The Justice Department announced this week that it will soon start investigating violent threats against school teachers and school board members around the country — a concerning trend that escalated in recent months as students returned to the classroom amid a lingering pandemic and GOP-instigated culture wars violently boiled over during school board meetings across the U.S.

You’ve probably seen the latest controversy about Facebook/Instagram leading vulnerable teenagers to anorexia, fat-shaming content that seems almost designed to send teenage girls and some boys into spirals of self-loathing and unsafe behaviors. What jumps out to me about this latest controversy is that most people still don’t grasp that things like this are close to inevitable because of what Facebook is. It’s foundational to the product. It is not surprising.

Let me explain. First, set aside all morality. Let’s say we have a 16 year old girl who’s been doing searches about average weights, whether boys care if a girl is overweight and maybe some diets. She’s also spent some time on a site called AmIFat.com. Now I set you this task. You’re on the other side of the Facebook screen and I want you to get her to click on as many things as possible and spend as much time clicking or reading as possible. Are you going to show her movie reviews? Funny cat videos? Homework tips? Of course, not. If you’re really trying to grab her attention you’re going to show her content about really thin girls, how their thinness has gotten them the attention of boys who turn out to really love them, and more diets. If you’re clever you probably wouldn’t start with content that’s going to make this 16 year old feel super bad about herself because that might just get her to log off. You’ll inspire or provoke enough negative feelings to get clicks and engagement without going too far.

I’m starting to think this latest bout of debt limit hostage taking will end with a filibuster carve out. On its face that seems highly improbable given the resistance through the year from Manchin and Sinema. And I think Manchin has said no way to this specifically. So it seems really improbable. But we’re down to very improbable outcomes and this is starting to seem like the least improbable one.

Let’s walk through the scenarios.

Facebook, Instagram and other applications owned by the social media giant are all down today. The company is describing the outage as “networking issues,” while tech sleuths and new reports suggest the problem might be bigger than that.

I won’t speculate on technology as I know nothing about technology. But the outage comes just one day after a previously anonymous former Facebook executive and whistleblower went on “60 Minutes” to make new allegations concerning the company’s apathy about the dangerous spread of far-right disinformation on the platform.