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The NYT is vowing to fight President Trump's lawsuit. Stephen A. Smith is launching his new politics talk show. Meta is unveiling a new pair of AI-powered smart glasses. Here's the latest on Pam Bondi, NPR, YouTube Live, the Dallas Morning News, and more...

'We have regressed'

Whenever American political discourse feels a whole lot angrier and toxic online than it does offline, I think about old columns like "We Should All Know Less About Each Other," by the NYT's Michelle Goldberg, and "People Aren't Meant to Talk This Much," by The Atlantic's Ian Bogost.

We are all members of the media now, thanks to the incredible publishing tools in our pockets. But with that power also comes peril — as previously private thoughts become public and algorithms amplify our differences, defects and delusions.

We're in the middle of another "how is social media warping society?" news cycle stemming from Charlie Kirk's murder one week ago. Perhaps it all relates back to the simple idea that we have access to way too much info about each other now, while we simultaneously have a hard time seeing each other in 3D through the flatness of the screen.

"Our human brains are attracted to anything that's unusual or that provokes us, makes us angry," San Diego State psychology professor Jean M. Twenge told CNN's Pamela Brown in this excellent segment. "And when you're thinking about a kid or a teenager, that's even more true. So when our kids and teens are spending so much time online, they're being exposed to a lot of these radical and extreme ideas, particularly because their brains are really attuned to seek out those things that are unusual or disturbing." 

This NYT story points out that most social platforms "have stayed quiet and ducked the spotlight" as elected officials have blamed the internet for radicalizing the suspect in the shooting. The point: "Their reactions are starkly different from a decade ago, when executives at Google, Facebook, Twitter and other sites repeatedly vowed to work together to limit hate speech, remove violent content and root out disinformation from their platforms."

"We have regressed," Graham Brookie of the Digital Forensic Research Lab told the Times. "We are in a worse place now than when countries and companies came together to say never again to violence and hate speech online."

Nepal as a glimpse of the future?

David Bauder's latest for the AP is titled "Social media has us in its grip and won’t let go. The Charlie Kirk killing is a case study." He points out that "on the other side of the world, as the Kirk story preoccupied Americans, Nepal reeled from a spasm of violence that erupted when the government tried to ban social media platforms." CPJ's Jon Allsop has an informative piece about Nepal here.

Anti-social social media

WaPo contributing columnist Matt Bai has lost the hope he once had about tech bringing us together. He now suspects that "America can have social media, or we can have a healthy democracy," but maybe not both. 

The online cacophony is "rewriting the American story," he says in a new column this morning. "It's affected the way we talk to each other, IRL. We inch toward actual civil war, egged on by a showman, because we've grown accustomed to the idea that the enemy tweets among us. The medium is the message — and the message is fracture."

Yes, but let's just recognize that we all put the "social" in social media. Each user is either part of the problem or part of the solution (or probably a bit of both). The same goes for news coverage: If we only concentrate on the arsonists — so to speak — and don't recognize the firefighters, we just contribute to the firestorm.

Confessions and conspiracy theories

The Kirk suspect's text exchanges, revealed yesterday by authorities, were stunning. The suspect wrote in one text that his engravings on the bullets were "mostly a big meme, if I see 'notices bulge uwu' on fox new[s] I might have a stroke."

Professional conspiracy theories immediately sowed doubt about the legitimacy of the texts, and X promoted their baseless theories to countless users, for the reasons we outlined above. More broadly, as Politico Playbook notes, there's a whole lot of disbelief and denialism about the suspect's ideological bent: "Even as the facts of the case are laid out, significant voices on either side still seem wedded to whatever version of events most helps their own political cause."

 >> Expect to hear more of this from MAGA media: Steve Bannon said on his podcast that he is "absolutely not buying" the government's "lone assassin" narrative.

Total disregard for the First Amendment

Pam Bondi has been pretty much universally criticized for asserting that the DOJ will go after "hate speech," as CNN's Aaron Blake wrote here. "The attorney general has no idea what she’s talking about," The Free Press wrote. She "needs a free speech tutorial," the WSJ editorial board opined.

Bondi walked back her comments. But President Trump seemed to back her up yesterday, warning ABC's Jon Karl that "we'll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly." As I said on air, Trump was speaking emotionally, not legally, but his remark showed a total lack of respect and understanding of the First Amendment. 

 >> Related: From "The Source with Kaitlan Collins" last night: "Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche defends idea of prosecuting protesters."

Experts say Trump's NYT suit lacks merit

Trump's lawsuit against the NYT "is extraordinary, even in this already extraordinary media-law moment," RonNell Anderson Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, told CNN's Liam Reilly yesterday.

Jones and half a dozen other lawyers and scholars told Reilly and me that the suit is meritless. But Trump's chances in court are almost beside the point. "To pick through its legal defects, such as the complaints about statements about Fred Trump — a deceased man who cannot be defamed — is to ignore its purpose: to threaten any criticism of Trump," Rebecca Tushnet of Harvard Law School said.

 >> Both the Times and Penguin Random House, which was also named in the suit, are signaling that they will defend themselves forcefully. Read more of the reactions here...

TikTok deadline punted, but deal imminent?

Trump has done it again, signing another executive order delaying any enforcement of a TikTok ban for another three months — "an action that may be superseded later this week with an agreement to sell the social media app's US assets," David Goldman reports here. But "nothing is final until it's final," as Hadas Gold noted on air just now. According to the WSJ, the US business "would be controlled by an investor consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz..."

COMING UP TODAY...