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    Big tech facilitated QAnon and the Capitol attack. It’s time to hold them accountable

    Donald Trump’s election lies and the 6 January attack on the US Capitol have highlighted how big tech has led our society down a path of conspiracies and radicalism by ignoring the mounting evidence that their products are dangerous.But the spread of deadly misinformation on a global scale was enabled by the absence of antitrust enforcement by the federal government to rein in out-of-control monopolies such as Facebook and Google. And there is a real risk social media giants could sidestep accountability once again.Trump’s insistence that he won the election was an attack on democracy that culminated in the attack on the US Capitol. The events were as much the fault of Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg – CEOs of Google, Twitter and Facebook, respectively – as they were the fault of Trump and his cadre of co-conspirators.During the early days of social media, no service operated at the scale of today’s Goliaths. Adoption was limited and online communities lived in small and isolated pockets. When the Egyptian uprisings of 2011 proved the power of these services, the US state department became their cheerleaders, offering them a veneer of exceptionalism which would protect them from scrutiny as they grew exponentially.Later, dictators and anti-democratic actors would study and co-opt these tools for their own purposes. As the megaphones got larger, the voices of bad actors also got louder. As the networks got bigger, the feedback loop amplifying those voices became stronger. It is unimaginable that QAnon could gain a mass following without tech companies’ dangerous indifference.Eventually, these platforms became immune to forces of competition in the marketplace – they became information monopolies with runaway scale. Absent any accountability from watchdogs or the marketplace, fringe conspiracy theories enjoyed unchecked propagation. We can mark networked conspiracies from birtherism to QAnon as straight lines through the same coterie of misinformers who came to power alongside Trump.Today, most global internet activity happens on services owned by either Facebook or Alphabet, which includes YouTube and Google. The internet has calcified into a pair of monopolies who protect their size by optimizing to maximize “engagement”. Sadly, algorithms designed to increase dependency and usage are far more profitable than ones that would encourage timely, local, relevant and, most importantly, accurate information. The truth, in a word, is boring. Facts rarely animate the kind of compulsive engagement rewarded by recommendation and search algorithms.The best tool – if not the only tool – to hold big tech accountable is antitrust enforcement: enforcing the existing antitrust laws designed to rein in companies’ influence over other political, economic and social institutions.Antitrust enforcement has historically been the US government’s greatest weapon against such firms. From breaking up the trusts at the start of the 20th century to the present day, antitrust enforcement spurs competition and ingenuity while re-empowering citizens. Most antitrust historians agree that absent US v Microsoft in 1998, which stopped Microsoft from bundling products and effectively killing off other browsers, the modern internet would have been strangled in the crib.The best tool to hold big tech accountable is antitrust enforcement: enforcing the existing antitrust laws designed to rein in companies’ influence over other political, economic and social institutionsIronically, Google and Facebook were the beneficiaries of such enforcement. Over two decades would pass before US authorities brought antitrust suits against Google and Facebook last year. Until then, antitrust had languished as a tool to counterbalance abusive monopolies. Big tech sees an existential threat in the renewed calls for antitrust, and these companies have aggressively lobbied to ensure key vacancies in the Biden administration are filled by their friends.The Democratic party is especially vulnerable to soft capture by these tech firms. Big tech executives are mostly left-leaning and donate millions to progressive causes while spouting feelgood rhetoric of inclusion and connectivity. During the Obama administration, Google and Facebook were treated as exceptional, avoiding any meaningful regulatory scrutiny. Democratic Senate leadership, specifically Senator Chuck Schumer, has recently signaled he will treat these companies with kid gloves.The Biden administration cannot repeat the Obama legacy of installing big tech-friendly individuals to these critical but often under-the-radar roles. The new administration, in consultation with Schumer, will be tasked with appointing a new assistant attorney general for antitrust at the Department of Justice and up to three members of the Federal Trade Commission. Figures friendly to big tech in those positions could abruptly settle the pending litigation against Google or Facebook.President Joe Biden and Schumer must reject any candidate who has worked in the service of big tech. Any former White House or congressional personnel who gave these companies a pass during the Obama administration should also be disqualified from consideration. Allowing big tech’s lawyers and plants to run the antitrust agencies would be the equivalent of allowing a climate-change-denying big oil executive run the Environmental Protection Agency.The public is beginning to recognize the harms to society wrought by big tech and a vibrant and bipartisan anti-monopoly movement with diverse scholars, and activists has risen over the past few years. Two-thirds of Democratic voters believe, along with a majority of Republicans, that Biden should “refuse to appoint executives, lobbyists, or lawyers for these companies to positions of power or influence in his administration while this legal activity is pending”. This gives the Democratic party an opportunity to do the right thing for our country and attract new voters by fighting for the web we want.Big tech played a central role in the dangerous attack on the US Capitol and all of the events which led to it. Biden’s antitrust appointees will be the ones who decide if there are any consequences to be paid. More

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    Biden signs four executive orders aimed at promoting racial equity – video

    The US president, Joe Biden, has signed four executive orders aimed at healing the racial divide in America, including one to curb the US government’s use of private prisons and another to bolster anti-discrimination enforcement in housing. They are among several steps Biden is taking to roll back policies of his predecessor, Donald Trump, and to promote racial justice reforms that he pledged to address during his campaign
    Biden signs more executive orders in effort to advance US racial equity
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    Biden announces 'wartime' boost in vaccine supply – video

    The Biden administration is increasing vaccination efforts with a goal of protecting 300 million Americans by early fall, as the administration surges deliveries to states for the next three weeks following complaints of shortages and inconsistent supplies. ‘This is enough vaccine to vaccinate 300 million Americans by end of summer, early fall,’ Biden said. ‘This is a wartime effort,’ he added, saying more Americans had already died from the coronavirus than during all of the second world war
    Biden vows to vaccinate 300m in the US by end of summer or early fall – live
    Joe Biden appears to boost vaccination goal to 1.5m Americans per day More

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    Biden vows to vaccinate 300m people in US by end of summer or early fall

    Joe Biden vowed on Tuesday to ramp up vaccination programs so that most of the US population is inoculated by the end of summer or early fall.“This will be enough vaccine to fully vaccinate 300m Americans by the end of the summer,” the US president said on Tuesday afternoon, later adding “end of summer, beginning of the fall”, in a briefing at the White House.The new administration will increase vaccine supplies to states, exercise an option to buy a total of 200m more vaccine doses from Pfizer and Moderna and will give states more lead time on the amount of vaccine it will deliver.The administration’s immediate plan is to accelerate vaccine distribution to deliver roughly 1.4m shots a day and 10m doses a week for the next three weeks, as part of the White House’s earlier-stated ambition to vaccinate 100 million people in 100 days.“This will be one of the most difficult operational challenges we’ve ever undertaken,” said Joe Biden on Tuesday, announcing the plans. But, he added, “Help is on the way”.He indicated that the vaccination program he inherited from the Trump administration was not in adequate order.“When we arrived, the vaccine program was in worse shape than we expected or anticipated,” Biden said.He added: “Until now, we’ve had to guess how much vaccine to expect for the next week, and that’s what the [state] governors had to do. This is unacceptable.”The new purchase order is expected to allow the government to vaccinate 300 million people with a two-dose regimen of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, a senior administration official said earlier.The official said there were two “constraining factors”, for delivering vaccines quickly: supply and distribution. The official said the White House was working to increase capacity for both, by purchasing more vaccine, raw supplies and setting up federal vaccination sites.“This is a wartime undertaking, it’s not hyperbole,” said Biden.The official called the rollout a “daunting effort”, and called on Congress to pass a $1.9tn stimulus package which includes more money for state vaccination campaigns.The Biden administration has repeatedly said it aims to vaccinate 100 million people in 100 days, a goal that appeared to be in hand as the US exceeded 1m doses a day in the president’s first week. As of Tuesday, 19 million people had received one vaccine shot, and 3.4 million received a second.On Monday, Biden said he was hopeful the US was on track to deliver nearly 1.5m vaccinations a day, and that the US would be “well on our way” to herd immunity by the spring. Over the weekend, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, described 1m vaccinations a day as, “a floor, not a ceiling”.However, Biden also forecast a more harrowing death toll, and on Monday said the US “could see” 660,000 deaths total before the pandemic is brought under control. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) predicts up to 508,000 people in the US could have been killed by Covid-19 by 13 February. The death toll so far is 423,000, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus research center.The Biden administration is also planning to exercise an option to purchase 200m more vaccine doses, 100m from Pfizer/BioNTech and 100m from Moderna, the two producers with US emergency use authorization so far, through contracts first established by the Trump administration.This would increase the government-purchased vaccine supply to 600m doses, enough to inoculate 300m people. The senior official said the government expects to deliver 10m vaccine doses to states each week for the next three weeks, and will give states at least three weeks’ notice of upcoming shipments. Vaccine allotments are determined by state population.The vice-president, Kamala Harris, and the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, received the second dose of a Covid-19 vaccine on Tuesday afternoon. More

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    Twitter permanently bans My Pillow chief Mike Lindell

    Twitter has permanently banned My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell, after he continued to perpetuate the baseless claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election.Twitter decided to ban Lindell due to “repeated violations” of its civic integrity policy, a spokesperson said. The policy was implemented last September and is targeted at fighting disinformation.It was not immediately clear which posts by Lindell triggered his suspension.Lindell, a Trump supporter, has continued to insist that the election was rigged even after Joe Biden has begun work in the Oval Office.Major retailers such as Bed Bath & Beyond and Kohl’s have said they will stop carrying My Pillow products, Lindell previously said.Lindell is also facing potential litigation from Dominion Voting Systems for claiming their machines played a role in alleged election fraud. He also urged Trump to declare martial law in an attempt to overturn the election.Following the storming of the US Capitol earlier this month, Twitter has banned more than 70,000 accounts for sharing misinformation.Trump, who urged on the mob, has also had his account permanently suspended. More

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    Avril Haines's unusual backstory makes her an unlikely chief of US intelligence

    Avril Haines, who now oversees all 16 US intelligence agencies, is unlike any of the spies who came before her, and not just because she is the country’s first female director of national intelligence.She is also the first intelligence chief to have to make an emergency landing while trying to cross the Atlantic in a tiny plane; the first to take a year out in Japan to learn judo; and surely the first anywhere in the world to have owned a cafe-bookstore that staged frequent erotica nights.“What’s interesting about Avril is that she’s just a voraciously curious person who will throw herself into whatever she’s doing,” said Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s former speechwriter and foreign policy aide who is a close friend of Haines.The Haines backstory makes her an unlikely spy, but proved no obstacle to getting bipartisan support. She was the first Biden nominee to be confirmed, with 84-10 Senate vote on Wednesday night.David Priess, a former CIA official now chief operating officer at the Lawfare Institute, said her unusual life story is an advantage in the world of espionage.“She has to be able to understand and to lead everyone from analysts to intelligence collectors to engineers to pilots to disguise artists to accountants,” Priess said.“Having that diverse set of experiences very much helps her to lead the very diverse and disparate intelligence community.”Haines’ period of lifestyle experimentation anyway ended decades ago, in 1998 when she started a law degree. Since then she has been a legal counsel in the Senate, state department and White House, the deputy director of the CIA and deputy national security adviser.Senate Republicans, who had confirmed her Trump-appointed predecessor, John Ratcliffe, despite his lack of any significant experience in intelligence and his exaggeration of his previous brushes with security work, had few excuses to oppose her.The main source of scepticism comes from human rights activists, over whether she might be too much of an insider, with too much baggage. She redacted the report on torture – some argue over-redacted it – and she codified a set of procedures and rules for the use of drone strikes in the assassinations of terror suspects.Early lifeThere is little in Haines’ early life to suggest a trajectory towards national security and intelligence. She grew up in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the daughter of a biochemist, Thomas Haines and a painter, Adrian Rappin. Rappin fell seriously ill with lung disease when Avril was 12, and she spent four of her early teenage years as her mother’s principal carer until her death in 1985.According to an account in Newsweek, the family was forced to give up their apartment under the relentless pressure of medical costs, and had to move around the homes of friends and relatives. By the time she left high school, the teenage Haines was so spent, she deferred college for a year and instead went to study judo at Tokyo’s Kodokan Institute, where she rose to a brown beltOn her return to the US, she studied theoretical physics at the University of Chicago and to help make ends meet, worked as a car mechanic, rebuilding car engines, and while at university, she was knocked off her bicycle by a car and left with a serious injury that continues to dog her.Undeterred, she plunged into her next dream project, restoring a second-hand plane and flying it to Europe. With her flight instructor she found a 1961 Cessna and rebuilt its navigation, communication and other electronic systems, before taking off from Bangor, Maine, with long-distance fuel tanks strapped to the fuselage.Not long into the flight, however, the Cessna began to take on ice and then both engines stopped. They had to glide low over the Labrador Sea, and were lucky to find a small airfield on the Newfoundland coast, where they made an emergency landing, and where they looked after for a week in the local community until the weather improved. Haines’ friends confirmed they believed the Newsweek account of the adventure to be accurate.One upshot of the failed adventure was that Haines married her instructor, David Davighi. They moved to Baltimore, and though the initial plan was for her to go back to school and for him to work as a pilot, another inspiration took them in a different direction entirely.They saw a newspaper advertisement for a bar-brothel that had been seized in a drugs raid and was being auctioned off. They bought it, selling the Cessna and going into debt to refashion it as Adrian’s Book Café, in honour of Haines’ mother.In Fells Point, a formerly dodgy area of Baltimore that was gentrifying, the shop succeeded, through hard work and innovations like erotic literature evenings upstairs in the former brothel, where Haines would read extracts.She defined the genre to the Baltimore Sun in 1995 as as “everything that’s repressed, guttural, instinctual, chaotic and creative.”“Erotica has become more prevalent because people are trying to have sex without having sex,” Haines said. “Others are trying to find new fantasies to make their monogamous relationships more satisfying … What the erotic offers is spontaneity, twists and turns. And it affects everyone.”Change of directionThe bank offered more launches to expand the franchise but by then, Haines had changed direction again. Community organising had got her interested in the law and in 1998 she enrolled at Georgetown University, where she came to specialise in human rights and international law.To Haines’ detractors, those were ironic choices in light of her later associations with two of the biggest stains on the US record after 9/11: torture and drones.Much of her work in the Obama national security council involved writing up a “playbook” which codified criteria for drone strikes, which the administration relied on increasingly to target leading members of terrorist groups.Her former colleagues however, insist that Haines played an important role in limiting the use of drones, challenging top officials in the Obama administration to prove that a target represented a genuine threat.“Avril really spearheaded the efforts that impose limits on the use of drones, the standard for avoiding civilian casualties, a more controlled process for determining who could be targeted,” Rhodes said.“Many people didn’t want those rules written down, because they thought by specifying things that would limit their options,” another former senior official, who did not want to be named, said. “I’ve seen her speak to power over and over and over again, in situations where I’ve seen many other people chicken out.”Obama administrationThere are other criticisms of Haines’ tenure as deputy CIA director. She arrived in 2013 when the Obama administration was still bogged down in dealing with the aftermath of its predecessor’s use of torture against terror suspects.In 2015, Haines had to decide what to do about CIA officials who had hacked into the computers of Senate intelligence committee staffers who had been compiling a comprehensive report on torture, and even drummed up spurious criminal cases against them. She overrode the advice of the CIA inspector general and recommended against disciplinary action.“No one was held accountable for that and Haines apparently thinks that is an okay resolution to the matter,” Daniel Jones, the Senate report’s lead author who was one of the targets of the CIA reprisals. “Many people have nothing but great things to say about her, but that is a massive blind spot which is kind of unforgivable.”When the Senate report by Jones and his team was finished, it was Haines who had the job of redacting it. By the time she was done, only 525 pages of the 6,700 total were released.“When Obama came into office he signed an executive order that explicitly stated that you could not classify information that was simply embarrassing,” Jones said. “I feel strongly that she advocated for redactions that were not consistent with Obama’s executive order.”Haines’ role in the torture report, on the other hand, has probably strengthened her standing in the intelligence community, where she might otherwise be viewed as an outsider without experience in the field.What counts even more though, is her previous relationship with the president, something none of her predecessors had. That alone could make her one of the more powerful directors of national intelligence.“I was in the PDB [president’s daily brief] every morning with her for the last couple of years [of the Obama administration] when she was deputy national security adviser, and so was Biden,” Rhodes said. “Presumably now as DNI, she could be the person briefing Biden every morning on intelligence matters.” More

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    Oregon Republican party falsely suggests US Capitol attack was a 'false flag'

    Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterThe Oregon Republican party has falsely claimed in a resolution that there is “growing evidence” that the 6 January attack on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob was “a ‘false flag’ operation”.The resolution, which was published on 19 January and was endorsed by the executive committee of the state Republican party, suggested that the storming of the capitol by Trump supporters was an orchestrated conspiracy “designed to discredit President Trump, his supporters and all conservative Republicans,” and to create a “sham motivation” to impeach the former president.To back up these false claims, the resolution cited links to rightwing websites, including the Epoch Times, a pro-Trump outlet that has frequently published rightwing misinformation, as well as the Wikipedia entry for “Reichstag Fire.”In a Facebook video released on 19 January, the Oregon Republican party chairman, Bill Currier, said that Oregon Republicans were working with Republicans in other states to release similar resolutions. “We are encouraging and working with the others through a patriot network of RNC members, the national level elected officials from each state, to coordinate our activities and to coordinate our messaging,” Currier said as part of the video conversation with other members of the Oregon Republican party.“We’re partway in the door of socialism and Marxism right now … and we have to fight,” Currier said. “It’s a time for choosing. People can decide what they want to believe and what they want to do, but there are people standing up and there are people sitting down.”Currier did not respond to a request for comment on Monday. The Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In addition to labeling the Capitol attack a potential false flag operation, the Oregon GOP’s resolution also condemned several House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over the 6 January assault. The statement called the legislators “traitors” who had “conspired” with the enemy, and described members of the Democratic party as “Leftist forces seeking to establish a dictatorship void of all cherished freedoms and liberties.”The resolution was a sign of the Oregon GOP “aligning itself with conspiracy theories,” the Oregonian, the state’s largest newspaper, wrote last week.The newspaper also reported that one of the members of the Oregon GOP’s executive committee, which produced the resolution, is the chief of staff to the Republican state lawmaker who opened the door to allow armed demonstrators protesting coronavirus restrictions to illegally enter the Oregon state capitol on 21 December. This invasion of the Oregon state capitol in December was one of the events that served as a model for the US Capitol invasion in January.Federal prosecutors in Washington have already charged more than 100 people in connection with the violence at the Capitol on 6 January, which was extensively documented in real time by journalists, as well as by many of the people who participated in the invasion, including well-known members of hate groups.Several of the people facing charges in connection with the invasion of the capitol have said they believed they were following Trump’s instructions. “I listen to my president, who told me to go to the Capitol,” a Texas real estate agent facing federal charges told CBS News.Family members and friends of the four participants who died during the Capitol invasion, including an air force veteran shot to death by a police officer, have also described them as dedicated Trump supporters. More