The Brief

This article was copublished with The Markup, a nonprofit, investigative newsroom that challenges technology to serve the public good. Sign up for its newsletters here.

On a recent Monday, Eric Natividad woke up around 8 a.m., showered, ate breakfast, and braced himself for a day of being tracked.

This article was co-published with The Markup

Natividad, 32, is a student at Mt. San Antonio College, which is one of California’s largest community colleges, serving more than 26,000 students east of Los Angeles, about half of whom attend part-time. Like virtually all college students in 2023, his life is constantly being converted into a steady stream of data. This information undergirds algorithms and informs decisions by his professors, college administrators, campus police officers, and a far-reaching universe of technology companies—including some he has never heard of.

By the time Natividad went to bed that night, Google and Facebook had data about which Mt. SAC webpages he’d visited, and a company called Instructure had gathered information for his professors about how much time he’d spent looking at readings for his classes and whether he had read messages about his courses. Campus police and a company called T2 Systems potentially had information about what kind of car he was driving and where he parked. And as he drifted off to sleep, Natividad had to contend with the worry that, later this semester, his professors could subject him to the facial detection software incorporated into the remote proctoring tools used at Mt. SAC.

“There isn’t a part of the day where it leaves your mind,” Natividad said about the pervasive tracking.

To understand how Mt. SAC collects data on its students, The Markup used public records requests to obtain contracts between the college and companies that provide its learning management system, online proctoring services, and automated parking enforcement technology, three of the most invasive data collection mechanisms on campus. The Markup also obtained five college policies that govern these technologies, as well as information security and computer use at Mt. SAC.

Few institutions collect as much data about the people inside of them as colleges and universities do. Residential campuses, in particular, mean students not only interact with their schools for academics, but for housing, home internet, dining, health care, fitness, and socialization. Still, whether living on campus or off, taking classes in person or remotely, students simply cannot opt out of most data collection and still pursue a degree.

A day of data collection for a college student

As college students go through their days, their movements and behaviors can be tracked on and off campus.

Learning management systems track students as they read and complete assignments online.

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Gabriel Hongsdusit

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Automated license plate readers archive video of students’ movements on campus.

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Gabriel Hongsdusit

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Campus buildings, like the library, track students as they swipe their student IDs to enter.

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Gabriel Hongsdusit

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Campus Wi-Fi allows universities to monitor students’ internet activity.

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Gabriel Hongsdusit

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Remote proctoring software records students in their homes while they take exams remotely.

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Gabriel Hongsdusit

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Campus security cameras at some colleges also use AI to look for “red flags,” like weapons or specific people.

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Gabriel Hongsdusit

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For many students, that’s not a problem. They generally trust their institutions and see the online elements of higher education as convenient. Putting up with data collection seems like a necessary cost.

But even though Natividad’s preoccupation with data privacy makes him a bit of an anomaly among his classmates, he’s part of a growing group of college students arguing it shouldn’t be this way. Long written off as not caring about privacy because of their extensive sharing on social media, college students have become more organized and insistent about what they see as a right. At the University of Michigan, a student’s quest for greater transparency led to ViziBLUE, a website launched in 2020 that lets students see what personal information is collected and how it is used. When the COVID pandemic forced a huge portion of higher education to move online, students across the country protested the use of online exam-proctoring software that gathered information about their faces and homes. On many campuses, protesters have pressured university administrators to commit to banning the use of facial recognition technology before ever trying it.

And as more colleges disclose data breaches, many students are becoming uneasy about how much personal information their schools gather. They are forming new on-campus student groups to advocate for privacy and tapping into global networks designed to facilitate a more collective fight. Some colleges are taking note of the unrest as well as the liability inherent in holding so much data. The University of California, San Diego, for example, is among the universities that have created stand-alone positions for chief privacy officers in recent years.

Juan Cruz is the director of policy at Encode Justice Florida, a state chapter of a global youth-led advocacy organization fighting for human-centered artificial intelligence. A student at Florida International University, Cruz sees collegegoers as among the most vulnerable to data privacy violations.

“You don’t really get any options,” he said. “You’re just kind of expected, if you want to pass this class or pass this test, you have to willingly give up a lot of your information and then hope that nothing happens.”

They watch you learn

When Natividad was in high school he didn’t pay much attention to the data he was generating for ed tech companies, or to news reports detailing data breaches. Coming of age during the Occupy Wall Street protests and spending several years in China, however, opened his eyes.

While living in Shanghai, Natividad saw security cameras everywhere and the introduction of facial recognition cameras on the subways, but he said it wasn’t until he saw articles about the same technology in the United States that he started doing more research about it. He started to believe surveillance technology runs counter to a free democracy and began monitoring purchases made by the Los Angeles Police Department. He also started paying closer attention to all the companies that get access to his data and became convinced this was something he should learn more about and protect himself against.

“You just don’t know how you’re going to be targeted sometimes,” Natividad said, “by state or police or bad actors or somebody trying to steal money. … This is something that I need to care about, too.”

When he registered at Mt. SAC in 2022, interested in pursuing a degree in computer science, he asked questions about the technology he’d have to use and whether he could opt out of data collection. He was told opting out wasn’t an option but figured he’d enroll and see how it went.

He found more cause for concern than he had expected.

On that recent Monday morning, after his shower and breakfast, Natividad turned on his computer. He needed to log into Canvas, his college’s learning management system for online coursework, reading, class discussion, quizzes and faculty gradebooks, which is used by more than a third of higher education institutions in North America. Natividad’s goal was to be in Canvas for as little time as possible, avoiding one of the primary dragnets of data collection for college students.

Students access learning materials using Canvas on the school website or phone apps at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, CA on Thursday, Nov. 23, 2023.

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Susanica Tam

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Soon, he had downloaded everything he was supposed to read for the week, copied assignment instructions for each of his classes into plain text documents, sometimes with screenshots, and logged back out. Over the course of the week, he read the documents offline and drafted his assignments in a text editor. He only logged back into Canvas to check for any updates from his professors and, ultimately, to copy and paste his work when it was ready to submit.

Canvas tracks what pages students view, their time spent on each page, and when they submit discussion comments or assignments. It houses students’ grades, tracks when they complete quizzes and how long they take to finish them, and it gives professors visualizations of student progress and participation in the course.

Some professors use this information to refine their teaching and serve students better, and at many institutions this data informs course planning, program design, and academic advising. But it’s not only educators who have access to it.

Mt. SAC’s contract for Canvas, which The Markup obtained through a public records request, says that the parent company, Instructure, owns the usage data. The contract lists examples of how the company can use that data, including statistical analyses, trend analyses, and the creation of “data models.” The contract says usage data can only be used if it is aggregated or anonymized and should never be used for profit or sale—but in 2019, Instructure’s former CEO Dan Goldsmith pointed investors to the company’s corpus of education data as key to its multibillion-dollar value, saying it could be used to train algorithms and predictive models.

Since that comment, Instructure has stopped working on predictive models, according to Daisy Bennett, who said she was hired as the company’s privacy officer in part to repair the damage from Goldsmith’s claims.

“We are not monetizing our schools’ data,” Bennett said. “Absolutely not.”

Natividad, however, still doesn’t think the company should be able to have or keep any data he generates while using its platform. And Canvas isn’t his only problem.

This semester, one of Natividad’s professors assigned a digital textbook through Cengage, a publishing company turned ed tech behemoth. In the past, professors have allowed Natividad to stick with paper textbooks, but he now must submit to the additional data tracking of e-books for a required course. Professors sometimes mandate digital textbooks because they want students to complete interactive assignments contained in them.

According to Cengage’s online privacy policy, the company collects information about a student’s internet network and the device they use to access online textbooks as well as webpages viewed, links clicked, keystrokes typed, and movement of their mouse on the screen, among other things. The company then shares some of that data with third parties for targeted advertising. For students who sign into Cengage websites with their social media accounts, the company collects additional information about them and their entire social networks.

Noah Apthorpe, an assistant professor of computer science at Colgate University, studies privacy and the implications of data collection in academia. He said students seem to be suffering the consequences of widespread data collection across the web.

“Once we become accustomed to an ecosystem where everything is collected, it both becomes harder to change and we become numb to it happening in the first place,” Apthorpe said. Learning management systems like Canvas collect more data about student behavior than educators have ever had access to, creating detailed profiles of individual students and new ways to label them. While Canvas is one of the most popular systems on the market, virtually all colleges use one and a variety of options have emerged to serve them, including Moodle, Blackboard, and Brightspace.

Apthorpe said that because learning management systems track, down to the minute, when students submit assignments, professors may come to think of students as deadline pushers, for example, or those who get their work done early.

“You can imagine that having repercussions for students,” Apthorpe said.

Students know their professors can see this data. Some who work or take care of children on top of going to school worry they will be seen as lazy or uncommitted for spending less time on their assignments than their peers.

Natividad said one of his professors told him he can see in Canvas whether students seem to log on together and complete work from the same location. Natividad became worried it would look like he was cheating if he simply studied and completed assignments with his peers. Now he and his friends go out of their way to avoid the appearance of impropriety, not wanting to be falsely accused. For them, that means staggering their log-ons to Canvas and accessing the internet through virtual private networks that obscure their location.

While Instructure insists its platform should not be used to detect cheating, its logs have led to such allegations. Seventeen medical students at Dartmouth made national news in 2021 when their professors accused them of accessing course materials in Canvas during an online exam. The logs, students argued, were wrong, and the university ultimately dropped the charges.

For Natividad, stress about what could happen has taken its toll. Last year, he watched his grades in a computer science course slip after he stopped completing assignments because he didn’t want to use Canvas.

“It’s just really stressful,” he said.

They watch you park

Most concerning to Natividad is the parking enforcement at Mt. SAC, which last winter installed automated license plate readers. Instead of asking students to hang parking passes on their rearview mirrors, the college now relies on cameras mounted on three parking enforcement vehicles and 11 fixed cameras installed in the campus’s two garages. The cameras read license plates and alert officers if they spot a plate that doesn’t have a valid permit associated with it.

Mt. SAC’s policy for its automated license plate reader says none of the information in the system can be sold and that it can only be shared or transferred after a request is made in writing and college officials approve it in writing.

Three campus police vehicles are outfitted with automated license plate readers to scan parked vehicles at Mt. San Antonio College.

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Courtesy of Eric Natividad

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But the college’s contract with T2 Systems, also obtained through a public records request, says the parking management company can store, back up, and archive content and use it to generate anonymized data, though the nature of that data is not made clear.

Automated license plate readers have been the subject of controversy around the country. Fight for the Future, an activist organization that plans online protests to secure a future “where technology is a force for liberation, not oppression,” calls them “illegal dragnet surveillance” that violates individuals’ right to privacy.

In Florida, where it is against the law to transport undocumented immigrants, students mention that their peers with undocumented family members are at risk if they have relatives in the car with them on campus. The automated license plate reader cameras can capture not only the license plate itself but the entire car and who is in it.

Natividad requested information about T2 and couldn’t find out much. For months, he said, he was passed from one campus employee to another but got few concrete details about where the parking footage and data would be stored and who would have access to it.

Mt. SAC’s police and campus safety department declined interview requests for this article. The college’s contract indicates license plate information and video footage are only stored if a campus police officer issues a ticket.

Natividad said some college employees suggested he take classes online if he didn’t like the new parking cameras. Since that would mean losing out on valuable in-person experiences and spending even more time on Canvas, he has found another, more expensive solution: quarters.

The college has retained a number of metered parking spaces. They cost more than a parking pass and require a tedious amount of coordination to always have enough change on hand and run back and forth to add more time, but they don’t require Natividad to turn over personal information to yet another tech company to get a parking pass. Still, even these steps do not ensure his privacy while parking: His car remains in view of cameras mounted on Mt. SAC public safety vehicles. Should a camera read error ever mean Natividad’s car is mistaken for a stolen vehicle, as happened to a San Francisco woman in 2009, that routine scanning could make him a target.

Students at Mt. SAC have rallied in recent weeks in support of Palestine and Natividad worries that records of who, exactly, was on campus during the hours the protest lasted might create problems for his peers. Students on other campuses have had job offers rescinded and their names and faces published online in connection to their support for Palestine.

At Mt. SAC, there haven’t been such dramatic consequences for students, and few have joined Natividad’s fight for greater privacy on campus. In fact, as he has been asking questions and quietly advocating over the last year and a half, the two most common reactions he gets are surprise and apathy. Most people don’t think there are alternatives to the current state of data tracking and surveillance, or they don’t care to explore them. Natividad routinely hears that he shouldn’t worry. But he does. And not just for himself—for the entire student body.

“It just feels like our rights are being violated all the time,” he said.

They watch where you go

On a recent Thursday, Natividad parked at the meter and met a friend in Mt. SAC’s student center. It’s one of the buildings on campus he doesn’t need to swipe his student ID to enter — and while it’s not as good a location for studying as other parts of campus, he likes that he can avoid creating a new data point in the college’s logs. When he goes to any tutoring centers on campus, including just to study, he can’t avoid it.

Logging student movement through card swipes is ubiquitous in higher education today. At Mt. SAC, Natividad was told the tutoring center uses this information to track how many students it supports so the college can apply for state grant money. College administrators did not respond to requests for comment about what else these logs are used for or how long they are stored.

Eric Natividad scans his ID to access a lab at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, CA on Thursday Nov. 23, 2023.

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Susanica Tam

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Eric Natividad scans his ID to access a lab at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, CA on Thursday, Nov. 23, 2023.

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Susanica Tam

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At the University of Maryland, administrators considered using this data in the early days of COVID to know when wellness checks were in order. Joseph Gridley, the university’s chief data privacy officer, recounted the scenario during an October conference for IT professionals working in higher education. He said it seemed mildly creepy to send people to student dorm rooms to check on them after noting they hadn’t been to the dining halls in a certain number of days. But after surveying students, it became clear they didn’t mind and, in fact, only thought the university should wait five days before dispatching someone.

The data collection, Gridley said, is happening. The question is whether universities should use it.

It’s also not clear if they can keep sensitive information secure. The University of Michigan revealed at the end of October that a hack compromised personal information, including Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses, of 230,000 people. When a well-resourced institution known for its commitment to privacy is home to such a leak, Natividad wonders how long his data will be safe at his relatively under-resourced community college.

Natividad has spoken before Mt. SAC’s student government and tried to raise awareness about all the data that’s being collected. Mariah Moreno, a student senate chair at Mt. SAC, said while Natividad’s concerns have piqued the interest of some members of the campus community, more students would have to share them for the student government to consider taking action.

That might only be a matter of time. Natividad also spoke with Max McCarthy Neal, a leader in the college’s Black Student Union, who told him to connect with other activism-oriented campus groups.

“It’s something that is affecting all of us and will continue to do so,” said McCarthy Neal.

Natividad has spent more than a year discussing his concerns with student leaders and college employees at all levels of the institution. He has braved sweaty palms and anxiety to speak at the college’s board of trustees meeting and the president’s open office hours. He has requested his data from tech companies, exercising his rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act.

All of it has been a distraction from his studies. He is taking fewer classes to give himself time for this awareness-building. But he would prefer not to do any of it.

“I like just being a geeky computer guy,” Natividad said. “I want to be the stereotypical guy on his computer in his room that nobody really talks about that much.”

The problem, he said, is that many of his peers have no idea about the extent to which their data is being collected and shared. And many of them have weighty commitments outside of their coursework as parents and providers in their families. Natividad feels responsible for stepping up, agitating both because he can and knows he should.

McCarthy Neal decided to help after coming to the same conclusion.

“Due to the fact that we are a community college, most people are heads-down, in the books, do the work and move on to the next step,” McCarthy Neal said, whether that’s a transfer to a four-year school or a better job. “[They] don’t really care what’s going on here now.”

McCarthy Neal hopes speaking out with Natividad and winning more students over to the cause will lead to greater power to opt out of data collection at Mt. SAC and more attention to student privacy generally.

Back in Mt. SAC’s student center, Natividad sits down with his friends to study; he accesses the school website and Canvas using a virtual private network. In addition to obscuring his location, the VPN encrypts his data, giving him a sense of protection from tracking.

That tracking, he knows, can be extensive. A Markup analysis of Natividad’s network logs showed multiple analytics platforms tracking pageviews and clicks in Canvas and on the college website, including on a health center webpage about coping with anxiety and a counseling request form for DACA students (who are protected from deportation because they immigrated to this country with their parents as young children). The platforms send analytics to Instructure, Google, and Facebook.

Natividad points to a wave of privacy class-action lawsuits against companies sharing personally identifiable information with Facebook through a snippet of code known as a pixel.

“These companies are being sued for privacy violations, but we’re still using [the pixel] all over,” he said.

They watch your face

At some point this semester, Natividad may have to give up another type of personal information. Two of his courses are completely online, and the university has contracts with two companies that facilitate secure remote testing. If his professors require students to use these so-called e-proctoring tools, Natividad might have to give either Honorlock or Proctorio access to his laptop camera. While both companies say they do not use or store biometric data or match test-takers’ faces with an image database, they do run software to detect students’ eye movements and the presence of their faces. In its contract with Honorlock, which The Markup obtained through a public records request, Mt. SAC agreed to let the company use, publish, and sell aggregate data collected over the platform, facilitating the company’s ability to profit from students’ data.

E-proctoring tools faced a stiff backlash when schools closed during COVID and sent test-taking online. Fight for the Future called the tech “glorified spyware” in an online campaign seeking to ban its use by colleges. Students with disabilities faced more frequent flags for potential cheating because of hand, eye, and body movements the software algorithms said were abnormal. Dark-skinned students reported not being able to take exams because the software wouldn’t register their faces as being present.

The programs’ failings fueled outrage and stress among students needing to take exams to progress toward their degrees or chosen careers.

At Mt. SAC, McCarthy Neal dropped an online course last spring rather than use Proctorio. The professor told students they had to run the monitoring program every time they completed an assignment in the online workbook, something that felt overly invasive.

Students on other campuses have fought back against the use of ExamSoft and ProctorU, two other tools that collect biometric data as part of their e-proctoring, using facial recognition software to match the face in front of the camera with records of the student who is supposed to be there.

While Mt. SAC officials said the college doesn’t use it, some universities have begun experimenting with facial recognition technology for attendance logs and campus security, and researchers are testing it as a method for measuring student engagement.

Leila Nashashibi, a Fight for the Future campaigner, said a major concern with facial recognition technology is that it dissuades social and protest movements.

“One of the most successful strategies for quelling dissent is to make people feel like they have no privacy,” she said.

When facial recognition systems capture data, they tend to store it in the cloud where, Nashashibi points out, it is vulnerable to being hacked, stolen, or abused. When people get their credit cards stolen, they can get new cards and new numbers; when their biometric information is stolen, they can’t change their faces. Nashashibi sees the use of facial recognition for things like attendance or campus security as a slippery slope.

“As it spreads in these seemingly convenient and innocuous use cases, it’s desensitizing people to the technology, which is actually invasive and dangerous,” she said.

A different way

Natividad has had a hard time convincing his fellow students at Mt. SAC that it’s worth their time to speak out against data collection in higher education, or even to demand more transparency. But on other campuses, privacy concerns have contributed to new tools and staff positions.

At the University of Michigan, the ViziBLUE website explains how the university collects, uses, and shares 18 different types of data, including that related to academics, admissions, housing, and use of campus Wi-Fi. Virtually no other university has anything like it. At UC San Diego, where Pegah Parsi became the inaugural chief privacy officer in 2018, a team is working on something similar but running into challenges of even identifying the scope of data collection.

Parsi’s department has started by focusing on data collected and used by offices of advancement, admissions, and financial aid — the “heavy hitters,” as she calls them — and then plans to work through smaller, more grassroots sources of data collection on campus.

“We haven’t had regulator scrutiny, to a great extent, on our privacy practices or our data practices, so our data really do live all over the place, and no one quite knows who has what,” Parsi said.

Eric Natividad talks to classmate Jared, 20, inside the student center at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, CA on Thursday, Nov. 23, 2023.

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Susanica Tam

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Mariah Moreno, the student government senate chair, hadn’t spent any time thinking about Canvas’s data collection and use policies before Natividad brought it up.

“With this day and age, it had kind of been normalized, so I hadn’t felt that concern related to myself as a student,” she said.

Having now acknowledged the privacy concerns, she still doesn’t think it makes sense to stop using Canvas or even to use it any differently. On her path to a political science degree and eventually law school, Moreno sees herself as having two options: do the assignments as the professors assign them—in Canvas—or not do the assignments. And she chooses the former.

But privacy advocates say there should be a third choice that gives students more control over their own data.

Kyle Jones, an associate professor at Indiana University — Indianapolis who studies information ethics and data mining in higher education, is among those arguing that higher education institutions should be considered data fiduciaries, charged with acting in the best interests of students when collecting and using their data. Fiduciary duties are most commonly connected to managing someone else’s money, and they bring legal responsibilities to make decisions solely for the other person’s benefit.

Parsi, too, encourages her colleagues to think of their role as data fiduciaries. Much more common, she said, is for higher education institutions to think of themselves as stewards of student data, which connotes a lower standard of responsibility to students. For Parsi, it’s past time for change.

“Our use of someone’s personal data, at the end of the day, should benefit them,” she said, “not just somebody else or some other thing.”

You may surmise that the majority of my knowledge about hockey comes from watching The Mighty Ducks, but apparently that’s all you need to know now that the real-life Anaheim Ducks are progressing through the Stanley Cup playoffs — catch a playoff watch party this week to get up to speed on all the action on the ice.

Licorice Pizza’s music picks include experimental ambient artist Ana Roxanne at Sid The Cat Auditorium and YouTube star-turned-rapper DDG at the Roxy, both on Monday. On Tuesday, Paramore’s Hayley Williams kicks off her solo run at the Wiltern, RAYE plays the first of two nights at the Greek Theatre and indie-pop heroes the New Pornographers play the Teragram. Wednesday, Mika relaxes and takes it easy at the Orpheum; Canadian singer-songwriter Katie Tupper is at the Echoplex; and electronica legends the Prodigy restart their fire with the first of two nights at the Novo.

Thursday, you can see Nottingham post-punks Sleaford Mods at the Fonda; Rozzi at LAX (the club, not the airport); UB40 at the Pacific Amphitheatre; or the triumphant Indigo Girls, who are soldiering on despite singer Emily Saliers’ health issues, at the Bellwether. Lorde will also play the first of her two-night stint at the Forum.

Elsewhere on LAist, you can read about LA’s history of counterculture nuns, get a taste of the birria soup dumpling (“the most LA thing we’ve ever eaten”) and get ready for primary day — June 2 — with our comprehensive Voter Game Plan.

Events

Rakim and Soul Rebels

Monday and Tuesday, May 11 and 12
Blue Note 
6372 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood
COST: FROM $71; MORE INFO

Rakim ahead of the 65th Grammy Awards.

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Tommaso Boddi

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Getty Images

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Jazz Fest in New Orleans is over, but really, who can get enough? Rap and hip-hop pioneer Rakim headlines, supported by the legendary New Orleans brass band the Soul Rebels, for two more unforgettable nights at the Blue Note.

Millennials Are Killing Musicals

Through Sunday, May 17 
Colony Theatre
555 N. Third Street, Burbank
COST: FROM $60; MORE INFO

Last year, I was lucky enough to go to a small read — er, sing — through of a new musical, Millennials Are Killing Musicals. It was clever, witty, tight and very au courant. And so how pleased was I to learn that just over a year later, this little-show-that-could is getting a full staging at the Colony Theatre in Burbank. Nico Juber’s musical follows the daily life of a millennial mom who’s trying to keep up in this emoji-laden world. It’s good fun for anyone who can’t get off their phone, which, let’s admit, is all of us.

AAPI Night Market

Wednesday, May 13, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Sender One LAX
11220 Hindry Ave., Inglewood
COST: FREE; MORE INFO

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FilipinUp

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Startr Co.

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Climbers and wannabe climbers, head to indoor rock climbing gym Sender One for a special AAPI month event with the Asian Climbing Collective and FilipinUp. Celebrate Asian culture and community through climbing, plus local vendors, music, mock competitions and a raffle.

Zahra Tangorra book release

Monday, May 11, 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. 
Garibaldina Society 
4533 N. Figueroa Street, Mt. Washington
COST: $10; MORE INFO

Chef and restaurant consultant Zahra Tangorra’s new culinary memoir, Extra Sauce: The Good, The Bad, and The Onions, received a recent rave from The New York Times. She’ll be on hand for a discussion and book signing with the Italian American cultural group, the Garibaldina Society, at their club, moderated by L.A. Times food writer Jenn Harris. Of course, there will be snacks, drinks and sauce.

New exhibits at CAAM

Ongoing 
California African American Museum 
600 State Drive, Exposition Park 
COST: FREE; MORE INFO

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Jose Lima/Willie Birch

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The California African American Museum is always a great place to spend an afternoon, but with eight current exhibits now open, you can go again and again this summer and never fail to learn something new (plus, it’s free!). The latest show to open there is Willie Birch: Stories to Tell, which looks at the New Orleans-born artist’s chronicling of Black life in America from the late 1960s through the present, with a focus on “retentions” — African traditions that show up across American culture. The Birch exhibit joins ongoing shows, including Free and Queer: Black Californian Roots of Gay Liberation, and A New Song: Langston Hughes in the West.

Meet the Artist: An Evening with ZiBeZi

Thursday, May 14, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Yi Cha
5715 N. Figueroa Street, Highland Park
Cost: FREE, MORE INFO

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Courtesy N|A Consulting

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Art and food collide at Highland Park modern Korean restaurant Yi Cha for an intimate open house celebrating ZiBeZi, the Korean American artist behind the restaurant's beloved mural (you might also recognize his work from 2020 Oscar winner Parasite). The free-to-enter event includes bites inspired by his work, cocktails and a chance to purchase a tote bag that the artist will sign and illustrate on the spot for a one-of-a-kind keepsake.

Hannah Dasher

Thursday, May 14, 9 p.m.
Desert 5 Spot 
6516 Selma Ave., Hollywood
COST: FREE; MORE INFO 

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Courtesy Shorefire

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I’ll admit I knew little about Hannah Dasher before I ended up in an endless scroll of her addictive TikTok feed that blends Southern cooking and country music. She brings her signature honky-tonk sound to a free live performance at Desert 5 Spot, timed with the release of her first cookbook titled — I am not making this up — Stand By Your Pan. Perfect, no notes. Practice your line dancing and find a Waffle House to head to afterward.

Californians can’t cast a ballot until they turn 18, but for the past decade 16- and 17-year-olds have been able to pre-register to vote and be automatically added to the rolls on their 18th birthday.

“Teens get to get a head start on the access to voting,” said Daphné Rottenberg, a 17-year-old Venice High School student who pre-registered last year. “I think that it's a very important thing for younger people to learn about their rights, their voting rights and ultimately their ability to decide what policies and politicians become their leaders.”

Nearly 1.5 million students have pre-registered since the program started in 2016 and more than 1.1 million became eligible voters, according to a spokesperson for the California Secretary of State.

However, LAist reviewed state data and found that participation in the program cratered during the COVID-19 pandemic and has yet to recover. A nonprofit that promotes youth voting found California’s pre-registration totals represent less than 12% of eligible 16- and 17-year-olds.

“California is not doing a good job implementing pre-registration,” said Laura Brill, who lives in Los Angeles and is the founder and CEO of The Civics Center. “It's a very nice law that lets you do it, but it has not been widely adopted by high schools.”

The unrealized promise of the program is to jumpstart the civic lives of young voters, who’ve been historically underrepresented at the polls.

“The process of signing up creates conversations, dialogue that can educate young people and hopefully encourage them [to vote],” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at USC. “If they vote at 18, they're much more likely to continue to vote through the life course. But you've got to get them when they're young.”

Do young people vote?

Rottenberg, who describes herself as “pretty involved in the political scene,” didn’t know about pre-registration until she connected with The Civics Project through a teacher to hold a voter registration drive at her school.

Young people vote, but at lower rates than older voters. In the 2024 presidential election, 43% of Californians 18-24 cast a ballot compared to 62% of overall turnout. Romero said this deficit has been consistent over time.

“Every youth vote is valuable and important, but the numbers should be higher,” Romero said. “It's really on our society and we shouldn't be blaming young people for that.”

For example, Romero said campaigns typically don’t prioritize youth outreach and engagement, which feeds into the narrative that candidates don’t represent young people’s interests.

“I think young people really struggle with particularly coming of age in this polarized environment,” Romero said. “They feel really disconnected from the political process. They care about the world and issues, but they don't see necessarily how voting is an actionable step on what they care about.”

Another factor is the decline of civics education at many schools.

“We somewhere along the line disconnected the notion of high schools and K through 12 schools as like, bedrocks of teaching democracy and democratic practice,” said Joel Snyder, a social studies teacher at a charter school in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood. “I think a lot of that nationally is a real fear of folks looking or feeling like they're being partisan.”

Even Snyder, who's been a teacher for more than two decades, paused during our interview to consider whether to share that as part of his class, students register to vote.

When did pre-registration start?

California is one of 19 states that allow teenagers to pre-register to vote at 16 or younger. The majority of states allow people to register if they will be 18 at the time of the election.

California 16-year-olds became eligible for pre-registration in fall 2016.

Then-Santa Barbara Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson cited the state’s low voter registration rates to promote the legislation that lowered the pre-registration age.

“Studies have shown that the earlier people are introduced to voting, the more

likely they are to become life-long participants in democracy,” Jackson wrote.

Research shows that pre-registration is associated with higher youth voter turnout.

Here’s how pre-registration works in California:

Eligible 16- and 17-year-olds must be:

• A U.S. Citizen and California resident 
• Not currently serving a state and federal prison term for a felony conviction or found mentally incompetent to vote by a court

Then, eligible teens can register

• Online— this option requires a California-issued driver’s license or identification card number. 
• By mailing or turning in a paper registration form to your county elections office— this option does not require a California-issued driver’s license or identification card number  

In April 2018, then-Secretary of State Alex Padilla said the pre-registration of 100,000 teenagers was a “big milestone.”

The number of pre-registered teens peaked in January 2020 at 163,000 — then fell to a record low, about 113,000, in February 2021.

About 119,000 California 16- and 17-year-olds are pre-registered to vote as of April 3, per the most recent report from the California Secretary of State.

Romero hasn’t analyzed the program’s outcomes, but offered a “likely” set of factors contributing to the stagnating participation.

One is a lack of funding for outreach and education around pre-registration.

“You can't just offer it and then expect a high sign-up rate,” Romero said. “There needs to be conversations around why it's important, what the nuts and bolts of registration are, what the nuts and bolts are of voting so kids feel confident.”

Governor Gavin Newsom has twice vetoed legislation that would have required high schools to help register students to vote.

In the veto letter for AB 2724, a 2024 bill that would have required schools to provide students information about pre-registration before the end of their junior year, Newsom wrote he was concerned about creating another school mandate.

“Schools already have the ability to fulfill the requirements of this bill without creating a new mandate,” Newsom said.

The last two weeks of April and September each year are designated as “high school voter education weeks,” in California, but the responsibility is on individual districts, schools and teachers to follow through.

“Civics in schools is under-taught, right, and under-resourced, and teachers are burdened, they have lots of different competing requirements,” Romero said. “So you have to be really committed to wanna talk to young people about this.”

Brill, with The Civics Center, said there are other changes that could help make it easier for teens to pre-register, including removing the requirement to have a driver’s license to sign up online. About a third of teenagers nationwide have their driver’s license.

Her organization holds trainings and created a toolkit for students and educators to host voter registration drives at their schools. Brill said more than 100 are planned for this spring, including at Venice High School.

“It really bothers me when people think that they're not being heard and so they completely disengage,” said Sage Smith, who is organizing the drive with several other students, including Rottenberg. “Instead of tuning everything out, I, we are able to bring people in so that they actually get involved.”

Smith said more than 300 of her peers pre-registered to vote during last year’s drive, which targeted seniors.

“There's an idea that, you know, younger people are uninvolved, but when they're presented with the information, everyone cared, everyone was quick to sign up,” Smith said.

The 1994 World Cup kicked off with a sold-out match. On a scorching afternoon in Chicago, some 63,000 spectators — including then-President Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey — were packed like sardines at Soldier Field to watch Germany vs. Bolivia. Their cheers and boos, as loud as thunder.

Today, it's easy to imagine a World Cup game drawing such American fanfare. But back then, it was a much different story.

"It was a big question as to how the U.S. would embrace it. Would people come to the games?" Mike Sorber, who played for the U.S. Men's National Team in 1994, told NPR.

Ahead of the 1994 World Cup, most Americans were unaware that the U.S. would be hosting the tournament. A survey from the time ranked soccer 67th among the nation's favorite sports (behind tractor pulling).

Despite this, the 1994 World Cup — the first held in the U.S. — took a surprising turn. Game after game, stadiums were filled to capacity, packed not only with tourists and die-hard fans but also with soccer novices who came out of curiosity and because tickets were relatively affordable, according to soccer historians.

Mike Sorber plays during an exhibition game at the Rose Bowl in 1994.

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" I think all the naysayers were surprised," said Sorber, who is currently an assistant coach for Major League Soccer's New York Red Bulls. "The atmosphere was electric. It was like a big party."

Soccer's momentum in the U.S. has only been growing since then, fueled by the launch of Major League Soccer and the success of the U.S. Women's National Team. When the World Cup returns to the U.S. in June, it will be greeted by a larger and more passionate fanbase than ever before.

How exactly did a sport that struggled to gain traction for decades go on to break the World Cup's record for largest attendance and win over Americans' hearts? To answer that, NPR spoke to Sorber, along with soccer journalists and fans, about the breakthrough World Cup.

Why did it take so long for the U.S. to embrace soccer?

How far back the soccer tradition in the U.S. goes depends on whom you ask and where they're from.

Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis and pockets of New York, New Jersey and New England all have deep soccer roots — often brought by European immigrants in the 19th century, according to Brian D. Bunk, who teaches the history of sports at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

As a result, the sport was largely associated with working-class and immigrant communities, Bunk added. Some also dismissed soccer over the perception that it lacked the physicality of sports like American football.

Colombian soccer fans wave their country's flag during the "Chicago Welcomes the World Cup" parade on June 15, 1994.

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"The argument that was often made against soccer is that it was an inferior form of football," Bunk said.

There were brief bursts of excitement for the sport in the late 20th century — such as when legendary Brazilian player Pelé came to play in the U.S. in the late 1970s — but they never lasted long.

By the 1980s, the future of soccer in the U.S. looked bleak. The North American Soccer League, which began in 1968, folded after the 1984 season. American soccer officials hoped a World Cup tournament at home could resuscitate interest.

" Let's face it: You need to have the product in front of you to see what the heck this is all about," said Michael Lewis, who has covered soccer for five decades. He's the editor of Front Row Soccer, a website that follows the soccer scene in New York and New Jersey.

FIFA also saw an opportunity. Soccer's global governing body viewed the U.S. "as the last and largest uncracked market for its sport," Pete Davies, who has written extensively about sports, told NPR's Fresh Air in 1994.

"And it want[ed] to get into that market," he added.

What led to the tournament's success in 1994? 

What the U.S. lacked in soccer prowess, it made up for with its ability to put on a massive sporting event (thanks to the nation's football stadiums and experience hosting the Olympics) — and a fun one at that.

" We have the sporting infrastructure — the stadiums — we have the hotels, the restaurants, the transportation systems," said Bunk, of the University of Massachusetts. "And so all of that stuff meant that the World Cup could go very smoothly."

Americans also proved they were up for a good time — and World Cup fans knew how to bring the party. Drums, whistles, trumpets, singing, dancing and face paint were the hallmarks of a World Cup game.

A Mexican fan, his face painted with Mexico's national colors, cheers in the stands at the Citrus Bowl stadium in Orlando, Fla., on June 24, 1994, prior to the start of the World Cup match between Mexico and Ireland.

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A soccer fan supporting Argentina plays a drum at the World Cup match between Argentina and Nigeria at Foxboro Stadium in Massachusetts in June 1994.

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That's what Kevin Tallec Marston, a research fellow at the International Centre for Sports Studies in Switzerland, remembers most vividly from the Belgium vs. Saudi Arabia match in Washington, D.C., which he attended as a teenager.

"It was not the kind of fandom that Americans would associate with going to an NBA game, going to an NFL game," he said. "Seeing these people from all around the world with their own cultures, their own chants, their own songs, their own instruments."

Univision played a major role in attracting both Spanish- and non-Spanish-speaking viewers alike, especially through World Cup announcer Andrés Cantor and his iconic "Goooooooooool!"

"It created this sort of mythical element of what it was to watch the World Cup," said Tallec Marston, who, along with Front Row Soccer's Lewis, is a board member of the Society for American Soccer History.

But perhaps what electrified Americans most was the strong performance of the U.S. Men's National Team. It started with a hard-fought 1-1 tie with Switzerland, followed by a stunning 2-1 upset over powerhouse Colombia. (The victory was later marred by tragedy: Colombian defender Andrés Escobar, who had accidentally knocked the ball into his own team's net, was shot and killed shortly after returning home.)

That match was the first World Cup win for the U.S. men's team since 1950. The team's victory was witnessed by more than 93,000 fans at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

Sorber, a midfielder in the starting lineup, said he had played for large crowds before, but never for an audience so enthralled by the U.S. team. It was "euphoria," he said.

" All of a sudden, it really opened the eyes to the whole United States … that wow, this is what the future of soccer could be."

Steve Davis covered the 1994 games as a young sports reporter for The Dallas Morning News. "It sort of lit a fire under people," he said. "I would think some Americans became soccer fans that day."

The U.S. team went on to lose to Romania 1-0 and then to Brazil 1-0. Although the U.S. didn't win, Sorber said, the support and energy from American fans during those matches felt like a victory.

" You had a huge turnout," he said. "So again, that was a big moment in U.S. soccer history … to reestablish soccer, to build that foundation and get more awareness for the U.S. national team."

Post-1994

In total, over 3.5 million people attended the 1994 World Cup — the largest attendance in FIFA history to this day. Despite its success, soccer's American fanbase didn't grow overnight.

"Soccer's growth isn't linear," writer Davis said.

Two years later, the professional Major League Soccer (MLS) launched. Around that time, FIFA's World Cup video game franchise helped introduce soccer to an even broader audience. All the while, the U.S. Women's National Team emerged as a dominating force and accelerated the rise of women's soccer globally. Across the U.S., youth soccer exploded in popularity.

Brandi Chastain celebrates after kicking the winning penalty kick at the 1999 women's World Cup final against China on July 10, 1999.

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Roberto Schmidt

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The arrival of international superstars to MLS, like David Beckham in 2007 and Lionel Messi in 2023, added fire to the nation's passion for the sport. MLS, which began with 10 teams, has since expanded to 30 clubs.

Together, these moments helped transform the soccer landscape in the United States. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar drew an average of 4.7 million American viewers per game, according to Nielsen. Each year, millions of Americans watch England's Premier League matches on TV and streaming platforms.

When it comes to America's favorite sports, soccer now ranks third, surpassing baseball, according to Ampere Analysis, a data firm focused on entertainment industries.

Davis, who is now the director of legacy programs for the North Texas FIFA World Cup Organizing Committee, said it's validating to see the sport he has loved and played since childhood resonate with more people at home.

"I did have some faith that it was going to grow," he said. "But I would be lying if I said I thought we'd be here in 2026, seeing how big it's become."

The challenges ahead 

Although this isn't the first time that the U.S. has hosted the World Cup, the upcoming tournament is expected to be vastly different.

"One of the key aspects of the '94 World Cup was taking football to the new horizon," said Tallec Marston, who co-wrote Inventing the Boston Game. "So it'll be interesting because we are no longer in a new frontier."

Hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico, this year's competition will introduce more teams and matches than ever before. It will also return to a far more diverse United States. In 1994, about 8% of the country's population was foreign-born. As of 2025, immigrants make up 15% of the nation.

Two men walk past a mural of a soccer player in Guadalajara, Mexico, on April 29. Mexico will co-host the biggest World Cup in history, along with the United States and Canada, from June 11 to July 19.

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"You're going to have a representation of countries and nations that we will have never seen before. And so that will be very exciting to see," Tallec Marston said.

The current U.S. Men's National Team has far more experience on the World Cup stage compared with the 1994 team. Since then, the team has qualified for every World Cup except one, in 2018. There's much excitement for this group of young players, many of whom are playing for top European clubs.

The controversies leading up to the games are also quite different. In 1994, the uncertainty was whether many Americans would attend the matches. This year, the question is whether they will be able to afford to — with dynamic pricing driving ticket costs sky-high.

The tournament will also take place during a politically volatile period in the United States. The ongoing war with Iran has led to questions about whether the Iranian team will participate.

The Trump administration's travel restrictions and harsh immigration crackdown have also sparked debate as to how many tourists will feel comfortable traveling to the United States. The administration is also requiring a bond of up to $15,000 for travelers from 50 countries that it deemed as having immigration risk factors, such as high overstay rates and screening and vetting deficiencies. Five nations that qualified for the World Cup — Algeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Tunisia and Cape Verde — are on the list.

For all these reasons, Lewis, who wrote Around the World Cup in 40 Years, about his experience covering eight men's World Cups, expects that "there'll be magic, but there'll be headaches too."

" I think the games themselves should be exciting and fun," he said. However, putting the problems to rest, Lewis added, will be "easier said than done."
Copyright 2026 NPR

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On March 1, the day after U.S. forces bombed Iran and began a war that's now more than nine weeks long, President Donald Trump posted 30 times on Truth Social.

Just after midnight, he posted about the bombing campaign, including a threat to retaliate if Iran itself retaliated ("THEY BETTER NOT DO THAT").

But he soon had a lot more on his mind; mid-morning, he posted a video portraying Senator Mitch McConnell as the floppy, deceased Bernie from Weekend at Bernie's.

He posted a Tiktok video praising his State of the Union — a speech he had given five days prior — then reposted that video, along with a screenshot of a post on the social media site X. Just after noon, he posted an update on the war ("we have destroyed and sunk 9 Iranian Naval Ships, some of them relatively large and important"). Mid-afternoon, he posted a string of Trump-friendly news coverage, including a New York Post article from September 2024 about how Lady Gaga's father endorsed Trump in the presidential race. Shortly thereafter, in the span of five minutes, he posted 10 times, all of them lists of screenshots of praise from X users for his State of the Union address. He later posted a video update about the war in Iran, followed by a video marked as being from an Instagram user called @truthaboutfluoride, purporting to show San Francisco as a run-down city filled with poverty.

During his first presidential campaign, Trump's constant stream of seemingly unvetted tweets was a sideshow that quickly became inescapable — the boasts, insults, and lies at times hijacked news cycles. Once he was elected, they presented a new frontier in American politics: a real-time view into a president's mind.

Ten years, one Twitter ejection, one Twitter return, and a move to Truth Social later, Trump's posts still make news — like when he announces a war or tries to pick a fight with the pope — but for many have become the background noise of American politics.

The president of the United States is now communicating with the public sometimes dozens of times a day on a social media platform that he himself created, and most Americans (and perhaps even journalists) never see most of those posts. Of course, most of those posts are not individually newsworthy. But looking at them together provides a picture of exactly what, in the aggregate, the president of the United States is thinking about and saying to the world at all hours.

To try to grasp that, NPR analyzed the first four months of Trump's Truth Social posts this year. What emerged is a portrait of an extremely online president with scattered focus — who, even while he dealt with fallout from his policies such as war in Iran and immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, was also busy insulting his critics, posting pictures of his proposed ballroom, and continuing to insist on the lie that he won the 2020 election. The president also has unorthodox posting habits that illustrate that, even as arguably the most powerful person on earth, he remains focused on how he is seen.

What the president is posting about

To quantitatively analyze the president's posts, NPR compiled the president's first four months of posts, using a data scraper maintained by CNN. We then classified each post based on its topic (tariffs, the war in Iran, Greenland) and the type of post it was (sharing a news story, reposting someone else, making a threat).

Trump posted 2,249 times in the first four months of 2026, an average of just under 19 posts per day.

The most common topic Trump posted about – at about 14% of his posts – was 2026 elections. These posts — more than 300 of them — consist largely of either candidate endorsements or posts touting a Trump-backed candidate's win.

However, Trump at times did not give a simple endorsement, instead adding attacks on an endorsee's opponents. For example, in endorsing Republican candidates for the Indiana state Senate, the posts became paragraph-long screeds as Trump attacked sitting senators as "RINOs" (Republicans in name only) if they voted against a Trump-backed redistricting plan.

The next most common topics after elections were Iran (247 posts) and the economy (177). He also posted dozens of times about alleged fraud in Minnesota's safety net programs, the SAVE Act, and his belief that the justice system was weaponized against him.

To the degree that his posts measure what he's thinking about, the president's social media feed suggests he is as preoccupied — or even more so — with his personal projects and vendettas than he is with pressing policy matters.

President Trump posted about the 2020 election 71 times in the first four months of 2026, more than he posted even about tariffs (57 times — all of which we coded as a subset of posts about the economy). Those 2020 election posts all promoted the lie that via massive voter fraud or other malfeasance, Joe Biden stole that election.

Trump posted 68 times about his various Washington, D.C., building projects, including his White House ballroom and a proposed massive arch across the Potomac near Arlington National Cemetery. That's slightly more than he posted about Venezuela, more than he posted about the SAVE Act he's promoting, and more than he posted about protesters and federal agents in Minneapolis, including federal agents killing two U.S. citizens.

He posted more than six times as often (105) about his various legal grievances than he did about healthcare policy (17).

Also notable are the topics that get little attention. While tariffs and the war in Iran do affect, for example, the farm economy, Trump posted just four times specifically about American farming during the first four months of the year — less than half as many times as he posted (nine times) about his anger at comedian Bill Maher.

As for the top types of posts, the largest category – at just under one-quarter of his posts – are social media reshares. These take several formats — some are screenshots of posts from X, and others are videos reposted from other social media sites, such as TikTok.

This emphasizes the technological differences between now and Trump's first term.

Near the end of his first term, the videos Trump posted were largely from Fox News or other right-leaning news outlets, or they were videos produced by the White House.

Now, there's an endless array of TikTok and Instagram videos and memes the president can repost, many of them from amateurs or generated by AI. Some have been outright offensive, as when he posted a racist video that depicted former President Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. The White House initially defended the video, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt telling reporters, "Please stop the fake outrage." Trump later said he hadn't seen the full video, telling reporters, "I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine." He did not apologize, and the post was later deleted.

Other posts have promoted conspiracy theories, as with a video that baselessly proposed that Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was involved in the 2025 killing of Minnesota Democratic State Rep. Melissa Hortman.

Occasionally, those videos have nothing to do with current events, or even Trump, but are the kind of inane posts littering many people's Facebook feeds. Around 11 p.m. one night in February, Trump posted a TikTok video of a person's pet corgi reacting to a can of Reddi-wip. A minute later, he reposted that video along with a screenshot of a supporter's X post ("Good Night Patriot Friends!"). A minute after that, he posted a 15-second video of Bruce Lee fighting, which he similarly reposted alongside another X screenshot seconds later.

Reposting material from X

This posting-then-reposting pattern is one of the more notable oddities of the president's Truth Social posts. It appears to be a makeshift way of reposting things from X. The president regularly grabs, for example, a video someone else has posted on X, posts it without attribution on Truth Social, then immediately quote-posts his own post along with a screenshot of the original X post.

Some of these reposts are about current events, but they cover many other topics as well – they include a variety of amateur-made videos praising Trump, attacking his enemies, and (incorrectly) concurring with his false claim that he in fact won the 2020 election. In recent months, Trump has reposted a video compilation of moments with his grandkids, a video about his loyalty to Michael Jackson over the years, a montage of Trump moments set to a choral arrangement of "Like a Prayer," and an apparently AI-generated video of Trump playing hockey against Canadian hockey players – and punching the bejeezus out of one of them.

The pattern of snagging content from X highlights two important facts about Truth Social.

One is that X appears to dwarf it in size. The Center for Campaign Innovation, a right-leaning political strategy organization, provided NPR with polling from around the 2024 election, finding that only 6% of people used Truth Social for news on even a weekly basis. That's compared to 30% who used X.

Trump may therefore go to X to get material because there are just more users there, and especially more big names like politicians, news organizations, and MAGA influencers.

Secondly, Truth Social's smaller size means it serves a different purpose for Trump than Twitter ever did, before Trump was kicked off of the platform after the January 6 riot. (His account was eventually reinstated.)

"I think really the best way to understand it is this is where you get your marching orders if you're MAGA," said Eric James Wilson, a Republican strategist and executive director of the Center for Campaign Innovation. "And too, it is direct communication from him, in the way that maybe a statement, an administration policy or a press release would have to go through multiple layers of, if not revisions, certainly approvals."

Leavitt told NPR in a statement that Truth Social is "the most powerful and popular social media platform in the world because it serves as President Trump's authentic voice."

One restriction has kept Trump from simply posting on X when he wants a bigger audience – according to details about a licensing agreement in a 2023 SEC filing, he is "generally obligated to make any social media post on TruthSocial and may not make the same post on another social media site for 6 hours." This gives the site "limited time to benefit from" his postings.

NPR emailed Truth Social's press team to check if this agreement is still in effect, but the email bounced back.

It's not entirely clear how many of the posts on the president's Truth Social account come directly from him. Leavitt also told NPR that some posts are made by staffers.

"President Trump posts at all hours because he is constantly working, but sometimes these posts are also published by staff who are simply catching up on the many articles and reading materials President Trump approves the day prior," she said in another statement.

It's not just news articles that the White House says Trump isn't personally posting; after backlash to the racist video depicting the Obamas the White House also said a staffer "erroneously" posted the video.

Old news

One of the most telling indicators of what's on Trump's mind can be found in the news articles he posts — more than 1 in 5 of the president's social media posts in the first four months of this year were news articles, op-eds, and videos. Those news pieces almost uniformly praise the president or promote administration-friendly storylines, including persecuting his perceived enemies.

On March 29, in a span of six minutes, his account posted 10 news pieces about criminal referrals against New York Attorney General Letitia James, who prosecuted Trump in a civil business fraud case.

A substantial number of the news stories Trump's account posts are not current. At least 1 in 4 of the news stories posted were more than 10 days old at the time he posted them (the dates of some TV news clips could not be easily verified).

In some cases, such as the article about Lady Gaga's father, the news pieces were months old. At other times, he posted several older articles in rapid succession about the same event. On March 16, Trump posted three January articles in a row about the crowd at the College Football National Championship game cheering for him.

Leavitt told NPR in a statement: "The President is extraordinarily well read, and he likes to share stories or content that he finds interesting on his account."

The problem with bluster

In the first four months of the year, President Trump made 98 posts we classified as "announcements" — which we defined as the president purporting to give the public new information.

These covered a range of topics — there was the video announcing the U.S. had bombed Iran. There was the announcement of a new DHS secretary nominee — Markwayne Mullin. There were announcements about disaster aid to states affected by a massive winter storm. There were notifications of upcoming interviews or press conferences. Not all of these announcement posts turned out to be accurate, however, as with an April 17 post declaring the Strait of Hormuz to be "COMPLETELY OPEN AND READY FOR BUSINESS AND FULL PASSAGE."

He also made 29 posts we classified as "threats." These range from the specific ("If Canada makes a deal with China, it will immediately be hit with a 100% Tariff") to the vague ("I wonder what would happen if we 'finished off' what's left of the Iranian Terror State"). The president hasn't followed through on all of these threats with concrete action.

Altogether, that's 127 of Trump's most newsmaking posts — around one per day. Those posts have introduced an unprecedented unpredictability into presidential policymaking. His tariff policy posts, for example, have created widespread uncertainty in the business world.

This can make life in a Trump White House particularly difficult, especially in the realm of foreign policy. John Bolton, who served as National Security Advisor in Trump's first term, tells a story about Trump's chaotic posts.

"My deputy was there when [Trump] was shown — this is in 2019 — overhead pictures of a failed Iranian missile launch," Bolton says. "And he said to the intelligence briefer, can I keep this picture? And she said, 'Well, yes, but it's very sensitive, Mr. President.' He said, 'Okay.' And about 20 minutes after they left, he tweeted the picture out with some of the markings still on the picture."

As NPR later reported, the photo was revealed to be classified. Experts told NPR that tweeting the picture potentially helped America's adversaries, including Iran and Russia, because it revealed U.S. satellite capabilities.

Since his time in the first Trump administration, Bolton has been willing to sharply criticize the president. In October, the Trump Department of Justice obtained indictments against Bolton on 18 charges alleging that he unlawfully retained and transmitted classified documents. Bolton pleaded not guilty.

Bolton sees Trump tweeting the picture as part of a larger pattern: to attempt maximum bluster and in the process reveal more than he intends to. Trump's recent posts about the war in Iran are another example.

"The very ferocity of his tweets or the outrage you can hear just tell the Iranians 'If we just stay, if we just be patient a little while longer, he's just going to flip right out entirely, and he wants out. So we're going to drag it out and get every concession we can from him,'" Bolton said. "I don't understand why he can't see that."

Pundits have theorized that with his threatening posts about Iran, President Trump is practicing the "madman theory" of foreign relations. H.R. Haldeman, who served as chief of staff to President Nixon wrote that Nixon's strategy was to make the U.S.S.R. and the government in North Vietnam think that the fervently anticommunist president was willing to go to even extreme lengths, such as dropping a nuclear bomb, to end the Vietnam War.

"Nixon had credibility. He was strongly anti-communist," Bolton said, adding that communist adversaries might have thought, "Good God, that guy is crazy enough that he would drop a nuclear weapon."

"Just being generically crazy does not give you an advantage," Bolton added.

A president's id on display

To some degree, the president's posting can be seen as an extension of his communications strategy of simply communicating a lot. Trump regularly does lengthy press gaggles in the Oval Office, and he also has the unprecedented habit of fielding calls directly from reporters who have his phone number.

However, with posts, unlike interviews, the president is not having a conversation. Rather than being prompted by a reporter, the president in his posts seemingly reveals what is on his mind at any given time. On April 2, the day he announced that Pam Bondi would be leaving her post as attorney general, President Trump was also thinking about Bruce Springsteen. He insulted the singer in two posts shared at 7:58 a.m. and 9:21 p.m. that day.

Indeed, the president's insults and tirades have become so commonplace that they at times don't get much notice. Some of these posts go on at length. On April 9, he wrote a more than 2,700-character post that insulted a series of right-wing commentators but also veered into the topics of Iran, election results, media outlets he dislikes, and his approval rating.

This kind of naked fury from the president of the United States toward his perceived opponents ("NUT JOBS," "TROUBLEMAKERS," "low IQs," "nasty") might once have made headlines.

In 2026, it's a Thursday.

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NPR also analyzed the length of Trump's posts this year through the end of April. He wrote 93 posts of 1,500 characters or more in that time period, accounting for around 4% of all his posts. About half of those are endorsements, in which the president praises his chosen candidates and at times rails against the opponent ("DEFEAT Third Rate Congressman Thomas Massie, a Weak and Pathetic RINO"). Many of these endorsements appear to be variations on boilerplate language as Trump endorses a string of candidates in a short timeframe.

The rest of these long posts are anything but boilerplate – they are often attacks ("Pope Leo is WEAK ON CRIME") and occasionally announcements ("I am nominating Kevin Warsh to be the CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM").

Trump had more of those ultra-long posts in April than in any other month. And if you take out endorsements, it's even more stark. In April, Trump posted 22 extra-long posts about things other than endorsements — slamming Supreme Court justices, repeatedly promoting his ballroom, and railing against particular media outlets. That's twice as many such posts, or more, as he had in any other month.

To the degree, then, that the length of his posts correlates to Trump's anger, or perhaps enthusiasm, April was a particularly enthusiastic month for the president.

The president's Truth Social account primarily gets wide attention when the president either makes an announcement or writes something particularly coarse or offensive.

That was the case on Easter morning this year, at around 8:00 a.m., when President Trump threatened Iran.

"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F*****' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah," he wrote.

A threat of massive violence — and potentially war crimes — along with an obscenity and a tongue-in-cheek praise to Allah, all on one of Christianity's holiest days, together were stunning choices for a president whose core supporters are white evangelical Christians.

In a recent NPR focus group of Georgia swing voters — people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024 — no one reacted positively to that post. Participants were identified by their first names as a condition of their participation. One voter named Joe said that posts like that one inspire fear.

"It's not presidential. They're supposed to be doing diplomatic negotiations. You know, he's the agent of chaos when it comes to this kind of thing. It just – it scares me," he said. "He's a loose cannon, in my opinion, when it comes to this kind of stuff."

Brent Jones contributed to this report.

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