The 2020 presidential campaign occurred in the midst of the first worldwide pandemic in 100 years. The pandemic engulfed the United States for the entire length of the campaign and the incumbent president was hospitalized with the virus at the height of the fall campaign. In this chapter, we show that people’s concern about the coronavirus pandemic increased significantly after Trump contracted COVID-19. Furthermore, and consistent with the citizen-centered theory of campaigns, we find that psychological predispositions, along with political and demographic characteristics, substantively and significantly predict changes in worry about the coronavirus from September to October. For instance, people high in authoritarianism and conflict avoidance become significantly more worried about the coronavirus pandemic from September to October. Finally, we show that people are more likely to consider assessments of the candidates’ competence for dealing with the coronavirus when developing overall evaluations of the candidates in October – after Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis – compared to September.

The laws of defamation and privacy are at once similar and dissimilar. Falsity is the hallmark of defamation – the sharing of untrue information that tends to harm the subject’s standing in their community. Truth is the hallmark of privacy – the disclosure of facts about an individual who would prefer those facts to be private. Publication of true information cannot be defamatory; spreading of false information cannot violate an individual’s privacy. Scholars of either field could surely add epicycles to that characterization – but it does useful work as a starting point of comparison.

The end of the first millennium BC saw the rise of a series of civilizations in the central Andes and in Ecuador supported by irrigation works, connected by elaborate road systems, featuring growing populations and monumental architecture, elaborate “royal: burials, and continual warfare. The outstanding cultures of this time period are those of the Moche or Mochica in the north of Peru, the Nazca in the south, and a series of states in the Altiplano which gave rise to Tiahuanaco as well as the Chorrera derived cultures o the Ecuadorian coast.

The commercial market for local news in the United States has collapsed. Many communities lack a local paper. These “news deserts,” comprising about two-thirds of the country, have lost a range of benefits that local newspapers once provided. Foremost among these benefits was investigative reporting – local newspapers at one time played a primary role in investigating local government and commerce and then reporting the facts to the public. It is rare for someone else to pick up the slack when the newspaper disappears.

In the spring of 2022, visitors to the Smoking Gun website would find a challenging “game, where [one’s] wasted time [was] well spent.”1

An entity – a landlord, a manufacturer, a phone company, a credit card company, an internet platform, a self-driving-car manufacturer – is making money off its customers’ activities. Some of those customers are using the entity’s services in ways that are criminal, tortious, or otherwise reprehensible. Should the entity be held responsible, legally or morally, for its role (however unintentional) in facilitating its customers’ activities? This question has famously been at the center of the debates about platform content moderation,1 but it can come up in other contexts as well.2

Trade in the central Andes was not market based but under the control of various governments and government agencies. In the north markets are known for international exchange of salt, gold, slaves and similar luxury items in both Colombia and Ecuador.

Coordinated campaigns of falsehoods are poisoning public discourse.1 Amidst a torrent of social-media conspiracy theories and lies – on topics as central to the nation’s wellbeing as elections and public health – scholars and jurists are turning their attention to the causes of this disinformation crisis and the potential solutions to it.

Current approaches to content moderation generally assume the continued dominance of “walled gardens”: social-media platforms that control who can use their services and how. Whether the discussion is about self-regulation, quasi-public regulation (e.g., Facebook’s Oversight Board), government regulation, tort law (including changes to Section 230), or antitrust enforcement, the assumption is that the future of social media will remain a matter of incrementally reforming a small group of giant, closed platforms. But, viewed from the perspective of the broader history of the internet, the dominance of closed platforms is an aberration. The internet initially grew around a set of open, decentralized applications, many of which remain central to its functioning today.

The period of AD 500-1000 saw the development of the first international state is Peru and Bolivia: Tiahuanaco and Huari. Tiahuancaco controlled the Altiplano and, perhaps, northern Chile, whereas Huari, formed a huge conquest state in Peru which may have provided a model for the later Inca.

Political scientist and ethicist Russell Hardin observed that “trust depends on two quite different dimensions: the motivation of the potentially trusted person to attend to the truster’s interests and his or her competence to do so.”1 Our willingness to trust an actor thus generally turns on inductive reasoning: our perceptions of that actor’s motives and competence, based on our own experiences with that actor.2 Trust and distrust are also both episodic and comparative concepts, as whether we trust a particular actor depends in part on when we are asked – and to whom we are comparing them.3 And depending on our experience, distrust is sometimes wise: “[D]istrust is sometimes the only credible implication of the evidence. Indeed, distrust is sometimes not merely a rational assessment but it is also benign, in that it protects against harms rather than causing them.”4

The citizen-centered theory of campaigns improves our understanding of participation in the 2020 election. In this chapter, we show that people who dislike conflict participate at a much higher rate than people who are more tolerant of conflict. We also show that people who watched the September presidential debate, people who have higher levels of confidence in the election results, and people with more polarized views of the social justice movement are significantly more likely to vote in the general election. The citizen-centered theory of campaigns also informs our understanding of convenience voting. People who are more sympathetic to Trump are more likely to heed his message of forgoing mail voting and going to the polls on Election Day. Further, people who dislike conflict are significantly more likely to rely on mail voting compared to voting on Election Day. Finally, views about the important issues of the campaign affect how people choose to cast a ballot; people who are more concerned about the COVID-19 pandemic and people with more confidence in the integrity of the election are more likely to vote by mail than in person on Election Day.

The first inhabitants of South America came from North America down the Central American isthmus (or, perhaps, along the coast in canoes) at ca. 15,000 BC. They rapidly moved into a wide range of ecosystems, including very high altitudes in the Andes and the tropical rain forest and developed numbers of new strategies for survival. Including hunting of both herd animals and megafauna, seacoast fishing and gathering, and in the northern Andes, began to improve plant species, leading eventually to domestication.

The first complex civilizations in the central Andes—those of Chavín de Huantar in the north and Paracas in the south—were very different but also very obviously shared many of the same religious ideas. This period saw the spread of metallurgy, international art styles and religious cults and the beginning of many practices which formed the basis for later civilizations as well.

Almost all platforms for user-generated content have written policies around what content they are and are not willing to host, even if these policies are not always public. Even platforms explicitly designed to host adult content, such as OnlyFans,1 have community guidelines. Of course, different platforms’ content policies can differ widely in multiple regards. Platforms differ on everything from what content they do and do not allow, to how vigorously they enforce their rules, to the mechanisms for enforcement itself. Nevertheless, nearly all platforms have two sets of content criteria: one set of rules setting a minimum floor for what content the platform is willing to host at all, and a more rigorous set of rules defining standards for advertising content. Many social-media platforms also have additional criteria for what content they will actively recommend to users that differ from their more general standards of what content they are willing to host at all.