The Day the Capitol Became a Content Farm

On January 6, 2021, a mob of Trump supporters breached the United States Capitol building while Congress was certifying the 2020 election results. Lawmakers hid under desks. A man in face paint and a fur hat with horns posed for photos on the Senate floor. Windows were smashed, offices were looted, and the entire world watched live on television as the oldest democracy on Earth had its worst day in modern history. The dissonance was staggering: this was an insurrection carried out by people who also stopped to take selfies. Five people died. The National Guard arrived hours too late. Social media struggled to moderate content that was also being entered into evidence. The President who incited the march was banned from Twitter, a sentence that would have been incomprehensible in any previous decade. Congress reconvened that night, certified the election in the early morning hours, and the country woke up on January 7th to a question nobody had a good answer for: what now?