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Covid Prescription: Get the Vaccine, Wait a Month, Return to Normal - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...h-return-to-normal-11615401516 vaccine effects consequences pandemic
shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • the CDC finally started telling vaccinated people that they can have normal interactions with other vaccinated people—but only in highly limited circumstances. Given the impressive effectiveness of the vaccine, that should have been immediately obvious by applying scientific inference and common sense.
  • Parts of the new guidelines are absurdly restrictive.
  • the CDC didn’t withdraw its advice to avoid air travel after vaccination. A year of prevaccine experience has demonstrated that airplanes aren’t a source of spread. A study conducted for the defense department found that commercial planes have HEPA filtration and airflow that exceed the standards of a hospital operating room.
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  • An unpublished study conducted by the Israeli Health Ministry and Pfizer showed that vaccination reduced transmission by 89% to 94% and almost totally prevented hospitalization and death, according to press reports. Immunity kicks in fully about four weeks after the first vaccine dose, and then you are essentially bulletproof.
  • On a positive note, the CDC did say that fully vaccinated people who are asymptomatic don’t need to be tested.
  • that obvious recommendation should have come two months ago, before wasting so many tests on people who have high levels of circulating antibodies from vaccination.
  • self-harm among kids increased as much as 300% last year in some parts of the country
  • The CDC highlights the vaccines’ stunning success but is ridiculously cautious about its implications. Public-health officials focus myopically on transmission risk while all but ignoring the broader health crisis stemming from isolation. The CDC acknowledges “potential” risks of isolation, but doesn’t go into details.
  • Separating family members was excessive and cruel, driven by narrow thinking that focused singularly on reducing viral transmission risk, heedless of the harm to the quality of human life.
  • As people yearn to be with their loved ones and rebuild communities, we shouldn’t repeat that mistake. We cannot exaggerate the public-health threat, as we did with hospital visitation rules, and keep crushing the human spirit with overly restrictive policies for vaccinated Americans.
  • Loneliness has become a public-health crisis. In pre-Covid times, it was estimated that 20% of American’s struggled with loneliness, a figure that has surely multiplied faster than research has been able to measure
  • n its guidance the CDC says the risks of infection in vaccinated people “cannot be completely eliminated.” True, we don’t have conclusive data that guarantees vaccination reduces risk to zero. We never will. We are operating in the realm of medical discretion based on the best available data, as practicing physicians have always done
  • I too will invoke “common sense” to answer the big question so many are asking: What am I allowed to do after I’ve been vaccinated? Once a month has passed after your first shot, go back to normal.
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Opinion | The Supreme Court must undo the harms that flowed from its 'Roe v. Wade' over... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...lowed-its-roe-v-wade-overreach supreme court
shared by martinelligi on 27 May 21 - No Cached
  • The landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision establishing the right to abortion arrived in January 1973. It happened during a month of milestones in a long season of American convulsions. Former president Lyndon B. Johnson died the same day Roe was handed down, two days after Richard M. Nixon was sworn in as president for a second term, and a day before Nixon would announce the Paris Peace Accords ending the Vietnam War — or so the country believed.
  • Now, nearly half a century later, the Supreme Court has agreed to take up a case that could finally undo Roe’s vast expansion of the judiciary’s power. But such hopes have been disappointed in the past.
  • Now perhaps the court will finally come to grips with the consequences of that unconstitutional ambition to be the “decider in chief” of all divisive issues. In deciding to hear a case next fall involving a Mississippi law that bans most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy (Roe drew the line at six months), the court will, in effect, weigh the right of states to establish their own abortion laws without regard for Roe and Casey.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Signs Transgender Athlete Bill Into Law : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ransgender-athlete-bill-into-l florida transgender Culture
shared by mimiterranova on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Florida's Republican governor signed a bill Tuesday barring transgender females from playing on public school teams intended for student athletes born as girls, plunging the state into the national culture war over transgender rights.
  • "In Florida, girls are going to play girls sports and boys are going to play boys sports,"
  • The NCAA, which oversees college athletics, has said it has "a long-standing policy that provides a more inclusive path for transgender participation in college sports." The NCAA currently requires transgender women to get treatment to lower their testosterone levels before they can compete in women's sports.
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  • The measure approved by the GOP-led Legislature takes effect July 1. It says a transgender student athlete can't participate without first showing a birth certificate saying she was a girl when she was born
  • The law would not bar female athletes from playing on boys or men's teams.
  • Human Rights Campaign President Alphonso David said the new law would not only harm transgender girls. "All Floridians will have to face the consequences of this anti-transgender legislation — including economic harm, expensive taxpayer-funded legal battles, and a tarnished reputation."
  • The Florida law mirrors an Idaho law, the first of its kind when enacted last year, that is now mired in legal challenges. GOP governors in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee recently signed similar measures.
  • North Carolina stood to lose $3.8 billion over a dozen years because of a so-called "bathroom bill." Those losses were averted when a 2019 settlement kept the state from barring transgender people from using bathrooms that conformed to their gender identity.
  • mimiterranova on 03 Jun 21
     
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Senate Democrats Urge Google To Investigate Racial Bias In Its Tools And The Company : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...bias-in-your-tools-and-company
shared by anonymous on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • A group of Democratic senators is urging Google parent company Alphabet to investigate how its products and policies may be harming Black people.
  • In a letter to the tech giant's CEO, Sundar Pichai, and other executives, Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Mark Warner of Virginia, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said they worried about bias and discrimination, both in the products Google makes and the way it's handled workplace diversity.
  • They highlighted several examples of Google products that appeared to produce biased results or potential harms for Black people.
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  • They cited recent reporting from Vice showing that a new app to identify skin conditions hadn't been trained using a "sufficiently diverse" dataset and therefore wasn't effective on people with dark skin.
  • The senators suggested the company has not made good on racial justice pledges Pichai made in a letter to employees and congressional testimony following the murder of George Floyd a year ago.
  • The first step, the senators said, is a "racial equity audit." They want Google to work with outside civil rights and legal experts to identify the root causes of any discrimination within the company and its tools, and what it can do to address the problems.
  • The companies have also been slammed for not paying enough attention to the impact of their technologies on people of color and the way their design and development may perpetuate bias.
  • In their letter to Google, the lawmakers pointed to Facebook and Airbnb, which have done similar audits examining racial bias and discrimination on their platforms and within their companies after outside pressure from activists and lawmakers.
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Biden White House Disavows Knowledge of Gag Order in Leak Case - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...order-new-york-times-leak.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden had declared last month that he would not let prosecutors go after reporters’ communications data, after disclosures that the Trump Justice Department had secretly seized phone data of Washington Post reporters and phone and email data of a CNN reporter.
  • But Mr. Biden’s comment — which came before the Justice Department notified the same four Times reporters this week that it had secretly seized their phone records in 2020 — was seemingly off the cuff, and contradicted existing department regulations that dated to the Obama administration.
  • Mr. Biden’s seemingly unequivocal vow never to let the Justice Department go after reporters’ records in leak investigations has made some veteran national security officials, including from Democratic administrations, uncomfortable.
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  • Mary McCord, who led the Justice Department’s national security division late in the Obama administration and into the first part of the Trump administration, argued that there should be flexibility to do so under certain circumstances, if all other methods of gathering information had been exhausted.
  • Separately, the Justice Department informed USA Today on Saturday that it was withdrawing a disputed subpoena seeking information about who had read an online article about a February shootout in Florida in which two F.B.I. agents were killed. U
  • That meeting occurred about three weeks after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland took office, and about two months before the Justice Department asked a judge to quash the order to Google.Mr. Coley has noted that “on multiple occasions in recent months,” the Biden-era department had moved to delay enforcement of the order and it then “voluntarily moved to withdraw the order before any records were produced.”
  • The regulations make an exception to that requirement of advance notification only if “the attorney general determines that, for compelling reasons, such negotiations or notice would pose a clear and substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation, risk grave harm to national security or present an imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm.”
  • On Saturday, civil liberties and press freedom advocates condemned the sequence of events. Patrick Toomey, a senior staff lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, called the Justice Department’s actions “a disgrace.”
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In Minnesota, a G.O.P. Lawmaker's Death Brings Home the Reality of Covid - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...relph-covid-minnesota.html harm principle morality pandemic responsibility liberty
shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • while Republicans insist that their freedom was at issue in refusing to wear masks or enforce mandates, such events and the death of Mr. Relph raise urgent questions as to where individual “freedom” ends and where responsibility to others begins in a pandemic during which breathing shared air can be fatal.
  • “It’s ironic that Senator Gazelka, as majority leader, was always the person most outspoken in opposing the governor’s emergency order and would state to us over and over again that Minnesotans would do the responsible thing,” said Richard Cohen, a Democrat who retired from the Legislature last month. “And now it is alleged that because of a caucus event, where apparently many people were not wearing masks, a caucus member became ill and then passed away.”
  • An owner of the catering hall, John Schiltz, said that his servers had worn masks and gloves throughout that evening, and that none had later tested positive. Although masks were offered to guests, state guidelines at the time allowed them to be removed at tables.Mr. Schiltz said the dinner was the only event any group had booked at his venue in November before he had to close on Nov. 20.
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  • Pressed about the dinner in a radio interview in late November, Mr. Gazelka, 61, who is reported to be considering a run for governor, said he had no regrets.
  • “The idea that everyone can just be trusted rings a little hollow with the knowledge” that Republicans did not tell Democrats of the positive cases before the special session, Ms. Kent said in an interview last week.
  • He continued through the year to argue that mask mandates or limits on restaurants and bars were not needed because Minnesotans could be trusted to make responsible choices, and that the harmful effects on schools, the economy and people’s mental health outweighed the value of restrictions.
  • Holding the celebratory dinner wasn’t the only point of contention.Afterward, Republicans alerted their own caucus about the virus outbreak, but not Democrats. They instructed Republican staff members not to go to the Capitol for a special session of the Legislature on Nov. 12 — but did not inform Democrats, who were livid after learning of the positive cases from news reports.
  • “There was a lot of food and a lot of beverage, and when you’re at an activity when the food and beverage is there, that’s when you don’t have your mask,” he said. “I don’t regret that we had the celebration. The Republican majority was the No. 1 target to switch from Republican to Democrat.”
  • She described the working environment of the Senate as poisoned by Republicans’ disregard for masks. Most refuse to wear them on the Senate floor, she said. One Republican senator, she recounted, broke into fake coughing while waiting for an elevator in a cramped vestibule with Democratic colleagues.
  • After learning of the outbreak from Republican leaders, Mr. Relph, who did not have any symptoms, went for a coronavirus test, his daughter said. It came back positive.
  • “None of us can be sure he got sick at that party, but it’s really, really likely,” Dana Relph said. “There wasn’t any other place he would have gotten it.”
  • As one of the Senate’s oldest members, Mr. Relph was one of the few Republicans known for regularly wearing a face covering. He had an underlying condition, mild asthma, his daughter said.
  • As a lab technician for 3M, Ms. Relph tests industrial masks. “The fact that people deny the science behind masks makes me even angrier,” she said. She recalled that a Senate colleague of her father’s had stopped by her family’s house, without a mask, while her father was in the hospital. “Point blank, he said, ‘I don’t think this is as serious as they’re telling us it is,’” Ms. Relph said. “My dad was dying. These are people that think they’re good, kind, compassionate people, and yet they don’t act that way.”
  • Last week, as the Legislature returned for its 2021 session, senators held a moment of silence for Mr. Relph. Mr. Gazelka called him “a great senator, a true friend.”
  • The majority leader also led his party in blocking a Democratic proposal to require masks in public areas of the Capitol, flouting a statewide mask mandate, imposed by the governor, in indoor settings. (The Legislature is not subject to the governor’s orders.) Republicans questioned the effectiveness of masks. But Mr. Gazelka did include language in a resolution “strongly encouraging” mask wearing.
  • Ms. Kent, the Democratic leader, said that she had noticed lately that Mr. Gazelka was always wearing a mask himself in the Capitol, where before he had not worn one. Besides Mr. Relph’s death, Mr. Gazelka’s mother-in-law died in December after contracting Covid-19.
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Opinion: There's only one way to stop violent extremists - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by anonymous on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Once a cohort or society builds a hateful mindset, the hatred takes on a life of its own. Extremist ideology not only hurts a society's enemies, but also eventually attacks from within and harms the society from which it originated.
  • Consider how the kingdom of Saudi Arabia disseminated the Wahhabi sect's fundamentalist attitudes against Jews and Christians at home and abroad. It helped to fund the madrassas that fostered the extreme perspectives that eventually contributed to the September 11th terror attacks on New York and Washington.
  • The great irony is that his unbridled hatred had also prompted him to attack the Saudi kingdom, too. Bin Laden's extremist hunger was such that even the Saudi Wahhabis who helped inculcate his all-consuming intolerance could no longer prove pious enough in his eyes.
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  • n Israel too, the government has taken limited action to shut down the behavior of the so-called "hilltop youth," extremist settlers who deem themselves highly religious despite not respecting the rabbis of the settlement.
  • Here in the United States, there are Republican legislators and anchors on Fox News who have willingly participated in race-baiting and birtherism for years, even before President Trump hijacked the Republican Party. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has looked the other way for close to five years as Trump incites violence and sows mistrust in our system.
  • Then came the insurrection. Mobs of Trump supporters, hopped up on Trump's conspiracy theory of a stolen election and encouraged to go to the Capitol by the President himself, stormed and vandalized our nation's Capitol building.
  • It was the disturbing culmination of a months-long series of attempts by Trump to bully state officials into "finding" votes that would help him win the 2020 presidential election, as almost all Republican "leaders" stood by with stunning silence -- though elections officials in Georgia, headed by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, stood up for truth against pressure from Trump.
  • When thinking turns extreme, there is little room for nuance or aberration from the narrow mindset deemed acceptable.
  • Trump and a small subgroup of his most radicalized and violent supporters, who include White supremacists and Neo-Nazis, are responsible for this dark chapter. Nothing can justify their sedition. But beyond this specific situation, it would be simplistic to believe that extreme ways of thinking reside exclusively within the right.
  • All extremes are bound together by their intolerance for "the other." The far-left's tendency to call others out and automatically cast judgment harms all of society by stifling the critical thinking, nuanced debate, and exchange of differing ideas that lead to progress -- the very progress for which progressives advocate.
  • When terrorists or violent extremists cross the line, the only recourse is to forcefully stop them and prosecute them to the full extent of the law. For society at large, independent thinking and even avoiding partisan fanaticism can be antidotes to unruly tribalism in the future. Embracing the middle space characterized by critical thinking and nuance gives us a pathway for avoiding absolutist and hateful thinking that preys on societies from both the outside and within.
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Defunding Or Reallocating Police Resources: Most Mayors Do Not Support : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-police-resources-survey-finds police Politics US Culture policy BLM
shared by carolinehayter on 28 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The vast majority of mayors in American cities do not support sweeping changes to the funding of their police departments, and most say last year's racial justice protests were a force for good in their cities, according to a new survey of more than 100 mayors from across the U.S.
  • Eighty percent of the mayors who responded to the Menino Survey of Mayors say they believe their police budgets last year were "about right." Most mayors said they did not support reallocating many, or some of their police department's resources and responsibilities.
  • The findings come in the early days of the Biden administration, as the president seeks to make good on campaign promises to rein in police abuse and dismantle systemic racism. The country's divisions over race, criminal justice and policing are some of the most significant domestic challenges facing Biden's administration.
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  • The mayors were surveyed over the summer, as the country reckoned visibly, and painfully, with racism and police violence across all sectors of American life.
  • making Black Lives Matter a national rallying cry.
  • Mayors say they believe that the protests that swept the country during the summer of 2020 did more good than harm in their communities, but there were divisions along party lines. Republican mayors were 31 percentage points more likely to see protests as having done harm to their communities, according to the report.
  • "There was a small but sort of reasonably sized minority of mayors that really wanted to think about those bigger transformational changes, but for the most part, mayors proposed reforms that existed within existing structures," said Katherine Levine Einstein, a Boston University assistant professor of political science who is one of the report's authors.
  • The mayors that responded to the survey are overwhelmingly Democrats. Just 20% are Republicans.
  • 44% of mayors say they believe that Black residents in their city distrust the police
  • The survey also found that most mayors surveyed opposed drastically reshaping the budgets of their local police departments, amid calls in some parts of the country to slash funding for police departments or to disband them entirely, redirecting funding to social programs. A large, bipartisan majority of mayors said that in their city, their police department's share of the budget was "about right." Just 12% said that the budget for their police department was too large.
  • Inglewood, Calif., Mayor James Butts said he believed that the slogan defund the police was "too simplistic" to solve what is ultimately a "multi-layered long-standing cultural and leadership issue."
  • Mayors also say they recognize the disparities in how Black people are treated by police with their white counterparts. Sixty-eight percent said they agree that the police treat white people better than Black people. But there is a sharp partisan gap, with 73% of Republican mayors saying that police treat white and Black people equally, compared to just 14% of Democratic mayors.
  • "They thought more about, OK, we have this police force, how can we maybe make it a little more diverse? How can we maybe change our training practices at the margins? So they thought more about what I would say are some of these more modest reforms rather than big, structural overhauls about what policing might look like in a community."
  • Butts said that the root problem that needs to be addressed to improve police-community relationships is department culture, discipline and leadership.
  • "They can't be schemes that say 'Look, we're doing this, so we've changed.' You have to look inside at your culture, how you police, how you think, look at your complaints that you receive and use those as a barometer or guide as to what you need to do to change behavior or thinking in the department."
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Here's a Look Inside Facebook's Data Wars - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-data.html facebook data privacy transparency right-wing
shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • On one side were executives, including Mr. Silverman and Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president in charge of partnerships strategy, who argued that Facebook should publicly share as much information as possible about what happens on its platform — good, bad or ugly.
  • On the other side were executives, including the company’s chief marketing officer and vice president of analytics, Alex Schultz, who worried that Facebook was already giving away too much.
  • One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits.
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  • They argued that journalists and researchers were using CrowdTangle, a kind of turbocharged search engine that allows users to analyze Facebook trends and measure post performance, to dig up information they considered unhelpful — showing, for example, that right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino were getting much more engagement on their Facebook pages than mainstream news outlets.
  • These executives argued that Facebook should selectively disclose its own data in the form of carefully curated reports, rather than handing outsiders the tools to discover it themselves.Team Selective Disclosure won, and CrowdTangle and its supporters lost.
  • the CrowdTangle story is important, because it illustrates the way that Facebook’s obsession with managing its reputation often gets in the way of its attempts to clean up its platform
  • The company, blamed for everything from election interference to vaccine hesitancy, badly wants to rebuild trust with a skeptical public. But the more it shares about what happens on its platform, the more it risks exposing uncomfortable truths that could further damage its image.
  • Facebook’s executives were more worried about fixing the perception that Facebook was amplifying harmful content than figuring out whether it actually was amplifying harmful content. Transparency, they said, ultimately took a back seat to image management.
  • the executives who pushed hardest for transparency appear to have been sidelined. Mr. Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and chief executive, has been taking time off and no longer has a clearly defined role at the company, several people with knowledge of the situation said. (Mr. Silverman declined to comment about his status.) And Mr. Boland, who spent 11 years at Facebook, left the company in November.
  • “One of the main reasons that I left Facebook is that the most senior leadership in the company does not want to invest in understanding the impact of its core products,” Mr. Boland said, in his first interview since departing. “And it doesn’t want to make the data available for others to do the hard work and hold them accountable.”
  • Mr. Boland, who oversaw CrowdTangle as well as other Facebook transparency efforts, said the tool fell out of favor with influential Facebook executives around the time of last year’s presidential election, when journalists and researchers used it to show that pro-Trump commentators were spreading misinformation and hyperpartisan commentary with stunning success.
  • “People were enthusiastic about the transparency CrowdTangle provided until it became a problem and created press cycles Facebook didn’t like,” he said. “Then, the tone at the executive level changed.”
  • Facebook was happy that I and other journalists were finding its tool useful. With only about 25,000 users, CrowdTangle is one of Facebook’s smallest products, but it has become a valuable resource for power users including global health organizations, election officials and digital marketers, and it has made Facebook look transparent compared with rival platforms like YouTube and TikTok, which don’t release nearly as much data.
  • Last fall, the leaderboard was full of posts by Mr. Trump and pro-Trump media personalities. Since Mr. Trump was barred from Facebook in January, it has been dominated by a handful of right-wing polemicists like Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Bongino and Sean Hannity, with the occasional mainstream news article, cute animal story or K-pop fan blog sprinkled in.
  • But the mood shifted last year when I started a Twitter account called @FacebooksTop10, on which I posted a daily leaderboard showing the sources of the most-engaged link posts by U.S. pages, based on CrowdTangle data.
  • The account went semi-viral, racking up more than 35,000 followers. Thousands of people retweeted the lists, including conservatives who were happy to see pro-Trump pundits beating the mainstream media and liberals who shared them with jokes like “Look at all this conservative censorship!” (If you’ve been under a rock for the past two years, conservatives in the United States frequently complain that Facebook is censoring them.)
  • Inside Facebook, the account drove executives crazy. Some believed that the data was being misconstrued and worried that it was painting Facebook as a far-right echo chamber. Others worried that the lists might spook investors by suggesting that Facebook’s U.S. user base was getting older and more conservative. Every time a tweet went viral, I got grumpy calls from Facebook executives who were embarrassed by the disparity between what they thought Facebook was — a clean, well-lit public square where civility and tolerance reign — and the image they saw reflected in the Twitter lists.
  • Mr. Boland, the former Facebook vice president, said that was a convenient deflection. He said that in internal discussions, Facebook executives were less concerned about the accuracy of the data than about the image of Facebook it presented.“It told a story they didn’t like,” he said of the Twitter account, “and frankly didn’t want to admit was true.”
  • Several executives proposed making reach data public on CrowdTangle, in hopes that reporters would cite that data instead of the engagement data they thought made Facebook look bad.But Mr. Silverman, CrowdTangle’s chief executive, replied in an email that the CrowdTangle team had already tested a feature to do that and found problems with it. One issue was that false and misleading news stories also rose to the top of those lists.“Reach leaderboard isn’t a total win from a comms point of view,” Mr. Silverman wrote.
  • executives argued that my Top 10 lists were misleading. They said CrowdTangle measured only “engagement,” while the true measure of Facebook popularity would be based on “reach,” or the number of people who actually see a given post. (With the exception of video views, reach data isn’t public, and only Facebook employees and page owners have access to it.)
  • Mr. Schultz, Facebook’s chief marketing officer, had the dimmest view of CrowdTangle. He wrote that he thought “the only way to avoid stories like this” would be for Facebook to publish its own reports about the most popular content on its platform, rather than releasing data through CrowdTangle.“If we go down the route of just offering more self-service data you will get different, exciting, negative stories in my opinion,” he wrote.
  • there’s a problem with reach data: Most of it is inaccessible and can’t be vetted or fact-checked by outsiders. We simply have to trust that Facebook’s own, private data tells a story that’s very different from the data it shares with the public.
  • Mr. Zuckerberg is right about one thing: Facebook is not a giant right-wing echo chamber.But it does contain a giant right-wing echo chamber — a kind of AM talk radio built into the heart of Facebook’s news ecosystem, with a hyper-engaged audience of loyal partisans who love liking, sharing and clicking on posts from right-wing pages, many of which have gotten good at serving up Facebook-optimized outrage bait at a consistent clip.
  • CrowdTangle’s data made this echo chamber easier for outsiders to see and quantify. But it didn’t create it, or give it the tools it needed to grow — Facebook did — and blaming a data tool for these revelations makes no more sense than blaming a thermometer for bad weather.
  • It’s worth noting that these transparency efforts are voluntary, and could disappear at any time. There are no regulations that require Facebook or any other social media companies to reveal what content performs well on their platforms, and American politicians appear to be more interested in fighting over claims of censorship than getting access to better data.
  • It’s also worth noting that Facebook can turn down the outrage dials and show its users calmer, less divisive news any time it wants. (In fact, it briefly did so after the 2020 election, when it worried that election-related misinformation could spiral into mass violence.) And there is some evidence that it is at least considering more permanent changes.
  • The project, which some employees refer to as the “Top 10” project, is still underway, the people said, and it’s unclear whether its findings have been put in place. Mr. Osborne, the Facebook spokesman, said that the team looks at a variety of ranking changes, and that the experiment wasn’t driven by a desire to change the Top 10 lists.
  • This year, Mr. Hegeman, the executive in charge of Facebook’s news feed, asked a team to figure out how tweaking certain variables in the core news feed ranking algorithm would change the resulting Top 10 lists, according to two people with knowledge of the project.
  • As for CrowdTangle, the tool is still available, and Facebook is not expected to cut off access to journalists and researchers in the short term, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s plans.
  • Mr. Boland, however, said he wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook executives decided to kill off CrowdTangle entirely or starve it of resources, rather than dealing with the headaches its data creates.
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Why Blue Places Have Been Hit Harder Economically Than Red Ones - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ed-blue-economic-recovery.html
shared by mattrenz16 on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • different mix of jobs in red and blue places.
  • The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths. In the spring, infection rates were far higher in blue states than in red states, with deaths even more skewed toward blue states, especially in and around New York. But the jobs gap has persisted even though red states have had higher case rates than blue states since June, and higher death rates since July.
  • Across all industries, 57 percent of employed people live in counties that Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
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  • Among hard-hit sectors in the pandemic, 59 percent of workers in lodging and food service; 63 percent in arts, entertainment and recreation; and 66 percent in information industries like publishing, film and telecommunications live in counties that Mrs. Clinton won.
  • In contrast, jobs in most sectors less harmed by the pandemic, like utilities, construction and manufacturing, are disproportionately located in counties that President Trump won in 2016.
  • local businesses like retail and restaurants have been slower to hire in places where more people can work from home.
  • Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic. Employment has fallen more in larger metros and those metros with a higher cost of living — perhaps as people move away from cities, possibly to more affordable places, or as businesses struggle where rents and local wages are higher.
  • So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living.
  • Research suggests that individual choices contributed more than lockdown policies to declines in economic activity, and places that imposed few restrictions still lost jobs.
  • The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories).
  • Still, the future looks far more promising than the present for blue states’ economies.
  • mattrenz16 on 30 Oct 20
     
    " different mix of jobs in red and blue places. The consistency of the partisan jobs gap contrasts with a shifting pattern of infections and deaths. In the spring, infection rates were far higher in blue states than in red states, with deaths even more skewed toward blue states, especially in and around New York. But the jobs gap has persisted even though red states have had higher case rates than blue states since June, and higher death rates since July. Across all industries, 57 percent of employed people live in counties that Hillary Clinton won in 2016. Among hard-hit sectors in the pandemic, 59 percent of workers in lodging and food service; 63 percent in arts, entertainment and recreation; and 66 percent in information industries like publishing, film and telecommunications live in counties that Mrs. Clinton won. In contrast, jobs in most sectors less harmed by the pandemic, like utilities, construction and manufacturing, are disproportionately located in counties that President Trump won in 2016. local businesses like retail and restaurants have been slower to hire in places where more people can work from home. Other factors that are correlated with partisanship are also systematically related to job losses during the pandemic. Employment has fallen more in larger metros and those metros with a higher cost of living - perhaps as people move away from cities, possibly to more affordable places, or as businesses struggle where rents and local wages are higher. So that means more than two-thirds of the partisan gap can be explained by local job mix, size of the population, and cost of living. Research suggests that individual choices contributed more than lockdown policies to declines in economic activity, and places that imposed few restrictions still lost jobs. The coronavirus recession is unusual in that services employment (like at restaurants) has declined more than goods-sector employment (like at factories). Still, the future looks far more promising t
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Opinion | Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oyd-abolish-defund-police.html police reform law enforcement violence
shared by Javier E on 13 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues
  • We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an interview with Jacobin. But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of the month.”
  • Second, a “safe” world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.
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  • here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people
  • After the 1967 urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission found that “police actions were ‘final’ incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders.”
  • don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.
  • even a member of the task force, Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”
  • The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break rules all the time.
  • The final report of the Obama administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing resulted in procedural tweaks like implicit-bias training, police-community listening sessions, slight alterations of use-of-force policies and systems to identify potentially problematic officers early on.
  • Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades
  • We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison.
  • What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence never report it to anyone.
  • In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days
  • When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder
  • As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.
  • People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation.
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Biden Revokes Trump's Pause on Green Cards - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-immigration-trump.html politics culture policy
shared by delgadool on 25 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden reopened the country on Wednesday to people seeking green cards, ending a ban on legal immigration that President Donald J. Trump imposed last spring, citing what he said was the need to protect American jobs during the pandemic.
  • the ban did “not advance the interests of the United States,”
  • “To the contrary,” Mr. Biden said of his predecessor’s immigration ban, “it harms the United States, including by preventing certain family members of United States citizens and lawful permanent residents from joining their families here. It also harms industries in the United States that utilize talent from around the world.”
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  • At the time, Mr. Trump described his action as a way to protect Americans, millions of whom lost their jobs as the threat of the coronavirus shut down the economy.
  • “By pausing immigration, we will help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as America reopens. So important,” Mr. Trump said. “It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad. We must first take care of the American worker.”
  • Critics of Mr. Trump accused him of using the pandemic as an excuse to further advance his agenda of severely restricting immigration.
  • An analysis by the Migration Policy Institute at the time estimated that the policy could affect as many as 660,000 people.
  • In his legislation, the president would provide an eight-year path to citizenship for most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
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Body Bags and Enemy Lists: How Far-Right Police Officers and Ex-Soldiers Planned for 'D... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...germany-nazi-infiltration.html neo-Nazi germany
shared by Javier E on 02 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists call it Day X — a mythical moment when Germany’s social order collapses, requiring committed far-right extremists, in their telling, to save themselves and rescue the nation.
  • Today Day X preppers are drawing serious people with serious skills and ambition. Increasingly, the German authorities consider the scenario a pretext for domestic terrorism by far-right plotters or even for a takeover of the government.
  • “I fear we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg,” said Dirk Friedriszik, a lawmaker in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where Nordkreuz was founded. “It isn’t just the KSK. The real worry is: These cells are everywhere. In the army, in the police, in reservist units.”
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  • the obstacles to prosecuting such cases more aggressively point to another problem making the German authorities increasingly anxious: Infiltration of the very institutions, like the police, that are supposed to be doing the investigating.
  • In July the police chief of the western state of Hesse resigned after police computers had been repeatedly accessed for confidential information that was then used by neo-Nazis in death threats. It was in Hesse that a well-known neo-Nazi assassinated a regional politician last summer in a case that woke many Germans to the threat of far-right terrorism.
  • The region where they live is nestled between the former Iron Curtain and the Polish border. Members had grown up in the former East Germany.
  • There were two criteria for joining, Mr. Moll recalled: “The right skills and the right attitude.”Mr. Gross and another police officer in the group were members of what was then an emerging far-right party, the Alternative for Germany, now the third largest force in the national Parliament. At least two others in the group had visited the Thule Seminar, an organization whose leaders had a portrait of Hitler on their wall and preach white supremacy.
  • Over time, Nordkreuz members recalled, their group morphed into a close-knit brotherhood with a shared ambition that would come to dominate their lives: preparing for Day X.
  • The group identified a “safe house,” where members would decamp with their families on Day X: a former Communist vacation village deep in the woods.
  • “This movement has its fingertips in lots of places,” he said. “All this talk of Day X can seem like pure fantasy. But if you look closer, you can see how quickly it turns into serious planning — and plotting.”
  • “Under Communism, everything was scarce,’’ Mr. Moll explained. ‘‘You had to get creative getting things through certain channels. You could not rely on things being in the supermarket. You could say we’re used to prepping.’’
  • “The scenario was that something bad would happen,” Mr. Gross told me. “We asked ourselves, what did we want to prepare for? And we decided that if we were going to do this, we would go all the way.”
  • But at least one member of the group portrays a more ominous story.“People were to be gathered and murdered,” Horst Schelski told investigators in 2017, according to transcripts of his statement shared with The New York Times.
  • Jan Henrik H. was described by other members as particularly fervent and hateful. On his birthdays, he held a shooting contest on a field behind his house in Rostock, a nearby city on Germany’s northern coast, Nordkreuz members recalled.The winner got a trophy named for Mehmet Turgut, a Turkish street vendor killed in Rostock in 2004 by the National Socialist Underground, a far-right terrorist group.
  • As they drank coffee at the truck stop, Jan Henrik H. turned the conversation to “the people in the file,” who he said were “harmful” to the state and needed to be “done away with,” Mr. Schelski later told the police.Jan Henrik H. wanted advice on how best to transport their captives once they had been rounded up. He asked Mr. Schelski, a major in the state reservist unit, how they could get them past any checkpoints that might be created in a time of unrest. Would uniforms help? Army trucks?
  • “They showed me a handmade sketch of my home,” Mr. Böhringer said. “‘Do you recognize this?’ they had asked.”“It was the exact same sketch that those officers had made in my home,” he said.“I had to swallow pretty hard,” he recalled. “The very people who said they wanted to protect me then passed this on to people who wanted to harm me.”“They didn’t just want to survive Day X, they wanted to kill their enemies,” he said. “It was concrete, what they were planning.”
  • Chancellor Angela Merkel belongs “in the dock,” he said. The multicultural cities in western Germany are “the caliphate.” The best way to escape creeping migration was to move to the East German countryside, “where people are still called Schmidt, Schneider and Müller.”A copy of Compact, a prominent far-right magazine, with President Trump’s face on the cover, lay on a shelf. A selection of the president’s speeches had been translated into German in the issue. “I like Trump,” Mr. Gross said.
  • As far back as 2009, some fellow police officers had voiced concerns about Mr. Gross’s far-right views, noting that he had brought books about the Nazis to work. But no one intervened, and he was even groomed for promotion.“There is no danger from the far right,” he insisted. “I don’t know a single neo-Nazi.”Soldiers and police officers are “frustrated,” he told me the third time we met, ticking off complaints about migrants, crime and the mainstream media. He likens the coverage of coronavirus to the censored state broadcaster during Communism. Instead, he says, he has a YouTube subscription to RT, the Russian state-controlled channel and other alternative media.In that parallel universe of disinformation, he learns that the government is secretly flying in refugees after midnight. That coronavirus is a ploy to deprive citizens of their rights. That Ms. Merkel works for what he calls the “deep state.”“The deep state is global,” Mr. Gross said. “It’s big capital, the big banks, Bill Gates.”
  • He still expects Day X, sooner or later. Riots linked to an economic meltdown. Or a blackout, because the German government is shuttering coal plants.Nordkreuz members never told me, nor the authorities, the location of the disused vacation village that was their safe house for Day X.The safe house is still active, said Mr. Gross, who at the height of Nordkreuz’s planning had boasted to a fellow member that his network contained 2,000 like-minded people in Germany and beyond.“The network is still there,” he said.
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Trump Is Winnowing Down His Base - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...611902 trump supporters survey 2020 politics
shared by Javier E on 22 May 20 - No Cached
  • most voters are basing their assessments of Trump’s performance less on their actual daily experiences and more on their preexisting viewpoints about his tumultuous and norm-shattering presidency
  • The biggest exception to that dynamic is older Americans, including older white voters, who polls suggest have clearly cooled on Trump as he and other Republicans have signaled—or flat out declared—that more deaths among seniors might be an acceptable price for reopening the economy.
  • mostly, the intense pressure of the pandemic appears to be fortifying, rather than fracturing, the long-standing divisions in the electorate that Trump has already widened since 2016
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • twice as many non-college-educated white men said Trump is providing helpful, rather than harmful, information on the virus; college-educated white women were more than three times as likely to say that his information was harmful rather than helpful,
  • “If they like him, everything he does just affirms why they like him, and if they don’t like him, everything he does reaffirms why they don’t like him.”
  • In last week’s national CNN poll, two-thirds of white men without a college degree said they approved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak
  • While 55 percent of blue-collar men said in the CNN poll that they are comfortable returning to their normal routines, 68 percent of college-educated white women said they are not
  • “I think, generally, the last two months have been a good reminder that most people made up their minds about Donald Trump a long time ago, and nothing is going to change their opinion,”
  • non-college-educated white women exhibit more strain over the outbreak than college-educated white men. In the Navigator polling, these women were considerably more likely to say that they worry about falling behind on bills. And while a slight majority of the men in the CNN survey said they are comfortable returning to their routines, three-fifths of the women said they are not.
  • while these women report more unease over the pandemic, they are more likely than the men to praise Trump’s response to it. In the Navigator polling, 56 percent of the women said they approved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak, compared with just 44 percent of the men
  • education trumps gender in shaping attitudes about the president’s performance.
  • Operatives in both parties believe that Trump’s volatile and often-erratic pronouncements about the outbreak—such as suggesting the use of bleach and ultraviolet light to treat patients, and announcing that he is taking hydroxychloroquine—have compounded existing doubts among many well-educated white voters about his fitness for the presidency.
  • the 2018 exit polls generally showed the GOP suffering some erosion among blue-collar white women, with the party’s advantage slipping to 14 percentage points. The latest round of surveys suggests that, among those women, Trump has stabilized at that diminished level, leading by roughly a dozen points (or slightly less) among them.
  • ox News surveys last month in Pennsylvania and Michigan put Biden even among non-college-educated white women, and he led Trump among them in the latest Marquette University Law School poll in Wisconsin.
  • Among nonwhite voters, gender, not education, remains the key divide
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Twitter To Remove Or Place Warning Labels On COVID Vaccine Conspiracy Tweets : Coronavi... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ovid-vaccine-conspiracy-tweets vaccine conspiracy us politics crisis policy culture pandemic
shared by carolinehayter on 17 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Twitter says it will work with global health experts to enforce new rules prohibiting conspiracy-based misinformation about the coronavirus.
  • Debunked claims about COVID-19 vaccinations will be swiftly removed from Twitter starting next week, the company announced on Wednesday.
  • 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."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The new rules broaden Twitter's existing practices requiring the removal of tweets that it says "advance harmful false or misleading narratives about COVID-19 vaccinations," Twitter wrote in a blog post.
  • 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.
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Researchers Demand That Google Rehire And Promote Timnit Gebru After Firing : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...archer-be-rehired-and-promoted us culture policy BLM economics google
shared by carolinehayter on 17 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Members of a prestigious research unit at Google have sent a letter to the company's chief executive demanding that ousted artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru be reinstated.
  • Gebru, who studies the ethics of AI and was one of the only Black research scientists at Google, says she was unexpectedly fired after a dispute over an academic paper and months of speaking out about the need for more women and people of color at the tech giant.
  • "Offering Timnit her position back at a higher level would go a long way to help re-establish trust and rebuild our team environment,"
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  • "The removal of Timnit has had a demoralizing effect on the whole of our team."
  • Since Gebru's termination earlier this month, more than 2,600 Googlers have signed an open letter expressing dismay over the way Gebru exited the company and asking executives for a full explanation of what prompted her dismissal.
  • Gebru's firing happened "without warning rather than engaging in dialogue."
  • Google has maintained that Gebru resigned, though Gebru herself says she never voluntary agreed to leave the company.
  • They say Jeff Dean, senior vice president of Google Research, and other executives involved in Gebru's firing need to be held accountable.
  • Gebru helped establish Black in AI, a group that supports Black researchers in the field of artificial intelligence.
  • At Google, Gebru's former team wrote in the Wednesday letter that studying ways to reduce the harm of AI on marginalized groups is key to their mission.
  • Last month, Google abruptly asked Gebru to retract a research paper focused on the potential biases baked into an AI system that attempts to mimic human speech. The technology helps power Google's search engine. Google claims that the paper did not meet its bar for publication and that Gebru did not follow the company's internal review protocol.
  • However, Gebru and her supporters counter that she was being targeted because of how outspoken she was about diversity issues, a theme that was underscored in the letter.
  • The letter says Google's top brass have committed to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion among its research units, but unless more concrete and immediate action is taken, those promises are "virtue signaling; they are damaging, evasive, defensive and demonstrate leadership's inability to understand how our organization is part of the problem," according to the letter.
  • She also was the co-author of pioneering research into facial recognition technology that demonstrated how people of color and women are misidentified far more often than white faces. The study helped persuade IBM, Amazon and Microsoft to stop selling the technology to law enforcement.
  • saying such "gaslighting" has caused harm to Gebru and the Black community at Google.
  • Google has a history of striking back against employees who agitate internally for change. Organizers of the worldwide walkouts at Google in 2018 over sexual harassment and other issues were fired by the company. And more recently, the National Labor Relation Board accused Google of illegally firing workers who were involved in union organizing.
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Opinion | Move On, but Never Forget - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-biden-united-states.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 17 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Studies have shown that two things are true: Black people on average tip less, and servers on average provide Black people inferior service, in part because of the perception that they will tip less anyway. There has always seemed, to me, to be a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here.
  • None of this is fair of course. It shifts the burden of the servers’ biases onto the innocent recipient of the service. The victim of prejudgments assuming the responsibility of mollifying the persons prejudging.
  • There is always so much talk of unity and coming together, of healing wounds and repairing divisions. We then have to have some version of the tip debate: Do we prove to them that we can rise above their attempt to harm us, or do we behave in a way that is commensurate with the harm they tried to inflict?
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  • 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 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 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 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.
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Facebook Whistleblower's Testimony Builds Momentum for Tougher Tech Laws - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...efore-senate-panel-11633426201 facebook whistleblower testimony momentum congress
shared by Javier E on 06 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • “I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profit and our safety. Facebook consistently resolved these conflicts in favor of its own profits,” Ms. Haugen told a Senate consumer protection subcommittee. “As long as Facebook is operating in the shadows, hiding its research from public scrutiny, it is unaccountable. Until the incentives change, Facebook will not change.”
  • “There is no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself,” she said. Facebook under Mr. Zuckerberg makes decisions based on how they will affect measurements of user engagement, rather than their potential downsides for the public, she said.
  • “Mark has built an organization that is very metrics-driven,” she said. “The metrics make the decision. Unfortunately that itself is a decision.”
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  • Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), the chairman of the subcommittee conducting Tuesday’s hearing, called on Mr. Zuckerberg to appear before Congress to testify, terming the company “morally bankrupt.”
  • Facebook has said it plans to continue doing internal research and is working on ways to make that work available to others. The company has recently battled with some academic researchers over access to its data, but Facebook says that it works cooperatively with many others.
  • Republican and Democratic lawmakers at the hearing renewed their calls for regulation, such as strengthening privacy and competition laws and special online protections for children, as well as toughening of the platforms’ accountability. One idea that got a particular boost was requiring more visibility into social-media data as well as the algorithms that shape users’ experiences.
  • “The severity of this crisis demands that we break out of previous regulatory frames,” she said. “Tweaks to outdated privacy protections…will not be sufficient.”
  • A good starting point, she added, would be “full access to data for research not directed by Facebook. On this foundation, we can build sensible rules and standards to address consumer harms, illegal content, data protection, anticompetitive practices, algorithmic systems and more.”
  • Ms. Haugen also raised national-security concerns about Facebook, citing foreign surveillance on the platform—for example, Chinese monitoring of Uyghur populations—and what she termed Facebook’s “consistent understaffing” of its counterintelligence teams.
  • Ms. Haugen made the case for policy changes to address her perceived concerns. In products such as cars and cigarettes, she said, independent researchers can evaluate health effects, but “the public cannot do the same with Facebook.”
  • “This inability to see in Facebook’s actual systems and confirm that they work as communicated is like the Department of Transportation regulating cars by only watching them drive down the highway,” she said, arguing for an independent government agency that would employ experts to audit the impact of social media.
  • She said that if Congress moves to change Section 230, a federal accountability law that protects Facebook and other companies from liability for user-generated content, it should distinguish between that kind of content and choices that companies make about what type of content to promote.
  • “Facebook should not get a pass on choices it makes to prioritize virality and growth and reactiveness over public safety,” she said.
  • Ms. Haugen was hired by Facebook two years ago to help protect against election interference on Facebook. She said she acted because she was frustrated by what she viewed as Facebook’s lack of openness about the platform’s potential for harm and its unwillingness to address its flaws.
  • “I would simply say, let’s get to work,” said Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.), who has sponsored several measures on algorithm transparency. “We’ve got some things we can do here.”
  • “There’s always reason for skepticism” about Congress reaching consensus on legislation, Mr. Blumenthal said after the hearing. But he added that “there are times when the dynamic is so powerful that something actually is done…I have rarely, if ever, seen the kind of unanimity on display today.”
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Facebook flounders in the court of public opinion | The Economist - 2 views

www.economist.com/...21805344 politics history Culture policy
shared by woodlu on 07 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • “YOU ARE a 21st-century American hero,” gushed Ed Markey, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts. He was not addressing the founder of one of the country’s largest companies, Facebook, but the woman who found fault with it
  • Frances Haugen, who had worked at the social-media giant before becoming a whistleblower, testified in front of a Senate subcommittee for over three hours on October 5th, highlighting Facebook’s “moral bankruptcy” and the firm’s downplaying of its harmful impact, including fanning teenage depression and ethnic violence.
  • Facebook’s own private research, for example, found that its photo-sharing site, Instagram, worsened teens’ suicidal thoughts and eating disorders. Yet it still made a point of sending young users engaging content that stoked their anxiety—while proceeding to develop a version of its site for those under the age of 13.
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  • In 2018 a different whistleblower outed Facebook for its sketchy collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, a research organisation that allowed users’ data to be collected without their consent and used for political profiling by Donald Trump’s campaign. Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, went to Washington, DC to apologise, and in 2019 America’s consumer-protection agency, the Federal Trade Commission, agreed to a $5bn settlement with Facebook. That is the largest fine ever levied against a tech firm.
  • Congress has repeatedly called in tech bosses for angry questioning and public shaming without taking direct action afterwards.
  • Senators, who cannot agree on such uncontroversial things as paying for the government’s expenses, united against a common enemy and promised Ms Haugen that they would hold Facebook to account.
  • Social media’s harmful effects on children and teenagers is a concern that transcends partisanship and is easier to understand than sneaky data-gathering, viral misinformation and other social-networking sins.
  • If Congress does follow through with legislation, it is likely to focus narrowly on protecting children online, as opposed to broader reforms, for which there is still no political consensus.
  • Congress could update and strengthen the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which was passed in 1998 and bars the collection of data from children under the age of 13.
  • Other legislative proposals take aim at manipulative marketing and design features that make social media so addictive for the young.
  • However, Ms Haugen’s most significant impact on big tech may be inspiring others to come forward and blow the whistle on their employers’ malfeasance.
  • “A case like this one opens the floodgates and will trigger hundreds more cases,” predicts Steve Kohn, a lawyer who has represented several high-profile whistleblowers.
  • One is the industry’s culture of flouting rules and a history of non-compliance. Another is a legal framework that makes whistleblowing less threatening and more attractive than it used to be.
  • The Dodd-Frank Act, which was enacted in 2010, gives greater protections to whistleblowers by preventing retaliation from employers and by offering rewards to successful cases of up to 10-30% of the money collected from sanctions against a firm.
  • If the threat of public shaming encourages corporate accountability, that is a good thing. But it could also make tech firms less inclusive and transparent, predicts Matt Perault, a former Facebook executive who is director of the Centre for Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
  • People may become less willing to share off-the-wall ideas if they worry about public leaks; companies may become less open with their staff; and executives could start including only a handful of trusted senior staff in meetings that might have otherwise been less restricted.
  • Facebook and other big tech firms, which have been criticised for violating people’s privacy online, can no longer count on any privacy either.
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A Revealing Look At Zuckerberg | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...a-revealing-look-at-zuckerberg facebook zuckerberg ego winning profit right-wing vietnam
shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • these tradeoffs get to the heart of Facebook’s problem and the heart of what the site is. The harm is inherent to Facebook’s business model. When you find ways to reduce harm they’re almost always at the expense of engagement metrics the maximization of which are the goal of basically everything Facebook does. The comparison may be a loaded or contentious one. But it is a bit like the Tobacco companies. The product is the problem, not how it’s used or abused. It’s the product. That’s a challenging place for a company to be.
  • Facebook now makes up a very big part of the whole global information ecosystem. In many countries around the world Facebook for all intents and purposes is the Internet. The weather patterns of information as we might call them are heavily shaped by Facebook’s algorithms and the various tweaks and adjustments it makes to them in different countries. Facebook may not create the misinformation or hate speech or hyper-nationalist frenzies but its algorithms help drive them.
  • the guiding light for those algorithms is first to maximize engagement.
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  • That part we know. That’s the business model. But in a different way they are driven by goals and drives of this one guy, Mark Zuckerberg
  • my read is that it was more the ‘winning’ part than the money, though of course the two become somewhat indistinguishable. So Zuckerberg is a near free speech absolutist, as the story conveys. Except when it might mean going dark in a medium-to-large-sized country.
  • One interesting anecdote in the article comes out of Vietnam, where Facebook is estimated to make about $1 billion a year. A few years ago Vietnam demanded that Facebook start censoring anti-government posts or really any criticism of the government or be taken off line in the country. Essentially Vietnam insisted that Facebook delegate content moderation within Vietnam to the government of Vietnam. Zuckerberg personally made the decision to agree to the demands.
  • his article and much else makes pretty clear that it really is still Mark Zuckerberg that runs the show. And what drives him? This article and much else suggests that what shapes Zuckerberg’s goals are perhaps three things in descending order: 1) to win (in all its dimensions), 2) to maximize profits and 3) to cater to the complaints of the right which is most effective and aggressive about complaining about purported mistreatment.
  • He apparently justified this on the reasoning that Facebook disappearing in Vietnam would take away the speech rights of more people than the censorship would. If that sounds like self-justifying nonsense thank you for reading closely.
  • this is just too much power for one person to have. But it’s more that the win, win, win!!! mentality which certainly lots of CEOS and especially Founder-CEOS have in spades is here harnessed to an engine that does a lot of damage.
  • Back in 2018 I wrote about a distinct but related issue. No big tech company has been worse at launching off on new ventures or ideas, having whole cottage industries grow up around those ventures, and then shifting gears and having countless partner businesses go belly up
  • there is a related indifference or oblivious to the impact or social costs of what Facebook does, if in many case only because of its sheer scale.
  • This isn’t just corporate culture, or perhaps Zuckerberg himself. A lot of it is tied to Facebook’s relationship to the rest of the web. Google is structurally much more connected to and reliant on the open web. Facebook is much more a closed system which remains highly profitable regardless of the chaos it may create around it.
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