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    Biden pledges to combat sexual assault in US military – video

    Joe Biden pledged to combat sexual assault in the US military as he announced the nomination of two female officers, Gen Jacqueline Van Ovost and Lt Gen Laura Richardson, to become four-star commanders. The president, who spoke on International Women’s Day, said: “Sexual assault is abhorrent and wrong at any time. And in our military, so much of unit cohesion is built on trusting your fellow service members to have your back – there’s nothing less than a threat to our national security”
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    Mail-in voting did not swell turnout or boost Democrats, study finds

    Mail-in voting did not significantly increase turnout nor did it benefit Democrats in the 2020 election, a new study has found, undermining the talking point, advanced by Donald Trump and others, that mail-in ballots cost him the election.States that required an excuse to vote by mail saw increases in turnout similar to those that did not, the researchers from Stanford found. In Texas, where only voters ages 65 and up can vote by mail without an excuse, Democratic turnout did not “substantially increase” relative to Republican turnout.“Despite the extraordinary circumstances of the 2020 election, vote-by-mail’s effect on turnout and on partisan outcomes is very muted,” the researchers wrote. “Voter interest appears to be far more important in driving turnout.”Those findings challenge the conventional wisdom that has emerged after Joe Biden’s victory in November. Republicans have repeatedly pointed to the decision to expand vote by mail – a choice driven largely by the Covid-19 pandemic – as a major reason Trump lost the election. They have filed a flood of bills in statehouses seeking to restrict voting, several of which take aim at mail-in voting specifically. In Georgia, for example, there are proposals to require voters to provide identification information as well as an excuse when they vote absentee, which would end the no-excuse policy Republicans adopted there in 2005.The Stanford findings also come amid an effort by Democrats in Congress to push nationwide changes that would require states to offer no-excuse balloting nationwide. Republicans staunchly opposed that effort, saying it is part of a broader set of reforms to help Democrats’ political prospects.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletter“The results of our paper do not offer a clear recommendation for the policy debate around vote-by-mail, but they do suggest that both sides of the debate are relying on flawed logic,” the study says. “Vote-by-mail is an important policy that voters seem to like using, and it may be a particularly important tool during the pandemic.”Overall, states that adopted no-excuse absentee voting in 2020 saw around a 5.6 percentage-point increase in turnout compared to 2016. States that still required an excuse saw a 4.8-point increase. The researchers were unconvinced that the modest difference in turnout represented an even minor bump in turnout because of vote-by-mail, noting there was random variation in turnout between elections.To better understand the effects of mail-in voting, the researchers focused on Texas, where they compared turnout among 65-year-olds able to vote without an excuse under state law to that of 64-year-olds, who still needed an excuse. When they did the comparison, they found “no noticeable increase” in turnout among the 65-year-olds who did not have to provide an excuse to vote by mail.They reached a similar conclusion when they looked at partisanship in Texas. Sixty-five-year-old Democrats embraced absentee voting in 2020 while Republicans continued to vote early in person. Overall, being able to vote easily by mail did not produce “large effects on the partisan composition of overall turnout in 2020”.Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who closely tracks voter turnout, said there were factors not discussed in the study that were important to consider when assessing turnout. Some of the biggest increases in turnout from 2016 to 2020 were in states where voters automatically receive a ballot, he said. Several of the states where there was no-excuse absentee voting also still had a wide range of hurdles – like showing photo ID or getting a notary signature – that could make it harder to cast a ballot.“Mail ballot usage is a better way to examine the effect of laws and policies than simply whether or not a state had a particular policy, since there are often many policies that affect mail ballot usage, such as all-mail ballot elections, ID requirements, dropbox accessibility, return deadlines, etc,” he said.Even if mail-in voting did not ultimately boost Democrats, officials told the Guardian last year that the process made it easier to target, track and encourage voters to cast a ballot. Jay Tucker, the chair of the Democratic committee in Pike county, Pennsylvania, said it was useful for the party to be able to see who had requested a ballot and had yet to return it during the election. Those efforts, he said, helped cut into Trump’s margins in the county.While the researchers found mail-in voting did not have a major effect on turnout in 2020, they noted that it could be more consequential in contests where interest is typically lower, like a midterm.“When voter interest is high, such as in 2020, even low-propensity voters … could base their decision to vote on the convenience of doing so, turn out at the same rate whether or not they can take advantage of no-excuse absentee voting,” they wrote.“When voter interest is low, there is likely to be more room for altering the costs of voting to affect turnout.” More

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    US Capitol attack: former Trump state department aide charged

    A former state department aide in Donald Trump’s administration has been charged with participating in the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January and assaulting officers who were trying to guard the building, court papers show.It is the first known case to be brought against a Trump appointee in connection with the Capitol attack, which led to Trump’s historic second impeachment.Federico Klein, who also worked for Trump’s 2016 election campaign, was seen wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat amid the throng of people in a tunnel trying to force their way into the Capitol on the day, the papers say.Klein pushed his way toward the doors, where, authorities say, “he physically and verbally engaged” with officers trying to keep the mob back.Klein was seen on camera violently shoving a riot shield into an officer and inciting the crowd as it tried to storm past the police line, shouting: “We need fresh people, we need fresh people,” according to the charging documents.As the mob struggled with police in the tunnel, Klein pushed the riot shield, which had been stolen from an officer, in between the Capitol doors, preventing police from closing them, authorities say.Eventually, an officer used chemical spray, forcing Klein to move somewhere else, officials say.Klein was arrested on Thursday in Virginia and faces charges including obstructing Congress and assaulting officers using a dangerous weapon.He was in custody on Friday and could not be reached for comment.It was not immediately clear whether he had an attorney who could comment on his behalf. A Trump spokesman said the former president had no comment.More than 300 people have been charged with federal crimes relating to the deadly riots that day.Klein became a staff assistant in the state department shortly after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, according to a financial disclosure report.He held a top secret security clearance that was renewed in 2019, according to the court papers.He resigned from his position on 19 January 2021.Klein reportedly worked in the office of Brazilian and Southern Cone affairs, according to the court papers. More

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    Rightwing 'super-spreader': study finds handful of accounts spread bulk of election misinformation

    A handful of rightwing “super-spreaders” on social media were responsible for the bulk of election misinformation in the run-up to the Capitol attack, according to a new study that also sheds light on the staggering reach of falsehoods pushed by Donald Trump.A report from the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a group that includes Stanford and the University of Washington, analyzed social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok during several months before and after the 2020 elections.It found that “super-spreaders” – responsible for the most frequent and most impactful misinformation campaigns – included Trump and his two elder sons, as well as other members of the Trump administration and the rightwing media.The study’s authors and other researchers say the findings underscore the need to disable such accounts to stop the spread of misinformation.“If there is a limit to how much content moderators can tackle, have them focus on reducing harm by eliminating the most effective spreaders of misinformation,” said said Lisa Fazio, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies the psychology of fake news but was not involved EIP report. “Rather than trying to enforce the rules equally across all users, focus enforcement on the most powerful accounts.” The report analyzed social media posts featuring words like “election” and “voting” to track key misinformation narratives related to the the 2020 election, including claims of mail carriers throwing away ballots, legitimate ballots strategically not being counted, and other false or unproven stories.The report studied how these narratives developed and the effect they had. It found during this time period, popular rightwing Twitter accounts “transformed one-off stories, sometimes based on honest voter concerns or genuine misunderstandings, into cohesive narratives of systemic election fraud”.Ultimately, the “false claims and narratives coalesced into the meta-narrative of a ‘stolen election’, which later propelled the January 6 insurrection”, the report said.“The 2020 election demonstrated that actors – both foreign and domestic – remain committed to weaponizing viral false and misleading narratives to undermine confidence in the US electoral system and erode Americans’ faith in our democracy,” the authors concluded.Next to no factchecking, with Trump as the super-spreader- in-chiefIn monitoring Twitter, the researchers analyzed more than more than 22 million tweets sent between 15 August and 12 December. The study determined which accounts were most influential by the size and speed with which they spread misinformation.“Influential accounts on the political right rarely engaged in factchecking behavior, and were responsible for the most widely spread incidents of false or misleading information in our dataset,” the report said.Out of the 21 top offenders, 15 were verified Twitter accounts – which are particularly dangerous when it comes to election misinformation, the study said. The “repeat spreaders” responsible for the most widely spread misinformation included Eric Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and influencers like James O’Keefe, Tim Pool, Elijah Riot, and Sidney Powell. All 21 of the top accounts for misinformation leaned rightwing, the study showed.“Top-down mis- and disinformation is dangerous because of the speed at which it can spread,” the report said. “If a social media influencer with millions of followers shares a narrative, it can garner hundreds of thousands of engagements and shares before a social media platform or factchecker has time to review its content.”On nearly all the platforms analyzed in the study – including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – Donald Trump played a massive role.It pinpointed 21 incidents in which a tweet from Trump’s official @realDonaldTrump account jumpstarted the spread of a false narrative across Twitter. For example, Trump’s tweets baselessly claiming that the voting equipment manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems was responsible for election fraud played a large role in amplifying the conspiracy theory to a wider audience. False or baseless tweets sent by Trump’s account – which had 88.9m followers at the time – garnered more than 460,000 retweets.Meanwhile, Trump’s YouTube channel was linked to six distinct waves of misinformation that, combined, were the most viewed of any other repeat-spreader’s videos. His Facebook account had the most engagement of all those studied.The Election Integrity Partnership study is not the first to show the massive influence Trump’s social media accounts have had on the spread of misinformation. In one year – between 1 January 2020 and 6 January 2021 – Donald Trump pushed disinformation in more than 1,400 Facebook posts, a report from Media Matters for America released in February found. Trump was ultimately suspended from the platform in January, and Facebook is debating whether he will ever be allowed back.Specifically, 516 of his posts contained disinformation about Covid-19, 368 contained election disinformation, and 683 contained harmful rhetoric attacking his political enemies. Allegations of election fraud earned over 149.4 million interactions, or an average of 412,000 interactions per post, and accounted for 16% of interactions on his posts in 2020. Trump had a unique ability to amplify news stories that would have otherwise remained contained in smaller outlets and subgroups, said Matt Gertz of Media Matters for America.“What Trump did was take misinformation from the rightwing ecosystem and turn it into a mainstream news event that affected everyone,” he said. “He was able to take these absurd lies and conspiracy theories and turn them into national news. And if you do that, and inflame people often enough, you will end up with what we saw on January 6.”Effects of false election narratives on voters“Super-spreader” accounts were ultimately very successful in undermining voters’ trust in the democratic system, the report found. Citing a poll by the Pew Research Center, the study said that, of the 54% of people who voted in person, approximately half had cited concerns about voting by mail, and only 30% of respondents were “very confident” that absentee or mail-in ballots had been counted as intended.The report outlined a number of recommendations, including removing “super-spreader” accounts entirely.Outside experts agree that tech companies should more closely scrutinize top accounts and repeat offenders.Researchers said the refusal to take action or establish clear rules for when action should be taken helped to fuel the prevalence of misinformation. For example, only YouTube had a publicly stated “three-strike” system for offenses related to the election. Platforms like Facebook reportedly had three-strike rules as well but did not make the system publicly known.Only four of the top 20 Twitter accounts cited as top spreaders were actually removed, the study showed – including Donald Trump’s in January. Twitter has maintained that its ban of the former president is permanent. YouTube’s chief executive officer stated this week that Trump would be reinstated on the platform once the “risk of violence” from his posts passes. Facebook’s independent oversight board is now considering whether to allow Trump to return.“We have seen that he uses his accounts as a way to weaponize disinformation. It has already led to riots at the US Capitol; I don’t know why you would give him the opportunity to do that again,” Gertz said. “It would be a huge mistake to allow Trump to return.” More

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    Most alleged Capitol rioters unconnected to extremist groups, analysis finds

    Nearly 90% of the people charged in the Capitol riot so far have no connection with militias or other organized extremist groups, according to a new analysis that adds to the understanding of what some experts have dubbed the “mass radicalization” of Trump supporters.A report from George Washington University’s Center on Extremism has analyzed court records about cases that have been made public. It found that more than half of people facing federal charges over the 6 January attack appear to have planned their participation alone, not even coordinating with family members or close friends. Only 33 of the 257 alleged participants appear to have been part of existing “militant networks”, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers anti-government militia.The dominance of these “individual believers” among the alleged attackers underscored the importance of understanding the Capitol violence as part of a “diverse and fractured domestic extremist threat,” and underscored the ongoing risk of lone actor terror attacks, the George Washington researchers concluded.Other analysts have argued the Capitol attackers should be understood as “not merely a mix of rightwing organizations, but as a broader mass movement with violence at its core”.‘Mass radicalization becomes mass mobilization’While individuals associated with far-right networks were critical in escalating the violence at the Capitol, the report found that members of organized extremist groups make up only a small minority of the people charged so far.About a third of the people charged were part of “organized clusters” of family members or friends who planned their participation together. These small groups allegedly include a father and son from Delaware, a mother and son from Tennessee, several husband and wife pairs, two brothers from Montana, and a group of acquaintances from Texas, including Jenna Ryan, a real estate broker, who took a private plane to Washington together to storm the capitol.The existence of these clusters of participants “demonstrates the importance of involvement in friendship or kinship networks as a key factor in encouraging increasingly extreme beliefs and high-risk, often violent, activism”, the report notes.But the largest category of alleged rioters, according to the report, was a “hodgepodge” of individuals with a variety of extremist beliefs who made plans to come to the rally, originally billed as a “Stop the Steal” protest, on their own, and had no documented connections to existing groups, or even to small clusters of other Trump supporters. These “inspired believers” included adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, as well as people who simply believed the false claims of Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers that the election had been stolen from Trump and wanted to do something about it.Michael Jensen, a senior researcher who specializes in radicalization at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, said the results of the analysis were not surprising. “What we witnessed on January 6 wasn’t a one-off extremist plot,” he said. “We witnessed an instance of mass radicalization which turned into an instance of mass mobilization.”Trump’s “big lie” about election fraud, repeated for months across social media and traditional media platforms, had succeeded in radicalizing “potentially millions of individuals who have collectively adopted an extremist viewpoint” about the legitimacy of the election, Jensen said.“We’re seeing a lot of folks [charged] who look like pretty normal people,” he said. “They tend to be older individuals, that were married, with families, that had jobs. These are not hardcore extremists. These are individuals who got caught in a really extraordinary circumstance.”Many of the unaffiliated people charged in the attack might not have even known what an Oath Keeper or a Proud Boy was, Jensen said, “but they know who the president is … and the president was providing a narrative of fraud”.A different analysis of court records by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, looking at 290 arrests connected to the Capitol attack, found very similar results to the George Washington University report, including that only 12% of alleged participants were part of militias or other organized violent groups.This initial data revealed, the Chicago analysts wrote, that “‘normal’ pro-Trump activists joined with the far right to form a new kind of violent mass movement”.The Chicago report also warned that typical counter-terrorism approaches, such as arresting members of dangerous extremist groups, would not be very effective to confront this complex threat, which may require “de-escalation approaches for anger among large swaths of mainstream society”.The George Washington University report also revealed how instrumental the alleged rioters’ own social media posts have been to building criminal cases against them. Roughly half of people charged over the riot had their own alleged social media posts used against them as evidence, while about 30% of people charged had “been possibly incriminated” by the social media accounts of friends. More

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    Donald Trump hints at run for president in 2024 – video

    Former US president Donald Trump has hinted at a possible run for president again in 2024 during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference [CPAC] in Florida. Trump attacked president Joe Biden and repeated his fraudulent claims that he won the 2020 election in his first major appearance since leaving the White House nearly six weeks ago. ‘Who knows, who knows, I may even decide to beat them for a third time,’ he said.
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    Militia attack groups want to ‘blow up Capitol’, police chief warns – video

    In alarming testimony to a House subcommittee, the acting chief of Capitol police, Yogananda Pittman, said threats were circulating that directly targeted Joe Biden’s first formal speech to a joint session of Congress – the date of which has not yet been announced.
    Militia groups involved in the 6 January insurrection want to stage another attack aiming to ‘blow up’ the complex and kill lawmakers, Pittman has warned
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