Behind the Blog: Zuckerberg’s Kook-ness and Trump Week One

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Nazis celebrating Elon Musk’s salute, Zuckerberg as a kook, dictating your own threat model and a good block/mute ethos.

EMANUEL: The first week of Trump’s second term is in the books and we’re off to a terrible start. A flurry of executive orders is filled with symbolic and potentially impotent threats, but is also already causing real harm and fear. Local police and schools are preparing for the possibility of ICE raids coming for children. It feels like a return to Trump’s first term time dilation effect and if the first term is a guide to the second we’ll probably see more shocking headlines before the weekend. 

People I know who don’t usually ask me about work reached out this week asking what I thought about Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other big tech company CEOs showing up prominently during Trump’s inauguration, if that will impact 404 Media, and if we were scared. I do think there is currently more interest in what we cover but that this surge of interest will fade, as it did during Trump’s first term. I also think that it is probably about to become a more hostile environment for journalists, but I don’t feel like journalists are a particularly vulnerable group under the Trump administration.