++Thoughts and prayers. +
++In August 2020, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) filed an audacious lawsuit against the nation’s largest and most powerful gun rights group. +
++The suit alleges that several top leaders of the National Rifle Association (NRA) — including its CEO, Wayne LaPierre — engaged in a ridiculous amount of self-dealing with the organization. Among other things, the lawsuit accuses LaPierre of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on private charter planes for himself and his extended family, accepting lavish gifts from NRA vendors, and spending $1.2 million in NRA funds on “personal expenses,” the list of which includes his golf club membership. +
++Although the NRA initially denied the allegations, it filed a tax document with the IRS in November admitting it “became aware during 2019 of a significant diversion of its assets.” The tax return also says LaPierre reimbursed the NRA for $300,000 in travel expenses. +
++James’s lawsuit asks the court to impose several steep penalties on the NRA, including dissolving its corporate charter — a sanction NRA’s attorneys have characterized as akin to the “death penalty” for a corporation. +
++Needless to say, the NRA wants to avoid this outcome and has engaged in some fairly audacious legal maneuverings of its own to strip the state of New York of much of its power over the organization. Although the NRA is, by its own accounts, in strong financial shape and fully capable of paying off its creditors, the organization declared bankruptcy last January. +
++The primary purpose of the NRA’s declaration, many outsiders surmised, is to cut many of its formal ties with New York and reincorporate it in the state of Texas, thus stripping James of much of her authority over the organization. On Tuesday, a federal bankruptcy judge agreed. +
++Texas-based Judge Harlin Hale formally rejected the NRA’s attempt to use the bankruptcy courts in this way, ruling that “the NRA did not file the bankruptcy petition in good faith because this filing was not for a purpose intended or sanctioned by the Bankruptcy Code.” +
++If you’re confused by this complicated web of corporate and bankruptcy law, fear not. It is arcane and convoluted, and I will explain what the law has to say about all of these legal maneuvers. The bottom line is the NRA lost the first round of what is likely to be years of litigation over whether it can declare bankruptcy and what sanctions New York’s courts can impose on the group. +
++There is a very small chance that this all ends with the dissolution of the NRA. That could mean the NRA’s current leadership would lose control of all the organization’s assets, including its valuable donor lists. +
++Meanwhile, there’s a larger possibility that New York’s courts will allow the NRA to continue operating but will also impose significant sanctions on LaPierre and other top NRA leaders. Those sanctions could include requiring reimbursing the NRA for their own alleged self-dealing, or even removing them from the NRA’s leadership. +
++And there’s an even greater possibility these lawsuits reveal humiliating information about LaPierre and other top officials. The NRA faced several unexpected policy defeats during the Trump administration, and it is caught up in another round of litigation with one of its former vendors. More embarrassing news about the gun rights group may discourage people from giving to the NRA in the future. NRA supporters, after all, typically give to the organization because they agree with its political views, not because they want to help pay for one of LaPierre’s trips to the Bahamas. +
++Why does New York get to decide whether the NRA can continue? +
++There is something a little odd about the fact that just one state, New York, may have so much authority over a major interest group such as the NRA. Not long after James filed her suit, the usual suspects denounced it as a power grab: Former President Donald Trump accused the “Radical Left New York” of “trying to destroy the NRA.” +
++New York’s power over the NRA arises from an unusual quirk of American corporate law. Although corporations can do business in all 50 states or in foreign countries, new companies are typically chartered by states and are thus bound by the state’s corporate laws, not the federal government’s. +
++The fact that corporations typically get to choose which state to incorporate in often benefits the companies themselves. More than 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies, for example, are incorporated in Delaware. That’s because Delaware laws are particularly favorable to these corporations; also, many corporate lawyers are familiar with Delaware law and Delaware’s courts. +
++But this system also places a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of some states’ courts. The large number of companies incorporated in Delaware means that multibillion-dollar corporate cases of national importance are often decided by judges appointed by the governor of a tiny state with fewer than a million residents. +
++It’s not unusual, in other words, for a single state to wield the type of power New York now does over the NRA. +
++The NRA is 150 years old. Indeed, it is so old that it was formed in an era when corporations were often created by special acts of the state legislature — New York’s legislature granted the NRA a corporate charter in 1871, and the organization continues to operate under the charter to this day. +
++That means the NRA is subject to a wide array of New York laws governing corporations formed in the state, including one that permits the state attorney general to bring a lawsuit seeking to “annul the corporate existence or dissolve a corporation that has acted beyond its capacity or power.” +
++Under certain circumstances, a New York corporation may also be dissolved if “the directors or members in control of the corporation have looted or wasted the corporate assets, have perpetuated the corporation solely for their personal benefit, or have otherwise acted in an illegal, oppressive or fraudulent manner.” +
++The crux of James’s lawsuit against the NRA is that LaPierre “exploited the organization for his financial benefit, and the benefit of a close circle of NRA staff, board members, and vendors,” and that he did so in violation of his legal “duties of care, loyalty and obedience to the mission of the charity.” The suit also claims several other senior NRA leaders “regularly ignored, overrode or otherwise violated the bylaws and internal policies and procedures that they were charged with enforcing” in order to divert assets to “insiders and favored vendors.” +
++Thus, James claims the NRA has “acted beyond its capacity or power” by operating not as a legitimate nonprofit corporation that serves its stated mission but as a kind of personal enrichment machine for a handful of the organization’s senior leaders. +
++What are the allegations against the NRA? +
++Realistically, James’s office faces a tough road if it hopes to dissolve the NRA. New York courts have likened this remedy to a “judgment … of corporate death,” and they place a very high burden on state officials seeking to dissolve a corporation. The state often must show that the corporation committed “some sin against the law of its being” that is “material and serious … such as to harm or menace the public welfare.” +
++Yet, while it’s far from clear James can convince a court to impose a “corporate death penalty” on the NRA, her complaint does describe some very serious allegations against the NRA’s senior leadership, which stretch for more than 100 pages of James’s filing. They claim the NRA misused as much as $64 million over just three years, and they include some genuinely shocking claims of self-dealing. +
++LaPierre, for example, is accused of chartering a private flight, priced at more than $26,995, for his niece and her daughter after they were unable to catch a commercial flight to an NRA event. The NRA allegedly paid more than $500,000 to fly LaPierre and his family to the Bahamas on at least eight different occasions, where LaPierre often stayed on a 108-foot yacht owned by one of the NRA’s largest vendors, as well as nearly $600,000 over five years for “consulting services” provided by LaPierre’s wife’s “executive assistant.” +
++The NRA also purportedly agreed to pay LaPierre a simply enormous amount of money if he retired or was not reappointed as the organization’s CEO — so much money, in fact, that his annual compensation would have increased. One version of LaPierre’s “post-employment” contract specified he would be paid more than a million dollars a year through 2030 if he left his job. +
++And then there’s the NRA’s relationship with certain favored vendors. According to James’s complaint, for many years the NRA’s largest vendor was the public relations firm Ackerman McQueen. The NRA allegedly paid Ackerman nearly $32 million in 2018 alone — and that’s on top of the fees the NRA paid to the Mercury Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ackerman. +
++According to the complaint, however, the NRA’s arrangement with Ackerman appeared designed to hide what all that money actually paid for. LaPierre, who reportedly had a very close relationship with a late co-founder of Ackerman whom he would often speak to daily, allegedly “requested that invoices from Ackerman … contain very little detail about the work performed or services rendered.” +
++To be clear, it’s not like the NRA received nothing at all from Ackerman — among other things, the PR firm built the NRA’s now-defunct video streaming network NRATV. But the relationship between the NRA and Ackerman has also turned sour. Among other things, the NRA sued Ackerman in 2019, claiming the firm misled it into wasting millions of dollars on NRATV and produced content even many NRA leaders viewed as “distasteful and racist.” +
++In any event, these are just a few of the accusations in James’s complaint, which paints a picture of an organization that allowed LaPierre to spend lavishly on himself, his family, and his personal friends and close associates, with little oversight from within the NRA. +
++The NRA’s response to James’s allegations has also evolved over time. In August, the organization put out a statement claiming it was “well governed, financially solvent, and committed to good governance,” but then admitted in its November IRS filing that it discovered “a significant diversion of its assets” in 2019. +
++In October, the NRA filed a lawsuit against James, claiming her investigation of the NRA and subsequent lawsuit violate the Constitution because James intends to “obstruct, chill, deter, and retaliate against the NRA’s core political speech, which is protected by the First Amendment.” The NRA states in the suit that it “has undertaken efforts to improve its internal governance functions up to the present day.” +
++Regardless, even if James’s allegations are proven, they may not be enough to justify dissolving the NRA in its entirety. But they do suggest the organization is deeply corrupt and may need new management. +
++What does bankruptcy law have to do with all of this? +
++The purpose of bankruptcy, as the Supreme Court explained many years ago, is to “relieve the honest debtor from the weight of oppressive indebtedness and permit him to start afresh free from the obligations and responsibilities consequent upon business misfortunes.” +
++The idea is that an organization sometimes takes on debts it cannot afford to pay, whether because of poor business decisions, bad luck, or court decisions ordering it to pay large sums of money. When this happens, it is normally better to allow the organization to pay off as many of these debts as possible, and continue to exist and employ some of its workers, than to have it simply collapse under the weight of its financial obligations. +
++Given that bankruptcy exists to relieve debtors from unpayable debts, the NRA’s decision to file bankruptcy is more than a little odd. As Hale explained in his opinion dismissing the NRA’s filing, “The NRA has consistently represented to the Court and to its members” that it is “in its strongest financial condition in years.” Like most large organizations, the NRA does have debts, but there is no indication it can’t pay those debts, or that it needs a federal bankruptcy court to step in and help manage its finances. +
++Rather, as the NRA itself admitted in a court filing, the organization hoped to use the bankruptcy process to implement “a plan of reorganization that provides for the reorganized NRA to emerge from these chapter 11 cases as a Texas nonprofit entity.” The NRA, in other words, hoped a bankruptcy court would allow it to reincorporate in Texas, thus stripping New York state of much of its power over the NRA. +
++Yet, while bankruptcy courts sometimes have significant power to restructure a bankrupt corporation, Hale refused to play along with the NRA’s scheme. +
++While debtors often file bankruptcy because they lose a lawsuit and, as a result, cannot afford to pay what they owe, multiple courts have held that, in Hale’s words, “a bankruptcy case filed for the purpose of avoiding a regulatory scheme is not filed in good faith and should be dismissed.” +
++So, after determining that the purpose of the NRA’s bankruptcy filing was to frustrate James’s effort to enforce New York’s corporate law, Hale dismissed it, ultimately agreeing with James that “the NRA is using this bankruptcy case to address a regulatory enforcement problem, not a financial one.” And that is not something federal bankruptcy law permits. +
++Is the NRA actually going down? +
++So, the NRA lost the first round in its fight against NY regulators. +
++Hale, however, is unlikely to have the final word on whether the NRA’s attempt to reorganize as a Texas corporation through bankruptcy will prevail. +
++For one thing, the NRA may appeal Hale’s decision, and it is likely their appeals will ultimately be heard by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, an extremely conservative court dominated by Bush and Trump appointees. So it’s possible the NRA will argue its appeal in front of a panel of judges who are very sympathetic to the NRA’s mission — and equally unsympathetic to Democratic attorneys general from New York. +
++Meanwhile, the NRA’s general counsel testified that he does not expect New York’s courts to try James’s lawsuit against the NRA until early next year. So even if the NRA’s attempt to file bankruptcy in order to reincorporate in Texas ultimately fails, it will be a long time before any New York judge weighs in on James’s allegations against the gun rights group — and even if James prevails at trial, the NRA will likely appeal that decision. +
++What’s more, Hale wrote in his opinion that he was “not dismissing this case with prejudice,” meaning the NRA could potentially refile for bankruptcy in Hale’s court — though it’s unlikely a second filing would accomplish much, unless its circumstances change. +
++All of which is a long way of saying that dissolution of the NRA remains unlikely and is certainly not imminent. Nevertheless, the organization did suffer a significant loss in Hale’s court, and James’s allegations against it are very serious. Even if James’s lawsuit does not end in the NRA’s destruction, it could end with significant sanctions against LaPierre and his inner circle. +
++What’s happening in Israel and Gaza is the near-inevitable result of a grim status quo. +
++Dozens have already died in the fighting between Israel and Hamas, and more will perish if the fighting continues to escalate. +
++But there is little chance that the root cause of all this death — the long-running political status quo in the Israel-Palestinian conflict — will be altered in the slightest. Israeli-Palestinian warfare has become routinized; it follows a familiar script that repeats itself endlessly. +
++Since Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, there have been three full-scale wars and numerous rounds of lower-level fighting. But the basic structure of the conflict — Israel’s blockade of Gaza and occupation of the West Bank, and Palestinian rule divided between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — has remained remarkably durable. +
++It would seem as if the current round of violence emerged out of a complex series of events in Jerusalem, most notably heavy-handed actions by Israeli police and aggression by far-right Jewish nationalists. But in reality, these events were merely triggers for escalations made almost inevitable by the way the major parties have chosen to approach the conflict. +
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Mahmoud Illean/AP
++Both Israeli and Palestinian leadership have basically accepted the painful political status quo in Gaza, seeing the violence and humanitarian suffering it causes as bad, but basically tolerable as part of an effort to secure their hold on power. Israel’s leadership bears particular responsibility: As the most powerful actor in the conflict, it has the greatest ability to break the pattern. But the current factions in power in Jerusalem have strong ideological and strategic reasons for keeping its Gaza policy in place. +
++As a result, the underlying status quo will likely outlive this conflict, guaranteeing more violence. +
++“It’s like the worst version of Groundhog Day,” says Khaled Elgindy, the director of the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute. “[Leaders] just put a Band-Aid on it and we go back to the pre-crisis normal.” +
++It’s a horrible equilibrium, one in which “manageable” levels of violence stand in for doing something to actually improve the lives of Israelis or Palestinians. It is also a direct result of the deepest political structure governing the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the iron hand of Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza’s border. +
++The Israeli-Palestinian doom loop +
++The current violence began with a series of conflicts in Jerusalem. +
++Israeli police in the city blocked off the Damascus Gate, a popular gathering place for Arabs during Ramadan, sparking protests. An attempt by Jewish settlers to evict longtime Arab residents of Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem, inflamed tensions dramatically, leading to violent clashes with Israeli police. Arab youth attacked ultra-Orthodox Jews in the city and Jewish extremists assailed Arab residents. All of this culminated in a violent Israeli police raid on the al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem’s holiest site for Muslims, located on the Temple Mount (the holiest site in the world for Jews). +
++Then Hamas fired rockets at Jerusalem. Ostensibly, this was a display of solidarity with the protesters on the ground. But it appears to have been a political calculation — Hamas attempting to capitalize on Palestinian anger over Jerusalem to expand its own influence, especially in the wake of recently canceled Palestinian elections that would likely have strengthened its political position. +
++“This is much more about internal Palestinian politics than it is about what’s been going on in Jerusalem,” says Michael Koplow, the policy director at the Israel Policy Forum. +
++The attacks on Jerusalem crossed what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to as a “red line,” breaking the unspoken rules that limited the pace and range of rocket attacks to limited barrages mostly targeting southern Israel. Israel responded with overwhelming force; massive air strikes targeting Hamas emplacements in densely populated Gaza. This prompted more rocket attacks from Hamas and, in turn, more bombings from Israel. As a result, at least seven Israelis and dozens of Palestinians are dead — with no end in sight. +
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Heidi Levine/AP
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Oded Balilty/AP
++But while the events that led to this point are unique, the broader pattern of events is not. This week’s violence is part of a recurring pattern determined by structural factors in the conflict. If the events in Jerusalem hadn’t prompted Hamas rocket fire and Israeli escalation, something else almost certainly would have. +
++“The most likely scenario is unfortunately the one we’ve been in for the past 15 years,” says Ilan Goldenberg, the director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. +
++Goldenberg coauthored a report in 2018 documenting what he terms “the cycle of violence” between Israel and Hamas. It documents the ways in which the political status quo is arranged in a way that makes frequent violent flare-ups all but inevitable. +
++The stage is set, Goldenberg and his coauthors say, by the policy approaches of both sides. Israel aims to minimize the threat posed by Hamas and other militant factions, imposing a harsh blockade on Gaza that limits the flow of goods and people into the territory. Hamas aims to cement its hold on power and expand its influence relative to its Palestinian rivals, seeing violence against Israel as a key tool in this struggle. This creates an underlying reality in which fighting breaks out again and again. +
++“Eventually, humanitarian and economic pressure builds inside Gaza, and Hamas escalates its use of violence both to generate domestic political support and to pressure Israel to ease the economic situation,” they write. “Israel responds with its own escalation, including military strikes inside Gaza and punitive economic measures that further choke the Strip.” +
++Once the fighting starts, it’s not clear how much it’ll escalate. Sometimes it ends swiftly and with minimal loss of life. Other times — as in 2008 to 2009, 2012, and 2014 — it turns into an all-out war, with hundreds of (mostly Palestinian) casualties. The current fighting is rapidly moving in that direction, with Israeli leaders pledging to continue the bombardment of Gaza indefinitely. +
++“The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] will continue to strike and bring complete silence for the long term,” Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said on May 12. +
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Adel Hana/AP
++Ultimately, the warring parties either unilaterally decide to stop bombing, or else agree to an internationally brokered settlement that does little to change the fundamental dynamics. This is the nature of current conflict: Many people die, and many more suffer, without any real prospect for change. +
++“The question isn’t why this keeps happening,” Elgindy says. “It’s why anyone isn’t doing anything to prevent it from [continuing to] happen.” +
++The doom loop has deep roots in Israeli politics +
++It’s clear that that this status quo produces horrors. The problem, though, is that these terrible costs are seen as basically tolerable by the political leadership of all the major parties. +
++Hamas continues to be able to rule Gaza and reaps the political benefits from being the party of armed resistance to Israeli occupation. Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas appears cowed by Hamas’s power — most analysts believe he canceled the Palestinian election because he thought he would lose — and so is content to let Israel keep his rivals contained in Gaza. +
++Israel is the most powerful actor of the three: It controls access to the Gaza Strip and operates a military occupation in the West Bank. If the Israeli leadership wanted to take actions to short-circuit the cycle of violence, like easing the blockade of Gaza, it could. But despite the persistent rocket threat, the leadership isn’t willing to try something new. +
++Why? +
++The last time I was in Israel, on a reporting trip in November 2019, I spoke with Yehuda Shaul, the founder of Breaking the Silence, a group that helps Israeli soldiers tell their stories about service in the Palestinian territories. He told me that the traditional categories used to describe politics — left, right, and center — are fundamentally inadequate when it comes to explaining what happens in Israel. +
++These days, he argues, most of Israel’s leadership falls into what he terms the “annexation” camp or the “control” camp. +
++The annexationists are Jewish extremists, who want to formally seize large chunks of Palestinian land while either expelling its residents or denying them political rights — ethnic cleansing or apartheid. The “control” camp, which includes current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, sees things primarily through the lens of military and physical security: how the Palestinians are ruled is less important than minimizing the threat they pose to Israeli lives. +
++“The driving principle [of the control camp] is a national security idea,” Shaul explains. “We are in a zero sum game: between the river and the sea, there is room for one sovereign power. It’s either us or the Palestinians.” +
++The status quo in Gaza serves both groups. From the annexationist view, keeping the Palestinians weak and divided allows Israeli settlements to keep expanding and the seizure of both the West Bank and East Jerusalem to continue apace. Lifting the blockade on Gaza, and working to promote some kind of renewed peace process involving both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, jeopardizes the agenda of “Greater Israel.” +
++“It is Israeli policy to fragment Palestinians politically and geographically, to isolate them into these different areas. It’s classic colonial strategy of divide and conquer,” Elgindy says. +
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Majdi Mohammed/AP
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Majdi Mohammed/AP
++Meanwhile, the “control” camp sees this as the least bad option. Any easing of the Gaza blockade would risk Hamas breaking containment and expanding its presence in the West Bank, which would be far more dangerous than the rockets — a threat heavily mitigated by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. In this analysis, periodic flare-ups are a price that has to be paid to minimize the threat to Israeli lives — with heavy escalations like this one required to restore a basically tolerable status quo. +
++I witnessed one of these flare-ups on the same trip where I met Shaul, reporting from Israel and the West Bank as Israel and Hamas exchanged fire. After a few days of mayhem and air raid sirens, life just went back to normal in Israel — as if nothing had happened, as if dozens of Palestinian lives had not just been snuffed out (there were no Israeli deaths in that round). +
++“A lot of the Israeli security and political establishment has sort of internalized this idea that … there’s a sort of stable equilibrium,” says Koplow. “You get occasional rockets, and Israel will respond with a few missile strikes on Gaza, but it happens very occasionally and things immediately quiet down.” +
++For much of Israeli history, a third camp — which Shaul calls the “equality” camp — presented a different vision for achieving Israel’s security needs. Epitomized by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s government formed in 1992, it believed that Palestinians deserved a political voice as a matter of principle — either in a single state or, more typically, through a two-state arrangement. Such an agreement would sap Palestinian support for violent groups like Hamas by taking away the population’s underlying grievance: the lack of a state to call their own. +
++Yet the equality camp practically collapsed after the failure of the peace process and the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. Its political vehicles among Israeli Jews, the Labor and Meretz parties, make up a little more than 10 percent of Israel’s current Knesset (parliament). The result is indefinite occupation with no end in sight; no fundamental rethinking of the approach to either Gaza or the West Bank. +
++“As a society, the view is that the risks necessary to solve [the conflict with the Palestinians] are not worth it and it won’t work,” Goldenberg says. “So all we can deal with is the problem in front of us today, without really thinking long-term. We’ll deal with the other problems tomorrow — that’s basically the Israeli attitude.” +
++None of this excuses Hamas from its role in escalating the current conflict, or makes the deep divisions between Palestinians themselves less significant. The status quo is not only Israel’s fault. +
++But the Israeli government sets the terms for how Israelis and Palestinians interact, the underlying policy architecture that shapes the options available to the various different sides. +
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Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
++So long as the annexation and control camps are in the driver’s seat in Israel, it will pursue policies that aim to maintain control over Palestinian land while simultaneously minimizing the security threats intrinsic to the enterprise of military rule over a hostile population. The Gaza situation is an outgrowth of this reality, the sort of policy that one pursues in a world where a more fundamental revision is ideologically foreclosed. +
++Barring some international intervention, it’s hard to see how things get much better — and easy to see how the same terrible things keep happening, over and over again. +
++
++
++Twitter users rarely agree on anything. When they do, it’s an opportunity for community building. +
++Twitter recently made a small but striking change to its interface: It changed the aspect ratio of cropped images on users’ mobile feeds, meaning many photos that would usually be cropped can now be displayed in their entirety. +
++The sudden shift — one among a slew of changes Twitter began testing in March — gave many people the impression that the social media site had done away with automatic image cropping overnight. (In actuality, the old cropping ratio is still in effect on desktop browsers, and cropping is still happening on mobile but in a different ratio.) Once users started noticing, celebrations ensued, with an outpouring of art-sharing, meme-making, and gentle ribbing. The response provides an interesting lesson in how we use social media and why such unexpected changes often become opportunities for vital community building. +
++Welcome to the vertical art party! +
++Two of the fundamental truths about modern social media is that every platform has its own quirks, and that different communities of users evolve and transform these characteristics in a way that makes each platform unique. Whether they’re well-liked, core features (such as Twitter’s overall brevity) or inconveniences users must work around (like Twitter’s lack of an edit button), it’s how a platform’s users respond to and incorporate these traits into their daily lives that matters. +
++On Tumblr, for example, users evolved the “gifset,” a bundle of interlocking animated images that tell a story and could really only exist as a creative entity on Tumblr. On Vine, the fact a video could only be six seconds long became the linchpin of the entire platform, spawning a new medium of microvideos that continue to shape internet culture. One of TikTok’s defining qualities is the ability to reuse audio from someone else’s videos; while lots of sites enable remixes, TikTok users, building off earlier apps such as Musical.ly (which merged with TikTok in 2018), routinely utilize each other’s original art as the basis for glorious strings of duets, virtual choirs, and other vocal creations. +
++Less popular features and quirks can reliably unite an entire community in complaining. On Twitter, users have spent years lobbying for an image crop that works correctly. +
++Twitter began to crop photos around 2014, when it introduced different default aspect ratios for users to apply to their own photos during uploading. At one point in 2015, it announced it would completely do away with image cropping; it later reneged on that decision, and by 2018 it was using AI image detection to automatically crop the images people added to their tweets, much to their chagrin. +
++Until this recent change, the auto-crop feature typically forced all images, regardless of size and original framing, into a landscape orientation, often trimming photos in unpredictable and sometimes nonsensical ways. The desire to circumvent the Twitter crop grew so strong that elaborate tutorials emerged explaining exactly how to crop and display images so they’d show in their entirety without being placed on the algorithmic chopping block. +
++Another way Twitter users evolved and adapted to the crop is the “open for a surprise!” meme, where they strategically post photos (knowing Twitter will crop out the best parts) and invite others to click on the full version for a “surprise.” For example: +
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Twitter
++With the Twitter crop thoroughly established as a source of both endless hilarity and petty annoyance, the change in aspect ratios quickly became cause for celebration. While some users understandably mourned the hit to the “open for a surprise!” meme, conversation about the new image crop spread across the platform, with trends like “RIP Twitter crop” and #VerticalArtParty gaining traction. +
+++RIP Twitter crop!
+— Rishi (@rishi_kara) May 5, 2021 +
Here is a favorite that I took recently in NYC pic.twitter.com/uJUu3S2gaT +
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