I love this sentence in a new explainer for how hard it has been for social platforms to kick the Taliban out.

We’ve seen revolutions in the age of social media; we’ve seen coups. But we haven’t seen a case where an internal insurgency successfully co-opts a state and seeks to take over that state’s functions.

It begs the question of whether the 2016 Presidential election was a coup or an insurgency that co-opted the state.

My argument has been that 2016 qualifies as a coup (which fizzled and fumbled for years until flaming out in 2021), yet here I’m seeing evidence that I may have to update that assessment.