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And moving into 2021, officials said, the company may start placing labels or warnings on messages containing "unsubstantiated rumors, disputed claims, as well as incomplete or out-of-context information about vaccines."

Among the posts that will be flagged are those making false conspiracy claims suggesting immunizations and vaccines are used as tools to control or harm the population at large. Others alleging that the global coronavirus pandemic is made up and those that are dismissive of the gravity of the virus will also be taken down.

Officials said Twitter will use a combination of technology and people who will be consulting with health experts around the world to enforce the changes on such posts.

And yet, that is the very same position that Black people — and other people of color, religious minorities and women — are often forced into, or are asked to assume.

We have to acknowledge that he bragged about sexually assaulting women, had scores of women accuse him of sexual misconduct and was revealed to have paid off at least two women for their silence about alleged affairs.

We have to acknowledge that Trump is a racist — something proven over and over again by his own words and actions — and that he still received a record number of votes for a sitting president anyway.

We have to acknowledge that he has disparaged Mexicans, Muslims, Haitians and African nations.

These things happened. These people who supported him mostly knew these things happened. In many cases they heard Trump say them live on television or tweet them from his Twitter account.

And yet, his supporters still supported him. Many of them still do, even after his refutation of democracy. Many believe Trump’s lie that he actually won the election that he lost

oe Biden, as he has always said, is seeking to be a unifying president, to be the president of the people who didn’t vote for him as well as the ones who did.

the FBI released new information in hopes of catching the person suspected of leaving behind two pipe bombs on Capitol Hill the night before the riot, one of the enduring, unsolved mysteries of that chaotic week.

The potential presence of the extremist groups at next week’s event is concerning because, while members and associates of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys make up just a fraction of the nearly 600 people who have been charged so far in the riot, they are facing some of the most serious charges brought.

Those charges include allegations that they conspired to block the certification of Biden’s victory. Several Oath Keepers have pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges and are cooperating with investigators in the case against their fellow extremists, who authorities say came to Washington ready for violence and willing to do whatever it took to stop the certification of the Electoral College vote.

Perhaps the most concerning: A series of unexploded pipe bombs placed near the Capitol on Jan. 5 remain unexplained and no suspect has been charged.

“I would hope that we wouldn’t have to fence in the Capitol every time there’s a demonstration,” Norton said. But she added, “If they go with the fence, I’m not going to criticize them.”

Reports highlighted internal research showing that Instagram, Facebook’s photo-sharing app, makes one in five American teenagers feel worse about themselves.

They paid less attention to the finding that Instagram makes twice as many feel better about themselves.

She revealed internal projections that a drop in teenagers’ engagement could lead to an overall decline in American users of 45% within the next two years. Investors have long faced a lack of open disclosure.

The question of how to regulate viral content for children goes beyond Facebook, as any parent who has left their child with YouTube knows. Likewise, dilemmas over how the firm amplifies attention and how to draw the line between upholding free speech and minimising harm.

Facebook repeated its plea that Congress should weigh in on matters such as minimum ages, rather than leaving it to firms.

Facebook’s critics are right that it should be more open. But the firm has half a point when it says that the hysterical reaction to unsurprising findings will lead companies to conclude that it is safer not to do such research at all.

The most damaging claim this week gained the least attention. Ms Haugen alleges that Facebook has concealed a decline in its young American users.

Misleading advertisers would undermine the source of nearly all the firm’s sales, and potentially break the law.

Although Facebook’s share price has lagged behind some tech giants, it has risen by almost 30% in the past 12 months. Politicians threaten to break the company up, but the antitrust case is flawed.

The Justice Department’s claim that Facebook is a monopoly rests on defining its market so as to exclude most social networks.

Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return. Even when it set out plausible responses to Ms Haugen, people no longer wanted to hear.

The firm risks joining the ranks of corporate untouchables like big tobacco. If that idea takes hold, Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff.

Even if its ageing customers stick with the social network, Facebook has bigger ambitions that could be foiled if public opinion continues to curdle.

According to the documents, Facebook is aware that its products are being used to facilitate hate speech in the Middle East, violent cartels in Mexico, ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, extremist anti-Muslim rhetoric in India, and sex trafficking in Dubai. It is also aware that its efforts to combat these things are insufficient. A March 2021 report notes, “We frequently observe highly coordinated, intentional activity … by problematic actors” that is “particularly prevalent—and problematic—in At-Risk Countries and Contexts”; the report later acknowledges, “Current mitigation strategies are not enough.”

As recently as late 2020, an internal Facebook report found that only 6 percent of Arabic-language hate content on Instagram was detected by Facebook’s systems. Another report that circulated last winter found that, of material posted in Afghanistan that was classified as hate speech within a 30-day range, only 0.23 percent was taken down automatically by Facebook’s tools. In both instances, employees blamed company leadership for insufficient investment.

last year, according to the documents, only 13 percent of Facebook’s misinformation-moderation staff hours were devoted to the non-U.S. countries in which it operates, whose populations comprise more than 90 percent of Facebook’s users.

Among the consequences of that pattern, according to the memo: The Hindu-nationalist politician T. Raja Singh, who posted to hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook calling for India’s Rohingya Muslims to be shot—in direct violation of Facebook’s hate-speech guidelines—was allowed to remain on the platform despite repeated requests to ban him, including from the very Facebook employees tasked with monitoring hate speech.

The granular, procedural, sometimes banal back-and-forth exchanges recorded in the documents reveal, in unprecedented detail, how the most powerful company on Earth makes its decisions. And they suggest that, all over the world, Facebook’s choices are consistently driven by public perception, business risk, the threat of regulation, and the specter of “PR fires,” a phrase that appears over and over in the documents.

“It’s an open secret … that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention,” an employee named Sophie Zhang wrote in a September 2020 internal memo about Facebook’s failure to act on global misinformation threats.

In a memo dated December 2020 and posted to Workplace, Facebook’s very Facebooklike internal message board, an employee argued that “Facebook’s decision-making on content policy is routinely influenced by political considerations.”

To hear this employee tell it, the problem was structural: Employees who are primarily tasked with negotiating with governments over regulation and national security, and with the press over stories, were empowered to weigh in on conversations about building and enforcing Facebook’s rules regarding questionable content around the world. “Time and again,” the memo quotes a Facebook researcher saying, “I’ve seen promising interventions … be prematurely stifled or severely constrained by key decisionmakers—often based on fears of public and policy stakeholder responses.”

And although Facebook users post in at least 160 languages, the company has built robust AI detection in only a fraction of those languages, the ones spoken in large, high-profile markets such as the U.S. and Europe—a choice, the documents show, that means problematic content is seldom detected.

A 2020 Wall Street Journal article reported that Facebook’s top public-policy executive in India had raised concerns about backlash if the company were to do so, saying that cracking down on leaders from the ruling party might make running the business more difficult.

Employees weren’t placated. In dozens and dozens of comments, they questioned the decisions Facebook had made regarding which parts of the company to involve in content moderation, and raised doubts about its ability to moderate hate speech in India. They called the situation “sad” and Facebook’s response “inadequate,” and wondered about the “propriety of considering regulatory risk” when it comes to violent speech.

“I have a very basic question,” wrote one worker. “Despite having such strong processes around hate speech, how come there are so many instances that we have failed? It does speak on the efficacy of the process.”

Two other employees said that they had personally reported certain Indian accounts for posting hate speech. Even so, one of the employees wrote, “they still continue to thrive on our platform spewing hateful content.”

Taken together, Frances Haugen’s leaked documents show Facebook for what it is: a platform racked by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy thinking, extremism, hate speech, bullying, abuse, human trafficking, revenge porn, and incitements to violence

It is a company that has pursued worldwide growth since its inception—and then, when called upon by regulators, the press, and the public to quell the problems its sheer size has created, it has claimed that its scale makes completely addressing those problems impossible.

Instead, Facebook’s 60,000-person global workforce is engaged in a borderless, endless, ever-bigger game of whack-a-mole, one with no winners and a lot of sore arms.

Zhang details what she found in her nearly three years at Facebook: coordinated disinformation campaigns in dozens of countries, including India, Brazil, Mexico, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bolivia, Spain, and Ukraine. In some cases, such as in Honduras and Azerbaijan, Zhang was able to tie accounts involved in these campaigns directly to ruling political parties. In the memo, posted to Workplace the day Zhang was fired from Facebook for what the company alleged was poor performance, she says that she made decisions about these accounts with minimal oversight or support, despite repeated entreaties to senior leadership. On multiple occasions, she said, she was told to prioritize other work.

A Facebook spokesperson said that the company tries “to keep people safe even if it impacts our bottom line,” adding that the company has spent $13 billion on safety since 2016. “​​Our track record shows that we crack down on abuse abroad with the same intensity that we apply in the U.S.”

Zhang's memo, though, paints a different picture. “We focus upon harm and priority regions like the United States and Western Europe,” she wrote. But eventually, “it became impossible to read the news and monitor world events without feeling the weight of my own responsibility.”

Indeed, Facebook explicitly prioritizes certain countries for intervention by sorting them into tiers, the documents show. Zhang “chose not to prioritize” Bolivia, despite credible evidence of inauthentic activity in the run-up to the country’s 2019 election. That election was marred by claims of fraud, which fueled widespread protests; more than 30 people were killed and more than 800 were injured.

“I have blood on my hands,” Zhang wrote in the memo. By the time she left Facebook, she was having trouble sleeping at night. “I consider myself to have been put in an impossible spot—caught between my loyalties to the company and my loyalties to the world as a whole.”

What happened in the Philippines—and in Honduras, and Azerbaijan, and India, and Bolivia—wasn’t just that a very large company lacked a handle on the content posted to its platform. It was that, in many cases, a very large company knew what was happening and failed to meaningfully intervene.

solving problems for users should not be surprising. The company is under the constant threat of regulation and bad press. Facebook is doing what companies do, triaging and acting in its own self-interest.

He entered politics to advocate for traditional or socially conservative beliefs. “He glowed with certain passions—outlawing abortion, preserving family values, fighting bureaucrats on behalf of the little guy—that could not be championed in the stables,” Alberta writes. McBroom stated his position on gun ownership in 2012: “The Second Amendment guarantees our rights to own firearms[,] and I stand strongly for that correct interpretation.”

The American Conservative Union gave McBroom the best marks of any Michigan state senator—voting in line with the organization’s position 95 percent of the time—in 2019, the most recent year of data. By the old rules of political communication, no one is more qualified to be a “credible messenger” to the right-of-center voters of the U.P. than Ed McBroom.

last month, McBroom and three of his senate colleagues—two of them Republicans, only one a Democrat—released their report, and it “crackled with annoyance at certain far-flung beliefs,” writes Alberta:

His committee interviewed scores of witnesses, subpoenaed and reviewed

thousands of pages of documents, dissected the procedural mechanics of Michigan’s highly decentralized elections system, and scrutinized the most trafficked claims about corruption at the state’s ballot box in November. McBroom’s conclusion hit Lansing like a meteor: It was all a bunch of nonsense. “Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan,” McBroom wrote in the report. “There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.” For good measure, McBroom added: “The Committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain.”

“McBroom said he is not fazed by the criticism or the prospect of a primary challenge, which he was already expecting,” notes the Michigan Bridge. “I’ve been totally honest and up front, and if (voters) judge that’s not what they want, and if the majority of them want a different course of action, that’s okay,” he told that publication.

Yet despite three of the four senators who wrote the election report being Republicans; and despite McBroom’s ideological reputation, the product of a decade in Michigan’s state legislature (he was a state rep from 2010 to 2018), and the familiarity of the McBroom family name, and McBroom’s culturally Christian values—despite all that, his political standing is still taking a hit.

Trump trashed McBroom and the state senate president, Republican Mike Shirkey. He published their office phone numbers. He urged people to “vote them the hell out of office.”

more to the point about credible messengers is this: McBroom said that he’s felt heat from people he knows—allies of his—not just randos on social media. “It’s been very discouraging, and very sad, to have people I know who have supported me, and always said they respected me and found me to be honest, who suddenly don’t trust me because of what some guy told them on the internet,” he told Alberta.

So thorough were the authors’ conclusions that they recommended “the [state] attorney general consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County,” where an obvious and brief reporting error showed Biden thumping Trump, “to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”

What McBroom clarified is this:

Trump’s base is the animating force of the Republican party, which holds GOP officials accountable mostly for their accountability to Trump. To this group, there is no such thing as a credible critic of the former president.

the unanswered question that confronts coalition-builders today is how to reach a movement for which all reasoning is motivated reasoning; for which facts and proof are subjective

Terrorism, public health, and police violence are all life-and-death issues, and all involve the state, so they’re more consequential than the criticism, shunning, and loss of professional opportunities associated with cancel culture. But that doesn’t mean the latter isn’t a problem.

We can, and should, care about more than one thing at a time, and many things that aren’t the worst problem deserve attention.

Nevertheless, it’s important to assess problems accurately.

Michael Hobbes calls all this worrying about wokeness a “moral panic.” That’s a term some use online to wave away serious concerns, but Hobbes uses it the way sociologist Stanley Cohen did in the 1970s, as a phenomenon where something becomes “defined as a threat to societal values and interests” based on media accounts that “exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm.”

The point here is not that stranger abductions never happened, but that they didn’t happen nearly as much as the media, concerned parents, and lawmakers thought. And because stranger kidnappings were not a national crisis, but treated as one, the “solution” made things worse.

Along similar lines, Hobbes argues that anti-woke alarm-bell-ringing relies on a relatively small number of oft-repeated anecdotes. Some don’t stand up to scrutiny, and some of those that do are low-stakes. The resulting moral panic fuels, among other things, a wave of red state legislation aimed at banning “critical race theory” that uses vague language and effectively cracks down on teaching about racism in American history.

For that, we should look to data, and here again the problem looks smaller than anti-woke liberals make it out to be

In the universe of cancel culture cases, I find more incidents concerning than Hobbes and fewer concerning than Young, but “this one incident wasn’t actually bad” vs. “yes it really was” doesn’t answer the question about size and scope. It doesn’t tell us what, if anything, society should do about it.

In Liberal Currents, Adam Gurri cites the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which documented 426 “targeting incidents involving scholars at public and private American institutions of higher education” since 2015 and 492 “disinvitation attempts” since 1998

The organization Canceled People lists 217 cases of “cancellation” since 1991, while the National Association of Scholars (NAS) lists 194 cancellations in academia since 2004 (plus two in the 20th century).

Based on these numbers, Gurri concludes, “If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved.”

There are nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. U.S. News’ 2021 rankings of the best schools lists 1,452. Using that smaller number and NAS’s figure of 194 academic cancellations since 2004, the chance of a college or university experiencing a cancellation in a given year is less than 0.8 percent.

There are some concerning cases in the NAS database too, in which professors were fired for actions that should be covered under a basic principle of academic freedom — for example, reading aloud a Mark Twain passage that included a racial slur, even after giving students advance notice — so this isn’t a total non-issue. But the number of low stakes and relatively unobjectionable cases means the risk is lower than 0.8 percent (and it’s even lower than that, since NAS includes Canada and my denominator is ranked schools in the United States).

Similarly, FIRE classifies about 30 percent of the attempted disinvitations in its database as from the right. About 60 percent are from the left — the other 10 percent N/A — so if you want to argue that the left does this more, you’ve got some evidence. But still, the number of cases from the left is lower than the total. And more than half of FIRE’s attempted disinvitations did not result in anyone getting disinvited.

Using U.S. News’ ranked schools as the denominator, the chance of left-wing protestors trying to get a speaker disinvited at a college or university in a given year is about 0.5 percent. The chance of an actual disinvitation is less than 0.25 percent. And that’s in the entire school. To put this in perspective, my political science department alone hosts speakers most weeks of the semester.

Two things jump out here:

Bari Weiss and Anne Applebaum both cite a Cato study purporting to show this effect:

even if we assume these databases capture a fraction of actual instances — which would be surprising, given the media attention on this topic, but even so — the data does not show an illiberal left-wing movement in control of academia.

The number agreeing that the political climate prevents them from saying things they believe ranges from 42% to 77%, which is high across political views. That suggests self-censorship is, to a significant degree, a factor of the political, cultural, and technological environment, rather than caused by any particular ideology.

Conservatives report self-censoring more than liberals do.

The same study shows that the biggest increase in self-censorship from 2017 to 2020 was among strong liberals (+12), while strong conservatives increased the least (+1).

If this data told a story of ascendent Maoists suppressing conservative speech, it would probably be the opposite, with the left becoming more confident of expressing their views — on race, gender, etc. — while the right becomes disproportionately more fearful. Culture warriors fixate on wokeness, but when asked about the political climate, many Americans likely thought about Trumpism

Nevertheless, this data does show conservatives are more likely to say the political climate prevents them from expressing their beliefs. But what it doesn’t show is which beliefs or why.

Self-censoring can be a problem, but also not. The adage “do not discuss politics or religion in general company” goes back to at least 1879. If someone today is too scared to say “Robin DiAngelo’s conception of ‘white fragility’ does not stand up to logical scrutiny,” that’s bad. If they’re too scared to shout racial slurs at minorities, that isn’t. A lot depends on the content of the speech.

When I was a teenager in the 1990s, anti-gay slurs were common insults among boys, and tough-guy talk in movies. Now it’s a lot less common, one of the things pushed out of polite society, like the n-word, Holocaust denial, and sexual harassment. I think that’s a positive.

Another problem with the anti-woke interpretation of the Cato study is media constantly tells conservatives they’re under dire threat.

Fox News, including Tucker Carlson (the most-watched show on basic cable), Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino (frequently among the most-shared on Facebook), and other right-wing outlets devote tons of coverage to cancel culture, riling up conservatives with hyperbolic claims that people are coming for them

Anti-woke liberals in prestigious mainstream outlets tell them it’s the Cultural Revolution

Then a survey asks if the political climate prevents them from saying what they believe, and, primed by media, they say yes.

With so many writers on the anti-woke beat, it’s not especially plausible that we’re missing many cases of transgender servers getting people canceled for using the wrong pronoun in coffee shops to the point that everyone who isn’t fully comfortable with the terminology should live in fear. By overstating the threat of cancellation and the power of woke activists, anti-woke liberals are chilling speech they aim to protect.

a requirement to both-sides the Holocaust is a plausible read of the legal text. It’s an unsurprising result of empowering the state to suppress ideas in an environment with bad faith culture warriors, such as Chris Rufo and James Lindsay, advocating state censorship and deliberately stoking panic to get it.

Texas, Florida, and other states trying to suppress unwanted ideas in both K-12 and higher ed isn’t the Cultural Revolution either — no state-sanctioned mass violence here — but it’s coming from government, making it a bigger threat to speech and academic freedom.

To put this in perspective, antiracist guru Ibram X. Kendi has called for an “anti-racist Constitutional amendment,” which would “make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials,” and establish a Department of Anti-Racism to enforce it. It’s a terrible proposal that would repeal the First Amendment and get the state heavily involved in policing speech (which, even if well-intentioned, comes with serious risks of abuse).

It also doesn’t stand the slightest chance of happening.

It’s fair to characterize this article as anti-anti-woke. And I usually don’t like anti-anti- arguments, especially anti-anti-Trump (because it’s effectively pro). But in this case I’m doing it because I reject the binary.

American politics is often binary.

Culture is not. It’s an ever-changing mishmash, with a large variety of influential participants

There have been unmistakable changes in American culture — Western culture, really — regarding race and gender, but there are way more than two sides to that. You don’t have to be woke or anti-woke. It’s not a political campaign or a war. You can think all sorts of things, mixing and matching from these ideas and others.

I won’t say “this is trivial” nor “this stuff is great,” because I don’t think either. At least not if “this” means uncompromising Maoists seeking domination.

I think that’s bad, but it’s not especially common. It’s not fiction — I’m online a lot, I have feet in both media and academia, I’ve seen it too — but, importantly, it’s not in control

I think government censorship is inherently more concerning than private censorship, and that we can’t sufficiently counter the push for state idea-suppression without countering the overstated fears that rationalize it.

I think a lot of the private censorship problem can be addressed by executives and administrators — the ones who actually have power over businesses and universities — showing a bit of spine. Don’t fold at the first sign of protest. Take some time to look into it yourself, and make a judgment call on whether discipline is merited and necessary. Often, the activist mob will move on in a few days anyway.

I think that, with so much of the conversation focusing on extremes, people often miss when administrators do this.

I think violence is physical, and that while speech can be quite harmful, it’s better to think of these two things as categorically different than to insist harmful speech is literally violence.

at a baseline, treating people as equals means respecting who they say they are. The vast majority are not edge cases like a competitive athlete, but regular people trying to live their lives. Let them use the bathroom in peace.

I think the argument that racism and other forms of bigotry operate at a systemic or institutional, in addition to individual, level is insightful, intuitive, and empirically supported. We can improve people’s lives by taking that into account when crafting laws, policies, and practices.

I think identity and societal structures shape people’s lives (whether they want it to or not) but they’re far from the only factors. Treating them as the only, or even predominant, factor essentializes more than it empowers.

I think transgender and non-binary people have a convincing case for equality. I don’t think that points to clear answers on every question—what’s the point of gender segregated sports?

I think free association is an essential value too. Which inherently includes the right of disassociation.

I think these situations often fall into a gray area, and businesses should be able to make their own judgment calls about personnel, since companies have a reasonable interest in protecting their brand.

I think free speech is an essential value, not just at the legal level, but culturally as well. I think people who would scrap it, from crusading antiracists to social conservatives pining for Viktor Orban’s Hungary, have a naively utopian sense of how that would go (both in general and for them specifically). Getting the state involved in speech suppression is a bad idea.

I think America’s founding was a big step forward for government and individual liberty, and early America was a deeply racist, bigoted place that needed Amendments (13-15; 19), Civil Rights Acts, and landmark court cases to become a liberal democracy. I don’t think it’s hard to hold both of those in your head at the same time.

I think students learning the unvarnished truth about America’s racist past is good, and that teaching students they are personally responsible for the sins of the past is not.

I think synthesis of these cultural forces is both desirable and possible. Way more people think both that bigotry is bad and individual freedom is good than online arguments lead you to believe.

I don’t think the sides are as far apart as they think.

I think we should disaggregate cancel culture and left-wing identity politics. Cancellation should be understood as an internet phenomenon.

If it ever was just something the left does, it isn’t anymore.

I think a lot of us could agree that social media mobbing and professional media attention on minor incidents is wrong, especially as part of a campaign to get someone fired. In general, disproportionally severe social and professional sanctions is a problem, no matter the alleged cause.

I think most anti-woke liberals really do want to defend free speech and academic freedom. But I don’t think their panic-stoking hyperbole is helping.

Japan’s complicated relationship with vaccines can be traced to successful class-action lawsuits brought against the health ministry by a small number of parents who claimed – without presenting evidence of a causal link – their children had experienced serious side-effects from the MMR vaccine in the 1990s.

“There was also an element of ‘negativity’ in spurring people to get vaccinated. People decided they should have the vaccine so they could tell other people that they were not a threat. It was a social courtesy, and to protect themselves, of course.”

Iwata has been critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic, but praised its approach to inoculations. “The Covid vaccination programme has been a great success,” he said. “I have never seen something implemented this pragmatically in the history of vaccinations in Japan.”

Initially, however, even government politicians and health experts were cautious about encouraging people to have the Covid jab. The turning point came in the summer, as Tokyo was preparing to host the 2020 Olympics in defiance of public opinion.

“Japanese bureaucrats are quite hesitant when it comes to advocating vaccines, however, particularly after the government lost lawsuits regarding side effects from the MMR vaccine,” he said.

The shift in attitudes is not limited to the Covid-19 vaccine. A panel on Friday said the health ministry should resume actively recommending the HPV vaccine – which is universally recognised as safe and effective – to teenage girls. Japan withdrew the recommendation – but kept the vaccine available free of charge – in 2013 after sensationalist media reports of alleged severe side-effects.

Although no causal link between the vaccine and side-effects was established, the rate of HPV inoculation fell from 70% in 2013 to less than 1%.

Sakikawa, who said she and almost all of her initially vaccine-hesitant friends were now fully jabbed, acknowledged that peer pressure had influenced their decision.

“There was definitely a feeling that we should have the vaccine, since everyone else seemed to be having it, and we promised we would meet up once we were double jabbed. Now it’s easier to go out and meet friends and do the all the things we couldn’t do before.”

For the first time in American history, in 1994, the federal government funded states to change their laws and practices that treated domestic violence and sexual assault as less serious than other offenses. The law included a provision to address state justice system’s routine mishandling of sexual assault cases, putting accountability in the hands of survivors by enabling them to seek redress themselves. The law declared it a federal “civil right” to be free from gender-based violence.

In 2000, the Court declared the Violence Against Women Acts’s civil rights remedy unconstitutional precisely because it dealt with sexual abuse crimes.  Despite the fact that the law allowed private survivors to seek damages, the court ignored the civil nature of the remedy and declared the underlying fact of sexual abuse had to be considered a crime.

The justices were almost hysterical about the danger: If the federal government could regulate sexual abuse, they said it would “obliterate” the distinction between the federal and state governments.

The decision was supposed to be about federalism, but it led to no legal revolution.  In fact, five years later, the Court decided another case, Gonzales v. Raich, allowing the federal government to regulate an individual’s marjuana possession, even though that too involved “crime,” on the theory that there was a commercial market for marijuana.  Many law professors think Gonzales silently overruled Morrison, giving the federal government the power to regulate all sorts of crime, just not sexual assault.

How did this happen? How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path?

For the American delegates, the question belonged to the higher plane of moral principle. The delegation wanted to extend into the international sphere the classic liberal notion of press freedom, which would prohibit governments from censoring the news and enshrine the rights of journalists to access sources and to dispatch the news across borders.

Carlos Romulo, the legendary Philippine diplomat and journalist who had uncovered Japanese atrocities in his country, went so far as to call freedom of information the “touchstone of all the freedoms to which the UN is consecrated.” World War II had been horrifying in scale and severity; information barriers were believed to have played a part. Japan’s and Germany’s bids for autarky had insulated their citizens from global currents, incubated aggressive nationalism, and, from the perspective of American policymakers, driven the world into war.

The answer, Sam Lebovic’s new book, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization, convincingly argues, largely comes down to American policy in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

But when 600 or so journalists, media magnates, and diplomats arrived in Geneva in 1948 to draft the press freedom clauses for both the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, definitional difficulties abounded. Between what the U.S. meant by “freedom of information” and what the rest of the world needed lay a vast expanse.

By 1949, American films made up around half of the European and Asian markets, 62 percent of the African market, 64 percent of the South American market, and three-quarters of the Central American and Pacific markets.

Back in Geneva, delegates from the global south pointed out these immense inequalities. S.A. Brelvi of India called for the wealthier nations to equitably allocate the “supplies of physical facilities and technical equipment for the dissemination of information between all countries.” But the American delegates refused the idea that global inequality itself was a barrier to the flow of information across borders. Besides, they argued, redistributive measures violated the sanctity of the press

The U.S. was able to strong-arm its notion of press freedom—a hybrid combining the American Constitution’s First Amendment and a consumer right to receive information across borders—at the conference, but the U.N.’s efforts to define and ensure the freedom of information ended in a stalemate.

The failure to redistribute resources, the lack of multilateral investment in producing more balanced international flows of information, and the might of the American culture industry at the end of the war—all of this amounted to a guarantee of the American right to spread information and culture across the globe.

But representatives of other states had more earthly concerns. The war had tilted the planet’s communications infrastructure to America’s advantage. In the late 1940s, for example, the U.S. consumed 63 percent of the world’s newsprint supply; to put it more starkly, the country consumed as much newsprint in a single day as India did over the course of a year. A materials shortage would hamper newspaper production across much of the world into at least the 1950s (though this did provide the fringe benefit of enabling political interference with the press: The CIA supplied Italian anti-Communist newspapers with newsprint in the lead-up to the 1948 election, while the U.S. occupation administration in Japan cut the allocation of newsprint to local Communist newspapers). The war had also laid low foreign news agencies—Germany’s Wolff and France’s Havas had disappeared entirely—and not a single news agency called the global south home. At the same time, America’s Associated Press and United Press International both had plans for global expansion,

The focus of A Righteous Smokescreen is broader. It is a study of both sides of the globalization ledger: As the U.S. exported its culture in astonishing amounts, it imported very little

it remained surprisingly cut off from the rest of the world. A parochial empire, but with a global reach.

Containment, Lebovic shows, wasn’t just a territorial strategy committed to holding back Soviet expansion into Europe and Asia. Rather, it began at the American border and it involved policing the flow of people and ideas that were potentially inimical to the American status quo

An Iron Curtain, to rejig Churchill’s famous speech about Soviet policies in Eastern Europe, had descended around the U.S.

can be seen in the American national security state’s efforts to block out “propaganda.”

Throughout most of the second half of the twentieth century, Americans had to seek government approval to purchase magazines, books, and even stamps from China, North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, and Vietnam.

An untold number of parcels—untold because for several years of the program they didn’t have to notify would-be recipients that the government had decided to destroy their mail—never arrived at their American destination.

even without direct state interference, American culture had inward-looking tendencies

Few of the films shown in American cinemas were foreign (largely a result of the Motion Picture Production Code, which the industry began imposing on itself in 1934; code authorities prudishly disapproved of the sexual mores of European films)

Few television programs came from abroad (about 1 percent, in fact, in the early 1970s—compared to 12 percent in Britain and 84 percent in Guatemala)

Few newspapers subscribed to foreign news agencies. Even fewer had foreign correspondents. And very few pages in those papers were devoted to foreign affairs.

In 1910, nearly 15 percent of the American population had been born overseas, but by 1960, that portion shrank to only 5.4 percent. Similarly, bureaucrats in the burgeoning national security state kept a variety of radicals from entering and leaving the country. Since World War I, foreign anarchists, Communists, and others—ranging from German spies and saboteurs to Black internationalists—found the gate to the U.S. bolt-locked. Likewise, Americans whom the State Department identified as holding so-called “alien” beliefs were barred from the exits.

In-person contact with foreigners was limited, too, thanks to travel controls.

Two exhibitions, one in the U.S., the other in the Soviet Union: Yet neither artist could attend their own exhibition because of American border policies. The State Department had denied Picasso a visa back in 1950 on ideological grounds, and it refused to issue a passport to Kent because of his alleged sympathies for communism.

So-called “area restrictions” forbade all Americans from traveling to countries in the Communist bloc.

in the 1940s and ’50s, hundreds or even thousands of Americans—more precise data from the innards of the national security state is rather difficult to come by—were denied passports and many, many more never thought to apply for one in the first place, out of fear of what a background check might turn up.

(about half of all foreign scientists who sought to enter the U.S. in the early postwar years encountered visa difficulties).

how “actively engaged” was the U.S., really? The answer in Menand’s exploration of culture in the early Cold War is: very. Menand points to the rest of the world’s ravenous consumption of American entertainment as evidence, as well as how Americans “welcomed and adapted art, ideas, and entertainment from other countries”

as Louis Menand notes on the first page of his recent book, The Free World, it was an era in which “the United States was actively engaged with the rest of the world.”

in Lebovic’s telling, this was a narrow stream. A lot of its contents were foreign imports that had already been thoroughly Americanized.

The flow of foreign culture and ideas into the U.S. was so limited that building bridges with the rest of the world became an important impulse of the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s,

“It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions,”

In the days after the attack, Reddit banned a discussion forum dedicated to former President Donald J. Trump, where tens of thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters regularly convened to express solidarity with him.

In the year since the events of Jan. 6, social media companies have been heavily scrutinized for whether their sites played an instrumental role in organizing the attack.

In the months surrounding the 2020 election, employees inside Meta raised warning signs that Facebook posts and comments containing “combustible election misinformation” were spreading quickly across the social network, according to a cache of documents and photos reviewed by The New York Times.

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, said the company relaxed its safeguards too quickly after the election, which then led it to be used in the storming of the Capitol.

On Twitter, many of Mr. Trump’s followers used the site to amplify and spread false allegations of election fraud, while connecting with other Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists using the site. And on YouTube, some users broadcast the events of Jan. 6 using the platform’s video streaming technology.

Meta said that it had “produced documents to the committee on a schedule committee staff requested — and we will continue to do so.”

The committee said letters to the four firms accompanied the subpoenas.The panel said YouTube served as a platform for “significant communications by its users that were relevant to the planning and execution of Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol,” including livestreams of the attack as it was taking place.

The panel said Facebook and other Meta platforms were used to share messages of “hate, violence and incitement; to spread misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories around the election; and to coordinate or attempt to coordinate the Stop the Steal movement.”

“Meta has declined to commit to a deadline for producing or even identifying these materials,” Mr. Thompson wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive.

The panel said it was focused on Reddit because the platform hosted the r/The_Donald subreddit community that grew significantly before migrating in 2020 to the website TheDonald.win, which ultimately hosted significant discussion and planning related to the Jan. 6 attack.

“Unfortunately, the select committee believes Twitter has failed to disclose critical information,” the panel stated.

In recent years, Big Tech and Washington have had a history of butting heads. Some Republicans have accused sites including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter of silencing conservative voices.

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether a number of tech companies have grown too big, and in the process abused their market power to stifle competition. And a bipartisan group of senators and representatives continues to say sites like Facebook and YouTube are not doing enough to curb the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

After months of discussions with the companies, only the four large corporations were issued subpoenas on Thursday, because the committee said the firms were “unwilling to commit to voluntarily and expeditiously” cooperating with its work.

The panel has interviewed more than 340 witnesses and issued dozens of subpoenas, including for bank and phone records.

“It’s completely unacceptable to spy on journalists,” said Carlos Dada, the founder and director of El Faro. “It endangers our sources, it limits our work and it also endangers our families.”

An El Faro journalist’s phone had been reinfected with the spyware over 40 times, the most persistent hacking attempt by Pegasus yet to be discovered.

Revelations that Pegasus software has been used to unjustly spy in El Salvador may not come as a complete surprise, but there is no match to our outrage.”

El Salvador’s government denied responsibility, and a spokesperson with NSO Group would not say whether Pegasus spyware had been provided to El Salvador’s governments, past or present.

“The government of El Salvador is investigating the possible use of Pegasus,”

a prized Israeli technology company whose spyware has long been under scrutiny for its ability to capture all activity on a smartphone — including a user’s keystrokes, location data, sound and video recordings, photos, contacts and encrypted information — and for mounting allegations of misuse by repressive governments.

The spokesman added that the company does not know who the targets of its customers are, but that NSO works to ensure that its tools are used only for authorized purposes.

The Biden administration blacklisted NSO Group in November, stating that the company had knowingly supplied spyware used by foreign governments to “maliciously target” the phones of human rights activists, journalists and others.

After the American government blacklisted NSO Group, the company promised that Pegasus was only licensed to governments with good human rights records.

But in December it was announced that the iPhones of 11 American Embassy employees working in Uganda had been hacked using Pegasus spyware.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for NSO Group, who declined to provide their name, maintained the company only provides its software to legitimate intelligence agencies and to law enforcement agencies to fight criminals and terrorists.

In August it was revealed that Pegasus had been secretly installed on the smartphones of at least three dozen journalists, activists and business executives across the world, including close associates of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The Israeli military has also been criticized for its human rights violations at home and abroad.

El Salvador has been criticized for intimidating and censoring local media.

El Salvador’s president, Mr. Bukele, has come under withering criticism from the United States government and rights groups for using the military to interfere with the legislature and to suspend Supreme Court judges and the attorney general.

Voters in some major cities, in addition to choosing their next mayor, will also have the opportunity to weigh in on an important issue that has been heavily debated in their communities.

Proposition 6 would codify the right for long-term care residents to designate an essential caregiver for in-person visitation.

Texas -- Proposition 3 Read MoreWritten in response to Covid-19 restrictions, Texans will consider a constitutional amendment that would prohibit the state or a political subdivision, such as an elected official, from "prohibiting or limiting religious services of religious organizations."

Like Proposition 3, Proposition 6 was also influenced by the Covid-19 restrictions enforced during the height of the pandemic.

Texas -- Proposition 3 Read MoreWritten in response to Covid-19 restrictions, Texans will consider a constitutional amendment that would prohibit the state or a political subdivision, such as an elected official, from "prohibiting or limiting religious services of religious organizations." Enter your email or view the Vault By CNN webpage to own a piece of CNN History with blockchain technology.close dialogExplore Vault by CNN . Presidential elections, space discoveries, CNN exclusives and more.Explore NowGet UpdatesBe the first to know about upcoming releases from our Vault, with updates delivered right to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign Me UpBy subscribing, you agree to our privacy policy.Success!See you in your inbox.close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1426699 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1426699 *//* custom css from creative 60682 *//* V Text Alignment Fix */ .bx-custom.bx-campaign-1426699 .bx-row-input + .bx-row-submit { vertical-align: top;}/* custom css from creative 60872 *//************************************ CREATIVE STRUCTURE Do not remove or edit unless non applicable to creative set.************************************//* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1426699 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1426699.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 185px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1426699.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {bo

Cleveland -- Issue 24 Ballot initiative Issue 24 would establish a new civilian commission, called the Community Police Commission, whose members will have final authority over the police department's policy and procedures, hiring and training, and disciplinary action.

Question 2 would replace Minneapolis Police Department with a new "Department of Public Safety" overseen by the mayor and city council.

Proposal 7, also known as Local Law J, asks city residents whether to expand a civilian police review board's authority to conduct investigations and "to exercise oversight, review, and resolution of community complaints alleging abuse of police authority."

Austin, Texas -- Proposition A Voters in Austin, Texas are being asked whether to bulk up the city's police department with Proposition A, as its supporters argue that the city is in the midst of a "crime wave" and a shortage of police officers.Proposition A would require that the Austin police department employs at least two police officers for every 1,000 residents.

Detroit -- Proposal R A "yes" vote on Proposal R would be in favor of the Detroit City Council establishing a task force that would recommend housing and economic programs that "address historical discrimination against the Black community in Detroit."

New Jersey -- Question No. 1 Question No. 1 asks New Jersey voters whether to allow betting on college sports. Currently, sports betting on college events in the state and on college events in which New Jersey teams participate is prohibited.

Richmond, Virginia -- Local ReferendumResidents of Virginia's capital city will decide whether to approve the construction of a new casino and 250-room luxury hotel in south Richmond along the I-95 highway.

New York -- Ballot Proposal 1New Yorkers are being reminded to flip over their ballots to answer five statewide ballot proposals.

New York -- Ballot Proposal 3New York currently requires that its residents register to vote at least 10 days before an election. Ballot Proposal 3 would remove that requirement, clearing the way for state lawmakers to enact new laws that would allow a resident to register to vote in less than 10 days -- such as same-day voter registration.

New York -- Ballot Proposal 4As it stands now, New York voters may vote by absentee ballot if they are unable to appear at their polling place due to illness or physical disability or expect to be absent from their county of residence, or New York City if they're residents, on Election Day.Ballot Proposal 4 asks whether to eliminate the requirement that a voter provide a reason if they wish to vote by absentee ballot.

Philadelphia -- Question #1: Asks whether to amend the city charter so it urges the Pennsylvania legislature and governor to legalize cannabis for recreational use in the state.

She now faces up to 20 years in prison for each count, although legal experts say she is unlikely to receive the maximum sentence.

The jury deadlocked on three remaining charges, which a federal judge anticipates dismissing as part of a mistrial ruling that could come as early as next week. The split verdicts are “a mixed bag for the prosecution, but it’s a loss for Elizabeth Holmes because she is going away to prison for at least a few years,” said David Ring, a lawyer who has followed the case closely.

Iran has reportedly tried to balance its support of Kadhimi with its alliance with local groups, who are alleged to have attempted to assassinate the prime minister last month.

Hadi al-Amiri, the leader of the Iran-backed coalition Fatah, said in a statement he and his bloc would abide by the court ruling. Asaib Ahl Al Haq, an armed group that is part of the Fatah coalition, expressed disappointment at the ruling, without saying if it would challenge it.

Norman Pattis, a lawyer for Jones, said an appeal of Bellis’ default ruling is planned.

Judge Barbara Bellis took the rare step of issuing a default judgment in the case because she said Jones and his companies, Infowars and Free Speech Systems, had failed to turn over documents including records that might have showed how, and if, they had profited from spreading misinformation about the school shooting and other mass killings.

Shortly after the judge’s decision, Jones went on his show and said he’d been deprived of a fair trial.

His lawyers have asked that Bellis be removed from the case, alleging she has not been impartial.

The ruling has the same outcome as a jury determining the case in favor of the families. A jury will now determine the damages.

The shooting was portrayed on Jones’ Infowars show as a hoax involving actors aimed at increasing gun control. Jones has since acknowledged the school shooting did occur.

Families of the victims said they have been subjected to harassment and death threats from Jones’ followers because of the hoax conspiracy pushed on Infowars. They sued Jones and his companies for defamation and infliction of emotional distress. The hearing on damages before a jury is expected to be held next year.

In one of the lawsuits, a Texas judge in 2019 ordered Jones to pay $100,000 in legal fees and refused to dismiss the suit. And a jury in Wisconsin awarded $450,000 to one of the parents in his lawsuit against conspiracy theorist writers, not including Jones, who claimed the massacre never happened.

Haugen filed at least eight complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that the company is hiding research about its shortcomings from investors and the public.

Haugen, who started at Facebook in 2019 after previously working for other tech giants like Google (GOOGL GOOGLE) and Pinterest (PINS), is set to testify on Tuesday before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security.

Facebook has aggressively pushed back against the reports, calling many of the claims "misleading" and arguing that its apps do more good than harm.

Haugen said she believes Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg "never set out to make a hateful platform, but he has allowed choices to be made where the side effects of those choices are that hateful and polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach."

Pietsch released a more than 700-word statement laying out what it called "missing facts" from the segment

Lena Pietsch said in a statement to CNN Business immediately following the "60 Minutes" interview. "We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true."

Haugen said she was recruited by Facebook in 2019 and took the job to work on addressing misinformation. But after the company decided to dissolve its civic integrity team shortly after the 2020 Presidential Election, her feelings about the company started to change.

The social media company's algorithm that's designed to show users content that they're most likely to engage with is responsible for many of its problems

Haugen said that while "no one at Facebook is malevolent ... the incentives are misaligned."

the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume."

A senior State Department official underscored the urgency, telling reporters: “We are now at a point where Russia could launch an attack on Ukraine at any time.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki underscored the urgency. “We’re now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack in Ukraine. And what Secretary Blinken is going to go do is highlight very clearly there is a diplomatic path forward,” she said.

From Kyiv, Blinken will travel to Berlin, where he will meet with his German, British and French counterparts to discuss a possible response to any Russian military action. In Geneva on Friday, Blinken will be testing Lavrov on Russia’s interest in a “diplomatic off-ramp” for the crisis, the senior State Department official said.

Blinken’s meetings follow inconclusive diplomatic talks between Moscow and the West in Europe last week that failed to resolve stark disagreements over Ukraine and other security matters.

Russia has massed some 100,000 troops with tanks and other heavy weapons on its own soil near the Ukrainian border in what many observers believe may be preparation for an invasion.

CIA Director William Burns visited Kyiv last Wednesday to consult with his Ukrainian counterparts and discuss current assessments of the risk to Ukraine, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss Burns’ schedule, which is classified. While there, he also discussed the current situation with Zelenskyy and efforts to de-escalate tensions.Blinken spoke by phone Tuesday with Lavrov, discussing the diplomatic talks and meetings held last week. The State Department said Blinken “stressed the importance of continuing a diplomatic path to de-escalate tensions” surrounding the Russia-Ukraine situation and “reiterated the unshakable U.S. commitment” to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.On Monday, Lavrov, Russia’s top diplomat, rejected the U.S. allegations that his country was preparing a pretext to invade Ukraine. Speaking to reporters, he dismissed the U.S. claim as “total disinformation.”

Russia in 2014 seized the Crimean Peninsula after the ouster of Ukraine’s Moscow-friendly leader and also threw its weight behind a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine. More than 14,000 people have been killed in nearly eight years of fighting between the Russia-backed rebels and Ukrainian forces in the country’s industrial heartland called Donbas.

Putin has warned that Moscow will take unspecified “military-technical measures” if the West stonewalls its demands.

“In some ways Amazon doesn’t really want to be a retailer,” said Juozas Kaziukenas of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce consultant. “It doesn’t want to do curation or offer human interaction,” two of the essential qualities of retail for centuries.

Offering tens of millions of items to hundreds of millions of customers prevents any human touch — but opens up a lot of space for advertising, and for confusion and duplicity.

It’s the paradox of plenty: The more things there are to buy, the more difficult it is to find the right thing among the plethora of ads and competition, new material and secondhand, quality and garbage.

“Amazon knows what I buy, how often I buy, what I search for,” Mr. Kaziukenas said. “But decades after it launched, it can’t answer a simple question — what would Juozas like to buy? Instead it shows me thousands of deals, with some basic filters like category and price, and hopes I will find what I like. Amazon is so much work.”

Once upon a time, when the dot-coms roamed the earth, the Amazon bookstore was a simple place. It had knowledgeable human editors, bountiful discounts and delivery that was speedy for the era. For the book-obsessed, it offered every publisher’s backlist, obscure but irresistible titles that had previously been difficult to discover and acquire.

Amazon “doesn’t care if this third-party stuff is a chaotic free-for-all,” she added. “In fact, it’s better for Amazon if legitimate businesses don’t stand a chance. In the same way Amazon wants to turn all work into gig jobs, it wants to turn running a business into a gig job. That way it can walk off with all the spoils.”

Third-party sellers were an Amazon innovation in the late 1990s. Before that, stores either entirely controlled the shopping experience or, if they had a lot of sellers under one roof, were called flea markets and were not quite reputable.

Amazon in theory offered the brisk competition of the latter while exercising the oversight of the former. Bringing in third-party sellers was also a way for Amazon to champion how it was helping small businesses, which helped defuse controversies about its size and behavior.

A new report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a research and advocacy group often critical of Amazon, details the most direct benefit of third-party sellers to the retailer: profits. A third-party seller pays Amazon $34 out of every $100 in sales, the nonprofit institute calculates, up from $19 in 2014.

The money comes from fees, ads and premium logistics that make the merchandise more visible to potential buyers. Amazon called the report “intentionally misleading” because the site does not force sellers to advertise or use its logistics system.

The combination of all those things in one place was a sensation. Amazon quickly took market share from independent stores and chains.

“Best sellers and other books that you might find at a local bookstore are almost all sold by Amazon itself at prices that keep those competitors at bay,” Ms. Mitchell said. “Then Amazon lets third-party sellers do the rest of the books, taking a huge cut of their sales.”

Bookselling at Amazon is a two-tier system, said Stacy Mitchell, a co-director of the institute and the author of the report, “Amazon’s Toll Road: How the Tech Giant Funds Its Monopoly Empire by Exploiting Small Businesses.”

Extraordinary prices for ordinary books have been an Amazon mystery for years, but the backdating of titles to gain a commercial edge appears to be a new phenomenon. A listing with a fake date gets a different Amazon page from a listing with the correct date. In essence, those Boland books were in another virtual aisle of the bookstore. That could power sales.

Mark Lemley, the director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, said the company was probably right. “I don’t think Amazon will be liable for misstatements posted by others, and certainly not if it wasn’t aware of them,” he said.

In 2019, Mr. Bezos celebrated the fact that Amazon’s two million independent sellers were doing so well. “To put it bluntly: Third-party sellers are kicking our first party butt,” he wrote. They were pulling in $90,000 a year on average, the company said.

The U.S. attorney’s office in the Western District of Michigan recently announced arrests in a case involving Amazon’s textbook rental program. Geoffrey Mark Hays Talsma was charged with selling his rentals of “Using Econometrics: A Practical Guide,” “Chemistry: Atoms First” and other volumes instead of returning them.

At Amazon, the customer is king. According to the indictment, Mr. Talsma profited by repeatedly saying he had received the wrong products. He said, for instance, he had mistakenly been shipped flammable products that could not be returned, like a bottle of Tiki Torch Fuel that was leaking. Amazon would then credit his account.

What’s remarkable is the scale, length and profitability of this alleged activity. Amazon allows customers to rent up to 15 textbooks at a time. With the help of three confederates, Mr. Talsma rented more than 14,000 textbooks from Amazon over five years, making $3.4 million, prosecutors say. His lawyer declined to comment.

It’s the same story over and over again, Mr. Boland said: “Amazon has done a great job of expanding the marketplace for books. It’s too bad they’ve decided not to police their own platform, because it’s leading to all sorts of trouble.”

Amazon has resisted requiring its sellers to share more information about themselves. It has opposed lawmakers’ efforts to demand more transparency, saying it would violate sellers’ privacy. Recently it signaled guarded approval of a weaker bill but noted that there were a few parts of it “that could be refined.”

“It doesn’t seem like anyone at Amazon is saying: ‘We’re junking the store up. We have to decide what’s best for the customer,’” said Ms. Friedman, the publishing consultant.

Small presses say it’s hard to get Amazon to acknowledge a mistake, because it’s hard to get hold of a human being who could fix it. Valancourt Books, a publisher in Richmond, Va., that has won acclaim for its reissues of horror and gay interest titles, frequently runs afoul of the site.