Hasta La Gadget!

Alec Baldwin and Hollywood producer Dana Brunetti ― two successful men who are presumably very busy ― spent about five hours on Wednesday night engaged in a no-holds-barred Twitter war of epic proportions. 

Earlier this week, Brunetti called out Baldwin for allegedly lying in his recently released memoir, claiming that he didn’t know co-star Nikki Reed was underage when they filmed 2006’s “Mini’s First Time,” which included some sex scenes ― but no nudity ― between the actors. It was an odd anecdote for Baldwin to include in his memoir, since almost no one saw the film, and neither Baldwin nor the production company had done anything illegal by casting Reed, who was 16 at the time. 

Brunetti claimed that Baldwin was fully aware that Reed was underage throughout the course of filming. The film’s director, Nick Guthe, as well as another producer, Evan Astrowsky, backed Brunetti’s version of the events in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.  

Yet Baldwin refused to back down and, at times, seemed to be demonstrating his Donald Trump impersonation as he went after Brunetti on Twitter. The result was an exhausting back-and-forth exchange.

The feud started out fairly tame, with Baldwin demanding that Brunetti produce a release form from the Screen Actor’s Guild regarding Reed’s age and Brunetti threatening to “bury” him.”

Then things started to get personal. Baldwin made cracks about Brunetti’s dealings with producing partner Kevin Spacey and troubles at the studio Relativity, while Brunetti threw Baldwin’s divorce from Kim Basinger in his face. 

They took shots at each other’s work and, at one point, Baldwin plugged the fact that he’ll be hosting “Match Game” on ABC. 

Wow. Just wow. 

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WASHINGTON ― Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his fellow Republicans prepared to pull the nuclear rules trigger Thursday, ending filibusters for Supreme Court justices after Democrats blocked President Donald Trump’s conservative nominee, Colorado federal appeals court judge Neil Gorsuch.

Democrats have argued that Gorsuch was simply too conservative, and were nearly united in opposing a cloture vote to end debate on the nominee. Opposing cloture amounts to a formal filibuster, which takes 60 votes to break. With just a few Democrats joining the chamber’s 52 Republicans, McConnell’s only means of confirming Gorsuch was to change the rules.

To accomplish that requires a string of procedural moves that allows a Senate majority to change long-standing rules with a simple majority, or 51 votes.

It normally takes a two-thirds vote to jettison rules in the middle of a session, and using procedural tools to do so is a rare step that threatens to generate extreme ill-will in historically deliberative body.

Gorsuch is expected to be confirmed on Friday.

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Computational propaganda flourished during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but what is most concerning is not so much the amount of fake news on social media but where it might have been directed. 

False information didn’t flow evenly across social networks. There were six states where Donald Trump’s margin of victory was less than two percent ― Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If there were any real-world consequences to fake news, that’s where they would appear ― where public opinion was evenly split right up to Election Day. 

So, what political news and information were people in those states sharing over social media? How much of it was extremist, sensationalist or commentary masking as news?

To answer these questions, my team and I at politicalbots.org collected data on fake news ― what we call “junk news” ― on Twitter using major hashtags related to politics in the state of Michigan in the lead-up to the election. Separately, we tracked news shared from the Kremlin-backed news agency Russia Today and WikiLeaks. What we found is that in Michigan, conversation about politics over Twitter mirrored the national trends ― Trump-related hashtags were used more than twice as often as Clinton-related hashtags. Social media users in Michigan shared a lot of political content, but the amount of professionally researched political news and information was consistently smaller than the amount of junk news.

Some politicians may keep pushing junk news to the parts of the country that voted their way, while other parts get high-quality information.

In fact, when you add in the number of links to unverified content on WikiLeaks or news from the Kremlin-backed news agency Russia Today, more than half the political news and information being shared by social media users in Michigan was not from trusted sources. For every link to a news story produced by a professional journalist, there was a link to content from one of the extremist, sensationalist, commentary sites. And not only did such junk news “outperform” real news, but the proportion of professional news content being shared hit its lowest point the day before the election.

Political speech gets a lot of protections in the U.S., but the reasonable balance between freedom of speech and election interference has been tipped. There is such a significant volume of misinformation flowing over social media that it is difficult to imagine voters in the U.S. are equipped with what they need to make good decisions. Did voters in Michigan get what they needed last year? Our conclusion: certainly not. 

We did similar research during a less controversial election in Germany and found that for every four stories sourced to a professional news organization, there was one piece of junk. In part, this healthier ratio is because levels of education are high in Germany, and there is public financing for several kinds of professional news organizations. But the voting public in Germany ― and its politicians ― are panicked even with this level of misinformation.

That may produce deeper inequality across states, with some politicians making decisions based on evidence and others making choices based on bad information.

People get their political news and information from many sources. Social media is an important one because we often trust our friends and family to pass on good information. Unfortunately, the science of network analysis shows how information pollution, like what we found in Michigan, can weaken democracy.

If the followers of candidates who lost the election begin un-friending the followers of candidates who won, our social networks will become even more bounded than they already are. Worse, some politicians may keep pushing junk news to the parts of the country that voted their way, while other parts get high-quality information. Indeed, as former FBI agent Clint Watts said during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, social media bots and online trolls didn’t stop at the election – they are still working to spread fake news today. That may produce an even deeper level of inequality across states, with some politicians and government officials making good decisions based on evidence and others making lousy choices based on bad information.

It is hard to know what a comprehensive solution might be. Part of the explanation for all this involves big-picture changes in the business of news and generational differences in how young people consume news. But we are at a point where some kind of public policy oversight is needed, and we past the point where social media firms can be left to come up with voluntary initiatives.

The FEC was formed in response to Watergate. Perhaps our current crisis will produce the political will to revive the FEC.

First, the Federal Elections Commission needs to revisit its very limited rulings on electronic communications. Unfortunately, the FEC has been deadlocked on many big decisions in recent years. Dirty tricks, AstroTurf campaigns and now junk political news are appealing political campaign tools because they have been largely unregulated. Some campaigns of misinformation are low-budget but involve coordinated content production with candidates and big political action committees. Currently, the FEC doesn’t have the capacity to regulate, even if it wanted to. But the FEC was formed in response to Watergate. Perhaps our current crisis will produce the political will to revive the FEC with the clout to restore the balance between free speech and election interference.

The second step is to hold social media firms responsible for serving misinformation to voters. For the moment, Facebook and Twitter are deflecting responsibility by encouraging civil society groups and journalists to fact-check content on Facebook and Twitter. And they decline to say much about how their algorithms work or share data with researchers. Did political campaigners concentrate their propaganda in key states? Social media firms like Twitter and Facebook could answer this question, but they have not ― yet. Facebook in particular has conducted wide-ranging experiments but won’t share data with researchers.

Governments around the world are considering a variety of interventions ― fines, algorithm audits and mandatory public service ads, for example. Voters learn about politics through social media, and right now, social media firms are giving us junk. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter don’t generate junk news but they do serve it up to us. They are the mandatory point of passage for this junk, which means they could also be the choke point for it.

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Antibiotics are a sometimes necessary evil, but they can upset the body’s delicate bacterial balance. 

For the gut in particular ― which is home to trillions of bacteria that play a crucial role in our physical and mental health ― antibiotics can cause serious damage. The healthy bacteria inhabiting the digestive tract are critical for maintaining the health of the digestive system, brain and immune system in particular, along with numerous other systems in the body. One single course of antibiotics can indiscriminately kill off hundreds of important strains of healthy bacteria alongside the bad bacteria it aims to target. 

Now, a Monash University study involving mice, published in the April issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, finds that childhood antibiotic use impedes the normal growth and development of gut bacteria. This, in turn, affects the function of the immune system ― around 70 percent of which is contained in the gut. 

This can lead to inflammatory diseases like multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel syndrome and asthma in adulthood, the research found. 

The Gut-Immune System Connection 

For the study, the researchers treated female mice with broad spectrum antibiotics during pregnancy and also treated their pups with the same drugs during their first three weeks of life. A second group of pregnant mice and pups their remained untreated to act as a control. 

The pups treated with antibiotics had reduced levels of gut bacteria, as was expected. When the pups were eight weeks old, the researchers examined a specific type of immune cells (known as CD4 T cells) from both the treated and untreated groups to examine their ability to induce an inflammatory bowel disease in other mice. The scientists found that immune cells from the antibiotic-treated mice induced a significantly more severe and rapidly forming disease than those from the untreated mice. 

“Our intestinal bacteria are now understood to have a major role in shaping immune health and disease, but the details for this process remain poorly understood,” said John Wherry, Ph.D., deputy editor of the journal in which the study was published, in a press release. “These new studies provide an important clue as to how the early signals from our gut bacteria shape key immune cells and how these neonatal events can shape disease potential later in life.”

CD4 T cells are known to play a critical role in the inflammatory response. Dysfunction in these cells is involved in the over-active immune response that eventually leads to the development of chronic inflammatory conditions like Crohn’s, lupus, multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases. Previous studies have shown that the use of certain antibiotics can trigger autoimmunity, but now we have a better idea of how this happens. 

New hope for preventing and treating autoimmune disease 

The findings add growing weight to the idea that targeting gut bacteria may be an important way to treat inflammatory diseases.

The good news is that certain lifestyle changes ― like adopting a gut-healthy diet, managing stress levels and exercising regularly ― can make a real difference for gut, and therefore immune, health.

“We know that gut microbiota are altered by stress, antibiotics, high-fat diet, and a ‘overly clean environment,’” University of Texas associate professor of pediatrics and gastroenterology Dr. Yuying Liu, who has conducted research on gut bacteria and autoimmunity, recently told The Huffington Post. “It is reasonable to postulate that lifestyle interventions could help to prevent or treat autoimmune diseases.”

Giving a child antibiotics can be unavoidable in certain situations, but very often it’s not. Antibiotic misuse is rampant in the U.S., and according to the Centers for Disease Control and prevention, one in three antibiotic prescriptions is unnecessary.

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