The show must go on...

Excuse me, I’m speaking

As many of you already know, last Thursday there was a highly coordinated attack on my personal and professional social media accounts, which resulted in a successful hack (yes, I had two-step authorization and yes, my passwords were complex).

Helplessly watching a group take away 11 months of my hard earned blood, sweat, and tears has been one of the most heartbreaking experiences of my life. That is/was a page I started from scratch, which I grew into a following of more than 160,000 people in 11 months with over 500 posts of evidence-based, data driven information. These posts were shared by Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, scientists and layman, families and neighbors. They infiltrated echo chambers. They became a place of scientific debate and transparency. All of which are greatly missing from social media and something I’m incredibly proud of building. Also, many of those followers became my friends and highly respected colleagues. But, now, all I can do is watch it slowly burn.

If I’ve learned one thing from this experience, it’s the fact that we all rent space from social media without any tenant rights or control. I still don’t have any access to my accounts. I don’t know if (or when) I’ll ever get access again. I have received zero communication from the social media sites. If it wasn’t for my girlfriend working at FB headquarters, I would be completely blind.

But it’s time to pull myself together and get back in the game. So, I’m starting this newsletter. If you found my previous posts useful at all, consider signing up. Instead of a FB post or IG post, you will receive an email when I post something new. You won’t get advertisements, FB won’t be collecting any of your data, and it will still be easily accessible to you (something science should always be).

Time to rebuild this thing. Here we go.

Love, YLE

PS Thank you to my husband for handing me this mug filled with coffee this morning, ultimately refueling my fire.