broken. They want to rise. They just don’t know what will make them finally stand.

Maybe they’re waiting for a spark. Maybe for a face, a name, a moment that makes rebellion feel possible again. But revolutions don’t schedule themselves, and waiting is a luxury the oppressed can’t afford.

Instead, everyone’s sitting around pretending democracy will course-correct, that the institutions will hold, that the next election will fix it, that accountability will come “through the proper channels.” Meanwhile, those channels are being rerouted, blocked, or bought. The republic’s on fire, and half the country’s still asking for the fire marshal’s permission to panic.

What America needs now isn’t another election cycle. It needs new leaders, ones who aren’t complicit, compliant, or conveniently silent. The revolutionaries of old didn’t wait for permission; they became the permission. They didn’t play by the tyrant’s rules; they rewrote them.

The irony is that the script already exists. They’ve been singing it for years. Hamilton told them exactly what to do: rise up, speak truth, make noise, leave a mark. Instead, they’ve isolated it as entertainment, something to consume, not something to live.

The country that once burned tea over taxes now shrugs as billionaires buy politicians in bulk. The land that preached “no taxation without representation” now lets votes be stripped and districts redrawn beyond recognition. The people who belt “freedom” before every game are fine watching it die, as long as the anthem still plays before kickoff and nobody is taking the knee.

It’s not that America forgot the revolution, it’s that it’s scared of what remembering it would require.

Because to remember is to act. And acting would mean admitting the system no longer works as promised. It would mean standing up to neighbors, bosses, governors, cops, to comfort itself.

They don’t know or don’t realize that this is what’s written in their own Declaration of Independence:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

And if this post somehow gains traction among Americans, I can guess what’s coming: the replies calling it “unfounded,” “uninformed,” or “too simplistic to understand the nuance of American politics.” But there’s nothing nuanced about the erosion of freedom, or the spectacle of cruelty being televised daily. There’s no complexity in racism and fascism when it’s parading down Main Street with a flag and these days they’re not just carrying the Star Spangled Banner, they’re flying the Israeli flag alongside and calling for allegiance to that other country ahead of their own.

Nuance is what people invoke when they’re too scared to pick a side. What’s left now isn’t nuance. It’s clarity. The kind that history forces on you when you’ve waited too long to act. Maybe history really does have its eyes on them. It’s just wondering what the hell they’re waiting for.

The Apple – Perplexity rumor that won’t go away

This is a longer think piece from the quick post I had on Mastodon the other day.

Every time someone floats the idea that Apple should acquire Perplexity to “supercharge” its AI efforts, I get whiplash, not just from the sheer strategic laziness of the suggestion, but from the deeper cultural misalignment it completely ignores. The very idea is a perplexing thought.

Perplexity isn’t some misunderstood innovator quietly building the future. It’s a company fundamentally unsure of what it is, what it stands for, or how to exist without parasitizing the open web. It’s been posing as a search engine, an AI-powered Q&A tool, a research assistant, and lately, some vague hybrid of all three, depending on who’s asking and what narrative sounds hottest that week. The only throughline is this: a constant need to justify its own existence, retrofitting its product pitch to whatever the industry is currently foaming at the mouth about.

And then there’s the CEO.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has made a habit of saying the quiet parts out loud, and not in a refreshing, brutally honest way, but in a way that suggests he hasn’t thought them through. Case in point: TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, where he was asked point blank to define plagiarism and couldn’t answer. Not didn’t answer. Couldn’t. That wasn’t just a missed PR opportunity. That was a red flag, flapping violently in the face of a company that scrapes content from other publishers, slaps a “summarized by AI” badge on it, and tries to call that innovation.

When you can’t define plagiarism as the CEO of a company built on other people’s work, that’s not strategic ambiguity, that’s an ethical void. And it’s telling. Perplexity has made a business of riding the razor-thin line between fair use and flat-out theft, and they want the benefit of the doubt without the burden of responsibility.

Which is where the Apple comparisons get absurd.

Yes, Apple stumbled. For more than a decade, Siri was a rudderless ship, a clunky commuter train in an age where everyone else was racing to build maglevs. The company completely missed the LLM Shinkansen as it rocketed past, leaving Siri coughing in the dust. What followed was a scramble, an engine swap mid-ride, and the painful attempt to retrofit a creaky voice assistant into something worthy of generative AI expectations.

That failure — public, prolonged, and still unresolved — gave the impression that Apple had no idea what was coming. That they were too slow, too self-contained, and too arrogant to evolve. And to some extent, that criticism landed. The year-long silence after ChatGPT’s breakout moment painted Apple as unprepared, reactive, even out of touch.

But here’s the thing: while Apple still hasn’t shown much of anything tangible since the Apple Intelligence announcement at WWDC 2024 (Genmoji? Really? Messed up email and notification summary?), the signals are clear. The company has changed course. They’ve acknowledged they’re behind and now they’re moving, quietly but with force. Once Apple has its engineering machine locked onto a target, the company doesn’t need to acquire noisy, erratic startups to plug the gaps. What it needs is time. And direction. And both are now in motion.

Which brings us back to Perplexity. Apple doesn’t need it. Not for the tech — which is just a UX layer on top of open models and scraped data. Not for the team — which seems more interested in testing the boundaries of IP law than building products people trust. And definitely not for the culture — which is allergic to accountability and powered by vibes over values.

Apple’s entire value proposition is control: of the user experience, of the ecosystem, and of the narrative. Perplexity brings chaos. Unapologetically so. It doesn’t have a sustainable moat, a mature product, or a north star. It has hype. It has press. And it has the moral compass of a company that thinks citation is a permission slip to republish everyone else’s work for free.

If Apple wants a better search experience, it can build one, with privacy built in, on-device processing, and full-stack integration. If it wants a smarter assistant, it can leverage its silicon and software in ways that Perplexity simply can’t touch. What it doesn’t need is a cultural virus from a startup that treats copyright like a rounding error and ethics like an optional plugin.

So no, Apple shouldn’t buy Perplexity. Not because it can’t. But because it finally knows what it needs to build, and it’s building it the Apple way. At least that’s what I think they’re doing.

Megawati: Indonesia’s political system doesn’t recognize oppositions and coalitions

Megawati Soekarnoputri is once again lecturing the nation from a podium padded with nostalgia and selective memory.

At PDIP’s 6th Congress in Bali, following her reelection as party leader until 2030, she confidently announced that “there’s no such thing as opposition or coalition in Indonesia’s presidential system,” arguing that such dichotomies belong only in parliamentary governments. She then doubled down, framing Indonesia’s democracy as one “based on the people’s sovereignty and the Constitution,” and insisting that PDIP would now act as an “ideological balancing force” rather than opposition.

It’s the kind of speech that sounds profound until you remember how politics in this country actually works.

Let’s start with the basics. Coalitions are not just a feature of Indonesia’s political system, they’re a structural necessity. You need them to qualify for the presidential race. You need them to pass legislation. You need them to govern. There is no constitutional path to power without them. The electoral threshold makes sure of that. So Megawati’s insistence on semantics changes nothing about how political parties operate in practice. If anything, it’s an attempt to overwrite the obvious with rhetorical fog.

Without a coalition, Megawati wouldn’t have had Prabowo Subianto as her running mate in 2008, the same Prabowo whose party just beat hers in the 2024 election, and who spent a solid decade as the loudest, most confrontational opposition to the Jokowi administration, which PDIP dominated. Never mind that in the final years of Jokowi’s term, Gerindra’s loyalty in that so-called coalition was visibly eroding.

That same “nonexistent” coalition also helped put Jokowi and Ahok into City Hall in Jakarta. And let’s not forget, oppositions, even if not enshrined in constitutional vocabulary, have existed and operated for decades in this country. Political parties outside power have always criticized, challenged, and scrutinized those in it. They hold press conferences. They file lawsuits. They propose alternatives. That’s called being the opposition, regardless of whether Megawati feels like saying the word out loud.

Oppositions and coalitions in Indonesia are as inevitable as Jakarta’s traffic jams, they only disappear during Lebaran holidays when no one’s around. So why deny them now?

Well, it’s hard not to notice the timing. Megawati’s sudden interest in redefining Indonesia’s entire political vocabulary coincides, coincidentally, of course with President Prabowo’s decision to grant amnesty to PDIP’s Secretary General who was convicted for bribing officials to parachute a party-hopping politician into parliament and sent to 3.5 years in prison. That politician has since gone missing. For five years. But sure, tell us more about constitutional purity.

This is the kind of gaslighting that only works when everyone else agrees to play along. Megawati wants to position PDIP as above the fray, “a critical balancer,” not opposition, not loyalist, just… conveniently in between. But you don’t get to erase the last 25 years of your own party’s behavior and pretend the entire system is suddenly different because you’re not in charge anymore.

Megawati still sees herself as the matriarch of Indonesian politics, cloaked in Sukarnoist symbolism and mythic authority. But at some point, that legacy turns into a liability, especially when it’s used to blur history, dodge accountability, and deny the very dynamics that made her party viable in the first place.

If PDIP wants to stay relevant in a post-Jokowi, post-victory Gerindra era, it needs more than ideological posturing. It needs to stop pretending that the system it thrived in doesn’t exist. Because it obviously does.

And it’s probably a sign that the party needs new leadership and direction. As it stands it will never not be known as the party of whatever she wants it to be.

Indonesia declared war on the One Piece flag

In what might be the most unintentionally self-owns in modern governance, parliamentary leaders have claimed that the Straw Hat Jolly Roger — the beloved skull-and-crossbones from One Piece — represents separatist tendencies and is being used by shadowy forces who want the Prabowo government to collapse (the news even made it to Screen Rant of all places). The flag has since been targeted for criminalization, under the claim that it’s “provocative,” “disrespectful,” and “threatening national unity.”

So let’s get this straight: a cartoon pirate flag — flown initially by angry truck drivers protesting against what they claim to be unjust safety laws — is now being treated like an act of sedition. Because in a country that refuses to hold corrupt conglomerates accountable, it’s easier to demonize drivers than fix the system. And it’s easier to vilify a pirate crew from a manga than face public anger that refuses to stay quiet.

The real kicker is that any One Piece fan can see it from ten thousand nautical miles away.

The people trying to ban the Straw Hat flag? They sound exactly like the villains in the story.

The rhetoric, about order, unity, suppressing dangerous symbols, and punishing those who question authority, is textbook World Government. This is Gorosei energy. This is the Tenryuubito clutching their pearls because the commoners dared to speak. This is CP0-level control tactics dressed up in nationalistic language. And just like in the manga, it’s not about real threats. It’s about protecting the illusion of stability, no matter how rotten the core has become.

The Straw Hat Pirates in One Piece aren’t the enemy. They’re the ones who sail against corrupt institutions, take down slave-trading elites, and expose the lies propping up unjust empires. Sound familiar? In that universe, flying the Jolly Roger isn’t an act of terrorism — it’s an act of refusal. A refusal to bow, to comply, to play along with a system built to exploit and erase.

And now here in the real world, when working-class Indonesians adopt that symbol in protest — not even violently, just by putting it on their trucks, on their front yards, on their cars, flown atop mountains and volcanoes, etc — the state starts echoing the exact same paranoia we see in the story. The same language. The same scapegoating. The same absurd claims that any challenge to the hierarchy must be criminal, foreign-funded, or anarchist.

It’s actually impressive, the level of irony involved in banning a flag that literally represents resistance to authoritarian overreach because you think it represents resistance to authoritarian overreach.

This isn’t about a flag. It’s about power — and who’s allowed to speak against it. It’s about fear — not of pirates, but of symbols that resonate. It’s about the ruling class realizing that a bunch of truck drivers with anime decals are suddenly more culturally relevant than their entire media machine.

In One Piece, the Jolly Roger is a symbol of freedom, loyalty, self determination, and righteous rebellion. It flies over ships that break chains and challenge tyrants. In Indonesia, it was flown by people tired of being silenced, manipulated, gaslit, and taken advantage of, and now the government wants to treat them like enemies of the state.

If that’s not the most perfect, painful parallel between fiction and reality, I don’t know what is.

So go ahead. Ban the flag. Call in intelligence briefings. Threaten legal action. But just know, you’ve officially cast yourself in the role of the very villains this generation grew up learning to resist.

The funniest things out of this? Vice President Gibran wore a Jolly Roger pin during an election debate last year (while also wearing a Naruto inspired denim jacket) and there is a parody version of the flag using the sideways logo of Indonesia’s 80th anniversary of the Independence Day declaration. Because it really does work and drives home the point much further.

By the way, Deputy Home Minister Bima Arya said nobody is banning the flag (never mind that the parliament leaders are rushing to ban it and demanding law enforcement to act against those flying the flag) and people are still free to fly it as a form of expression. When the government can’t even get their messaging right, nobody should surprised that people are doing what they do.

Apple’s billion dollar Indonesian drama

The Apple investment saga in Indonesia highlights the tension between government ambitions, expectations, and the realities of global business strategies.

Tirto published an article about what’s happening with the Apple investment story in Indonesia with quotes and statements from government officials and analysts. It wouldn’t be the Indonesian government if it didn’t generate drama out of foreign relations or commercial arrangements worthy of a telenovela.

A few things about this drama. Apple has yet to deposit or realize the last $14 million of its $100 million investment commitment made in 2016. It’s chump change for the company but necessary to unlock the permit for the latest iPhones and end the sales ban which the government enacted last year because of it. Only Apple knows definitively why they haven’t delivered on this. Meanwhile there’s been no update on the status of the Bali Apple Academy, announced by Tim Cook in April on his visit to the country. This fourth Academy in the country is likely to be part of the unrealized investment.

Indonesia has also been on Apple’s sales performance radar for a few years now having posted consecutive quarterly sales increases and mentioned specifically during multiple financial calls, so it’s in Apple’s best interest to keep the momentum going. The country makes roughly 50 million Android phones a year mainly for the domestic market, and 85% of phone imports in 2023, or 2.3 million of them, worth around $2 billion, were iPhones. The government is keen to reduce this foreign spending by getting Apple to make phones locally.

Armed with this information and situation, the Indonesian government decided to increase pressure on the company to make good on their promise and weaponised it to force them to eventually offer an investment worth a billion dollars late last year.

Political ego meets business reality

Expecting companies to invest in Indonesia just because they’re doing well in sales ignores the realities of running a sustainable business. Sure, it’s fair to want businesses to contribute to the markets they profit from, but investments can’t be driven by sales numbers alone. They need to make sense, whether it’s about supply chains, regulations, or long-term viability. Pressuring companies to invest without considering these factors often leads to rushed, unsustainable decisions that end up costing everyone in the long run.

That said, there’s room for a balanced approach. Instead of tying investments directly to sales, Indonesia could focus on creating conditions that make investing worthwhile, like improving infrastructure, offering clear incentives, and ensuring regulatory stability. This way, companies can contribute meaningfully without being forced into decisions that don’t align with their business goals. Fair contributions are important, but they should come from partnerships built on mutual benefit, not pressure. Otherwise, it’s just a short-term fix with a long-term price tag.

Apple’s Vietnamese success

Indonesian officials and analysts love to compare Apple’s meager investment in the country with the $16 billion Apple already spent in Vietnam since 2019. The company has 26 suppliers and 28 factories in the country as of 2022 and they announced in April that they will spend much more.

Apple didn’t invest in Vietnam because the market loves the iPhone so much, they’be been investing for years and each time increasing their commitment because the government offer attractive investment opportunities and incentives, provide a stable and consistent environment for businesses, deliver the necessary labor force, and ensure long term investment and production sustainability and security despite political upheavals. Not to mention the factories are mostly located near China which allows them to maintain a streamlined supply chain operation. Indonesia doesn’t have that advantage.

Vietnamese mobile developers also took up the Apple platforms because they saw opportunities, not because they were pushed or coaxed into the platforms. They didn’t need an Apple Academy to get developers going. Most Indonesian developers and companies only see opportunities based on local sales numbers and market size. They don’t see beyond the domestic market. That’s why it was a struggle to find quality Mac and iOS apps and developers from Indonesia before the Academies opened.

By the way

The article also mentioned about the Ministry of Industries spokesperson saying that Apple submitted their investment proposal over WhatsApp. It sounds like the government wants to shame Apple for sending such an important document over a chat app but the country runs almost entirely on WhatsApp. Comms within and across government ministries and agencies are done almost exclusively on the platform, with letterhead documents for official records.

What are the chances that they sent it that way because they were told to submit the document ASAP and the paper doc would follow after, and that they haven’t managed to schedule the meeting with the Ministries because November and December are holiday months for the company? I mean, if it’s that important, Tim Cook could get a few execs to drop their holiday plans and make the meeting but it seems that the urgency of this deal has yet to reach that critical level.

Indonesia 2045: Between Dreams and Reality

A personal take on potential, promise, paradox, and pragmatism

Growing up in Indonesia, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard the phrase “future superpower.” It’s a narrative that’s been woven into our national fabric, a story we tell ourselves about our destiny. As we approach 2045, our centennial of independence, this narrative has taken on new urgency. But we’ve watched years of grand visions collide with stubborn realities, so you can’t be hopeful about this country without a healthy dose of skepticism, probably much more than you might think.

Let’s talk about numbers first, because they tell an interesting story. By 2045, we’re projected to be home to 324-326 million people, up from today’s 284 million. Our GDP per capita could nearly triple from $4,900 to somewhere between $12,000-15,000 or optimistically, above $20,000 as set out by the government in their Digital Indonesia Vision 2045. The middle class could expand from roughly half the population to nearly 80%. These aren’t just numbers, they represent millions of individual dreams, aspirations, and potential futures.

But here’s where it gets complicated.

The Promise and the Paradox

Indonesia in 2024 is a study in contrasts. We’re a nation where gleaming skyscrapers rise above Jakarta’s perpetually flooded streets, where digital payments are ubiquitous yet basic infrastructure remains patchy, where tech unicorns coexist with traditional markets. Our youth are increasingly global in outlook while remaining deeply rooted in local traditions. It’s these contrasts that make both our potential and our challenges so fascinating.

The good news is substantial. Our digital transformation is real and accelerating. Barring any technological or societal collapse, practically everyone would have access to to the internet by 2045. Our demographic dividend provides a workforce that could power decades of growth. The country’s strategic location between the Pacific and Indian Oceans positions us perfectly for a time where maritime trade routes are increasingly crucial.

But, and there’s always a but, the challenges are equally substantial.

The Reality Check

Corruption isn’t just a governance issue, it’s a cultural challenge that has proven remarkably resistant to reform. Our corruption perception index, measured by Transparency International, had gone from 34 in 2014 to 34 in 2023. To be fair, it hadn’t been flat, in fact it went up by the end of Jokowi’s first term to 40, which is a good thing, but it fell back to 34 in 2022 and stayed there, while in terms of ranking we fell five spots. In 20 years, who knows where it will be, because it’s such a deeply rooted problem. Regional disparities remain stark as what’s true for Jakarta isn’t true for Bandung or Medan, let alone Denpasar, Pontianak, or anywhere else in the archipelago, and the gap isn’t closing as quickly as it needs to be.

The environmental challenges are particularly daunting. Rising sea levels threaten our coastal cities, especially our main cities like Jakarta and Surabaya. Deforestation continues despite commitments to the contrary. Our renewable energy transition, while accelerating from 12% to a projected 30-35% by 2045, may not be fast enough to meet climate challenges.

The Global Stage

This is where things get really interesting. By 2045, the global order will have shifted dramatically. China and India will likely be the world’s largest economies. The Indo-Pacific region will be the center of global economic gravity. Where does Indonesia fit in this new world?

Our potential role is significant. As the unofficial leader of ASEAN, a G20 member, a BRICS partner, and the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy, our diplomatic leverage ought to count for something, more significantly than it is right now. Our economy could be the world’s 4th or 5th largest by 2045. Our cultural influence, from cuisine to creative industries, is growing.

But here’s the cynical part: we’ve heard all this before. The question isn’t about potential, we’ve always had that, we are the sleeping Asian tiger after all. The question is about execution.

The Balancing Act

Our foreign policy challenges exemplify this complexity. We’re navigating between China and the US, between regional leadership and domestic development, between economic sovereignty and global integration. We’re trying to be everyone’s friend while advancing our own interests, a challenging diplomatic dance that will only get more complex.

By 2045, Indonesia could be:

  • A regional power with global influence
  • A key player in global supply chains
  • A leader in environmental and climate diplomacy
  • A cultural and religious bridge between East and West

Or we could be:

  • Still struggling with basic governance issues
  • Caught in the middle-income trap
  • Vulnerable to climate change and environmental degradation
  • Left behind in the global technology race

The Hope and the Hurdle

What makes me cautiously optimistic? The resilience that’s evident. The youth’s entrepreneurial spirit. The way we’ve maintained a semblance of unity despite diversity that would tear many nations apart. Our ability to adapt and evolve while maintaining our core identity.

What keeps me up at night? The persistence of old problems. The way corruption seems to adapt faster than anti-corruption measures. The environmental clock that’s ticking ever louder. The risk that we might miss our demographic dividend window while we’re still sorting out basic educational challenges.

Looking Forward

By 2045, if I’m still around, I’ll be old enough to have seen this entire journey unfold. Will we look back at this moment as the turning point where we finally converted potential into reality? Or will we still be talking about being a “future” superpower?

The truth probably lies somewhere in between. We’re likely to see significant progress, higher incomes, better infrastructure, more global influence. But we’re also likely to face continued challenges with governance, inequality, and environmental sustainability.

The Personal Stakes

This isn’t just about national statistics or global rankings. It’s about the kind of future we’re creating for the next generation. It’s about whether my kids will have to leave the country to find opportunities, or whether they’ll be able to build their dreams right here.

The Indonesia of 2045 won’t be a utopia. But it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be better, more just, more sustainable, more prosperous, than today. It’s certainly achievable but my skepticism tells me it’s not going to be what it needs to be. I mean, ten years ago we all had expected so much more under Jokowi and yet here we are with a middle class crunch and facing further economic challenges.

The country is not going to be the superpower some dream of, never will. But it needs to be something perhaps more valuable, a nation that has found its own path to progress, balancing tradition with modernity, economic growth with sustainability, global influence with local wisdom.

That’s a future some people think they’re working to achieve while others are seemingly working to ensure something else happens.

A Final Thought

We need to stop thinking about Indonesia as a “future” superpower and start thinking about it as a present responsibility. The future isn’t something that happens to us, it’s something we build, decision by decision, day by day.

We’ll definitely not get everything right and will certainly face setbacks and challenges, and as always, the country isn’t defined by its challenges but by its response to those challenges.

Funnily enough when you look back, how the country responded to challenges will not be enough and will instead predictably stunt its own growth because what is disappointment if not Indonesian politicians and their lack of willingness to put aside personal greed over national gain? Not to mention the seeds of conflicts that seem to be consistently sowed. 

Will the country grow and get better? I mean look at the progress that’s happened over the last 20 years. We’ve got better infrastructure, strong economic growth, improved social welfare, but corruption, inequality, and institutional fragility continue to hinder progres. Our democracy keeps regressing and there are active efforts within the government and among the people ourselves, to return the country into authoritarianism and take away people’s rights.

Golden Indonesia by 2045? Tell ‘em they’re dreaming.

Facts aren’t enough: Why journalism needs to find a new way to reach the public

Journalism is in a crisis of accountability. Too many reporters are taking the easy route: regurgitating statements from politicians and officials without pushing back, questioning, or even glancing beneath the surface. It’s like they’ve decided that the press briefing is the new gospel, letting the people in power control the narrative and dodging any real scrutiny. This isn’t just lazy; it’s dangerous. When journalists stop asking the hard questions, they become complicit in misleading the public, and they fail democracy.

But here’s the other side of the crisis. Even when journalists are on their game, digging deep, presenting hard facts, and keeping things objective, a big chunk of the public isn’t even listening. Instead, they’re tuned into their own personal version of reality, patched together from social media rumors, conspiracy theories, and “alternative facts” that suit their biases.

A growing number of the public are increasingly immune to traditional reporting, whether it’s coming from newspapers, digital publications, or the nightly news. We’ve reached a point where the truth itself is somehow up for debate, no matter how well it’s documented because the other side have been presenting their versions more convincingly.

So what’s the answer? For starters, journalists need to get back to actually holding people accountable. Enough with the rehashed sound bites. Journalists must turn up the heat, pull apart the claims made by those in power, and lay bare the inconvenient truths, even if they’re messy or complicated.

But let’s be honest: reporting the facts clearly and objectively isn’t enough if they’re just going to be ignored. The media can’t afford to keep shouting into the void. To get through to people, journalists need to shake up the way they’re telling these stories.

Conventional formats aren’t cutting it anymore, readerships are down across the board and publications have been shutting down all around the world. Maybe it’s time to lean into platforms and techniques that disrupt echo chambers rather than reinforcing them.

This could mean turning to data visualizations that make complex issues impossible to ignore or creating interactive stories that don’t just tell people what’s true but show them, letting them see the process and judge for themselves. We need formats that combine the immediacy of social media with the depth of investigative reporting, something more visceral, less dismissible.

And this is where the press need to admit: current methods of engaging with audiences aren’t working for everyone. If journalists want people to trust the media again, they’re going to have to earn it in new ways. That might mean getting closer to the communities they cover and the audience they serve, being more transparent about the reporting process, or even tackling popular myths and misinformation head-on instead of just waving them off as fringe ideas.

Journalism’s mission isn’t just to report facts, it’s to make those facts matter. They can’t give up on that mission just because some people would rather live in a reality of their own design. It’s time for the media to level up, to be tougher, sharper, and more innovative in how to tell the truth. Because the stakes are too high for the facts to keep getting ignored.