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The challenge of zombie startups

Hello, and welcome to Pipeline. I’m Biz Carson, and my favorite Vine was the Del Taco fresh avocado.
This week in the startup world: zombie startups, lots of layoffs, and disappearing megarounds.
Elon Musk wants to bring back Vine. It won’t be easy.
There’s a collective tech nostalgia of what could’ve been, would’ve been, should’ve been when it comes to Vine.
Years before TikTok, Vine created a social network around six-second looping videos. It had all the early hallmarks of TikTok: the virality, the influencers, the marketing. But three years after a 2013 launch that saw it catapult to the top of the app charts, Twitter shut Vine down. Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube were all competing over short videos, and Vine didn’t build the right features or help creators monetize.
Now, Elon Musk is considering resurrecting Vine and bringing it back as a challenger to TikTok.
“Instagram is vulnerable now, so any new approach has better chances of working than before. But if it's the exact same product, it's tricky to believe that it's going to go as well,” said Niko Bonatsos, an investor at General Catalyst who has backed social app makers like Snap, Discord, and Yik Yak.
There’s certainly public support for a Vine reboot. In a Twitter poll with over 4.9 million votes, nearly 70% of respondents were in favor of bringing back the short-form social network.
- But nostalgia alone won’t mean it becomes useful overnight. As Bonatsos pointed out, most of Vine’s original fans from nearly 10 years ago are no longer in their teenage or college years with loads of free time to spend on social media. Today’s time-rich teenagers don’t have that fond recollection of Vine that would help drive them to naturally use it.
- “To bring back the app is not that hard. To make it culturally relevant again is the hardest thing,” Bonatsos said.
Bringing it back might not be so easy either. There’s a whole lot of technical debt, thanks to an untouched codebase that a slimmed-down army of Twitter engineers would have to work through.
- While Musk has asked employees to start looking through the existing code, it might be better if the company just started from scratch, according to Sara Beykpour, who worked on Vine at Twitter and led its shutdown. “This code is 6+ years old. Some of it is 10+. You don't want to look there. If you want to revive Vine, you should start over,” Beykpour said in a tweet. (She didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Products have come back from the dead before, but zombies rarely win.
- On the pro side: Steve Jobs is hailed as a hero for reviving the Mac. Yik Yak, a once-popular app among college students, died in 2017 and relaunched last year; it recently released an Android app. Gowalla was dissolved in 2012 but came back with new venture funding in 2021. The cyclical nature of trends means things like QR codes, vinyl records, and even Polaroid cameras are having a moment again. (Unfortunately, ’90s fashion is too.)
- On the con side: There are still plenty of zombie startups walking around that exist in name, but aren’t quite the same. Munchery, the former food delivery service, is now a recipe website. Napster’s latest revival is some kind of Web3/NFT play. Social network Bebo was resurrected four times and sold twice before giving up the ghost. “It’s been emotional,” wrote founder Michael Birch on what's left of its website.
Vine will have to be something different to usurp TikTok and have any staying power. YouTube creator MrBeast pointed out that everyone has copied TikTok, so whatever Twitter does, it has to make it more than a copy or it could be a waste of time. “No one is original anymore, whatever you do will be on every other platform the next month unless it has a deep moat,” he said.
- Twitter’s product leaders are already trying to think through it with the goal of potentially relaunching by the end of the year. An early idea is to turn the camera inside of Twitter’s app into an easy way to record and post Vines, according to a report from Platformer. A reported use case could be users filming reaction videos to tweets they see.
With Twitter’s product roadmap evolving by the hour, it’s too early to say what will happen to Vine 2.0. Let’s just hope its lifespan isn’t as short as its videos.
A version of this story previously appeared on Protocol.com. Read it here.
Overheard
“I couldn’t give my boyfriend the full allocation he wanted in my seed round, so he floated the idea of us getting married instead,” a VC overheard. I guess that’s dating in San Francisco these days.
If there is such thing as a “good” layoff announcement, Stripe’s memo from CEO Patrick Collison has earned praise for being forthright in the two mistakes the founders made: 1) “We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown.” 2) “We grew operating costs too quickly. Buoyed by the success we’re seeing in some of our new product areas, we allowed coordination costs to grow and operational inefficiencies to seep in.”
“There’s just too much influence in a small number of people, where if Keith Rabois or Elon Musk just tweet something, everyone just jumps on the bandwagon,” said former AngelList exec Eric Woo, who is trying to build a new ratings system for the venture industry.
“Basically, they were trying to make fun of me.” #Girlboss author and Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso called out The Information for making her into a “disgraced girlboss” costume idea in the same category as Elizabeth Holmes. “I’ve laughed off a lot of painful things over the years, but this one stung,” she said. The Information ended up apologizing and removing the item.
The worst mail-merge mistake ever: Instead of the name field, a founder instead inserted their personal CRM notes on the VC. That’s how Lightspeed’s Mercedes Bent got an email saying: “Hi Has deck. Seems kinda stuck up. Didn’t accept my LI request but boss did. Stanford grad. Paints a picture, Updating you on a few.…”Sponsored content from SkyBridge

Valuations have become less hype-driven and more realistic; the amount of time spent on due diligence has increased substantially; and every founder needs to directly, clearly, and concisely answer the question, “Does this project have any real-world utility, and does it create economic value?”
Inside track
No one ever says congrats when someone gets a term sheet for a down round, but perhaps they should, writes Threshold’s Heidi Roizen. Valuation nostalgia can creep in, but it’s not the end of the world as long as you avoid making certain mistakes.
If you're looking to build a paid membership program, look to China. Their internet giants largely skipped an ad-based model and went straight to memberships that come with VIP perks based on usage, and it can be a model for companies like Twitter, Snap, and startups exploring building a membership program, says a16z’s Connie Chan.
Everyone used to be asked about their 5G strategy, now it’s the metaverse. But what is that nebulous place? Former a16z partner Benedict Evans outlines ways tech leaders should be thinking about the metaverse.
“The problem isn’t that Elon Musk owns Twitter — it’s that you don’t,” writes Substack’s Hamish McKenzie. Yes, it’s partially an argument for why Substack is better, but McKenzie brings up some interesting points around ushering forward an era where people have the power over their own distribution.
As promised, Sequoia’s Sonya Huang updated the Generative AI market map to include even more companies.Need to know
Another no-good, very bad week for layoffs. Twitter was gutted by massive layoffs of the company, but it wasn’t the only one to cut staff this week. In addition to the aforementioned Stripe layoffs, more fintech companies also had to pull back with Chime cutting 12%, Digital Currency Group decreasing by nearly 13%, Upstart laying off 7%, and NFT startup Dapper Labs slashing 22%. Keith Rabois’ Opendoor cut 18% of the company, and Lyft laid off 13%.
The DOJ is sniffing around the Adobe-Figma deal. The government reportedly contacted Figma investors, competitors, and customers as it scrutinizes the transaction. Don’t forget: Adobe will have to pay Figma a $1 billion breakup fee if the deal is blocked.
Tiger Global backs out of China. It made its name as an early believer in China, but now Tiger Global is reportedly stopping new investments in the country amid political uncertainty.
75+ VC firms signed on to support reproductive rights. The VCs for Repro Coalition states that criminalizing abortion is a violation of human rights that stifles innovation.
The $100 million round is disappearing. Data from Carta shows the number of megarounds has fallen to pre-pandemic levels.
OpenAI wants to back generative AI startups. The company behind GPT-3 and DALL-E is launching the Converge accelerator and giving around 10 teams $1 million each to build new products around AI.
Moves: Former VC Megan Quinn stepped down as COO of Niantic, but is remaining on the company’s board. The #TCtoVC pipeline is alive and well with TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook being the latest to move into venture and join Betaworks as a partner. Lerer Hippeau’s Meagan Loyst is leaving her investing role to focus on the Gen Z VCs collective full time. Self-driving trucking company TuSimple fired its CEO, Xiaodi Hou. Yext founder Howard Lerman is back with a new remote-work startup Roam (waitlist only). Optimizely co-founder Dan Siroker is building “a search engine for your life” with new a16z-backed startup Rewind.
From Protocol: Are the U.S. and China really in an AI race? In a special series from Protocol, AI reporter Kate Kaye dug into how a golden age of collaboration has turned into competition with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt profiting from AI investments while spreading Cold War rhetoric.
Also from Protocol: How I decided my startup needed a new leader, from Marqeta CEO Jason Gardner, who says he’s looking for a “late-stage co-founder.”
Also, also from Protocol: What's something no one tells you about raising capital? ClickUp’s Zeb Evans, LaunchDarkly’s Edith Harbaugh, TrueLayer’s Francesco Simoneschi, Retool’s David Hsu, and TigerEye’s Tracy Young all shared the advice they wished they’d been given with Protocol’s Braintrust.
Your weekend reading: You may know Alexis Ohanian as the founder of Reddit or as Serena Williams’ husband who cheers her on courtside. But the founder-turned-VC is working on building his own legacy with venture firm Seven Seven Six. “I don’t want to ever again feel like I’m one vote out of five on a thing that I created,” he told The Information in a new profile on Ohanian’s search for redemption.Sponsored content from SkyBridge

The VC correction is proving once again that valuations are not an indicator of success. While money continues to flow, the crypto winter and VC slowdown have forced even the most committed Web3 venture capitalists (and their investors) to proceed with more caution.
Thanks for reading! If you like what you’re reading, sign up here to get it in your inbox. Send story tips and newsletter feedback to bcarson@protocol.com.
What the tech industry wants at COP27

It’s once again climate conference season. Negotiators are set to descend on Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, for international climate talks known as COP27.
This is the 27th iteration of what’s known as the Conference of the Parties. And a lot has changed since the first meetings were held in Berlin in 1995. Chief among them is the role that the tech industry plays in both shaping the talks and the world’s path forward to address climate change.
When negotiators first met, Google didn’t even exist. Now, it and other tech companies bring in annual revenue on par with some European countries’ GDP, and they’re using the power that affords them to shape the official negotiations and craft side deals. That includes this year’s meeting kicking off on Sunday.
This year’s hot topic will be loss and damage, or a framework for rich countries to pay emerging ones for climate damages. It’s a highly complex and contentious topic, albeit one the tech industry doesn’t have much of a say in given it’s basically a fight over money between countries that caused the climate crisis while getting rich and those suffering the effects.
But tech has a role to play in the shape of the discussion. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chairman and president, told Protocol that “we need to focus on the needs of the Global South.” That could mean deploying AI and other tools that can help mitigate crop losses when extreme weather hits, for example.
Suzanne DiBianca, EVP and chief impact officer at Salesforce, echoed Smith’s comments. She told Protocol that the company is “committed to advancing climate policy and climate justice.”
At last year’s climate talks in Glasgow, tech industry heavyweights and national governments announced the First Movers Coalition, a group that’s putting money and policy muscle into propping up industries like carbon removal and green steel. The former could become a powerful tool in its own right to serve international climate justice.
Removing the legacy carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will help create a more stable climate. And a growing number of carbon removal companies and trade groups are incorporating environmental justice principles into their work, including ensuring the economic benefits of managing carbon are distributed evenly around the world.
The industry also clearly sees itself as part of the international order. It’s impossible in many ways to disentangle business interests from nation-state interests at this point, but particularly when it comes to the climate because everyone has to live with the world’s choices.
“COP27 is taking place against a backdrop of intersecting crises in the global economy including economic uncertainty, an energy crisis in Europe, and climate change impacts globally, but we cannot slow our progress,” said Kate Brandt, chief sustainability officer at Google. “This is why collaboration, implementation, and innovation will be essential over the next decade, and the discussions and outcomes over the next two weeks will be key in driving progress.”
Progress, though, could take a number of different forms. So far, it’s taken the form of climate pledges that have yet to bend the emissions curve at the company and global levels. Microsoft saw its emissions increase last year due to growth in Xbox use and its data center business despite its pledge to cut emissions and reach carbon negativity by the end of this decade. (Most countries haven’t done much better.) The company has since laid out what policies it will advocate for that will, in theory, make it easier for the company and the world to start cutting emissions.
But there are deeper discussions to be had at COP27 and beyond about how the industry uses its power to shape the world.
“The tech sector exists to see around the bend,” Jamie Beck Alexander, the director of Drawdown Labs, told Protocol. “Given this foresight, industry leaders know that we will all one day soon wake up and realize that we have to make impossibly hard changes in our economy on impossible time horizons.”
Among the contradictions the industry will have to confront is whether it will continue to help prop up the fossil fuel industry by selling cloud computing services. While that makes operations more efficient from a carbon emissions perspective, it also makes operations to get fossil fuels out of the ground easier as well. And given that the majority of emissions tied to fossil fuels are when they’re burned in a car’s engine or a natural gas power plant, that efficiency is a death sentence for the climate.
Some countries are starting to take the need to end the fossil fuel era seriously. At last year’s climate talks, Denmark and Costa Rica founded an alliance of countries that are the first in the world to agree to end fossil fuel production. The tech industry taking a similar stand could drive a change in how we produce energy with much more force than any clean energy buying commitment or CDR investment could.
The industry has also preached unfettered growth, constantly rolling out new products like Apple’s annual iPhone update and innovations like Amazon Prime’s free two-day shipping. While Apple has touted its recycling initiatives and push toward a circular economy and Amazon has invested in electric delivery vehicles, Beck Alexander said that “our ability to see around the bend shows us that growth for growth’s sake is unsustainable.” That points to the need for rethinking what brought about the climate crisis in the first place, including at COP27.
“I’d like to see tech leaders offer an invitation to the business community at large to have a serious conversation about growth,” she said.
Michelle Ma contributed reporting to this piece.
How to survive as the only remote person in the hybrid room

The hybrid approach to remote work can meet the needs of diverse teams of people, but too often those who sign in from afar can feel left out, absent from impromptu hallway discussions or outright ignored on Zoom calls.
When you’re on the outside it’s tempting to just stay quiet and hope things will improve, but if your team isn't aware of your struggles, things will only get worse. I spoke with three experts in remote work and here are their pro tips on how to survive and even thrive.
Build trust through tools
The first step is to make sure that your team has access to the right tools. "Digital tools create a level playing field for collaboration," Darren Murph, head of remote for GitLab, told me. He suggests things like Google Docs, Notion, and Figma for tracking everything from documents to deadlines.
While some products, like Google Docs, are immediately familiar, others like Notion or Asana are a lot more nuanced. When encouraging their adoption, make sure you talk up the efficiencies and benefits they offer everyone, not just you. Get buy-in from some other stakeholders on the team. Most importantly, don't force this stuff if you can avoid it, lest you burn your team out before they're even on Teams.
Formalize team meetings
While sometimes it can be nice to fade into the wallpaper in a meeting, nobody wants to be ignored. To ensure equal footing, Kate Lister, president at Global Workplace Analytics, suggests formalizing rules for meetings, including anonymous polls to ensure everyone's opinion is counted and outright bans on side conversations. My favorite of her rules, though, is creating a "remote/non-remote buddy system." Basically, find someone in the room who’ll make sure you’re heard.
Murph suggests dynamic agendas shared before every meeting: "This way, those in the room can see you typing a new agenda item, which will prompt the current speaker to pause and recognize your written note." He calls these live doc meetings.
If all else fails, Murph says to simply be a little more forceful: "Don't be afraid to speak over those in a boardroom."
Set expectations
Clear expectations are an important part of any employer/employee relationship, but if you're the lone soul working remotely, you need to be crystal. Nobody's going to see you roll your eyes when yet another meeting hits your time zone at 6:30 p.m. on Friday.
Again, tools can help. "I use Calendly to book all meetings," Chase Warrington, head of remote at Doist, told me. "The time I am available is predefined, and I don’t budge on this."
But expectations need to cover performance, too. "Set expectations with team leads on what should be shared, and on what cadence, and ensure that those expectations apply to the whole team," Murph said. Here, again, tools can help on the follow-through: "If your team is on Slack, implement a Geekbot prompt to provide updates without the need for a synchronous stand-up."
That way, that bot is the jerk demanding updates, not you.
Establish a safe, transparent sharing space
Invisibility paranoia is a major side effect of being the lone remote worker. "Regardless of whether people are F2F, hybrid, or remote, transparency is the best solution for staying visible, team effectiveness and efficiency, and building trust," Lister said. "When everyone’s work is visible via a project sharing or management platform ... there’s no question about who is or isn't contributing."
But seeing others' work won't always ensure that people appreciate yours. Murph suggests creating a safe place for oversharing: "Establish 'permission to play' behaviors, which would outline where work is shared, and how often ... If this isn't happening at your workplace, speak up and be the first example."
Watch for red flags
"Hybrid is the future of work for those companies that choose not to adopt a fully remote model, and to do this well it will take a lot of effort and intentionality," Warrington said. The sad truth is that a lot of companies simply won't make the effort.
What are some signs that your employer isn't committed? Murph says that reluctance over accessibility is a concern: "Ideally, global collaboration happens on tools that are digital by design and accessible anywhere." More tasks written on whiteboards than Trello boards? That's a big red flag.
Also, look out for unwillingness to make technology upgrades for in-office facilities. Are you cranking the volume up on your end to try and hear everyone circled around a 1998 vintage Polycom? That's another flag.
Stay strong
The most important thing in all this is to not let the quality of your work be impacted. Being trusted to work remotely means you need to be your own biggest motivator. If your employer isn't providing the tools, technologies, or support needed for you to do your best, it might be time to look for one that does.
What is the WARN Act? Here’s what to know about the Twitter lawsuit.

It’s an email no tech worker wants to read: “If your employment is impacted, you will receive a notification with next steps via your personal email.”
Some 7,500 Twitter employees received that warning in their inboxes on Thursday evening, with the mass layoff following swiftly after. Altogether, this round of layoffs is expected to cut the Twitter workforce in half. When you factor in the resulting drop in employee morale, the suspended advertising deals, and the mandatory return-to-office policy, Twitter could see even more employee losses in the coming weeks.
When California-based companies conduct mass layoffs, they’re supposed to provide 60 days’ notice to the government and employees ahead of time. Right now, it appears Elon Musk — who took control of the company just over one week ago — failed to do that. A group of former Twitter employees filed a preemptive lawsuit on Thursday warning that Twitter could violate both the state and federal WARN Acts, and other suits may follow.
But the law is a little more complicated than that. The lawsuit asked Twitter to provide the requisite notice or severance payment. Twitter reportedly told fired employees they could expect to receive details about severance agreements by next week. If those severance agreements end up providing more than 60 days’ worth of pay, then the WARN Act doesn’t offer much beyond that. The lawyer behind the lawsuit, Shannon Liss-Riordan, said on Friday that Musk had been “making an effort to comply” and clarified that the would-be class-action lawsuit was made “preemptively to make sure a repeat of that violation did not happen,” per Bloomberg.
What’s the WARN Act?
The California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act is a worker-friendly version of a federal statute that requires employers over a certain head count threshold to give the public a heads-up of at least 60 days when major cuts are coming. The idea is for employees to be able to move on with as little disruption as possible. In the Golden State, businesses employing more than 75 people full time and laying off at least 50 of them have to give notice. Musk’s layoffs reportedly came to more than 3,000 people, meaning it’s all but certain the WARN Act applies.
Did Musk violate the WARN Act?
The short answer is “we don’t know.” A spokesman for the California Employment Development Department — which should have received notice from Musk about the mass layoffs — told the New York Times that the agency didn’t receive notice from Twitter.
So things aren’t looking great for Musk, and a violation wouldn’t come as a surprise given his track record for filing government paperwork. Even for this deal, Musk failed to file the necessary SEC disclosures on time. In May, the SEC launched an investigation into the delayed filing, which likely allowed Musk to save around $143 million as he built up his stake in the company (though those savings now look meager against the $44 billion he paid for a company that is likely now worth much less than that.)
Earlier this year, Musk laid off workers at Tesla, which also sparked a lawsuit under the WARN Act. Employees claimed Musk asked them to sign severance agreements for two weeks of pay, far less than the 60 days of pay required under the WARN Act. In an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum, Musk described that lawsuit as having “no standing.”
What might Musk have to do if a court does find he violated the WARN Act?
For the most part, the punishment for bosses is that they have to give back pay for every day of notice that employees should have gotten but didn’t — so, 60 days’ worth of wages for no-warning layoffs, 59 days’ worth for a day of notice, etc.
In addition, the company is “liable for the cost of any benefits to which the employee would have been entitled had his or her employment not been lost,” according to the Society for Human Resource Management. That mostly means medical expenses that Twitter’s insurance plan would have covered for the ex-staffers.
Finally, Musk might have to pay $500 per day of violation, which likely isn’t too much for the world’s richest man.
Couldn’t Musk just give the workers a two-month severance package?
Mostly, yes. That seems to be pretty common, at least under the federal WARN Act. California tech, after all, has surprise layoffs all the time, particularly with the economic future looking so cloudy.
The problem may be that Musk — in one of his only communications with the company since he took it over last week and began dismissing leaders — said Twitter would be providing just a single month of severance. Reports came out on Thursday that company administrators were still finalizing potential severance agreements. The lawsuit is intended to sway Twitter into giving at least the 60 days guaranteed under the WARN Act.Trump allies are questioning US democracy. Tech is letting them.

U.S. election infrastructure is exceedingly secure, and voter fraud here is so rare it’s comparable to your annual chances of getting struck by lightning. Despite this, former President Donald Trump and a long list of allies in the Republican Party have spent the last two years questioning the overall integrity of the U.S. election system. Many of those allies are now candidates themselves, and their coordinated attack on the country’s status as a democracy is not a relic of 2020. Some have already started repeating these “Big Lie” charges ahead of next week’s midterms. And the social platforms that help them spread their message have prepared few measures to stop it.
In short, many of the efforts from companies — including Twitter, Meta, and YouTube — to protect 2022’s elections look a lot like the measures the platforms took in 2020.
- The platforms had made (some) genuine progress on the threats from 2016 or so. Many of their policies, for instance, focus on coordinated inauthentic behavior, like foreign botnets and Chinese or Russian interference campaigns.
- Social networks have also put pretty expansive rules in place around lies that would stop people from voting — such as when polls close or who is eligible to cast a ballot.
- The services have also tried to plug some remaining holes with resource pages posting accurate information, limits on ads about political topics, or more invoking of policies forbidding certain types of harmful misinformation.
But many lies about the security of the whole system and the reliability of the general results still don’t fall under these policies, and such content often slips through moderation nets because it’s not clear what rules apply.
Twitter could be making the problem worse, especially given Elon Musk gutting half the company’s staff in the last 24 hours.
- In terms of policy, Twitter actually goes a little further than some of its peers, limiting “misleading claims intended to undermine public confidence in an election.”
- Musk also punted on bringing Trump back onto the platform for a few weeks, pushing off any decision until after the election.
- The company, though, had its hands full enforcing its rules even before the cuts.
- Its coming changes to verification will also allow bad actors to pay just a few bucks to pose as reliable sources of information and further the flood of lies, particularly during what’s expected to be slow counting and certification of results.
Meta seems to have mostly recycled its 2020 playbook, despite reporting that suggested the company’s three platforms were particularly helpful in supercharging the original Big Lie — focused on Biden’s election — in the leadup to Jan. 6.
- In laying out its plans for the midterms, Meta said it might append labels to “content discussing the integrity of the election.”
- The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp said users disliked the volume of labels it applied last time around, though, so it suggested any labeling that does occur will only happen on posts that reach a certain level of virality.
Other platforms’ approaches don’t necessarily inspire confidence, either.
- YouTube, in addition to the usual bans on incitement and lies about the voting process, prohibits “false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in certain past elections to determine heads of government.” The company said it has also taken down such claims about 2020.
- That sounds like a policy tailor-made for confronting the new Big Lie with its firmness and specificity — except it doesn’t apply to claims about 2022, which is both current and a contest when the president isn’t on the ballot.
- TikTok actually says it will go so far as to remove misinformation that undermines “public trust in civic institutions and processes such as … elections,” although its record is thin and staff turnover may threaten its efforts even as it becomes a major news source.
- Reddit’s policies seem to focus on detecting attempts to intimidate voters or suppress turnout (like lies about when polls close), as well as the site’s usual ban on calls to violence.
Many Republicans will win election contests fairly next week. It’s quite possible there’ll be enough of them that they’ll take control in one or both chambers in Congress. There’s real risk, though, that some will seek to overturn legitimate losses — or even that a few Democrats will sense an opening for bad behavior — by fostering doubts about whether the U.S. can still pull off real elections. The social networks seem mostly to be hoping they have the tools to tackle that. It’s not clear they do.
A version of this story appeared in Protocol’s Policy newsletter. Sign up here to get it in your inbox three times a week.