Facebook on Thursday said it will block President Trump on its platforms at least until the end of his term on Jan. 20, as the mainstream online world moved forcefully to limit the president after years of inaction.
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Trump Is Banned on Facebook 'at Least' Until His Term is Over - The New York Times - 0 views
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Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said in a post that the social network decided to cut off Mr. Trump because a rampage by pro-Trump supporters in the nation’s capital a day earlier, which was urged on by the president, showed that he “intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden.”
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The actions were a striking change for a social media industry that has long declined to interfere with Mr. Trump’s posts, which were often filled with falsehoods and threats.
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“We believe the risks of allowing the president to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote.
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Lawmakers and even employees of the companies said the platforms had waited too long to take serious action against Mr. Trump.
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Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, spent Thursday morning liking and retweeting commentary that urged caution against a permanent ban of Mr. Trump. That suggested he would not deviate from the plan to allow Mr. Trump back onto the service.
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At Facebook, that unwillingness changed on Wednesday after Mr. Trump egged on his supporters using social media and a mob stormed the Capitol building.
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After Twitter locked Mr. Trump’s account late Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg approved removing two posts from the president’s Facebook page, the two people said. By that evening, Mr. Zuckerberg had decided to restrict Mr. Trump’s Facebook account for the rest of his term — and perhaps indefinitely, they said.
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The social media companies’ clampdown extended beyond Mr. Trump. Twitter overnight permanently suspended Lin Wood, a lawyer who had used his account to promote the conspiracy theory QAnon and to urge on Wednesday’s mob. The company also removed a post from Dan Bongino, a conservative podcast host, on Thursday.
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Man Who Stormed Capitol With Assault Rifle Charged With Threatening Pelosi - The New Yo... - 0 views
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The Department of Justice said on Friday that Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr. was one of 13 people who had been charged in federal court after a violent pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.
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A man who had an assault rifle was charged with threatening Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, after he traveled to Washington for the pro-Trump rally on Wednesday and sent a text message saying he would put “a bullet in her noggin on Live TV,” the federal authorities said.
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Mr. Meredith was charged with transmitting a threat in interstate commerce, possession of an unregistered firearm and unlawful possession of ammunition, according to court records.
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Mr. Meredith told The Journal-Constitution in 2018 that he had put up the QAnon billboard because he was “a patriot among the millions who love this country.”
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In another text message, accompanied by a purple devil emoji, he said he had “a ton of 5.56 armor piercing ammo.” In other text messages, he referred to Ms. Pelosi with misogynistic slurs and threatened to run her over, the F.B.I. said.
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Opinion | The Shame of Jan. 6 Should Reverberate for Generations - The New York Times - 0 views
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You know, there was a time that I thought — hoped, even — that once 2021 came around we’d stop agreeing about things because Donald Trump would be gone and we’d only be talking about Joe Biden.
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Bret: And he always saves the worst for last. That’s why I don’t think impeachment and conviction are enough. (Alas, removal from office probably won’t happen since the trial is unlikely to finish by Jan. 20, though Congress can also vote to bar him from ever holding federal office in the future.)
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Gail: I see your point, but as ex-president Trump could also be indicted in New York, where authorities have long been investigating him for possible bank, insurance and tax fraud. For that, we would welcome him back.
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Bret: I hope we never forget Jan. 6, 2021, as one of the darkest days in American history. Even though the loss of life was much less, it was, in a moral sense, worse than Dec. 7, 1941, or Sept. 11, 2001, when we were attacked by foreign enemies. On 1/6, we were attacked by domestic enemies, led by the president of the United States. He violated his oath of office. He slandered his vice president. He directed an attack on the Congress. He incited the sacking of the Capitol. He did nothing helpful while the barbarians were inside the gate, and even blew them a kiss on Twitter. He attempted to stop an election for the purposes of stealing it. He kept faith with the most despicable Americans among us: neo-Nazis, Neo-Confederates, the QAnon conspiracy lunatics and the morons in Viking suits. His followers killed a Capitol Police officer, Brian Sicknick.
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Fringe Groups Splinter Online After Facebook and Twitter Bans - The New York Times - 0 views
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In the days since rioters stormed Capitol Hill, fringe groups like armed militias, QAnon conspiracy theorists and far-right supporters of President Trump have vowed to continue their fight in hundreds of conversations on a range of internet platforms.
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me of the organizers have moved to encrypted messaging apps like Telegram and Signal, which cannot be as easily monitored as social media platforms.
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Adding to the muddle, when Twitter and Facebook kicked Mr. Trump off their platforms last week, they made it harder for organizers to rally around a singular voice.
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Just hours after rioters were cleared from the Capitol on Wednesday, there was already discussion about what would happen next on Parler and Gab, another social-media platform that has become popular with the far right.
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Andrew Torba, chief executive of Gab, said: “As we have communicated to our partners in law enforcement, we have adopted a heightened security posture in the lead-up to the inauguration and are ready to respond quickly to any request law enforcement may make of us during the period.”
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Opinion | Trump Lives in a Hall of Mirrors and He's Got Plenty of Company - The New Yor... - 0 views
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If Donald Trump loses his re-election bid, there will be a lot of ruin to sort through. But his most damaging and enduring legacy may well turn out to be the promiscuous use of conspiracy theories that have defined both the man and his presidency.
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The president’s cruelest policies, like intentionally separating children from their parents at the border, can at least be ended, although their devastating effects will reverberate for decades
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There have been so many conspiracy theories it’s easy to forget some of them, and this list is hardly exhaustive,
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There was a time when popularizing such crazed machinations would have caused one to be cast to the outer fringes of American politics; in the case of Mr. Trump, it helped elect him and has created a cultlike devotion among tens of millions of his supporters. And because of Mr. Trump, conspiracy theorizing is now a central feature of the Republican Party and American politics.
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“We’ve never had a president who trades in conspiracy theories, who prefers lies instead of fact,” the presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told Peter Nicholas of The Atlantic.
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But what is new — where Mr. Trump is a genuine innovator — is having a conspiracy-monger who is president in a social media age. Whatever his other limitations, Mr. Trump is a master at trafficking in conspiracy theories, implying that they are true without always embracing them as true.
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There is something particularly dangerous about contemporary conspiracy theories. “What we’re seeing today is something different: conspiracy without the theory,”
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This is injurious to Trump supporters because people who believe conspiracy theories can become consumed by them. It is not good for your brain (or your family life) when you see patterns — secret plots by powerful, sinister figures — that don’t exist, in order to give meaning to events.
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Of course, there is an allure to conspiracy theories; they provide their followers with a sense of control, certainty and the belief that they are holders of “privileged knowledge.” At the same time, studies show that a belief in conspiracy theories correlates to “impoverished interpersonal functioning,” meaning paranoia,
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People who believe in conspiracy theories are more likely to endorse violence as a way to express disagreement with the government
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But the damage hardly stops there. Conspiracy theories, when they gain a wide enough currency, are destructive to democracy.
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They cloud and eventually warp people’s thinking to the point that even the most basic and obvious steps we need to take to slow the spread of a lethal pandemic, like wearing a mask, are ridiculed.
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The president has also accused doctors around the country of inflating the number of Covid-19 cases, in unforgettable terms: “Our doctors get more money if somebody dies from Covid. You know that, right?” he told a rally in Michigan on Friday. “I mean our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say ‘I’m sorry but everybody dies of Covid.’ ”
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Conspiracy theories also create profound mistrust of institutions and our fellow citizens; their purpose is to demolish faith in facts, data and science. And the propaganda spread by conspiracy theorists encourages extremism and hatred of others, especially anti-Semitism.
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When conspiracy theories are promoted with the velocity and on the scale that we are seeing today — when vanishingly few Republican officials publicly stand against them — the effect is vertiginous and disorienting. Peddling so much misinformation and disinformation eventually overwhelms people and their critical faculties.
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Live Election Trump vs. Biden Updates: Town Hall Recap - The New York Times - 0 views
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In a result that few in the TV and political arena predicted, Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s ABC town hall on Thursday night drew a larger audience than President Trump’s competing event on NBC, MSNBC and CNBC, according to preliminary Nielsen figures.
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Savannah Guthrie pressed him to denounce QAnon and white supremacy (Mr. Trump hesitated on both) and clear up questions about his medical condition.
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Mr. Trump is known for his sexist remarks, and the clips the ad shows are real. Mr. Biden, on the other hand, has long styled himself a champion of women. He still refers to the Violence Against Women Act as his proudest legislative achievement and he said months before he selected Ms. Harris as his running mate that he would name a woman to his ticket.
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President Trump’s rude and demeaning comments to and about women are no secret. Just last week, he called Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, a “monster.” A new ad from the Lincoln Project urges voters to consider what it would be like to have a different kind of president — a man, it suggests, who actually respects women.
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The 90-second ad opens with two directives: “Imagine a young girl looking in the mirror, searching for role models in the world to give her hope that one day she, too, can make a difference. Now imagine how she feels when she watches women being verbally attacked.” Cue a series of clips that show Mr. Trump belittling women, including female reporters. “Your daughters are listening,” the ad says.
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North Carolina may have broken a record for first-day, early-voting turnout on Thursday, when more than 333,000 people showed up in person to cast their ballots, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
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The forums replaced what was to be the second debate between the two candidates, after Mr. Trump rejected the decision by the Commission on Presidential Debates to hold the debate virtually because of Mr. Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis.
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Mr. Trump also all but confirmed that he owed about $400 million to creditors, as reported in a New York Times investigation about his taxes.
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Over on ABC News, at a very different octane and a very different volume, Mr. Biden answered policy questions from George Stephanopoulos.
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Mr. Biden’s outing was not completely easy. He again dodged a question on expanding the Supreme Court if he gets elected, though he did say, that he would offer an answer before Election Day but wanted to see how the nomination process for Judge Amy Coney Barrett plays out first.
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Mr. Biden also made some news, saying that his support of the 1994 crime bill — which has been blamed for the large-scale incarceration of Black people — was a “mistake,”
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The venerable NBC/WSJ poll did show Mr. Biden’s lead dropping from 14 points, right after the Sept. 29 debate, to 11 points.
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In Arizona, for instance, two new polls found Mr. Biden ahead by four points and one found Mr. Trump ahead by one point.
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He also dodged repeated questions about whether he had a negative coronavirus test immediately before the first presidential debate.
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Mr. Biden got his numbers wrong on troop levels in Afghanistan relative to when he left office four years ago and mischaracterized an element of the Green New Deal, but generally avoided clear misstatements.
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That day, Nov. 3 this year, instead represents the end of a six-week sprint during a record number of Americans cast their ballots in advance.
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In an effort to make polling places less crowded on Election Day, many states have encouraged absentee voting, opened more in-person early-voting sites and, in a few cases, mailed ballots to all registered voters.
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While the long lines were a vivid symbol of longstanding efforts to make voting more difficult — particularly for people of color — they also demonstrated the intensity of the desire to vote in an election that millions of Americans have waited for since the last one,
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Yet the voters keep coming, intent on exercising a constitutional right and in hopes of shaping a better future for their country.
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13 questions that the US election may start to answer - CNN - 0 views
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Anchors and reporters have been communicating all of the uncertainty that comes with a high turnout election and a huge increase in mail-in balloting.
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"What is critical is a transparency with the audience — letting viewers know this is what we know and how we know it, but that this is information right now and could change," CBS News president Susan Zirinsky said on Tuesday. "It's like being at a baseball game: You're in the 3rd inning, they give you the score, but you know there are other dynamics that could change the game. We want to be careful, not timid."
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Did journalists and local election officials sufficiently prepare the public for red shifts, blue shifts and potential delays?
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Were the major networks and The Associated Press able to practice what they preached, a/k/a patience?
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Can this election help the American media restore a little bit of the trust that's been eroded in recent years?
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Will the Trump presidency go down in history as a one-term, one-off fluke or a fundamental realignment of American politics? (Or maybe both?)
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Will QAnon adherents realize they were fooled when Trump does not win all 50 states, as a recent Q world narrative has claimed?
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If Biden wins, for how long after the election will the media uncover more wrongdoing from the Trump admin?
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My impression, as a reporter who covers the media industry every day, is that some journalists feel like they are limping to the finish line.
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Opinion | The Republican Party's future: Being terrorized by its unhinged base - The Wa... - 0 views
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Go back to 2009 and the rise of the tea party movement, and you should recall the general feeling of chaos that gripped our politics. Amid a national economic crisis, a movement sprang up that was both genuinely grass-roots and assisted by elite Republicans. It was loud and aggrieved, and it filled the Republican Party with fear.
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It did so because, from the beginning, its targets were not only Obama, whom it saw as an illegitimate president, but because it regarded as a quisling any Republican whose opposition to Obama was not strong, outraged or effective enough.
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Its members have spent four years swimming in Trump’s sea of paranoia and misinformation, and the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump will become their foundational belief. Any Republican who dismisses it will be branded a traitor to the cause.
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Despite the fact that Fox News hosts have been relentlessly pushing bogus claims of voter fraud and questioning the legitimacy of the election, significant portions of the GOP base have decided that the network’s commitment to Trump has waned, and, therefore, it must be part of the anti-Trump conspiracy. “Fox News sucks! Fox News sucks!” chanted the MAGA faithful at last week’s march of dead-enders in Washington.
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the strategy Fox has always used to maintain the loyalty of its viewers — telling them that every other news source is fatally infected with liberal bias — is now being deployed by those minor-league outlets against Fox itself.
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If their critique is that Fox News is too establishment, they’re not wrong: From its founding in 1996, the network has always been equally devoted to the twin goals of making money and advancing the interests of the Republican Party. It represents and defines the center of gravity in the party, even as that center of gravity may shift.
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Keep your eye on the likely 2024 presidential candidates — Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.), Josh Hawley (Mo.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Tom Cotton (Ark.), as well as former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley — as they jockey for advantage and try to find the party’s key points of influence. Once they start appearing on Newsmax, claiming the election was stolen, and giving winks and nods to QAnon and other conspiracy theories, you’ll see how deeply the madness has penetrated the GOP.
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Though many of the Republican leaders who were reviled by the tea party, such as former speaker John Boehner and former congressman Eric Cantor, are no longer around, the ones still in office remember well what it was like. And now they’re going to have to go through it all over again.
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Opinion | The Rotting of the Republican Mind - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...republican-disinformation.html
gop paranoia conspiracy theory polarization divergence epistemic crisis politics history culture
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In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
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We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality
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Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?
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My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real.
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In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.
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This ecosystem, Rauch wrote, operates as a funnel. It allows a wide volume of ideas to get floated, but only a narrow group of ideas survive collective scrutiny.
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We let alt-truth talk,” Rauch said, “but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.”
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While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities.
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In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge.
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People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers.
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Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say, but also the so-called rules they use to say them.
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In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending.
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The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community.
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conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.
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For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools
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For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have
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For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals
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Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set
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He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source.
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That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it
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Fearing a 'Blood Bath,' Republican Senators Begin to Edge Away From Trump - The New Yor... - 0 views
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For nearly four years, congressional Republicans have ducked and dodged an unending cascade of offensive statements and norm-shattering behavior from President Trump, ignoring his caustic and scattershot Twitter feed and penchant for flouting party orthodoxy, and standing quietly by as he abandoned military allies, attacked American institutions and stirred up racist and nativist fears.
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But now, facing grim polling numbers and a flood of Democratic money and enthusiasm that has imperiled their majority in the Senate, Republicans on Capitol Hill are beginning to publicly distance themselves from the president.
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The shift, less than three weeks before the election, indicates that many Republicans have concluded that Mr. Trump is heading for a loss in November. And they are grasping to save themselves and rushing to re-establish their reputations for a coming struggle for their party’s identity.
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eviscerating the president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and accusing him of “flirting” with dictators and white supremacists and alienating voters so broadly that he might cause a “Republican blood bath” in the Senate.
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Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the president’s most vocal allies, predicted the president could very well lose the White House.
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On Friday, the president issued his latest Twitter attack on Senator Susan Collins of Maine, one of the most endangered Republican incumbents, apparently unconcerned that he might be further imperiling her chances, along with the party’s hopes of holding on to the Senate.
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Senate Republicans — who have rarely broken with the president on any major legislative initiative in four years — are unwilling to vote for the kind of multitrillion-dollar federal aid plan that Mr. Trump has suddenly decided would be in his interest to embrace.
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Republicans could very well hang onto both the White House and the Senate, and Mr. Trump still has a firm grip on the party base, which may be why even some of those known for being most critical of him, like Mr. Sasse and Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, declined to be interviewed about their concerns.
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But their recent behavior has offered an answer to the long-pondered question of if there would ever be a point when Republicans might repudiate a president who so frequently said and did things that undermined their principles and message. The answer appears to be the moment they feared he would threaten their political survival.
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McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, has been more outspoken than usual in recent days about his differences with the president, rejecting his calls to “go big” on a stimulus bill.
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Mr. Romney assailed the president for being unwilling to condemn QAnon, the viral pro-Trump conspiracy movement that the F.B.I. has labeled a domestic terrorism threat,
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Yet Mr. Romney and other Republicans who have spoken up to offer dire predictions or expressions of concern about Mr. Trump are all sticking with the president on what is likely his final major act before the election: the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a favorite of conservatives, to the Supreme Court.
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The dichotomy reflects the tacit deal congressional Republicans have accepted over the course of Mr. Trump’s presidency, in which they have tolerated his incendiary behavior and statements knowing that he would further many of their priorities, including installing a conservative majority on the nation’s highest court.
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the grim political environment has set off a scramble, especially among Republicans with political aspirations stretching beyond Mr. Trump’s presidency, to be on the front lines of any party reset.
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“As it becomes evident that he is a mere political mortal like everyone else, you’re really starting to see the jockeying taking place for what the future of the Republican Party is,”
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“Most congressional Republicans have known that this is unsustainable long term, and they’ve just been — some people may call it pragmatic, some may call it opportunistic — keeping their heads down and doing what they have to do while they waited for this time to come,”
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It is unclear whether Republicans will seek to redefine their party should the president lose, given that Mr. Trump’s tenure has shown the appeal of his inflammatory brand of politics to the crucial conservative base.“He still has enormous, enormous influence — and will for a very long time — over primary voters, and that is what members care about,”
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On the campaign trail, Republicans are privately livid with the president for dragging down their Senate candidates, sending his struggles rippling across states that are traditional Republican strongholds.
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“His weakness in dealing with coronavirus has put a lot more seats in play than we ever could have imagined a year ago,
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“We always knew that there were going to be a number of close Senate races, and we were probably swimming against the tide in places like Arizona, Colorado and Maine. But when you see states that are effectively tied, like Georgia and North Carolina and South Carolina, that tells you something has happened in the broader environment.”
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Despite repeated public entreaties from Mr. Trump for Republicans to embrace a larger pandemic stimulus package, Mr. McConnell has all but refused, saying senators in his party would never support a package of that magnitude. Senate Republicans revolted last weekend on a conference call with Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff, warning that a big-spending deal would amount to a “betrayal” of the party’s base and tarnish their credentials as fiscal hawks.
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A more personal rebuke came from Mr. McConnell last week when the Kentuckian, who is up for re-election, told reporters that he had avoided visiting the White House since late summer because of its handling of the coronavirus.“My impression was their approach to how to handle this was different from mine and what I insisted that we do in the Senate,” Mr. McConnell said.
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Opinion | Where Liberal Power Lies - The New York Times - 0 views
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“This is what totalitarianism looks like in our century,” the Post’s Op-Ed editor, Sohrab Ahmari, wrote in response: “Not men in darkened cells driving screws under the fingernails of dissidents, but Silicon Valley dweebs removing from vast swaths of the internet a damaging exposé on their preferred presidential candidate.”
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In his new book “Live Not By Lies,” for instance, Rod Dreher warns against the rise of a “soft totalitarianism,” distinguished not by formal police-state tactics but by pressure from the heights of big media, big tech and the education system, which are forging “powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse.”
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what we call the American “right” increasingly just consists of anyone, whether traditionalist or secularist or somewhere in between, who feels alarmed by growing ideological conformity within the media and educational and corporate establishments.
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finally, Trump’s mendacious presidency and the spread of online conspiracy theories has encouraged liberals in a belief that the only way to safeguard democracy is for this consolidated establishment to become more aggressive in its attempts at cultural control — which is how you get the strange phenomenon of some journalists fretting about the perils of the First Amendment and demanding that the big social-media enterprises exert a kind of prior restraint over the American conversation.
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Over the same period, in reaction to social atomization, economic disappointment and conspicuous elite failure, the younger members of the liberal upper class have become radicalized, embracing a new progressive orthodoxy that’s hard to distill but easy to recognize and that really is deployed to threaten careers when the unconvinced step out of line.
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Let me try to elaborate on what this right is seeing. The initial promise of the internet era was radical decentralization, but instead over the last 20 years, America’s major cultural institutions have become consolidated, with more influence in the hands of fewer institutions. The decline of newsprint has made a few national newspapers ever more influential, the most-trafficked portions of the internet have fallen under the effective control of a small group of giant tech companies, and the patterns of meritocracy have ensured that the people staffing these institutions are drawn from the same self-reproducing professional class.
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he right fears that what starts with bans on QAnon and Alex Jones will end with social-media censorship of everything from pro-life content to critiques of critical race theory to coverage of the not-so-peaceful style in left-wing protest.
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writers anxious about soft totalitarianism on the left tend (not always, but too often) to underestimate how much of a gift the presidency of Donald Trump has been to exactly the tendencies they fear. Trump’s own authoritarian impulses and conspiratorial style are so naked, so alienating and frightening, that many people who might otherwise unite with conservatives against the new progressive establishment end up as its reluctant fellow travelers instead.
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having offered these doubts about the diagnosis, let me stress that the mix of elite consolidation and radicalization that conservatives fear is entirely real
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Power lies in many places in America, but it lies deeply, maybe ineradicably for the time being, in culture-shaping and opinion-forming institutions that conservatives have little hope of bringing under their control.
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Opinion | How to Break the Hold of Conspiracy Theories - The New York Times - 0 views
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The polls for Joe Biden look good, but in 2020, any hint of optimism feels dangerously naïve, and my brain has been working overtime in search of potential doom.
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I have become consumed with an alarming possibility: that neither the polls nor the actual outcome of the election really matter, because to a great many Americans, digital communication has already rendered empirical, observable reality beside the point.
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America is heavily armed, and from Portland to Kenosha to the Michigan governor’s mansion, we have seen young men radicalized and organized online beginning to take the law into their own hands.
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Donovan told me she fears that “people who are armed are going to become dangerous, because they see no other way out.”
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Propagandists keep discovering new ways to spread misinformation; researchers like Donovan and her colleagues keep sussing them out, and, usually quite late, media and tech companies move to fix the flaws — by which time the bad guys have moved on to some other way of spreading untruths.
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It’s a very internet story, analogous to the way Amazon expanded from an online bookstore into a general-purpose system for selling anything to anyone.
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Facebook and YouTube this month launched new efforts to take down QAnon content, but Q adherents have often managed to evade deplatforming by softening and readjusting their messages.
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Opinion | Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Republican Perversion of 'Freedom' - The New Y... - 0 views
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Many House Republicans have been freaking out, no exaggeration, over the installation of metal detectors along their paths to the House floor
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Apparently, if you can’t pack heat in proximity to Nancy Pelosi, you’re living in a totalitarian state.
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Lesko, an Arizona Republican, tweeted that the new security screening was proof that lawmakers “now live in Pelosi’s communist America.”
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One is the reflexive attempt to divert attention from the florid craziness in their own ranks and own base by screaming “communist,” “socialist” or “radical left.”
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How did Marco Rubio, emblematic of all the Republican senators who are determined to stay cozy with Trump’s supporters, respond to Trump’s richly earned second impeachment?
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By saying that the “radical left” was out of control. Mind you, the radical right, bloated by Trump’s fictions and most Republican senators’ silence, orchestrated the deadly events of Jan. 6, but confronting that head-on is of no political use to Rubio. So, instead: socialism! Cancel culture! The radical left!
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Many Republicans immediately accepted Greene’s speech on the House floor on Thursday — during which she disavowed QAnon and the idea that school massacres and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were hoaxes — as a redemptive apology. It was nothing of the kind.
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Sensible firearms restrictions aren’t an insult to freedom. They’re a bulwark against bloodshed and chaos, protecting the freedom of high school students and others to go about their days without the constant, gnawing fear of being shot.
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“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she said. Allowed to? No, ready to. Eager to. Itching with paranoia and hate, which she then spread.
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Removing Representative Greene from her House committee assignments — which the House did on Thursday night by a 230-to-199 vote, with 11 Republicans joining 219 Democrats in favor of her ouster — wasn’t the death of free speech. Greene remains free, as an individual, to spout the bunk she once spouted
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But Congress has the right — and, I’d argue, the responsibility — to make crystal clear that such bunk is vile, dangerous and antithetical to anything and everything that democratic government should be about, and to hold Greene to account for her actions. What happened to Republicans’ belief in personal responsibility?
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Requiring that people wear face masks in crowded settings in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic doesn’t repress individualism. It protects many individuals, so that they’re free to continue breathing and living
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She played the victim, deriding “big media companies” and “cancel culture,” and insisting that she “never once said any of the things that I am being accused of today during my campaign” or since being elected.
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context is everything. The new detectors popped up after a violent invasion of the Capitol. Proudly gun-loving Republican members of Congress have bragged about carrying their firearms everywhere and have coddled voters on the far right who espouse violence against Democrats.
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Representative Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, had previously delivered a floor speech in which he said that the detectors weren’t merely unnecessary. They were “atrocities.” Once upon a time, that word had meaning. But then, once upon a time, “freedom” did, too.
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Impeachment Is Working-Just Not as the Framers Expected - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Yes, Trump can probably still expect a second acquittal in 2021. But Trump has three main post-presidential goals, and the forthcoming trial will do severe and possibly lethal damage to all three.
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Failing that, Trump would like to demonstrate that—president or not—he remains the dominant force within the Republican Party, a leader surpassing all others.
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Failing even that, Trump would at a minimum like to prove that he remains a potent-enough figure to frighten away federal and state prosecutors from investigating his businesses for tax or bank fraud.
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The second impeachment in the House has already complicated these goals. The second trial in the Senate will complicate these goals further.
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Will he compel Senate Republicans to disassociate themselves from him? Or will they succumb to the trap set by Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats, who are trying to identify all Republicans with the bigoted conspiracizing of QAnon and the violent sedition of January 6? The trial presents many hazards for both Trump and his party, and the odds are good that they will emerge from the trial exposed and weakened.
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A criminal trial is binary: guilty or not guilty, punishment or release. Politics offers a much wider range of outcomes. The Senate does not have to vote to disqualify Trump to destroy his future political prospects. It does not have to convict him on the impeachment charge to signal state and federal prosecutors that it’s safe to proceed against private-citizen Trump—that ex-president Trump has forfeited some large measure of the deference normally extended to former presidents.
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shared by tsainten on 30 Nov 20
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Opinion | When Can We Stop Thinking About Trump Every Minute? - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...trump-biden-election-2020.html
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Janet Yellen isn’t going to blow up the economy. Antony Blinken isn’t going to blow up the free world. Alejandro Mayorkas isn’t going to put kids in cages. All this promises to make 2021 better than 2020 purely by default.
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so many rank-and-file Republicans refuse to accept that Trump lost fair-and-square is a very bad sign about the sanity — or lack thereof — of the party.
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rump is going to skip the inauguration so that he can announce his next run for president is another bad sign for and about the party’s future. Together, they augur for the QAnonization of the G.O.P., which is just awful news for a democracy with a two-party system.
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Republicans were all about balancing the budget and the popular banner of anti-Communism. (Back then, anybody who wanted to raise taxes could get a “commie” categorization just for proposing the idea.)
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Then the social right wing — particularly the anti-abortion forces — came up to the front. And the big money people realized they lost nothing financial by making an alliance. Everything is about taking a stand and nothing is about getting stuff done.
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he simply consumed all of our mental bandwidth, so that it became all but impossible to think of anyone or anything else.
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How about a great new White House agenda focused on raising taxes on the rich and redistributing the money to the poor? I believe I remember hearing someone talk about that — Joe Somebody?
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We also need to think about why we are burdening college students with mountainous debt in exchange for increasingly useless college degrees. B.A. now stands for Bankruptcy by Arts. The best thing that could happen educationally is an investment in community colleges that enhances their value, rigor and prestige.
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let the Biden administration focus on how to make community colleges work, occasionally reminding Republicans that should have been one of their goals if the Trump years had actually been about upward mobility for the lower-middle class.
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I sometimes fear the Trump administration has reduced us, emotionally and intellectually, to a single thought, played like a Gregorian chant on an endless loop: Just. Make. It. Stop.
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Or freshman year! I’m not sure it’s ever a good idea for students to go directly from high school to college, and a gap year that entails some form of service would do everyone a lot of good.
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After four years of Trump, discussing these things feels a bit like seeing the sun and hearing those chirping birds you were just talking about for the first time in years.
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Opinion | When Can We Stop Thinking About Trump Every Minute? - The New York Times - 0 views
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On the other hand, there’s a lot that worries me, too. The fact that so many rank-and-file Republicans refuse to accept that Trump lost fair-and-square is a very bad sign about the sanity — or lack thereof — of the party. The possibility that Trump is going to skip the inauguration so that he can announce his next run for president is another bad sign for and about the party’s future. Together, they augur for the QAnonization of the G.O.P., which is just awful news for a democracy with a two-party system.
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Maybe my biggest worry, though, is that we’re living in a country where the Dow just hit 30,000 at the same time that people are waiting in line for hours at food banks. That’s a recipe for potentially catastrophic social friction.
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The rich will always figure out how to avoid taxes, if not evade them, whether it means setting up complex trusts to protect their wealth or moving to some offshore tax haven. Just look at the Trump family. The people who really get walloped by high taxes are upper-middle class types who don’t have exit options but aren’t exactly the malefactors of great wealth.
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The best thing that could happen educationally is an investment in community colleges that enhances their value, rigor and prestige.
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I sometimes fear the Trump administration has reduced us, emotionally and intellectually, to a single thought, played like a Gregorian chant on an endless loop: Just. Make. It. Stop.
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Now, all of a sudden, we’re being reminded that we have real problems, like rising inequality, collapsing social mobility and the mounting financial burden one generation is placing on the next.
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Biden’s higher education plan would make community college free for up to two years. For those who want to go further he’d make public colleges tuition free for most students and liberate many of the poor kids who were lured into signing up for an ungodly amount of debt.
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t: I have no problem making college more affordable, but I’m generally against making things free on the view that people rarely value, or stick with, what they don’t pay for.
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Anyway, the point here is just to think fresh. After four years of Trump, discussing these things feels a bit like seeing the sun and hearing those chirping birds you were just talking about for the first time in years.
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Trump May Have Covid, but Many of His Supporters Still Scoff at Masks - The New York Times - 0 views
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“I have my own business and I don’t have anybody wear a mask in my business,” said Mr. Girvin, a used-car dealer. “I don’t buy into it. When you look at the facts, with how many people die of influenza every year. Obesity kills more people than the Wuhan virus does.”
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“Joe Biden has enough nerve to say Donald Trump’s killing people? No. The far-left liberals are causing this. The Pelosis, the Soroses and all these people, that’s who caused it. And I wish them all the worst.”
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“Younger people’s more safe,” said Mr. Dechert, 31. “Older people have an issue. Nobody batted an eye for the flu. Now all of a sudden, it’s an election year — Covid.” #styln-signup .styln-signup-wrapper { max-width: calc(100% - 40px); width: 600px; margin: 20px auto; padding-bottom: 20px; }
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“I like my freedom” on leaving the store, and pronounced Covid-19 as “nothing more than a flu, really.’’
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Scoffing at masks, social distancing and crowd avoidance — all measures recommended by health experts, including in the Trump administration — has become a test of loyalty for fervent supporters of the president, who mocked Mr. Biden’s masks during their debate last week and, on returning to the White House on Monday from the hospital, ripped his off, despite being highly contagious.
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“Say I have it and I get tested five times, that’s five new cases,” he said. “I know for sure, through E.M.T.s, they count it separately.” (This misconception, spread on social media, has been rebutted; the C.D.C. reports total cases and total tests separately.)
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In a Quinnipiac University national poll last month, four out of five likely voters said they believed masks to be effective at slowing the spread of the virus. Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., told Congress that wide use of face masks would bring the pandemic under control and might offer more protection than a vaccine.
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Doubts about the C.D.C. figures trace back at least to August, when Mr. Trump retweeted a post by a follower of the QAnon conspiracy. Twitter later removed the president’s retweet for violating its rules about sharing disinformation. The false claim arose because doubters of the C.D.C. argued that deaths in people with underlying health problems, such as diabetes or heart disease, were not deaths from Covid-19 — whereas experts said they were.
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How a Kennedy became a 'superspreader' of hoaxes on COVID-19, vaccines, 5G and more - T... - 0 views
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In 2017, after a meeting with then president-elect Mr. Trump in New York, Mr. Kennedy Jr. announced that he had been asked to chair a commission to review vaccine safety. The move alarmed doctors, epidemiologists and public health experts, who pointed out that Mr. Trump had previously raised concerns that vaccines cause autism.
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Even though the commission never materialized, to Mr. Kennedy Jr.’s bitter disappointment, the fact that the meeting took place at all signals how closely conspiracy theories and misinformation have been interwoven in everyday politics.
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“You have [U.S. Republican senator] Lindsey Graham talking about the deep state; you could argue the President was elected around conspiracy theories. So Kennedy’s well placed to fit into that trend. He appeals to the notion that there are dark forces working against us.”
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Larry Sabato, one of America’s leading political scientists, believes the confusion created by the President will find its denouement on Nov. 3, presidential election day, when “we’ll find out whether the truth matters in American politics.” Mr. Sabato said: “What is disturbing is that for tens of millions, it doesn’t matter anymore. We are in the postfactual era, not just in America, but around the world.
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“Almost all of these theories are pretty, pretty darn boring. And I hate to complain about my job. It’s the same crap over and over again. Same theories, different nouns. There’s nothing to even QAnon, which people look at and say, ‘Oh my God, that’s so wacky.’ Well, the idea of a pedophile deep state working against the president is the plot of Oliver Stone’s JFK movie that came out 30 years ago. ... The idea that your enemies are pedophiles and Satanists and sex traffickers goes back millennia. So there’s really even nothing new there.”
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Mr. Kennedy Jr.’s siblings Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and former congressman Joseph Kennedy, as well as niece Maeve Kennedy McKean, published an excoriating article in Politico claiming that “he has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines."
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“We love Bobby,” they said, and praised his record on environmental issues. “However, on vaccines he is wrong.”
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shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 20
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Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...617384
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megadeath is not the only thing that makes the Doomsday Machine petrifying. The real terror is in its autonomy, this idea that it would be programmed to detect a series of environmental inputs, then to act, without human interference. “There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision,” wrote the military strategist Herman Kahn in his 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War, which laid out the hypothetical for a Doomsday Machine. The concept was to render nuclear war unwinnable, and therefore unthinkable.
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so far, somewhat miraculously, we have figured out how to live with the bomb. Now we need to learn how to survive the social web.
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There’s a notion that the social web was once useful, or at least that it could have been good, if only we had pulled a few levers: some moderation and fact-checking here, a bit of regulation there, perhaps a federal antitrust lawsuit. But that’s far too sunny and shortsighted a view.
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Today’s social networks, Facebook chief among them, were built to encourage the things that make them so harmful. It is in their very architecture.
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Megascale is nearly the existential threat that megadeath is. No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.
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Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence.
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The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning.
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Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences.
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Facebook decided that it needed not just a very large user base, but a tremendous one, unprecedented in size. That decision set Facebook on a path to escape velocity, to a tipping point where it can harm society just by existing.
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No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. I’ve come to realize that Facebook is not a media company. It’s a Doomsday Machine.
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Scale and engagement are valuable to Facebook because they’re valuable to advertisers. These incentives lead to design choices such as reaction buttons that encourage users to engage easily and often, which in turn encourage users to share ideas that will provoke a strong response.
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Every time you click a reaction button on Facebook, an algorithm records it, and sharpens its portrait of who you are.
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The hyper-targeting of users, made possible by reams of their personal data, creates the perfect environment for manipulation—by advertisers, by political campaigns, by emissaries of disinformation, and of course by Facebook itself, which ultimately controls what you see and what you don’t see on the site.
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there aren’t enough moderators speaking enough languages, working enough hours, to stop the biblical flood of shit that Facebook unleashes on the world, because 10 times out of 10, the algorithm is faster and more powerful than a person.
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At megascale, this algorithmically warped personalized informational environment is extraordinarily difficult to moderate in a meaningful way, and extraordinarily dangerous as a result.
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These dangers are not theoretical, and they’re exacerbated by megascale, which makes the platform a tantalizing place to experiment on people
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Even after U.S. intelligence agencies identified Facebook as a main battleground for information warfare and foreign interference in the 2016 election, the company has failed to stop the spread of extremism, hate speech, propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories on its site.
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it wasn’t until October of this year, for instance, that Facebook announced it would remove groups, pages, and Instragram accounts devoted to QAnon, as well as any posts denying the Holocaust.
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In the days after the 2020 presidential election, Zuckerberg authorized a tweak to the Facebook algorithm so that high-accuracy news sources such as NPR would receive preferential visibility in people’s feeds, and hyper-partisan pages such as Breitbart News’s and Occupy Democrats’ would be buried, according to The New York Times, offering proof that Facebook could, if it wanted to, turn a dial to reduce disinformation—and offering a reminder that Facebook has the power to flip a switch and change what billions of people see online.
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reducing the prevalence of content that Facebook calls “bad for the world” also reduces people’s engagement with the site. In its experiments with human intervention, the Times reported, Facebook calibrated the dial so that just enough harmful content stayed in users’ news feeds to keep them coming back for more.
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Facebook’s stated mission—to make the world more open and connected—has always seemed, to me, phony at best, and imperialist at worst.
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Facebook is a borderless nation-state, with a population of users nearly as big as China and India combined, and it is governed largely by secret algorithms
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How much real-world violence would never have happened if Facebook didn’t exist? One of the people I’ve asked is Joshua Geltzer, a former White House counterterrorism official who is now teaching at Georgetown Law. In counterterrorism circles, he told me, people are fond of pointing out how good the United States has been at keeping terrorists out since 9/11. That’s wrong, he said. In fact, “terrorists are entering every single day, every single hour, every single minute” through Facebook.
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Evidence of real-world violence can be easily traced back to both Facebook and 8kun. But 8kun doesn’t manipulate its users or the informational environment they’re in. Both sites are harmful. But Facebook might actually be worse for humanity.
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In previous eras, U.S. officials could at least study, say, Nazi propaganda during World War II, and fully grasp what the Nazis wanted people to believe. Today, “it’s not a filter bubble; it’s a filter shroud,” Geltzer said. “I don’t even know what others with personalized experiences are seeing.”
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Mary McCord, the legal director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told me that she thinks 8kun may be more blatant in terms of promoting violence but that Facebook is “in some ways way worse” because of its reach. “There’s no barrier to entry with Facebook,” she said. “In every situation of extremist violence we’ve looked into, we’ve found Facebook postings. And that reaches tons of people. The broad reach is what brings people into the fold and normalizes extremism and makes it mainstream.” In other words, it’s the megascale that makes Facebook so dangerous.
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Facebook’s megascale gives Zuckerberg an unprecedented degree of influence over the global population. If he isn’t the most powerful person on the planet, he’s very near the top.
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“The thing he oversees has such an effect on cognition and people’s beliefs, which can change what they do with their nuclear weapons or their dollars.”
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Facebook’s new oversight board, formed in response to backlash against the platform and tasked with making decisions concerning moderation and free expression, is an extension of that power. “The first 10 decisions they make will have more effect on speech in the country and the world than the next 10 decisions rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Geltzer said. “That’s power. That’s real power.”
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Facebook is also a business, and a place where people spend time with one another. Put it this way: If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly intervene?
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In 2004, Zuckerberg said Facebook ran advertisements only to cover server costs. But over the next two years Facebook completely upended and redefined the entire advertising industry. The pre-social web destroyed classified ads, but the one-two punch of Facebook and Google decimated local news and most of the magazine industry—publications fought in earnest for digital pennies, which had replaced print dollars, and social giants scooped them all up anyway.
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localized approach is part of what made megascale possible. Early constraints around membership—the requirement at first that users attended Harvard, and then that they attended any Ivy League school, and then that they had an email address ending in .edu—offered a sense of cohesiveness and community. It made people feel more comfortable sharing more of themselves. And more sharing among clearly defined demographics was good for business.
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in 2007, Zuckerberg said something in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that now takes on a much darker meaning: “The things that are most powerful aren’t the things that people would have done otherwise if they didn’t do them on Facebook. Instead, it’s the things that would never have happened otherwise.”
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We’re still in the infancy of this century’s triple digital revolution of the internet, smartphones, and the social web, and we find ourselves in a dangerous and unstable informational environment, powerless to resist forces of manipulation and exploitation that we know are exerted on us but remain mostly invisible
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The Doomsday Machine offers a lesson: We should not accept this current arrangement. No single machine should be able to control so many people.
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we need a new philosophical and moral framework for living with the social web—a new Enlightenment for the information age, and one that will carry us back to shared reality and empiricism.
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In other words, if the Dunbar number for running a company or maintaining a cohesive social life is 150 people; the magic number for a functional social platform is maybe 20,000 people. Facebook now has 2.7 billion monthly users.
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we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today’s platforms—and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather.
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The web’s existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case.
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We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.
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We must also find ways to repair the aspects of our society and culture that the social web has badly damaged. This will require intellectual independence, respectful debate, and the same rebellious streak that helped establish Enlightenment values centuries ago.
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Right now, too many people are allowing algorithms and tech giants to manipulate them, and reality is slipping from our grasp as a result. This century’s Doomsday Machine is here, and humming along.